(Note: author will draw some material from my editor’s interpretation, but her, at times, saccharine version has not yet been merged with this one).
This chapter delves into the captivating and sometimes deceptive nature of personal stories. Our narratives have the power to entertain, manipulate, and even deliver profound insights and wisdom. But how do we navigate the fine line between truth and falsehood in the stories we tell and hear?
I explore the dual nature of personal stories as tools for enlightenment and manipulation. Through thought-provoking examples, I uncover the importance of discernment and critical thinking when interpreting stories. I navigate the intricate web of narratives while encountering the human tendency to weave and believe compelling stories, whether they are rooted in truth or not.
This chapter takes place within the broader context of the book, which explores human storytelling and its impact on personal and collective identities. I continue to unravel the power of narratives and their influence on shaping our perceptions, actions, and societal frameworks.
This is the opportunity to reflect on our personal stories, the narratives that shape our identity, and the stories we encounter in our journey. Together, let us unravel the power of our stories and unveil the truth that lies within.
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It is what it is, but it is not what it seems—Paul Hewson, and countless others
We all love a great story. Those who have developed real insight into the story and can both translate the essence of an experience and convey the emotion of all participating characters through words are the raconteurs of our culture. These honored storytellers 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 may be accurate or fiction, but as long as it entertains, it will keep our attention. As all of the best storytellers know, it is essential to keep the truth from getting 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 relationships with each other and the world. We also listen intently to the stories told by our parents, teachers, religions, history, and society about who we are, who others once were or now are, and who we might aspire to become. Many of our stories, individually and those created by society for us, are steeped in illusion, ignorance, half-truths, and outright falsehoods. Far too many stories are just dramas about the attempts of others to control us, our attempts to control others, and, sadly, our failed attempts at exercising control over our own lives and our emotional experiences around all of these intersections and collisions, with each other But these stories have a fantastic 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,” where we question every aspect of our historical narrative, both shared and individual, lest the entirety of our life experience is lived and experienced without complete integrity, the potential for healing, evolution, and completeness, and the best alignment with reality.
Some aspects of life elude our ability to communicate around them effectively and never get incorporated into our personal stories, thus adding to the collective conspiracy of silence. Also, other people’s stories and garbage get backfilled into the holes and empty spaces within our own stories, becoming embedded within us and adding to our internal confusion and chaos. Such was the situation with me until relatively late in life when I finally began to put words to my life experiences in a more meaningful, insightful manner. 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 long ago, silenced by the diseases that living in a conspiracy of silence encourages. I found that some wounds are so deep and primal that just pasting new names onto aspects of my disease and creating new stories were not enough. But I finally realized my responsibility as a conscious or semi-conscious human being was to bring my personal truth and story back to the social network. The main lesson here is that we all must become willing to share our stories, no matter how unfinished they may appear to be, to the collective experience, including our family, friends, co-workers, neighbors, religious and political leaders, and even ourselves.
Nearly 2.2 billion world citizens that claim to be Christian, 2 billion claim to be Muslims, and over 400 million claim to be Buddhists. They point to their religion as the source of their inspiration and understanding. Regardless of our faith, or lack thereof, unless we deliver our story, our existing world narratives will stay in control and remain unchallenged and unchanged by our participation in life. If enough of us share our stories, the collective storytellers must eventually adapt and adjust their narratives to include the excluded, or fade into insignificance through their attachments to the past and their ever-increasing irrelevance.
Oh religious marionettes on the screen of the world’s mind, With the dogmas of their beliefs in control, what possible freedom can you find?
Names and stories are only a convenience for communication. They need to be more comprehensive and inclusive to ultimately reveal the true nature of what they were created for in our minds to represent in the first place. The naming process is how our consciousness weighs and measures new forms of life, ideas, and experiences to insert the unknown and the mysterious into a present context for understanding, which becomes the latest iteration of our “story.” Naming attaches 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.
Creating stories and context and being conversational about the details of life do not dislodge the detritus from our field of consciousness. The Devil is in the details, figuratively speaking, and if we need change, we must find a way to see under the vast matrix of theories and fantasies that only float on the surface of the mind. We must also personally explore and experience the movements through consciousness and find 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 the mind. They 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. “It is only deep insight into the nature of our consciousness itself, and the stories that we tell ourselves, that finally allows us to catapult our awareness FAR BEYOND THE CONFINES OF OUR STORIES. Such vision brings a renewed appreciation and respect for all who attempt to transcend the story’s limitations while refining their own unique version of it.
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 at close to age 4, I proved I had the capacity for speech and A LOT OF IT. My father wondered, at times, if I would ever shut up. I remember starting to talk about things around me, giving new information my parents had no knowledge about. My parents thought 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 that built-in to the very fabric of words is access to imagination and knowledge beyond the word, or sequence of words, spoken. Looking back now, I can also see 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.
As a young boy, around four, I remember having a doll named Percy, who sometimes talked with me and even spoke to me once over the telephone. I briefly had my sister convinced that Percy talked to me, and she was six years of age! The fundamental truth here is that our Creative Nature makes us believe in, see, and hear our creations, whether or not they exist for others. Percy was to me what the concept and experience of “God” was to other innocent children: a reassuring voice that would speak to me and remind me that I had value.
Percy, God, our traumas, our healing and/or our creative nature is always trying to tell us a story. Please listen carefully!
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. This book touches extensively upon the many self-destructive and false stories and realities, as well as the unique, and often 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 my life.
In some of the early times of my life, before 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 alcohol abuser, 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 destruction to our planet Earth. While we contemplated our own end, we witnessed a world amid its own collective march towards suicide. The story of Armageddon, as both an individual and a collective event, becomes very real to those trapped by their illusions of powerlessness, helplessness, and despair.
We are the loosely knit tribe most susceptible to the oppression by others and the repression of ourselves. 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 and eventually adopt their stories as our own, even if our 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 accurate and what is false about ourselves. The stories that continue to be told to us keep us connected with a minimal view of “our people,” all the while keeping us disconnected from our own true natures and more realistic story integrity.
A spiritual awakening process beginning in 1987 was the start of my exit from the chaotic mindset that characterized my life up to that point. Since 1987, I have lived more fully, with enhanced personal awareness, good health, honest expression of all feelings, joy and happiness most 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. His silence proved that he was a mature spiritual being and saw the futility of proclaiming his righteousness and understanding in the face of Pilate’s political and physical power. The question “What is truth?” was intended as mockery, and that principle continues today. Speaking truth to power is not an easy or automatic proposition, no matter how enlightened one might appear. Truth is more like a continuous rainfall upon rocky mountains. 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 must be prepared appropriately, 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 and fantasy, the Infinite will speak 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 an excellent 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 more profound truth while also still possessing keen wits. Would anyone like a serving of golden plates, from which the “Book Of Mormon” is based, or Jesus appearing in the Wild West of America two thousand years ago? The sirens of my bull-shit detector continue to go off loud and clear whenever I hear these stories. Yet, for members of the Mormon Church, their metal detectors indicate they have struck gold plates. And don’t forget to tithe your ten percent, or your next of kin will hear about your lack of faith and commitment to the faith at your own funeral. I witnessed this horror in an abominable address by the minister at a funeral for a co-worker who had committed suicide. I stood up and walked right out on the proceedings.
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 sacred, but dirty underwear because their delusional stories have soiled 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, 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 – 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. And they continue to send their missionaries around the world to proselytize among the naive and susceptible. Shame would be an appropriate feeling for me if I tried to peddle their nonsense,
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 still struggle 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.” All stay outside of the universality of our divine heritage and potential for eternity until Jesus is accepted as our 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, 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 theories 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 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.
Religious reasoning forms the foundation for some very entertaining and hypnotizing theories. Yet, religious reasoning is all too often just an oxymoron.
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, God will deliver security and prosperity. The doctrine emphasizes the importance of personal empowerment, proposing that it is God’s will for God’s people to be happy. It is based on interpretations of the Bible that are mainstream in Judaism (concerning 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. Have you ever wondered how capitalism erupted within our civilization? If you are rich, it is God’s will for you to become even richer. Hey, the poor will always be among us, especially if the rich determine the distribution of Mother Nature’s assets.
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 resource competition continues to cause our Earth to suffer while the few prosper. Abject spiritual and intellectual poverty is imbued within a philosophy that celebrates prosperity as a manifestation of “God’s reward for the good” and indicates 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.
However, the fundamental oppressive force in the human universe is not our wayward religious, political, economic, or social agendas or systems, as the real problem is within the human mind itself. Jesus Christ would be crucified again (and, in fact, the Truth continues to be sacrificed at life’s bloody alters 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 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 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.
Punch A Nazi Sign at June 2018 Portland, Oregon Rally for Immigrants and their families
“if you tell a big enough lie and tell it frequently enough, it will be believed.” ― Adolf Hitler.
If you tell a lie often enough, you are prone to start to actually believe it 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; the world and our minds can be dangerous places. 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, 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 our stories, many of which have created quite a 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 to live this life. It has also been a terrific fulfillment to have lived long enough and become articulate enough to describe my unique life experience. There are many chapters to follow. I bring my extended journey into the mystery of human consciousness and its corruption into the verbal universe. Those with unconscious and ignorant or selfish and self-destructive agendas. Finding my unique story and the supportive silence underneath that story is the journey of my salvation, the hero’s journey toward healing and integrity. Buckle up, fellow travelers, as the ride will sometimes be rather turbulent! What is “reality,” and who am I? Watch out, for more stories are constantly 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!
It is what it is, but it is not what it seems.
If our minds finally find our innocence, our unconditioned minds directly witness what it is.
