Insight Into The Conspiracy Of Silence, or, How I Lived Beyond My Expiration Date-From Prologue To Chapter 14

Conspiracy of Silence

—-(definition from Wikipedia) An agreement, either formal or tacit, between two or more parties not to discuss some matter nor to reveal any information concerning it, especially in order to avoid blame, embarrassment, or other discomfort.

 

PROLOGUE/INTRODUCTION

Presently, I am 62 years old, and I am learning how to live the life of a retired person. I am married to Sharon White, a retired hospice nurse, and writer of the book:

Whose Death Is It Anyway-A Hospice Nurse Remembers

Sharon is a wonderful friend and life partner of nearly 30 years. We have three grandsons through two of Sharon’s children, Brad Graves and Hayley Graves.

My writings are part of my new life in retirement. I have recently created a blog, and I began filling it up with my writings on matters of recovery and spirituality. I saw that my blog contained enough material for a book, so those writings are the foundation for this book.

I take a deep look at life, and write extensively about it from a unique and rarely communicated perspective. Some writing covers the time from 1955 through1987 when I was a boy, then an addict and alcoholic, with my subsequent recovery experience, and search for “Truth” after 1987. Writings include my more recent experiences around the subjects of death, dying, and transformation, and friends and family having the most challenging of life’s experiences. There also will be a couple of musings about “GOD”, but I try to limit that kind of verbal gymnastics, because it is like chasing a sunbeam with a flashlight.

There are writings derived from my personal involvement with and insight into toxic masculinity, toxic religion, toxic capitalism, and all of their intersections with our POTU$. These topics will not be a draw for all people, as such personal and/or cultural toxicities tends to get ignored, overlooked, or “normalized” by those with little time for insight, introspection, or interest in other people’s points of view on these troubling issues.

This book is best suited for the non-materialistic “one-percenters” of our world. The “one-percenters” are those seekers of truth who fearlessly look at the root of all issues to seek for answers to the most challenging of life’s questions, and who are also not afraid to make changes to their life’s course as necessary. This “book” is non-fiction, and is not good reading for anybody seeking to escape and be entertained. Some of the writings are spiritual, philosophical and intellectual in nature, and some descend the depths into the darkest recesses of the human mind. I have included a full cross section of all of my thoughts and feelings. It is a classic “over-share”, and I have no shame in doing so.

My hope is that through this book my grandsons can get an opportunity to know who their grandfather really is, what I have experienced in life, and what I now believe in. My hope for the rest of the world is that enough people will wake up and assert earth and human friendly behavior, before the walking dead of the world ruin or destroy it for all of us.

This work is dedicated to my late father, Beryl Donald Paullin, who died September 15, 2017. I would not have undertaken this work at all, had I not “picked up the mantle that had fallen off” of my father, and carried it forward into my own life. I wrestled with his cloak my entire life, and it almost became my burial shroud. Yet, in the end, miraculously it began its transformation into my own spiritual raiment.

A Master Teacher once spoke to me, and said:

“No teacher shall effect your salvation, you must work it out for yourself”.

This writing represents my personal work towards that ultimate end.

SATAN’S GREATEST TEACHING

Satan and his main disciple were drifting above the planet Earth, and observing all of the activities that were of interest, while his student learned some more of the great lessons of the truth of the Dark Master.  One of their journeys  brought them to a single man standing in an open field, who looked up to the heavens, with a look of great relief and joy upon his face.  As Satan and his disciple looked closer, they found that the man was holding something in his hands, hidden under his shirt, close to his heart.  The man hurriedly walked back to his home, protecting his find from the scrutiny of the outside world.

The disciple asked Satan:

“What do you think that this man has found?”

“Oh, he has found Truth!”,

replied Satan, with a satisfied look on his face.

“But Satan, how can you be so happy?  Should we not be terrified by this man’s revelation?  This could spell the end of your rule over our earthly kingdom!”

“Hush, my student, and listen closely.  We are about to help this man write volumes of texts create spiritual fantasies and stories, and organize this “truth” into yet another religion.  This is my greatest teaching, that organized religion eventually becomes the structure to capture and imprison the minds and hearts of susceptible people.”

Chapter One

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

There has been an 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. I have personally witnessed both mental illness and the early death syndrome of the white American male through many of my acquaintances, and I may be captured by the phenomenon, as well. 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 been the recent news reports with many references to the Opioid Epidemic, painkiller addiction, and the progression to heroin addiction by those participants. 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.

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/03/health/death-rates-rising-for-middle-aged-white-americans-study-finds.html

In this book I address 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 point out the darkened movements of human energy that become the underlying foundation for “toxic masculinity”, a name coined to encompass all that is detrimental to the male version of the human spirit. I 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 twisted notions of what normal social connections should look like. I attempt to address difficult human emotions, and problems with expressing them skillfully. I make a commentary on my rocky relationship with American Christianity, and why I am no longer directly associated with that philosophy, though I still have hope for some members within its body. I do not specifically address our culture’s problems with physical fitness, or environmental, water and food supply toxicity, which are important issues, but are better left to the medical writers, scientists, and environmental and nutritional experts.

Those who continue to suffer and are not following a 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 of 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 the those who have no voice, and it is perceived as an existential threat for them to examine the damaged structure that gave rise to their own predominance, while others still suffered. There must be a national discussion about our shared disease, its treatment, and the healing and changing of our culture to reduce the 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.

I have been asked why I seem to perseverate 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.

The light of our country, though still burning brightly for the healing and the hopeful, still 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, and we buried another drug addicted cousin in August of 2017. I have also witnessed two close family members who are practicing alcoholics continuing to ply their self-destructive trades, as well as one of our own grandsons has been addicted to pot and other substances since he was 11 years old. 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 some of the cases that I am familiar with, the men 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 mental illness, and they could not recover from that.

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?

A recent book club meeting that was held at our house in November of 2016 exposed me to the Emmy award winning journalist and author Sheila Hamilton. She visited our home, and shared with our book club insights into her life, and her marriage with David Krol, her deceased husband who had committed suicide. While reading Ms. Hamilton’s book “All the Things We Never Knew”, I was struck by how Sheila had to piece together what David’s inner experience must have been like, as David did not communicate to others his inner turmoil and chaos effectively. When Sheila told the group that David’s parents had wrapped him up in a blanket as a baby and left him in the garage at night because of his excessive crying, I had an AHA moment, because that is exactly what had happened to me, as well. I felt a need to give another voice for our shared disease, as I am a person who had also walked through the gates of hell itself. Somebody has to speak up for David, and for the people that suffered like David, and myself, and that person is me.

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

—-Martin Luther King, Jr.

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.

But, there have been other messages occasionally bubbling up within my consciousness that has indicated otherwise, and this work is the culmination of my attempt to honor all of those “whispers of the Spirit”, which have demanded that I deliver their 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, skill of the musician, message from a miraculous healing, or even the voice of the 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 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. 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, then 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.

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 others’ 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 that noble human value.

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 grandparents’ 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.

I offer my apologies to any widow or family member of a diseased or deceased man who might read this story and become offended by what appears to be judgmental or incomplete representation of the facts. What I have observed is quite subjective, and the population that I have witnessed is fairly small, compared to the whole of the population that has been impacted by our cultural disease. 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”.

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 walked through many miles of underbrush, stickers, thorny bushes, weeds, stinging nettles, and mud 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.

Chapter Two

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

—Paul Hewson

Some aspects of our lives just seem to continue to elude our ability to communicate around them, and add to the conspiracy of silence.  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.  Some wounds are so deep, and primal, that just pasting new names onto aspects of the disease are not enough. Names 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.  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.  Naming tends to attach a dynamic process to a fixed point in time and space, and thus lodges it in the past.

But, 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.  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.

“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

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.  This book touches extensively upon the many false realities, that I, as an individual person, and as a collective, acculturated  human being was subjected to and unconsciously adapted to throughout the course of my life.

From 1971 through 1987, as a practicing alcoholic and drug addict, and mentally ill human being, I lost all 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.  And while we contemplated our own end, we witnessed a world in the midst of its own collective march towards suicide.

Crippled Inside, by John Lennon

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=otwuTetDSUs

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 good health, happiness and with 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 sees 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 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 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 controlling 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.  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.  This type of spiritual corruption only further confuses and alienates those seekers of a deeper truth that are still in possession of keen wits.

Like our mother’s 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 “underwear”, their delusional stories have created quite the mess in human consciousness.  The Church may have done a lot of good over the years, but that has to be balanced with corruption that this tribalistic cult creates.

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 them!  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 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.

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.

Chapter Three

INSIGHT

“The unexamined life is not worth living”

Socrates

“The unexamined life” refers to a life lived by rote under the rules of others without the individual ever examining whether or not he truly wants to live with those routines or rules. According to Socrates, this type of life was not worth living. Rather than living an unexamined life, Socrates chose death, and these words are attributed to the philosopher during one of his last speeches before his suicide.

The truth is that the practicing addict, alcoholic, and toxic human is also living an unexamined life, and an early death through accidents, poor health choices or suicide, is at a much higher likelihood for occurrence for all such people. And, a mind hijacked by addictive substances and/or self-destructive thoughts and behaviors will not readily adjust its course, without a compelling interior counter-argument being offered to its own often times unconscious desire for annihilation.

To develop the capacity for insight requires a tremendous depth of desire to know one’s self in a different, more profound, holistic, way, while overcoming a lifetime of suffering, ignorance, indifference towards and/or oppression by others, and repression of one’s emotional and spiritual nature.  An inscription on a temple at Delphi stated:   “Know thyself, and you will know the Universe and the Gods.”  Insight, or “knowing thyself” has been the path to the Gods since the mind of man first postulated the existence of a unique self, and of a God.

Education and indoctrination tends to teach the student about other people’s perspectives on matters of individuality, self-expression, and connection with a “power greater than our self”, while confusing and hindering the individual’s direct connection and link to his own higher truth and nature.  We become hypnotized by other people’s thoughts and attitudes, and mistakenly associate all others’ points of view as being our own, until we finally decide to break free from our own second-hand, culturally inculcated reality for the understanding of self, and other, and thus, start the journey of awakening.

Awakening is an interactive process, encouraged and facilitated by the pain and suffering that we experience as human beings, while engaging with the “real world”. Far too many Americans live in alternate universes, where pain and suffering are not directly dealt with, or are to be avoided at all costs, wherever possible.  Immersion in fantasy and denial of our personal and collective responsibility towards the ills of this world also reigns supreme in major sections of our culture. This is fueled by addictions to media devices, diversions of our life force into entertainment and worship of TV and movie personalities, hypnosis by false religious and spiritual leaders, alcohol and drug addictions, and personal and sexual power abuses.  To facilitate healing, we must reject the false leaders, hypnosis, hero-worshiping and idolatry, and we must become our own leaders, with awakened powers of understanding and compassion. All of the sleeping beauties, and the ugly ones with warts, will continue to sleep, until their nightmares become so frightening that they either have to wake up to the “kiss of the healing prince, or princess”, or die.

Early in 2017, I began yet another process of “awakening”, which for me is another term for the experience of enhanced insight.  In January of 2017, I took my father to the doctor, and my number one concern, next to my dying father’s needs, was that my father was going to outlive me. Why would such a concern erupt within my own mind?  The stress of providing care for a moderately demented older “gentleman” did exact quite the toll, even though it also provided great spiritual benefits to me.  My father was quite passive and gentle the last several years of his life, in quite the contrast to his earlier years, yet the historical momentum established through my sixty-two years of relationship with him just did not magically end or transform itself, and I continued to feel some internal challenges to my equanimity.  My relationship with my father had created much of the irregularities in the foundation for my own vision of life and of love, especially in my years prior to age thirty-one.  This was the year of my new beginning in life, when I became sober, and began my spiritual awakening in earnest.

I developed some insight into how my own father’s ignorance and selfish needs early in my childhood negatively impacted my own mind’s formation.  There was a revelation within me that as a result of my father’s sometimes toxic influence in my life, I had unwittingly and unconsciously created two fundamental cores to my personal dysfunction. I came to refer to these forces as “tricksters”, and a thorough examination of all of my “inner demons” showed that they were created through incomplete, unskilled interactions with life.  Their presences initially kept me from being helpless as I attempted to navigate the world as a young being, offering their own extremely limited versions of interior guidance.  But, these miscreations kept me from developing into my greater good as an independent, free adult human being. It was around these cores that the whole of my consciousness swirled around, as if drawn and disfigured by two distinct, though interconnected, loci of negative influence.  These “dark masses of influence” resembled actual personality subsets within my consciousness, and I posit that these forces are the precursors to all manners and types of mental illness, including anxiety, depression, schizophrenia, and multiple personality disorder.

My father had come to represent to me how my life experience had become overshadowed by the needs and concerns of our culture, and its own unconscious needs to dominate, control, and oppress, especially those who did not conform to its often conflicted, twisted values. My father had great difficulty, in times of stress, in recognizing the intrinsic value of all life, including my “baby self”, and my essence as a young boy. My father showed to me what a potential end point looks like from a lifetime lacking in true collaboration and emotional integrity while sharing life force with others. My father achieved many of his goals in life, yet at what cost did they come to him, and to the people who he may have influenced and over which he exerted control? And, what is the cost to a society that blindly plows forward while supporting ideals that do not conform to the development of all of its citizens’ highest nature, and truth?

“Boy Named Sue”, by Johnny Cash

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Gbtm-93oqE

This song really does capture the basic story of my life, and that life which is impressed upon all of humanity.  The boy named Sue has to begin his search for the source of his ‘bad name’ or nature, which was his absent father.  He needs to conquer and punish those forces of abandonment and shame, yet after confronting his “darkness”, he gains an understanding of his father, forgives him, and states a new intention for his life.  As a culture, and as individuals, we unconsciously transmit our understandings of life through our children, so even if the child of the “original dysfunction” wanted to have a radically different life, they are still predisposed to make many of the same mistaken judgments in life.  Like Sue, in this world, we are given an incomplete identity not our own, and forced to defend it for the rest of our lives, unless we can become aware of those unconscious relics of our shared history, or predispositions from the parental and historical past that would gives us our”Sue” nature.

With the death of my father, it ended the era of subservience to my perceptions of his needs.  It also ended the era of incomplete grieving for my own mother’s death, as I never completely worked through my own process around her sudden demise. I was now an “orphan”, and all of the entanglements that kept me wound around their lives were now physically removed. My fathers’ spirit no longer could overshadow my own life, and now I was allowed to live fully into whatever, or whoever that I am.  I found that I no longer had the unconscious need to protect my mother from my father’s wayward emotions and behavior, which I always girded myself for, and I had prepared myself to do throughout my life.   In truth, however, I never really succeeded in protecting anybody from my perception of my father, including myself.

For me this is an extraordinary release, because my “ego” may have formed somewhat differently than much 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 “damn crying baby”) left me as a young being with so-called “attachment issues”, such as 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 throughout my childhood, and adulthood through my first thirty-one years of life.

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.  Some biologists and scientists, such as Rupert Sheldrake, postulate the existence of a “morphogenetic” field of energy, in which in the whole biological and environmental history of each species is stored, and which each member of the species shares energy with.  This name identifies a scientifically recognized process whereby the whole of the species influences the individual, and the individual can also exert influence on the whole, especially when the number of individuals is great.

To quote Rupert Sheldrake, as documented by John Horgan, in Scientific American, July 14, 2014:

“Morphic resonance is the influence of previous structures of activity on subsequent similar structures of activity organized by morphic fields. It enables memories to pass across both space and time from the past. The greater the similarity, the greater the influence of morphic resonance. What this means is that all self-organizing systems, such as molecules, crystals, cells, plants, animals and animal societies, have a collective memory on which each individual draws and to which it contributes. In its most general sense this hypothesis implies that the so-called laws of nature are more like habits”.

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/scientific-heretic-rupert-sheldrake-on-morphic-fields-psychic-dogs-and-other-mysteries/

The human mind appears to have a self-organizing principle attached to it, as it organizes itself into a personal sense of being.  Some say that the “word” or the act of first recognizing that a verbal sound or a specific set of symbols can represent an environmental influence is the initial generative force behind the “creation of the personal sense of self”.  Helen Keller gives an outstanding account of the beginning of her own sense of self, once she recognized that the letters W A T E R represented the substance that she washed with, and drank.

http://www.findingdulcinea.com/news/on-this-day/March-April-08/On-this-Day–Helen-Keller-Comprehends-the-Word–Water-.html

But the mystery of the origination of the sense of self revolves around many additional factors, including how well the organism feels accepted by, and connected to the environment that the body travels through. Thus, healthier senses of self arise from, and are supported by, myriads of “successful” interactions with its social and physical environment, and the internal “name giving and associations” and stories that eventually get created by the self.  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, or possibility for experiencing another way of being,  had been masked over, or silenced, through that process.

Black Holes

A black hole is a region of space/time exhibiting such strong gravitational effects that nothing—including particles and electromagnetic radiation such as light—can escape from inside it. The theory of general relativity predicts that a sufficiently compact mass can deform space/time to form a black hole. The boundary of the region from which no escape is possible is called the event. Within the human psyche, I posit the existence of consciousness “black holes”, or singularity points.  We, as a human race, seem to have a predisposition to creating “black hole events” where no light (love, compassion, empathy, healing thoughts) escapes from our consciousness.  These events occur especially during times of collective distress including mass hypnosis and the resultant mob mind activity that leads to wars, genocide, racism, xenophobia, hysteria and fear.

We, as individuals, also have a real talent for creating “black hole events” within our personal worlds, as well.  Our concepts of time and space certainly get distorted, as present day events occurring in our lives get distorted within our minds by traumatic events of our past, or “black holes” of past influence through which the light of our ever unfolding “present moment of life” gets sucked into the darkness of a singularity point of a traumatic event from our past.

Our minds are “generators of consciousness”, which simply stated, means aspects of ourselves generate internal feedback, develop and support our own internal self-concept, create internal imagery and understanding of the “outer world” and support our verbal relationships with and actions towards all others. We attempt to match the “outer reality” by forming internal verbal and emotional linkages within ourselves, and this helps us to stay “relevant” and abiding within some measure of resonance and continuity with the perceived “external universe” or community that we presently share with others.

This “light” that we internally emit, and eventually share with our worlds either through action or verbal expression, is influenced dramatically by our own secret, internal agendas, whether we are conscious of those agendas, or not. While these agendas remain “unconscious”, they become the equivalent to our own internal “black holes”. All streams of consciousness that our minds and hearts attempt to “emit” become trapped in the swirling vortices of these powerful forces, and these internal “black holes” continue to influence virtually every aspect of our lives. And, if not dealt with consciously and carefully, these black holes will eventually draw all of our internal light into them, and we become unwitting agents of our own internal darkness.

To repress or deny these internal forces is to continue to feed them. As we get in touch with our fears, angers, hatreds, or whatever name for manifesting “darkness” that we might give to them, it is important to realize that these are great forces, and once they are harnessed, NOT REPRESSED OR DENIED, these “black holes” will continue to keep us connected to the real world, and, as we transmute their energy, the light within us uses these once “dark energies” for the good of ourselves, and for all mankind.

I have identified two major black holes within my own internal universe, which have created powerful forces of control, which must be dealt with directly and honestly, lest one’s entire life becomes a manifestation of “black hole events”. For me, I have named the BIG TWO. Number One, is the black hole that my voice will never be heard. Number Two, is the black hole of death. Insight finally reveals that these two are actually related, and are a direct result of failure to be fully integrated as a complete, healthy human being, and manifesting holistic or divine intent.

These two vortexes drew all of my internal light towards themselves, and by the time that those internal “singularity points” worked their dark magic to their fullness, I actually flirted with the end of my own life. Such is the way these “black hole events” can influence and control our lives, making peace of mind and positive, loving connections with others virtually impossible.

These “black holes” may remain, even after making profound spiritual and emotional changes. Their dark influence, however, continues to recede, once there is a committed intention to stay connected with insight and spiritual healing, where all true light comes from. As I strive to stay balanced internally, so shall my walk through the rest of my life remain balanced, as well. Insight keeps these forces balanced internally, so that the “spirit of wholeness” within us can utilize our energy in more “sane” and mutually beneficial ways.

And, for more than one of us, these “black holes” are eventually transformed into “white holes”, where no darkness can escape, and all of our experience becomes “enlightened”. We can’t short-circuit this process, by just substituting the pleasant-sounding “spiritual froth ” produced by other great spiritual thinkers, and trying to layer those messages over our unexamined inner universe. Well meaning advocates of this process become unwitting contributors to the repression, and oppression, of the Human Spirit. It is only after we do the real inner work, that these teachers can assume their rightful position in our consciousness, as fellow travelers on the path to Truth, which has no final destination. Our most profound words and thoughts only present the illusion of a “final resting place”, when, in fact, truth is eternally unfolding into each moment as a brand new, unique manifestation.

I have my moments with the “white holes”, and I continue to strive for experiencing this phenomenon with both increased frequency and intensity. A path of insight and meditation is quite helpful, and association with others who share in this new reality has been shown to produce almost miraculous results. If this experience is to become our real new reality, then there is work to do! Please, let us not rest on another person’s “spiritual laurels”, for by this culturally and religiously ingrained process we will be delayed in finding our True Passion.

What might a man performing a thorough self-examination through internal probing discover about his self, and the subconscious guidance and direction by those black holes within his own unique nature?. To uncover the treasure, we first have to dig through the dirt, and believe me, it can be a toxic waste site. It is no wonder to me that there are “few there be that enter into” this unexplored realm within.  There is a kingdom within that searches for its rightful king, but will we ever rise up and assume our proper place?  This process requires patience, time, experience, and humility, but eventually insight is developed whereby we, as men, can see the forces of corruption within our own heart and soul, and through the seeing, we also begin to facilitate the healing, as well. 

In the absolute, we are the space that we witness, either through our eyes, the telescope, or our mathematics, we are the time, or the timelessness, that we experience, and we are all of the people, and the cultures, that we are presently having relationships with. All that we will ever see, unto eternity, is our self. Insight is life, and life is insight. In truth, none of us are on the “outside looking in”. We are all on the “inside looking everywhere”, whether we want to take responsibility for our perceptions, or not.

Insight IS life, and life IS insight.

Chapter Four

Here are some principles of toxic masculinity that I found lived in unconscious domains of my own mind and heart. I have exaggerated them, and linked them with common monetary, sexual, and personal power dynamics. And yes, these principles, or variations of these themes, are part of the Common Knowledge Game fundamentals for erroneous understanding of self and other. If they appear to mimic some of the values and principle’s underlying Donald Trump’s abhorrent behavior, then you are already paying close attention to our collective consciousness, and its dangerous and sometimes catastrophic influence on the affairs of humanity throughout our history.

#1:

I am the center of the Universe. The rest of humanity is here either for my pleasure, for my profit, or for my disdain. I may attend a church occasionally, so that I can create the impression that I worship a higher power than myself. But, I already know that there is no higher power but me. HUMILITY IS NOT AN OPTION FOR ME, and is only for the poor and weak among us.

#2

Truly loving another human being is a sign of weakness, and thus I must continue to suppress all such impulses so that I can achieve my selfish goals. I will carry on a campaign of hatred, judgement, and condemnation of all people unlike myself, all the while claiming to represent their interests at the highest level of my being (with subtlety, if one is of the passive/aggressive nature) . The ignorant people populating my world will hopefully associate my hateful behavior with their understanding of what love is, thus damaging the hearts and souls of all who may fear, respect, and/or follow me. My schizophrenia will be confusing to others, but may still be normalized, as others that I may have influenced model and support my behavior.

#3:

People are most valuable if they can be monetized. If I can’t make money from my relationship with people, then I don’t necessarily need them. They will have to prove that they belong in my life in some other selfish self-serving ways.

#4:

Never admit that I am wrong. Always blame somebody else for my problems. The admission of guilt is a sign of weakness, and only for those who do not have sufficient monetary and legal power. I don’t need your forgiveness for my mistakes, because, as far as you should be concerned, I do not ever make mistakes.

#5:

I have a right to choose how much drugs and alcohol that I consume.  I do not need feedback from others telling me that I am abusing my medicine and/or alcohol.  I have earned the right to drink as much as I feel like, because I make so many sacrifices in my life, and I deserve an extra break and release through excessive alcohol and;/or drug consumption.  I do not have a problem, and if you think that I have a problem with my chemicals, then it is your misunderstanding, and not my own.

#6:

Never spend any time in self-reflection or meditation. Developing insight is difficult and time-consuming, and I have more important things to do  I am already perfect, I always have been perfect, and everybody else needs to change to accommodate my needs. If I am not “perfect” today, I always have someone, or something, else to blame.

#7

I have a right to use my strong emotions to intimidate and threaten anybody that I need to in order to get my way.  My anger is a weapon, to be wielded whenever necessary, and its expression is my first selection from my arsenal of control tools in manipulating and controlling my world.

#8

If I can’t get my way with another human being, then I will cajole or bully them into submission, or attack their name and character, and/or impugn their dignity, until they either submit, or are discredited by my allies.

#9:

Everybody unlike me  should be distrusted. Relationships built through mutual trust and collaboration can be threatening to my short-term goals, and should not be cultivated, as only alliances of hate and distrust are capable of bringing me to my goals.

# 10

The women in our lives are more suited to be our personal possessions than self-sufficient, independent people, and are not to be treated as equals, and are better suited for exploitation for family support, sexual purposes and/or economic gain.  

#11

If I can’t get my way through truth-telling, then the telling of lies becomes my most potent weapon. If I am caught in a lie, then it is only your misunderstanding of my point, and not what I said, that is wrong. If I tell the same lie often enough, then people will start to accept the lie as the truth.

#12

If there is no conflict currently in progress, then I must start creating the conditions for the next one, and socially position myself so that I can maximize emotional profits and visibility for myself.

#13

I never will obtain enough money, power, sex, or attention to keep me happy. I must continue to pursue these needs to extremes in order to keep me from becoming depressed and losing my sense of personal value in this world. If I achieve my goals, and I am still unhappy, I must set new goals to attempt to fill that big hole in my heart and soul.

#14

The powers of my penis reigns supreme. When it is erect, it always points me in the right direction, regardless of the people that may be hurt by my wayward sexual desires. My self-esteem is dependent on how many women that I can convince to make love to me, and nobody is immune from my advances. One is too many, and a thousand is not enough, when it comes to sexual conquests.

#15

I am the king of my home. I have created my kingdom to serve my selfish needs. If my rules are not honored, and my intentions for the family do not hold up, and family members start to stray, I will coerce, cajole, or threaten all wayward members with violence, if necessary. The family must stay together under my control, no matter what the cost to others might be.

#16

Perfectionism and full control of others should not be mutually exclusive propositions. I will judge, criticize, and condemn others, and myself, as needed, to bring all of my world into alignment with how I think that it should be. I will compare and contrast my wealth and success with others to establish the best baseline for my expectations and behavior.

#17

If those closest to me engage in betrayal, and destroy my sacred relationship with my family, I must avenge myself, and destroy all who have threatened my life and values. My wife is my property, and my property alone.  If she should ever have an affair with another man, I reserve the right to punish her and my family, up to, and including, murdering them. If I must die in the process, it is a good death for me.

#18

Self sabotage is my unconscious need.  It is my right to destroy my creations even as I destroy myself, so murder-suicide is an acceptable option in the extreme, when my needs have been dishonored, and I feel that I have no more options to improve my life situation.

#19

My wife and my children are first and foremost my possessions. I will direct and control as necessary, and nobody else has any right to criticize my choices in how I provide and care for them.  My whole sense of self-esteem is derived by how deeply they honor and obey me, without argument or back talk. I do not want or need alternate points of view, as my view is the only view that is relevant.

#20

I have been a failure since I never measured up to my father’s, my church’s, or my society’s standards. I will continue to self-sabotage my success at ever bend in life’s road, and I will see life as a self-fulfilling prophesy of incompleteness and loss. I will not even question that my life has other possibilities for it, and I will resign myself to my depressing fate.

#21

I reserve the right to murder anybody, when it suits my needs to protect myself. I will justify my possession and use of firearms through quoting the 2nd Amendment of the Constitution, as well as pointing to the fear and threats in our world, and our country as my own justification for stockpiling weapons. I will not listen to reason, as my mind is made up, and you can have my weapons after “prying them from my cold, dead hands” (thanks NRA, and the late mega-asshole Charlton Heston).

This list is the abbreviated list, as aspects of our collective selfishness covers the entire range of human darkness.  Men burdened by toxicity tend towards sexism, racism, isolation, poor judgement against all others unlike themselves, and low self esteem, while men moving towards spiritual healing tend to unite with others in peace and mutual acceptance, and a willingness to share an improving sense of their self with the world.

Most of these toxic masculinity values and principles underpin much of the common knowledge game, a process of collective consciousness that will be extensively developed in chapter six.  When each of these dark principles is “turned inside out”, the potential to create “the renaissance man” becomes highly likely.  To not heal and transform these toxicities is to continue to support and replicate the very disease that now plagues our world, and our Trump presidency.

 

Chapter Six

THE COMMON KNOWLEDGE GAME

(as played through Collective Consciousness)

The Common Knowledge Game (CKG) is a newer name for a form of consensus social understanding used in collective consciousness since humans became social animals. The CKG informs our understanding of our own lives, how we see and interact with others, and how to use it’s often times twisted knowledge of poor self-esteem and negative judgments of others to help inform our decisions about actions we can take in our own lives. There are several good books to be read on the matter, and articles on the theory are available on the internet, should your own insight into or experience of it not be sufficient for its understanding. The “common knowledge game”, is a phenomena well-studied in the last generation by Nobel Prize winners, mathematicians, and New York Times best-selling authors and philosophers (this has been called many other names by seers and seekers over the millennia).  My thanks to several published authors for providing some of the background for the following discussion about the Common Knowledge Game.

I first consciously encountered the CKG in my employment with the US Postal Service during the time period from 1975 to 1985.  There were several  boundary conditions of the Common Knowledge Game for my continuing employment with that agency.  Many of my co-workers, and myself, worked there because we felt that we could do no other work, that we did not have the skills, qualification, competency, or motivation to try anything else.  Everybody knew that truth including members of the management team, not only about our selves, but also about all of our co-workers, which in turn, was what the co-workers understood about each other, as well.  It was part of shared story that we told to ourselves and joked about with each other on occasion.

In addition to the CKG, many of us also shared a common foe, chemical dependency.  Those two factors helped to define my relationship to the Post Office career, as well.  I really enjoyed my time working as a machine clerk, however, as the fast pace of the job, and the fact that it was a lifetime guaranteed job,  kept me from feeling too bad about my personal and employment decisions.  Even though I felt “trapped” by my own insecurities and dysfunctions, through the use of drugs and alcohol I found a way to sing in my cage often enough to delay the inevitable crush of despair that was to follow in earnest later on in my career after I joined the sorting machine maintenance department.

COMMON KNOWLEDGE GAME

What continues to set up the negative aspects of the CKG in our minds and hearts?  Our inaccurate assessments, or judgements of others, and of our self, both physical form and spiritual essence, is the foundation for the CKG, and the reason for the spiritual imprisonment for all of us. This internalized social process of consciousness has become culturally inculcated into our awareness, and we all share in this “collective consciousness”. This process has become so ingrained in consciousness, so accepted, so standardized, so normalized that the individual who even casually practices it continues to contribute to the imprisonment of all of mankind through this process.

Here is a more specific explanation and definition of the Common Knowledge Game (Game Theory is an offshoot of this phenomenon):

An item of information in a game is common knowledge if all of the players know it (it is mutual knowledge) and all of the players know that all other players know it and all other players know that all other players know that all other players know it, and so on. This is much more than simply saying that something is known by all, but also implies that the fact that “what is known by me” is also known by all, etc.  Thus, common knowledge implies not only that we all know some piece of information, but can also be absolutely confident that the rest know it, and that the rest know that we know it, and so on.

A positive example of this is the live performance of a popular musician in a stadium or other large venue.  Everybody is there because they already like the performer, and they already anticipate a great performance.  And, everybody knows that everybody else that is there also likes the performer, and anticipates a great show, or why else would they be there?  If it is a rock and roll performance, then everybody knows that it is acceptable, and almost demanded, of each other to show raucous audio support for the performer, and performance, whenever appropriate.  People see others cheering, dancing, clapping and carrying on, and this affirms their own intention to celebrate the performer and their performance, as well.  One mind, heart, and breath is shared by all, and the actions witnessed represent the collective energy of the experience of sharing the grouped mind.  It is the same experience at a religious revival meeting.

Consider a simple negative example of several jealous office workers seeking to demean a common foe, be it a boss or a motivated co-worker, through just plain nasty or capricious attitudes, or practicing racism, sexism, religious persecution, etc. (this can be several human beings practicing typical mutually inaccurate assessments of a party not currently in their presence, also typical of what happens in big companies, politics and Donald Trump style “tweet attacks” , high school, or in church). To those with prior knowledge, this will be reminiscent of the “mob mind”, and how it acts in the real world. The participants will not attack unless they are sure that the other will attack at exactly the same time, as nobody wants to be the lone attacker, becoming vulnerable and thus expose their own intent for aggression. The first person sends out a “feeler” (verbal exchange of internalized culturally inculcated thought process) to the other parties with the message “You know, I am really unhappy with Mr. X, he is problematic.” Yes, we warm up for the attack, by gently degrading the third-party, while awaiting the others reply within the group physically or emotionally present, which, hopefully affirms our intent. Our verbal or written means of attempting to communicate with the other “attackers” may be misinterpreted, so we initially have no collective security in adopting an “attack mode”. If however, the message of attack is received simultaneously by others within the group, which it does in “common knowledge modes of thought”, then the attack is on. Note that all parties already know the message. They all knew in advance that the “other attackers” had the message as well, because it is COMMON KNOWLEDGE that others share at least some of their negative perceptions, and they will attack the other, because they always have before, and they have already prepared their internal fortifications, as well as their “verbal and social weapons” for such an experience.

This is the classic attack/defense posture or mechanism that the entirety of the human race is now participating in. Anybody who has worked in the construction trades, or in work areas dominated by men, know this process quite well.  Anecdotally, I have heard it works in similar fashion in female dominated group environments, though I will not be able to speak directly to that experience. The terms repartee, badinage, bantering, persiflage, etc. are the kind names given to this culturally accepted, and sometimes revered process, whereby we “lightly and without intentional malice” impugn the dignity and reputation of others, through pokes at each other. We call this “humor”, and some may feel almost hurt when others do not engage in this behavior with us. This has been an accepted standard of behavior (though we are finally awakening to darker aspects of this by identifying hostile work environments, and instituting regulations for reducing persecution, racial discrimination, age discrimination, sexual harassment and sexual discrimination in the workplace).

In schools, the wimps, eggheads, goths, transsexuals, homosexuals, hippies, outcasts, or whatever name that defines the “out group” outside of the popular, socially accepted standards of behavior, can be quite susceptible to aggression, antagonism, and bullying.  I think that everyone reading this had experience with this phenomenon in grade or high school.  There only needs to be one in an “in” group, in the presence of others from that group, who may want to impress their peer group, and they begin by attacking a member of the ‘out” group.  It may be only verbal, or it can be a combination of both physical and verbal, but the rules of engagement have already been worked out generations in advance of any new bullying behavior.  It follows standards paths of aggression, hostility, belittlement, and debasement, and somehow the aggressor becomes elevated in stature, at the expense of the victim.  Of course, these are the same behaviors that get translated into our adult life as racism, xenophobia, and the callous judgement against the poor, old, disabled, and the rest of the compromised members of society, that our conservative Republican politicians and wayward POTU$ continue to try to abuse and deprive of health care and welfare.

Be aware, once again, of what the “common knowledge game” really is. In its negative incarnation, it is the process whereby we have internalized the verbal understandings of all others, whereby ignorant, judgmental, limiting, obfuscating, damaging, soul-destroying concepts of self and other are “socially acceptable” modes for assessing and understanding the self, and the other. This are internalized, and socialized, and this “knowledge” becomes a collectively shared experience. And, we all know that everybody else knows what we know, while we know what everybody else knows.  Within the Christian churches with backwoods understanding, we are all “sinners”, we are “corrupt”, we have no hope for “salvation”, etc. unless we believe a certain way, and bow down before certain philosophies and religious and political leaders.  Who wants to be damned to hell for eternity for not following the religious path?  Everybody knows that is where you go when you disobey the laws that are represented in the bible, or expounded upon by the minister.

Our culture shows many examples of this process playing out in movies, on TV programs, and, of course, we all experience this in our day-to-day lives, as we interact with our social and cultural environment. The implications are vast, and insidious. Please consider the following excerpt from the movie COOL HAND LUKE

Captain: You gonna get used to wearing those chains after a while, Luke. Don’t you never stop listening to them clinking, ‘cause they gonna remind you what I been saying for your own good.

Luke: I wish you’d stop being so good to me, Cap’n.

Captain: Don’t you ever talk that way to me. NEVER! NEVER! [Captain hits Luke, who rolls down the hill to the other prisoners] What we’ve got here is … failure to communicate. Some men you just can’t reach. So you get what we had here last week, which is the way he wants it. Well, he gets it. I don’t like it any more than you men.

The “failed” communication of the Captain to Luke is the basis for the successful communication of the Captain to the prisoners: subvert my rules and you will be crushed. The brutal message is made in public, not so that all the prisoners can see what happens to Luke, but so that all the prisoners can see all the prisoners seeing what happens to Luke.

In environments like prisons, the education system, the military, and larger groups up to, and including, American society, behavioral decisions based on private information (“I saw Luke beaten down for breaking the rules. If I break the rules I might get beaten, too.”) are almost always weaker than behavioral decisions based on Common Knowledge (“Everyone knows that if you break the rules like Luke you will be beaten down. Why would I even think about breaking the rules?”). The latter has more binding power, because, in effect, the prisoners themselves end up enforcing the warden’s (or society’s) rules. Even if you privately believe that you and your fellow prisoners could make a break for it, so long as you believe that “everyone knows” that you will be punished for breaking the rules, then you do not believe that you will receive any support from your fellow prisoners (fellow citizens, or friends). It is irrational to even raise the subject with your fellow prisoners, as you will mark yourself as someone who is either too stupid or too dangerous not to recognize what everyone else knows that everyone else knows. And because everyone is making a similar calculation, no one ever makes an escape attempt and the Common Knowledge grows stronger over time, as does the no-escaping binding attitudes. This is why the Captain goes to such lengths not just to punish Luke for his escape attempts, but to break Luke, and not just to break Luke, but to break Luke as publicly as possible.

Because of the Common Knowledge game, there is enormous power in making a public spectacle out of information, which is why our local and national news, especially those tainted by the present day propaganda generators (see Fox News and Sinclair Broadcasting), Presidential Twitter posts, terminations from employment, public humiliations, coronations and executions (remember Timothy McVey?) alike are carried out in front of live audiences, posted to Facebook, broadcast through Twitter feeds, and/or are televised.  This lesson in behavioral influence – the crowd doesn’t just need to see the event, the crowd needs to see the crowd seeing the event – is why religious revival events, rock concerts, and so many of our modern social institutions – from political campaigns to American Idol – are staged in front of live audiences. When you sit in front of your TV set and watch, say, a national political convention, you are infinitely more engaged with the event when you see a crowd than when you don’t. We can’t help our self. It doesn’t even matter if the live audience is faked and we know that the audience is faked … have you ever listened to a sitcom without a laugh track? It’s just not as funny. The fact is that humans are social animals. We are hard-wired to look for and respond to Common Knowledge, and smart people – from political leaders to religious leaders to business leaders and concert organizers– have taken advantage of this for years.

What happens in religious cults or in the diseased family structure, where alcoholism and drug addiction, physical and sexual abuse, and/or psychological abuse of all types is present? There are many situations of discipline and control that exactly parallel the common knowledge game. Eventually, the members, or children learn not to attempt to act out, or break free from, the oppressive qualities of an abusive parent, or parents, their church and its interpretation of “religious thought”, their cult leader, and/or their educational experience. Breaking the spirit of the abused family member, and making sure that other members know that such “punishment” will also come their way keeps the victims under control, and traumatized. Children entering the school system where bullies are allowed to run free get to experience this process repeatedly, in a bigger social setting. And, people who attend a church where the dignity of the individual is constantly degraded through their religious philosophy (you are a sinner, you always have been a sinner, and unless you believe the way we do, you are evil, and doomed to an eternity in hell) also will feel the horrific abuse of the COMMON KNOWLEDGE GAME. If any of us were to speak out against our oppressors, we will be punished severely, and we will be smacked down, and “roll down the hill” just like what happened to Paul Newman in the movie Cool Hand Luke.

So, our COMMON KNOWLEDGE GAME keeps all of us in some sort of order, albeit one that affirms the false truth that we are all broken human beings, with our only hope for salvation lying with chaotic, and insane, orders of unreality that continue to be inculcated into our collective consciousness. In other words, unless we march to the drummer of our religious and cultural past, we will be judged, persecuted, marginalized, and otherwise thrown to the wolves, with little hope for our own redemption.  Woe to the brave individual that strikes out on his own,  and attempts to find a new way of being in this world of chaos, distraction, and torment.

Our culture encourages men to engage in the Conspiracy of Silence daily, which is a most deadly component of the CKG.  These include encouraging the following admonitions:

don’t talk

don’t tell

don’t touch

don’t feel

don’t engage

don’t listen

don’t change

These are attitudes that we witness over and over again in far too many men in our lives.  The Conspiracy of Silence is a common practice for addicts, alcoholics and generally dysfunctional people of both genders, and is also a prime underlying principle in the Common Knowledge Game.  There is little wonder as to why our culture is so emotionally and  spiritually disfigured, with the men being, predominantly, the control figures within our civilization

The Buddha had his own ideas about what constitutes mental health, and by his definition anyone who isn’t well on the way to Enlightenment is insane. Quite how literally he meant it when he said “All humans are mad” is hard to say, but when he looked at ordinary people like us going about their daily business he saw a world out of balance — and a world that by necessity is out of balance, because it is composed of those same off-kilter individuals.  He viewed this imbalance as a form of perversion, inversion, and/or derangement  He understood that we, collectively, misunderstand the world that we live in, misunderstand ourselves, thus we all end up living in a virtual reality of delusion, confusion, and distortion.  What’s more, we largely share the same delusions, which mean that we don’t even realize that our minds are disturbed.

As Krishnamurti suggests, it’s possible to think that we’re spiritually and mentally healthy because we share our mistaken values and understandings with those around us. Collectively, our ill minds create social circles, or society that is itself ill, and we consider ourselves healthy because we see our values reflected in our spiritually sick fellow travelers.

Jesus of Nazareth stated quite clearly that “My kingdom is not of this world”. Also he stated “Be in this world, yet do not be of it”. And, “Do not attempt to remove the sliver from each other’s eye, before first removing the log from your own eye”. Finally, he also stated “Straight is the way, and narrow is the gate, and very few there are who will enter in”. “Truly I tell you,” Jesus also said, “unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.

This is a pretty clear message, for those who have “ears to hear”.

Pockets of conscious, self-aware, healthy people have been sprouting up among the weeds of American misunderstanding since the beginning of our time together as a people and nation. Perhaps these pockets will someday be woven into  a national garment of spiritual, intellectual, emotional, and physical well-being, to be worn by all. This is not happening while I am still alive, however, and may not ever be realized in our time, or any time for that matter. Changes must happen within consciousness itself, and the “common knowledge game” that we all unconsciously play must be examined, and re-examined again and again, until we are no longer subjugated to its darker sides of oppression and repression of human spirit.

Yes, our country is in a downward spiral, where telling the truth is no longer a virtue, but instead it is bastardized, and spun into alternate reality fantasies, to be just another tool to be abused by propagandists. Propagandists are masters at manipulating fear, distrust, lies, half-truths, and specious reasoning, which also help to create new channels of control in the Common Knowledge Game.  We are in a war of ideologies, and the “first victim of war is the truth”. Supporting and promoting Pseudo-Christian Apocalyptic irrationality, and making “America Great Again” for the rich, for the polluting energy industry, and for the military, spells doom for the rest of us, and for our precious world.  Donald Trump and his family constitute non-holistic capitalism, and, at times, a borderline criminal enterprise. It is both a reflection on Donald Trump, and of America itself, that a known liar, cheater, manipulator, and one time Russian money dependent bankrupt businessman would be elected as Commander-in-Chief.

The most corrupt human being to occupy the White House in many, many generations (maybe ever?) knows a little about corruption and lying. It is kind of hard not too, since he is a master at both. Accusing others of his own bad behavior is typical of all “projectionists”, especially when guilty of all charges, and unable to mount a rational defense. The only fake news here is when Donald Trump opens his hyperbolic mouth, and entertains his minions with his verbal drooling. This dirty diaper of a human being needs to be changed, QUICKLY. 

TREASON:  Trump Related Extreme Anxiety Strikes Our Nation.

One of the oldest, most superstitious understandings of God has to do with some sort of “higher power in the sky”. Those artistic renditions of a man on a throne, with angels circling his head really captures the imagination, doesn’t it? What the image does not capture, is the truth about God, and our relationship to a “higher power”. Yet, this powerful metaphor, shared through the CKG for thousands of years, makes sure to keep our “higher power” separate from us, and, mostly unavailable to us, as well. We are told to look for our entire life outside of ourselves for our greater good. We can’t help but confuse material objects, and graven images, for our source of happiness and “salvation”. And, we must not forget to sacrifice our “first born son” to this idol of personal disempowerment, to this graven image, ladies and gentlemen!  We end up worshiping the dead, materialism reigns supreme, and, thus, so does our soulless capitalistic philosophy.

THE OLD MAN UP THERE

The Ultimate Position, God, has been vacated by that White Bearded White Man wearing flowing robes, who used to sit on, and rule from the Golden Throne. Yes, that old, worn out fantasy of an image for God no longer serves the awakening consciousness of our world, though it still serves the ignorant, and the artist, quite well.

I have an idea. . . Donald Trump could resign from the presidency, be given that position, rule from his White Porcelain Altar, and not miss a beat, or a wipe. It is said that his greatest thoughts are engraved daily upon the sacred white Twitter scrolls of his toilet paper. His followers will have the same success worshiping this false Idol as they did his “predecessor”.

It is a win-win proposition. Our country can then survive and prosper, and Trump can stay in his ignorant, hateful, delusional world, ruling without conflict, while the rest of his hypnotized minions continue to ponder why they feel abandoned by their “God”.

In God’s Universe, and Mind, all that is ever seen, unto eternity, is Itself. In Trump’s universe, in which he sees “shit-hole countries”, rest assured that this is the most revealing insight into how he sees himself, and his relationship to the ALL. All of the Universe is but a ‘shit hole’ to Trump, if it has no use to him with his self-serving agendas. Pardon me if I excuse myself from his twisted, deluded “divine mission’.

The rest of humanity can continue to witness the real God working It’s Love and Miracles with the Awakened People Of Our Country, and The World, guiding the Aware, opened Hearts and Minds, as It always has. The dark and ignorant will continue to unconsciously benefit, without ever knowing why. And Trump can continue to be worshiped as the Dark King that he is.

Just a thought, with my verbal tongue planted firmly in my cheek.

Yes, the “devil made me do it!”

Also a most insidious part of the CKG is the belief in our leaders and religious texts without exposing their message to the light of reason and truth.   We have tens of millions of Americans who believe in their “leaders” no matter what (and many of these “blanket believers” also regard their religious “reasoning” AS BEYOND QUESTION), thus insanity and irrationality are built right into most of our collective understandings, and our individual personalities. i have little or no hope for that backward segment of our country, and the poor will always be among us and have a need to be dealt with. The laziness of their obese minds, overweight with rampant materialism, distrust of others unlike themselves, and ignorance, coupled with the rest of America’s present ineffectiveness at dealing with this national disgrace known as our POTU$, will potentially rain down all sorts of cruel and unfortunate outcomes upon all of us.

A variation of the Common Knowledge game appears in a story first presented in ancient times.  Plato has Socrates describe a group of people who have lived chained to the wall of a cave all of their lives, facing a blank wall. The people watch shadows projected on the wall from objects passing in front of a fire behind them, and give names to these shadows. The shadows are the prisoners’ reality. Socrates explains how the philosopher is like a prisoner who is freed from the cave and comes to understand that the shadows on the wall are not reality at all, for he can perceive the true form of reality rather than the manufactured reality that is the shadows seen by the prisoners.

The inmates of this place do not even desire to leave their prison, for they know no better life. The prisoners manage to break their bonds one day, and discover that their reality was not what they thought it was. They discovered the sun, which Plato uses as an analogy for the fire that man cannot see behind. Like the fire that cast light on the walls of the cave, the human condition is forever bound to the impressions that are received through the senses. Even if these interpretations are an absurd misrepresentation of reality, we cannot somehow break free from the bonds of our human condition – we cannot free ourselves from phenomenal state just as the prisoners could not free themselves from their chains. If, however, we were to miraculously escape our bondage, we would find a world that we could not understand – the sun is incomprehensible for someone who has never seen it. In other words, we would encounter another “realm,” a place incomprehensible because, theoretically, it is the source of a higher reality than the one we have always known; it is the realm of pure Form, pure fact.

Through a process which has existed since verbal consciousness first formed in humanity, we develop verbal constructs to represent the outside world in our own internal universe. Yet, none of these internalized assessments are 100% accurate, NOR COULD THEY EVER BE, even though the entirety of human consciousness now shares in the illusion that what they do represent what is actually “out there” as represented by their current misunderstanding of their fellow human being, and their current relationship to the other (“the finger pointing at the moon can never be the moon”). And, we use these constructs to oppress, repress, and deny the other, all the while unconsciously honoring the culturally inculcated process of mutual oppression, and repression, of the “innocent one within us” or our divine nature.

The healthy, sane, spiritually inspired individual steps outside of the COMMON KNOWLEDGE GAME, and practices seeing him or herself through a new lens with few or NO VERBAL CONSTRUCTS from our culturally damaged memories, the only “place” where a “heart centered experience” of the other becomes possible. Ultimately, if there is any words to be shared about what is experienced, it serves only as a temporary bridge to understanding, to be discarded at the earliest possible moment, as truth reveals itself MOMENT TO MOMENT, and not just through the shared verbal constructs of a dead past that may have arisen.

In mystical Christianity, The WORD was meant to represent the spiritually realized person, whose very being, and words, come from the Truth as it exists in this eternal moment. Historically, some religious interpreters mistakenly believe that the Word becomes flesh in only one human form (Jesus), and dwelt among us some 2000 years ago (sorry, to those who misinterpret the first Christian mystic, St. Paul and his main disciple through the New Testament book of John). The Word actually points to a loving, non-verbal reality, far above and beyond the limiting verbal beliefs and insane actions of man in the world, and it also points to the human beings who through all time have been able to access that energy, express it in new, unique, loving ways, while practicing its universal principles in all of their affairs.

Chapter Seven

MALE TERRORISM: SOME MEN, AND WOMEN, JUST WANT TO WATCH THE WORLD BURN.

I have made a personal acquaintance with the Hindu God, Lord Shiva, the god of Destruction. Of all the “gods’ that the human race consciously or unconsciously worships, this aspect of most American male egos needs some dissection and examination, so that the entirety of our human race will no longer be hypnotized by its apocalyptic spell.

The unconscious male, Christian, American, Russian, Muslim, Jew, or whatever label you like, is the seed bed for true terrorism in our world.

I will submit a great series of exchanges between Alfred and Batman (Bruce Wayne), from within the Batman movie, the Dark Knight, showing how the writers caught the very essence of the “God of Terror” that lives within us:

Bruce Wayne: [while in the underground bat cave] Targeting me won’t get their money back. I knew the mob wouldn’t go down without a fight, but this is different. They crossed the line.

Alfred Pennyworth: You crossed the line first, sir. You squeezed them, you hammered them to the point of desperation. And in their desperation, they turned to a man they didn’t fully understand.

Bruce Wayne: Criminals aren’t complicated, Alfred. Just have to figure out what he’s after.

Alfred Pennyworth: With respect Master Wayne, perhaps this is a man who *you* don’t fully understand, either. A long time ago, I was in Burma. My friends and I were working for the local government. They were trying to buy the loyalty of tribal leaders by bribing them with precious stones. But their caravans were being raided in a forest north of Rangoon by a bandit. So, we went looking for the stones. But in six months, we never met anybody who traded with him. One day, I saw a child playing with a ruby the size of a tangerine. The bandit had been throwing them away.

Bruce Wayne: So why steal them?

Alfred Pennyworth: Well, because he thought it was good sport. Because some men aren’t looking for anything logical, like money. They can’t be bought, bullied, reasoned, or negotiated with.

SOME MEN JUST WANT TO WATCH THE WORLD BURN.

Cue in Donald Trump’s and Steve Bannon’s white supremacist, pseudo-Christian apocalyptic visions and propaganda, and one can see a phenomenon that our culture rarely speaks about, because male patriarchy subjugates and dominates the truth, moderates all discussions about the truth, and establishes the conclusions which become future truths, asserting whatever fiction fits the need of the entrenched masculine power brokers at any particular time.

Within all men lies the seeds of the destruction of our very planet Earth. It has been given many names over time, but the end result is that when men are stressed at a high enough level, we will self-destruct (including  the destruction of all others, as well) if we perceive our creations are imperfect, and no longer deserve our love, respect, and support.  MAD is a great acronym, for mutually assured destruction, a principle underlying all war and man’s inhumanity against man.

A rational, introspective, evolving human being would use our imperfection to hone our insight into unfolding a higher reality within ourselves, but for most men, such a change is threatening, and healing is regarded as a threat to our very being. I let “healing” chase me through the gates of hell, to Death’s actual doorstep, and only when I made a decision to change the way i look at life, could help come my way.

Yes, the collective insanity of the American male (perhaps the world male) is on display right now. Only those men in denial, or with limited awareness of self and other, would ever deny this fact.

Cue in all of the murder/suicides, alcoholism, drug addiction, alienation, child abuse, homelessness, monetization of humanity for the benefit of the few, and, ultimately, insanity, and we see the dark aspects of the world we now live in. This unspoken internal terrorist is the ultimate bullying behavior that we consciously, or unconsciously, utilize as men, when we have had our egos threatened, with no safety outlets perceived.

Only desperate, disconnected human beings would place their faith in this century’s version of the anti-Christ. Trump, Putin, Pence, and Steve Bannon (that the four-headed lying monster) have their plan for ascendancy after they deploy their self-serving, wallet fattening, Apocalyptic Insurrection.

The NRA is a front organization for this movement of self-destruction by the American male.  I will now make another quick diversion into the darkened American Male underbelly of guns, gonads, and greed.  Toxic masculinity, toxic capitalism, toxic religion and the NRA’s ideas around guns, are filled with holes, BULLET HOLES. I have written extensively about toxic masculinity, and there is a direct relationship between the damaged American male, and the incidence of gun marketing, distribution, sales, use, and murder and terrorism within our country. Enough is enough, my fellow male (and supporting female) citizens who are hypnotized by the destructive potential of their weapons of war, and by the extremist hooligans that so effectively promote their value to our diseased society.

Human and civil rights are not equivalent to gun rights, period, and, in fact, supersede all philosophical claims to dominion by extremist gun rights advocates. Owning a gun is a privilege, NOT A RIGHT. The 2nd Amendment has been fine tuned by neurotic, overzealous gun rights advocates to promote ideals not conforming to a rational, effective approach to gun safety and ownership. No individual is a militia, no matter how megalomaniacal they may be, and it is utter nonsense that paranoid people use that as an excuse to stockpile weapons of mass-destruction. See US Supreme Court Justice Warren Burger’s comments on this issue, if you do not trust my point of view.

These are statements of common sense, law, reason, and love. Those who “politicize” this issue with divisive, hateful reasoning, form their deadly alliances (see NRA) around their fears, to help prevent our society from healing. It is up to us to challenge these defective ideas in open forum, and to vote out of office all politicians who support politically sanctioned mass murder, and strictly regulate or ban the weapons used to assault our families, our own bodies, and our sensibilities.

An American society dominated by the self-destructive and other-destructive fantasies of sick minds, (including the ultra-conservative “Christian followers” who believe in Armageddon, and who are doing everything in their power to create the conditions for it), have created this unsafe, upside down world where weapons of mass destruction are worshiped as tools of freedom and safety, rather than being seen for what they are, which are tools for murder, propagation of fear, bullying, and self-righteousness.

The floodwaters of gun violence have been created by the unleashing of weapons upon our society by the twisted advocates of the 2nd Amendment, gun manufacturers, the NRA, and insane minds who understand nothing but fear, self-preservation, and hatred. It is impossible to save ourselves from the ravages of flooding brought about by the dam bursting, so why don’t we work on preventing the dam from bursting in the first place?

Freedom is not preserved and protected through the threatened use of lethal force of one citizen upon another with guns. Freedom is preserved and protected through the understanding that the enemy lies within our own consciousness, and then healing our world through insight, and the cultivation of collaboration, unity, justice, and love. To the extent that Christian America believes in their weapons, is the extent that they do not believe in their supposed Christian ideals, period. The ultra-conservative “Christian” gun promoter is a wolf in sheep’s clothing, and should be recognized as such.

Time to listen up, America. Time to shut up, NRA, and the politician’s feeding at their troughs of gun violence, death and insanity. People that profit from the deaths of innocent civilians are worse than terrorists. Why does America support domestic terrorism? Do we understand that our culture is disfigured, diseased, and in need of dramatic change? Guns kill people, and the people who supply guns to people KILL PEOPLE.

There are those who prefer to gloss over the darkness in our society, and call the evil, bullying, and cruelty by names other than what represents the truth of the matter. Learn to recognize these people, and remember that in any coercive society, including Hitler’s Germany, these types of individuals were part of darkness’ support network, whether inadvertently by their own ignorance, or intentionally by their own malevolence.

I have spoken out against guns and gun violence since 1980, and my voice has been drowned out by those who speak louder than me. Now, I am starting to believe that the silent majority is finally going to assert itself, and our country steer towards more rational approaches to gun ownership, and control. Our culture is INSANE, as are the people who support the unfettered DISTRIBUTION AND SALE OF GUNS AND AUTOMATIC WEAPONS. Once again, their specious reasoning and heartless, hollow arguments are filled with holes, the bullet holes of death to our rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

We really are not a “Christian nation”, which may not be a bad thing, taking all factors into consideration, especially the spiritual destruction that our supposed “National Religion” has experienced through political rape and pillage by the brokers of corporate and political power. I believe that Christianity has long since died in this country, and has been taken over the last several generations by politicians and zealots intent on the disfigurement of our society, through contorting our nation so that it conforms to their own dark, selfish needs. These economic, religious, and political bullies create an imbalanced, disfigured world where economic and social disparity reigns supreme, and where violence and mass murder have become culturally acceptable byproducts of the need to serve their own conscious desires for self-promotion, corporate welfare, as well as their NRA masters. Little do they understand, that these are also unconscious desires for their own self-destruction, and the destruction of all others unlike their own mistaken understanding of themselves.

I am not an American Christian, I am appalled and disgusted by those in political power who profess a belief in Christian religious ideology, and go ahead and rape and pillage America in the name of their corrupt Gods of power, hubris, death, and greed. .I follow the directions that Truth and Love create for me in my life. I am not afraid to confront darkness, wherever it might appear, be it in the Church, in the NRA, Congress and in the White House, in our corporations, in my family, or even if it is within my own mind and heart

NRA prayer:  THE LORD’S PRAYER (corrupted)
Our father, who art in Heaven, hallowed be thy name,
Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven
Give us this day our daily munitions, and forgive us our poor marksmanship,
While we plot our revenge for the real or imagined trespasses of others.
And lead us not into temptation to be at peace without automatic weapons,
But deliver us from evil with our sacred AR-15’s,
For thine is the kingdom, the firepower, and the glorious gore of death, forever.
Amen

Politics, Insanity, guns, and religions, is an open marriage made in hell.  Satan smiles at one of his greatest creations.
Why are these evil cults of hatred, or religions tax exempt, and supported by Trump and other toxic Americans?

The hypocrisy of it all, Donald Trump and his violent, gun hoarding and toting gang of NRA supporters, will not even attempt to control the spread of weapons of war and mass destruction within our own country, yet he vainly tries to control the impulses of other countries.

DICKHEAD — Deceiver In Chief Knows He’s Evil And Divisive

Trump saying that he would run into a “shooting situation” even if he did not have a gun sounds almost consistent to me. He runs into intellectually challenging situations all of the time, with half a wit and no sensibility at all.
This is the same guy that avoided the Vietnam draft with a five deferments, one for a “foot disorder” or “bone spurs”. Little did anybody know that the “foot disorder” was just that he liked to put his foot in his mouth repeatedly.
Is there no sanity at all left in our leadership? Why are automatic weapons required for a sane society to operate effectively?. Age 18, 21, or 101, nobody needs weapons of mass destruction and murder PERIOD, except for our military, or spoiled gun hoarders, bullies, and murderers.

What is the true source of your fear, those who stockpile weapons and fear monger? Patriotism does not support terrorism, Christianity does not support gun violence and terrorism, and true patriots, be they Christians, Jews, Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists, agnostics, or atheists do not get confused by this.  Jesus, in whatever form “he spiritually exists today” would take his “spiritual sword”, and hack the ideas behind 2nd Amendment hooligans to pieces. If you are seeking for guns, and for weapons of war, you are not seeking for peace.

—-Robert Browning

How did I attempt to bring healing to my broken interior?  I first acknowledged that, of myself and my old ways, I was heading nowhere, and that I was doomed to repeat the same potentially fatal mistakes over and over again   I did have any childhood training in, nor did I spontaneously develop capacities for insight, positive change and growth.  I first needed to develop the emotional and spiritual fortitude to look at the entirety of my life, and then incorporate the experience for my greater good, which also impacts the whole of life in a more positive manner.  By developing the power of insight, I brought a new level of healing and awareness into this new, present moment of experience.  Some call this process “mindfulness:, though I just call it ‘taking personal inventory’, and improving my “conscious contact with my higher power” as I learned through practicing the 12 steps of Alcoholics Anonymous.  I have come to believe that there is a “power greater than myself” that lives within my internal reach that restores me to sanity, no matter how often I might fall.   Part of maintaining sanity is to allow for a continuous evolution of understanding and experience of what “God” or “Higher Power” is, apart from religious dogma, ignorance, politics, and superstition.

There was no minister, church, support group, therapist, Care Unit counselor, Indian guru, psychiatrist, mother, father,  sister, wife, friend, daughter, son, pet dog, or Jesus Christ figure that could dig into my unique version of the human soul, and remove the thorns/swords that had been thrust into my side since my birth.  My internal wounding and the resultant unsustainable suffering became the impetus to begin my inward journey, to face the absolute darkest areas of life itself, and then mine the treasure from my unique relationship with the dark force or shadow.  To not face myself would mean to continue living the second-hand/passed down story of dysfunction that I inherited from our culture and from my ancestors, from which we cannot ever completely heal, without first becoming aware of our internalized, unconscious subservience to those controlling agendas.

This is my story about my exploration of some of the more fundamental aspects of my consciousness, and, thus, of all human consciousness.  Virtually all of the interesting characters in history have struggled with, and have overcome, at least to some degree, a dark internal force, and it is their journey that becomes the stuff of great stories and legends.   I will try to give a context to this distress that I share with the rest of humanity.  For, the one is the many, and the many are the one.  The author and scholar Joseph Campbell refers to the “Hero’s Journey” that we all must take to find our true self, and the story about to follow is representative of my own version of it.

The length of my story  reveals the level of my resistance to life, an extreme resistance that may have begun in my mothers’ womb, or, maybe, it extends all the way back to the beginning of human consciousness, but, the start date is unimportant.  What is important is the intention to bring healing to a darkened situation.  The story that follows is my testimony to the complexity and the rewards of this process.

Interspersed throughout the story are the Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous, brief quotes from the Christian bible (I am not a fundamentalist Christian, nor even a member of that body of thought) as well as several songs by musicians that have a relevant message.  There will also be a few poems, some of which were written by me.  I have included some memes, links to other websites, and a couple of comics, as well.

“It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”

—-Jiddu Krishnamurti

American society has created the perfect conditions for our population to practice insanity and addictive behaviors, but it remains up to us as individuals to create our own conditions for recovery.  Self-awareness, personal inventory, making amends to all that we have harmed, working a strong spiritual program, mindfulness, meditation, eating healthier and exercising wisely, and hanging around like-minded people took me to the outskirts of my own “promised land”.  Life isn’t always pretty, but I remain personally responsible for my attitudes and behaviors, and I retain freedom of choice in most of my affairs. But, many have lost all such freedom of choice.   I have much compassion for those who still struggle with mental illness and alcoholism/drug addiction.  It is no mystery to me as to why those who still suffer choose death through suicide or continued dysfunction over a healing path.

Collective consciousness is comprised of all of the answers that our culture, our families, and all of our individual selves have dreamed up to some of the great questions of life.  The answers have become part of our philosophy, our history, our religion, the substance of our hopes and dreams, and the foundation for all of our nightmares.  My journey towards healing is documented below.  I will first briefly address the seed consciousness, where my own answers to the important questions of life gave rise to my interpretation of life, and of the universe.  My incomplete and inaccurate answers became the unstable foundation for my journey through collective consciousness, spurring me onto new paths of consciousness, in the eternal search for meaning, truth, beauty, healing, and, ultimately, God.  It is this very matrix of misunderstanding that we all must eventually embrace within ourselves, see it for what it really is, and isn’t, and then move through the illusions of self to the very foundation of our timeless soul, where peace and healing eternally resides.

Questions that I have pondered:

Why does suffering exist, and why does it visit me so often?

Who and what am I?

Is happiness, joy, and freedom possible in my life?

What am I really looking for, and will I ever find it?

What really is prayer?

Does religion have relevance anymore?

Can there be any truth. love, or justice to be found in the 21st century version of American Christianity?

What happened to the moral and ethical authority once touted as being endemic to Christianity?

Does religion hinder or help a modern-day seeker of God?

What is a “well lived life” and how do I achieve it?

What is good mental health, or what does it mean to be normal?

Who are my “people”, and where are they located?

Why do people cling to certain groups of people, and reject all others, and why do I feel rejected so often?

Why don’t people get along better with each other, and why have I become so isolated?

Will I ever fit in?  Will anyone ever notice me?

Why don’t I feel peace of mind?

What is death, and what does it mean to die to myself?

Why does our society and much of the world’s population continue to not experience peace of mind, with beauty, wonder, and the innate internal integrity of our (potentially) divine nature, and what might I do to attain these qualities?

Why is history defined predominantly by male energy, and why does my own life story spin so tightly around the male gender and its destructive byproducts?

Why do some men become spiritually and emotionally disfigured by their desire for sex?

What is the role of objectifying people in ignorance, racism, xenophobia, homophobia, and sexism?

Can men ever completely overcome objectifying women in their relationships with them?

Why do some men exercise excessive emotional control over their partners?

Why do I not feel satisfaction when I achieve the goals that I have set up for myself?

Why do I not feel joy when others achieve greatness, or accomplish great things for themselves?

Why do I sometimes feel threatened by others’ successes?

Why do I internally try to hold others back from success and positive social acknowledgement?

Why do I always seem to “self-destruct” right at the moment when I am about to achieve great success?

Will I ever completely understand myself, and others?

What is oppression, and what is my relationship to it?

What is repression, and why do I participate in it?

Why is expressing real human emotions such a double-edged sword, and why are my feelings so hard to identify sometimes?

Why are some people always so angry, indifferent, detached, or depressed, and can these people ever see me for who I am?

Why is anxiety the defining feeling of this age, and why is it so hard to heal from it?

Where is the love that I feel is missing from my life?

Why don’t I feel more love for myself or for others?

Why do I continue to experience poor self-esteem?

Why is our culture so focused on youth and physical appearance?

Why am I so self-conscious, and will I ever be accepted for who I am?

Why do I feel that I have to always be competitive, or “better than the others” just to fit in?

Why is competition and greed, as presently coupled with Capitalism, the predominant economic system in our world?

Why does shame and guilt control so much of my life’s experience?

Is it possible to speak or live a lie long enough that we no longer can accept or believe the truth?

Is a person’s silence because of an absence of opinion, or from a fear of speaking the truth?

Why can’t some people be more emotionally and spiritually present for others?

Why do people feel that they need to engage in mutual “control dramas”?

Why do people endlessly pursue entertainment and/or use drugs and alcohol to excess, and ignore their own personal transformation and healing?

Why is just more knowledge so much more important than intuition, wisdom and insight to most men and left brained dominated women?

Why is collaboration such a dirty word for a national political process?

Why do I have no desire to contribute to society in a more generous and meaningful way?

Will America Ever Fully Awaken?

My story indicates a path for a more holistic approach to the answer of some of these questions, and my answers may have a more universal application than to just my limited life experience. To satisfactorily answer all of these questions would require a series of trite responses, or a 5000 page book.

The following are formative energies that tend to shape and guide men in today’s America, and are the unintentional by-products of our incomplete answers for the previous questions:

Unconscious participation in the Common Knowledge Game of harsh and inaccurate self and other judgement, with resultant poor self-esteem inculcated into boys from birth by our wayward fathers, religions, and cultures,

Remaining ignorant or fearful of our own feelings, including anger and grief, or expressing them unskillfully,

Letting stress go on unabated in our lives, without challenging its points of origin

Loss of emotional and physical safety in home, school or work environments

Not communicating honestly with others, and carrying the feeling of not being heard or appreciated,

Eschewing deep and meaningful relationships with others,

Excessive competitiveness with others while engaging with greed, trying to “keep up with the Jones’ “,

Proving self-worth in environments where self, and others’, worth is disrespected, thus trying to fit in where we really don’t belong,

People pleasing, at the expense of our personal integrity

Not speaking up for ourselves or for others that are oppressed for fear of being marginalized,or further victimized

Over immersion in entertainment, excess reliance upon Snapchat, Facebook, or other social media platforms for social awareness and connection

Excessive eating and/or eating excessive sugar or processed foods

Not exercising, not hiking in Nature and thus staying away from its healing balm

Excessive drinking of alcohol, use of recreational drugs to the point of habituation (including marijuana),

Smoking or chewing tobacco,

Using sex as a way to emotionally hide or escape, or to manipulate others,

Workaholic behavior, and forgetting how to laugh and play well with others

These and other phenomenon represent the factors that most men encounter or employ in our efforts to meet the needs for economic security, establish our place in society, relieve stress and keep ourselves at least marginally happy, and pursue family fulfillment, including ones sexual gratification. And, statements of personal well-being, such as those listed below, were anything but “facts of life” for most men.

I am worthy,

I am safe,

I am whole,

I am loving and lovable,

I have something worthwhile to say

What do we really want and need, as human beings, and what might we need, that we have yet to be able to express clearly to others?  I have listed a few possibilities below, please add your own to the list.

To be able to express our thoughts and feelings authentically, without bringing unnecessary harm to ourselves or to others

To belong, to feel safe while belonging, including the desire to help and protect others while helping oneself,

To speak up, and feel like we really were heard, and not have our spirit layered over with errors in reasoning and judgement by others,

To be able to listen to another at the deepest level possible, and be present in the spirit of understanding, cooperation, and collaboration.

To feel whole, and to be able to recognize that wholeness, not only within ourselves, but within all others, even those living in alternative realities.

To love all others, as well as to be accepted, and loved, by others, with as few conditions attached as possible.

To evolve, for if we do not, we become subject to the forces of friction and chaos inherent within a closed mind, and system, resulting in higher physical and mental disease and dysfunction.

A most important issue of the emotions is our willingness and ability to skillfully express our anger  All too many of us have been victimized by family members, friends, acquaintances, co-workers, or strangers who have aggressively and maliciously used this emotion in an attempt to control or abuse others.  Anger gets a really bad name from those who are of a sensitive nature, whose being does not respond well to strong emotions, and from those who have fear of anger itself.  I know that when I did something wrong as a child, and my father either witnessed it or heard about it, he got angry, and my ass got whipped by his belt, so anger sure had a bad association in my mind between its expression and my pain!

Anger is appropriate in these times, but constructively using this energy for the good of the people requires understanding, however. We are beings of energy, GREAT ENERGY, but that energy gets pushed away every time we fail to recognize that anger may be one of our most important spiritual assets available. There is a vast difference between anger and hatred, and those who confuse the two, in the name of their own dis-empowered belief systems, have given themselves permission to not rise up publicly, and to speak out against those who are attempting to oppress, dominate, and control us. Anger can inform our Passion, and give us access to that extra energy needed to rise up, and speak out. Sitting back on our hands, and developing spiritual philosophies that allow us to ignore what we are viewing is tantamount to creating more FAKE NEWS, and normalizing that which is insanity.

We can’t dismiss what is going on, and deny our hearts and spirits, when there are millions of dis-empowered citizens who cannot defend themselves, or speak out against the oppression, ESPECIALLY WHEN THEY HAVE THEIR RELIGIOUS AND SPIRITUAL LEADERS CONTINUING TO FOIST DIS-EMPOWERING BELIEFS, AND PHILOSOPHIES, UPON THESE UNSUSPECTING ADHERENTS. Though their hearts may be in the “right place”, this is not the time for more dis-empowering agendas from those who have already given themselves permission not to stand up and be counted .Righteous indignation and anger may not be for everybody, but those who have been inspired by these powerful energies can harness them for the greater good of mankind, and, for themselves.

An appropriate response to the needless suffering of others IS ANGER, especially when we are witnessing the same ignorant oppressors repeating the same antagonistic actions over and over again. Speaking out in loud voices is a powerful way to let the oppressors know that we are NOT SHEEP WILLING TO BE LED TO OUR SLAUGHTER, but instead we are warriors willing to stand up and defend our self, our families, our neighbors, and our world. The Liars and Thieves that many times takes the form of politicians and national leaders need to be able to hear our voices. The feeble, baying voices of the multitudes of oppressed sheep of this world will continue to be persecuted, oppressed, and their human values will continue to be systematically trod upon. The AWAKENED AMERICAN has never been a member of that dis-empowered flock, however.

My heart breaks for the innocent, yet somehow, miraculously, love still lives.   And I want to give the reader some hope, after so much description of the down side of the American male consciousness.   My philosophical background predisposes me to the discussion of the blocks to love’s awareness and experience, for by seeing completely the shades pulled over Truth, ultimately we will see through them, to where the mystery of the unknown, and Love itself, actually resides. The capacity for insight brings change, in the actual seeing IS AWAKENED THE CAPACITY FOR LASTING INTERNAL CHANGE.  The  Kingdom of Love is where the need for words is almost negated, unless one is a poet, or a writer seeking an audience or a book deal.

THE FOOLS

You know who we are, there is no need for our names

We may be outwardly different, but inside we are the same

We vacation on ego trips, and with the world play strange mind games

While striving for material success, and its dubious fame

We remain graceless souls trying to blend into life’s masses

Some affirming our uniqueness, though we remain stuck in the same class

With  our delusions of grandeur, while appearing just like an ass

And steering clear of self-awareness, Oh our transparency of glass!

At times spewing words of wisdom, but with only another dogs’ bark

Seeking to make a good life, but on life’s script still leaving just a dirty mark

Believing we may have seen light, but, if so, why is our life always so dark?

Needing more purifying inner flames, while snuffing every divine spark

Though we think that we have blossomed, we do not possess Love’s flower,

We hope for a life carried by the river of sweetness, while we still wade through the sour

Never realizing that, over life, we hold very little power

We can only avoid the reality of our lives, while living in our ivory tower

We tend to bring up life’s rear, though we think that we should be first

And from life we want all of the best, somebody else deserves the worst!

We think that our life should be more blessed, why on earth do we feel cursed?

Our lives just become overblown bubbles, just waiting to be burst!

Individuals who are addicts/alcoholics, and/or who are mentally ill, and the cultures that breed and support that behavior, and who are not yet ready to face their shame, guilt, fears, and insecurities consciously will not have an easy time of it in recovery and in the search for greater meaning in their lives. There are many religious paths to take,  methodologies for achieving and maintaining sobriety, and therapeutic modalities and medications available for mental illness, and the technique chosen should be wisely considered based on personal needs and philosophies-or lack of them. For those who just want to treat the body, and not the mind or Spirit, there are injections available to reduce alcohol and/or drug cravings, and medications to temporarily treat the illnesses of the mind, which may be all that the sufferer needs for now, especially if they have little inclination towards personal awareness, insight, and spiritual evolution.

Each of my mentally ill or substance abusing family members knows of my own drug addicted and alcoholic background, and so far has had little use for my experience, strength, and hope in sobriety, showing that my “process for recovery” has debatable value for a diseased mind that has no desire to change. A common statement uttered by a practicing alcoholic/addict is “I don’t have a problem”, or, “he/she is the one with the problem, not me!” Denial of the facts of addiction and/or toxic attitudes, and justification for continuing unhealthy behaviors, results in the creation of the “fake news” that they don’t have a problem with drugs and alcohol and our underlying consciousness, and this sad fact remains a constant for most sufferers of addiction and Toxic Masculinity and Toxic Religion.  Our culture is insane, and the insanity has crept into all of our families, and all of our individual lives, whether we want to face it, or not.

One of my problems with religion in general, their prophets, messengers, and associated religious texts, is that they take a scatter-gun approach to delivering their message.  Most of their “truths” are hard to digest, and they tend to speak AT the listener or student, rather than speaking TO the student or practitioner.  There are those blessed few who are attuned to the inner value or meaning of the truth being delivered, and the message speaks TO the listener.  It has been said that those are the ones who were either born with or somehow learned how to develop and practice spiritual discernment.  In the hearing of Love, or Truth,  hope for change is stimulated, and the internal motivation to make necessary changes in the course of one’s life begins.

There is one more step, however, with religious attainment, or attunement.  Only a few in recorded history have developed the capacity to have their religion, their God, their Buddha Mind, their Christ Consciousness speak THROUGH them.  In Christian mystical terms, this is the word made flesh, and dwelling among us.  Ministers and politicians ever so rarely qualify for this exalted state, as experts and practitioners of the law  have limited access to the spirit behind it.  Watch out for television preachers and evangelicals, as they are ministers of propaganda, and are money accumulating propagators of illusion, delusion, deception, and fear, while preying on the ignorant, and the innocent.

If this book finds that its readers feel like this work only speaks AT them, then the work has little lasting value.  If the reader feels that this work speaks TO them in some way, however, then a true connection has been made, and human energy has been exchanged, for the betterment of the reader and the writer.  This is a fundamental form of energy exchange, or prayer.  But if a reader somehow finds a truth within this work that resonates within their mind and heart, to the point of dislodging some repressed or oppressed divine energy, an enlightenment or liberation is attained that the whole human race has the potential to benefit from.  If healing, wholeness, or divinity subsequently speaks THROUGH the reader, then this becomes a form of universal prayer that genuinely has the chance to help in the healing of the planet.  To this point, nothing I have ever said or written has led anybody into the “promised land”, so I would be happy if this story somehow finds a way to speak TO a few readers.  We can then share in a prayer with the potential to bring healing, wholeness, and divinity to us and the consciousness that we presently share.  I will leave liberation and enlightenment to the spiritual savants, and to their students that insist on hanging onto their every word.

There is a unique path that each one of us must take, to find our greatest good.  Those who continue to follow other people’s routes, at the exclusion of the route that their own internal GPS system is generating, risk losing all, including their freedom and their unique life expression.  Trying to fit in with and adapt to insanity, and the continuing attempts to normalize it, is the foundation for mental illness, our national schizophrenia, and its spawn, our present day corrupted economic, political, and religious systems.

Even though we as individuals did not create this disease of the human mind, and we appear to have little control over its wayward actions in others, or our society in general, we still have access to a cure.  The development of personal insight is a mechanism that points to the cure.  As we heal as individuals, and join with others who have also chosen to heal, we can create a new culture of healing, and awakening, and reduce the destructive effects of social oppression and the repression of our inner, truest natures.

Built right into the very fabric of life, is death itself.  There are up to fifty trillion cells within our human bodies which are constantly dying off, and being replaced by others so that we can continue to live, and even evolve (or regress as the situation may dictate).  So also should all of our old thoughts die off, to be replaced by newer, more vibrant creations, if we are to continue to live, and grow, and even evolve.  Those who do not do the work to shed the old ways, the old thoughts, the incomplete and inaccurate ways of seeing life, and being in life, will remain the “poor among us”, and more susceptible to the ravages of disease, aging and deterioration of the mind and body.  Yet, even though the disease and despair wrought by toxic male energy is woven throughout the collective garment that now covers our humanity, there are many threads of hope interwoven within it, as well, and these threads are our hope for transcendence.

I continue to feel that A New Story Needs To Be Told by our teachers and leaders, and by ourselves.  The fatal flaw with all philosophies touting the coming of a new age of peace and enlightenment is that they fail to embrace a fundamental flaw in the human mind, its character and reasoning.  And, this flaw typically arises in the male dominated mind, with a few notable exceptions.  Those who continue to promote the “light”, without first addressing the required walk through the personal and collective “darkness”, are offering up shallow containers for those who need to drink deeply from the waters of the Spirit.  We are left thirsty, and confused, as to why we do not reach the “promised land” as offered by others who are supposedly “in the know”.

Men use their philosophies to justify greed and selfishness, and to give themselves permission not to feel for others less fortunate than themselves, nor to even fully feel their own human emotions.  Male energy in general, and all patriarchal cultures are out of balance, having repressed so much of our basic, human (feminine) nature that we can no longer access our innermost divine/human nature, where all love and healing bubbles up from.  Men who can’t access their feelings, can’t access their higher natures, period.  The path to the Spirit goes directly through the flooding streams of human emotions.  Those who bypass this step live mostly from their “heads” rather than through their “hearts”.

I Looked For My Soul (by William Blake)

I looked for my soul,

But my soul I could not see.

I looked for my God,

But my God eluded me.

I looked for a friend,

And then I found all three.

May we all become friends of the Spirit.

 

U2–Love Is Bigger Than Anything In Its Way