Tag Archives: Philosophy

THE WILL TO PURPOSE – ACTIVATING OUR INNER DRIVE & INTENTIONALITY

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By Kingsley L. Dennis

Source: Waking Times

‘A sincere reflection on human behavior is enough to convince us that the power of choice plays much less part in the life of man than we think.’ ~J.G. Bennett

We are familiar with the concept that a person has no real choice, and we generally regard this in relation to our commercial choices. That is, what we choose to buy is generally a decision based on a selection of limited choice. This has also been referred to as ‘curated needs.’ What we think or believe we want, or need, is conditioned into us – or ‘curated’ – so that we are merely responding to managed external stimuli to acquire certain goods. Whilst this is valid, and is indeed an operative modality, it remains within the material realm. In the opening citation, the thinker and author J.G. Bennett was referring to a form of choice beyond that of a material one. He was relating to the lack of choice within the inner world of the human being – that is, the presence of human will. Bennett was speaking and writing from the 1940s to the 1970s, yet what he said then is as relevant for today as he was not speaking about things that are relative to historical time or place but to an almost timeless situation – the human condition. The lack of genuine inner will of the human being has been made starker in modern times due to the lens of psychology and similar sciences.

Professor Mattias Desmet has recently popularised the concept of mass formation and false solidarity, which refer to how crowd psychology is established and sustained.[i] In his recent book (The Psychology of Totalitarianism), Desmet points out that what we call totalitarianism has only been with us for the past 120 years, since the beginning of the twentieth century. Two previous examples that he gives are the Stalinist regime that came to power on the back of the Russian Revolution, and the National Socialist (Nazi) regime in Germany. Most recently, he says, the world is experiencing the rise of a global form of totalitarianism under the guise, or ideology, of technocracy. The one thing that totalitarianism has in common is that it is based on ideology rather than brute power. Further, that the populace is persuaded (or programmed) into obeyance through propaganda and social-cultural conditioning, rather than forced through fear (as is the case with dictatorships). The mass formation of willing obedience is a symbol for our times. With the availability of global communications, a largely digitally ‘plugged-in’ world population, the widespread influence of controlled media, and the pervasive presence of mind-influencing technologies, the human species has never been in a more pressing moment in its collective history.

Modern day humanity may not only be suffering from a lack of genuine choice; more importantly, it may be experiencing the dilemma of a lack of connection with internal will power. It is this dominant state of the human psyche – we may even go so far as to call it a widespread psychosis – that lies at the root of much of our present ills with its sense of apathy and pessimism. Some readers will be familiar with German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s concept of the will to power; lesser known is the English philosopher Colin Wilson and his notion of the will to perceive. For Wilson, the question of freedom and choice is not a social problem – it is an internal one for it requires an ‘intensity of will.’[ii] In other words, it is a personal struggle to achieve a form of self-awakening, or triggering, to arouse oneself from the torpidity and apathy of life. The issue is that for most people they don’t consider the fragility of life’s situation. The general masses, at least in the western world, consider themselves to be already free. They exist within the belief structure that they are protected and looked after by their governments and social institutions and that, give or take a few things, they have most essential needs provided for. Such people, I would posit, live on the outside of themselves – they are skin-dwellers. They live through their personalities and are most likely to adhere to mass consensus narratives. They are to be swayed by the rollercoaster ride of external events and react as anticipated by the governing elites who manipulate finances, food supply, energy supply, and more. This mass of people will only recognize the loss of freedom when it is threatened in relation to external events. It is a manufactured sense of freedom for once the threat has vanished – or seemingly made to vanish – then the meaning of freedom dissipates for the danger is no longer perceived. That is, it is an exterior crisis or danger that triggers people into action and as the perceived threat fades, they slip back once again into apathy and mass obedience. There is a lack of internal stimulation.

The stimulation of the human will requires that a person has the will to acquire insight. This they must choose for themselves, for no other agency shall give it to them. On the contrary, many social systems are designed to deteriorate a person’s will by compelling them to give away their dependency and authority onto external systems. Consistency, commitment, and the intention to will, are human aspects severely undermined by the deliberate constraint of material structures and social systems. Such critical observations and the power of intention are also being increasingly undermined by the rise of what I would call ‘lazy spirituality.’ This is the type of Instagram positive thinking or commercial well-beingness that online ‘spiritual celebrities’ are all too eager to promote (and sell). Behind such on-demand spiritual well-being-positive-thinking packages is a passivity or laziness to critically engage in inner work and to gain perceptive cognition to recognize the fallacy inherent within the material domain.

It is one thing to be positively-orientated and having ‘oneness’ for all creation; it is another matter to have the perceptive capacity to recognize that there are forces in play in the world that are active in nullifying metaphysical values and realities in order to replace them with an ever-deepening materialism. It would seem that there is an increasing form of cultural laziness and indecision, especially in this current time when people chiefly wish for things to be made easy for them. Instead of a person having faith and hope that they can change by making real effort, they are usually entertained with illusions that then take away from them the impulse to make any real change within themselves. In today’s world, a person who seeks to develop inner awareness and to raise their perceptive capacity often find themselves at odds with their cultural milieu. Those with ‘spiritual seriousness,’ so to say, are what Colin Wilson referred to as the Outsider.[iii] Such individuals have an intangible need to be more than just a ‘happy, well-fed animal.’ Again, Wilson referred to this state as being that of the robot; he said that we all have a robot within us that is eager to come out and take over all our daily duties for us. The Greek-Armenian mystic G.I. Gurdjieff called this the state of the ‘man machine.’ I have referred to this as the robosapien.[iv]

Within such automated states the individual experiences the world through a narrowed lens of awareness. Wilson, for example, recognized that such limited awareness almost lulled a person into a ‘state of permanent drowsiness, like being half-anesthetized’ so that a broader vision of life is restricted. And this is how what we call ordinary, everyday life affects us. Whether it be through external impacts, stimulants, distractions, information, technological entanglement, energetic haze, and more, the environment of everyday life pacifies us by closing down our perceptual horizons. In response to this, Colin Wilson noted that ‘it is as impossible to exercise freedom in an unreal world as it is to jump while you are falling.’[v] Freedom is not only related to physical mobility and access to human rights; it is also a question of an inner ‘intensity of mind’ that can pull a person out of the collective of mass formation (as Desmet would call it). The modern life can be regarded as a cause of spiritual decay because it seeks to demolish any recognition of a metaphysical reality. And through this, many people are unknowingly suffering a form of ‘reality deficiency.’ There have been people who, over the years, have strived to point this out to us, from wisdom teachers, mystics, and philosophers (like Colin Wilson). This deficiency prevents people from receiving inner nourishment; over time, this acts to deprive human cognition by literally starving it of nutrients (perception). We are in a time right now of great ‘reality deficiency’ as the dominant consensus narratives peddle their lies, manipulations, and programming.

Each age has its own form of reality and/or metaphysical suppression, from the physically overt (Spanish Inquisition) to the covert (technocracy). Within each specific era, there are calculated forces that act to impinge upon the individuals’ own evolutionary drive toward not only self-attainment but, more importantly, a connection with a transcendental impulse (what some may call as Source). The historian Arnold Toynbee believed that civilizations (and its individuals) progress by overcoming struggles; by moving through ‘challenge points,’ so to speak. If the crisis is too great, the civilization succumbs and collapses. If the challenge is not great enough, the civilization overcomes and becomes complacent, slides into greater decadence and eventually collapses. The challenge must be just right – the ‘Goldilocks’ zone, as Gary Lachman calls it. Challenges bring out the best in individuals too, yet they must be able to grow and develop through the crisis – and this is often down to an inner will or drive.  Toynbee believed that a civilization needs to produce a ‘creative minority’ to meet such a challenge of its time. It would seem that we are amidst such a ‘challenge point’ right now; and it is not only a physical crisis but also an existential one. I would go further and suggest that human civilization cannot survive indefinitely without some inborn sense of a transcendental purpose – otherwise it is like a hollow shell that becomes increasingly brittle over time. British philosopher and historian Nicholas Hagger, whose monumental work The Fire and the Stones examines the sacred impulse (the ‘Fire/Light’) within twenty-five civilizations, likewise has shown how civilizations are inspired by the transcendental impulse and decay when such an impulse is forgotten or dismissed.[vi]

What is required is for us, our communities and cultures, to become more conscious of our participation in reality. Further, that what we take to be reality is a merger between the physical and the metaphysical. As such, humanity is a being ‘of spirit’ that is manifesting through the intermediary of a physical body. To take this even further, we need to come to recognize that all existence is consciousness primarily, and that physical phenomena is an energetic state that manifests from a source of consciousness. What is required of humanity to survive beyond this existential crisis and challenge point is to become more conscious. Is this possible? Colin Wilson was not so sure. Wilson believed, and stated as such, that the majority of people cannot accept the burden of becoming more conscious. He felt that the ‘masses’ were both consciously and subconsciously choosing the more comfortable ‘mediocracy of life.’ I would even question what this term means any more – what is the ‘mediocracy of life’ when we can no longer be sure what reality is? Abstractions have now replaced realities to create an enveloping world of pseudo-reality and a ‘theatre of the absurd.’ As I talked about in my book Bardo Times,[vii] life has become a simulation – a simulacra as the French theorist Jean Baudrillard would say – and the notion of what is ‘real’ appears to have dissolved into what is the latest consensus narrative. What is important to acknowledge in these challenging times is that as the chaos whirls around us, humanity stands on the threshold of a higher form of life.

This is the other point that perceptive individuals have been attempting to point out to us (not least of them has been the Indian sage Sri Aurobindo). And this threshold becomes more apparent and urgent whenever a civilization begins either its decline or its necessary transition to a different epoch and modality. This is the challenge that civilization must face – either to raise/adjust its level of consciousness and perceptive capacity or stagnate and then collapse. Human civilization necessarily reflects the state of perception of its inhabitants. As that indwelling perception expands, so too does the physical environment develop in alignment. If perceptive capacity is restricted or even being deliberately reduced, as is the case right now, then entropic or atrophying forces begin to dominate. This is why we must resist, at great effort, to submit to a programming of conformity and perceptive limitation that is likely to come about through increased technocratic forms of social management and control. This is where Colin Wilson’s notion of the will to perceive comes in. Due to the external environment, human consciousness is generally conditioned into a dulled state so that higher insights or perceptions are not ‘allowed’ to get through. We need to seek to ‘widen’ (expand) our consciousness beyond such limiting influences so that greater perceptive insights can be achieved. Most people, however, are reflections of their surroundings and, as such, require external inputs to motivate or trigger them into action. Chaos and crises can function as such triggering impacts. The ‘will to perceive’ also activates a will to purpose. Behind the human developmental impulse there is a push, I would say, to increase our intentionality. Without the ‘will to purpose’ there is a lack of conscious participation. It is the will to purpose that distinguishes the human being from the machine – the ‘robosapien.’ Modern life, with its technocratic pull, is encouraging people not to think but to allow automation to take over duties and responsibilities. On the contrary, we need to be ‘pulling ourselves up by the bootstraps’ and intentionally driving ourselves across the threshold. What could this threshold be?

Humanity is moving towards a stage in its evolutionary path whereby it becomes cognizant of its role as a fusion (a bridge or merger) between spirit/consciousness and physicality/matter. We are, in these times, the forward ground crew sent ahead to prepare the groundwork. Sometime in the future – it could be ten, twenty, thirty years or more – human understanding and the sciences will come to recognize the primary role of consciousness behind all existence. And when this occurs, human life will alter drastically. We shall understand that human existence is a merging of non-physical intelligence with physical forces. The very notion of life and reality will be greatly expanded beyond current conceptions. We shall be propelled beyond the confines of the physical robot – the robosapien – and shall utilize presently unknown organs of perception. But we are not at that threshold yet. And this is partly why we are seeing a contestation of forces in play. There are forces that do not wish for humanity to reach, and pass, this threshold for we shall then no longer be their passive robots to manage and control. The present control hierarchies will be demolished. And there is a small contingency that wish to cut humanity off from this transcendental impulse, to isolate us from receiving such developmental forces, and to push us back into our perceptual prisons of the ‘everyday mundane.’ Such forces aim to increase the programming and technologies of cognitive influence to hypnotize the mass of humanity into accepting an ‘upside-down’ reality that the robosapien seems the most suited to. Our will to purpose now is about having the inner drive and intentionality to move us beyond this current predicament and modern state of alienation, and forward into a state of heightened cognition and expanded perceptual awareness.

It is my view that the ‘teething pains’ that we are presently experiencing represent the birthing, or arrival, of a new form of consciousness coming to manifestation through the human species. That is, a mergence with an expanded field of consciousness. And for this to emerge, the individual is called upon to ‘meet it’ halfway, so to speak. Social forces will attempt to continue to hold back the individual by mental, emotional, and physical/biological interventions. And yet, against these artificial constrictions, I am confident that if enough of us (we don’t need to be a majority) can strive for cognitive freedom, perceptive clarity, and inner awareness, we can become the early wave – the evolutionary outsider – to make the initial steps across the threshold. Just enough of us need to act as the ‘antennae of the race’[viii] to pass the baton onto our descendants. And that, I would say, gives us enough reason to activate our will to purpose.

About the Author

Kingsley L. Dennis is the author of The Phoenix Generation: A New Era of Connection, Compassion, and Consciousness, and The Sacred Revival: Magic, Mind & Meaning in a Technological Age, available at Amazon. Visit him on the web at http://www.kingsleydennis.com/.

[i] See my previous essay: ‘The Establishment of Mass Psychology & False Solidarity’ – https://kingsleydennis.com/the-establishment-of-mass-psychology-false-solidarity/

[ii] For an in-depth study of Wilson’s life and thought, I would recommend the excellent biography by Gary Lachman – Beyond the Robot: The Life and Work of Colin Wilson (2016)

[iii] See Colin Wilson’s book The Outsider (originally published in 1956)

[iv] See my book Hijacking Reality: The Reprogramming and Reorganization of Human Life (2021)

[v] Wilson, Colin (1982) The Outsider. Los Angeles: Jeremy P. Tarcher, p39

[vi] Hagger, Nicholas (1991) The Fire and the Stones. Dorset: Element Books.

[vii] Bardo Times: hyperreality, high-velocity, simulation, automation, mutation – a hoax? (2018)

[viii] A phrase coined by the poet Ezra Pound.

LA VOLUNTAD DE PROPÓSITO: Cruzar el umbral venidero de la humanidad

THE EIGHTFOLD PATH OF GOOD CHARACTER

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By Gary Z McGee

Source: Waking Times

“Watch your thoughts, they become words. Watch your words, they become actions. Watch your actions, they become habits. Watch your habits, they become character. Watch your character, for it becomes your destiny.” ~Frank Outlaw

A robust character hinges on eight core virtues: courage, curiosity, temperance, humility, liberty, honor, wisdom, and humor. These virtues are vital rungs on the ladder toward achieving wholeness in character.

Courage frees character, curiosity grows character, temperance balances character, humility grounds character, liberty stabilizes character, honor unifies character, wisdom guides character, and humor overcomes character. Let’s break it down.

1.) Courage:

“Without courage you can’t practice any other virtue consistently.” ~Maya Angelou

Courage is the bedrock of human excellence. Before any other virtue can be realized, courage must be self-actualized. There must first come a courageous deviation or there is no “first.” Period. Therefore, it is of the utmost importance that you live a courage-based lifestyle over a comfort-based lifestyle.

Without the initial leap of courage there is no freedom, no excellence. Without courage, one is merely restricted to the conventional, inhibited by the whims of others, imprisoned inside the box of the status quo, and hampered by outdated reasoning. Without courage, the third eye remains calcified, rigid, blind.

With the leap of courage, however, one is emancipated. The world unlocks. The mind unbolts. The soul unfastens. Inhibitions dissolve, and serendipity, adaptability, and improvisation manifest. Boundaries transform into horizons. Comfort zones stretch into adventure. You split the smoke. You shatter the mirrors. And the glory of the path is revealed.

2.) Curiosity:

“If you are not living in awe, you are not paying attention.” ~Rumi

Curiosity is essential. It is the fuel that launches us beyond faith. It is the cure for the disease of certainty.

True curiosity is deep, primal, absorbing, imaginative and ravenous for updated knowledge that has the potential to put outdated knowledge to rest.

Curiosity is the ultimate existential leveling mechanism. It forces our thoughts outside the box, stretches our comfort zone, shatters entrenched mental paradigms, keeps us ahead of the curve, and pushes the envelope of all the things we’ve taken for granted.

Curiosity is on the edge of tomorrow, laughing into the abyss, shirking the tiny-minded perspective of our parochial past, and gaping in astonishment and wild wonder into the mysterium tremendum et fascinans of the Great Mystery.

3.) Temperance:

“The best amount of property to have is that which is enough to keep us from poverty, and which yet is not far removed from it.” ~Seneca

Luckily, health is a benchmark for temperance. It’s the core of universal law. Unluckily, this benchmark is hidden in a ‘language older than words,’ which can sometimes seem impossible to decode. Moderation is Health’s secret decoder ring.

Although some things must be moderated more than others, extremism in anything is the bane of health. We can breathe too much oxygen. We can drink too much water. We can even live too much in the moment. Through moderation we discover health. And through health we are free to practice temperance. We maintain our personal health through moderation so that health in general can manifest. As Gandhi wisely suggested, “Live simply so that others may simply live.”

A good rule of thumb, then, is this: moderation in all things, to include moderation. This way we are proactively injecting balance into the cosmos, while at the same time enjoying life. The key is to accept responsibility for the consequences of both our moderate and immoderate choices. Tricky, but that’s where humility comes into play.

4.) Humility:

“After the ecstasy, the laundry.” ~Jack Kornfield

Research suggests that a healthy dose of humility helps protect against extremism, polarization, and bias. When we are humble, we can admit that we are fallible, imperfect, and uncertain. It gives us the courage to admit when we are wrong.

Without humility we are more likely to fall victim to cognitive dissonance. Without humility we are blinded by faith and stuck in hand-me-down ideologies and outdated traditions. Without humility we are more likely to be clouded by pride. Without humility self-pity outmaneuvers self-empowerment and the Ego reigns supreme as it edges out Soul.

Humility brings us back down to earth. It unravels the roots, uncovers the bones, strikes at the core of the human condition. It reveals the wizard behind the curtain was always us. It forces our head over the edge of the abyss. It exposes our halos as mortal coils. It gets us out of our own way.

That Serbian Proverb said it best, “Be humble for you are made of earth. Be noble for you are made of stars.”

5.) Liberty:

“Seek freedom and become captive of your desires. Seek discipline and find your liberty.” ~Frank Herbert

Freedom is not a given. It must be earned. It must be cultivated, practiced, and acted upon daily. The moment freedom is taken for granted is the moment it is lost.

Freedom is always a rebellion. What it rebels against is anything seeking to fetter the progressive and healthy evolution of the human spirit. In the crashing plane of an unfree world, a free human is someone who puts the oxygen mask on themselves first in order to be there for those who are incapable or who are ignorant of the fact that they are not free.

As Jean Piaget said, “We organize our worlds by first organizing ourselves.” And so self-organization (self-discipline) is the first step toward freedom. Liberty, then, is a culmination of earning freedom through self-discipline, and then holding the world accountable.

6.) Honor:

“Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power.” ~Abraham Lincoln

The core of honor is self-honesty. We cannot be honorable without self-honesty. Where honesty puts character into perspective, honor unifies character. True honor is being responsible with our power.

Foremost, honor is responsibility. If we are not responsible with our power, then we become a pawn to it. Being a pawn to power is dangerous because power causes us to believe we are always right. When we are responsible with our power, however, we are more likely to admit we could be wrong. And since the fallible and imperfect human condition tends to be wrong about a great many things, it behooves us all to take responsibility with our power so as not to become a pawn to it.

If we lord our power over others, we are being dishonorable. If we use our power to help others flourish, we are being honorable. If we hoard power at the expense of others, we are being dishonorable. If we expiate power to empower others, we are not only being honorable we are being prestigious.

7.) Wisdom:

“We are not provided with wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can take for us.” ~Marcel Proust

Wisdom cannot be taught. Knowledge can be taught, skills can be taught, but not wisdom. We can discover wisdom, we can live it through experience, we can dip in and out of it in Flow States, we can do wonders with it with our creative powers thereafter, but we cannot teach it.

Wisdom is likewise just as undefinable. It is mystical, numinous, and transcendent. It can even be foolish, eccentric, and outlandish. There’s a childlike element to it that humbles mastery, just as there’s a maturity to it that towers over naivete.

Most of all wisdom is a heightened state of clarity. It’s a crispness of elevated spirit. It’s a three-eyed owl on a high branch. It’s a profound sense of humor that’s undeterred by the knowledge, experience, and tribulations that birthed it. Most of all, Wisdom has the wherewithal to get out of its own way.

As Lao Tzu wisely stated, “To attain knowledge, add things every day. To attain wisdom, remove things every day.”

8.) Humor:

“The individual is more completely revealed in play than in any one other way, and play has a greater shaping power over the character and nature of man than has any one other activity.” ~Luther Gulick

Humor is the only virtue that is transcendent. It sees how character is just that: a character caught within a tragicomedy, strutting itself across an all-too-mortal stage. It sees the character’s feet of clay. But it also sees the character’s wings. It honors both through a laughter born out of levity.

Such levity creates a powerful gravity. The self becomes magnetic. When you are flexible in humor you attract the world to yourself. You’re able to have a soulful laugh at all the ego seriousness. Pettiness falls away from you like water off a duck’s back. You become transcendent, detached, unconquerable.

Having a good sense of humor is the crowning achievement of good character, and the soul is the crown. It’s the golden crown chakra of character, sparking in the eternal night, a beacon of hope in the dark, a beacon of darkness in the blinding light, a symbol of recycled mastery that honors the Great Mystery despite our all too mortal angst.

IN THE CULTURE OF HUNGRY GHOSTS

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By Dylan Charles

Source: Waking Times

“No society can understand itself without looking at its shadow side.” ― Gabor Maté, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction

Something wicked bubbles just beneath the surface of the collective conscience. Our society is rife with corruption, predation, perversion, over-consumption, violence, addiction and so much more. Somehow enough is never enough, as if the driving force behind human existence is pure want.

This is not true, though, for we know that spiritually well beings are content beings, looking no further than the present moment’s blessings for satisfaction. We don’t have an inherent need for want. Want is a symptom, not the condition. It’s something that enters when the spirit is untended to.

It must then be a spiritual illness which plagues society. Something secretly driving so many of us mad with insatiable desire for sensation and objects. Unforgiving cravings that manifest in any way imaginable, from sex, to money, to food, to power and even in the need to be perfect. It’s a war against the self, waged unconsciously by the self. A below subconscious campaign of self-annihilation.

There are no contemporary metaphors to understand this kind of emptiness. The void just is. And since the void is so rarely acknowledged and so rarely looked at deeply, it sits in the shadows driving us mad, steering with impulse.

In Chinese Buddhist philosophy, though, there is a story that fits. The hungry ghost.

“In Chinese Buddhist teachings, “hungry ghosts are unable to take in or assimilate what they desperately need. The problem lies in their constricted throats — which cannot open for nourishment. They wander aimlessly in search of relief that is not forthcoming.”” [Source]

Interestingly, according to some of its origin myths, the hungry ghost was born out an act of cruelty. In many of the stories, it is a wealthy man’s wife who did some terrible thing to a monk, and when she eventually dies her spirit takes the form of the hungry ghost, forever lurking in purgatory, unable to ever fill its distorted belly and therefore always needing and wanting more.

The hungry ghost, then, is an expression of karma.

Hungry ghosts are the demon-like creatures described in Buddhist, Taoist, Hindu, Sikh, and Jain texts as the remnants of the dead who are afflicted with insatiable desire, hunger or thirst as a result of bad deeds or evil intent carried out in their life times. [Source]

In the realm of hungry ghosts, a deep drama between the ego and the ghost plays out ad infinitum. It’s an interplay that feeds the ego just enough for it to survive, so that in turn the ego can feed the hungry ghost. A dead-end cul-de-sac of sorts. A looping projection of one of our worst human vulnerabilities.

“The work of the ghost does not want to completely destroy its prey. Having fed off the other through dissociative trajectories of turbulence, the ego again becomes more robust. The hungry ghost now has, as companion and source of nurture, a replenished ego on which internal feeding may resume inside the space of erasure until the plenitude of the ghost-within again permeates the intersubjective.” ~  Nick Totton, Psychoanalysis and the Paranormal: Lands of Darkness

Spiritually healthy people understand their cravings for what they, expressions of innumerable forms of pain. Manifestations of the suffering caused by disconnection from the self, and from nature. And the self is nature. There really is no distinction between the two. The illusion is of separateness.

The ghosts are there to remind us that our real work is transmuting our suffering and cruelty into resilience and compassion. It’s not enough to numb the pain, it must be used to our advantage, for our growth, to serve as a catalyst for transformation, and to provide a chrysalis in which the transformation can take place.

“We are social beings. When we feel disconnected or alienated, we experience pain. Addiction, depression, anger, and violence are different ways we react to pain. To heal our society we must heal the emotional wounds.” ~Chris Agnos

Few understand this more clearly than Dr. Gabor Maté, whose work with drug addicts has transformed our understanding of what it means to be stuck in the realm of hungry ghosts.

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. []

Billionaires, Bunkers and Brain Damage

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“The rich are not like us”

By Mickey Z.

Source: Dissident Voice

Douglas Rushkoff has an article (based on his latest book) called “The super-rich ‘preppers’ planning to save themselves from the apocalypse,” in The Observer.

This excerpt gives you an idea of how the barbaric brain of a billionaire operates:

Finally, the CEO of a brokerage house explained that he had nearly completed building his own underground bunker system, and asked: “How do I maintain authority over my security force after the event?” The event. That was their euphemism for the environmental collapse, social unrest, nuclear explosion, solar storm, unstoppable virus, or malicious computer hack that takes everything down.

This single question occupied us for the rest of the hour. They knew armed guards would be required to protect their compounds from raiders as well as angry mobs. One had already secured a dozen Navy Seals to make their way to his compound if he gave them the right cue. But how would he pay the guards once even his crypto was worthless? What would stop the guards from eventually choosing their own leader?

The billionaires considered using special combination locks on the food supply that only they knew. Or making guards wear disciplinary collars of some kind in return for their survival. Or maybe building robots to serve as guards and workers – if that technology could be developed “in time.” It’s as if they want to build a car that goes fast enough to escape from its own exhaust

I tried to reason with them. I made pro-social arguments for partnership and solidarity as the best approaches to our collective, long-term challenges. The way to get your guards to exhibit loyalty in the future was to treat them like friends right now, I explained. Don’t just invest in ammo and electric fences, invest in people and relationships. They rolled their eyes at what must have sounded to them like hippy philosophy.

After reading that, you may be wondering if the rich are brain-damaged. To which I reply: Why weren’t you thinking that all along and yes, they are brain-damaged. Some studies to consider:

There’s plenty more where that came from but, of course, all such “research” must be viewed with healthy skepticism. Personally, since I’m justifiably wary of “studies,” I’ll just look around to see — with my own three eyes — how the wealthiest humans on the planet have behaved since, well… forever.

Or consider the words of the immortal Dorothy Parker: “If you want to know what God thinks of money, just look at the people he gave it to.”

Translation: The billionaires are not going to save you — or ever help you. They’re running scared to get their brain-damaged butts into bunkers.

So, connect with your peers. Connect across “party” lines and ideological hive minds. Toss away your purity litmus tests and find common ground.

What will save us is what always saves us: community, resilience, compassion, open-mindedness, innovation, and imagination.

Consider the Chickens

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Intelligence, ethics, and the inner lives of animals

By Rafia Zakaria

Source: The Baffler

I OWE CHICKENS AN APOLOGY. Not only have I been eating them until very recently, but I have refused to even consider the possibility of a chicken having any kind of inner life. This estimation was not made from a lack of interaction. As children, my twin brother and I purchased baby chicks from a street vendor. We did this unfazed by the fact that quite often, the chickens would die. Once, when we were nine, we had two that lived, a hen and a rooster. No one told us that we should probably get more hens. Not having any other female companions, the rooster exerted his attentions on the one chicken. She would lay an egg or two every day, much to our delight, but soon sickened and died. Then there was only an incel rooster who roamed our compound and terrorized the women. After a few ugly incidents, he was “given away” to one of the women who worked at our house. We were never told what happened to him, and I didn’t care. There is nothing worse than an incel rooster patrolling your house all day long.

Now, so many years later, I’ve found my way to animal behaviorist Justin Gregg’s brilliant new book If Nietzsche Were a Narwhal: What Animal Intelligence Reveals About Human Stupidity. Gregg’s chicken coop is “a huge enclosed area” with high rafters, because as an animal scientist, he knows them to be jungle birds who need perches on which to sleep at night. But it is not only the magisterial heights of Gregg’s discussion of chickens that stayed with me. I was struck also by Gregg’s description of his chickens’ varied personalities, one anxious, another friendly, and so on; he tells us that these chickens do have inner lives and thus a consciousness of themselves as distinct from others. Instead of the feckless creatures I (and most people) assume them to be, chickens have just the sort of intelligence that is necessary for their own survival. They don’t think like humans, Gregg tells us, because they do not need to.

Intelligence, in Gregg’s explanation, does not exist in the way SATs or other IQ tests would have you believe. Those tests quantify a certain kind of ability to process information. People who do not do well on such tests may have other kinds of abilities that simply are not being measured. Intelligence is not one easily definable thing; engineers working on artificial intelligence cannot agree on a definition of it. But what humans have is a tendency to ask why things operate in a certain way. In Gregg’s terminology, humans are “why specialists,” a proclivity that in natural selection terms is no advantage and perhaps even a liability. A narwhal swimming around in the sea, for instance, would never have the kind of mental breakdown that the German philosopher pondering nihilism suffered toward the end of his life. Animal intelligence is practical and does not get caught up in abstract thought. By and large, animals make calculations based on what they can observe; ideas such as “causality,” which lie at the crux of human intelligence, are outside their capacity for thought.

Humans evolved to become why specialists. As Gregg tells it, 200,000 years ago, humans were hanging out with chimpanzees and exhibited no interest in the whys. They could make rudimentary tools and had some kind of assemblage of grunts that allowed for basic communication. He notes that roughly 40,000 years ago, cave paintings were created. Here were humans asking the whys; symbolic representation is an exclusively human thing.

Inability to be why specialists does not mean that animals are not capable of “metacognition,” the ability to be conscious of their own thinking or cognition. One of the most stunning examples in this book full of stunning examples is that of Natua, a dolphin at the Dolphin Research Center in Florida. An experiment was set up where Natua was exposed to two kinds of sounds, one a very high tone and one a very low tone. After hearing the sound, Natua had to choose between two paddles, one for the high and another for the low. If he chose correctly, he was given a fish for a reward. If he did not, he was sent for a long time-out, in that the experiment stopped. As the experiment progressed, the high tone sound came very close to the low sound such that they were nearly indistinguishable. At this point, Natua was unable to tell the difference; “he just started randomly pressing paddles,” Gregg writes. His behavior proved that some animals are capable of metacognition, the awareness that they do not know, or that their thinking about something is wrong.

It is no surprise that Gregg is pessimistic about how humans have used their abilities as why specialists, and he thinks that there is a chance that humans might not even survive over another century. The prospect of nuclear war and the climate crisis suggest, in Gregg’s view, that the end is possible. In the meantime, developing a consciousness of animals as beings who are capable of metacognition, of having individual personalities and so on, points to the need for a new ethics. This new set of basic premises would abandon the centering principle that the animal-human relationship must always be of one having dominion over the other.

But if you consider the continued resistance to the idea of animal rights, it is hard to be optimistic about the emergence of a new ethics of mutuality that eschews the dominion portion. Too many human rationalizations, attached to what we eat, what we wear, how we live, are predicated on the belief that we are the only feeling beings and that our actions upon animals are independent of consequences. If you know the fear of a chicken or a cow or a pig about to be slaughtered, you may look at your food in a different way. You might eschew fried chicken or beef or pork completely. If you understand that a horse being whipped is suffering terribly, is extremely scared and dissolute, you can also understand that there is a need for a radical expansion of mindfulness and a concomitant shrinking of power.

In the moral universe informed by Gregg’s argument, the survival of the human race is not an imperative for the planet because humans as a species have been far more disastrous for the world than others. “Prognostic myopia” keeps us horribly and condemnably in the moment, burning fossil fuels and trashing the oceans even though we know that it is terrible for the environment. This is a unique position among philosophers, a lot of whom have lately concerned themselves with questions of ethics and planetary survival. 

As a contrast to Gregg, the Oxford Associate Professor in Philosophy William MacAskill, in his What We Owe the Future, proposes “effective altruism” as a way to live ethically in times of climate crisis. If Gregg argues against human exceptionalism, MacAskill reduces humans to data points, where the survival of the most, and the most benefit to the planet, are guideposts to a present and future ethics. Using Gregg’s arguments, however, effective altruism is rendered meaningless. Even those who live sparingly on twenty-six thousand pounds a year, like MacAskill, are still a burdensome threat, unless we define their worth according to tiresome illusions of human exceptionalism.

If Nietzsche Were A Narwhal is the sort of critical look at human dominion that our world needs. A few years ago, Brown University environmental historian Bathsheba R. Demuth wrote Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait, a similarly groundbreaking look at the consequences of the extractive relationship humans have had with the environment. Just as Gregg reveals the risks of humans imagining their power over animals as shorn of consequences, Demuth reveals the consequences of human dominion over nature.

Thinkers and scientists like Gregg and Demuth are presenting readers with the urgent and pressing necessity for a new ethics. The unthinking, extractive, and dominant human treats animals as a lower form of existence, rather than a different form; we assess the environment based on what can be extracted from it. Like our means of communication, our means of travel, of treating disease, and so much else, our ethics need an urgent and pressing update that takes into consideration the understanding of animals. Factory farms, the constant consumption of animal products, and the greedy use of fossil fuels are the seeds of destruction.

I am not sure I could have offered the chicken and rooster of my childhood a deluxe chicken coop with high rafters, but an argument for better living conditions and the introduction of new companions for the rooster would have been easier if we had understood the first thing about the animals around us. I do not need to underscore the rapid pace at which our world is changing. If Nietzsche Were A Narwhal is a must-read because it explains how we can save the world only if we exist in symbiosis with the thinking, feeling creatures that have had the misfortune of sharing the planet with humans, who turn out not to be as intelligent as they believe themselves to be.

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.