The Moment You Notice: Someone feeling down, sitting alone, standing back from everyone else.
There is a strange little moment that happens to us all the time.
We notice something.
Someone’s voice changes.
A friend becomes unusually quiet.
A child stops playing.
Someone smiles, but the smile doesn’t quite reach their eyes.
We notice the hesitation before someone answers a question. The tension in a room. The person standing just a little too far away from everyone else.
Most of these moments seem insignificant.
We notice them, and then we move on.
But sometimes we don’t.
Sometimes something catches our attention and refuses to let go.
And I have begun to wonder if that tiny moment—the moment we notice—may be far more important than we realize.
Because seeing and noticing are not quite the same thing.
We see an enormous amount every day. Our senses are constantly gathering information, much of which never reaches our conscious attention.
Noticing is different.
Noticing is when something crosses the invisible threshold between what is happening and what we become aware is happening.
And once we notice, something else becomes possible.
We can choose what to do with what we have seen.
The Moment You Notice: Seeing Isn’t the Same As Noticing
What happens next?
Imagine that you notice someone is vulnerable.
Perhaps they’re frightened.
Perhaps they’re lonely.
Perhaps they’re desperate for approval.
Perhaps they’re simply having a terrible day.
The vulnerability itself is neither good nor bad. It is simply something you have perceived.
But what happens next can tell us something about the consciousness doing the perceiving.
One person might think:
How can I help?
Another might think:
How can I avoid making this worse?
Another might not know what to do at all—but recognize that something is wrong and remain present.
And another person might see the same vulnerability and immediately begin calculating how it could be used.
The perception is the same.
The orientation is not.
This is something I’ve been thinking about a great deal lately.
We often assume that a person who understands other people well must therefore possess a highly developed consciousness.
But that isn’t necessarily true.
The Moment You Notice: Predators Can Notice Too
A predator has to be observant.
A predator has to recognize weakness.
A predator has to understand behavior well enough to anticipate what another creature will do.
In fact, some of the most destructive people can be extraordinarily perceptive.
They notice everything.
They simply use what they notice differently.
And perhaps that is one of the great misunderstandings about consciousness.
Awareness by itself does not make us wise.
We can become extremely good at seeing without becoming any better at understanding.
We can become extraordinarily skilled at reading other people without ever becoming interested in what our knowledge does to them.
We can learn someone’s fears, desires, insecurities and dreams—and use that knowledge either to protect them or to control them.
The difference isn’t necessarily in the information.
It is in the direction that information takes us.
The Moment You Notice: The Space Between Seeing & Doing Stands Choice
The little space between noticing and doing
There is, however, something remarkable that can happen between perception and action.
A pause.
It might last only a second.
We notice our irritation before we speak.
We notice that someone is afraid before we push harder.
We notice our own desire to win an argument.
We notice the impulse to retaliate.
We notice that we are enjoying someone else’s humiliation.
We notice.
And suddenly we have a choice that we didn’t have a moment before.
We can still make the wrong choice.
We can still be angry. We can still be selfish. We can still misunderstand.
Being conscious does not make us perfect.
But noticing gives us the opportunity to interrupt the automatic response.
Perhaps that is where consciousness becomes something more than perception.
Perhaps consciousness is not simply the ability to see what is happening.
Perhaps it is the ability to see what is happening and remain conscious of what we do next.
The Moment You Notice: Yourself Noticing Within
And sometimes the thing we notice is ourselves
This may be the hardest kind of noticing.
It is relatively easy to recognize someone else’s cruelty.
It is much harder to recognize our own.
We notice the manipulation in someone else, but not the manipulation in ourselves.
We notice another person’s need for control, but overlook our own.
We recognize someone else’s arrogance while quietly protecting our own.
We can become very clever at seeing what we don’t want to see in ourselves.
This is where the inward journey becomes important.
Becoming conscious isn’t simply learning more about the world.
Sometimes it means becoming willing to look at what is happening inside us without immediately defending it, explaining it away, or pretending it isn’t there.
Because the moment we notice something within ourselves, we have a choice too.
We can turn away.
We can become defensive.
We can blame someone else.
Or we can stay with what we have seen long enough to understand it.
That small pause can change everything.
That Is Where Consciousness Begins & Sapience Grows
The moment you notice
Maybe this is why I have become so fascinated by the word sapience.
We tend to associate wisdom with knowledge.
But perhaps wisdom begins somewhere much smaller.
Perhaps it begins with attention.
With the willingness to look again.
To notice what everyone else has stopped seeing.
To notice what we would rather not see.
To notice the consequences of our own actions.
And then, importantly, to choose.
Not always perfectly.
Not always bravely.
Not always wisely.
But consciously.
Because the moment we notice, something changes.
The world has presented us with information.
And for one brief moment, before instinct, habit, fear, desire or conditioning takes over, we have a choice about what we will do with it.
Perhaps that is one of the smallest—and most consequential—moments in human consciousness.
This is an image of the moment consciousness awakens: the instant we become aware of something beyond what we previously understood and discover that becoming conscious means seeing both light and dark choices. The Moment is always now. This is a companion piece to Sept. 6 blog: The Moment You Notice.
There is a feeling in the air right now that’s hard to deny, even if people are still arguing about what to call it. Something is rising, as if from a great depth… sometimes it feels like a volcano, sometimes it feels like the sea is rising. It is happening everywhere… all at once.
And it is making something break.
You see it in the escalation of wars and the widening circles of conflict. You feel it at the gas pump, in the grocery aisle, in the quiet calculations people are making about what they can no longer afford. You hear it in the language of fear, in the hardening of identities, in the rising hostility between neighbor and neighbor. You see it in the streets, where enforcement begins to look less like law and more like force. And you sense it in the growing number of people who no longer believe the system they live under is stable—or even survivable.
Call it instability. Call it fracture. Call it the early tremors of something much larger.
Or call it what it may actually be: the beginning of a fall.
In Sapience: The Moment Is Now, there is a dream—a vision experienced by a man trying to answer a question that may be the most important one humanity has ever faced:
How do we transform human consciousness so that, if we survive what’s coming, we don’t rebuild the same broken world?
What he sees is not a distant future. It feels uncomfortably close.
He sees a species that has become more ferocious than any predator it once feared—not because of strength, but because of blindness. A blindness born not of stupidity, but of disconnection. Disconnection from nature. From reality. From the deeper layers of the self that understand complexity, interdependence, and consequence.
Instead, modern life has trained us to live inside ideas.
We mistake models for reality. Narratives for truth. Memes for meaning.
We’ve been taught to scan the world in lines—headlines, feeds, slogans—while reality itself unfolds as a vast, interconnected field where everything is happening at once. The result is a dangerous simplification. A thinning of perception. A kind of collective “ignore-ance”—not just ignorance, but an active ignoring of what doesn’t fit the story we’ve been handed or have chosen to believe.
And from that place, we act.
We act on partial truths. On distorted fears. On inherited divisions. On identities that feel solid but are, in many cases, carefully constructed and continuously reinforced.
We act as if we are separate—from each other, from the environment, from consequence itself.
But there is no such separation.
There is no human being without an environment any more than there is a heart without a body. What we are doing to the world, we are doing to ourselves. And yet, the dominant mindset still treats nature as an adversary to be controlled, extracted from, or defeated.
That is not just an error.
It is a fatal one.
In the dream, people begin to feel it—though they don’t understand it. A rising pressure. A loss of coherence. A creeping sense that something fundamental has gone wrong.
And instead of turning inward—toward deeper awareness, toward integration—they are pushed further outward into fragmentation.
The pace of life accelerates. Information fragments into smaller and more emotionally charged pieces. Cultural understanding collapses into viral units—memes that spread faster than truth and stick harder than nuance. These fragments don’t deepen awareness; they inflame reaction.
And slowly, almost invisibly at first, humanity is herded into shallower and shallower waters of consciousness.
Waters too shallow to sustain a thinking, feeling, interconnected species.
Cut off from what the book calls the Primordial Being—that deeper, integrated awareness capable of holding complexity—people begin to unravel. Some sink into despair. Others lash out. Many retreat into hardened psychological bunkers.
Fear becomes the dominant currency.
And fear does what fear always does: it divides, isolates, and escalates.
In the dream, this psychological fragmentation doesn’t stay internal. It spills outward into the physical world.
The environment degrades under the weight of unchecked consumption and short-term thinking. Air thickens. Waters choke. Waste piles into monuments of excess. The systems designed to sustain life begin to buckle under the strain.
At the same time, social systems fracture.
Trust erodes. Cooperation collapses. Violence—both personal and collective—rises. Not everywhere at once, but enough, and often enough, to shift the overall balance.
People begin to turn on each other.
Not because they are inherently evil—but because they are overwhelmed, disconnected, and operating from a distorted sense of reality.
In that state, even “civilized instinct” becomes dangerous. It is no longer guided by wisdom or awareness, but by centuries of conditioning layered over fear and scarcity.
The result is a world that feels increasingly unrecognizable.
Unstable.
Unsafe.
Insane.
And here is the hardest part to confront:
In the dream, the fall is not caused by a single event.
It is the cumulative result of millions—billions—of small actions taken from a fragmented state of mind.
The tipping point comes not because there were no good people left. There were many. There were even good groups, good efforts, real attempts to change course.
But the balance had shifted too far.
Fear outweighed cooperation.
Division outpaced unity.
Reaction overwhelmed reflection.
And so, when the moment came to act together—to truly confront the climate crisis, to de-escalate conflict, to reimagine systems—the collective capacity simply wasn’t there.
Not because it was impossible.
But because the consciousness required to do it had not been cultivated.
That is the warning embedded in the dream.
And that is why it matters now.
Because if you’re paying attention, you can feel how close we are to that tipping dynamic—not necessarily to an immediate, singular collapse, but to a continued slide driven by fragmentation, fear, and disconnection.
The point is not to declare that collapse is inevitable.
But it is equally dangerous to pretend that nothing fundamental is happening.
The real question is this:
What do we do with this awareness?
If the core problem is fragmentation of consciousness, then no purely external solution—political, technological, or economic—will be enough on its own.
Those matter. They are necessary.
But they are downstream.
Upstream is perception. Awareness. The ability to hold complexity without collapsing into fear or simplistic narratives. The willingness to reconnect—with reality, with each other, and with the deeper layers of our own minds.
That kind of shift is harder than protest. Harder than policy. Harder than innovation.
It requires discipline.
It requires honesty.
And it requires resisting the constant pull toward outrage, simplification, and psychological retreat.
You don’t fix a fragmented world with a fragmented mind.
So as protests rise, as tensions escalate, as the world feels increasingly unstable, the work is not just “out there.”
It’s in here.
Because if we carry the same patterns of thought—the same reactive instincts, the same shallow processing—into whatever comes next, we will rebuild the same conditions that led us here.
Different faces. Same outcome.
That is the cycle the dream is trying to break.
Not just survival.
But transformation.
The moment we’re in right now is not just political or economic.
It is psychological.
And whether this is a death spiral or a turning point depends, in no small part, on whether enough people are willing to move beyond the surface… and learn how to think, perceive, and act from a deeper place.
That’s not a comforting conclusion.
But it is an honest one.
And at this stage, honesty may be the most necessary starting point we have.
Excerpt — Sapience: The Moment Is Now
Dream Yong Xing-li has as he nears understanding how to Transform human consciousness on a scale never before achieved in human history, a transformation necessary so that humans do not go right back over the Climate Cliff that very nearly annihilates all life on Earth (including human) during the 21st Century (our time now).
Modern Man is more ferocious, savage, and feral than the most dangerous animal on Earth. He ignores the balances and limits nature worked out over eons of time on others. He blames his own Element of Irreducible Rascality, his shadow, his Yetzer Hara, his sin on others.
Disconnected from his inner most nature, Modern Man acts in ignorance wherever he goes. This ignore-ance is his greatest evil. Deeds done in the name of ignorance are more savage than the biggest, baddest saurian ever was. Instead, man feels himself to be as the English poet Alfred Edward Housman wrote: “I, a stranger and afraid, in a world I never made.” His feeling of utter alienation in an unintelligent universe leaves him feeling trapped inside his own skin and at war with the blind, stupid forces of nature and the universe. But, this feeling it due to an idea based on 19th century commonsense that human beings are fluke in nature and if humanity does not fight nature, it will not be able to maintain its status as an intelligent fluke. And so, the war on nature rages based on a ghastly error of thinking, a way of living in the world that can only examine the world in lines like a scanner. Therefore modern education takes so long, each child must scan miles of lines of print just to know the basic stuff man has come to understand about himself, society, nature, and the universe. But the world does not come at us in lines. It comes at us in a multi-dimensional continuum of everything happening together everywhere at once. In short, man ideas of reality are paltry substitutes for what it really is and basing actions on ideas has led humanity to an all-out war with nature, which is really himself for you do not find a man without an environment and if man leaves the atmosphere of Earth, he must take a canned version of his environment with him just as he must take his legs, arms, and head with him—they go together—man and environment are the same thing for there is no man without a sufficiently complicated environment to support bodies and living beings.
And so, Modern Man hassled and stressed and often beholden to men greater than himself who held the power, money, and authority to dictate his life, increasingly based his deeds and actions around ideas. At first, many Modern people based their lives around religious ideas and cultural norm, but increasingly as these fabrics of society frayed, he based core beliefs on memes, a unit of cultural information spread by imitation such as a practice, a ceremony, an image, a story, or a joke passed between people. As the pace of modern life got faster and faster, the unit of cultural information was diluted and reduced to tiny bits of polarizing ideas that spread like virulent viruses through the world wide web increasingly replacing the world of nature with the world of ideas created by men.
Without even knowing it, the Good People of Earth had been herded into conscious waters too shallow to sustain them. Here most of the humanity were trapped by their circumstance dictated by harsh and heartless economic realities created by men who had more than them and desired even. Carefully taught over centuries of civilization not to swim into the deeper waters of their own consciousness, Modern Man became more and more divorced from their Primordial Being who knows the world is vastly more complicated than a mere idea, fact, or fantasy. Cut off from the very part of themselves that could help them most, people sank into deep pits of hopelessness, sadness, and despair. Others lash out in cruel ways further polarizing the risingSea of Unconsciousness flooding the ground of civilization all modern people stood, the unconsciousness pouring out of each person cut off from their Primordial Being. It was a sea choked with of carbon waste piled into high mountains of garbage; filling rivers with poop and plastic; and filling the air with Methane and CO2 pumped out by the machines Modern man used to save time, cut costs, and save labor.
People adopted a locked down, bunker, and siege mentality.
It was hell.
Instinct takes over…
…but it was a Civilized Instinct…
…one misshaped after centuries of social programming.
Just before the fall, the suicide and homicide rates rose exponentially. Big and little wars broke out all over the world. Husbands turned on wives… wives turned on husbands… children turned on parents… neighbor on neighbor. Nobody felt safe or normal anymore. There were plenty of good people and even a good number of good collectives in the world, but the balance had tipped too far. The slide over the climate cliff was inevitable because instead of acting together to mitigate climate change, fear and hopelessness had been poured on theFlames of Division, further fragmentating and polarizing theSea of Unconsciousness.
Free to Choose: Mirror of Deeds: “The past reflects eternally between two mirrors -the bright mirror of words and deeds, and the dark one, full of things we didn’t do or say.” ― Gregory David Roberts, Shantaram
In the second episode of Shantaram, available on AppleTV, Lin steps out of his friend Prabaker’s tent in one of Bombay’s sprawling slums. He looks around at all the people in the bustling slum who are looking at him and wonders if they are afraid of him and hate him. He knows he doesn’t belong there, but fate has put him there.
Thinking to himself, he says something like this: “It is what people know about themselves that make them afraid of you.“
Free to Choose: Mirror of Deeds: In A World…
I rewound and watch this moment again. I was not expecting a nugget of wisdom in this drama. But, there it was…something real, something true, something very pertinent to the world we live in now. Today, no matter where you live, we live in a world….
…where MAGA Republicans think all Democrats are evil beings who drink the blood of children. This belief makes liberals and Democrats not really human. If they aren’t really human, then that makes it all right to kill them, all of them.
“Oh? You don’t believe me?”
Listen to this man right here. He’s the man with the littlest Wiennie of them all. The man in the middle touting hate, lies, deception, stories of separation, fear, and division. He’s Steve Bannon.
Free to Choose: Mirror of Deeds: Steve Bannon Swears Revenge On His Democratic Enemies After Being Sentenced To Prison — Politicus Media; 10.2K subscribers
This little man, Trump’s Rasputin, knows that a democracy divided is easy to control. And he wants to control everything. Look at his beady eyes and scrubby stubble. He’s a tormented man doing everything to create confusion, chaos, and destruction so he can rise as a Christ for a world of sinners. If you have not seen CNN’s special report Divided We Fall, it is time to watch it.
“You say it’s the radical left touting Joe Biden’s radical agenda…and before that it was Hillary….and before that it was Obama…and before and before…”
How far back should we go with the blame game and ‘I don’t trust you‘ contest? To Adam and Eve? Is it really that nasty little snake who started it all?
If you’re playing this game, you have already swallowed the Red Pill, and it’s working its toxic poison deep inside of you. It’s a poison that makes you deeply afraid of others and deeply afraid ofyour own shadow. And, you probably should be deeply afraid of your own shadow.
That is what Lin is aware of while standing alone in the slum of Bombay. That sneaky shadow that lives inside all of us casting its evil intensions and desires onto everyone else, except for you.
If you are playing this game, you have joined the ranks of people who violently participate in the denial of diversity. You do this to legitimize yourown violent fear of anyone who doesn’t walk like you, talk like you, look like you, act like you, or think like you. You secretly believe and harbor a wish to bring into being a world that obeys and worships you.
The dirty little secret is hidden deep inside of you is a greedy, little, bloodthirsty thing who rages and whines about inflicting pain and suffering onto others. You want to do this so that you can enjoy your comforts and privileges. You need to do this because how would you know you are enjoying comforts and privileges unless others are suffering?
When you get called out on your racism, homophobia, antisemitism, and racism, you rage. You rage against the radical liberals who are merely pointing out your evil shadow. But, you don’t want to see the evil inside of you. So you build a wall. It’s a really tall wall that is made from the seething anger and rage boiling inside of you. If anyone gets too near, it burns like a living fire.
‘God damn it!’ if anyone is going to penetrate you inner wall and see that howling, wounded, frighten, greedy thing that lives inside of you.
That thing…. that scoundrel, that fiend, rascal, rogue, fraudster, trickster, beast, son of a bitch, deviant thing, loser, weirdo, cry baby, stupid brutal bastard, and bully. But guess what? So am I, and so is everyone else you know. We all have this evil thing living inside of us.
It never goes away. It bubbles and boils and burns inside us all. It pursues and terrorizes us in our dreams. Lin says, “A dream is when a wish and fear come together. A nightmare is when they are the same thing.”
Remaining ignorant of your evil being merely locks it inside of you where it is hidden behind the carefully constructed idea of yourself (your persona: the role you play in your community and for your family). It is your personal internal prison cell behind the giant wall that you built to conceal your evil being. You built the wall so well, most of the time you can’t even see your evil being locked inside your mental prison cell with you.
This thing inside of you is relentless and torments you night and day. In an act of utter desperation, you spew it out onto others and shout in a voice dripping with rage and fury:
“There! There is the boogeyman!
There is the Devil!
There is the Evil Thing that must be annihilated!”
Or, if the other person (the boogeyman) was once part of your exclusive club of people who know the Truth and what is really going on, you might shout:
“Hang Mike Pence!!”
In a world where Putin calls the people of Ukraine Nazis. Never mind he is the one acting like the Nazi. He is the one full of hate. He is the one who has driven out close to a million Russian men because they don’t want to fight in his barbaric, poorly equipped, and pretty bad army. He is losing. So he resorts to lies and double downs on stupid while waging his limp, impotent Nuclear Weiner.
Do not be fooled by Putin’s weak, victim-based, impotent hysterics! He is exactly the type of man who would push the button.
In a world where Iran’s Moral Police beat up and kill young women simply for wearing their hijab too loosely. But it is themselves they are really policing. They are afraid that if they see a single strand of hair sticking out from a hijab, their Limp Weak Weiner will grow. And if this happens, they are afraid they’ll lose control and turn into the Devils they know themselves to really be deep, deep down inside. This corrupt and bankrupt regime has already killed 272 young people and beaten and/or tortured 1,110 others.
In each world outlined above, each man’s rigid, inflexible thinking and bullshit is camouflage for the shitty little men they really are. They lust after power and cluster together helping each other hold onto power and control in their stinking palaces riddled with long, long corridors of terror.
Free to Choose: Mirror of Deeds: Maps of Hate
This is what the corruption is and this is what it does to human beings. It is a kind of moral bankruptcy. It takes root inside individuals who find each other and clump together in groups that try to take control in order to enforce their style and way of thinking. If they do get control, they quickly create systems that exclude diversity and impose their way of doing things in brutal ways meant to terrorize everyone else into compliance. When a government becomes populated by such individuals, it turns into a structural system of terror bent on brutalizing anyone who is not exactly like them.
There are three main mappable categories of this deadly psychic virus: Dictators, Terror Groups, and Hate Groups. But the corruption lives inside everyone and is readily expressed in every day transactions. You see it in families, in workplaces, in schools, between friends and lovers. It thrives in ignorance and lack of self-awareness. It particularly loves to reside inside narcissists!
Dictators of the World
Free to Choose: Mirror of Deeds
This is a comprehensive, up-to-date list of the world's current dictators and authoritarian regimes. In 2022, there are 57 dictatorships in the world. We define a dictator as the ruler of a land rated “Not Free” by the Freedom House in their annual survey of freedom. See the interactive map and photos below or click to visit the current dictators category.
Of course, the dictators of the world will point to all the yellow areas of this map and claim, “There! There is the evil capitalists who are draining the world of resources and polluting our planet!”
They are not entirely wrong, expect they think in black and white, good and evil,right and wrong. They split the world into opposite halves. Then, they step inside the Good Bubble, created entirely inside their mind and spew out their pent-up boiling hate, vengeance, and destructive tendencies on everyone else. They never take responsibility for themselves. They are the consummate victim, and always the hero in their narcissistic story. And so, it is in this way that we (the human race) will split the planet into two unreconcilable halves and all die together in a seething puddle of hate.
Free to Choose: Mirror of Deeds: Terror Groups
One step behind dictators and authoritarian rulers of the world are terror groups such as Boko Haram, ISIS, and Taliban (which actually managed to retake control of Afghanistan bumping them back up to the dictator map above). The map below shows terror groups around the world and provides a list of largest terrorist groups worldwide.
These are groups of people who twist words and religions to bolster their brutal causes. They are mostly stateless centers of terror who are trying to grab some land and people who they can crush and ruin.
Overall Terrorism Index Score: GTI is a composite measure made up of four indicators: incidents, fatalities, injuries and property damage. To measure the impact of terrorism, a five year weighted average is applied.
Free to Choose: Mirror of Deeds: Hate Groups
One step behind terror groups are hate groups. Rather than centering their brutal activities in one spot or country, hate groups operate like a distributed network that hock, sell, and propagate hate. It is easier than ever to breed hate with the advent of the Internet and people who live their lives online.
Hate groups traffick outrage and outlandish accusations designed to divide the world into Us and Them, into people you can trust and people you can’t trust. Hate groups are insidious and invade peoples minds like a drug. Once you become addicted to hate, it is an addiction that is harder to kick than heroin. It is a poison to your mind that is more destructive than Meth. Hate literally changes the neural pathways of your brain.
The following images are from Jigsaw, an incredible website that helps you visualize hate.
Free to Choose: Mirror of Deeds: Red Pilling: Signalling allegiance to a group or ideology often becomes an all-consuming project for extremists. Even once an extremist has been formally admitted into a group or online forum of extremists, formers described the need to prove themselves as “down for the cause” or “white enough” by committing more and more time and energy. This performance of dedication often escalates in a competitive fashion, resulting in hate speech and violence.Free to Choose: Mirror of Deeds: Red Pilling: The rise of informal white supremacist communities online over the last 20 years has made it easier to find, join, and become radicalized into white supremacist groups. Whereas groups in the past might have recruited at white power rock shows or amenable bars, online radicalization no longer requires this investment of in-person time and physical vetting. Today a person can spend hours online moving through increasingly radical content and discussion forums. The immersive nature of these online forums and communities can create a “new normal” that contradicts offline social norms28. This also means younger children and teens, who could not be recruited at bars or white power concerts in the past, can more easily join white supremacist groups at impressionable ages. One former interviewed had entered a white supremacist forum at age 13 and, drawn to the provocative memes and secretive chat forums, had adopted national socialist beliefs by 15. By 18, he was part of a neo-Nazi terrorist organization proscribed in the UK.Free to Choose: Mirror of Deeds: Formal and informal extremist groups often coexist online, playing complementary rolesFree to Choose: Mirror of Deeds: White supremacy is a globally networked movement
Another excellent mapping project is the Hate-Map using real time data of hate events to create a map that shows hotspots and how hate is growing worldwide.
Free to Choose: Mirror of Deeds: Interactive Hate Map | You need to go to the site embedded in the Hate Map, but as you zoom into an area, the number of incidences increases in the the places that appear white in the map above this one.
The Hate Map is populated with data submitted both by our internal researchers, the public and our network of volunteers. This data largely stems from publicly available news-sources and consolidations of information from other public data-sets and records. Existing records are however often limited in scope and fail to give a comprehensive picture of the global activities of the far right ranging from spread of propaganda and low-level activities through major terrorist incidents.
All data in the Hate Map is verified and quality controlled by internal researchers who are experts on far right extremism and experienced in the field of open source intelligence (OSINT) building on public sources and providing verifiable documentation before it is made available in our public-facing database and dashboard. Our researchers take great care to verify sources where there might exist any doubt. Links to external sources are provided for all our database entries in order to ensure that the public further can verify any incident independently.
Our dataset is cross referenced against the work of other institutions and organizations mapping the far right in order to ensure as comprehensive a picture of the global situation of the far right as possible, in keeping with the highest academic standards.
The Hate Map is a living document and both recent and historic events are added and verified on a daily basis. -- The Hate-Map
Free to Choose: Mirror of Deeds: The Playbook
Regardless of if you are a dictator; an authoritarian ruler; a leader or member of a terror group; a leader or member of a hate group; a narcissistic boss, sibling, friend, or parent, you play from the same dirty handbook. That book repeats one mantra over and over, which is to inflict as much pain, terror, and suffering on your enemy (which is anyone who does not agree with you) while constantly claiming to be the victim. And if you can’t win that way, then you have the right to destroy everything.
This attitude, belief system, behavior is all a big cover up of who you really are. It is a smoke screen and distraction because deep, deep down inside yourself you feel inferior, impotent, dithering, confused, frighten, and like a limp Weiner. That’s why you run around the world hurting everyone else. If you can’t have it your way, then you want to be the first to destroy it!
Looking at these map, it is pretty clear we are not doing very well as species. No wonder we are not paying attention to Climate Change. Perhaps we won’t need to after all. The way things are going we will blow ourselves up before nature cleans us off the surface of the planet with climate disasters that are only getting bigger and more deadlier by the year… and this trend is only going bigger and badder not the other way.
Perhaps we all better stop, take a deep breathe, and listen to the Whale Songs again. The ones Vermont biologist Roger Payne captured and brought to us in the 1970s!
Free to Choose: Mirror of Deeds: Songs Of The Humpback Whale – by Dr. Roger Payne Gordon Snyder; 494 subscribers
Free to Choose: Mirror of Deeds: Yetzer Harah
I realized this thing Lin said in the second episode of Shantaram is part of the puzzle of the Yetzer Harah.
I first heard about the Yetzer Harah while listening to Alan Watts lectures who describes it like this:
So, in Hebrew theology incidentally. That there is a thing called the yetzer harah. And in the beginning of time when God created Adam he implanted in him the yetzer hara and the yetzer hara means that wayward spirit. He put something funny in man so that man would be a little odd and it was a result of the yetzer hara that Adam was tempted by Eve who was tempted by the serpent to eat that famous fruit. And, but the Hebrew believes that everything that God created is good. Including the Yetzer Hara. Because if it hadn’t been for the yetzer hara, there would have nothing ever happened. Everybody would have obeyed God and God would have said well this is kind of a bore.
Now that you see, you can’t you can’t just get up to someone and say disobey me, because if they do there are varying you. See that’s a double bind. Say to somebody disobey me but God is much more subtle than that. He didn’t tell Adam to disobey he told him to obey.
But suddenly he put this yetzer hara thing in like that so that, God would say well I’m not responsible. For this thing’s going to happen on its own because what everybody wants is something to happen on its own. And everybody wants that.
Because you see, this sensation of being you. This curious lonely center of awkward sensitivity, subject to the most peculiar feelings and pains and anxieties and all that sort of thing all that. Is an essential prerequisite for feeling something else. These two experiences go together. -- 2.4.9 Way Beyond Seeking Part 2; Alan Watts Organization
In short, the Yetzer Harah is why we do evil things, why we fear people we don’t know, why we wage wars, why we cheat each other… pretty much why we are living in the mess we made of the world today.
Shantaram tells the story of how Lin made a mess of his life (surely guided by his inner Yetzer Harah that tempted him into making a lot of bad choices that landed him in prison). Then, Lin makes a courageous choice, escapes from prison, and gets a second chance to live his life, which he is messing up again–gosh darn it!
I’m only on episode 2…so Lin is probably going to embark on different mistakes. And I bet he is going to grow from these mistakes because Lin demonstrates the capacity to reflect on his new situation and past mistakes, which pushing open the door of the prison cell inside your head, just a little bit, but if you look…there is vast and beautiful field of wisdom beyond your prison cell behind your wall of ignorance.
Is wisdom perhaps the reason God implanted the Yetzer Harah into man at the very beginning?
I suppose we will never know because clearly we are going to kill each other long before we can collectively learn how to embrace diversity and celebrate life in all its many facets and ways of being in the world.
Free to Choose: Mirror of Deeds: Images For Archetypal Animations
Music: Down the Rabbit Hole: Emma Wallace [1] Rabbit Hole 2:02
Second Archetypal Animation
I was searching for exactly what Lin said to himself when he woke up the first morning in his friends tent in the Bombay slum. I could not find it, but I found a lot of other great quotes from Gregory David Roberts who is the author of Shantarm. So, I have sprinkled these in between the credits of where I found the images for this animation.
“Civilisation, after all, is defined by what we forbid, more than what we permit.” ― Gregory David Roberts, Shantaram
“Fear dries a man’s mouth, and hate strangles him. That’s why hate has no great literature: real fear and real hate have no words.” ― Gregory David Roberts, Shantaram
“For this is what we do. Put one foot forward and then the other. Lift our eyes to the snarl and smile of the world once more. Think. Act. feel. Add our little consequence to the tides of good and evil that flood and drain the world. Drag our shadowed crosses into the hope of another night. Push our brave hearts into the promise of a new day. With love; the passionate search for truth other than our own. With longing; the pure, ineffable yearning to be saved. For so long as fate keeps waiting, we live on.” ― Gregory David Roberts, Shantaram
“The past reflects eternally between two mirrors -the bright mirror of words and deeds, and the dark one, full of things we didn’t do or say.” ― Gregory David Roberts, Shantaram
Charlie Hunnam And Shubham Saraf Tell Us About How The Spirit Of Chaos (And One Drunken Night) Fueled ‘Shantaram’
“While I was chained to a wall and being tortured, I realized, through the screaming of my mind, that even in that shackled, bloody helplessness, I was still free: free to hate the men who were torturing me, or to forgive them. It doesn’t sound like much, I know. But in the flinch and bite of the chain, when it’s all you’ve got, that freedom is a universe of possibility. And the choice you make between hating and forgiving, can become the story of your life.” ~ Gregory David Roberts
“The truth is that there are no good men, or bad men,’ he said. ‘It is the deeds that have goodness or badness in them. There are good deeds, and bad deeds. Men are just men – it is what they do, or refuse to do, that links them to good and evil. The truth is that an instant of real love, in the heart of anyone – the noblest man alive or the most wicked – has the whole purpose and process and meaning of life within the lotus-folds of its passion. The truth is that we are all, every one of us, every atom, every galaxy, and every particle of matter in the universe, moving toward God.” ~ Gregory David Roberts
“It’s forgiveness that makes us what we are. Without forgiveness, our species would’ve annihilated itself in endless retributions. Without forgiveness, there would be no history. Without that hope, there would be no art, for every work of art is in some way an act of forgiveness. Without that dream, there would be no love, for every act of love is in some way a promise to forgive. We live on because we can love, and we love because we can forgive.” ~ Gregory David Roberts
“There’s a truth deeper than experience. It’s beyond what we see, or even what we feel. It’s an order of truth that separates the profound from the merely clever, and the reality from the perception. We’re helpless, usually, in the face of it; and the cost of knowing it, like the cost of knowing love, is sometimes greater than any heart would willingly pay. It doesn’t always help us to love the world, but it does prevent us from hating the world. And the only way to know that truth is to share it, from heart to heart, just as Prabhakar told it to me, just as I’m telling it to you now.” ~ Gregory David Roberts
“Love is the passionate search for a truth other than your own; and once you feel it, honestly and completely, love is forever.” ~ Gregory David Roberts
“Some feelings sink so deep into the heart that only loneliness can help you find them again. Some truths are so painful that only shame can help you live with them. Some things are so sad that only your soul can do the crying for them.” ~ Gregory David Roberts
