Category Archives: Spirituality

BE YOUR OWN SAVIOR WHILE YOU STILL CAN

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By Gary Z McGee

Source: Waking Times

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Place the oxygen mask on yourself before assisting others:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Be counteractive with answers and proactive with questions:

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

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

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

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

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

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

In a world full of toxic positivity be authentic chaos:

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

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

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

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

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

Practice Fait Sur Mesure:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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By Mickey Z.

Source: Dissident Voice

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

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

Expert vs. Beginner

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

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

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

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

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

Creativity

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

Gratitude

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

Mindfulness

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

How to Rediscover a Beginner’s Mind

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

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

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

2. Slow down

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

3. Channel your inner child

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

4. See with new eyes

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

5. Embrace nonsense 

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

6. Meditation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Us vs. Them’ Thinking Is Hardwired—But Consciousness Can Overpower It

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By Joe Martino

Source: The Pulse

Are we hardwired to categorize each other into ‘Us vs Them?’ Simply put, yes. But this hardwiring is remarkably easy to break. It’s time we equip ourselves with the knowledge and tools to do so.

Why? Well, anything from powerful governments to mainstream and alternative media is consistently trying to divide us by focusing aggressively on our differences. When we know how these mechanisms work and focus our consciousness in an effective way, these attempts to divide fail.

First a quick story.

When we first launched our membership I hired marketing teams to help. They would always tell me “in the sales messaging we need to create an ‘Us vs Them dynamic’ in order to get people to buy.” I resisted.

I felt like that wasn’t necessary and also contrary to our mission of unifying people to create a better world. But, the marketers were right. When we would A/B test sales messaging without ‘Us vs Them’ compared to sales messaging with it, the ‘Us vs Them’ messaging always won.

I have to admit this made me a bit sad. Was I thinking too idealistically about human beings? Maybe. But I always asked ‘Why doesn’t Us vs Them messaging work on me?” Before you suggest I’m naive and think “of course the messaging works on you,” read to the end of this piece. You’ll see how simply it is for this messaging not to work on anyone should they choose.

Neuroscience suggests that this Us vs Them biological trait developed thousands of years ago. As you might imagine, it had much to do with survival in much different times than we live in today.

It essentially states that human beings are primed to make very basic and categorical Us vs Them judgments. In fact, your brain is processing these Us vs Them differences in a twentieth of a second. These noticed differences are your classically promoted artificial constructs of: ethnicity, gender, skin color, age, socioeconomic class, and even something like sports team preference.

(I say artificial because social constructs tell us we should focus on these as differences. We don’t actually have to see them as differences as we are ALL one species. Other animals do not engage their Us vs Them biology within their species – only we do – and it’s a taught behaviour.)

All of this is enhanced by a multi-purposed hormone in our brain called Oxytocin.

Oxytocin has been shown to be a wonderful hormone for connecting and bonding with others that we know in our communities, ‘Us’. It’s often referred to as the love hormone or connection hormone. It essentially heightens meaningful connections with our in-group.

But on the flip side, studies have shown that when it comes to people who we see as strangers (Them), oxytocin creates a decrease in cooperation and increases envy when people are struggling. Further, it pushes one to gloat when they are ‘winning.’ In fact, there are many ways in which oxytocin is linked to dividing ourselves from ‘Them’ and keeping it that way.

In short, oxytocin enhances this Us vs Them divide. But, while this sounds like we may be doomed for division and judgment of others forever, what has also been shown is that these almost instantaneous judgements we make can be manipulated incredibly easily. And that’s without bringing in a little bit of conscious awareness and presence.

Studies have shown that when you expose people to others who look different from them, the ‘Us’ wiring often turns on when people look similar, and the ‘Them’ wiring turns on when people look different. This showed an implicit judgment based on ethnicity.

Yet when those same people were exposed to people who looked the same and different from them but were now wearing baseball hats with team logos, things changed. Suddenly the participants brains indicated that Us and Them had nothing to do with ethnicity anymore, it was about which team they supported.

A tiny change created an instantaneous manipulation of who is Us vs Them. I wrote about a similar phenomenon in a recent piece called Racism Plummeted When People Were Told Aliens Exist. This showed that when humans were told aliens existed, the Us became humans, and the Them became aliens. Suddenly people were nicer to each other and more accepting of differences.

The point? It doesn’t take much to for us to see each other as one, we just have to focus our consciousness a bit.

Consciousness Is Everything

There is much gained in our well being and in society when we become more self-aware, reflective and present. It moves unconscious and often automatic behaviour into a lens where we can ask: why do we do this?

Further, an increase in the above mentioned traits can lead to something as simple as stopping ourselves before we do something destructive out of anger. We can then pause for a short period, reflect, and respond.

The more we move from automatic, unconscious and reactive ways of living to present, reflective and conscious ways of living, the more harmony surrounds our lives.

What I’m saying can bring up similarities to new-agey, online influencer judgments that the ‘conscious’ are more than the ‘unconscious,’ this is not at all what I’m saying here. And I will expand in a moment.

First, I trust it’s clear that we can be manipulated into different Us vs Them dichotomies very easily. Studies exploring implicit bias also show that when we are exposed to different people regularly, we become less judgemental towards their differences.

Even still, we can build self awareness around how WE play into these divides in order to diffuse them.

For example, during COVID government leaders like Justin Trudeau sowed division in Canada by making unvaccinated Canadians less than. He did this by calling them names and characterizing them in ways that would cause the general population to dislike them.

“They [the unvaccinated] don’t believe in science/progress and are very often misogynistic and racist. It’s a very small group of people, but that doesn’t shy away from the fact that they take up some space.”Justin Trudeau

He combined this rhetoric with un-contextualized and false data around vaccination status in Canada to strengthen his propaganda.

Note, I’m not focusing on Trudeau here because I’m “a Poilievre fan” or anything. In fact, I don’t feel our current structure of politics is healthy nor serving us as people. I’m simply illustrating the ways in which our society has become ‘lost’ in division. Getting out of it requires us to take a close examination of what is happening so we can choose a different path.

In contrast, some unvaccinated people around the world began to refer to themselves as ‘pure bloods’ because they were not vaccinated. This led to memes, hateful rhetoric, and actions like avoiding and separating themselves from their vaccinated friends and families. Instead of attempting to understand why some became vaccinated, it was often simply seen as ‘the vaccinated are sheep.’

Once again we see division, in/out groups, and greater than/less than beliefs.

In both cases we are seeing the destruction and damage that can occur when we allow our flimsy biological traits around Us vs Them to be fed and upheld by faulty information and propaganda.

What is also important to note is that our ‘authoritative’ institutions of government and mainstream media will often be guilty of this destructive behaviour which deeply normalizes it amongst the masses.

That said, we are not doomed. Consciousness is everything. By that I mean, the quality of our consciousness. The ways in which we slow down, reflect, and become more present in everyday life becomes an antidote to propaganda feeding Us vs Them.

This is why we have the section at the top of our articles to “Pause and set your pulse.” To cultivate more presence and self awareness, check out a couple of the pieces of content I list at the bottom of this piece.

Let’s go deeper. Perhaps why I have felt Us vs Them messaging does not work on me stems from: what happens when we have experiences that lead us to feel we are all one and interconnected with everything? I have had these experiences many times in my life. I experienced them through meditation, breath work, and even randomly.

Thrust into what can be best described as ‘sensing the nature of our reality,’ when you have these transcendental experiences you do not see yourself as all that separate from everything else. Sure, you are YOU, and you know you are an individual, but you also have a knowing of the connection and sameness you share with everything.

What happens if we nurture and hold that knowing in our consciousness and allow it to form our worldview? Does our sense of Us vs Them get triggered as easily? I don’t think so. But that’s my experience.

This direct experience has led me to believe that a shift in our consciousness can be one of the most powerful tools in changing the way we see each other and ultimately re-design our society – because it has to happen.

Albert Einstein had some thoughts on this as well:

“A human being is part of a whole, called by us the ‘Universe’ —a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts, and feelings, as something separated from the rest—a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”Albert Einstein

A task indeed, but one that is very possible with the right practice and focus.

Education Is Key Too

Why are things the way they are? We have to explore content that seeks to answer these questions. Instead of using social media for fast memes, 15 second videos, and short out of context video clips, deepen your knowledge. Consume less, but spend MORE time on each thing you consume.

Buying into this fast and distracting culture of information consumption is only furthering the problems we have. Social media algorithms are rigged to build an echo chamber around you and to give you ‘truth’ that confirms your existing bias’. This is not real education.

As for the biological trait itself, why can’t we focus our attention on our human similarities instead of our differences? We can. But culturally we have learned not to because somewhere along the lines it’s what we chose to obsess over.

Perhaps because powerful people glean more power by dividing masses. Perhaps because our current economic systems thrive off division, competition, and having various classes. Either way, we’re making this all up as we go. It doesn’t have to be like this.

For those who might think “this is our biology. We will always do best in small groups of the same type of people,” this doesn’t appear to be true. Studies have shown that diversity trumps ability. Diversity significantly enhances the level of innovation in organizations around the world.

Groups of only ‘like-minds’ become echo chambers and our efficiency and innovation suffers. Yet another reason we must learn to love, respect and communicate with one another.

(Note: here I’m pointing to the uncovering our potential as humans and having that be our driver. Not productivity and innovation tied to making more money and having a ‘bullish market economy’)

The Takeaway

The key is that consciousness can overcome a flimsy biological trait that produces Us vs Them thinking within us. We can engage experience and education that connects us to our similarities, adopts a consciousness of interconnection and a shared stewardship of our planet and people.

Everything from ‘woke ideology’ constantly obsessing over our differences, to political news commentary always inviting people to ‘dislike the other side’ is contributing to a worse direction for humanity. Don’t just sit there and blame it though, simply choose to engage differently. Improve how you use social media. Consume less content but go deeper.

Consciousness is the power here. Why can’t we extend our worldview of who we are into oneness and a deeper connectedness? Why must we fight to shut off our wonder and hold to petty differences?

LIFE… IN REVERSAL

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By Kingsley L. Dennis

Source: Waking Times

‘We must distinguish between real change and fictitious change. The change that comes from without, from externally imposed training and discipline, is fictitious…Real change comes from within, by conscious work intentionally performed by the being himself.’ ~J.G. Bennett 

It is increasingly difficult in these times to speak of ‘non-verifiable’ or unprovable matters, especially concerns of the spirit-consciousness, for too many people are inculcated with fixed beliefs and thinking patterns. This is itself a sign of social conditioning and of a certain ‘management of mind.’ We should not be surprised that this situation is rife throughout our societies and cultures and is becoming increasingly predominant. Social norms are persuading many people to prefer safety and security rather than the potential discomfort that comes from gaining new realizations and understanding.

An ex-officer of the Soviet secret police who defected to the West (Gregory Klimov), revealed that in the fields of Soviet psychological warfare (and social psychology) they utilized the principles of psychoanalysis. In this, they saw the phenomena of evil as a ‘complicated, complex social illness.’ The psychoanalysts within the KGB equated evil with illness, especially an illness of the human psyche. This perspective places demonic actors and events as ‘objective realities;’ i.e., as various forms of illness of ‘psyche and soul.’ As the Russian anthroposophist G.A. Bondarev writes: ‘The devils represents an involved and complex process of degeneracy or retrogression that in the main consists of three parts: sexual deviation, psychic illnesses and some physical deformities of the organism.

The number of humans already afflicted with this degeneration is legion.’1 Bondarev goes on to say that, based on certain social-psychological testing, the greatest degeneracy exists within the so-called elite of the world (as much as 75%). What this points to, concludes Bondarev, is a drastic decline of the human spirit. What it also tells us is that the phenomenon of ‘evil’ does not necessarily need to be personified or projected into certain personages as it represents an illness of the human psyche. We can recognize its presence operating within psychic imbalance and internal disconnect and detachment. And I would concur with Bondarev’s conclusion in that such psychic dis-ease represents an inner disconnect with the transcendental impulse. This disconnect, or splintering, from a sacred source has now come to signify the nature of the reversal that epitomizes much of contemporary life.

It is within this reversal that we see much of the negating, or counter-evolutionary, forces within humanity. And these forces have been dominating much of our everyday lives and continue to do so. I would suggest that it is our individual responsibility to recognize these forces, attempt to comprehend them, and to transform them into impulses that can work for humankind’s evolvement. In this, we need to come to grips with the presence and activity of those aspects that signify a psychic illness, or dis-ease, within life. Such aspects are a feature of existence as much as positive, developmental forces. They all act within the playground of attraction, repulsion, and the expression of energy. The Rosicrucians recognized these forces when they referred to the Deus Inversus – or the ‘Reversed God.’ This nature of reversal works on humanity through the spheres of imbalance and disharmony to counteract civilizational development. The Austrian mystic Rudolf Steiner was aware of the future impact of such forces when he stated that: ‘It is essential that the forces which manifest as evil if they appear at the wrong place must be taken in hand…in such a way that humanity can achieve something with these forces of evil that will be beneficial for the future of the whole of world evolution.’2 In this regard, it is important that the individual becomes aware of the metaphysical realm that lies beyond the threshold of normal, or every day, consciousness.

If we remain unawares to our own forces of spirit-consciousness, then we are more susceptible to the manipulations of such counter-developmental forces. Those readers familiar with my writings will know that I have attempted to draw attention to certain aspects of our consensus reality in order to gain greater clarity about how we may respond to the situation in a constructive way. I stand by what was written in the Gnostic Gospel of Philip: ‘For so long as the root of wickedness is hidden, it is strong. But when it is recognized, it is dissolved. When it is revealed, it perishes.’ Recognition, through heightened awareness and perception, brings more choice into play. The individual needs to be conscious of certain facts before they can manifest the correct intention and focus of will. What is needed is a culture of revelation – of ‘uncovering’ – rather than of cover up. It is through revelation that insight into the metaphysical foundation of life can be sustained within our increasingly materialistic societies. This access to metaphysical realities can never be wholly eradicated. Yet just a cursory glance at modern life indicates that there are attempts to deepen peoples’ immersion into deteriorating forms of dissonance and distraction. This can be seen as a form of reality deceit.

Reality Deceit

The great deceit that is coming upon us is the unveiling of a so-called ‘utopia’ based on the isolation of the human spirit-consciousness. This fake promise is wrapped up in tech-salvationist terms, heralding a false ideal future. The real dis-ease of the human condition is to be in a state of estrangement. That is, estranged and alienated from any metaphysical influence or nourishment. It is not that the metaphysical background to life must necessarily be obvious to us, or tangible in our daily lives – only that we are cognizant of its existence and continual influence. Yet once this sense of recognition (the act of aware cognition) is dissolved, a barren soulless life is the result. And yet, in most circumstances, people will not be cognizant of this loss – this lack of the transcendental impulse in their lives – for they will be entrained into a reality consisting of a physical-digital mesh that keeps them attached to their lower nature and desires. This deceit consists of a most heinous form of enslavement, for it shall both be a willing one as well as an ignorant one. The splintering of the human being from its metaphysical connection shall go almost unnoticed, and the transfer into a reality of limited consciousness will have been enacted quite skillfully. This sly route to a human condition of alienation, procured through the guise of technological advancement and progress, will be a coup against the creative spirit. And this shall be the reversal of the human reality – the reality deceit.

The almost imperceptible dangers are that we have been slipping into a reversed reality, constructed through a realm of fantasy and make-believe, which now fuels the crass and superficial culture industries that dominate modern life. Any notion of Higher Reality has been twisted into an artificial lesser reality that attempts to hinder, as far as is possible, the developmental impulse from penetrating. This arrangement has culminated in dissociating humankind not only from its natural, organic, carbon-based environment, but also from an inherent contact with its origin – Source consciousness. This increasing disembodiment is reflected in such forms as the techno-digital ecosystem, extended reality (the Metaverse), computerization (including algorithms), and artificial intelligence. For many people today, their digital devices have become their instruments of salvation. But this salvation, this divine deliverance, belongs to the Deus Inversus – and we should choose our gods carefully. We should be careful too, not to be pulled into the encroaching banalization of life. And we should be on the look-out for signs and signals.

If anyone wishes to see how ‘signals’ can operate within the reality deceit, then watch all the episodes in the recent Westworld TV series (2016-2022). In Season Four, the machinic android ‘hosts’ have taken control of the world using a bioengineered virus that infects humans over the course of a generation, turning them docile and susceptible to AI and ‘host’ control. Storylines and narratives are created in order to give people their roles and characters in life, which they passively follow believing them to be their own life stories. Humankind is managed through these manufactured ‘storylines’ (a.k.a. socio-cultural narratives) that are transmitted directly to the minds and lives of humans through a series of radio-sonic transmission signals via the global technological infrastructure…But then again, this is just a fantasy story after all.

The course of external events that inform our political, economic, and cultural systems are not arbitrary, coincidental or natural. The modern human has been subtly manipulated into disconnecting from, and even shunning, the guidance of higher impulses. We are being told that the human being alone is the sole and dominant driving force for the future. And by this, we are propelled ever further into the personality construct with the human ego at the wheel. We are standing at the threshold of adopting a glorified materialistic view of life and the world. The spell of this disease is working to over-materialize materialism in a very deliberate and nefarious way. There may be some discomfort in the unfoldment of awareness, yet this is part of the transmutation of the dis-ease.

Life ‘in reversal’ is working hard and fast on this intensifying of materialism. This deepening materialism not only denies the expansion of consciousness but is actively working to stagnate it. At the same time, we are moving through an impulse of increasing individual awareness against the backdrop of this over-materialization. Yet it is an awareness through the few, and not the many (yet). By recognizing that certain forces within the world are using processes of mass suggestion to introduce a simplification – or ‘dumbing down’ – of human consciousness, we can gain greater awareness over our condition and predicament. And in this awareness, we can gain a natural resistance and protection, as recognition allows a discernment to be made. It is this discernment to step away from the negating energies and frequencies of toxicity that can help a person to attune to a resonance of perceptive consciousness. By choosing where we place ourselves – our focus and attention – we can either take a step forward or stay where we are and stagnate. As always, the choice remains with us.

RE-WIRING FOR THE FOUNDATIONS OF A NEW WORLD

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By Kingsley L. Dennis

Source: Waking Times

‘You are the foundation in which a new world needs to be built upon – each and every one of you are a part of this foundation.’ – Abe

There have always been individuals among the population that exhibit a higher resonance, and this enables them, whether they are conscious of it or not, to act as ‘alarm clocks’ for others. What may be the real issue here is not so much the chaos unfolding in the physical world but rather that not enough people are enabling an appropriate resonance to take root and to become established within humanity. The real ‘apocalyptic’ scenario is the breaking down of old ways and the bringing in of new resonant alignments. It is difficult for humans to accept that great change and shifts come about through breakdown, and what appears as destruction. That is, beginnings need a new space from which to emerge, both physically and energetically.

The current reality of the modern world has much within it to overload the human senses. There are many factors that contribute to vibrational dissonance, and this seems to be increasing, not lessening. Part of this is related to our advancing technologies, especially our digital devices and communications infrastructure. Other aspects are related to the human psyche, and its individual and collective state of psychological (dis)equilibrium. Both elements – the technological and the psychological – are interrelated and affect one another. Moreover, there are also deliberate human strategies to maintain this dissonance and state of fragmentation as a means to manipulate, control, divide, and box up each individual inside their own conscious experience. If placed into specific labelled boxes, then human thinking patterns and fields of consciousness will become artificially restricted. Unfortunately, many people have become so used to experiencing consciousness within limited parameters. These are our restrictive thinking patterns, that then go on to form belief systems, intellectual structures, and programmed perspectives. We are literally living out of boxes – psychologically homeless – with our genuine freedoms curtailed. We are so used to projecting our psychological attachments upon so many unnecessary things, which we then get entangled with.

It is understandable that there is a confusion around the concept of resonance. There is a popular notion that resonance is something to be ‘raised’ through certain actions such as positive thinking. Yet ultimately, this may be little more than sugar-coating – a ‘band-aid treatment’ as it is called.[1] That is, people end up masking the issue without actually getting to the root of it. And this appears to be fast becoming a default setting in modern life. By seeking out positive thinking ‘feel good’ type of practices, this is like using medication to mask the pain without finding out the root cause. And in the end, it may serve as a distraction rather than a benefit for there is still an attachment to the old patterns and feel-good factors may function more as a delay rather than as a remedy. Positive thought is not a bad thing, but it should not detract from the understanding that a person is, relatively speaking, already imbued with their own potentials. The misunderstanding here is that people are pushing to ‘raise something.’ But in this, people often remain clinging to all the old baggage of seeking salvation away from the circumstances of everyday life. And this can make it harder still for people to let go, to disconnect, from their unhealthy entanglements. Natural resonance is more a question of being receptive rather than pushing to ‘raise’ something. That is, we are being reminded to refine what we already are – there is no need to feel compelled to go anywhere ‘higher.’

A person’s energetic state and resonance is relational to how they feel within. As such, it is strongly connected to our mental and emotional states. As it is now broadly recognized, the human being is highly socially conditioned. We are easily influenced and manipulated to give away our inner authority onto external structures and supports. The more things that we link our energy up to, the more we can be influenced. In this, we can be giving our energies away without a reciprocal exchange. This can be through linking up to other people, as well as with possessions, ideas, desires, etc.

The more we send out our vibrational tentacles, the more we are liable, often unknowingly, to give a little away of ourselves each time. We easily forget to ‘draw back the links,’ and to reevaluate our psychological, emotional, and physical attachments. It is often through our own unawareness that we block or distort our natural resonance – our flow. Just as we arrange our house to the way we like it, to give us the energetic feel that makes it right for us, so too should we arrange our life, our connections and relations, in a way that harmonizes with us. Humans have the advantage over other animals that we have a high degree of self-awareness. Yet because of this, we often over-complicate matters; whereby animals, on the other hand, are much more instinctive and responsive to fields of energy. It may be good to remind ourselves that we each have the capacity to literally re-wire our internal connections that then will manifest in our external relations. In the end, human survival is dependent upon the connections we make to the world around us. We cannot evolve as a species cut off from its environment, energetically isolated.

It seems that humanity is being nudged down its rabbit hole, but all alone. We have lost part of our essential connection in how we resonate to the planet, the animal kingdom, with the ecosystem, and within the larger cosmos. We are severing our resonance with the very environment that sustains and nourishes us – it is like we are peeing in our own bathwater. In the end, any imbalance will cause our species the greatest upset. The planet, and its environment, can always find rebalance, for this is their natural resonance. On the other hand, humanity has placed this disequilibrium and off-kilter resonance upon themselves – or else allowed others to place it. Yet now is the moment to step away from these pathways of dissonance and disequilibrium and to allow for the establishment of a new foundation.

Beginnings need a new space from which to emerge, both physically and energetically.

The path of self-development – ‘a process of human becoming’ – is something that generally goes against all that we have been taught. Or rather, against all the social programming and conditioning that we were brought up within. We may even be asking ourselves: ‘why be the foundation in which a new world needs to be built upon when I have a hard enough time dealing with my regular everyday life?’ It may also sound like pseudo-science when it is said that the creation of new neural pathways in the human brain can allow for a new resonance pattern. Yet this is how new thinking operates – it starts to establish new patterns of neuronal connection. And this is where the initial re-wiring should occur – in our own internal workings, not out there in the physical world. Besides, what happens within will also be reflected without: this is also part of the relational aspect of energy. It is about reprogramming ourselves first, before we rush off trying to reorder and reorganize the world around us. We need to take time to reassess and to question ourselves and the world we perceive. It is time for us to take a good, deep look at our own human programming.

Humanity (broadly speaking) has seemingly got itself embedded into a ‘vicious cycle,’ or loop pattern. Our socializing processes literally hypnotize us, and we create a myriad of manifestos and ideologies to keep us entertained (or transfixed). We easily become trapped within our own rankings and system of hierarchies, and little realize how much we smother ourselves.  After putting on so many outer layers (like overcoats) – socially, psychologically, emotionally, etc. – it is now time to start stripping them back. We often refer to the life experience as the ‘game of life,’ yet we often miss the point in that games are meant to be played – and we need to learn how to play our ‘selves.’ In playing our Self, we also should be playing our own truths. Yet most of the time we end up playing someone else’s truths. We need to ground ourselves first. Otherwise, we are liable to be swung around by the events, influences, and manipulations of life.

We are not here to pre-define to ourselves where we may find our truths or not, for then we are already creating limitations and confinements. The barriers, blockages, and illusions that we may have built up around us need now to be dropped. After all, life often has a way of circumnavigating our expectations and presenting us with incredible, spontaneous opportunities. Let us just say that it is timely to be now taking time out to re-align with our ‘home resonance’ and to root this. It is important that we each find the space to refocus, to readjust, and realign. To find our balance – our resonance/equilibrium – is not rocket-science, as they say.

If a person wishes to use certain practices/tools to re-sync back up, then this is fine – so long as they realize that these are tools and not the thing itself. Of course, it can be said that humans have always used tools throughout their history; tools have helped us navigate through the material world and to mediate our experiences. The danger here, though, is when we start to over-identify with them; when we say, ‘my practice or meditation is more spiritual, more aligned than yours,’ then such an attitude as this helps no one. Readjustment is not a forced process; it is a natural re-alignment and, as such, should be as normal as possible and not strained. Our tools and practices should not end up getting in the way by becoming our crutches. Once the ‘work is done,’ so to speak, we can put them down again and stop carrying them with us. After all, we wouldn’t continue to use a hammer if it is not needed, for it would only damage the wood.

Ultimately, those structures and groupings that favour separation, division, and control will fall for they are not sustainable or relatable to natural law. If the energy upon this planet increasingly shifts to one of unity and togetherness, then this will attract others into this alignment. People, structures, and groupings that have previously favoured separation and discord may then be compelled to realign if the prominent energies upon the planet shift. Not only is this scenario possible, it may even be likely, due to cosmic factors which then influence planetary ones. This realignment upon the planet may be chaotic initially, yet such chaos generally has a function. And let us also be honest: this re-wiring for the foundations of a new world will not attract everyone. Not everyone is ready for it yet. There are a great many people not yet actively seeking this type of information or understanding. And that is fine. Nothing can be forced – that is the nature of natural resonance. Yet if enough people start to manifest a new harmonic resonance, the collective instrument that is humanity can be re-tuned. After all, it only takes a few musicians to hear the new pitch in order to guide the orchestra.

At the Lost and Found

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By Edward Curtin

Source: Behind the Curtain

“Nothing is more real than nothing.”
Samuel Beckett, Malone Dies

Those who are never lost are forever lost.  Only those who know they are lost and that life is a shipwreck have a chance to find their way to shore.

The world’s great religions, including Taoism and Existential philosophy, understand that at the heart of human existence is the presence of the not (death, emptiness, void), but this negative reality, this “nothingness” interpenetrates with the positive of being alive so that our knowledge coincides with our ignorance, our lives with our death, and our truth with untruth.  This is also common sense.

Everyone is a pilgrim on the way, and because there are no maps, we all get lost.  And it is only by getting lost in a deep sense that we can find ourselves and discover the truth about the world.

It is well known that Ernest Hemingway made famous the phrase “the lost generation” when he opened his novel The Sun Also Rises with the epigram “You are all a lost generation,” attributed to Gertrude Stein, who said she heard it from a garage owner who said it about a young auto mechanic in his employ.

It is less well known that Hemingway later wrote “that all generations were lost by something and always had been and always would be …But to hell with her lost-generation talk and all the dirty easy labels.”

He was thinking of how the madness of war with the calls to patriotism and God and country and the never-ending official lies about everything maimed people at very deep levels.  His words in A Farewell to Arms have lasted because they are so true in their dismissal of abstract obscenities and their embrace of the concrete:

I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice and the expression in vain …. And I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards of Chicago if nothing were done with the meat except to bury it …. Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates.

No doubt he was also thinking of the existential anxiety of being alive and the fear of death and nothingness that is conveyed in his powerful short story, “A Clean Well-Lighted Place” that appeared in the 1930 volume Winner Take Nothing.  He was well acquainted with nothing (the not, nada) and knew that social circumstances only add to it, particularly wars and the nihilistic death wishes of lying political leaders.

Some say nothing has changed for millennia and that every age is similar and people are the same, always complaining about the present and recalling the good old days.  There is some truth in this, but the issue of assessing today in all its uniqueness remains paramount.  For every age and every generation is different; therein lies its potential and dangers.  Each can only be understood within its place and time.  We live in the era of high technology that has never before existed.  It is unique.  And it is uniquely dangerous.

Today is a time of unprecedented official lies about everything, endless wars hot and cold, class wars of the rich against the poor, medical wars of international elites against everyone, etc. –  it is a daily electronic digital  barrage meant to pound people into the deepest despair.  Call it “The Lost World of the Information Superhighway.”  These lies have sown a vast sense of bewilderment, as intended.  Lostness for so many, including those who don’t know it and take those lies for truth. People who don’t know that there are still places, although they are shrinking, where truth can be found.  The problem is, of course, that even when they are told about media sites and writers that operate honestly and outside the propaganda mill, they usually refuse to go there.  They prefer to live inside what Jim Garrison, the former New Orleans District Attorney who brought the only trial in the assassination of President Kennedy, correctly termed “the Doll’s House.”

Picking through the bins at the lost and found on the Internet, which is dominated by intelligence services and their Silicon Valley big tech partners, many who feel lost find “things” they think they have lost but which are counterfeit.  They cling to them as to false gods, not realizing that they have been placed there by the elite mountebanks and their accomplices, a process similar to a document dump that contains fabricated records.  It is an old trick.  Often what is really lost is the sense that life makes sense and is meaningful, but this awareness is often replaced with shards of false reassurance meant to distract and far too much information for anyone to comprehend.

What’s up?  Check your cell phone and head down the primrose path to unreality.

Just as there are two senses to being lost, one based on the awareness that if we refuse to grasp at straws and proceed through life by faith, the unknown road will bear us up (Thoreau said, “How vigilant we are! determined not to live by faith if we can avoid it…”), and the other being the more socially induced one of incessant propaganda, so too there are two ways of thinking about nothing.  The existential sense as described by Hemingway in his famous story mentioned above, and the sense of trivia or superficial preoccupations that distract.  C.S. Lewis described the latter sense very well:

The Christians describe the enemy as one ‘without whom Nothing is strong’. And Nothing is very strong: strong enough to steal away a man’s best years not in sweet sins but in a dreary flickering of the mind over it knows not what and knows not why, in the gratification of curiosities so feeble that the man is only half aware of them, in drumming of fingers and kicking of heels, in whistling tunes that he does not like, or in the long dim labyrinth of reveries that have not even lust or ambition to give them relish, but which, once chance association has started them, the creature is too weak and fuddled to shake off.

This is a perfect description of the passivity of scrolling the internet or social media.  Much ado about absolutely nothing but distractions.  Tranquilized by trivia.

Our current situation has been long in coming.  Back in the early 1960s, there was a  highly touted intellectual named Marshall McLuhan whose 1964 book, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, was gobbled up by the baby boomers raised on television, whose rebellious members protested the inhumanity of IBM computer technology of that time.  Ironically, it was members of this generation who later created the computer revolution and have promoted the digital revolution.  They carry cell phones as sidearms to defend themselves from reality.

Newsweek called McLuhan “the oracle of the New Communications.”  He was an obscurantic celebrator of the electronic media and retribalized man long before the Internet, cell phones, personal computers, and digital mania.  McLuhan’s paeans to technology sounded very profound and liberating  with their vaguely Gnostic and Jungian rhetoric, which also fit with the 1960s “vibes.”  He called the electronic media our gods whom we must serve, for they in turn would liberate us.  He gave life to things while taking it from persons.  He wrote:

Electromagnetic technology requires utter human docility and quiescence of meditation such as befits an organism that now wears its brain outside its skull and its nerves outside its hide. Man must serve his electronic technology with the same servo-mechanistic fidelity with which he served his coracle, his canoe, his typography, and all other extensions of his physical organs. But there is this difference, that previous technologies were partial and fragmentary, and the electric is total and inclusive. An external consensus or conscience is now as necessary as private consciousness. [my emphases]

Clearly this was a message of a prescient religious crank: mystical, mythological, technological nonsense perfectly in tune with the dawning new age. Not any coming of the Age of Aquarius, however, but that of the Age of Digital Control and endless wars.

By turning the person inside out and giving life to things, McLuhan was certainly anticipating and promoting the developments of the past forty years.  His ideas gave legitimacy to the passivity of the person in the face of the burgeoning mass media consumer culture.  They supported the growing commodification of all aspects of life, especially people.  By externalizing the person, McLuhan was eliminating the idea of the autonomous self and opening the way for today’s era of consumers, blank screens for the reception of advertising, public relations, and propaganda on a vast scale.  In fact, what he wrote of television runs deeper for cell phones and computer screens.  “ … with TV,” he wrote, “the viewer is the screen.  He is bombarded with light impulses that James Joyce called the ‘Charge of the Light Brigade’ that imbues his ‘soulskin with subconscious inklings.’ “

Inklings of abstract obscenities at war with the lost world of reality.

While many people sense this, they still embrace their killers, feeling that they would be lost without them. They have become appendages of their electronic appendages.  The current push to transform all person-to-person life into a digital one run by Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies with its mass surveillance powers is recognized by many but dismissed as a weird conspiracy.  This is so far from the truth.  A good indicator of this nonchalant attitude toward such developing trends is the vastly increased popularity of on-line shopping.  Its innocence conceals the future that is coming.

I recently won a very high-tech looking electric toothbrush at the dentist.  When I opened it, I discovered it contained a gadget with a suction cup that could hold a “smart phone” that you could attach to the mirror.  The phone could electronically be linked to the toothbrush and it would monitor your brushing as you watched yourself brush.  Poor me, I felt so stupid: a man without a smart phone!

While everybody knows that the boat is leaking and the captain lied, to paraphrase Leonard Cohen, such knowledge is abstract.  It is a sort-of knowledge, sensed but also denied.  Real but unreal.  Known but unknown.  And that’s how it goes.  It is very difficult for many conventional people to admit that the life they have known is disappearing while they dawdle in fantasy land, believing the propaganda of their rulers.  To live in the U.S.A. is to live in Neverland where no one ever has to be alone, never grow up, and always be “in touch” through the ether.  It is a country of lost children.

You can choose any issue of importance and its official explanation is certain to be untrue, obvious or subtle propaganda.  The lies about Ukraine and Russia; Covid-19, lockdowns, and vaccines; China and Taiwan; U.S. forces in Syria and U.S. support for Israeli aggression against Syria and the Palestinians; its support for Saudi Arabia’s ruthless policies and war against Yemen; the economy, central banking, and inflation; the increasing censorship of dissident voices; digital IDs, digital programmable currencies, and social credit systems; the persecution of Julian Assange; the Great Reset; a series of binaries meant to suggest false alternatives, etc.  The list is endless.  All official lies to support a sinking ship captained by psychopathic liars seemingly intent on a world war that will destroy the world.  Melville’s Captain Ahab writ large. Like those traveling on the Titanic, today’s passengers on the flailing American empire’s Good Ship Lollipop are in for a surprise, and it won’t be a sweet trip to a candy shop.

Hemingway was surely right that “Winner Take Nothing.”  Yet losers also exit empty-handed.  Everybody knows this but goes on surrounding themselves with stuff, lots of things.  Hoarders are a popular TV subject because they represent the extreme form of this madcap method of trying to secure oneself from loss.  It is a form of mental and spiritual despair that could only exist in advanced capitalist consumer society.  Too many possessions and too much information.  Cluttered minds, cluttered abodes.  There is a reason why the world’s poor are called the dispossessed.  One could say hoarders are the possessed, and it is a form of demonic possession.

Recently I was called upon to help a hospitalized elderly relative by checking on her house.  The house is filled from attic to basement, in every nook and cranny, with collected things that serve no life purpose but were kept to provide a security blanket that was really a strangulation cord.  I will spare you the details, except to say that this relative is an intelligent woman, as was her deceased husband, and yet they surrounded themselves with so much “stuff,” never threw things out, kept papers from 70 years ago, old keys and coins, empty jewelry boxes by the score, etc.  An overwhelming scene to behold.  And why did they do this?  Because they thought they were protecting themselves against loss, against nothing, nada.

As T. S. Eliot wrote in The Wasteland: “These fragments I have shored against my ruins.”  But there is nothing that will protect against the loss Eliot was referring to – the social, psychological, and spiritual fragmentation of Europe as a result of World War I.  A wasteland created by politicians. Like today.

We too are now living in a wasteland, and the only way to find our way forward is to acknowledge that we are lost and to jettison the false security of believing the vast tapestry of lies promulgated by the captains of the American-led Titanic.

I often think of the words of the poet Rilke as good advice, a step in the right direction where there is a lost and found worth visiting and insights await us. While primarily writing about the artist who time and again is that someone who emerges from the crowd and whose “winged heart everywhere beats against the walls of their time,” I think his words apply to every person, including journalists.  To plumb the depths of our sordid current world demands aesthetic, political, and spiritual resistance rooted in the open sociological imagination, a willingness to go wherever the facts and intuition leads us.  Rilke said:

Not any self-control or self-limitation for the sake of specific ends, but rather a carefree letting go of oneself; not caution, but rather a wise blindness; not working to acquire silent, slowly increasing possessions, but rather a continuous squandering of all perishable values. This way of being has something naïve and instinctive about it, and resembles that period of the unconscious best characterized by a joyous confidence, namely the period of childhood …. [the child] has no anxiety about losing things …. And whatever he has once been lit up in love remains as an image, never more to be lost, and the image is possession; that is why children are so rich.

For a country of lost children, this is a good place to start.

We’ve Been Lied To Our Whole Lives About Everything That Matters

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By Caitlin Johnstone

Source: CaitlinJohnstone.com

Stories about protagonists who’ve been misguided their whole lives about something very important have been emerging in our culture for generations, and they continue to delight audiences in the box office to this day.

The pauper was really a prince. Luke was Darth Vader’s son. Keanu Reeves had been living in a computer simulation. Bruce Willis was really a ghost. Jim Carrey’s whole world was the set of a TV show, and everyone in his life had been lying to him since his infancy.

This theme repeats so often because it strongly resonates with people. And it strongly resonates with people because it’s exactly what is happening.

From our earliest moments we are trained to fit in with a society that was designed from the ground up by the powerful in the service of the powerful. As soon as we are old enough to get curious about the world and how it works our heads are filled with lies about such matters, by our education systems, by the media we consume, by our parents who were indoctrinated in the same way, and by the very culture we find ourselves immersed in from day one.

These stories about a character who’s been deceived about life resonate so strongly with us because on some level we all suspect it might be true of our own lives as well. They whisper to something hidden and sacred within us that has always sensed that there’s something not quite right with the way we are perceiving things.

We’ve spent our whole lives marinating in lies which serve the powerful. We’re deceived into believing that we live in a democracy whose government acts in accordance with the will of the voting public. We’re deceived into believing our political systems are driven by two warring ideological factions whose divisions are naturally occurring phenomena in our society instead of the product of deliberate social engineering. We’re deceived into believing our government is basically good, and that it stands in opposition to foreign governments who are pure evil. We’re deceived into believing the way things are is the only way they could possibly be.

We’re deceived into believing false things about the ways we gather information and form our understanding of the world. We’re deceived into believing the news media tell us the truth about what’s going on. We’re deceived into believing that everything we hear from our side of the political partisan divide is true and trustworthy. We’re deceived into believing the partisan filters which have been placed over our perception of national and world events by indoctrination are entirely reliable instruments for interpreting information and drawing conclusions.

We’re deceived into believing false things about ourselves. We’re deceived into believing that we are successful if we can become dominant capitalists and wealthy ladder climbers, and that we are failures if we don’t turn the gears of industry and climb over others to get ahead. We’re deceived into believing that we are good if we uphold the made-up, power-serving rules of law, of culture and of religion, and that we are bad if we transgress them. We are deceived into believing that we need to keep accomplishing, achieving and obtaining, that we need to keep earning money and approval, so that we might one day feel adequate at some imaginary point in a future which never arrives.

If we really commit to uprooting the untruth that’s been planted in us, we can even discover that we’ve been deceiving ourselves about the way we experience reality. That the perception of oneself as a finite character who is separate from the world is based on false assumptions about the way experience is happening, unhelpful mental habits born of incorrect premises, and overlooked aspects of our own consciousness. That we’ve been making ourselves miserable with false beliefs about who and what we are.

This civilization is the set of the Truman Show, and we are all Truman.

But because we are all Truman, we can only walk off the set if we walk off together. There is no option to leave as an individual, because even if you know it’s all lies, you’re still stuck in a world full of humans whose behavior is driven by lies.

Awakening to reality as an individual can for this reason sometimes be more uncomfortable than remaining asleep in the dream, because you’re like Truman after he realizes it’s all a sham, but before he escapes. At times you’re just stuck there, freaking out at the actor who’s playing your mother while she tries in vain to cut to a commercial break. It can be distressing for you, and it can be distressing for the people around you who aren’t yet on the same page.

The only way we’re getting off the set of the Truman Show is if we can all succeed in waking each other up from the lies which built it. Until then we’ll be stuck in a world of poverty, war, exploitation, degradation, ecocide, and suffering. It’s not until enough of us have unplugged our minds from the matrix of lies that we’ll be able to use our strength of numbers to force real change.

Only then will we be able to escape.

Only then will we be able to walk off the set.

Only then will we be able to turn to the audience and say, “In case I don’t see ya: good afternoon, good evening, and good night!”

And then turn around, and walk out the door, and begin our adventure into reality.

Our Challenge Is To Transcend Our Evolutionary Ape Heritage

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By Caitlin Johnstone

Source: CaitlinJohnstone.com

Did you know chimpanzees hunt smaller primates for food?

They do. They’re actually very skillful hunters due to their size, their strength, and especially their intelligence. They coordinate their attacks, working together to cut off the escape routes of their prey to greatly increase their success rate. Scientists have even frequently observed them using crude spears to kill a small primate species called the lesser bush baby for their meat.

One of the many interesting things about this behavior in our primate cousins is that they are so good at hunting they can become victims of their own success, wiping out entire populations of prey in their area. Red colobus monkeys have been hunted to the brink of local extinction in Uganda by chimpanzees hungry for a quick protein fix, solely because they’ve been gobbling up those delicious little guys faster than they can reproduce.

Sound familiar?

The tendency of homo sapiens to overburden our ecosystem with our consumption is not unique to us, and is not new. In fact, it looks like we’ve been on this trajectory toward ecocide since our ancient evolutionary ancestors began evolving extra brain matter.

And it is possible to just stop there and conclude that we are no different from our chimp relatives in this sense. That we will simply keep overhunting the red colobus monkey until there are none left, that we will keep depleting and destroying our biosphere until it can no longer sustain life. That the human brain differs from the chimpanzee’s only in intelligence, not in wisdom. That we are in essence no different from the cyanobacteria at the dawn of the Proterozoic Era, a new species showing up on the scene and causing a mass extinction event in an ecosystem overburdened by their rapid flourishing.

You do also however have the option of openness to the possibility that maybe, just maybe, our species is destined for greater things. That maybe, just maybe, we have within us the capacity to transcend the mindless patterning of our evolutionary ancestors and move into a mindful relationship with this planet and its life forms. That maybe, just maybe, this whole human adventure doesn’t need to end in disaster after all.

From what I can tell, the only people who find this idea outlandish are those who have never experienced a great unpatterning of their own. Who have never healed the wounds of their past and transcended the unwholesome mental habits which were given to them by their conditioning. To anyone who has experienced a dramatic transformation from dysfunction into health, it’s obvious that any human could potentially go through such transformations as well. Or even all humans.

It is possible that our descendents will look back on humanity’s existence on this planet from prehistoric times up until this crucial present moment as a kind of bridge between animal life and a new terrestrial expression that isn’t driven by the unconscious conditioning patterns that have driven the movements of every species on this planet from the very first single-celled organisms onward. That what we’re experiencing right now at this critical juncture is what it looks like before the emergence of the Earth’s first conscious species.

An unconscious human is one driven compulsively by deep-seated mental habits they don’t really see and can’t do much to control, so they’ll often find themselves engaged in unwholesome behavior patterns like addiction, unkindness, greed and neurosis, and making the same mistakes over and over for reasons they don’t quite understand.

A conscious human is one who doesn’t have unseen conditioning pulling the strings from behind the scenes in their subconscious mind, because they have done their work and drawn their inner demons into the light of consciousness where they can be healed. They are therefore able to move through life deliberately and in the interest of what’s best, rather than compulsively and in a way that spreads trauma to others.

A conscious humanity would mean that this way of functioning blossoms throughout the entire species.

Doesn’t it kind of look like that might be what’s happening? Like all the chaos and confusion of these strange times could simply be the birth pangs of a species whose relationship with consciousness is about to take a dramatic pivot? The increasingly shrill mass media narratives rapidly approaching white noise saturation? The increasingly widespread awareness that our society’s rules are made up and we can change them whenever we want? The mysterious increase in incidents of spiritual awakening as reported by teachers of enlightenment? Just how goddamn weird everything’s been getting these last few years?

I think it’s possible. I think it’s possible we are moving as a species toward an adaptation that will enable us to survive in a situation which is very different from the one we first emerged in, as every species eventually does if it doesn’t go extinct. If this is indeed what is happening, it stands to reason that it will be an adaptation that prevents us from wiping ourselves out via ecocide or nuclear war, and that a collective movement into consciousness is what that adaptation will look like.

A conscious species would be able to work in cooperation with its ecosystem, rather than compulsively consuming it due to primitive impulses to obtain and dominate and egoic impulses to be rich and have more. A conscious species would be able to convert civilization from competition-based models into collaboration-based models, where rather than trying to climb over each other to get ahead we all work together to make sure everyone has what they need to live. A conscious species would no longer see the sense in dividing itself up into separate competing nation-states which brandish armageddon weapons at each other out of fear and greed.

The more I learn about humanity, and the more I learn about myself, the more possible such a world appears to be. Sure the world’s a chaotic and distressing mess right now, but so is childbirth. However bad things get for us, as long as we’re still alive our problems are nothing that can’t be fixed with a collective movement into consciousness.

Anyway. That’s my pet theory right now. And the cool thing about my theory is that if you like it too, you don’t have to wait for it to come true. You can start becoming more conscious on your own right now and leading the charge for the rest of us. Investigate your true nature, heal your wounds, be responsible with your actions, and begin working to coax all your endarkened bits into the light.

And then hopefully the rest will follow. If they don’t, worst-case scenario is you wind up a lot more happy and functional than you otherwise would have been, because you brought so much more consciousness to your inner processes and your habits of perception and cognition.

This is where the real adventure is at, in my opinion. This is where the rubber meets the road.

I will meet you there.