Prologue-Book #8
.
No More Turning Away—Breaking the Conspiracy of Silence,
by Bruce Paullin
.
If you want to become whole, let yourself be broken.
If you want to become straight, let yourself be crooked.
If you want to become full, let yourself be empty.
If you want to be reborn, let yourself die.
If you want to be given everything, give everything up
Lao Tsu (in the Tao Te Ching)
.
In 1987, I had a series of remarkable transformative events in my life. I was near death, and insane, and if I could not find a truth that I could guide my life by, I was prepared to leave this earth life. I finally found that truth, and I had what the Christians might call a born-again experience, sans their prophet Jesus, and all the tradition and mythology surrounding that religion. I had a miraculous healing, which gave me a blank slate to write my new identity upon, without being burdened by all the wayward attitudes of the old me. But the spiritual experience revealed the presence in consciousness of two trauma created “tricksters” who I did not have the knowledge or capacity to deal with at that time, and that TRUTH would not just magically dissolve without some sort of conscious participation on my part.
.
I was to find that most spiritual teachings, religions, and prophets for those traditions (except Jesus, who spent ‘forty days in the wilderness dealing with himself and the collective concept of “satan”) totally bypassed the necessary engagement with these powerful cultural and personal forces, thus keeping them as unconscious advisors to all well-meaning practitioners. Yet ancient shamans, the early Greek philosophers, and, more recently, Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell, Gabor Mate, Dick Schwarz, and the modern-day shaman Dr Alberto Villoldo have pointed to the way to engage, transform, and transcend these ever-present forces in consciousness that impede our spiritual evolution.
.
When it comes to being conscious as a human being, it is what it is, but it is not what it seems. I would like to encourage any hesitant reader to consider this challenging yet, potentially, transformative work. I will not promise you eternal salvation or a seat next to God in heaven. I will not promise you infinite financial prosperity and all the popularity that you need to fulfill your vision of who you think you are. I do promise you that I will present to you deep and potentially healing truths to contemplate and, perhaps, to apply to your own life.
.
This is hard hitting material., and for most people, it will be difficult to read all the way through in one sitting. What I have already seen from friends and family is that they already have too much to consider, too much family troubles, too much distraction to even consider such an intensive and extensive work. And, they have not yet even begun their own journey of self-discovery and are unconscious of the effects of individual and culturally derived trauma.. Please remember, these words have a value many will not immediately recognize, and thus, it can be easy to casually dismiss them and move on to more important matters. But these words have immense importance to me, and I would not be here had I not made a decision to keep living, and find an accurate description of the challenges that living in this diseased culture brings, and why so many like me felt the need to leave it prematurely, or engage in self-and/or other destructive activities.
.
I wrote this as if my own, and many other, lives depended upon it, BECAUSE THEY DO. Note that, while you read, many parts of yourself will be motivated to just turn away, put the book down, and move onto something much more pleasant. If you can be more conscious of that inclination, you need not judge or condemn it, just witness it, and not be carried by it back into perceptions of boredom, or even indifference to this subject matter.
.
Do you want to know why things never change? It is because we let our “not relevant to me” or “don’t care” indifference algorithms rule our minds. I urge you from the very beginning of this work to hang in there and wait for a new miracle of perception to appear in your awareness that meditating upon this work may eventually stimulate within you.
.
This work has a healing potential for those who are not trapped in culturally and religiously constrained patterns of unawareness, or, if they are trapped, are seeking release from these historical pillories. According to the latest neuroscientific studies,led by Antonio Damasio, our identity as a human being is much more determined by the collaboration of all cells within our bodies and our feeling nature than our left brain dominated rational processing centers.. Men have taken issue with that fact thousands of years before Descartes time (I think therefore I am), yet the fact remains—-we have to feel something DEEPLY, to truly find a new truth, and to feel and experience our real self.. I will be appealing to the very marrow of your bones, the cells within your body, the feeling nature of your heart and soul, while balancing the need to keep the intellect, and our rational processes, engaged.Please remember, we have to feel the truth deep within our very bones before we will act upon it.
.
I did not write this book to entertain or amuse the reader. I wrote this book, not only to give voice to my process, but to give voice to those that never developed their own healing message, or who lost their voice due to early deaths, and/or historical cultural oppression. The words that you are about to read may be considered to have an almost miraculous quality to them because they are written by a man who, by all rights, should be dead. Research for this book nearly cost me my life several times, and it is serious business to me.
.
After nearly dying at 31 years of age, and embarking on a life changing search for truth, I was finally able to give voice to my past, and to my suffering, as well as to point in the direction of healing’s true origins. Dead men tell no tales, and, often, the world would not have wanted to hear their message anyway, because the conditions that often lead to premature death and disease lie latent within all of us, and our denial of that fact is a powerful internal ruler for the unawakened. Yet, I live to tell my difficult tale, a tale that almost cost me my life, and a tale that is especially hard to listen to by those often in the greatest need..
.
I do not live much beyond 31 years of age if I continued to turn away from my own traumatic wounding and resultant suffering. This book does not get written if I turn away from the wounding and suffering of others. A powerful realization came to me that I could no longer just keep taking crap from past versions of myself and a society that drains life force out of all its unconscious members. just so we could continue in our own unexamined, unconscious, unhealed existence while parading around as if everything is still OK. Most of the scars on our hearts were not left by our enemies, but they were left by the culture, the religion, and the people that claimed to love us the most.
.
I finally realized that I wanted and deserved love, while the world that we live in thinks that it deserves more comfort, entertainment, distraction, religious and political fantasy and delusion, and avoidance of difficult cultural truths, at the very expense of being more loving to itself, and to each other.
I eventually found the love that I was looking for, but it did not come from this crazy world that we live in. The Love erupted within my own mind and heart. Yet, what about this world around me, where and when will it be captured by the infinite spirit of Truth and Love? Sadly, the world must continue spinning in its wobbly orbit around its culturally institutionalized and normalized control dramas and insanity, where unhindered traumatic wounding of its citizens, spiritual decay, loneliness, anxiety, political divisiveness, religious fundamentalism, and mental illness, often posing as adherents of the 2nd Amendment of the US Constitution, continues unabated. There is no such thing as the devil or Satan. There is only the unconscious selfish beliefs of men and women who would rather watch the world burn than make necessary changes in the errant courses of their lives.
.
I have given a voice to my dark and light sides, and I now live in harmony within myself. Yet, the nightly news continues to give a sad summation daily of the ever-present shadows and darkness permeating the fabric of our civilization. We do not live in harmony, and the light and dark continue to seek their own tribes rather than collaborate on a healing path.
.
I saved the world, FROM MYSELF. Yet, the world is too unconscious to save other innocent people from its own wayward intentions, let alone the intentions of its misguided individual citizen. The powerful message here is that we each must work out our own salvation and find our own unique healing, guiding light, for the ones being offered to us by our culture are suspect at best. We each must consciously look at life, discard the old, unnecessary parts that still try to rule us, and crown a new king, or queen, within our being who will rule with compassion, understanding, and healing intention over our thoughts and actions for the rest of our days.
.
It is tough to know in advance who to trust in these most challenging times as we attempt to move away from the old ways into a new understanding. Should we trust the authorities like we are programmed to do? Should we just automatically trust anyone with a PHD, a medical and/or therapeutic practice, a license to practice law, a degree from a Christian college, a former military commander, a reality tv star turned politician, the awakening Pope Francis from the long corrupted Catholic church, or US Supreme Court justices who takes advantage of our collective complacency and ignorance? Is that not tantamount to putting “new wine into old wineskins”?
.
Staying silent and remaining compliant within the face of our diseased culture is easy in the short term, but deadly to all in the long term. It is time to trust the courageous ones, the ones who attempt to speak the truth, and hold themselves, and each other, accountable to healing intentions. To speak the truth requires an integrity that seems to be evaporating from the very landscape of our culture, as more power-seeking people, cowards by their very nature, tell lies to get their way. Telling a lie is easy, especially when our culture has normalized so many of them. Standing up for what is right is hard work, and few seek employment in that field. Thinking for ourselves is hard, while also being compassionate, authentic, and empowered.
.
In times like these, it takes all of the courage in the world to question the status quo, to speak up, and to tell the truth. Dead men tell no tales, but, unlike the legions of the spiritually comatose, I am no longer under the spell of the conspiracy of silence, where lies and avoidance of discomfort are our paradigms, and rule our awareness. I have looked deeply at both the light and the shadow of human existence. I have even stared into the face of Death.
I did not turn away from what I saw.
.
The following book is a report on what I have seen.
The power revealed within ourselves by clearly seeing the limitations of our collective and individual consciousness is everything.
.
There is no other truth.
.
No More Turning Away—Breaking the Conspiracy of Silence,
by Bruce Paullin
.
If you want to become whole, let yourself be broken.
If you want to become straight, let yourself be crooked.
If you want to become full, let yourself be empty.
If you want to be reborn, let yourself die.
If you want to be given everything, give everything up
Lao Tsu (in the Tao Te Ching)
.
In 1987, I had a series of remarkable transformative events in my life. I was near death, and insane, and if I could not find a truth that I could guide my life by, I was prepared to leave this earth life. I finally found that truth, and I had what the Christians might call a born-again experience, sans their prophet Jesus, and all the tradition and mythology surrounding that religion. I had a miraculous healing, which gave me a blank slate to write my new identity upon, without being burdened by all the wayward attitudes of the old me. But the spiritual experience revealed the presence in consciousness of two trauma created “tricksters” who I did not have the knowledge or capacity to deal with at that time, and that TRUTH would not just magically dissolve without some sort of conscious participation on my part.
.
I was to find that most spiritual teachings, religions, and prophets for those traditions (except Jesus, who spent ‘forty days in the wilderness dealing with himself and the collective concept of “satan”) totally bypassed the necessary engagement with these powerful cultural and personal forces, thus keeping them as unconscious advisors to all well-meaning practitioners. Yet ancient shamans, the early Greek philosophers, and, more recently, Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell, Gabor Mate, Dick Schwarz, and the modern-day shaman Dr Alberto Villoldo have pointed to the way to engage, transform, and transcend these ever-present forces in consciousness that impede our spiritual evolution.
.
When it comes to being conscious as a human being, it is what it is, but it is not what it seems. I would like to encourage any hesitant reader to consider this challenging yet, potentially, transformative work. I will not promise you eternal salvation or a seat next to God in heaven. I will not promise you infinite financial prosperity and all the popularity that you need to fulfill your vision of who you think you are. I do promise you that I will present to you deep and potentially healing truths to contemplate and, perhaps, to apply to your own life.
.
This is hard hitting material., and for most people, it will be difficult to read all the way through in one sitting. What I have already seen from friends and family is that they already have too much to consider, too much family troubles, too much distraction to even consider such an intensive and extensive work. And, they have not yet even begun their own journey of self-discovery and are unconscious of the effects of individual and culturally derived trauma.. Please remember, these words have a value many will not immediately recognize, and thus, it can be easy to casually dismiss them and move on to more important matters. But these words have immense importance to me, and I would not be here had I not made a decision to keep living, and find an accurate description of the challenges that living in this diseased culture brings, and why so many like me felt the need to leave it prematurely, or engage in self-and/or other destructive activities.
.
I wrote this as if my own, and many other, lives depended upon it, BECAUSE THEY DO. Note that, while you read, many parts of yourself will be motivated to just turn away, put the book down, and move onto something much more pleasant. If you can be more conscious of that inclination, you need not judge or condemn it, just witness it, and not be carried by it back into perceptions of boredom, or even indifference to this subject matter.
.
Do you want to know why things never change? It is because we let our “not relevant to me” or “don’t care” indifference algorithms rule our minds. I urge you from the very beginning of this work to hang in there and wait for a new miracle of perception to appear in your awareness that meditating upon this work may eventually stimulate within you.
.
This work has a healing potential for those who are not trapped in culturally and religiously constrained patterns of unawareness, or, if they are trapped, are seeking release from these historical pillories. According to the latest neuroscientific studies,led by Antonio Damasio, our identity as a human being is much more determined by the collaboration of all cells within our bodies and our feeling nature than our left brain dominated rational processing centers.. Men have taken issue with that fact thousands of years before Descartes time (I think therefore I am), yet the fact remains—-we have to feel something DEEPLY, to truly find a new truth, and to feel and experience our real self.. I will be appealing to the very marrow of your bones, the cells within your body, the feeling nature of your heart and soul, while balancing the need to keep the intellect, and our rational processes, engaged.Please remember, we have to feel the truth deep within our very bones before we will act upon it.
.
I did not write this book to entertain or amuse the reader. I wrote this book, not only to give voice to my process, but to give voice to those that never developed their own healing message, or who lost their voice due to early deaths, and/or historical cultural oppression. The words that you are about to read may be considered to have an almost miraculous quality to them because they are written by a man who, by all rights, should be dead. Research for this book nearly cost me my life several times, and it is serious business to me.
.
After nearly dying at 31 years of age, and embarking on a life changing search for truth, I was finally able to give voice to my past, and to my suffering, as well as to point in the direction of healing’s true origins. Dead men tell no tales, and, often, the world would not have wanted to hear their message anyway, because the conditions that often lead to premature death and disease lie latent within all of us, and our denial of that fact is a powerful internal ruler for the unawakened. Yet, I live to tell my difficult tale, a tale that almost cost me my life, and a tale that is especially hard to listen to by those often in the greatest need..
.
I do not live much beyond 31 years of age if I continued to turn away from my own traumatic wounding and resultant suffering. This book does not get written if I turn away from the wounding and suffering of others. A powerful realization came to me that I could no longer just keep taking crap from past versions of myself and a society that drains life force out of all its unconscious members. just so we could continue in our own unexamined, unconscious, unhealed existence while parading around as if everything is still OK. Most of the scars on our hearts were not left by our enemies, but they were left by the culture, the religion, and the people that claimed to love us the most.
.
I finally realized that I wanted and deserved love, while the world that we live in thinks that it deserves more comfort, entertainment, distraction, religious and political fantasy and delusion, and avoidance of difficult cultural truths, at the very expense of being more loving to itself, and to each other.
I eventually found the love that I was looking for, but it did not come from this crazy world that we live in. The Love erupted within my own mind and heart. Yet, what about this world around me, where and when will it be captured by the infinite spirit of Truth and Love? Sadly, the world must continue spinning in its wobbly orbit around its culturally institutionalized and normalized control dramas and insanity, where unhindered traumatic wounding of its citizens, spiritual decay, loneliness, anxiety, political divisiveness, religious fundamentalism, and mental illness, often posing as adherents of the 2nd Amendment of the US Constitution, continues unabated. There is no such thing as the devil or Satan. There is only the unconscious selfish beliefs of men and women who would rather watch the world burn than make necessary changes in the errant courses of their lives.
.
I have given a voice to my dark and light sides, and I now live in harmony within myself. Yet, the nightly news continues to give a sad summation daily of the ever-present shadows and darkness permeating the fabric of our civilization. We do not live in harmony, and the light and dark continue to seek their own tribes rather than collaborate on a healing path.
.
I saved the world, FROM MYSELF. Yet, the world is too unconscious to save other innocent people from its own wayward intentions, let alone the intentions of its misguided individual citizen. The powerful message here is that we each must work out our own salvation and find our own unique healing, guiding light, for the ones being offered to us by our culture are suspect at best. We each must consciously look at life, discard the old, unnecessary parts that still try to rule us, and crown a new king, or queen, within our being who will rule with compassion, understanding, and healing intention over our thoughts and actions for the rest of our days.
.
It is tough to know in advance who to trust in these most challenging times as we attempt to move away from the old ways into a new understanding. Should we trust the authorities like we are programmed to do? Should we just automatically trust anyone with a PHD, a medical and/or therapeutic practice, a license to practice law, a degree from a Christian college, a former military commander, a reality tv star turned politician, the awakening Pope Francis from the long corrupted Catholic church, or US Supreme Court justices who takes advantage of our collective complacency and ignorance? Is that not tantamount to putting “new wine into old wineskins”?
.
Staying silent and remaining compliant within the face of our diseased culture is easy in the short term, but deadly to all in the long term. It is time to trust the courageous ones, the ones who attempt to speak the truth, and hold themselves, and each other, accountable to healing intentions. To speak the truth requires an integrity that seems to be evaporating from the very landscape of our culture, as more power-seeking people, cowards by their very nature, tell lies to get their way. Telling a lie is easy, especially when our culture has normalized so many of them. Standing up for what is right is hard work, and few seek employment in that field. Thinking for ourselves is hard, while also being compassionate, authentic, and empowered.
.
In times like these, it takes all of the courage in the world to question the status quo, to speak up, and to tell the truth. Dead men tell no tales, but, unlike the legions of the spiritually comatose, I am no longer under the spell of the conspiracy of silence, where lies and avoidance of discomfort are our paradigms, and rule our awareness. I have looked deeply at both the light and the shadow of human existence. I have even stared into the face of Death.
I did not turn away from what I saw.
.
The following book is a report on what I have seen.
The power revealed within ourselves by clearly seeing the limitations of our collective and individual consciousness is everything.
.
There is no other truth.
