Tag Archives: spirituality

Are We Living Haunted Lives?

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By Kingsley L. Dennis

Source: Waking Times

‘Fear has many eyes
And can see things underground’
~Cervantes, Don Quixote

The world as we know it has gone from being flat to round; from being the center of the universe to the center of the solar system; from being animistic and supernatural to raw in tooth and claw; from being particle-atomic to wavy-quantum. And now we are disappearing into the digital domains of virtual-augmented spaces and false information, bombarded with the spectacle and the image. And somewhere in the midst of all this is the human soul, still largely wrapped and unopened. If there’s a crime here then it is that we’ve allowed ourselves to become haunted – to live haunted lives that lack significance and meaning.

The ‘objects’ or values that we have attempted to live by, or that we pursue, – such as power, truth, understanding, dreams, work, love, and the rest – have all seemingly vanished into some warped, elusive reality where the presence of these things no longer tangibly exist. However, the doubt, uncertainty, and pain of their absence – or ‘fake presence’ – are indeed real enough to affect us deeply. We seek the already disappeared and stalk their substitutes.

We are now close to the stage where we end up just acting out our fantasies upon the phantasmal theatre of our lives and thinking it is reality. This theatre, or screen, of fantasies and the fantastical is like the cave wall in Plato’s allegory where the flickering shadows that move across are taken to be the real. In an updating of Plato’s famous allegory we no longer have shadows projected upon the cave wall; they are now projected upon the green screens that form the back-drop for computer-generated imagery (CGI) that adorn our movies, television programs, and video games.

Whole societies, notably in the technologically-advanced western world, are arranging for our lives to be enacted amidst a scenery backdrop of events and issues artificially projected for us as CGI onto a fake canvas. Within this encroaching visual world, full of misinformation that influences our worldview, we are made to believe in a different kind of reality. It is a reality that is uncertain and insecure, and that requires for us to hold deep obedience to our state institutions to protect us. And within this projection of reality, meanings are provided for us as ready-made meals. In other words, full of too much salt, saturated fats, and laziness.

These socially manufactured meanings are provided as a substitute for the genuine lack. Of these choices offered we often take our pick, as consumers in a marketplace. It may be career, wealth, fame, achievement, or a combination of these and more. Yet the manufactured consent in our sense of meaning, no matter how thoroughly pursued and potentially obtained, is still not genuine. And like the ready-made meal, it soon leaves us with a continued hunger. The illusion of meaning is a vital illusion, yet it still remains an illusion. We may say then that the world we have come to know is a great spectacle of illusion and play; of movement, distraction, simulation, and excess. Yet rather than critically confronting the illusions and distractions we are cleverly persuaded to indulge in them.

The world we share now is also shared with our collective doubts, fears, anger, and frustrations. And these new emotions upon the global stage are blurring our picture of the world and its future. Whilst there are many of us who are excited and genuinely inspired by this increased complexity and diversity there has been a cultural backlash, in the western nations especially, to cover this up with a sheen of simplicity through generic news, bland reporting, and excruciatingly trivial entertainment. This clash of the complex with the simple is creating an odd reality where things just don’t feel right anymore.

We are participants on a ride through the flippant and the flimsy, the significant and the necessary, as we are expected to find our foothold – our human soul – in a world seemingly on the verge of insanity. In such a world, Disneyland may seem to some as the greatest of sanctuaries; whilst to rest of us it stands as a superficial sign of our times.

Most of us do not have the capacity to verify the truth claims of the mainstream media and yet we are more than willing it accept the veracity of their claims. We suspend our own disbelief by trusting in others, especially when it comes to authority and experts. In other words, we have been conditioned to respect the positions of authority and ‘the expert,’ often without critical thought.

And this is the context which frames the telling of his-story and also our-stories. The singer-songwriter Lou Reed once sang, ‘Don’t believe anything you hear and only half of what you see.’ Documentary film-maker Adam Curtis discusses this phenomenon of how the mainstream media projects a simplified, fake reality in his film HyperNormalization (2016). The term hypernormaliztion was taken from an account of life in the Soviet Union during the twenty years before it collapsed. In this account everyone knew the system was failing but they couldn’t envision any alternative and so everyone is resigned to maintaining the pretence of a functioning society. Over time this delusion is accepted as real, an effect termed as hypernormalization. In other words, when the fake is finally accepted as the real then we are living in a hypernormalized state. Does this sound familiar?

The question is – does Reality ever take place?

Our bodies of authority, our mainstream media channels, and our centers of learning – that is, a majority of our significant institutions – have turned, or are in the process of turning, into advertising gimmicks. They peddle publicity and propaganda as endless programs stuck on a loop. They serve to produce the appearance of reality; yet they fail to represent a sense of reality. And this fundamental difference has produced a feeling of living haunted lives. We wander as ghosts in liminal zones, hungry for meaning.

In this sense of loss we no longer seem to know, or distinguish, between oppositions. Almost all of our value systems are based on relative terms – good, bad, my history, your history, etc. Often, the values we take to be ‘our values’ were inculcated in us depending upon which culture we happened to be born into. It is true there are some values more universally shared – such as thou shalt not kill – but the majority of them are culturally relative. Take for instance, sex before marriage – good or bad? Same-sex partnerships? Freedom of religious speech? Eating pork? Eating rats? Democrats or Republicans? Labour or Conservative? Which is good and which is bad? In the case of political parties it is neither – they are false oppositions. More than that, they are also distractions. When you’re arguing (sorry, debating) over political parties you are not observing the system behind them that created this false lack of choice in the first place. False oppositions plague our haunted hinterland. We don’t see this if we are the aimless ghosts, or the walking dead. It’s not pleasant – it’s eerie. And we are in eerie times.

Modernity in its current form is haunted by a sense of loss; of not knowing where it is heading. There are a great many aspects of our age that are in disruption and dislocation. All forms of stability are in question; old and incumbent patterns and models are in dispute; and too many people are experiencing moods of despair and anguish. It is as if our human civilization has come loose from its moorings and is now adrift upon the waters of uncertainty, insignificance, and the loss of meaning.

And so it seems that our civilization is careering dangerously close to some kind of blind spot where we no longer can tell what is true or false anymore. Truth is replaced by a fake substitute and the false becomes a parody of the truth. They are the haunted spaces where the mist drifts by. It’s like a Zen joke. It’s the same as a voice whispering in the darkness saying there is no such thing as a voice whispering in the darkness. They couldn’t have written a better riddle if they had tried.

So what went wrong? Where did it all go? What is it, in fact?

A profound sense of unease has crept into many of us, and also into our social systems, our cultures, our art, our news, and into the very collective soul of humanity. It is an eeriness; an uncertain disquiet – almost an unsettling foreboding. Something has come loose, and we’re not sure what it is. Further still, most of us are fairly certain that those institutions supposedly ‘looking after our best interests’, or running the show – whether they be governmental bodies, financial elites, or shadowy organizations and cabals – are not really in control or are sure either. It feels as if something is amiss, and we just can’t quite put our finger on it. Welcome to our haunted modernity.

We have disarray over a consensus concerning climate chaos, stock market panics and economic crashes, offshore tax evasions and leaked documents, political scandals, pandemic threats and contested vaccines, state and terrorist violence, congenital anxiety and existential fear – a whole cauldron of terror, dread, disquiet, nervousness, angst, and what-the-hell-is-going-on collective confusion is bubbling both under and over in many of our societies.

We have been infiltrated with a virus and it is infecting not only our bodies but our very minds. It’s a pure mind-bending virus and it’s playing havoc with our insecurities and indulging in our sense of lostness. The Spanish have a phrase for this state – “de perdidos al río” – and it roughly translates as from lost to the river. It may not make complete literal sense in English but that’s just it; you can get the sense of it and its vagueness is exactly where we are – from lost to the river!

In such ‘haunted lives’ we can easily become accustomed to metaphysical anguish as just another pain. It is like a pulled muscle or a sprained ankle; something unpleasant and yet we continue to move around with it. In the end we learn how to direct and project this metaphysical anguish onto other things – we choose intoxicating entertainment, sports, and other cultural pastimes and diversions. Angst just becomes a factor that appears to come as a default setting with our species. There is the danger that we become accepting of the ghostly flimsiness to life, which ends up being hypernormalized so that the sense of absence of something real becomes the new reality. There is the dangerous potential here for a state of indifference to emerge and seep into our cultures, which then becomes an ennui-creep into the world until…oh, well, what does it matter anyway?

During these years of disarray and turbulence it is essential that we create meaning for ourselves, otherwise the ‘distant algorithmic’ universe that runs the life around us will create a deep sense of alienation. In a world of scrambled code and big data, transcendence will seem another chimera not within grasp or even real. Or, at worse, the very notion of transcendence will seem the delirium of unstable minds – for those people not able to ‘get real’ with the world of Now.

In this instance, transcendence will appear as a form of spiritual autism. And yet the notion of going beyond ourselves, of developing our capacities for higher perception, are the saving grace inherent within our human species. We are incomplete, and this haunts us, and yet it should also give us meaning and a higher aim in life in knowing that there is further to go. In knowing that there are tools within us for creating, shaping, and cultivating these finer faculties. In being haunted we are also being reminded of what is lacking and this urge should compel us to find a solution within ourselves. We are in fact being ‘haunted into remembrance.’

However, for many of us a haunted modernity offers us a conditioned life where there is little or no space for transcendence. In such social and cultural hauntings there are no navigable locations. We have stepped into an unsouling from the wilderness. We are compelled to walk on.

Upgrade to the Next Level of Now

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By High Vibe Tribe

Source: Waking Times

All things are new. The old systems and paradigms are crumbling before our eyes and minds. Outdated mechanisms of knowledge and understanding have shifted and are passing. For those who are open and ready, it’s an amazing time for letting go.

It can be conceived as timeline or dimensional shifts and bleed-throughs if you like. For those experiencing and tracking these changes you will understand, others may sense something fundamentally different but are having a more difficult time just yet, but all will continue to progress. For those wanting to move with this energetic shift it will come, and more understanding as well as awareness will seep in. It can be subtle, or sometimes one psychic or transdimensional experience can trigger a big leap forward.

While we have so much in common we are all on unique paths. There’s no “one way” but there are commonalities that we all experience.

This energetic shift simply requires letting go into it, because it just is. As sure as we’re alive and Source eternally exists, our progression is assured one way or the other. The move “forward” is always there if we’re willing to move into it, but even if we hang back the overall field is moving anyway. This gets to the crux of our learning experience here, as there are several paradoxical aspects to all of this.

Those who’ve been seeking and learning and growing and working to bring about a better world as well as a more realized self expression have gone through much. While our most profound realizations are incredibly simple, all we’ve gone through to get there has been essential. Each of our paths are distinctly individual, yet we are a form of collective soul at the same time, each yearning for mastery of our being with the best possible outcome for all. This obviously does not apply to all those we share the planet with at this point, but the opportunity is available to all.

While many of us have striven to bring truth and openness to a deliberately darkened world, we’ve gone through many stages in the process. We’ve been the dreaming child, the system slave, the dropout, the student, the philosopher, the hungry researcher, the activist, the warrior, the preacher, the pundit, the angry cynic, the tired observer, the insider, the outcast, etc. The list is long, but these stages, whatever they’ve been, were essential to our development.

We eventually learn we cannot impose receiving the truth on anyone, only offer what we individually have learned, and it’s up to others what they do with it. Increased communication has been one of the driving forces for this recent acceleration of awareness that’s sweeping the planet, in addition to other unseen influences. For those engaged in these activities it’s right at whatever level they’ve chosen, but we must be aware of being drawn back into their vibrational level.  We need to help in whatever effective way possible but we can’t force it or interfere with free will, despite the fact that the matrix operates this way.

It operates on a judgmental frequency. Source does not.

Whatever our outlook, a rising tide lifts all boats.

And the tide is rising.

The Dissolving Past

Not only is the external structure collapsing, albeit somewhat violently, old manners and frameworks of perception are dissipating. How much each old system is sustained depends on how many cling to these often self-projected or believed paradigms, as nothing can override our choice to progress or hold on to the status quo. This is causing a separation of worlds in many respects, as realities split apart, much like worlds or timelines.

This is real.

This is not always obviously manifested externally, certainly not to the satisfaction of the skeptic or naysayer. It is evident, however, in changed lives, raised and lowered vibrations, new discoveries and ideas surfacing, and new social trends taking hold. In fact, it’s quite remarkable once you can perceive them.

A Place Called Now

For the sincere seekers, our search has been for meaning, for the full experience of living, and the Truth that permeates all things. We look for answers to the fundamental questions of life and eventually come to realize we’ve contained them all along in our heart of hearts . We have a knowing about a Source that emanates from within and without and have always been set out to connect with it.

It appears in the timeless state of Now. We get glimpses of it; our feelings draw us towards it, and our hearts long to experience more of it. A certain amount of information helps us along the way, but the reality we seek is beyond it, as what we perceive through this limitation only provides arrows pointing towards the unspeakable which we experience in moments outside of time.

This has long been known, yet even this experience is transcending the old concepts and belief systems. We’ve accumulated many helpful understandings from past teachings, yet in the light of this truly new energetic shift even those are outdated in many respects. Reference points can be anchors if we’re not fully conscious, which is clearly seen in the fullness of a truly fresh Now experience.

The Now is a portal. It’s always there, it’s always here. The Now is the ever present zero point everyone is striving for, yet it is always with us. It exists – over and over, yet timelessly. It’s we who have the difficulty in turning into it fully. Again the paradox, finding no time while inhabiting a world seemingly bound by time.

The Now just is, yet we struggle to find it, to understand it, as it slips through our fingers. Or so we think. In fact we’re flickering in and out of it continuously. Sometimes we can feel its ecstasy, sometimes not. We know we should live in it, yet time sweeps us along like the current of a mighty river, only allowing temporary glimpses of the majestic Now. Our minds then scurry to understand what only the heart can perceive, our ever present conundrum in this denser world of duality.

How do we escape time and explore this amazing realm of Now? It’s not always easy, yet it happens spontaneously with little or no effort. Mind gets in the way to make work of it, or identify when it is happening. Filtration mechanisms working overtime dull our nowness. Concerns and habits shroud our sensibilities. Circumstances and physical conditions blind the senses. Ever new as well as old ephemeral belief systems cloak our awareness.

Yet inspiration opens the door continually. Imagination lights the way. Each of our developmental stages were paving stones that led up to now, and they will continue, albeit in continued transformational manifestations. Yet those too must be let go of in deep energetic and forgiving ways in so many respects so as not to hold us back from previous perceptions.

Everything Is New

The truth is we can all be more in the Now than we are, but the inspiring realization is we’re there a lot more than we think we are. Besides always being in it whether we’re fully conscious of it or not, our lives are filled with breakthrough Now experiences.

Techniques such as meditation and more quiet time and deep experience in nature enhance this, while moments of emotional release, insights and creative imagination and inspiration abound in our lives, often spontaneously, resulting in the same. Making room for more of all of these aspects being a higher priority than ever in our lives soon goes without saying, once we’re really serious about this transition personally as well as for all of humanity and our planetary condition.

Therein lies a commitment to be made.

The Letting Go

We each experience a great falling away of many things in this process. Old unfruitful relationships, locations, living conditions, modes of expression and cherished belief systems. All of these shift or evaporate altogether. Let them pass. The new will manifest almost immediately and in many cases concurrently.

While we may experience times of isolation and solitude, it’s all a wonderful growing opportunity. It can be quite an emotional journey facing ourselves honestly and seeing former close acquaintances or beliefs fade from our lives. The beauty here is that our true friends and family become manifest.

And we are many.

Depending on our rate of acceleration as well as preparation, this shifting process can be a bit disconcerting. While our previous efforts may appear to have been off course or pointless in light of what we learn down the road, they weren’t. Many ideas and concepts and viewpoints will prove to have been quite off course in relation to what we come to learn is true, but they were what helped get us here. It’s seeing that and letting the old go that are at issue.

It’s easy if we’re malleable and trusting. Call it faith in the divine nature of it all, but that is something we can all be securely confident of, despite the seemingly bizarre nature and consequences of many of the choices that have taken place on this evolving planet.

There are no mistakes. There is no condemnation except what we personally ascribe to. Outside of us everything is beautifully neutral. There is no judgement. We invent and comply with that, in accordance with separation. When we realize all is One in different facets and stages and in the process of expansion we don’t judge, we accept, and in love, seeing the wonder of Creation both seen and unseen.

The Paradox of Three Dimensional Life

Yet paradoxically there is the part we are each here to do, most of all to truly awaken and raise in conscious awareness and enduring unconditional love. The ultimate solution. Nothing to wait for. Just be it. The rest will follow as we let go of old triggers toward less fruitful endeavors. It’s very tempting to get into the fray and all things reactive and fight it out in our minds or on the streets or in the staged informational platform at their low density level, but it’s to no avail and only muddies the waters.

Steer clear. Don’t feed the miasma. Be aware of it but don’t even touch it. It’s a tar baby designed to short circuit our connectivity to Source and who we truly, deeply are. That’s what they fear. Not our activism or exposure, although that’s all part of it. It’s us getting the real understanding of our true power as well as what energizes them and keeps them in business, which we then refuse to supply as we rise to a higher vibration with much more effectiveness.

That’s non-compliance.

Get free. Stay free. Help raise the planetary vibration. Share love, speak truth, live in the true joy of real Knowing that transcends these tricks and traps and manifestations of ignorance. Live according to your passion. The world is starving for love, kindness, gentleness, hope and happiness. We’re awash in it if we look around. Don’t let them drag us down to their level.

Let’s rise up and be the living solution. All is well and right in the grand scheme of things, the BIG picture.

Creation keeps expanding and learning, and we are an amazing and integral part of it all!

What a wonder!

Crow’s God: Ego Dissolution and the Evolution of the Self

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By Gary ‘Z’ McGee

Source: Waking Times

“To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible god.” ~Jorge Luis Borges

“Trickster god is god’s God,” Crow says, peering from behind The Branches of Lost Time. These branches are a metaphor for our misremembered synapses. They symbolize our having lost touch with both our own nature and with wild Nature, our forgotten link between cosmos and psyche, our misunderstanding of how we-the-microcosm makes up a vital aspect of We-the-macrocosm.

Crow is here to remind us. But Crow’s medicine is harsh. It is ruthless: a tearing apart, a torn off Band-Aid. For Crow is between worlds like no other creature. His moon-eye sees the light. His sun-eye sees the dark. And his shadow is the grayest thing in the universe: The Middle-gray, the Middle Way, casting itself over and above all things. Smearing out yin-yangs, he reveals how nothing is separate; how everything is connected to everything else in a glorious melting down of black and white, dark and light, life and death, finitude and infinity.

Crow is here to remind us that we need to get over ourselves. He is a black beacon in a room filled with blinding light. He’s the Dark Truth in the sugar-coated ointment. He is here to trick us out of unconsciousness. He is here to crucify the ego. But more importantly, he is here to resurrect it as a mighty tool for the self-actualized Soul.

Ego Dissolution

“Buddha is dead. God is dead. The path is littered with insufferable egos. Even your own ego has an enlightened sword penetrating through its self-righteous heart, and your soul is all the stronger for it.” ~Seven Signs You May Be Unfuckwithable

Don’t worry so much. Ego death doesn’t hurt. What hurts is realizing that you’ve been, as they say in Zen, “tied to a post without a rope.” What hurts is admitting that your ego is nothing more than a front for your multilayered self. What hurts is letting go of your expectations. What hurts is letting go –full stop.

Crow is here to help you let go. Crow’s medicine has just the right amount of humor disguised as honor and compassion disguised as courage to fill up the humble pie disguised as a red pill needed to get you past the blue-pill addiction of your un-mighty ego. Sure, Crow shoves it down your unwilling and reluctant throat with a beak blacker than dark matter and harder than God’s Femur, but he gets the job done with a humor of the most-high.

He’s a necessary amoral agent: Zeno’s Compass, Ockham’s hellraiser. He’s here to flip your worldview on its head, to vivisect the animal of your knowledge, to cut what you think you know about the way the world works in half and pluck out the organs of all the things you take for granted. He’s neither gentle nor comforting, but he is sincere in his exact fierceness. He must be, in order to reveal yourself to yourself. In order to transform your whiny, woe-is-me placation into a mighty self-overcoming revelation.

No easy feat, dissolving egos. But Crow does so with pluck and aplomb, with molten mettle and mercurial moxie. The letting go process is easier if you just give your ego over to him to chew-up (courage), to digest (cocoon) and eventually shit-out (rebirth), but he doesn’t mind stealing it from you like a thief in the night either. Actually, he would prefer pulling it out of you kicking and screaming and begging the gods to save you. He would rather stamp out the little light that blinds you so that you can finally see the bigger light that awakens you.

Don’t worry. On the other side of this beautiful annihilation is a soulful illumination: A Three-eyed Raven. He has come to carry you to a terribly exquisite juxtaposition: the gloriously painful journey of self-overcoming.

Evolution of the Self

“Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death.” ~Anais Nin

At the fork of in the path, at the crossroads, where yesterday’s you meets today’s you in bardo-perfect juxtaposition, there is a psychosocial reckoning at hand. There is an existential decision to make: get busy adapting and overcoming, or get busy stagnating and succumbing. The cliché phrasing is ‘get busy living or get busy dying,’ but on the Path of the Three-eyed Raven there is room for dying (rebirth) as a steppingstone for growth toward living life more profoundly, adventurously, and on-purpose.

So here you are, in a state of in-between, unmolded clay. You’ve been rocked to your foundations with the realization that you are not your ego, that you’ve only ever been unmolded clay. You’re no longer that, and not yetthis. You’ve emerged from your ego’s death with your soul bloody from a thousand and one cutting questions. Your ego is now a pulsing blister inside you, oozing indifference and apathy even as it begins filling itself with interdependence and empathy. It leaps and bounds inside you, a terribly beautiful wound turned primordial womb that purges pettiness and superfluity even as it begins impregnating itself with the world.

Crow is satisfied, perched up high, licking his razor-sharp beak, filled to bursting with the rigid invulnerability of your ego bulging inside him. But the Three-eyed Raven is anything but satisfied. He sees the Infinite Game being played out. He sees how you are an integral catalyst for the progressive evolution of your species. He is a symbol for your ego’s rebirth. The most wide-awake aspect of you that invulnerably and soulfully flexes out; that individuates and self-actualizes as it perpetually overcomes the vicissitudes of self, and thus the vicissitudes of life.

With Crow’s medicine in one hand and your wide-awake ego in the other; with Crow on one shoulder and the Three-eyed Raven on the other, you are ready to self-overcome. You are ready to existentially crush out. You are ready to bridge the gap between man and overman.

Don’t be afraid of this vulnerable power, though it is both the scariest and most powerful thing in the universe, save for the power of a good sense of humor. Embrace it. Be fearless with it. Use it as a tool to leverage wonder and numinous experience into your life. Use it as medicine for a profoundly sick society. You –the you not drowning in ego pettiness and woe-is-me religious placation– are the one the world has been waiting for.

 

Magic Never Died: The Sacred is Still Alive

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By Kingsley L. Dennis

Source: Reality Sandwich

God is alive, magic is afoot
God is alive, magic is afoot
God is afoot, magic is alive
Alive is afoot, magic never died
Leonard Cohen

 

The sense of the sacred does not require any image of the gods. There will be no more gothic cathedrals built to exalt humankind to the heavens; no more prophets to lead humankind to the divine; and no more Holy Grails to entice humankind upon the Quest – we now have the sacred suffusing us en masse, manifesting as both the tangible and intangible. Our cultures are being finely renewed from the inside-out by a subtle vibration that has come to us through a myriad of emanations in different forms. Look at the conversations we are having today with each other; look at how many creative projects around the world are being instigated and led by young people. The generations before us were not discussing transcendence or the technologies of the soul so openly and publicly. Our era has brought the inner world out into the open world and into focus. The sacred is not a concept but an experiential understanding, of life beyond our limited selves – of transcendence and immersion simultaneously. Only two or three generations before us there was no inner world to explore publicly. Before the rise of the psychological sciences there was no cultural language to explore the subconscious. The inner landscape of the human being was quietly explored and navigated by the mystics, seers, adepts, shamans, and initiates that kept their traditions away from the masses – away from persecution.

For millennia the sacred arts were defiled, harassed, and discriminated against. The magical arts also fell into this tarnished category. And yet magic and alchemy are found worldwide, in all traditional cultures, in remarkably similar manifestations. Spiritual realization has never been a mass pursuit; usually pursued by those few individuals often classed as outsiders. And so the presence of the sacred in our societies has always been unperceived, operating unseen and under the radar. It has always been present and operating, only not in ways suspected by humankind. Magic too has always been present in its various guises – magic is afoot, magic is alive, magic never died. Magic, in its original form, is that which concentrates and radiates the mind; it is a deep penetrating force-field of compassion and communion. Our reality-matrix is composed of energy; everything within it is a form of energy in various states. Those states can be modified, like the fine tuning of an instrument to create a more harmonious sound. The wisdom traditions, the perennial philosophy, speak of how a human being, by their own spiritual ascent, is able to also animate and raise up the world around them. The emanation of the sacred energies furthers the spiritual realization within material reality.

Most of what is today labeled as supernatural is but the residue of the sacred which is inherent in humankind and the world, no matter how we ignore or discard it. Unbeknown to us we recreate this sense of the sacred through our pursuits and pastimes. Magic may shock the profane, yet it has existed as a core experience long before we had any sense of what it actually was. As historian and scholar Arthur Versluis notes,

The reason that magic is not in good standing in the West is that it is based upon the fundamental unity of man and cosmos and so is in conflict with the inherent dualism of the modern outlook. But magic will be in existence long after the modern era has disappeared: it cannot be otherwise, for magic is the physical expression of the eternal, inner, spiritual transmutation. 1

When it comes to the ‘eternal, inner, spiritual transmutation’ there are no absolute laws, just the continual unfolding. As human beings we each interact with the world differently because we perceive the world differently. In interacting differently we each contribute to creating a different world. The sacred reality understands that we exist as part of a participatory cosmos. It is this sacredness without a name that infuses the human condition. To be a human being is to be inherently imbued with a spiritual force that animates us in ways we are largely unaware of. And yet through this animated force we see the world around us – it cultivates our worldview, our values, and is the source of our quest for meaning. And a civilization’s worldview is its most precious possession.

Everything proceeds from this primary perception – a collective gaze of wonder…or of limitation.  The basic, fundamental understanding is that we cannot observe the world without changing it. And the presence of the sacred is so crucial in our lives that without it our human status itself is in question. The sacred order of the past existed at a time when the world was different, when its needs were different. At each moment we articulate the human condition in the context of our times. The sacred energies, the spiritual impulses, are a medium – and a means – through which we come to learn of and express the human condition. And these expressions are in response to a shifting and unfolding understanding of the cosmos and of our reality-matrix. Before the emergence of structured religions the human condition articulated itself in ‘pre-religious forms’ of spirituality. Whatever the times, the sacred impulse attempts to be known. For great periods the sacred impulse was almost invisible within human societies, as we struggled with the raw energies of brute materiality ‘red in tooth and claw,’ and cloaked in mechanical rationalism. Yet now the sacred impulse is raising its head again in new cultural forms, expressions, and mediums.

Magic has a role in helping to give shape and substance to our meanings. Magic teaches us that the way forward, the way to heal the rift in our reality-matrix, is by the uniting of the spiritual and the profane, the celestial and the mundane. In our reality, each day lived is an expression of the spiritual and the sacred existing through us, invisible as a silent breath. And yet the magic never died; magic is still alive, magic is afoot (to paraphrase Leonard Cohen). For us now, ‘the greatest danger to us shall arise, not because of “magic,” but rather if true magic, true transmutation, should disappear.’2 The world is becoming an exciting, magical, and mysterious domain once again. And within this domain technology is likewise moving from its position as a brute, mechanistic hardware to a fluid, almost seamless, magical part of our augmented reality. The world is reviving its sense of being a Misterium Tremendes, a sacred place to dwell in. To live as part of the sacred is about living that which comes through us – as beacons we must pass it on as well as lighting up the way for each traveler upon the path. The truth is a spiritualizing force that actualizes through us. The sacred impulse is also the creative and dynamic force of transcendence. And yet it must be a sacred energy for our times. It must be alive and relevant, otherwise it becomes another relic to be idolized and venerated rather than lived. The sense of the sacred is of a living work.

Our physical global body – our systems and structures – are responding to this need by shifting from top-down structures to decentralized networks. As this unfolds we need to meet this transformation by changing the ways we think; by altering the ways we do things; by allowing consciousness and the sacred energies to flow into the world – to flow through us. That is, to manifest the qualities, attitudes, and our presence in the world that will most effectively receive, hold, and transmit this consciousness. This responsibility is also a part of our living work right now. The days of working in seclusion are over – the new sacred energy does not support monasticism. The sacred strives to connect fluidly between our inner and outer worlds; it is not a monastic endeavor but exists within the active avenues and marketplaces of life. High castles, priestly enclaves, guru sanctuaries, etc, are edifices of the past where a different energy was contained. The sacred revival of today is a nurturing, feminine energy that comes alive through people. The sacred revival stands as comfortable with the spandex superhero mutants on our screens as it does with the appreciative touch, the supportive word, the reassuring glance that we each can weave into our lives. This is the sacred impulse for our times – that which is a part of the living substance that comes through us. It is a living soul that holds within it the species body. As Meister Eckhart said – ‘The soul is not in the body; the body is in the soul.’

The sacred is already affecting us, infecting our thinking patterns and consciousness whether we are aware of it or not. Our perspectives on the world and the cosmos have been changing dramatically over recent years. Most of us who have thought deeply about life and the cosmos have come to the realization that we do not exist as part of a dead universe. Even our sciences, our telescopes, have begun to point their attention toward intelligent life in the cosmos. We are unfolding – slowly metamorphosing out of our cocoon of cosmic quarantine. The human being too is forced to transcend beyond the conditioned cocoon we sleep within – to continually transcend every station we reach. A part of our transformation is the recognition that the human being is a sacred particle in a sacred universe.

Enchantment has been humanity’s natural state for aeons. The innate state of humanity is to feel integral to all life. This continuity has only been disrupted for a number of centuries, whereas our state of enchantment has been with us for millennia. It is time we return to that enchantment, and to a re-connection with a source of meaning. Those streams of significance, those waters of wisdom, have always been with us. It only depended upon whether we wished to get our feet wet or not. As the poet Rainer Maria Rilke says, ‘we are the bees of the invisible’ and our task as individuals is for each of us to be a channel for the transmutation of the familiar things of this world into the transcendent. The sacred impulse works through the planet, the living species, and also each individual. As we come together, increasingly so through the medium of our technologies, we each can bring a spark into the burning flame of the living workof our transmutation. As Sri Aurobindo understood, our sacred revival (what he considered as a spiritual age) must ‘be preceded by the appearance of an increasing number of individuals who are no longer satisfied with the normal intellectual, vital and physical existence of man, but perceive that a greater evolution is the real goal of humanity and attempt to effect it in themselves, to lead others to it and to make it the recognised goal of the race.’3 The antithesis of the sacred revival, those whom attempt the reverse of leading others toward transition, seek their power in the sorcery of psychological control and manipulation, also now on a mass scale. Yet the call of the sacred impulse beats within each one of us – yet for some it is louder than others.

The sacred presence is a reflection of the individual soul as well as the world soul. The integral communion of the soul is between the inner world of the individual (the individual soul), and the physical world outside of us. It is a synthesis which gives us meaning. If we do not renew our task daily – reflect upon the soul – we do an injustice to ourselves. And yet this is no easy task. No other relationship can be achieved that is higher than the one you have with the sacred essence within yourself. Life must have meaning for us before we can bring authentic meaning into the lives of others. Maybe Pierre Teilhard de Chardin said it best when he said that sacred human becoming is not only ‘open to a few of the privileged nor to one chosen people to the exclusion of all others’ but rather is ‘in a direction in which all together can join and find completion in a spiritual regeneration of the earth.’4

Our ancestors were aware that they lived in a sacred cosmos, where the physical world existed in communion with the unseen dimension which ensouled and sanctified it. There was no rigid line drawn between what was the inner world and what was external reality, because both domains were in correspondence. The individual human soul was a part of the greater sacred reality. And just as the sacred is an instrument of the human, so the human is an instrument of the sacred. The sacred worldview is one that accepts not only the metaphysical but also the magical and the mysterious – the magnificent wonder in everything and all. As the Greek Orphic Mysteries of 2,500 years ago spoke: ‘I am a child of earth and starry heaven, but my race is of heaven alone.’

 

References

1 Versluis, Arthur (1986) The Philosophy of Magic. London, Arkana, p129

2 Versluis, Arthur (1986) The Philosophy of Magic. London, Arkana, p125

3 Aurobindo, Sri (1999/1950) The Human Cycle: The Psychology of Social Development. Twin Lakes, WI, Lotus Light Publications, p263

4 Cited in Davis, Erik (1998) Techgnosis: myth, magic and mysticism in the age of information. New York, Three Rivers Press, p317

 

Adapted from Kingsley L. Dennis’s forthcoming book, The Sacred Revival: Magic, Mind & Meaning in a Technological Age, to be published October 24th, 2017.

Angelic Wars, Heart Openings and We the People

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By rahkyt

Source: Sacred Space in Time

The awakening of the heart is not affecting us all the same way. Some people are lightening their psychological load, working through their issues, reconciling their pasts and choosing to be present in the Now in order to choose the best future.
Others are decidedly not doing that. For them, the heart is trying to open but they force it shut again, perhaps afraid of what is bubbling up to the surface. Traumas of childhood and life, hatreds and shames, dysfunctions sealed in by years of practice, thoughts acted out upon that should have been exorcised long ago.

But this is the way of things in the days of Light and Dark, when energies of such sublime potency inundate the earth, bringing us to our own personal encounters with angels and demons, gods and goddesses, the one God of All and his most beautiful angel Lucifer, the Light-bringer, too. Your orientation matters not, as dark and light as polarity manifest serve the deepest and highest Truth simultaneously. Names change over the span of the infinite and the eternal, but energy-types/archetypes do not. How we each choose is a function of who we are truly, not who we think we are.

Sometimes when you think your personality is who you are, you can make the mistake of choosing self-flagellation and suffer from martyr complexes, punishing yourself for sins imagined, not sins actualized. Human laws are not Divine laws in most instances although the original intent was to mirror heaven on earth, but we all see how that is working out.

The murderous and soulless serve the good as object lessons to the souled, every atrocity committed in darkness gives rise to the light in you, in me, can’t you feel it burning inside, when you read about the one who murders nine in a church, another today who murders eight after fighting with his ex, that one who killed two and injured another after hating two and the one who stopped another from killing hundreds, just because it was in his soul to hug a man, no matter the consequences.

The Light is born within as we see it without, you can feel it as a warmth, a vibration that rises from your core to permeate and encompass all of your very Being – from essence to ego – straining for release, in tears, in cries out to creation, to rising joy and righteousness as a quality of existence itself, bringing out the highest and most perfect Love, which is that Most High expression of multiversal consciousness encapsulated in form.

You.

Me.

We.

This world is perfect in its imperfection and nothing you and I do – or those others out there of each polarity and every shade of potentiality in between – is not known beyond the sphere of time and space that limits our perception of the Greater Good, whatever that might look like and mean beyond our limited conception of such infinite and eternal qualities.

Perhaps this is why believing is different from knowing, why data and information can often be a perceptive trap rather than an aid in our personal evolutionary schema. Garbage in, garbage out and the monkey mind ruminates endlessly observing the cascade of thoughts and processes beyond necessity, bordering closely upon the realms of obsessive compulsion and neurosis.

Once the heart opens, it cannot be stopped. For those who attempt it, perhaps they can quell it for a spell, clamp down with their will, shut out the dark corners of their minds and seek the sunshine of false cheer and the surface veneer of shiza and shinola. But it is a losing proposition. If not now, then later, the hurt and pain and agony and rage and despair will spill out indiscriminately, affecting all held dear, prized or cherished, depending upon the original state of inherent spiritual nature.

But for my soul peeps, my sista and brotha souls, those awakened who know they are here to combine in heart-born alliance to carry this planetary body into a new expression of potentiality, even if we do not live to see it, our job will be done, our purposes will become manifest. Our children will carry on. The light will live on, but for today, in the Now, each choice passes through the crucible of Divine fire that lives within us, each decision is pounded out on the crux, the core black hole/white hole singularity we call the heart, exuding energetic frequencies that birth the future through our own unique and fated expression.

The Fallen rise again, the Old Ones embody in form and nature, the cycle turned spiral tube torus-like in Fibonacci patterns of predestination and fate. The mind informs the practiced heart and what is prophesied becomes a fait accompli. Such is life in these wild, wild days. Feel the burn, process and accept the grief and the joy, stoking the fire within in preparation for the ascension of phoenix-like glory that is promised. The best future was chosen in the past and Now, we must live it.

Escaping the iron cage of hopelessness

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By Edward Curtin

Source: Intrepid Report

“Specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilization never before achieved”—Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

“In this frightful round of unchecked means, nobody knows any longer where they are going, purposes are forgotten, and ends are overtaken. Human beings have set off at astronomically high speeds toward nowhere.”—Jacques Ellul, Presence in the Modern World

In a previous article, I argued that those who think science can solve our major social problems—in particular, world destruction with nuclear weapons and the poisoning of the earth’s ecology and atmosphere—were delusional and in the grip of the myth of science and technology. These problems were created by science when it became untethered from any sense of limits in its embrace of instrumental rationality. Once it became wedded to usefulness and the efficiency of technical means, it lost its original aim: the search for truth. (Obviously this doesn’t include all scientists.) In embracing means as ends, it produced an endless loop of means justifying means that has resulted in what Weber called an “iron cage.” Concomitantly, the ideology of pure objectivity and impartial innocence was joined to elite state power and the capitalist profit motive where it was supported and instantaneously and completely applied to technical applications, including nuclear, biological, chemical and “conventional” weapons; bio-engineering; GMO foods and people; eugenics and cloning; and chemical/oil production, etc. It is indisputable that if our planet is incinerated or slowly destroyed through toxic pollution that modern science with its Faustian “prohibition to prohibit” will stand indicted, if anyone is left to make the case.

Albert Camus warned us long ago:

And even though we do it in diverse ways, we extol one thing and one alone: a future world in which reason will reign supreme. In our madness, we push back the eternal limits, and at once dark Furies swoop down upon us to destroy. Nemesis, goddess of moderation, not of vengeance, is watching. She chastises, ruthlessly, all those who go beyond the limit.

Ostensibly rational, the illogical logic of modern science has resulted in a mystifying double-bind that denies human freedom and leads to widespread despair and hopelessness. Many people feel trapped by this deterministic ethos, while others fail to see that the cause of our problems can’t be their solutions.

In this essay, I will explore the possibility of a path out of the seeming impossibility of escaping the cul-de-sac of our spiritually disinherited and disenchanted condition.

Max Weber argued that modern rational capitalism was informed by a religious impetus of inner-directed worldly asceticism derived from Protestant Christianity. In essence, modern capitalism was a religion. Likewise, modern mainstream science, despite the discoveries of quantum physics, rests upon a materialistic presupposition that is a self-contradictory act of faith that it denies to others. Committed to determinism, this materialistic scientific world view offers no basis for its truth claim since what is determined cannot be disputed when it wasn’t freely chosen. To espouse a position that was predetermined is to choose nothing. In essence, such science is also a religion that, like capitalism, serves no end but its own regeneration.

Is it any wonder that so many people feel trapped on an endless merry-go-round that contradicts their felt experience and their hopes for a better world? They look around and see a mad world of war and lies and science run amok. The physical scientists tell them that everything started with a bang and will end with a bang or a whimper of one sort or another and that’s how it goes since when did people so puny think they were anything but specks in a vast cosmos of meaningless gas that will devour them in a few billion years, give or take a year or so. The psych folks tell them they are the products of their brain chemicals and neurotransmitters and must submit “freely” to chemical treatment if they know what’s good for them and want to be happy. The social scientists insist that all knowledge is socially conditioned and relative and therefore everything they think and feel is also relative and so they are lost souls forever wandering in a world of relativity where true wisdom is impossible and the difference between right and wrong is a relative choice that has no basis in any “reality.” And of course the power elites and media play with their minds in endless games of mind control as they insist the only real truth comes through screens that they control. Mind and body warped, so many people stumble through their days like the living dead in search of some exit from their pain and confusion.

Or to say it differently. Science—both physical and social—has resulted in the systemization of doubt and the embrace of the relativity of thought and knowledge. The modern predicament is such that whereas in former times people felt that their knowledge was fact or truth and that it was grounded in a physically palpable reality, we have been exposed to systematic doubt and the suspicion has grown that all the various standpoints are limited and “relative.” While not consciously espoused by the majority of people, this doubting worldview permeates social life as a vague insecurity and uncertainty. It may be left to intellectuals to circulate such relativizing ideas, but they have become part of the cultural air we breathe. For people today in a scientifically based society, faced with the relativizing of all knowledge and every eternal verity, the question of how to understand their deaths, and thus their lives, has become acutely problematic. Uncertainty has undermined people’s wills as they have forgotten they are free.

The question that modernity forces us to ask is this: once knowledge is seen to be relative; old cosmologies are transformed by science; symbol systems and religions are seen as the products of humans’ own creativity; reality is understood to be socially constructed; once these developments take place consciously and unconsciously, how then can people understand their lives and deaths and find the confidence to live in peace and harmony with the earth and all living creatures?

Tolstoy put it this way:

Science is meaningless because it gives no answer to our question, the only question important for us: ‘What shall we do and how shall we live?’

In order to make our way out of this maze, we might contemplate the underlying presupposition that “everything is relative.” That, of course is an absurd position. Everything can’t be relative when the statement “everything is relative” is an absolute statement. Joined to that, one can muse on the self-contradiction of materialistic determinism and perhaps glimpse an escape from the iron cage, the prison, the closed room, the garbage pail, or the no-exit—so many terms that our best writers have used to describe the modern condition.

Rudolf Steiner did that as follows in The Philosophy of Freedom:

Materialism can never offer a satisfactory explanation of the world. For every attempt at an explanation must begin with the formation of thoughts about the phenomena of the world. Materialism, thus, begins with the thought of Matter or material processes. But, in doing so, it is ipso facto confronted by two different sets of facts, viz., the material world and the thought about it. The materialist seeks to make these latter intelligible by regarding them as purely material processes. He believe that thinking takes place in the brain, much in the same way that digestion takes place in the animal organs. Just as he ascribes mechanical, chemical, and organic processes to Nature, so he credits her in certain circumstances with the capacity to think. He overlooks that, in doing so, he is merely shifting the problem from one place to another. Instead of to himself he ascribes the power of thought to Matter. And thus he is back again at his starting-point. How does Matter come to think of its own nature?

But these are intellectual exercises and are therefore probably not very helpful to the average person.

Tolstoy maintained that for the modern person death had no meaning because civilization was based on progress—an ‘infinite’ progress—which according to its own internal logic should never come to an end.

On this road of progressiveness everything is provisional and indefinite and so individual death seems like a failure and meaningless because it marks an end. But what then, asked Tolstoy, is the meaning to our lives? Are they meaningless means to meaningless ends?

Materialistic science can only answer in the affirmative. A negative affirmative. But for most people this doesn’t satisfy. They sense the truth that we live by faith—scientists do, religious believers do, atheists do, agnostics do, everyone does—faith is the water we swim in; it is our element. It is what impels us to get out of bed in the morning. But getting out of bed in the morning is a choice, a judgment. It is not inevitable. We do it in faith that the day will be meaningful and worth meeting. We encounter others in good faith and hope they do the same with us. This awareness of the faith dimension of life is a daily human experience that points beyond itself and is a source of hope, even when confusion reigns. While modern science and philosophy have largely attempted to treat all things, including people, as objects to be controlled by subjects, most people encounter others in daily life not as Its, as in Buber’s I-It, but as Thous, as in I-Thou.

Where have I come from? Why am I here? Where am I going? These are life’s basic questions that science answers with nowhere, no reason, and nowhere in that order. Such answers are attestations of a faith in nothing, what is usually called nihilism.

The psychiatrist R.D. Laing maintained that the key to a sane world is for people to truly regain experiencing their experience and not to make-believe. He felt that most people had become estranged from the roots of their being. He put it thus:

The condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of one’s mind, is the condition of the normal man. Society highly values its normal man. It educates children to lose themselves and to become absurd, and thus to be normal. Normal men have killed perhaps 100,000,000 of their fellow normal men in the last fifty years. Our behavior is a function of our experience. We act according to the way we see things. If our experience is destroyed, our behavior will be destructive. If our experience is destroyed, we have lost our own selves. . . . There is everything to suggest that man experienced God. Faith was never a matter of believing. He existed, but of trusting, in the presence that was experienced and known to exist as a self-validating datum. It seems likely that far more people in our time experience neither the presence of God, nor the presence of his absence, but the absence of his presence. . . . The fountain has not played itself out, the frame still shines, the river still flows, the spring still bubbles forth, the light has not faded. But between us and IT, there is a veil which is more like fifty feet of solid concrete. Deus absconditus. Or we have absconded.

So what can we do to break through this mystification of experience that has resulted in a double-bind that has trapped us?

I say nothing, at first. We are so busy doing and thinking our doing is the solution to our problems. We must stop the world we know by first not doing and by simply being in the presence of Being. We must develop a contemplative discipline of allowing the awareness of our egocentric thinking to reveal to us the arrogance of our confused belief that we can coerce others and the natural world to do our bidding and that every problem has a solution. The grotesqueness of nuclear weapons is the physical manifestation of that willfulness. For the magician, the applied scientist, and the technologist all wish to conquer reality with techniques from the outside rather than being open to the truths that Reality (that we are in and is us and that goes by different names—Being, the Tao, Logos—all names for the unnameable) might reveal to us.

“To ‘know’ reality,” writes Alan Watts, “you cannot stand outside it and define it; you must enter into it, be it, feel it.” So the first thing we must “do” is to do nothing so we may heal our divided minds; otherwise we are spinning in a vicious circle, “like everything else which the divided mind attempts.”

This seems self-evident to me and “doing” this should be our first “act” of dissent—our break-out (by breaking in)—from the reigning consensus that underlies the violent and sick condition of the world today. James Douglass, author of the ground-breaking book, JFK and the Unspeakable, says this perfectly in Lightning East to West: Jesus, Gandhi, and the Nuclear Age:

What we know ‘out there’ as the most resistant evil reality to be transformed, is in reality “in here” in its primary being. The precise nature of that correspondence, or identity, between inner and outer worlds is the mystery which Jung was attempting to describe with his theory of Synchronicity, whereby outer events can be increasingly recognized as unifying correlations of a profoundly traveled inner way. Once we begin to see this profound interpenetration of inner and outer worlds in a oneness of reality, the insoluble enigma of the world of evil gives way to the edge of the unifying mystery of Oneness, or of Love, a mystery that we cannot fully understand but which we can in fact move into with our lives and participate in to the extent of experiencing an ever-more-united world in Reality.

I think if we can see the big picture by “doing nothing,” we will have taken a major step toward a solution, or at the least an insight into how we can act to resist the evil that is occurring in the world.

“Seeing through” is to diagnose—dia, through + gignoskein, to know, perceive—which can allow us to see through to the roots of world problems. Without a deep comprehension of the causes of these problems, and how so many of our solutions have failed because they are based on false premises, we will get nowhere.

“The way one sees through the situation changes the situation,” writes Laing. Then, “as soon as we convey in any way . . . what we see or think we see, some change is occurring even in the most rigid situation.”

I think we can agree that we are in a “most rigid situation” as the nuclear weapons await discharge, countries and people are destroyed by U. S. war-making, the environment is poisoned, elite capitalist crooks line their pockets at the expense of everyone else, etc. Many of us convey this again and again, seemingly to no avail. Perhaps this is because we are missing the forest for the trees in our understandable haste to remedy it all. I suspect this is so and scatter these thoughts like breadcrumbs in the hope they may suggest a way home. “Conveying” my thought experiments in the hope “some” change occurs in the process. First, in me.

The word spiritual has acquired a bad name with its embrace by New-Agers et al. with its association with magic and out of the world mumbo-jumbo. So I use it reservedly. But if we look to those so many hold in such high regard for their fight against violence and injustice—e.g. Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., to name but two—it is apparent that their “truth-force” and “non-violent resistance” were rooted in a spiritual understanding of the human condition. We don’t need to get caught up in words, for they have a way of missing the truth. Gandhi said God was truth and truth was God. King equated God with love. Truth, God, Love—do the words matter? Did not these men grasp the deepest dimensions of our problems? Didn’t they understand the root causes of hate and violence? Didn’t they see the Tao? Didn’t they see that the way we conceive existence through our deterministic and instrumental sciences is a reflection of our violent world? Didn’t they realize that we can’t force change on anyone from the outside without doing violence and that the only way forward is to move the world through love and truthful resistance? Didn’t they tell us that freedom is our birthright and is indivisible, and when you deny existential freedom you are lost in despair?

Despite the question marks, these are rhetorical questions. Don’t our deepest experiences confirm their truth?

Let me end with James Douglass’s words, for it seems to me they ring true, despite being far outside the reigning scientific paradigm and “common sense.”

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? Einstein discovered a law of physical change: the way to convert a single particle of matter into enormous physical energy. Might there not be, as Gandhi suggested, an equally incredible and undiscovered law of spiritual change, whereby a single person or small community of persons could be converted into an enormous spiritual energy capable of transforming a society and a world? I believe that there is, that there must be, a spiritual reality corresponding to E=mc2 because, from the standpoint of creative harmony, the universe is incomplete without it, and because, from the standpoint of moral freedom, humankind is sentenced to extinction without it. I believe that the human imperative of our end-time is that we discover the spiritual equation corresponding to Einstein’s physical equation, and that we then begin to experiment seriously in its world-transforming reality while there is time.

We must experiment in truth, for time is running out.

 

Edward Curtin is a writer whose work has appeared widely. He teaches sociology at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts. His website is edwardcurtin.com.

The Price of Resistance

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Statues at the Museum of Myths and Traditions. (León)

By Chris Hedges

Source: OpEdNews.com

In the conflicts I covered as a reporter in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East and the Balkans, I encountered singular individuals of varying creeds, religions, races and nationalities who majestically rose up to defy the oppressor on behalf of the oppressed. Some of them are dead. Some of them are forgotten. Most of them are unknown.

These individuals, despite their vast cultural differences, had common traits–a profound commitment to the truth, incorruptibility, courage, a distrust of power, a hatred of violence and a deep empathy that was extended to people who were different from them, even to people defined by the dominant culture as the enemy. They are the most remarkable men and women I met in my 20 years as a foreign correspondent. And to this day I set my life by the standards they set.

You have heard of some, such as Vaclav Havel, whom I and other foreign reporters met most evenings, during the 1989 Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia, in the Magic Lantern Theatre in Prague. Others, no less great, you probably do not know, such as the Jesuit priest Ignacio Ellacuria, who was assassinated in El Salvador in 1989. And then there are those “ordinary” people, although, as the writer V.S. Pritchett said, no people are ordinary, who risked their lives in wartime to shelter and protect those of an opposing religion or ethnicity being persecuted and hunted. And to some of these “ordinary” people I owe my own life.

To resist radical evil is to endure a life that by the standards of the wider society is a failure. It is to defy injustice at the cost of your career, your reputation, your financial solvency and at times your life. It is to be a lifelong heretic. And, perhaps this is the most important point, it is to accept that the dominant culture, even the liberal elites, will push you to the margins and attempt to discredit not only what you do, but your character. When I returned to the newsroom at The New York Times after being booed off a commencement stage in 2003 for denouncing the invasion of Iraq and being publicly reprimanded by the paper for my stance against the war, reporters and editors I had known and worked with for 15 years lowered their heads or turned away when I was nearby. They did not want to be contaminated by the same career-killing contagion.

Ruling institutions–the state, the press, the church, the courts, academia–mouth the language of morality, but they serve the structures of power, no matter how venal, which provide them with money, status and authority. In times of national distress–one has only to look at Nazi Germany–all of these institutions, including the academy, are complicit through their silence or their active collaboration with radical evil. And our own institutions, which have surrendered to corporate power and the utopian ideology of neoliberalism, are no different. The lonely individuals who defy tyrannical power within these institutions, as we saw with the thousands of academics who were fired from their jobs and blacklisted during the McCarthy era, are purged and turned into pariahs.

All institutions, including the church, Paul Tillich once wrote, are inherently demonic. And a life dedicated to resistance has to accept that a relationship with any institution is often temporary, because sooner or later that institution is going to demand acts of silence or obedience your conscience will not allow you to make. To be a rebel is to reject what it means to succeed in a capitalist, consumer culture, especially the idea that we should always come first.

The theologian James H. Cone in his book “The Cross and the Lynching Tree” writes that for oppressed blacks the cross was a “paradoxical religious symbol because it inverts the world’s value system with the news that hope comes by way of defeat, that suffering and death do not have the last word, that the last shall be first and the first last.”

Cone continues: “That God could ‘make a way out of no way’ in Jesus’ cross was truly absurd to the intellect, yet profoundly real in the souls of black folk. Enslaved blacks who first heard the gospel message seized on the power of the cross. Christ crucified manifested God’s loving and liberating presence in the contradictions of black life–that transcendent presence in the lives of black Christians that empowered them to believe that ultimately, in God’s eschatological future, they would not be defeated by the ‘troubles of this world,’ no matter how great and painful their suffering. Believing this paradox, this absurd claim of faith, was only possible in humility and repentance. There was no place for the proud and the mighty, for people who think that God called them to rule over others. The cross was God’s critique of power–white power–with powerless love, snatching victory out of defeat.”

Reinhold Niebuhr labeled this capacity to defy the forces of repression “a sublime madness in the soul.” Niebuhr wrote that “nothing but madness will do battle with malignant power and ‘spiritual wickedness in high places.’ ” This sublime madness, as Niebuhr understood, is dangerous, but it is vital. Without it, “truth is obscured.” And Niebuhr also knew that traditional liberalism was a useless force in moments of extremity. Liberalism, Niebuhr said, “lacks the spirit of enthusiasm, not to say fanaticism, which is so necessary to move the world out of its beaten tracks. It is too intellectual and too little emotional to be an efficient force in history.”

The prophets in the Hebrew Bible had this sublime madness. The words of the Hebrew prophets, as Abraham Heschel wrote, were “a scream in the night. While the world is at ease and asleep, the prophet feels the blast from heaven.” The prophet, because he saw and faced an unpleasant reality, was, as Heschel wrote, “compelled to proclaim the very opposite of what his heart expected.”

This sublime madness is the essential quality for a life of resistance. It is the acceptance that when you stand with the oppressed you get treated like the oppressed. It is the acceptance that, although empirically all that we struggled to achieve during our lifetime may be worse, our struggle validates itself.

Daniel Berrigan told me that faith is the belief that the good draws to it the good. The Buddhists call this karma. But he said for us as Christians we did not know where it went. We trusted that it went somewhere. But we did not know where. We are called to do the good, or at least the good so far as we can determinate it, and then let it go.

As Hannah Arendt wrote in “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” the only morally reliable people are not those who say “this is wrong” or “this should not be done,” but those who say “I can’t.” They know that as Immanuel Kant wrote: “If justice perishes, human life on earth has lost its meaning.” And this means that, like Socrates, we must come to a place where it is better to suffer wrong than to do wrong. We must at once see and act, and given what it means to see, this will require the surmounting of despair, not by reason, but by faith.

I saw in the conflicts I covered the power of this faith, which lies outside any religious or philosophical creed. This faith is what Havel called in his great essay “The Power of the Powerless” living in truth. Living in truth exposes the corruption, lies and deceit of the state. It is a refusal to be a part of the charade.

“You do not become a ‘dissident’ just because you decide one day to take up this most unusual career,” Havel wrote. “You are thrown into it by your personal sense of responsibility, combined with a complex set of external circumstances. You are cast out of the existing structures and placed in a position of conflict with them. It begins as an attempt to do your work well, and ends with being branded an enemy of society. … The dissident does not operate in the realm of genuine power at all. He is not seeking power. He has no desire for office and does not gather votes. He does not attempt to charm the public. He offers nothing and promises nothing. He can offer, if anything, only his own skin–and he offers it solely because he has no other way of affirming the truth he stands for. His actions simply articulate his dignity as a citizen, regardless of the cost.”

The long, long road of sacrifice and suffering that led to the collapse of the communist regimes stretched back decades. Those who made change possible were those who had discarded all notions of the practical. They did not try to reform the Communist Party. They did not attempt to work within the system. They did not even know what, if anything, their tiny protests, ignored by the state-controlled media, would accomplish. But through it all they held fast to moral imperatives. They did so because these values were right and just. They expected no reward for their virtue; indeed they got none. They were marginalized and persecuted. And yet these poets, playwrights, actors, singers and writers finally triumphed over state and military power. They drew the good to the good. They triumphed because, however cowed and broken the masses around them appeared, their message of defiance did not go unheard. It did not go unseen. The steady drumbeat of rebellion constantly exposed the dead hand of authority and the rot of the state.

I stood with hundreds of thousands of rebellious Czechoslovakians in 1989 on a cold winter night in Prague’s Wenceslas Square as the singer Marta Kubisova approached the balcony of the Melantrich building. Kubisova had been banished from the airwaves in 1968 after the Soviet invasion for her anthem of defiance “Prayer for Marta.” Her entire catalog, including more than 200 singles, had been confiscated and destroyed by the state. She had disappeared from public view. Her voice that night suddenly flooded the square. Pressing around me were throngs of students, most of whom had not been born when she vanished. They began to sing the words of the anthem. There were tears running down their faces. It was then that I understood the power of rebellion. It was then that I knew that no act of rebellion, however futile it appears in the moment, is wasted. It was then that I knew that the communist regime was finished.

“The people will once again decide their own fate,” the crowd sang in unison with Kubisova. [Editor’s note: To see YouTube photographs of the 1989 revolution and hear Kubisova sing the song in a studio recording, click here.]

The walls of Prague were covered that chilly winter with posters depicting Jan Palach. Palach, a university student, set himself on fire in Wenceslas Square on Jan. 16, 1969, in the middle of the day to protest the crushing of the country’s democracy movement. He died of his burns three days later. The state swiftly attempted to erase his act from national memory. There was no mention of it on state media. A funeral march by university students was broken up by police. Palach’s gravesite, which became a shrine, saw the communist authorities exhume his body, cremate his remains and ship them to his mother with the provision that his ashes could not be placed in a cemetery. But it did not work. His defiance remained a rallying cry. His sacrifice spurred the students in the winter of 1989 to act. Prague’s Red Army Square, shortly after I left for Bucharest to cover the uprising in Romania, was renamed Palach Square. Ten thousand people went to the dedication.

We, like those who opposed the long night of communism, no longer have any mechanisms within the formal structures of power that will protect or advance our rights. We too have undergone a coup d’e’tat carried out not by the stone-faced leaders of a monolithic Communist Party but by the corporate state.

We may feel, in the face of the ruthless corporate destruction of our nation, our culture and our ecosystem, powerless and weak. But we are not. We have a power that terrifies the corporate state. Any act of rebellion, no matter how few people show up or how heavily it is censored, chips away at corporate power. Any act of rebellion keeps alive the embers for larger movements that follow us. It passes on another narrative. It will, as the state consumes itself, attract wider and wider numbers. Perhaps this will not happen in our lifetimes. But if we persist, we will keep this possibility alive. If we do not, it will die.

Dr. Rieux in Albert Camus’ novel “The Plague” is not driven by ideology. He is driven by empathy, the duty to minister to suffering, no matter the cost. Empathy, or what the Russian novelist Vasily Grossman called “simple human kindness,” becomes in all despotisms a subversive act. To act on this empathy–the empathy for human beings locked in cages less than an hour from us [here in Princeton], the empathy for undocumented mothers and fathers being torn from their children on the streets of our cities, the empathy for Muslims who are demonized and banned from our shores, fleeing the wars we created, the empathy for poor people of color gunned down by police in our streets, the empathy for girls and women trafficked into prostitution, the empathy for all those who suffer at the hands of a state intent on militarization and imposing a harsh cruelty on the vulnerable, the empathy for the earth that gives us life and that is being contaminated and pillaged for profit–becomes political and even dangerous.

Evil is real. But so is love. And in war–especially when the heavy shells landed on crowds in Sarajevo, sights so gruesome that to this day I cannot eat a piece of meat–you could feel, as frantic family members desperately sought out loved ones among the wounded and dead, the concentric circles of death and love, death and love, like rings from the blast of a cosmic furnace.

Flannery O’Connor recognized that a life of faith is a life of confrontation: “St. Cyril of Jerusalem, in instructing catechumens, wrote: ‘The dragon sits by the side of the road, watching those who pass. Beware lest he devour you. We go to the Father of Souls, but it is necessary to pass by the dragon.’ No matter what form the dragon may take, it is of this mysterious passage past him, or into his jaws, that stories of any depth will always be concerned to tell, and this being the case, it requires considerable courage at any time, in any country, not to turn away from the storyteller.”

Accept sorrow–for who cannot be profoundly sorrowful at the state of our nation, the world and our ecosystem–but know that in resistance there is a balm that leads to wisdom and, if not joy, a strange, transcendent happiness. Know that if we resist we keep hope alive.

“My faith has been tempered in Hell,” wrote Vasily Grossman in his masterpiece “Life and Fate.” “My faith has emerged from the flames of the crematoria, from the concrete of the gas chamber. I have seen that it is not man who is impotent in the struggle against evil, but the power of evil that is impotent in the struggle against man. The powerlessness of kindness, of senseless kindness, is the secret of its immortality. It can never be conquered. The more stupid, the more senseless, the more helpless it may seem, the vaster it is. Evil is impotent before it. The prophets, religious leaders, reformers, social and political leaders are impotent before it. This dumb, blind love is man’s meaning. Human history is not the battle of good struggling to overcome evil. It is a battle fought by a great evil struggling to crush a small kernel of human kindness. But if what is human in human beings has not been destroyed even now, then evil will never conquer.”

10 Life Lessons I Learned as a Psychiatric Nurse – and Patient

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By Cortland Pfeffer

Source: Wake Up World

Over the past 25 years, I have been immersed in the mental health and addiction system as a patient, later as staff, as a Registered Nurse (RN), and eventually as a supervisor. My time in the mental health system officially began at age 17 when I was first hospitalized in a psychiatric unit. This preceded further hospitalizations, a number of treatment episodes for alcoholism/addiction, along with multiple stints of incarceration in jails. Eventually, through this experience, I was able to embrace recovery and ultimately gain employment at some of these same facilities in which I was treated.

Often I am asked about how I went from being a psychiatric patient and homeless drug addict to being a registered nurse and a supervisor at some of these facilities. While there is no magical answer to that question, there certainly have been some valuable life lessons learned along the way. These are 10 of the life lessons I have learned over time, which allowed me to continue on this journey.

1. If you are naturally different than the majority, you will be labeled.

It is our nature to want to try to fit in with the tribe. It can be lonely when you feel like you are different from other people. When you are not like the majority, others will notice this and try to get you to fit in to this box of normality. But defining “normal” is an impossible task. It is defined as conforming to a standard. However, this standard changes with different cultures and time periods. What was once normal, is now insane. Today we clearly live in an insane society – one in which we favor materialism over that of our fellow man; one in which there is more public uproar over a sporting event than the humanitarian crisis in Aleppo. To be “normal” in this type of society would actually make one insane. Yet, when you don’t follow the mold of a brainwashed culture you get labeled as different.

This can be quite destructive as Erich Fromm points out in his 1941 book “Escape from Freedom” as he highlights how people are drawn to authority as it is safer to go along with the pack than to think independently.

We go along with the societal norms for harmony, acceptance, and belonging – which are also innate human desires. Each human has a desire to feel a sense of community and purpose. However, when we go along with the group – even when it is violates our personal beliefs just for acceptance – it causes us to believe that something is wrong with us for thinking differently.

Solomon Asch tested human’s conformity in an experiment in 1951. Over the 12 critical trials approximately 75% of participants conformed at least once; and 25% of participants never conformed. In the control condition, the participants were asked to write down the correct match between the lines without sharing their answers with the group. The results showed that the participants were very accurate, giving the correct answers 98-percent of the time. This is one of many studies that show most people will go along with a crowd, even if it is not what they believe. So what happens if the tribe has decided that there is something “wrong” with you? Science will show that most of us will go along with that.

However this is a mistake. Take a look at the bell curve, which is used to show “normality distribution.” The bell curve is used in many areas of life and can be used here. In many bell curves, you see that 95-percent are within two deviations from the mean, or average. On the very end you will always see 5-percent of people. They are at the extreme end and do not fall inside the box of “normal.” It doesn’t make you bad to be outside the norm, and it also doesn’t make you crazy or sick. In fact, I would argue that those on the extreme ends are the ones that have changed the world.

For example, Mahatma Gandhi did not fit inside that box. The “norm” of his time was to accept the British imperialism in his home country of India. He saw the injustices and spent his life trying to free his people from oppression. He was imprisoned and survived many assassination attempts (although one finally killed him). Likewise, Martin Luther King Jr. also saw the injustices of African-Americans were facing in the United States and stood up to the oppression. They both went against the norms, were labeled, judged, and eventually lost their lives for speaking against the status quo. They both ended up dead, but years later we realized they were speaking the truth against an insane society.

Other people’s labels of you are just that — other people’s labels. It is out of fear and ignorance. Do not adapt to other people’s expectations. The world needs people of all sorts. We need diversity.

If you closely take a look at the criteria for someone who is gifted versus someone who has ADHD, Bipolar, Aspergers, and many other mental health diagnosis you will see that they are almost identical. So whether you are called bipolar or gifted doesn’t depend on you, but rather on the so-called expert assessing your life. It is all about perception and none of it matters. All that matters is that you are your most authentic and true version of yourself.

2. We as a society create mental health and addiction.

There have been numerous studies that have exposed the fact that trauma as a child leads to neural chemistry changes in your brain. Childhood trauma has been called the smoking of mental health. The same way smoking can cause or invoke many physical diseases, childhood trauma and maltreatment does the equivalent for mental health and addiction.

There are higher relapse rates for hypertension and heart disease than there are for addiction and mental health. However, we often treat the addict like they are a bad person or making bad choices. So we are taking someone who has been traumatized and often did not receive treatment for their trauma and we punish them by locking them up. This creates more shame, exasperating the trauma and causing the cycle to repeat itself. Additionally, the patient is not going to be readily willing to seek help in the first place due to the aforementioned shame.

What if we had a cancer drug that works 10-percent of the time and made people sicker? We would throw the drug away! However if a treatment center has a 10-percent success rate for addiction or mental health they’re considered successful. What other business could be 10-percent successful and would continue to exist?

The addiction and mental health industry continue to grow, despite this complete lack of success. There are extremely high rates of recidivism in these fields. Speaking from personal experience, more often than not the patients get sicker while in treatment.

The staff then blames this lack of success on the patient. They point fingers and say that the patient “was not ready” or that they have “poor insight.” The site that failed to provide adequate treatment blames the victim and takes no responsibility for their failure.

This system only continues because too many people are making too much money off keeping people sick. The staff tends to be undertrained, under-qualified, and lack any meaningful or diverse life experience. They are trained to believe that their patients are bad people that are making bad choices instead of a sick person who has been traumatized. This obviously results in receiving much different treatment.

Now there are some absolutely wonderful people in this field. That is a fact. However, in general there is an overall lack of humanity and compassion in the way this population has been treated. We are the most incarcerating society in the history of mankind and most of these prisoners are there for harmless drug offenses.  Due to this influx of incarcerations, we have created for-profit prisons which rely on mass incarcerations for profit. They set up contracts with governments to guarantee high occupancy rates and spend millions of dollars lobbying to congress to make tougher prison laws to ensure they stay profitable. In turn, members of congress then hold stock in these private prisons – meaning that the people that make the laws are making money off the laws they sign into action.

We are locking up people who have a disease to profit the rich. Punishment does not work for this disease – it never has and it never will. If it did work, we would not have a this astronomical recidivism rate in jails for drug offenses.

3. Be true to who you are.

We run from who we truly are because we are told to by our environment. We are told that it is not okay to be our true self from the time we are young and we begin to believe it to be true. We spend our whole lives living for other people and living based on other people’s expectations. We eventually lose ourselves and create a false persona (or false self) – This is what I refer to as “The Mask”.

The longer we wear the mask, the more we forget who we are underneath. We start to think that we are our masks – the character that we present to the world for acceptance. As this continues, we grow to dislike our mask because it is not our true self. This leads to depression, self-hate, or even suicidal ideation. We think we hate ourselves, but in reality we hate this false self that we have created. When we go against our own nature, it will always create depression.

If you have forgotten who you are, it’s easy to remember. You know the truth by how you feel. If you want to remember what that feeling is like, simply go do something that is pure, genuine, and has good intentions and see how that feels. If you can do something for somebody that can never repay you, you will remember this feeling – that is the feeling you are seeking.

Some of us may not even know who we really are because we’ve been wearing this mask for so long. In that case you get to explore and try new things. You get to discover who you truly are and what makes your soul feel alive. This can be viewed as an obstacle or an opportunity. You can now try everything – writing, dancing, singing, etc. – try anything you desire and you will find your true self in the process.

You will find out who you were, before the world told you who you were supposed to be.

This concept can be frightening, especially if we have become too accustomed to the mask. Some will do anything and everything to put the mask back on for safety, security, and possibly they are benefiting from pretending to be their false self. Although, in the long run it will create more inner dissent.

The world needs you to be you. Your true self fits into the world exactly how it should. When we go against this, we are robbing humanity of the gifts our true selves possess. Albert Einstein said, “great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.”

It can be scary to finally be yourself. You will likely start feeling rejected and you will lose some people. But those are the people that you want to lose. You will also gain people in your lives – the ones that love the true you and not the false you.

This is a change that is painful and it causes most people to go back into their false self (ore put their mask back on). However, this is an essential struggle that you will encounter on your way. It will turn your world upside down and your relationships will change.  But as the old saying goes, “it is better to be hated for who you are than to be loved for who you are not.”

You are only doing a smidgen of what you are capable of doing by being your true self. You have no idea what you’re capable of until you embrace who you are and you will be blown away by the results.

4. Fear destroys us; and makes others money.

When we are not ourselves, then our lives are being lived and based on fear. When we are always afraid, it is from remembering pain or trauma. Just like any animal, when we are afraid we will hide. We live in a society in which many people benefit of us being afraid.

We are evolutionarily programmed to remember the negative experiences at a much higher rate, more clearly and more intensely, than positive experiences.

Many businesses profit off of our fear. The news gets higher ratings when they show fights, violence, and all the things that are wrong with the world. So that is what they show and that is what we see. They are not showing a true representation of the world, but a sample size that spreads fear and increases ratings. This is paid for by commercial advertisements that spend millions of dollars by spreading fear into your mind in an effort to buy their product. They will tell you might get bitten by a snake, so you need to buy a fence to keep the snakes out. They tell you to buy material items to fit into society or you will be left out and not included. When the fear does not go away, we continue to consume more. And it never goes away until we realize that we are being played.

“If tomorrow, women woke up and decided they really liked their bodies, just think how many industries would go out of business?” – Dr. Gail Dines

Our insane society has created these masks and then they profit off these masks they created. Then you are labeled as insane if you don’t want to wear your mask anymore. Because when we take off our masks, they lose business.

What goes into your brain will affect your subconscious mind. If you feed it with fear, it will seek fear. If you feed it with love, it will find love. The opposite of living in fear is living with love. Love is the antidote to fear.

When you live with love, you will be faced resistance from those still guided by fear. But remember, in the end, throughout history, every single time love always wins. There may be a time it seems this is not true. But it becomes a crucial point in your recovery when you decide to choose love over fear if you are going to succeed. Every person going through a true recovery will come to this stage and it is scary, it is lonely, and it is supposed to be. It takes immense strength to love when everything inside of you tells you to run away. Once you make it through this stage, you have reached a turning point and the mask begins to crumble.

5. Love, acceptance, and truly listening is far more powerful than any advice you can ever give someone.

We have all seen someone struggling and we want to fix it. Usually we want to fix it the way we would fix it for ourselves if we were in the same struggle. We tend to go in and tell people how to change. Although well-intentioned, when we do this, we begin to lose them. Everyone is different, and every recovery is different. Every mask is unique, and therefore every mask removal must be unique.

Relationships are the single most important thing to someone going through a recovery. You can have the cure for them, but if they do not trust you, they will not hear it. They do not care how much you know, until they know how much you care.

Accepting people for who they are and where they are at in their life will go further than any piece of advice you can ever give them. Giving someone love and a hug when everybody else is kicking them is what I call “psychological life support.”

I had two people that did this for me and they saved my life. Not those who criticized me and tried to force me into treatment. It was those who offered unconditional love and acceptance who kept me alive. Unconditional, meaning without conditions/judgments, but just loving them and accepting them in their entirety with no desire to change or point out their flaws. When I was ready to change, I went to the same people because I had gained their trust.

Relationships come first. If you cannot build a relationship, a trusting relationship, then you will only do damage. I believe many staff in this field are well-intentioned, however they make these problems much worse and the patients get much sicker simply because there is a lack of acceptance, love, and an overabundance of advice giving and fixing.

Trust me, if there was an easy-fix, the person would have already done so. In rushing to fix a person, you are sending the message that they are incompetent and could not think of this on their own. A broken person doesn’t need to be fixed, they need to be loved, then they are able to heal themselves.

When I say listening, I mean being present completely with that person. This means not checking your phone, not looking at the clock, and not even thinking about anything else. This is referred to as active listening. The ten people I think are the best in this field all do this. They make the person they are with feel like they are the most important person on earth in that moment. When the person can feel heard, the magic begins.

6. Embrace your struggles, they are gifts.

When I see a patient walking around a treatment center saying “everything is fine,” “everything is ok,” or “I’m doing great,” this becomes a giant red flag. You should be struggling. Muscles do not grow without struggle and the same goes for our soul.

Since we were young, we were trained to believe that admitting to a struggle is a sign of weakness, but in fact it is a great strength. We are all going through a struggle. We should be working on the thing that is the most difficult for us for optimum growth. The thing that you are most scared to do is probably the thing that is most essential to your recovery.

If you are in pain, if you are crying, if you are scared, then you are growing. If you are questioning why you are there, or why you are going through this, or questioning your own sanity, then you are growing. If you are angry, if you are tense, if you are isolating, then you are growing.

If there is no struggle, there is no growth. If there is no growth, there is no recovery.

Everything in my life in which I thought would be my demise, ended up being the very best things in the long run. We see a small portion of the big picture and act like that’s the reality, when it’s not. We must trust the process and trust in the bigger picture. Without the illusion, there would be no enlightenment.

There will come a time that you will think this is not worth it and feel like giving up. This means you are getting close to breaking through. We usually give up right before the miracle happens.

There is not one magical moment where you reach some mountaintop. It usually takes two steps forward, followed by one step back. It is a continuous, non-linear process. It is like a newborn baby deer trying to learn to walk. Their feet are wobbly and they fall down often. Falling down is not the issue, it is the learning process that makes you stronger and not having shame about the fall. It is about being around people that do not judge the fall.

The only way through the pain you have is to deal with it. There are many things we have hidden inside ourselves through the years because of fear and using the mask. Sometimes it may be for years, or decades, but all things eventually rise to the surface and all your pain is revealed. But that is the only way that it can be healed is for it to come to the surface. It cannot be healed when it is buried.

Let the storm come. After the storm comes the rainbow.

“Life isn’t about waiting for the storm to pass; it’s learning to dance in the rain.” – Vivian Greene

7. Our subconscious is what drives us.

We have two parts of our mind – the conscious and the subconscious. The conscious is all of which we are aware. The subconscious is the part that we are not aware, but all the millions of things we process daily and store away.

Our brain cannot tell if what is in our subconscious is true or not. It takes everything in as fact. It is like a hard drive that receives commands and stores everything as fact. It is built by other people and society – parents, siblings, teachers, television, pop culture, advertisements, etc. If we grow up being told that we are “bad,” our subconscious processes it to be true.

Everything is a perception and not reality. However, as different things start to play out in our conscious mind, then the subconscious files come to the surface to back it up as “evidence.” This creates stronger files in our subconscious mind. These files in our subconscious mind are what drives us; not what we are consciously aware.

As young children and even as adolescents, our brains are flooded with gray matter. This is the part of our brain that can be molded and create the person we are to become. This is what shapes the subconscious mind which will determine what drives us for a lifetime. If someone is told they are bad, lazy, incompetent, then they will be driven by this. If someone deals with pain, torture, trauma, and abandonment, they will be drive by this as well.

The good news is we can change the subconscious mind by implanting new messages. It is flexible, but it takes time, practice and patience.

Additionally, some of us will be more affected than others by these messages. Some people are naturally more sensitive, more prone to trauma,  and more prone to take things too personally.

We are all born with an innate temperament that lasts our entire lives. That would be like if a couple people were eating a pizza. One person takes a bite and it tastes lukewarm to them; but the other person burns their mouth and complains as to how hot it is. The others would not believe it to be true.  However when it comes to emotions, we can’t see anything, the scars or burns are invisible. So we are told that it is not real and our emotions are crazy, in which we believe to be true. This only further pushes our true selves down and creates more negative self-talk which creates files in the subconscious.

This leads to the most sensitive, warm, kind people in our society being invalidated and told they are “babies” for feeling and caring more than most. We tell them that they are not right when inside they are going through a trauma.

But if a young boy acts out in anger instead of crying, that is more acceptable in our society. That is one form of a mask that is created and is prevalent among young men. Then with this mask, and all masks, comes depression from not being your true self from going against nature.

That’s the inner voice, it is the subconscious.  It is strong but it may not even be true. The only way to combat this is to start telling yourself positive things (affirmations), surround yourself with positivity, changing your perceptions of the world (cognitive behavioral therapy), focus on the positive things in life (gratitude). This starts to build more positive files in your subconscious which drives you out of despair and into a positive direction.

We all are born pure, and with nothing but love in our hearts. This is often taken from some of us by a combination of temperament, environment, society, and trauma. We eventually believe that we are not good at our core. But we are. We can change our subconscious by what goes into our brain daily. This takes persistence and daily practice, and it is hard when we are used to thinking negatively about ourselves. However, this out of everything is probably the key to sustained long-term recovery- dealing with that inner voice and changing our thoughts.  It will seem foreign at first to say “I’m a good person.” If you are going to make it, you have to start doing on a daily basis. You can replace those files just like your body replaces every cell in the body every seven years. Soon those old files will be gone and the new positive files will be your subconscious.

8. Who you surround yourself with is one of the most important decisions you will make.

I have heard many wise people say that we are the average of the five people we spend the most time with. As I said above, that directly affects our subconscious and what we think of ourselves.

I remember years ago my oldest daughter enrolled in a private school. Everyone in the school was Catholic and she came home and believed in her inner core that the entire world was Catholic. She cried about it at night that she was different because she did not go up to get the fake bread at their ceremonies. Similarly, if you are around five people that smoke pot and you do not smoke pot, then you are the weirdo for not smoking pot. However, if you are with five people that do not smoke pot and you do, then you are considered strange for smoking pot.

At the end of the day, if you are around negativity — eg. those who consider you strange or different — it will eventually influence you.

Now some negativity can be good if you’re an overly positive person and turn a blind eye to all negativity because that is also unrealistic and can actually benefit the person. Also, being angry can help mobilize and motivate you to change. People who are totally happy and content at all times are never the ones that change the world – see Martin Luther King Jr. and Gandhi. It is those that are healthy discontents that create change.

On the flip side, if you only are surrounded by negativity it will suck the life out of you. Likewise if you are around a bunch of people who believe that you are a bad person, be that your family, friends, or relatives, then that’s going to creep right back into your subconscious and you creep right back into old patterns. Soon you believe that pattern as real.

You cannot do this alone. It took many others to help us put the mask on, and it will take others to help remove the mask as well. I came across five amazing people that helped change my life and save it.

Part of recovering is making the effort to be true to yourself. Once you can do this, you will find yourself in others. You start to see that all of life is a synchronicity. You will suddenly be around people who can help you and you have to be willing to accept help and make yourself vulnerable. If you cannot expose yourself and be vulnerable to these good people, then you will fall.

Vulnerability allows others to lift the mask.

You have to start all over sometimes; that may even mean leaving your family and lifelong friends. It is terrifying, but you will find new people that embrace your true self, whereas your friends and family have only got to know your mask and are not ready for your true self. You’ll find that people who you thought were close friends really were not; and people who you thought were not your friends actually were. You find out everybody’s true character when you go through this. It’s a gift in that way as well. Someone you may not have associated with five years ago, you’ll love them when you are your true self. This just means that the transformation is happening.

9. You must learn to truly love yourself or you will not make it.

I wrote earlier about being your true self and that is completely different from loving your true self. There is a reason we wear these masks and have these false selves. It is because we think that at our core, we are not OK. Then we start to be ourselves, but also seek to make changes. We have to 100-percent, truly, genuinely love our true self and embrace it or we will eventually slip back on our masks.

This is the often overlooked Steps Six and Seven of the 12-Steps. We are removing the parts of ourselves that are not true and keeping those that are. However, we get confused at this point because we feel that part of ourselves is flawed.

But, that is impossible! Every single person is perfect at their core. You do not have any flaws. That is a lie created by society. Every person is perfect and once you find your true self you will see this to be true.

Which is why, when you are finally being yourself you are likely going to be mocked, ridiculed, and teased. It begins to seem much easier to revert back to old ways (the mask). It is hard when you have run your whole life and been afraid. Then you start to be yourself and people start teasing you or pushing you away. You must realize that this has nothing to do with you and has everything to do with them. If somebody loves you that usually has more to do with them than you; and if somebody hates you that has more to do with them than you.

I remember when I had to have a psychological test done, I had to have my four closest people fill out a form and I figured it would all be the same answers that they gave. I got four completely different forms with four completely different sets of answers. Others love us based on their perception of us or they hate us based on their perception of us, none of this is reality – but it is reality to them.

What matters is what we think of ourselves. If we love ourselves, we will glow and other people will be drawn to us and some will be drawn away from us.

“The ego says, ‘Once everything falls into place, I’ll find peace.’ The spirit says, ‘Find your peace, and then everything will fall into place.’” – Marianne Williamson

10. Whatever you do, if you do it with love in your heart as your intention, you cannot go wrong.

The world is full of opinions. Everyone has the answers. You can’t do this, or you shouldn’t do that. People can show you evidence about why they are right and why you are wrong. Everyone will tell you how to handle your recovery and how to handle every situation in life. When we are listening to other people instead of our true selves, we are going against our own truth and against our own nature.

There is no right and wrong. We used to think smoking was okay for you and doctors advertised it. We used to think the world was flat. We used to think Columbus discovered America. There is no truth, there is only perception. You must do what your true inner self believes. Your mask is unique so your mask’s removal is going to be unique. The one thing that is common for all mask removals is connection and love. Science and studies have found out that we are breathing the same air that people breathed in and breathed out thousands of years ago. The air we breathe is composed of mainly nitrogen, gas, and oxygen gas. Very little is lost in space, and only occasionally is there a new source of carbon or oxygen introduced into this planet. So every breath you take has atoms that have been here for billions of years.

There was a computer program set up in various spots around the world. It would shoot off random numbers, there was no pattern ever seen for years. This is called a Random Number Generator. However when the September 11th attacks happened, or other moments that human consciousness became coherent, things changed. For instance, in the case of a severe tragedy in which all humans are thinking about similar things and having similar emotions, all the numbers become structured and organized. They show an unpredictable sequence of ones and zeroes. The odds of this happening by chance is one in a trillion. How is this possible?

Every single thing you can see around you — the rocks, the birds, and the trees — all are comprised of the same atoms. They are just expressed differently — yet intricately interconnected. Whatever you do and whatever decisions you make, if you do it with love as your motive and if your intentions are pure with love you cannot be wrong. So know your intentions and know your truth and embrace it. You were born with a light that others have tried to dim with a mask, let your light shine again and take your mask off. Humanity needs the gift that your true self possess.

Taking the Mask Off: Destroying the Stigmatic Barriers of Mental Health and Addiction Using a Spiritual Solution

“Taking the Mask Off” is the new book by Cortland Pfeffer and Irwin Ozborne. Cortland Pfeffer spent years as a patient in psychiatric hospitals, treatment centers, and jails before becoming a registered nurse and working in the same facilities. Based on his experience, this story is told from both sides of the desk. It offers a unique and valuable perspective into mental health and addiction, revealing the problems with the psychiatric industry while also providing the solution – one that brings together science, spirituality, philosophy, and personal experience.

“Taking the Mask Off: Destroying the Stigmatic Barriers of Mental Health and Addiction Using a Spiritual Solution” is available on Amazon, and Balboa Press.