Prologue-Book #8.
No More Turning Away—Breaking the Conspiracy of Silence
If you want to become whole, let yourself be broken.
If you want to become straight, let yourself be crooked.
If you want to become full, let yourself be empty.
If you want to be reborn, let yourself die.
If you want to be given everything, give everything up—Lao Tsu (in the Tao Te Ching)
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 to avoid blame, embarrassment, or another discomfort. .
I would like to encourage the reader to consider this challenging yet, potentially, transformative work. I will not promise eternal salvation or a seat next to God in heaven. I will not promise infinite financial prosperity and all the popularity that you need to fulfill your vision of who you think you need to be. I do promise that I will present deep and potentially healing truths to contemplate and to apply to your own life. Note that, while you read, many parts of yourself will be motivated to just put the book down and move on to something much more pleasant. If you can be more conscious of that inclination, you need not judge or condemn it, just witness it, and do not be carried by it back into perceptions of boredom, or even indifference to this subject matter. There need be no more turning away from the problems of ourselves or of this world, if we can engage our hearts and our intellect in a collaborative effort with the rest of the awakening world.
Do you want to know why things never change? It is because we let our “not relevant to me” or “don’t care” indifference algorithms rule our minds. I urge you from the very beginning of this work to hang in there and wait for a new miracle of perception to appear in your awareness that meditating upon this work may eventually stimulate within you. This work has amazing healing potential for those who are not trapped in culturally and religiously constrained patterns of unawareness, or, if they are trapped, are seeking release from these historical pillories. When our minds become clearer, our awareness naturally becomes more focused on what is dear to our hearts and most relevant to our spiritual intentions.
In 1987, I had a series of remarkable transformative events in my life. I was near death, and quite insane, and if I could not find a healing truth that would guide my life, I was prepared to leave this earth life. I found that truth, and I had what Christians might call a born-again experience, sans their prophet Jesus, and all the tradition and mythology surrounding that religion. This healing gave me a blank slate to write my new identity upon, without being burdened by most of the wayward attitudes of the old me.
However, the spiritual experience revealed the presence in consciousness of two trauma-created deep wounds, or “tricksters” that I did not have the knowledge or capacity to deal with at that time. I just hoped that the same healing experience that brought me into my new life would somehow take care of this trauma business behind the scenes. I thus never fully left the legions of others who suffered in silence. We all become a part of an unintentional conspiracy of silence, until we find our healing, and give voice to it. Most of us had no clue as to how to liberate ourselves from seemingly incurable social and emotional issues while finding support with others also suffering and seeking a spiritual awakening. My untreated wounds were to eventually rear their ugly heads and start controlling much of my life from 2005-2016, much like drugs and alcohol had before 1987,
The tricksters do not magically dissolve without some sort of conscious interaction with them. I was to find that most spiritual teachings, religions, and prophets for those traditions, except for Jesus spending forty days in the wilderness dealing with himself and the collective concept of satan, totally bypassed the necessary engagement with these powerful cultural and personal forces. This kept those unaddressed forces as unconscious advisors to all well-meaning practitioners. The concept of grace while pretending that others, or even God, have already done our work for us is a form of denial of our personal responsibility for bringing true spiritual and emotional healing to ourselves. The conspiracy of silence is maintained through this ignorance. Yet ancient shamans, the early Greek philosophers, and, more recently, Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell, Gabor Mate, Dick Schwarz, and the modern-day shaman Dr. Alberto Villoldo have pointed to the way to engage, transform, and transcend these ever-present forces in consciousness that impede our spiritual evolution.
A powerful realization came to me that I could no longer just keep taking crap from past versions of myself and a society that drains the life force out of all its unconscious members. just so we could continue in our own unexamined, unconscious, unhealed existence while parading around with everybody as if everything is still OK. Most of the scars on our hearts were not left by our enemies, but they were left by the culture, the religion, and the people who claimed to love us the most. I finally realized that I wanted and deserved love, while the world that we live in thinks that it deserves more comfort, entertainment, distraction, religious and political fantasy and delusion, and avoidance of difficult cultural truths, at the very expense of being more loving to itself, and to each other. I eventually found the love that I was looking for, but it did not come from this crazy world that we live in. The Love erupted within my mind and heart.
I did not write this book to entertain or amuse the reader. I wrote this book, not only to give voice to my process, but to give voice to those that never developed their healing message, or who lost their voice due to early deaths, and/or historical cultural oppression. The words that you are about to read may be considered to have an almost miraculous quality to them because they are written by a man who, by all rights, should be dead. Research for this book nearly cost me my life several times, and it is serious business to me. After living in my version of the conspiracy of silence and nearly dying at 31 years of age, I embarked on a life-changing search for truth. After 31 more years, I was finally able to give voice to my past, and to my suffering, as well as to point in the direction of healing’s true origins. Dead men tell no tales, and, often, the world would not have wanted to hear their message anyway, because the conditions that often lead to premature death and disease lie latent within all of us, and our denial of that fact is a powerful internal ruler for the unawakened.
I take a deep look at life and write extensively about it from a unique and rarely communicated perspective. Some of the writing covers the time before 1987 when I was a boy, then an addict and alcohol abuser, with my subsequent recovery experience, and search for truth. 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 45th POTU$. I will talk about the history of humanity. I will touch upon the divine immanent within us all. These topics will not be a draw for all people, as such personal and/or cultural toxicities tend 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. Any talk about God or religion is sure to stoke the fires of resistance within those who are hardened in their present understanding, or lack of it. The conspiracy of silence is almost an all-powerful force in our cultural awareness.
This is hard-hitting material., and for many people, it will be difficult to read. What I have already seen from friends and family is that they already have too much to consider, too many family troubles, too much distraction to even consider such intensive and extensive work. And, many have not yet even begun their journey of self-discovery and are unconscious of the effects of individual and culturally derived trauma. Please remember, that these words have a value many will not immediately recognize, and thus, it can be easy to casually dismiss them and move on to more important matters. But these words have immense importance to me, and I would not be here had I not decided to keep living, and find an accurate description of the challenges that living in this diseased culture brings, and why so many like me felt the need to leave it prematurely or engage in self-and/or other destructive activities. .
According to the latest neuroscientific studies, led by Antonio Damasio, our identity as a human being is much more determined by the collaboration of all cells within our bodies and our feeling nature than our left brain-dominated rational processing centers. Men have taken issue with that fact thousands of years before Descartes’s time (I think therefore I am), yet the fact remains—-we have to feel something DEEPLY, to truly find a new truth, and to feel and experience our real self.. I will be appealing to the very marrow of your bones, the cells within your body, and the feeling nature of your heart and soul while balancing the need to keep the intellect, and our rational processes, engaged. Please remember, we have to feel the truth deep within our very bones before we will act upon it.
I live to tell my difficult tale and a tale that is especially hard to listen to by those often in the greatest need. I would not live much beyond 31 years of age if I continued to turn away from my traumatic wounding and resultant suffering. This book does not get written if I turn away from the wounding and suffering of others.
I have given a voice to my dark and light sides, and I now live in harmony within myself. Yet, the nightly news continues to give a sad summation daily of the ever-present shadows and darkness permeating the fabric of our civilization. We do not live in harmony, and the light and dark continue to seek their tribes rather than collaborate on a healing path. I saved the world, FROM MYSELF. Yet, the world is too unconscious to save other innocent people from its wayward intentions, let alone the intentions of its misguided individual citizens. The powerful message here is that we each must work out our salvation and find our unique healing, guiding light, for the ones being offered to us by our culture are suspect at best. We each must consciously look at life, discard the old, unnecessary parts that still try to rule us and crown a new king, or queen, within our being who will rule with compassion, understanding, and healing intention over our thoughts and actions for the rest of our days.
It is tough to know in advance who to trust in these most challenging times as we attempt to move away from the old ways into a new understanding. Should we trust the authorities like we are programmed to do? Should we just automatically trust anyone with a Ph.D., a medical and/or therapeutic practice, a license to practice law, a degree from a Christian college, a former military commander, a reality TV star turned politician, the awakening Pope Francis from the long corrupted Catholic church, or US Supreme Court justices who takes advantage of our collective complacency and ignorance? Is that not tantamount to putting “new wine into old wineskins”? Staying silent and remaining compliant in the face of our diseased culture is easy in the short term, but deadly to all in the long term.
It is time to trust the courageous ones, the ones who attempt to speak the truth, and hold themselves, and each other, accountable to healing intentions. To speak the truth requires an integrity that seems to be evaporating from much of the very landscape of our culture, as more power-seeking people, cowards by their very nature, tell lies to get their way. Telling a lie is easy, especially when our culture has normalized so many of them. Standing up for what is right is hard work, and few seek employment in that field. Thinking for ourselves is hard, while also being compassionate, authentic, and empowered. In times like these, it takes all of the courage in the world to question the status quo, to speak up, and to tell the truth. Dead men tell no tales, but, unlike the legions of the spiritually comatose, I am no longer under the spell of the conspiracy of silence, where lies and avoidance of discomfort are our paradigms, and rule our awareness. I have looked deeply at both the light and the shadow of human existence. I have even stared into the face of Death.
I did not turn away from what I saw.
The following book is a report on what I have seen. The power revealed within ourselves by clearly seeing the limitations of our collective and individual consciousness is everything.
There is no other truth.
A Master Teacher once spoke to me, and said “No teacher shall affect your salvation, you must work it out for yourself”.
This writing represents my work towards that ultimate end.
