Of Obedience and Control – Mass Formation

COVID and “Mass Formation” theory

by Jon Rappoport

September 7, 2022

(This article is Part-1 in a series. For Part-2, click here.)

Since there is current discussion about the concept of “mass formation,” as it relates to “the pandemic experience,” I thought I’d make some comments.

The concept of mass formation is an intellectual castle in the air.

It purports to explain both manipulators and their human targets in the “pandemic years.”

Mass formation refers to some sort of mass hypnotic state of mind. As if a cloud, a mist, a transmitted signal. Birthed within a few hundred million or a few billion minds…whoosh. And its basic message is: YOU WILL OBEY YOUR COVID LEADERS. AND IF YOU’RE A LEADER, YOU’LL BE A TYRANT. Something like that.

Uh huh.

But in fact, we can simply say: there are people who do bad things to other people. When these evildoers are in charge, they do VERY BAD things. Like maiming, killing, illegally imprisoning, bankrupting.

There is no psychological mass formation of anything involved there.

A vaccine is killing and wounding huge numbers of people? The guilty parties are obvious. The vaccine manufacturer, the agency that authorized the vaccine (FDA), the government officials who laid on mandates, and so on…

And the doctors who give the shots or order them.

Where is the mass? Where is the formation? Nowhere.

Then we have the population of the world, assaulted with lies and lockdowns and killer medical treatments and false diagnoses and financial ruin, and so on.

Are these billions of people themselves forming some kind of mass in any literal sense? No.

Are most of them NOT resisting the oppression? That would be correct.

Is that a problem? Yes.

What kind of problem?

It’s not very technical. It’s called surrendering to fear. Fear of predators who have state power.

Am I therefore “blaming the victims?”

First of all, I don’t particularly like the term “victim.” To me, it implies a person can’t do anything about the people who are coming down on him like a ton of bricks.

I refuse to say that or believe it. And history proves so-called victims have fought for and won freedoms against stunningly long odds. MUCH longer odds than what we’ve been facing these past 2 years.

So let’s not bullshit ourselves about billions of recent victims who couldn’t rise up.

Every person can resist oppressors, and if necessary, die in that struggle.

Do I criticize people for failing to resist oppression? Well, gosh o gee, I do. Yes. I plead guilty to the crime of failing to be polite.

Do I realize different people have different limits on how far they will go to win their freedom? Yes.

OK. So…as far as the world population is concerned, where is the mass or the formation? Nowhere.

Are there exceptions to what I’ve written so far in this piece?

Here’s one. As I’ve reported for years, over and over, people across the world are being treated with massive amounts of destructive medical drugs. Toxic drugs. By doctors who are violating their oath every day.

These drugs, among other numerous effects, weaken the mind and scramble thought processes. You could call that a “mass formation,” if you were quite specific about what you were referring to.

But what about this: all of a sudden, two years ago, in response to a government declared state of emergency, and mandates, thousands and millions of people suddenly showed up everywhere WEARING MASKS.

This certainly looked like a mass phenomenon. Boom. Masks. People wearing them wherever they went.

There was an easy temptation to call that spontaneous mass formation.

I was somewhat less technical about it at the time. I said, who are all these fucking idiots wearing masks?

After further pondering, I came up with this amazing revelation. Each day, EACH INDIVIDUAL put on his stupid mask, INDIVIDUALLY.

And so when I went to the market and saw all these people wearing masks, although that was a compelling visual presentation, every one of those people had INDIVIDUALLY donned his/her mask.

It wasn’t really a mass phenomenon.

“Mass formation” is simply one of thousands of high-falutin terms academics feel compelled to come up with, because otherwise they’ve got nothing.

They can’t just talk about what’s going on in the world and who’s doing what to whom. That would be below them.

Plus, describing actual killers in high places would put them in deep shit with the people who are bankrolling the colleges they work at.

Yes, there is that.

Therefore, much better to bloviate endlessly and invent intellectual garbage which is adored by an “educated audience.”

As a result, that audience fails to face the bottom line: killers are just killers and dead bodies are people the killers killed.

PS: As I blithely stroll across those dead bodies on my way to the Post Office, I’m simultaneously submitting this article as my PhD thesis to Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and the Sorbonne. When they get back to me with their enthusiastic confirmations, I’ll post screen shots of my diplomas. DOCTOR JON.

I’ll ditch my barber for a hair stylist, buy a few splendid suits from a British tailor, and start showing up at conferences with lots of psychological and philosophical gas to dispense to large audiences.

Now THOSE will be mass formation events.

from:    https://blog.nomorefakenews.com/2022/09/07/covid-and-mass-formation-theory/

Fear, False Narratives, and Control

Manufacturing (New Normal) “Reality”

CJ Hopkins

The ultimate goal of every totalitarian system is to establish complete control over society and every individual within it in order to achieve ideological uniformity and eliminate any and all deviation from it.

This goal can never be achieved, of course, but it is the raison d’être of all totalitarian systems, regardless of what forms they take and ideologies they espouse.

You can dress totalitarianism up in Hugo Boss-designed Nazi uniforms, Mao suits, or medical-looking face masks, its core desire remains the same: to remake the world in its paranoid image … to replace reality with its own “reality.”

We are right in the middle of this process currently, which is why everything feels so batshit crazy. The global capitalist ruling classes are implementing a new official ideology, in other words, a new “reality.” That’s what an official ideology is. It’s more than just a set of beliefs. Anyone can have any beliefs they want. Your personal beliefs do not constitute “reality.”

In order to make your beliefs “reality,” you need to have the power to impose them on society. You need the power of the police, the military, the media, scientific “experts,” academia, the culture industry, the entire ideology-manufacturing machine.

There is nothing subtle about this process. Decommissioning one “reality” and replacing it with another is a brutal business. Societies grow accustomed to their “realities.” We do not surrender them willingly or easily. Normally, what’s required to get us to do so is a crisis, a war, a state of emergency, or … you know, a deadly global pandemic.

During the changeover from the old “reality” to the new “reality,” the society is torn apart. The old “reality” is being disassembled and the new one has not yet taken its place. It feels like madness, and, in a way, it is. For a time, the society is split in two, as the two “realities” battle it out for dominance. “Reality” being what it is (i.e., monolithic), this is a fight to the death. In the end, only one “reality” can prevail.

This is the crucial period for the totalitarian movement. It needs to negate the old “reality” in order to implement the new one, and it cannot do that with reason and facts, so it has to do it with fear and brute force. It needs to terrorize the majority of society into a state of mindless mass hysteria that can be turned against those resisting the new “reality.”

It is not a matter of persuading or convincing people to accept the new “reality.” It’s more like how you drive a herd of cattle. You scare them enough to get them moving, then you steer them wherever you want them to go.

The cattle do not know or understand where they are going. They are simply reacting to a physical stimulus. Facts and reason have nothing to do with it.

And this is what has been so incredibly frustrating for those of us opposing the roll-out of the “New Normal,” whether debunking the official Covid-19 narrative, or “Russiagate,” or the “Storming of the US Capitol,” or any other element of the new official ideology.

And, yes, it is all one ideology, not “communism,” or “fascism,” or any other nostalgia, but the ideology of the system that actually rules us, supranational global capitalism. We’re living in the first truly global-hegemonic ideological system in human history. We have been for the last 30 years. If you are touchy about the term “global capitalism,” go ahead and call it “globalism,” or “crony capitalism,” or “corporatism,” or whatever other name you need to.

Whatever you call it, it became the unrivaled globally-hegemonic ideological system when the Soviet Union collapsed in the 1990s. Yes, there are pockets of internal resistance, but it has no external adversaries, so its progression toward a more openly totalitarian structure is logical and entirely predictable.

Anyway, what has been so incredibly frustrating is that many of us have been operating under the illusion that we are engaged in a rational argument over facts (e.g., the facts of Russiagate, Literal-Hitlergate, 9/11, Saddam’s WMDs, Douma, the January 6 “insurrection,” the official Covid narrative, etc.) This is not at all what is happening. Facts mean absolutely nothing to the adherents of totalitarian systems.

You can show the New Normals the facts all you like. You can show them the fake photos of people dead in the streets in China in March of 2020. You can show them the fake projected death rates. You can explain how the fake PCR tests work, how healthy people were deemed medical “cases.”

You can show them all the studies on the ineffectiveness of masks. You can explain the fake “hospitalization” and “death” figures, send them articles about the unused “emergency hospitals,” the unremarkable age-and-population-adjusted death rates, cite the survival rates for people under 70, the dangers and pointlessness of “vaccinating” children.

None of this will make the slightest difference.

Or, if you’ve bought the Covid-19 narrative, but haven’t completely abandoned your critical faculties, you can do what Glenn Greenwald has been doing recently. You can demonstrate how the corporate media have intentionally lied, again and again, to whip up mass hysteria over “domestic terrorism.” You can show people videos of the “violent domestic terrorists” calmly walking into the Capitol Building in single file, like a high-school tour group, having been let in by members of Capitol Security.

You can debunk the infamous “fire-extinguisher murder” of Brian Sicknik that never really happened. You can point out that the belief that a few hundred unarmed people running around in the Capitol qualifies as an “insurrection,” or an “attempted coup,” or “domestic terrorism,” is delusional to the point of being literally insane. This will also not make the slightest difference.

I could go on, and I’m sure I will as the “New Normal” ideology becomes our new “reality” over the course of the next several years. My point, at the moment, is … this isn’t an argument. The global-capitalist ruling classes, government leaders, the corporate media, and the New Normal masses they have instrumentalized are not debating with us. They know the facts. They know the facts contradict their narratives. They do not care. They do not have to. Because this isn’t about facts. It’s about power.

I’m not saying that facts don’t matter. Of course they matter. They matter to us. I’m saying, let’s recognize what this is. It isn’t a debate or a search for the truth. The New Normals are disassembling one “reality” and replacing it with a new “reality.” (Yes, I know that reality exists in some fundamental ontological sense, but that isn’t the “reality” I’m talking about here, so please do not send me angry emails railing against Foucault and postmodernism.)

The pressure to conform to the new “reality” is already intense and it’s going to get worse as vaccination passes, public mask-wearing, periodic lockdowns, etc., become normalized. Those who don’t conform will be systematically demonized, socially and/or professionally ostracized, segregated, and otherwise punished.

Our opinions will be censored. We will be “canceled,” deplatformed, demonitized, and otherwise silenced. Our views will be labeled “potentially harmful.” We will be accused of spreading “misinformation,” of being “far-right extremists,” “racists,” “anti-Semites,” “conspiracy theorists,” “anti-vaxxers,” “anti-global-capitalist violent domestic terrorists,” or just garden variety “sexual harassers,” or whatever they believe will damage us the most.

This will happen in both the public and personal spheres. Not just governments, the media, and corporations, but your colleagues, friends, and family will do this. Strangers in shops and restaurants will do this. Most of them will not do it consciously. They will do it because your non-conformity represents an existential threat to them…a negation of their new “reality” and a reminder of the reality they surrendered in order to remain a “normal” person and avoid the punishments described above.

This is nothing new, of course. It is how “reality” is manufactured, not only in totalitarian systems, but in every organized social system. Those in power instrumentalize the masses to enforce conformity with their official ideology. Totalitarianism is just its most extreme and most dangerously paranoid and fanatical form.

So, sure, keep posting and sharing the facts, assuming you can get them past the censors, but let’s not kid ourselves about what we’re up against. We’re not going to wake the New Normals up with facts. If we could, we would have done so already.

This is not a civilized debate about facts. This is a fight. Act accordingly.

CJ Hopkins is an award-winning American playwright, novelist and political satirist based in Berlin. His plays are published by Bloomsbury Publishing and Broadway Play Publishing, Inc. His dystopian novel, Zone 23, is published by Snoggsworthy, Swaine & Cormorant. Volumes I and II of his Consent Factory Essays are published by Consent Factory Publishing, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Amalgamated Content, Inc. He can be reached at cjhopkins.com or consentfactory.org.

from:   https://off-guardian.org/2021/06/21/manufacturing-new-normal-reality/

Waking Up? Here’s For You:9/1

Episode 385 – A Message to New “Conspiracy Theorists”

09/25/2020

So, it’s 2020 and you’ve fallen down the rabbit hole. Disorienting, isn’t it? Well, don’t worry: you are not alone. On this special edition of The Corbett Report, James Corbett welcomes all the newcomers to the reality-based community and gives them some tips and advice that he’s learned along the way about navigating this world of lies and cover ups.

For those interested in audio quality, CLICK HERE for the highest-quality version of this episode (WARNING: very large download).

Watch on Archive / BitChute / LBRY / Minds / YouTube or Download the mp4

SHOW NOTES:
Dr. William F. Pepper @ “9/11: Revealing the Truth / Reclaiming Our Future”

Truth At Last: The Assasination of Martin Luther King

COVID-911: From Homeland Security to Biosecurity

TSA turns off naked body scanners to avoid opt-out day protests

The Library of Alexandria is on Fire

Can You Find This Video?

A Brief History of False Flag Terror

BOOK III of the Final Report of the Church Committee

Documents for Your Info Arsenal

Corbett Report Documentaries

History Is Written By The Winners

“history” search at Corbett Report

The CIA and the Media by Carl Bernstein

“The News” is a Social Construct. It is Used to Program You.

from:   https://www.corbettreport.com/episode-385-a-message-to-new-conspiracy-theorists/

Looks Can Kill?

Authored by Paul Joseph Watson via Summit news,

A coronavirus alert sign in the United Kingdom reminding people to maintain social distancing also tells them, “Look away when passing other people.”

The sign was seen in the northern market town of Stockton-on-Tees.

It says;

“CORONAVIRUS BE ALERT – NARROW WALKWAY AHEAD. Please ensure you keep your distance, pass others quickly, look away when passing other people.”

The person who originally tweeted the image remarked, “A prime example of psychological warfare and mind control.”

Author and commentator Peter Hitchens, a vehement critic of coronavirus lockdown laws, also weighed in.

“This official tax-funded placard from Stockton-on-Tees encourages human beings to treat each other as toxic hazards,” tweeted Hitchens.

“Leaving aside the disturbing philosophical and moral implications, surely such behaviour is incompatible with anything resembling a society,” he added.

As we previously highlighted, the UK is home to some of the most draconian social distancing rules in the developed world, with one company telling staff that only 40% of them will be able to return to work in January due to a rule that dictates cars must be “socially distanced” in the parking lot.

As we document in the video below, the public’s perception of the threat of coronavirus is infinitely greater than its actual lethality.

A survey revealed in the UK for example that people on average think COVID-19 has killed 7 per cent of the population – around 5 million people.

from:    https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/social-distancing-sign-says-look-away-when-passing-other-people

Be Afraid… Wait.. Maybe Not…

UK Chief Medic confirms (again) covid19 harmless to vast majority

Catte Black

From the beginning of this crisis we have been pointing out that there are two mutually contradictory messages at the heart of the covid19 rollout, and, just as Orwell describes in 1984, a major point of the exercise seems to be to get people to believe both at the same time.

1. ‘Be Afraid…’

The first message is that covid19 is terrifying, unique, an existential threat to the human race.

This message is never sourced to much fact, because the facts about the virus don’t really support it. If it cites anything solid it’s the appallingly sloppy and discredited Imperial computer model, or some generic research into the pathology of severe infections or rare viral syndromes, which it tries to spin as being unique to covid19, even though it is not. But mostly it doesn’t cite anything at all. Or really claim anything at all.

It just tells people to be afraid. Very afraid. Of death, of uncertainty, of the ‘virus’, of other people, of ‘fake news’.

The fear being encouraged is not rooted in facts, and is therefore impervious to them.

2. ‘There is nothing to be afraid of…’

The second message is that covid19 is actually pretty harmless and no big deal.

This message is rooted in a great deal of fact, because, as we have been pointing out since day one, pretty much all the data coming out about this virus supports exactly this conclusion.

No official body has ever denied this, and most of them readily admit it. Regularly and unambiguously. Here and here and here and here.

All these sources admit the virus is ‘mild’ or even asymptomatic in the majority of cases, and chiefly a danger only to the already ailing or severely immuno-compromised. Just as most coronaviruses are.

So, Chris Whitty above is only one of many to point this out and this is not even his first go (see here) at explaining clearly that covid19 is only dangerous to a very very small minority of people, and that most who get it will be just fine.

Here’s a slide from his talk on April 30th:

Now, let’s look at what he is saying in the above video, on May 11th [our emphasis]:

[T]he great majority of people will not die from this and I’ll just repeat something I said right at the beginning because I think it’s worth reinforcing:

Most people, a significant proportion of people, will not get this virus at all, at any point of the epidemic which is going to go on for a long period of time.

Of those who do, some of them will get the virus without even knowing it, they will have the virus with no symptoms at all, asymptomatic carriage, and we know that happens.

Of those who get symptoms, the great majority, probably 80%, will have a mild or moderate disease. Might be bad enough for them to have to go to bed for a few days, not bad enough for them to have to go to the doctor.

An unfortunate minority will have to go as far as hospital, but the majority of those will just need oxygen and will then leave hospital.

And then a minority of those will end up having to go to severe end critical care and some of those sadly will die.

But that’s a minority, it’s 1% or possibly even less than 1% overall.

And even in the highest risk group this is significantly less than 20%, ie. the great majority of people, even the very highest groups, if they catch this virus, will not die.

And I really wanted to make that point really clearly…

It seems all the officials want ‘to make that point really clearly’, even while they behave as if it was not true.

Why?

There’s plenty of room for speculation there, and we leave it to readers to get into that BTL.

The motives, though, are less important than the basic and undeniable fact – the fear currently gripping the public mind is being simultaneously encouraged and acknowledged as unnecessary by the bodies overseeing the ‘response’.

And if enough people would wake up to the pea-and-thimble trick being pulled on them, then the most dangerous and far-reaching coup against human liberty we have ever seen would essentially be stopped in its tracks.

from:    https://off-guardian.org/2020/05/15/watch-uk-chief-medic-confirms-again-covid19-harmless-to-vast-majority/

youtube kink:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=adj8MCsZKlg&feature=emb_logo

South Dakota Knows You Own Your Body

(Please Note:  This article was written 020520 as the CV19 plandemic became so widely publicized.  In this matter, please do your research)

South Dakota Considers First State Bill To Outlaw All Vaccine AND Medical Mandates

South Dakota Migration

Will there be a medical refugee migration to South Dakota?

by Ginger Taylor

Who owns your body?

A growing number of legislators in South Dakota believe you do.

They have introduced a bill to not only end vaccine mandates in the state, but all future medical mandates that my be introduced in generations to come.

One hundred and fifteen years ago this month, the US Supreme Court made a decision that because there was a deadly smallpox epidemic, the City of Cambridge, Massachusetts was allowed to charge a pastor five dollars to opt out of a city wide vaccine mandate. The law didn’t apply to children.

That precedent has been the basis for the mandate of dozens of now liability-free vaccines for children and adults, where no epidemic (or even one case) exists, at the costs of thousands, or even hundred of thousands, per year to opt out. It is even the basis on which the Supreme Court ruled that women can be force sterilized, for the good of themselves and society, of course.

Bad precedent, plus a century, has resulted in the legalization of actual war crimes.

The current vaccine mandate enforcement drive by Merck and Friends has driven our community, and those who never questioned vaccines before now, back to a basic question at hand here.

WHO OWNS YOUR BODY?

The knee jerk reaction , and normal human response for Americans is, “I do.”

But that is not what most governments believes. Even under our Constitution of individual liberties, governments strive to control even your medical choices, and if they can’t, they will find a reason to justify it, and the means to carry out their will.

In 21st century America, there are no deadly epidemics of communicable disease, despite the fact that we are subject to constant fear campaigns that one is coming. In fact no such event has happened in my lifetime. If the fear mongers want to scare you into fearing deadly epidemics, they have to go back more than a hundred years. So the circumstances for the justification of the government’s actions in Jacobson v. Massachusetts exist only in the history books.

So in this age of medical tech, including vaccines, that most people want, why do mandates still exist? And if Jacobson can justify the sexual mutilation of women, then what else can it justify as medical technology progresses over the next century and beyond?

What new medical interventions and body tech will The Gates Foundation invent and convince (bribe) governments and NGOs to force people into utilizing? And where will the battle to end coerced “medical care” begin.

I submit to you that it has begun in South Dakota. Today.

South Dakota House Majority Leader, Representative Lee Qualm (R), has introduced HB 1235 An Act to Revise Provisions Regarding Immunizations.

The bill repeals ALL vaccine mandates in the State.

South Dakota would be the first US state to have no vaccine mandates at all, joining other governments like the UK, Japan and Canada, in uncoerced vaccine decision making.

But the bill goes even further. IT ENDS MEDICAL MANDATES ALL TOGETHER. It adds new law that reads:

“Section 5. That a NEW SECTION be added:

334-22-6.1. Discrimination-Immunization

Every person has the inalienable right to bodily integrity, free from any threat or compulsion that the person accepts any medical intervention, including immunization. No person may be discriminated against for refusal to accept an unwanted medical intervention, including immunization.”

The State of South Dakota would function under the truth that YOU OWN YOUR BODY, and codifies into law that YOU make our own medical decisions. And no one can coerce your choices or discriminate against you because of them.

This is the real conversation that we should be having now. Begging the government not to take away our right to bodily integrity, or trying to claw back religious and philosophical exemptions that give us “loopholes” that “allow” us to make our own decisions about our own bodies is becoming an outdated conversation that is based on a lie. The lie that we have no right to bodily integrity in the first place, and government is doing us a favor by giving us even a medical exemption.

Cambridge, and the turn of the 20th century courts didn’t care that Pastor Jacobson protested the violation of his body (and his bank account) based on his arguments that vaccines were not safe, that both he and his son had previous vaccine reactions (Jacobson himself was injured in childhood) and they violated his religious conscience. SCOTUS didn’t care that Carrie Buck was a woman of sound mind who wanted to retain her ability to have children after she was raped and impregnated by a family member.

They declared her intellectually disabled, an “imbecile,” even though there was never any evidence that she had any disability. They then forced her to be sterilized.

“Carrie Buck ‘is the probable potential parent of socially inadequate offspring, likewise afflicted, that she may be sexually sterilized without detriment to her general health and that her welfare and that of society will be promoted by her sterilization”

The state did, of course, have a stated compelling interest, as they always do, when they seek to violate the civil rights of Americans. This was it:

“in order to prevent our being swamped with incompetence. It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes. Jacobson v. Massachusetts, 197 U.S. 11 , 25 S. Ct. 358, 3 Ann. Cas. 765. Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”

And that justification was based on the existence of vaccine mandates.

This is dead thinking. It is unconscionable in the 21st century that such logic is allowed to stand in the law books, but Buck v. Bell is still law, as Jacobson is still law.

South Dakota will now consider the rejection of the lie that you do not own your body, the laws that can allow the state to do what it wants with your body.

It is time for America to decide who owns a person’s medical choices. Is it the state, or the person in the body who must live (or die) with the consequences of those medical choices?

I urge you to change the conversation in your state. Take the SD bill to your legislators, tell them about Henning Jacobson and Carrie Buck, and ask them who they think owns your medical choices.

Because if governments have the right to coerce vaccination for Henning Jacobson, they also have the right to remove Carrie Buck’s reproductive organs. And yours.

Who owns your body?

Time TO Act for Your Own Freedom

Bill Gates: Phase 2 is a Bio Terror Attack

By Spiro Skouras

For generations the public has been controlled through fear. The progression of perceived enemies has evolved over time.

We were once told our enemies were nation states and we had to duck and cover because the enemy could strike with great devastation at a moment’s notice.

While this outside threat, used to instill fear and bolster the military industrial complex was very effective, this enemy could only last so long and was merely a stepping stone.

The fear of an outside threat later evolved into terrorists who had no borders, which justified military expansionism globally.

We were told They hate us because were free, gradually we became less free as the government has erected a police state and a surveillance state to protect us from the very terror threat they created.

Now we are told our enemy is invisible yet everywhere; we are told our way of life will never be the same, much like we heard in the aftermath of 9/11 — and boy were they right!

The public has been conditioned to live in a constant state of fear, we have been conditioned to rely on the government as our only solution for safety.

This is a solution we have been warned about for hundreds of years. Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.

from:     https://www.activistpost.com/2020/04/bill-gates-phase-2-is-a-bio-terror-attack.html

 

It’s Up To You

THE NEGLECTED POWER OF FREEDOM OF CHOICE

Zen Gardner, Contributor
Waking Times

The degree of freedom to consciously make our own decisions in life is something we’re continually waking up to. It’s similar to living in the now. We keep trying, knowing it’s right, and making fresh runs at it daily to live in the moment more and more fully, either by conscious decisions or spontaneously.

What impresses me is how easy it is to fall into unsatisfactory routines. Be they habitual behaviors or living within self circumscribed limits, whatever the reasons or excuses may be. Physical life lends itself to routine for comfort and convenience. This includes survival issues which can appear quite daunting, and even insurmountable, leading to our environment being dictated by base needs and desires.

It gets more complicated when we consider personal relationships which we can often become trapped in. These go hand in hand with whatever environment we find ourselves – our location, finances and true quality of life being the basic guidelines for most. Now add life purpose to this and let’s consider how free we are able to find that true fulfillment our hearts crave. They don’t always work together without seriously draining compromises.

Freedom has to be fought for.

Are we Prisoners of Our Own Making?

The point is we can change these conditions and much more anytime we want. It’s remarkable just how free we are. We “blame” external limitations such as the system, upbringing, mates, family, friends and finances, but these conditions rarely lead us to what we truly desire and are for our highest good. The question looms, are we truly confined by these? Do we only do those things that are prescribed by previous conditions we find ourselves in, either by choice or by simply continually defaulting to external pressures and circumstances?

It’s worth re-evaluating these questions continually, as I see it. When we honestly get down to analyzing the various areas of our personal progress, how would we score ourselves? What needs changing or challenging that we’re either too lazy to do anything about, or too afraid to rock the boat and lose our seeming support system or the comfort of our routine, whether financially, socially, psychologically, spiritually, etc? What’s holding us back from making the changes we know we need?

More importantly, why are we so often afraid to go into the unknown? What prevents us from stepping out to find our truest expression?Change – Ready or Not, Here It Come

The entire game board of life is being shaken from the cosmic down to the very social structure of our planet, and it’s wonderful! Only truth will endure. This isn’t good news to those holding tightly to what they currently have or how they want things to be, whether born from a culturally reinforced fear based mentality, belief system, deep self issues or not. It’s time to wake up and shake off the programming and follow our guts, our hearts. It’s way easier to do it voluntarily by our own volition and heart born desire than to be forced into changes.

A time of personal challenge is now hitting us all. It’s starting with a self clean-up opportunity to prepare us for much greater changes to come. If anyone is going through this you are not alone. However, many will miss the significance of what’s going on right now energetically and will pass along with increased cognitive dissonance and stubborn resistance to change. That’s their choice, but unfortunately in most cases it will affect the rest of us. This is something to be very aware of as the external confusion will only grow. It’s just the nature of things right now. Similar to natural “disasters”, anyone’s life can be turned upside down at a moment’s notice. When we live a more conscious life this realization is ever before us. The key is to not be at the wrong place at the wrong time, in every sense.

The active ingredient within us is our free will, the power of choice, no matter the circumstances or conditions.

As Don Juan aptly said:

“Before you embark on any path ask the question: Does this path have a heart? If the answer is no, you will know it, then you must choose another path. The trouble is nobody asks the question; and when a man finally realizes that he has taken a path without a heart, the path is ready to kill him. At that point very few men can stop to deliberate, and leave the path. A path without a heart is never enjoyable. You have to work hard even to take it. On the other hand, a path with heart is easy; it does not make you work at liking it.”

This is a brief life on this planet. One day our lives will end. It’s time to be alive, not dead in some rut – aptly called a grave with the ends kicked out.

We are fully free to move about the planet, and the Universe. As we always have been.

Let’s exercise our freedom and not let it go to waste. The energy and fulfillment to be released are unfathomable!

Love, Zen

PS. The above was inspired by a lucid dream where I found myself listening to someone demonstrating and going on about something I had no interest in, yet felt trapped in some small gathering of onlookers. As I went through the lucid dream transition to waking up, I found myself wondering why had I just subjected myself to this experience? The resultant thoughts and realizations extrapolating that dynamic quickly ensued, leading to honestly making my own life list evaluating my current situation. A true eye opener from the heart level and great exercise for me. This is simply sharing my experience and personal insights, for what it’s worth to others.

About the Author

Zen Gardner is an impactful and controversial author and speaker with a piercing philosophical viewpoint. His writings have been circulated to millions and his personal story has caused no small stir amongst entrenched alternative pundits. His book “You Are The Awakening” has met rave reviews and is available on Amazon.com.

from:    https://www.wakingtimes.com/2019/03/01/the-neglected-power-of-freedom-of-choice/

Stand Up For Your Truth

HOW TO LEVERAGE YOUR OWN CONSCIENCE AS PURE LAW

Gary Z McGee, Staff Writer
Waking Times

If we heed these wise words by Lao Tzu, then it stands to reason that we focus more on developing highly evolved people capable of honoring universal laws, rather than waste our energy bludgeoning people with invalid laws that violate the golden rule, the nonaggression principle, and the universal laws that dictate health.

But what constitutes a highly evolved person? What might a highly evolved person’s character look like? How do we define such a broad concept? In Five Counterintuitive Traits of Highly Evolved Humans, I broke down the emotional disposition of highly evolved people. In this article we’ll break down the political disposition of highly evolved people.

Choose a courage-based lifestyle over a fear-based lifestyle:

Does your government have a taste for blood and a thirst for power? A highly evolved person, with their own conscience as pure law, would choose smart rebuking over fearful obsequiousness.

Don’t allow such a government to have its way. Question its authority. Practice strategic civil disobedience. Count coup on overreaching power constructs. Challenge outdated, immoral, and unjust laws. Be the personification of checks and balances. Dare to be a courageous David facing down the Goliath of the state.

We don’t need more people who blindly obey in deadly fear. That’s already the vast majority of people. We need more people who are highly evolved enough to smartly rebuke any and all governments that use violence to “solve” problems.

Choosing a courage-based lifestyle over a fear-based lifestyle is choosing to no longer be a victim. It’s choosing, instead, to become a hero. It’s choosing courage over fear, self-sacrifice over comfort and security, adventure over banality, fierceness over obsequiousness, and ruthless skepticism over blind faith.

Understand that the vast majority of people are still willing to live fear-based lifestyles. Sympathize with them for having not woken up yet, but do not pity them. It’s not their fault they were brainwashed, conditioned and indoctrinated into living fear-based lifestyles, but it is their responsibility to educate themselves and to break themselves of their conditioning.

You can lead people to knowledge, but you can’t make them think. You can, however, remain ruthless with your courage-based lifestyle. Become a beacon of courageous hope. Especially for those who are still living fear-based lifestyles. Call it tough love. As Derrick Jensen said, “Love does not imply pacifism.”

Choose heart-centeredness over political divisiveness:

Bipartisan politics is old hat. It’s high time you toss that hat in the fire. Highly evolved people have already done so. They have gone Meta with politics. They’ve gone beyond the outdated, codependent divisiveness of bipartisanism and graduated into an updated, interdependent metamorality.

Metamorality, coined by Joshua Greene, is based on a common ground that all humans can agree upon while proposing a utilitarian deep pragmatism that empathically broadens the mind and compassionately opens the heart to the plight of us all as interdependent beings on an interconnected planet. Highly evolved humans use this strategy, along with the Astronaut Overview Effect, to go big-pictur

Going big-picture helps us change our minds. Or, at least be more flexible and open in our thinking. It puts things into proper perspective. It helps us feel more empathic and less psychopathic toward each other. We’re better able to see the world as one, without borders.

We’re better able to narrow our highfalutin politics down to a single concept we can all agree on: freedom. We’re better able to see through all the red herring cognitive biases of the climate debate and realize that our problem is a single problem we can all agree on: pollution. We’re better able to cut straight through the divisiveness of religion and narrow it down to a single concept that we can all agree on: love. Especially love for our children, and creating a healthy environment for them to grow up in. And suddenly there are not so many differences between us.

Choosing heart-centeredness over political divisiveness puts a compassionate spin on our conscience. Indeed, it puts the “conscience” in having our own conscience as pure law. For pure law is universal law, based upon the healthy interconnectedness of all things.

Choose self-improvement over self-preservation and create a better world:

When it comes down to it, becoming a highly evolved human is about spitting out the unhealthy blue pill of comfort, safety, and security based on outdated laws, and having the courage to swallow the healthy red pill of curiosity, questioning, and skepticism that questions bad laws in order to create healthy laws that align with universal laws.

It’s about becoming the personification of checks and balances. It’s about putting in the hard and difficult work of becoming a highly evolved person who has the wherewithal to “use their own conscience as pure law.” And to teach others how to do the same.

The answer is not creating more bad laws to shove down people’s throats. The answer is creating people smart enough to question the authority that seeks to shove bad laws down people’s throats. Indeed. The answer is teaching people how to become bigger than the law, how to gain the capacity to have their own conscience as pure law, and how to become a more valuable human. As Niels Bohr said, “Every valuable human being must be a radical and a rebel, for what he must aim at is to make things better than they are.”

If, as Plato famously said, “Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws,” then it stands to reason that we should focus more on teaching people how to act responsibly and less on creating laws. Especially since humans are so terrible at making good laws. And especially-especially since humans are even more terrible about abusing their power regarding those ill-conceived laws.

As Edward Abbey wisely suggested, “Since few men are wise enough to rule themselves, even fewer are wise enough to rule others.” The few seeking to rule others do so through the enforcement of bad laws.

So, it is incumbent upon anyone with their own conscience as pure law to ruthlessly interrogate such bad laws and then mercilessly check and balance any authority seeking to enforce such bad laws. We do ourselves, our children, and our grandchildren a disservice when we decide not to.

There is no greater cause than becoming more ethical than the society you grew up in. Will you defend outdated unethical laws and merely turn a blind eye to those who unjustly enforce them? Or will you defend the people’s right to ruthlessly challenge unethical laws and those who unjustly enforce them? The choice is yours. As William James said, “We are all ready to be savage in some cause. The difference between a good man and a bad one is the choice of the cause.”

from:   https://www.wakingtimes.com/2019/01/21/how-to-leverage-your-own-conscience-as-pure-law/

Reflections on The Election

The Election: Of Hate, Grief, and a New Story


The following was originally published on The New and Ancient Story.

Normal is coming unhinged. For the last eight years it has been possible for most people (at least in the relatively privileged classes) to believe that society is sound, that the system, though creaky, basically works, and that the progressive deterioration of everything from ecology to economy is a temporary deviation from the evolutionary imperative of progress.

A Clinton Presidency would have offered four more years of that pretense. A woman President following a black President would have meant to many that things are getting better. It would have obscured the reality of continued neoliberal economics, imperial wars, and resource extraction behind a veil of faux-progressive feminism. Now that we have, in the words of my friend Kelly Brogan, rejected a wolf in sheep’s clothing in favor of a wolf in wolf’s clothing, that illusion will be impossible to maintain.

The wolf, Donald Trump (and I’m not sure he’d be offended by that moniker) will not provide the usual sugarcoating on the poison pills the policy elites have foisted on us for the last forty years. The prison-industrial complex, the endless wars, the surveillance state, the pipelines, the nuclear weapons expansion were easier for liberals to swallow when they came with a dose, albeit grudging, of LGBTQ rights under an African-American President.

I am willing to suspend my judgement of Trump and (very skeptically) hold the possibility that he will disrupt the elite policy consensus of free trade and military confrontation – major themes of his campaign. One might always hope for miracles. However, because he apparently lacks any robust political ideology of his own, it is more likely that he will fill his cabinet with neocon war hawks, Wall Street insiders, and corporate reavers, trampling the wellbeing of the working class whites who elected him while providing them their own sugar-coating of social conservatism.

The social and environmental horrors likely to be committed under President Trump are likely to incite massive civil disobedience and possibly disorder. For Clinton supporters, many of whom were halfhearted to begin with, the Trump administration could mark the end of their loyalty to our present institutions of government. For Trump supporters, the initial celebration will collide with gritty reality when Trump proves as unable or unwilling as his predecessors to challenge the entrenched systems that continually degrade their lives: global finance capital, the deep state, and their programming ideologies. Add to this the likelihood of a major economic crisis, and the public’s frayed loyalty to the existing system could snap.

We are entering a time of great uncertainty. Institutions so enduring as to seem identical to reality itself may lose their legitimacy and dissolve. It may seem that the world is falling apart. For many, that process started on election night, when Trump’s victory provoked incredulity, shock, even vertigo. “I can’t believe this is happening!”

At such moments, it is a normal response to find someone to blame, as if identifying fault could restore the lost normality, and to lash out in anger. Hate and blame are convenient ways of making meaning out of a bewildering situation. Anyone who disputes the blame narrative may receive more hostility than the opponents themselves, as in wartime when pacifists are more reviled than the enemy.

Racism and misogyny are devastatingly real in this country, but to blame bigotry and sexism for voters’ repudiation of the Establishment is to deny the validity of their deep sense of betrayal and alienation. The vast majority of Trump voters were expressing extreme dissatisfaction with the system in the way most readily available to them. (See here, here, here, here) Millions of Obama voters voted for Trump (six states who went for Obama twice switched to Trump). Did they suddenly become racists in the last four years? The blame-the-racists (the fools, the yokels…) narrative generates a clear demarcation between good (us) and evil (them), but it does violence to the truth. It also obscures an important root of racism – anger displaced away from an oppressive system and its elites and onto other victims of that system. Finally, it employs the same dehumanization of the other that is the essence of racism and the precondition for war. Such is the cost of preserving a dying story. That is one reason why paroxysms of violence so often accompany a culture-defining story’s demise.

The dissolution of the old order that is now officially in progress is going to intensify. That presents a tremendous opportunity and danger, because when normal falls apart the ensuing vacuum draws in formerly unthinkable ideas from the margins. Unthinkable ideas range from rounding up the Muslims in concentration camps, to dismantling the military-industrial complex and closing down overseas military bases. They range from nationwide stop-and-frisk to replacing criminal punishment with restorative justice. Anything becomes possible with the collapse of dominant institutions. When the animating force behind these new ideas is hate or fear, all manner of fascistic and totalitarian nightmares can ensue, whether enacted by existing powers or those that arise in revolution against them.

That is why, as we enter a period of intensifying disorder, it is important to introduce a different kind of force to animate the structures that might appear after the old ones crumble. I would call it love if it weren’t for the risk of triggering your New Age bullshit detector, and besides, how does one practically bring love into the world in the realm of politics? So let’s start with empathy. Politically, empathy is akin to solidarity, born of the understanding that we are all in this together. In what together? For starters, we are in the uncertainty together.

We are exiting an old story that explained to us the way of the world and our place in it. Some may cling to it all the more desperately as it dissolves, looking perhaps to Donald Trump to restore it, but their savior has not the power to bring back the dead. Neither would Clinton have been able to preserve America as we’d known it for too much longer. We as a society are entering a space between stories, in which everything that had seemed so real, true, right, and permanent comes into doubt. For a while, segments of society have remained insulated from this breakdown (whether by fortune, talent, or privilege), living in a bubble as the containing economic and ecological systems deteriorate. But not for much longer. Not even the elites are immune to this doubt. They grasp at straws of past glories and obsolete strategies; they create perfunctory and unconvincing shibboleths (Putin!), wandering aimlessly from “doctrine” to “doctrine” – and they have no idea what to do. Their haplessness and half-heartedness was plain to see in this election, their disbelief in their own propaganda, their cynicism. When even the custodians of the story no longer believe the story, you know its days are numbered. It is a shell with no engine, running on habit and momentum.

We are entering a space between stories. After various retrograde versions of a new story rise and fall and we enter a period of true unknowing, an authentic next story will emerge. What would it take for it to embody love, compassion, and interbeing? I see its lineaments in those marginal structures and practices that we call holistic, alternative, regenerative, and restorative. All of them source from empathy, the result of the compassionate inquiry: What is it like to be you?

It is time now to bring this question and the empathy it arouses into our political discourse as a new animating force. If you are appalled at the election outcome and feel the call of hate, perhaps try asking yourself, “What is it like to be a Trump supporter?” Ask it not with a patronizing condescension, but for real, looking underneath the caricature of misogynist and bigot to find the real person.

Even if the person you face IS a misogynist or bigot, ask, “Is this who they are, really?” Ask what confluence of circumstances, social, economic, and biographical, may have brought them there. You may still not know how to engage them, but at least you will not be on the warpath automatically. We hate what we fear, and we fear what we do not know. So let’s stop making our opponents invisible behind a caricature of evil.

We’ve got to stop acting out hate. I see no less of it in the liberal media than I do in the right-wing. It is just better disguised, hiding beneath pseudo-psychological epithets and dehumanizing ideological labels. Exercising it, we create more of it. What is beneath the hate? My acupuncturist Sarah Fields wrote to me, “Hate is just a bodyguard for grief. When people lose the hate, they are forced to deal with the pain beneath.”

I think the pain beneath is fundamentally the same pain that animates misogyny and racism – hate in a different form. Please stop thinking you are better than these people! We are all victims of the same world-dominating machine, suffering different mutations of the same wound of separation. Something hurts in there. We live in a civilization that has robbed nearly all of us of deep community, intimate connection with nature, unconditional love, freedom to explore the kingdom of childhood, and so much more. The acute trauma endured by the incarcerated, the abused, the raped, the trafficked, the starved, the murdered, and the dispossessed does not exempt the perpetrators. They feel it in mirror image, adding damage to their souls atop the damage that compels them to violence. Thus it is that suicide is the leading cause of death in the U.S. military. Thus it is that addiction is rampant among the police. Thus it is that depression is epidemic in the upper middle class. We are all in this together.

Something hurts in there. Can you feel it? We are all in this together. One earth, one tribe, one people.

We have entertained teachings like these long enough in our spiritual retreats, meditations, and prayers. Can we take them now into the political world and create an eye of compassion inside the political hate vortex? It is time to do it, time to up our game. It is time to stop feeding hate. Next time you post on line, check your words to see if they smuggle in some form of hate: dehumanization, snark, belittling, derision.., some invitation to us versus them. Notice how it feels kind of good to do that, like getting a fix. And notice what hurts underneath, and how it doesn’t feel good, not really. Maybe it is time to stop.

This does not mean to withdraw from political conversation, but to rewrite its vocabulary. It is to speak hard truths with love. It is to offer acute political analysis that doesn’t carry the implicit message of “Aren’t those people horrible?” Such analysis is rare. Usually, those evangelizing compassion do not write about politics, and sometimes they veer into passivity. We need to confront an unjust, ecocidal system. Each time we do we will receive an invitation to give in to the dark side and hate “the deplorables.” We must not shy away from those confrontations. Instead, we can engage them empowered by the inner mantra that my friend Pancho Ramos-Stierle uses in confrontations with his jailers: “Brother, your soul is too beautiful to be doing this work.” If we can stare hate in the face and never waver from that knowledge, we will access inexhaustible tools of creative engagement, and hold a compelling invitation to the haters to fulfill their beauty.

Image: Creative Commons – picture by Abhi Ryan

from:    http://realitysandwich.com/320959/the-election-of-hate-grief-and-a-new-story/