Meditation and Manipulation

Long but worth a read and some consideration:

Cults, Meditation, Drugs and Psychosis

The Many Dangers of Spiritual Manipulation

Story at a Glance:

•Spiritual practices are a double edged sword. On one hand one’s faith can be profoundly beneficial to their life, but on the other, there is a longstanding problem of spiritual practitioners becoming permanently damaged from their practices (e.g., psychosis).

•Much of this results from spiritual “teachers” promoting practices which give the participant a spiritual high (and hence makes them a loyal customer) rather than the safe and effective practices which are harder to monetize.

•One of the primary reasons cults form is because individuals (especially those in a vulnerable place) are highly susceptible to spiritual manipulation and rarely recognize when one of the common spiritual scams is pushed upon them.

•This article will discuss how spiritual manipulation contrasts with conventional forms of mind control, critical points to understand when attempting to rescue someone from a cult, ways to recognize dangerous spiritual practices, and the overlap between spiritual psychosis and drug induced (e.g., via psychedelics) psychosis.

One of the largest challenges I face with this newsletter is deciding what I want to write about, as since I have a moderately large following, choosing the “wrong “topic can ripple out into a variety of unintended consequences. Conversely, one of the greatest benefits, I have to being anonymous (while simultaneously being viewed as a credible source) is that gives me the wiggle room to touch up on more controversial topics no one else is talking about.

Despite all this, I have still had numerous topics I’ve wanted to discuss, which I have just not felt comfortable diving into. One is the subject of cults, drugs and harmful spiritual practices since on one hand, within the integrative health field, this issue comes up a lot, but simultaneously, discussing it requires you to broach a variety of topics far outside our accepted cultural discourse (which seriously calls my character into question for a more skeptical audience) and it’s nearly impossible to go into the subject without rubbing people the wrong way (e.g., people’s egos often very invested in what they are doing regardless of how harmful it is to them).

These issues have repeatedly come up in my life and every 1-3 years I end up getting involved in a fairly stressful cult deprogramming situation. Recently, I found out that my nephew whom I had not been keeping tabs on got involved with a religious group that turned out to be dangerous cult and a lot of my time over the last month went into rescuing him from their clutches (which is part of why I have not written as much recently). Reflecting on what happened, I took this as a sign that I needed to begin exploring that topic here. Conversely, however, I would like to request that if this is not your cup of tea you don’t read this article or if you do, that you don’t hold what’s in here against me or view it as the typical content of this publication.

Note: for those of you who are not spiritually inclined, many of the cult dynamics that will be discussed here were also seen with how many individuals were brainwashed into becoming fanatically devoted to the COVID-19 vaccination program. Likewise, many of the approaches we’ve used to rescue people from cults are also often applicable to other interventions (e.g., someone suffering from drug abuse).

Spirituality and Integrative Medicine

One of the rarely appreciated facets of the integrative medicine field is how intertwined it is with one’s faith. For example, I’ve previously alluded to the fact I was privileged to know some of the most talented integrative doctors in the country (all of whom stay under the radar), and the regular success with which they treat otherwise “incurable” conditions has given me a very different perspective than many of my colleagues on what is actually medically possible.

In the article where I discussed their common habits and behaviors, I mentioned that for each of them, their faith and it’s practices was a central focus of their lives. This in turn was because:

•Their devotion to their faith made them much more resistant to being swayed by all the different forms of propaganda in our society that try to hijack your minds (best summarized by the classic adage, “if you don’t stand for something, you fall for anything”).

•Their faith made them strongly prioritize behaving in an ethical manner (e.g., going out of their way to advocate for their patients regardless of the pressures they got to not do so).

•Their spiritual practice helped them develop the perceptual capacity to recognize critical but subtle things occurring within their patients (and conversely, their innate perceptual gifts often was what drove them to pursue a spiritual path).

•Since a subset of the issues patients with complex issues face are spiritual in nature, being well-versed in a faith often made them much more able to help those patients.

Conversely, however, while there are many merits to spiritual practices (e.g., I think good meditation is one of the most valuable things one can do in life), bad spiritual practices can cause a lot of problems, and both I and my colleagues have had a lot of patients who had a lot of problems from unsafe spiritual practices.

In essence, a very analogous situation exists between the wild west of “non-mainstream” medicine and “non-mainstream” spirituality. Some of it is remarkably effective, some of it is marginal at best, and some is quite harmful. This becomes a huge problem because:

1. Very few people have the background which is necessary to recognize who is a good healer or spiritual teacher and who is not. In my case, beyond being extremely lucky to have met who I did, I had decades of experience in the alternative medical field. Because of this, the people I ultimately chose to really studying under were either people a lot of competent colleagues had endorsed or a relatively unknown person I happened to spend a brief period with whom I could immediately recognize was remarkably talented. Had I not had this background (and a willingness to accept people I’d previously spent a lot of time studying under actually weren’t that great) it would have been impossible for me to find my mentors. Since my background is quite rare, most of my colleagues never found people of a similar caliber to study under.

2. No objective criteria exists to evaluate the quality of spiritual teachers or alternative healers (or even for that, often, matter conventional doctors). In the past, this problem was solved by having “lineages” that built their credibility over centuries through the accomplishments of their adherents and maintained strict criteria for who would be certified in the lineage, but that method of quality control has largely died off since:

•Modern society places much less value on a longstanding lineage.

•Many of the existing lineages, like the rest of society have been eroded by the corrupting influences of our society.

•Many of those that remain don’t advertise publicly.

3. The people who tend to be really good do not publicly advertise what they do (as more people than they ever will need come to them through word of mouth and they conversely do not wish to get embroiled in all the issues publicly advertising themselves creates). Conversely, the people who aren’t so good aggressively advertise themselves and hence end up being the people who everyone sees. Because of this, I frequently hear people (e.g., patients) state they had to go through a lot of bad people before they found someone worth sticking with and how grateful they were to have found them.

4. While many people in the alternative field are drawn it because of a genuine desire to help people (e.g., I can state with certainty this is the case for many of the prominent COVID dissidents), many are instead drawn to it because they see an opportunity for fame money and power. This in turn leads to the sad situation I frequently observe such as someone speaking the standard lines used to attack conventional medicine (e.g., doctors just profit off treating symptoms because all they care about is money) then do the exact same thing to their patients.

5. Many people who get involved in the alternative field do not fully understand what they are dabbling in and tend to greatly overestimate their knowledge or competence over the subject (which again conventional doctors often do as well). In many cases, this just wastes people’s time (generally speaking I think holistic medicine is much safer than conventional medicine), but in other cases it significantly harms them. This is particularly true with spiritual practices.

Being Influenced

Human society has always revolved around trying to get others to support one’s agenda, and as a result, we are constantly bombarded with attempts to influence us.

Some are relatively harmless. For example, one my goals has been to have this publication be read, seriously considered, and supported by a lot of people. So, I’ve:

•Made sure to consistently publish good quality (and relevant) content.
•Made a point to be compassionate and considerate to those I interact with.
•Tried to be as transparent as possible with my thought process.
•Avoided doing anything I thought was potentially unethical.

In turn, my “influencing plan” successfully met my goals.

However, while many wish to influence others, the strategies they often pursue are often much less ethical and, in turn, highly manipulative people have always existed at every level of society.

Classically, if you want to manipulate someone, there are three ways to do it:

•Psychologically

•Hypnotically or physiologically

•Spiritually

Since the core of human psyche has remained relatively unchanged over the centuries, people inevitably stumble across (or copy) the same methods of manipulation and periodically, someone (e.g., Hitler) comes along who has a great deal of success with them. As marketing is essentially the “science of manipulating people” (to buy your product), in the last century, there has been an incredible degree of systematization and refinement of those existing methods. Worse still, the propaganda industry (termed “public relations“) has adopted these tactics and weaponized against the entire society.

In my eyes, one of the biggest problems with manipulation is how resistant people’s egos are to admitting they got manipulated. For example, as I discussed recently, I am still in awe of how effective public relations (PR) is at manipulating people, best demonstrated by the fact the PR campaign used to sell the COVID-19 vaccines got a lot of people who you have never expected to vaccinate (e.g., people who actively spoke out against the childhood vaccine program or the American propaganda apparatus) to receive the most dubious vaccine in history. Likewise, one of the biggest problems with calculating the extent of the COVID vaccine injuries that have occurred is how many people are still in denial about the vaccine they took (and pushed on others) being dangerous.

The one “bright side” to all of this is that while modern science has been able to systematize psychological and hypnotic manipulation, it has not been able to do the same with spiritual manipulation as this cannot be done by a machine (rather it must be done by a human being) and hence cannot be scaled up for the entire population.

This is a “bright side” because spiritual manipulation is by far the most powerful (and hard to recognize) of the three methods but its use has been restricted to individuals who had an innate talent with it. Since individuals with that talent who have no qualms about using it for their own ends aren’t all that common, we only periodically see them rise to power, and most importantly, Public Relations has not been able to manufacture it at will.

However, they’ve tried and many groups try to scout individuals with the inherent capacity to spiritual manipulate others. For example, in the entertainment industry, they use the term “the ‘it’ factor” (defined in detail here) to describe individuals with an inexplicable charisma that talent scouts seek out to recruit and turn into stars (which has been confirmed to me by people in Hollywood). Likewise, I know of a few cases where a rising politician who had “the ‘it’ factor” began to be groomed by outsiders who entered their personal circle and eventually reached a very prominent role (e.g., the presidency).

One of the major contentions with “the ‘it’ factor” (and hence its name) is exactly where that inexplicable charisma comes from. I adamantly believe it is energetic or spiritual in nature, and there are quite a few public figures (e.g., Michael Jackson or Taylor Swift), for whom many in our circle can describe exactly what those individuals are (consciously or unconsciously) doing to influence their audience.

The major challenge we in turn face is how specific to get with elucidating the mechanisms of spiritual manipulation, as on one hand it’s helpful to everyone to know how it’s done (so they can be resistant to it). At the time however, we don’t actually want to tell anyone how to do it as it’s inevitable unscrupulous individuals will abuse that knowledge and we know of many truly tragic examples of this occurring (including some where their teacher admitted deeply regretting having taught the student who went on to do that).

Being Grounded

The importance of being “grounded” (and conversely identifying individuals who are suffering from not being grounded) is widely recognized within the spiritual field. However, while the need to be “grounded” is understood, there is much less clarity on exactly what that means or how to do it (e.g., electrically connecting yourself to the earth to reduce your positive charge will often improve your zeta potential and reduce anxiety is just one type of “grounding”).

Typically, ungrounded individuals are characterized by not being connected or integrated with their bodies (e.g., they are psychologically disassociated, poorly coordinated not in the present, or very much live in their heads). In turn, most reputable faiths recognize the importance of being grounded and emphasizes the importance of being integrated and connected with the physical body (e.g., by making the point always to feel your body).

Unfortunately, while the tendency to disconnect from ourselves has been an issue throughout history, the modern (digital) era has made this problem much worse since more and more of life revolves around rapidly transitioning images, ideas and data rather than being physically connected with reality.

In this article, I want to highlight two of the major issues with becoming ungrounded.

First, a great deal of our basic satisfaction and contentment in life comes from being grounded in our physicality. In turn, once this is lost we become lost souls desperately searching for meaning. Likewise, I and many others believe the two primary causes of anxiety (which is now the most common psychiatric condition as it affects almost half of all Americans) are a loss of physical grounding and the media relentlessly conditioning us to become disconnected from the present (e.g., much of marketing revolves around expectations in the future).

Note: many descriptions of this sense of being lost exist throughout literature. For example, I’ve seen it phrased as: “without compass or direction, anxious for an ideal, but without knowing where to render their adoration.”

Second, physical grounding is one of the primary things that protects each human being from external influences. In turn, as this is lost individuals both become much more susceptible to external influences and much less able to realize what is happening to them. To illustrate:

•One of the things that always made it hard for me to fit in with society was my intrinsic resistance to hypnosis (something which often underlies the cohesion within social groups). This was because anytime I began to be influenced by something, I would immediately notice something in my body was changing (e.g., my heart rate, a muscle tightening up, an inexplicable emotion rising up or the pacing of my thoughts shifting) at which point my first thought would be to try to recognize what was triggering this and then get upset with the trigger for attempting to violate me.

This in turn is why I’ve always had such a strong interest in propaganda; I would constantly notice subliminal ways the media (e.g., music, the news, the internet, written pieces) were doing this, and as time went on I started noticing how systematically and repetitively it was done (especially by Big Tech).

Note: it’s impossible to avoid influencing someone within human communication. For example, my goal here is to empower people with what I believe to be true and to move readers into a positive emotional state where they are not paralyzed by fear, but while that is arguably “good” to do, it still is me forcing my agenda upon you, which is part of why I try so hard to (concisely) be transparent about exactly what I am doing.

Susceptibility to Influence

At any given time, a constellation of factors determine how susceptible one is to being influenced. Some (e.g., how innately grounded one is) remain relatively static, others gradually change (e.g., how stressful one’s life is or how desperate one is for a life purpose to attach themselves to) and some can change quite quickly (e.g, the current “health” of the individual or how strong of an external influence they are exposed to).

I believe one problem in medicine helps to illustrate much of this.

The medical profession believes a doctor (and healthcare workers) should not under any circumstances engage in sexual relations with a patient. In turn, the penalties for doing so are quite strict (e.g., a consensual relationship is often automatic grounds for the revocation of a license while some states go even further and make the activity a felony) and when the occasional sexual predator who has victimized numerous patients is identified (which seems to happen every few years) the justice system makes it very clear to the public the individual will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.

As a result, almost all doctors in practice believe they would not under any circumstances become sexually involved with a patient. Nonetheless, it still happens (I even know of a few cases where former patients who married their physicians).

In all the cases I’ve looked, I noticed two factors were commonly at play:

•First, the doctor (or other healthcare worker) was in a particularly vulnerable place of their life (e.g., a bankruptcy, a traumatic divorce, a new workload which was too stressful for them to handle, a recent death of someone very close to them or another catastrophic loss).

•Second, the individual they became involved with had an energetic presence the doctor had never encountered before which was overpowering and caused them to experience a lot of intense or tumultuous things (e.g., emotions) the doctor had never experienced before which was eventually rationalized as a need to be with the patient.

In turn, when both the first and second were at play and the patient was attracted to the doctor, the doctor often ended up engaging in a relationship they previously believed they would never get themselves into.

While the above example seems a bit extreme and not applicable (as most of you aren’t doctors), the reality is very similar things happen all the time. For example, I’ve lost count of how many people have lamented the relationship they are stuck in, and then noted that one or both of the above factors was what drew them into it.

In turn, I would argue there are two critical points to take from this:

The first is that individuals with “the ‘it’ factor” often have that energetic presence and hence cause many people to be drawn to them even though those drawn can’t put into words why they are.
Note: many other individuals can have weaker versions of “the ‘it’ factor” that only specific people are inexplicably drawn to (e.g., sometimes this is labeled as being convinced the individual is their “twin flame”), while even weaker forms of it are often just referred to as having “chemistry.” This “draw” in turn is often what sparks sexual relationships, and my present perspective is that while compatibility is critical in dating, the stronger this pull is, the less likely the relationship is to be healthy and sustainable (e.g., I’ve watched numerous “twin flames” rapidly transition from being madly in love with each other to permanently despising each other, sometimes in fairly dramatic ways).

The second is that a variety of ways exist to protect yourself from this (e.g., becoming more grounded). I believe one of the most important strategies is simply becoming aware that energetic influences exist so they no longer become this overpowering experience that draws them in. For example:

•One of my close friends crossed paths with a notorious public figure who was notorious for using his “it” factor to both seduce women and gain political power. When he did that to her, she first felt an overpowering draw to him and began to fall into his sway, then took a step back as she had the thought “oh this must be one of the [redacted] techniques my guru told me about,” at which point she completely lost her attraction to him (which left him quite confused for a long time as almost no one else had rebuffed his advances). After that she began to look for it, and realized he just did the same thing again and again on the young women he met.
Note: if you know who I am referring to, please do not mention his name in the comments; that stipulation was what I agreed to with her in return for sharing this here.

•When I was younger I became involved with people I just felt I had to be connected to (e.g., they had an intoxicating presence). This puzzled me as I often did not at all approve of their character, and over time, I realized that the overwhelming experience I had around them was simply a product of how a specific energetic quality they had interacted with me, at which point, like my friend, I became immune to it.
Note: It’s important to recognize this principle does not just hold true for romantic interactions—it can also hold true for platonic ones (e.g., I had friends of the same gender I felt an overwhelming pull towards, became very attached to and ultimately was involved with for years despite it not being at all healthy for me to do so).

Mass Formations

Two years ago, Robert Malone introduced Matthias Desmet’s mass formation hypothesis to this movement. It was controversial since its suggestion that much of the evil we’d seen over the last few years was something which could emerge spontaneously in the correct conditions (as this implied the psychopaths who engineered this were not the ones at fault) but simultaneously embraced by many because they felt it at last put words into what they had been observing.

This hypothesis essentially argues that:

•Crowds can take on a life of their own and before long pull their participants into an altered state of mind where many begin to do unspeakable actions no one imagined could ever be possible.

•The perpetuity of a mass formation is largely based upon whether or not a vocal minority of the population is willing to take on the personal risk required to speak out against it (which is why it’s so important for those who can to speak out against them).

•Certain conditions such as being disconnected from everything or a severe source of anxiety gripping the society make individuals much more susceptible to falling into a mass formation.
Note: these were the exact same conditions that existed during the COVID lockdowns.

•The most successful tyrants in history (e.g., Hitler, Stalin, Mao) controlled a society which was in the grip of a mass formation and enacted a variety of policies and propaganda presentations which further reinforced the mass formation.
Note: while it did not happen to those three, Desmet cited many other cases where the mass formation became a self-perpetuating entity which devoured the society (including those who had initially championed it).

I immediately supported Desmet’s position because it both encapsulated much of what I’d seen throughout my lifetime and also because he provided an unusual degree of accuracy over what had transpired in those totalitarian states I almost never see provided within the literature.

Note: much of what happened in those states is nearly impossible to put into words, and I only know of because I am close to perceptive individuals who grew up within them. The fear many of us have is that we are extremely vulnerable to repeating those mistakes of the past because there are now so few people who are still alive who directly experienced what happened in these nightmares is a large part of what motivates to write here.

Furthermore, I believe there are three important but rarely recognized aspects of this phenomena.

First, much of what Desmet described (e.g., the inexplicable sway people are pulled under, the hypnotic current that forms between them, and the rapid transmission of states of consciousness between the participants) is energetically mediated. This for example is why individuals with “the ‘it’ factor” often initiate the creation of mass formations and why (in the wrong settings such as a war zone) you can watch a malevolent emotion rapidly spread through a crowd, which is following by something inconceivable like a terrifying madness gripping the crowd or them transforming into monsters in the blink of an eye.
Note: it’s very difficult to appreciate what I am describing (or even believe it’s possible) unless you’ve seen it firsthand.

Second, less intense mass formations exist around us all the time. For example, any social group or identity will often develop a shared emotional resonance and linguistic style members of the group will adopt to fulfill their subconscious desire to belong to the collective. This for instance is why many nonsensical ideologies can perpetuate as while their specific words are relatively meaningless, they all reinforce the underlying resonance of the group. To illustrate, a recent article, “The Deadly Rise of Scientism” discussed how randomly generated text (i.e. nonsense) that mimics the cadence of post-modernist or new age writings often can pass for being authentic to members of those groups.
Note: while I strongly believe patients should be informed and have access to support groups, I now often recommend my patients leave them as I find many who participate in these groups latch onto unhealthy beliefs being continually reinforced within the collectives of those groups (e.g., “we are all so damaged” “there is no hope” etc).

Finally, whenever you start to look into cults, you will typically find some type of mass formation is at work. I share this because in a cult deprogramming I was involved in a year ago, I realized what the person was describing perfectly matched what Desmet had shared with Tucker Carlson about mass formations, and in turn, once the individual was at the place they were willing to listen, sharing that excellent interview played a pivotal role in breaking them out of the cult.

Note: one of the major social challenges I faced throughout life was how much internal resistance I’ve had to surrendering myself into the mass formation of a group—something which makes it very hard to fit in.

Cults

Anytime groups of people gather together for a shared ideology, they will develop varying degrees of cult like behavior. Exactly where you draw the line on what degree of that constitutes a cult is hard to say—everyone agrees Jim Jones (who inspired the phrase ‘drinking the Kool-Aid’) was one of the most infamous cult leaders in history, but very different perspectives exist on how to describe the zealots trapped within the COVID-19 mass formation (e.g., many still think they were completely sane, while others ofter refer to them as the “Branch Covidians”).

Note: many of my colleagues refer to modern medicine as a cult because of how deeply held many of its toxic beliefs are and because of how quickly collective psychoses can spread through the medical field (e.g., what we saw throughout COVID-19).

In turn, cults are an enduring issue with almost every faith. For example, by the criteria that exists in almost every one of them, Jesus Christ was a genuine spiritual being and a teacher of great integrity. Yet, since Jesus’s time, countless false prophets claiming to act in his name have done unspeakable acts (e.g., Jim Jones did this) that go against every single teaching of Christ, and sadly I can name individuals who have done the same for almost every other major religion (e.g., I’ve come across a few cults run by a psychopath who has convinced everyone he held the true teachings of the Buddha—and sometimes even genuinely believe he was Buddha’s reincarnation).

Typically cults form in one of three ways:

•A Cult Leader Creates It
•A Mass Formation Emerges On It’s Own
•Both happen concurrently.

Note: mass formations being linked to cults explain why these organizations (unlike other predatory businesses) often become focused on more than than just making money and why they often become so hard for their leaders to control.

Cult leaders in turn tend to come from two sources:

1. Individuals with “the ‘it’ factor” who then use their charisma to attract a following.

2. Individuals who have uncovered something inspiring, get in over their heads while promoting it, get placed into a leadership position, and then rapidly become transformed by their position (which they were not prepared to handle).

In turn, there are a few key points to take from this.

First, the degree of charisma a cult leader has varies greatly. Typically, the more innate charisma they have (due to their energetic makeup), the less they look for outside help. Conversely, as the leader has less charisma, they will resort to some combination of:

•Asking outside forces to provide that charisma (e.g., this is a common reason why people engage in channeling).

•Psychologically manipulating their group (e.g., by coming up with an endless list of reasons why people must devote themselves to the cult, doing lots of things to “unground” them such as subjecting them to sleep deprivation in order to make them easier to manipulate, or isolating them from anyone outside the group so no one can break the leader’s spell).
Note: a good case can also be made that all of the above occurs in many other areas like the training one goes through to become a doctor.

Secondly, since cults (and the energetic manipulation that maintains them) have had much more time to develop in Asia than they have in the Western World, the “marketplace” for cults tends to be more competitive and selects for people who are very good at spiritually manipulating their groups. Conversely, while individuals like that are rare to find in the Western World, modern technology (like NLP) has bridged that gap here.

For example, a common marketing technique is to combine an (often repetitive) activity that invests you in the product with something that triggers a dopamine spike, as doing these in concert with each other creates an addiction to the product.

In turn, many examples exist showing how big tech has done this to increase business (e.g., with blue light from screens creates addictive serotonin releases, I’ve observed certain music playing programs will sometimes slightly speed up your favorite songs which in parallel speeds up your nervous system not unlike a stimulant, and it is now widely acknowledged that social media is structured to create addictive dopamine spikes in the users).

Cults often use similar approaches, especially those that are focused on selling their doctrine to as many people as possible. For example, in a manner somewhat analogous to how Big Tech addicts you to their products, I’ve come across quite a few groups which covertly (or overtly) drugged their recipients with illicit drugs that caused them to have euphoric experiences cult members were trained to associate with the cult’s messages. Likewise these groups often use some type of easy method to create a spiritual high and then convince each follower that high validates the importance of the cult’s doctrines.

Positive Spiritual Practices

Since determining what constitutes a “cult” can be quite subjective, another way to evaluate the merits of one is to see if it offers the positive things known to go hand in hand with a religion or spiritual tradition.

Most longstanding spiritual traditions have served as a powerful repository of societal and cultural wisdom, and our highest ideals (e.g., the Judeo-Christian and Buddhist narratives about compassion, kindness, freedom and liberation or the Pagan and Indigenous traditions reverence of the natural world, embrace of positive feminine ideals, and the reality of the interconnectedness of all things). Cults, especially as their mass formation grows, rarely offer the same (e.g., Jim Jones initially promoted egalitarian ideals but then pivoted far away from them).

Similarly, one of the primary reasons people embrace their faith and is because it has serves as a cornerstone for their productive and worthwhile life. So, healthy spiritual practices should be expected to produce outcomes such as:

•Improved physical health and longevity.

•Improved mental health (e.g., increased happiness and satisfaction).

•Improved social health (e.g., intact families, lower divorce rates, increased kindness and greater community engagement).

•Improved spiritual health (e.g., being more grounded).

Note: research such as this large survey by Pew Research has demonstrated many of those benefits are seen from actively participating in a religious group.

In turn, I would argue that when you are engaged in a genuine spiritual tradition, you should:

1. Feel you directly experienced positive change in yourself.

2. Other people inside your community recognize and acknowledge these positive qualities emerging in you.

3. People outside of your community (e.g., those not practicing your faith and those sharing some other affiliation with you) should acknowledge these positive qualities in you.

As you might guess, it is very rare to see these benefits from being in a cult. So if you aren’t experiencing them, you may want to reconsider the merits of what you are doing.

The Problems With Being a Cult Leader

Since cult like behaviors exist everywhere, it’s inevitable they will end up in spiritual groups. In turn, like many other facets of our society, each faith operates somewhere on the spectrum between integrity and manipulation, but fortunately most of the traditions which have stood the test of time, while not perfect tend to err towards integrity.

Conversely, the newer groups are typically much more prone to becoming cults. This is usually because one or more of the following happened:

•A charlatan founded it to advance their own selfish agenda.

•Organizational structures were not in place to prevent bad apples in managerial positions from hijacking the organization for their own agenda.

•The leader was not prepared for the role (as they had not yet done the decades of hard work necessary to cultivate genuine inner humility and spiritual maturity).

Throughout my life, I’ve seen numerous cases of well-intentioned individuals that got thrust into the role of a cult leader role and due to their lack of spiritual maturity were unable to handle that role and got really messed up by it. Likewise, I’ve seen unscrupulous individuals attain that role and become much more twisted once they were within it.

Presently, I believe there are a few key reasons to explain why cults are so damaging to their leaders:

•First, history has consistently shown that having the absolute power to do whatever you want is extremely corrosive to the soul as it causes you to stop considering how others feel or the consequences of your actions (e.g., this was a well-known problem with the Roman emperors) and frequently, I observe that when people attain the ability to manipulate others with ease this occurs. For example, if you consider the politician mentioned above, he became so used to being able to use his “it” factor to seduce woman, they in many ways became objects to him and as best as I can tell (as I never knew him personally) his sex addiction consumed him.

•Secondly, anytime one taps into a core need people have (e.g., their purpose in life) they will reciprocally project all their needs onto that person (e.g., to be saved or to be manipulated by someone they “trust”). This is why the most advanced spiritual teachers tend to rebuff or dodge the praise they receive from their students whereas the other teachers often take that validation to heart, gradually becoming addicted to it and distorted by it, and in many cases, eventually succumbing to the desire within every human being to be a god. This amongst other things is why MD’s are sometimes mockingly referred to as “minor deities,” and why many celebrities “live for the applause” (Lady Gaga even made a song about it).

Note: one of the primary reasons I am anonymous on here is because I do not want to have a cult of personality form around me. Had I not had that anonymity buffer, I probably would have never touched upon many of the core issues that lie deep within many of us.

Third, once leaders become (consciously or unconsciously) addicted to the role of the leader who receives the adulation of their flock, they naturally want to maintain it. This for instance makes them much more prone to temptation (e.g., to accept the “help” of an outside force that will help them control their flock). Likewise, teachers (especially those who are not that advanced) will inevitably run out of material to teach their students, and at this junction, those who have become addicted to maintaining their position will switch from providing their students with value to manipulating their students to stay with them.
Note: this is why similar lines are seen again and again when more conscious students begin to recognize their teacher has nothing to offer them and begin to drift away to new teachers (e.g., “unless you follow me you will go to hell,” “without my practices you will never purify your karma,” “our church is the only way you can repent for your sins,” “my teachings are the one true way to obtain enlightenment; anything else is a fraud,” “I am offering you a direct connection to god and the infinite,” “fate has brought you here; if you squander this opportunity, it will be thousands of lifetimes before you get another chance to wake up” etc).

•Fourth, interactions (particularly energetic and spiritual ones) are always a two-way street, and as one influences someone else, they inevitably are influenced as well. In many cases, what cult leaders take on from their flock is much more than what they can handle and in far too many cases, completely destabilizes the innermost core of their being. Of the four points, I believe this final one is the most important.

Spiritual Psychoses

pOne of the things I have always been fascinated by is the overlap between psychosis, illicit drug usage, and spiritual disturbances (which are resulted from unsafe spiritual practices). To illustrate:

•The psychoses I’ve seen from harmful spiritual practices often resemble specific types of drug psychoses (and respond to similar interventions).

•With a significant number of psychiatric patients I’ve worked with, I noticed I they had some type of Chinese medicine diagnostic pattern which would cause the exact symptomology they were experiencing. Without exception, this was never recognized by their psychiatrists.
Note: I and numerous colleagues believe short circuits in the energy channels of the body is a common cause of mental illness.

•A significant portion of people who go into the spiritual field do so because they unresolved mental illness, and seek spirituality out in the hope it will help them. Sadly, while they tend to be much more sensitive to spiritual experiences, this almost never works out well for them and I know far more people who got worse than those who get better by using mediation to fix their minds (including quite a few who had psychotic breaks in the middle of a retreat).

•I’ve met many patients who turned psychotic after doing what is classically considered to be a dangerous spiritual practice.
Note: there is now some recognition of this issue. For example, in China, psychosis triggered by a bad Qigong practice is referred to as Zouhuorumo or “Qigong deviation,” while the equivalent in is Yoga termed the Kundalini Syndrome, both of which are analogous to the “Cultural Concepts of Distress” which were recently introduced to psychiatry.

•I’ve met many extremely sensitive patients who I felt were erroneously deemed to be partially psychotic because they were simply perceiving things in the environment others were not (and in many cases also not able to functionally process everything they were taking in). At same time however, I’ve also met many sensitive people who were absolutely certain they were perceiving things I assessed (and in some cases concretely verified) to be hallucinations—which speaks to how incredibly tricky this issue is for even an extremely open minded psychiatrist to handle appropriately.

•Segments of the shaman community believe that many severe mental illness are the result someone becoming awakened to the spirit realm but not being able to have a functional integration with that process. The most well-known article on this subject detailed the experiences of an African Shaman who observed this issue throughout an American psychiatric hospital he visited. That shaman spoke throughout the USA, and remarkably, the Washington Post published an article that somewhat corroborated his claims.
Note: both I and colleagues have observed cases of psychoses (e.g., with schizophrenics) which fall into that shamanistic model, but do not believe it is appropriate to apply it to all of them.

There was a very controversial article published by the Washington Post 8 years ago (e.g., see this rebuttal) where an academic psychiatrist from New York discussed his experiences working with exorcists throughout the United States who consulted him on their cases. The psychiatrist shared that while the majority of cases were classical mental illnesses, a subset existed which he could not explain as anything besides demonic possession, and recounted a variety of compelling stories (and four years later wrote a book synopsizing his 25 years of work in this field which is summarized in this interview).

•I had quite a few spiritually inclined friends from medical school who went into psychiatry specifically because (like me) they recognized that many psychiatric patients were sensitive individuals with issues outside the medical model and it thus offered them a way to productively engage with this realm.
Note: as you might have guessed, some of them contribute to this publication.

Universal Persuasions

Years ago, I read a book which argued that to be successful, any party (e.g., an institution) wishing to market itself must use “universal persuasions” as these hold the highest chance of capturing people (e.g., customers) who will support it. For example, I would argue the reason why the mainstream religions have stood the test of time, whereas the cults I described which appropriated their teachings rapidly faded into memory was because their message had much a much narrower appeal (and hence only was embraced by those already trapped within the mass formation of the cult).

That book argued there were two universal persuasions:

•You are special.

•Everything that is wrong in your life is not your fault.

In turn, if you think about it, so many ideas which have gone viral throughout history used both of these. For example, consider how much the modern left utilizes both of these to recruit its zealous adherents (e.g., by pushing DEI on the world you are saving it and everything that’s wrong in your life is the result of structural oppression).

Having thought this over, I believe there are three other universal persuasions:

If you want something of value (e.g., something which will cultivate your self-esteem) if you do what we tell you to do, you can get that with minimal work on your part. For example, in the previous article about scientism, I argued that much of its “hook” has been to tell everyday members of society if they mindlessly repeat whatever the scientific authorities say, they are “smart” too.

Note: one could argue this universal persuasion is a correlate of the first two.

Utilize someone with “the ‘it’ factor,” which while highly effective, as discussed above isn’t scalable and in many cases (unless the individual is exceptionally charismatic) only appeals to those who have an energetic resonance with the individual. As a result, this ends up being used on a case by case basis rather than being the default.

Provide people with something that feels profound and true, as it’s what people are always searching for but can never quite attain (which for example is part of why “the ‘it’ factor” is so appealing to people as it gives them a taste of what they’ve always been searching for).

Dangerous Spiritual Practices

On this Substack, I have repeatedly complained about how the practice of mainstream medicine is often shaped by business interests rather than what is best for the patient. Regrettably, this also often holds true for many other fields including holistic healing and spirituality, and I hence repeatedly see them adopt business approaches which cater to the universal persuasions rather than helping their customers.

Within spirituality and meditation, much of this comes from the fact it is relatively easy to give people a strong spiritual experience but much harder to teach them a practice which can productively cultivate their spiritual growth. So as you might expect, many chose to have a way to create that experience and then package it with an (often ego inflating) story which means you must devote yourself to the teacher providing it. Furthermore, since the people who tend to seek out spirituality often do so because they are ungrounded and searching for a meaning, they are much less able to protect themselves from predatory sales tactics or recognize what is being done to them (whereas grounded individuals immediately have their critical thinking kick in).

Note: typically groups which focus on superficial appearances (e.g., having a spiritual teacher dress in an extravagant manner and encouraging each member of the group to copy the teacher’s dress and demeanor) do so because the teacher lacks the ability to offer anything of genuine spiritual value to their students. Likewise, cult leaders who wish to control a group typically do so through manipulating the external images each member of the group follows as it is much rarer to find cult leaders who have enough spiritual knowledge to manipulate the spiritual core of their followers (rather people who can actually do this typically only want to help their students).

My primary objection to pursuing “experience based” spirituality is that it can often be quite dangerous (e.g., I’ve know a few people who developed major issues after an intense Kundalini yoga retreat taught by unqualified teacher).

In turn, over the generations, each spiritual tradition has identified specific mind-body practices that are not good to do, but inevitably get reused up again and again because they offer the experience (and hence promise) of enlightenment in return for very little work. Some of the most common examples I (and many others) have come across in clinical practice are:

•Aggressively forcing physical structures and energy channels in the body to open (especially within the brain).

•Channelling spirits or guides.

•Pulling energy from deep within the earth up through the body.

•Using powerful drugs in conjunction with a spiritual practice to increase the experience of a practice.

Note: I’ve also run into many people who had issues with inappropriate “spiritual” sexual practices, including people who belonged to somewhat infamous western sex cults. However, these rarely turn people psychotic like the previously listed items. For those more interested in this NSFW subject, recent exposés on OneTaste (e.g., this one and this one) are both accurate (as they match what people who belonged to the group shared with me) and synopsize many of the common “business” tactics cults use. Additionally, they highlight a common marketing tactic cults use—having attractive individuals who are fully committed to a cult use their sexuality to entice members of the public into the cult (especially if that member has “the ‘it’ factor”).

In my eyes, one of the biggest problems with all of this is that not just the students but often the teachers as well lack the experience to understand the dangers of the specific practices being done. This is then compounded by four critical problems:

•People tend to develop big egos about what they are doing and hence become extremely resistant to considering the possibility what they are doing is not wise or that they wasted their time pursuing it. This is some analogous to how countless brutal conflicts have happened throughout history because people on both sides could not accept the notion their god was second best and there was a valid reason to worship something else.

•Since unsafe spiritual practices mentally destabilize people, both students and their teachers gradually lose the ability to recognize the practice is harming them.

•These practices are combined with other practices which often further unground the individual. For example, the fruitarian diet continually goes in an out of fashion, since it “cleanses” the body and gives people a high on life, but over time makes them become ungrounded and often somewhat mentally ill (e.g., I know a few groups within the raw vegan community have experienced significant difficulties from confrontations initiated by militant fruitarians).

•As mentioned above, many of those who are seek out these practices are ungrounded to begin with. The additional correlate to this is that frequently those individuals will bounce from one questionable teacher to another who offers them the promise of salvation but instead provides damaging spiritual practices which further un-ground them.

In short, I believe that if you want to do an intense spiritual practice, you need to have a clear understanding of exactly what you are trying to do, what can go wrong and how to fix things if they do go awry. Sadly, like many things, this issue is not at all unique to spirituality. For example, in a recent series, I discussed the many issues with SSRI antidepressants. One point I emphasized was the horrifying experience many patients have when they discover that the doctors they trusted (and who put them on these powerful drugs) actually understand very little about the SSRIs and that the safety net they assumed would exist to fix an SSRI injury simply doesn’t exist—an experience almost identical to what many have had with the COVID vaccines.

Note: our culture also has a longstanding issue forceful physical practices (e.g., gymnastics) coming into vogue and then being abandoned once too many people get injured by it. This for example is what’s recently happened with CrossFit, and what has somewhat happened with Yoga (as many people who teach it have limited familiarity with the traditional practice and are instead doing aggressive routines they came up with that they “think” are a good idea).

Finally, to further illustrate how challenging all of this is, we’ve had quite a few cases where I introduced someone to what we considered to be a moderately safe spiritual practice. That individual (due to their ego or them being fairly ungrounded) did something different from what they were told to do, ran into issues, did not listen to when I told them to stop, then ran into more issues and it ultimately took an immense amount of work to bring them back to a functional state.

Note: One of the major challenges in medicine is that there just aren’t enough healthcare workers available to sufficiently look after every patient, and likewise, in most spiritual groups, unless the leader is quite talented, it’s simply not feasible for them to keep an eye on every student and continually intervene as needed. This in turn is why now I almost never introduce students or colleagues to the majority of spiritual practices—it’s simply not possibly for me to be involved enough with them to provide the supervision necessary to prevent things from going awry.

Psychoactive Brews

Within our culture, the concept of using psychedelics has become intertwined with spirituality, and in turn, many of the same issues I’ve described above can be see within the psychedelic field. At this point, I believe psychedelics have a lot of promise when used in moderation within an appropriate setting (e.g., I have psychiatrist colleagues who are getting remarkable results from combining them with psychotherapy) but unfortunately, it is rare that setting is available.

Ever since the psychedelic scene started in the 1960s, many in my circle have observed the same general pattern:

•People will have strong experiences on psychedelics which are spiritual in nature and often makes them more open to consider a broader spiritual perspective in life.

•People often develop immense egos about the experience they had.

•Most of the benefits seen from the psychedelics are quite fleeting and rarely cultivate the same type of growth seen with a sustained spiritual practice.

•A significant number of people develop varying degrees of mental (or neurologic) illness from these drugs, especially when they use them for a prolonged period (which often happens once they believe the drug is their path to spirituality).

The most recent psychedelic which has become extremely popular is ayahuasca, a traditional psychoactive brew made from the leaves of a plant containing DMT and the stems of a vine which inhibits the breakdown of DMT (as typically DMT produces very brief highs due to how rapidly the brain metabolizes it).

A lot of people I know have used it, and the pattern matches there much of what we’ve observed with the other psychedelics. For example, many have had very interesting experiences on the drug and quite a few developed a massive ego about it, but to at this point in time, I only know of one person who I believe developed a clear and sustained psychological benefit from it.

Conversely, since ayahuasca forcefully opens people up (which is essentially why they perceive so many unusual things around them) you often run into many of the same issues seen with unsafe spiritual practices. For example:

•I know a few people who became extremely ungrounded after their ayahuasca experience, lost the ability to perform a job they’d effectively done for decades and were simply unable to receive any guidance from their co-workers who genuinely wanted to help them (e.g., this happened to a nurse I know who had worked in a very holistic medical practice).

•I know of many instances where people on ayahuasca (due to their open state) picked up an outside influence which caused a lot of issues for them until it was removed.

•I know of a few cases where part of their nervous system effectively “short circuited” and the individual lost the ability to do specific tasks they had previously been able to perform.
Note: LSD is notorious for doing this, and I have occasionally seen psilocybin do it as well.

If you study the history of ayahuasca, it’s clear that it’s really benefitted the indigenous communities which used it. However, I believe much of the harm we are seeing now is a result of it having been commercialized (which in turn is resulting in a lot of tourists flocking to South America to receive it alongside ayahuasca “churches” opening in the USA) and because of that money, many people are entering the business who are not qualified to administer it.

Some of the common issues we observe are:

•Some of the shamans in the ayahuasca scene travel through dark places in their shamanic work and they take that darkness with them when they leave (in many cases without the shaman even realizing it), which then transfer to individuals working with the shaman (e.g, in their ayahuasca ceremonies).

•When the group settings are used, it’s much harder for the shaman to supervise and protect each participant and likewise much more likely pathologies will be transferred from the unhealthy members of the group to everyone else. Because of this, the most experienced and reputable people we know in the field typically will only administer it to a few people at a time and completely avoid those group settings.

•Many people who claim to be qualified to supervise these events have very little knowledge of what’s actually going on or what needs to be done to prevent things from going awry.

In short, this is not that different from the pattern that is seen in many other spiritual groups, and I know from mutual friends that many the top people within those indigenous communities feel awful about what has happened to their sacred medicine.

Note: Individuals who aren’t grounded tend to be much more likely to end up in groups which offer a way to provide that meaning they have lost or “heal” them, which is unfortunate since these individuals also tend to be the most susceptible to being manipulated or destabilized (e.g., this is a huge problem in the ayahuasca because this characterizes many of the people who journey to South America for it). Similarly, I feel this very much holds true for the modern left, as it offers the tantalizing promise of providing that meaning by “saving the world” but since those who get tricked into it lack the grounding which begets basic critical thinking and skepticism, they often get pulled into fanatically supporting ideas which are completely at odds with reality and common sense.

Cult Interventions

When working with someone you believe is trapped in a cult, I believe the most important thing to remember is that most attempts to break someone out of a cult fail, so you need to immediately question if what you want to do is actually going to help.

Note: the challenges of rescuing people from cults led to the creation of a cult deprogramming industry which (with tacit support from law enforcement) would violently abduct people and forcefully try to break their attachment to the cult . Despite a lot of money being spent on this (essentially illegal and frequently harmful) approach, decades of research showed it didn’t really work and it gradually went out of vogue.

Much of this I believe comes from how people react to emotional confrontation (e.g., consider how defensive people often get when they are overtly challenged). More specifically (as I tried to describe in detail within this article), whenever we (consciously or unconsciously) dislike something, something inside our body mind or spirit will tighten up and close down. In turn, I would argue the the most common issues which arises within interpersonal communication is that this tightening occurs within the communicator and then triggers a tightening within the listener.
Note: cult leaders also often pre-empt this approach by giving their prey a story which causes them to become even more defensive over criticisms of the cult (e.g., they see it as a sign the world is against the cult’s “one truth”).

Many different methods have been developed throughout history to solve this enduring challenge of human communication, and many of them essentially encourage the speaker to completely lose their attachment to the situation. This is because it is only when one is at peace with whatever happens that they can engage stressful situations without having their insides tighten up in response to whatever happens.

To illustrate—I had a few times where someone very close to me got involved in a cult which had an extremely strong grip on them and based on my relationship to them, their being involved with the cult would have essentially been catastrophic for my life. In these situations, the very first thing I did was completely make peace with that happening (which was not easy to do) and did not engage with them until I had. This ultimately worked, and they told me had I done anything else, they would have stayed with the cult.

Note: I have heard almost identical stories of how critical a non-judgmental attitude is with drug or alcohol interventions being done by family members of someone whose life is being destroyed by addiction.

So, rather than attack the cult directly, an indirect approach has to be used. Some of the things I’ve found were the most helpful were:

1. Say something along the lines of “I really don’t think this is a good idea, but if this is what you truly want, I will support you in doing it.”

2. Do something completely outside their expectations (e.g., if you’ve had a lifelong habit or addiction they disapproved of but you would never quit, at some point nonchalantly inform them you aren’t doing it anymore). This is important because by the time someone has committed to joining a cult, they will have a fairly detailed story in their mind about why that is the correct decision and often have planned out how they will refute each argument from those close to them about why they shouldn’t join the cult. If you break a few foundational mental conceptions they had of you (e.g., that you’d fight with them over the cult), that will begin to create doubt that can ripple into their mental conception of the cult and begin to give you a weak point the ideology can be attacked at.

3. Try to figure out what weaknesses made them vulnerable to getting pulled into the cult. For instance, if you see someone describing their group in a very culty (i.e. disconcerting) way, this is often linked to them being heavily disconnected from their body. This in turn suggests the issue was them having a weakened connection to their and them needing to do some type of practice which physically integrates them. I first realized this after someone I knew who was trapped in a cult spoke to me and I realized what they were telling me (that they wanted to devote themselves to the cult) was in complete conflict with what their body was communicating.

4. Similarly, individuals often join cults because they are looking for a community or a connection, so as it is feasible, having a support group of people who can (non-judgmentally) give them a sense of connection and community can help counteract that weakness the cult preys upon.
Note: Cults are well known for coming up with and endless number of reasons to isolate its members from anyone outside of the cult (e.g., consider how much fear the vaccinated and masked were conditioned to have of the unvaccinated or unmasked) as they both alleviate the isolation the cult thrives upon and provide a contrary message which breaks the mass formation of the group. Sometimes this results in truly remarkable things happening (e.g., I’ve forgotten how a longstanding family business I worked in during college imploded because the aging patriarch began to develop cognitive impairment and was then preyed upon by a cult leader who unbelievably convinced him to cut everyone off and then torch the whole company).

5. Once it seems that they are at least a bit open to questioning the cult (e.g., because you’ve made them stronger and sown a little bit of doubt which has made the cult’s story which crystalized in their mind become more malleable), expose them to people who publicly point out common cult issues that match what victim went through. This for example is why Desmet’s previous interview was so incredibly helpful; it came from someone with no connection to the situation and simultaneously sounded quite objective and insightful about the specific situation they were trapped in. Likewise, the primary reason why I wrote this article was so you could show it to people trapped in similar situations to the ones described throughout this article.

6. At this point, precisely targeting the cult’s anchors (in a confrontational way) tends to be the most helpful.

Note: In the final part of this article I will discuss the most controversial aspects of this article (e.g., specific dangerous spiritual practices and some of our perspectives on exactly what some encounter within the spiritual realm) as I feel they are necessary to tie the previous points together. If the darkness around us is not your cup of tea, please do not read further and if it you do, please do not view what follows as the typical content of this publication

 

from:    https://www.midwesterndoctor.com/p/cults-meditation-drugs-and-psychosis?utm_source=profile&utm_medium=reader2

These Guys Are Totally Insane

WEF Calls for AI to Rewrite Bible, Create ‘Religions That Are Actually Correct’

A top official with the World Economic Forum (WEF) has called for religious scripture to be “rewritten” by artificial intelligence (AI) to create a globalized “new Bible.”

Yuval Noah Harari, the senior advisor to the WEF and its chairman Klaus Schwab, argues that using AI to replace scriptures will create unified “religions that are actually correct.”

Harari, an influential author and professor, made the call while giving a talk on the “future of humanity.”

According to Harari, the power of AI can be harnessed and used to reshape spirituality into the WEF’s globalist vision of “equity” and inclusivism.

Speaking with journalist Pedro Pinto in Lisbon, Portugal, Harari told the elitist audience:

“It’s the first technology ever that can create new ideas.

“You know, the printing press, radio, television, they broadcast, they spread the ideas created by the human brain, by the human mind.

“They cannot create a new idea.

“You know, [Johannes] Gutenberg printed the Bible in the middle of the 15th century; the printing press printed as many copies of the Bible as Gutenberg instructed it, but it did not create a single new page.

“It had no ideas of its own about the Bible: Is it good? Is it bad? How to interpret this? How to interpret that?”

Harari then revealed that he and his allies at the WEF have a solution to the supposed problems he’d just highlighted.

“AI can create new ideas; [it] can even write a new Bible,” he declared.

“Throughout history, religions dreamt about having a book written by a superhuman intelligence, by a non-human entity,” he added.

“In a few years, there might be religions that are actually correct … just think about a religion whose holy book is written by an AI.

“That could be a reality in a few years.”

WATCH:

Harari noted in another recent gathering that software like ChatGPT has mastered human languages and can harness that function to influence culture, the Times of Israel said.

“For thousands of years, prophets and poets and politicians have used language and storytelling in order to manipulate and to control people and to reshape society,” he said, according to the paper.

“Now AI is likely to be able to do it.

“And once it can… it doesn’t need to send killer robots to shoot us.

“It can get humans to pull the trigger.”

Harari also said that “contrary to what some conspiracy theories assume, you don’t really need to implant chips in people’s brains in order to control them or to manipulate them,” the paper noted.

He also warned that “we need to act quickly before AI gets out of our control” and that “governments must immediately ban the release into the public domain of any more revolutionary AI tools before they are made safe,” the paper added.

Harari frequently pushes ideas that involve humanity being replaced by machines.

As Slay News previously reported, Harari gloated last year that “we just don’t need the vast majority of the population” in today’s world.

According to Harari, most of the general public has now become “redundant” and will be of little use to the global elite in the future.

Harari argues that modern technologies like artificial intelligence “make it possible to replace the people.”

“If you go back to the middle of the 20th century — and it doesn’t matter if you’re in the United States with Roosevelt, or if you’re in Germany with Hitler, or even in the USSR with Stalin — and you think about building the future, then your building materials are those millions of people who are working hard in the factories, in the farms, the soldiers,” Harari said.

“You need them.

“Now, fast forward to the early 21st century when we just don’t need the vast majority of the population,” he added.

“The future is about developing more and more sophisticated technology, like artificial intelligence [and] bioengineering.

“Most people don’t contribute anything to that, except perhaps for their data, and whatever people are still doing which is useful, these technologies increasingly will make redundant and will make it possible to replace the people.”

WEF Calls for AI to Rewrite Bible, Create ‘Religions That Are Actually Correct’

Opening to Your Truth

Things are happening very quickly right now, and part of what is going on is confusion, discombobulation, and outright deception.  It is up to you to untangle the threads of just what’s what and who’s who.

Not so easy, you say?  The key to finding and knowing the truth for yourself involves going within, looking within, and trusting the messages that come from within.  Although we can be masters at lying to ourselves, in an atmosphere of authentic longing to see through the illusion, what is real will stand out.  This is not to say that it will be the only thing there in your awareness, however the chances are that it will be the one that ultimately makes the most sense to you.

The one thing that can keep you from allowing your truth to shine through is fear.  So, what ARE you afraid of?  In making up your mind, in choosing your preferred alternatives, in allowing your truth, there is courage, and courage always looks beyond fear.  it knows that it is there, but being true to your inner light illuminates the path, and fear scrambles away because in the light of what is real, the insubstantiality of fear becomes manifest and it dissolves.

SO be your truth and you can be amazed at how others respond to you and just what you attract to yourself!

 

Embrace Your Power

HOW TO REWIRE YOUR CONSCIOUSNESS AND MAKE CONTACT WITH THE FIELD

October 4, 2018

Vic Bishop, Staff
Waking Times

One of the most beautiful aspects of today’s highly connected technological world is that we have access to an extraordinary amount of ideas and information, which can forever change your life for the better, if only you would apply them toward your personal evolution.

Think about it. For the first time, any philosophy is at your our fingertips, you can parse through infinite volumes of medical and scientific research, read the documented personal experiences and stories of people from all walks of life, and read nearly any book on a whim. Even biology, genetics and quantum physics can be studied anytime, anywhere.

Couple this with the fact that science is finally beginning to merge with spirituality, and you have an unbelieveable opportunity to evolve into something that has never before been possible. If we want to become superhuman, we can.

At the center of all this lies the human capacity to make contact with ‘the field,’ which is a way of referring to the energy of the universe that pervades all things. The Chinese hint at something similar when they describe chi. The Jedi refer to this field as ‘the force.’

Make no mistake, this is real, and we have the science now that confirms it. We now know for sure that what we think of as matter is actually just energy, vibrating at whatever frequency needed to create an object, being, or thought. And our mind has the ability to organize this energy into material things, which is something we are just now beginning to grasp.

But how do you put it all together in a cohesive way of being that allows you to actually experience the most extraordinary possibilities in your life? How do you bring all this knowledge together to actually elevate your consciousness?

It all happens in your mind, as quantum physics proves. What you do inside of your mind creates the outcomes you see in the world. Whatever it is you are ‘being’ in your mind, is what you will be in our shared reality.

The key to getting this and to putting it to use in your life lies first and foremost in your beliefs about the nature of reality. That is, do you see reality as being a fixed stage where you are merely playing along with what is presented before you? Or do you see reality as an ongoing creation of the imagination of human beings, where our beliefs and thoughts shape the contents and form of the stage?

If you want to shift your consciousness and make contact with the field, you apply your attention, energy, thought and imagination to doing so. The tools of the mind are the workbench for creating anything, and without an understanding of how to properly use it, it is easy to squander or never fully take advantage of ability to create. To live in chronic mediocrity.

This presentation by consciousness researcher Dr. Joe Dispenza is an excellent primer on this idea, explaining how the power of the mind is used by people with terminal diagnoses who somehow are able to enter spontaneous remission of disease.

If you believe that this is possible, then it is possible. If you don’t believe that it is possible, then you only have to rewrite your beliefs, which is something any of us can do. What do you think? Is there an intelligence within you that is capable of affecting matter and reality?

from:    https://www.wakingtimes.com/2018/10/04/how-to-rewire-your-consciousness-and-make-contact-with-the-field/

Ways for Getting Through

3 Powerful Reminders For When Life Gets Tough

by Tanaaz

Life is always going to be bringing us challenges, twists and turns, but no matter where you are on your journey, here are 3 powerful reminders that are always worth remembering-

1. Stay Hydrated

Stress and anxiety can put a lot of strain on the body. While exercising, meditating and eating well is always important, it can be hard to keep on top of these things when you are going through a rough patch.

One quick solution to support your wellbeing however, is staying hydrated. Drinking lots of water is not only beneficial to your body’s cellular processes but it can also boost your energy levels and clear your mind.

Water can also help to flush out heavy emotions and help to detoxify any stagnant energy that may be lingering in the etheric body.

If you are going through a challenging period remember to drink plenty of water throughout the day.

2. Don’t Think, Feel

Part of our human gifts in this life is being able to understand and rationalize things using our logical mind.

While this is an incredible skill to have, sometimes it is important to remember that not everything can be understood from this place of thinking.

Sometimes, no matter how hard you try things are just not going to make sense on a logical or practical level. When this occurs, it is important to stop thinking and start feeling instead.

Our feelings are powerful guidance tools that can actually be far more effective than trying to understanding things from a place of logic. The trick with using our feelings as a guide is to not let our logical mind analyze or interfere with the process.

To do this, simply calm your mind using your breath and then tune into your true feelings. You may just be surprised as to what comes up and how you can use it to guide you.

3. Know Everything Will Make Sense in the End

When you are in the midst of a challenging life period it can be tricky to find the gratitude and understand why things are unfolding the way that they are.

Often the most challenging periods of our lives lead us to the most rewarding places, but it can be hard to see this when going through the motions.

When life is no longer making sense to you, it is often a sign that huge growth and transformation is underway. During this process it is important to step out of the chaos for a moment or two and acknowledge that things will all make sense in the end.

There is always an ending and always a resolution that will arise and the more you can trust that, the easier it will be to moving through the process.

Remember that things always work out and there is already a resolution to all of your problems, all you have to do is keep moving forward.

Need More? Self-Love and Self-Worth are also key

from:     http://foreverconscious.com/3-powerful-reminders-life-gets-tough

Indigenous Activism & the Environment

The growing indigenous spiritual movement that could save the planet

North Dakota is just the beginning.

Demonstrators in Canon Ball protest the Dakota Access Pipeline. CREDIT: Flickr/Joe Brusky

When Pua Case landed in North Dakota to join the ongoing Standing Rock protests in September, she, like thousands of other participants, had come to defend the land.

Masses of indigenous people and their allies descended on camps along Cannonball River this year to decry the construction of the Dakota Access pipeline, a series of 30-inch diameter underground pipes that, if built, would stretch 1,172 miles and carry half a million barrels of crude oil per day — right through lands Native groups call sacred.

“We are not here to be anything but peaceful, but we are here,” Case told ThinkProgress, describing the moment she linked arms with fellow demonstrators and stared down rows of police in Bismarck. “We will stand here in our tribal names in respect and honor.”

A Lakota Sioux and her 5-year-old son pose for a photo at a protest camp erected to halt the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline. CREDIT: AP Photo/James MacPherson

But while media attention has focused on the massive, sometimes heated demonstrations—which include several alleged instances of brutality and dog attacks —there has been less attention paid to how the protest is recharging the lager climate movement, not to mention the peculiar nature of the participants. Case, for instance, traveled quite a long way to the Peace Garden State: she is from the sunny shores of Hawaii, not rugged North Dakota, and she claims a Native Hawaiian identity, not a Native American one. And she wasn’t there just to protest; the sacredness of the land is especially important to her, so she was also there to pray.

“Standing Rock is a prayer camp,” she said. “It is where prayers are done.”

“Standing Rock is a prayer camp. It is where prayers are done.”

Case’s experience is shockingly common—both as a protester visiting a far-flung land to support a Native cause, and as a witness to an emerging indigenous spiritual movement that is sweeping North America.

She’s part of something bigger that is, by all accounts, the theological opposite of the aggressively Christian “awakenings” that once dominated American life in the 18th and 19th centuries, when primarily white, firebrand ministers preached a gospel of “manifest destiny”—the religious framework later used to justify the subjugation of Native Americans and their territories. The diverse constellation of Native theologies articulated at Standing Rock and other indigenous protest camps champions the reverse: they seek to protect land, water, and other natural resources from further human development, precisely because they are deemed sacred by indigenous people.

And this year, after centuries of struggle, their prayers are starting to be answered.

The size and intensity of the Standing Rock protest caught many observers off guard — the media included. Beginning with just a few tents sprinkled across a barren field earlier this year, protesters now say nearly 10,000 people have visited the thriving camps, with guests hailing from as many as 300 different indigenous tribes.

“Seeing all the tribes come out was just incredible,” Caro “Guarding Red Tarantula Woman” Gonzales, a 26-year-old Standing Rock protester and founding member of the International Indigenous Youth Council, told ThinkProgress. “We can do that for every single indigenous fight.”

“Seeing all the tribes come out was just incredible.”

Expressions of solidarity between indigenous groups may sound predictable, but the history of Native American activism is pockmarked with internal squabbles. Early attempts to unify indigenous causes in the United States, such as the creation of the American Indian Movement in the 1960s, have since been marred by controversy and factionalism. Native Hawaiians once avoided connections between their cause and that of Native Americans, lest they suffer the same humiliating defeats as those in the continental United States. And while flashes of unified activism persisted throughout the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, indigenous communities in North America often struggled to win major victories — legal, cultural, or otherwise.

CREDIT: Dylan Petrohilos/ThinkProgress

But all that changed in December 2012, when four women in Western Canada — three First Nations women and one non-Native ally — held a teach-in to protest legislation they said would weaken environmental laws that protect lands Natives hold sacred.

The activists entitled their demonstration “Idle No More,” and the movement exploded on social media; within days, flash mobs performing traditional spiritual dances sprung up in city centers and shopping malls across the country. Taking cues from Occupy Wall Street’s organic structure, a series of marches, rallies, and direct-action peaceful protests that blocked highways and railways quickly followed, making headlines in Canada and abroad.

Idle No More’s success set off a firestorm of solidarity protests among indigenous groups in the United States, who in turn used the energy to draw attention to their own local fights — virtually all which involved some sort of spiritual claim. In Hawaii, protesters inculcated the same tactics — and sometimes even the same slogans — into an ongoing effort to halt the construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) atop Mauna Kea, a volcano Native Hawaiians consider sacred. In Arizona, members of the Apache nation began occupying an area known as Oak Flat, vowing to fend off the proposed development of a copper mine on land they call holy. And when environmentalists pushed back against the creation of the Keystone XL pipeline, organizations such as the Cowboy and Indian Alliance bolstered the existing climate change movement with Native activists in both Canada and the United States.

A Native American prayer stick is held near the capital during a Keystone XL protest in 2014. CREDIT: AP Photos/Manuel Balce Cenata

“Idle No More raised our consciousness,” Gonzales, who is of the Chemehievi nation, said. “When people are chaining themselves to bulldozers, that is prayer.”

Meanwhile, something new happened: social media allowed indigenous people across the country to show support for their fellow activists with a few simple clicks, adding hashtags and memes to their own Facebook and Twitter profiles. The digital connections helped elevate their respective causes, but also forged real-world relationships between activists in different tribes.

“When people are chaining themselves to bulldozers, that is prayer.”

By the time Standing Rock rolled around, a spiritual network of indigenous people was already in full effect.

“Many of the people I met at Standing Rock I’ve been friends with on Facebook for years,” said Case, who has been a key organizer in Native Hawaiian activist circles.

Case noted that she and several of the Standing Rock protesters had been “sending prayers” back and forth over social media for some time. These connections inspired Native Americans such as Caleen Sisk of California’s Winnemem Wintu nation to join her in an occupation of Mauna Kea in Hawaii. Years later, Case returned the favor by assisting Sisk in her effort to restore California waterways once frequented by millions of local salmon.

“We prayed on each others’ mountains and made commitments to one another,” Case said, speaking over the phone just minutes after finishing a ceremonial raft ride down the river. “They have prayed for us — they’ve come out physically to Mauna Kea. So now it’s our turn.”

“The most important word here is alliances,” she said.

Asked about the movement’s religious elements, Gonzales insisted spirituality isn’t a cursory side-effect but a crucial, driving force behind the recent surge of Native environmental activism. Virtually all of the protests she has attended, she said, featured some form of prayer or sacred ritual.

“All of us are protesting because we are part of this sacred [connection] to the earth,” Gonzales said. “We are all the mountains, we are all the birds — it sounds corny, but it’s true.”

Native protestors rally on Capitol Hill in 2015 to stop the construction of a copper mine in Oak Flat, Arizona. CREDIT: ThinkProgress/Jack Jenkins

It would be a mistake to characterize the new wave of indigenous activism as emanating from a uniform, codified theology. All of the activists ThinkProgress interviewed insisted they spoke only for themselves when discussing faith, explaining that each tribe harbors its own unique spiritual traditions, practices, and customs forged over the course of centuries, if not millennia.

But for all their differences, the various indigenous populations share a common theological belief typical of what Joshua Lanakila Mangauil, a Native Hawaiian activist, called “earth-based” cultures: that the environment, at least in parts, is sacred in and of itself.

“Earth-based cultures are tied to places,” Mangauil, whose current Facebook profile picture reads “Solidarity with Standing Rock,” said. “There is no separation from our spirituality and our environment — they are one and the same.”

“Other [religious groups] have these debates over whether or not God exists — but I know my god exists,” he added, referencing Mauna Kea, which towers above his island home. “It’s the mountain — I can see it.”

“Other [religious groups] have these debates over whether or not god exists — but I know my god exists. It’s the mountain — I can see it.”

Religion has long been a part of Native American protest movements, as has its connection to the environmentalist struggle. But religious scholars say they’re also seeing something unusual this year: demonstrators are actively creating new religious expressions. Greg Johnson, a Hawaiian religion expert and an associate professor of Religious Studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder, said these indigenous protests are increasingly led by young, creative organizers who are “generating” religion through their activism.

TOP: A Native Hawaiian chants before oral arguments at the Hawaii State Supreme Court regarding the Thirty Meter Telescope in August 2015. BOTTOM: A man blows a conch shell near a protest camp next to the summit of Mauna Kea in 2015. CREDIT: AP Photo/Craig T. Kojima, AP Photo/Caled Jones

“The kids of today’s generation know a new set of chants, a new set of prayers because of those who came before them,” Johnson said. He noted that Native Hawaiian schoolchildren are already singing songs written in the protest camps of Mauna Kea just a year before. “In this moment of crisis, the religious tradition is catalyzed, activated, but most of all articulated — this is when it happens.”

While this groundswell of religious generation is rooted in old traditions, it sometimes reawakens ancient elements that can challenge elders.

“My sacredness as a human is part of my tradition — myself as a protector, as a sacred protector.”

“To introduce another spiritual element — I am a two spirit,” Gonzales said, referencing a Native American term used to describe gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people in their communities. Although traditionally celebrated in many tribes, two-spirit people have not always been welcomed by modern indigenous people. Yet when Gonzales and others formed the International Indigenous Youth Council at Standing Rock, the majority of the leadership identified as two-spirit — a designation they link to their faith.

“My sacredness as a human is part of my tradition — myself as a protector, as a sacred protector,” she said. “There are a lot of two-sprits at [the Standing Rock] camp, and that is sacred too… We see that as integral to our activism.”

Faith is a core mobilizing and stabilizing force for the movement, but it’s also central to the legal arguments used by Native groups to defend their land. In addition to other claims, both the Oak Flat and Standing Rock lawsuits contend that the federal government — or the companies it employs — violated the National Historic Preservation Act, which requires agencies to “consult with any Indian tribe… that attaches religious and cultural significance to properties with the area of potential effects.” The Hawaii case is similarly rooted in disputes over sacred land, although the lawsuit currently focuses on state laws, not the federal statutes.

Native groups can also lean on the American Indian Religious Freedom Act of 1978, which compels the federal government to “protect and preserve for American Indians their inherent right of freedom to believe, express, and exercise [their] traditional religions…including but not limited to access to sites, use and possession of sacred objects, and the freedom to worship through ceremonials and traditional rites.”

But according to Johnson, an expert on sacred land disputes, the law is often not enough to guarantee indigenous groups a win.

One of the camps near North Dakota’s Standing Rock Sioux reservation on September 9, 2016. CREDIT: AP Photo/James MacPherson

“There is very little track record of sacred land victories,” he said. “More likely what they will generate is allegiances, attention — the secondary effects of having made the case for their tradition.”

“There is very little track record of sacred land victories.”

Indeed, the movement thus far has largely been sustained through protest and agitation. The legal case to protect Standing Rock ultimately fell flat in early September, for instance, when a U.S. District Court judge denied the nation’s request to halt pipeline construction. But the movement proved more powerful than one judge: shortly after the ruling, the Obama administration — under pressure from scores of Native groups and their allies — called on the Dakota Access to stop construction voluntarily, and the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals temporarily halted work on the pipeline shortly thereafter.

Such is the recurring — and increasingly successful  — strategy of these protests. Slowly accruing support and attention over time, and leaning on sacred claims, activists whittle away the patience of corporations and government officials until they (ideally) give up.

In Hawaii, construction of the TMT is currently stalled while lawyers debate aspects of the construction process, prompting The Hawaii Island New Knowledge fund to begin investigating alternative sites. In March, the Obama administration moved to place Oak Flat on the National Register of Historic Places, adding another bureaucratic hoop preventing the Resolution Copper company from installing a mine on site. The Lummi Nation in Washington State successfully defeated an effort to build the largest coal port ever in North America near their land earlier this year, and Native groups are also credited with helping stop the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline in 2015.

A Dakota Pipeline protest in Washington, DC in September. CREDIT: ThinkProgress/Alejandro Davila

And in addition to their secular allies in the climate movement, indigenous groups are also attracting partners in non-Native faith traditions. Representatives from the Presbyterian Church (USA), United Church of Christ, Episcopal Church, and the United Methodist Church have all visited the Standing Rock camp or expressed solidarity with the protesters, as has the Nation of Islam, according to the Religion News Service.

But the fight is far from over. Many of these disputes—including the Dakota Access Pipeline—are not yet resolved, and Native activists are already gearing up for new campaigns. In late September, dozens of tribes in Canada and the United States signed a treaty pledging to combat any further development of Canadian “tar sands,” which they say put their reservations and “sacred waterways” at risk of oil spills.

“If one of us loses, then we all have to work harder,” Case said. “We need to be stronger every day, and I believe the creator believes that’s what we need as well.”

Case said movement members will continue to lean on each other for strength moving forward (“We could use some prayer,” she joked) and that they won’t rest until they make it clear that the environment — earth, sky, and water — is, in a very literal sense, sacred.

There comes a time when people have a right to say no — and now is that time,” she added. “So we’re saying no, resoundingly, like the thundering sky.”

FROM:    https://thinkprogress.org/indigenous-spiritual-movement-8f873348a2f5#.khsb77fms

Signs of the TImes

There is Something Extraordinary Happening in the World

Most of us haven’t quite realized there is something extraordinary happening.

A few months ago I freed myself from standard-procedure society, I broke the chains of fear that kept me locked up into the system. Since then, I see the world from a different perspective: the one that everything is going through change and that most of us are unaware of that.

Why is the world changing? In this post I’ll point out the 8 reasons that lead me to believe it.

No one can stand the employment model any longer

We are reaching our limits. People working with big corporations can’t stand their jobs. The lack of purpose knocks on your door as if it came from inside you like a yell of despair.

People want out. They want to drop everything. Take a look on how many people are willing to risk entrepreneurship, people leaving on sabbaticals, people with work-related depression, people in burnout.

2. The entrepreneurship model is also changing

Over the past few years, with the explosion of startups, thousands of entrepreneurs turned their garages in offices to bring their billion dollar ideas to life.

The vortex of entrepreneurship was to find an investor and get funded. To be funded was like winning the World Cup, or the Super Bowl.

But what happens after you get funded?

You get back to being an employee. You may have brought in people not sharing your dream, not in agreement with your purpose and soon it’s all about the money. The financial end becomes the main driver of your business.

People are suffering with it. Excellent startups began to tumble because the money seeking model is endless.

A new way to endeavor is needed. Good people are doing it already.

3. The rise of collaboration

Many people have figured out that it doesn’t make any sense to go on by yourself. Many people have awakened from the “each man for himself” mad mentality.

Stop, take a step back and think. Isn’t it absurd that we, 7 billion of us living in the same planet, have grown further apart from each other? What sense does it make to turn your back on the thousands, maybe millions, of people living around you in the same city? Every time it crosses my mind, I feel blue.

Fortunately, things are changing. Sharing, collaborative economy concepts are being implemented, and it points towards a new direction. The direction of collaborating, of sharing, of helping, of togetherness.

This is beautiful to watch. It touches me.

4. We are finally figuring out what the internet is

The internet is an incredibly spectacular thing and only now, after so many years, we are understanding its power. With the internet the world is opened, the barriers fall, the separation ends, the togetherness starts, the collaboration explodes, the helping emerges.

Some nations saw true revolutions that used the internet as the primary catalyst, such as the Arab Spring. Here in Brazil we are just starting to make a better use out of this amazing tool.

Internet is taking down mass control. The big media groups controlling news by how it suits best what they want the message to be and what they want us to read are no longer the sole owners of information. You go after what you want. You bond to whomever you want. You explore whatever you may want to.

With the advent of the internet, the small is no longer speechless, there is a voice. The anonymous become acknowledged. The world comes together. And then the system may fall.

5. The fall of exaggerated consumerism

For too long, we’ve been manipulated to consume as much as we possibly can. To buy every new product launched, the newest car, the latest iPhone, the top brands, lots of clothes, shoes, lots and lots and lots of pretty much anything we could our hands on.

Going against the crowd, many people have understood that this of way off. Lowsumerism, slow life and slow food are a few excerpts of actions being taken as we speak, pointing out by contradiction how absurdly we have come to organize ourselves.

Fewer people are using cars, fewer people are overspending, and more people are swapping clothes, buying used goods, sharing assets, cars, apartments, offices.

We don’t need all of that they told us we needed. And this consciousness of new consumerism can take down any company living of the exaggerated end of it.

6. Healthy and organic eating

We were so crazy we even accepted eating anything! It only needed to taste good, and everything would be alright.

We were so disconnected that companies started to poison our food and we didn’t say anything!

But then some people started waking up, enabling and strengthening healthy and organic eating.

This is only to get stronger.

But what has this got to do with economy and work? Just about everything, I’d say.

Food production is one of the basic fundamentals of our society. If we change our mindset, our eating habit and our way of consuming, corporations will have to respond and adapt to a new market.

The small farmer is getting back to being relevant to the whole chain of production. Even people are growing plants and seeds inside their homes as well.

And that reshapes the whole economy.

7. The awakening of spirituality

How many friends do you have who practice yoga? What about meditation? Now think back, 10 years ago, how many people did you know by then who practiced these activities?

Spirituality, for too long, was for esoteric folks, those weird-like and mystic people.

But fortunately, this is also changing. We’ve come to the edge of reason and rationality. We were able to realize that, with only our conscious mind, we can’t figure out everything that goes by here. There is something else going on and I’m sure you want to get hold of that as well.

You want to understand how these things work.

How life operates, what happens after death, what is this energy thing people talk about so much, what is quantum physics, how thoughts can be materialized and create our sense of reality, what is coincidence and synchronicity, why meditation works, how it’s possible to cure using nothing but bare hands, how those alternative therapies not approved by regular medicine can actually work.

Companies are providing meditation to their employees. Even schools are teaching the young how to meditate. Think about it.

8. Unschooling trends

Who created this teaching model? Who chose the classes you have to take? Who chose the lessons we learn in history classes? Why didn’t they teach us the truth about other ancient civilizations?

Why should kids follow a certain set of rules? Why should they watch everything in silence? Why should they wear a uniform? What about taking a test to prove that you actually learned?

We developed a model that perpetuates and replicates followers of the system. That breed people into ordinary human beings.

Fortunately, a lot of people are working to rethink that though concepts such as unschooling, hackschooling, homeschooling.

Maybe you’ve never thought of that and even may be in shock. But it’s happening. Silently, people are being woken up and are realizing how crazy it is to live in this society.

Look at all these new actions and try to think everything is normal we were taught so far is normal. I don’t think it is.

There is something extraordinary happening.

from:    http://humansarefree.com/2015/12/there-is-something-extraordinary.html

Jung & Spirituality

Psychologist Carl Jung on Spirituality

| August 28, 2016 |

 Psychologist Carl Jung on Spirituality

Carl Gustav Jung (July 26, 1875, Kesswil, – June 6, 1961, Küsnacht) was a Swiss psychiatrist, influential thinker, and founder of analytical psychology. Jung’s unique and broadly influential approach to psychology has emphasized understanding the psyche through exploring the worlds of dreams, art, mythology, world religion and philosophy. Although he was a theoretical psychologist and practicing clinician for most of his life, much of his life’s work was spent exploring other realms including Eastern and Western philosophy, alchemy, astrology, sociology, as well as literature and the arts. His most notable contributions include his concept of the psychological archetype, the collective unconscious, and his theory of synchronicity. Jung emphasized the importance of balance and harmony. He cautioned that modern humans rely too heavily on science and logic and would benefit from integrating spirituality and appreciation of the unconscious realm. Jungian ideas are not typically included in curriculum of most major universities’ psychology departments, but are occasionally explored in humanities departments.

Jung’s work on himself and his patients convinced him that life has a spiritual purpose beyond material goals. Our main task, he believed, is to discover and fulfill our deep innate potential. Based on his study of Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, Gnosticism, Taoism, and other traditions, Jung believed that this journey of transformation, which he called individuation, is at the mystical heart of all religions. It is a journey to meet the self and at the same time to meet the Divine. Unlike Sigmund Freud, Jung thought spiritual experience was essential to our well-being.

The work and writings of Jung from the 1940s onwards focused on alchemy.

In 1944 Jung published Psychology and Alchemy, where he analyzed the alchemical symbols and showed a direct relationship to the psychoanalytical process.[b] He argued that the alchemical process was the transformation of the impure soul (lead) to perfected soul (gold), and a metaphor for the individuation process.

 Psychologist Carl Jung on Spirituality

Spirituality Quotes from Carl Jung

Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.

Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.

As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.

The shoe that fits one person pinches another; there is no recipe for living that suits all cases.

Your vision will become clear only when you look into your heart. Who looks outside, dreams. Who looks inside, awakens.

It is on the whole probably that we continually dream, but that consciousness makes such a noise that we do not hear it.

We meet ourselves time and time again in a thousand disguises on the path of life.

from:    http://www.bodymindsoulspirit.com/psychologist-carl-jung-on-spirituality/

Finding Your Twin

5 Signs In Recognizing Your Twin Soul

July 11, 2016 

5 Signs In Recognizing Your Twin Soul

via SpiritUnite

With your continuous expansion through the spiritual journey, there is that possibility that you may come across the one person who understands the core of your soul. It’s as if you both posses the same soul just in two separate bodies. You may foresee this as some form of fantasy, evidence suggests otherwise, as many have met their twin soul and recall past life instances. Evidently it is rare to meet your twin soul on Earth. Whenever you meet the other half of your soul, your universe will shift by the immense power of the souls uniting together as one again.

Twin souls have gone through many reincarnations and lifetimes on earth and throughout the universe, so when they do meet again, the soul recognizes and the synchronicities light up, just like spark and passion combined, a feeling of familiarity. If you need insight and direction to know if you have come across this person, here are some tips.

5 Signs In Recognizing Your Twin Soul

1. Twin Souls Signs – The instant spark.

Not just the physical chemistry, there is a spark within your heart and soul, you will know the difference. A soul recognition, that you have once known each other on a deeper level, you have so much love for this one person even though you have not met them before, you will feel that instant bond.

2. We Meet Again, Deja Vu

You will begin to see there are many things you both have experienced together, you may see flash backs, signs in dreams. The feeling you have done this before will be quite frequent. This happens because the soul never forgets its previous life experiences. This is an immense loving union of heart and soul.

3. Synchronicity

There will be endless synchronicity a sense you know each other very well, you end up finishing each others sentences. You are both deeply connected on the soul level and you both feel each others happiness and even sadness.

4. Comfort

There is stability, sense of security and trust with them and you have never felt like this before with anyone. You know in your heart they will never hurt you.

5. There is Balance

Between both of you there is masculine and feminine balance, which is very complimentary and feels natural. The union feels very balanced as far as twin souls goes. Your masculine energy honors the feminine energy in them and the same can be said in reverse.

So Why do I keep dreaming about about my twin soul?

Twin souls signs in dreams often carry warnings about possible future events, most likely it’s a message that needs your attention.

Spiritual dreams are when we are subconsciously in our soul self, and we can connect with other souls, some may call this the astral plane. Pay extra attention these dreams often need your attention, it has been said that these dreams are not created by our subconscious, twin souls have shared dreams together.

Twin souls Signs and Romance

Unfortunately not all twin soul connections begin being romantic, if your encounter was just being friends and deep level understanding then that’s all it will be. There are some occasions where meeting of twin souls can be very romantic, and it will remain that way. It’s important for the man to be dominant and have confidence in flirtatious ways. This isn’t about Hollywood romance, the twin soul union is much bigger than some movie script. To be with your twin soul is to share your love, heart and soul with each other and with this planet, selfless, in unison.

Twin Souls signs and Kundalini Awakening

Whenever twin souls meet, the recognition activates the dormant chakras. The kundalini rises up your spine like a coiled snake, this spark of energy happens mostly when you are close to your twin soul, this energy may pull you closer together and it won’t matter how many miles away you are. If you have read stories about people who have met their twin soul, this strong pull is very evident.

from:    http://in5d.com/5-signs-in-recognizing-your-twin-soul/

Finding Meaning in the Darkness

A Dark Night of the Soul and the Discovery of Meaning

Anyone may go through a period of sadness or challenge that is so deep-seated and tenacious that it qualifies as a dark night of the soul. Not long ago I was giving a talk at a university when a man shouted at me from back in the crowd: “I’m terribly depressed. It’s been years. Help me.” I shouted back my email address. In his voice and body language I could see that this man was not caught in some passing depression. His life was broken by some loss, failure, or long-forgotten emotional wound that left him in a desperately dark place.

I reserve the expression ‘dark night of the soul’ for a dark mood that is truly life-shaking and touches the foundations of experience, the soul itself. But sometimes a seemingly insignificant event can give rise to a dark night: You may miss a train and not attend a reunion that meant much to you. Often a dark night has a strong symbolic quality in that it points to a deeper level of emotion and perhaps a deeper memory that gives it extra meaning. With dark nights you always have to be alert for the invisible memories, narratives, and concerns that may not be apparent on the surface.

Faced with a dark night, many people treat it like an illness, like depression. They may take medication or go into counseling looking for a cause. It can be useful to search for the roots of a dark night, but in my experience the best way to deal with it is to find the concrete action or decision that it is asking for.

Engaging the Night

A dark night of the soul is a kind of initiation, taking you from one phase of life into another. You may have several dark nights in the course of your life because you are always becoming more of a person and entering life more fully. At least, that is the hope.

One simple rule is that a truly deep dark night requires an extraordinary development in life. One outstanding example is Abraham Lincoln. With his early life surrounded by death and loneliness and his adult life weighed down by a war in which thousands of young men died, he was a seriously melancholic man who, in spite of or through his dark night, became an icon of wisdom and leadership. One theory is that he escaped his melancholy in his efforts for his country, but another possibility is that the very darkness of his life—he once said, “If there’s a worse place than hell, I’m in it.”—was the ground out of which his leadership grew.

As a therapist, I have worked with people profoundly sad and discouraged, and I join with them in looking for ways to transform that heavy mood into a weighty life. Contemporary people often don’t take their lives seriously enough. This tendency might be an aspect of the cult of celebrity, where we lose sight of our own importance by making too much of it in others.

In the archetypal psychotherapy that I practice, we always say: Go with the symptom. I don’t look for quick escapes from the pain or good distracting alternatives. I try to imagine how a symptom, like a long-standing dark night, might be re-imagined and even lived out in a way that is not literally depressive. As far back as the Middle Ages at least, dark moods were considered to be the work of Saturn, a spirit symbolized by a planet far out in the solar system. He was cold, lonely, and heavy, but he was also the source of wisdom and artistic genius. Look through history and you will find a great number of creative men and women who have struggled with the Saturnine humor.

This ancient idea that a dark night may be connected with genius and inspiration could help us today as we try to be constructive with a Saturnine disposition, like Lincoln’s, or a period of smoky moodiness. We might imagine it as the root and basis of an engagement with life that could give meaning and purpose. This doesn’t necessarily mean that eventually the dark spirit will go away, but it may have a counterweight—some extraordinary creative activity and involvement in life—that will make it more than bearable and may diminish it.

With our contemporary view of anything that looks like depression, we think: I’ll never be happy, never have a good relationship, never accomplish anything. But with the medieval image of Saturn, we might instead tell ourselves: A dark night is the sign of a high calling. My pain and loneliness will prepare me for my destiny.

Finding the Gift in Darkness

There are many examples of men and women who endured unimaginable ordeals and yet contributed in a striking way to humanity’s progress. Nelson Mandela was in prison for 27 years under harsh conditions, yet he never lost his vision and sense of destiny. One of his younger fellow prisoners said of him: “The point about Nelson, of course, is that he has a tremendous presence, apart from his bearing, his deportment and so on. He’s a person who’s got real control over his behavior. He is also quite conscious of the kind of seriousness he radiates.” This is dark night talk—presence and seriousness, the key gifts of Saturn—as a long tradition holds. Mandela’s dark night was an actual imprisonment, not a mood. Still, he teaches how to deal with a dark night. Don’t waste time in illusions and wishes. Take it on. Keep your sense of worth and power. Keep your vision intact. Let your darkness speak and give its tone to your bearing and expression.

The regenerative power of nature grows more beautiful after a devastating forest fire at Yellowstone Park in 1988. photography | Wikimedia Commons, Jim Peaco

As strange as it may sound, there is a temptation in a dark night to slip into enjoyment of the pain and to identify with your emotions and moods. “I’m a lonely person. I’m depressed. Help me.” One striking quality we see in men and women who are dealing with their dark nights effectively is a lack of masochistic surrender to the mood, which can be forceful and dominating.

Mandela had “control over his behavior.” He didn’t succumb. It’s important to live through the dark night, acknowledge it, notice its qualities, and be affected by it. At the same time, it is not useful to be too attached to it or to let it dominate. You don’t want to be the hero who slays dragons and tries to obliterate the darkness, but you do need all the strength of heart you can muster.

While giving a dark night its due, you can also cultivate a love of life and joy in living that doesn’t contradict the darkness. You can be dedicated to your work and your vision for humanity and also feel overwhelmed by the suffering in the world. To do this it helps to have a philosophy of life that understands the creative coming together of conflicting moods. The rule is simple: Human beings can do more than one thing at a time. You can acknowledge your darkness and still find some joy.

An example of the dark night leading to a transformative presence in the world is Maya Angelou, who went from not speaking for five or six years as a child out of guilt and the wounds of abuse to reciting the inaugural poem for Bill Clinton and inspiring millions to make something of their own dark nights. In all her public appearances, Angelou showed both the pain and the joy that shaped her mission in life. She carried her pain throughout her life and yet her joy seemed to increase with her impact on men and especially women around the world.

Angelou’s experience demonstrates in an intriguing way how a dark night might take away your ‘voice’ and then give it back with added power. The question is, how do you go from a dark night to having a positive impact on the world, thus giving your own life purpose?

The first step is to embrace the darkness, take it to heart, winnow out any subtle innuendos of resistance. Then find any images that are trapped in the thick dark mood or situation. Those images may hold the clue to your release and future service. Angelou lost her voice, a fascinating symptom and a strong image, and then became known worldwide for her voice. The cure lies in the illness, the hint at future activity within the symptom. If you tone down the dark elements because they are painful and discouraging, you may also hide the gifts that are there for you.

The Return of Aliveness: The Dark Night of the Soul

By Eckhart Tolle

The ‘dark night of the soul’ is a term that goes back a long time. Yes, I have also experienced it. It is a term used to describe what one could call a collapse of a perceived meaning in life… an eruption into your life of a deep sense of meaninglessness. The inner state in some cases is very close to what is conventionally called depression. Nothing makes sense anymore, there’s no purpose to anything. Sometimes it’s triggered by some external event—some disaster perhaps. The death of someone close to you could trigger it, especially premature death—for example, if your child dies. Or the meaning that you had given your life, your activities, your achievements, where you are going, what is considered important, and the meaning that you had given your life for some reason collapses.

It can happen if something happens that you can’t explain away anymore, some disaster, which seems to invalidate the meaning that your life had before. Really what has collapsed is the whole conceptual framework for your life. That results in a dark place.
There is the possibility that you emerge out of it into a transformed state of consciousness. Life has meaning again, but it’s no longer a conceptual meaning that you can necessarily explain. Quite often it’s from there that people awaken out of their conceptual sense of reality, which has collapsed.

They awaken into something deeper. A deeper sense of purpose or connectedness with a greater life that is not dependent on explanations or anything conceptual. It’s a kind of re-birth. The dark night of the soul is a kind of death. What dies is the egoic sense of self. Of course, death is always painful, but nothing real has actually died—only an illusory identity. Now, it is probably the case that some people who’ve gone through this transformation realize that they had to go through that in order to bring about a spiritual awakening. Often it is part of the awakening process, the death of the old self and the birth of the true self.

You arrive at a place of conceptual meaninglessness. Or one could say a state of ignorance—where things lose the meaning that you had given them, which was all conditioned and cultural and so on.

Then you can look upon the world without imposing a mind-made framework of meaning. It looks, of course, as if you no longer understand anything. That’s why it’s so scary when it happens to you, instead of you actually consciously embracing it. It can bring about the dark night of the soul. You now go around the Universe without any longer interpreting it compulsively, as an innocent presence. You look upon events, people, and so on with a deep sense of aliveness. You sense the aliveness through your own sense of aliveness, but you are not trying to fit your experience into a conceptual framework anymore.

Another important strategy is to avoid making the dark night too personal, too focused on yourself. Yes, you feel it intimately and alone. But it could still have more to do with the suffering of the world than with yourself. Maybe dark nights are generally less personal than they feel. At any one time, beings on the planet are suffering. The planet itself is suffering; it is going through a dark night constantly. If you live in a place where children are hungry and dying in wars and in domestic violence, you are within the realm of the world’s dark night. Listen to political leaders deny climate change and you worry about the future, not of the planet on which you live but the planetary being of which you are a living part. If you can stretch your moral imagination to perceive this suffering, then you will have the energy and focus to work toward a transformation.

Waking Up

By definition, visionary people imagine utopia, a word that means both ‘no-place’ and ‘good-place.’ It is an imagined state of the world in which people are free of their struggle, where at least the basic insecurities and inequalities have been dealt with. But oddly, it takes the pain and despair of a dark night to envision utopia.

Think about it, you wouldn’t be compelled to imagine a perfected life unless you were steeped in its imperfection. The emptiness of the dark night transforms into the no-place of a wonderful world. If you don’t feel the hopelessness of a dark night, you will probably float through life identifying unconsciously with the values and expectations of the culture. You won’t know that there is something wrong, something that calls for a response from you. Personally, you may not feel your being. You may eventually decide that you’re a nobody, for you become a somebody by identifying with the world outside you. Self-realization is not a private psychological achievement managed by a strong will and a hygienic attitude. A strong sense of self emerges when you own and activate the awareness that you are your world. A mystical sensibility and social action go together. Through an essential shift in imagination you realize that you are not the one suffering; the world is.

The real stunner is that when you begin to serve the world, your darkness changes. It doesn’t go away completely; nor should it. It continues to feed your vision of utopia and your frustration at the imperfection of it all. But your personal darkness converts into anger at injustice and then into compassionate vision and effective action. The darkness and the vision are two parts of one flowing movement.

Maybe it isn’t that your darkness eases but that your ego investment in it diminishes. It feels as though it goes away because you’ve been grasping it. There may be a degree of love for the darkness and a disdain for hope. You don’t want the challenge of being alive and engaging the world. It may be easier to sink into the pit. Some people resist participating in the transformation of the world because they glimpse the challenge in it. They will have to give up a long-held philosophy of easy, comfortable pragmatism and, maybe for the first time in their lives, feel the world’s suffering.

You see this pattern of waking up from pleasant unconsciousness to awareness of suffering in the story of the Buddha, and one of the key words Jesus uses in his teaching, not often pointed out by his followers, is ‘wake up.’ But waking up is also entering your dark night instead of remaining in the oblivion of avoidance. You do wake up to a joyful message, the meaning of the word ‘Gospel,’ but the dark night is always part of the picture, the other side of the coin.

The best source in classical spiritual literature for describing the paradox of darkness and vision is the Tao Te Ching, where on every page you are invited to live without polarization. Chapter 14 is a good example: “Above, it is not bright. Below, it is not dark.” ‘It’ is everything. Below, where you might expect darkness, it’s bright. Above, where you think you’d find light, it’s dark. Keep this paradox in mind and you will be neither a sentimental idealist nor a cynical pessimist. You will be part of the transformation of it all because it is happening in you.

from:    http://www.kosmosjournal.org/article/a-dark-night-of-the-soul-and-the-discovery-of-meaning/