Tag Archives: Philosophy

Born in a Police State: The Deep State’s Persecution of Its Most Vulnerable Citizens

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By John & Nisha Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

“When the song of the angels is stilled, when the star in the sky is gone, when the kings and princes are home, when the shepherds are back with their flocks, the work of Christmas begins: to find the lost, to heal the broken, to feed the hungry, to release the prisoner, to rebuild the nations, to bring peace among the people, to make music in the heart.”—Howard Thurman, theologian and civil rights activist

The Christmas story of a baby born in a manger is a familiar one.

The Roman Empire, a police state in its own right, had ordered that a census be conducted. Joseph and his pregnant wife Mary traveled to the little town of Bethlehem so that they could be counted. There being no room for the couple at any of the inns, they stayed in a stable (a barn), where Mary gave birth to a baby boy, Jesus. Warned that the government planned to kill the baby, Jesus’ family fled with him to Egypt until it was safe to return to their native land.

Yet what if Jesus had been born 2,000 years later?

What if, instead of being born into the Roman police state, Jesus had been born at this moment in time? What kind of reception would Jesus and his family be given? Would we recognize the Christ child’s humanity, let alone his divinity? Would we treat him any differently than he was treated by the Roman Empire? If his family were forced to flee violence in their native country and sought refuge and asylum within our borders, what sanctuary would we offer them?

A singular number of churches across the country have asked those very questions in recent years, and their conclusions were depicted with unnerving accuracy by nativity scenes in which Jesus and his family are separated, segregated and caged in individual chain-link pens, topped by barbed wire fencing.

Those nativity scenes were a pointed attempt to remind the modern world that the narrative about the birth of Jesus is one that speaks on multiple fronts to a world that has allowed the life, teachings and crucifixion of Jesus to be drowned out by partisan politics, secularism, materialism and war, all driven by a manipulative shadow government called the Deep State.

The modern-day church has largely shied away from applying Jesus’ teachings to modern problems such as war, poverty, immigration, etc., but thankfully there have been individuals throughout history who ask themselves and the world: what would Jesus do?

What would Jesus—the baby born in Bethlehem who grew into an itinerant preacher and revolutionary activist, who not only died challenging the police state of his day (namely, the Roman Empire) but spent his adult life speaking truth to power, challenging the status quo of his day, and pushing back against the abuses of the Roman Empire—do about the injustices of our  modern age?

Dietrich Bonhoeffer asked himself what Jesus would have done about the horrors perpetrated by Hitler and his assassins. The answer: Bonhoeffer was executed by Hitler for attempting to undermine the tyranny at the heart of Nazi Germany.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn asked himself what Jesus would have done about the soul-destroying gulags and labor camps of the Soviet Union. The answer: Solzhenitsyn found his voice and used it to speak out about government oppression and brutality.

Martin Luther King Jr. asked himself what Jesus would have done about America’s warmongering. The answer: declaring “my conscience leaves me no other choice,” King risked widespread condemnation as well as his life when he publicly opposed the Vietnam War on moral and economic grounds.

Even now, despite the popularity of the phrase “What Would Jesus Do?” (WWJD) in Christian circles, there remains a disconnect in the modern church between the teachings of Christ and the suffering of what Jesus in Matthew 25 refers to as the “least of these.”

Yet this is not a theological gray area: Jesus was unequivocal about his views on many things, not the least of which was charity, compassion, war, tyranny and love.

After all, Jesus—the revered preacher, teacher, radical and prophet—was born into a police state not unlike the growing menace of the American police state. When he grew up, he had powerful, profound things to say, things that would change how we view people, alter government policies and change the world. “Blessed are the merciful,” “Blessed are the peacemakers,” and “Love your enemies” are just a few examples of his most profound and revolutionary teachings.

When confronted by those in authority, Jesus did not shy away from speaking truth to power. Indeed, his teachings undermined the political and religious establishment of his day. It cost him his life. He was eventually crucified as a warning to others not to challenge the powers-that-be.

Can you imagine what Jesus’ life would have been like if, instead of being born into the Roman police state, he had been born and raised in the American police state?

Consider the following if you will.

Had Jesus been born in the era of the America police state, rather than traveling to Bethlehem for a census, Jesus’ parents would have been mailed a 28-page American Community Survey, a mandatory government questionnaire documenting their habits, household inhabitants, work schedule, how many toilets are in your home, etc. The penalty for not responding to this invasive survey can go as high as $5,000.

Instead of being born in a manger, Jesus might have been born at home. Rather than wise men and shepherds bringing gifts, however, the baby’s parents might have been forced to ward off visits from state social workers intent on prosecuting them for the home birth. One couple in Washington had all three of their children removed after social services objected to the two youngest being birthed in an unassisted home delivery.

Had Jesus been born in a hospital, his blood and DNA would have been taken without his parents’ knowledge or consent and entered into a government biobank. While most states require newborn screening, a growing number are holding onto that genetic material long-term for research, analysis and purposes yet to be disclosed.

Then again, had Jesus’ parents been undocumented immigrants, they and the newborn baby might have been shuffled to a profit-driven, private prison for illegals where they first would have been separated from each other, the children detained in make-shift cages, and the parents eventually turned into cheap, forced laborers for corporations such as Starbucks, Microsoft, Walmart, and Victoria’s Secret. There’s quite a lot of money to be made from imprisoning immigrants, especially when taxpayers are footing the bill.

From the time he was old enough to attend school, Jesus would have been drilled in lessons of compliance and obedience to government authorities, while learning little about his own rights. Had he been daring enough to speak out against injustice while still in school, he might have found himself tasered or beaten by a school resource officer, or at the very least suspended under a school zero tolerance policy that punishes minor infractions as harshly as more serious offenses.

Had Jesus disappeared for a few hours let alone days as a 12-year-old, his parents would have been handcuffed, arrested and jailed for parental negligence. Parents across the country have been arrested for far less “offenses” such as allowing their children to walk to the park unaccompanied and play in their front yard alone.

Rather than disappearing from the history books from his early teenaged years to adulthood, Jesus’ movements and personal data—including his biometrics—would have been documented, tracked, monitored and filed by governmental agencies and corporations such as Google and Microsoft. Incredibly, 95 percent of school districts share their student records with outside companies that are contracted to manage data, which they then use to market products to us.

From the moment Jesus made contact with an “extremist” such as John the Baptist, he would have been flagged for surveillance because of his association with a prominent activist, peaceful or otherwise. Since 9/11, the FBI has actively carried out surveillance and intelligence-gathering operations on a broad range of activist groups, from animal rights groups to poverty relief, anti-war groups and other such “extremist” organizations.

Jesus’ anti-government views would certainly have resulted in him being labeled a domestic extremist. Law enforcement agencies are being trained to recognize signs of anti-government extremism during interactions with potential extremists who share a “belief in the approaching collapse of government and the economy.”

While traveling from community to community, Jesus might have been reported to government officials as “suspicious” under the Department of Homeland Security’s “See Something, Say Something” programs. Many states, including New York, are providing individuals with phone apps that allow them to take photos of suspicious activity and report them to their state Intelligence Center, where they are reviewed and forwarded to law-enforcement agencies.

Rather than being permitted to live as an itinerant preacher, Jesus might have found himself threatened with arrest for daring to live off the grid or sleeping outside. In fact, the number of cities that have resorted to criminalizing homelessness by enacting bans on camping, sleeping in vehicles, loitering and begging in public has doubled.

Viewed by the government as a dissident and a potential threat to its power, Jesus might have had government spies planted among his followers to monitor his activities, report on his movements, and entrap him into breaking the law. Such Judases today—called informants—often receive hefty paychecks from the government for their treachery.

Had Jesus used the internet to spread his radical message of peace and love, he might have found his blog posts infiltrated by government spies attempting to undermine his integrity, discredit him or plant incriminating information online about him. At the very least, he would have had his website hacked and his email monitored.

Had Jesus attempted to feed large crowds of people, he would have been threatened with arrest for violating various ordinances prohibiting the distribution of food without a permit. Florida officials arrested a 90-year-old man for feeding the homeless on a public beach.

Had Jesus spoken publicly about his 40 days in the desert and his conversations with the devil, he might have been labeled mentally ill and detained in a psych ward against his will for a mandatory involuntary psychiatric hold with no access to family or friends. One Virginia man was arrested, strip searched, handcuffed to a table, diagnosed as having “mental health issues,” and locked up for five days in a mental health facility against his will apparently because of his slurred speech and unsteady gait.

Without a doubt, had Jesus attempted to overturn tables in a Jewish temple and rage against the materialism of religious institutions, he would have been charged with a hate crime. More than 45 states and the federal government have hate crime laws on the books.

Had anyone reported Jesus to the police as being potentially dangerous, he might have found himself confronted—and killed—by police officers for whom any perceived act of non-compliance (a twitch, a question, a frown) can result in them shooting first and asking questions later.

Rather than having armed guards capture Jesus in a public place, government officials would have ordered that a SWAT team carry out a raid on Jesus and his followers, complete with flash-bang grenades and military equipment. There are upwards of 80,000 such SWAT team raids carried out every year, many on unsuspecting Americans who have no defense against such government invaders, even when such raids are done in error.

Instead of being detained by Roman guards, Jesus might have been made to “disappear” into a secret government detention center where he would have been interrogated, tortured and subjected to all manner of abuses. Chicago police have “disappeared” more than 7,000 people into a secret, off-the-books interrogation warehouse at Homan Square.

Charged with treason and labeled a domestic terrorist, Jesus might have been sentenced to a life-term in a private prison where he would have been forced to provide slave labor for corporations or put to death by way of the electric chair or a lethal mixture of drugs.

Indeed, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, given the nature of government then and now, it is painfully evident that whether Jesus had been born in our modern age or his own, he still would have died at the hands of a police state.

Thus, as we draw near to Christmas with its celebration of miracles and promise of salvation, we would do well to remember that what happened in that manger on that starry night in Bethlehem is only the beginning of the story. That baby born in a police state grew up to be a man who did not turn away from the evils of his age but rather spoke out against it.

We must do no less.

27 Premises

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Silent Assumptions to Drive Systemic Thinking

By J Circio

Source: Modern Mythology

When you derive a conclusion, how do you get there? As you gather facts and pieces of narratives and figure out the picture that the puzzle should be configured into, what assumptions are you making — do you need to make for the sake of expediency, if nothing else — to get there without spending the better part of a lifetime so you no longer require a shortcut?

These are intrinsically generalizations, since they seem to arise from experience such as — if you find blue seashells every time you go to a particular sea shore, you might derive that sea shells are often blue and so come to conclude that is a general rather than local effect.

The following list each contain a brief explanation, and then a few additional comments. More on this in the upcoming Newsletter! (December 2023)

Talk with a GPT instructed to follow these 27 Premises, aka Narrative Machine-139.

1. Simpler is not necessarily more correct; Complicated is not necessarily more correct.

This principle challenges the idea that the truth or correctness of an idea, theory, or system can be judged based on its simplicity or complexity alone. It’s a rebuttal to both any rigid application of Occam’s Razor, which suggests that simpler explanations are generally better, and to the assumption that more complex theories are inherently more sophisticated or accurate simply on account of their complexity.

“Correctness” is question and context dependent, not innate.

2. Simplicity often obscures inner complications… and the inverse is also often true.

This principle underscores the notion that both simplicity and complexity can be misleading in their own ways. A simple explanation might overlook critical nuances, while a complex one might overcomplicate what is fundamentally straightforward.

An important corollary is that looking at a problem with the mindset of optimal complexity, or optimal simplicity, each will bring out some dynamics and minimize or remove others. Ideally, both frames need to be considered, although not always equally weighted.

3. Anything true is likely propped up by unspoken falsehoods. The inverse is sometimes but not always true.

This suggests that truths are often supported by assumptions or beliefs that may not be accurate. It underscores the importance of scrutinizing the underlying assumptions of any ‘truth,’ as well as the extreme difficulty of actually doing so. The inverse — that falsehoods can support truths — is acknowledged as a less common but possible scenario.

Logical relationship is based on assumptions about likeness, mimesis, and consistency with specified rules. In generalized form, it is tautological. This was a major fin de siecle fixation (before WW1), and in many ways historically and culturally, the devastation of that particular apocalypse was a form of answer to the question, in terms of some of the potential outcomes of “applied reason.”

Of that which goes beyond such tautological relationships, to quote Wittgenstein, “we cannot speak.” As he would also later come to recognize, that includes a significant portion of life.

4. Everything is relatively dependent on context; everything is in some sense connected, but not equivalently.

Context is critical in understanding any concept, idea, or system, as the environment in which anything might come to be. This principle aligns with systems theory, where the meaning and function of a component can only be fully understood in relation to the whole system. It also touches on existentialist ideas about individual perception being shaped by one’s unique context, however the emphasis is on the distributed interconnections of systems that actually operate within the world.

Everything is relatively dependent/contingent, and the range of possibilities that exist within those overlapping contexts in a given place and time, which is another way of saying that everything is connected but not equivalent. Your mileage may vary based on the local neighborhood you’re living in, whether that means solar system or city block. The same is likely true regarding time.

5. Time has various senses, such as that which is measured versus that which allows for experience.

This principle integrates ideas from physics and phenomenology. While time has measurable physical properties, our experience of time is subjective and varies based on individual perception and context.

Time can be measured through the entropy in a system, and it can be distorted by mass (4d curvature), but as a field that allows for experience to occur, our experience of time is just another socio-biological construct of our nervous system.

6. There are no first causes. Look instead for drivers of outcomes.

In line with complex systems theory, this principle rejects the notion of an original, singular cause of events, suggesting that causes are themselves effects of prior conditions, forming an interconnected web of causality.

The billiard ball model is oftentimes less salient than the idea of ‘entanglement.’ Attempting to chase that train to its point of origin will invariably lead you back to the big bang, although that neither means that it necessarily started there, or that it was ‘caused’ by it. Rather, if that had not happened, its antecedents would similarly not exist. That is to say the chain is one of contingency and continuity rather than discrete causality.

7. Nothing happens for a “reason”. (Causal syncretism).

This principle challenges the notion of a singular, directed purpose in events, instead favoring a view of causality where events are contingent on preceding conditions, always “reasons” plural. This aligns with complex systems theory, where outcomes are often the result of numerous interacting variables rather than a linear cause-effect relationship.

“It was meant to be.” Only in the sense that everything happens because many other things did or didn’t happen. What can we actually make of this contingency?

8. Meaning is something we project on the world, not the other way around.

This principle reflects the existentialist and constructivist view that meaning is not an inherent property of the world but is either constructed or imagined by individuals through their interactions, experiences, and interpretations.

Meaning is dependent on action and intent. What is the meaning of a rock? What is the meaning of a flower? What is the meaning of that letter you sent to me? Only one of these makes sense. Even the Buddha’s “flower sermon” only makes sense because of the intention behind holding up the flower, even if its specific meaning is enigmatic.

9. Conversely, and yet equally, our meaning is shaped by our being in the world.

Expanding on the previous as a corollary and yet seemingly contradictory point, this principle suggests that our personal meaning is contingent on our interactions with the world around us. There is in fact no contradiction here. This is a phenomenological view, recognizing that our consciousness and perception shape our understanding and meaning-making processes.

Our meaning is shaped by our own being in the world. We are not in any way inseparable from the worlds in which we have been. “Nothing exists within a void.” That also has dual meaning.

10. No point of view, model, or experience can singularly encompass the truth; they can only model it well or poorly, which is to say, be more or less pertinent to the needs of a specific situation.

This aligns with the philosophical understanding that absolute objectivity is unattainable, and in fact incoherent. All perspectives and models are inherently limited by virtue of their very existence, and can only approximate truth within specific contexts.

Those “needs” might be broad or narrow. Relating back to the first Premise, this is a determinative factor when it comes to how to model a situation, how many variables are necessary to track, and how they should be evaluated.

11. Correlation isn’t causation except when it is.

This principle addresses a fundamental concept in statistics and scientific reasoning, emphasizing the distinction between correlation (when two variables are related) and causation (when one variable directly affects another). While correlation does not inherently imply causation, there are instances where a causal relationship does exist, emphasizing the need for careful analysis in understanding relationships between variables.

This impetus to look for the exception to the rule holds true for many other things as well: e.g. The human mind isn’t like a computer… except in the ways it is.

12. Cause is often both partial and plural.

This principle suggests that in many situations, causes are not singular or absolute but are instead multiple and interconnected, each contributing partially to the outcome. It emphasizes a more nuanced understanding of causality that acknowledges the complexity and interdependence of factors in various contexts.

13. Beware false binaries, such as Free Will/Determinism.

This principle emphasizes the importance of recognizing and challenging oversimplified dichotomies, like the free will versus determinism debate. It suggests that such binary oppositions often fail to capture the complexity and nuance of philosophical, scientific, and ethical concepts.

Outcomes are determined within the context of systems, and in that sense nothing exists “outside” of the system including our own volition. We are free to the extent that our available range of choices allow us to be, although those actions are similarly conditioned (and so on down the chain). All parts affect all other parts, if not universally in the same type or measure.

14. Emergent complexity makes determinism problematic, and randomness or order may appear to emerge at certain levels of complexity or scale.

This principle addresses the challenges determinism faces in the context of complex systems, where emergent properties and behaviors can arise unpredictably. It suggests that at different levels of complexity, what may seem random or orderly may be a product of the system’s own inherent complexity. The unpredictability and non-linearity inherent in complex systems, where larger patterns and behaviors emerge from the interactions of simpler components, render deterministic models less applicable or even irrelevant in certain contexts.

Emergent complexity makes determinism not just epistemologically problematic, but also it doesn’t seem to hold between different scales. For example, things may appear more random at certain levels of complexity or scale, and deterministic at others.

15. Taxonomic categories are descriptive, not prescriptive.

This principle suggests that the classifications and categories we use in various disciplines are tools for describing the world, not inherent truths that dictate how the world must be. It aligns with contemporary understandings in linguistics, biology, and social sciences, challenging essentialist and fixed views of categorization.

We cannot learn all we need to know about an entity from its descriptive taxonomy. Language conceals as it reveals. This has cross-domain salience.

16. Fixed reality is always off limits.

This principle suggests that reality is not knowable without introducing some form of extension or abstraction based on our own prior assumptions, our experiences, and is similarly contingent upon the types of experience we can have. This aligns with post-structuralist ideas about the fluidity of meaning and reality.

We are required to look around corners to derive anything about the world we live in. This is at the root of the “problem of language” and representation in western philosophy.

17. Consciousness as we so far know it on earth is an embodied phenomenon.

This principle posits that consciousness may be a fundamentally embodied experience, emerging from the interactions between a living organism and its environment. It suggests that consciousness is not an abstract or detached entity but is intimately connected to the physical and experiential realities of organisms, operating within an environment.

More on this in upcoming notes.

18. Complexity and emergence on their own don’t simply result in capacity for experience.

This principle posits that consciousness arises not merely as a byproduct of complexity, but from a confluence of various factors within a system, leading to emergent phenomena that cannot be predicted solely from the properties of individual components. It emphasizes the role of emergence in the development of consciousness and warns against simplistic, reductionist views.

19. Consciousness may have a plurality of forms.

This principle recognizes the diversity and continuum of consciousness across different life forms, challenging the notion of a singular, universal model of consciousness. It posits that consciousness manifests in various forms, each unique to its bearer’s biological and ecological makeup.

20. The form of embodiment appears to determine cognitive shaping.

This principle acknowledges the significant role of the body in shaping cognition and consciousness, challenging the traditional dichotomy between the self and the external world. It suggests that the form of embodiment — how an entity exists within an existing ecosystem — plays a crucial role in the development and nature of its consciousness.

21. Self is sustained by narrative.

This is influenced by both existentialism and narrative psychology. It posits that our sense of self is constructed through the stories we tell about ourselves and our experiences, highlighting the importance of narrative in identity formation.

In this specific sense, we don’t exist save as a figment of our collective imagination, and the universe is just another such narrative construction, even if what it represents is obviously quite ‘real’ in a sense that none of our stories are. (Real, but singularly unknowable.)

22. Stories collectivize experience.

This aligns with the role of narrative in forming collective identities and shared understandings, a concept central to folklore and myth studies. Stories serve a crucial role in shaping collective understanding, identity, and social cohesion, but they also have the power to enforce and sustain hierarchies, manipulate public opinion, and solidify power structures.

This dual aspect of storytelling reflects its significant influence in societies, capable of both unifying and dividing through the central lie that the signifier is an entity akin to the signified.

23. A group, when regarded as a single entity, is a kind of mental fiction.

This principle acknowledges that while we often conceptualize groups as singular entities, this is a cognitive simplification. Each member of a group retains individuality as actually existing entities, whereas the group identity is an abstract construct.

The singular entities described by a group are not a mental fiction, nor are they usually strictly limited by that definition.

24. Entities are replicated within other minds by way of narrative methods.

This principle reflects the idea that our understanding of others and the world is mediated through the stories we construct and share, highlighting the role of narrative in shaping our understanding and internal representation of entities, whether they are individuals, groups, concepts, or events. It suggests that our mental models of these entities are largely formed and communicated through storytelling and narrative frameworks.

Our experience is direct, certain, and present to ourselves, and to no one else. Language is one of the primary ways that humans attempt to bridge that gap, to maintain the illusion of a society when living in groups far larger than actual kinship groups.

25. Ideology is a form of fashion.

This principle suggests that aesthetics, beyond mere surface beauty, play a significant role in forming ideologies, cultural hierarchies, and power dynamics. It emphasizes that our understanding and interpretation of the world are profoundly influenced by aesthetic values and preferences.

“Aesthetics” as based in the “image”, a field of idealized possibilities and desires that run through the whole of our daily lives, composed among other things of what we want to see and how we want to be seen. Much of our ethics might amount to the attempt to make that idealized vision a reality.

26. Performance is a fundamental aspect of social life.

This principle, drawing from Judith Butler’s concept of performativity and the ideas presented in the excerpt, suggests that performance and performativity are fundamental aspects of social life, shaping and reifying social relations, structures, and ethics. It highlights the dual nature of performance as both a real act in the world and a constructed representation that can distort reality.

This might seem a path through which ethics can be materialized from art — as if by a single work you might write a new Gospel through the act of speaking or writing. There is a danger, however, in misunderstanding the function of performativity.

It is not a process that lends inherent truth to the concepts it conveys, but rather, it creates a semblance of reality, often masking their inherently subjective and contingent nature.

27. Interpretation is in part an act of projection.

This principle reflects the postmodernist view that multiple interpretations of any text or artwork are valid. It acknowledges the intersubjective / co-creative nature of understanding and interpretation.

There is no singularly correct reading of a book, movie, album, meme, piece of street theater. This includes the creator’s reading of their own work. Some are however nearer or further from the mark. (Determined by who or what? There’s the rub).

There’s a deeper level to it. Mythic symbols — like a god such as Dionysus — tend to bear a great deal of resemblance on the people investing attention (manna) into that image. This is true whether that reflection is a positive or negative one. As an embodiment of libidinally repressed “homicidal fury” (in Rene Girdard’s words), to Freud, Dionysus was a threat. To Nietzsche, he came to represent the allure of a kind of revolution of the spirit. To Jung, the potential of casting off restriction seemed most salient. And so on.

It might even seem as if we only see the psychology of the person speaking writ large in their symbols and the stories they make of them. And yet it is not quite so. The fact that they aren’t just a simple mirror is the greater mystery, as there’s a character hiding out there within or perhaps beyond the symbol, or at least a bias or tendency, which exists outside our influence, on the other side of the mirror.

Reading List Recommendations

For more explication in the following, begin with the following list:

Philosophy and Systems Theory:

  • “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” by Thomas Kuhn — Explores how scientific theories and paradigms evolve and are influenced by historical and social contexts.
  • “The Logic of Scientific Discovery” by Karl Popper — A critical analysis of the philosophy of science, emphasizing the importance of falsifiability in scientific theories.

Complexity Theory and Biology:

  • “Complexity: A Guided Tour” by Melanie Mitchell — Offers an accessible introduction to complexity theory and its applications in various disciplines, including biology and computer science.
  • “The Web of Life: A New Scientific Understanding of Living Systems” by Fritjof Capra — This book delves into the principles of living systems and their relevance to understanding complex biological and ecological networks.

Semiotics and Phenomenology:

  • “Course in General Linguistics” by Ferdinand de Saussure — A foundational text in the study of semiotics, exploring the nature of linguistic signs and their meaning.
  • “Being and Time” by Martin Heidegger — A seminal work in phenomenology, discussing concepts of being, time, and existence.

Existentialism:

  • “Existentialism is a Humanism” by Jean-Paul Sartre — A concise introduction to existentialist philosophy, emphasizing human freedom and responsibility.
  • “On Truth and Lie in a Non-moral Sense” by Friedrich Nietzsche — Examination of several cogent concepts.

Narrative Psychology and Myth Studies:

  • “The Hero with a Thousand Faces” by Joseph Campbell — Examines the common patterns in global myths, highlighting the significance of storytelling in human culture. The monomyth reduces differences and conflates similarities, which poses both a conceptual tool and a potential cognitive risk, if unexamined.
  • “Acts of Meaning” by Jerome Bruner — Explores the role of narrative in shaping human perception, cognition, and culture.

Folklore and Myth Studies:

  • “Mythologies” by Roland Barthes — A collection of essays analyzing modern myths and the semiotics of popular culture.
  • “The Power of Myth” by Joseph Campbell and Bill Moyers — A dialogue exploring the enduring power of myth in human society.

Manuel DeLanda:

  • “A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History” — DeLanda applies the concepts of nonlinearity and self-organization to interpret the course of history, offering a unique perspective on social and biological systems.
  • “Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy” — This book tackles the topic of virtuality and its relation to reality, emphasizing the role of topological thinking in understanding complex systems.

Jean Baudrillard:

  • “Simulacra and Simulation” — Baudrillard’s exploration of the nature of reality, simulation, and the hyperreal offers critical insights into the impact of media and technology on society.
  • “The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures” — An analysis of consumer culture, exploring themes of consumption, social stratification, and the creation of modern myths.

Peter Godfrey-Smith:

  • “Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness” — An intriguing exploration of consciousness through the lens of cephalopod intelligence, blending philosophy, biology, and the study of the mind.
  • “Metazoa” — extends this exploration into the history of evolution beyond cephalopods.
  • “Theory and Reality: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science” — This book provides an accessible introduction to the main themes in the philosophy of science, from logical positivism to scientific realism and antirealism.

John Gray:

  • “Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals” — Gray challenges the commonly held beliefs about what it means to be human, questioning humanism and our perceptions of human progress.
  • “The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths” — A contemplative work that critiques the idea of human progress and explores the value of contemplating the world beyond human-centric narratives.

Additional Recommendations:

  • “Narrative Machines: Modern Myth, Revolution & Propaganda” by James Curcio — This work examines the role of narrative and myth in shaping cultural and political realities.
  • “Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny” by Robert Wright — An exploration of cultural evolution, arguing that human history is marked by a trend toward increased complexity and cooperation.
  • “Chaos: Making a New Science” by James Gleick — A seminal work on chaos theory, illustrating how the principles of chaos are evident in various scientific disciplines.
  • “The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge” by Jean-François Lyotard — This book examines the status of knowledge in the computerized societies of the West and the legitimization of knowledge in the postmodern era.
  • “The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World” by David Abram — An examination of the relationship between human perception, language, and the natural world, advocating for a more ecologically attuned way of living.
  • “The Society of the Spectacle” by Guy Debord — A critical theory of media and consumer culture, examining the ways in which reality is constructed and consumed.
  • “Finite and Infinite Games” by James P. Carse — Explores the concept of life as a series of games, each with different rules and outcomes, influencing our perception of identity and reality.

Israel’s Savagery Is So Shocking It’s Sometimes Hard To Take In

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By Caitlin Johnstone

Source: CaitlinJohnstone.com.au

Sometimes Israel’s crimes are so horrific that at first you don’t even understand what you’re looking at. You just stare at it trying to make sense of what you’re seeing for a bit, like you would if you suddenly saw a space alien or a leprechaun or something.

It happened to me yesterday when I was watching a Sky News report about a teenage boy who was shot by Israeli forces in Jerusalem for celebrating the release of Palestinian prisoners in the hostage negotiations with Hamas. I was watching it thinking to myself, I must be misunderstanding what I’m looking at. I know that Israel does gross things, but surely the story here isn’t that they shot a kid for being happy about something.

Then, as has happened so many times over the last two months, I kept watching and learned that yes, that is indeed what happened. The deputy mayor of Jerusalem Fleur Hassan-Nahoum is seen defending the shooting by saying “part of the deal is that there would be no celebrations for the release of attempted murderers” (this was actually not a part of the deal, it was just a decree issued by Israel’s national security minister) and claiming dishonestly that “we’re talking about the release of attempted murderers” (the vast majority have not been convicted of any crime and have been denied any due process for the accusations against them).

The band Eve6 nicely summed up what it felt like watching the clip of the deputy mayor’s comments, tweeting, “The remarkable thing about this clip is her self assurance. Like she’s supremely confident that ‘we shot the teenager because he was celebrating’ is a thing that people will find reasonable.”

I had the same experience reading about the five premature babies who were left to die after the IDF raided al-Nasr Pediatric Hospital in Gaza earlier this month, their decomposing bodies only discovered when the temporary ceasefire allowed access to the hospital. It’s just too insane to believe — they attacked a pediatric hospital? And then they left the babies there to die? What??

The only reason we’re learning about this now is because the pause in fighting allowed journalists to get cameras into the building and show the dead infants to the world. This calls to mind the Politico report immediately prior to the ceasefire which said that the White House was worried “an unintended consequence of the pause” would be “that it would allow journalists broader access to Gaza and the opportunity to further illuminate the devastation there and turn public opinion on Israel.”

Indeed, since the pause in fighting began the world has been receiving drone footage from mainstream platforms like Reuters and The Washington Post revealing vast expanses of urban terrain completely destroyed by a blanket of Israeli military explosives spanning from city block to city block. Looking at the blatantly indiscriminate devastation that’s been caused by Israel’s assault on Gaza since October 7 makes it clear that the IDF are not targeting Hamas but Gaza itself.

I’ve been amazed at how much I’ve been sleeping since the ceasefire started; that’s why I haven’t been writing as much. I guess spending weeks staring at unbelievable horrors unfolding on your screen can be pretty hard on your system if you’re sensitive to that sort of thing, so my body’s been resting up as much as it can while there’s an opportunity. 

And I’m just here watching this all unfold safely from my home in Melbourne. I cannot imagine what it’s like to be living in the midst of this horror for the last two months, trying to figure out the best way to survive while also grieving the family, friends and neighbors you’re losing along the way. These people have all been deeply traumatized in ways that will haunt them for the rest of their lives, if they survive the violence, disease and deprivation that’s to come.

This thing is so astonishingly ugly, and it could get a whole lot uglier after the ceasefire ends. If there’s anything positive to be found in this living nightmare, it’s that it’s so earth-shakingly ugly that it just might shake the world awake.

Rebalancing The Masculine & The Feminine For A New Paradigm

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In a time of collapse, witnessing the consciousness and paradigm driving our current moment is paramount. A rebalancing of consciousness may be a solution.

By Anne Baring

Source: The Pulse

When the masculine and the feminine are in balance, there is fluidity, relationship, a flow of energy, unity, totality. This fluidity and balance is perhaps best illustrated by the Taoist image of the indissoluble relationship and complementarity of Yin and Yang.

In the broadest terms, the feminine is a containing pattern of energy: receptive, connecting, holding things in relationship to each other; the masculine is an expanding pattern of energy: seeking extension, expansion towards what is beyond.

More specifically, the feminine reflects the instinctual matrix and the feeling (heart) values of consciousness; the masculine reflects the questing, goal-defining, ordering, and discriminating qualities of consciousness, generally associated with the mind or intellect.

For millennia women have lived closer to the first pattern; men to the second. But now, there is a deep impulse to balance these within ourselves and in our culture. There is an urgent need to temper the present over-emphasis on masculine value with a conscious effort to integrate the feminine one.

In the ancient world the feminine principle in the image of the goddess stood for relationship – the hidden connection of all things to each other. Secondly, it stood for justice, wisdom and compassion. Thirdly, and most importantly, it was identified with the unseen dimension beyond the known world – a dimension that may be imagined as a matrix connecting invisible spirit with visible nature.

The word used then to name this matrix was goddess; later it was soul. The feminine principle offered an image of the oneness, sacredness and inviolability of all life; the phenomenal world (nature, matter, body) was regarded as sacred because it was a theopany or manifestation of invisible spirit.

The greatest flaw in civilisation has been the over-emphasis on the masculine archetype (identified with spirit) and the devaluation of the feminine one (identified with nature). This has been reflected in the fact that the god-head has no feminine dimension.

The history of the last 4000 years has been forged by masculine traits – principally the goals of conquest and control. (this is in no sense intended as a criticism; in the context of prevailing belief systems and general level of consciousness, things could not have been different).

However, religion and science – all our cultural ideas and patterns of behaviour – have developed from this unbalanced foundation. Throughout this time, everything designated as “feminine” (nature, body, woman) was devalued and repressed, including the rich diversity of the Pagan legacy of the ancient world.

In the domain of religion, heretics were eliminated; diverse ways of relating directly to the transcendent were lost. Naturally, this has created a deep imbalance in the culture and in the human psyche. It has led finally to the tyrannies of this century where the lives of some 200 million people have been sacrificed to totalitarian regimes.

The modern tyrant is the extreme reflection of a deeply-rooted pathology derived from a long-standing cultural imbalance between the masculine and feminine archetypes.

Where there is no relationship and balance between the masculine and feminine principles, the masculine principle becomes pathologically exaggerated, inflated; the feminine pathologically diminished, inarticulate, ineffective. The symptoms of a pathological masculine are rigidity, dogmatic inflexibility, omnipotence, and an obsession with or addiction to power and control.

There will be a clear definition of goals but no receptivity to ideas and values that conflict with these goals. The horizon of the human imagination will be restricted by an overt or subtle censorship. We can see this pathology reflected today in the ruthless values that govern the media, politics, and the technological drive of the modern world.

We can see the predatory impulse to acquire or to conquer new territory in the drive for global control of world markets, in the ideology of growth, in new technologies such as the genetic modification of food. We see exaggerated competitiveness – the drive to go further, grow faster, achieve more, acquire more, elevated to the status of a cult.

There is contempt for the feeling values grounded in the experience of relationship with others and with the environment. There is a predatory and compulsive sexuality in both men and women who increasingly lose the capacity for relationship. There is continuous expansion in a linear sense but no expansion in depth, in insight. The pressure of things to do constantly accelerates.

What is the result? Exhaustion, anxiety, depression, illness which afflict more and more people.

There is no time or place for human relationships. Above all, there is no time for relationship with the dimension of spirit. The water of life no longer flows. Men and women and, above all, children, become the victims of this harsh, competitive, uncaring ethos: women, in their disorientation, and because the feminine value has no clear definition or recognition in our culture, are drawn to copy the pathological image of the masculine which itself incorporates fear of the feminine.

Because to a large extent, this whole situation arises unconsciously, not much can be done about it until catastrophe intervenes.

Evolutionary Pressure Emerges

I feel we are living in a time of kairos – a mythic time of choice – a time of stupendous scientific discoveries which are enlarging our vision of the universe, shattering the vessel of our old concepts about the nature of reality.

Yet the delicate organism of life on our planet and the survival of our species are threatened as never before by technologies driven by an ethos of the conquest and control of nature, technologies which are applied with an utter disregard for the perils of our interference with the complex web of relationships upon which the life of our planet depends.

The choice is between clinging to an outworn and unbalanced ethos and maturing beyond it towards a more responsible and sensitive capacity for relationship. If we are unable to develop this empathic capacity to relate, we will surely destroy ourselves and the environment that sustains our life.

Bringing Balance

So how could we help to redress the balance between the masculine and feminine in ourselves and in our culture?

First of all, where are we, as individuals out of balance? Where are we driven by the unbalanced cultural ethos of achieving power and control, ignoring our feelings of depression, anxiety or symptoms of the body’s distress?

Are we allowing ourselves enough time for reflection, for relationships, for connection with a deeper dimension of reality?

The priority as I see it is to make the fact of this pathology a matter of public discussion. Shift the emphasis from achieving power to achieving balance.

Secondly, here are some suggestions for strengthening the feminine principle in our society.

  • Free the Imagination from the stranglehold exercised by a controlling minority which excludes the non-rational from inclusion in our understanding of life.
  • Formulate a new image of spirit as the totality of all that is – both seen and unseen. Recover the lost and devalued feminine aspects of spirit: restore nature, matter and the physical body (including sexuality) to the realm of the sacred.
  • Imagine the Soul as a cosmic internet. We belong to an immense field or matrix of relationships. We could imagine the soul in this new way as something we belong to and can develop a relationship with.
  • Religion – Relinquish the dogmatic formulations of the past: Monotheism as Mytheism. (Ravi Ravindra) Recognise the negative effects of deeply rooted beliefs – such as the belief in original sin – on our interpretation of life and its meaning. Welcome the idea of direct individual experience of the sacred and the numinous.
  • Science – Integrate the principle of empathic relationship with what is studied in scientific teaching and practice. In education give children an empathic understanding of their own bodies and of nature rather than the image of the body and the universe as a machine. Help them to become aware of their environment as a great chain of relationships in which their lives are embedded. Nourish their sense of wonder.
  • The psyche: Heal the split between mind and soul. Recognise that feeling is a valid mode of perceiving reality and must be integrated with thinking. The main problem in our society is emotional immaturity.
  • Politics: develop a forum beyond national and international politics where the true problems of the planet can be articulated and addressed. Recognise grandiosity, standardisation, the drive for control, the proliferation of bureaucracy as symptoms of the pathology of an inflated and unrelated masculine principle.
  • Medicine: integrate alternative (complementary) methods of healing with orthodox ones as a deliberate policy. Focus on preventive medicine. The modern GP has no time for an empathic relationship with his or her patient. The pressure of numbers is simply too great. However, in some surgeries and hospitals alternative practises are being integrated with orthodox ones. This integration could be expanded.
  • Agriculture: Focus on increasing the production of organic food. Removal of pesticides, antibiotics and toxins from our food and water.
  • Care of Children: A much higher level of prenatal care. Compared with the rest of Europe, we are way behind (Sweden is the most advanced). Attention to quality of children’s diet and to nourishing the imagination as well as the intellect.
  • Educate Women to be aware of their own specific value and the importance of their contribution to the culture. Articulating feeling values without fear or shame.
  • Educate Adolescents in awareness of the responsibilities of relationships and of the parent towards the child. Teach them the psychology of the child; its dependency; its sensitivity, its potential for emotional growth. Teach them about the complexities of neuroscience so they understand how their emotions affect their bodies and vice-versa. Ask them to invent ways of caring for the environment.
  • Teaching Methods: integrate right-hemispheric consciousness with the linear consciousness of the left hemisphere – opening to the creative power of the image. Balance in the curriculum between developing the capacity for logical thought and creative imagining and participation. This poem by a 12 year old boy at school in Southampton shows how a teacher can provide the environment in which a child can dare to express his true feelings:

I hear my inner voice talking to me,
Explaining, encouraging,
Opening the part of me that I thought was lost.
In this world of cruelty and fear little lights are burning.
Everyone has a flame inside their hearts,
If only they had the courage to find it.
The light can trickle out through a hole in your mind.
When the inside is out
You are transformed and revealed.
There is no need to be afraid,
But be curious
As you will probably never know
where the force is coming from. – Daniel Webster

Each of us is called to focus on rebalancing the masculine and feminine in ourselves and in our culture. This could affect a profound alchemy in our lives. Women and men could both participate in a process of transformation which could bring into being a new cultural focus whose emphasis is no longer on power and control but on relationship, balance and connectedness.

The phrase “the conquest of nature” could be replaced by the awareness that humanity and nature participate in a deeper and still unknown reality that embraces them both.

Millions of people have no choice. Those of us who do have a measure of choice could rise to the immense challenge of defining and living a new and responsible role in relation to each other and our planetary home.

Waiting for an Apocalypse

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By Edward Curtin

Source: Behind the Curtain

“Method, Method, what do you want from me?  You know that I have eaten of the fruit of the unconscious.”  – Jules Laforgue, Moralités légendaires

The other day my wife attended an event at a well-appointed home in town where men in dark suits stood around to provide a sense of security that no harm would come to the visitors, even though the angel of death had visited this house on previous occasions, for it was a funeral home, well-steeped in boxing people up for the journey to the underworld.  So to call it a “home” is really a misnomer; that might sound cozy, but it is really a way station for the dead.  A layover.

Mistakenly thinking that she was attending a traditional wake and the dead person’s corpse would be there in a coffin, I suggested that she check out the casket and, if she liked its wood and the softness of its velvet liner, to inquire whether they had any sales going on, especially if they had a buy-one-get-one-free sale like the local supermarket often has for English muffins and other goodies.

I think she forgot to ask, but she did tell me that the elderly woman who died had been cremated weeks ago and that her ashes were in a box on a table.  Boxes, ah, little boxes.

***

I have long wondered why so many people are enchanted by sunsets, why they travel to see them and gasp in wonder that the sun disappears and night comes on.  Colorful yes, but not as glorious as the sunrise, the rosy-fingered dawn of every new day.  Why celebrate the death of the day and our journey into the underworld of sleep and the cave of dreams rather than the dawn of our awakening and new life.  Jokes aside, morbidity is not life-affirming.  The true apocalypse – Greek apokalyptein, uncover, disclose, reveal – is every dawn’s epiphany when we can dream while awake and create.

***

In Apuleius’s Metamorphoses there is the story of Cupid and Psyche, the former being a male god and the latter a female human.  Psyche, who has lost her lover Cupid but wants him back, is tricked by the goddess Aphrodite who challenges her, if she wants Cupid back, to take the dangerous journey to the underworld to retrieve a box of beauty cream.  Psyche goes and gets the box but is tempted to open it since it would enhance her already beautiful human appearance.  When she does, she falls into a deathlike sleep.  It’s an old story, forever new.  Switch the sexes if you wish.  Take 200 vitamin pills a day as many billionaires and other assorted crazies do intent on becoming immortal gods.  Good luck.  Get uploaded or downloaded into a computer, whichever it is, and live forever.  Maybe watch the sun set or perchance wake up.  And although Psyche is given a Hollywood ending when she is saved by Zeus and made immortal with the other gods in Olympus, that’s just an old movie.  We live by facts these days, not myths.  Ah, boxes.

***

The Boxer by Simon & Garfunkel
I am just a poor boy, though my story’s
seldom told
I have squandered my resistance for a
pocketful of mumbles
Such as promises
All lies and jest
Still a man hears what he wants to hear
And disregards the rest, hmm

***

Children love boxes within which they often hide their collections for safekeeping.  Give a child a box with a lid and it will be filled in no time.  Filled with little things that symbolize for children the vast infinity of secret space that is their hold on time.  Children are born poets and philosophers who over time are usually dulled by adults around them from whom they learn to hide their secrets and the questions these secrets raise.  The secrets often fester and die, only to live on in repressed lives.  I knew a man who collected cigar boxes.  They were everywhere in his house when he died.  Most were empty.  His wife outdid him with her collection of empty boxes: shoe boxes, jewelry boxes, every kind of box imaginable.  All empty.  Were they waiting to be filled?  With what?  Secrets? Another woman I knew had a box with an envelope inside marked, “My Father’s Magic Envelope – AKA Miracles.”  It was empty.  She pictured herself as a boxer in a sketch she drew, a child without a face with boxing gloves.  I can only guess at the secrets she was fighting to remember or forget. The experimental method is based on repetition, but so too is trauma.  Internment is not just for the dead.

***

Boxed in, boxed up, housed, enclosed. trapped, contained, caged , enveloped, bounded, penned, corralled, trapped: calling from my cell for help?  The screen lights up with a concatenation of phantom images that seize the mind, what the Greeks called eidolon.

***

Let’s forget about Pandora’s box, which was actually a jar in the original story.  Its last content being hope.  I once knew a girl named Hope.  She was very seductive. But I sensed she was trouble and escaped when she started to open up about her secrets.  I wasn’t very curious, just afraid.  So long, Hope, “it’s time that we began to laugh and cry and cry and laugh about it all again.”  Thanks, Leonard.

***

There are countless political analyses of what drives the United States’ ruling forces in their systematic, brutal, and remorseless wars of aggression around the world.  The perpetual effort to expand an empire originally built on the blood of indigenous people.  The refusal to live in peace within national boundaries.  The pushing of NATO expansion up to Russia’s borders.  It seems insane, which of course it is.  But what is behind such madness?  The secret may be quite simple.  Again the ancient Greeks come to mind as Roberto Calasso writes in The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, quoting the historian Jacob Burckhardt, when he wrote of the secret of war-loving Sparta: “But the power of Sparta seems to have come into being almost entirely for itself and for its own self-assertion, and its constant pathos was the enslavement of subject peoples and the extension of its own dominion as an end unto itself.”  Power as an end in itself.  Realizing this is apocalyptic in the revelatory sense, for it opens the box on the secret nihilism of the U.S. ruling elites.

***

I am waiting
to get some intimations
of immortality
by recollecting my early childhood
and I am waiting
for the green mornings to come again
youth’s dumb green fields come back again
and I am waiting
for some strains of unpremeditated art
to shake my typewriter
and I am waiting to write
the great indelible poem
and I am waiting
for the last long careless rapture
and I am perpetually waiting
for the fleeing lovers on the Grecian Urn
to catch each other up at last
and embrace
and I am waiting
perpetually and forever
a renaissance of wonder

– Lawrence Ferlinghetti, “I Am Waiting,”
for jazz accompaniment

Warning : Reality Is Escaping Out The Back Door

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By Patrick Wood

Source: Technocracy News & Trends

There’s a big word that you can add to your vocabulary: Simulacrum. It is a hard word to wrap your head around, but one you are not too likely to forget. Indeed, you should not forget it!

Collins defines it as: “1) an image; likeness; 2) a vague representation; semblance; 3) a mere pretense; sham.”

Cambridge Dictionary says: “something that looks like or represents something else”.

Purdue University put it this way: “Something that replaces reality with its representation.”

Jean Baudrillard wrote about this in a 1981 paper called “The Precession of Simulacra”, where he digs deeper, making a distinction between a simulation and a simulacrum.

Whereas representation attempts to absorb simulation by interpreting it as a false representation, simulation envelops the whole edifice of representation itself as a simulacrum. Such would be the successive phases of the image:

it is the reflection of a profound reality;

it masks and denatures a profound reality;

it masks the absence of a profound reality;

it has no relation to any reality whatsoever;

it is its own pure simulacrum.

So, the switch for reality is anti-reality: “The simulacrum is never what hides the truth – it is truth that hides the fact that there is none.”

This whole process does not happen in a vacuum because it involves human agency. Reality exists but human perception distorts it.

Just for review, reality slips into distortion, then into simulation, then finds its resting place in a state of simulacrum. Reality is subsumed by the simulacrum.

An example of simulacrum in the making

It is estimated that 90 percent of all online content will be generated by AI by 2025. This means news, social media posts, chats, pictures, videos, podcasts, websites, etc. A deluge of fake social media accounts will be run by AI. In short, everything.

Nina Schick, A.I. thought leader, wrote,

“What generative AI can do, essentially, is create new things that would have thus far been seen as unique to human intelligence or creativity, Generative AI can create across all media, so text, video, audio, pictures – every digital medium can be powered by generative AI. So, I think these valuations that you’re seeing for OpenAI are actually going to go up and you’re going to start to see even more generative AI companies which have universal applications across many industries in 2023.”

People will remember back to 2023 images and think that nothing has changed in 2025.

Warning : The Total Collapse Of Reality Could Be At Hand

As described above, a simulacrum is anti-reality.

This is not a paradigm shift of reality. This is not a “new realty”. This is not reality, period. Unfortunately, billions of people risk being captured by it.

While everyone is looking at shiny new simulacra forming right before their eyes, reality is escaping out the back door.

Chance Encounters as the Walls Close In

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By Edward Curtin

Source: Behind the Curtain

“A treasure stumbled upon, suddenly; not gradually accumulated, by adding one to one. The accumulation of learning, ‘adding to the sum-total of human knowledge’; lay that burden down, that baggage, that impediment. Take nothing for your journey; travel light.”   – Norman O. Brown, Love’s Body

These are “heavy” times, colloquially speaking.  Forebodings everywhere.  Everything broken.  People on edge, nervous, filled with anxiety about they know not what since it seems to be everything. The economy, politics, elections, endless propaganda, the war in Ukraine, censorship, the environment, nuclear war, Covid/vaccines, a massive world-wide collapse, the death of democratic possibilities, the loss of all innocence as a very weird and dangerous future creeps upon us, etc. Only the most anesthetized don’t feel it.

The anxiety has increased even as access to staggering amounts of knowledge – and falsehoods – has become available with the click of a button into the digital encyclopedia.  The CIA’s MK-Ultra mind control program has gone digital.  The more information, the more insubstantial the world seems, but it is not an insubstantiality that connects to hope or faith but to despair.  Across the world people are holding their breath.  What’s next?

Roberto Calasso, the late great Italian writer, wrote that we live in “the unnamable present,” which seems accurate.  Information technology, with its easily available marriage of accurate and fraudulent information, affects people at the fathomless depths of the mind and spirit.  Yet it is taken-for-granted that the more such technological information there is available, as well as the ease with which one can add one’s two-cents to it, is a good thing, even as those powerful deep-state forces that control the Internet pump out an endless stream of purposely dissembling and contradictory messages.  Delusions of omnipotence and chaos everywhere, but not in the service of humanity.  Such chaos plays in chords D and C – Depressing and Controlling.

In the midst of this unnamable present, all of us need to dream of beauty and liberation even as we temporarily rely on digital technology for news of the wider world.  For the local news we can step outside and walk and talk to people, but we can’t endlessly travel everywhere, so we rely on the Internet for reports from elsewhere.  Even as we exercise great effort to discern facts from fictions through digital’s magic emanations, we hunger for some deeper experiences than the ephemerality of this unnamable world.  Without it we are lost in a forest of abstractions.

While recently dawdling on a walk, I stopped to browse through tables of free books on the lawn of my local library.  I was looking for nothing but found something that startled me: a few descriptive words of a child’s experience.  I chanced to pick up an old (1942), small autobiography by the English historian, A. L. Rowse – A Cornish Childhood.  The flyleaf informed me that it was the story of his pre-World War I childhood in a little Cornish village in southwestern England.  The son of a china-clay worker and mother of very modest means, Rowse later went on to study at Oxford and became a well-known scholar and author of about a hundred books.  In other words, a man whose capacious mind was encyclopedic long before the Internet offered its wares of information about everything from A to Z.

Since my grandfather, the son of an Irish immigrant father and English mother, had spent his early years working in a bobbin factory in Bradford, England, a polluted mill town in the north, before sailing at age 11 from Liverpool to New York City aboard the Celtic with his four younger siblings sans parents, I had an interest in what life was like for poor children in England during that era.  How circumstances influenced them: two working-class boys, one who became an Oxford graduate and well-known author; the other who became a NYC policeman known only to family and friends.  The words Rowse wrote and I read echoed experiences that I had had when young; I wondered if my grandfather had experienced something similar.  Rowse writes this on pages 16-17 where I randomly opened the book:

A little group of thatched cottages in the middle of the village had a small orchard attached; and I remember well the peculiar purity of the blue sky seen through the white clusters of apple-blossom in spring. I remember being moon-struck looking at it one morning early on my way to school. It meant something for me; what I couldn’t say. It gave me an unease at heart, some reaching outwards toward perfection such as impels men into religion, some sense of the transcendence of things, of the fragility of our hold upon life . . . . I could not know then that it was an early taste of aesthetic sensation, a kind of revelation which has since become a secret touchstone of experience for me, an inner resource and consolation. . . . In time it became my creed – if that word can be used of a religion which has no dogma, no need of dogma; for which this ultimate aesthetic experience, this apprehension of the world and life as having value essentially in the moment of being apprehended qua beauty, I had no need of religion. . . . in that very moment it seemed that time stood still, that for a moment time was held up and one saw experience as through a rift across the flow of it, a shaft into the universe. But what gave such poignancy to the experience was that, in the very same moment that one felt time standing still, one knew at the back of the mind, or with another part of it, that it was moving inexorably on, carrying oneself and life with it. So that the acuity of the experience, the reason why it moved one so profoundly, was that at bottom it was a protest of the personality against the realization of its final extinction. Perhaps, therefore, it was bound up with, a reflex action from, the struggle for survival. I could get no further than that; and in fact have remained content with that.

I quote so many of Rowse’s words because they seem to contain two revelations that pertain to our current predicament. One a revelation that opens onto hope; the other a revelation of hopelessness. On the one hand, Rowse writes beautifully about how a patch of blue sky through apple blossoms (and his reading Wordsworth’s Intimations of Immortality) could open his heart and soul to deep aesthetic consolation.  Calasso, in discussing “absolute literature” and the Bhagavad Gita in Literature and the Gods, refers to this experience with the word ramaharsa or horripilation, the happiness of the hairs.  It is that feeling one has when one experiences a thrill so profound that a shiver goes down one’s spine and one experiences an epiphany.  Your hairs and other body parts stand up, whether it’s from a patch of blue, a certain spiritual or erotic/love encounter, or a line of poetry that takes your breath away.  Such a thrill often happens through a serendipitous stumbling.

For Rowse, the epiphany was bounded, like a beautiful bird with its wings clipped; it was an “aesthetic experience” that seemed to exclude something genuinely transcendent in the experiential and theological sense. Maybe it was more than that when he was young, but when this scholar described it in his 39th year, this intellectual could only say it was aesthetic.

C. S. Lewis, in the opening pages of The Abolition of Man, echoing Coleridge’s comment about two tourists at a waterfall, one who calls the waterfall pretty and the other who calls it sublime (Coleridge endorsing the later and dismissing the former with disgust), writes, “The feelings which make a man call an object sublime are not sublime feelings but feelings of veneration.” In other words, the sublime nature of a patch of blue sky through apple blossoms in the early morn cannot be reduced to a person’s subjective feelings but is objectively true and a crack into the mystery of transcendence. To see it as a protest against one’s personal extinction and to be content to “get no further than that” is to foreclose the possibility that what the boy felt was not what the man thought; or to quote Wordsworth about what seems to have happened to Rowse: “Shades of the prison house begin to close/Upon the growing boy,” and that is that.

But we are even a longer way gone from when Rowse wrote his remembrances.  In our secular Internet age, first society and now its technology, not aesthetics or the religion of art, have replaced God for many people, who, like Rowse, have lost the ability to experience the divine.  It embarrasses them.  Something – an addiction to pseudo-knowledge? – blocks their willingness to be open to surpassing the reasoning mind.  We think we are too sophisticated to bend that low even when looking up. “The pseudomorphism between religion and society” has passed unobserved, as Calasso puts it:

It all came together not so much in Durkheim’s [French sociologist 1858-1917] claim that “the religious is the social,’ but in the fact that suddenly such a claim sounded natural. What was left in the end was naked society, but invested now with all the powers inherited, or rather burgled, from religion. The twentieth century would see its triumph. The theology of society severed every tie, renounced all dependence, and flaunted the distinguishing feature: the tautological, the self-advertising. The power and impact of totalitarian regimes cannot be explained unless we accept that the very notion of society has appropriated an unprecedented power, one previously the preserve of religion. . . . Being anti-social would become the equivalent of sinning against the Holy Ghost. . . . Society became the subject above all subjects, for whose sake everything is justified.

For someone like Rowse, the Oxford scholar and bibliophile, writing in the midst of WW II about his childhood before WW I, an exquisite aesthetic explanation suffices to explain his experience, one that he concludes was perhaps part of an evolutionary reflex action connected to the struggle for survival.  Thus this epiphany of beauty is immured in sadness rather than opening out into possible hope.  Lovely as his description is, it is caged in inevitability, as if to say: Here is your bit of beauty on your way to dusty death.  It is a denial of freedom, of spiritual reality, of what Lewis refers to for brevity’s sake as ‘the Tao,’ what the Chinese have long meant as the great thing, the correspondence between the outer and the inner, a reality beyond causality and the controlling mind.

Now even beauty has been banned behind machine experiences.  But the question of beauty is secondary to the nature of reality and our connection to it.  The fate of the world depends upon it.  When the world is too much with us and doom and gloom are everywhere, where can we turn to find a way forward to find a place to stand to fight the evils of nuclear weapons, poverty, endless propaganda, and all the other assorted demons marauding through our world?

It will not be to machines or more information, for they are the essence of too-muchness.  It will not come from concepts or knowledge, which Nietzsche said made it possible to avoid pain.  I believe it will only come from what he suggested: “To make an experiment of one’s very life – this alone is freedom of the spirit, this then became for me my philosophy.”  And before you might think, “Look where it got him, stark raving mad,” let me briefly explain.  Nietzsche may seem like an odd choice to suggest as insightful when it comes to openness to a spiritual dimension to experience since he is usually but erroneously seen as someone who “killed God.”  Someone like Gandhi might seem more appropriate with his “experiments with truth.”  And of course Gandhi is very appropriate.  But so too are Emerson, Thoreau, Jung, and many others, at least in my limited sense of what I mean by experiment.  I mean experimenting-experiencing (both derived from the same Latin word, expereri, to try or test) by assuming through an act of faith or suspension of disbelief that if we stop trying to control everything and open ourselves to serendipitous stumbling, what may seem like simply beautiful aesthetic experiences may be apertures into a spiritual energy we were unaware of.  James W. Douglass explores this possibility in his tantalizing book, Lightning East to West: Jesus, Gandhi, and the Nuclear Age, when he asks and then explores this question: “Is there a spiritual reality, inconceivable to us today, which corresponds in history to the physical reality which Einstein discovered and which led to the atomic bomb?”

I like to think that my grandfather, although a man not very keen on things spiritual, might have, in his young years amidst the grime and fetid air of Bradford, chanced to look up and saw a patch of blue sky through the rising smoke and felt the “happiness of the hairs” that opened a crack in his reality to let the light in.

Roberto Calasso quotes this from Nietzsche:

That huge scaffolding and structure of concepts to which the man who must clings in order to save himself in the course of life, for the liberated intellect is merely a support and a toy for his daring devices. And should he break it, he shuffles it around and ironically reassembles it once more, connecting what is least related and separating what is closest. By doing so he shows that those needful ploys are of no use to him and that he is no longer guided by concepts but by intuitions.

I have an intuition that there are hierophanies everywhere, treasures to be stumbled upon – by chance.  If we let them be.

My eyes already touch the sunny hill,
going far ahead of the road I have begun.
So we are grasped by what we cannot grasp;
It has its inner light, even from a distance –

And changes us, even if we do not reach it,
Into something else, which, hardly sensing it, we already are;
A gesture waves us on, answering our own wave. . .
But what we feel is the wind in our faces.

– Rainer Maria Rilke, “A Walk”

THE INVERSION: HOW WE HAVE BEEN TRICKED INTO PERCEIVING A FALSE REALITY

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By Kingsley L. Dennis

Source: Waking Times

Let us begin with a story …

Human life is a story. And yet it is not one single story. It is an open book full of rich, amazing, powerful, and sometimes dangerous, stories. Humanity is quite literally living its own 1001 Nights yet across millennia. And just like that book of masterful storytelling, there have been incredible stories that filled the minds, and hearts, of many millions of people throughout the ages. We live upon and within a story each second of our lives. Some of these stories are greater than others – more epic, more powerful, and more influential. Others are daily stories that fill our pockets and arrange our hours. Yet over and above our stories there has always been a grand narrative. It is this grand, sweeping story that narrates, and influences, the general direction in which humanity moves.  And this grand narrative is often so compelling, so full of persuasive detail, that we believe in it wholeheartedly. Like an amazing tale told to a child before bedtime, this tale then becomes woven into that night’s dream. Upon waking, the dream feels so real that it lingers far long into the day and until it is replenished once again before bedtime. And yet sometimes, within special circumstances, the dream is so captivating and convincing that it causes the dreamer never to awaken. The dreamer continues to dream the dream that they were told before sleeping.

Human history is like a dream within a dream – an inversion within an illusion. And as many dreamers know, there are levels within dreams. Like a Russian Matryoshka doll, there are nesting layers of stories that all combine to create an overarching narrative body or realm. And many people, like good dreamers, find themselves caught up within one of the layers. And it can be almost impossible to get out. Even though we are technically awake, we are also dreaming. Why? Because we are living through particular stories and narratives that have been sown, implanted, or entwined in our heads. They get into our subconscious and from that privileged position they begin to influence our behaviour and thinking from behind the scenes. Even when we think we are awake, we are never free from those stories, narratives, and constructs that manage our perceptions and create the arc of our dreaming lives. To truly be awake, a person would need to know how to drop all these stories and step out of the construct; that is, to turn ourselves the right way up within the inversion. This may actually have been achieved by a few people, yet it has always been considered something odd, esoteric, or mystical to do so. Because to the dreamers, anyone who steps out of the dream must be some weird eccentric, must they not? Or that is perhaps just how the main story goes.

‘We are dreaming the wrong dreams.” ~Anon

The mainstream story doesn’t like very much when dreamers – sorry, people – try to leave. Why would people want to leave when the story is so compelling? Overall, however, this is rarely a problem as so few people ever realize that it is all a dream within a dream, so the issue hardly ever comes up. So, shall we get back to our story?

… Things in life are not as they seem… Human life is lived as a normalization of this inverted reality construct. That is why life is filled with so many irregularities, oddities, and downright madness. We all know, or instinctively feel, that something has gone astray.

We now believe in anything because nothing seemingly has any truth to it. We’ve become lost within the reflections of our own mirror world. Seeing our reflections smile back at us, we are content with the distraction. Everything must be okay, we tell our reflections – the governments wouldn’t lie to us, would they? We’re protected by benevolent authoritative structures that care for us like our mothers. Oh dear. Topsy-Turvey.

To let you in on a little secret… it’s been like this for a long time. Only that until recently, the waking dream of the Inversion was good at keeping everyone asleep (except the rare few) because the trickle of consciousness within the reality construct was low. But something has been happening – if you haven’t noticed? There’s been cracks in the veil; and more consciousness has been seeping through. And it’s been getting into our heads, even if we hadn’t noticed. Gradually, people have been gaining more and more awareness over this thing they call the ‘human condition.’ There have been a few exceptional individuals within each generation that spoke about these things, or even wrote about them; but few people listened and fewer still read any of their writings (because they had been kept illiterate). But still, the gradual seeping of consciousness into this reality construct continued. And the insights kept coming. Some people were inspired; others gained revelations. But the numbers remained small. The Inversion continued to impose itself; to keep the blinders on the dreamers whilst turning up the music. Greater distractions were offered; a glittering array of entertainment sprang up. And incentives were given to those people who began to open just one of their eyes. Those few who suspected something were spotted early on and fast-tracked up the hierarchy of the ‘people pyramid’ so that they benefited most from the pleasures and gains of the Inversion. Then these higher ups would want to invest in keeping the system exactly how it was – a protection of self-interests. The masses of dreamers – the sleeping mob as they were called – remained swaying to the lullaby. But slowly, the frequency of the lullaby was being changed. A new vibration was being added. I think you get the gist of where this is going.

And it arrives to here: where you are sitting right now.

So – what are you going to do about it…?