At the Lost and Found

Posted on August 28, 2022 by Reid Mukai

By Edward Curtin

“Nothing is more real than nothing.”
Samuel Beckett, Malone Dies

Those who are never lost are forever lost. Only those who know they are lost and that life is a shipwreck have a chance to find their way to shore.

The world’s great religions, including Taoism and Existential philosophy, understand that at the heart of human existence is the presence of the not (death, emptiness, void), but this negative reality, this “nothingness” interpenetrates with the positive of being alive so that our knowledge coincides with our ignorance, our lives with our death, and our truth with untruth. This is also common sense.

Everyone is a pilgrim on the way, and because there are no maps, we all get lost. And it is only by getting lost in a deep sense that we can find ourselves and discover the truth about the world.

It is well known that Ernest Hemingway made famous the phrase “the lost generation” when he opened his novel The Sun Also Rises with the epigram “You are all a lost generation,” attributed to Gertrude Stein, who said she heard it from a garage owner who said it about a young auto mechanic in his employ.

It is less well known that Hemingway later wrote “that all generations were lost by something and always had been and always would be …But to hell with her lost-generation talk and all the dirty easy labels.”

He was thinking of how the madness of war with the calls to patriotism and God and country and the never-ending official lies about everything maimed people at very deep levels. His words in A Farewell to Arms have lasted because they are so true in their dismissal of abstract obscenities and their embrace of the concrete:

I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice and the expression in vain …. And I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards of Chicago if nothing were done with the meat except to bury it …. Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates.

No doubt he was also thinking of the existential anxiety of being alive and the fear of death and nothingness that is conveyed in his powerful short story, “A Clean Well-Lighted Place” that appeared in the 1930 volume Winner Take Nothing. He was well acquainted with nothing (the not, nada) and knew that social circumstances only add to it, particularly wars and the nihilistic death wishes of lying political leaders.

Some say nothing has changed for millennia and that every age is similar and people are the same, always complaining about the present and recalling the good old days. There is some truth in this, but the issue of assessing today in all its uniqueness remains paramount. For every age and every generation is different; therein lies its potential and dangers. Each can only be understood within its place and time. We live in the era of high technology that has never before existed. It is unique. And it is uniquely dangerous.

Today is a time of unprecedented official lies about everything, endless wars hot and cold, class wars of the rich against the poor, medical wars of international elites against everyone, etc. – it is a daily electronic digital barrage meant to pound people into the deepest despair. Call it “The Lost World of the Information Superhighway.” These lies have sown a vast sense of bewilderment, as intended. Lostness for so many, including those who don’t know it and take those lies for truth. People who don’t know that there are still places, although they are shrinking, where truth can be found. The problem is, of course, that even when they are told about media sites and writers that operate honestly and outside the propaganda mill, they usually refuse to go there. They prefer to live inside what Jim Garrison, the former New Orleans District Attorney who brought the only trial in the assassination of President Kennedy, correctly termed “the Doll’s House.”

Picking through the bins at the lost and found on the Internet, which is dominated by intelligence services and their Silicon Valley big tech partners, many who feel lost find “things” they think they have lost but which are counterfeit. They cling to them as to false gods, not realizing that they have been placed there by the elite mountebanks and their accomplices, a process similar to a document dump that contains fabricated records. It is an old trick. Often what is really lost is the sense that life makes sense and is meaningful, but this awareness is often replaced with shards of false reassurance meant to distract and far too much information for anyone to comprehend.

What’s up? Check your cell phone and head down the primrose path to unreality.

Just as there are two senses to being lost, one based on the awareness that if we refuse to grasp at straws and proceed through life by faith, the unknown road will bear us up (Thoreau said, “How vigilant we are! determined not to live by faith if we can avoid it…”), and the other being the more socially induced one of incessant propaganda, so too there are two ways of thinking about nothing. The existential sense as described by Hemingway in his famous story mentioned above, and the sense of trivia or superficial preoccupations that distract. C.S. Lewis described the latter sense very well:

The Christians describe the enemy as one ‘without whom Nothing is strong’. And Nothing is very strong: strong enough to steal away a man’s best years not in sweet sins but in a dreary flickering of the mind over it knows not what and knows not why, in the gratification of curiosities so feeble that the man is only half aware of them, in drumming of fingers and kicking of heels, in whistling tunes that he does not like, or in the long dim labyrinth of reveries that have not even lust or ambition to give them relish, but which, once chance association has started them, the creature is too weak and fuddled to shake off.

This is a perfect description of the passivity of scrolling the internet or social media. Much ado about absolutely nothing but distractions. Tranquilized by trivia.

Our current situation has been long in coming. Back in the early 1960s, there was a highly touted intellectual named Marshall McLuhan whose 1964 book, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, was gobbled up by the baby boomers raised on television, whose rebellious members protested the inhumanity of IBM computer technology of that time. Ironically, it was members of this generation who later created the computer revolution and have promoted the digital revolution. They carry cell phones as sidearms to defend themselves from reality.

Newsweek called McLuhan “the oracle of the New Communications.” He was an obscurantic celebrator of the electronic media and retribalized man long before the Internet, cell phones, personal computers, and digital mania. McLuhan’s paeans to technology sounded very profound and liberating with their vaguely Gnostic and Jungian rhetoric, which also fit with the 1960s “vibes.” He called the electronic media our gods whom we must serve, for they in turn would liberate us. He gave life to things while taking it from persons. He wrote:

Electromagnetic technology requires utter human docility and quiescence of meditation such as befits an organism that now wears its brain outside its skull and its nerves outside its hide. Man must serve his electronic technology with the same servo-mechanistic fidelity with which he served his coracle, his canoe, his typography, and all other extensions of his physical organs. But there is this difference, that previous technologies were partial and fragmentary, and the electric is total and inclusive. An external consensus or conscience is now as necessary as private consciousness. [my emphases]

Clearly this was a message of a prescient religious crank: mystical, mythological, technological nonsense perfectly in tune with the dawning new age. Not any coming of the Age of Aquarius, however, but that of the Age of Digital Control and endless wars.

By turning the person inside out and giving life to things, McLuhan was certainly anticipating and promoting the developments of the past forty years. His ideas gave legitimacy to the passivity of the person in the face of the burgeoning mass media consumer culture. They supported the growing commodification of all aspects of life, especially people. By externalizing the person, McLuhan was eliminating the idea of the autonomous self and opening the way for today’s era of consumers, blank screens for the reception of advertising, public relations, and propaganda on a vast scale. In fact, what he wrote of television runs deeper for cell phones and computer screens. “ … with TV,” he wrote, “the viewer is the screen. He is bombarded with light impulses that James Joyce called the ‘Charge of the Light Brigade’ that imbues his ‘soulskin with subconscious inklings.’ “

Inklings of abstract obscenities at war with the lost world of reality.

While many people sense this, they still embrace their killers, feeling that they would be lost without them. They have become appendages of their electronic appendages. The current push to transform all person-to-person life into a digital one run by Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies with its mass surveillance powers is recognized by many but dismissed as a weird conspiracy. This is so far from the truth. A good indicator of this nonchalant attitude toward such developing trends is the vastly increased popularity of on-line shopping. Its innocence conceals the future that is coming.

I recently won a very high-tech looking electric toothbrush at the dentist. When I opened it, I discovered it contained a gadget with a suction cup that could hold a “smart phone” that you could attach to the mirror. The phone could electronically be linked to the toothbrush and it would monitor your brushing as you watched yourself brush. Poor me, I felt so stupid: a man without a smart phone!

While everybody knows that the boat is leaking and the captain lied, to paraphrase Leonard Cohen, such knowledge is abstract. It is a sort-of knowledge, sensed but also denied. Real but unreal. Known but unknown. And that’s how it goes. It is very difficult for many conventional people to admit that the life they have known is disappearing while they dawdle in fantasy land, believing the propaganda of their rulers. To live in the U.S.A. is to live in Neverland where no one ever has to be alone, never grow up, and always be “in touch” through the ether. It is a country of lost children.

You can choose any issue of importance and its official explanation is certain to be untrue, obvious or subtle propaganda. The lies about Ukraine and Russia; Covid-19, lockdowns, and vaccines; China and Taiwan; U.S. forces in Syria and U.S. support for Israeli aggression against Syria and the Palestinians; its support for Saudi Arabia’s ruthless policies and war against Yemen; the economy, central banking, and inflation; the increasing censorship of dissident voices; digital IDs, digital programmable currencies, and social credit systems; the persecution of Julian Assange; the Great Reset; a series of binaries meant to suggest false alternatives, etc. The list is endless. All official lies to support a sinking ship captained by psychopathic liars seemingly intent on a world war that will destroy the world. Melville’s Captain Ahab writ large. Like those traveling on the Titanic, today’s passengers on the flailing American empire’s Good Ship Lollipop are in for a surprise, and it won’t be a sweet trip to a candy shop.

Hemingway was surely right that “Winner Take Nothing.” Yet losers also exit empty-handed. Everybody knows this but goes on surrounding themselves with stuff, lots of things. Hoarders are a popular TV subject because they represent the extreme form of this madcap method of trying to secure oneself from loss. It is a form of mental and spiritual despair that could only exist in advanced capitalist consumer society. Too many possessions and too much information. Cluttered minds, cluttered abodes. There is a reason why the world’s poor are called the dispossessed. One could say hoarders are the possessed, and it is a form of demonic possession.

Recently I was called upon to help a hospitalized elderly relative by checking on her house. The house is filled from attic to basement, in every nook and cranny, with collected things that serve no life purpose but were kept to provide a security blanket that was really a strangulation cord. I will spare you the details, except to say that this relative is an intelligent woman, as was her deceased husband, and yet they surrounded themselves with so much “stuff,” never threw things out, kept papers from 70 years ago, old keys and coins, empty jewelry boxes by the score, etc. An overwhelming scene to behold. And why did they do this? Because they thought they were protecting themselves against loss, against nothing, nada.

As T. S. Eliot wrote in The Wasteland: “These fragments I have shored against my ruins.” But there is nothing that will protect against the loss Eliot was referring to – the social, psychological, and spiritual fragmentation of Europe as a result of World War I. A wasteland created by politicians. Like today.

We too are now living in a wasteland, and the only way to find our way forward is to acknowledge that we are lost and to jettison the false security of believing the vast tapestry of lies promulgated by the captains of the American-led Titanic.

I often think of the words of the poet Rilke as good advice, a step in the right direction where there is a lost and found worth visiting and insights await us. While primarily writing about the artist who time and again is that someone who emerges from the crowd and whose “winged heart everywhere beats against the walls of their time,” I think his words apply to every person, including journalists. To plumb the depths of our sordid current world demands aesthetic, political, and spiritual resistance rooted in the open sociological imagination, a willingness to go wherever the facts and intuition leads us. Rilke said:

Not any self-control or self-limitation for the sake of specific ends, but rather a carefree letting go of oneself; not caution, but rather a wise blindness; not working to acquire silent, slowly increasing possessions, but rather a continuous squandering of all perishable values. This way of being has something naïve and instinctive about it, and resembles that period of the unconscious best characterized by a joyous confidence, namely the period of childhood …. [the child] has no anxiety about losing things …. And whatever he has once been lit up in love remains as an image, never more to be lost, and the image is possession; that is why children are so rich.

For a country of lost children, this is a good place to start.

We’ve Been Lied To Our Whole Lives About Everything That Matters

Posted on August 21, 2022 by Reid Mukai

By Caitlin Johnstone

Source: CaitlinJohnstone.com

Stories about protagonists who’ve been misguided their whole lives about something very important have been emerging in our culture for generations, and they continue to delight audiences in the box office to this day.

The pauper was really a prince. Luke was Darth Vader’s son. Keanu Reeves had been living in a computer simulation. Bruce Willis was really a ghost. Jim Carrey’s whole world was the set of a TV show, and everyone in his life had been lying to him since his infancy.

This theme repeats so often because it strongly resonates with people. And it strongly resonates with people because it’s exactly what is happening.

From our earliest moments we are trained to fit in with a society that was designed from the ground up by the powerful in the service of the powerful. As soon as we are old enough to get curious about the world and how it works our heads are filled with lies about such matters, by our education systems, by the media we consume, by our parents who were indoctrinated in the same way, and by the very culture we find ourselves immersed in from day one.

These stories about a character who’s been deceived about life resonate so strongly with us because on some level we all suspect it might be true of our own lives as well. They whisper to something hidden and sacred within us that has always sensed that there’s something not quite right with the way we are perceiving things.

We’ve spent our whole lives marinating in lies which serve the powerful. We’re deceived into believing that we live in a democracy whose government acts in accordance with the will of the voting public. We’re deceived into believing our political systems are driven by two warring ideological factions whose divisions are naturally occurring phenomena in our society instead of the product of deliberate social engineering. We’re deceived into believing our government is basically good, and that it stands in opposition to foreign governments who are pure evil. We’re deceived into believing the way things are is the only way they could possibly be.

We’re deceived into believing false things about the ways we gather information and form our understanding of the world. We’re deceived into believing the news media tell us the truth about what’s going on. We’re deceived into believing that everything we hear from our side of the political partisan divide is true and trustworthy. We’re deceived into believing the partisan filters which have been placed over our perception of national and world events by indoctrination are entirely reliable instruments for interpreting information and drawing conclusions.

We’re deceived into believing false things about ourselves. We’re deceived into believing that we are successful if we can become dominant capitalists and wealthy ladder climbers, and that we are failures if we don’t turn the gears of industry and climb over others to get ahead. We’re deceived into believing that we are good if we uphold the made-up, power-serving rules of law, of culture and of religion, and that we are bad if we transgress them. We are deceived into believing that we need to keep accomplishing, achieving and obtaining, that we need to keep earning money and approval, so that we might one day feel adequate at some imaginary point in a future which never arrives.

If we really commit to uprooting the untruth that’s been planted in us, we can even discover that we’ve been deceiving ourselves about the way we experience reality. That the perception of oneself as a finite character who is separate from the world is based on false assumptions about the way experience is happening, unhelpful mental habits born of incorrect premises, and overlooked aspects of our own consciousness. That we’ve been making ourselves miserable with false beliefs about who and what we are.

This civilization is the set of the Truman Show, and we are all Truman.

But because we are all Truman, we can only walk off the set if we walk off together. There is no option to leave as an individual, because even if you know it’s all lies, you’re still stuck in a world full of humans whose behavior is driven by lies.

Awakening to reality as an individual can for this reason sometimes be more uncomfortable than remaining asleep in the dream, because you’re like Truman after he realizes it’s all a sham, but before he escapes. At times you’re just stuck there, freaking out at the actor who’s playing your mother while she tries in vain to cut to a commercial break. It can be distressing for you, and it can be distressing for the people around you who aren’t yet on the same page.

The only way we’re getting off the set of the Truman Show is if we can all succeed in waking each other up from the lies which built it. Until then we’ll be stuck in a world of poverty, war, exploitation, degradation, ecocide, and suffering. It’s not until enough of us have unplugged our minds from the matrix of lies that we’ll be able to use our strength of numbers to force real change.

Only then will we be able to escape.

Only then will we be able to walk off the set.

Only then will we be able to turn to the audience and say, “In case I don’t see ya: good afternoon, good evening, and good night!”

And then turn around, and walk out the door, and begin our adventure into reality.

Our Challenge Is To Transcend Our Evolutionary Ape Heritage

Posted on August 14, 2022 by Reid Mukai

By Caitlin Johnstone

Source: CaitlinJohnstone.com

Did you know chimpanzees hunt smaller primates for food?

They do. They’re actually very skillful hunters due to their size, their strength, and especially their intelligence. They coordinate their attacks, working together to cut off the escape routes of their prey to greatly increase their success rate. Scientists have even frequently observed them using crude spears to kill a small primate species called the lesser bush baby for their meat.

One of the many interesting things about this behavior in our primate cousins is that they are so good at hunting they can become victims of their own success, wiping out entire populations of prey in their area. Red colobus monkeys have been hunted to the brink of local extinction in Uganda by chimpanzees hungry for a quick protein fix, solely because they’ve been gobbling up those delicious little guys faster than they can reproduce.

Sound familiar?

The tendency of homo sapiens to overburden our ecosystem with our consumption is not unique to us, and is not new. In fact, it looks like we’ve been on this trajectory toward ecocide since our ancient evolutionary ancestors began evolving extra brain matter.

And it is possible to just stop there and conclude that we are no different from our chimp relatives in this sense. That we will simply keep overhunting the red colobus monkey until there are none left, that we will keep depleting and destroying our biosphere until it can no longer sustain life. That the human brain differs from the chimpanzee’s only in intelligence, not in wisdom. That we are in essence no different from the cyanobacteria at the dawn of the Proterozoic Era, a new species showing up on the scene and causing a mass extinction event in an ecosystem overburdened by their rapid flourishing.

You do also however have the option of openness to the possibility that maybe, just maybe, our species is destined for greater things. That maybe, just maybe, we have within us the capacity to transcend the mindless patterning of our evolutionary ancestors and move into a mindful relationship with this planet and its life forms. That maybe, just maybe, this whole human adventure doesn’t need to end in disaster after all.

From what I can tell, the only people who find this idea outlandish are those who have never experienced a great unpatterning of their own. Who have never healed the wounds of their past and transcended the unwholesome mental habits which were given to them by their conditioning. To anyone who has experienced a dramatic transformation from dysfunction into health, it’s obvious that any human could potentially go through such transformations as well. Or even all humans.

It is possible that our descendents will look back on humanity’s existence on this planet from prehistoric times up until this crucial present moment as a kind of bridge between animal life and a new terrestrial expression that isn’t driven by the unconscious conditioning patterns that have driven the movements of every species on this planet from the very first single-celled organisms onward. That what we’re experiencing right now at this critical juncture is what it looks like before the emergence of the Earth’s first conscious species.

An unconscious human is one driven compulsively by deep-seated mental habits they don’t really see and can’t do much to control, so they’ll often find themselves engaged in unwholesome behavior patterns like addiction, unkindness, greed and neurosis, and making the same mistakes over and over for reasons they don’t quite understand.

A conscious human is one who doesn’t have unseen conditioning pulling the strings from behind the scenes in their subconscious mind, because they have done their work and drawn their inner demons into the light of consciousness where they can be healed. They are therefore able to move through life deliberately and in the interest of what’s best, rather than compulsively and in a way that spreads trauma to others.

A conscious humanity would mean that this way of functioning blossoms throughout the entire species.

Doesn’t it kind of look like that might be what’s happening? Like all the chaos and confusion of these strange times could simply be the birth pangs of a species whose relationship with consciousness is about to take a dramatic pivot? The increasingly shrill mass media narratives rapidly approaching white noise saturation? The increasingly widespread awareness that our society’s rules are made up and we can change them whenever we want? The mysterious increase in incidents of spiritual awakening as reported by teachers of enlightenment? Just how goddamn weird everything’s been getting these last few years?

I think it’s possible. I think it’s possible we are moving as a species toward an adaptation that will enable us to survive in a situation which is very different from the one we first emerged in, as every species eventually does if it doesn’t go extinct. If this is indeed what is happening, it stands to reason that it will be an adaptation that prevents us from wiping ourselves out via ecocide or nuclear war, and that a collective movement into consciousness is what that adaptation will look like.

A conscious species would be able to work in cooperation with its ecosystem, rather than compulsively consuming it due to primitive impulses to obtain and dominate and egoic impulses to be rich and have more. A conscious species would be able to convert civilization from competition-based models into collaboration-based models, where rather than trying to climb over each other to get ahead we all work together to make sure everyone has what they need to live. A conscious species would no longer see the sense in dividing itself up into separate competing nation-states which brandish armageddon weapons at each other out of fear and greed.

The more I learn about humanity, and the more I learn about myself, the more possible such a world appears to be. Sure the world’s a chaotic and distressing mess right now, but so is childbirth. However bad things get for us, as long as we’re still alive our problems are nothing that can’t be fixed with a collective movement into consciousness.

Anyway. That’s my pet theory right now. And the cool thing about my theory is that if you like it too, you don’t have to wait for it to come true. You can start becoming more conscious on your own right now and leading the charge for the rest of us. Investigate your true nature, heal your wounds, be responsible with your actions, and begin working to coax all your endarkened bits into the light.

And then hopefully the rest will follow. If they don’t, worst-case scenario is you wind up a lot more happy and functional than you otherwise would have been, because you brought so much more consciousness to your inner processes and your habits of perception and cognition.

This is where the real adventure is at, in my opinion. This is where the rubber meets the road.

I will meet you there.

THE HIDDEN FORCES OF LIFE

Posted on July 31, 2022 by Reid Mukai

By Kingsley L. Dennis

Source: Waking Times

“For my consciousness the whole life upon earth, including the human life and all its mentality, is a mass of vibrations, mostly vibrations of falsehood, ignorance and disorder, in which are more and more at work vibrations of Truth and Harmony coming from the higher regions and pushing their way through the resistance.” ~The Mother
“Sleep is very comfortable, but waking is very bitter.” ~G.I. Gurdjieff

It is a natural, yet incorrect, assumption to accept physical events at face value. Influences come to us upon many varied levels, and the visible, physical carrier or medium is the most superficial form. All of life is a play of forces; we may call these ‘universal forces’ for they act both within and beyond the physical. We have become accustomed to giving personal forms to many of these forces, and we believe that we are independent and free from their influence. The Greek-Armenian mystic G.I. Gurdjieff used to say that humankind lives under 48 laws, of which they are mostly unaware or ignorant of. This is a very precise number, and it is not the numbers – the quantity – or the specifics that I wish to focus on here, but the quality. It may be necessary to have a ‘feeling’ for the forces of influence that populate our lives in the physical domain.

Most people, most of the time, are not aware of the forces acting upon them; and this is a natural condition. We all live our lives within a sea of vibrations – thoughts, suggestions, influences, etc – and we are barely aware of which ones belong to us and which we take to be our own. Let us take a common example as an illustration: information. When a person receives information, the general response is to consider the likelihood of that information in relation to their belief sets and range of accumulated opinions. The person then makes a response regarding whether the information is ‘true’ or ‘false.’ Yet this is a limited two-dimensional way to regard the relationship of the communication.

We have to also consider the background to the source of the information: what is the source; do they have an agenda; are they relaying the information from another source; what is the motivation; what are the expected outcomes? And more. We may also need to ask ourselves whether the medium of transmission is reliable or corrupted. If a technological medium is used, are there subtle subliminal messages and signalling within the transmission? Are certain frequencies being used to manipulate the hearer? Is the receiver being discreetly nudged into making desired outcomes? If this is a face-to-face communication, we may also ask whether the speaker is using specific techniques of language coercion, such as neuro-linguistic programming? These are just a very few of the potential influences that could be used in the physical communication of information. And yet, these are still those forces of influence that are limited to the physical range. It is good to be mindful that non-physical forces compete for power the same as familiar physical forces do. What is hidden to us in everyday life are the motivations behind the impulses that surface within the physical.

The human life experience conditions us to view and respond to outward aspects whilst remaining unaware of those things acting behind the veil – or behind the scenes. This disjuncture between origin and target is more than a gap; it is a gulf. As the Indian philosopher Sri Aurobindo remarked in relation to the hidden forces of life, ‘the only way out is through the descent of a consciousness which is not the puppet of these forces but is greater than they are and can compel them either to change or disappear.’[1] Aurobindo is saying here that the ‘way out’ is not to attempt to fight or meet these forces head on but to align with a degree of consciousness that is greater, or vibrationally beyond, the level of those forces. Rather than struggle with them, we are to resonate to a different vibrational alignment that takes us out of their spectrum of influence.

Within the general scheme of things, most people are treated as ignorant instruments; they are moved around like puppets, suspecting nothing. They live predictable lives; that is, lives that can be predicted as they move within known patterns. Often, these patterns are what have been programmed into the collective mass society. As soon as a person shifts to an inner-directed life, they begin to move away from predictability. That is, they move ‘off-pattern,’ and this is not well-liked by those of the governing forces.

The spirit-consciousness can override the lower forces, which is why the earthly life is being increasingly pulled into a physical-material direction – a pathway to both outer as well as inner automation. Stability is based on a repetition of vibrations and frequencies that our being becomes accustomed to. A person gets entrained through vibrational alignment into a mode of stability. The question we should be asking ourselves is: what type of frequencies are we aligning with? A great deal of stability within the physical realm is of a ‘lower order’ type, based on more limited patterns. Some may wonder, what is all this talk about vibrations – isn’t that new age nonsense? It all depends on how such information is presented and conveyed. A truth can easily be made into a mockery if handled incorrectly. The Serbian inventor Nikola Tesla famously said: ‘If you want to find the secrets of the universe, think in terms of energy, frequency and vibration.’ Again, going back to G.I. Gurdjieff, who stated:

It is necessary to regard the universe as consisting of vibrations. These vibrations proceed in all kinds, aspects, and densities of the matter which constitutes the universe, from the finest to the coarsest…In this instance the view of ancient knowledge is opposed to that of contemporary science, because at the base of the understanding of vibrations ancient knowledge places the principle of the discontinuity of vibrations. The principle of the discontinuity of vibrations means the definite and necessary characteristic of all vibrations in nature, whether ascending or descending, to develop not uniformly but with periodical accelerations and retardations.[2]

It is interesting here that Gurdjieff speaks about the ‘discontinuity of vibrations’ that develop through periodical accelerations (increases) and retardations (delays). There is not a uniformity in the influence of vibrations. The ‘energetic background’ of life, so to speak, moves through these periodic shifts. This can be seen as a macro influence upon human life. In such times, we may feel irritable, restless, frustrated, or more. Philosopher J.G. Bennett referred to this when he wrote:

In a more subtle and pervasive manner, great regions of the earth’s surface, and sometimes even the whole of the earth, become subject to a state of tension that produces in people a strong sense of dissatisfaction with their conditions of life. They become irritable or aggressive, apprehensive, nervous and highly suggestible.[3]

These impersonal forces that influence the world, and our states of being, we know only by the results they cause. We perceive only a small degree through the lens of visible events and consequences. There are forces unknown to us that are responsible for shaping our physical, psychic, and emotional environment. The human being lives ‘constantly in the midst of a whirl of unseen mind-forces and life-forces of which we know nothing, we are not even aware of their existence.’[4]

There are currently forces acting upon human consciousness and producing a great deal of pressure. We are in need of an outlet for this pressure, before it implodes/explodes through our societies in uncomfortable and disagreeable ways. There is now a contestation of forces that are so visible that they can no longer be denied by the aware (or awake) individual. At the same time, a great evolutionary (developmental) force is pushing into the earthly domain, and there is immense resistance to this. This makes the struggle – the contestation of forces – more acute, more violent, and more definitive. Yet this very visibility of the counterforces upon the physical world stage is an important sign for us – it displays their state of desperation to come out of the shadows in this way. This opens up an important path of realization for the rest of us – and possibilities too. Even if individual transformation is upon a small scale, there is the opportunity now for a general uplifting within collective humanity. And it is this general uplifting that will usher in the potentials and conditions for a new world to emerge. Again, as Bennett says,

If a new world is to come, we must first create it in ourselves. You may ask how the work of a few people can change the world. It has always been so. Ideas are powerful, not organizations. Nothing can be done by outward force; everything can be done by inner strength.[5]

We have arrived at an exceptional hour, a privileged time for the expansion of human awareness and perception, if only we can bypass those forces of hindrance. What we need now is inner certitude and to exercise discernment – especially when open to the forces of mass vibration.

The Forces of Mass Vibration

The mass exhibits a different resonance than the individual. When in a group, or crowd, an individual invariably takes on the features, thoughts, and moods of others. In this way, the individual can be inwardly polluted and corrupted by forces they are not aware of. It is important to be conscious of who we choose to be with, mix with, for each person is a point of reception/transmission, and we vibrationally align (resonate) with those we are physically close to. That is why the mob can be psychologically, and behaviourally, dangerous. And this is also why we are advised to choose our friends carefully; a lot can be said about a person according to their friends and associates. It would do us well to remember that ‘one catches the constant contagion of all desires, all the lower movements, all the small obscure reactions, all the unwanted vibrations which come to us from those around us.’[6] Life is a continual interplay of forces, a continuous alchemy in which a person is constantly absorbing various kinds of vibration that may contain all types of possible dissonance. In this, the task of the conscious and aware person is to transmute these dissonant forces so that their action and influence is disabled.

We can do this by grounding the vibration. Let us say that something, an event, a person, or a comment, has caused us frustration. We refrain from responding to it by taking an inner pause, an internal step back, and we observe the discomfort. This ‘item’ is treated as an observable object with a life of its own – it is an energy form. And it needs to be allowed to dissipate rather than find an energy source to latch onto (i.e., oneself). In this, the energy form (the ‘item’) needs to be grounded within neutral physicality – just as electricity or lightening needs to be grounded or ‘earthed.’ Similarly, we earth the dissonant energy by visualizing its transference into the ground beneath us (it doesn’t matter if you are sitting or standing). In this way, the dissonant energy vibration is transmuted. This action is the work of perceptive consciousness and does not have to be regarded as something ‘spiritual.’ On the contrary, it is part of the task of the human being during its sojourn through physical life to transmute energies. It is through the presence of conscious individuals that, according to the Mother (Sri Aurobindo’s spiritual co-worker), a ‘minimum of general harmony’ can be accomplished:

That presence, that spiritual light – which could almost be called a spiritual consciousness – is within each being and all things, and because of it, in spite of all discordance, all passion, all violence, there is a minimum of general harmony which allows Nature’s work to be accomplished.[7]

It is through such Work as this that we become aware of the intervention of forces, impulses, and influences, which are non-visible to our ordinary states of consciousness, and which seek to affect physical life circumstances.

The forces of mass vibrational dissonance are exceptionally intense in these current times. It can be said that humanity has reached a particular state of general tension. Such ‘forces of hindrance’ would delight in creating divisions by dividing friendships and social alliances. Some divisions, however, are set to occur, for these are the breakdowns in the dysfunctional external systems that perpetuate the fractures in our societies. These are such systems as politics, economy, and social trust. We can expect some cracks to appear in these systems for ‘Nature’s Work’ to operate. Yet we cannot allow these fractures to disable the human spirit – or to numb the forces of spirit-consciousness that act through us.

As stated by the Mother in the opening citation to this essay, life is mostly awash with vibrations of disorder and falsehood, in which ‘vibrations of Truth and Harmony are coming from the higher regions and pushing their way through the resistance.’ We are tasked, in these times, to assist these ‘vibrations of Truth and Harmony’ and to help them to push their way through the resistance. And in this, we are aligning with the continuation of the alchemical work by assisting in the transmutation of the dissonance (the lead) into constructive forces (the gold). And by doing this we shall also be assisting in the alchemical transmutation of the great treasure of the philosopher’s stone – ourselves.

About the Author

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

References:

[1] Hidden Forces of Life: Selections from the Works of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother (Lotus Press, 1999), p6

[2] P. D. Ouspensky, In Search of the Miraculous: Fragments of an Unknown Teaching (New York: Harcourt Brace and World, 1949), 122-23

[3] Bennett, J.G. 1989. Is There “Life” on Earth? – An Introduction to Gurdjieff. Santa Fe, NM: Bennett Books, p31

[4] Hidden Forces of Life: Selections from the Works of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother (Lotus Press, 1999), p81

[5] Bennett, J.G. 1989. Is There “Life” on Earth? – An Introduction to Gurdjieff. Santa Fe, NM: Bennett Books, p32

[6] Hidden Forces of Life: Selections from the Works of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother (Lotus Press, 1999), p185

[7] Hidden Forces of Life: Selections from the Works of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother (Lotus Press, 1999), p167

True Leadership at a Time of Crisis

Posted on July 24, 2022 by Reid Mukai

By Julian Rose

Source: Global Research

Minds that work three dimensionally cannot solve the problems of the world. They can only make them worse.

Those who see themselves as being ‘in charge’ of world events are not able to understand the actual nature of the problems they are supposed to deal with, so obviously they can’t change them for the better.

For example, those trained in banking have a two dimensional thinking process. They can see only ledgers, numbers and material gain.

Those heading leading corporations see only what their corporations can profit from. How to make them ever more profitable. Those who go into politics accept the three dimensional prison that politics is. Anyone thinking outside this box won’t last long in politics. The list goes on – interminably.

But suffice it to say that the great majority of ‘leaders’ of this world come from the above categories. Plus a smattering of billionaires, royals and a handful or two of psychopaths and megalomaniacs.

None of these, quite obviously, come anywhere near fulfilling the need for wisdom or the pursuit of truth and justice. Such values don’t even enter the picture. They are seen as the preserve of those lost in a world of illusion.

So long as this status quo prevails, no change for the better can happen – on the global stage. That place where all attention is focussed, therefore from which all actions emanate. Two/three dimensional actions bereft of insight, wisdom, truth or courage.

Those who believe and follow the edicts of these incapacitated directors of society, live in a prison of their own construction. It’s a dark place of delusional slavery to whatever they hear on ‘The News’. The State uses them to keep its two/three dimensional plans on-track.

In the world we want to become manifest, none of the two/three dimensional thinkers has any part. As we know, if we care to stop and reflect on it, only those with genuine breadth of vision, qualities of humane leadership and a deep devotion to the manifestation of truth, can fulfil the necessary qualities to direct our planet in the way – deep down – we all want and long for.

It’s a surprisingly simple message I am articulating: joining together in refusing to cooperate with those who we know have no qualities capable of improving the health and welfare of humanity and of our planetary ecology – is the only strategy which can end their sterile destructive reign.

We know that only those capable of a deep grasp of life’s challenges and how to set-about confronting them, can put us on the road we all want to be on. Make us feel moved to support the path of liberation from our slave driving oppressors – and from our own weakness – that leads over and over again into submission to their toxic demands.

The path to victory demands dedication. Dedication to listening to our hearts, not our minds. Only to our minds when they are first informed by our hearts and by a sound sense of morality.

We are becoming aware that this is the channel through which victory will be achieved. The only channel. It is the opposite dimension from the destroyers we are up against. They fear it, because they don’t understand it. It is outside their two/three dimensional prison. Yet it is our greatest asset; our wealth as true sentient humans. Our power as spiritual warriors.

It is time to ditch all distractions from this path. Only that which supports our great awakening must be put at the top of our ‘must do’ list from now on. And the further items down that list must all be in support of this great affirmation, this passion for truth.

There is nothing else ‘to do’.

If we fail to listen and act on the voice of our deepest hearts and intuitions, we can never be free. That message, determinedly put into practice in the outside world, will unlock the gates of all barricades erected to disempower us – and will set us free.

There is no other task.

How to Transform Lambs into Lions

Posted on July 17, 2022 by Reid Mukai

By Gary Z McGee

Source: The New Agora

“Rise and rise again, until lambs become lions.”

Step 1.) Realize that imagination is superior to reason:

“Necessary illusions enable us to live.” ~Ingmar Bergman

Before transformation, before self-empowerment, even before courage, there must be imagination. If you cannot even think outside your tiny lamb’s box, how will you ever be able to transform yourself into a lion powerful enough to trample it?

Thus, imagination is foremost. It is even more important than reason. Because reason is telling you that you’re just a little lamb stuck in a little lamb world with mighty wolf laws keeping you in check, docile, and immure. So, you will have to sacrifice reason to imagination in order to gain the wherewithal to challenge the system. Most of which is religious smoke and mirrors, a political song and dance, and merely a cultural cartoon playing itself out in your brain.

You must be able to transcend the box that has you thinking like a lamb before you can gain the courage to crush it. Mind must come before matter in this matter. It’s a delicate epistemological balancing act, a precarious existential highwire show, an intellectually Herculean task requiring Promethean audacity. And it is one that you will probably fail at.

This is because cognitive dissonance itself will be your greatest enemy. Which means you will be your greatest enemy. Therefore, the most important part of realizing that imagination is superior to reason is understanding the importance of staying ahead of the curve of your own human conditioning. In short: it means getting out of—and then staying out of—your own way.

This will require putting your Ego on a leash. Which will require resurrecting the only thing that can keep it on a leash: your Soul.

Step 2.) Take a leap of courage out of faith:

“It is the certainty that they possess the truth that makes men cruel.” ~Anatole France

After you’ve managed to think outside your tiny lamb’s box through the power of imagination, it’s time to crawl out of it. But how do you do that? The simple answer is courage. In particular: a leap of courage. In more particular: a leap of courage out of faith (rigid certainty) and into fortitude (flexible curiosity).

But first, we need some context. What exactly is it that’s buttressing your lamb’s faith? What is it in particular that’s propping up your lamb’s rigid certainty? What is it precisely that is keeping you conditioned, indoctrinated, and/or brainwashed into believing a certain way?

Put simply: it’s the pettiness of your ego. Put a bit more complexly: it’s the culturally conditioned aspect of yourself projected onto the world. Put concisely: It’s the socially constructed part of you that you have subconsciously used as an identity to engage with reality.

But what happens when—having used the power of imagination over reason—you finally realize that this culturally conditioned aspect of you is limiting you and keeping you inside the box? What happens when you finally see how it is the culturally constructed ego that is keeping you meek, weak, and courage-less in your lamb-hood? What happens when you finally understand what’s preventing you from becoming a lion?

Now enter Ego Death. Most people falsely assume that Ego Death means killing off the ego. This is not what it means. Ego Death means annihilation. The ego is annihilated in the “cocoon” of “death” in order to emerge as the “butterfly” of the soul. Ego Death is more of a rebirth than it is a destruction.

The metaphor of the cocoon is trite but important. The invulnerable ego must die in order for the vulnerable soul to be born. Certainty must die for curiosity to be born. Attachment must die for detachment to be born. Rigidity must die for flexibility to be born.

Taking a leap of courage out of your tiny lamb’s box (faith) must take place in order to cure the disease of certainty with the medicine of curiosity. Without curiosity there is no openness to new knowledge, there is no flexibility of thought, there is no plasticity of spirit. Without curiosity there is no way you will be able to integrate your shadow. Which is the next vital step in how to transform a lamb into a lion.

3.) Integrate the shadow:

“My devil had long been caged; he came out roaring.” ~Dr. Jekyll

With your curiosity in front of you and your certainty behind you, you now have the existential plasticity to face the Underdark of Yourself. Your certainty is shattered glass behind you as you walk “barefoot” into yourself. Your curiosity is a blazing light inside you, shining into the darkness, making the darkest parts of yourself light up into glorious conscious awareness.

Having been hidden, hushed, and repressed for so long, the shadows come alive. They dance with fierce revivification. They laugh with thirsty desire. They sing with jovial howls. They are finally seen, felt, heard. And they are hungry. Their appetite slams together inside you, a soul-quaking shockwave, shaking you to the core. They join forces to become the shadow aspect, the inner beast reborn, primal darkness incarnate.

It rises up inside you, an alien demon taking over, seemingly separate at first, but finally coalescent. In the end, you realize that it is more you than your previous self could have ever hoped to be. More real. More primal. More vital to becoming the best version of yourself than anything that could have come before. It transforms your delicate sheepishness into fierce lionheartedness.

You feel more alive than ever. A sacred alignment manifests. The pieces of your puzzled self-paradoxically click together. You feel whole, actualized, aware. Most of all, you feel hungry, thirsty, ravenous, voracious. Your lion appetite swallows your tiny sheep stomach whole. It’s finally time to eat—and eat well.

4.) Grow your teeth; sharpen your claws:

“We should go to heaven for form and to hell for energy and marry the two.” ~William Blake

Now that your shadow has been aligned with your light, it’s time to transform fear into fuel for the fire to come. It’s time to grow those teeth and sharpen those claws. It’s time for fierceness over pettiness, absolute vulnerability over resolute invulnerability, and courage over cowardice. In short: it’s time to start living a courage-based lifestyle rather than a fear-based one.

You do this by first honoring what came before. Honor the death of your Ego and its painful transformation into Soul. Honor the death of your naivete and its painful transformation into shadow alignment. Honor the death of your sheepishness and its painful transformation into lionheartedness.

Second, you must transform your roots into a crown. You must force your mortal coil into a vital halo. You must dig deep into the humus of your humanity and strike the primal lodestone. From the spark will come an energy that will sharpen your teeth, claws, and soul. It will propel you into animal greatness. It will teach you honor, humility, and humor. But it will also teach you fierceness, courage, and audaciousness.

It’s finally time to crush that outdated sheep’s box with your mighty lion’s paw.

5.) Draw a line in the sand; challenge all comers:

“The increasing dependence on the State is anything but a healthy symptom, it means that the whole nation is in a fair way to becoming a herd of sheep, constantly relying on a shepherd to drive them into good pastures. The shepherd’s staff soon becomes a rod of iron, and the shepherds turn into wolves.” ~Carl Jung

How does a lamb transform fear into courage and become the brave lion who is capable of keeping wolves in check? The lamb must first put itself in check by questioning why it believes what it believes about the way the world works.

The lamb must ask itself: Are my beliefs culturally conditioned by a sick society? Have I been brainwashed into believing a certain way by a religious or political party? Do I just blindly obey out of fear of losing my comfort, safety and security? And, most importantly of all, once I realize I’ve been mistaken, will I cease being mistaken or will I cease being honest?

It’s a tricky tightrope between fear and courage. The way toward freedom is not for the faint of heart. Which is probably why there are so few lions among men.

A lamb that can manage to question its fear-based lifestyle—a lifestyle built upon blind obedience, addiction to comfort, and reliance on wolves to keep them “safe”—is a lamb that has the potential to become a courageous lion.

If a lamb can manage to become a courageous lion, then the next step is to reveal its courage to the world. This requires a complex recipe of trust, vulnerability, adaptability, and risk-taking.

Lions realize that life is a risk. They embrace that risk with honor and courage. Where sheep fear making waves, lions relish in it. For they realize that sometimes you must rock the boat to keep it afloat.

Life is too short to be a bystander. Lions take a stand. They draw a line in the sand. They bare their teeth. They show their claws. They crush ultimatums through the power of their own moral autonomy. They ruthlessly reveal why the buck must stop here.

Lions are all too willing to cause trouble when the culture itself is troubled. They must. Trouble be damned! When society fails to regulate itself, the lionhearted must regulate society. This has always been the task of lions.

UNCONSCIOUS BECOMING CONSCIOUS: UNDERSTANDING THE NATURE OF NEGATIVE FORCES

Posted on July 10, 2022 by Reid Mukai

By Kingsley L. Dennis

Source: Waking Times

‘What people of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch must learn to recognise is the fully conscious struggle against the evil rising up in the evolution of humanity.’ ~Rudolf Steiner, 18 November 1917

According to Austrian metaphysician Rudolf Steiner, the task of humanity in this epoch is to comprehend the relation of good and evil; especially, the human choice between good and evil, and the challenge of evil to make humanity more aware of spirit-consciousness. In our present age, we are to experience the negative counterforces in order to move through to greater development. Steiner stated that the ‘forces of evil’ exist in the world so that humanity might, at the appropriate time, break through into a ‘life of the spirit.’[1]

The presence of the counterforces gives humanity an opportunity to gain insight into the human condition, as well as the life conditions in this earthly domain. By having some understanding of the intention of opposing forces, a person is better prepared for continuing their own journey. That is, we each can learn from our encounters with negating forces; we can take these encounters as an opportunity to connect more strongly with our own force of will. In the words of philosopher Sergei O. Prokofieff:

In addition to working intensely on oneself, especially with regard to eradicating falsehood of any kind and all aspects of fear, together with all overt and secret inclinations towards materialism – something different is required, namely, a working together of human beings in the social realm that is based on spiritual principles.[2]

In advocating the coming together of spiritually minded people, it is not our responsibility to be concerned with those who Steiner called the ‘soulless’ ones. Rather than being pulled into the influence of such people (with their lower vibrational energies), it is more beneficial for a person to transform their immediate environment into a more harmonious energy. Another way of saying this is that the presence of negativity is to be transmuted into that which is not negative or counterproductive. This is akin to an alchemical procedure.

The 21^st century is a transformatory epoch, where we shall have to face our shadows and deal with them. Without this acknowledgement, and cleansing, we will be dominated by the forces of stagnation. Later, when this catharsis or ‘cleansing’ has been achieved, we may collectively move into a stage of transmutation where the negative is transmuted into constructive forces. The spirit of our times, therefore, is one of transmutation and transformation. And until counterforces are transmuted, there is no real or lasting transformation. This ‘transmutation of the negative/shadow’ is the leitmotif of our epoch, and it cannot be done without passing through ‘the valley of the shadow of death;’[3] experiencing and, above all, understanding both the forces of negation and those of development. As author Terry Broadman writes:

In saying that, we immediately meet a paradox, because we need to recognise that without the resistance posed to our development by these counterforces, there would be no human freedom possible and therefore, ultimately no possibility for love either. No great drama, especially the great drama of the story of mankind, is possible without the challenge from forces of darkness within us.[4]

By casting light upon those forces that oppose human freedom, we may also see that, somewhat paradoxically, it is these same forces that make freedom possible. And yet, we need to gain this realization so we can know what we are up against.

Entropic counterforces attempt to control and manage human thinking and cultural narratives through arid materialism – the forces of limitation, indifference, rational logic, and consumption, for example. Such arid forces seek to constrain and contain human thinking by limiting it to the physical domain. That is, by negation and denial of the metaphysical background to life; a worldview that recognises no spirit-consciousness or genuine inspiration from beyond the material realm. It can be said that such counter-evolutionary forces wish to ensure that humanity remains at the level of the ‘lower ego;’ that is, our base level ‘everyday’ selves, ruled by passions, possessions, promises, and pseudo-truths. We have already seen how modern life is rife with the self-centred materialist concerned only for their physical pleasures and gains.

This is the false-polished underbelly of a capitalist-fed globalist agenda. This is the sphere where the tightly controlled culture industry provides ultimate dissonance through glamour-distraction. Cacophonous music, jarring rhythms, and discordant lyrics appeal to the basest impulses within the tranced modern listener. It is little wonder then that there is resistance to those people who wish to develop their inner senses and modes of perception. The everyday environment is not conducive to the development of spirit-consciousness. And yet, it is the role of awakened individuals to assist the unconscious in becoming conscious.

Entropic forces can be regarded as forces of hindrance. For various reasons, they have not fulfilled their developmental potentials; they have faltered in their path, and thus ‘fallen by the wayside.’ And as wayside creatures, they hinder and disrupt all other wanderers and walkers upon the path. It can be said that they belong to our realm but are no longer upon our developmental path. Such counterforces are not creative; that is, they are not a creative principle in the universe, and so they need to make use of – or usurp – existing impulses to be able to act in the physical world. Such forces operate by distorting, and demonising, other processes and/or vessels in order to function.

We need to be aware of those beliefs, idealisms, organizations, groupings, etc, that show a deliberate antipathy and hostility towards aspects of spirit-consciousness and the metaphysical. These may be collective, and/or concealed, forces aiming to divert humanity’s path of growth. The materialistic route is a caricature of what now needs to be the human being’s present state. Total materialization, including the digital-virtual domains (such as the Metaverse) represent a paralysis of growth in spirit-consciousness. A total materialization of human consciousness is taking place across the world and is especially dominant within the technologically advanced nations.

Modern life has been turned upon itself to become a parody. Nothing can be taken at face value for the outer expressions have become corrupted. Pseudo-truths are the caricature of relative truths; deep fakes are the travesty of genuine selves; and the lines between knowing and unknowing have been deliberately smeared. The outer life, on its own, exists as a tarnished kingdom. The only thing to do is to extract oneself from this polluting sphere and to re-wire one’s alignments, attachments, and allegiances. In previous epochs, the human being’s inner authority was undermined by subjugating it to exterior bodies of authority – such as institutionalized religions.

When the masses moved out of illiteracy and became educated enough to read, research, and learn for themselves, the exterior forms of authority shifted from the sacred to the secular. Secular institutions came to regulate social norms, thinking patterns, and modes of accepted behaviour. In present times, as conscious awareness and perceptive understanding expands rapidly, the exterior bodies of authority are attempting to gain leverage by gaining interior access to our bodies and minds – what I have referred to as the new forms of biopower. These interventions into the physical integrity of the human being have serious consequences for the natural expression of spirit-consciousness. If the human vessel is unbalanced, or bio-chemically – or even genetically – interfered with, then the incarnated spirit-consciousness will have trouble in manifesting within the physical.

This intervention can be taken to the extreme through advancements in the biological-genetic sciences. The process of human cloning is a further step in this domain. If a physical body is cloned, then it is basically manufactured – it has not been brought into life through an organic birthing process (regardless of how the fertilized egg was delivered into the female body). In a metaphysical sense, it can be said that the physical body is not capable of receiving spirit-consciousness for it is not vibrationally aligned. It is an empty vessel, in a spiritual sense. From this, it may be inferred that other entities or forces could inhabit such a physical vessel. Why is human science increasingly moving towards the automation, the techno-hybrid, the slicing and dicing with DNA and human genetics? In this, there is a shift toward splintering the human being from its metaphysical origins and from the domain of spirit. If anything, this is the definition of evil – the isolation of the physical from its metaphysical source.

The counter-developmental forces are acting against the human mind (psyche), the heart (emotions), and the body (will). These three aspects can be related to imagination, inspiration, and intuition. And these three aspects have been targets for manipulation for quite some time. In our current age, the imagination is targeted through the media, video games, propaganda, digital life, and augmented reality, for example. The faculties of inspiration are being distorted through a controlled culture-industry (music, literature, art). And the intuition is deadened through a weakening of the human will as well as interventions and violations against the physical body. All these forces aim to press down upon the human being in a way that increases its immersion in materiality whilst bringing forth more animalistic, or primitive drives. How much more difficult it is for spirit-consciousness to come into a life experience, only to find that everything is subordinated to a material perspective – a world that is almost oblivious to the reality of the spirit.

The more a person comes under the powers of this world, under the laws set within this materiality, the less a person can act from an inner place of personal and spiritual will. A human being can no longer truly become their essential self if they are wholly invested in a consensus reality that is averse to metaphysical truths. As Christ famously stated: ‘My Kingdom is not of this world.’ (John 18:36) Although not of this world, it must work in this world. Our point of interaction – participation and action – are within this world, yet our foundation does not originate from within this world. And this combination, this merger, is what creates a strength to be in this world and not to be worn down by it.

The expression of spirit-consciousness is a fusion – and the human being is the vessel (the receptor as well as the carrier). Being the carrier for that which is also beyond the physical means also that the person needs to strengthen their interior world – their inner environment. A fully exteriorized person is too much attached with events and influences of the material world, and this can become a hindrance. There needs to be enough capacity within each person to exercise internal creative imaginations so that received inspirations have a vessel, a protected space, in which to gestate before outward expression. A ‘new world’ can come into being, yet it must come through the human being and not to be forced upon it. This is why it is said that a new world is birthed rather than built. The outer actions may be that of building, yet the initial impulses are birthed from within. It is in this way that metaphysical influences can enter into the domain of the physical – through receptive individuals.

The act of transmuting counteractive forces into constructive ones requires that humanity shifts from a place of outward dominance, under the sway of external influences, and into spaces of inward receptivity to inspirational impulses. In this, it can be said that the transformative process is one of the unconscious becoming conscious.

Is There Life After Death?

Posted on July 3, 2022 by Reid Mukai

By Edward Curtin

Source: Behind the Curtain

A review essay of James and Whitehead on Life after Death by David Ray Griffin

Life is entwined with death from the start, for death is the price we must pay for being born, even though we don’t choose it, which may be why some people who are very angry at the deal, decide to choose how and when they will die, as if they are getting revenge on someone who dealt them a rotten hand, even if they don’t believe in the someone.

The meaning of death, and whether humans do or do not survive it in some form, has always obsessed people, from the average person to the great artists and thinkers. Death is the mother of philosophy and all the arts and sciences. It is arguably also what motivates so much human behavior, from keeping busy to waging war to trying to hit a little white ball with a long stick down a lot of grass into a hole in the ground and doing it again and again.

Death is the mother of distractions.

It is also what we cannot ultimately control, although a lot of violent and crazy rich people try. The thought of it drives many people mad.

No one is immune from wondering about it. We are born dying, and from an early age we ask why. Children often explicitly ask, but as they grow older the explicit usually retreats into implicity and avoidance because of adults’ need to deny death or their lack of answers about it that makes sense.

David Ray Griffin is not a child or an adult in denial. He has spent his life in an intrepid search for truth in many realms – philosophy, theology, politics, etc. He is an esteemed author of over forty books, an elderly man in his eighties who has spent his life writing about God, and also in the last twenty years a series of outstanding books on the attacks of September 11, 2001 and the demonic nature of U.S. history. He fits T.S Eliot’s description in The Four Quartets:

Old men ought to be explorers
Here and there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Though the dark cold and the empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning

In his latest book, which is another beginning, James and Whitehead on Life after Death, he explores the age-old question of whether there is life after death and concludes that there probably is. It is a conclusion that is arguably shared in some way still by many people today but is clearly rejected by most intellectuals and highly schooled people, as Griffin writes:

The traditional basis for hope was belief in life after death. Modern culture, however, has so diminished this belief that today, in educated circles, it is largely assumed that life after death is an outmoded belief….The dominant view among science-based modern intellectuals is that the idea of life after death is not one to take seriously. That conclusion, however, is virtually implicit in the presuppositions of these intellectuals, such as Corliss Lamont. According to these modern intellectuals, there is no non-sensory perception; the world is basically mechanistic; and the world contains nothing but physical bodies and forces.

Griffin argues the opposite. His book is devoted to refuting these presuppositions with the help of William James and Alfred North Whitehead. It is not an easy read, and is not aimed at regular people who would find it rough going, except for the middle chapters on mediums, extrasensory perception, telepathy, apparitions, near-death out-of-body experiences, and reincarnation – the stuff of tabloid nonsense but which in Griffin’s scholarly hands is treated very intelligently. Moreover, these chapters are crucial to his overall argument. However, the book will mainly appeal to the intellectuals whom Griffin wishes to convince of their errors, or to those who agree with him. It is scholarly.

Without entering into all the nuances of his rather complicated thesis, I will try to summarize his key points.

Griffin is what is called a process theologian and his work of philosophical theology is intimately linked with scientific thinking and the idea of evolution, even as it rejects the modern mechanistic worldview for a “postmodern” cosmology based on recent science, in particular, the work of microbiology. Although he is a Christian, the present book does not presuppose any Christian beliefs such as revelation, nor, for that matter, specific beliefs of any religion, although he does presuppose (and partially explains in chapter eleven) the existence of a “divine creator” or “divine reality” who is responsible for the evolutionary process that is the expression of a cosmic purpose with the “fine-tuning” of the universe. This “Holy Reality” is important to his argument.

The thought of the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead underlies everything Griffin writes here. Whitehead is known as the creator of process philosophy, which, to simplify, is the idea that all reality is not made up of things or bits of inert matter, no matter how small (e.g. atoms, brain molecules) or large (people or trees) interacting in some blind way with other bits of matter, but consists of conscious processes of ongoing experiences. In other words, reality is constant change, flowing experiences with types of awareness and intention and the free creativity to change. Humans are, therefore, ongoing experiments, not static entities.

Following Whitehead, Griffin has coined the term “panexperientialism,” meaning that all reality is comprised of experiences. It is worth noting that the etymology of the words experience and experiment are the same – Latin, experiri, to try. Life is therefore a trying. As some might say, it is trying to be born and to know you will die.

Griffin begins by noting the importance of life after death and why many argue against it. He states how he will avoid many of their objections and how he will show how the valid ones dissolve under his analysis. He promptly writes that “Microbiology has dissolved the mind-body problem.” He bases this on the work of acclaimed evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis,, among others, and her theory of symbiogenesis:

Her theory of symbiogenesis was based on the idea that all living organisms are sentient. Saying that her world view ‘recognizes the perceptive capacity of all live beings,’ she held that ‘consciousness is a property of all living cells,’ even the most elementary ones: ‘Bacteria are conscious. These bacterial beings have been around since the origin of life.’

Margulis’s point is consonant with Whitehead’s philosophy of organism, meaning that all physical reality possesses a degree of perceptive experience, although Griffin says “some of us may prefer to save the term ‘consciousness’ for higher types of experience.” The fundamental point is that all of physical reality experiences, or, as he quotes William James, “is a piece of full experience.” In layman’s language as applied to people, the mind and body are one.

Having laid down this scientific/philosophical foundation in the first four chapters (and in two more detailed appendices), Griffin turns to psychical research and how Whitehead and James believed in the need for such research and how James’s radical empiricism supported the reality of parapsychological events as did Whitehead, who accepted telepathy. Griffin writes:

Like James, Whitehead affirmed the reality of non-sensory perception. Moreover, besides affirming its reality,Whitehead argued that non-sensory perception is fundamental, so that sensory perception is secondary. Far from being primary, sensory perception is derivative from non-sensory perception….Accordingly, there is nothing supernatural about telepathy; one becomes aware of the content of other minds through the same non-sensory mode of perception that tells us about causation, the real existence of physical objects, memory, and time.

(Let me interject the simple but important point that it follows that in order to have any perceptions one must exist in physical form.)

Turning to actual psychical research that was promoted by the establishment of The Society For Psychical Research (SPR) in London in 1882, Griffin, as previously mentioned, devotes four key chapters to mediums, telepathy, extrasensory perception, near-death out-of-body experiences, apparitions, and reincarnation. This research and its findings, while rejected by the modern scientific worldview, is widespread and quite believable, in various degrees. Griffin shows why this is so. The truth of such psychic experiences is hard to refute since there are so many examples, which Griffin gives. He would agree with James who said:

The concrete evidence for most of the ‘psychic’ phenomenon under discussion is good enough to hang a man twenty times over.

And James, of course, the longtime professor at Harvard University, is revered as one of the United States’ most brilliant thinkers, not a fringe nut-case. This is also true for many of the others Griffin calls on to show how solid is the evidence for much psychic phenomena. Most readers will find these chapters very engaging and the most accessible.

Finally, Griffin explains why the idea of a fine-tuned universe makes the most sense and how it dovetails with the belief in God, even as it runs counter to the mechanistic, materialistic, and atheistic view of many intellectuals. He writes:

The new worldview advocated in this book requires a new understanding of the divine reality. Whitehead and [Charles] Hartshorne [an American process philosopher and theologian who developed Whitehead’s work] advocated a view of the universe known as ‘panentheism.’ The term means ‘all-in-God.’ Panentheism [the world is in God] is thus distinguished from pantheism, on the one hand, and traditional theism, on the other.

Based on these factors – microbiology, Whitehead and James’s philosophy, psychic research, etc. – Griffin concludes that there is ample evidence for life after death, not in the physical sense but in that of psyche or soul or spirit. He says that he has “long believed in life after death,” but that in offering this book with his argument for life after death as our “only empirical ground for hope” since we all die, he does so reluctantly. “I suggest this answer with fear and trembling, knowing that most of my friends and other people whose opinions I respect will hate this answer.”

That they would be surprised by his conclusion is a bit perplexing since he has long believed in life after death. I surely do not hate his answer and believe that he has made a strong case for his long-held belief. I share it, but differently. And I think that many of his scientifically-oriented friends and others may indeed agree with him more than he thinks, for his argument is rooted, not just in philosophy and theology, but in science. It is based on the idea of the non-duality between mind and matter, with the difference being that for him matter is conscious and for them it is not. They may come to accept the recent findings of microbiology and reject the “assumption of materialists and dualists alike” that “neurons are insentient.” They may reject some of their own presuppositions. For these debates take place at the highest level of abstraction where intellectuals dwell, and accepting one new scientific paradigm does not necessarily lead to belief in life after death. Far from it. That is when God enters the picture.

Griffin wisely uses hardcore commonsense beliefs to refute dualism and materialism. But I propose that there is another hardcore, commonsense belief that he ignores: that people know and feel that they are flesh and bones. Out of this feeling comes our conceptions about life, not the other way around. The Spanish philosopher Miguel De Unamuno, in The Tragic Sense of Life, put it this way:

Our philosophy – that is, our mode of understanding or not understanding the world and life – springs from our feeling toward life itself …. Man is said to be a reasoning animal. I do not know why he has not been defined as an affective or feeling animal …. And thus, in a philosopher, what must needs most concern us is the man.

David Griffin, relying on John Cobb’s term, says the “resurrection of the soul” is a better term for life after death than the more traditional ones of “immortality of the soul” and the “resurrection of the body,” since it splits the difference, thereby taking a bit of truth from both terms.

But as I understand his argument in this book, he is doing what he cautions against via Whitehead: “… he [Whitehead] said that one must avoid ‘negations of what in practice is presupposed.’” Griffin’s presupposition is that both dualism and materialism are both wrong and panexperientialism is correct. He writes:

Panexperientialism is based upon the supposition that we can and should think about the units comprising the physical world by analogy with our own experience, which we know from within. The supposition, in other words, is that the apparent difference in kind between our experience, or our ‘mind,’ and the entities comprising our bodies is an illusion, resulting from the fact that we know them in two different ways. We know our minds from within, by identity and memory, whereas in sensory perception of our bodies, as in looking in a mirror, we know them from without. Once we realize this, there is no reason to assume them really to be different in kind. [my emphasis]

So if that is true, I ask this question: why, if body and soul/mind are inseparable and are what people are, why is it necessary to argue for their divorce in death? If God created them as one at birth, could not God recreate them as one in death? Why Griffin concludes that this is impossible or would require a miracle escapes me. Maybe contemplating it is a bit too pedestrian and non-philosophical.

Despite my point above, James and Whitehead on Life after Death is another quintessentially brilliant volume from Griffin’s pen. It forces you to think about difficult but essential matters. It may not be easy reading, but it may force you to imaginatively ask yourself, what, if anything were possible and life continued after death, you would want such a life to be like. Maybe the man David Ray Griffin wants it to be non-bodily. Maybe many do and can’t imagine an alternative. But I can, and I hope for bodily resurrection. It’s just what I am.

Philosophy and theology can get very abstract and leave regular people in the dust. Another poet comes to mind, a counterpoint to T.S. Eliot, William Butler Yates, who wrote in “An Acre of Green Grass”:

Grant me an old man’s frenzy,
Myself I must remake
Till I am Timon and Lear
Or that William Blake
Who beat upon the wall
Till Truth obeyed his call;

A mind Michael Angelo knew
That can pierce the clouds,
Or inspired by frenzy
Shake the dead in their shrouds;
Forgotten else by mankind,
An old man’s eagle mind.

I would love to read what a frenzied David Ray Griffin has to say, now that I have read his philosophical logic. I can’t help agreeing with Unamuno:

And thus, in a philosopher, what must needs most concern us is the man

The man of flesh, blood, and bones.

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After the Crash

Dispatches From a Long Recovery (Est. 10/2024)

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