Book #8, Part 1(5): A Search For Truth, The Miracle Experiment, And Exiting The Conspiracy Of Silence

Part 1 is Items 1-11 from the Table Of Contents (below).  These writings are former blog posts which are introductory/prologue/first chapter type of material for my final book.

My editor Melinda will pare about 66 percent of the words from Part 1.  If it seems verbose, it is.  The sawdust from her chainsaw will be used to create a literary Glulam.

Table Of Contents

1. Author’s Note
2. Prologue  Revisiting a Troubled Past, Finding A Way To Live In The Present
3. Introduction (2) or Chapter One
4. Danny B.  And The Potential Cost Of Telling The Truth
5. Prologue:  Mythology, Religion, Liars, The Conspiracy Of Silence, And The Cloak Of Invisibility (grandma toxic, miner with canary, three stages of unfoldment
6. Prologue Alternate (see Re-imagination and Our Journey . .
7. Re-imagination and Our Journey Through Consciousness
8. Proposal #1 For Book Introduction
9. To Find Our Voice
10. Penetrating The Conspiracy Of Silence (is this Disrupting?)
11. The Conspiracy Of Silence, Voices Lost and Found
12. To Be Born In A Forgotten Past, To Be Reborn In The Now 
    
13. The Three Evolutionary Stages Of Being (check with prologue duplication/position)
14. Bruce 1.0 to 2.0
15. A Brief Look At the Differences Between Men And Women
16. The Divine Feminine, and Finding Spiritual Balance (duplications!)
17. Living Life On A Wider Frequency Of Being (Lots of replications here)
18. Revisiting The Search For Truth (look at revisiting Jan 28, 1986 and see if there are any differences)
19. 1987 The Year I began To sing, and to fly
20. Steps On The New Paths Of Recovery And Rebirth (see 13-duplication?)
21. New Dance Steps On The Path To Recovery And Healing (see 12)
22. Troubleshooting And Repairing Broken Systems
23. An Electrician’s Guide To The Galaxy (need transition chapter in and out)
24. The Mystery Of The Path Between You and Me
25. The Common Knowledge Game, Voodoo, Black Magic
26. Knowledge, Facts, Insight, and The Whim
27. Insight And Mindfulness (see #23 black dogs)
28. Black Dogs And Black Holes (see #22-insight for overlap)
29. The Labyrinth’s Exit And New Paths Of Awakening (duplication hazard!)
30. The Labyrinth, An Exit Strategy, and a New Path Of Awakening (duplication potential)
31. Insight Into Our Exit Strategy, and Our Awakening (duplication potential)
32. Defender Dan, and Growing Up In America
33. Anosognosia
34. Just Say No:  Approaching Trauma Consciously
35. Mankind’s Healing Potential
36. The Uncommon Knowledge Theory (check for duplication within Dreams s Guides # 19)
37. Hearing Voices, Hearing Silence (lots of duplication here, be aware!)
38. Dreams As Guides In Slaying The Minotaur, And Finding An Exit Out Of The Labyrinth
39. Tentative Steps On The Newer Paths Of Recovery and Rebirth
40. New Paths Of Awakening, Final Exit From Labyrinth
41. Anger, Self Awareness, and Mastery
42. A Master Teacher Speaks
43. Experimenting With Consciousness
44. The Pearl Of Greatest Price
45. Enlightenment
46. Moon Landings (see #46, huge overlap)
47. Final Thoughts On That Which Exists Beyond All Thoughts

Author’s Note:

There are three primary sources for Inspiration for all of my writing since 2017.  Number one is  my wife, Sharon White, who has one fantastic, heart filled book published “Whose Death is It Anyway, A Hospice Nurse Remembers”. Sharon’s patience and compassion with me during the writings, which began in earnest in early 2017 during a time of heightened stress and anxiety, has been extraordinary.   Number two is Sheila Hamilton, writer of the book ” All The Things We Never Knew”.  Sheila came to our house for a book club meeting to present and promote her book in 2016.  I then became.motivated to get this book out as a direct result of her stories around her deceased husband, who I had much in common with.  Number three is my deceased friend Marty Crouch, who encouraged my writing, and, in fact, through my desire to help to bring healing to him, opened up new doors to infinity for me and helping me to live my life in a more conscious manner.

Prologue  Revisiting a Troubled Past, Finding A Way To Live In The Present

The process of writing a book has been a great challenge for me.  First, I am new to writing, having written very little in my life until the fall of 2016.  I am still learning about writing, while also learning about myself and my world through this process.

What I have learned about my life is that much of my early life can be characterized by mesmerization from the traumatic influences that I experienced.  Trauma’s most damaging impact upon a human being is its capacity to attenuate, or even block, normal emotional expression and interchange with others. Literally, unexpressed energy becomes stored within the body and mind, creating black holes of negative influence on healthy bodily function, the creation of perceptions, and happy human interchange.  As various trauma experts have stated, the issue is in the tissues, so our bodies do keep score!

My Spirit of Wholeness gave to me a profound dream in 1964, when I was eight years old.  Up to that point in my life, I was anything but whole.  I experienced nightmares almost continuously during sleep time, resulting in bed wetting and poor sleep patterns.  There were several adult truths expressed through the dream, but the final message  was that the darkness that I witnessed in my life had personal and collaborative causes, much of which was embedded within myself.  The rest of my life, even up to the present moment, can be characterized by my wrestling match with that most important individual, and collective, truth.

Writing about my trauma experienced as a baby and as a pre-verbal human being eventually opened up Pandora’s box to my unexpressed anger, abandonment, betrayal, and loneliness issues.  The unblocking and release of that energy caused a major movement in consciousness within me, while bringing fear and concern for my emotional health from my life partner, Sharon,  during the two plus hours I had tapped into that suffering.

Recently, I also rewrote the section of my life of the period 1986-1987, when I attempted suicide, and then began my search for Truth.  Pandora’s box opened up again, causing me to re-experience the traumatic emotions of that age including despair pain, loneliness  and grief.  I truly entered the “dark night of the soul”.In July of 2021, I took a long drive in my sports car.  Typically, I find great joy and happiness through such a drive, but this time there was no such release.  As I slowed down and began to end the drive about an hour from home, a dove changed direction, and flew to my car, and led me for about 20 seconds, until I stopped the car.  I wondered what this experience meant, then I remembered that, In spiritual circles, the dove leading me meant that my guiding spirit was still with me, forever leading me back onto the paths of peace and healing.

I cried for two minutes.  And, with the tears, I found forgiveness and compassion for the 1986-1987 version of myself.  That allowed for me to retire that version of myself, and continue my journey into the present moment with reduced attachment to the wounds of an unconscious past.

What greater gift to self can there be?

The investigation of personal trauma, my response to it, and my search for truth is an exercise in compassion, understanding, and healing, and not maudlin in nature., My intention for this writing was not to bring harm to myself, but to bring a message to my world about the suffering that the world so casually creates, and then denies its own culpability.  I wanted to give voice not only to myself, but also to the millions who already died, went insane, or have been imprisoned because of our shared disease of the spirit, and the collective conspiracy of silence around society’s and religion’s responsibility for it.  My hope for this book is that it accurately points in the direction towards where our healing might be found.

This book may not be for the healthy, wealthy, and wise among us.  It is designed, however, for those seeking to create their own unique bridge to our healing potential.

This book is a mantle woven together by the words and stories that I have chosen to represent the whole of my life experience. I wear this garment in honor of all those who have preceded me, and for those who still walk beside me in spirit, in love, and in healing. I honor my deceased parents and grandparents, my aunts and uncles, and the countless generations past. I honor those who have sacrificed their lives to diseases of the body, and of the Spirit, be they the addict, alcoholic, mentally ill, victim of violence, or the so-called normal person who struggled with comprehending the insanity in their own life, and of their civilization, and died before finding healing. I honor those who are still alive, and suffering under the forces of oppression and repression that characterize much of life lived under our present economic, religious, and political systems. I honor those who will take the time to consider this work, and I also honor those who will never find the opportunity or the willingness to do so. Finally, I honor my wife Sharon White, who suffered with me through some tough times during a relapse in 2007, caring for my dying father the last several years up to 2017, and for the actual writing of this book.

The search for truth continues.

May you find what you are looking for.

Introduction Apollo 11: 

“We set sail on this new sea because there is new knowledge to be gained, and new rights to be won, and they must be won and used for the progress of all people. For space science, like nuclear science and all technology, has no conscience of its own. Whether it will become a force for good or ill depends on man, and only if the United States occupies a position of pre-eminence can we help decide whether this new ocean will be a sea of peace or a new terrifying theater of war. I do not say that we should or will go unprotected against the hostile misuse of space any more than we go unprotected against the hostile use of land or sea, but I do say that space can be explored and mastered without feeding the fires of war, without repeating the mistakes that man has made in extending his writ around this globe of ours.

There is no strife, no prejudice, no national conflict in outer space as yet. Its hazards are hostile to us all. Its conquest deserves the best of all mankind, and its opportunity for peaceful cooperation may never come again. But why, some say, the Moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask, why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas?

We choose to go to the Moon! We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win, and the others, too.”

—-President John F. Kennedy, September 12, 1962

In 1962, President Kennedy proposed a great adventure for America.  I have borrowed from our hallowed leader’s ambitious address, and I now proffer to our country another national undertaking, a healing journey into  “inner space”.  I have reimagined JFK’s great address with the substitution of the word “mind” or “consciousness” in his speech each time that he mentions “space” or the “moon”.  With this new wording,  I have recreated a proposal for another fantastic voyage, a journey to the center of our “inner space”., the Ground Of All Being  Never forget the old aphorism:

“as within, so without”

because the trips that we take into both the outer and inner spaces are intimate traveling companions on the same infinite, and often unpredictable journey through life, being two sides of the same divine coin.  All that we now see, hope to see, and will ever see, unto eternity, is the extensions of our minds into the real world that we witness together as a community, or see deep within ourselves as insight.  The James Webb space telescope looks almost into the farthest regions of space.  The Cern collider looks deep into the most basic particles in nature.  Yet, all that has been witnessed and documented are just more symbols, or representations of, previously undefined characteristics and elements within our own human mind.

The potential for our minds can never be limited by our misunderstanding of it, only we are limited by the degree of our own ignorance of our true potential..

• Do you ever wonder why the world never changes?
• Do you ever wonder why the religious world clings so tightly to worn out or misunderstood  myths and stories, with some dating from over 3000 years ago?
• Do you ever wonder why certain family members never let go of a grievance?
• Do you ever wonder if mankind has any real potential for collective transformative change?
• Do you ever wonder why advertisers, politicians, historians, media tycoons,  and book publishers keep channeling the same or similar information, consumer items, and/or  politically acceptable revisionist history to you?
• Can you “teach an old dog new tricks”?
• Can there be a more exalted life affirming and sustaining truth “hidden” in the Unknown than we are now experiencing in all of our “knowns”?
• Can we become curious, and then obsessive, about the higher potential for our lives than we might be currently experiencing and expressing?
• Does the thought of newer, more diverse and healthier possibilities for life stir enough deep desire for change for all of us who continue to suffer and struggle?
• Do we dare to “shoot for the moon”, or should we just accept the status quo for all of our Earth time?

One of the greatest inspirations to the human imagination is the contemplation of and the preparation for the launch of a new mission into an unknown and mysterious realm.  ..Since I first saw a rocket ship take off into the heavens at age 6, I became hooked on the possibility of becoming an astronaut.  My childhood was characterized by my experience of periods of unhappiness,  loneliness, poor self-esteem, and social anxiety, as well as periods of unconscious joy and happiness of being a free spirit while playing in the wilds near my childhood homes.  As I told my friends, I wanted to “get off of this fucking rock” and travel to far away worlds, where I might find happier versions of myself.

When I was eight years old, my father drove us over to our new house being built in Milwaukie.  The house had not received sheet rock yet, because the electrician had not finished his duties.  I followed the electrician around for 15 minutes, and I was fascinated by him and his work.  I told my parents that if I did not make it into outer space as an astronaut that I wanted to be an electrician.  Well, even though I never made it to space, my life became the spiritual synthesis of both energies when I reached my thirties..

For the awakening ones, our launch day is here and now.  Today we can become spiritual astronauts and be launched into higher energy orbits through our own healing, insight, and awareness.  It remains up to us as individuals to start our own unique “launch sequence” into the exalted spiritual orbits, and this has always been true, regardless of the status of our national leadership. Many individuals and small groups of people have been embracing healing changes and spiritual awakening since time immemorial.  Collectively, however, our country currently appears to be resistant to initiating its own launch sequence towards healing on international and national levels

The resistance to healing has resulted in an epidemic of select groups of Americans dying at earlier ages, and having auto-immune diseases,at higher rates than would be statistically forecast, for at least the past 30 years. There has also been a marked increase in anxiety, depression, loneliness, substance abuse, and other forms of mental illness in our general population, for both men and women. The two years following the 2016 US Presidential election has revealed the appearance of a burgeoning divide between major elements within the population, and the behavior of the  45th President has certainly added to the collective stress and worry. Trump Related Extreme Anxiety Strikes Our Nation, or TREASON for short, and this phenomenon has made its mark on the national soul, though his “base” continues to delight in the ‘in your face” hostility, lies and misstatements,  and dysfunction that has been Trump’s style..

Mr. Trump is not the cause of the national crisis.  Our 45th president is only a manifestation or symptom of a national disease for the major blocks of people who feel that they have been neglected, ignored, or persecuted.  Far too many people on either side of the divide have felt that way most of their lives, and continue to diagnose and treat themselves for their own stress, loneliness, and anxiety.   It is dangerous behavior to self-medicate, and much too easy to choose the immediately available remedies of drugs, alcohol, and/or awkward or self-destructive political and religious ideologies to treat symptoms of our national disease.  I have personally witnessed both mental illness, religious fanaticism and rigid fundamentalism, drug addiction, and the early death syndrome of the  American male through many of my co-workers, friends, family members, and acquaintances, and, even through myself.  I have developed a few insights and observations into the whole phenomenon over the course of my life, and I present them in my effort to bring healing to personal and national wounds.

I believe that we need to explore our personal and collective consciousness, the potential for both dysfunction and recovery, as well as our attempts at connection with humanity’s highest potential.  I believe that we need to understand the darkened movements of human energy that become the underlying foundation for “toxic masculinity”, a name coined to encompass all that is selfish and detrimental to the male version of the human spirit. I believe that our country needs to discuss at length the Common Knowledge Game, which refers to the process by which we all become imprisoned by the way that we form words, ideas, and judgements against self and other, while attempting to maintain society’s often times twisted notions of what normal social connections should look like. I believe that we need to address difficult human emotions, and problems with expressing them skillfully. I could not avoid making commentaries on my rocky relationship with religion in general, and American Christianity specifically, and why I am no longer directly associated with tribes practicing those philosophies,

My life’s lessons were not gained in a classroom, or sitting at the feet of an Indian guru, as my experience, and resulting wisdom, is directly derived from my immersion into real life, through love relationships, friends, enemies, family, and my work career.. During the course of my six years of collegiate studies, I extensively explored philosophy, theology, psychology, and electrical, electronic, and computer engineering.  During the course of my work career, I was a mail clerk, maintenance mechanic, electrician, computer engineer, and instrument and electronic technician.

I assisted in the building and subsequent technical support of the operation of multi-billion dollar chip fabrication plants in Oregon, and maintaining the pumping and delivery systems of the entire fresh water supply to the City of Portland, among many other less economically significant endeavors. I learned not only how to put people and material together to get a desired result, but also how to troubleshoot and repair systems that have become defective due to wear or poor initial engineering. I worked in a male dominated industry, and I had the privilege of working with many top notch men over the course of my career. The best managers balanced the need for productivity with the needs of the people performing the work, and I walked that balance beam as best I could whenever necessary.

As both a manager and a worker in the field of electrical construction, I dealt with friendly, cooperative and productive workers, but I also was to encounter innumerable damaged, broken, and even dangerous men, and I sometimes struggled with engaging with them directly, and meeting their needs. With the vast personality differences distributed throughout our industry, employment could be both extremely challenging and fulfilling as we all attempted to navigate the often times turbulent waters of male dominated work experience.. I would frequently wonder how any work gets successfully accomplished, especially with the diversity of interests and conflicts in philosophies and mutual negative personality assessments that characterized the crews that worked with each other. The desire to continue to eat and to prevent one’s homelessness through retaining one’s employment motivates most socially distressed and diseased people to avoid physical violence with others. Fortunately for the peaceful and the non-violent employees,

the need to eat exceeds the need to beat,

most days.  Many of these intellectually and emotionally challenged workers continue to resonate with Donald Trump’s personality defects and spiritual poverty, and celebrate them and their dark effects upon our culture as if they were their own.

Unconscious men tended to be minimally cooperative, overly competitive, pseudo-religious, antagonistic and verbally violent, misogynistic, judgmental, hateful, superstitious, jealous, racist, misanthropic, and abusive, both within the workplace and at their homes,  Several of these victims of their own unconsciousness were to become murderers, sexual perverts, child abusers, wife beaters, thieves, liars, cheaters, saboteurs, suicide victims, heroin addicts, alcoholics, and, in general,  were six-o’clock news worthy characters.  These are the men that may appear to be permanently “ungrounded” in a dangerous  conspiracy supporting  collective unreality, isolation, fear and mutual distrust.

As a result, I did not leave employment and enter retirement with a balanced, healthy attitude towards much of the local male construction worker population, so I began to troubleshoot and repair my own life system.

• Why were so many of my male friends and acquaintances dying so young?
• Why were so many of my female friends getting auto-immune diseases?
• Why was I not able to soar to great spiritual heights with many of my male compatriots while employed?
• What might have been my role in the proliferation of disease and enmity within the work environment?
• Can I successfully search for higher degrees of understanding of myself and our population’s diverse collection of males and females, and the healing potential for all of us, including the planet Earth?

All of these questions, plus many more, contributed to the desire to write this book. My hope is that by the reading of this book the reader will be able to see everything just a little bit differently than they did before.  I use the Apollo 11 American experience of a moon landing as a metaphor for what we all might accomplish, should we each strive to place spiritual integrity, wholeness, love, and truth into our own spiritual rocket engines as fuel

 

It has been proposed by psychologists and spiritual masters  that the human being has at least three stages of consciousness to experience,

1. the unconscious stage,
2. the aware stage, and
3. the self-aware stage,

I utilize this three-stage model to represent the potential for growth and evolution of human consciousness, though there are other accepted models of more complex natures available for understanding (see Maslov’s hierarchy of needs, Spiral Dynamics, Etc.).

In the first stage of our unfoldment as human beings, we spend most of our time in the unconscious state, remaining chained to life’s launching pad.  We are basically living life through our habits of thought, without much concern about our thoughts and their ultimate source, or our subsequent behavior inspired by those inchoate impressions.  Relationships that are more defined by power and control issues are activated and supported by the lower, or reptilian, brain where fight or flight predominates. This ancient component of our brain is engaged with most threatening issues, and passive/aggressive styles of interaction predominate.  Fear, isolation or tribalism, superstitious reasoning around hope and faith, social insecurity, chronic emotional illness and scarcity consciousness, and a disconnect with nature with the resultant lack of a grounded connection with Earth and nature are the dark results.  Thus, there is little sense of curiosity, awe, mystery, and wonder while chained to this state of being.  Suffering is our present and future experience.  We may even attempt to destroy our lives and/or the lives of others through actions motivated by chronic despair,  We are consumed by our personal sense of self, and falteringly attempt to preserve and protect it, most times at the exclusion or expense of all others unlike ourselves. In this first stage of our unfoldment, humanity forever exists on the launching pad of life, while never fully engaging the launch sequence for the truth of existence, with its spiritually empowered expression.

The second stage of our  unfoldment is living more in the aware state, which is , where we may begin the “launch sequence” for our rocket ship of life, and engage in more conscious behavior such as self improvement and personal goal setting and achieving. This second state of human evolution does not supply all of the conditions for transcending the self and its limitations, though it gives enough insight to indicate that a change of heart can be a desirable outcome.  Hope and faith take on a different meaning for those in the second stage from those still stuck in the first stage, because now hope and faith become expressions of a more conscious personal intention.  We now believe in the possibility that we can actually transcend ourselves and our problems, and we start drawing our resources together in anticipation of the beginning of the greatest adventure that life can offer.

We start to become sincere in our desire to improve ourselves, and to  reach out, however falteringly, to others who may be less fortunate.  Our “higher power”  gives us hints that we have access to much greater wisdom and power, but we continue to believe that we are not worthy, or we may still be a little overweight with hubris.  Either of these qualities limits our full time access to our highest nature, and this delays our “launch date”, until the internal weather conditions improve.  We are finally beginning to see that the boundary between self and other is a lot vaguer than we ever thought possible.  There is now a lot of activity around the launching pad, and in the second stage of our unfoldment, we become willing to leave the safe confines of our lives and set our intention for exploring the unknown.  We might wonder what our next step in life is at this stage, which starts catalyzing that spiritual rocket fuel in our souls.

The third stage of our  unfoldment is the self-aware state, which is achieved once one has not only left the launching pad, but has also transcended the boundaries of the historical self.  We can now soar into the new, unexplored mysteries of human spiritual potential and love for all being, human, animal, and the whole of the planet Earth.  We see that, in our true essence, we are a hologram of the whole, and our intentions now carry the need to protect, honor, and enhance the health and well-being of the totality of life, and not just that of our family, friends, neighborhood, country of origin, or species.. We become consumed by reducing, and then eliminating, our negative impacts upon the world, and upon each other.  A driving question of existence becomes how we can be of greater service to the ignorant and/or less fortunate among us, including the animal world.  We are no longer consumed by our personal sense of self and what others might think or expect of us.  Personal suffering is transmuted into compassion and empathy, and we have the experience of transcendence and mysticism.  Our “higher power” is no longer a theory, but a living, breathing reality residing in our hearts.  We are now rocketing into a new dimension of being.  From this exalted position, all that we see, and ever will see, unto eternity, is ourselves, and our primary action in this world is to bring more love to our Self.

• Why would anybody ever want to become more consciously aware as a human being?
• Why would anybody ever want to explore the unknown and unknowable within one’s self, and leave behind the safety and security of all of one’s accumulated life experience?
• Why would anybody ever want to begin to question, and, potentially, then abandon, all of one’s personal knowledge, especially the memories that lead to one’s suffering?
• Why would anybody ever want to commit several thousand hours of their valuable time in reading about religion and spirituality, enhancing introspection, developing intuition and insight, making amends to ALL people and institutions that we have harmed through our ignorance, improving the mysterious practices of both meditation and prayer, and exploring new meetings and workshops with strangers?
• Why would anybody ever want to develop the intention of transforming one’s life so as to be happier, healthier, and better connected with the greater meaning and purpose available?
• Why would anybody ever want to undertake the epic journey of transforming oneself, and being reborn into a new reality where the will to live and prosper is an innate part of being?
• Why would anybody want to take up the spiritual mantle of all consciously realized human beings who have ever lived, and attempt to carry that energy forward into a new, unique life experience, while blessing other people’s lives, as well as one’s own?
• Why would anyone ever want to rocket themselves into another, infinitely more expansive vision and dimension of themselves, and of existence?

Our country, and our world, may be dying.  There appears to be a terminal illness, and the breakdown of our immune systems coupled with the increased toxicity of right wing conservative Christian groups, and white supremacists (a lot of overlap there) is showing how unstable of a foundation that our institutions and government can provide for us, while we are being attacked from wayward elements within our own country..

( The Grandma Henry section, below,  may be eliminated for final draft)

n 1995, my grandmother, Beatrice Henry, was hospitalized after becoming extremely ill. She was diagnosed with terminal lymphoma, and given a prognosis indicating a short period of time left for her to live. The oncologist had suggested to the family that she would respond positively to one round of chemotherapy, to “reduce pain and suffering”. The toxins released by that therapy overpowered her kidneys, and sent her into a form of systemic toxicity, causing temporary loss of consciousness, and accelerating her physical deterioration. My wife Sharon and I asked to have my grandmother stay with us during her dying times, as there was no way that I wanted my grandmother to die in a hospital or care facility.

One day, shortly after she arrived at our home, while still barely conscious, one of her three granddaughters, Carla, brought her newborn son, Kodiak, over for grandma to see. He was the typical boy baby, healthy and happy, and full of potential. Yet my grandmother, still bedridden and semi-conscious at the time, in a most uncharacteristic manner, proclaimed:

“My, Carla, what a homely baby that you have!”

Carla, Sharon and I were all stunned, and surprised. My grandmother always loved babies, and always treasured each and every one, yet this response came from a place within her that we did not know or recognize. Over the course of the next two weeks, her kidneys started functioning again, she gradually regained her consciousness and awareness, and eventually she was able to walk short distances again. .She was to see Kodiak again during her period of minor recovery, and this time stated:

“My, what a handsome baby boy Kodiak is. Carla, you must be a very proud mother!”

Women, especially those who have carried the life of “another” in their wombs, know at their deepest level the experience of biological creation, the bringing forth real life into our shared world. It is not just the fertilization of the egg that brings life, it is also the carrying and internal nurturing of the developing fetus for almost nine months, then delivering the viable, complete life form to the world. Healthy, aware women know, at the deepest level, that their babies have ultimate value, and they will see beyond any apparent lack of physical beauty. All babies are beautiful, and there is little question about it. My grandmother was dying, yet she was able to once again see the beauty of human potential, and acknowledge it at the deepest level.

Like most everyone else on this planet, I have been subjected to the family and cultural forces of oppression and repression and crazy making communication and behavior.  I have found that most people do NOT appreciate feedback about their errant behavior, and if I wanted to make more ‘friends” and be accepted by groups of damaged people I certainly would not offer to the world this book.  I would probably have written a vacuous book about four minute meditations for success, or a three step enlightenment techniques for transcendence.  But that is NOT me.  This book is NOT for people who want to stay grounded in their own unconsciousness, but instead for those who want to understand why they are not soaring upward into new dimensions of being and doing, for in the complete seeing, is the new being revealed.

This book, which is my only creative baby, may be greeted by readers with this same initial negative response as my grandmother had for Kodiak. The “launching pad” of the life that I was chained to was not a pretty place, and it was not populated by the happy, healthy, wise human beings that one would prefer to be associated with.  The beauty and infinite possibilities for my own “rocket ship” will not be immediately recognizable by most people.  My story is quite HOMELY, and it will repel all but the most curious, courageous and loving of readers. But, like my cousin Kodiak, this story is full of potential, and points to a healthy and happy state of being, once the “homeliness” is presented and acknowledged. ( end of section to be deleted, used elsewhere)

My search for Truth, with the subsequent delivery of my spiritual “baby” is nothing like anything that the reader has ever seen before. It will be difficult to assess its value and relevance, until it has “an opportunity to grow on the reader”, and whatever toxicity that the story stirs up is filtered out. The story will not have universal appeal, yet, to me, it is my only child, and as such it remains a “handsome baby boy”, full of life, love, and the potential for healing. And, this “handsome baby boy” is the story of my exploratory trips into my own “inner space”, where my mission to support personal and collective evolution continues to this day.  Not only did humanity make it to the moon (why do moon landing deniers even exist?), each of us also has the potential to reach God, Truth, Love, Compassion, Healing, and Light, after we leave the launchpads of our own lives.

My goal in life was certainly not to become a diseased human being, attempt recovery from that disease, write a book about the process, and, establish myself as an authority on subject matter that makes me irrelevant to all who have no interest in healing or in my journey.  Life is more about building a better state of consciousness, with enhancing the life-affirming qualities, and the cultivation of greater insight, than the books that get written, and the foes that get smitten..Literally, the words of my story are the vapor trails of my journey through the space and time, and no one should set out as a goal to just chase my trails, or anyone else’s, for that matter.  We are all capable of making our own unique vapor trails on our journey to the higher dimensions of our life experience and its supporting consciousness, and we can develop the willingness to share those inspired words with others…

Through our resonance with the “wise ones” of our age, and of all ages, we may yet drum up sufficient support for a healing change in collective and individual consciousness, before our planet fails, and our civilization collapses upon itself..

Why choose this goal?

“. . . But why, some say, the Moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask, why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas?. . . “

Just like the journey into outer space that America undertook to reach the moon, America can also succeed in the journey to the center of our minds, where all of our opportunities, and perils, reside.

“. . . not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win,. . . “

This book has been written by a man who never had anything to say, or a desire to say it, until nearly dying in 1986. It only took another thirty-five years to finally put life experiences to words, after more brushes with DEATH.. Death is the final and greatest frontier, and a great motivator for the procrastinator.. Early death threatens everybody, including our planet Earth.  It will be noted that on several occasions in this book, I will be speaking up for Mother Earth, as her voice has been drowned out by the American Capitalist concerns of this age..

This life of mine has become a “Miracle Experiment”, in which I attempt to penetrate our cultural conspiracy of silence, the conspiracy that keeps mankind imbalanced and diseased, and prevents humanity from achieving its collective potential. Note that the title indicates that I am penetrating the “conspiracy of silence” rather than dispelling it, as the power of the collective experience still dominates human consciousness. My life was not lived in vain, however, for I am a part of a massive movement to heal the American soul. I will continue to write, and to speak out, until I am no more. The story that follows is my attempt to document the process, and present it to the world

“. . . we help decide whether this new ocean will be a sea of peace or a new terrifying theater of war. I do not say that we should or will go unprotected against the hostile misuse of space any more than we go unprotected against the hostile use of land or sea, but I do say that space can be explored and mastered without feeding the fires of war, without repeating the mistakes that man has made in extending his writ around this globe of ours. . . . “

We have been called to be the “truth tellers” of the world, which releases us from the bondage to the past and the unhealthy conditioning that keeps unaware people eternally chained to the launching pad of life.  The following book is the story of my own preparation of my launching pad for spirit, and may it bless each of us in a way that benefits the most of us.  And, even if our own life appears to be the only life to be positively impacted by our hero’s journey, that is MORE THAN ENOUGH.

Danny B And The Potential Cost For Telling The Truth

There are times shells, or walls, are necessary..  Neither hiding nor revealing ourselves will prevent our share of pain, but in being who we are, we get to be part of the Universal stream, not just a nut in a shell waiting to fall.–Mark Nepo

Danny B…….s and I were neighbors from1968-1969.  We both were, at times, exuberant and rambunctious lads, and enjoyed playing hard and having fun several times together, though we were not best friends.  Danny’s father, Greg,  and my father were to become acquainted, as well, and they both knew how to put an entertaining story together, and keep each other’s interest

One afternoon Greg walked down the road to our house, and engaged my father in conversation.  Greg had a serious , concerned look on his face.  I hung around them a bit, overhearing bits and pieces of their exchanges while kicking my football through imaginary goal posts on our roof.

Greg stated that he and his wife were getting divorced.  Greg had caught his wife having an affair while he was out of town, which happened frequently for his employment.  And, there was more than one instance of this behavior with other men.  Greg called his wife a whore, a term I had not heard used before, though I knew what it might mean.

The next day, Danny and I happened to be exploring a vast field east of our homes. I casually mentioned that his father had come down to speak to my father the day before.  Danny asked what I thought they might have talked about.

“Umm, Danny, your father said your mother is a whore, and that they are getting divorced”.

“That is not true! You take that back you bastard!”   Danny exclaimed in an anger I had not seen from a playmate before.

“Why would I take this back, Danny?  This is from your dad!  It ain’t going to change anything for you!”  I yelled back at him, a bit intense and now defensive.

He then wrestled with me for a while.  He was a little bigger than me, but we were almost equal in strength.  After more wrestling around on the ground, he got me in a leg lock around my mid section, and squeezed me with all of the strength he could muster.

“Take that back, or I will squeeze you to death!”

It was a decidedly uncomfortable position to be in.  I was trapped and helpless, and he was inhibiting my ability to breathe.

“Danny, what purpose is there for me to take your father’s statements back.  Go talk to your dad, and leave me the fuck alone!”

“Take it back. Take it back!  TAKE IT BACK!”  He then squeezed harder, like his life depended upon it.

“Jesus, Danny, I need to breathe!  If this gets me out of your leg lock, then I take  it back. ”

He then released me.

“Go fuck yourself, and stay away from me!”

Exclaimed Danny

I never hung out with him again.

Danny was to get into multiple skirmishes with the law, eventuating in his extended imprisonment,  first in county jail, and then in the Oregon State penitentiary several years later.

Me?

I still can feel Danny’s legs attempting to squeeze the life out of me, when I feel obligated to tell the truth.  While growing up, whenever my father became aggressive or over-exuberant in his feedback to the family, there was no truth telling, just me wanting to hide.  Later in young adult life whenever conflict would erupt,  my first reaction was just wanting to duck under a table, or go to the bathroom until the clouds cleared.  In 1976, my energy took a decidedly different direction, and several times I became willing to defend myself, while taking more aggressive stands with the uncooperative ones. Yet I still predominantly worked through the fight or flight response, until self-awareness began to dawn upon me, offering me other choices for response..  The writing of book is a true miracle for me, as I had to overcome our culture’s conspiracy of silence and denial, its leg lock upon my soul, and my own internalization of its oppressive qualities

The world would probably prefer that I just have a joint and/or a few drinks, or await an imaginary empyrean realm after death, and just move on with the daily drudgery of existence..

Such is the way of our traumatized, disillusioned world.

Yet, we have other choices.

We can be healed.

Religious irrationality, anti-social and Earth destroying capitalist economic philosophy, and family traumatic engagement with each other is the leg lock around our capacity to speak the difficult truth, heal from the damaging effects of its oppression,, and move forward in a healed life.

We must speak truth to power, or lose our breath, and become oppressed and overcome by it.

We don’t have to die to find our final freedom.

True freedom is the path of all healthy life experience, and my liberation from the conspiracy of silence is the only reason that I am still here..

And no, I ain’t taking anything back now, no matter how hard the world squeezes me.

 

Mythology, Religion, Liars, The Conspiracy Of Silence, And The Cloak Of Invisibility

“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”—-Joseph Goebbels

Whether we’d like to admit it or not, governments, in general, are some of the shadiest organizations out there. The bigger and more powerful the country, the more likely it is to sit on a massive pile of shocking secrets. Such is the United States case, which perhaps has the most significant number of conspiracy theories drafted in its honor.  What about the Bay of Pigs invasion, Kennedy’s assassination, the Iran Contra Affair, UFO’s, and all of the other so-called conspiracy theories did not just grow out of nowhere.  Due to the work of Congressional investigations, and the Freedom of Information Act, our country has learned that many of our so-called conspiracy theories actually do have a foundation in fact, though most times, the facts are not as clear as we would like them to be, thus subject to interpretation and political leveraging.

Our government is of the people, by the people, and for the people, according to President Lincoln’s Gettysburg address..  As goes our government, so goes our citizens, so goes our government, etc.  Our governments have been designed to represent the interests of its citizens, and if the citizens are prone to keeping dangerous secrets, so also shall the government.  Historically, America has shown itself to be the People Of The Lie. The white race has shown that it has immense talent and expertise in leveraging a falsehood into a profitable enterprise for itself. For example, the European immigrants committed genocide and stole America from its native inhabitants, and kidnapped and enslaved men and women of African descent, and much of America still found a way to justify its own murderous excesses,.

Much of the American Christian Church morphed into a political ally for our capitalist economic system and government, and they are the primary agent for the proliferation of the lie that we have no value unless we adhere to their belief systems..  And when it comes to our excesses and crimes against humanity, we have learned that if we change the subject fast enough, or spin the facts in creative, though deceptive ways, we can avoid being held accountable and responsible for our own errant attitudes and actions in our world.  We are a country that has learned to scapegoat the innocent, and enrich and aggrandize the guilty among us.

• Where and when are we to find our freedom, while the church and the government are trying to control us?
• Where and when are we to find our freedom, while our conditioning and our traumas are still trying to tether us to an unhealthy past, while trying to control us in the present?
• Why would we ever consider granting each other release from the binding arguments of our own lies and misunderstandings?

This book is a documentation of my understanding of the facts of our lives, clues about our shared human nature, and the discovery of our possibilities for the transcendence of our human condition.  Our sense of self or ego is as limited and mysterious to us in our unenlightened space as is our limited concept of God.   The only “God” that most people ever become aware of.are the lies and confusion spread by unevolved religions and their less than aware adherents, or created through our reactions to our own history.  We do not give real prayers, as we continue in earnest our culturally prescribed mutual control dramas.

In our native essence, we have a curious mind and a balanced masculine/feminine nature.  We naturally seek to understand our self and our relationship with the whole, yet we become self-conscious, judgemental, and/or uncomfortable with those assessments.  The loss of our connection with nature and our imbalanced and inaccurate perceptions of self and each other contributes to our sense of isolation, loneliness and vulnerability. If we do not make ourselves aware of the reasons behind the choices that we make in life, we remain unconscious human beings, with little true freedom.  The resulting perceptions spawned from our confusion are legion in number, and are resistant to change. It is no wonder why making a conscious choice is so difficult. One eventually has to ask:

• Why is life, and the truth, so threatening?
• Why would I rather hold onto a fantasy, than face myself?

The fig leaf represents denial, or our need to hide from our inner creator and all of our creations. Thus, the ceding of personal responsibility is consummated through the scapegoating, or the sacrifice, of others. Our self protective armor has evolved over hundreds of generations from a single fig leaf to become a Kevlar suit and military style weapons for far too many human beings.  As Goebbels alludes to, the truth is the greatest enemy of our culturally institutionalized misunderstanding of Life, our self, and all of our relationships with all of mankind.  This division between reality and fantasy draws its energy from the lies that we continue to tell ourselves, and vigorously defend to each other.  Our ignorance to higher possibilities began in the mythical Garden of Eden, and is where, at least conceptually, the feeling of shame and the need to tell lies to cover up our sense of inadequacy becomes, mythologically, mankind’s first experience of dishonesty, which continues unabated to today.

When we don’t have the facts that we need, we sometimes trust the version of the facts offered to us by others, or even ourselves, even if their source is the cunning “snakes in the grass”.  The lies start small, as indicated by the fig leaf. But as our defense mechanisms grow in sophistication over a period of time, eventually we clothe ourselves entirely with them.  The flaming swords of the Cherubim guard the gates back into Eden, preventing us in our now “fallen” nature from ever reentering the Garden again.  The reason is simple:  We have abandoned our native intelligence, and now all that we see is a lie, projected out of our self, until we find a release from our temptations to  believe solely in our self-defining and limiting judgements, grief, traumas and wounds.  As we return back to our innocence, we lose our need to hide from ourselves and to control others, and we no longer remain paralyzed by the fear of our own vulnerability and innate spiritual power.

I don’t blame the circumstances; I do not blame the place and time. When I had the choice between right and wrong, I could not quite make up my mind “—Peter Yarrow, from lyrics to Arkansas

Lies are the primary activity of the relatively unevolved mind,  a mind typically intoxicated by subservience to its hubris,  a second hand life experience,  and twisted self-centered understanding of what is good, and what is bad. Lies serve us as a creative avenue for maintaining a safe distance from threatening truths that we are not yet prepared to confront. Nobody wants to grow up to be the best liar in the world (the former President Trump might be the exception). Yet, through the living of a lie, and the telling of lies, we can convince ourselves that we have no need to adapt, adjust, understand others, accommodate, and/or heal.

Some who have been traumatized and victimized by the family, or by the community, may find little support in their search for justice and compassion, thus they are compelled to  remain silent about the abuse, fearing reprisal and spiritual assaults.  There are sometimes good intentions behind our cultural conspiracy of silence. But there is no healing to be found by remaining silent about the problems that we witness.  People will feel threatened, and have hurt feelings, when we call them out for their ignorance and hurtful behavior. Some will even want us to apologize for the crimes that they committed.

We are ALL the beloved of God, of this Universe, and of our Mother Earth, and that is a poorly comprehended and applied fact within our collective consciousness. In truth, we should also be the beloved of our fellow man, though we all have felt that lack of love.  Unnecessary pain and suffering comes through denial of this truth, and is the basis for all of the social ills within civilization.

The parable of The Emperor’s New Clothes represents in narrative form how we are susceptible to the lies of the mind being spun together,with the invisible golden threads of self-deceit.  Our deception, both to ourselves and to others, creates for us a self-perceived “cloak of invisibility”.  The lies that we tell ourselves to cover our innocence and vulnerability feel like they are spun from gold, and, at least initially, we take pride in our new version of our self. Because of our social nature, we want to look good to others, thus the parading around of our latest “clothing”.  But an awakening life will always present us with “an inner innocent young boy” who sees through the deception, and proclaims our nakedness before our adoring crowds.  Oh how the masses loves this eternal parade of fools, which, in our deceived state, we remain active participants.

The need to please others without first finding our real self can lead to some incredibly challenging, and embarrassing, situations. It is enlightening to note how much of the ego’s energy is devoted to it’s own recognition, when there was a shortage of loving attention very early in life. The ego, both individual and collective, is created from a desperate call for love from a world that has not yet learned how to listen to and to love itself.

Through our own unwillingness to embrace this world with love, with its ever evolving truth, we tend to maintain a caricature of our real self, and we build an almost impenetrable fortress around this misunderstanding (this idol, or self creation, is called our “ego”), thus perpetuating a culturally conditioned war both against the present moment, and all who appear unlike ourselves. Acts and attitudes of duplicity and folie-a- deux characterize much of the crazy making attitudes and communication styles. The need to tell lies is a confirmation that we are practicing denial of our basic truth, and are not yet courageous enough to face our self completely and honestly.  When we don’t honor our own truth, we share in our culture’s conspiracy of silence created to continue the perpetuation of those control dramas that prove we are anything but children of God.

Be conscious, oh Mankind, of those pain filled secrets that we must keep,

For by our suffering silence, we slowly die, while staying disempowered and asleep.

The so-called cultural conspiracy of silence is spawned through our culture’s accommodations to our lying nature, the need to hide from those lies, and it manifests itself in two primary ways.  First, the conspiracy embodies all of the shameful ideas that we have thought and  acted upon, sometimes culminating in intentional harm to self, and to other.  We keep our secrets close to the chest and fear our day of reckoning, when others may see through our surface stories to the hidden truth behind our senseless fear,  heartless indifference or hatred of our self and others.  A compelling part of this conspiracy is that others also share in this activity of keeping dangerous secrets, secrets that are attacks against our self, the (potentially) innocent other, and the truth.  This mutually imprisons all of us.  And this is a most important component of the common knowledge game, an activity that I will devote a lot of attention to in a future chapter.

Second, the conspiracy indicates a hesitancy to talk with others around our spiritual potential, and our innate ability to connect with and manifest a more aware, intelligent, state of being.  Those who are avid in their church attendance may believe that merely belonging to a particular tribe, be it Judaic Christian, Muslim, or Buddhist, they are already granted their necessary grace, as if through a magical dispensation..They are threatened by talk that indicates that their way may not be in resonance with “God’s will”, and they shut down all points of view in disagreement with their own,  Others feel their resistance to any truth not already understood and applied.  Many just turn their heads, and their words, away from the resistant person, knowing that their own new or elevated understanding, or true spiritual discernment, makes them invisible to those who refuse to look at life anew, from a shared love or more collaborative perspective.

Who wants to spend their lives continuously  in confrontation with the unevolved?  Thus, those not trained or equipped to qualify for the debate team just smile, and walk away, keeping their words to themselves.  We may remain silent because of our own perceived inadequacy at presenting a supporting and compelling argument for our own point of view, fearing the indifference and rejection from others..  Those with personalized versions of our culture’s institutionalized hatred or judgements, such as white supremacists, toxic forms of masculinity,  misanthropic gun owners, and/or religious and political fundamentalists are especially resistant to open communication.  Such people may even  feel that their freedom and way of life are threatened.

The presidential election of 2020 showed that there were 72,000,000 voters who picked, perhaps,  the most obvious and outrageous liar and deceiver to ever take political office.  And, of the 79,000,000 voters who opted for the more evolved alternative, who knows what percentage of those voters voted against the liar only because they did not have a well defined point of view, and a vote for Biden aligned them with their own tribe, yet not with their own heart.  It takes a person of the highest order of spiritual integrity to successfully confront such attitudes while maintaining compassion and equanimity, thus not being threatened or degraded by the contact.

This is a critical part of the conspiracy of silence.  We become invisible to each other, the less that we are curious about others while becoming unwilling to communicate with each other,  and the less we remain curious about ourselves.  We become invisible to our self when we sit on our voice, and fail to listen to our essence as our inner voice cries out for justice, peace, healing, and change.

As a culture, we also need to remember that our mentally ill population, which includes the addicts and the alcoholics, are society’s “canaries in the gold mine”. We are all susceptible to the damages incurred by spiritual asphyxiation, should we neglect to listen to the stories being told by our most vulnerable family members. The sensitive and the oppressed of our culture define the leading edge of the journey of our own shared human experience and are indicators of our collective spiritual condition.

 

There is a cultural conspiracy of silence, and that fact remains beyond question. Those who have been traumatized by their own, or their family member’s, mental illness often do not communicate their distress, and thus suffer in silence. There are many secrets that are kept, that are held close to the heart, for the victimized, the broken, and the ill do not have the language, nor the receptive audience to share their trauma and pain, with. Some traumas are so painful and distressing that the victim is fearful that the revelation of their disease will bring harm to others, or further harm to themselves. And major sectors our culture remains judgmental, uncaring and indifferent to the plight of the suffering, and close their minds, hearts, and ears to those in need, so that they can continue relatively unbothered in their own selfish, self serving worlds.

Be mindful, oh mankind, of the painful secrets that we must keep, for by our suffering silence, we will not awaken, but die isolated, lonely, and spiritually asleep—-Elisha Scott

I have been personally impacted at the deepest, most profound levels, and my own mental illness and addictions as a teenager and young adult were a cause of greatest concern for myself, my family, and my community, as well. I have been victimized by mental illness, addiction, depression, anxiety, and panic attacks, and my path through life has made me a reluctant expert in these matters. Not only is remaining unconscious and victimized not a helpful option now, It is inappropriate and unhealthy for me to keep a silence around these issues, as I tend to be as sick as my secrets. In my unhealthy past, my conditioned response would be to keep silent, as I had nothing of value to share with the world, and/or the world could give a shit about what I had to say anyway. Extrapolate that response to all of life, and we can perceive the isolating framework that imprisons much of the American psyche..

We continue to feel forced to argue for our own limitations. Yet, to argue for those illusions is to ultimately prove their existence, for that which the mind focuses upon and identifies with, it attempts to develop a supportive narrative around.  Concurrently, if we continue to argue for and defend the world’s present chaotic, limited state of awareness, those illusions become further entrenched within our matrix of understanding.  In the seeing of our problems is the pathway to our release from them, and to our liberation, revealed.  Let us walk with assurance and integrity upon these new paths, after fully understanding the errant paths that we are presently wandering upon.

The mythical story of Theseus and the Minotaur provides for us an allegorical sign pointing in the direction towards our own healing potential.. .Theseus had to travel deep into the labyrinth (the human mind) to confront, and to defeat, the Minotaur (our parental wounding, lies, fears, and other traumas that feasts on our creativity and negatively impacts our life).  Yet, Theseus would not have had success, had he not left a trail of string, to follow back out of the labyrinth,  after the Minotaur’s defeat..  Theseus had a “clew”, or, in our modern terminology,  a clue, or way to finally escape the clutches of a mind under the influence of its darker side.  In the myth, Theseus’s father died in the end of the story, when he committed suicide due to his misunderstanding of his son’s success in defeating the Minotaur.  For all men, our father has to “die”, at least conceptually, before any of us can escape the labyrinth, and ascend to our own unique greatness.  The son has to empower himself, and replace the image of his father, whether still physically alive or dead, with a new understanding where the father and his wayward values no longer lives in and through the son..

Those with a serious drug, alcohol problem have been given many clues, they just have not yet successfully struggled through the maze of their own mind to find and slay the real beast that keeps them seeking pain killing intoxication, to the point of their own detriment.

 

J.R.Tolkien’s Lord Of The Rings trilogy is a fantastic “Middle Earth” variation on the same theme, with the heroes Samwise  and Frodo taking the Ring back to its source in Mordor.  We must confront the dark tricksters and defeat and silence them, or remain controlled by them.  It is OUR responsibility to find our freedom, and blaming others for our creations is a failed, though socially acceptable, solution.

Consciousness itself is the Garden of Eden, Adam, Eve, the Serpent, the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, the Apple, God, the labyrinth, the Minotaur, the Emperor’s New clothes, and the innocent boy calling out our lies. And, we are that Consciousness.  Jesus of Nazareth clearly stated that humanity is the prodigal son.  We have strayed far from Eden, and feast in the pig pen of an unevolved human experience.  Yet, the journey back to our true nature, or essence,  though being a most difficult endeavor, is the most rewarding, experience that life has to offer.  If we commit to traveling upon new paths of consciousness, eventually, Eden will reappear within our interior vision, and we need spin no more illusions of our self in vain attempts to capture the attention of others.

We can all return to our essence, to our original “Garden of Eden” state, but we had better have a “clew”.  Otherwise, we will remain trapped in our labyrinth of self deception and spiritual corruption until the end . Without the healing of our wounds,  loving acceptance of our self and each other remains impossible, we remain separated from our true nature, and we continue being dominated by our demons from the past.. The conspiracy of silence still reigns supreme, and our religions, economic policies, politics, and, in general, our collective consciousness, continues to give more support to our fantasies, rather than to facts and reality.  “Spin to win” is the propagandists slogan, and is a tool for oppression. By such processes throughout our history disputed or unproven “facts” are used to create theories that promote division, chaos, and disease within our world.

• Be aware of those fig leafs, bullet proof vests, and automatic weapons.
• Watch out for those Minotaurs.
• Listen for that innocent child who is trying to call BULLSHIT on the parade of fools.
• Beware of those institutions of capitalism, government and its politics, and religion as they force feed the population lies and misstatements of the truth in order to bring monetary profit to themselves, and maintain their own self-serving “order”.

Eventually, without collectively AND individually embracing our troubling issues and seeking healing from them, the  chaos and division created through the lie, or Armageddon,  will eventually overwhelm the culture, and threaten civilization with its very destruction.  And, the most “religious” humans among us will suffer the same fate as the most profane, for we all are living the LIE.  When the planet’s ecological balance is irreparably damaged through the actions of man, Armageddon  will not separate the ” good from the bad”, it will only separate humanity from its ability to live, and to thrive.

I do not care to read the post apocalyptic narrative that will be created by the ignorant, or the wise, survivors.   We can choose to work together to defeat the cultural Minotaur.  We can work together to take the dark ring back to Mordor.  We can work together to repair the gates to Eden to make paradise accessible once again,

We are free to make new choices, and thus travel new paths of consciousness.

We can dramatically improve our perceptual aim, and  finally hit love’s bullseye with consistency.

Freedom is only for those brave enough to seek it, while breaking free of our culture’s historical shackles.

We can break free from the narratives created by the religious and politicized people of the LIE.  We must find a way to bring Love’s eternal order out of the chaos of the normal human experience.  By improving our perceptual aim, we will hit Love’s bullseye more consistently.

We can save the world . . . from our unhealed self.

We can stop hiding from ourselves. . . and from each other.

Prepare to take the journey to meet our real Maker!

Are We Ourselves? (The Fixx)

Lost feelings return

So now maybe I can learn
To stop the world of a lie this time around

Are we are we are we ourselves?
Are we are we are we ourselves?

Because seen through these eyes
We lead a double life
No one would know so check it out
Stepping out, here I go

Are we are we are we ourselves?
Are we ourselves and do we really know?

So they say, so they say, that to this earth we are bound
Most spirit returns and now maybe we’ve learned
To stop this whirl of a lie
To this earth we are bound
I ask you
Are we are we are we ourselves?
Are we ourselves, and do we really know?

(Songwriters: Adam Terence Woods / Cyril John Curnin / Daniel Kingsmill Brown / James West Oram / Peter John Greenall

Prologue Alternate

It is what it is, but it is not what it seems—Paul Hewson (amongst many other philosophers and commentators)

We are as sick as our secrets—aphorism used extensively in recovery groups

 

What on Earth or in Heaven is the relationship between a “miracle experiment” and a family and cultural conspiracy of silence?

A miracle experiment, most simply, is the intention and all subsequent effort to heal from traumatic wounding, and the consciousness, and world culture, that such wounding creates. It means dealing directly with all of the darkness of our past, seeing it in the light of insight, love, and compassion, and moving onto new paths of conscious evolution.  It means eliminating the objectification of reality, and instead perceiving the universe as an extension of our true nature.  If we have a mystical union, we will now know the relative unreality of the known, and the absolute ultimate reality of the knower.

The Miracle Experiment brings the understanding that every time that  I identify with a person, a process, or a place, I have created either a “new path of consciousness”, or I have reaffirmed some older, more familiar, potentially worn out path that I have already been traveling upon. .”I am a victim of traumatic abuse”, or “I am a lonely, isolated person”,  or “I am an electrician”, or “I am an alcoholic”, or “I am a son of Beryl and Corinne Paullin”, or “I am full of shit”,  or “I am angry with X,Y, Z”, or WHATEVER I associate my self, my “I am” with, either continues my path in old directions, or creates the imperative to create new words, thoughts, and experiences around a new direction.

After I have identified my own internalized issues, and have become willing to heal from them, I could just as easily say “I am no longer traveling old paths of consciousness”, and then through mindfulness and meditation, STOP, or at least dramatically reduce, thinking time-based thoughts, and rehashing and rehearsing painful old memories, to create a new life experience for myself. I would then have to trust in my innate capacity to heal and change, or in spiritual terms, a “Higher Power”, “the Unknown”, the “Present Moment”, and/or “the Mystery” to create my new “timeless self” in each moment. Some may call this process “letting go” and “forgiveness”.

This process is what I call “my miracle experiment”

The conspiracy of silence is all about maintaining some sort of spiritual continuity with the past, while promoting an ethos or umbrella philosophy that exists to preserve and enhance the status quo. The resultant toxic silence has become the manifestation of unevolved religious, cultural, and political intentions to keep most members of society from talking about underlying issues related to trauma, wounding, oppression, misogyny, child abuse, patriarchy, and the whole spectrum of issues related to that activity. The conspiracy continues whenever evolving people become too fearful to speak their truth and share their insights, for fear of being further attacked, and marginalized.

The male human animal certainly has a handle on its ability to influence and control behavior, from the family level through the highest levels of religion, government and commerce. Typically, it has been the male who creates the narrative, and supports, promotes, and defends it.   It is HIS-story, and not HER-story, after all!  The miracle experiment has no guarantee of success from a cultural standpoint, as the institutionalized traumatizing behavior and control is is highly resistant to change.  Yet, to the degree that the individual can uncouple from these toxic influences, and explore the roots of suffering, the miracle experiment can proceed.  And we will know that our experiment is producing a successful outcome when we witness more balancing of power between the sexes, more acceptance of a diverse humanity by its members, more justice for the oppressed, and more love and care for Mother Earth.

 

I really took a walk on the wild side, when I decided to address family, societal, religious, and personal trauma, and the conspiracy of silence that continues its legacy.  Eventually, the garbage can no longer be pushed down or away, categorized as something that it is not, or denied by dismissive intellectual, philosophical, or religious narratives.  It can be addressed by creating a new narrative, witnessing our healing response to it, refining it through more self-knowledge and insight, then reexamining it and refining it again through more knowledge and insight until we can be at peace with the past, stop creating stories from the fragments of the past, and be more open to the present. .

 

Life has trained me to be an electrician, a computer engineer, a psychologist, a philosopher, an archeologist, and a spiritual explorer.  I love functioning systems, and I am intensely curious as why some systems succeed, and some fail, even after successful periods of operation.  My intention is always to bring repair, and balance, back to any system which is malfunctioning.  I use the power of insight, understanding of system history, and my trained ability to see solutions where others can usually only get to the problem identification stage.

My troubleshooting questions;

• What is the history and  intention behind the system design?
• Does the system presently work?
• What are the present day ;problems?.
• Can this process be improved, or stabilized without a total rebuild?
• What are the history of the problems?
• Are the problems a failure of the system and its original design, poor overall  maintenance, and/or by the human operator?
• What are the best options for repair?
• Who is going to help me?
• How much can I help myself?

The answers to these questions will guide the inquiring mind in corrective and healing directions.

Is our life out of control right now?

What are our options for repair?

How deep is our desire to search for the truth of our lives?

If you are still with me, let the journey of self discovery, and self repair, continue!

 

 

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Some wounds are so deep, and primal, that just pasting new names onto aspects of the disease and creating new stories are not enough. . It is each of our responsibilities as conscious, or semi-conscious, human beings to bring our personal truth, and our stories, no matter how incomplete they may be, to the collective experience, including our family, our friends, our co-workers, our neighbors, and our religious and political leaders.. Names and stories are only a convenience for communication, and are never comprehensive and inclusive enough to completely reveal the true natures of what they were created for in our minds to represent in the first place.  The process of naming is the way that our consciousness weighs and measures new forms of life, ideas and experiences, in the attempt to insert the unknown and the mysterious into a present context for understanding, which becomes the latest iteration of our “story”.  Naming tends to attach a dynamic process to a fixed point in time and space, always with a past frame of reference, and thus permanently lodges it in the dead past.

.

The act of creating stories and context, and just being conversational about the details of life does not dislodge the detritus from our field of consciousness. The Devil is in the details, figuratively speaking, and if our need is for change, we need to find a way to see under the vast matrix of impressions of our past history that only float on the surface on the mind .  We who still choose to name processes and create stories must also have personally explored and experienced the movements through consciousness, and found the way to the silence at the foundation of our being.  Otherwise, the process of naming, and the resulting stories that arise from naming, are just more theoretical and/or intellectual knowledge and entertainment for superficial minds, and only bond people together who are ungrounded in nature.  This will not pry open the healing doors to insight and wisdom.

 

“Once I had asked God for one or two extra inches in height, but instead, he made me as tall as the sky, so high that I could not measure myself.” —Malala Yousafzaia .

 

The intellectual and the atheist, though possessing finely tuned minds, can never explore the mystery, and the depth, of the human soul, and comprehend that we all have a connection with Infinity, and can be its very extension into this world.  The willing explorer of the new paths of consciousness or the mystic both have access to the limitless territory of the Spirit, and will soar to new heights and see the sights rarely seen by the rest of mankind. We need not nearly die at the hands of a toxic Christian or Taliban fundamentalist male zealot to find our true place in the spiritual universe.

.

I did not develop verbal abilities until relatively late in my childhood  My sister reports that she spoke for me until I developed the capacity, or  inclination, to speak.  Once I started talking (close to age 4) I proved that I had the capacity for speech, and A LOT OF IT.  My father wondered, at times, if I would ever shut up.  I  proved to be quite precocious, once I engaged my verbal skills.  I remember that I would start talking about things that were around me, giving new information that my parents had no knowledge about.  My parents thought that there was no way for me to know anything about what I was spouting off about, so I was mostly ignored.  But I can remember how good it felt to be talking, and sharing the excitement of the magic of words exploding in my mind!

.

I intuited quite early that built-in to the very fabric of words is an access to imagination and knowledge beyond the word, or sequence of words, spoken.  Looking back now, I can see also the incredible capacity of the human mind to represent the real world with words and internal imagery, as well as to create false realities while remaining utterly convinced of their “truth”, even in the face of non-supporting facts.  I can remember as a young boy around four years of age having a doll named Percy, who spoke with me at times, and even spoke to me once over the telephone.  Percy was to me what “God” was to other innocent children, a reassuring voice that would speak to me, and remind me that I had value.  I almost had my sister convinced of it, as well, and she was almost six years old at the time.  So, illusions can become contagious, if not recognized, and reigned in early. . What is truth? Sometimes, we must remain open to a mystery that far transcends our simple explanations, as well.  This book touches extensively upon the many self-destructive and false stories and realities, as well as the mundane, and sometimes amazing, life-affirming truths, that I, as an individual person, and as a collective, acculturated human being was subjected to and consciously and unconsciously adapted to throughout the course of my life.

.

In some of the early times of my life, prior to my addictive cycles, I carried with me a sense of isolation, depression, and a strong feeling of anxiety around the unknown.  From 1971 through 1987, as a practicing alcoholic and drug addict, and mentally ill human being, I lost most of my remaining freedom of choice.  I belonged to the “death wish core group” of Americans, who lived lives of desperation,  addiction, suicidal ideation, and mental illness.  We all sought an early death, either by our own hands, through our addictions, or by the poor health and relationship decisions that we continued to make.  Many of us could see the insanity of those still claiming for themselves good mental health, while the choices of those supposedly “healthy people of the world” continued to bring the promise of the destruction to our planet Earth.  While we contemplated our own end, we witnessed a world in the midst of its own collective march towards suicide.

The story of Armageddon, as both an individual and as a collective event, becomes very real to those trapped by their own illusions of powerlessness, helplessness, and despair. We are the loosely knit tribe most susceptible to the oppression by others, and the repression of our selves.  We are the prime candidates for political and religious propaganda.  We may seek a new tribe that gives us a sense of safety and purpose, even if our own anticipated benefits come at the expense of other innocent people or groups.  We have become limited caricatures of ourselves, as we continue to play to stereotypes that those in power have thrust upon us.   We do not have the emotional and spiritual intelligence to discern what is true, and what is false, about our selves.  The stories that continue to be told to us keep us connected with an extremely limited view of “our people”, all the while keeping us disconnected from our own true natures, and more realistic stories of ourselves.

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I began my own “search for Truth” in 1986, after a failed suicide attempt.  A spiritual awakening process beginning in 1987 was the start of my exit from the chaotic mindset that characterized life up to that point.  Since 1987,  I have chosen to live life more fully, with enhanced personal awareness, good health, honest expression of all feelings, joy and happiness the majority of the time, and almost continuous sobriety.  My own living, dynamic story has become forefront in my mind, and having examined my life to its deepest core, I have seen the source of my own spiritual disease and despair.

.

I finally found a way to describe the foundational dynamics of both personal and collective consciousness that contributed to my disease, and to all of our suffering.  I need no longer be an unwilling participant and just another silent partner in the conspiracy of silence. . The conspiracy of silence has to be exposed and disrupted, again and again if necessary, to stop the silencing of our true identities.  We must choose to no longer adhere to old, worn out patterns of behavior inculcated into us by our culture, our religions, our so-called teachers and teachings, and our misunderstandings of our parents,  and of our creator.   Our outdated sense of self will have to end, and we will have to find a new path of consciousness for this present moment healing event to have any hope of transforming the heart, body, and soul.  We need to follow new paths of consciousness, while dispelling the illusions created by our society and our individual fantasy thinking.

 

As none can know in advance what our final destination is to be, or will look like, this becomes an experiment in consciousness for us.  If we are not experiencing miracles of any nature in our day to day life, it only indicates that we are too firmly entrenched in the ruts created by our past. .

 

To be in realization of Truth, is to see that God’s High Mount is another illusion to climb,

Being created by fearful, desirous minds caught upon the merry-go-round of time.

The unillumined, restless mind remains forever bereft of Love’s Rhyme, and Truth’s Reason,

And only chases mirages, until it sees all of the movements of thought that are guilty of treason.

Re-Imagining Our Journey Through Consciousness

(consider eliminating criticism of LDS and Prosperity Christianity)

It is what it is, but it is not what it seems

—Paul Hewson .

We all love a great story. Those who have developed real insight into the story, and who can both translate the essence of an experience and convey the emotion of all of the participating characters through words, become the raconteurs of our culture.  These honored story tellers may become famous and beloved novelists, musicians and rock stars, ministers, writers of religious stories and texts, comedians, and playwrights.  The story may be about a personal or historical event, and it may be real, or fiction, but as long as it entertains, it will keep our attention.  As all of the best story tellers know, it can be important not to let the truth get in the way of telling the best story, especially if they are trying to keep our attention.

We all create stories around our individual lives, and around all of our relationships with each other, and with the world.  We also listen intently to the stories told to us  by our parents, our teachers, our religions, our history, and our society about who we are, who others once were or now are, and who we might aspire to become.  Many of our stories, both individually and those created by society for us, are steeped in illusion, ignorance, half-truths and outright falsehoods.  Far too many stories are just illusory dramas about our attempts to control others, and, sadly, our failed attempts at control over our own lives and our emotional experiences around all of these intersections, and collisions, with each other  But these stories have an amazing hypnotic appeal, especially to those who have not undertaken the process of insight and healing.  At some point in our lives, each of us must begin a “search for truth”, lest the entirety of our life experience be lived and experienced without true integrity, the potential for healing and completeness, and the best alignment with reality.

Some aspects of life just seem to elude our ability to effectively communicate around them, and never get incorporated into our personal stories, and thus add to the collective conspiracy of silence.  Also, other people’s stories and garbage gets back-filled into the holes and empty spaces within our own stories,  becoming embedded within us, and adding to our internal confusion and chaos.

Life was never an easy journey for me, and had it not been for some deep need to understand my dysfunctional process, and try to find the underlying truth amid my personal chaos, I would have passed away, silenced by the disease.  Some wounds are so deep, and primal, that just pasting new names onto aspects of the disease and creating new stories are not enough.  But it is each of our responsibilities as conscious, or semi-conscious, human beings to bring our personal truth, and our stories, no matter how incomplete they may be, to the collective experience, including our family, our friends, our co-workers, our neighbors, and our religious and political leaders..

Names and stories are only a convenience for communication, and are never comprehensive and inclusive enough to completely reveal the true natures of what they were created for in our minds to represent in the first place.  The process of naming is the way that our consciousness weighs and measures new forms of life, ideas and experiences, in the attempt to insert the unknown and the mysterious into a present context for understanding, which becomes the latest iteration of our “story”.  Naming tends to attach a dynamic process to a fixed point in time and space, always with a past frame of reference, and thus permanently lodges it in the dead past.

The act of creating stories and context, and just being conversational about the details of life does not dislodge the detritus from our field of consciousness. The Devil is in the details, figuratively speaking, and if our need is for change, we need to find a way to see under the vast matrix of details that only float on the surface on the mind .  We who still choose to name processes and create stories must also have personally explored and experienced the movements through consciousness, and found the way to the silence at the foundation of our being.  Otherwise, the process of naming, and the resulting stories that arise from naming, are just more intellectual knowledge and entertainment for a superficial mind, and will not pry open the healing doors to insight and wisdom.

“Once I had asked God for one or two extra inches in height, but instead, he made me as tall as the sky, so high that I could not measure myself.” —Malala Yousafzaia

The intellectual and the atheist, though possessing finely tuned minds, can never explore the mystery, and the depth, of the human soul, and comprehend that we all have a connection with Infinity.  The willing explorer of the new paths of consciousness or the mystic both have access to the limitless territory of the Spirit, and will soar to new heights and see the sights rarely seen by the rest of mankind. “

I did not develop verbal abilities until relatively late in my childhood  My sister reports that she spoke for me until I developed the capacity, or  inclination, to speak.  Once I started talking (close to age 4) I proved that I had the capacity for speech, and A LOT OF IT.  My father wondered, at times, if I would ever shut up.  I  proved to be quite precocious, once I engaged my verbal skills.  I remember that I would start talking about things that were around me, giving new information that my parents had no knowledge about.  My parents thought that there was no way for me to know anything about what I was spouting off about, so I was mostly ignored.  But I can remember how good it felt to be talking, and sharing the excitement of the magic of words exploding in my mind!

I intuited quite early that built-in to the very fabric of words is an access to imagination and knowledge beyond the word, or sequence of words, spoken.  Looking back now, I can see also the incredible capacity of the human mind to represent the real world with words and internal imagery, as well as to create false realities while remaining utterly convinced of their “truth”, even in the face of non-supporting facts.  I can remember as a young boy around four years of age having a doll named Percy, who spoke with me at times, and even spoke to me once over the telephone.  Percy was to me what “God” was to other innocent children, a reassuring voice that would speak to me, and remind me that I had value.  I almost had my sister convinced of it, as well, and she was almost six years old at the time.

Illusions can become contagious, if not recognized, and reigned in early. What is truth?  Sometimes, we must remain open to a mystery that far transcends our simple explanations, as well.  This book touches extensively upon the many self-destructive and false stories and realities, as well as the mundane, and sometimes amazing, life-affirming truths, that I, as an individual person, and as a collective, acculturated human being was subjected to and consciously and unconsciously adapted to throughout the course of my life.

In some of the early times of my life,  prior to my addictive cycles, I carried with me a sense of isolation, depression, and a strong feeling of generalized anxiety..  From 1971 through 1987, as a practicing alcoholic and drug addict, and mentally ill human being, I lost most of my remaining freedom of choice.  I belonged to the “death wish core group” of Americans, who lived lives of desperation,  addiction, suicidal ideation, and mental illness.  We all sought an early death, either by our own hands, through our addictions, or by the poor health and relationship decisions that we continued to make.  Many of us could see the insanity of those still claiming for themselves good mental health, while the choices of those supposedly “healthy people of the world” continued to bring the promise of the destruction to our planet Earth.  While we contemplated our own end, we witnessed a world in the midst of its own collective march towards suicide. The story of Armageddon, as both an individual and as a collective event, becomes very real to those trapped by their own illusions of powerlessness, helplessness, and despair.

We are the loosely knit tribe most susceptible to the oppression by others, and the repression of our selves.  We are the prime candidates for political and religious propaganda.  We may seek a new tribe that gives us a sense of safety and purpose, even if our own anticipated benefits come at the expense of other innocent people or groups.  We have become limited caricatures of ourselves, as we continue to play to stereotypes that those in power have thrust upon us.   We do not have the emotional and spiritual intelligence to discern what is true, and what is false, about our selves.  The stories that continue to be told to us keep us connected with an extremely limited view of “our people”, all the while keeping us disconnected from our own true natures, and more realistic stories of ourselves.

A spiritual awakening process beginning in 1987 was the start of my own exit from the chaotic mindset that characterized my life up to that point.  Since 1987, I have chosen to live life more fully, with enhanced personal awareness, good health, honest expression of all feelings, joy and happiness the majority of the time, and almost continuous sobriety.  My own living, dynamic story has become forefront in my mind, and having examined my life to its deepest core, I have seen what the source of my own spiritual disease and despair was.  And, I finally found a way to describe the foundational dynamics of both personal and collective consciousness that contributed to my disease, and to all of our suffering.  I need no longer be an unwilling participant and just another silent partner in the conspiracy of silence.

John 1.1-From New Testament Of Christian Bible

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

Yet, another layer of the Conspiracy of Silence exists around the Divine, Higher Power, God, or Truth.  Organized religions, intellectual savants and those parading as atheists, and political powers all too often obfuscate the truth that underlies all of our existence. When Pontius Pilate asked Jesus

“What is truth?”,

Jesus, as the story goes, could only be silent in the face of the greatest power of the day.  The question “What is truth?” was intended as mockery, and that principle continues to this day. Speaking truth to power is not an easy or automatic proposition, no matter how “enlightened” one might appear to be.

Truth is more like a continuous rainfall upon a rocky mountain.  It does not immediately displace all of the sharp, dangerous edges of eons of ignorance, but, over time, it finally erodes the roughest of terrains, and exposes the deeper layers of existence where a new level of experience is to be found.  Those who are not patient will be mortally wounded by thrusting themselves too aggressively against our human monuments to stupidity and ignorance that often act as the controlling religious, political, and economic powers within civilization.

Those who touch the Infinite relate back to the world the ineffability of the experience, though they have been deeply impacted by that contact.  The universe of Spirit defies rationality, though it will eventually speak intelligently through the healed human mind.   First, the mind has to be properly prepared, and then it must be willing to communicate, no matter how mighty the struggle may be  to interpret or express its energy.  But if the mind is overburdened by education, knowledge, religious and cultural inculcation, the Infinite will be speaking through distorted measures of reality, creating illusion, deception, and delusion.

LDS–White Jesus Approved

A look at Joseph Smith and his revelations, and the LDS movement that subsequently arose from this process,  is a great example of the corrupted marriage of spirituality and truth with hallucination and delusion, producing its inevitable spawn, toxic religion and cults.  This type of spiritual corruption only further confuses and alienates those seekers of a deeper truth that are still in possession of keen wits. Would anyone like a serving of golden plates, from which the “Book Of Mormon” is based upon, or Jesus appearing in the wild west of America, say, two thousand years ago?  The sirens of my “bull shit detector” continue to go off loud and clear, whenever I hear these stories.  And don’t forget to tithe your ten percent, or your next of kin will hear about your “lack of faith” at your own funeral (yes, I witnessed this in an abominable eulogy at a funeral for a co-worker, who had committed suicide).  Like our mothers sometimes said:

“Oh, and always wear clean underwear in case you are in an accident! “.

It is time for the Church of the LDS to change their dirty “underwear”, because their delusional stories have created quite the mess in human consciousness, and this philosophical buffoonery is an accident waiting to happen to all of its adherents.  The Church, and its community of well-meaning human beings,  may have done a lot of good over the years, but that has to be balanced with the corruption in consciousness itself that this tribalistic cult creates and maintains.

On June 1 of 2018, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints – or the Mormons – will celebrate the 40th anniversary of what they believe to be a revelation from God.  This revelation to the then-President of the Church Spencer W. Kimball – which is known as “Official Declaration 2” – reversed longstanding restrictions placed on people of black African descent in the church.  I believe this history illustrates the struggle the Mormon church has had with racial diversity – something that the church leadership still grapples with today.  Racism, patriarchy, sexism, misogyny, fantasy, and errant nonsense are built right into the very fabric of this corrupted belief system.

All religions promote the hope that humanity has a capacity for love and healing.  The simple truth behind Christianity is that we all have divine heritage, though we may be still struggling with our human experience.  Ignorant Christian philosophers, scholars, and ministers continue to interpret and promote the Word as having its expression only through Jesus Christ.  In their minds humanity remains relegated to outcasts from the “Garden Of Eden” and we will all remain on the outside of the universality of our divine heritage and potential for eternity until Jesus is accepted as our personal savior.  There are many other errors in spiritual discernment in addition to this one that continue to be propagated, especially all of the nonsense that is promoted around the concept of Armageddon.  This is important, because these beliefs contribute mightily to the Common Knowledge Game of human perception, which is a socially and culturally inculcated system for assessing and judging against all others unlike the observers. Most of the world does not hold the belief in Jesus as the Savior, though many of us have been victimized by those with such a vision!  With our American judicial and political processes still impacted by, and in some cases dominated by, so-called “Christian ideals”, it is easy to see the potential for collective persecution of and discrimination against those not conforming to these ideals and dogmas.

And, much of our American religious landscape remains dominated by blind adherence to  patriarchy, which manifests through toxic masculinity, toxic capitalism, and toxic religion, with their qualities of misogyny, white supremacy and its outright hatred or indifference to others unlike themselves, greed and rampant selfishness, and self-destructiveness, and all of the planetary destructive evil that emanates from it.  When the writer quoted from in the Bible proclaimed that we “be fruitful and multiply”, that writer did not intend for our race to become a planet ravaging virus, through overpopulation, pollution, extinction of 1000’s of species, genocide, religious persecution, greed, and competition, yet our race has been fruitful, and multiplied our collective ignorance and evil exponentially.

 

Prosperity theology is a religious belief among some Christians, who hold that financial blessing and physical well-being are always the will of God for them, and that faith, positive speech, and donations to religious causes will increase one’s material wealth. Prosperity theology views the Bible as a contract between God and humans: if humans have faith in God, he will deliver security and prosperity.  The doctrine emphasizes the importance of personal empowerment, proposing that it is God’s will for his people to be happy. It is based on interpretations of the Bible that are mainstream in Judaism (with respect to the Hebrew Bible), though less so in Christianity. The atonement (reconciliation with God) is interpreted to include the alleviation of sickness and poverty, which are viewed as curses to be broken by faith. This is believed to be achieved through donations of money, visualization, and positive confession.

Our blind adherence to our soulless Capitalist economic system is a force that must be reckoned with.  With capitalism now married to religion, we end up with Corporate Religion, whereby sects of American Christianity celebrate wealth and fame, and goad their members towards rampant materialism, all in the name of God’s prosperity..  These mega-churches with ministers, such as Joel Osteen, set the tone and the pace for self-glorification, materialism, overpopulation, and the continued destruction of our planet through their adherence to the Prosperity Gospels.  Prosperity is oppression, when we see the long-term effects of focusing wealth and planetary resources into the pocketbooks of fewer and fewer people, in manners that tend to increase profits and visibility for the unconscious adherents of the new Corporate Religion.

This competition for resources continues to cause our Earth to suffer, while the few prosper.  There is abject spiritual and intellectual poverty imbued within a philosophy that celebrates prosperity as a manifestation of “God’s reward for the good”, and is indicative of a larger poverty that has overwhelmed our nation, and our world.  We all need umbrellas to shield ourselves from the “golden showers” of “trickle down theories” that follow such megalomaniacal visions of privilege and power.

The fundamental oppressive force in the human universe is not our wayward religious, political, economic, or social agendas or systems, however, as the fundamental problem is within the human mind itself. Jesus Christ would be crucified again (and, in fact, the Truth continues to be sacrificed daily), and Muhammad and the Buddha, were they alive today, would be ignored or attacked, in today’s diseased, divisive, dark money controlled political, social, and religious climate. Some say that it may be time to PUNCH A NAZI, in whatever form it takes, but it is best to first master the Nazi within our own minds.

A new story needs to be told by each and every one of us, as our old stories are killing us,  both individually, and collectively.  We need a new world religion, one that honors ALL life upon the planet, and the very planet Earth itself, as our Lord and Savior. We must have a story that allows for each being to have the opportunity to live in peace and harmony, and to share in the benefits of an evolutionary consciousness.  We either grow together as a race, and as a planet, or we will not survive as a species, and, potentially, we may destroy the rest of our supporting animal species, the environment itself, and the planet.

 

If you tell a big enough lie, to others, and to yourself, and tell it frequently enough, it will be believed by many others, but especially by yourself.   All of the internal defense mechanisms are engaged to support the story and to maintain the lies existence, and the corruption that living a lie creates can become part of our nature.

Be careful out there, the world, and our minds, can be a dangerous place.

Unlike TV entertainment series, where the programs have the potential to resolve the contrived issues  before the ending of the weekly show, life carries our issues for prolonged periods of time, sometimes whole lifetimes, if we do not find a way to dislodge our lies, and our stories of disease and dysfunction from the cells of our bodies, and from our consciousness.

There is no freedom to be found, if we do not first see that we are trapped. Pay attention  to all of our stories, many of which  have created quite the mess to sort through.  Constantly question reality,, search for available facts, and learn not to unconsciously accept statements from authority figures.  “Reality” many times, is only someone else’s opinion about “what is”, so a cautious, probing mind, not rushing to simplistic conclusions, or susceptible to popular suggestion or hypnotism, is required to maintain, or re-establish, personal integrity, healing, sanity and reason.

It has been a great challenge and adventure living this life. It has also been a great fulfillment for me to have lived long enough and to have become articulate enough to be able to put into words my unique experience of life. There are many chapters to follow, where I attempt to bring into the verbal universe my extended journey into the mystery of human consciousness, and its corruption by those with unconscious and ignorant, or selfish and self-destructive agendas.  Finding my unique story, and finding the supportive silence underneath that story, is the journey of my salvation, the hero’s journey towards healing and integrity.

Buckle up, fellow travelers, the ride is going to be a rather turbulent one at times! What is “reality” and who am I? Watch out, for more stories are always forming around those questions! I am what I am, but I am not what I seem We all need a bigger story, with more heart and healing, higher accuracy, and maximum inclusivity!

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To Find Our Voice

Powerlessness and silence go together. We … should use our privileged positions not as a shelter from the world’s reality, but as a platform from which to speak. A voice is a gift. It should be cherished and used.

—- Margaret Atwood

What is the relationship between the conspiracy of silence that permeates our culture and world civilization, and the incidence of degraded health outcomes through reduced opportunities for healing, growth and evolution? Why do we continue to support potentially soul damaging techniques for engagement, dialogue and communication, when other more effective and loving means are available? Why do we clamor for peace and healing, and simultaneously make preparations for confrontation and war? When we look deep within ourselves, do we even perceive that we have choices as to how to frame our view of reality, or is our life like witnessing a marionette speaking somebody else’s words? Are we able to locate all of the cultural and familial controls whose spell we are now under, and consciously examine each one, eschewing those which are impediments to our health and well-being? Finally, are we able to find our own truth, and then, find the courage to speak from it to those who might have need to hear it?

 

Our culture is only starting to come to an understanding about the epidemic of white middle-aged American men dying at earlier ages than would be statistically forecast, for the past 25 years. There has also been a marked increase in anxiety, depression, substance abuse, and mental illness in our general population, for both men and women. One of several causes around both lifespan decline and increased mental illness revolves around chronic abusive drinking of alcohol, and this has been reflected in our bodies by higher incidences of liver and esophageal cancer, especially in people under fifty years of age. There has also been the recent news reports with many references to the Opioid Epidemic, painkiller addiction, and the progression to heroin addiction by those participants. Drug overdoses killed 72,000 Americans last year alone.  Since 1999, more than 700,000 Americans have died from drug related causes.  America is losing the war on drugs, that is for sure.

Alcohol and drug misuse are only symptoms of our cultural disease, and the abuse of intoxicants may be the way America medicates itself to avoid feeling the distress of feeling victimized by the forces of oppression within our society, failure to find one’s true voice and mission in life, and the repression of our inner natures. Other symptoms include our culture’s increasing problems with obesity, poor physical fitness, or environmental, water and food supply toxicity. These are important issues, and their proliferation is directly dependent upon our often times toxic Capitalist economic principles and culture, so healing and enhanced awareness in this arena will lead to more effective solutions in our future.

Those who continue to suffer while eschewing the path of recovery live and operate in the background of our culture, and have a message that may not be spoken and/or cannot be heard or acknowledged because of the power of the collective Conspiracy of Silence. Our culture is broken, which leads to broken people and broken families. Yet, collectively, America has created a culture of denial, where we don’t look at our fundamental problems together, and confront them directly. To the extent that the broken individual might indicate a brokenness within our culture, is the extent that the broken individual is marginalized and minimized by the entrenched power brokers of our civilization and their sycophants. There are many economic, religious, and political leaders who have derived the greatest personal and economic benefits through the exploitation of those who have no voice, and it is perceived as an existential threat for them to examine, acknowledge their own faults, and make changes to the damaged structure that gave rise to their own predominance in the first place. There must be a national discussion about our shared disease, its treatment, and the healing and changing of our culture to reduce the alarming probabilities of its recurrence.

The race is on between those who are spiritually supporting personal and collective Armageddon, and those who are promoting a more holistic, healing approach to living together in lasting harmony, peace and health upon our sacred planet. Those who can become receptive to their own spiritual awakening will become part of a world-wide healing movement, through co-creating the roots of the Tree of Life that supports a new world order of Love, Compassion, and the preservation of our home planet Earth and all of its sacred inhabitants. Those who choose to stay asleep will continue to contribute to the suffering, and the destruction of life in all of its diverse forms, and unconsciously contribute to the ravages that toxic masculinity brings to our shared world. As a result of the division, it has been quite the mosh pit dance of conflict between the colliding forces of the need for revolutionary change, and the need for clinging to the status quo.

I have been asked why I perseverate so much on the damaged American male psyche, and why I don’t instead focus on more pleasant, loving thoughts and activities. The question itself reveals the flaws inherent in living an unexamined life, and the fragmentation already present in our collective understanding of how to bring healing to our self, and to our world. Does anybody think that the suicide victim, lone wolf arsonist, abusive alcoholic, mentally ill man shot by a policeman, drug overdose victim, morbidly obese person, rapist, child abuser, corrupted national politician and/or reality TV star, or mass murderer, is a unique being, with no relationship to the rest of the very humanity that spawned him? Just because we are not now consciously aware and viscerally experiencing the damaging effects of the unhealed American male psyche, does not mean that we remain unaffected by its self-destructive, and other-destructive, energies. Ignorance never leads to bliss, but instead to more suffering by self and others.

It is extremely difficult in finding a way to reach those who have unconditionally accepted a diseased culture and/or one’s own unique fragmented individual life, while they remain in rigorous denial of those facts. Those who have made a decision to slowly and painfully commit suicide, individually and collectively through their addictive and self-destructive cycles of behavior are becoming part of the new normal in American life. Each mentally ill human being, including all alcoholics and drug addicts must find their own unique “bottom”, where the pain of the disease causes a change, or turning point, in their lives. Insanity, poor physical health, loss of job, loss of family, jail, DUI, threat of death, or near death experiences, and deaths of close friends or family members also suffering from cultural disease and addiction have been known to bring the desire for healing. Personally, it took all the previously mentioned negative addictive cycle outcomes to convince me to change my self-image, self-esteem, attitudes and behavior.

Before we can proceed into a new world order of better health, increased happiness, peace, and preservation of our sacred planet and our relationships with the totality of life upon it, we must first completely see where we came from, or our self-destructive history will repeat itself. No human being remains unaffected by our damaged common core of consciousness, whether we personally express it, are impacted directly by it from others, or only read about it in the newspapers or on Facebook. For the truth is, our core of collective consciousness gets transmitted from our individual minds to the rest of the conscious universe, and we receive back from collective consciousness, as if it were an eternally uttered prayer shared by all of humanity.

In your own experience, if you have never dealt directly with a mentally ill family member, drug addict or alcoholic, or had a desire to search for a new understanding and/or direction for your own life, this story may carry little meaning and have no value for you. When you watch the news, and witness all of the dysfunction of our world, if you are a disinterested, disconnected spectator, your emotions will not become engaged, nor will you be moved to action. The intention to heal can carry almost anyone to their own unique “promised land” of recovery, but without that intention, all hope for healing is lost. As I was finally to learn, intention is the very slingshot which launches our will into the human universe, and the universe ALWAYS returns back to us the energy that we have given, often times in the most unexpected of ways. Learning to fine tune those intentions for healthier outcomes is akin to the preparation for prayer, a process that is a rather mysterious, yet a completely natural form of energy exchange between all manifestations of life.  For humankind, it is what we give off in life force vibrations that reflects what we truly are, so the more holistic the “prayer”, the more healed becomes the person “praying”.

The light of our country, though still burning brightly for the healing and the hopeful, attracts all manners of darkness to it, as evidenced by heartless terrorists, capitalists, and politicians victimizing our most innocent of beings. While witnessing victims of persecution and oppression within our own homeland, including our immigrants, our minorities, our homeless, our mentally ill, our children, our old, our diseased, our poor, our disabled, our sacred animals, or our environment itself, it can be difficult to feel the miracle of life that is constantly with us. Yet, to not have that experience, is to live a life devoid of much of the greater meaning available to us as human beings. And, the American male, who carries most of the self-destructive, earth destructive, socially destructive, and feminine destructive energy within humanity, is paying a huge spiritual and physical price for the errors in both the presentation of our lives to the world and the experience of others’ contributions to our own lives. We, as a gender, continue to carry the historical fallout from many generations of callous indifference to the needs of others, and to our own spiritual needs for wholeness, love, healing, and compassion.

Toxic masculinity is a disease of Spirit that has targeted males since the beginning of civilization, and it continues to strike down men to this very day. Our world remains both addicted to and intoxicated by its masculine hubris, greed, indifference and insensitivity, and the resultant domination and subjugation of all life upon our planet. Callous, ignorant, hate inspired masculine energy runs rampant in our world, victimizing and destroying sacred life in all forms, while extremists of all types, including capitalists, politicians, and other opportunists profit from our own destruction. I have seen how men run in tribes or packs defined by their acts of self-destruction, the destruction of others, and the destruction of our planet. And I have seen, and I believe at the deepest level of my own being, that disease in the mind of mankind is directly related to the predisposition towards disease within the body of mankind.

One only needs to look around, and view the effects of toxic masculinity, and several of its ugly spawn, toxic religion, toxic politics, and toxic capitalism, to see that repression of our collective emotional/feeling natures, including the feminine and the Divine, is built right into the very fabric of our cultural existence. Our POTU$ is the perfect representation for all of the ills of our culture, and to the extent that the men within our culture practice his unholy principles of engagement with the world, and with its women, and men, they also share in his disease of mind, body, and spirit.

What happens to a man defeated by the dark energy of unhealed masculinity? We don’t need to look too far to see the insanity around us, the monetization of humanity and the world, mass murders, early deaths, suicides, drug addiction, alcoholism, abuse of woman, and children, extinction of species, destruction of our ecology, and see the relationships that now continue to a very bleak future, unless the men in this world awaken, and rebel against the prevailing dark attitudes of our dying culture.

I have watched an endless parade of friends, family members, co-workers, and acquaintances suffer from mental illness, alcoholism and addiction, and/or meet an early death, and I nearly died prematurely, as well. Most of my grade school and high school friends have already suffered, and have either become disabled or have had early deaths. Both of my best friends from earlier in my life died young from alcoholism and poor health choices My nephew has a bipolar condition along with alcoholism, and has alienated himself from important parts of his family

I have a cousin who in February of 2018 was comatose and near death from the DT’s in the ICU, and who continues to drink. He was suicidal, and has expressed interest in bringing suffering to the rest of the family. He died December 26, 2020 in his father’s home.  We buried another drug addicted cousin in August of 2017, who, through her own self-directed treatment of pain coupled with the ignorance of her doctors, missed pancreatic cancer, and she died a miserable death within a week of a correct diagnosis. I have also witnessed two close family members who are practicing alcoholics continuing to ply their self-destructive trades, while ostracizing my wife and I.   One of our own grandsons has been addicted to pot and other substances since he was 11 years old, and he just has not been able to put a productive life together. I just can’t ignore this disease of the Spirit which has taken over my family, and our country.

In many cases, those early deaths or disabilities from mental illness and/or alcoholism were, literally, a divorce from their lives, as their lives were so unfulfilled and unhappy, and they had lost all hope for any positive change. In many of the cases that I am familiar with, they were not happy at the end, and their death appeared to be a welcome release for them. Some had lost their careers, and could not recover from that. Some had no meaning in their lives, and could not recover from that. Some were addicted to drugs and/or alcohol, and could not recover from that. Some were addicted to the idea that their only function was to provide for their wives or family, and, having achieved success or failure, they could not recover from that. Some were just waiting for a better day, and when it never appeared, they could not recover from that. Some were lonely and depressed, and they could not recover from that. Some had profound physical health issues, and they could not recover from that. Some had profound mental illness, and they could not recover from that.

The dead cannot cry out for justice. It is a duty of the living to do so for them.

• Lois McMaster Bujold

What is the hidden story, the real back story to all diseased men and their lives that may not have been told to their families, to their religions, to their culture, to their employer and co-workers, and to their Gods? Were any of our male victims of society able to listen to themselves, and identify their own unique pain and suffering, and bring it to the light of Love and Reason, to search for, and eventually find a newer path to healing and meaning? Or, did they blindly follow down the well-worn path of premature deterioration and death that unconscious humanity, through engaging in our collective common knowledge game, the road defined by “sin”, suffering, and dying, is doomed to trudge upon?

I am a product of our civilization, and of our shared humanity. Thus, I am also a broken container for our Spirit, like everybody else, who is not in denial of their own human nature. The act of writing this book was a difficult proposition, as I had to overcome a lifetime of internalized oppression, poor self-esteem, and repression of major aspects of my spirit. The messages that I received from my world, or collective consciousness, as both a child and as an adult are that I had nothing to say, or what I had to say had little or no value. Even in recovery from those difficult conditions of spirit, I also had to overcome some well-meaning, but inaccurate spiritual teachings and aphorisms that distort reality, and do not point to the truth that I was finally hearing within myself.

The reason you have a hard time trusting your intuition is because you are still convinced that some outside authority knows better than you.

— Maryam Hasnaa

There have been other messages occasionally bubbling up within my consciousness that have hinted at the collective errors in human reasoning, and this work is the culmination of my attempt to honor all of those “whispers of the Spirit”. My personal truth demands of me that I deliver these words, regardless of what others might think, or how resistant I might be in sharing them. In the face of the evil and ignorance that predominates our world mind, those who have the sensitivity of the artist, the skill of the musician, the Message from a miraculous healing, or even the voice of the marginalized prophet, must continue their best efforts to bring forth the Word, even while our civilization continues its seeming inexorable slide into chaos, hatred, and planetary destruction. This work is the culmination of my own efforts in that direction.

I am a three-time diagnosed depressed individual, as well as a recovering addict/alcoholic. I have the label and experience of a dual-diagnosis human being. Dual diagnosis is the term used when a person has a mood disorder such as depression or bipolar disorder (also known as manic depression) and a problem with alcohol or drugs. We are one of the dark castes of our society, and, collectively, our spirits are stymied, and our voices have been quieted. When we don’t have a voice, the most we can hope for is to be a silent witness to life, rather than a robustly interactive participant with life, with little hope for ever being seen for who we really are. I recount my own drama and internal struggles, with the hope that I can bring to verbal light some of the inner workings of my own mind and life as it existed when I was an addict/alcoholic and mentally ill person, as well as while I was upon the journey back to wholeness.

The following story indicates my path towards wholeness and spiritual integrity, while moving away from both my own personal insanity and our culture’s schizophrenia. I document many hard-earned insights that I have been given into the life that we all share. This is a presentation of my own unique perspective, and it will not conform to other”s expectations of what the “Truth” should look like. Please forgive me in advance if my insights and realizations appear obvious and simple, or challenge basic sensibilities. Though it is not my intention to be offensive and argumentative, I hope that some new energy is stirred within the reader. It is not my intention to create more “spiritual froth” with trite all-encompassing statements like “love heals all wounds”, or “love is the only power”. Love of this type and nature can be a most elusive spiritual resource, and is not what the vast majority of the human race initially seeks or believes it to be. The following work is the documentation of my own “hero’s journey” towards all such noble human values.

This book is a mantle woven together by the words and stories that I have chosen to represent the whole of my life experience. I wear this garment in honor of all those who have preceded me, and for those who still walk beside me in spirit, in love, and in healing. I honor my deceased parents and grandparents, my aunts and uncles, and the countless generations past. I honor those who have sacrificed their lives to diseases of the body, and of the Spirit, be they the addict, alcoholic, mentally ill, victim of violence, or the so-called normal person who struggled with comprehending the insanity in their own life, and of their civilization, and died before finding healing. I honor those who are still alive, and suffering under the forces of oppression and repression that characterize much of life lived under our present economic, religious, and political systems. I honor those who will take the time to consider this work, and I also honor those who will never find the opportunity or the willingness to do so. Finally, I honor my wife Sharon White, who suffered with me through some tough times during a relapse in 2007, caring for my dying father the last several years up to 2017, and for the actual writing of this book.

My life certainly has not been newsworthy or extraordinary in any obvious ways. In my youth, I was the person who was best described as one who was on the “outside looking in” on life, versus the one who was on the “inside looking everywhere”. I never really quite fit in, when it came to living life. But, the best part of my story lies in the lessons learned from a life experienced from both perspectives, with much of my personal truth having been derived from the movement through my family and its history, as well as through the bigger picture painted through my movement through our culture and civilization. There is a direct connection between what unfolded in my life while being a masculine energy dominated addict, alcoholic, and isolated, mentally ill human being, and the dysfunctional patriarchy that continues to unfold in our world today.

My personal story will be told after I discuss the collective influences of consciousness on the individual. In my personal story I use more than one linear time line, with some overlap between the stories. There will be no lurid tales of debauchery (well, maybe a reference or two), nor overt acts of aggression or crimes against my fellow-man, though I certainly carried the capacity for all manners of the evil inherent in the human mind. In my journey through Portland’s underworld community, I associated with people who had acted on all manners of ignorance, evil, and darkness, and many lives had been destroyed or damaged as a result of their behaviors. While a practicing addict/alcoholic, I had the potential to damage or destroy many lives, especially through driving. I was pulled over seven times for drunken or reckless driving, though I never got a DUI because of my capacity to appear sober, no matter how intoxicated that I was. I drove intoxicated over two thousand times, and though I never hurt or killed anyone, there were a few wrecks, and many near misses. In alcoholic blackouts, I accessed incorrigible attitudes and contemplated egregious acts, but good fortune saved the day for me, and for the world.

Conceptually, this book can be seen as consisting of two parts. There is my personal history, with some references back to our shared reality, or collective consciousness. There are my lessons learned about collective consciousness, with a lot of references back to my personal experiences. The two parts are inextricably intertwined, and the separation will be seen to be mainly for clarification purposes. My life since my birth in 1955 is the obvious link between the two creative aspects. There are the individual, cultural, and divine vibrations which constitute the rainbow of my being, and the colors of my rainbow stretch throughout all phases of this work.

I give a thumbnail sketch of my mother’s, father’s and grandparent:s lives to provide a rudimentary foundation for my story. My personal history is extensively developed, including my childhood, my first love, where I address issues around my first wife and her mental illness , my fall into addiction, suicidal ideation, and, ultimately, my immersion into an underworld experience, and the remarkable awakening that occurred after my exit from that world. My history is presented like a winding, dotted line path, a path with many intersections with itself as it jockeys between the past and present. I defy the analytical mind’s need for the linearization of time and reality, and the offending elements of the story will be confusing to some, and irritating to others. My real life was not lived in a straight line path, nor will my story be presented that way, either.

I discuss prayer, and several spiritual and cosmic consciousness oriented events. I eventually bring my life experience up to the present moment, after documenting a relapse which occurred two years prior to my mother’s death. I refer to a life-altering friendship with a long-term friend who died in 2017. I finish my life’s story with some of the greatest teachings that life has revealed to me. This project has taken on epic proportions for me, and it appears to be quite fragmented, and repetitive at times, qualities which parallel my real life experience.

My intention remains to provide a voice for my own process, as well as for those who cannot or will not speak out against the ills of the society and the minds that created the conditions for their own disease or early demise, be it through heart attacks, brain cancer or cancer in general, alcoholism, drug addiction, suicide, murder, or “accidents”.

“Our lives begin to end, the moment that we become silent about things that matter” –

—Martin Luther King, Jr.

The conspiracy of silence is built right into the framework of our collective consciousness. Dead men tell no tales, but the nearly dead MUST continue to tell their stories, with respect for themselves and others, until our civilization finally wakes up. To not express ourselves honestly and openly results in our own early demise, Spiritually as well as physically. We each must penetrate the conspiracy of silence, and bring the light of a loving heart and healing words to the hidden darkness. My conditioned response would be to keep silent, as I have nothing of value to share with the world, and/or the world could give a shit about what I have to say anyway. Extrapolate that response to all of life, and we can perceive the isolating framework that imprisons much of the American male psyche.

“If you really, really knew me, you wouldn’t love me”

—Often heard in many recovery meetings, and one of the foundational beliefs behind our collective conspiracy of silence, which supports poor self-esteem, and distrust of others.

This is not solely a self-help or pop psychology/spirituality book. I will not be appealing to the ego, nor will I explicitly attempt to make anybody feel good about life, and their prospects for economic, social, or spiritual success. I am not seeking money, respect or adoration from the reader. I am not engaged in any people-pleasing need, or out of any passive-aggressive need to hurt the world, without letting the world know why I was angry or distressed with it in the first place. All that I ask for is the suspension of judgement for a few hours. and the treatment of this manuscript like it is a meditation on life. Those who are able to tune into this work with their heart, and attempt to listen to what has been written here, may find compassion, insight, and wisdom revealing itself, as I attempt to reveal my own life.

I am using this book to communicate, as best I can, the unfolding new reality bubbling up within my heart and soul. But, this new reality exists side by side with my typical human response to life, no matter how much I attempt to walk the path of spirituality, healing, and wholeness. The statement that the “poor will always be among us” even refers to me. The personal me, the collective me, and the divine me all walk together as one being, and now it is my day-to-day responsibility to stay in balance, and to try to bring myself back into equilibrium whenever I get disturbed.

I walked through many miles of underbrush, stickers, thorny bushes, weeds, stinging nettles, mud, and too many mine fields to count, to get to my mountain top, so be prepared for an uneven journey to the place in the book where the greatest, most far-reaching views are finally presented. Life is sometimes like the childhood game of Chutes and Ladders, so I will not be expounding solely from upon neither the spiritual mountaintops of peace and love for all beings, nor from the darkened valleys of mutual judgement and condemnation, suffering and death. What value is a story, if it is never told? What value is love, if it is never shared?Through this book, I will not be whispering my message to the world, as I have learned to turn to volume up a notch  or two, especially in areas where I need to hear myself the most.  And, just because I finally am listening to myself does not guarantee that others who are conditioned to ignore me will suddenly change behavior.  Sometimes, a bird sings in the forest, even though there are no other birds to listen to it.  The real miracle is not that others listen to us, it is that we finally are listening to ourselves.

CAN I HEAR ME NOW?!

There is a story:

Once upon a time an old woman ran through the streets shouting:

“POWER, GREED, CORRUPTION!!!
POWER, GREED, CORRUPTION!!!”

For a while, people stopped to hear, to think, and to discuss the problem. As time went by and nothing happened, they finally went back about their business. Finally, one day, a child stepped in front of the prophet to say, as she ran by,

“Old woman, no one is listening to you”
.
So, the woman stopped to say

“Oh, I know that.”

The boy was puzzled.

“Then if you know that you have failed, then why do you go on shouting?”

and the old woman answered

“Oh, child, you do not understand. I do not shout in order to change them. I shout so that they cannot change me”

Come on America, start your spiritual engines, and let us all blast off of this fucking rock that we call our unconscious life!

 

I grieve with the rest of humanity for the early deaths of often times brave, though many times, damaged souls, and for the loss of human potential to the rest of humanity. Please, America, listen to, and retell their stories, so that we can all heal, grow, and love together in a new, transformative environment that can celebrate wholeness, and our individual contributions to it, from both the male and female perspectives.

May all sentient beings be released from suffering.

May all spiritually and emotionally damaged men be released from the cultural Conspiracy Of Silence, which contributes to personal, and collective, suffering.

..

Penetrating The Conspiracy Of Silence (duplication of Marty-March 2017 and others here)

 

“It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society” —Jiddu Krishnamurti

Powerlessness and silence go together. We … should use our privileged positions not as a shelter from the world’s reality, but as a platform from which to speak. A voice is a gift. It should be cherished and used.

—- Margaret Atwood

Our nation’s mental health status is an issue of greatest concern. The intention of this book is to reduce the stigma associated with trauma induced mental illness, and enhance our understanding of the issues surrounding it. We are now witnessing the cumulative effects of the oppression of our citizenry, and its primary spawn, mental illness, while they cast their chaotic spell over our world. The internal fogs created by the repression of powerful aspects of our most noble essence and shared human spirit is encouraged by our culture, thus compounding the effects of the disease. And, diseases in the mind of mankind spawn diseases within its own body, so our national health and wellness is at risk, too. Until the day comes that we collectively make a change, mankind will continue to suffer in silence, and all of the oppressed, victimized, innocent and sensitive people will remain part of our most vulnerable group of citizens.

In America right now, it is conservatively estimated that there are FORTY EIGHT MILLION citizens suffering from mental illness. That figure works out to nearly ONE IN FIVE Americans who are subjected to being taken by such illness. FORTY THREE percent do not ever get care for themselves. And, the time period between the onset of mental illness, and the victims first treatment for it, averages around ELEVEN YEARS. And, the most common medical disorders for children under of eighteen years of age involve mental health issues, with suicide becoming one of the leading causes of early death. And the sufferers of mental illness impact their families, their friends, their employers, their communities, and, ultimately, their worlds in confusing, destabilizing, conflicting, and even tragic ways.

Many men are experiencing despair. There are underlying social and economic forces at work, as well. More men are finding themselves in a much more hostile labor market with lower wages, lower quality and less permanent jobs. There is greater difficulty to find life partners and reduced prospects for marriage. When the work brings excessive overtime there becomes reduced connections to children, play, and social connections. Resultant social dysfunction continues to build up over time. These people have lost a sense of status and belonging. There is a sense of loss of personal empowerment and that they have any say in their lives.

These are classic preconditions for suicide.

The rates of suicide are much higher among men than women, though both suffer immensely under the weight of distress and despair. Drug overdoses and alcohol-related liver deaths are higher. Mortality trends are identical for men and women with a high school degree or less. Under that body count there’s a lot of social dysfunction that is the result of poor job prospects over the course of their lives. Economic and social status continues to decline, and further oppression can be a result. Pain and suffering increases, repression of that pain through dysfunctional responses increases, which spills over into all other areas of the lives of susceptible people. Yet, it is not just economic forces that lead to mental illness, it is the cumulative effects of a civilization that has faltered, while failing to create a collective foundation for good mental health. The creation of jobs alone is not equivalent to the creation of well-being for its citizenry.

The oppression of our citizenry, and our culture’s unconscious response to it, which includes the continued and dysfunctional repression of our pain and suffering, exacerbates a cultural conspiracy of silence. Those who have been traumatized by their own, by their family’s, or even by their community’s mental illness often do not communicate their distress, and suffer in silence. There are many secrets that are kept and held close to the heart, for the victimized and the broken do not have the language, nor the receptive audience to share their trauma and pain with. Some traumas are so painful and distressing that the victim is fearful that the revelation of their disease will bring harm to others, or bring further harm to themselves. And many have been punished for merely mentioning to others that they have been victimized, or are continuing to be victimized.

I am a three-time diagnosed depressed individual, as well as a recovering addict/alcoholic. I have the label and experience of a dual-diagnosis human being. Dual diagnosis is the term used when a person has a mood disorder such as depression or bipolar disorder (also known as manic depression) and a problem with alcohol or drugs. I belong to one of the dark castes of our society, and, collectively, our spirits are stymied, and our voices have been quieted. When we don’t have a voice, the most we can hope for is to be silent witnesses to life.. We thus join with a multitude of others in a conspiracy of silence rather than be robustly interactive participants with life.

Our society continues to play into a conspiracy of silence, only focusing on these difficult issues when convenient to its agenda, when a popular star or athlete experiences the ravages of this disease, or when there is a sensational news story to be reported. Our insurance industry has denied coverage for addictions and mental health therapies until recently, and even now co-payments for treatment and medication remain inordinately high, and out of the financial reach for far too many Americans. And in the most evil of recent developments, the mentally ill have become the scapegoats of immoral and emotionally unhealthy gun rights propagandists who continue to claim that this category of humanity is responsible for all gun violence, as well.

I should have died by suicide on January 28, 1986. Death by an overdose was to be my response to a lifetime of not feeling loved, not having been heard, and not developing the capacity to listen to myself. My greatest fear in life, the fear that I had no value, probably took form within me while I was still a baby. That perception was to plague all future iterations of my self, as well. I was to be saved by a twist of fate, a desire to find the truth, a timely intervention by an agent of the Drug Enforcement Administration, and an almost divine intercession. The rest of our mentally ill population can not be guaranteed that such helpful interventions will happen within their own lives, however.

 

The following work is my attempt to capture lightning in a bottle, and see if a little of my personal experience of “The Mystery” might bring a small light to others. I recount my own drama and internal struggles with mental illness, with the hope that I can bring to verbal light some of the inner workings of my own mind and life as it existed while I was in a diseased condition, and while I was also in relationship with a woman with her own disease. I have been personally impacted at the deepest, most profound levels, by my own mental illness and depression, addictions, anxiety, and panic attacks, and my path through life has made me a reluctant expert in these matters.

I am a product of our civilization, and of our shared humanity. Thus, I am also a broken container for our Spirit, like everybody else, who is not in denial of their own human nature. The act of writing this book was a difficult proposition, as I had to overcome a lifetime of internalized oppression, poor self-esteem, and repression of major aspects of my spirit. The messages that I received from my world, or collective consciousness, as both a child and as an adult are that I have little of any lasting value to give to the world, and that I should just blend in as best I can, and not complain. My conditioned response would be to keep silent, as I had nothing of value to share with the world, and/or the world could give a shit about what I had to say anyway. Who is actually out there that cares, anyway?

Recently, I had to travel on an extraordinary path to develop the willingness to write about my experiences with mental illness, and our individual and collective healing potential.

On January 11th of 2017, I had a ‘seizure’, the first of its kind since my drug using days of 1986. I awoke at 2:45 in the morning, and went into my office and sat down. Suddenly, I lost all ability to move, and to even think, though I remained quite aware during this approximately one minute process. It was then that I became aware of a “black mass”, almost the size of a golf ball, in the left portion of the brain area of my inner field of body awareness. This was the first time that I had awareness of the energy field of my body since July of 1987, when I had my first, and only, experience of detecting my own life energy field. Those who understand what our proprioceptive senses are, will know this vision is just an enhanced  version of that capacity .

I became quite concerned by this whole experience, though I kept it to myself initially. Every subsequent time I looked internally, I could still see the dark mass. In February, I was to have another seizure, this time much milder in nature, while in a public setting.  I did not initially talk about the seizures, or the black mass, because I thought that I might be losing my mind. I learned early in life to keep secrets, especially about aspects of my self that I know that others would not understand.

I later began talking about it with my wife, and two friends, and it was theorized that it might be related to something spiritual or psychic in nature. But I came to know it as “death”, at least in a spiritual sense. I saw that there was no negotiating with it. Prayers, meditations, affirmations, reading, and talking with others would not dislodge the dark mass. I knew that some sort of death was coming my way, though I felt little need to discuss it with a doctor. I trust the doctor for ailments of the body, but much less so for ailments of the mind and spirit. I did tell my family doctor that I feared that my own death might precede my father’s, when I took my demented, dying father to see her in the first week of January.

On March 5, 2017 Marty, a friend of mind for over twenty years, suffered a major seizure and was hospitalized at OHSU. Marty had been in a four year recovery phase from malignant melanoma, a process first diagnosed in late 2012. He appeared to have been successfully treated with Interleuken II therapy, a powerful immunotherapy regimen. Now, he was diagnosed with a brain tumor. My wife Sharon and I visited him two days prior to its surgical removal. Marty and I talked about our seizures, and I was struck by the similarity of his seizures with my own, though mine were relatively tame by comparison. Marty’s brain tumor was the exact size, and in the same place in his brain that I had perceived the dark mass to be within my own, as well. I told Marty that my perception was that Death was making itself known to me, through the dark mass that I could see in my own energy field. I was also beginning to see a relationship between our problems, but I was hesitant to tell Marty about it. I told him that I hoped that his brain mass did not indicate a death for him.

That next day, Wednesday, at noon, I had another episode of such intensity, and duration, that I dared not even attempt to get up from the couch. I had previously arose from the couch, and briefly lost consciousness, so I was all shook up, yet I still had no desire to get a doctor involved. Sharon came home later that afternoon from her creative writing class, and found me quite compromised. She listened to my story, and accepted my decision not to seek further medical attention. This was perceived to be a spiritual crisis, and she offered her own love and care. She monitored my blood pressure, and whenever she noted when my breathing became shallow, she offered me a paper bag to breathe into, to prevent a panic attack.

Each time I tried to get off the couch, I became quite dizzy. I continued feeling quite physically subdued, and some sort of anxiety reaction was also happening with my body/mind. I was also losing my ability to talk. It took all of the power that I could muster to force words out. It was reminiscent of a time 31 years before, when for two days I had an event that prevented me from speaking during a portion of my trip through the underworld. I lost my voice for two days when confronted with the reality that there were dangerous people I was associating with, and this fact had finally, and powerfully, struck home with me.

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The present time, I actually felt like my consciousness was trying to escape, that I might be losing my mind, and it took all of my resources just to hold it together. I did not want anything to do with a psychiatrist, or another neurological exam, having been through a horrible experience several years before, when I had experienced excruciating headaches. I tried to go about my normal activities, while being grateful that I did not have to provide care for my disabled father, whose care that week was taken over by others.

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Thursday came, and I had not improved much. It also was the day that Marty’s tumor was being removed. I had dual concerns, for Marty, and for myself. I went about my limited daily activities as best I could, but I became quite conscious of my own fear and anxiety around Death, both of self, and of Marty. I continued to listen to the occasional taped spiritual wisdom tapes of some of my past teachers, hoping to hear something that might bring me comfort. I listened to one special one from Jack Boland, a nationally renowned speaker and master of the recovery process. I owned a tape where he referred to me personally, and stated that he knew me, probably better than I knew myself. He wished pain, not peace of mind, to all who had not yet fulfilled their interior spiritual obligation to cleanse their hearts, as this is the great precursor to any lasting spiritual progress . Those who understand this statement UNDERSTAND. And here I thought that I had already performed that process many, many years before! How wrong I was.

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Thursday evening came, and after yet another nearly sleepless night, I got up and sat in the family room, and awaited for Sharon to join me . My mind had become extremely active, and a dam burst within my mind, unleashing a torrent of words and thoughts. I felt a compulsion to share this message with my world. Yet I also knew that there were few, if any, people presently in my life who had the time, or even the interest, in listening to what Spirit was trying to pour out of my mind. I have witnessed that people become bored after reading about twenty words on my Facebook pages, and if there is not a clever or cute meme to look at, they just move on to something more distracting. As I lay out on the couch, feeling my own emotional/spiritual death about to overtake me, I cried out in despair to Sharon,

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“Please share my message, I don’t have the medium to carry, or the capacity to deliver, this message in a way that others can hear, or understand!”.

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Sharon looked at me with acceptance, love, and compassion. Sharon had been listening to my story for close to thirty years, and she had witnessed me sitting on my voice for most of that time.

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“Bruce, your message is your own, and must be spoken through you, or not at all.”

 

“But Sharon, that puts me head butt up against my greatest fears, and I know that I will never be heard!”

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Even my tears, and begging, would not change her mind. She is a published author, and well respected within her community. I, on the other hand, had no such experience and background. I was in such pain and agony, that I knew that I could not go on with my life in any kind of healthy way, and I did not know what to do. I had the experience of a lifetime of people perceiving me as less of a human being than I am, starting with my own diseased father, followed by a steady progression of angry, sometimes hateful, judgmental male and female power figures, with a few very notable exceptions. I did not know how to act or feel differently. My voice had been silenced not only by others, but also by myself in the past, and this extends even unto the present time.

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This loving act on Sharon’s part by refusing to speak for me was instrumental in the recovery of my ability to speak and to write. I could not let myself die again emotionally and spiritually, so I asked my Spirit how to best deliver my message. A prayer from my past, first created from a dream in 1992, formed in my mind and began with “Grandfather, Great Spirit, Thank You”.

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All of a sudden I was COMPELLED to write, and I did not stop the process until fifteen pages of a story poured through me. My Spirit chose the format of a parable, perhaps knowing that it would be discarded, without reading, by those who already believed that they knew me. But the curious ones, the ones who had an inner Spirit that had not been yet stymied, would read, and appreciate, this aspect of the message that I now felt compelled to give to my world.

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It took less than two days to write, and it was the first story I have ever written. I was never a writer, and before recovery from alcoholism and drug addiction, most of the insight that I had was irrelevant to recovery and healing, and certainly was not worth writing about. While hospitalized for a month in 1984 for alcoholism, the journal that I was required to write about my daily insights seemed to be written by our society asking for permission to continue to be dysfunctional, rather than me getting in touch with my pain, and making progress with healing. People pleasing stories may be easier to read and write, but they sure lose their allure when one finally decides to move into the neighborhood of truth and real insight into self.

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The dark mass in my body of energy disappeared upon completion of my story, coincidentally at about the same time that Marty’s tumor had been surgically removed. To this day, I remain healed of that darkness, though I am forced out of bed frequently now, to write, and to share with, the One who listens. Yes, I have finally learned that I need to listen to myself, more than just listening to other “authorities”. Some nights, I may only sleep 3 or 4 hours, and so I get out of bed to write until my wife Sharon awakens at 5 am. I have now written well over 300,000 words about recovery, healing, insight, and spirituality, which is miraculous considering that I never had anything to say until recently. I will spare you, by beloved reader, by limiting this work to only 50,000 words.

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Creativity, and spiritual healing, when finally accessed, doe not conform to our conditioned mind’s expectation of how it should unfold. As a result of this process, I had an insight that is extremely difficult to talk with others about, an insight about my relationship with Marty and his disease in the final year of his life. I saw how I had become attuned to Marty on a psychic level. Some have called this connection radical empathy, some have called it telepathic, some have called it just plain fucking mysterious, and some would call it insane thinking on my part. For me, this is a natural outcome of prayer, meditation, mindfulness, tuning into a wider frequency of being, and enhanced attention to my dream world.

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My love, compassion, and concern for Marty gave me the temporary ability to sense the dark, golf ball sized mass in my brain. It was not my physical cancer, it was Marty’s. Yet this “black mass” came to represent the cancer of oppression, and repression, within both of us. Death was to find Marty six months later, when the pain and suffering from the effects of the metastasized cancer and adverse reactions to new treatments drove him to select the Death with Dignity option. Yet repression, and oppression, continues, and a dark mass remains on the collective mind of mankind, and now I pursue the path towards a more universal version of recovery from spiritual disease.

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We need to explore the relationship between the conspiracy of silence that permeates our culture and world civilization, and the incidence of degraded health outcomes that have resulted through reduced opportunities for healing, growth and evolution.

• Why do we continue to support potentially soul damaging techniques for engagement, dialogue and communication, when other more effective and loving means are available?
• Why do we clamor for peace and healing, and simultaneously make preparations for further confrontation with others, and for war?

When we look deep within ourselves, do we even perceive that we have choices as to how to frame our view of reality, or is our life like witnessing a marionette speaking somebody else’s words? Are we able to locate all of the cultural and familial controls whose spell we are now under, and consciously examine each one, eschewing those which are impediments to our health and well-being? Finally, are we able to find our own truth, and then, find the courage to speak from it to those who might have need to hear it?

 

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Our culture is only starting to come to an understanding about the causes of the epidemic of white middle-aged American men dying at earlier ages than would be statistically forecast, for the past 25 years. There has also been a marked increase in anxiety, depression, substance abuse, and mental illness in our general population, for men, women, and our most vulnerable of citizens, our children. For the adults, one of several causes around both lifespan decline and increased mental illness revolves around chronic abusive drinking of alcohol, and this has been reflected in our bodies by higher incidences of liver and esophageal cancer, especially in people under fifty years of age. There has also been the recent news reports with many references to the Opioid Epidemic, painkiller addiction, and the progression to heroin addiction by those participants. Drug overdoses killed 72,000 Americans last year alone.  Since 1999, more than 700,000 Americans have died from drug related causes.  America is losing the war on drugs, that is for sure.

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Alcohol and drug misuse are only symptoms of our cultural disease, and the abuse of intoxicants may be the way America medicates itself to avoid feeling the distress of feeling victimized by the forces of oppression within our society, failure to find one’s true voice and mission in life, and the repression of our inner natures. Other symptoms include our culture’s increasing problems with obesity, poor physical fitness, hoarding of weapons of war, or environmental, water and food supply toxicity. These are important issues, and their proliferation is directly dependent upon our often times toxic Capitalist economic principles and culture, so healing and enhanced awareness in this arena will lead to more effective solutions in our future.

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Those who continue to suffer while eschewing the path of recovery live and operate in the background of our culture, and have a message that may not be spoken and/or cannot be heard or acknowledged because of the power of the collective conspiracy of silence. Our culture is broken, which leads to broken people and broken families. Yet, collectively, America has created a culture of denial, where we don’t look at our fundamental problems together, and confront them directly. Those who currently belong to certain religious, spiritual, or philosophical tribes tend to blame others rather than accepting their own roles that contribute to our shared disease. To the extent that the broken individual might indicate a brokenness within our culture, is the extent that the broken individual is marginalized and minimized by the entrenched power brokers of our civilization and their sycophants.

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It is extremely difficult in finding a way to reach an individual, or a society, that has unconsciously made a decision to slowly and painfully commit suicide through toxicity and addictive cycles, while all remain in rigorous denial of that fact. Each toxic human being, be they an unconscious power hungry man or woman, alcoholic, drug addict, or mentally ill person must find their own unique “bottom”, where the pain of the disease causes a change, or turning point, in their lives. Insanity, loss of job, loss of family, admission to a mental health or addiction recovery facility, jail, DUI, threat of death, or near death experiences, and deaths of close friends or family members also suffering have been known to bring the desire for healing to many of us. A confrontation from those we may have harmed can have rather dramatic effects on our desire to change, as well. It took all of the negative life cycle outcomes to convince me to change behavior. Living in hell for an extended period of time brought me to death’s doorstep, yet I did survive, and the process helped me to seek for a deeper light.

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Major sectors our culture continue to remain overly judgmental, uncaring and even indifferent to the plight of the suffering, and close their minds, hearts, and ears to those in need, so that they can continue relatively unbothered in their own selfish, self serving worlds. This indifference leads to those remaining silent in the face of the assault against their own neighbors, thus adding to our conspiracy of silence. There are many economic, religious, and political leaders who have derived the greatest personal and economic benefits through the exploitation of those who have no voice, and it is perceived as an existential threat for them to examine, acknowledge their own faults, and make changes to the damaged structure that gave rise to their own predominance in the first place. There must be a national discussion about our shared disease, its treatment, and the healing and changing of our culture to reduce the alarming probabilities of its recurrence.

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The race is on between those who are spiritually supporting personal and collective Armageddon, and those who are promoting a more holistic, healing approach to living together in lasting harmony, peace and health upon our sacred planet. Those who can become receptive to their own spiritual awakening will become part of a world-wide healing movement, through co-creating the roots of the Tree of Life that supports a new world order of love, compassion, and the preservation of our home planet Earth and all of its sacred inhabitants. Those who choose to stay asleep will continue to contribute to the suffering, and the destruction of life in all of its diverse forms, and unconsciously contribute to the ravages that toxic living brings to our shared world. As a result of the division, it has been quite the mosh pit dance of conflict between the colliding forces of the need for revolutionary change, and the need for clinging to the status quo.

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I have been asked by two male friends with strong spiritual connections as to why I continue to perseverate upon my own woundedness, and the damaged American psyche, and why I don’t instead focus on pure mysticism, Buddhist philosophies, and more pleasant, loving thoughts and activities. The question itself reveals the flaws inherent in absolutist philosophies, living an unexamined life, and the fragmentation already present in our collective understanding of how to bring healing to our self, and to our world. Does anybody think that the suicide victim, lone wolf arsonist, abusive alcoholic, mentally ill man shot by a policeman, drug overdose victim, morbidly obese person, rapist, child abuser, corrupted national politician and/or reality TV star, or mass murderer, is a unique being, with no relationship to the rest of the very humanity that spawned him? Just because we are not now consciously aware and viscerally experiencing the damaging effects of the unhealed American psyche, does not mean that we remain unaffected by its self-destructive, and other-destructive, energies. Ignorance never leads to bliss, but instead to more suffering by self and others.

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Before we can proceed into a new world order of better health, increased happiness, peace, and preservation of our sacred planet and our relationships with the totality of life upon it, we must first completely see where we came from, or our self-destructive history will repeat itself. No human being remains unaffected by our damaged common core of consciousness, whether we personally express it, are impacted directly by it from others, or only read about it in the newspapers or on Facebook. For the truth is, our core of collective consciousness gets transmitted from our individual minds to the rest of the conscious universe, and we receive back from collective consciousness, as if it were an eternally uttered prayer shared by all of humanity.

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The light of our country, though still burning brightly for the healing and the hopeful, attracts all manners of darkness to it, as evidenced by heartless terrorists, capitalists, and politicians victimizing our most innocent of beings. While witnessing victims of persecution and oppression within our own homeland, including our immigrants, our minorities, our homeless, our mentally ill, our children, our old, our diseased, our poor, our disabled, our sacred animals, or our environment itself, it can be difficult to feel the miracle of life that is constantly with us. Yet, to not have that experience, is to live a life devoid of much of the greater meaning available to us as human beings.

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The American male, who carries most of the self-destructive, earth destructive, socially destructive, and feminine destructive energy within humanity, is paying a huge spiritual and physical price for the errors in both the presentation of our lives to the world and the experience of others’ contributions to our own lives. We, as a gender, continue to carry the historical fallout from many generations of callous indifference to the needs of others, and to our own spiritual needs for wholeness, love, healing, and compassion.

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Toxic energy has damaged our masculinity, and is a disease of the human spirit that has been in existence since the beginning of civilization, and it continues to strike down men to this very day. Our world remains both addicted to and intoxicated by its masculine hubris, greed, indifference and insensitivity, and the resultant domination and subjugation of all life upon our planet. Callous, ignorant, hate inspired masculine energy runs rampant in our world, victimizing and destroying sacred life in all forms, while extremists of all types, including capitalists, politicians, and other opportunists profit from our own destruction. I have seen how men run in tribes or packs defined by their acts of self-destruction, the destruction of others, and the destruction of our planet. And I have seen, and I believe at the deepest level of my own being, that disease in the mind of mankind is directly related to the predisposition towards disease within the body of mankind.

 

As a culture, we need to remember that our mentally ill population, which includes the addicts and the alcoholics, are society’s “canaries in the gold mine”. We are all susceptible to the damages incurred by spiritual asphyxiation, should we neglect to listen to the stories being told by our most vulnerable family members. The sensitive and the oppressed of our culture define the leading edge of the journey of our own shared human experience and are indicators of our collective spiritual condition.

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The conspiracy of silence is built right into the framework of our collective consciousness. Dead men tell no tales, but the nearly dead MUST continue to tell their stories, with respect for themselves and others, until our civilization finally wakes up. To not express ourselves honestly and openly results in our own early demise, spiritually as well as physically. We each must penetrate the conspiracy of silence, and bring the light of a loving heart and healing words to the hidden darkness. We can then bring hope to all of the canaries in our society who are now struggling for air.

“If you really, really knew me, you wouldn’t love me”

—This is often heard in many recovery meetings, and one of the foundational beliefs behind our collective conspiracy of silence, which supports poor self-esteem, and distrust of others.

We are only as sick as our secrets”

–This is another aphorism frequently heard in recovery meetings. Shame keeps those secrets secret. My present understanding is that we will remain as sick as our secrets, while being victimized by society’s secrets, as well.

There are many in our culture who have calloused hearts, which reflects in both toxic and criminal behaviors, and crazy making communication styles. Those who have witnessed the way that many men abuse their physical privilege, and take advantage of their positions of power and influence to oppress, victimize and control others spiritually, and sexually, can become disheartened and demoralized. Members of my own sex have also suffered under toxic influences from other men, as well as from our own wayward intentions. There are no positive mental health outcomes for those who suffer under such abuse. My heart goes out to all women and men, past and present, who have been abused by unconscious male power dynamics and abhorrent sexual behavior. These darkened and traumatizing actions made lifelong victims of my first wife, and at least one other woman who I had a long term relationship with.

Our political, religious, and economic leaders, and those whose professional practice includes mental health, have found that they have limited options for dealing with the disease, resulting in feelings of helplessness, powerlessness, and even institutionalized indifference. On that down side, there are those within our culture who misunderstand or ignore, over-medicate, ostracize and marginalize, Isolate and imprison, abuse and punish, degrade and dispose, and just plain “give up on” the mentally ill. On the up side, there are many family members, therapists, psychologists, spiritual advisors, and psychiatrists who have given their lives, hearts, and souls to the care and healing of our mentally ill, and my heart sometimes breaks FOR ALL OF US, as we struggle to manage both our own lives, while also being of service to these fallen fellow members of our family and society.

The psychiatric profession would do itself wonders to finally gain the necessary insight to understand the underlying message here, for we are all being impacted by our cultural INSANITY, and far too many American citizens will continue their own unconscious descent into darkness and mental illness. The mentally ill need better guidance, and our sick society needs better guidance, before it is too late for all of us. Chemicals can carry a disabled personality only so far, and then the river of spirit, with healing and insight, must carry the diseased human being the rest of the way to sanity. Yet, better than treatment is a plan for prevention, which a resistant society will not take the necessary measures to enact.

Our culture’s stories revolving around mental illness points to a problem with professional bias. Each patient is trying to tell the world a secret, yet due to the conditions of their disease, they cannot reveal it. The mentally ill, like all semi-conscious human beings, do not yet have a safe container for their troubled feelings around whatever has traumatized their lives. It takes each patient a unique period of time to connect with the willingness to access the source of their pain and suffering. And it takes a specially trained listening ear to hear the broken person’s deepest meaning, as it can be buried among ancient pain relics from far distant places and times, and, in the extreme, disassociated personalities. Many patients in need of healing may well head for the door, figuratively or literally speaking, if there is a perception that they are not being listened to with compassion and empathy. That is the primary reason many never even reach a professional’s doorstep, for the isolation and fear informs the broken person that there is nobody alive who will understand them, and embrace them with love anyway.

Be mindful oh Mankind, of all the painful secrets that we must keep, By sharing with others we may awaken, or by our suffering silence just die asleep —–Elisha Scott

The following story indicates my path towards wholeness and spiritual integrity, after moving away from both my own personal insanity and our culture’s schizophrenia. I document a few of my hard-earned insights that I have been given into the life that we all share. This is a presentation of my unique perspective. Please forgive me in advance if my insights and realizations appear obvious and simple, or challenge basic sensibilities. Though it is not my intention to be offensive and argumentative, I hope that some new energy is stirred within the reader. It is not my intention to create more spiritual froth with trite all-encompassing statements like “love heals all wounds”, or “love is the only power”. Love of this type and nature can be a most elusive spiritual resource, and is not what the vast majority of the human race initially seeks or believes it to be. The following work is the documentation of my own “hero’s journey” towards all such noble human values.

There have been several messages bubbling up within my consciousness that have hinted at the collective errors in human reasoning, and this work is the culmination of my attempt to honor all of those “whispers of the Spirit”. My personal truth demands of me that I deliver these words, regardless of what others might think, or how resistant I might be in sharing them. In the face of the evil and ignorance that predominates our world mind, those who have the sensitivity of the artist, the skill of the musician, the message from a miraculous healing, or even the voice of the marginalized prophet, must continue their best efforts to bring forth the Word, even while our civilization continues its seeming inexorable slide into chaos, hatred, and planetary destruction.

The “me” of the past would prefer to entertain my own participation in the cultural conspiracy of silence, yet my own healing demands that I share my understanding and experience at the deepest levels. One of the greatest gifts that we can give to each other is a non-judgmental listening ear, and to keep our hearts open to the stories that are being told. I struggled mightily with manifesting my potential for this, though I have dramatically improved over the years since 1987. Because I found a way to listen to myself, and listen to all people in my life, both past and past I now can better relate our shared story.

In some of the early times of my life, prior to my addictive cycles, I carried a sense of isolation, depression, and a strong feeling of anxiety around life and the unknown. From 1971 through 1987, as a practicing alcoholic and drug addict, and mentally ill human being, I lost most of my remaining freedom of choice. I belonged to the “death wish core group” of Americans, who lived lives of desperation, addiction, suicidal ideation, and mental illness. We all sought an early death, either by our own hands, through our addictions, or by the poor health and relationship decisions that we continued to make. Many of us could see the insanity of those still claiming for themselves good mental health, while the choices of those supposedly “healthy people of the world” continued to bring the promise of the destruction to our planet Earth. While we contemplated our own end, we witnessed a world in the midst of its own collective march towards suicide.

There will be no lurid tales of debauchery (well, maybe a reference or two), nor overt acts of aggression or crimes against my fellow-man, though I certainly carried the capacity for all manners of the evil inherent in the human mind. In my journey through Portland’s underworld community, I associated with people who had acted on all manners of ignorance, evil, and darkness, and many lives had been destroyed or damaged as a result of their behaviors. While a practicing addict/alcoholic, I had the potential to damage or destroy many lives, especially through driving. I was pulled over seven times for drunken or reckless driving, though I never got a DUI because of my capacity to appear sober, no matter how intoxicated that I was. I drove intoxicated over two thousand times, and though I never hurt or killed anyone, there were a few wrecks, and many near misses. In alcoholic blackouts, I accessed incorrigible attitudes and contemplated egregious acts, but good fortune saved the day for me, and for the world.

 

My life certainly has not been newsworthy or extraordinary in any obvious ways. In my youth, I was the person who was best described as one who was on the “outside looking in” on life, versus the one who was on the “inside looking everywhere”. I never really quite fit in, when it came to living life. But, the best part of my story lies in the lessons learned from a life experienced from both perspectives, with much of my personal truth having been derived from the movement through my family and its history, as well as through the bigger picture painted through my movement through our culture and civilization. There is a direct connection between what unfolded in my life while being a masculine energy dominated addict, alcoholic, and isolated, mentally ill human being, and the dysfunctional patriarchy that continues to unfold in our world today.

 

The Conspiracy Of Silence:  Voices Lost And Found (there is something fundamental here is repeated here)

 

Over the years, I have become deeply disturbed by the developments within our shared world, within my individual consciousness, and destabilized points of connection between self and other.   Our dysfunction manifests through the languages, religions, and philosophies that create oppression, repression, and the resultant physical, emotional, and social diseases that characterize much of mankind’s present collective experience.  Starting within myself, I have seen how a lifetime of oppression, and repression, had brought about a sequence of serious illnesses, physiological as well as spiritual.  I saw how a dark force, common to all of humanity, lived, moved, and had its being enshrined within my own heart and soul.  I also saw how the medical, economic, religious, cultural, political, and spiritual traditions had failed in their understanding of humanity, and it’s basic, innermost needs of being valued and listened to.

Virtually all men and women have experienced oppression, repression, and the resultant diseases of the spirit at some point in their lives, and we have been both the victims, and the conscious and unconscious perpetrators, of this behavior. We have all attempted to manage our symptoms in our own unique, yet all too often broken and dysfunctional ways.  I have wanted to help myself, my father and several of my male friends, to develop greater insight into these issues over the years, but I did not find a consistent interest being expressed by others in exploring these issues with me.  But my friend Marty did begin to show great interest in my Facebook posts beginning late in 2016, and this opened the door to a different level of sharing between the two of us.  Concurrently, by this point in time, most Facebook “friends” had either ceased responding to my posts, save my wife and my friend Jim H., or had stopped following or unfriended me altogether.

Marty and I had shared over twenty years in a couple’s group, which was three couples who were long term friends.  We shared many weekend trips, nights out for dinner and entertainment, and an unrelated book club experience that Eddy, Marty, Sharon and I  shared together until July of 2017.  Marty and I were quite friendly with each other, yet rarely spoke at great  length or depth, or showed extraordinary interest in developing a deeper friendship apart from our wives. In 1996, Marty came into Eddy’s life, after successfully answering a 140 question philosophical and spiritual survey that Eddy had created.  An uncomfortable truth is that Eddy created this questionnaire with the specific intention of drawing a person most closely resembling myself, of whom Eddy had grown to find various attractive qualities that I expressed that she wanted in a man.  Marty and I even had an overall similarity in appearance (see photograph).  Marty and I were eventually to find, near the end of his life, that we were linked to each other in deeper and more mysterious ways.

Eddy organized and directed many parts of Marty’s life over the years that I had known him, and she would often speak for, or even verbally run over, him in group meetings, especially in the early years of their relationship.  She was not being a bitch, as she was just making sure that Marty was being recognized.  It was common knowledge that when Eddy was present, Marty would not consistently reveal himself and his own story, and through his silence he would defer to his wife.  My own experience of Eddy was that she was usually quite willing to listen to what others had to say, and then would talk at length about her own knowledge and authority on the subject.. When Marty was plagued with malignant melanoma in 2012, I noticed that the quality of our friendship was starting to change, in a positive way.  I had no idea of the miraculous connection that was to ensue closer to his death, however.

On January 11th of 2017, I awoke at 2:45 in the morning, and went into my office and sat down.  Suddenly, I lost all ability to move, and to even think, though I remained quite aware during this approximately one minute process. I was experiencing a seizure for the first time since early 1987, when I was trapped in my final period of drug addiction and alcohol abuse.

I became aware of my body as both a field of energy, and as a vehicle for my consciousness moving within it, for the second time in my life.  The first time, the vision lasted for a very short period of time.  This time, it would not go away.  It was disorienting, to say the least.

It was then that I became aware of a black mass, almost the size of a golf ball, in the left portion of the brain area of my inner field of body awareness.  This was the first time that I had awareness of the energy field of my body since July of 1987, when I had my first, and only, experience of detecting my own life energy field. This was a pretty “woo woo”, or “out there” vision, and I became quite concerned by it, keeping it secret, at least initially.  Every subsequent time I looked internally, I could still see the dark mass.  In February, I had yet another seizure, this time much milder, and in a public setting, while playing cards at Jim’s, who was a mutual friend of both of us and the third male member of the couple’s group.

I did not talk about the seizures, or the black mass, initially, because I thought that I might be losing my mind. I later began talking about it with my wife, and two friends, and it was theorized that it might be related to something spiritual or psychic in nature.  But I came to know it as a harbinger of death, at least in a spiritual sense.  I saw that there was no negotiating with it.  Prayers, meditations, affirmations, reading, talking with others, nothing seemed to have any impact upon the dark mass.  I knew that some sort of death was coming my way, while still feeling little need to discuss it with a doctor.   I did tell my family doctor that I feared that my own death might precede my father’s, when I took my ill father to see her about January 4th of 2017..

On March 5, 2017 Marty suffered a major seizure and was hospitalized at OHSU.  , Marty had been in a four year recovery phase from malignant melanoma, a process first diagnosed in late 2012.  He appeared to have been successfully treated with Interleukin II therapy, a powerful immunotherapy regimen.  Now, he was diagnosed with a brain tumor.  My wife Sharon and I visited him two days prior to its surgical removal.  Marty and I talked about our seizures, and I was struck by the similarity of his seizures with my own, though mine were relatively tame by comparison.  I told Marty that my perception was that Death was making itself known to me, through the dark mass that I could see in my own energy field.  I was also beginning to see a relationship between our problems, but I was hesitant to tell Marty about it, wanting him, and myself, to remain hopeful, though I told him that I did not know for certain if his brain mass indicated a death for him.

That next day, Wednesday, at noon, I had another episode of such intensity, and duration, that I dared not even attempt to get up from the couch.  I had previously arose from the couch, and briefly lost consciousness, so I was all shook up, yet I still had no desire to get a doctor involved.  Sharon came home later that afternoon from her creative writing class, and found me quite compromised.  She listened to my story, and accepted my decision not to seek further medical attention, since this was perceived as a spiritual crisis, while she offered her own love and care. She monitored my blood pressure, and when she noted when my breathing became shallow, offered to me a paper bag to breathe into, lest I sink into a panic attack.

Whenever I tried to get off the couch, I became quite dizzy.  I continued feeling quite physically subdued, and some sort of anxiety reaction was also happening with my body/mind.  I was also losing my ability to talk.  It took all of the power that I could muster to force words out.  It was reminiscent of a time 31 years before, when for two days I had an event that prevented me from speaking during a portion of my trip through the underworld.  I lost my voice when confronted with the reality that there were dangerous people who I was associating with, and this fact had finally, and powerfully, struck home.

The present time, I actually felt like my consciousness was trying to escape, and it took all of my resources just to hold myself together.  I characterized this present event to Sharon White as losing my mind, while having a neurotoxic component to it.  I did not want anything to do with another neurological exam, having been through that horror several years before, when I had experienced excruciating headaches.  I tried to go about my normal activities, while being grateful that I did not have to provide care for my disabled father, whose care that week was taken over by others.

Thursday came, and I had not improved much.  It also was the day that Marty’s tumor was being removed.  I had dual concerns, not only for Marty, but also for myself.  I went about my limited daily activities as best I could, but I became quite conscious of my own fear and anxiety around Death, both of self, and of Marty.  I continued to listen to the occasional taped spiritual wisdom tapes of some of my past teachers, hoping to hear something that might bring me comfort. I listened to Jack Boland, a nationally renowned speaker and master of the recovery process, and a man who I had known since 1987..  I owned a tape where he referred to me personally, said he knew me, probably better than I knew myself. He then stated that he wished pain, not peace of mind, to all who had not yet fulfilled their interior spiritual obligation to cleanse their hearts, as this is the great precursor to any lasting spiritual progress . Those who understand this statement UNDERSTAND.  And here I thought that I had already performed that process!

How wrong I was.

Thursday evening came, and after yet another nearly sleepless night, I got up and sat in the family room, and awaited for Sharon to join me .  My life’s message was bubbling up within me, and I felt a compulsion to share it with my world.  Yet I also knew that there were few, if any, people presently in my life who had the time, or even the interest, in listening to what Spirit was trying to pour through me.  As I lay out on the couch, feeling my own emotional/spiritual death about to overtake me, I cried out in despair to Sharon,

“Please share my message!   I don’t believe that I have the capacity to deliver it in a way that others can hear, or understand!”.

Sharon looked at me with acceptance, love, and compassion.  Sharon had been listening to my story for close to thirty years, and she had witnessed me sitting on my voice for most of that time.  She then stated unequivocally

Your message is your own, and must be spoken through you, or not at all.

Even my tears, and begging, would not change her mind.  I was in such pain and agony, that I knew that I could not go on with my life in any kind of healthy way, and I did not know what to do.

I had the lifetime experience of people experiencing me as less of a human being than I am, starting with my own diseased father, followed by a steady progression of angry, sometimes hateful, judgmental male and female power figures, with a few very notable exceptions, and I did not know how to act or feel differently.   My voice had been silenced by myself and others, even in many settings where spiritually aware, conscious people gathered to celebrate ‘connection’. Trauma induced ‘tricksters” were still embedded within my body and being, keeping me tethered to their black hole.

This loving act on Sharon’s part by refusing to speak for me was instrumental in the recovery of  my ability to speak and to write.  I could not let myself die again emotionally and spiritually, so I asked my Spirit how to best deliver my message.  A prayer from my past, first created from a dream in 1992, formed in my mind and began with “Grandfather, Great Spirit, Thank You”.  All of a sudden I was COMPELLED to write, and I did not stop the process until fifteen pages of a story poured through me. My Spirit chose the format of a parable, perhaps knowing that it would be discarded, without reading, by those who already believed that they knew me.  But the curious ones, the ones who had an inner Spirit that had not been yet stymied, would read, and appreciate, this aspect of the message that I now felt compelled to give to my world.

The parable took less than two days to write, and it was the first story I have ever written.  I was never a writer, and before recovery from alcoholism and drug addiction, most of the insight that I had was irrelevant to recovery and healing, and certainly was not worth “writing home about”.  While hospitalized for a month in 1984 for alcoholism, the journal that I was required to write about my daily insights seemed to be written by our society asking for permission to continue to be dysfunctional, rather than me getting in touch with my pain, and making progress with healing.  People pleasing stories may be easier to read and write, but they sure lose their allure when one finally decides to move into the neighborhood of truth and real insight into self.

The dark mass in my body of energy disappeared upon completion of my story, coincidentally at about the same time that Marty’s tumor had been surgically removed.  To this day, I remain healed of that darkness, though I am forced out of bed frequently now, to write, and to share with, the One who listens.  Yes, I have finally learned that I need to listen to myself, more than just listening to other “authorities”.  During the following year, I slept only 3 or 4 hours a night, getting out of bed to write until my wife Sharon awakened at 5 am.

As a result of this process, I had an insight that is extremely difficult to talk with others about, an insight about my relationship with Marty and his disease in the final year of his life.  I saw how I had become attuned to Marty,  resonating on a psychic level.  Some have called this connection radical empathy, some have called it telepathic, some have called it just plain fucking mysterious, and some would call it insane thinking on my part.  For me, this is a natural outcome, as I came to understand it after I had a miraculous experience around prayer with a co-worker in 1992.

Somehow, Marty’s structure of consciousness, his ego mind, part of his sense of self had resonated within me, and I “felt his presence” within my own sensitive, susceptible consciousness through my love, compassion,  and concern for the man.  This is how I was able to sense the dark, golf ball sized mass in my own brain. It was not my cancer, it was Marty’s.  And I was also finally able to articulate the forces of oppression and repression within both of us for the first time.  I never had the capacity to communicate around the two “black holes” or tricksters, revealed by the teaching from the Master on July 21, 1987, that were embedded within my own field of consciousness before this time.  Somehow,  a bridge of words was created to describe the vast matrix whose complete description had eluded me since.  The light of my own awareness, shown through our shared matrix of consciousness, created the shadows, or words, words that ached to reach from the unknown to the knowing parts of myself.

Part Two:  There Is Something Fundamental Here

Know thyself, and know God, and the Universe.

This message was attributed to the Oracle, and inscribed at the Temple at Delphi, in Greece.  Note that wisdom states to first know thyself, and then the knowledge of the Universe and God may become available.

• Does love come to, from, or through us, if it ever comes at all?
• Why does the racing, turbulent, “monkey mind” develop, causing deprivation of peace of mind and the absence of sacred silence?
• Why do many decent, caring people remain unacknowledged for their worth by their communities until their final eulogy?

Do you have any interest in finding the answers to these questions, and do you perceive that they are related to each other?

If your answer is “YES”, then you are already on the path to healing, and the following missive may have value to you..

The empyrean realms of human experience are reserved for those willing to consciously unhitch their spiritual wagon from  troubled pasts and skewed understandings of life. In the lifetime journey of self discovery, therefore,  some of the hinterlands remain beyond the reach of those not in search of such realms, such as the superficially oriented, indifferent or spiritually antagonistic traveler.  There must be a deep desire to see beyond the limited vision of the self, to get to the deeper reality hidden within the soul.   There, the potential for an inspired and higher powered human experience lies buried under the detritus of a traumatized history.  This can be perceived as being dangerous territory for the uninitiated heart and mind, and often elicits fear and distrust of the process, even though profound healing may result from this interior journey.

My intense desire to “Know Thyself”, coupled with the incredible spiritual strength and wisdom of my life partner, Sharon, helped to guide me back onto a long forgotten, though profoundly influential, internal path of memory.  At the path’s starting point, when I first became verbal, began the creation of my own internal tomb for my spiritual potential.   A lifetime of not adequately addressing and healing from the disease of my spirit led to two profound insight experiences in 2017.

For the first cathartic event, I was preparing to go to the Pilates class that Sharon and I attended each Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday at our athletic club. Typically, I get there a little early, so that we can warm up on an exercise bicycle, with a little aerobic activity that I still enjoyed participating in.  I no longer ran, having retired the last year after a lifetime of enjoyment, and pain.  It was 9:15, and I was fully prepared to leave, while Sharon remained on the telephone, talking with a friend. As it turned 9:19, I spoke to her, in my most innocent of voice,

“Can we go now?”

Sharon had a series of humorous and minimally derisive responses that I won’t repeat, but three things that she said coincided with me entering a “spell”. I felt the presence of something so basic, so fundamental, so raw, so real, so hurt, that I raged for a couple of minutes, declaring several times:

“THERE IS SOMETHING FUNDAMENTAL HERE!”

The trapped energy of a lifetime was released. I became aware of a pain so deep, and so all-encompassing, resulting in an anger from a source that I had never touched before, at least as a verbally conscious human being.

Sharon and I went our separate ways for a few hours, while we both tried to understand what the hell had just transpired. We had only two arguments or angry exchanges our entire nearly three decade relationship, and this exchange was quite shocking.  Leading up to this experience, I had been intensely exploring the entirety of my life experience, having written 70 pages about my early childhood, maturation process, addictive and self-destructive cycles, and glimpses into higher possibilities for living. All of this writing had placed me, without realizing it, into the psychic world of the pain and suffering of a pre- four year old being (I developed the capacity or willingness for speech very late, at nearly four years of age),

After a meditation, I had a realization. My wounded essence had actually cried out for the first time and I actually listened to it, without my ego repressing it as it had for 61 years. And I also saw, for the first time, the wounding process that I shared with my father. I felt an incredible compassion, love, and acceptance for my father, who had also suffered immensely under the spiritually destructive parenting of his own diseased parents.

I finally had experienced the most basic nameless suffering of an ignored child, or baby, and I have now given it verbal description:

“MY VOICE/CRIES ARE WORTHLESS, AND I MUST HAVE NO VALUE, AS NO ONE RESPONDS TO ME, THUS I DON’T FEEL LOVE WHEN I NEED IT MOST.  I MUST BE ALONE IN THIS WORLD.”

And, a most insidious false assumption about life and love came to me at age 5, a little over a year after I began to talk.

“If there is any love in this world, I have to compete with others for its grace and experience”.,

As a lonely five year old boy, I began to fantasize about saving someone’s life, so that they would feel obligated to love me.  I also learned to attack myself by minimizing my own value to others, so that they might take pity upon me, and spare me from their own desire to be punitive.  Ultimately, it led to the idea that I would kill myself when life had lost all meaning, and the accompanying pain became too great.  .  My “tricksters” were already well established, and erroneously informed my perceptions from the very earliest of ages.

Sharon paid the price for a couple of hours, while I witnessed the wounded baby within me, and I paid attention to its long muted cries. Through this process, I had an insight that still informs me daily.

I saw how we, as humans, keep layering ourselves and our ideas upon what somebody else is saying, rather than meeting the being where they are, and responding according to the dictates of our “heart center”, which in most people, ESPECIALLY MEN, has been scabbed over by our own early spiritual wounding. Men typically inflict their own wounding on everybody else, in subtle, or not so subtle ways. Usually, this manifests in dominating, or being dominated, by others. Philosophies of oppression, and of the monetization of reality, arise out of this wounding. Women and children are usually victimized, and/or those with sensitive and/or non-confrontational natures.

“Our unhealed emotional issues and traumas become entombed within our bodily tissues”.

When our personalities have been formed by the layering of our egos upon our own unnamed, unrecognized dark/unconscious energy, we end up with an energy exchange dynamic where we “project” our shadow onto others, and make them wrong for it, not recognizing that we were the source of our misplaced judgement.  That judgement may have arisen from one’s own personal experience, and/or drawn from the experiences of others..

We just can’t quiet our minds long enough to listen with our hearts to what is being said, and respond accordingly with our heart. We are much too eager to respond with ego programmed responses, which, typically, are based on incomplete perceptions or someone else’s ‘knowledge’, and it remains our attempt to control other people’s perceptions and experience through linking our own unhealed energy with their own.

In our attempt to be “heard”, we instead try to program people, unconsciously, to behave and react more in accordance with our expectations. When they don’t (they rarely do, unless they are our impressionable young children), we are very disappointed, and feel rejected, and, in the absolute, we feel betrayed by the sum total of exchanges between the parties.

Why do I submit such intensely personal information? I do not want a life that has been lived in vain. I also see a world where the majority of us still suffer from the same, basic issues that I have tried to describe here. Even amongst some people closest to me, denial reigns supreme, and I have only a small measure of hope that the “personal truth” that I am trying to convey here will actually be heard, and applied by others that I care about, which now includes the entirety of our planet Earth.

“There is something fundamental here.”

As a baby, my parents placed a blanket around my baby body, and deposited me in a car in their garage so that my father could get at least 5 hours of sleep a night. My father was “chasing the American Dream”, and worked two jobs at the time.

I don’t need to remind any of my loved ones of the profoundly damaging effects of denying love and interactive time to a developing human being. What I might need to remind myself at times is that others, no matter what their age, or how much that I think that I know them, deserve my undivided attention, as they attempt to reveal who they are in this moment.

It is funny, sometimes when I share some of my creative work (which, incidentally, just started happening in early March of 2017), I get the very strong impression that some important people in my life just don’t have the time to listen.  Oh, how that trickster tries to convince me that nothing has changed with the world’s listening ability since my infancy.

Another clue about our own, or another person’s listening intention, is when we try to share a profound life event, and are immediately run over by another with more knowledge of the subject. Sometimes we, or the other, either have too much book knowledge, we have the certificate, we already have read about it on the internet, we have memorized something from a class that we already took, or we have a friend who has already “been there, done that!”

Trust me on this one. If I do not want to grow anymore, I will stop listening to what others are really trying to say. If i don’t want to be of service to my fellow-man/woman, I can just stop listening to what they are trying to express, and just layer my own ignorance and judgement, over somebody else, and not let them reveal to me who they Really Are in this special moment.

Our religious and political leaders are masters at this, as well as family members who promote their “control dramas” in the place of loving, open communication. Please don’t inflict this same treatment on the ones you love. It is like putting a blanket around our heart and soul, and putting us into the car, so that those with a dehumanizing or monetizing philosophy can continue to oppress others, while keeping themselves spiritually asleep.

We all deserve to be listened to. I don’t need to remind any of my loved ones of the potential of the damaging impacts to our relationships with others, by merely not taking the time to listen with our hearts, to the other’s deepest meaning. Most of my closest connections already practice this, and do not intentionally ignore the needs of others.

We are all developing human beings, no matter what our age. And, we are all God’s children, and God speaks through us, whether we can hear the “truth”, or not. Sometimes the “truth” is so difficult to hear, that we shut down emotionally, and we either ignore what is said, or substitute our own story for what the “other” is trying to communicate.

What is it within me that causes such a disproportionate reaction to other people’s deafness or indifference towards me?

UNHEALED TRAUMA.

It is in “knowing thyself” that one finally comes into conscious contact of what is the foundation of our own limited sense of self, so that we can mindfully manage and consciously dismiss those lies generated from our own traumas.  Our unconscious traumas, many of which have been internalized since birth or before, are guards who stand at the gate preventing our access to our higher possibilities.  When we remove those guards, we access the sacred, and secret vault that is within.  We are then free to wander upon new paths of consciousness, where spiritual prosperity reigns supreme, and “the Universe and God” may reveal their true nature.

The awareness and the healing of childhood trauma places us squarely on new paths of consciousness, which leads us into sacred realms..  Without such freeing insight, we continue on the older, more familiar paths of painful existence, where replication of errors of perception continue, suffering predominates, and the profane reigns supreme.

Please see into self, and find the willingness to be set free from its pillory, to reveal our Self.

For most people, healing requires perseverance and patience, to bring the us the fullest measure of healing.  And, until the final release from ego’s grasp, we must remain vigilant through insight and mindfulness, catching ourselves whenever we stray back upon the old paths.  I took several photographs of my baby and early childhood self, and grieved with these images of self my loss of innocence and healthy self-esteem.during the early years.  It is heartbreaking work, and the floodgates of tears opened up, threatening to drown me,   Yet, this grief, like the unexpressed anger, are the most important contributors to the letting go of the old, familiar lonely path of feeling ignored and unloved by the world.

It is important to acknowledge that we tried to love ourselves since birth, and we also tried to love those who did not appear to return it back to us.

The truth is that our world does not heal, until we do.

“We don’t see the world as it is, we see it as we are”—Anais Nin

The new name for the guards preventing our entry into our eternal self is Anger and Grief. We must identify their source within us and face them directly,  without judgement or condemnation, or we will be prevented from assuming our rightful place in the spiritual universe.

We can’t give to others what we do not feel to be true about our self.

We can save the world . . . from our limited sense of self.

Our anger and our grief are the keys to the door to our lost kingdom.

Once the inhibiting power of trauma is recognized, the desire for freedom erupts,  In the seeing of this embedded trauma, the seer is transformed,  eventuating in liberation of the heart and mind from the pillories of the past.

When we finally see what is false within our self, the liar loses its voice, and the silence born of oppression and repression is dissipated.

Part Three:  Cannon Beach And An Anxious Silence

On the first weekend in October of 2017, we arrived at the Oregon coast, at Cannon Beach, on a partly sunny Monday afternoon. We were quickly greeted by our very long-term dear friend from Arizona, June and her ten-year love interest, Michael.. After checking into our hotel rooms, and getting geared up for a walk, we headed out to the beach, to walk northward up the coast, past Haystack Rock. We engaged in our normal conversations, catching up on June and Michael’s activities, as well as giving them a brief download on what has been happening in our own lives.

As the walk progressed, we separated a bit into two groups, the guys and the girls, though we did not create a huge distance between the two groups in our walk. We continued to enjoy the scenery, the clearing blue skies above us, the seagulls swooping and gliding, the watching of and engaging with the other tourists and their dogs, while being continuously soothed by the constant breaking of the waves upon the sandy shore. Small talk continued between both groups, until I had to remove my shoes, due to extreme pain in my right foot.

The pain in my foot was accompanied by another unidentified discomfort, deep within my heart, which continued to trouble me. I looked at Michael, and I began to relate the experience of my friend’s very recent death, and how the notice of my own father’s death coincidentally occurred at the moment that I was helping to place my friend’s body into the hearse. I wanted to talk about the disturbing appearance of insanity in the marriage of my deceased friend, and it’s impact on my friend’s final days, and its impact upon my own being.

Michael looked up at the nearby mountains, appearing not too interested in what I was trying to say.  He attempted to redirect my attention away from myself, and the view away from the ocean. Suddenly, a strangely uncomfortable, unidentified feeling came over me, and I also felt like my heart was starting to beat harder. The skin on my face, and on the front of my body started to tingle, and I felt light-headed. I attempted to breathe deeper and slower, thinking that I had somehow lost my breathing cycle rhythm, yet a deepening, sickening feeling continued to creep through my mind, and through my body.

I sped up my pace, so that I could join up with my wife, who was ahead of us with June. I started to shudder a bit, and shake as if I was cold (there was a breeze, though it was sixty-five degrees, and not extraordinarily chilly). My condition continued to deteriorate, yet all that I felt comfortable with sharing with the group was about my sore foot, which was aching horribly. This foot would eventually need surgery, and I had delayed such surgery for quite a while, but it was not the only source for the pain that I was presently experiencing. Yet, in this group, it was the only pain that I could safely talk about.

We neared our hotel room, and the anxiety reaction that I was experiencing (yes, I finally named it ANXIETY) was threatening to overwhelm me. It was dinner time, so we walked over to the Mo’s restaurant that was connected to our hotel, and ordered dinner. Sharon was very light, and happy, and introduced a “spinner” to the dinner table, to try to keep lightness going, and bring humor and delight to our group. Yet I had lost my sense of delight, and humor, and my appetite, and I knew that I could not even eat dinner, even though I had already ordered a meal with the rest of the group. June commented that I looked like I had turned a gray color, and that I looked ill, and ill I was. I had to leave the table immediately.

I went back to our hotel room, took off my clothes, and lay down in our bed. The world felt like it was spinning around me, and my heart beat so loudly that it sounded like a drum was being bashed in my ears. I continued to try controlled breathing patterns, thinking that this was an anxiety reaction, but I really felt extremely ill, and I felt like a visit to the hospital may be in order. I became so concerned that I got my tablet and went to a medical portal to ask a doctor some questions about what was happening, and ask if I should be hospitalized. I was not sure if I was having an adverse neurological response to something toxic, preparing for a stroke or seizure, having the beginning of a migraine headache, or if I was losing my mind.

The response from the doctor brought some temporary relief to me, when he stated that I was having a stress induced anxiety reaction. OK, that sounded like something I might be able to manage, so I prepared myself to go back to dinner, and finish the evening with our friends. I felt much better, and looked forward to eating, as my appetite had returned from the dead, as well.

Everyone had already finished their meal, so I shared dessert with everybody. I felt good for a while, as we finished our evening together, and headed back to our individual units. But something was still active in my mind, and I began to again feel nauseous, with my heart beating wildly again, and, now, my body started shuddering like I was frozen. Sharon crawled into bed and held me close, I was shaking so violently, and her warmth, and presence, brought some comfort to me. Yet my foot ached like I had never experienced pain before, and I was definitely anxious about that pain, as well as something a bit more undefined, up to that point.

After two hours of holding me, Sharon had fallen asleep, yet I was so wired by my anxiety that I could not sleep, so I left the bed to lay on the couch, and listen to some meditation music. I felt like I might still be “losing my mind”, whatever that meant, or that I was having some sort of nervous breakdown. While meditating on what was happening to me, I came to realize that I really needed to communicate around the absolute insanity of the family activity revolving around the life and death of my dear friend, and, to a lesser extent, that of my father, as well. Michael had shut me down at the moment that I needed to talk most, thinking that by redirecting me away from talking about death, he was doing me a favor. Instead, by not communicating with him and the group what was troubling me, the anxiety reaction launched me off of the pad into outer space, and brought upon me a sickness, and a pain, that I had never experienced before in my life. Oh, that blessed pain and suffering, for it would lead me further down the path to my own ‘liberation’.

As I was awake all night, I attempted meditation upon my own source of pain and suffering, and what came to me was how most of what I know about myself, and my reactions to the world, was created by my fundamental relationship to my parents. I had never developed a complete sense of self in my early years (I will not call it Asperger’s Syndrome, or Autism, though it manifested similarly to ADHD) and my sense of self revolved around internalizing what my mother and father expected from me, what I could or could not give back to them to attempt to please them, and my defense mechanisms for managing the fallout when I failed to either please them, or protect them, or myself, from the results of the conflict that arose in our house when I either made yet another mistake, or when father overreacted to any situation that brought a sense of fear or threat into the home environment. There was also that aspect where I felt a need to “balance” whatever energy was being over expressed at any particular moment, which certainly added to my “passive-aggressive component” of self-expression.  It was as if I had two extra self-organizing personalities occupying my ego mind, my creations of who I thought my father and mother were, which was crowding out the “real me”, whoever or whatever that might be (if anyone, maybe there was never a real “me” present, only some sort of complex verbal construct?).

With the death of my father, it ended the era of subservience to his needs, and the need to “protect” my mother from my perception of his aggression towards her.. It also ended the era of incomplete grieving for my own mother’s death, as I had to immediately support my mentally deteriorating father when mother died, and I never completely worked through my own grieving process. I was finally an “orphan”, and all of the entanglements that kept me wound around their lives were now physically removed. My fathers’ spirit no longer needed to overshadow my own life, and now I was allowed to live fully into whatever, or whoever I am, or was supposed to be.

For me this is an extraordinary release, because my “ego” formed much differently that most of the rest of humanity due to unusual parental bonding issues just after birth, and through my first 4-5 years. Being placed on “formula” right after birth, and being placed in a chilly car in the garage at night so that my father could sleep better (I was just another “damned crying baby”) left me as a young being feeling abandoned, and lonely, from the beginning. Though I loved my parents, I certainly did not want to grow up and be like them. Yet, I was not able to offer to my developing self a viable alternative to being like my father, being extremely limited creatively, and my resultant dull, though at times insightful, personality reflected that darkness.

Up to this most recent point in my life, I have perceived the collective impact of toxic male consciousness upon my individual existence, with some insight into my own father’s sometimes toxic involvement in my own mind’s formation. I saw that I had two Tricksters roaming through the inner recesses of my heart and soul, and their continued presence, though they kept me from being lonely as a young being, kept me from developing into my greater good as an independent, free human being. In our world, there are countless examples of “self organizing systems”, and all creatures, and the minds of those creatures, are examples of that miracle in action. The bodies appear to be primarily organized through the pattern created by the history of that species, and it’s interactions with its earthly environment. DNA appears to carry that pattern within our very cells.

Yet the mind appears to have an extra self-organizing principle attached to it, as it organizes itself into a personal sense of being. That little mystery revolves around how well the organism feels accepted by, and connected to the environment that the body travels through. Thus, healthier senses of self arise, and are supported, by myriads of “successful” interactions with its social and physical environment. First and foremost is the beings’ acceptance and integration into the primary family cell, or group. If the young being does not get the requisite positive feedback early on, it faces tremendous odds against forming a happy, well-adjusted self organizing principle, or ego. My first 31 years of life reflected the internalized horror of a life suppressed by the “conspiracy of silence” created by my subservience to a damaged image of self, and other. My own true nature had been masked over, or silenced, through that process.

Who, or what, am I now? I am a mystery, even to myself. I need not be anxious, though the transition times from what  I thought I was to who I am predestined to become does create intense anxiety. I am to be forever walking into the unknowable present moment. Living into the Truth of what that is now is the new story of my life. There is but One Mind, but it is only experienced in the Unknown.

That next day at the beach, on Tuesday, I experienced the most beautiful perfect peace, and sense of wholeness, that I can recall. The rest of our shared day was characterized by a strong sense of the sacred, and I felt a deepening connection with everybody, and everything. The beauty of the ocean and it’s scenery, the beauty of our friendships, the taste of our food, even the continuing pain in my foot, all felt to me like lyrics of a heavenly song that was connected together by the rhythm of Love.

The conspiracy of silence has to be broken, again and again if necessary, and the silencing of my true identity through adherence to old, worn out patterns of behavior inculcated into me by our culture, our religions, our so-called teachers and teachings, and our misunderstandings of our parents, our God and creator, and our outdated sense of self have to end, for this present moment healing event to have any hope of transforming the heart and soul.

In this moment, I am no longer anxious, I am free.  I will find a way to manage future moments, if they bring anxiousness back to me.

“I” will not be denied. I will not deny your own excellence, and your own potential for greatness. Our shared sense of self, and our stories will support and highlight the rest of our continued existence on this plane of being.

May all sentient beings remain free from suffering.

May my own sentience guide me away from all temptations to bring suffering to self, and other.

Please, save yourself.

Depression, Anxiety, and Panic Attacks

I never chose this uneven life path of recovery from trauma, life chose it for me. I choose how to deal with the sights along the way, however.

The amygdala in our brains under duress from trauma creates new paths, leading in unhealthy directions, when these issues that arise through trauma are not promptly dealt with honestly and openly. For me, my number one intention for facilitating healing of myself is to avoid situations or people where poor communication and suppression of human emotions has become ‘normalized’. There are guaranteed negative outcomes associated with those interactions which have resulted in secondary damage and the potential for profound anxiety attacks.

I began to experience the “BIG THREE” of depression, anxiety, and the occasional panic attack, in the latter part of 2017, beginning about two weeks after the death of my father, and three weeks after the death of my friend Marty.

I grappled with (and sometimes continue to contemplate):

1). (from 2010-2017) The care for, and eventual death of my father, and the difficulties in the management of his estate,

2). (from 2017) The challenges in supporting the protracted dying process, and the eventual death of my good friend Marty in the week prior to my fathers’ death

3). (from 2017) dealing with the insanity of the wife of my deceased friend, and her ongoing spiritual dementia,

4). a crippling foot problem characterized by the highest possible pain intensity,

5). cancelling a lifetime “friendship” with a high school best friend who had become physically, spiritually, and emotionally unavailable through the past 40 years,

6). becoming alienated in 2016 from an alcoholic/bipolar nephew, and his family which we had been spending much time with, and not being able to talk to them about the issues, after a vicious divorce cycle,

7). an ongoing issue of dealing with and managing the health and safety of my elderly aunt (dad’s sister) who is disabled, and abandoned by the rest of her family, including her own daughter, and

8) (from 2016-2021) TREASON (Trump Related Extreme Anxiety Striking Our Nation)

I now have intimate knowledge of depression, anxiety, and panic attacks, and I now consider myself a personal expert in these matters, albeit a reluctant one. It is inappropriate to keep these issues “secret”, as I tend to be as sick as the secrets that I attempt to keep. Remaining unconscious and victimized by these conditions is not a helpful option for me now, or anytime.

The following have been found to be helpful for me:

1). Seeking “professional help” from therapists or physicians/surgeons as required,

2). exercise (such as yoga, with emphasis on proper breathing techniques),

3). immersion in Nature (walks through parks, forests, deserts, etc. as available),

4). meditation (listening to relaxing music is useful, if the mind will not quiet on its own),

5). getting plenty of rest/sleep (not automatic or easy when in anxious states. Use of melatonin and non-caffeinated relaxation tea prior to bed is helpful),

6). honest and open communication with friends and family (hanging around people with positive, loving attitudes and behaviors is important),

7). insight (and taking my inventory, to use the parlance of 12 step groups),

8). prayer (focused intention/thought energy for personal and collective change, for those so inclined),

9). service to others who are less fortunate, and

10). medication (if necessary) can be helpful. Ibuprofen is effective for anxiety, as well as (in the short term) some “heavier hitters” such as Ativan and Xanax, or anti-depressants (FYI, I can’t stand Xanax).

11). avoiding obvious anxiety producing behaviors, like excess coffee consumption, eating sugar or high carbohydrate mix foods excessively, or over booking my day-to-day life,

12). continue to allow feelings to naturally arise, with no judgement.

13). continue without shame and guilt any unfinished emotional business, such as grieving for the loss of loved ones.

14). watch a few good comedies, or go see a good comedian (lighten up!)

15). Go to live music performances, and enjoy the presence of powerful positive group energy.

Post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a name given to one powerful variation of related symptoms, and therapy and techniques developed for its healing may be appropriate, as well (a form of acupressure called the “tapping” technique is quite helpful).

Writing into a personal journal or blog can be helpful. Posting to Facebook, with the hope or expectation that somebody who cares might read a posting and give meaningful feedback, is unrealistic, and can potentially be dangerous, depending on the state of mind of the writer at the time of posting. It is best to have friends and connections who respond directly, preferably in person, where our humanity shines the brightest and has the most healing potential. Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter, or whatever other media vehicle that one may employ for communication in isolation just cannot get the job done, PERIOD. Just passing time without helping myself would never have allowed for sufficient healing either.

As I move toward healing, compassion towards myself and others is one of the intended outcomes. The absence of this only perpetuates the anxiety cycle.

For those who still suffer, please save yourself.

The Universe and God preexisted our civilization and our religious and philosophical misinterpretations. Our unique self preexisted our family and our culture’s misinterpretation of who we really are.

The journey of a thousand lifetimes culminates in the union of the Universe and God, and our unique Self.

Look out from our new eyes. As far as we can see, unto eternity, is our Self.

How we see our self today determines the quality of our life, our relationships, and  the love and miraculous healing that we experience.