An anthropologist's point of view:

It's only ostensibly about the "fax"
now. What it actually is about is Baptism into the fraternity of the new Religion - complete with mandatory dress code, segregation of the "flock" (herd) and regular purification rituals.

By declining the wack-scene, one declares oneself to be an Unbeliever and a Heretic - a Leper Outcast Unclean, Unrepentant of one's Original Sin.

The virus is the orthodox God of humanity now, and like all Gods it is invisible, capricious, omnipotent and immortal.

CJ Jung warned us what would happen if we became so secular we made no room for any kind of healthy spirituality in our lives ... it would simply replace itself with something far more destructive.

😑

image by Sumanley xulx - pixabay

THE WISE MAN BUILT HIS HOUSE UPON THE ROCKS

When I was a boy in Primary (Elementary) School - perhaps eight or nine years old - we learned and performed a song in front of the school which related to the biblical Parable of The House on the Rocks.

I can still recall the words of that song to this day, nearly four decades later:

Now, the wise man built his house upon the rocks

The wise man built his house upon the rocks

The wise man built his house upon the rocks

And the rains came tumbling down.

Oh! The rains came down and the floods came up

The rains came down and the floods came up

The rains came down and the floods came up

But the house on the rocks stood firm.

Now, the foolish man built his house upon the sands

The foolish man built his house upon the sands

The foolish man built his house upon the sands

And the rains came tumbling down.

Oh! The rains came down and the floods came up

The rains came down and the floods came up

The rains came down and the floods came up

And the house on the sands fell flat!

As a child, critical of authority even then, it seemed like a bit of a pointless lesson to me. What man would be so foolish, I recall thinking, as to build his house upon the sand? And why have a parable about something so absurdly obvious? Wasn't the point of parables to impart wisdom that might evade the grasp of most grown-ups, not to offer advice that even eight-year-old boys already instinctively understood? I didn't get it.

It's only relatively recently that the penny dropped for me regarding this very old riddle. Naturally, I had long ago reasoned that the parable wasn't intended to be taken literally - but the allegorical allusion nevertheless still evaded me.

I have come to understand in this last year or so of unprecedented and ubiquitous craziness that the parable wasn't referring to literal houses, literal floods or actual sand; but to belief systems and their relationship to the physical world.

We dwell in the houses of our worldviews: our understanding of the cosmos and our place and role within it, the parameters of our egos and identities; who we are, what we're about, the things we support and the things we decry, our sense of the possible and the impossible - all of these things inform our sense of Self and Other, and of the relationship between Self and Other.

Our sense of Self is like a house of memories, lessons, feelings, ideas and suppositions that we build and expand upon as we go through our lives. 

But what of the foundations upon which we build this sense of Self?

 What if the visceral, tangible world upon which we orientate and navigate our daily experiences is not the infrangible rock we always believed it to be, but is in fact merely comprised of shifting sands - fated to give ground under the very feet of our self-identity? The physical universe is, after all, in a constant state of flux and motion. (Show me something that doesn't move or change and I'll show you something that doesn't exist, so to speak). 😁

This being the case, what implications for building the house of our sense of who we are - and where we fit into the scheme of things - on the things we can smell, taste, touch, hear and see?

That which has manifested into the physical realm has become subject to the physical laws of time and motion; it will move and it will change form sooner or later, like water ... or like sand.

For me, the true message of that parable is that it is the unseen, the ineffable, that is represented by the rocks. And that only if we build our sense of who we are and our place in the cosmos on the unseen and unknowable, will we be able to weather the storm, should the very foundations of the world we know one day be swept away beneath our feet.

But what does that even mean, to build your sense of self and your place in life on the "unseen"? Is that not a complete waste of time, a farcical indulgence - like inventing a nothing burger and then claiming to have developed the perfect diet? Far from it. Because it is from the unseen that the world we live in is formed. Everything from your bed to your breakfast to your annoying boss with the face you wish you could punch started off as nothing but an idea (or an urge) in the mind of another. On the physical plane, the unseen (or undetectable, if you prefer) can only be known as a concept, like pure spirit; a castle in the clouds. Nebulous and immeasurable and unprovable. And so it will always be: the only true constant.

To put it much less subtly than the Parable of the House on the Rocks, I reckon this is why spiritual people have always been predicted since the ancient scriptures to fare better at the End of the World than hard-nosed materialist types. It's got not so much to do with them being "chosen ones" or "righteous" or whatever as it has to do with the fact that they are not as heavily invested in the physical world as it explodes or goes up in flames or simply gets eroded away by the shifting sands of time. Their sense of themselves doesn't get washed away with it all: They have their castle in the clouds - untouchable and immovable; immaculate and eternal.

We may have a very good idea of who we are and what we're about as it relates to the world around us, the one that we interact with on a daily basis. And that's all well and good when the weather is fair. 

But winter (as they like to say in Game of Thrones) is always coming. 

And when the proverbial rains come tumbling down and that old house somehow gets flushed away ... where is one gonna take shelter then?

Image by homestead1997 from Pixabay 

AB-solution I

I've been viewed as a "conspiracy theorist" for about a dozen years now.

In that time I've devoted almost all my spare time to reading about the world from non-orthodox, non-mainstream, independent sources - some of which I deem to be highly plausible and credible, many others not so much. That's tens of thousands of hours of research from an individual whom academia itself has certified with a distinction-grade Masters in Social Anthropology (for whatever that's worth). The most memorable lesson I learned from that Masters course was: if you want to really understand and get to grips with a society at its core, go for the taboos. Study them, analyse them, dare to take them seriously.

I made a decision back in 2009 that I would be the arbiter of what information was worth taking on board and what wasn't. I made a decision to trust my critical reasoning faculties rather than outsourcing them to what seemed to me to be heavily compromised accredited information sources with a poor track record for integrity, historically speaking.

In those twelve years, the world very much seems to have consistently moved in a direction that supports the hypothesis of a slide to a global, totalitarian, dystopian biotechnological dictatorship.

However, I *grotesquely* underestimated the power of mass hypnosis on the human population.

As the evidence of the slide into Brave New Hunger Games World '84 grows more undeniable on a daily basis, and brutally stamps its presence on almost every face and in almost every home and every workplace all over the world, people dig their heels in and become ever more implacably convinced that the authorities are well-meaning, and that people like me who are critical and skeptical of their every move are the ones acting out of stupidity, ignorance, selfishness, incompetence, a hunger for attention, or malice.

I'm no longer fooling myself that my words have any force to sway minds or hearts. This and subsequent postings are going to be purely journalistic in nature: the subjective ruminations and observations of an unremarkable man in his 40s who is either losing his mind, or is witnessing his entire species in its existential nihilism enthusiastically endorse and applaud the continuing slide into worldwide tyranny and darkness.

On a more positive note, because I don't personally partake in the aforementioned existential nihilism for any number of reasons (most of which tend to bore the pants off people or make their faces split in two with the power of their sneers), I view things from a more esoteric and spiritual perspective.

To wit: we did not defeat evil after WWII. Evil has learned many lessons from nazism, from communism, from Bernaysian advertising and TV programming and colour revolutions, and especially from giving us a couple of decades of free social media. Evil is our own shadow-side that we dare not acknowledge. It is our self-righteousness, our implacable conviction that our worldview must be imposed on everyone else for the Common Good, because we are right and they are misguided. It is the egregore conjured up by our unhealed traumas and our unchallenged fears.

At this particular critical juncture in human history, we are ignoring such fears with all our might, even though such ignore-ance is resulting in our suffocation and the prospective mandated violation of our bodily integrity. And the more we ignore these fears, the more we will get them physically rammed up our arses, wound round our noses and mouths, and punctured through our skins.

Once we summon the courage to shine a light on this darkness - collectively - it will reveal the most shocking, frightful mess ... like the rotting carpet of the human psyche that has been left to fester in the dark for way too many centuries ... but at least we'll be able to commence some spring cleaning.
Brace yourselves. It's gonna be a filthy task.

#conspiracy #tyranny #esoteric #spiritual #dystopia #21stcenturyheretic #spirituality #blog

Duality means positive is just as powerful as negative

 

The yin-yang symbol of Daoism has white spots in the black and vice versa for a reason. There is a fractal nature to creation within Duality that is absolute - positive and negative both contain the seeds of their polar opposites. There is light in the darkness and dark in the light. This is a universal and invariable law (within Duality). The positive forces are contained within the negative and will rise to meet/match them. Otherwise one declares one's belief that the negative is inviolate, absolute, and transcendent. In doing this one invites the collapse of the duality in one's experience and one's world goes to shit. But this is only because one has declared oneself as dissociated from Source/the natural order - and furthermore has decided that one "pole" (love/truth) is weaker than the other pole (fear/distortion). The extent to which one declares this dissociation from ultimate reality to be what is really happening is the extent to which one is cut off from source. The light is in the dark: believe it. Were it not so, there would be no duality in our experience. And if the light is in the dark, it is really not difficult to see ... ;)

How the light wins. Inevitably.

We need to be able to *conceive* of possibilities and scenarios in which the dark cabal fail. IMO that's more important than the details of *how* it plays out in the physical. For me it's simply natural law; the spot of yang in the ocean of yin: Frodo and Sam out there in the dark, cut off from the greater light -we can't contact them but they have the weaponry to utterly fuck Sauron and his ugly fucker minions up while we make keyboard war to keep the Eye busy 😁








Image by Colin Behrens from Pixabay

A word on Orwell in these Orwellian times...

I've read 1984, and though I enjoyed it as a literary creation, it utterly failed to convince me that the human spirit will inevitably be permanently crushed for all time. This is because despite it being a great book written by a master wordsmith, it is abjectly materialistic, totally lacking in any kind of soul, and entirely blind (or perhaps willfully ignorant and disdainful) to any state of being that is not mundane.

Image by Gordon Johnson from Pixabay 

THE DEVIL AS SPIRITUAL CONSULTANT

In our enthusiasm to jettison the lower frequencies from our daily experience and our society, it is wise to keep our focus positive. But you can’t hermetically seal yourself off from discord and anharmonious frequencies; they are a part of divine creation, and we ourselves are an outcome of the eternal dynamic interplay between chaos and order. We are the link between the ground and the heavens, and we must never lose sight of this, out nature.

Water cleanses and purifies, yet it does not shun the dark, dirty parts of the Earth; it transits through all spaces from the lowest and filthiest hole to the top of the sky.

If you believe that the focus of your attention, the outward manifestations of your internal choice, can ever be devoid of doubt, discord and darkness - that you can attain a state of perfect harmony and unassailable faith and yet remain anchored to physical reality - then you misunderstand the most fundamental nature of being on this plane. Being is the ON (OM?) part of the ON/OFF (being/nonbeing) dichotomy, and the lack of either renders the other meaningless. In the same way, DOUBT and FAITH are each other’s eternal dance partners. Remove one, and you remove the dance itself. The floor clears, you collapse the dichotomy, and dissipate into loftier realms. This, too, will happen in due course, because everything has its season - but while there’s moonlight and laughter and love and romance, let’s face the music and dance, as the song goes!

Even should the present Lifting of the Veil, as expected, banish many seemingly omnipotent demons of the past age, the new paradigm will usher in its own breed of disharmony and chaos - and these won’t look anything like the last lot, because now we’ll be able to see those coming a mile off. The lessons we are learning in these times are emotionally and spiritually excruciating, and not ones we are likely to forget. No, the devil of the nascent age will speak the patois of the nascent age, walk the walk, crack the jokes, and write the songs as ever before. And if we are wise, that’s all he’ll ever have to do.

The price of sovereignty, they say, is eternal vigilance. Coming through the Lifting of the Veil includes an understanding that the power differential between Self and Other is vastly reduced (or even entirely banished). Our first, tottering steps in this higher frequency will be beset with their own pitfalls. In such an ecology, it is unwise to expect the devil to simply vanish in a puff of love and light. In such an ecology, the devil’s job morphs into that of keeping you on your toes ... like any competent dance partner.

ahb 21.3.2020

Image by Clker-Free-Vector-Images from Pixabay 

For all those who despair at the state of the world ...

Warmongering psychopaths in power. Fake news. School shootings. Rampant paedophilia. Divide and conquer. Escalating censorship. Endless propaganda. Voracious corporate greed. Out-of-control technological advancements. The total perversion of nature, healthcare provision, and nutrition. Shit music. The list goes on.

I know how you feel. It seems so natural to sink into despair when you think of the scale of the challenges we collectively face. For what it's worth, this is how I deal with it.

I am generally able to maintain a healthy degree of optimism and good cheer because from my point of view, we are indeed consciousness having a physical experience. I don't say this out of vapid adherence to some trite & trendy McSpirituality: it's something I've been thinking about very deeply, and reading about very widely, for many years.

The implications of consciousness being the foundation of reality are far greater than most appear able to appreciate (at least, that's how it seems to me).

The experiential Tomorrows of each and every one of us are like a vast ocean in front of us, but we are the Captains of our own vessel. The waters we will sail into tomorrow (to continue the metaphor) are entirely dependent on our sense of the possible, today.

For example, if I am only able to seriously entertain the possibility of there being one physical Earth, which is heading uni-dimensionally into the future at a vector set by the collective conscious frequencies of all 7-odd billion of us, then I can only move forward within the parameters of that vector allowed by my imagination.

In other words, my steering wheel is jammed. I am unable to navigate the full range of potential destinations on the map of reality. Furthermore, the buffeting winds created by the feelings and actions of 7 billion other human beings are apt to blow my vessel wherever those feelings and actions are bound to lead.

In the vast majority of cases, nowhere good.

If, however, I have learned a degree of mastery over the rudder of my thoughts and the sails of my emotions, I can harness those elemental forces (regardless of their source, over which I have no control) to navigate myself into a favourable Tomorrow.

Other Captains of other ships will end up perceiving and experiencing the waters of other Tomorrows - other Earths - according to their own skill and mastery over their respective rudders and sails.

What this means in practical terms is: a bad sailor blames the weather for where his vessel ends up. The better we learn to steer our thoughts and handle our emotions, the more of a chance we give ourselves - individually - to navigate our way towards a better Tomorrow; a better Earth.

Every life is its own timeline. As long as we focus on our own game, keep showing and living by example in the truth that we are more powerful by far than we have ever been led to believe by any orthodox State-accredited or religious mentor (with a very few honourable exceptions, of course), our fate will never be the fate of those who despair.

Try it and see.

As John Lennon once said: “Everything will be okay in the end. If it's not okay, it's not the end.”
To put it another way: It isn't the end until you - yes, you! - give up.

If you haven't given up, it isn't the end.

Image by Clker-Free-Vector-Images from Pixabay 

Bloody robots! Coming over here ... taking all our jobs ...

I'm getting more than a little bored of hearing all this wailing and gnashing of teeth about robots soon taking most of the jobs. 

Getting robots to fulfil our basic Maszlow needs is only an existential threat if we buy into the idea that we invariably need to pay someone in order to exist on this physical plane (and this is an idea we have been robustly encouraged to subscribe to throughout the ages - but that's another story for another time). This is a critical point in human evolution (as we all know!). 

I should make it clear that I'm not at all in favour of the forced redistribution of wealth from other human beings who have worked hard to amass it but the work of robots is a different kind of energy exchange. Whatever corporate entity has the means to build robots to take away menial labour irrespective of our wishes only serves to create an economy in which there are almost no customers (i.e. a moribund one). At this point it either becomes a naked, tyrannical master-slave relationship or the true free market kicks in to correct things. 

If robots start generating all the food and building all the shelter, yet not distributing the overwhelming surplus to the enormous slice of humanity they have made obsolete, who *are* they giving it to? A correction would be inevitable, by hook or by crook. So to speak.

Image by OpenClipart-Vectors from Pixabay 

WHAT'S GOIN' ON ACCORDING TO THE 21ST CENTURY HERETIC

I’m a process, not a fixed entity. I allow my views and opinions to be fluid and subject to evolution in the face of new evidence, and I recognise that sometimes the most valuable and significant new evidence comes from the periphery of human wisdom and endeavour – in other words, from the heretics of modern society. 

The trick is to always be prepared to apply one’s own critical reasoning faculties to one’s direct, personal, first-hand experience where applicable and not just automatically accept the conclusions of people more qualified or academically intelligent without first doing the former. And then to at least double-check that there aren't equally-or-better qualified people who advocate an alternative position (see below).

I was once extremely orthodox in my world view, earning two academic degrees in the social sciences and humanities –  but by my mid-thirties I was finding mainstream reality increasingly unsatisfactory and inadequate in both narrative and methodology. Now approaching my mid-forties, I’m experimenting with an alternative cosmology, which I call my “21^st Century Heresy”. It incorporates a certain amount of alternative and so-called “conspiracy” information that many have been programmed to automatically reject and ridicule; but it rejects a lot of it too.

Because I subscribe to the cosmology that consciousness and information are the fundamental basis of our reality – as opposed to materialism – it means that my sense of what may and may not be possible has become far broader than a materialist cosmology is able to allow. That is not to say that I dismiss materialism as unimportant – kicking me in the bollocks would hurt me as much as it would hurt any man, I suspect! – but it does mean that I perceive a reality that is far more expansive and profound than merely the material, physical reality: indeed, it means that my base assumption is that material reality is born out of the mystery of consciousness and not the other way round, which is the contemporary orthodox position.

There is plenty of robust, credible scientific support for such a cosmology. For example, Max Planck – founder of Quantum Mechanics and 1918 Nobel Physics Prize winner – who famously wrote: "I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness." (Source: The Observer, Jan 1931).

Perhaps frustrated by the fact that so many of his colleagues failed to understand the implications of this, and kept on imaginging the Universe as though it was at the most fundamental level made out of godzillions of tiny little billiard balls – that appeared out of no-where and no-when – mindlessly smashing into each other, he is also known for having said something to the effect that "science advances one funeral at a time". 

Max Planck is far from alone  in the pantheon of scientific heavyweights who accord primacy to consciousness, however. His quantum buddies, Neils Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, were of a similar opinion. Interestingly, there are impeccably qualified scientists who today share this perspective, though much of the internet dismisses then as cranks and excommunicates them from the scientific in-crowd with terms such as 'pseudoscience'; formerly 'respectable' scientists who have descended into sinful, heretical modes of thinking (see Dr. Rupert Sheldrake, Dr. John Hagelin, Dr. Bruce Lipton, Thomas Campbell, Dr. Bernardo Kastrup, Peter Russell, Dr. Eben Alexander, Prof. Brian Josephson, and others). Equally interestingly, it doesn't take much research to ascertain that the above's more orthodox peers themselves generally remain respectful and civilized in their disagreements. The ad-hominems, the defaming, debunking and dismissing tends to come from less able and more anonymous sources.

While listing all these contemporary intellectual powerhouses and academic heretics, of course, is nothing more than an appeal to authority that can be more than matched (in numbers, at least) by people arguing in favour of the orthodox cosmology, it does at least endorse my point that there is a whopping great debate to be had here, that the science is not 'settled' or 'in' as we so often see proclaimed; there are plenty of flaming brilliant, highly accredited minds who support  (or at the very least acknowledge) the validity of a consciousness-before-matter cosmology; that it is not crazy or unhinged to do so - or that if it is, it is the sort of crazy that puts one in the company of individuals who really know their stuff.

"The Science Is In", is it? Feck off!

In the old days, you were a heretic if you expressed any doubt about the cosmology espoused by your friendly neighbourhood priest or vicar or rabbi or whatever. Scripture told us where we came from, who was responsible, what was nice, and what was naughty. If you disagreed, you’d be socially ostracized at best, and burnt at the stake or beheaded if you didn’t learn to keep your mouth shut and start singing from the prescribed songsheet with the rest of the great unwashed. 

 

The moral of the story? People in positions of authority don't like independent thinkers. And in case I need to spell out the obvious, it's because their authority is derived from mass consensus.

Nowadays of course, the attitude towards modern heretics is mercifully more civilized. Burning them at the stake is generally frowned upon (though some high-profile heretics have been known to end up dead under mysterious circumstances from time to time even in these more laissez-faire times). We normally just exchange pained expressions with other non-heretics and do some social ostracizing with the odd bit of ridicule and scoffs of derision thrown in for good measure, don't we?

Our esteemed 21st century custodians of knowledge and wisdom are our scientists. They may still wear distinguished white frocks, but they now use the formidable Scientific Method - backed up by the Peer Review Process - to form our contemporary cosmology. These are very reliable tools, don't ya know (but sssh, don't say too much about the replicability crisis, or the peer review crisis, okay? You'll be cruising for an intellectual bruising...) and have a reassuringly consistent relationship with observable reality. Scientists tend to routinely kick ten tons of shite out of scripture and 'olde worlde' beliefs in that department, and have been doing so for centuries. It is of course ultimately thanks to them that I am able to communicate with you, dear reader, through the mixed blessings of mass communication and social media. For this and a number of other reasons, I have a great deal of respect for science and scientists. 

This is, however, tinged with a robust and incorrigable dose of scepticism.

The trouble with our dear, lovable modern-day scientists is that on the whole (with a few honourable exceptions) they are either too trusting of their superiors and benefactors, or just simply not badass enough to hold onto their integrity in the face of people with lots of money, power, guns and an agenda. Most of them are desperate for cash. Or peer recognition. Or tenure. Or all of the above. No doubt, it's difficult to see beyond these things if your life's work is at stake. Anyone in a position to provide the above academic mana, and you'd be amazed how broadly and flexibly applications of the scientific method can suddenly be interpreted by people with big brains. Think about it.

Hark! Do I hear gasps of shock, outrage and indignation at this latest heretical point? Do I hear cries for evidence and proof? 

Sorry to disappoint you guys. It's not gonna be that kind of blog. Sure, I may occasionally toss you the odd link chock full of overwhelming evidence from some much more dedicated and accomplished alternative researcher (i.e. fellow 21st century heretic) than myself here and there to chew on. There's plenty of it out here in heretic country. But see, the beauty of heresy is that it's first and foremost "an opinion at odds with what is generally accepted”. I'm not a journalist with a mission to spoon-feed you common sense. Go and check it out for yourself if you're iconoclastic enough to dare, or alternatively, feel free to keep right on outsourcing all your opinions and worldviews to fellow fallible human beings who - if they are ambitious enough - invariably end up getting funded by people who are known control freaks and unscrupulous sociopaths. 

Disagree all you want. That's heresy for you. I haven't even got started yet. *grins*

Here's a provocative parting heresy to challenge you with until next time: He who pays the piper calls the truth.