Tag Archives: Philosophy

THE ART OF SHADOWING YOURSELF

Posted on by
Reply

By Gary Z McGee

Source: Waking Times

“Look at every path closely and deliberately, then ask yourself this crucial question, does this path have heart? If it does, then the path is good. If it doesn’t, then it is of no use.” ~Carlos Castaneda

The art of shadowing yourself is a ruthless form of self-overcoming made popular by the writings of Carlos Castaneda (he called it stalking the self), who was inspired by the Yacqui Shaman Don Juan.

The shadower needs four essential qualities: ruthlessness, cunning, patience, and humor. The fundamentals of the art of shadowing yourself are three-fold: shadowing the self, shadowing the world, and shadowing the unknown. Let’s break it down…

Shadowing the Self:

“Be melting snow. Wash yourself of yourself.” –Rumi

Shadowers are seekers. They are ruthless explorers. When shadowers shadow themselves, they are shadowing inner knowledge, sacred wisdom, and hidden information. They are in search of the golden shadow, where latent creativity is hidden beneath layer upon layer of cultural conditioning, religious indoctrination, and political brainwashing.

When a shadower shadows him/herself, he is a hunter mercilessly routing out codependence, weakness, and cowardice. He uses self-interrogation like Occam’s Razor, shaving away the superfluous, cutting away years and years of false knowledge, unlearning what was learned, un-washing the brainwash, and reconditioning the conditioning that came before.

A shadower audaciously digs a hole right into the center of his own comfort zone. He digs deep. He keeps digging, hungry for something more, for something he knows not what. He digs until there is nothing more than a snarling abyss, a soul-shattering existential darkness that presses in on him, that smashes his fragile ego into a million little pieces.

It is at the bottom of the abyss, deep in the throes of a Dark night of the soul, with his shattered ego reassembled into an individuated tool for further exploration, that the shadower discovers the diamond hidden in the rough of his soul: shadow’s gold.

Shadow’s gold is our sacred wound glowing like nothing else can glow. It is the accumulation of all the repressed pain, failure, setbacks, and loss experienced in a lifetime pressurized into a powerful force of darkness made conscious. It is our repressed shadow married with our inner light.

Having discovered the inner darkness of his soul’s abyss, the shadower takes his shadow’s gold and uses it to climb out of fearful codependence and into courageous independence. Now it’s time to use this newfound independence—this unity of abyss and summit, of shadow and light—to stretch his tiny comfort zone into the world.

Shadowing the World:

“The shamans say that being a medicine man begins by falling into the power of the demons. The one who pulls out of the dark place becomes the medicine man, and the one who stays in it is the sick person. You can take every psychological illness as an initiation. Even the worst things you fall into are an effort of initiation, for you are in something that belongs to you.” ~Marie-Louise von Franz

Now that the self has been thoroughly interrogated, shadow’s gold discovered, abyss and summit united, it’s time for the shadower to shadow the world. It’s time for the shadower to rise up out of the ashes of his codependence and break down the walls of his tiny comfort zone. It’s time to piece back together his shattered ego into an individuated ego. The shadower uses the knowledge of his individuation to take a leap of courage out of his comfort zone. He finally has the ears to hear the call to adventure. He is ready to take the next step into his hero’s journey.

But the world is dangerous. Living a life well-lived is full of risks. Adventure is at hand, yet when a shadower stretches his comfort zone, he understands that he is stretching into risky adventure. Hence the need for courage.

Shadowing the world is not for the faint of heart. It requires questioning all institutions to the Nth degree. It requires getting in the face of all so-called authorities. It requires ruthless civil disobedience that puts the powers that be in check. It requires David-like courage challenging any and all Goliath-like power structures. Sometimes, it even requires amoral agency to balance out the extremes of the overly moral goodie-two-shoes and immoral psychopaths of the world.

A shadower shadows the world with the same ruthlessness in which he shadowed himself, mercilessly interrogating everything the culture has taken for granted. He holds outdated world views against the hot iron of universal law and tosses out what cannot withstand the heat. He counts coup on power. He deflates egos and animates souls. He cuts the strings that once bound him to a profoundly sick society like a mere puppet and turns those strings into a lasso with which he lassos truth.

The shadower acts as a mirror to the world, revealing the shadows of others. People fear their own shadows and so they tend to fear the ruthless honesty of the shadower. They cringe. They balk. They reel inside the slow simmer of their own cognitive dissonance. Nevertheless, the shadower relentlessly injects wakefulness into an otherwise somnambulant world.

When a shadower shadows the world, he becomes the world. He stretches his tiny comfort zone into a mighty horizon, subsuming the world. And the shadow of the world is a mighty thing indeed. He is now ready for the difficult task of shadowing the unknown.

Shadowing the Unknown:

“The need for mystery is greater than the need for an answer.” ~Ken Kesey

When a shadower shadows the unknown, he goes Meta. He shadows the infinite. He shadows God. He cunningly interrogates mental paradigms. He lives between worlds, bridging gaps. To a shadower, the unknown is merely procrastinating knowledge just waiting to be known.

If, as Einstein said, “Imagination is more powerful than knowledge,” then the shadower turns the power of his imagination on the universe itself, flexing on Infinity, despite his own finitude.

It is in this sense that a shadower becomes a cosmic hero. Having risen up out of his codependent comfort zone, having leveraged a life well lived through shadow’s gold, having embraced the interconnectedness of all things through the union of summit and abyss, the shadower becomes an interdependent self-actualizer projecting the prism of his shadow’s glow into the Great Mystery. He has left behind the fear-based lifestyle and embraced a courage-based lifestyle that manifests the provident-based lifestyle of cosmic heroism.

Shadowing the unknown almost always leads to high art. Cathartic art. The kind of art that changes the world, full of myth and metaphor and existential leitmotifs. The kind of art that becomes the magic elixir that wakes up entire “tribes,” that animates an otherwise inanimate world. A shadower shadows the unknown in order to give birth to the sacred known.

Shadowing the unknown is the art of living life to the Nth degree. It’s inflicting oneself with a life well-lived through a courage of the most high, with a humor of the most high, with honor of the most high. It’s grabbing God by the throat and forcing him to cough up all his secrets, blasphemy be damned. It’s being ruthlessly determined to live life well, as a shining example to those living life ill.

Ultimately, shadowing the unknown is shadowing death. It’s being on the hunt for a good death that balances out a good life. As Castaneda said, “Death is the only wise advisor we have. Whenever you feel like everything is going wrong and you’re about to be annihilated, turn to your death and ask if that is so. Your death will tell you that you are wrong; that nothing matters outside its touch. Your death will tell you, “I haven’t touched you yet.”

On the Duty of Civil Disobedience

Posted on by
1

By Stephen Parato

Source: Waking Times

“If the injustice is part of the necessary friction of the machine of government, let it go, let it go: perchance it will wear smooth–certainly the machine will wear out… but if it is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then I say, break the law. Let your life be a counter-friction to stop the machine. What I have to do is to see, at any rate, that I do not lend myself to the wrong which I condemn.” ~Henry David Thoreau

Obedience is the connective tissue of oppression.

In other words, any form of control on a collective level can only be carried out through obedience. A dictator can’t arrest or kill an entire population himself; he needs mindless minions to do the dirty work. This principle applies across all forms and degrees of systematic control, even the most subtle.

The desires of any wannabe controller can only come to fruition through the compliance of others. And that’s been the case throughout recorded history (his-story). The desire for control becomes a virus, driven by fear and infecting more and more people, until there are enough drones to oppress an entire population.

This phenomenon isn’t just the case with large-scale atrocities; it applies to anything which is an impediment to freedom or love; be it a person, group, system or idea.

Everything is held up by belief. Laws are merely words written on paper, only legitimized by collective acquiescence. Laws need people to enforce them. And if laws are unjust (as most are), those who carry them out must unquestioningly submit to authority and go against their own inner knowing.

The only way control or oppression works on any scale is through compliance. Too many people do the work of ‘the man’ for ‘the man.’ That’s the problem. The solution lies in civil disobedience.

Freedom Cannot Be Granted

“Freedom cannot be granted. It must be taken.” ~Max Stirner

Asking for freedom is oxy-moronic. If you have to ask for freedom, you’re already a slave.

How is freedom taken? The simple decision to be the master of your own body and mind.

It really is as simple as that, though difficult to apply. It’s easy to blame problems on others, it’s easy to neglect our health and think “the doctor can fix me.” We’ve been conditioned to externalize our power since childhood. We’ve been taught to not trust ourselves. We’ve been taught to submit to authority without question.

This is a recipe for a control system to stealthily and slowly permeate society (the totalitarian tiptoe).

When you attain a degree of self-mastery, you do not acquiesce to the will of destructive people or disharmonious institutions. Which leads to the next point…

Fear-Based Programming

“The pioneers of a warless world are the youth who refuse military service.” ~Albert Einstein

The covert means by which oppression takes over is through fear-based programming.

If you have people in fear, you can easily control them. Fear activates the part of the brain known as the amygdala (the center for emotional behavior/motivation) and inhibits neocortex function (our “thinking brain”). This means that rationality and intellect are thrown out the window, the perfect storm for brainwashing. There’s even a term for this fear response; amygdala hijack.

The media is one big amygdala hijack, perpetually programming the population with which boogeyman to fear next. This is a massive ritual of fear-based programming that insidiously shifts entire populations into thinking and acting irrationally out of fear. Television is called programming for a reason.

Remember the whole weapons of mass destruction fiasco with Iraq in 2003? US military action in Iraq and massive destabilization of the middle east (which continues to this day) was predicated on that lie. There were no weapons of mass destruction. But lingering fear from 9/11 resulted in a string of irrational behavior and many people blindly believing the hype.

The holocaust took place because German soldiers were thoroughly conditioned to carry out orders. They didn’t carry out orders because they liked doing it, but because they feared the wrath of their higher ranking officers, or even because they were conditioned to fear jewish people. These abominations only occur when fear is the driving force.

Fear is hard to pin down. It’s slippery, and ultimately illusory (False Evidence Appearing Real). Yet it’s the undercurrent of all “negative” emotions. Fear is what stops us from saying no to evil. Fear might actually distort our perceptions to support evil. That’s why it’s so dangerous.

When you cultivate self-mastery, you’re able to break the cycle. The spread of fear stops before you and is transmuted by the omnipotent force of unyielding love.

Love Over Fear

“There are two basic motivating forces: fear and love. When we are afraid, we pull back from life. When we are in love, we open to all that life has to offer with passion, excitement, and acceptance. We need to learn to love ourselves first, in all our glory and our imperfections. If we cannot love ourselves, we cannot fully open to our ability to love others or our potential to create. Evolution and all hopes for a better world rest in the fearlessness and open-hearted vision of people who embrace life.” ~John Lennon

Strive to choose love over fear in every situation. You can never go wrong if you act from a place of compassion. This is the fulcrum of change, and it starts within you.

The change we all yearn to see in the world will only happen in the wake of a fundamental change in consciousness. Everything we see in this world starts in the realms of imagination before coming into manifestation.

The change begins within and ripples outward. Embodying the change is the first step, the prerequisite. Without inner transformation, humanity will be stuck on the same merry-go-round of madness.

When a critical mass of people create positive inner changes, it will open up doors we never could’ve imagined before and will provide possibilities far beyond our current limited perspective. Solutions will spontaneously emerge.

Go within and stop the momentum of fear. Learn to listen to and trust your intuition. Have the courage to follow your heart instead of cowardly bowing to fear.

“Courage is a heart word. The root of the word courage is cor – the Latin word for heart. In one of its earliest forms, the word courage meant ‘To speak one’s mind by telling all one’s heart.’” ~Brene Brown

Compliance with destruction, hatred, oppression, violence and fear is cowardice, while noncompliance is courageous. In the depths of your being, in your heart of hearts, you know what is right.

Choose love over fear.

Have the courage of heart and freedom of mind to disobey oppressive forces.

Be the change.

Brave New Cancel Culture World

Posted on by
1

By Pepe Escobar

Source: The Unz Review

In 2020, we saw the enshrinement of techno-feudalism – one of the overarching themes of my latest book, Raging Twenties.

In lightning speed, the techno-feudalism virus is metastasizing into an even more lethal, wilderness of mirrors variant, where cancel culture is enforced by Big Tech all across the spectrum, science is routinely debased as fake news in social media, and the average citizen is discombobulated to the point of lobotomy.

Giorgio Agamben has defined it as a new totalitarianism.

Top political analyst Alastair Crooke has attempted a sharp breakdown of the broader configuration.

Geopoliticallly, the Hegemon would even resort to 5G war to maintain its primacy, while seeking moral legitimization via the woke revolution, duly exported to its Western satrapies.

The woke revolution is a culture war – in symbiosis with Big Tech and Big Business – that has smashed the real thing: class war. The atomized working classes, struggling to barely survive, have been left to wallow in anomie.

The great panacea, actually the ultimate “opportunity” offered by Covid-19, is the Great Reset advanced by Herr Schwab of Davos: essentially the replacement of a dwindling manufacturing base by automation, in tandem with a reset of the financial system.

The concomitant wishful thinking envisages a world economy that will “move closer to a cleaner capitalist model”. One of its features is a delightfully benign Council for Inclusive Capitalism in partnership with the Catholic Church.

As much as the pandemic – the “opportunity” for the Reset – was somewhat rehearsed by Event 201 in October 2019, additional strategies are already in place for the next steps, such as Cyber Polygon, which warns against the “key risks of digitalization”. Don’t miss their “technical exercise” on July 9th, when “participants will hone their practical skills in mitigating a targeted supply chain attack on a corporate ecosystem in real time.”

A New Concert of Powers?

Sovereignty is a lethal threat to the ongoing cultural revolution. That concerns the role of the European Union institutions – especially the European Commission – going no holds barred to dissolve the national interests of nation states. And that largely explains the weaponizing, in varying degrees, of Russophobia, Sinophobia and Iranophobia.

The anchoring essay in Raging Twenties analyzes the stakes in Eurasia exactly in terms of the Hegemon pitted against the Three Sovereigns – which are Russia, China and Iran.

It’s under this framework, for instance, that a massive, 270-plus page bill, the Strategic Competition Act , has been recently passed at the US Senate. That goes way beyond geopolitical competition, charting a road map to fight China across the full spectrum. It’s bound to become law, as Sinophobia is a bipartisan sport in D.C.

Hegemon oracles such as the perennial Henry Kissinger at least are taking a pause from their customary Divide and Rule shenanigans to warn that the escalation of “endless” competition may derail into hot war – especially considering AI and the latest generations of smart weapons.

On the incandescent US-Russia front, where Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov sees the lack of mutual trust, no to mention respect, as much worse than during the Cold War, analyst Glenn Diesen notes how the Hegemon “strives to convert the security dependence of the Europeans into geoeconomic loyalty”.

That’s at the heart of a make-or-break saga: Nord Stream 2. The Hegemon uses every weapon – including cultural war, where convicted crook Navalny is a major pawn – to derail an energy deal that is essential for Germany’s industrial interests. Simultaneously, pressure increases against Europe buying Chinese technology.

Meanwhile, NATO – which lords over the EU – keeps being built up as a global Robocop, via the NATO 2030 project – even after turning Libya into a militia-ridden wasteland and having its collective behind humiliatingly spanked in Afghanistan.

For all the sound and fury of sanction hysteria and declinations of cultural war, the Hegemon establishment is not exactly blind to the West “losing not only its material dominance but also its ideological sway”.

So the Council on Foreign Relations – in a sort of Bismarckian hangover – is now proposing a New Concert of Powers to deal with “angry populism” and “illiberal temptations”, conducted of course by those malign actors such as “pugnacious Russia” who dare to “challenge the West’s authority”.

As much as this geopolitical proposal may be couched in benign rhetoric, the endgame remains the same: to “restore US leadership”, under US terms. Damn those “illiberals” Russia, China and Iran.

Crooke evokes exactly a Russian and a Chinese example to illustrate where the woke cultural revolution may lead to.

In the case of the Chinese cultural revolution, the end result was chaos, fomented by the Red Guards, which started to wreak their own particular havoc independent of the Communist Party leadership.

And then there’s Dostoevsky in The Possessed, which showed how the secular Russian liberals of the 1840s created the conditions for the emergence of the 1860s generation: ideological radicals bent on burning down the house.

No question: “revolutions” always eat their children. It usually starts with a ruling elite imposing their newfound Platonic Forms on others. Remember Robespierre. He formulated his politics in a very Platonic way – “the peaceful enjoyment of liberty and equality, the reign of eternal justice” with laws “engraved in the hearts of all men”.

Well, when others disagreed with Robespierre’s vision of Virtue, we all know what happened: the Terror. Just like Plato, incidentally, recommended in Laws. So it’s fair to expect that the children of the woke revolution will eventually be eaten alive by their zeal.

Canceling freedom of speech

As it stands, it’s fair to argue when the “West” started to go seriously wrong – in a cancel culture sense. Allow me to offer the Cynic/Stoic point of view of a 21st century global nomad.

If we need a date, let’s start with Rome – the epitome of the West – in the early 5th century. Follow the money. That’s the time when income from properties owned by temples were transferred to the Catholic Church – thus boosting its economic power. By the end of the century, even gifts to temples were forbidden.

In parallel, a destruction overdrive was in progress – fueled by Christian iconoclasm, ranging from crosses carved in pagan statues to bathhouses converted into churches. Bathing naked? Quelle horreur!

The devastation was quite something. One of the very few survivors was the fabulous bronze statue of Marcus Aurelius on horseback, in the Campidoglio/ Capitoline Hill (today it’s housed in the museum). The statue survived only because the pious mobs thought the emperor was Constantine.

The very urban fabric of Rome was destroyed: rituals, the sense of community, singin’ and dancin’. We should remember that people still lower their voices when entering a church.

For centuries we did not hear the voices of the dispossessed. A glaring exception is to be found in an early 6th century text by an Athenian philosopher, quoted by Ramsay MacMullen in Christianity and Paganism in the Fourth to Eight Centuries.

The Greek philosopher wrote that Christians are “a race dissolved in every passion, destroyed by controlled self-indulgence, cringing and womanish in its thinking, close to cowardice, wallowing in all swinishness, debased, content with servitude in security.”

If that sounds like a proto-definition of 21st century Western cancel culture, that’s because it is.

Things were also pretty bad in Alexandria. A Christian mob killed and dismembered the alluring Hypatia, mathematician and philosopher. That de facto ended the era of great Greek mathematics. No wonder Gibbon turned the assassination of Hypatia into a remarkable set piece in Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (“In the bloom of beauty, and in the maturity of wisdom, the modest maid refused her lovers and instructed her disciples; the persons most illustrious for their rank or merit were impatient to visit the female philosopher”).

Under Justinian – emperor from 527 to 565 – cancel culture went after paganism no holds barred. One of his laws ended imperial toleration of all religions, which was in effect since Constantine in 313.

If you were a pagan, you’d better get ready for the death penalty. Pagan teachers – especially philosophers – were banned. They lost their parrhesia: their license to teach (here is Foucault’s brilliant analysis).

Parrhesia – loosely translated as “frank criticism” – is a tremendously serious issue: for no less than a thousand years, this was the definition of freedom of speech (italics mine).

There you go: first half of the 6th century. This was when freedom of speech was canceled in the West.

The last Egyptian temple – to Isis, in an island in southern Egypt – was shut down in 526. The legendary Plato’s Academy – with no less than 900 years of teaching in its curriculum – was shut down in Athens in 529.

Guess where the Greek philosophers chose to go into exile: Persia.

Those were the days – in the early 2nd century – when the greatest Stoic, Epictetus, a freed slave from Phrygia, admirer of both Socrates and Diogenes, was consulted by an emperor, Hadrian; and became the role model of another emperor, Marcus Aurelius.

History tells us that the Greek intellectual tradition simply did not fade away in the West. It was a target of cancel culture.

Culture, Self and Law

Posted on by
Reply

By Darren Allen

Source: Off-Guardian

This is an extract from Self and Unself, Darren Allen’s new ‘philosophy of all and everything’. Some of the terms herein — consciousness, self, ego, etc — may appear somewhat mysterious or abstract as they are explained in earlier sections of the book.

Self produces manifest culture, and then that culture shapes self. First, self is externalised as an expression — some kind of act or presentation. The expression appears as an object, a thing in the world, which is related to other objects, which are then reappropriated by man back into the self.

A band releases an album, a building company constructs a block of flats, an advertising agency puts up hoardings around town, an individual recounts a few anecdotes. The songs, the dwellings, the signs and the stories become part of a world which then shapes those within that world.

If self is unselfish this process ultimately begins “beyond” culture, with consciousness, to which the reappropriated modifications are subject to some kind of evaluation — I can reject the bullshit music, the ugly council estate, the advertising lies and the witless jibber-jabber.

If, however, self is fundamentally egoic, consciousness is given no freedom to operate, and the caddis case is formed almost entirely from without, walling up inner quality, and with it, genuine individuality.

First self speaks, then the words get set in stone, then the stone speaks to the self, writing its words back into the human heart, which speaks again.[1] If there is freedom to speak, and to be heard, and to walk away, this dialogue (or dialectic) is fruitful and serves man.

But, just as if one person screws another down and forces words into her head it is no longer a conversation, so if society (culture plus self, or selves) fills its schools and lines its streets with messages that all say the same thing, with no way of escape, then we are no longer individuals participating in a society, but stackable storage units for whomever or whatever is filling us with the things we are forced to feel, eat, look at, think about and energetically engage with; in short, build our selves with.

Culture was once built from nature, and, more intimately, from the unselfish origin of that which nature and culture have in common. This is why pre-civilised man considered nature and culture to be identical. The more culture came to be built from itself, the less it served the essence of man, until it came to compel man to accept its objective validity or suffer the consequences. Not in an overt tyrannical sense, but in the unalterable fact of its existence.

You can think away culture or pretend it doesn’t matter — ignore, say, the rules of language or pretend that they are dispensable, but you will be punished, mocked, excluded, brought back into line or killed. Likewise, if your social self is at odds with your individual self, then all kinds of problems are on their way. This does not mean that I must be something other than my social self, but that I am continually compelled to harmonise the two, and if I can’t — if I cannot be in the world who I feel I really am—then I will suffer in the world, as everyone who is honest does.

Ego keeps this suffering at bay by endlessly affirming its social self. As that most unreal and egoic of sources, the average Teevee-American has it, ‘I am a cop, it’s what I do…’ ‘I am a mother, it’s what I do…’ Or, alternatively, ‘This is my town, these are my people’.

Such a ‘self’ is not something which is invented, it is there, ‘inside me’. I look inside and see that I am the cop or mother that society takes me to be (or, for the fake outsider, that I wish society to take me to be). And I have no desire to be anything else. Not that there is anything wrong with inhabiting a role, nor with identifying with a community, nor that there aren’t always elements of self that do not fit into what is required by the social world; rather that ego hides from itself in its social representation.

Man may be psychologically and spiritually deformed by his activity within the egoic group or institution, he may work in a mechanical manner, in mediated environments, in order to produce or manage things which have no recognisable human meaning, and he may be forced to conceal his horror and disgust behind an upbeat mask of emotional management, but if there is no truth beyond a self-constructed from the group, he will defend his deformity, and consequent duplicity and misery, as truth.

All criticisms of the group are taken to be criticisms of the self — ‘I am mortally offended by your prejudice’ — and all criticisms of the self are taken to be prejudice against the group — ‘It’s not because you are repulsed by my moral deformity, it’s because you are racist/homophobic/anti-white/anti-American etc’.

The seamless unity of self and society in the egoic mind explains man’s total blindness to systemic constraints, and to the fundamental paradigms of the system. They are one with his ego, which is why, today for example, man spends so much time thinking and talking about voting, about reforming teaching, about having fairer laws, about creating cleaner motorways and so on and so forth; but not a word on how disabling democracy is, or education, or law, or transport, or the encompassing system, which is as invisible to him as water is to a fish, or anger is to a van driver.

*

The social self and its inner component, the personality, are maintained through communication, through constant confirmation (either explicit or implied) of who I am to others. When there is nobody to validate my personality, it dies, which is why solitude is so necessary to people with character — who need to periodically let their personality wither away in winter so that spring life might grow—and so terrifying to people without character, who must exist in a constant stress of forced blooming for the world.

Likewise, if a critical avenue of personality-confirming communication is permanently disrupted—if a lover leaves, or a mother dies, or self is forced to live in another country, cut off from its culture—the whole world crumbles. The egoic self, forged through the shared reality created with a partner, a family or a society, is ripped out.

This is why people stay in abusive relations and in abusive societies. Leaving the objective world of the known is to be plunged into chaos, a fate worse than death for ego, which may even choose death in preference.

Loss of self-reinforcing dialogue is not just a threat to the individual self, but to the social body, which provides all kinds of ritualised means by which the disrupted self is expected to deal with its disarray and return soothed and placated to the ‘normal’ world. A spouse torn apart by the death of a partner is fine, we can accept and sympathise; but if the grief is too noisy or outstays its welcome, then the social world will take measures to exclude it, quarantine the infection as it were, and remove conspicuous misery from the scene, so that production and consumption can smoothly proceed.[2]

For the same reason, madness, bizarre dreams and visions, psychotropic intoxication, spiritual extremism and all other exits from the system—including literally leaving it to gad off into the forest—are to be bricked up, or, if that’s not possible, managed by society, which deals with the void by projecting a screen of rationalisations onto it.[3] Your visionary dream was a message from Satan, or a repressed desire, or a random brain signal, your glorious experience of the fundamental oneness of creation was a message from Allah, or a crazed illusion, or confirmation of your status as our Mystic Cham.

All of these validations are gratefully taken up by the ego, which cannot bear to be cut off, alone (or alone with unself), and prefers to masochistically submit itself to The Worldview — or, on behalf of that world, to sadistically control others — rather than have to face any kind of reality beyond the boundaries of the social known.

Just as society is threatened by loss of face and loss of reason, so it must also deal with the danger of men and women rebelling against their internalised role; finding, for example, that being a nice obedient little wife, or the upwardly-mobile manager of a car-rental firm, is something of a burden, and that they’d rather be members of a non-stop erotic cabaret or hunting-and-gathering in Botswana.

It’s fine for a man to masturbate to high-budget porn, or for a woman to spend a month on safari, but to actually do something about their dreams, particularly the genuinely wild ones, is out of the question, and again, if substitutes are not functioning, the machinery of social meaning must step in to make sure such desires are suppressed or channelled into something ‘productive’, or at least that the dreamer is reminded that if they are not, he can expect to pay an horrendously high price to realise them.

*

The most potent and pervasive threat to selfish society is not in this or that criticism, loss or disruption, but in consciousness itself; which is everywhere and at all times. Consciousness must therefore be continually suppressed, and man’s relation to it, to ever-present unselfish quality, continually managed.

This is largely done, on a social level, through laws, legitimations, taboos and totems. These are the rules of society — the ‘walls’ of cliched thought, feeling, sensation and activity — which range from everyday non-verbal norms of behaviour (we greet in such and such a way, we react to bad news in such and such a way), through more explicit linguistic formulations of what is right and proper (the shared ethics of society, encoded in its wisdom, its maxims, its proverbs and even its jokes), through the art, myths and folk tales of a culture (by which we learn what is appropriate or tasteful, and what is to be condemned), through the explicit legal codes of a civilisation or of its various institutions, up to, finally, the various sacred justifications or secular theories which explain, in the most abstract sense, why things are as they are.

Although all these legitimations are constantly in conflict, they work as a whole to order men and women’s responses to their own conscious impulses and the context they find themselves in. In a selfless society, these ‘orders’ are soft guidelines (or, if you prefer, flexible human laws) — useful and necessary, but fluid, and at the service of the individual.

In an egoic society, the individual must serve the laws, legitimations and taboos. If he breaks them — if he smiles when he should frown, does what the gods say never to do, questions evolution, utters the magical ‘n’ word or sends a magnet in the post — he’ll be punished.

Note that men and women must be continually reminded of these justifications and continually enjoined to affirm their commitment to them, just as communities of belief must be continually reinforced and protected. Human beings are never far away from their original nature, and easily forget what has been programmed into them from without.

This is why ritualised laws of defilement, containment of outsiders (physical or ideological), and, above all, walling off experiences of unreality (dream, madness, apostatic transcendence, death and love; even taking a shit puts one outside the bounds of history and religion and must be legitimately dealt with) play such an important, ongoing role in all ideological systems.

Today, in the West, continual reinforcement takes the form of constant affirmations of the goodness and rightness of a highly invasive, technocratic, global market-economy and of constant reminders that without the various ideological totems required to engage in it—tolerance, respect, pacifistic acceptance, keeping two meters apart from one’s fellows and keeping your trousers on in the supermarket—everything would fall apart and we’d all drown in a flood of anarcho-fascism, or die of a medieval lurgy, or be overwhelmed by the Beast.

If it looks like these reminders aren’t taking hold, then their intensity is stepped up and penalties for contravention escalate and intensify until you get your mind right.

Laws, legitimations, taboos and totems, being self-justifying and self-created, are entirely causal. The notion of law is coterminous with the notion of causality; a non-causal law is a contradiction in terms. In reality there are, ultimately, no laws in nature, in consciousness or in human affairs, because there is, ultimately, no causality in them; the world today was no more caused by the world yesterday than the morning was caused by the night before.

The laws we find in history (e.g. Hegel’s or Marx’s), or in nature (e.g. Aristotle’s or Newton’s), or in society (e.g. Confucius’ or Comte’s), or in consciousness (e.g. Leibniz’s or Freud’s), are products of self, and therefore only applicable to self; occasionally useful, as facts and causes are, but with zero qualitative truth.

The truth of an individual or society moving through ‘time’, like that of a tree, like the meaning of an act or the essence of reality, are invisible to causal consideration, which can only perceive a tumult of interrelated bits and pieces, slices and sections, and shrink-wrapped events, never the whole; which means it can never give an appropriate response to the whole (except by accident) which becomes impossible as soon as laws are set, and [directly or indirectly] enforced.

This is why people without direct experience of reality, isolated from it by money, power, fame, technology or drugs, rely on laws and legitimations, and give them the same existential status as experience. When it comes to right or wrong, for example, they cannot trust their experience, because they do not have experience, and so they cleave to factual-casual calculation.

Property is inviolable, therefore stealing is wrong; a man steals an apple, therefore he must be punished, no matter how wealthy the supermarket he steals from. Context — the history of the supermarket, the functioning of the market, the state of society — and consciousness — compassion for the man, empathic understanding of his life — cannot be allowed into consideration. To do so would disrupt one’s entire life.

The brutal inflexibility of the law-abider is sometimes seen as a ‘lack of imagination’, but imagination is part of the abstract schema that the law-maker appeals to, the series of ideas codified as The Law; it is wrong to lie, it is wrong to kill, it is wrong to steal.

When these ideas harden into eternal truths — when, in the management phase of civilisation, they are codified or written down, in holy texts or in statute books, or in the consciences of men and women — they serve, and can only serve, that which is incapable of abandoning facticity and causality, the inherently dishonest, selfish and violent ego. This is why you can’t trust a law-abider.

Self and Unself is available in the usual places, and on Darren Allen’s bookshop.

Notes:-

[1] Peter Berger and Thomas Luckman, The Social Construction of Reality.[back]

[2] Ernest Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life.[back]

[3] Peter Berger, The Sacred Canopy.[back]

Zen In The Trenches

Posted on by
1

By Gary Z Mcee

Source: Waking Times

“You ask, ‘what is Zen?’ I answer, ‘Zen is that which makes you ask the question.’ Because the answer is where the question arises. The answer is the questioner himself.” ~Daisetz Suzuki

Zen is ultimately undefinable. It’s paradoxical. It’s a feeling; a meditation on opposites and interconnectedness intermittently. It’s a bridge between the unanswerable question and the unknowable answer. Even more cryptic: it’s No-mind meditating the mind into mindfulness.

No matter what Zen really is, the meditator attempting Zen is Zen. Or perhaps they are Zenning and Zen is actually a verb disguised as a noun—like God.

Either way, Zen practice is never more important than when we are in the trenches, down and out, at the bottom of the rollercoaster ride, experiencing a Dark Night of the Soul. In such a state, Zen is the great equalizer, an individuating leveling mechanism. An excuse to climb out of Hell and into Heaven. Or at least back to level ground.

Transforming shadows into sharpness:

“By accepting the inevitability of our shadow, we recognize that we are also what we are not. This humbling recognition restrains us from the madness of trying to eliminate those we hate or fear in the world. Self-mastery, maturity, and wisdom, are defined by our ability to hold the tension between opposites.” ~Louis G. Herman

Zen is the essence of holding the tension between opposites. It’s a proactive meditation on the paradoxical state of the human condition. It acts like a bridge between the unconscious shadow and the darkness made conscious.
When our shadow is hidden from us or repressed—either subconsciously or through willful ignorance—we feel dull, insecure, fragmented, confused, unaware, and less than whole. But when our darkness is made conscious, we fell whole, aware, open, and sharper in mind, body, and soul.

Zen teaches us how to reconcile our dark side. Deep in the trenches of our shadow, Zen plants a question mark seed made of light. Through daily cultivation and practice (attention, awareness, focus), the light brightens the darkness, and the shadow becomes a vital self-aware aspect of the overall condition. Light magnifies shadow out of repression and into self-actualization.

Transforming certainty into curiosity:

“I ask you: what are you? You don’t know; there is only ‘I don’t know.’ Always keep this don’t-know mind. When this don’t-know mind becomes clear, then you will understand. Keep don’t-know mind always and everywhere. This is the true practice of Zen.” ~Seung Sahn Sunim

The most deceptive of all “trenches” is being stuck in the box of certainty. Believing that one certainly knows is the ultimate delusion. Whereas thinking that one possibly knows, but probably doesn’t, is the ultimate escape from delusion. Flexibility and open-mindedness are key. Zen can help us with both.

Zen helps us get in touch with the primordial coordinates of the interconnected cosmos. It helps us recognize the probability spectrum. When Socrates said, “The only thing I know is that I know nothing,” he was speaking in probabilities. He recognized that his was a single perception dwarfed by an unfathomably large universe. He realized that what he thought he knew was incomparably less to what he didn’t know and wisely swallowed his pride.

Better to use Zen to keep us in flow. When we are fluid and dynamic in our thinking, we are less likely to be seduced by dogmatic belief. Zen keeps us questioning to the nth degree. It keeps is open to the vital transformations the universe goes through. Zen is the art of adapting to the ebbs and flows of constant change. Being aware of this deep flow is being curious. Curiosity is the wave of change crashing over the fragile structure of our certainty. We would be wise to ride that wave straight over and learn from the destruction. The debris of which holds gold tantamount to transformative ambrosia.

Transforming anxiety into artistry:

“Who among you can at the same time laugh and be exalted? He who climbs upon the highest mountains laughs at all the tragedies, real or imagined.” ~Nietzsche

Anxiety is like an open wound of the psyche. And when you are down in the tranches, it can be a crippling experience. When we transform anxiety into art, we are using the stress as fuel for the fire of our imagination. The anxiety becomes a kind of eu-stress, which can be quite cathartic. Tension becomes a bridge between ‘stress’ and ‘creative outlet,’ where anxious state meets flow state.

Whether it’s transforming wounds into wisdom, demons into diamonds, or setbacks into steppingstones, the cathartic release of worry and pain can become the active components of a beautiful work of art. Pain is transformed into paint, misery into music, psychosis into poetry. And with enough practice, a kind of existential masochism can arise from the spiritual and psychological plasticity—robustness becomes antifragility.

Insofar as this existential masochism can be applied to a life well-lived, a Zen-full humor arises where all tragedies are laughable aspects of the overall cosmic joke. Life itself becomes a work of art.

Transforming hypocrisy into humor:

“No one ever grows up. They may look grown up, but it’s a disguise. It’s just the clay of time. Men and women are still children deep in their hearts. They still would like to jump and play, but that heavy clay won’t let them.” ~Robert McCammon

Governing the precept that life is a cosmic joke, it stands to reason that we get better at laughing at the joke rather than crying over the spilled milk of being the butt-end of it. The humbling effect of Beginner’s Mind can help with this. It reminds us that we are all merely fallible creatures at the mercy of the cosmic joke. Anything else is mere hypocrisy. Especially the title of “grown up.”

The Zen of Beginner’s Mind is the art of tapping into that playful innocence which refuses to be serious but is always sincere. It counters the hypocrisy of the human condition with a sense of playfulness. From which a creative adaptation and improvisation arises. We are fallible creatures? So be it. We are hypocritical naked apes? Might as well have a sense of humor about it. It’s all laughable in the grand scheme of things? We might as well have a laugh.

Adopting a good sense of humor is the best tool we can utilize while in the tranches. It can get us through just about anything. And even if it doesn’t, at least we’re laughing. Our inner child teaches us how to laugh and play through the misery, rather than just be miserable.

Transforming Hell into Heaven:

“Morality doesn’t mean ‘follow divine commandments.’ It means ‘reduce suffering.’” ~Yuval Noah Harari

Even in the trenches, we have a choice to be healthy or not. Even in the gutter, we can either drown in our own tears or flip over, take a deep breath, and regard the stars their aesthetic splendor. Yes. Even beauty itself can be healing. And beauty combined with a good sense of humor can be transcendent… Skipping through Hell with bells on. Laughing into the abyss. Mocking all devils, demons, angels, and gods. Using it all as a sharpening stone.

That’s Zen in the trenches.

We either play the victim and wallow in self-pity, or we rise up with a ‘humor of the most high’ and dare to become healthier. In the alchemical transformation of the human condition, Hell is the forge folding the blade of the soul into a sharper instrument.

Our comfort zone just isn’t hot enough. Heaven is too soft. Purgatory is too comfortable. Hell is just right, as long as we don’t make the mistake of losing ourselves there and burning ourselves out. We must remember to kill the devil first, and then make our way back to the “tribe” to inform them that there’s nothing to be afraid of anymore.

Zen in the trenches is no walk in the park. It takes daring and flexibility. It takes moxie and mettle. It takes a good sense of humor despite a meaningless universe. It takes emotional alchemy and existential masochism to deal with the pain and suffering.

Practicing Zen in the trenches is whistling, “Always look on the bright side of life” while nailed to a cross (The Life of Brian). It’s creating meaning out of nothingness, building bridges out of bandages, birthing a Phoenix out of ashes. It’s laughing and playing and dancing despite the slings and arrows and in spite of the ever-tightening mortal coil. Indeed.

As Rabelais said, “For all your ills, I give you laughter.”

THE HARMONY OF NONCONFORMITY

Posted on by
1

By Jason Gregory

Source: Waking Times

In a linear world, the external order dictates an artificial way of life to the individual, creating a conformist society and forcing us to relinquish our power to a machine that is unnatural and devoid of life. This passive conformity can be traced back to the origins of the Vedic Hindu caste system and the feudal system under medieval Western Christianity. When a settled agrarian culture such as these is born, it tends to build towns, not only to protect people from outside influences but also to develop a mental framework based on rules and regulations.

The complexity of agrarian culture leads to a division of labour and a division of function. From this division, the ancient Hindus (the Vedic civilisation of Dravidians and Aryans) developed a caste system. The Hindu caste system is made up of the Brahmins (priesthood), Kshatriyas (nobility), Vaishyas (merchants and farmers), and the Shudras (labourers). A direct parallel to the Hindu caste system can be found in medieval Christian society, where we see the priesthood and the church, feudal lords and nobility, farmers and merchants of the commons, and the serfs.

Although we no longer have a caste system, this underlying pattern is still with us today. When we are born into this world, we come out of our mother’s womb (nature) and are taught to submit to the rules of society and culture according to our socioeconomic status. This is the crucifixion of the individual; it is the sacrifice we all make. According to the tyranny of the machine, this crucifixion is for the “common good” or “greater good.” But there is a stark difference between the Hindu and Christian societies of ancient times.

First of all, the function of the Vedic caste system was an act of surrender to Brahman (ultimate reality/godhead). Individuals would crucify their egos and their desires in favour of the lives they had been given by nature. This means they would not seek another path or to try and control their lives according to their interests. Instead, they would abide by the order of society, which helped them diminish their egos so that they could feel the presence of Brahman within themselves. This is dharma as social duty.

The second difference is that, once Hindus have fulfilled their social duties in this life, they are allowed to break away from caste and become renunciate sages in the forest, a practice and title known as vanaprastha in Sanskrit. (This possibility is loathed by Christian society because one is thought of as useless if one does not contribute to the social order.) This breakaway from caste is viewed as a return back to nature and could be thought of as a resurrection. A sage is not part of society and does not conform to its rules. Jesus was a sage in this mould. This is why he was not thought of as a particularly good member of society, and he was actually put to death (if we take the story of Jesus to be real).

Those who submit invariably lose their natural innocence. Conformity is the result of force. When individuals are forced by society and culture into life situations that are against their will, they give away their natural sovereignty in exchange for comfort and servitude and are psychologically reduced to sheep. We developed this sheeplike behaviour as a result of the belief that the morals and ethics forced upon us by society are avenues to success and freedom. This notion is absurd inasmuch as the success and freedom of our world are unnatural. These goals are gauged only by finances. But obviously this is not true success or freedom, as money is empty and void of meaning, and it provides no happiness other than that of acquisition. Happiness cannot be contained in anything that we need to force to happen.

As human life is forced into a sheeplike way of being, happiness is reduced to momentary stimulants of excitement. In such a life we can never express our natural divinity, li, because we are following the model of someone else’s idea of life. Yet conforming to anything other than one’s own innate world destroys us physically, mentally, and spiritually, as te, the virtue of Tao, cannot come through the organic pattern of the individual, li. Anxiety, depression and stress are so prevalent in this day and age partly because we are forced to live such lives. Wars and social unrest then reflect the individual’s anxiety.

Liberated individuals are in alignment with their own nature and with the Tao. They do not benefit the accepted social order and are regarded as useless in the eyes of institutional and organisational power. [Taoist sages] Lao-tzu and Chuang-tzu were treated this way because they could see the unnaturalness of an artificial society. The Buddha and Jesus of Nazareth were two other such sages who could see through the hypnotic veil. A liberated sage understands that anyone who continues to act out the unnatural patterns of conditioning is contributing to chaos and destruction, either consciously or unconsciously. One who is liberated, on the other hand, begins the yoking process until a crystal-clear perception of the Tao in reality can be experienced. In Richard Wilhelm’s translation of the I Ching, he states:

Not every man has an obligation to mingle in the affairs of the world. There are some who are developed to such a degree that they are justified in letting the world go its own way and in refusing to enter public life with a view of reforming it. But this does not imply a right to remain idle or to sit back and merely criticise. Such withdrawal is justified only when we strive to realise in ourselves the higher aims of mankind. For although the sage remains distant from the turmoil of daily life, he creates incomparable human values for the future. (The I Ching or Book of Changes)

Evidence for these “incomparable human values” can be found in the legacy that a sage leaves behind. Lao-tzu is a good example. It has been over 2,500 years since he lived, and yet his wisdom still reverberates within our consciousness today. This is the power of te.

The virtue of te is only available to those who do not seek power, control, or force. Governments, politics, banking, religions, and commerce, on the other hand, are constantly striving for control by forcing the population to their will. This poses a significant hurdle for humanity to overcome. What would it take to bring the individual and the collective back into harmony with the Tao?

The above is an exclusive extract from Jason Gregory’s book Effortless Living: Wu-Wei and the Spontaneous State of Natural Harmony. Gregory outlines the Taoist practice of wu-wei, revealing that when we release our ego and allow life to unfold as it will, we align ourselves more closely with our goals and cultivate skill and mastery along the way. The book is available from all good bookstores.

In our hurry to conquer nature and death, we have made a new religion of science

Posted on by
1
Schoolchildren in Chennai, India celebrating the 60th birthday of Bill Gates

By Jonathan Cook

Source: Jonathan Cook Blog

Back in the 1880s, the mathematician and theologian Edwin Abbott tried to help us better understand our world by describing a very different one he called Flatland.

Imagine a world that is not a sphere moving through space like our own planet, but more like a vast sheet of paper inhabited by conscious, flat geometric shapes. These shape-people can move forwards and backwards, and they can turn left and right. But they have no sense of up or down. The very idea of a tree, or a well, or a mountain makes no sense to them because they lack the concepts and experiences of height and depth. They cannot imagine, let alone describe, objects familiar to us.

In this two-dimensional world, the closest scientists can come to comprehending a third dimension are the baffling gaps in measurements that register on their most sophisticated equipment. They sense the shadows cast by a larger universe outside Flatland. The best brains infer that there must be more to the universe than can be observed but they have no way of knowing what it is they don’t know.

This sense of the the unknowable, the ineffable has been with humans since our earliest ancestors became self-conscious. They inhabited a world of immediate, cataclysmic events – storms, droughts, volcanoes and earthquakes – caused by forces they could not explain. But they also lived with a larger, permanent wonder at the mysteries of nature itself: the change from day to night, and the cycle of the seasons; the pin-pricks of light in the night sky, and their continual movement; the rising and falling of the seas; and the inevitability of life and death.

Perhaps not surprisingly, our ancestors tended to attribute common cause to these mysterious events, whether of the catastrophic or the cyclical variety, whether of chaos or order. They ascribed them to another world or dimension – to the spiritual realm, to the divine.

Paradox and mystery

Science has sought to shrink the realm of the inexplicable. We now understand – at least approximately – the laws of nature that govern the weather and catastrophic events like an earthquake. Telescopes and rocket-ships have also allowed us to probe deeper into the heavens to make a little more sense of the universe outside our tiny corner of it.

But the more we investigate the universe the more rigid appear the limits to our knowledge. Like the shape-people of Flatland, our ability to understand is constrained by the dimensions we can observe and experience: in our case, the three dimensions of space and the additional one of time. Influential “string theory” posits another six dimensions, though we would be unlikely to ever sense them in any more detail than the shadows almost-detected by the scientists of Flatland.

The deeper we peer into the big universe of the night sky and our cosmic past, and the deeper we peer into the small universe inside the atom and our personal past, the greater the sense of mystery and wonder.

At the sub-atomic level, the normal laws of physics break down. Quantum mechanics is a best-guess attempt to explain the mysteries of movement of the tiniest particles we can observe, which appear to be operating, at least in part, in a dimension we cannot observe directly.

And most cosmologists, looking outwards rather inwards, have long known that there are questions we are unlikely ever to answer: not least what exists outside our universe – or expressed another way, what existed before the Big Bang. For some time, dark matter and black holes have baffled the best minds. This month scientists conceded to the New York Times that there are forms of matter and energy unknown to science but which can be inferred because they disrupt the known laws of physics.

Inside and outside the atom, our world is full of paradox and mystery.

Conceit and humility

Despite our science-venerating culture, we have arrived at a similar moment to our forebears, who gazed at the night sky in awe. We have been forced to acknowledge the boundaries of knowledge.

There is a difference, however. Our ancestors feared the unknowable, and therefore preferred to show caution and humility in the face of what could not be understood. They treated the ineffable with respect and reverence. Our culture encourages precisely the opposite approach. We show only conceit and arrogance. We seek to defeat, ignore or trivialise that which we cannot explain or understand.

The greatest scientists do not make this mistake. As an avid viewer of science programmes like the BBC’s Horizon, I am always struck by the number of cosmologists who openly speak of their religious belief. Carl Sagan, the most famous cosmologist, never lost his sense of awestruck wonder as he examined the universe. Outside the lab, his was not the language of hard, cold, calculating science. He described the universe in the language of poetry. He understood the necessary limits of science. Rather than being threatened by the universe’s mysteries and paradoxes, he celebrated them.

When in 1990, for example, space probe Voyager 1 showed us for the first time our planet from 6 billion km away, Sagan did not mistake himself or his fellow NASA scientists for gods. He saw “a pale blue dot” and marvelled at a planet reduced to a “mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam”. Humility was his response to the vast scale of the universe, our fleeting place within it, and our struggle to grapple with “the great enveloping cosmic dark”.

Mind and matter

Sadly, Sagan’s approach is not the one that dominates the western tradition. All too often, we behave as if we are gods. Foolishly, we have made a religion of science. We have forgotten that in a world of unknowables, the application of science is necessarily tentative and ideological. It is a tool, one of many that we can use to understand our place in the universe, and one that is easily appropriated by the corrupt, by the vain, by those who seek power over others, by those who worship money.

Until relatively recently, science, philosophy and theology sought to investigate the same mysteries and answer the same existential questions. Through much of history, they were seen as complementary, not in competition. Abbott, remember, was a mathematician and theologian, and Flatland was his attempt to explain the nature of faith. Similarly, the man who has perhaps most shaped the paradigm within which much western science still operates was a French philosopher using the scientific methods of the time to prove the existence of God.

Today, Rene Descartes is best remembered for his famous – if rarely understood – dictum: “I think, therefore I am.” Four hundred years ago, he believed he could prove God’s existence through his argument that mind and matter are separate. Just as human bodies were distinct from souls, so God was separate and distinct from humans. Descartes believed knowledge was innate, and therefore our idea of a perfect being, of God, could only derive from something that was perfect and objectively real outside us.

Weak and self-serving as many of his arguments sound today, Descartes’ lasting ideological influence on western science was profound. Not least so-called Cartesian dualism – the treatment of mind and matter as separate realms – has encouraged and perpetuated a mechanistic view of the world around us.

We can briefly grasp how strong the continuing grip of his thinking is on us when we are confronted with more ancient cultures that have resisted the west’s extreme rationalist discourse – in part, we should note, because they were exposed to it in hostile, oppressive ways that served only to alienate them from the western canon.

Hearing a Native American or an Australian Aboriginal speak of the sacred significance of a river or a rock – or about their ancestors – is to become suddenly aware of how alien their thinking sounds to our “modern” ears. It is the moment when we are likely to respond in one of two ways: either to smirk internally at their childish ignorance, or to gulp at a wisdom that seems to fill a yawning emptiness in our own lives.

Science and power

Descartes’ legacy – a dualism that assumes separation between soul and body, mind and matter – has in many ways proved a poisonous one for western societies. An impoverished, mechanistic worldview treats both the planet and our bodies primarily as material objects: one a plaything for our greed, the other a canvas for our insecurities.

The British scientist James Lovelock who helped model conditions on Mars for NASA so it would have a better idea how to build the first probes to land there, is still ridiculed for the Gaia hypothesis he developed in the 1970s. He understood that our planet was best not viewed as a very large lump of rock with life-forms living on it, though distinct from it. Rather Earth was as a complete, endlessly complex, delicately balanced living entity. Over billions of years, life had grown more sophisticated, but each species, from the most primitive to the most advanced, was vital to the whole, maintaining a harmony that sustained the diversity.

Few listened to Lovelock. Our god-complex got the better of us. And now, as the bees and other insects disappear, everything he warned of decades ago seems far more urgent. Through our arrogance, we are destroying the conditions for advanced life. If we don’t stop soon, the planet will dispose of us and return to an earlier stage of its evolution. It will begin again, without us, as simple flora and microbes once again begin recreating gradually – measured in aeons – the conditions favourable to higher life forms.

But the abusive, mechanistic relationship we have with our planet is mirrored by the one we have with our bodies and our health. Dualism has encouraged us to think of our bodies as fleshy vehicles, which like the metal ones need regular outside intervention, from a service to a respray or an upgrade. The pandemic has only served to underscore these unwholesome tendencies.

In part, the medical establishment, like all establishments, has been corrupted by the desire for power and enrichment. Science is not some pristine discipline, free from real-world pressures. Scientists need funding for research, they have mortgages to pay, and they crave status and career advancement like everyone else.

Kamran Abbasi, executive editor of the British Medical Journal, wrote an editorial last November warning of British state corruption that had been unleashed on a grand scale by covid-19. But it was not just politicians responsible. Scientists and health experts had been implicated too: “The pandemic has revealed how the medical-political complex can be manipulated in an emergency.”     

He added: “The UK’s pandemic response relies too heavily on scientists and other government appointees with worrying competing interests, including shareholdings in companies that manufacture covid-19 diagnostic tests, treatments, and vaccines.”

Doctors and clerics

But in some ways Abbasi is too generous. Scientists haven’t only corrupted science by prioritising their personal, political and commercial interests. Science itself is shaped and swayed by the ideological assumptions of scientists and the wider societies to which they belong. For centuries, Descartes’ dualism has provided the lens through which scientists have often developed and justified medical treatments and procedures. Medicine has its fashions too, even if they tend to be longer-lived – and more dangerous – than the ones of the clothing industry.

In fact, there were self-interested reasons why Descartes’s dualism was so appealing to the scientific and medical community four centuries ago. His mind-matter division carved out a space for science free from clerical interference. Doctors could now claim an authority over our bodies separate from that claimed by the Church over our souls.

But the mechanistic view of health has been hard to shake off, even as scientific understanding – and exposure to non-western medical traditions – should have made it seem ever less credible. Cartesian dualism reigns to this day, seen in the supposedly strict separation of physical and mental health. To treat the mind and body as indivisible, as two sides of the same coin, is to risk being accused of quackery. “Holistic” medicine still struggles to be taken seriously.

Faced with a fear-inducing pandemic, the medical establishment has inevitably reverted even more strongly to type. The virus has been viewed through a single lens: as an invader seeking to overwhelm our defences, while we are seen as vulnerable patients in desperate need of an extra battalion of soldiers who can help us to fight it off. With this as the dominant framework, it has fallen to Big Pharma – the medical corporations with the greatest firepower – to ride to our rescue.

Vaccines are part of an emergency solution, of course. They will help save lives among the most vulnerable. But the reliance on vaccines, to the exclusion of everything else, is a sign that once again we are being lured back to viewing our bodies as machines. We are being told by the medical establishment we can ride out this war with some armour-plating from Pfizer, Moderna and AstraZeneca. We can all be Robocop in the battle against Covid-19.

But there are others ways to view health than as an expensive, resource-depleting technological battle against virus-warriors. Where is the focus on improving the ever-more nutrient-deficient, processed, pesticide-laden, and sugar and chemical-rich diets most of us consume? How do we address the plague of stress and anxiety we all endure in a competitive, digitally connected, no-rest world stripped of all spiritual meaning? What do we do about the cosseted lifestyles we prefer, where exertion is a lifestyle choice renamed as exercise rather than integral to our working day, and where regular exposure to sunshine, outside of a beach vacation, is all but impossible in our office-bound schedules?

Fear and quick-fixes

For much of human history, our chief concern was the fight for survival – against animals and other humans, against the elements, against natural disasters. Technological developments proved invaluable in making our lives safer and easier, whether it was flint axes and domesticated animals, wheels and combustion engines, medicines and mass communications. Our brains now seem hardwired to look to technological innovation to address even the smallest inconvenience, to allay even our wildest fears.

So, of course, we have invested our hopes, and sacrificed our economies, in finding a technological fix to the pandemic. But does this exclusive fixation on technology to solve the current health crisis not have a parallel with the similar, quick-fix technological remedies we keep seeking for the many ecological crises we have created?

Global warming? We can create an even whiter paint to reflect back the sun’s heat. Plastics in every corner of our oceans? We can build giant vacuum-cleaners that will suck it all out. Vanishing bee populations? We can invent pollinator drones to take their place. A dying planet? Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk will fly millions of us to space colonies.

Were we not so technology obsessed, were we not so greedy, were we not so terrified of insecurity and death, if we did not see our bodies and minds as separate, and humans as separate from everything else, we might pause to ponder whether our approach is not a little misguided.

Science and technology can be wonderful things. They can advance our knowledge of ourselves and the world we inhabit. But they need to be conducted with a sense of humility we increasingly seem incapable of. We are not conquerors of our bodies, or the planet, or the universe – and if we imagine we are, we will soon find out that the battle we are waging is one we can never hope to win.

False Spirituality Is The Friend Of Corrupt Power. True Spirituality Is Its Enemy.

Posted on by
1
Everything 90's — Sinead O'Connor Rips A Picture Of The Pope On SNL...

By Caitlin Johnstone

Source: CaitlinJohnstone.com

“Leveraging Mindful Practices To Maximize Productivity”, reads a Forbes headline from last week.

“Using mindfulness to overcome financial stress”, reads another headline published a few days ago by Financy.

“The impact of mindfulness on businesses in the work from home era”, reads another by Business Review from last week.

Over the last few years we’ve seen a surge in the forceful mainstreaming of so-called mindfulness practices, a westernized iteration of various eastern meditative traditions emphasizing non-judgemental present-moment awareness which can, as a side effect, reduce stress levels. If you look at the headlines above, it’s not hard to see toward what end these practices are being promoted.

The way mindfulness is being so aggressively prescribed as a means to relieve the soul-crushing stress of meaningless labor under a meaningless system has been discussed at length in Ronald Purser’s 2019 book “McMindfulness“, which critiques the way “mindfulness has become a banal form of capitalist spirituality that mindlessly avoids social and political transformation, reinforcing the neoliberal status quo.” Are you experiencing financial stress from being ruthlessly exploited by your unfathomably wealthy employer? Mindfulness it away! Are you having trouble coping with the demands of empty gear-turning in an amoral corporate machine which benefits humanity in no discernible way? McMindfulness, baby!

The sticking point here is that mindfulness, like literally every other spiritual practice that has ever existed, can be used to psychologically compartmentalize away from certain aspects of reality. Bringing awareness to the present moment can indeed take mental energy away from stress-inducing impotent thought patterns, but it can also take attention away from real problems which should in fact be dealt with at some point: the fact that you are in an abusive marriage. The fact that you are in an abusive workplace. The fact that the working class is in an abusive relationship with the ruling class.

Hang out in spiritual circles long enough and you’ll realize that most of the people who frequent them are using spirituality to run away from themselves. Using spirituality as stress management instead of addressing the inherently stressful living situation they’ve found themselves in. Using spirituality to give themselves a few nice feelings here and there to escape from the unpleasant reality that all their close interpersonal relationships since birth have been with malignant narcissists. Using spirituality to give themselves a nice story about going to Heaven when they die to comfort themselves through the suffering caused by early childhood trauma.

This is false spirituality, and it comprises the overwhelming majority of what’s out there, whether you’re talking about personal spirituality, New Age/spiritual-but-not-religious spirituality, or organized religion. Probably ninety-nine percent of spirituality as it actually exists in our world is just glorified escapism. Nice stories, feel-good conceptual re-frames, practices to help you bliss out on the surface instead of addressing the deep sources of profound suffering underneath. Devices for reality avoidance, no different from drugs, overeating, compulsive sexual behavior, video games or Netflix binging.

False spirituality serves corrupt power. It always has: from the minute the local strongman discovered he can manipulate his subjects with fairy tales about invisible deities who only speak to him, to the Roman empire promoting a religion which promotes meekness, poverty, obedience and “render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s”, all the way to mindfulness practices being promoted at the World Economic Forum in Davos.

False spirituality serves corrupt power because it draws awareness away from a clear perception of reality, and therefore away from a clear perception of corrupt power. True spirituality does the exact opposite.

True spirituality means expanding consciousness of what’s true and real, both within and without. It means bringing consciousness to the subconscious dynamics within us which generate our suffering, rather than using feel-good spiritual practices or religious narratives to sedate ourselves through that suffering. It means becoming conscious of our true nature, of the way self, experience and perception are really happening as opposed to how the mind tells us they are happening. It means bringing consciousness to the unconscious aspects of our lives, our community, our society, and our species. It means shining the light of truth on all the injustice and depravity the powerful work so hard to keep anyone from looking at.

True spirituality isn’t pretty. It isn’t cutesy. It isn’t comfortable for the ego. It means getting absolutely, uncompromisingly real with yourself and calling the truth out into the light, regardless of how ugly or embarrassing it might be to realize. It means getting absolutely, uncompromisingly real about the contradictions and sources of dissonance in your personal life, no matter how inconvenient or downright terrifying it can be when you have to eliminate them. It means getting absolutely, uncompromisingly real about what’s going on in the world, even if it means flushing your old worldview and the psychological comfort it gave you right down the toilet.

Corrupt power relies on keeping things hidden and endarkened. That’s why government secrecy is a thing. That’s why mass media propaganda is a thing. That’s why the persecution of Julian Assange is a thing. That’s why internet censorship is a thing. Corrupt power structures cannot thrive in the light, because if people could see clearly how badly they’re being robbed and exploited and by whom they would immediately use the their vast numbers to overhaul that system. Corrupt power and false spirituality have therefore always had a symbiotic relationship, while corrupt power and true spirituality have always been natural enemies.

For this reason, it’s unsurprising that so much of what passes for spirituality in our world today is false. No matter what the age and no matter where the location, those with the ability to dominate culture the most successfully have been those with the most power. Healthy impulses to shed the light of truth in all directions would at best receive no platform and at worst get people burned at the stake, while unhealthy power-serving belief systems would be widely promoted by the powerful.

This remains as true as ever today. Colonialism, capitalism, consumerism and imperialism have left us so disconnected from ourselves, from our roots, from the land we live on and from any sense of depth that the majority of us end up turning in desperation to power-serving belief systems, not realizing what they are. We let old power-serving religions give us our spirituality. We let the news man tell us what’s good and what’s true. We let Hollywood tell us what’s meaningful, what’s worth living for, what’s worth dying for.

And it never satisfies. It never can. Trying to fill that hole we’re trying to fill with what mainstream culture offers us is like trying to quench your thirst with seawater.

Only truth can satiate us. Only by shining the light of truth inwardly and bringing our endarkened aspects into consciousness can we extend our roots downward in the way our spirit craves. Only by shining the light of truth outward to the reality of our current circumstances in this world can our branches extend upward and let our spirit soar.

The one advantage true spirituality has going for it that it didn’t have in ages past, if you can call it an advantage, is the fact that we as a species appear to have trolled ourselves into an evolve-or-die predicament, leaving ourselves in check on the chessboard where the only way to escape the checkmate of extinction via climate collapse or nuclear war is to collectively awaken to reality.

Humanity will not survive if we don’t all start getting very, very real with ourselves very, very soon, both inwardly and outwardly. We survive by purging ourselves of inner falseness and outer falseness, thereby reaching the level of maturity needed to shift to a collaboration-based planetary civilization where we work in harmony with each other and with our ecosystem for the common good.

We will either make the jump or we will not. Whether we do or don’t will have a lot to do with how courageous we are; whether we are brave enough to desire the truth come what may, or whether we succumb to the inertia of fear and fail.

The good news is we can all help building momentum for that jump right now, by doing everything we can to expand human consciousness both inwardly within ourselves and outwardly in the world. Sing the truth loudly, wake up as many people as you can to as much truth as you can, and wake yourself up to as much truth as possible by bringing consciousness to your inner dynamics.

Shine bright, and shine in all directions, and we just might win this thing.