Mankind’s Healing Potential (Book #1)

As the slowly shifting sands of time create ever taller hills for lost souls to climb,

It is in this selfish, hateful world of little reason and rhyme, that I must seek the way to truth, to find Love sublime.

What if a real miracle was trying to happen in all of our lives, and too few people cared or were not even aware enough to attempt to look for it? This indifference to or ignorance of our potential to reach for the sublime is the foundation for chaos in our world, and within our own minds..Those who refuse to look at the darkness within our culture, and its effects upon the self, become its unconscious and, unwittingly, its most ardent supporters.. Tragically, in this age, collective outpourings of love and support for victims follow murder-suicides and domestic terrorist acts, rather than prevent such occurrences from happening in the first place. Can we possibly envision an era where we can collectively experience enough healing to actually prevent or reduce acts of heinous behavior, as well as other self and other destructive activities?

We have healing options as a culture, and as individuals. Throughout the ages, Insight and mindfulness has transformed the minds and hearts of its practitioners, making all of us much less likely to become the source of suffering for others. We can all become the living examples of loving non-violence in action.  Insight plants the seed of the miracle into our minds, and mindfulness is the great gardener of that miracle, resulting in an abundant, healthy crop of happier and more peaceful, loving, and ordered thoughts. 

Yet our world continues to turn towards violence and unrest. Our home planet Earth, and billions of innocent animals, and humans, are suffering and dying because of our collective inattention or indifference to our physical, emotional, and spiritual needs. Books will continue to be written by fools like me, but only Love and Truth, and a world with a real plan for positive change, can set us free from our needless suffering. The collective failure to face our problems is the foundation for the continuation of our collective chaos. Denial is not a river in Egypt, it is an action of consciousness that continues to prevent us from accepting personal responsibility for the problems we experience, with its resultant damage to self, to others, and to our planet,

Once we overcome our denial, we all have the potential for healing, and we can move towards recovery from the injuries incurred through living our normal semi-conscious human life experience. Yet each one of us must learn to develop the requisite insight to guide us in more compassionate, rational directions.

“The unexamined life is not worth living”

Socrates

The unexamined life pointed to by Socrates is a life lived by rote under the rules of others, without the individual ever examining whether or not one truly wants to live with those routines, rituals, or rules. As we know through historical accounts, Socrates chose death rather than staying part of a collective unconsciousness, and these words are attributed to the philosopher during one of his last speeches before his suicide. As we watch the destruction of our sacred planet Earth by unconscious members of the human race, we see the tragic, epoch ending behavior of a race that has chosen collective suicide through living such unexamined lives.

The truth is that all violent, gun hoarding, hateful, diseased, unhealed, addicted, oppressed, alcoholic, addicted and otherwise toxic human beings, whether the toxicity is caused through personal, religious, economic or cultural values, are living unexamined lives. Early deaths through accidents, murder, suicide, or poor health choices, are at a much higher likelihood for occurrence for all such people. And, a mind hijacked by addictive substances and/or self and Earth destructive thoughts and behaviors will not readily adjust its course, without a compelling and consistent counter-argument being offered to its own unconscious desire for annihilation.

Because of the cumulative effects of our toxic culture, there is now an epidemic of younger, white, middle class men dying at earlier ages than would be statistically forecast for the past 25 years, and the trend continues in earnest. The increased rates of white mortality has contributed to an equalizing of death rates among all racial groups,. Death rates broken down by race and ethnicity once were pointers to the imbalances of health care opportunities within our civilization, but that may be no longer the case. White men, like all other American men, are now just as susceptible to succumbing to early death due to physical, emotional, and spiritual disease.

As I personally witness, read, and hear about the early death syndrome of the white American male, which may yet still capture me, I now know that our spiritual, political, and economic systems are flirting with catastrophic collapse. Many of my grade school and high school friends have already suffered, and have become emotionally calloused, disabled, or have died, from diseases of the spirit. My sister has already buried two husbands who died prematurely due to poor self-care. I recently visited a cousin who was comatose and near death from delirium tremens in the ICU, and we buried another drug addicted cousin in 2017,. My wife and I continue to witness a son and daughter-in-law who are co-enabling alcoholics ply their self-destructive trade. We have a toxic male nephew who clings to his guns and a most hateful philosophy disguised as Trump style politics, like his life depended upon them. One of our grandsons presently sits in a county jail for carrying a concealed weapon , resulting from a series of poor decisions arising from his use of pot and other substances since he was 10 years old. Most of my best friends from high school are deceased. I have already had three close male friends from my adulthood die young of brain cancer, and several others from heart disease. I can’t ignore this disease of the Spirit which has taken over our country.

A difficult but essential truth to contemplate and to perceive is that the ills of our society have created many of the conditions for our early demise. News in recent years has been dominated by references to the opioid epidemic, painkiller addiction, and heroin addiction as causal agents in early deaths. Environmental toxins, alcoholism, murder, mental illness, poor diets and exercise, and suicide are also major contributors to the upswing in mortality rates, These factors are a small part of the real story, especially for those people who I have known who have been struck down by it. 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 disease within the body of mankind.

While being an unconscious man, I have been a contributor to the overall relationship dysfunction within the world. I have been subjected to and contributed to the same family and cultural forces of oppression and repression, which contributes to crazy making communication and erratic behavior between all of us. Being a family man, I have also taken note of the mutual blame game that is continuously circulated which serves as justification for each individual holding onto their own version of our cultural disease. And I have found that most people do NOT appreciate feedback about this errant behavior.

If I wanted to make more ‘friends” and be accepted by groups of damaged people I certainly would not be offering this material as it is written. Instead, I would have presented positive affirmations, four minute meditations for success, or a three step enlightenment technique for transcendence, all to be performed in whatever spare time the practitioner can find. But that is NOT where the truth lies for me, and I now believe the same to be true for the rest of humanity, as well.

If I still have the reader’s interest, buckle up the seat belt, for we are in for quite a ride. Those who do not want to stay grounded in their own unconsciousness, but instead want to understand why they are not soaring upward into the new, unexplored dimensions of love, being and doing, will find value in this work. By the complete seeing of the old, the damaged, the diseased, the suffering, and the distraught, is the door of true insight opened to a new way of being in our minds, hearts, and in the world. To keep silent in the face of the injustice, ignorance, oppression, and collective darkness masquerading as the light within our culture is to continue to allow oneself and others to remain oppressed and spiritually diseased, and to compromise one’s own integrity and dignity.

To develop the capacity for insight requires a tremendous depth of desire to know one’s self in a different, more profound and holistic way. Overcoming a lifetime of suffering, ignorance, indifference towards and/or oppression by others, and repression of one’s emotional and spiritual nature can be a most difficult proposition. An inscription on a temple at Delphi stated: “Know thyself, and you will know the Universe and the Gods.” We must develop the strength of will to wrestle with our own demons, and angels, to successfully travel the path of transformation. 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, and then began the establishing of the rules of engagement with those mental creations.

One of the earliest insights that I have made is a direct result of a science class that I attended in fourth grade. Mr Hill, our Principal and co-teacher of our class, was going to perform an experiment, and he wanted to teach the students about the power of observation. Each member of the class was to record everything that they observed onto a note pad, so as to completely describe what they witnessed.

Mr. Hill heated a portable electric stove, then grabbed with some insulated tongs a thin sheet of metal and set it onto the burner. The metal immediately began to distort in size, and became quite disfigured, and the metal no longer looked like it did before. I watched, yet I had no words to describe what it was that I had just witnessed. I had never seen anything like that before, and I was struck dumb by it. I saw two kids writing feverishly on either side of me, and in my need to be accepted, “fit in” and not look stupid, I looked at each of the two student’s writings, and saw how they described the event. I used their expressions to help me to create my own descriptions.

As a child, I saw how dependent that I was on other people to give a description about events that I did not have the words for. Someone else had the description of what I could not yet describe, so I used borrowed words to fill in the gap. Extrapolate this need to fit in and to belong to all collective gatherings of human life, including religion, politics, and society, and it is easily seen the potential foundation for shared learning, and its alter-ego, illusion and superstition, within all such bodies of experience. As an adult, I have seen how the mystery of life can sometimes get overrun by society’s need for order by establishing and maintaining a continuity of reality and a shared understanding of events between all of its members.

The description is never the actual event, yet those who did not have the experience, copy and worship the description, and overlook the event that may be still happening right under their noses. They have never developed the capacity and/or the willingness, to give their own unique description of an event, for they are either in fear of offering a different or contrary version of the event, fear that they might look stupid if they don’t agree with the herd, or they have never witnessed the event itself and are dependent upon others for their descriptions.

Education and indoctrination brings a measure of order to all of us. Yet it can also teach the student about other people’s perspectives on matters of individuality, self-expression, and the potential for a connection with a “power greater than our self”, while confusing and delaying the individual’s direct connection and link to his own higher truth and nature. We easily can become hypnotized by other people’s thoughts and attitudes. It becomes easy to mistakenly associate all other’s 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 begin our awakening process.

Awakening is an interactive process, and it is encouraged and facilitated by the pain and suffering that we experience as human beings, while engaging with the so-called “real world”. Many Americans live in alternate universes, where pain and suffering are not directly dealt with, or are to be avoided at all costs. 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.

In this time when divisiveness seems to rule the United States, and when heartless terrorists, politicians, and unskilled family members victimize our most innocent of beings, be they human or animal, it can be difficult to feel the miracle of life that is constantly with us. Yet, to not have a more loving, peaceful, and spiritually guided experience is to live a life devoid of much of the greater meaning available to us as human beings. Without a collectively shared intention to honor each other’s dignity, and the dignity of ALL LIFE on our planet, oppression of our spirits and the continued destruction of our planet will remain the guiding forces dominating mankind.

What does the process of awakening look like, and how might I begin the journey? I now have my own life experience to refer to, having eschewed most other points of view that have been in conflict with the unfolding of my greater good. The process of awakening begins early for some, and later for other, and not at all for the most unconscious among us. For me, it has been a lifelong process, which began in my most unconscious of years as a young person.

Up until nine years of age, I did not like falling asleep, as sleep might open the door to yet more terrifying nightmares, which I was all too accustomed to. By this time, my dreams had finally began to evolve beyond the continuous nightmare phase that I was accustomed to, but uncertainty about their possibility of arising still prevailed within my mind. This was during a period of time when I slept very little, as I usually got to sleep no earlier than midnight, even though I my enforced bedtime was 8:00 PM.

In preparation for sleep, while lying in bed for all those hours, I would review the day every night, and see where I could have done things better, or said something a little differently. Somehow I had intuited that by improving my daytime behavior, my nighttime dream world might become more peaceful. And I had begun to have many unusual dreams, most of them which I quickly forgot. Yet at the age of nine, I had another amazing insight through the avenue of my dreams. To this day, its message still rings loud and clear in my mind, no matter how poorly, or successfully, that I may be applying its principles.

Here is THE DREAM:

The priest, having received his directive from “on high”, then returned to his village along the lake in the high mountain region. He gathered all of the villagers together, and informed them that they were to take every golden figurine, every sacred symbol that they owned, and they were to throw them all into the lake, and never to think about them again. Then, he told each villager that they must each go into their own home, and face the “evil one” without any protection or care from any of their gods or their symbols of the sacred.

Lake Titicaca Peru-Bolivia-South-America

The priest then returned to his own home, having tossed all of his own idols and treasures into the deep blue lake. He stripped himself bare of all clothing, and then began to summon the forces of the dark. He became surrounded by a fog, and as he lifted his hands, sparks started flying out of his fingertips at the unknown force of darkness that lay just beyond his visual field, still hidden beyond the boundaries of the fog. The priest refocused his energy into his arms, and hands, and the sparks grew into a steady energy field, extending from his body, his heart, and his spirit, towards his unknown adversary. He was determined to overcome this force, this dark energy, and he redoubled his efforts. The priest’s heart began to race out of control, he began to sweat profusely, and a growing sense of fear and dread began to take hold of his entire being, as he finally understood that his energy could not last forever. Yes, for him to continue this battle, he must sacrifice all of his life force. Yet, he felt that he had no choice but to keep engaging the enemy, to finally see the face of the force that had terrorized his village since time began. He desperately strained and stretched to see the object of his fear and disdain, even as the ebbing energy field flowing from his fingertips continued to cut through the fog. Suddenly, a face began materializing before his faltering gaze. As he collapsed to the floor, almost drained of all life, he could no longer fight an undeniable truth– the face of the evil one might be his own!

We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.  
– –Anaïs Nin

This insightful dream says it all, and even the unimaginative among us cannot miss out on the unmistakable message that is contained within it. Projection is a name given by psychologists to this experience, where we finally realized that the conscious world that we feared, the conscious world in which we created idols and gods, and self-protective psychological mechanisms, to protect us from the perceived or potential evil, was actually a world that we created through our own ignorance, both collectively, and individually. This manifests in all of the horrors that we witness on the world stage daily, and in all of the family and cultural dysfunction under which we were raised. We are all wounded by this process, and rather than find a way to heal from it, we ignorantly arm ourselves against further assaults from others, even though we are part of the attack against our own self in the first place.

Oh shadow boxer of evil, when will you ever tire? Becoming co-champions of a nightmare world creates conditions which are perpetually dire!

Stop breathing life into those illusions will all those mental pugilist blows, and await the peaceful messages from the only One who All Knows!

A most hurtful way that human beings acting out of their own wounded natures project their negativity is by continuing the attacks against those that they have already hurt. It is just heartbreaking to be a witness to, or to be on the receiving end of, attacks against our souls and being by those who have already hurt us, and who cannot or will not acknowledge their own culpability. The victim is made wrong for having feelings, and for expressing their anger, fear, distress, or heartbreak at having been attacked, either in the past, the present, or both. Because the perpetrator does not want to face his own bad attitudes and behavior, he lashes out, and makes wrong, those who attempt to speak up for their own life, and rights. If all cannot accept responsibility for wayward thoughts and actions, healing and forgiveness, whatever those words may point to, remains an impossibility.

Those who remain silent about their own responsibility for and participation in their own projections of hatred, ignorance, pain, suffering, intolerance onto others, remain a fixture of our culture’s conspiracy of silence. It happens on the cultural level, and on the personal level. We are all victims of racism, sexism, misogyny, xenophobia, and all other malicious, malevolent attitudes and behaviors, trickling down from our politicians, corporate boards, employers, family members, co-workers, acquaintances, fellow drivers on the road, or the person in the cashier’s line with us at the grocery store. Our country and its citizens owe an apology and reparations to all of the minorities it has persecuted and punished, such as the Indians, the Blacks, the Hispanics, the Immigrants, the Infirm, the Old, and the Poor. Our Christian religion owes an apology to the Muslims, homosexuals, to the infidels, to the secular, to the “Jewish faith who crucified Jesus”, and to all who have been persecuted because they were non-believers or non-conformers.

In my junior year in high school, I was required to keep a daily journal, and record my insights into myself for a writing class. The problem was that I had no insight, at least as far as being able to put into words what the interior nature of my mind and life looked like.I did not spend a lot of time giving descriptions to events happening around me, and, instead, listened to others as they described their own experiences, which I either accepted and supported or rejected and judged against. But for me to give a description of the interior dimensions of my own being seemed an impossible task. I had to submit something, and in my desperation to get a decent grade i went to a bookstore, to find a book to help me to ‘look at myself’.

Hugh Prather had written a book called ‘Notes To Myself’, and I stumbled upon it, and bought it. I was so empty of complete statements about myself and my life that I copied statements from Hugh’s book, and tried to ‘personalize’ them so that it would not be obvious that I had copied his work. I got my passing grade, felt very relieved, and continued on my awkward, highly dysfunctional path through high school. I was near the top of my class near graduation time, yet I was completely out of touch with the majority of my classmates, as well as with myself. I had hoped that to finally graduate from high school might change, if not end, much of my social anxiety and sense of disconnect. Of course this could not be further from the truth. When I entered my freshman year at the University of Portland in 1973, I was lost again, and I had no internal maps to guide me through the complexities of college life.The use of pot, alcohol, and relationships with emotionally diseased people continued in earnest, obscuring any clear vision of my goals, and I constructed many self-destructive road blocks that impeded all progress. I was to walk away from a full-ride scholarship with the US Air Force due to my own disease of the Spirit.

Looking back, this verbal and emotional disconnect would have been great stuff to write about in the high school class, but I was living a lie, without having the words to even describe it, and the telling of the truth to others, let alone to myself, would force me into changes that I could not embrace or consider as possibilities. The absence of personal honesty and insight, and to be verbal around it, and the inability to communicate my distress with others doomed me to a deteriorating life experience. This limited my choices so much that many days, and years, I felt trapped in a prison, with interior windows sometimes only opening to Hell. I did not even have an adequate description to communicate my hell to others, so this is the secret behind the motivation for many mysterious suicides. ..

I undertook a crash course in insight, when In April of 1984, I placed myself in the Care Unit for alcoholic recovery at Portland’s Lovejoy Hospital for a month. My initial intention was to maintain my job with the U.S. Postal Service, as well as, maybe, stay sober for a little while. I was assigned a female Christian counselor named Claire, who was my guide while residing in this facility. During an interview with my parents, Claire was to note that my father had poor boundaries, and was attempting to live his life through me. Conversely, I was to find, I had unconsciously and unintentionally patterned myself after my father, by both adopting and then rejecting my father’s mode of understanding as my own.

Claire was to try to steer me towards Jesus Christ as some sort of new container image for my hopes for healing, but that image was not to serve me well. The corrupted theology and philosophy of present day Christianity was a total turn off for me. The lifelong struggle to find the self that could be the ever expanding container for my hopes and dreams for the future, and for my healing in the present, was not to be found in white man’s Jesus, my father, my culture, or myself, The journey of self discovery was not to end here. The question remained:

Just who in the hell, or the heaven, am I?

While I was in the Care Unit, a requirement was to keep a daily journal, and to document our “internal weather” while undergoing reorientation into the new life of sobriety. I remained quite uncomfortable recording my interior universe. Little had changed within me since high school in regards to becoming honest with myself, and finding any hidden gems to discover, and write about. I found that i could write a lot if what I wrote had the intention of pleasing others ,especially if they were female, or if I wrote poetry.. And, if I could make somebody else wrong for what they were, and cast myself as the VICTIM, or, more regularly for me, if I accepted full responsibility for the mistakes of others, and thus cast myself as the AGGRESSOR, I could also find something to write about

Up to this time, I had never written a poem, nor had any inclination to do so. I found that in the writing of poetry, I could start to capture my unskilled attitudes, anguish and isolation in verbal form. Through my new found willingness to write about my suffering, I created two poems about the pain and suffering that had led up to my placement in the Care Unit.  These poems are from the hand, and heart, of a toxic man who was in the initial stages of awakening.

PAIN

Though the dark cloud looms on the horizon, it is also hidden within myself.

It appears to hover in the distance, just beyond my reach, and it patiently waits my most vulnerable moment.

I then feel the initial mist from its clouds, suspecting that I am its intentional target.

A piercing wind picks up, hugging me with its frozen arms, and I vainly look for protection

As the torrential downpour begins, I feel my tenuous sense of peace and safety eroding beneath my feet.

As it strips back, layer, upon layer, upon layer, upon layer, of my consciousness, exposing a bedrock bereft of sanity.

Exposing long forgotten mental relics, threatening old, unhealed memories, and dangerous old habits,

Stinging, piercing, hurting me at my core, obscuring visions of glorious, yet impossibly distant futures,

Washing away all tenuously held possessions of sanity, and hope.

Uprooting the feeble foundation of a life desperately, but futilely, attempting to, yet again, reconstruct itself,

Carrying a powerless, helpless, desperate soul back into toxic chemical valleys, amid a dark, swirling depression,

Ravaging, drowning, then decaying.

Part II

Yes, growing without roots, with a will that won’t bend,

Weathering life’s storms, which never seem to end.

No longer waiting for the sun that was once promised to arise,

How could truth’s light possibly shine in dimmed eyes?

Having reached with futility for all the high goals of life,

With no spiritual growth, while consumed by inner strife.

Devoid of healing affection, and a stranger to real love,

Unrealistic hope was what my failed dreams were all made of.

Despair meets each day, summer has now changed into fall,

Looking at life, I am totally disgusted by it all.

Dying of loneliness, and holding life by only a thread,

With me rotting inside, hopefully, I soon will be dead.

Pain,

Why?

There is no mystery to me as to why some people choose suicide, continued ignorance, or continued addictions over recovery. I made that same choice several times. The potential for recovery is only that, a potential, unless one develops a conscious continuous intention to break free from the tight grip of grief, loss, and heartbreak, and seek for a new container for experience. Pain, and suffering, without any hope for healing, brings a need to escape through addictions, or through unskilled actions and expressions including hatred, irrational anger, despair, depression, loneliness, and suicidal ideation. My stay in the Care Unit had placed me in conscious contact with my “lower powers”, while giving some hope that there might be a “higher power” lurking around that might be of assistance to me.

Every day my desire for PEACE was acknowledged, all the while attending the daily groups, and counseling sessions. I attempted to practice the 12 steps of AA, for alcoholic recovery, which demands insight, and rigorous honesty. My chances for healing were still much less than average, due to fundamental flaws in the basic makeup of my personal consciousness, and awareness. A lifetime of oppression, insanity, and repression of spirit, does not just magically disappear because others, or even myself, thinks that it might be a good idea. This first foray into intensive recovery from addiction was not to be a success for me. The three year period following the relapse became a most challenging, and at times horrifying period of my life, and I was to slip into a phase of life where my life system experienced catastrophic failure. Yet it was through this failure that the light of understanding redirected me to new paths of understanding.

To follow new paths of consciousness means to become aware as a human being, become open to new ways of seeing and doing, and listen to the heart, and to the heart of others, as we travel these uncertain paths of life that lay before us. We must become conscious, and maintain the conditions for healing, to continue on an awakening path. I must make verbal, as best that I can, that which defies description, no matter where those revelations place me on the spectrum of human energy. And, I must continue to accept personal responsibility for all of my thoughts, words, and actions, while supporting others to do the same. We must try to walk together, or I will die alone.

Recently, In January of 2017, I had further insight around my relationship with my parents, and my father. 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 man had exacted 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 contrast to his earlier years. But 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 youth. My father showed to me, in a perfect way, 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 threaten the dignity of others, and do not conform to the development of all of its citizen’s highest nature, and truth?

I saw how my own father’s ignorance and 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 fundamental internal feedback mechanisms that contributed to my personal dysfunction, and my unskilled interactions with our world. My father represented, in a perfect way, 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. A manifestation of this was that my father had difficulty, in times of great stress, in recognizing the intrinsic value of all life, including my baby self, and my essence as a young boy.

Most of what I know about myself, and my reactions to the world, was created by my fundamental relationship with my parents. My sense of self in my early years revolved around internalizing many of my parents’ attitudes. I was acutely aware of what my mother and father expected from me, what I could or could not give back to them to attempt to please them, and my defense mechanisms for managing the fallout when I failed to please them. Beginning early in my life, I also developed the desire to protect them and myself from the results of the conflict that arose in our house, either when I made yet another mistake, or when father overreacted to any situation that brought a sense of fear or threat into the home environment. I developed a need to balance whatever energy was being over expressed at any particular moment, and I was very unskilled at those kind of efforts.  I learned the power of the lie to deflect negative attention from myself. But the biggest revelation was that I had internalized and normalized two incomplete creations, or tricksters as I now call them, of who I thought my father and mother were, which were to become sources of self-talk and feedback for me as a child, and then as an unconscious adult.

But a most compelling and controlling dark agenda that I had either created or inherited revolved around my self worth. Through the history of my relationship with my parents while very young, in addition to whatever fundamental and universal factors that are innate through being alive and aware in human consciousness, I created two BLACK HOLES in my developing mind.

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 have witnessed the existence of consciousness “black holes”, or singularity points, and two dark assumptions became the source of much of my own suffering.

We, as a human race, have a predisposition towards 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. These also occur as a result of traumatic injuries to ourselves, as a result of the incomplete responses to the capricious actions of others and the vicissitudes of life.

We, as individuals, 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. I remained tethered to a past that never was through this very process.

Our minds are the generators of consciousness, which simply stated, means our brains generate internal feedback, develop and support our own internal self-concept, create internal imagery associated with our 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 our 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 express 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.

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 interacted with my internalized representations of my parents, and I now posit that these forces are the precursors to all manners and types of mental illness, including anxiety, depression, schizophrenia, and multiple personality disorder.

My two major black holes within my own internal universe created powerful forces of control, which contributed to my sense of powerlessness, anxiety, depression, loneliness, and isolation. Black hole number one is that my voice will never be heard, and because my voice has not been heard, I have no value. Insight number two was that I must be alone in this universe, with only death awaiting me. Insight finally reveals that these two are actually connected, and are a direct result of failure to be fully integrated as a complete, healthy human being. This formative consciousness is certainly not the foundation for a healthy integration into the world.

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.

The 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.

After the death of my father in 2017, I had the privilege and challenge of reading and sorting through a lifetime worth of writings and papers from my parents, and from myself.  After reading some of my mother’s personal writings, I was struck by the pain and suffering that she experienced remaining married to my father.  He was not a person with the soft touch, when it came to communicating with those that he loved, especially during challenging/difficult periods of life.  He was what those in the field of recovery refer to as a “dry drunk”.  He was a poor listener, and he could be opinionated, judgemental, angry, obnoxious, overly competitive, and hurtful. He was a member of a huge class of human beings now known as toxic males, and his behavior was to become a major influence for my own choices for how I was to present myself to the world

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

For me this was an extraordinary release, because the formation of my sense of self was influenced by parental bonding issues just after birth, and through my first 4-5 years. Being placed on “formula” right after birth, and being placed in a chilly car in the garage at night so that my father could sleep better (I was just another “damned crying baby”) left me as a young being feeling abandoned, and lonely, from the beginning. Though I loved my parents, I certainly did not want to grow up and be like them, and inflict this pain on innocent children. 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. Coping mechanisms such as passive/aggressive behavior became my normal response to the daily challenges of life. Toxic masculinity, or, more precisely, an unskilled capacity to relate to people in a peaceful and mutually accepting manner, was to become a defining characteristic of my life.

I came to perceive the collective impact of male unconsciousness upon my individual existence, with some insight into my own father’s sometimes toxic involvement in my own mind’s formation. I saw that the two tricksters roaming through the inner recesses of my heart and soul gave me limited guidance and kept me from being lonely as a young being, yet kept me from developing into my greater good as an independent, free human being.

In our world, there are countless examples of “self organizing systems”, and all creatures, and the minds of those creatures, are examples of that miracle in action. Our bodies appear to be primarily organized through the pattern created by the history of the human species, and it’s interactions with its earthly environment. Our DNA appears to carry that pattern within our very cells.

Our minds also have a self-organizing principle, as it organizes itself into our unique personal sense of being. The activity of self-organization in consciousness is the greatest mystery of life. The greatest story that I have read around this mysterious process is that which was recounted about the life of Helen Keller. As a young person, she had lost her sight and hearing, and she could not develop the capacity to communicate. As a mute, she appeared to be living a basic life characteristic of many intelligent animals. but not having the ability to communicate with her world. When her teacher was finally able to show her that the letters W A T E R, represented both the substance that she drank, and that which she was bathed in, she had an insight, or a revelation. And, according to Helen, the perception of the word water, as associated with the physical experience of water, initiated her own self awareness. Literally, Helen was birthed as an ego as a direct result of understanding this one word WATER in her mind. Of course Helen went on to become a beloved author, political activist, and lecturer.

Parents are always quite pleased when their children speak their first words, and they then know that they have a viable, healthy child. Usually, the first word is “Mom”, but it can be others. The initial words become the initial organizing energy around which the developing being initiates the launch sequence into consciousness itself. In biblical terms, the word becomes flesh, and dwells among us. It is a mystery of why and how this process actually works, and neuroscientists continue to study the brain, and the human mind, as they attempt the impossible, to locate the physical source of our sense of self.

Sociologists and psychologists have found that healthy integration of self revolves around how well the organism feels accepted by, and connected to the environment that the young person travels through. Thus, happier senses of self arise, and are supported, by myriads of “successful” interactions with its social and physical environment and, giving positive, life affirming names to those experiences. First and foremost is the beings’ acceptance and integration into the primary family cell, or group. If we do not get the requisite positive feedback early on, we face tremendous odds against forming a happy, well-adjusted self organizing principle, or ego.

My first 31 years of life reflected the internalized horror of a life suppressed by the conspiracy of silence created by my subservience to a damaged image of self, and other. My own true nature had been masked over, or silenced, through that process. A lifetime of oppression of myself and the unconscious repression of my feeling, loving nature had brought to me a series of near fatal illnesses, physiological as well as spiritual. I saw how a dark force, common to all of humanity continued to live, move, and have its being enshrined within my own heart and soul. I saw how the medical, economic, religious, cultural, political, and spiritual traditions remain burdened by their own limitations of understanding and intelligence.. I saw that my own suffering was shared by most of the other people that I knew. I saw that those who still suffer have little energy to provide emotional support for others who still suffer, as well.

There is so much suffering in the world, and eventually all members of humanity share in its universally humbling, painful reality. Human suffering and evil are two spiritually destructive forces that humanity has dealt with each moment of its existence. Failure to address these issues directly and consciously only leads to more suffering, and enhances the collective perception of the presence and growth of evil in our world. Many causes of suffering are preventable, however, and they have their origins within broken, unhealed minds of men unwilling to embrace the possibility of change. It is the resistance to change and evolution that is the origin of many forms of suffering and the proliferation of evil.

Suffering may arise through an action of intentional hostility, or it may arise spontaneously as a reaction to the vicissitudes of life. Suffering may arise from an inability to do what is right. Suffering may arise through incurable diseases of the body, or of the mind. Suffering may arise through the trauma of witnessing horrific acts of violence. Suffering may arise from the inability to reconcile the belief in God with one’s own grief and loss. Suffering may arise from becoming addicted to substances that were designed to take our pain away. Suffering may arise from the perceived inability to speak one’s truth and to have one’s voice heard in the face of the oppressive powers of the day. Suffering may also arise from contemplating the continuation of our daily pains into a distant, unknown future.

The suffering from my past provided the foundational material for my exploration into human suffering. The intention behind the documentation of my life experience in this book is to provide an example for others, and to be a representative voice for those who either choose to, or who cannot speak up for themselves. 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. I offer my apologies in advance to any widow or family member who might be offended by what appears to be judgmental or incomplete representation of the facts, but whatever facts are presented are backed up by my real life experiences..

Speaking out against the injustices of the world, and attempting to be inclusive of all those who suffer is an act of compassion, empathy, and spiritual justice. But, finding one’s courage to speak out brings the risk that the speaker with be seen as yet another voice of oppression against those already burdened by their own unique version of suffering, and who have not yet claimed their own personal power and responsibility. Wisdom dictates that I avoid becoming the voice for a resentment, injustice, or grievance of others, unless I have already experienced the difficult truth behind their pain. Because I have lived a life inclusive of intense pain and suffering, I know this path intimately, having nearly sacrificed my life at thirty years of age to the cumulative effects of the disease of toxic masculinity.

There is a direct connection between what unfolded in my personal life while being a suicidal, masculine energy dominated unconscious man and alcoholic, and the patriarchal evil that is unfolding in our world today. Our world remains intoxicated by its masculine hubris, greed, insensitivity, and the continuing domination and subjugation of all feminine energy, including our Mother Earth. And, the world is in the midst of its own collective march towards suicide, should ignorance, greed, and Trump style politics and economics predominate into the future.

Many men have lost their careers, and could not recover from that loss. 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 sexually or physically abused in their youth, 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 traumatized war veterans who suffered immensely, and 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. Some had a profound need to speak up around their own pain, and when they could not find a loving ear with the capacity to listen, they could not recover from that.

What happens to a culture dominated by the oppressive effects of toxic men? What happens to a society that remains out of balance within itself? What happens to a civilization when women are oppressed, and their holistic wisdom, is neglected in favor of self serving patriarchal ideology? What happens to a man defeated by the dark energy of unhealed masculinity? As we witness our families, watch the news and read the newspaper, we can see the tragic answer.

Men, and women, tend to clamor for politicians, economic, and religious leaders who do not challenge them, and who continue to support them in their ignorance. The election of our POTU$ is the perfect example, and is a symbol for all of the ills of our culture. To the extent that the men within our culture practice his unholy principles of engagement with the world and the women and men within it, they also share in his disease of mind, body, and spirit. Men seek to run in packs with others who also share in their diseases of the spirit, and they remain a most powerful, deadly force to be reckoned with.

And, insanity continues to expand and explode all around us, with lies being propagated by our spiritual and political leaders becoming accepted by the naive. Mass murders, early deaths, suicides, drug addiction, alcoholism, abuses of woman and children, extinction of species, destruction of our ecology, and all of the damaged relationships that fail to find healing will continue to predominate within the collective mind of mankind until we make conscious contact with rationality, love, and sanity…

It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.

—– James Baldwin

The effects of toxic masculinity, and its ugly spawn, toxic religion, toxic politics, and toxic capitalism, is the continued repression of human emotion, the feminine, and the sublime possibilities for existence. Over many centuries, men have built mutual oppression right into the very fabric of our cultural existence. Toxic masculinity values and principles underpin much of the Common Knowledge Game (CKG), which is the modern name for the phenomenon of socialized understanding of self and the other.  The following are guiding energies that tend to shape men’s thoughts and actions created through the CKG of understanding in today’s America.

1. Unconscious, harsh and inaccurate self and other judgement, with resultant poor self-esteem inculcated into boys from birth by our wayward fathers, religions, and cultures.
2. Remaining ignorant or fearful of our own feelings, including anger and grief, or expressing them unskillfully, We have been trained to ignore or to hide from our own feelings
3. Letting stress go on unabated in our lives, without challenging its points of origin
4. Loss of emotional and physical safety in home, school or work environments
5. Not communicating honestly with others, while carrying the painful feeling of not being heard or appreciated,
6. Eschewing deep and meaningful relationships with others,
7. Excessive competitiveness with others while engaging with greed, trying to “keep up with the Jones’ “,
8. Attempting to prove self-worth in environments where self, and others’, worth is disrespected, thus trying to fit in where we really don’t belong,
9. People pleasing, at the expense of our personal integrity and truth.
10. Not speaking up for ourselves or for others that are oppressed for fear of being marginalized,or further victimized
11. Over immersion in entertainment, binge watching of television, obsessive video game playing, and excess reliance upon Snapchat, Facebook, or other social media platforms for social awareness and connection
12. Excessive eating and/or eating excessive sugar, salt, or processed foods
13. Not exercising, not hiking in Nature and thus staying away from its healing balm
14. Excessive drinking of alcohol, use of recreational drugs to the point of habituation (including marijuana),
15. Smoking and chewing tobacco, all the while knowing that behavior is killing us
16. Using sex as a way to emotionally hide or escape, or to control or manipulate others, We are selfish with our sexuality.
17. Workaholic behavior, and forgetting how to laugh and play well with others. Because of our lack of prosperity, employers abuse our work ethic to encourage us to become workaholics, which ends up keeping us out of the connecting, healing currents of friendships and family relationships.

In our efforts to meet the needs for economic security, continue our family line, and meet our sexual needs, we often make sacrifices that diminish our health, our sense of well-being, our community connections, and our personal integrity.

Oh marionettes dancing image upon the ATM screen of the world’s mind, with its economic beliefs in full control, what freedom do you expect to find?

Release yourself from those controlling, spiritually binding strings, to prepare your heart for the healing wisdom that only my Intelligence brings!

The primary contributor to the continuing cultural disease and dysfunction is men’s unwillingness to make fundamental changes in attitudes and behavior. White male privilege, patriarchy, and toxic masculinity are three useful terms denoting the entrenched, institutionalized nature of our dysfunction, which is a major disease of the human spirit. This disease has its deadly flames fanned by our cultural denial of a deadly truth, which is the foundation for the conspiracy of silence. Our unskilled male behavior collectively remains a national disgrace, as we continue to dishonor each other, our animal brothers and sisters, the environment, and our planet Earth.

Men are still predominantly in control, and continue to skew the narrative away from the truth that MEN’S ATTITUDES ARE THE PROBLEM. Our ideas for addressing the problems of gun violence, addiction, greed, and sexism tend to avoid obvious, rational solutions, because we don’t want to face ourselves. And, failure to face ourselves will lead to the same self-destructive end that eventually happens to all humans and their attempts at maintaining civilization.

A prime example is the NRA and the corrupted politicians who do not act to reduce the proliferation of automatic weapons. These allied forces are sponsors of national terrorism. Just how many automatic weapons does it take to make America’s gun owners feel safe? It is just that many weapons that it takes to make America unhealthy, insane, fearful, and outside of the picture of potential national healing. Gun violence directly stems from a national mental illness, and guns are never the proper medication to alleviate the symptoms. One automatic weapon is too many, and 300,000,000 is never enough, so goes the divided, self-destructive collective mind of America.

There Is Something Fundamental Here

I had an amazing, cathartic experience around the origins of my own toxic masculinity. The following story recounts an experience that I had in 2017. If it weren’t for the incredible spiritual strength, and wisdom, of my life partner, Sharon White, I would not have been able to have, what some people call, the following “cathartic event”.

It was on a Thursday morning in February, and I was preparing to go to the Pilates class that Sharon and I attended each Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday at our athletic club. Typically, I wanted to get there a little early, so that we could warm up on an exercise bicycle, with a little aerobic activity that I still enjoyed participating in, since I no longer ran, having retired late last year after a lifetime of enjoyment, and pain.

It was 9:15, and I was fully prepared to leave, while Sharon remained on the telephone, talking with a friend. As it turned 9:19, I spoke to her, in my most innocent of voice,

“can we go now?”

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

“There is something fundamental here!”

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

Sharon and I went our separate ways for a few hours, while we both tried to understand what the heck had just transpired. Leading up to this experience, I had been intensely exploring the entirety of my life experience, having written 70 pages about my early childhood, maturation process, addictive and self-destructive cycles, and glimpses into higher possibilities for living. Without me realizing it, all of the personal story writing had placed me into the psychic world of all of my past pain and suffering.

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

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

MY VOICE IS WORTHLESS, I HAVE NO VALUE. I MUST BE ALONE IN THIS WORLD.

Sharon paid the price for a couple of hours, while I re-birthed the wounded baby within me. But, I had an insight that still informs me daily.

I saw how we, as humans, keep layering ourselves and our ideas upon what somebody else is saying, rather than meeting the being where they are, and responding according to the dictates of our “heart center”, which in most people, ESPECIALLY MEN, has been scabbed over by our own early spiritual wounding. Men typically inflict their own wounding on everybody else, in subtle, or not so subtle ways. Usually, this manifests in dominating, or being dominated, by others. Collaboration and cooperation become nasty words for all such practitioners. Philosophies of oppression, and of the monetization of reality, arise out of this wounding. All oppressed groups remain victimized and marginalized, and are only stick figures in the oppressors dreams of those seeking world domination.

When our personalities have been formed by the integration of our perceptions into an unconscious, unnamed, unrecognized dark energy, we create self-defeating tricksters within our minds, which become our internal advisors for life. We end up creating an energy exchange dynamic where we project our dysfunction onto others, and make them wrong for it, not recognizing that we were the source of our misplaced judgement. I have acknowledged their very presence within my own mind, and that their continued distorting presence can determine how I view reality. The spiritual thorn in my side will forever be that my voice will not be heard before I die, which is the adult version of my infantile suffering and separation from love.

When I am not fully conscious, the unfocused, chaotic energy within my mind makes me a poor listener. If I can quiet my mind long enough to listen with my heart to what is being said, I can respond accordingly with the intelligence of my heart. As a race and a culture, we tend to be too eager to respond with ego programmed responses, which, typically, are based on incomplete perceptions or someone else’s ‘knowledge’, so being mindful is a huge help.

In our attempt to be heard, we instead try to program people, unconsciously, to behave and react more in accordance with our expectations. When they don’t (they rarely do, unless they are our impressionable young children), we are very disappointed, and feel rejected, and, in the absolute, we feel betrayed by the sum total of exchanges between the parties. It is deadly to attempt to control the other’s experience through linking our own unhealed energy with their own.

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

“There is something fundamental here.”

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

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

When I shared some of my creative work, which began in early March of 2017, I got the very strong impression that some of the important people in my life just didn’t have the time or the inclination to listen. I am NOT asking that anybody agree with what I have to say. I am asking that people listen with the heart, and allow my deepest meaning to sink in, and finally reveal itself to the listener.

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

Another clue about our own, or the others’ listening intention, is when we try to share a profound life event, and then are immediately “run over” by another with more knowledge on the subject. Sometimes we, or the other, either have “too much book knowledge”, we have the “certificate”, we already have read about it on the internet, we have memorized something from a class that we already took, or we have a friend who has already “been there, done that!”  What about that “friend” or “family member” who checks their phone, and Googles information, perhaps to confirm their own biases or (mis)understandings, instead of accepting the validity of the energy that we are attempting to share in this new, unique moment?

Our President, and many of our politicians, are masters at this. Please don’t inflict this same treatment on the ones you love. It is like putting a blanket around our heart and soul, and putting us into the car, so that those with a dehumanizing or monetizing philosophy can continue to oppress others, while keeping themselves spiritually asleep.

Whether any of us can accept it, or even want to try to believe that it is possible, there is a unique truth, which some call divine inspiration, which reveals Itself moment to moment. In my ignorance, disguised as “knowledge”, I throw a ‘blanket” around IT, and throw IT in a car, so that I can continue to sleep.

We all have a secret that needs to be told

We all have secrets from others that need to be told to us.

We all need to be more willing to listen for the deeper meanings of each other.

Be careful, oh Mankind, the secrets that we keep,

For by our stories we may awaken, or all die asleep.

There is something fundamental here.

I choose Compassion today, with its loving, listening ear..

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

Please, listen to your self. Please, listen to the other.

Far too many men engage in our cultural conspiracy of silence daily, which is a most deadly component of the CKG.  These include the following admonitions:

• don’t talk
• don’t tell
• don’t touch
• don’t feel
• don’t engage
• don’t listen
• don’t change
• don’t heal

My male heritage and my experiences as both a son to a often times toxic father, and working with many damaged men in the electrical trades and in general employment, provided the background for most of my writing . Patriarchy, as expressed through men as a collective consciousness, is responsible for creating the present day conditions of our diseased world. Men in power would rather have our neighbors, wives and children assaulted, raped, overdosed through drug use, or murdered through gun violence, than to promote and enforce healing changes. We need more women in positions of power and influence, and men need to get in touch with their potential for toxic behavior and attitudes, and begin to make necessary course changes in their hearts and souls.

The abhorrent behavior of Donald Trump, the poster boy and face for toxic male stupidity and darkness, as well as his supporting cast of damaged characters, has become the de-facto leader of the energy of toxic masculinity.. If we as a culture, and me as an individual, don’t speak out, and affirm to ourselves, and to others, what the truth really is to us, then eventually the hypnosis and propaganda of others may become our own collective reality, and continue to overtly influence our personal integrity, community relationships and overall spirituality.

The historical legacy of the American white man’s ignorance and evil, and his support network of unconscious, disempowered, fearful and/or cowardly family and community members, continues even up till today.  Subservient women, often times religiously inculcated to be that way, continue to follow their husband’s lead, and as a group remain one of the leading populations of unconscious support for continued unhealthy male dominance. There always comes the day when the family of the woman under the husband’s domination needed for her to speak up the most, and the whole family is further damaged because of her own silence and continued powerlessness.

Women remain the number one oppressed group of humanity, though the blacks/African Americans, native American Indians, and other racial and ethnic groups have not escaped the grasp of white male privilege, masquerading as American Christianity inspired capitalism and politics.

Here are some principles of toxic masculinity that I found live in our collective consciousness, and which also 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 (CKG) 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 have influenced model and support my behavior.::
3. People, and Mother Nature itself, are most valuable if they can be monetized. If I can’t make money from my relationship with people or our natural surroundings, 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. I choose to neglect the long term effects of my short sighted thinking, because now is the only moment to profit from others, and from the Earth.
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 have so much stress in my life, and  I make so many sacrifices that 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 who 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. 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.
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, as I fail to achieve my goals.  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 achieve my goals, and improve my life situation.
19. 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.
20. 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.

As the wise ones advise:  To change my world, I first change myself. There is terrorist, a Nazi, that lives deep down within all of us.  Once we have addressed our darkness, and healed it through bringing our light to it (insight), it loses its power to unconsciously control us.  Then, when we go out into the world to subdue the evil that sometimes erupts in dank, dark places, we can fight the actual enemies, and not waste energy fighting projections of our unhealed self.The fundamental oppressive force in the human universe is not our wayward political or social agendas, it is the human mind itself.

Be careful in there!

‘Being male is a matter of birth. Being a man is a matter of age. But being a gentleman is a matter of choice

—–Vin Diesel

The following information, though not quite up to date, carries some painful truths about toxic masculinity, entrenched power, the #metoo movement, and gun violence.

Nov 4, 2017 – The rate of gun deaths in the United States rose in 2016 to about 12 per 100,000 people, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in a report released on Friday. That was up from a rate of about 11 for every 100,000 people in 2015, and it reflected the second consecutive year that the mortality rate increased.
The age-adjusted rate of drug overdose deaths in the United States in 2015 (16.3 per 100,000) was more than 2.5 times the rate in 1999 (6.1).

Sexual violence is a problem that is deeply rooted in our culture. Presently, the CDC does not have any statistics about sexual abuse against women in general, but i have read that one in four women have experienced sexual abuse at the hands of the diseased American male. The following statistics should be of interest (from RAINN):

• 17,700,000—The estimated number of women who have been the victims of rape since 1998.
• 99—The percentage of perpetrators of sexual violence that will walk free.
• 13—The percentage of female rape survivors who will attempt suicide.
• 64—-The percentage of trans people who will experience sexual assault in their lifetimes.
• 127,000,000,000—-The total amount of money rape costs victims every year in the U.S., excluding child sexual abuse.
• 16-19—-The age range that women are four times more likely than the general population to be victims of rape, attempted rape or sexual assault. Female college students ages 18-24 are three times more likely than women in the general population to experience sexual violence.
• 1 in 6—-The fraction of American women who have survived an attempted or completed rape in their lifetimes.
• 1.8—-The amount of times trans people of color are more likely to experience sexual violence than the general population.
• 3—-The percentage of men who will be raped in their lifetime.
• 90—-The percentage of adult rape victims that are female.
• 321,500—-The average number of victims of rape and sexual assault per year in the U.S.
• 80,600—-The estimated number of inmates who experience sexual violence in prison or jail every year.
• 60—-The percentage of instances of sexual violence experienced by inmates that are perpetrated by jail or prison staff.
• 2—–The number of times a person with a disability is more likely to be a victim of sexual assault or rape than a person without a disability.

A rational human being would posit that ALL VIOLENCE is unacceptable, and that the American culture needs to treat ALL conditions seriously and equally. Why are we so self-destructive and irrational as a culture that we allow gun violence, sexual violence, and drug additive violence to continue against our fellow citizens? You already know the answer, and it continues to propagate in the genitals, and the damaged minds, of far too many men in power.

If enough people do rise up and rebel against the prevailing order (disorder) of the day, dramatic and positive change can be made. This is, in fact, how all evolutionary change is to be successfully made in a diseased, structured society like our own. When a living system becomes infected with toxins, it must rid itself of the offenders, lest the disease spread, and destroy the entire system. The compromised system must fight back with love’s most powerful antibodies

Domestic violence, sexual abuse, and patriarchal attitudes are a set of learned behaviors with the emphasis on exerting unhealthy power and control over others, and can be unlearned — but it takes consistent work on the part of the person who caused harm well beyond the immediate crisis.  Complex ideas about gender roles and expectations are often at the root of abusive behavior, many times having been instilled from childhood.

Gentle confrontation with the offending person is a first step towards healing.  The person may be unaware of his negative influence over others, or may feel powerless to do anything about it.  Counseling can be the next step towards healing,  though it would take the mutual accountability through the controls exerted by the common knowledge game for the rest of our population to move towards change.  It takes ongoing attention and progress checks from the community, family members, and friends to ensure a true change of behavior.   And, people who harm others should allow justice to be determined by the survivor. The perpetrators should publicly own up to their behavior, apologize, and describe how they’re trying to change. This is how we change norms around the conspiracy of silence that permeates domestic violence — by showing others using harm that accountability is necessary and healing is possible.

Creating the basic conditions that support emotional and spiritual growth might be beneficial to the entirety of our human race. Men, and women have basic needs regarding personal safety, security, and placement within the society. Here are some simple, and not so simple, human needs coupled with spiritual intention:

• 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 others’ errors in reasoning and judgement,
• 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, with as few conditions attached as possible. Unconditional love was never meant to be reserved just for a mothers’ love for her child, so it is a great evolutionary objective to attempt to be a channel for it.
• 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.

FAILURE TO HONOR THESE NEEDS WILL RESULT IN THE CONTINUATION OF OUR PRESENT DAY CULTURAL CHAOS AND DYSFUNCTION, WITH LITTLE POTENTIAL FOR OUR NATIONAL HEALING.

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, paying the price for 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!

Make America Great Again? Normalize that which should never have been acceptable? Get real, and start healing, American male. Greatness only comes after we, as a society, face our collective darkness and see how we have institutionalized ignorance, acknowledge its damaging impacts on others, makes amends to ALL we have harmed, and find integrity, and stay on a more humane path in the future.

Discovering the truth about ourselves is a lifetime’s work, but it’s worth the effort. We live in a world in which we need to share responsibility. It’s easy to say ‘It’s not my child, not my community, not my world, not my problem.’ Then there are those who see the need and respond. I consider those people my heroes.

— Fred Rogers

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.

The Buddha, Jesus Christ, Krishnamurti, and even Fred Rogers are dead, yet we all can still become a hero for healing and transcendence.

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

There is an inmost center in us all, where truth abides in fullness;….and, to know, rather consists in opening out a way where the imprisoned splendor may escape, then in effecting entry for a light supposed to be without.”

—–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 not 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. My willingness to change IS my greatest asset, and opens the door to the highest power.  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. We don’t need to believe in any concept of God at all, but we do need to access our willingness to change, for that openness will point to our own unique higher powered life experience.

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.

To finally realize the Truth, is to see that all of our culture’s illusory agendas that limit and bind,

Spun together with the same golden threads of the Emperor’s New Clothes, the evil tailors did wind,

That corrupt the minds and hearts of all innocents, and vulnerable that they can find.

So we must continue to seek our own truth, and then our struggle becomes Sublime!

Since I have been in recovery, I have been involved in the 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 am trying 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.

I have been quite resistant to many aspects of life, and to change itself, 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.

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

American society has created the perfect conditions for our population to practice insanity, mutual control dramas, 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. 

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.  I have addressed the seed consciousness behind the development of my sense of self, where my own answers to the important questions of life gave rise to my fragmented interpretation of life, and of the universe.  My incomplete and inaccurate answers became the unstable foundation for my journey through collective consciousness, but I was not alone in my ignorance and misunderstanding.

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.

Do we know what new questions to ask of ourselves, questions that will place us on a new, healthier path of consciousness?

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?

To answer all of these questions successfully would require a 5000 page book. My intention is not to provide a universal answer, but to stimulate interest and curiosity within the reader to pursue their own answers. My story will indicate a path for a more holistic approach to the answer for some of these questions, and my answers may have a more universal application than just my limited life experience.

The answers to these questions point to foundational facts 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.

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 from 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.

ANGER AND AWARENESS

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 a belt whipping my sore ass!

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 disempowering beliefs and philosophies upon unsuspecting followers. 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 dignity and human values will continue to be systematically trod upon. The AWAKENED AMERICAN has renounced membership within that dis-empowered flock, however.

Anger is a natural, normal response, in any particular new moment, to any assault on our being, on those that we love, or on our inner sensibilities. Anger, among all other emotions, and in balance with those aspects of our self, help us to manage our response to the outer world, which is, at times, quite the aggressive, distressed, ugly, oppressive environment. Anger is not positive or negative energy, it is HUMAN ENERGY ITSELF, and like all aspects of our humanity, it needs to be understood in the context from which it arises, and when and how it expresses itself.

Anger can bring fear to the unaware among us, because of an incomplete or unhealed response to its expression in their past. We have all been persecuted, at one time or another (or many times), by the angry parent, boss, co-worker, or stranger driving next to us in a car. Or, how about the rapist, or child molester, who tries to attack us, or our children?

According to classic psychology, humans engage in “fight or flight” behavior, when they experience fear and/or perceive that they are being attacked. Whether we choose one or the other depends on any number of circumstances, and ONE SIZE DOES NOT FIT ALL. When we are backed into a corner, and there is no way out, where is our energy to come from, when the attacker makes his final lunge at us?

Anecdotally, we hear of those rare few who have successfully mitigated these circumstances, through some fortunate “intervention” through prayer, or luck, where those who are attacking us somehow are diverted, and move their aggression elsewhere. We only need watch the news, or read the paper, to see that these anecdotal stories do not embrace the collective reality that most of humanity experiences through the actions of those possessed by their own ignorance and evil. Murder, rape, child molesting, intimidation, oppression, misogyny, road rage, terrorism, paternal violence in ALL OF ITS FORMS, keeps manifesting itself, and has throughout all of history.

We all feel a need to be in control, even while attempting to conform to social norms, especially those “norms” expressed in the common knowledge game that dominates the unaware human consciousness. Philosophies and theologies that stress the need to repress aspects of our human nature need to be examined in their fullness, and not accepted at face value. By their very nature, any umbrella philosophy and theology devalues the “intelligence of the moment”, and intentionally and/or unwittingly contribute to the suppression, and repression, of sacred human values and emotions. When our human energy is not repressed and oppressed, we can find the balance that enables us to access and express the wholeness of our being. Emotionally intelligent actions appropriate to each new moment is no longer just a theory, and becomes an ever present healing activity of the awakening life.

True religion is a revolutionary force: it is an inveterate enemy of oppression, privilege, and injustice.

—Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan

There is a Wisdom deep inside us all, waiting to inform all of our thoughts and actions in this world. And, this world requires Ultimate Intelligence to navigate through it successfully, without bringing harm to ourselves and others needlessly. Anger and fear are not to be repressed by any healthy human being, but instead are to be witnessed, and studied, and utilized intelligently for wise action in this troubled world.

The liars and thieves that currently portray themselves as politicians, religious and other 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 disavowed membership within that disempowered flock, and continues to point to the life far away from the ignorant shepherd.

Stand up, stand up, stand up for your rights!

But, make sure that the anger is appropriate to the moment, and not some formulaic response that the “non-healed, unbalanced” nature within your own self offers up under many questionable circumstances. An “institutionalized expression of anger” becomes hatred in disguise, and that characterizes the oppressive nature of far too many male originated, and dominated, philosophies. When anger becomes an automatic response to all situations where threat is perceived, then the intelligence of the moment is denied, and we are susceptible to bringing needless harm to our bodies, and to our minds, as well as to the “other”.

To respond successfully in anger, we need to measure how mindfully we can engage these threats, and successfully group our own thoughts and actions, with others also engaged in the situation, to either fight the oppressors, or to speak our truth, and be heard. We do not engage in mass protests because we want to go for a walk with a bunch of strangers, we engage in protests because we want our voices heard. Channeled anger is an effective, time-tested method for standing up to those who would keep us silent.

One only needs to review history to see how well the silent sheep held back the Nazi oppressors. If you want to conform to the spiritual philosophies of those Tibetan or Hindu avatars who did not grow up in our country, and did not share in our American Experience, good luck to you. You are straying too far from home, and you risk becoming lost for this incarnation..

I cannot and I will not be led unconsciously to my own spiritual slaughter, and to the slaughter of my values, integrity, morality, and ethics that world patriarchy continues to threaten all of us with on a daily basis. The Demon must be recognized by all, and challenged by all, or prepare for the darkened ending of all that is important to us as an American culture, and a world civilization

I choose to wisely tend to my own “flock”, and not to become just another follower in someone else’s herd. I am now a shepherd of my own thoughts and feelings, and not just someone else’s lamb.

Please, tend to your own flock of thoughts and feelings. Some call this process “mindfulness”. You will learn to listen to your voice, and and your wisdom and emotional intelligence will be more accessible according to your own level of spiritual empowerment.

Keep in mind, some members within the Christian faith eagerly await Armageddon, which confirms their own biases about the worthlessness of the majority of the human race. These malevolent men, and self-destructive men in general, just want to watch their worlds burn. We need to be ever-present with spiritual fire extinguishers.

The non-illuminated, restless mind is devoid of all of Love’s rhyme and Truth’s reason,

And only chases after desert mirages, until it sees the corruption that is guilty of treason.

Shame on you, Donald Trump, your minions, and the pseudo-Christians who support you.

Blessings to all of America’s holy warriors, who seek for all that is just, equitable, and true.

Many of America’s nominally “good religious people” raised in “good religious homes” do not have access to the healing truth that the application of a more universally distributed love would have on their lives. The absence of that love has brought great harm to our world. Any philosophy that continues to devalue or obscure the pain that their own skewed understanding of God and Love has inflicted on innocent people, such as Jews, Muslims, LGBTQ’s, pagans, “witches”, “atheists”, or even themselves, over countless generations needs an immediate upgrade .

Many religious and non-religious strong, healthy children and adults look upon the destruction of our natural world, continued global warming, and the extinction of thousands of sacred species of animals as a necessary part of economic development, thus showing a true disconnect with the painfully dark reality of their own intentions. Some even cling to their denial of the reality of climate change/global warming, believing that their disregarding of scientific facts is somehow supported by living in a fantasy world in an “alternate reality” with “alternate facts” that support liars and cheaters like the President of the United States. These supposedly “healthy people” display a profound disease of the Spirit, which directly impacts ALL OF US.

The Earth-destructive and self-destructive decisions of Capitalist economics has been married to aspects of a Judeo/Christian ethic, culture and faith for several generations. This “two part harmony” has sung the following refrains for hundreds of years: “Be fruitful, and multiply,-Prosperity is a sign of God’s love for his people. We are the chosen people of God, Take dominion over the earth, etc.”. The selfishness and tribalism of these beliefs threatens the very safety and security of all of Mankind, with the religions encouraging over-population and the continued destruction of our planet. No one is immune to this disease, and the collective, worldwide brokenness that spawns such ignorance.

Those who profess to follow God through admiring Donald Trump are now the true infidels. I never thought that I would live to see the day when our country would be ruled by such a spiritually primitive, overtly lying, cheating, scandalous force. For Donald Trump, the end justifies the means. For Evangelical Christians, the end, and their new beginning is the suicidal world-wide Armageddon, in whatever forms that takes, that our wayward, selfish, white supremacist leader may ignorantly lead us into.

They treat the wound of my people as if it were nothing: “All is well, all is well,” they insist, when in fact nothing is well.

– Jeremiah 6:14 (CEB)

The people who hold most strongly to the “all is well” philosophy, or its “God’s will” without full internal examination of self, need enlightenment, they just aren’t aware of that fact yet. Most adults live a life of denial of the collective disease of American consciousness, while more than just a few have prospered economically from American Capitalism, and the diseases of the Spirit that are spawned from the socially, environmentally, and spiritually irresponsible versions of it. When economic standards of living take precedence over environmental and social standards of living, all manners of darkness erupts. Selfishness and self-aggrandizement, corporate, religious, and individual greed, socially and environmentally irresponsible allocation of resources, seizing of assets of those less powerful in other countries, and economic minimization and subjugation of those without an empowered voice becomes the norm within the society, Those who believe that economic transcendence is the end point in the journey of happiness and enlightenment are living a life begging for the rudest, and most painful of awakenings, 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 fragmented, broken thinking can be healed, as it has its own unique intelligence and understanding.

Healing through a heightened awareness must be individually experienced, and then the fruits of the experience can be collectively shared with other interested parties, such as in community gatherings, spiritual focus groups, AA meetings, friendship circles, etc.. Here we can create the strongest atmosphere for healing of self and others. We don’t need an edifice for this, yet our own home can become the foundation for community healing. If we belong to an enlightened group of people who attend church, there is also an immense potential for mutual support. Our own intention must start the process, though the healing intentions of others for us, and for themselves, can bring us together into a “healing formation”, where the miracle of the collective/shared mind of a love inspired mankind can really work its wonders. Here we may actually share in the real Master Mind that has attempted to guide the human race since the beginning, since well before our present day diseased world mind took over. The right group of people, sharing love and healing together, creates a palpable energy, and this can characterize some recovery groups, depending on the quality of recovery present, and being expressed, in those groups.

Individuals who are toxic men, 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 healing, recovery, and/or 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 toxic male, mentally ill or substance abusing family members knows of my own toxic 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 or toxic male in denial 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.

Now that we have thoroughly investigated human collective consciousness, we have found through the common knowledge game (conscious and/or unconscious) that there are many unconscious or unwritten rules for engagement between all members of society, in addition to the conscious and/or written ones.. The unconscious rules have been with us from the beginning, well before the introduction of mega-cities and civilizations, when mankind first falteringly attempted to both explore and to define inner experience. The conscious “rules” or laws have been developed over the last two hundred or more generations with the intention of establishing and maintaining the best order and harmony for the ever enlarging populations congregating together into the structure of cities or settlements. Hammurabi’s code of conduct and the Ten Commandments of the Old Testament are two great examples from our distant past of the documentation and implementation of rules defining acceptable conduct. The human race may continue to evolve in spirit and in truth as long as it is able to provide a minimum foundation of safety and security for all of its members, so it is important to remember that not all requirements to conform are misguided or evil in intent.

The Lemming Effect

A great allegory for the social behavior of humans is that of the story of the life cycle of some populations of lemmings. Lemmings are little rodents that live near the cold northern Arctic regions.  They are focused animals by nature, meeting only to mate and then going their separate ways, but like all rodents, they have a high reproductive rate when food is plentiful. When population density becomes too high, some of the lemming species migrate in large quantities and since they can swim, they choose to cross the water in search of a new habitat. Lemmings have been known to follow each other as they plunge off the edge of cliffs into the water below. Even though lemmings have been found to be “swimming migrants” rather than victims of collective suicidal ideation, the myth of mass suicide is still called the Lemming Effect.

Regardless of the lemmings real intentions, the lemming story has become a metaphor for people who go along unquestioningly with a group, with potentially dangerous consequences.  The “Lemming Effect” is an innate psychological phenomenon, a survival trait, an inborn instinct in the majority of people. We see this happening in many occurrences from bad collective investment decisions such as the dot com boom of the late 1990’s, craving the latest Apple I Phone releases, excessive alcohol consumption at a party, following theological assertions such as “the blood of Jesus is the sacrifice to God that saves our soul”, to modern day automobile and fashion trends.

This Lemming Effect enables entire segments of a society to lose their sense of judgment and the application of personal wisdom all at the same time.  It can be linked to the “mob mind” phenomenon inherent within collective consciousness itself. Anybody who has witnessed a Trump rally understands this mindset, and the participant may feel threatened, or even be appalled by such crowd behavior if not presently an active member of the violent tribe.. If you have ever been a member in good standing in the problem drinking division at the local bar, you have intimate understanding of the suspension of wisdom and good judgement with your drinking decisions, as well

We are all alive today due to the self-organizing principles of life itself. In manufacturing and industrial processes, in our planet Earth and its journey through the solar system, and even in the human mind, we bear witness to the wonders and mysteries of self-organizing systems. The human brain has evolved into a capable predictive mechanism since the introduction of language as a tool for communication. Words are used for the measure of our experience, and are now our primary avenue for communication with each other. Words are forever containers for energy, and are not the actual energy itself, being only pointers towards that energy. Yet the introduction of words into the conscious void of the ancient human being must have been the most transformational, apocalyptic event in human history, probably being more important than the harnessing of the power of fire and water for the creation of the conditions for safety, security, and even society itself.

The development and the evolution of human language itself has had the effect of bringing the hope for new or enhanced order to the chaos inherent within the unconscious human experience, at least through the structure of words used to represent the world that one is experiencing. Note the illusory sense of power that words sometimes create for us.  We sometimes think that to finally identify a phenomenon, and giving it a name, that we are now somehow in control of that which still exists outside of our control. One example is when we finally get a diagnosis for a troubling medical condition that had evaded identification and description.  The name brings momentary satisfaction and may point to the direction that a favorable outcome may be located, yet having a name or a diagnosis does not guarantee that a favorable prognosis will result.  Also, my personal experience of finally being able to bring a verbal description to the vast interior spaces of unconsciousness and ignorance within my individual and collective self has done NOTHING to bring a new order to the present day divisiveness and chaos within our national mindset, including the conscious and unconscious elements..

For most other situations where stress or conflict may have arisen, we only need witness the “committee”, or the “monkey mind” operating overtime within our minds while it unsuccessfully tries to make sense, or bring order, out of the background chaos forever present in our lives. Those who are neophytes in meditation, and even some of us when troubled by current events, experience this hyperactivity and perceive it as a block to peace of mind. In truth, this internal mental chaos, when reinterpreted, becomes a gateway or portal to be passed through so as to access deeper, more peaceful and benign regions of our spiritual identify.

There is an interesting interpretation of the Pauli Exclusion Principle which carries great relevancy to our understanding of the word. The Principle simply states that in our effort to describe or define any particle, or object, or to establish its exact location in the universe, we can never know all of the characteristics of the object of observation at one time, such as its angular momentum, direction, speed, and mass, being limited to three out of the four descriptors. Like our imperfect attempts at locating a particle in space, our words, literally, are our sincere, though incomplete, collective measurements, or representations, of reality, or our theories for how things now are, or could become in the future. We attempt to measure and locate eternally elusive phenomenon, and our words are perpetually in a state of “catch up” with an ever-unfolding new reality.

If establishing or maintaining order is our concern, we can effectively channel all relevant knowledge into intelligent systems of control that will maintain maximum stability wherever necessary, but only under those conditions where we understand most or all of the variables.. The basic process control theory underlying all modern industrial and manufacturing systems has an equivalent in the human mind, where we use feedback and feedforward information loops for refining and maintaining order (mindfulness, personal inventory, and meditation). For humans, though our primary system of control is through the laws of our society and of our religions, we have not yet developed the understanding of all of the boundary conditions for our human experience. Humanity’s egregious blunder has been in attempting to bring stability to itself while disregarding the laws of our spiritual heritage and of Mother Nature, which mankind continues to ignore, at its own peril. The instability introduced into our collective Earth life system by humanity’s ignorance of these laws will not be correctable until we humble ourselves enough to learn from our mistakes, be they theological, philosophical, religious, economic, ecological, or social in nature.

The nature of self-organizing systems is that once the quiescent point (also known as the Q point, set point, the functional operation level, the balance or the homeostasis point) has been altered, the system naturally seeks a return back to its native state, or “normalcy”. For our human experience, this may be both a blessing and a curse, depending on the “state” to which we are being returned back to. Typically, if we stretch a rubber band, and then release it, it returns to its original state. But, if we have stretched the rubber band too hard and too often, the rubber band loses its elasticity, and will never again return to its original state. A human being who has been stretched beyond their capacity through excessive stress, anxiety, and/or addictive behavior cycles will NOT be returning to their “normal” state, once it is recognized that the “normal” state was, in fact, an unhealthy, abnormal state of being in the first place, which in turn led to the creation of their present chaotic mindset..

For our planet Earth, this may mean ridding itself of any or all offensive life forms that threaten its very existence, and that continues to drive it out of balance with itself. The time intervals for finding a new, or returning to an old, “set point” that indicates a healthy life is far different between an individual human life and the life of planet Earth. The Earth may take thousands, or millions, of years to return to or reach its optimal state, whereas the evanescent ones must act immediately and decisively, lest we not live long enough to witness any real healing progress.

A life out of balance means that not enough knowledge has been uncovered, or applied, to guarantee harmonious system operation. And it is of ultimate importance to realize that, in the end, the human race is not the determiner of what homeostasis is for the world, as that has been established through many billions of years of its evolution and, thus, its changing relationship with itself and the rest of the Universe. It is also of greatest importance to realize that no man, or woman, is an island in this vast universe, and that our perception of harmony and balance is inextricably intertwined with the rest of humanity. No matter how healed, balanced, or empowered we believe that we are becoming, we are eternally linked with the rest of humanity, and the universe, in our attempts to create order or balance out of our own unique versions of the collective chaos known as human knowledge. The temptation to follow the herd, or to swim with the lemming, is built right into the foundational nature of our socialized existence.

We don’t realize how often our decisions are based on other people’s behavior. Lemming effect depicts a negative side of the conscious following of the crowd, especially when following leads to falling off the cliff. In real life situations it could mean losses of money, self identity and slower spiritual development. As it might sound easy to grasp the concept, it is difficult to notice in our own actual behavior. Moreover, social togetherness is sometimes very pleasant and valuable, for instance at a rock concert where one man starts to dance, then few people join and once the critical 10-20 people threshold is passed, massive amounts of people may join the dance.. It is a pleasant example of a positive manifestation of the lemming effect. It is all part of the process of making our unconscious parts more conscious, which must also bring awareness that mass behavior does not always result in positive experience for the individual.

Lets take the stock market dot-com bubble implosion in 1999-2001 and a recent real estate/collateralized debt obligation bond fiasco in 2007-2009, which also caused another stock market crash. Many investors were too emotional, irrational and instead of conducting the research themselves, followed the commonly accepted level of valuation. Believing that our world is always operating effectively and efficiently in short time periods results in the lazy approach of following what others do. A take away from this situation is that we each must remain vigilant in our awareness, and that we cannot walk individually, or join in the stampede as may be the case, on the same path as the others and be guaranteed that we will retain our integrity.

From a spiritual development perspective, following the masses could mean loosing our individuality, feeling anxious, uncomfortable and discontented. For instance, if the most popular educational program in universities happened to be engineering and we choose engineering while ignoring our true desires, this could lead to some serious cognitive dissonance. The supporting rationale that we have the best grades and this career would please our father the most may lead in unhappy directions. Many of us fail to perform sufficient research of what studies would fit us the best. Our choices could result in the premature termination of our studies, or worse, finishing the studies and then having to be retrained to work in a different field. I have pointed out a very real phenomenon here, as my educational life was directed through this very same unconscious process.

The lemming effect is not that far from pleasant, life affirming social togetherness, but the effect has some potential negative effects that we need to be aware at all times. It is healthy and wise to participate in social movements, but we must not lose our heads in the emotions. We must be critical of the movements of the crowd that are going against our vision and values. Also, we must do the research, and even experiment with unpopular ideas, before deciding that any massive new movement is for us. It is important not to ignore the “leading edge” movements, because accidentally standing on the way of the movement could bring harm to us or others. On the other hand, we could have a very good experience with the lemming effect, if played well. This is one of the aspects where an aware individual can play the common knowledge game and “lemming effect” to maximum personal benefit, without changing the collective rules of engagement. Our politicians, marketers and advertisers, and religious leaders have harnessed the power of the “lemming effect”, and our entire world civilization continues to be manipulated, for good or for evil, by these practitioners.

I dare not leave this subject without the presentation of an amazing, though disquieting, theory of human population control. We have an immune system which is automatically activated to fight and neutralize any invader into our body. Our minds work on a similar level, as it attempts to fight and neutralize any offender who threatens our safety, security, or peace of mind. Our planet Earth, or Gaia, also is a vibrant, living being with almost infinite potential to bring forth new forms of life into the universe. And Gaia has its own innate power to bring balance back to itself, with unexpected consequences in store for our unwary, overpopulating human race. It is not a stretch of reason to assume that whatever consciousness Gaia may be infused with may interpret our reproductive over exuberance as indicative of the presence of an imbalance within its own energy field, and make attempts to correct it.

Our planet Earth is now engaged in balancing itself and its energies, just as it has for billions of years. Though it may not have consciousness of the same nature as humans (the mind of the immortal, and the mind of the mortal, do not have a lot in common), the self-organizing principle of this vast system includes the elimination and/or balancing of all forces that do not positively contribute to its life and further its evolution. The human race, due to overpopulation, has brought great imbalances to planet Earth. Some experts believe that we may have ten times the amount of humans on our planet than our planet can sustain in harmony. The stress being generated in the mind of man by this overabundance of humanity may well be part of the self-protective mechanism of planet Earth itself. Humanity has captured a piece of Universal consciousness, which includes planet Earth and its collective awareness (see Teilhard de Chardin and his Noosphere concept). Our collective desire to go to war, to kill each other, to commit suicide, and/or to not generally thrive as a collective, may well be the Earth, acting through human consciousness, to bring healing to itself through the removal of damaged parts of itself, at least enough to bring balance back to the Earth. The Earth is, basically, eternal, as far as we are concerned, and is PRIMARY here, while the human race presently has little conscious presence in eternity. Our own Armageddon may well be written right into the operating system of Earth consciousness as it brings stability back to itself through all of its agents, be it earth, air, sunlight, fire, or water, and its almost infinite expression of flora and fauna.

Without harmony and peace, no homeostasis around a healthy operating point is possible.

Anyone care to take a plunge into the water from a cliff, or go for a long swim? Like lemmings, we are all migrants, albeit spiritual migrants, until we find our unique spiritual home. Once we have found our truth, we may follow our heart and our intelligence, and if that means following the herd for the moment, so be it. But if it means leading the herd, or even leaving the herd for a time, we must be ready to answer the call, as it may lead to all manners of healing and spiritual prosperity.

I would like to take the liberty of bringing a little cynical humor to the office of the POTUS, and the mythical throne of God, which was once collectively seen as an acceptable image for the “higher power”.

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 historical 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.

Soon, it will be COMMON KNOWLEDGE, that the President of the United States has no integrity, is a corrupt criminal, and has been unfit to serve as our national leader, let alone as a leader of a family or a business.

Yes, the “devil made me do it!”

Sometimes, the “devil” or the “trickster” can actually point to the unexplored doors within the self behind which resides the infinite reservoir of our spiritually based “uncommon knowledge”,

The mind must be clear so that the heart can hold others near and dear..

It is within our “uncommon knowledge” that our salvation lies.

However, it might mean that we have to leave the herd, and find our own way.

One of my problems with religion in general, their prophets, messengers, and associated religious texts, is the institutionalized ignorance that is passed for wisdom and spiritual knowledge. They try to squeeze all of their adherents into a nice neat little package of understanding, and encourage the Lemming Effect. And, they tend to take the 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 our 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, because love and insight is bigger than anything in its way.

“And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.”

Anais Nin

We all must find a way to blossom and to release our “imprisoned splendor”. Emotionally dishonest, hiding, shame based behavior, hateful, misogynistic, racist, irrational, anti-earth and anti-animal, and immoral agendas promoted by the existing POTUS, and tragically practiced by millions of our fellow Americans, will not lead to recovery and healing, period. We are all negatively impacted by the continued resistance of others to the unfoldment of healing, and love.

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.

While some believe that our collective emotional and spiritual IQ appears to be declining, there are those who continue to grow, evolve, transform, and become aware. which brings me a measure of optimism for the future. Women, who tend to think more holistically, are the hope for the future, as men’s fragmented thinking and selfish reasoning will only continue to lead us all down the path of chaos and brokenness. Men will never lead anybody into the “promised land”, because the “promised land” does not exist for persons living a life devoid of spiritual discernment, no matter how much they claim to read the bible, or attend church. Unhealed men are not capable of seeing everything as extending from an unbroken whole, of which everything emanates from and which we are eternally united with. Men do not automatically assign the highest value to life, instead opting for philosophical agendas that minimize other life’s value, so that they can achieve their selfish desires with less guilt.

The Pearl

Again, the kingdom of heaven is like unto a merchant man, seeking goodly pearls: Who, when he had found one pearl of great price, went and sold all that he had, and bought it.

—-Jesus of Nazareth

One of the quickest ways to turn off many an atheist or agnostic is to start a message with a quote from Jesus!   Our egos certainly take a liking or a disliking to certain messengers, depending upon our vision and values, and how well the messenger conforms to our hopes and expectations.  Jesus, Buddha, Krishna, Mohamed, Kant, Aristotle, Nietzsche are all potential guides for those who consider themselves lost, which, typically, are all those still enmeshed with their ego, So this brings up a question:

Of what value to us is our ego? 

Our ego can be likened to the shell of an oyster.  The oyster shell is rarely recognized for its own beauty.  Like the oyster shell, our personality may be appealing to some, ugly to others, or just plain uninteresting.  Yet we all have access to different, unknown, and, potentially, sublimely transformative layers of our self, even though the personality often fails to consciously engage with them.

In an oyster, natural pearls form when an irritant, usually a parasite, or, perhaps, the proverbial grain of sand, works its way into an oyster, mussel, or clam. As a defense mechanism, a fluid is used to coat the irritant. Layer upon layer of this coating, called ‘nacre’, is deposited until a lustrous pearl is formed.  The pearl developed inside gives the oyster its unique value to human beings, who prize the pearl’s positive response to a major irritant in its life.  But, the shell has to be opened, for all to witness the beautiful visual delight developed and hidden within.

Ego is formed and continuously affirmed in an environment where spiritual discernment has not yet sufficiently evolved.  Our ego is our static assessment of a dynamic, changing world, and it is constantly engaged in a state of “catching up” with the truth, however that may be expressing.  It can be likened to taking a picture of a movie in midstream, and assuming that the picture represents the entirety of the movie.   Wisdom is gained through our experiences in the journey through space and time, and the reinterpretations of and the release from all of the illusory static images stuck in our memory.  Wisdom IS the perception that our memory may be clogged with a  lifetime of the accumulation of static images, all out of context with our present day intentions to evolve and heal.    Life in the Now is eternally dynamic and changing, while the fragile ego clings to its static fantasies and hopes spawned from its past.

If we resist conscious, rational change, our ego will hold onto worn out understandings of life, and become out of touch with the ever unfolding new reality.  Yesterdays truth is today’s superstition, and yesterday’s inaccurate assessment of others is today’s isolation and pain, so it is imperative to keep an open mind to change.  Otherwise, the ego will be left behind, and suffer according to the cognitive dissonance it allows itself to experience.

At all the intersections of the points of conflict between our inner world and our “outer world”, there are choices to be made.  When a conflict arises, do we resist any new message or lesson being offered by another, especially when their understanding does not conform to our own?  What about that daughter-in-law who hangs up on you, or the husband who talks more than he should, and is unwilling to change?  What about that friend or writer who promotes a way of viewing life that does not conform to our own?  These are irritants, and if we use the irritant to justify an inaccurate judgement against, or physical separation from, the offending party, we may have pushed away a layer of nacre for our own internal pearl of wisdom.  Our judgements are only verbal measurements of an ever changing environment.  Any judgement should be a temporary rest stop, to be left behind when we move in resonance with the new reality continuously unfolding before our eyes.  Thus is the way of forgiveness.

Change is irritating, and often threatening, to the ego.  Our egos exist to help bring context and balance between what we are witnessing now with what we have experienced in the past, to assess what actions in life we must undertake to meet our social and societal obligations.   It is our minds conscious attempt at bringing a balance between the world of form that we share with all of life, and the almost secret world inside of the personal mind.  We might believe that we are keeping secrets from each other, but the truth is that we all share in the vast majority of thoughts and inclinations with our fellow man  (woman), and we are only in denial of that fact when we don’t believe it and fail to act with compassion towards our self and to others.

If the oyster was a closed system, and did not allow for an internal response to irritants, whatever parasites or grains of sand that entered into the oyster might cause its very destruction.  Because the irritant has been addressed, and stabilized through the deposit of the layers of nacre, the oyster continues to thrive, though it is now growing an internal “body” consisting of the layers of the nacre, which are forming into a most lustrous pearl.

So too do we, as humans, have the capacity to make pearls. But we must approach all irritants with love and compassion, or we will produce no spiritual nacre, only more  pain and suffering.  Those with spiritual discernment are finally able to see the Pearl for what it is, in Truth.  Love, or God, takes many forms, and those with the eyes to see, and the ears to hear, witness its action through the loving co-creation of a new reality with others who are also honoring their own pearls.  All of the “forgiveness” that we offer to ourselves, and to all offending parties in our world, also create the most lustrous layers of nacre

Do not judge another by their “shell”, but instead, wait, until they can open their self up, and reveal the Pearl of greatest price.

Do not judge yourself for your poor, ignorant, dysfunctional ego. Dividing and conquering is NO WAY to transcendence. Unifying and healing our interior universe, so that we learn to operate more out of the present, and our Presence, than the past, and our Absence, is our way to our wholeness.

We all experience the effects of thoughtless, capricious human activity.  Bring on those “irritants”, as they are the gate keepers to new layers of God consciousness!   Remember, most people ask for forgiveness, rather than permission before they engage in their controversial behavior.   Self will runs riot in an unconscious world, and we all suffer under a similar burden created through the action of that darkness in our world. Our wisdom, created through spiritually discerning the irritants in life, is our shiny Pearl.

To those who have not fearlessly faced themselves and their own personal darkness, I wish you more pain, as pain is a major gateway to personal change and transformation.  The point is to learn meaningful lessons from the pain, and not assume that it arose out of nowhere.  Unaddressed pain tends to take over small centers within the mind, and over a period of time the traumatized mind loses its ability to be an avenue of present moment awareness, and it becomes fixated upon a past that cannot be healed. 

The institutionalized pain embedded within our memory becomes virtual scabs over our unexamined wounds.  Are we just forming scabs that only partially cover our wounds, or are we facing our brokenness, in spirit and in relationship, which contribute to the formation of a healing spiritual nacre within our own mind and hearts.

But truly, what is the pearl of the greatest price?

It is your pearl, strung on the same string with the rest of humanity.  Our stories imbued with collective wisdom creates the necklace of ultimate value.  We must each build our own unique consciousness of truth and love.  Then, each of our stories can become the nacre for

THE PEARL OF GREATEST PRICE,

which is the story of the ever unfolding wisdom of mankind.  Some call this the Christ consciousness, the Buddha mind, or God consciousness.

Wear that necklace with love and compassion!

Wear that necklace with discernment and the applied wisdom of all ages!

Is There An End To Our Childhood?

There just are not enough recovering men in this country right now who have undertaken the practice of self-awareness and healing, and applied spirituality, devoid of the trappings of religious dogma and misplaced judgement. Men will not evolve, unless backed into a corner, and threatened with the loss of everything, and even then they will try to hold a discussion with you about why they don’t need to heal, just everybody else needs to. There are far too many men who pretend to be Christian, playing that music in the background while going about their typically anti-Christ unconscious, unhealed male behaviors, negatively impacting all those who make contact with that irrational, yet all too common, wounded American male soul. Most men will not change, unless faced with the certainty of death itself. And, the road that our country is now set upon, is defined by death’s very boundaries. There will be healing for the American male in our future, but by what impetus, and at what cost to the rest of our world?

Insight, enlightenment and healing do not come to the “fat and happy” people of our world. People who have been happy from birth may not have as much need, or motivation, towards achieving depth of understanding, compassion, and empathy as those who had a troubled upbringing, and are seeking answers to the great questions of life. The “happy ones” may not be driven to seek, and to find, the truth, at least as much as those whose spiritual siblings were suffering, disease, and impoverishment. It is a revelation to finally see that much of the dogma and nonsense that many variations of religious thinking morph into exist solely to insulate the believers from the access to their own legitimate, authentic human suffering and pain. The “painful Truth” is that Truth IS painful, until all of our wayward holdings, attitudes, and behaviors are fully examined, and released, so as to make way for a new understanding and experience of life, where Truth can be experienced more as Love and Peace, and a collective will to support and care for all of our sacred planet Earth.

When our childhood ends, and our eyes are finally opened, the conditions of our childhood becomes almost irrelevant, whether or not we had a positive experience. When our childhood ends, we are no longer insulated from the damaging effects of our own, our religion, or our culture’s wayward thoughts and intentions, and we begin the search for a new way of being. When our childhood ends, enlightenment becomes our teacher, our student, our lesson plan, and our life’s journey. When our childhood ends, we finally let “God” off of the hook, and directly address all of the greatest, most challenging issues of life itself. When our childhood ends, we stand in the power, love, and wisdom that “God” gave to us in the beginning, before we personally, and collectively, ignorantly, or with malice, added to the suffering of all of “God’s” creations. When our childhood ends, we are all healed, regardless of the conditions of our upbringing. When our childhood ends, the world becomes new to us, while we help those still stuck in the past of their own childhoods. When our childhood ends, we are able to help right the wrongs of our fellow man, and of ourselves. When our childhood ends, we stop thinking like we are separate, independent human beings, and start thinking collectively, for the good of the earth, and for the good of all mankind. When our childhood ends, the one true, real God begins to work with us, and through us. When our childhood ends, we lay aside our prayer fantasies and our worship of spiritual deities, and begin the real work of co-creating with the Universe.

It may be easier to build strong children, than to repair broken adults, yet both are important endeavors and services that mankind will be requiring for ages to come. Hopefully, our childhood, whether it is now happy, or unhappy, ends before our civilization self-destructs, and our sacred world, burns in the hell created by Mankind’s continued ignorance and darkness of Spirit. We remain terminally ill as a culture, as a nation, and, potentially, as a planet. We need a miracle experiment, a movement towards a change in individual and collective consciousness to be undertaken by all who want our planet to survive.

The beginning of Wisdom is knowing that Life is infinitely more sacred and important than the religious, economic, and philosophical beliefs by which we falteringly attempt to define our relationship to It..

We must commit to fearlessly challenge all assumptions that lead to depression, guilt, shame, drug addiction, suicide, and other self-defeating beliefs and behavior. We must commit to exposing the bedrock of lies that much of our collective consciousness and religious misunderstanding is based upon, the lies that tell us that we are not worthy of love and acceptance by others, and/or that we have no value other than remaining the unconscious minions of those in positions of power who have been spiritually disfigured by their monetization of humanity. We must commit to transcending all forces that lead to an untimely death through “white middle-class male despair syndrome”.

Freedom and intrinsic human value are not goals to forever pursue, as they are part of the very fabric of Love, awaiting those with the insight to weave them into happier, healthier, more meaningful lives.. Our civilization has not yet embraced and fully applied the principles of Love, the Love that transcends time and history, nationality and place. We must birth together the Love that has the capacity to save the world from the damaging, insane behavior of a collective consciousness hypnotized by its own imaginary self-importance, a self-importance that drives human overpopulation and the resulting destruction of the very planet Earth that was created to provide for all of Life, and not just our limited, selfish visions, religiously inspired or otherwise.

We must honor our body, and the planet Earth, as the temple of the “living God”. We must not knowingly introduce physical and/or spiritual toxins into our body/mind, nor will we encourage or support others to bring harm to their own bodies and minds, to the bodies and minds of others, or to our planet Earth. We all must become “prophets” for the truth that supports and sustains the very life-force of our sacred planet Earth, and all of its inhabitants. We must commit to continue to support and work towards rational solutions to global warming/climate change. We must continue to get outdoors and enjoy nature, and honor the natural world at an enhanced level, and encourage all others to do the same. To not do this work is to continue the suicidal,insanity into a self–destructive conclusion, the Armageddon that many of the religiously disfigured Christians now cling to, and see our corrupt POTUS as now leading us into.

“It is No Measure of Health to Be Well Adjusted to a Profoundly Sick Society”
—Jiddu Krishnamurti

It is time to grow up, end our collective childhood, and find our true relationship to Spirit. It is time to grow up, and save ourselves.

So, the Master Teacher is always speaking within our hearts and souls.  Is the Master Student listening?

Please listen within yourself.

Transformation is NOT a gentle process, merely attained through reading books, practicing a few affirmations, talking with friendly therapists under our emotional control, and/or attending a few workshops and conferences. To find true enlightenment, a path through personal, and our collective, insanity is REQUIRED. Watch how the so-called ‘professionals’ or spiritual “gurus” of our culture continue to try to oppress this movement, and repress those impulses within themselves, and others under their ‘spell’ or control.

I can quote from the Bible, Koran, Talmud, Bhagavad Gita, or the sayings of the “enlightened masters” such as the Buddha, Jesus Christ, Mohammed, or more recently Krishnamurti, the Dalai Lama, Ram Dass, OR ALL OTHERS, for the rest of eternity, but until I face myself directly and honestly, NO TRANSFORMATIVE CHANGE WILL OCCUR. The same is true for our country, and for our world.

Some of the greatest lessons that life has given me revolve around my relationship with my father. My grandfather’s alcoholism and his abuse of his wife, my father, and my aunt and uncle is the stuff of horror stories. Dad referred to his father as “that BRUTE“. The legacy that my grandfather tried to leave with his kids tragically revolved around diminishing the value of his children’s lives in his, and in their own, developing minds. My dad was, at times, troubled by his upbringing, though he rarely spoke of it until very late in life. Unconsciously, dad had impressed his own lack of a healthy mental self concept upon his children.

To this day, depending on how conscious I can or can’t be, I can be dramatically impacted by the wounds, or I can soar high above it all through maintaining the principles of an open heart and a quiet(er) mind, which neutralizes the unhealthy illusions of self that can be so troubling. But my lack of a healthy self-esteem did take me into hell very early in life. I was not to find the real path to recovery until I was 31 years of age. And, for me, my only hope was to find the Truth that underlies the whole of life, and attempt to derive a new sense of self through re-connection with this lost essence. A new openness to life and all of the possibilities that shared love can create, and a resurgence in the respect that I now give my body through enhanced physical activity, diet, and placement in healthier outdoor settings and social situations, helped to guide me in ways my father could not have embraced, nor given me any mentoring with, as he was too unconscious.

Awe, wonder, love, connection, healing, wholeness, collaboration, good mental health, all lie within the realm of possibilities for all men, and for humanity. With the acceptance of personal responsibility one human being at a time, for all of our negative perceptions, we can transmute their dark energy into a lighter, healthier energy through insight, mindfulness, and meditation. We will then find the perfect peace and goodness that some claim that we have always been looking for, since Mankind first arrived on this planet.

I did not write this book for fame, fortune, or cultural acceptance. This writing is based upon my entire life experience, which has been complemented by thousands of hours of meditation and mindfulness. This writing reflects my lifelong search for truth, wherever it may lead, and I found that it leads to all of us.. It even leads to YOU.

Dead men tell no tales, but the near dead, and fully alive, 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. My innate 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 life, and we can perceive the isolating framework that imprisons much of the American male psyche.

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

The compulsion to hide from ourselves can be lifted. We can know love and forgiveness of ourselves, and others, like we thought would never be possible. We can become a light unto ourselves and others, and that light can sustain us for the rest of our days. We can be at peace, and understand, perhaps for the first time in our life, how to live life on life’s terms. We can finally find what we were looking for our entire life, so please do not give up before the real miracle of our life reveals itself. Finding our real healthier, saner self is the greatest challenge of life.

Those who find what they are looking for, find the secret of spirituality, and the secret of a successfully lived life. Happiness, joy, and freedom become our life’s most enduring companions on our life’s journey. Difficulties, sorrows, heart breaks, deaths, depressions, anxieties, and even relapses may still arise, but we now have healthier tools for dealing with the adversity of life. We no longer hide from life, but instead remain engaged with it. We ride Life’s occasional Tsunami waves, rather than be drowned by them. We learn that it was not Life’s loads that broke us, but instead it was the unconscious and unskilled ways that we carried them. Now we have the developed spiritual skills to successfully manage Life’s unavoidable burdens, while creating the conditions for new opportunities in life and for prosperity in its many forms, including enhancing our relationships to each other!

We did not cause or create this disease, We cannot control this disease, and We cannot cure this disease. I have had many, many years of sobriety, but I have also had three major relapses over the past 34 years, as well. I can continue to treat myself consciously and with love for this disease, and show the benefits of recovery from this disease to those who still suffer, and have interest in their own recovery process. Relapse is a painful, but necessary, part of recovery, as we learn from our mistakes, and grow from them. The point remains to lift ourselves up in recovery, even though we might have descended the ladder into the hell of toxicity yet again. If we fall seven times, we lift ourselves up eight times.

Those who are still toxic are not without choices. We all have the internal power to change, we only need to learn how to consciously access that power which is greater than our resistance to change and bad habits, and express its infinite healing potential. For me, the choice became between living a an inspired life, or leading a self-destructive life. For those that continue to embrace toxicity to their own detriment, and the detriment of others, there are healthier, more life affirming choices to be made..

I continue to have contact with toxic people, practicing alcoholics and/or drug addicts, as well as the family and friend “enablers” that consciously or unconsciously continue to support them in their dysfunction. Enablers are not bad people, we just do not know what to say, or how to say it, to those who continue to abuse their chemical of choice, or attack love’s sensibilities. We might be hesitant to give feedback, for fear of being rejected and/or seen as being overly judgmental, or we may have become fatalistic in our appraisal of the situation, and given up hope. For some of us, we have remained silent in the face of direct threats against the continuing health and safety of our beloved family members or friends, and our own emotional well-being while attempting to remain an active part of the diseased family structure.

To some of us who continue to enable bad/self-destructive behavior of others, just remember that even though we did not cause the disease for others, we cannot control the disease for others, and we cannot cure the disease for others, by our remaining silent on the sidelines, we remain part of the denial system of the diseased culture. At some point, it WILL BECOME NECESSARY to confront the toxic attitudes and behavior, and speak our truth. Then we will need to set our boundaries, and hold fast to them. This can include eschewing all conversations and/or physical connection with the offending family member until they start to make the necessary changes in course, and MAKING SURE THAT THE OFFENDING PARTY KNOWS EXACTLY WHY WE ARE KEEPING AWAY FROM THEM.

Our own mental health and personal safety become most important, for without that, we remain a powerless part of the social and family toxicity. There are many who have found the way to use their disease to control their family, their friends, their employers, and all of the people in their lives like they were marionettes on a string. We must not remain a functioning part of their diseased control dramas, lest we lose control over our own destiny, and sanity.

I remain well acquainted with anonymity, which is one of the greatest supporting spiritual principles. My headlights shine brightly for my own “vehicle of consciousness” on my own new path of consciousness, yet they often provide little illumination for others on their own unique path. This is as it should be, as “no teacher can effect the salvation of others, as we each must work it out for ourselves”. Yet, we must be willing to share our experience, strength, and hope, so that others might benefit from our journey.

We are all as sick as the secrets that we keep from each other, and from ourselves.

Choose wisely, oh mankind, the secrets that we keep,

for by our choices, we all may awaken, or stay asleep.

May all sentient beings be released from suffering.

May all spiritually and emotionally damaged men be released from the cultural conspiracy of silence, which contributes to personal, and collective, suffering.

A Wider Frequency Of Being

If it’s painful for you to hear my story, it’s OK. That’s part of the process because my story includes pain, so don’t stop listening because you are uncomfortable. If you would just move past your discomfort you might learn something about empathy and compassion and mercy and justice.

—-Pastor Gricel Medinas

As a human race, all that we will ever see, unto eternity, is our Self. Can we see our Self with love and compassion today?

—–Bruce Paullin

There is a conspiracy of silence that exists within all societies, and ours is no exception. The conspiracy of silence is alive and well in many millions of American minds, including many present day religious and spiritual leaders.. The conspiracy of silence is continuously fed through our ignorance of our true nature, and our unwillingness and/or inability to both access and speak our personal truth at home and in the marketplace. This oppression and repression keeps us stuck in a very narrow frequency of existence.

We all look up to authorities from time to time. We all have been inspired, and sometimes oppressed, by them, as well. Yet, truth remains a pathless land, and we all need to pursue our own spiritual healing. Our journey in that new direction IS our unique path. The truth that sets us free IS the accessing and the sharing of our sense of enhanced wisdom and insight that has evolved through tuning into a wider frequency of being

An unfulfilling life experiences results from subservience to unhealed, oppressive forces from our past. No rejection or betrayal can ever hurt quite as much, and can have as long lasting impacts, as those which occurred while in childhood. Repeated rejections can contribute to an isolated, powerless sense of self for all susceptible people.

We travel the roads paved by two sources, which are our culture and our memory, and this shared infrastructure of consciousness is internalized and normalized within our own minds and hearts. But which roads of knowledge are being offered to us to travel upon, and where do they lead? Entire life experiences can become accommodations and adjustments to the “knowledge” that we are inadequate, woeful human beings who do not have the power to stand up for ourselves and be heard, both at home and in the marketplace. Entire life experiences can be created that keep us fearful and distrustful of others, well into our adulthood, and even unto death.

We all have access to infinity, and to each other, on levels that the conscious mind does not fully understand. The truth about each individual human life, and the collection that is called humanity, is that the sum total of all life influences each other directly and dramatically. Each moment of each day, our collective consciousness rains down upon us (or erupts within us) a wealth of information, and reaches our minds and “hearts”. We receive this information through the training, education, parental upbringing, media and news, the overall witnessing of life, our “dreams” and personal insights, as well as through some less obvious and poorly known and misunderstood means.

Each of us is both a receiver, and transmitter, of information. We tend to believe that the information that we are passing is exchanged solely through our words, and our body language, yet there is another level as well, a level that remains poorly understood, ignored, or even denied..We all have access to Spirit, with its “extra sensory perception”, yet we risk ridicule from many sources, including those scientifically inclined, or religiously indoctrinated, should we ever experience its mystery and claim it for ourselves. Each of us has a life energy field, which has not yet been detected by science, but certainly has been detected by the sensitive beings within the shamanic tradition, as well as within the mystics of the human race over the aeons of the existence of life. This life energy field, or in Rupert Sheldrake’s terms, the morphic field, is the field that we not only radiate, but that we are immersed in from the collective, interacting fields of nearly eight billion other human beings now living, as well as all humans and precedent life that has ever lived.

Let me bring this discussion home for just a moment. On Sunday, March 17, 2019, I went to play cards with my friend Jim H. While playing, I noted that I felt a blister forming on my forefinger on my right hand. I thought to myself that there was no way I could be developing a blister, because I had not done any work with my hands. Well, at that very moment, Sharon White was at home working outside around our home, and she had developed a blister, and noted it at the same time that day (6:00PM) that I felt the blister forming on my own finger. Coincidence?

Two years ago,in January of 2017, I started having seizures, and felt the presence of a golf ball sized black tumor in the left hemisphere of my brain. How on earth could I detect such a thing within myself without a MRI machine? I feared that I might be “losing it”, or even about to lose my own life, and was afraid to tell the doctor about it, though I mentioned to her that my dying father may well outlive me. Yet, on March 5, Marty C. had a major seizure, was hospitalized, and was diagnosed with a brain tumor the exact size, and in the same location in the brain as I detected within myself. And, when he described his seizure to me, I was struck by how similar his experience of the seizure was to my own. I told Marty that I felt that the black mass represented death itself, and that I hoped that it was not predictive of his immediate fate, or my own. When Marty had surgery to successfully remove the tumor two days later on Friday, the black mass from my own “life energy field” also disappeared. Marty was to die several months later, though, after a dramatic decline. Coincidence?

Two years ago, our dear friend June T. was visiting her brother Dale in Medford, Oregon. Dale was very sick at the time. In a Friday evening dream, I was in an unfamiliar bathroom, and I had fallen between the toilet and the wall. I was quite distressed in the dream. That next morning, Sharon and June talked on the phone, and June told her that Dale had fallen between the toilet and wall, while she watched helplessly. Coincidence?

The common bond to these experiences is my empathy and love for all three people, even while they went through their own unique version of suffering. Coincidences happen, and our eyes start to open to our long neglected truth. The more that we are receptive to that part of us that is truly unknown, the more we awaken to another possibility of our being. Whatever it is, and whoever it is that we are in consciousness, we also exist less consciously in realms where we have always been connected with our higher power, yet we did not yet know how to express its unique energies..

Empathy, compassion and love are the portals through which to receive the mysterious, higher level energies from our spiritual heritage. We are all connected at a much deeper level than we realize, yet we still can make this experience a more conscious one. Up to this point, I have not yet been able to apply this gift in any meaningful manner to help the human race, other than my willingness to write about the much greater undeveloped capacity of our human mind, heart, and soul. Learning to separate out from that energy what is mine, and what should be mine, from the vast sea of other member’s of the human race’s real life experiences, as well as their expectations and beliefs can initially bring fear and a sense of being overwhelmed. And, many of the people troubled by psychosis, including variations of paranoid schizophrenia, suffer from the inability to bring order out of the apparent chaos of many overlapping realities. Yet, that understanding of the information that we consciously, or unconsciously, share with each other may well be the key to ultimate transcendence for the human race.

I don’t see our medicine and technology catching up with our innate, though neglected, abilities in that area. It is finally starting to become “common knowledge” of the importance of searching for wholeness while undertaking any important medical treatments or processes, as these endeavors complement and work synergistically with western medical approaches to healing and cures.

I am not a religious person, though I have joined with the community of many theologians who believe that dreams are one of God’s (or, Higher Power, Universe, Healing, Spirit, Grandfather Great Spirit, The One, etc.)primary ways of getting our attention. In the absolute, there is little difference between what we experience through our dreams and through our so-called waking reality. Awake or asleep, internally we respond in real time to what we witness as if both experiences have equal footing in reality. So could God/Truth be trying to tell us something while we are sleeping? Here are six spiritually significant dreams that may be more than meets the mind’s eye….

1. Visitation Dreams
It’s common to have a visitation dream after a loved one passes. The deceased often appear in bodily form, healthy and luminous, in order to communicate an important message: “I’m okay.”, or “There is nothing to fear about death”. I have had several of these dreams over the years, with my most recent experience revolving around the recent death of a good friend.

2. Prophetic Dreams
Many people have had a “dream that came true.” Our dreams may use our past experiences to produce a probable series of future events—showing us patterns that help us make better choices when we’re awake. I have had several dreams that have predicted EXACTLY events that were to happen, yet they remain unreliable predictors of the future, because the future is always changing, depending upon changes made in the present.

3. Warning Dreams
God—and our body—can sometimes speak in dreams to warn us about imminent danger, especially regarding health. We may dream of a specific body part or even receive a verbal warning. In a 2015 study of women diagnosed with breast cancer, 83 percent had dreams that were more vivid than normal. And 44 percent reported hearing specific words like “breast cancer” or “tumor.”

4. Healing Dreams
These are the internal creations that bring us from an “out of balance” place into “harmony and balance.” They often involve a mystical encounter. I have experienced many healing dreams, I had one amazing dream with my deceased grandpa Henry which, to this day, inspires and confounds me.

5. Heavenly Dreams
According to a 1989 study, more than half of healthy young adults who dreamed of death spent a significant amount of time in that dream in heaven. These dreamers sometimes go down a tunnel or pathway and arrive at heavenly destinations. They also frequently encounter deceased loved ones. I have had dreams where I have heard the songs and sounds of the “angels of heaven”, carrying a message of beauty beyond my ability to describe or define.

6. Mutual Dreams
A mutual dream is when two people—typically in separate locations—dream of the same thing at the same time. According to a 2017 study, shared dreams are 80 percent identical on average. They often occur between close friends or relatives. Interestingly, 4 percent of these dreams are shared by strangers. A most profound realization and insight may come to the dreamer, that the collective mind of man dreams through individuals, and individuals dream through the collective mind of mankind. We are one, after all, you and I.

Wisdom and insight are available through our “dream channels”. Atheists and agnostics have the same capacity as the saints, as far as the ability to access dream wisdom goes. One of the more amazing dreams that I have had in recent years was the previously mentioned dream involving June Thomas’s brother Dale. We are much closer than we presently believe, and our beliefs keep us more separate as a human beings, than together as spiritual beings. June is much more like me, and attuned with me, than I am comfortable with, some times.

The same is true of ALL OF HUMANITY.

Theoretical physicists are now understanding that there are possibilities for alternate universes, as well as enhanced connections with the one we all currently reside within. I am saddened that mankind is becoming increasingly dependent on its technology for communication, while not concurrently developing the sensitivity to connect with the “energy” that we all share in, and with which we communicate with each other continuously. Our technology, especially the hand-held media devices that we use to entertain and hypnotize ourselves with, only serves to continue the energy of the past, without offering alternatives to the present collection of corrupted choices that humanity has seemed eternally resigned to make.

Science, though able to define relationships and the laws that dictate behavior between all observable, and quantum, phenomenon, are only now beginning to understand the ramifications of the real law of our existence, which is “all that we will ever see, unto eternity, is ourselves”. Science provides laws for what we see, yet, unlike enlightened spirituality, provides no laws predicting or supporting what is possible for humanity. Quantum mechanics will not be understood fully until the self-centered perspective towards infinity is replaced with the understanding that the collective, as well as the individual, is present in each of us, in each moment of existence. The impacts that we all have upon each other are not yet fully understood, yet prayer, meditation, and mindfulness prepare the mind for the unknown, where all true creation springs from. It is a much more collaborative effort being a human, and any other form of life on this planet, than our minimally conscious minds understand at this time. Ultimately, science and religion, medicine and technology, will all be united as manifestations of mankind’s expression of true being.

All of our “thoughts and prayers” have the potential to be of life-affirming value, yet their authority pales in comparison to the power of the underlying, unconscious intentions and manifestations of our collective consciousness and collective unconsciousness, and the infinite variations of potentially dangerous, unenlightened energies within it. I have seen that there are multitudes of suggestions and temptations floating around in our collective consciousness, and far too many of them revolve around diseases of the body, diseases of the mind, and rejection of our spirit of love. Yet,within that misunderstood and mysterious energy field, lies an infinite potential for healing and transformation, as well. The path towards conscious awareness, and “miraculous healing” includes sorting out what are our true thoughts and intentions from the collective stray noise of the human energy field, and how we can protect ourselves from all of the dangerous frequencies that we all tune into, intentionally or inadvertently.

Can we experience a spiritual apocalypse where we accept a new way way being, of seeing life, and finally remove ourselves from the limitations that our time based thinking has created for us? Can we come from a place not from our conditioned backgrounds, our upbringing, our wounding as children, our PTSD as adults, or even our most educated, intelligent parts of our training? Will we allow for ourselves the immense uncertainty, and the ultimate privilege, of accessing new paths of consciousness where love, empathy and compassion are our eternal companions? Will we allow our energy fields to resonate with the highest potentials for human experience, to even approach that of our purported divine nature? If we could move past our collective, and individual, discomfort we might learn something about empathy and compassion and mercy and justice, and even connect with a majesty and a miracle that far transcends our limited vision for life. We might finally know “God”, “Buddha”, Allah”, “Vishnu”, “Shiva”, “Krishna”, “Jesus Christ”, “Mohamed” and “Our Self” not as separate concepts, but instead as all part of a great holism.

To not do so is to continue our collective misanthropic experience of war, hatred, enmity between nations and peoples, destruction of our sacred planet Earth, economic inequality, racism, misogyny, diseases of all manners and types, and mental illness. We are free to choose what energy to manifest, and to access. If we do not want the damaged, diseased status quo to continue unto our collective Armageddon, then we will all make necessary changes to the paths we are now following, and/or we will follow completely new conscious paths of experience..

For I am about to create new heavens and a new earth; the former things shall not be remembered or come to mind.

—– Isaiah 65:17

Always remember that WE are the “I” in Isaiah 65:17, when we finally make conscious contact with the ultimate truth of being and existence.

I have attempted to “capture lightning in a bottle” by articulating this message. May each of us never despair of our faltering attempts to reach towards this infinite energy and to express its love and wisdom. To have a better life, we have to access new parts of our infinite self, and travel on new paths of understanding. A primary law of consciousness is that “we find what we are looking for”, so make sure to look for what we really want, and not fall victim to the suggestions of others that don’t always have our best interests at heart.

Very truly I tell you, whoever makes conscious contact with the truth of their real self will do the works I have been doing, and they will do even greater things than these, because we are all birthed from infinite power. And the miracles that we perform are to bring the highest glory to our lives, to the lives of all others, and to the transcendent energy from which we have arisen.

——-Jesus Of Nazareth, from John 14 12:14, (spiritually reinterpreted).

Life after enlightenment is all about personal responsibility for one’s thoughts and actions. When we decide to no longer be the victim, we can finally be the victor. Life can be lived on wider and wider frequencies of energy, where meaning, personal value, and loving service to others will bring to each of us all of the resources that we will ever need to live a successful life.

Can anyone conceive of the life where our hearts are opened so wide, that we literally feel like they will explode from all of the love that we now are able to share? Can anyone conceive of the life where our possibilities for understanding and experiencing more of the mysteries of the infinite nature of the interior universe finally becomes common knowledge?

We must not give up before the Miracle appears in our life, and in all of our lives which are impacted by our own.

Can we envision a more challenging, yet beautiful experience for ourselves, and for the planet?

What better reason for living can there possibly be?

Which frequencies of life are we attuned to today?

If we don’t appreciate where we now are, we are free to make another choice for our self.

Please, save yourself.

LOVE’S REUNION (poem by Bruce Paullin)

I stumbled over the frozen wilderness for oh, so long!

With a hole in my heart that life could just not fill

Until I stopped to rest, and heard a gentle voice singing a long forgotten song

That promised of my release from this winter world of painful chill

Her lyrics spoke of the return of Life to freedom

And the release of shivering minds from darkness’ frozen, fearful hands

She drew me closer without any further verbal tethers

And prepared me for the walk back to Love’s now awakening lands

Her warming presence melted the icy hardness that I used to know

Inspiring within me the courage, to myself and my world, to say

That, to all of my past memories’ barren trees of lifeless knowledge, I now refuse to go

I will now accept only the lessons learned along Love’s Infinite Way

Yes, she met me while I was with the dark companion

But it was to her pleasure to take me home to share her loving lights

And give me the shelter of Love’s never setting summer sun

She changed my cold mourning into happier, heavenly nights!

By freely offering of herself and all of her sacred charms

She moves me through life’s clamorous valleys unto its silent peaks

I can now retire from a life of fruitless wanderings

To live in the Source of Peace of which mankind forever seeks

Her life is resplendent with Wisdom, Strength, and Beauty

For these are the robes with which she clothes her being

The gift of Love now unwraps before my inviting eyes

To reveal her ecstatic vision, which is now all-seeing

My search for Truth and Love Sublime has finally ended

For, I now fill my empty cup from her joyous running streams

I have reunited with my eternally fulfilling lover

And, her healing waters dissolve all of my painful dreams

I only seek to remain within her all-embracing arms

While through all life she extends her ever unfolding surprise

My first waking breath each morning brings the certainty

That, from my bed, joined as one, we again shall arise

My broken heart and shattered life is finally mending

And, wedded to her life, I now call her my faithful bride

Life no longer has a fearful road ahead to travel

For, One with God, on Love’s lighted path, I now gratefully stride

All That Is Gold Does Not Glitter

All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost;
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by the frost.

From the ashes a fire shall be woken,
A light from the shadows shall spring;
Renewed shall be blade that was broken,
The crownless again shall be king

by J. R. R. Tolkien (1892-1973)

Even if you are now lost in the shadows while dancing upon the surface of your own “Dark Side Of The Moon”, there still is hope. To be insane in an insane world, to be a stranger in a strange land, is the true new normal for many people presently wandering upon the face of this chaotic planet. How we deal with the insanity determines whether we remain imprisoned, or find our freedom. Blaming others for ones’ present station in life is self-defeating. Yet, that is the first response of an immature mind, a mind not ready and willing to make the necessary adjustments in course to create a new life experience.

Mass hypnosis, oppression, mental illness, drug addiction and alcoholism, and their most oppressive spawn, suicide, have been a scourge upon the fabric of human consciousness for time immemorial. Mental illness, drug addiction, alcoholism, and suicidal ideation begins with the loss of personal meaning and choices for life, with their companions of depression, alienation, isolation, despair and loneliness. Suicide is the ultimate act of oppression against self, which has already been oppressed and repressed since birth. Suicide is a cruel act of violence against self, family, friends, and the supporting community. Suicide is perceived by those sufferers to be the only solution for desperate souls who have reached the end of their options.

Our society continues to churn out potential suicide victims at a catastrophic rate, and that rate will only increase, as the diseases of addiction and mental illness within our culture continues to increase. I have known, and buried, far too many friends and family members who were waiting for a better day, and life, while abusing drugs and alcohol, or collapsing into mental illness. My own “wait for a better day” has born great fruits for me, but the fruit was not passively acquired, nor was it acquired through waiting for the outer conditions of my life to improve. I first had to confront my own suffering, and the sources within my mind, memory, and heart that would push me towards self-annihilation. Suffering need not be a death sentence, for those who choose to awaken.

Life can be an extremely humbling experience. Those blessed few who stop resisting life and develop the capacity to accept “defeat” are the ones most susceptible to healing. It is when we are defeated, that we become the most open to life affirming change and growth. Then we can accept personal responsibility for the rest of our lives, knowing that the willingness, and capacity, for changes in our attitudes and behaviors can now become our “higher power”. When our goal has finally been spotted, or, has spotted us, we each can make our own, unique path towards it. The trail that each one of us blazes is as important as any path made by any prophet who has ever lived, or will live. It is only our ego, or the egos of the hero worshipers of other faiths who have not realized their own highest truth that would say otherwise.

To make dramatic changes in my life, the desire had to come from a place deep within myself. I did not change because my wife and family, my friends, my minister at church, my employer, my political leaders, or my “people pleasing” attitudes cajoled or advised me to change. I had to begin to value myself differently, and to become conscious that my behavior was causing irreparable harm to myself, to other human beings, to our animal brothers and sisters, and/or to the sustainability for life on this planet. I understood that my behavior was insane, and that I had a death wish for myself, and/or for others. I sought for a higher power or energy to overcome my insanity. Bringing healing to a situation is about what we are not doing well, and where we can improve, right now, in this moment, to help unfold divine intention. Positive change follows the hearts’ intentions, if the heart is pure. If it is a desire from the Heart, never stop seeking that which seems unattainable, for it is the Heart itself seeking for its own highest expression.

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.

Most forms of insanity can be healed without a lifetime of therapy or taking medications, if it is recognized that at its source, insanity arises from our habituated thoughts and feelings layered over traumatic injuries. Insight changes attitudes, insight changes behaviors, and insight changes lives. To change my world, I first changed myself, through insight, meditation, making amends to all people who I may have harmed through my insanity, and through carrying the message of recovery and healing to all who are interested in not only hearing my story, but bringing healing to their own lives, as well. I continue to die daily, to all that is not like my true nature. I do not need pills or philosophical ideas to separate me from life’s goodness. I now see the good that is really good, and all of the illusions of self that others, and the past versions of me, offer up to the world as our daily “prayer offerings’ for its conditional acceptance, or its rejection.

Though I lost out on my childhood dreams and goals of becoming a space traveler, to “get off this fucking rock”, I was able to live into a new dream. This “fucking rock” transitioned from a living hell, to becoming more of a peaceful paradise, where I became a more conscious traveler through the infinite regions of inner space, or Consciousness itself. My spiritual launching pad only awaited for me to “let go of the controls” to be catapulted into the unknown, mysterious, transformative and healing potential of the infinite. My “spirit rocket” now lifts off daily, without the extra encumbrance of religious and cultural conditioning, misunderstanding, judgement, and all of the superstition which impedes spiritual progress. Love and acceptance of myself and all others, INCLUDING ALL ANIMAL LIFE, now unfolds within me as my primary, life affirming propellant.

To remain healthy, we must be willing to “punch a Nazi”, figuratively speaking, but not just those projections out of our own wounded past. We instead will be dealing directly with issues that need to be addressed through insight into self, communication with others and/or outright confrontation with the offensive and antagonistic elements within our society still operating under the influence of the chaos and swamp of the collective consciousness that we all arose from.

Always question prevailing attitudes and philosophies of the people in power, be they politicians, employers, pop psychology or spirituality gurus, or religious figures. Healthy skepticism is warranted whenever a person or organization tries to exert pressure on individuals to conform to certain beliefs or traditions. Never sit idly by while witnessing injustice or unfair and hurtful judgement and action meted out by the people in power against innocent people. By your silence, you are supporting the ignorant and the evil doers. They will use your silence to claim that you were in full support of their abhorrent behavior.  Do not join in their conspiracy of silence.

Taking dominion over the world, and then destroying its wildlife, forests, rivers, oceans, and lands was never part of God’s will. It was always part of a worn out patriarchal attitude that still pollutes human awareness to this day. The greed and self-serving interests of our Christian ancestors has been glorified, and exalted, over and above the preservation of our planet, and the cultivation of harmony between the diverse interests of people on this planet. Our politicians and corporate leaders use our Capitalistic economic system to rape and pillage the Earth, and its people, and all of its life.. The “mark of the beast” is seen daily in the attitudes of those who promote the destruction of our environment, and who incite hatred and enmity between people.

The closer I get to my “God’ the more anonymous that I become, the less self important that i feel, and the more my story becomes about the truth of life, and, a little less about just myself..My story may have little or no value to you, yet, there is a story, long neglected within your own heart and soul, patiently awaiting its delivery to our world.  Your world awaits the King or Queen within you ..You only needs to pick up your own unique crown of the truth of being, and wear it with integrity and love.  Take that MAGA hat off, and throw it in the dumpster, the corruption of thought and heart that this hat represents exists at a level far below your real nature.

Never let someone speak for us, we are responsible for bringing our voice into the world, and having it heard. Never take for granted our right to freedom of speech and its expression, both at home and in the marketplace.  Find the way to express yourself without sacrificing your integrity, and stand up tall and strong in the face of any ignorant,  unfair or unwarranted criticism.  We will “cast your pearls before swine”.  Our hard-earned deepest truths have little value to those who are considered hypnotized, which are many of the “civilized” and “normalized” citizens within this diseased culture of ours.  If they cannot see how your wisdom will increase the size of their bank accounts, increase their prestige and popularity, get them more or better sex, or just generally appeal to their ego, it will have little value, except “laughing value”.  “A prophet is never respected in their own hometown”.

Healthy anger at people, situations, politicians, religious figures, and abusive family members is not only acceptable behavior, it is required for honoring the truth of the moment, and to retain spiritual integrity.  Do not follow those well-meaning souls who claim that all anger is hatred, for that is simply not true.  Anger becomes dangerous when it does not naturally arise from the moment, but instead from animal/tribal instinct, memory and religious and cultural conditioning.  Oppression and repression are birthed through incomplete and prematurely aborted responses to environmental threats.  Institutionalized anger, or hatred,  arises from memory, inadequate education, and emotional immaturity, and can be stoked by politicians and religious leaders with ignorant and evil agendas, and it is dangerous, being the source or racism, war, hatred, alienation, and cultural insanity.

I am concerned about the institutionalized  ignorance that is so prevalent within many sections of our society, including elements within the American Christian church. Using a church to get to the truth and beauty of Life can be like using an old Volkswagen Beetle to drive around the world, with a worn out, outdated map. Though Christianity brings a form of comfort with its historical and cultural familiarity to all, for many of us it is a clumsy vehicle for consciousness, with much too philosophically restrictive, time dependent dogma that even postpones “heaven” into a fantasy future after death, with no guarantee that anybody will ever spiritually ascend, no matter how much we try to match “what Jesus would do”, or what the other “prophets” would advise us to do.

Mysticism is at the core of all true religions. Each of us is a mystic, should we shed the oppressive and repressive energies of familial, cultural and religious conditioning. Each one of us should become the leader of our own internal movement towards truth, beauty, love, intelligence, awe, wonder, grace, and miracles. What is the difference between the “mind of God” and the “mind of man”? Ah, the answer is there, for you to discover for yourself. You should never just accept my answers, without your own deepest inquiries into your own personal truth.

It is revealing to note how the experience of “enlightenment” allows for the love for all people, and respect for all love based philosophies, yet promotes no dogma, religion or philosophy, as such, for its own support. The prerequisites are a desire for change, self-honesty, insight, mindfulness, meditation, and the developed ability to see beyond the controlling mirages of cultural and religious conditioning. Yet, religions, and their followers, tend to strongly move in tight circles around their own adherents and practices, and often exclude others from their spiritual “inner circles”. And those who point to the benefits of non-religious, spiritual enlightenment are regarded suspiciously, and, in some cases, as manifestations of Satan, or are seen as Infidels, by those who claim to be “religious”.

This story has presented a small portion of my own journey towards healing. As each individual is unique, please do not use my experience to minimize, or maximize, your own. We must eventually find our own direction for life, and not only learn how to think for ourselves, but also to learn how to think and feel with others. We can truly be one with others in a non-controlling, NON-JUDGMENTAL manner, and be with each other with compassion and in communion.

It is healthy to acknowledge that we all need each other. I can’t do this life alone, nor would I ever want that for myself. We are here to help and support each other, and to love each other. Each moment can either be a new beginning, or just the continuation of a painful past where all of human suffering arises from. It is our choice as to how we will experience this moment. I must be willing to travel new paths of consciousness, and never to become too attached to any particular memory, or teacher and their teachings, as it is up to me to work out my own “salvation”. When I let go of the controls, including my own internalized forms of institutionalized thoughts, when I let go of time based thoughts and expectations, when I respect the truth that many times the presence and wisdom of the Great Unknown, rather than just more information and knowledge, is what I am best fed with, that is when I am truly trusting the life force which has always supported me, whether I have recognized its presence or not.

While incarnated into human form, with our poorly illuminated human minds, we can only witness the projections of our minds. All that we will ever see, unto whatever eternity that we can possibly conceive of, is our self, so the most important question for each day is “how will I see myself today?” The answer to that question determines whether I can see through the eyes of the truth of this moment, or just the limited eyes of the past. Each person that I meet either is one of the infinite manifestations of God, deserving ultimate respect and love, or they become just another dead illusion of my aging, conditioned mind. The insight gained through mindful self-examination can erase the blocks to Love’s awareness, and imbue life with a new meaning. Yet, even with Love being cultivated, anger will arise, and it is the mark of a mature, healed person as to how they can skillfully express their most difficult emotions.  Why would anyone just settle for the “finger pointing at the moon” or the verbal description, when one could walk upon its very surface, and be one with it.  Sucking more meaning out of someone else’s “finger” will never replace the direct personal experience of our deepest desire, the underlying truth of our own nature.

Be ever vigilant with the internalized image of anything, or anyone. Note how the desire for the image, rather than the truth that underlies it, will attempt to take precedence, and will distort one’s view of the world. The image plays to a small part of fragmented being, whereas the truth plays through the wholeness of the all beings. Lust, greed, selfishness, hatred, and judgement of all others unlike oneself all play to the structure of internalized individualized images. Seeing each other through wholeness and love and thus disempowering the fragmenting images, which is another way of saying “giving forgiveness” allows for right action and healing in the otherwise chaotic and broken world created within the mind of individual self.

The ultimate truth is that “you can’t be real”. For in God’s eyes, there is only one self, one love, one existence, with an infinitude of manifestations. There is no room for “you and me” in ultimate truth, though we must continue to make room for that “illusion” in the relative truth of this world, through practicing forgiveness and letting go, until the final ascension into “enlightenment” or complete spiritual understanding. Finding the true connecting link is the journey into wholeness that our human race must undertake, if it is to survive. When we see our brother and sister as our own self, then we are home. This connecting link is not to be found through our digital devices, or through our “best thinking” or philosophies. It will unfold when we learn how to no longer think time based thoughts, but, instead, eternity based thoughts. That is the only place where Unity will ever be experienced. To see eternity, is to first witness the self without fear and judgement, and then see through the illusions of self to the Heart of Truth.

MOUNTAINS IN THE DESERT

While in realization of Truth, God’s High Mount is found to be just another illusion to climb

The idea infects like a virus to control the innocent, and all fearful, desirous minds.

The non-illuminated, restless mind remains forever devoid of Love’s Rhyme and Truth’s Reason

With its fruitless chasing of desert mirages, until it looks within, and sees the movements that are guilty of treason.

The quickest way to prepare for the new world order (which was once the old world order, by the way) is to get outside of the house, the computer, the movie theater, the Facebook pages, etc. and start getting acquainted with the great outdoors. Once we are free from the encumbrances of our daily lives, we may be more receptive to the call of our spirit. We are not connected to God through our technology. In fact, most of our media related technology has separated us from the quiet state of being that allows God’s will to be readily accepted into consciousness. Our mother Earth, Gaia is a living being, and is the true “son-daughter of God”. And yes, we are children of that sacred child. God’s face is seen clearly, once the detritus of human misunderstanding is moved aside long enough so that Reality may emerge, once again.

We need a real awakening, enlightenment, to change our way of thinking and seeing things. To breathe in and be aware of your body and look deeply into it, realise you are the Earth and your consciousness is also the consciousness of the Earth.”

~Thich Nhat Hanh

Technology is only a tool, though it has become another new world religion, a way of life for far too many people. Our country, and our world, shows the collective effects of falling far short of meeting or even acknowledging the existence of our spiritual needs, or attempting to meet our spiritual needs through illusory processes. Most of our media devices have continued the promotion and distribution of cultural hypnosis, and most people continue to be separated from a greater good through that process. The world exists in a state of hypnosis, and it is easy to see that truth when the mind finally takes itself off of the grid of shared cultural and religious misunderstanding. We can pull our eyes off of the phone display for a moment, and engage the person next to us in conversation. We will all benefit from the exchange. We do not benefit in any spiritual or social way by remaining glued to our phones.

Someday the rest of the world will wake up, and realize that all of our technology is only a symbol for the true power that we all have access to, if we only were to fully explore the full range of our consciousness. My closed mind and heart was eternally grounded, and would have NEVER freed itself from darkness’ grasp, until I accepted personal responsibility for the brokenness, and self-destructive and other-destructive life that I had co-created for myself and with others, see the damage that those illusions caused, and became willing to have a different, more spiritually oriented type of life experience.

Freedom may not be for everybody now, but it certainly is for me, now, and for all of eternity. I am grateful for my wife Sharon White, who shares in the new/old insight. May all sentient beings be freed from their suffering. But first, all sentient beings must become conscious enough to be aware of the options available to free themselves from their suffering. Pay attention to the man behind the curtain! Get to know him at the deepest level. And then, don’t give up finding truth, beauty, and love until the real Miracle appears in your own life, OK?

Like my father asked, when I was nearly four years old, and finally learned how to talk,

“Will that boy ever run out of things to talk about?” and

“Bruce, would you please shut up!”

Once I started talking I proved that I had the capacity for speech, and A LOT OF IT. Both of my parents wondered, at times, if I would ever shut up. Once a person touches Consciousness, Infinity is the limit to our potential.  Yet, my own voice disappeared, after many years of oppression, and repression.

The long-term oppressive effects of the conspiracy of silence that plagues most men will continue to limit our potential to experience happiness and longevity, and love for our life.  That certainly was the case for my own life, and nearly eventuated in my early death at thirty years of age.

I am humbled and amazed by both the miracle eternally embedded in SACRED SILENCE, as well as its bridge to human consciousness through the Word. May the Word take a form unique to each of us in all of lives, and lift all of us together into a unity of love, thought, action, and a new shared story of world healing and wholeness.  May the Word spontaneously arise from our SACRED SILENCE, and not from the chaos of our troubled past.

As I contemplate the entirety of my life, I see a simple truth arising from the complexities of the details. Silence born of ignorance and oppression brings suffering and disease. Silence born of healing brings joy and love into the world. This same Silence brings forth the capacity to listen with the heart for the deepest meaning embedded within All of Life, in All of Its infinitude of forms, and return the dignity back to each sacred manifestation of life.

Is anybody really listening to each other?

Those who have learned how to really listen, hear the “voice for God”. And, we finally get to live in the creation that Love provides for us all, when we accept Love’s vision as our own.

And, no, Father, in whatever form Father may take, I will never “shut up”

CAN YOU HEAR ME NOW?

We all have had problems listening to each other. We all have had problems listening to ourselves. Yet, our stories must be told, and we must listen to the “other’s” story, with respect and compassion for ourselves, and for the other. Every good story has an ending. And, so do our bad stories. What value is a story, if it is never told? What value is love, if it is never shared? What is the value of speaking, if nobody is even listening? What is the value of writing, if there is nobody left to read?

We all have infinite value, whether it is ever recognized by another, or not. Discover, enjoy and celebrate INFINITY, rather than the limitations thrust upon us by the deafness of our culture and of our families of origin.

Sing your song, like your life depended on it, BECAUSE, IT DOES! All of our lives depend on each others stories. Those who will not listen to our story, and in turn, will not share their own story with us, are still stuck in their own story of repression and oppression. They are still unconscious participants in the Conspiracy Of Silence.

The sun shines, and the artist interprets its light upon the beautiful landscape, and paints a classic piece of art. The wolf howls in the lonely, cold, snow-covered wilderness, and, miraculously, another wolf a great distance away howls back at him, reassuring both that each other is still there. The bird sings alone in the forest, yet, a hiker stops for a moment, listens, and her heart begins to sing and soar with the bird. The divorced and lonely man sings in the shower, and the salesman at the door hears him, and is so impressed by the man’s voice that he encourages him to try out for a local band. An isolated man stumbles upon the miracle of silence within his being, and a resultant bridge of words subsequently connects this sacred silence to his latest writings, creating beloved poetry and healing balms for all.

As I look at my life’s history, I bear witness to Love and its healing Mystery.

I have penetrated the Conspiracy of Silence, and I have lived well beyond my expiration date.  My “miracle experiment” continues in earnest.

I now shoot for the moon, and the stars beyond.  My world will NEVER be the same.

How about yours?

“Houston, Tranquility Base here.  The Eagle has landed.”

—-Neil Armstrong, July 20, 1969