The Path To Liberating Humanity Is The Same As The Path To Liberating The Individual

Posted on May 5, 2019 by Reid Mukai

By Caitlin Johnstone

The path to enlightenment is the process of becoming clearly aware of all the different aspects of the way you operate inside, which enables you to relate to life as it’s actually appearing instead of through the filters of old conditioned mental habits. The path to the liberation of our species is the process of collectively becoming clearly aware of the reality of our situation as opposed to the false narratives about it, so that we can begin solving our problems as they actually are instead of the way the establishment media describes them. These two processes are recursive mirrors of each other; one describes the process on the micro scale, the other on the macro, but they occur in the exact same way.

People sometimes complain that I talk about the problems that humanity faces without ever offering any solutions. I disagree with this criticism; I talk about the solution to our problem all the time, using plain language that anyone can understand. It just often goes in one ear and out the other, because it’s not the sort of answer that people have been conditioned to listen for.

When people ask for solutions to our problems, they’re conditioned by the standard rhetoric of our time to get an essay about labor organization, political activism, consumer activism, cryptocurrencies or technological innovations, depending on where they’re at on the political spectrum. What they are not conditioned to listen for is the most direct and honest answer that I am able to give them: that we’ve got to move from an unhealthy relationship with mental narrative into a healthy one.

This is not some lofty or impractical suggestion, it’s just the thing that we need to do in order to pull up and away from our ecocidal, omnicidal trajectory and move into a healthy collaboration with each other and with our ecosystem. As long as our minds are susceptible to the manipulations of the powerful people who rule us by controlling the dominant narratives in our world, we’ll be bent to the will of sociopathic plutocrats and opaque government agencies until we plunge forever into the darkness of extinction or dehumanizing dystopia. Individuals are capable of transcending the unwholesome relationship with mental narrative which dominates conventional human consciousness, so that’s a potentiality which exists within our species as a collective as well.

This is the only off-ramp that I can see from the armageddon superhighway. It’s impossible to get the people to use the power of their numbers to unseat their oppressors as long as their oppressors are able to control the thoughts that they think in their heads. Political organization and activism can be thwarted by mass media campaigns which manipulate the majority into continuing to support the status quo. Cryptocurrencies and technological innovations are impotent as long as those in power can control the stories that the majority tells itself about how they work and what should be done with them. You won’t engage in revolutionary behavior if you’re being manipulated into not wanting to. So we’ve got to become impossible to manipulate.

This is the solution, and it’s very achievable. For millennia humanity has been writing about the capacity within all of us to transcend our old conditioning patterns and perceive the world free from the filters of mental narrative. They wrote about it within the limitations that existed on their expression at the time, coloring their descriptions with their respective religious beliefs, linguistic and cultural conventions, and what understanding of the mind they had access to in a pre-science world, and their ideas were generally cloistered within small esoteric circles due to the limited nature of communication, but the underlying message was always the same: reality is not what our thoughts describe, and we are all capable of perceiving beyond that mental veil.

How To Wake Up

"I’ve been putting off writing this article all year, but readers keep asking for it, and since I’ve been writing about mass enlightenment a lot lately I figure I might as well slip it in now."#enlightenment #spirituality https://t.co/gmxHh267LX

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) September 1, 2018

Up until now, the phenomenon of what many refer to as enlightenment has been a fairly rare occurrence within our species (though I suspect not quite as rare as some claim). According to some teachers who’ve been coaching people through the process for decades, it seems to be happening more and more frequently today. The teacher Adyashanti writes the following:

There’s a phenomenon happening in the world today. More and more people are waking up—having real, authentic glimpses of reality. By this I mean that people seem to be having moments where they awaken out of their familiar senses of self, and out of their familiar senses of what the world is, into a much greater reality—into something far beyond anything they knew existed.

These experiences of awakening differ from person to person. For some, the awakening is sustained over time, while for others the glimpse is momentary—it may last just a split second. But in that instant, the whole sense of “self ” disappears. The way they perceive the world suddenly changes, and they find themselves without any sense of separation between themselves and the rest of the world. It can be likened to the experience of waking up from a dream—a dream you didn’t even know you were in until you were jolted out of it.

In the beginning of my teaching work, most of the people who came to me were seeking these deeper realizations of spirituality. They were seeking to wake up from the limiting and isolated senses of self they had imagined themselves to be. It’s this yearning that underpins all spiritual seeking: to discover for ourselves what we already intuit to be true— that there is more to life than we are currently perceiving.

But as time has passed, more and more people are coming to me who have already had glimpses of this greater reality.

Renowned author and teacher Eckhart Tolle agrees:

I see signs that it is already happening. For the first time there is a large scale awakening on our planet. Why now? Because if there is no change in human consciousness now, we will destroy ourselves and perhaps the planet. The insanity of the collective egoic mind, amplified by science and technology, is rapidly taking our species to the brink of disaster. Evolve or die: that is our only choice now. Without considering the Eastern world, my estimate is that at this time about ten percent of people in North America are already awakening. That makes thirty million Americans alone, and in addition to those people in other North American countries, about ten percent of the population of Western European countries are also awakening. This is probably enough of a critical mass to bring about a new earth. So the transformation of consciousness is truly happening even though they won’t be reporting it on tonight’s news. Is it happening fast enough? I am hopeful about humanity’s future, much more so now than when I wrote The Power of Now. In fact that is why I wrote that book. I really wasn’t sure that humanity was going to survive. Now I feel differently. I see many reasons to be hopeful.

You are of course free to believe these guys or not, but I personally don’t see any incentive for them to be disingenuous about what they’re seeing in their field of work. The best way to make a fortune as a spiritual teacher is to gather a large cult-like following around yourself under the presentation of having attained something exceedingly special and rare, not to say essentially “Yeah this is happening all over the place now; it’s no big deal. What happened to me is becoming as common as grass.”

So why the change? Why after millennia of enlightenment remaining a rare phenomenon are we suddenly seeing it becoming more common?

I don’t know. Maybe it’s got something to do with the fact that we’re at evolve-or-die time as a species, and something primal deep within us is leaping to clear that hurdle in the same way all organisms fight to survive with everything they’ve got. Maybe it’s got something to do with our exponentially improved ability to network and share information, making useful pointers and teachings which guide the way to enlightenment vastly more accessible. Maybe our unprecedented access to information itself is the cause; billions of human brains suddenly connected to mankind’s entire collective archive of knowledge is in and of itself a drastic change in human consciousness. Maybe it’s all three. Maybe it’s something else we can’t see yet. But it does appear to be happening.

So what is enlightenment? There are as many answers to this question as there are people interested in it. Many will tell you that it’s a “merging with the divine” or some other unhelpful word salad of metaphysical specialness. Others will tell you that it’s a recognition of your own true nature as pure awareness which witnesses the play of forms. Others will say it’s the awakening of an energy in the spine known as kundalini, whose rise up through the crown of the head transforms your way of functioning. Others will say it’s simply seeing life as it is, unfiltered by mental conditioning. Go to online spiritual discussion forums and you’ll find people arguing about this question with the same vitriolic fervor as you see between different political ideologies in the forums you’re probably more familiar with.

Personally I haven’t found it very useful to talk about enlightenment as one specific thing that happens in one specific instance, like a lightbulb flicking on once and then you’re done. There are many different aspects to the human condition, and you can be very conscious of the way some of them are happening and deeply unconscious of others. The fiery shopkeeper guru Nisargadatta Maharaj, for example, was profoundly lucid on the nature of awareness and the field of consciousness which appears within it, able to speak with earth-shaking clarity that radically changed people’s lives despite having little education. But he was also a chain smoker and died of lung cancer, unable to bring clear seeing to that particular unwholesome aspect of his functioning. Neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor had a stroke in a specific part of the linguistic center of her brain, permanently changing her relationship with mental narrative and bringing her a tremendous amount of inner peace, but she can’t teach people how to get there for themselves because she didn’t consciously walk through any path to get there.

Enlightenment is more like the process of turning on the lights in a very large house, room by room. For some people the kitchen light is on, but the entire upstairs floor is dark. Others have the lights on in the master bedroom and the basement, but everything in between is endarkened.

Some people have a very clear understanding of the nature of awareness and thought, which tends to get the most play in the discussion of spiritual enlightenment. But others have flicked the lights on in the way their bodily energy systems operate, able to experience and use those energies in a way that other people just aren’t conscious of. Others have enlightened their previously repressed childhood traumas, and are able to clearly understand how their experiences in life have shaped the way they’re conditioned to think and behave. Others have enlightened their emotionality, and have a deep, emotionally rich relationship with life while others sedate and ignore their emotions. Others have enlightened their inner guidance system and are able to perceive a tug toward wise decisions which lead them to take beneficial actions. None of these are any more special or important than the other, they’re just different rooms in the house that either have the lights on or off.

Whenever you hear about a spiritual teacher conducting themselves in a way that could be described as un-enlightened, sleeping with students or having childish temper tantrums or whatever, it doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re not enlightened in some sense. It could just mean that they’re enlightened in one way but not the other. In one way they’re able to relate to life with great clarity, and in another they’re just as confused and clumsy as anyone else. The lights are on in the attic but not the living room.

And, to bring this home to the opening paragraph of this essay, the same is true of the process of enlightening the world. There are a great many ways in which humanity is asleep at the wheel, and we’re going to have to bring the light of truth to all of them.

We’re going to have to bring the light of truth to the ways we’ve all been lied to by our teachers, by our politicians and by our media. We’re going to have to bring the light of truth to the horrors of war and the sinister motives behind it. We’re going to have to bring the light of truth to what we’re doing to our ecosystem and the forces which incentivize us to play along with ecocide. We’re going to have to bring the light of truth to the ways we enslave and are enslaved by each other in our interpersonal relationships, and how we enslave and are enslaved by our current social systems. We’re going to have to bring the light of truth to racism, sexism and other forms of bigotry and the ways that they prevent us from having wholesome relationships with each other. We’re going to have to bring the light of truth to the manipulations of the financial sector, money in politics, the evils of factory farming, the prison system, the war on drugs, and the structures which keep economic injustice in place. We can’t fight problems if we can’t see them clearly, so we’ve got to help each other turn the lights on in all of those areas. We’ve got to enlighten them.

One Rebel

"One rebel made dissident mini-zines in his parents’ basement,
and left them in laundromats, buses and trains.

One rebel attended antiwar demonstrations for decades,
getting arrested eleven times."https://t.co/seXM4wzvfu

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) March 29, 2019

None of the steps taken on this path toward the enlightenment of humanity are any more or less important than any other. One rebel may spend their energy exposing the false narratives of the news media. One rebel may bring attention to the plight of the Palestinians. One rebel may spend years making a documentary exposing the senseless butchery of dolphins in Taiji. One rebel may help film the unseen cruelty of factory farming. One rebel might share her story and expose the reality of rape culture. One rebel might help show everyone all the genocide and exploitation that went into creating their country as it currently exists, and help them come to a mature relationship with and response to that reality. One rebel might make art encouraging people to open their eyes to what’s really going on. Each of these small rebellions help flick on the lights of the house that is our world, and we need all of it.

With intense, sincere inner work, we can flick on the lights of our inner world room-by-room so that we can relate to life as it actually is in more and more ways. With intense, sincere outer work, we can flick on the lights of our outer world room-by-room and begin solving the problems that had previously been obscured by blackouts and propaganda disinfo. These movements are fundamentally the same. They both complement each other, and they’re both indispensable.

Cyberpunk: The Human Condition amid High-tech Alienation and Urban Dystopia

Posted on April 7, 2019 by Reid Mukai

By Raymond Lam

Source: BuddhistDoor.net

I love the seashore and the countryside, but I have spent most of my life in cities, with little to no time spent in the country. I grew up in Brisbane, Australia (which, despite its beauty and vibrant coffee culture, is hardly a skyscraper metropolis) and have spent a good deal of time in Hong Kong. Over the years I have visited Shanghai, Tokyo, and Seoul—cities that have long inspired novelists and artists in cyberpunk circles.

Cyberpunk features “technologized” cities with endless skyscrapers shimmering in an ocean of neon lights and elevated railways. These cityscapes are often bathed in darkness, shadow, and rain. More often than not, the protagonists of these stories are lone-wolf types, running through grungy alleys and estranged from wider society. As a genre of writing, film, and animation, the dystopian cyberpunk imagination has been immensely influential in both Asian and Western pop culture, exemplified by the Blade Runner movies, The Matrix franchise, and the Japanese anime Ghost in the Shell.

To many social commentators, cyberpunk carries eerie reminders of certain characteristics of urban living today—an endless feed of information, insecurity, and distractions through the Internet and social media, the press and media serving as distractions or brainwashing rather than useful information, and social alienation and unfulfilling work. In these activities is an almost gleeful dismissiveness of the need to reflect on human nature and what it means to be a human being: a key concern of religions and philosophical schools through the ages.

As Buddhistdoor Global columnist Paola Di Maio notes about our headlong trajectory into developing communication between human beings and AI: “Excited at the prospect of scientific advances, researchers seem to ignore that enhanced cognition comes with enhanced responsibility, maturity, and responsible decision-making abilities.” This is the key concern and, as it happens, the idea of human interface with computers or “mind technologies” is about as cyberpunk as it gets.

There are far more informed writers who have unpacked the themes of cyberpunk exhaustively, but I find this description particularly useful for grasping the general aesthetic and spirit. This is from an essay by Lawrence Person: “Classic cyberpunk characters were marginalized, alienated loners who lived on the edge of society in generally dystopic futures where daily life was impacted by rapid technological change, an ubiquitous datasphere of computerized information, and invasive modification of the human body.” (Slashdot.org) Surely many of these themes sound familiar?

The eminent science fiction writer J. G. Ballard (1930–2009) defied assumptions about traditional storytelling and sought to upend the archetypes that were assumed to be universal, saying that he wanted a storytelling style that possessed “more psycho-literary ideas, more meta-biological and meta-chemical concepts, private time systems, synthetic psychologies and space-times, more of the sombre half-worlds one glimpses in the paintings of schizophrenics.” (Ballard 2017, 103) Most interestingly, Ballard criticized the “external” emphasis of so much science fiction of his day (such as on space travel), declaring: “The biggest developments of the immediate future will take place, not on the Moon or Mars, but on Earth, and it is inner space, not outer, that needs to be explored. The only truly alien planet is Earth.” (Ballard 2017, 103)

My opinion is that good cyberpunk is itself a kind of literary expression of contemporary inner preoccupations and concerns. Take the notion of loneliness, for example. Some good research has been done about urban life and its correlation with loneliness, but the results are ambiguous. One study found that urban life is undoubtedly more stressful than rural life (and has been so since the Industrial Revolution), yet how lonely one feels is a very difficult thing to measure. If we are to take seriously Ballard’s notion that the best kind of science fiction is about inner space, then perhaps we have also been distracted by the neon cityscapes of gritty cyberpunk metropolises.

The interesting stuff is not happening in an action-packed helipad gunfight with a hypersonic jet on top of a tower owned by a futuristic robotics corporation. It is happening in the neurotic mind of one of that corporation’s low-level office workers, humiliated in public through a thoughtless social media post by her supervisor, who himself seeks distraction from his instantly replaceable managerial role by interfacing his brain with a computer’s pornographic VR program. It is not just about cybernetics and the development of androids, but how society changes as a result of them.

I like to think that, perhaps one day in the future, when meditation practice centers are hidden away in glass and metal skyscrapers—some of them already are in the worlds biggest cities—and temples of traditional Asian design are surrounded by looming corporate structures, these loci of spiritual meaning and truly human work will have helped to fortify the inner worlds of these cities’ denizens against the darker side of cyberpunk. Ballard was right. The true struggle for meaning and dignity is more often on the inside, even in a society dominated by neon, nightfall, and neuro-computers.

References

Ballard, J. G. 2017. “Which way to inner space?” In Science Fiction Criticism: An Anthology of Essential Writings. Edited by Rob Latham. London and New York: Bloomsbury.

Art and Dreaming: Realizing our Power to Co-Create Reality

Posted on March 10, 2019 by Reid Mukai

By Ruth Gordon

Source: Reality Sandwich

“True creativity doesn’t just make things; it feeds what feeds life. In modern culture where people are no longer initiated, the spirit goes unfed. To be seen, the uninitiated create insane things, some destructive to life, to feel visible and powerful. These creations are touted as the real world. They are actually forms of untutored grief signaling a longing for the true reality of village togetherness.”

Martín Prechtel, Secrets of the Talking Jaguar, p.232

These words, from a book detailing Martín Prechtel’s initiation as a Mayan Shaman, accurately sum up our modern world. In the humanitarian, ecological, and political crises we are facing, we are witnessing the effects of a severe spiritual hunger.

We in the Western world are a deeply wounded culture; our Indigenous traditions long destroyed, our common land stolen by the rich and powerful, we often now desperately seek comfort by any means possible – over-consumption of food, of social media, of drugs and alcohol, of our natural resources.

This way of being is known among North American Indigenous people by the name of “wetiko,” or the “disease of the white man.” In the traditional Algonquin myth, the “wetiko” is a rapacious spirit who lives in the dark forest and possesses people, filling them with an insane compulsion to consume and destroy. This spirit makes monsters out of humans, filling them with an insatiable drive to devour everything that crosses their path.

Today, we see wetiko everywhere – in our cruel systems of governance that refuse sanctuary to refugees fleeing conflict, while at the same time escalating those very conflicts, mostly for the single purpose of the highest possible short-term profit, in the disintegration of human community through separating and atomizing social structures and the corresponding upsurge of loneliness and despair, and in the continued addiction to economic growth despite clear and repeated warnings that this kind of globalized industry is killing our planet.

Wetiko functions like a virus – it’s highly contagious and most of us are infected with it to some degree. It’s at the root of the human conflicts that often derail attempts to create alternative ways of life. It’s not enough to simply wish for a better world, it’s not even enough to work hard at creating one. We need to be ready to transform our entire mode of perception, to boil down our ways of thinking and being and reconstruct ourselves from scratch, with consciousness of the wetiko-ized habits we often fall into.

In Dispelling Wetiko: Breaking the Curse of Evil, Paul Levy writes:

“The evil that is incarnating in our world simultaneously beckons and potentially actualizes an expansion of consciousness, all depending on our recognition of what is being revealed. It is as if hidden in the darkness is a spark of light that has descended into its depths, and when recognized in the darkness, this light returns to its source.”

(Levy, 2013, p. 145)

Levy’s idea, that hidden in the poison of wetiko lies its own antidote, offers a healing reference for how to approach what Prechtel calls “untutored grief”: the fecund raw material that, if not used to grow something new, becomes destructive. However, when we are educated, or “initiated” into ways of transforming our grief, of understanding what the darkness in us wants to bring to light, we often find we have stumbled upon a store of incredible potentiality – an almost boundless source of energy and power that we can refocus towards healing, if we choose to do so. Our collective shadows are potential treasure, showing us wounds that need healing, the deep behavioral structures that create conflict, and pushing us to grow beyond our self-limiting patterns. We find the light by going through the dark, not by avoiding it. We can only unfold our full potential for love, beauty, and creativity by recognizing the life-force that’s bound up in our trauma. It’s releasing that closed-off and separated aspect of ourselves that will make us whole.

There’s an interesting symbolic parallel in the human compulsion to dig, mine and extract precious metal. If we instead dug into the fertile ground of our consciousness and our imagination rather than into the physical Earth, would we then finally be able to create a sustainable form of the “treasure” we long for – the “true reality of village togetherness,” so overcoming our addiction to exploiting the Earth?

Consciousness and Creativity: We are the Universe Observing Itself

In Quantum Revelation: A Radical Synthesis of Science and Spirituality, Paul Levy describes how the science of quantum mechanics, although yet to really inform our everyday mode of being, could be a gateway for us: enabling us to understand the dreamlike nature of the world, to reconnect with the divine and infinitely creative aspects of existence. The central insight of quantum mechanics is that quantum particles respond differently depending on whether we are observing them or not. They are waves when we do not observe them and become particles when we do. This implies that quantum matter somehow knows when it is being observed, and subsequently changes both its form and behavior. This points to an astounding idea: that the world we perceive not only perceives us, but also manifests itself depending on our very mode of perception. Or, to put it another way, that the world we encounter depends on how we dream it up. It seems as if there are infinite possibilities of reality. The one that is activated depends only on our capacity to envision it, on the expansiveness and daring of our imagination.

Levy goes even further, asserting that we are living in a world that consciously responds to our consciousness, that, in fact, has created us for the purpose of understanding itself:

“[T]hrough us, the universe questions itself and tries out various answers on itself in an effort parallel to our own to decipher its own being. In the process of observing and reflecting upon our universe we are actually changing the universe’s idea of itself.”

(Chapter 5, “Cosmogenesis,” 2018)

If Levy is right, we are part of a cosmos that is self-creating and self-understanding. It is as if, through consciousness, the universe is craning its neck around to look at itself. We are its eyes, and its senses.

If we want to escape the hold of wetiko, to transition to a way of life that serves all beings, we need to value the power of our own creativity, and to understand that we are always creating the reality we experience, whether we are aware of it or not. The more conscious we are of our creative power, the more we can use it to dream up a world we want to live in; to orchestrate our lives with the same skill and precision as a highly trained conductor.

For this, we need to build a network of communities, (as in Tamera’s Healing Biotopes Plan), where we can study the raw matter of our cultural grief, where we can learn to compost it, and use it to grow new life, where we can discover how to create the “village togetherness” we all long for. We need spaces where we can experiment with and test out our powers of dreaming, encountering, understanding and interacting with the dreamlike nature of reality. We need spaces where we can build the self-confidence and courage that a “life artist” needs. We need public forums where our “life-art” is seen and honored. And all this needs to happen in a large enough group of people for our actions to hold weight, gather momentum and give courage to others.

As Paul Levy writes:

“The universe is a collectively shared dream that is too seemingly dense and solidified for any one person’s change in perspective to transform, but when a critical mass of people get into alignment and consciously put together what I call our “sacred power of dreaming” (our innate power to dream the universe into materialization), we can, literally, change the (waking) dream we are having.”

(Levy, Chapter 5: “Self-Excited Circuit,” 2018)

This is why it is so vital to build communities of trust – we will not be able to change the reality we are currently experiencing alone. However, by cooperating with others we will find the power to co-create paradise on Earth: a reality in which war and violence will be completely unthinkable, where we honor and respect the Earth as the sacred life giver it is, where we are able to fully use the creative potential that lies coiled within each of us. The field-creating power of a group of people can both activate our imaginative potential and provide the vessel in which to create the life we long for.

Waking Up to the Dreamlike Nature of Reality

Paying attention to our powers of dreaming is a simple first step towards comprehending the dreamlike nature of reality, as even those of us who believe that we are “not artistic” still dream each and every night, effortlessly creating symbols and stories that resonate through and inform us, if we take the time to remember and listen to them.

In the Tzutujil culture that Prechtel describes, families gathered each morning to share their dreams, which they saw as being the other half of waking life – just as real, and just as important:

“To a shaman a dream is not a creation of the mind, psyche or soul. It is the remembered fragment of the experience of one’s natural spirit in the twin world, the dreamworld … Although the landscape of dreams may seem different than the landscape of the awake world, it is actually the balanced opposite, reversed version, where our souls live out our bodies’ lives reenacted as if in a complex kind of mirror. Like the two opposing wings of a butterfly, the dreamworld is one wing and the awake world is the other wing. The butterfly must have both wings connected at the Heart in order to fly and function. Neither wing – dreams or waking – contains all of life. Real life occurs as a result of the interaction between the two. The life is the butterfly’s heart, and both dreaming and awake life are necessary to keep the heart alive.”

(Secrets of the Talking Jaguar, pp. 169–170)

As Prechtel goes on to say, “dreams read life back to us like a storyteller” and as such, can be excellent and often uncanny guides in life. I’m sure all of us have had the experience of a dream that seems wiser than we are, a dream that gives an answer to a problem, or that seems to foretell future events.

I’ve experienced personally how dreams can come into creative play with waking life. I once had a powerful dream in which a man, who in my waking life I was on the brink of falling in love with, guided me as I climbed down a building. He was agile, he knew the structure well, as it was his parent’s house, and he helped me down, showing me where to put my hands and feet. After I had this dream, I felt a deep certainty that I could trust this man. I understood that his role in my life right now was to accompany and guide me so that I could move forward, leaving behind the old structures of thought and being that no longer served me (structures he knew well, that he’d also “climbed down from” before). In my waking life, I had very little basis for such a deep trust at that point. I’d known this man a few months. And yet the indication of this dream turned out to be true. It encouraged me to trust him as a guide, and in turn, this faith allowed him (perhaps even prompted him) to actually play out this role in my waking life.

Was this dream reality not only informing but actually creating waking life? I think so. By believing in the certainty this dream instilled in me, I was able to act with faith and courage, which then allowed trust and intimacy to develop in waking reality.

For me, this is an example of those twin butterfly wings of the dreamworld and the waking world meeting at the heart’s center. Both dreamworld and waking life kept my heart alive at that time, nourishing and feeding it. These dual realities prompted me to be an artist: to act on my desires and impulses, to paint the world as I wished it to be.

Consciously Shaping Reality

The consequence of accepting our own creative powers and the dreamlike logic of existence are that we can begin to consciously shape reality. This is a deep responsibility – not anything we can take lightly.

Wetiko disrupts our natural experience of unity with all life. But in truth, we are inextricably interrelated with all other living beings, in the same way that a whirlpool is both identifiably different and part of the river it forms in. This knowledge comes with an immense duty to everything else that exists.

Our every thought, our every action, has an effect on the whole, unavoidably altering everything else in some way, however subtle. We do not need to become megalomaniacs about this – we are no more and no less important than any other human, plant or animal being. But we must understand, if we are to overcome wetiko’s hold on us, that all life, and all activity, constantly shifts the pattern of the whole.

Once we realize this, our everyday lives become imbued with a new sense of purpose and responsibility. Knowing that what we think, say and do alters the whole, guiding a new form of reality into being in each and every moment, means considering carefully how we want to exist in this world. It’s much easier to believe that we are powerless; then we can escape any sense of responsibility. Victimhood is much more comfortable than agency. But if we want to realize the role human beings can play in global transformation, we must be willing to step into agency. We must understand that our inherent creative powers are a divine gift. We’ve been given the capacity to make drastic alterations to the world – in the natural environment, in human society, perhaps even to outer space. Now we must choose whether we want to use these gifts in service of life or continue using them against it—and so push ourselves off the brink of abyss.

Let’s choose to use the wetiko virus rampaging through our human system to actualize an expansion of consciousness, to shine a light deep into the roots of our “untutored grief,” and begin to dream into our potential as deeply creative beings with the ability to create the reality of togetherness that we all long for.

The 4 Greatest Enemies of the State

Posted on February 10, 2019 by Reid Mukai

By Gary Z McGee

Source: The Mind Unleashed

“It’s no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society.” ~Krishnamurti

How do we know that our society is profoundly sick?

1.) Our society pollutes the air it needs to breathe.
2.) Our society pollutes the water it needs to drink.
3.) Our society pollutes the food it needs to eat.
4.) Our society pollutes the minds it needs to evolve with.

Any system that forces its people to breathe polluted air, drink polluted water, eat polluted food and then continue to do all the things that causes that pollution is a profoundly sick society.

It is in this fundamental way that human wellbeing itself has become the enemy of the state. Statism only functions with unhealthy, divided individuals. It cannot continue if people are healthy and connected. In short: statism fails when enough people achieve a sense of wellbeing despite it.

So, if wellbeing is the enemy of the state, then it stands to reason that anyone seeking wellbeing is also an enemy of the state. Just as those seeking health, vitality and freedom do well to be maladjusted to a profoundly sick society, those seeking wellbeing do well to become enemies of the state.

Freedom is the enemy of the state:

“State is the name of the coldest of all cold monsters. Coldly it lies; and this lie slips from its mouth: ‘I, the state, am the people.’” ~Nietzsche

Have no illusions, the curtailment of human freedom is the state’s business. At every turn the Goliath of the state rears its ugly head, checking the free movement of otherwise free individuals. It’s a monstrous Hydra of overreaching power, hellbent on keeping its people controlled, corralled, and contained under the illusion of security and safety, and under the rampant delusion of law and order.

No nation-state on the planet is genuinely free. All are falsely and insincerely “free.” They are only ever “free” inside the unhealthy box of their conditions. Therefore, they are not free. True freedom is allowing the free movement of people and allowing people to govern themselves under the guidance of the golden rule and the nonaggression principle.

So what is a free-range human to do in the face of such a monstrosity? Become David against Goliath. Become Heracles against Hydra. Become a well-armed lamb contesting all votes. Become lionhearted despite all cowards.

But before that, you must check yourself. You must become free. If you are not free, then you cannot be heroic. You must be free in order to gain the type of courage necessary to become. Full stop.

The golden rule is the enemy of the state:

“Live simply so that others may simply live.” ~Gandhi

Statism is the antithesis of the golden rule. Why is this? Because the state demands that you do unto each other as the state demands. This is the opposite of the golden rule.

The state tricks you into believing that the state is the people. But the state is not the people. It’s the illusion of a people. People are made up of individuals. Individuality is predicated upon freedom. Further freedom is predicated upon individuals allowing other individuals to be free. The state doesn’t allow individuals to be free. It only gives individuals “permission” to be free upon certain conditions, which is the illusion of freedom.

If freedom is the foundation of the golden rule, then consent is its backbone. Without consent there is only rape. Lest we allow rape, consent is paramount.

It’s simple: The difference between robbery and a good trade is consent. The difference between murder and assisted death is consent. The difference between rape and a healthy sexual encounter is consent. The difference between oppression and freedom is consent. The difference between coercion and voluntarism is consent. Consent is everything.

If I don’t want to trade my dollar for your twinkie and you steal my dollar anyway, that’s robbery, because I did not consent. If I don’t want to have sex with you but you have sex with me anyway, that’s rape, because I did not consent. If I feel that your arbitrary law is immoral and you force me to follow it anyway, that’s oppression, because I did not consent. If I don’t want to give up my money to your arbitrary tax system but you force me to do so anyway, that’s coercion, because I did not give my consent.

In order to be a healthy, responsible, moral, and just human being, you must allow others to give their consent. Otherwise, you are violating the golden rule.

If your values are based upon violence being the solution to problems, then your values violate the golden rule. If your values are based upon hindering the freedom of others, then your values violate the golden rule. If your values are based upon coercing people to give you money when they haven’t consented, then your values violate the golden rule.

Bottom line: if your values are based upon violating the golden rule, then your values are immoral, unjust and unhealthy.

Nonviolence is the enemy of the state:

“An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.” But “When there is only a choice between cowardice and violence, I would advise violence.”~Gandhi

The state wants violent citizens so that it can control them. When people are nonviolent and compassionate toward each other the state doesn’t have an excuse to prevent freedom (though it will still make up excuses). When people are violent and intolerant toward each other the state has a reason to prevent freedom.

Nonviolence is the enemy of the state because the state’s solution to all problems is violence. When its citizenry comes up with nonviolent solutions it makes the state obsolete. But the state will always fight to maintain its overreaching power and control. So, in order not to become obsolete, it must maintain its violence.

The only thing that can prevent state violence is the people realizing that the state is not the people, and upon realizing this, choose to be nonviolent despite the violence of the state.

The flip side of this coin, however, is self-defense. The people must also wake up to the fact that they alone must defend themselves against violence. Whether that violence comes from an individual, a group of individuals, or from the state. The only time when violence is morally correct is in self-defense.

This can become a tricky psychological briar patch. But, basically, offensive violence is unhealthy and immoral (tyranny), whereas defensive violence is healthy and moral (justice). As Albert Camus said, “Absolute freedom mocks justice. Absolute justice denies freedom. To be fruitful, the two ideas must find their limits in each other.”

Peace is the enemy of the state:

“Never relinquish your ability to doubt, reflect, and consider other options –your rationality as an individual is your only protection against the madness that can overcome a group.” ~Robert Greene

If wellbeing, health, freedom, the golden rule, and nonviolence are all the enemy of the state, then what does that tell you?

Feel free to lose the wrestling match between your higher reasoning and your cognitive dissonance. I’ll wait here…

The bottom line is this: War is the only way any nation-state maintains itself. And yet love (peace, compassion, freedom, justice) is the only way humans can progressively evolve in a healthy way.

The state is always at war—with itself, with its citizens, with other states. There is no way out of its net of covert violence unless you leave it behind and become a free-range human. In order to be a lover of humanity one must become an enemy of the state.

The realization that in order to be a healthy, moral, and just human one must become an enemy of the state, is a tough pill to swallow. It’s not for the faint of heart. It will take counterintuitive reasoning to fully fathom it. It will require you to think outside of whatever box you’ve been conditioned to think inside of for most of your life. It will force you to unwash the brainwash. It will involve reprogramming your programming. It will demand that you question the profoundly sick society you were born into.

Most of all, it will require audacious courage in the face of comfortable cowardice. But, as Ralph Waldo Emerson wisely stated, “A man is to carry himself in the presence of all opposition. I ought to go upright and vital and speak the rude truth in all ways. Your goodness must have some edge to it—else it is none.”

Jacques Ellul: A Prophet for Our Tech-Saturated Times

Posted on February 3, 2019 by Reid Mukai

Read his works to understand how we’ve been caught in technology’s nightmarish hold.

By Andrew Nikiforuk

Source: The Tyee

By now you have probably read about the so-called “tech backlash.”

Facebook and other social media have undermined what’s left of the illusion of democracy, while smartphones damage young brains and erode the nature of discourse in the family.

Meanwhile computers and other gadgets have diminished our attention spans along with our ever-failing connection to reality.

The Foundation for Responsible Robotics recently created a small stir by asking if “sexual intimacy with robots could lead to greater social isolation.”

What could possibly go wrong?

The average teenager now works about two hours of every day — for free — providing Facebook and other social media companies with all the data they need to engineer young people’s behaviour for bigger Internet profits.

Without shame, technical wonks now talk of building artificial scientists to resolve climate change, poverty and, yes, even fake news.

The media backlash against Silicon Valley and its peevish moguls, however, typically ends with nothing more radical than an earnest call for regulation or a break-up of Internet monopolies such as Facebook and Google.

The problem, however, is much graver, and it is telling that most of the backlash stories invariably omit any mention of technology’s greatest critic, Jacques Ellul.

The ascent of technology

Ellul, the Karl Marx of the 20th century, predicted the chaotic tyranny many of us now pretend is the good and determined life in technological society.

He wrote of technique, about which he meant more than just technology, machines and digital gadgets but rather “the totality of methods rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency” in the economic, social and political affairs of civilization.

For Ellul, technique, an ensemble of machine-based means, included administrative systems, medical tools, propaganda (just another communication technique) and genetic engineering.

The list is endless because technique, or what most of us would just call technology, has become the artificial blood of modern civilization.

“Technique has taken substance,” wrote Ellul, and “it has become a reality in itself. It is no longer merely a means and an intermediary. It is an object in itself, an independent reality with which we must reckon.”

Just as Marx deftly outlined how capitalism threw up new social classes, political institutions and economic powers in the 19th century, Ellul charted the ascent of technology and its impact on politics, society and economics in the 20th.

My copy of Ellul’s The Technological Society has yellowed with age, but it remains one of the most important books I own. Why?

Because it explains the nightmarish hold technology has on every aspect of life, and also remains a guide to the perplexing determinism that technology imposes on life.

Until the 18th century, technical progress occurred slowly and with restraint. But with the Industrial Revolution it morphed into something overwhelming due in part to population, cheap energy sources and capitalism itself.

Since then it has engulfed Western civilization and become the globe’s greatest colonizing force.

“Technique encompasses the totality of present-day society,” wrote Ellul. “Man is caught like a fly in a bottle. His attempts at culture, freedom, and creative endeavour have become mere entries in technique’s filing cabinet.”

Ellul, a brilliant historian, wrote like a physician caught in the middle of a plague or physicist exposed to radioactivity. He parsed the dynamics of technology with a cold lucidity.

Yet you’ve probably never heard of the French legal scholar and sociologist despite all the recent media about the corrosive influence of Silicon Valley.

His relative obscurity has many roots. He didn’t hail from Paris, but rural Bordeaux. He didn’t come from French blue blood; he was a “meteque.”

He didn’t travel much, criticized politics of every stripe and was a radical Christian.

But in 1954, just a year before American scientists started working on artificial intelligence, Ellul wrote his monumental book, The Technological Society.

The dense and discursive work lays out in 500 pages how technique became for civilization what British colonialism was for parts of 19th-century Africa: a force of total domination.

In the book Ellul explains in bold and uncompromising terms how the logic of technological innovation conquered every aspect of human culture.

Ellul didn’t regard technology as inherently evil; he just recognized that it was a self-augmenting force that engineered the world on its terms.

Machines, whether mechanical or digital, aren’t interested in truth, beauty or justice. Their goal is to make the world a more efficient place for more machines.

Their proliferation combined with our growing dependence on their services inevitably led to an erosion of human freedom and unintended consequences in every sphere of life.

Ellul was one of the first to note that you couldn’t distinguish between bad and good effects of technology. There were just effects and all technologies were disruptive.

In other words, it doesn’t matter if a drone is delivering a bomb or book or merely spying on the neighbourhood, because technique operates outside of human morality: “Technique tolerates no judgment from without and accepts no limitations.”

Facebook’s mantra “move fast and break things” epitomizes the technological mindset.

But some former Facebook executives such as Chamath Palihapitiya belatedly realized they have engineered a force beyond their control. (“The short-term dopamine-driven feedback loops that we have created are destroying how society works,” Palihapitiya has said.)

That, argued Ellul, is what technology does. It disrupts and then disrupts again with unforeseen consequences, requiring more techniques to solve the problems created by latest innovations.

As Ellul noted back in 1954, “History shows that every technical application from its beginnings presents certain unforeseeable secondary effects which are more disastrous than the lack of the technique would have been.”

Ellul also defined the key characteristics of technology.

For starters, the world of technique imposes a rational and mechanical order on all things. It embraces artificiality and seeks to replace all natural systems with engineered ones.

In a technological society a dam performs better than a running river, a car takes the place of the pedestrians — and may even kill them — and a fish farm offers more “efficiencies” than a natural wild salmon migration.

There is more. Technique automatically reduces actions to the “one best way.” Technical progress is also self-augmenting: it is irreversible and builds with a geometric progression.

(Just count the number of gadgets telling you what to do or where to go or even what music to play.)

Technology is indivisible and universal because everywhere it goes it shows the same deterministic face with the same consequences. And it is autonomous.

By autonomous, Ellul meant that technology had become a determining force that “elicits and conditions social, political and economic change.”

The role of propaganda

The French critic was the first to note that technologies build upon each other and therefore centralize power and control.

New techniques for teaching, selling things or organizing political parties also required propaganda.

Here again Ellul saw the future.

He argued that propaganda had to become as natural as breathing air in a technological society, because it was essential that people adapt to the disruptions of a technological society.

“The passions it provokes — which exist in everybody — are amplified. The suppression of the critical faculty — man’s growing incapacity to distinguish truth from falsehood, the individual from the collectivity, action from talk, reality from statistics, and so on — is one of the most evident results of the technical power of propaganda.”

Faking the news may have been a common practice on Soviet radio during Ellul’s day, but it is now a global phenomenon leading us towards what Ellul called “a sham universe.”

We now know that algorithms control every aspect of digital life and have subjected almost aspect of human behaviour to greater control by techniques whether employed by the state or the marketplace.

But in 1954 Ellul saw the beast emerging in infant form.

Technology, he wrote, can’t put up with human values and “must necessarily don mathematical vestments. Everything in human life that does not lend itself to mathematical treatment must be excluded… Who is too blind to not see that a profound mutation is being advocated here.”

He, too, warned about the promise of leisure provided by the mechanization and automatization of work.

“Instead of being a vacuum representing a break with society,” our leisure time will be “literally stuffed with technical mechanisms of compensation and integration.”

Good citizens today now leave their screens at work only to be guided by robots in their cars that tell them the most efficient route to drive home.

At home another battery of screens awaits to deliver entertainments and distractions, including apps that might deliver a pizza to the door.

Stalin and Mao would be impressed — or perhaps disappointed — that so much social control could be exercised with such sophistication and so little bloodletting.

Ellul wasn’t just worried about the impact of a single gadget such as the television or the phone but “the phenomenon of technical convergence.”

He feared the impact of systems or complexes of techniques on human society and warned the result could only be “an operational totalitarianism.”

“Convergence,” he wrote, “is a completely spontaneous phenomenon, representing a normal stage in the evolution of technique.”

Social media, a web of behavioural and psychological systems, is just the latest example of convergence.

Here psychological techniques, surveillance techniques and propaganda have all merged to give the Russians and many other groups a golden opportunity to intervene in the political lives of 126 million North Americans.

Social media has achieved something novel, according to former Facebook engineer Sam Lessin.

For the first time ever a political candidate or party can “effectively talk to each individual voter privately in their own home and tell them exactly what they want to hear… in a way that can’t be tracked or audited.”

In China the authorities have gone one step further. Using the Internet the government can now track the movements of every citizen and rank their political trustworthiness based on their history of purchases and associations. It is, of course, a fantastic “counterterrorism” tool.

The Silicon Valley moguls and the digerati promised something less totalitarian. They swore that social media would help citizens fight bad governments and would connect all of us.

Facebook, vowed the pathologically adolescent Mark Zuckerberg, would help the Internet become “a force for peace in the world.”

But technology obeys its own rules and prefers “the psychology of tyranny.”

The digerati also promised that digital technologies would usher in a new era of decentralization and undo what mechanical technologies have already done: centralize everything into big companies, big boxes and big government.

Technology assuredly fragments human communities, but in the world of technique centralization remains the norm.

“The idea of effecting decentralization while maintaining technical progress is purely utopian,” wrote Ellul.

Towards ‘hypernormalization’

It is worth noting that the word “normal” didn’t come into currency until the 1940s along with technological society.

In many respects global society resembles the Soviet Union just prior to its collapse when “hypernormalization” ruled the day.

A recent documentary defined what hypernormalization did for Russia: it “became a society where everyone knew that what their leaders said was not real, because they could see with their own eyes that the economy was falling apart. But everybody had to play along and pretend that it was real because no one could imagine any alternative.”

In many respects technology has hypernormalized a technological society in which citizens exercise less and less control over their lives every day and can’t imagine anything different.

Throughout his life Ellul maintained that he was “neither by nature, nor doctrinally, a pessimist, nor have I pessimistic prejudices. I am concerned only with knowing whether things are so or not.”

He called a spade a spade, and did not sugarcoat his observations.

If you are growing more anxious about our hypernormalized existence and are wondering why you own a phone that tracks your every movement, then read The Technological Society.

Ellul believed that the first act of freedom a citizen can exercise is to recognize the necessity of understanding technique and its colonizing powers.

Resistance, which is never futile, can only begin by becoming aware and bearing witness to the totalitarian nature of technological society.

Ellul believed that Christians had a special duty to condemn the worship of technology, which has become society’s new religion.

To Ellul, resistance meant teaching people how to be conscious amphibians, with one foot in traditional human societies, and to purposefully choose which technologies to bring into their communities.

Only citizens who remain connected to traditional human societies can see, hear and understand the disquiet of the smartphone blitzkrieg or the Internet circus.

Children raised by screens and vaccinated only by technology will not have the capacity to resist, let alone understand, this world any more than someone born in space could appreciate what it means to walk in a forest.

Ellul warned that if each of us abdicates our human responsibilities and leads a trivial existence in a technological society, then we will betray freedom.

And what is freedom but the ability to overcome and transcend the dictates of necessity?

In 1954, Ellul appealed to all sleepers to awake.

Read him. He remains the most revolutionary, prophetic and dangerous voice of this or any century.

What Are We Working For? The Economic System is a Labyrinthine Trap

Posted on January 27, 2019 by Reid Mukai

By Edward Curtin

Source: Global Research

One also knows from his letters that nothing appeared more sacred to Van Gogh than work.” – John Berger, “Vincent Van Gogh,” Portraits

Ever since I was a young boy, I have wondered why people do the kinds of work they do. I sensed early on that the economic system was a labyrinthine trap devised to imprison people in work they hated but needed for survival. It seemed like common sense to a child when you simply looked and listened to the adults around you. Karl Marx wasn’t necessary for understanding the nature of alienated labor; hearing adults declaim “Thank God It’s Friday” spoke volumes.

In my Bronx working class neighborhood I saw people streaming to the subway in the mornings for their rides “into the city” and their forlorn trundles home in the evenings. It depressed me. Yet I knew the goal was to “make it” and move away as one moved “up,” something that many did. I wondered why, when some people had options, they rarely considered the moral nature of the jobs they pursued. And why did they not also consider the cost in life (time) lost in their occupations? Were money, status, and security the deciding factors in their choices? Was living reserved for weekends and vacations?

I gradually realized that some people, by dint of family encouragement and schooling, had opportunities that others never received. For the unlucky ones, work would remain a life of toil and woe in which the search for meaning in their jobs was often elusive. Studs Terkel, in the introduction to his wonderful book of interviews, Working: People Talk About What They Do all Day and How They Feel About What They Do, puts it this way:

This book, being about work, is, by its very nature, about violence – to the spirit as well as to the body. It is about ulcers as well as accidents, about shouting matches as well as fistfights, about nervous breakdowns as well as kicking the dog around. It is, above all (or beneath all), about daily humiliations. To survive the day is triumph enough for the walking wounded among the great many of us.

Those words were confirmed for me when in the summer between high school and college I got a job through a relative’s auspices as a clerk for General Motors in Manhattan. I dreaded taking it for the thought of being cooped up for the first time in an office building while a summer of my youth passed me by, but the money was too good to turn down (always the bait), and I wanted to save as much as possible for college spending money. So I bought a summer suit and joined the long line of trudgers going to and fro, down and up and out of the underground, adjusting our eyes to the darkness and light.

It was a summer from hell. My boredom was so intense it felt like solitary confinement. How, I kept wondering, can people do this? Yet for me it was temporary; for the others it was a life sentence. But if this were life, I thought, it was a living death. All my co-workers looked forward to the mid-morning coffee wagon and lunch with a desperation so intense it was palpable. And then, as the minutes ticked away to 5 P.M., the agitated twitching that proceeded the mad rush to the elevators seemed to synchronize with the clock’s movements. We’re out of here!

On my last day, I was eating my lunch on a park bench in Central Park when a bird shit on my suit jacket. The stain was apt, for I felt I had spent my days defiling my true self, and so I resolved never to spend another day of my life working in an office building in a suit for a pernicious corporation, a resolution I have kept.

“An angel is not far from someone who is sad,” says Vincent Van Gogh in the new film, At Eternity’s Gate. For some reason, recently hearing these words in the darkened theater where I was almost alone, brought me back to that summer and the sadness that hung around all the people that I worked with. I hoped Van Gogh was right and an angel visited them from time to time. Most of them had no options.

The painter Julian Schnabel’s moving picture (moving on many levels since the film shakes and moves with its hand-held camera work and draws you into the act of drawing and painting that was Van Gogh’s work) is a meditation on work. It asks the questions: What is work? What is work for? What is life for? Why paint? What does it mean to live? Why do you do what you do? Are you living or are you dead? What are you seeking through your work?

For Vincent the answer was simple: reality. But reality is not given to us and is far from simple; we must create it in acts that penetrate the screens of clichés that wall us off from it. As John Berger writes,

One is taught to oppose the real to the imaginary, as though the first were always at hand and the second, distant, far away. This opposition is false. Events are always to hand. But the coherence of these events – which is what one means by reality – is an imaginative construction. Reality always lies beyond – and this is as true for materialists as for idealists. For Plato, for Marx. Reality, however one interprets it, lies beyond a screen of clichés.

These screens serve to protect the interests of the ruling classes, who devise ways to trap regular people from seeing the reality of their condition. Yet while working can be a trap, it can also be a means of escape. For Vincent working was the way. For him work was not a noun but a verb. He drew and he painted as he does in this film to “make people feel what it is to feel alive.” To be alive is to act, to paint, to write. He tells his friend Gauguin that there’s a reason it’s called the “act of painting, the “stroke of genius.” For him painting is living and living is painting.

The actual paintings that he made are almost beside the point, as all creative artists know too well. It is the doing wherein living is found. The completed canvas, essay, or book are what is done. They are nouns, still lifes, just as Van Gogh’s paintings have become commodities in the years since his death, dead things to be bought and sold by the rich in a culture of death where they can be hung in mausoleums isolated from the living. It is appropriate that the film ends with Vincent very still in his coffin as “viewers” pass him by and avidly now desire his paintings that encircle the room that they once rejected. The man has become a has-been and the funeral parlor the museum.

“Without painting I can’t live,” he says earlier. He didn’t say without his paintings.

“God gave me the gift for painting,” he said. “It’s the only gift he gave me. I am a born painter.” But his gift has begotten gifts that are still-births that do not circulate and live and breathe to encourage people to find work that will not, “by its very nature, [be] about violence,” as Terkel said. His works, like people, have become commodities, brands to be bought and sold in a world where the accumulation of wealth is accomplished by the infliction of pain, suffering, and death on untold numbers of victims, invisible victims that allow the wealthy to maintain their bad-faith innocence. This is often achieved in the veiled shadows of intermediaries such as stock brokers, tax consultants, and financial managers; in the liberal and conservative boardrooms of mega-corporations or law offices; and in the planning sessions of the world’s great museums. Like drone killings that distance the killers from their victims, this wealth accumulation allows the wealthy to pretend they are on the side of the angels. It’s called success, and everyone is innocent as they sing, “Hi Ho, Hi Ho, it’s off to work we go.”

“It is not enough to tell me you worked hard to get your gold,” said Henry Thoreau, Van Gogh’s soul-mate. “So does the Devil work hard.”

A few years ago there was a major exhibit of Van Gogh’s nature paintings at the Clark Museum in Williamstown, Massachusetts – “Van Gogh and Nature” – that aptly symbolized Van Gogh in his coffin. The paintings were exhibited encased in ornate gold frames. Van Gogh in gold. Just perfect. I am reminded of a scene in At Eternity’s Gatewhere Vincent and Gauguin are talking about the need for a creative revolution – what we sure as hell need – and the two friends stand side by side with backs to the camera and piss into the wind.

But pseudo-innocence dies hard. Not long ago I was sitting in a breakfast room in a bed-and-breakfast in Houston, Texas, sipping coffee and musing myself awake. Two men came in and the three of us got to talking. As people like to say, they were nice guys. Very pleasant and talkative, in Houston on business. Normal Americans. Stressed. Both were about fifty years old with wives and children.

One sold drugs for one of the largest pharmaceutical companies that is known for its very popular anti-depressant drug and its aggressive sales pitches. He travelled a triangular route from Corpus Christi to Austin to Houston and back again, hawking his wares. He spoke about his work as being very lucrative and posing no ethical dilemmas. There were so many depressed people in need of his company’s drugs, he said, as if the causes of their depression had nothing to do with inequality and the sorry state of the country as the rich rip off everyone else. I thought of recommending a book to him – Deadly Medicines and Organized Crime: How big pharma has corrupted health care by Peter Gotzsche – but held my tongue, appreciative as I was of the small but tasteful fare we were being served and not wishing to cause my companions dyspepsia. This guy seemed to be trying to convince me of the ethical nature of the way he panned gold, while I kept thinking of that quote attributed to Mark Twain: “Denial ain’t just a river in Egypt.”

The other guy, originally from a small town in Nebraska and now living in Baton Rouge, was a former medevac helicopter pilot who had served in the 1^stGulf War. He worked in finance for an equally large oil company. His attitude was a bit different, and he seemed sheepishly guilty about his work with this company as he told me how shocked he was the first time he saw so many oil, gas, and chemical plants lining the Mississippi River from Baton Rouge to New Orleans and all the oil and chemicals being shipped down the river. So many toxins that reminded him of the toxic black smoke rising from all the bombed oil wells in Iraq. Something about it all left him uneasy, but he too said he made a very good “living” and that his wife also worked for the oil company back home.

My childish thought recurred: when people have options, why do they not choose ethical work that makes the world more beautiful and just? Why is money and so-called success always the goal?

Having seen At Eternity’s Gate, I now see what Van Gogh was trying to tell us and Julian Schnabel conveys through this moving picture. I see why these two perfectly normal guys I was breaking bread with in Houston are unable to penetrate the screen that lies between them and reality. They have never developed the imaginative tools to go beyond normal modes of perception and conception. Or perhaps they lack the faith to dare, to see the futility and violence in what they are working for and what their companies’ products are doing to the world. They think of themselves as hard at work, travelling hither and yon, doing their calculations, “making their living,” and collecting their pay. It’s their work that has a payoff in gold, but it’s not working in the sense that painting was for Vincent, a way beyond the screen. They are mesmerized by the spectacle, as are so many Americans. Their jobs are perfectly logical and allow them a feeling of calm and control.

But Vincent, responding to Gauguin, a former stock broker, when he urged him to paint slowly and methodically, said, “I need to be out of control. I don’t want to calm down.” He knew that to be fully alive was to be vulnerable, to not hold back, to always be slipping away, and to be threatened with annihilation at any moment. When painting, he was intoxicated with a creative joy that belies the popular image of him as always depressed. “I find joy in sorrow,” he said, echoing in a paradoxical way Albert Camus, who said, “I have always felt that I lived on the high seas, threatened, at the heart of a royal happiness.” Both rebels, one in paint, the other in words: “I rebel: therefore we exist,” was how Camus put it, expressing the human solidarity that is fundamental to genuine work in our ephemeral world. Both nostalgic in the present for the future, creating freedom through vision and disclosing the way for others.

And although my breakfast companions felt safe in their calmness on this side of the screen, it was an illusion. The only really calm ones are corpses. And perhaps that’s why when you look around, as I did as a child, you see so many of the living dead carrying on as normal.

“I paint to stop thinking and feel I am a part of everything inside and outside me,” says Vincent, a self-described exile and pilgrim.

If we could make working a form of such painting, a path to human solidarity because a mode of rebelling, what a wonderful world it might be.

That, I believe, is what working is for.

HOW TO REPROGRAM YOUR MIND TO TAKE AN ACTIVE ROLE IN YOUR PERSONAL EVOLUTION

Posted on January 20, 2019 by Reid Mukai

By Jonathan Davis

Source: Waking Times

For a long time we’ve been taught that evolution is a process that is happening to us. Thankfully we’re living in times where the human race is finally getting a grasp on the fact that we’re actually actively involved in how we evolve as a species.

As humans, our bodies are constantly changing in response to the environment around us. Our muscles change according to whether we choose to use them or not. The enzymes in our digestive system change in response to the foods we choose to eat. Our endocrine system is in a constant feedback loop with our emotions which can change dramatically according to what’s happening in the world around us. As Dr Bruce Lipton put it, “the cell is a carbon-based ‘computer chip’ that reads the environment”, and the field of epigenetics teaches us that our DNA changes in quality – again, according to our environment.

When science talks about ‘environmental influence’ it seems to imply ‘all that which is outside ourselves’. It’s easy to overlook the fact that that our conscious choices about which environmental factors we engage with are part of what shapes the way our bodies restructure. We are part of the environment that influences our own development; our free will lets us choose and change the environment. We participate in our own evolution during our lifetime and what we do in our own lives can also affect future generations. In this way, personal evolution is collective evolution, and nowhere is personal evolution more apparent than how we are capable of rewiring our own brain.

How Reprogramming the Mind Is Helpful To Us

Humans work really well with routines. We repeat the same pattern over and over, and through neuroplasticity our brain wires itself so that it doesn’t have to think too much about that task anymore, it just runs that established electrical pathway. To riff off Noel Burch, it’s like when we learn to drive a car: we move from unconscious incompetence ‘I don’t know how bad at this I’m going to be’; to conscious competence ‘I now know how bad I am at this’; to conscious competence ‘OK, I can do this but I have to keep my mind on the job’; to unconscious competence ‘I can wind the window down, change the radio, turn a corner and change gears all at the same time, without even thinking about it’.

We program ourselves all the time with repetition, so we don’t have to waste energy engaging isolated focus on every task. The question is whether these are routines we are choosing for ourselves or that have been imposed on us? If they are imposed, are they helpful to us both personally and as a species?

When Are We Most Easily Able To Wire And Re-wire Our Mind?

During early childhood our brains are wiring themselves for the first time. While this process slows after the intense surge of development in first few years, our brains are still establishing the wiring we will largely use for the rest of our life throughout childhood. When we hit our teenage years we experience the second surge of new wiring and there is an opportunity for patterns to be created during this time that can setup behaviours for years to come. After this period, neuroplasticity still occurs but it just isn’t as fluid as it was before. So you can teach an old dog new tricks, it’s just a slower process.

The problem here is that our subconscious is overhearing everything our conscious mind is hearing, and is therefore to a being programmed by whatever influence we’re being exposed to. The Jesuits knew this 400 years ago. They would boast:

“Give me a child until it’s seven, it will belong to the church for the rest of its life.’” – Dr Bruce Lipton, paraphrasing Jesuit priests.

We Are Always Programming Ourselves

I like to imagine the subconscious mind is like an autopilot system. It is overhearing everything we ever think or say, and it’s mission (in the background and whenever possible) is to guide us towards whatever we want… or at least whatever it thinks we want according to what it overhears. An extra level of challenge is introduced when we imagine that the conscious mind has the capacity for judgment its higher expression – discernment. The subconscious, however, doesn’t have that ability. When it is overhearing everything you think and every word you say it simply hears the topic, not the context. ‘I don’t want to be fat’ with the judgment of ‘I don’t want’ removed becomes the topic only: ‘be fat’. The subconscious ‘overhears’ the topic of what is active in your conscious mind and it is listening for repetition. This is how it figures out for how ready we need to be for that particular thought process.

Repetition Is The Key. Repetition Is The Key.

If we lift weights we are using repetition to say to the muscles, ‘be ready for this, we may need to do this at any moment, so restructure yourself’. Scientists have found the fastest way to get fit is to do interval sprints, which is basically a physical way of saying to the body through repetition ‘you need to restructure yourself so we can sprint at top speed at any time, at the drop of a hat’. Rest, get your breath back and sprint again, over and over. This repetition tells the body that it’s a high priority to restructure and be ready for this at all times. My observation is that the same appears to be true for our brain. When our subconscious overhears our thoughts and words and there is repetition, there is an increased likelihood of neural rewiring. After all – neurons that fire together wire together.

The path of least resistance

When attempting to re-wire an old habit or behaviour pattern, it is useful to remember the old adage from high school science: electricity follows the path of least resistance. Imagine the old pattern as a well-established electrical pathway in your brain. As you put conscious focus into creating a new electrical pathway to replace the old pattern, you make that new electrical pathway fatter. As soon as you stop putting conscious focus into running the new behaviour pattern the electricity will revert to the old cable for as long as it is the fatter of the two cables, as that is the path of least resistance. As soon as the day comes when the new electrical pathway is thicker than the old one you have a new program in your autopilot system, that will now run on it’s own without you needing to focus conscious intention on it. You have reached a level of conscious competence. According to Dan Coyle a key to making the consciously chosen wiring stick is holding the intention that ‘I want to know this for the rest of my life’. Coyle suggests this causes the brain to coat the new electrical pathway in the brain with myelin insulation, making it much more permanent.

Taking care with the programs we allow our subconscious to overhear

As stated earlier, our autopilot system is taking direction from everything you’re experiencing – which includes the media we watch, the people we surround ourselves with and more. For this reason, one of the most powerful things we can do is exercise discernment around the kind of experiences we expose ourselves to, and their level of intensity and repetition.

“It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.” – Frederick Douglass

More importantly is the need for extra care in exercising this discernment on behalf of the children in our care and teaching this discernment to teenagers as, in both cases they are in a heightened state of neuroplasticity and are more susceptible to influence. To be clear, I am by no means advocating prudishness or avoidance of the truth, just a higher level of awareness of how we are either consciously or inadvertently being programmed all the time.

In the video below Bruce Lipton speaks passionately on this very subject, citing this discernment on behalf of our children as a clear solution to war and conflict.

Lobotomized: Secrecy and the “Dis-enlightenment”

Posted on January 13, 2019 by Reid Mukai

By Gordon Duff

Source: New Eastern Outlook

As we enter 2019, one thing above all others is clear, the mechanisms of human engagement, education, media and information, even what passes for human contact through social media and email, is all subjected to “algorithms,” whatever those are.

It was Snowden that brought it to our attention, from the Guardian back in 2014:

“Increasingly, we are watched not by people but by algorithms. Amazon and Netflix track the books we buy and the movies we stream, and suggest other books and movies based on our habits. Google and Facebook watch what we do and what we say, and show us advertisements based on our behavior. Google even modifies our web search results based on our previous behavior. Smartphone navigation apps watch us as we drive, and update suggested route information based on traffic congestion. And the National Security Agency, of course, monitors our phone calls, emails and locations, then uses that information to try to identify terrorists.”

Documents provided by Edward Snowden and revealed by the Guardian today show that the UK spy agency GHCQ, with help from the NSA, has been collecting millions of webcam images from innocent Yahoo users. And that speaks to a key distinction in the age of algorithmic surveillance: is it really okay for a computer to monitor you online, and for that data collection and analysis only to count as a potential privacy invasion when a person sees it? I say it’s not, and the latest Snowden leaks only make more clear how important this distinction is.”

When we look back on 2014 from where we are today, Edward Snowden’s warnings of an Orwellian nightmare seem innocent. Maybe it was Donald Trump that opened our eyes, if so, whatever contribution history attributes to him, he might well want to hang his hat on this one.

The fake science of intruding into lives in order to recognize and control “influencers” began in the private sector and was “tuned up” for political races, crime and terrorism prevention and more.

By “more,” we mean “dumbing down” the “masses,” as they are called, presenting reality as a consumer product, custom engineered to be believable, to create drama or fear, to raise concerns of imaginary threats, to distract, and, above all, to control.

Social scientists have postulated that humans can actually be programmed to respond to the most basic stimuli, touch, hearing, taste, based on “fake” information, that the human mind can be fooled into filtering out such basic sensory responses as smell.

The basic synaptic connections that tie sensory input to ideas or concepts, let’s look at one glaring example. Try to say the word “Palestinian” without following it with “terrorist.”

Then again, let’s go back one more step and define the difference between an “armed militant” and a “freedom fighter.” Nothing here is new, the rules were laid out a century ago.

Einstein predicted this in his “Autobiographical notes” on epistemology. It was some 50 years ago when Dr. John Ward of Michigan State University pounded this into my head in his Philosophy of Science lectures. “The relationship between sense experiences and concepts is entirely intuitive as are the relationships between all concepts. You see what you see, not because of what you see but because of what you think.”

It was quite one thing when such pursuits were endeavors of science and philosophy at our great universities, but it became something quite different when Wilson Bryan Key, back in 1973, wrote the seminal work, Subliminal Seduction, demonstrating how altered images could reach into the most basic primitive drives, the “reptile brain,” as it were, driving an unknowing viewer to alter both perceptions and reasoning, even toward lowering human survivability.

Key’s imagery, taken from popular magazines, strange figures of death’s heads or nude women, airbrushed into ice cubes, were an opening salvo. If thanatotic drive could sell liquor or cigarettes, how easy might it be to sell a war?

No more films like Sergeant York or Red Dawn needed, or perhaps only as a “supporting actor,” pounding the nail in just a bit more.

Twenty years prior to the publication of Key’s work, the US government began a project known as MK Ultra. Though it officially ended in 1973 after 20 years of poorly documented “research” into every form of psychological manipulation, in truth, MK Ultra and other programs as well, simply “went dark.”

The reason, of course, we are traveling his historical path today is that those programs, after not 50 but 65 years of still classified efforts, after billions of dollars in black funding, programs with no oversite, programs carried out on unsuspecting citizens, sometimes entire cities, sometimes on unwilling victims in “black sites,” are the precursors to the world of Google and Facebook today.

Looking at 2018, there were some obvious “projects,” the White Helmet staged fake gas attacks for sure. This involved Facebook posts, fake videos, but the key is that they were channeled directly to the President of the United States who had been programmed to ignore credible intelligence sources. Thus, Trump ordered an attack on Syria entirely based on a Facebook post.

But there are millions of Facebook posts every day. Why did he get this one? Who put it in front of him? Is Trump surrounded by handlers, traitors?

You see, it is one thing when something is put on the internet, the equivalent of leaving a post-it note in a public restroom on the “wrong side of town.” It is quite something else when the message, a parentless bastard of disinformation, is given to a man who has, according to sources within the White House, openly advocated use of tactical nuclear weapons against Syrian people in retribution for wildly fabricated accusations.

Consider the implications, even if someone, perhaps General Mattis, had taken the nuclear option off the table. Simply put, it lowers the standards of the United States exercising war powers in attacking a sovereign nation to an anonymous social media post.

Again, we ask, it is one thing posting something malicious and dangerous and quite something else when a national leader with access to nuclear weapons is programmed to seek out and act upon same.

Then again, were any other president to order a missile strike based on, well, based on nothing whatsoever, not even a decent lie, one might expect negative repercussions.

Let’s take a second to juxtapose. If a fake public narrative exists, and it is reasonable to postulate that “the public,” such as it is, is more than aware that a “real world” exists in which what is generally known and accepted as true is, in fact, utterly false.

In fact, some of the most popular television series of the past decades have exposed the flummery of generally accepted history. Shows like The Secret History of World War II and many if not endless others, feed a hungry public a continual diet of debunked reality.

What we are left with is this, an ongoing process, a spiral as it were, around and down, around and down, ever faster, ever more hopeless, intrusion into lives, into thoughts, planted feelings, manipulated responses, altered perceptions, until nothing can be trusted, especially not ourselves.

Gordon Duff is a Marine combat veteran of the Vietnam War that has worked on veterans and POW issues for decades and consulted with governments challenged by security issues. He’s a senior editor and chairman of the board of Veterans Today, especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook.”
https://journal-neo.org/2019/01/09/lobotomized-secrecy-and-the-dis-enlightenment/

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