How to Survive on the Sea of misery: Pulling Back Power from this stupendous Sea of Misery, Misfortune & Despair
I’ve been taking pictures on bike rides that I turn into mini movies documenting 2020: a year of hardship, reversals, and lost for people all over the world–a collective time of grief, anguish, and sorrow because all that has been previously been understood to be normal and safe, health, and wellbeing has been liquified turning our shared reality into a great sea, which is a miserable place to be. It is a place of endless uncertainty, misery, and misfortune. It is a place where no one is coming to rescue you. It is a place where survival of the fittest rules, but the rules have been bent to benefit only those holding power over others causing levels of competition, rivalry, and strife to arise that have never been experienced by living beings when nature ruled the world.
I’ve been floating on this Sea of Misery for some time now for my hardships and reversals began in earnest in 2015. The cruelty inflicted on me and my family can be traced back to those holding power over us. First, my husband was targeted and was forced to retire early by cruel co-workers eyeing his small department’s budget for their own purposes. Then, I was targeted in mass layoff the company I had been working for the past 6 years encountered due to choosing to compete rather than corporate with a rival company on a substantial government contract. It was done coldly, 12 days before the Christmas of 2016–a month before Trump would be inaugurated as President of the United States; an election win that stunned the world and would continue to stun and shock it for 4 more years. I was chosen to be thrown overboard because I was older, had been with the company for 6 years, thus risen up the ranks in pay, and because I had dared advocate for myself when others in the company unjustly tried to cast blame on me for their screw up. That’s a no, no in corporate culture. It is one of the fastest ways to awaken the heartless, sanguinary serpent that lies at the center of every corporate system existing in modern Western systems. To not be dominated by this slippery serpent takes conscious attention and will power. It is possible, but it takes energy and is not an easy path forward. Because of this, most companies descend to primal instincts that seek to crush descent to hold onto power. They will sacrifice anyone or anything to the Beast of Domination raging inside of them.
Misfortune would not end in 2017 for me and my family, in fact it narrowed its sights on us and then doubled down becoming even more ferocious. For me, I finally found a low paying job just weeks before my very small unemployment stipend ended. It was a job with a small, struggling nonprofit. I had little choice. I took it. Meanwhile, my husband was on the other side of the country caring for ailing family members. However, rather than being met with gratitude for his time, attention, and sacrifice to help his mother and paramour who nearly died of an aneurysm in his abdominal aorta, he was treated with scorn and derision by jealous siblings who saw him as merely as getting more from their mother than they perceived they were getting. At the root of the long-standing sibling rivalry was the desire for their mother’s love.
Meanwhile, my pitiful low-paying job would soon grow worse. I’ve written about how already. Suffice it to say, I wrote grants that brought in hundreds of thousands of dollars in the year that I work there. I also wrote competitive government grants; something they were unable to do before my arrival. At the time of my father’s heart attack, I had put in close to 100 hours of work for which I had not been paid. I accepted the job one year early with the understanding that I could reclaim this time as comp time. However, the woman who had hired me had left and the CEO did not want to honor this agreement. So during the 10 days I was at my father’s bedside before his death, I was fired because once again I dared advocate for myself, my family, and basic human dignity.
All in all, it is not so much my father’s death that sent me into a spiral of deadly depression, but the cruelty of others both before and after his death, especially the callousness of those holding power over me or my family.
Let me be perfectly clear: No one deserves misfortune. And, absolutely no one deserves fake sentimentality in place of true empathy, compassion, and help in the Maelstrom of Misfortune. No one asks for it. No one has done anything to deserve it, but our culture, which is the system of consciousness we live within and inherited from our ancestors, treats people who are experiencing misfortune, injustice, tragedy, trauma, and grief with contempt. And, in fact, it is precisely the system inflicting pain and trauma on some people existing inside the group more than others in the group. The system is designed this way with trauma is systematically built into it because the system channels the blessings meant for everyone living inside the system onto a few.
And it is the system that decides who is going to be the inferior one, the oddball, the outsider, the freak or bad boy, the wackadoodle weirdo who no one cares about. Let misfortune rain down upon them. Let me be absolutely clear: No one deserves misfortune. No one chooses to be the scapegoat, the whipping boy, the Aunt Sally (a game played in some parts of Britain in which players throw sticks or balls at a wooden dummy called Aunt Sally), the fall guy or girl for a wicked system. It is something that is done to them, so that resources and blessings that should naturally flow to everyone in the system is redirected only to a few who live at the top and hold power and authority over everyone else below them. To heal this injustice, which is a disease of the collective soul, requires the entire system to stop blaming innocent people for the immoral, corrupt, black-hearted actions of those who hold power over others.
Terrible consequences are inflicted on those from who resources, benefits, and blessing meant for everyone existing inside the system were stolen. A horrible consequence of this theft of the means to live a good and safe life is trauma as reported by PBS Newshour in this segment.
So why do our systems scapegoat people and just what is a scapegoat anyhow?
A scapegoat is a goat sent into the wilderness after the Jewish chief priest had symbolically laid the sins of the people upon it (Lev. 16) [Definition from Oxford Languages]
Judeo Christian beliefs contribute much material to the ancient channels of consciousness that grew to keep earlier groups of men and women safe from harm. However, what causes harm has been interpreted in vastly different ways according to the needs and environments in which the small groups of tribes of men grew. These ancient channels that hold the beliefs that sustained these ancient cultures–beliefs such as a goat can symbolically hold the sins of the people and be sent into the dessert to die for their sins–continue to flow through the channels of consciousness that live in the minds of modern men and women existing within Western Civilization. We even have a word for this: Mainstream. The banks of the mainstream hold and maintain the most commonly held beliefs and conventional ways of being in the world. It is broad and shallow. The banks of the mainstream are mostly made out of foregone and often very primitive social and cultural taboos. All systems of human consciousness evolved taboos to obtain an order of being together in groups. Taboos are simply shared customs that prohibit or forbid discussion of a particular practice (See The Boy Who Ate the Wrong Part of the Crocodile) or forbid association with a particular person, place, or thing.
Western Civilization’s taboos also originate from ancient Greek and Roman cultures, which themselves absorbed and assimilated much of the cultural substrate cultivated by ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia. The Western Civilization we recognize today really took its form and shape in medieval Europe, with strong and underlying influencers such as the Christian religion, feudal society, dispersed power-structures and growing economic dynamism — see Western Civilization TimeMaps. However, Western Civilization is very old and now very big and because of this, it incorporates beliefs, ideas, and cultural and religious taboos from many other religions and smaller civilizations that were gobbled up and incorporated into its ever growing Banks of Being in the world–otherwise known as the Mainstream.
Every child born into Western Civilization or individual assimilated into it by choice or by force is indoctrinated into its ways of being. Some of this conditioning is plain to see as in schools, places of worship, or the rules of a community, a state, a country. Other ways of being a good citizen are invisible. These are transmitted seamlessly from parent to child or through peer networks, flowing like water that is moving from person to person. They are the hidden cultural biases, prejudices, partisanship, favoritism and bigotry contained within the system at large or within the smaller systems existing inside it. They are in sum total the taboos that define the people in that system who stay within the confines of the unspoken taboos–the illicit, illegal, unutterable parts of being human that have been prohibited by the group. Many people mistakenly believe if you do not utter or see the dreadful, awful, unmentionable things that have been banned by the group, they do not exist, or at least they can be caged and contained. This is dangerous myth.
Because cultural taboos are often very fragile and easily broken because they are very old and worn out. We keep them concealed in the darkest recesses of the human mind, which in totality is a very small amount of consciousness illuminated and thus available for us to act on in the world. The vast majority of consciousness remains in the dark, ready to pounce on our puny minds, hijack them, and use them for purposes that do not suit a normal human being, often engaging them in action extremely counter to their personal and collective wellbeing.
Because taboos are so old but constructed to protect us from our own inner darkest recesses existing inside every human being, it is extremely easy to fall outside of them. Once a person steps over such a hidden boundary, they become the scapegoat for some lopsided system collapsing under its own weight of outdated taboos, banned behavior, and cursed activity of every kind of thought, action, or behavior deemed unacceptable by the group. The problem is all the banned unacceptable behavior remains alive and well inside of each of them. All they have done is suppress and put in the dark their own potentiality to be the very thing or behave in the very way that they have outlawed. The more they resist and deny their own potential to be the banned thing, the bigger thing they fear of becoming grows inside of them, creating a crack that grows into a chasm. And behold–the split inside the individual’s psyche is created and the fight to defend this pocket-sized piece of psychic ground begins. An endless fight because the darkness pushes in from every side and up and down, but for practical purposes, the land claimed inside their psyche as part of the conscious ground they have conquered. Failing to recognize how much of themselves remains in the darkness of their unconsciousness.
that they created by walling off from their diminutive and dimming light of consciousness and hiding it from the world. In the place of who they really are, they project all of which they have rejected about themselves onto others and pretend to be things they are not. This makes the very fragile and dangerous beings because they are strangling their inner light of consciousness by cutting it off from the deeper parts of themselves longing to be understood and brought into the small but powerful light of knowing. Rather, this vaster part of themselves remain shuttered in the darkness of their unconsciousness and left to rot in the darkness by a soul refusing to grow. A soul thus is stubbornly shutting itself down and by doing this, shutting off life.
I have fallen off the high wire of such intensely uptight systems many times. I don’t know why I keep trying to wake dark systems. Here are some of the taboos I have challenged or broken.
Family Taboos
At my father’s funeral, one of his cousins told me other members of his extended family clan had always looked down their noses at him, his brother, sister, and father. They had failed to be strong and sturdy enough probably. The tragedy began shortly after my father was born–probably exacerbated by unrecognized and untreated postpartum depression–but it led to a mental health breakdown that would result in the institutionalization of my grandmother. She had been born into a dominated cultural belief that no matter what: you got to tough it out mentality. Trauma was viewed as discipline and mental health issues were considered a sign of weakness. My grandmother retreated to her parents home where she did receive loving care and where my father and his siblings were being cared by his mother’s family. However, my grandfather felt humiliated that she had left him, leaving him an angry and broken man. And so it was that he and his twin brother (who probably suffered from an undiagnosed mental health disorder) schemed to get the children back into my grandfather’s custody. They began by stealing my father right out of his highchair while his grandmother hung the laundry…at least that is what my father remembers happening. He would sue for custody of my father’s older siblings, but this would take a year or so. He was deeply traumatized from this and his father was known to be overly harsh with his children. However, no one in his family confronted him or did much to help the children besides smalls acts of kindness here and there. His older brother would go on to suffer from schizophrenia. These formative years would leave an indelible mark on my father for his entire life. It haunted him in nightmares that made his scream and kick and fall out of bed two to three times a week. It was one of the reasons I moved him to comfort care in his final days because he got trapped in an endless delirium with these phantoms of long ago visiting him. I knew them well. I’ve grown up with them. They’ve marked me and my brothers with the taboo of mental illness and not being good enough.
Friendship Taboos
As my series of misfortunes piled up in the past 5 years, the last group of people I saw on a regular basis began to distance themselves from me. I had become a radioactive Contagion of Misfortune, and I was being blamed for my own misfortune. I doubt they even knew that they were doing this, but getting invited in group activities, conversations, and outings grew more and more infrequent. One of the most glaring exclusions occurred at the opening of the Star Wars: The Last Jedi movie. I had been invited to join my little gym group for the last several Star Wars movies–though reluctantly for I knew there was invisible resistance inside this circle of friends to even include me as one of the group. But due to circumstances, we saw each other every single day and so probably the taboo of pretending to be a nice person all the time was more powerful than the one to exclude me because I did not quite fit in with their dominate interests and form. However, as my misfortunes piled up, the balance tipped and when this movie came out, no invitation was forthcoming. I had just lost my job with a government contractor 12 days before Christmas and my husband had been pushed out of his just one year before. It was a very stressful time. So, my friends were steering clear of me. But I loved Star Wars and needed a distraction to my misfortune so I selected one of the opening showings, got a seat by myself, and went by myself. I enjoyed it immensely. I didn’t feel alone because the characters feel so vital and alive in my psyche. I sat watching the credits until the lights came up. I was sitting in a row close to the screen. When I got up and made my way to the closest isle, coming down the steps almost colliding with me, were ‘my friends‘ who this time did not include me. It was awkward, very awkward. I find it hilarious now. But then it was quite painful because I understood I had been marked with the taboo of being labeled the source of pestilence for my misfortune.
Workplace Taboos
One of my first corporate jobs was working for a hospital that was conducting cutting edge research in treating AIDS and cancer. It was located on the West Coast but treated people all across the country and world. I was hired by a high-spirited, dynamic woman who was opening a new regional office in Washington, DC. I rose quickly through the ranks to Director of Development with my boss based on the West Coast. I loved the job and my co-workers (who except for the woman who hired me), I helped hire. We got a lot done, raised a lot of money, and had lots of fun being together. Not long after rising to Director, word was racing through the workplace grapevine that there was a tremendous power struggle going on at headquarters. When I was first hired, there was a CEO and 4 or 5 Vice Presidents who oversaw various activities such as workplace giving programs, unions, special events, and so on. I worked under events planning and my boss was friendly and helpful. One by one, the VPs fell but we thought in DC my boss would remain because he was best friends with the VP making the power plays. We were wrong. He did him in too. At the next all staff meeting that doubled as the biggest gathering of volunteers from across the country, which always took place at the Beverly Hills Hilton, our new VP let us know the new rules. This was probably my 3rd all staff meeting and previously we were treated like adults who could conduct themselves appropriately and we did. But this time was different. The new VP of everything was letting everyone know who was the new boss in town. He lectured everyone the very first night that there would be no use of the pool, the exercise room, all employees were assigned set up and clean up shifts for the big thank you fundraiser of long-time volunteers. He made it known these were mandatory regardless of if there was anything to do or not. Having come from the East Coast to the West Coast, I was not hungry at the proper time and went for a run instead. I arrived at my assignment on time just to sit for 5 hours because everything was done. During this time, I grew famished and light-headed because I had not eaten breakfast or lunch. My co-worker from Philadelphia told me to go get a sandwich and bring it back, she’d cover for me if anyone asked but she was sure no one would notice. So, I slipped out, went downstairs to the little cafe, and ordered a sandwich to go. While I waited, I chatted with a man eating a late lunch. I thought nothing of it until I felt a forceful tap on my shoulder. I turned around and was shocked. It was the VP of Everything. He had noticed I was gone. He forced my co-worker to tell him where I went. He had come to fetch me back. I had to go immediately. I could not even wait for my sandwich even though I said I was light-headed and needed protein. His response was tough luck. You had your lunch time. You didn’t eat. There are candy almonds on the tables. Eat those. It is pretty funny now. I was kind of scared then. Fortunately, the man I had been talking to downstairs knew where the VP took me. He brought me my sandwich telling me that the whole thing was pretty unbelievable. However, from that day forward, I was marked with the taboo of putting my own physical needs and wellbeing (as well as the needs of others) above the VP’s edicts. This would be a taboo I would break in other ways with other super controllers trying to maintain questionable and overly broad grabs for power within a workplace system.
Facebook Taboos
Social media platforms are weird and very sugary environments. The idea that individuals all over the world who do not have any previous real life, face-to-face relationship of meaningful exchange can establish and maintain any kind of genuine human system is farcical. Facebook is a space that allows people to migrate to the most superficial extremities of who they have defined themselves as human being. Here, they marinate in the outermost cosmetic persona’s of themselves. But they do this at the expense of true knowledge of who they are as a complex being with good and bad qualities that must always be calculated and balanced in every moment, especially the liminal space where thought is manifested into words or deeds. Because of the vast superficiality of this virtual space (i.e., a space lacking in thoroughness, depth of character, or serious thought) the worse parts of being human tend to rise inside of individuals where it quickly gains dominance and power over thought and actions, which attracts others of liked mind and superficial attitudes. It is a space that cultivates addictive personalities. People who crave the time and attention of others to such an extreme other people stop being human beings with whom they can have a real and genuine relationship but become food for their vainglorious superficial self. Such environments tend to create vacuums of consciousness where one-sided, narcissistic thinking grows and thrives, lacking the normal brakes of reality that exists in the real, normal, drab, everyday life of being a human being who must cooperate and offer basic respect and decency to the people around them.
Not so long ago, I belonged to a group calling itself: The Ecology of Systems Thinking (EoST). Though recently, they demonstrated a rather brutal propensity for eliminating any kind of diverse thinking inside the group, opting for a rather stark, sterile, and monotone ecology. Not a very healthy system if this existed in the natural world where such lopsided systems tend to do themselves in and collapse under the weight of their own self-limiting and rapidly growing monotony. Recently, I broke an invisible taboo, which exists in many groups on Facebook. I expressed original thought, and then the gall to share my own thinking in a group extolling itself to be a place that explores and examines Systems of Thinking, which using my logic must begin with original thought. Any systems existing in the world today is simply a collection of thinking blocks that have been assembled over time and held up as a gold standard of being in the world. It turns out this group was growing beyond its own ability to manage its members and my expulsion was most probably a Mistake, but in the AfterMath, I discovered a serious Fake. I tell this story in the resource blog for this blog. If you have time and interest, go to AfterMath: The Magical Calculus of Consciousness and go down to Facebook Folly: The Mistake and the Fake.
It was AfterMath that was tagged as being fake and which got me ejected from this group, so the explanation I was given does not add up, but I do accept the sincere effort by one admin to repair the mistake. However, a much more serious issue was revealed that provides evidence of how Facebook acts as an amplifier of unconscious content contained inside us all. And not only that, Facebook incubates this content inside individuals where it grows in the shadows of their minds, warping into strange inner beings that jump into action and hijack the conscious parts of individuals turning them into monster capable of conducting great harm in the world. Consider the bomb that blew up in Nashville, TN or the plot to kidnap Gretchen Whitmer, Governor of Michigan, and kill her. The later plot to kidnap the governor originated inside a far right extremist group existing in the United States with plotting and planning taking place in private social media networks–the amplifier of warped and dangerous thinking. When we as individuals fail to account for our unconsciousness, we will succumb to it and become slaves to it. What will you choose? To learn more, read the story documented in the resource to this blog.
There is a poem Margaret Thatcher recites to the Queen in the fourth season of The Crown in the episode called ‘The Balmoral Test’? The poem is “No Enemies” by Scottish poet Charles Mackay, who lived from 1814 to 1889.
“YOU have no enemies, you say?
Alas! my friend, the boast is poor;
He who has mingled in the fray
Of duty, that the brave endure,
Must have made foes! If you have none,
Small is the work that you have done.
You’ve hit no traitor on the hip,
You’ve dashed no cup from perjured lip,
You’ve never turned the wrong to right,
You’ve been a coward in the fight.”
I believe we are all Consciousness Warriors during our time on Earth, and so now I have 10 enemies and my fight has just begun. I have forgiven 1 because he was human enough to admit the mistake without slinging insults and misinformation to cover up his own complicity in the erroneous action. This is another taboo rampant on Facebook and social media platforms, being more complicated than the stick figure you have been made out to be by your Fake Friends on Facebook
Taboos like algorithms are constantly at work at the edges of our Field of Consciousness. They herd the human psyche like frighten sheep into specific, long-standing patterns, some might call them ruts, even trenches. See After Math: The Magical Calculus of Consciousness and Parrots of the Algorithms for more on how the human psyche is contained in well-defined patterns of behavior and conformity.
Thus, when the Coronavirus knocked millions of other people into the Sea of Misery, Misfortune and Despair with me, I knew what to do: Tell My Stories of How I Have Survived Being Here. We are a species that tells stories. We tell stories about what has happen to us and our loved ones and our enemies in our journey through time and space. We do this because we have become aware of ourselves, our choices, and how our actions shape our reality. Some of the stories tell help us survive. Other stories simply distract us from painful realities. And still other stories shatter our shared reality by destroying our connections to each other and with ourselves.
The rest of this blog is divided into three sections:
Part 1: Individual Storytelling — How Being Outside Helped Me Observe Better Mind Stories that Helped Me Repair My Lost and Little Boat Cast Adrift on an Endless Sea of Unconsciousness;
Part 2: Collective Storytelling — The Good, The Bad & The Ugly, especially Conspiracy Myths that Always Rise during Times of Great Change and Crisis; and
Part 3: Mixing Our Individual Stories with the Collective Stories We Consume Is How We Create the Reality Bubbles We Put Into the World — Figuring Out How to Mix a Better Batch of Reality by Finding the Right Balance Between the Stories Rising Inside of You and the Ones Swirling All Around You, Especially the Ones You Choose to Eat, Is How to Create Better Bubbles of Reality
But first we must begin with the Death of the Benevolent Father. It is after all the narrative Western Civilization is falling into now.
Death of the Benevolent Father: How I Lost My Power & How Western Civilization Is Losing Its Power With the Death of this Father
The death of a father is devastating no matter when it happens in a person’s life or how old the father was at the time of death. Civilizations have fathers too. Civilizations are nothing more than of millions of individuals who contribute some of their individual currents of consciousness to the collective. This consciousness can then be projected by the larger container of the civilization in which the individuals exist. It is supposed to be used to sustain the good of all beings living inside the civilization. However, just like individuals, collective consciousness is complicated and has many aspects that translate into power potentialities. Some are good, some are bad, all when bundled into a collective state have an outsized impact on the shared reality of human beings and all other living beings. We don’t make reality, but we certainly can chip away at it.
Here I will only talk about my individual experience of losing my father who was an unusually kind, compassionate, and inordinately empathic human being. In ever sense of the word, he was the Benevolent Father. Western Civilization contains the image of a father too; however, it is fracturing and shattering in a very dangerous manner. I have written about this previously in my blog: It Feeds on Fear and Sadness. Thus, if you are interested in the death of the Benevolent Father of Western Civilization, please refer to this blog and go down to Death of the Father. Also see the section above, specifically my links to Contagion written by Barry Kort.
In the video above, Blue So Deep — Pulling Back My Power, I document the day when I understood how I have been losing essential interal energy by projecting good parts of myself onto others (e.g., the deep thinker, the doer, the seer, the dreamer, the successful one, the popular one). All these parts of myself were cast onto others around because to continue to play the part in my current mind narrative, I could not be them. But not being them were causing me to go in circles on the endless sea I had been cast onto due to no fault of my own but rather circumstance way beyond my control.
Indeed for a long time my only option was to float and hope someone would offer some random act of kindness or comfort like my dad used to do for people in pain. Slowly, very slowly, I healed from the hole left behind by his death. I lost all my resilience and strength when he died. I would catch glimpses of it once in a while, but I knew I was descending. I was going down into a Pit of Depression that would suddenly become much deeper and wider than I ever believed possible. I could not see the bottom. It was an abyss and if I could even reach the bottom, I knew there was a dangerous watery crossing I would have to make before being able to climb out on the other side. Turning back was not an option. Circumstances that were well beyond my control had pushed me too far down. I had collapsed. The only way out was to keep going down towards the raging unconsciousness currents deep inside of me. Currents so ferocious, so wild and beastly, I had hid them from myself my entire life. There was a good chance, they would be unsurvivable.
This was a descent into what in former times might have been called the Dark Night of the Soul. I sought professional help but found it insufficient and unaffordable. So, I stopped it and continued the journey alone. It grew very dark. I became suicidal. That is when I lost sight of myself inside myself. I no longer see my decent into the canyon. Nor could I feel any more where I was. I was lost in the dark. Somehow I held onto a slim and fragile memories–things that had made life meaningful and precious before.
Memories of my father’s love were particularly powerful. But these were accompanied by rage over all the circumstances that had lead to his sudden death and how I was treated afterwards. As I moved through this terrible place, I began to realize dad had been like a sun for our family. Everyone, most of all me, depended on his gravity to hold our course in life. This gravity of course was his love. He also held a great deal of our community and extended family together, after all he had been a pastor and hospital chaplain. He was the man who rushed in to help someone when tragedy struck–be it a job lost, sickness, accident, or death. He was there for a person or family suffering from some tragic reversal or lost. He did not try to minimize or explain the pain away. He held it with them. He knew he did not know why terrible things happen to good people. He knew there are no simple tropes or memes or words that magically take such pain away. He knew the only way to heal from this type of pain was to go through it, which often meant going down–descending into depression, deep grief, regret, remorse, desolation, torment, agony and unrelenting anguish. He knew people could get lost down there. So, he stayed near by as long as they needed him. He knew he could not make the journey through pain or grief for them, but he could listen, especially when the pain got so bad it made a person wail in primal agony. He did this for me–that is how I know he did this. Nothing about pain or suffering scared him. He knew it was energy that had to find an expression, sometimes he knew it needed a reflection or a witness. So he was there to do this for people who were suffering through their darkest journeys. No one is spared these journeys. If you are alive, you will hit a moment of great darkness inside yourself–often you will be pushed there by external circumstances–but the darkness you confront lives inside you. It is as real as the circumstances that pushed you to this extreme inner voyage.
Recently, I saw this picture and contest to caption it. To my great surprise I won the contest.
For me, there were many points on this journey where I almost gave up. I knew no one was coming to help. Then, just as suddenly as I had lost my way descending into the great canyon, I re-emerged. Somehow I had ended up underwater. It was not just the water of raging river at the bottom of the canyon. I was underwater in the middle of a Primordial Sea. I don’t know how I got there, but I was swimming to the surface. And, I was bringing something with me. This experience occurred near the first anniversary of my father’s death. I saw and felt it in a dream that I wrote down and then drew.
This year, 2020, the journey continued, but due to outer circumstances, high among them the novel Coronavirus, I am aware my energies have been redirected more externally. It remains difficult for inner turbulence remained challenging to navigate, but in a way, being pulled to my outer realities has allowed me to gain balance needed to move forward. For example, during 2019, I had to recognize and pull back dangerous and terrible aspects of myself that I had lost due to projections. It is very hard, even traumatizing to see the evil inside one’s self, but it is there inside every human being.
There is power in taking back your projections, but in the first year after my father passed, I had only taken back the dishonorable and nefarious parts. This was good, but it created a significant internal imbalance that I remained unaware of until this year when I encounter external circumstances that forced me to recognize and reclaim the magnificent, holy, and superior qualities of myself that I had also lost due to projection onto others. I needed them as well to maintain inner balance so I could move forward instead of in circles as I realize now I have been since reclaiming some of the devilish parts of myself. With these parts, I had managed to cobble together a little raft, but I needed their equal and opposite energies to move forward, and these I had bestowed onto others through my projections. I am still trying to bring them back. For some reason, these are harder to pull back in and reclaim as myself than the terrible ones. Perhaps that is due to the narrative that I tell to that part of myself that is aware about myself and what has happened to me during my journey through time and space. I know that I need all of them (the good, the bad, and the ugly) to finish writing the story about Climate Change and Consciousness that I began in 2012. It is a magnificent story. I know there are readers who will love it, if I can finish it.
Part 1: Individual Storytelling
How Being Outside Helped Me Observe Better Mind Stories that Helped Me Repair My Lost and Little Boat Cast Adrift on an Endless Sea of Unconsciousness.
Exercising Outside And How It Helped Me
ComE to Terms with COVID-19 & Make CRITICAL Internal Adjustments
I started bike riding outside for exercise after my gym closed down due to a national lockdown mandated after the Coronavirus began spreading in the community during March (however, hindsight shows it probably was spreading in the community much earlier). When my gym reopened in June, I went back only to discover they were allowing people to not wear masks while exercising. I was shocked and thought this was extremely short-sighted. But then, I think they knew this because they made me sign a document saying I would not sue them if I contracted COVID-19 at the gym.
Howbeit, I believe I already contracted COVID at the gym in March before the lockdown was issued; before we knew what was coming for us. I blame this ignorance, this lack of information of the American people, solely on the Trump administration who withheld it because they believed it would disrupt be bad for the economy and this would be bad for Trump’s re-election. This strategic withholding of information would prove to be fatal for hundreds of thousands of Americans. Indeed, it was a homicidal decision Trump made and has repeatedly doubled down believing it would help him get re-elected to deny reality. But, the only thing it did was needlessly increase the spread of this virus because Trump politicized it by calling it a fake Democratic ploy, by refusing to wear a mask, and by holding giant rallies where people crammed together, most not wearing masks (creating a Coronavirus’ dream domain) and telling his beautiful supporters coming to see him: ‘it’s nothing, it’s like the flu, one day: like a miracle, it will go away.’
And, Bob Woodward tells us in Trump’s own words that he knew it was a deadly airborne pathogen and he knew this in January. Woodward reveals this in his book, Rage, and backs it up with recorded interviews with Trump who often called Woodward to tell him things going on at the White House. We also know what Trump was telling the American people in January, February, and March when this pathogen could have been contained, but Trump lost interest sometime in April and swung the doors wide open in May never looking back, rather telling Woodward ominously in August: “Nothing more could have been done.”
It didn’t go away as Trump promised. One confirmed case turned into 2, that turned in 4, that turned into 8, then 16, then 32, and then 64, then 128, then 256… that turned into 13.6 million (this is how many confirmed cases of Coronavirus there are as I write this blog at the end of November 2020). And this is just the United States. Of these people who got infected, 293,000+ beloved souls have died (12/11/20). And around the world, the global infection is much higher: 69.8 million people have been infected with 1.59 million people succumbing to this deadly new disease.
And, I believe the infection and death rates are undercounts. So do many scientists and doctors because at the beginning of the pandemic we didn’t know what to look for, we didn’t have tests, and we were not told how it really spreads–through the air, just breathing. For my own possibly undiagnosed early case, my symptoms felt the worse on a Sunday night. It was very early March 2020. I couldn’t keep my eyes open and went to bed at 6 pm, which is unusually early for me. After that I’ve experienced continuing fatigue; foggy head and dizziness; sharp headaches upon waking up for no apparent reason; a feeling of restriction in my lungs when I try to take a deep breath, especially while bike riding; sometimes a usual heart rate; extreme pain in joints that sometimes makes me stop in my tracks; and slight cough. The symptoms come and go. Because of how mild the initial symptoms were, I did not seek treatment or a test (which was not available at that time even if I wanted one), nor did I quarantine or wear a mask or do any of the things we do now because I, along with everyone else, didn’t know how deadly this virus was for 1 to 2% of those who got infected (a number 10+ times more deadlier than the flu). Due to this, I have been paying close attention to people and the doctors trying to help them who are suffering with long lasting affects of COVID-19; something being called long-haul syndrome.
Also, I think someone died at my gym because of the criminal withholding of information by the Trump administration. It was a cleaning woman; an individual I’d known for over a decade. She did not know English well, but she was very kind and a hard worker. I learned from a woman who exercised around the same time and we talked regularly. She asked me if I knew this cleaning woman had died. I was shocked. I did not know. She told me she had died in January after a sudden and unexpected illness. She was not that old, but she was Hispanic and had endured many hardships. Also, she could not work from home (not that we even knew we should do this at that time last year).
Regardless of possibly already having contracted COVID at my gym, I have not returned to it, opting to stay outdoors, even in the extreme heat of summer and now the cold of winter. (Here is an article studying reinfection rates from COVID-19.) Following are some of the discoveries I made inside myself because of making this choice to stay outside. A decision to change long held routines I did not think I could survive without, but come to find that I could and this change was making me stronger inside.
Internal Change 1: Shifting from Me to We
Seeing More of Me Helped Me See More of We
At first, my commitment to exercise outside was entirely selfish aimed at keeping me and my family safe. But as I remained outdoors, something began to shift and transform inside of me. I could feel myself slowing down and disengaging from the deeply embedded routines of my cultural programming: all those things I had been told I needed to do to be a good person and contribute to my society. But really, these were the things demanded by the economy, and I had to learn them in order to survive as a person privileged enough to be born as a citizen of this country.
I had learned the rules and played by them for a long, long time. But I had fatal flaws for the system of consciousness within which I must survive. I probably learned them from my father. Moral attributes such as when I see something that is not fair or hurting someone else, to speak up about it and take action if possible. But, this is not always appreciated in Western-based society. There are things that happened in this system that one is supposed to ignore. If I spoke up about these things, I was punished, especially in the corporate world like speaking up about a boss who is doing something unethical, even illegal. For these things, I was duly punished. It didn’t matter if I was working in a healthcare setting, a nonprofit setting, or a for-profit setting. The unstated rule was: if you don’t have power, shut and go along with the group think, the tide of that system, its workplace culture. Every workplace, educational system, and community has a culture–slight differences and preferences different than the bigger collective within which they exist–things that make each smaller system different and unique just like individuals are.
The last time I spoke up about such things, I was duly punished by the CEO who required absolute fidelity to her will. Because I had advocated for myself, I was fired for being with my father during the 10 days he lived after his heart attack. This happened a year and a half before COVID hit, but it left me deeply traumatized for just 3 years earlier, I was thrown off the corporate ship of the organization I had been working for 6 years because I had done the same, advocating for myself by calling out deceptive and unethical behaviors of individuals who needed a scapegoat or to do work that went in circles, billable work but work that milked the system. (See Fresh Air interview from 2017 with Novelist John Le Carré Reflects On His Own ‘Legacy’ Of Spying and from 2018 with Novelist John Le Carré Reflects On His Own ‘Legacy’ Of Spying who talks about fraudulent and unethical systems, including working for his own father who asked him to conduct criminal work on his behalf.)
Also, two more important remembrances of le Carré and what made him the astounding man he was capable of deep insights into what drives human character include the following remembrance of Robert Harris:
“John le Carré, master of the spy thriller, has died at the age of 89. (…) In 2004, he told NPR’s Robert Siegel that “the one thing that marks most writers is the condition of unhappiness and alienation. I went to my first boarding school at the age of five, and I think it just drove me in upon myself and made the fictitious world the real one for me, that the imaginative world was a refuge that I could retreat to when life became incomprehensible.”
— Robert Harris, a fellow British fiction writer, in NPR interview remembering le Carré
And, “When he was sent away at the age of five — because his mother had left him, abandoned him — his brother was also at another school. And on a Sunday, so lonely, they used to get on a train and meet in a field midway between the two of them and just hold one another, he said. His eyes welled up with tears as he was describing this story, and I remember thinking, “ah, well, that’s why you’re always writing novels about betrayal. And that’s why you feel so angry, quite often, about society and the British establishment.” It all went back, I think, to the trauma of his childhood, which he indicated.”
— Robert Harris, a fellow British fiction writer, in NPR interview remembering le Carré
The cruelties that are an integral part of our modern economic realities are palpable, especially for individuals forced to exist on the lower rungs of the existing system of commerce. For people trapped on the lower levels of Western society, day-to-day reality is stark and sharp, particularly if they try to better their lot in life. For people who exist on higher levels of the current system of consciousness establish to keep the bodies holding the light of consciousness alive but enslaved for the use of others who have gobbled up resources, power, and control, there are modest advantages. But, the greatest advantages are reserved for the few at the very top and for anyone below them, there is an automatic amnestic inflicted on humans trying to exist on the lower levels, but not the lowest. This effect makes them ignorant of what is happening to people on any level of being below them. It takes a lot of inner energy to grow beyond this amnesia effect baked into the higher rungs of our dominate system of consciousness. To fit into this system and receive any benefits from it, an individual must remain ignorant or risk being knocked off the rung they are standing on and trying to exist. In this system, ignorance is rewarded by the collective. Intelligence growth of consciousness is punished by throwing the daring ones off the lopsided superstructure created by Westernized systems of thinking and being in the world. Because this system has gobble up most of the resources of Earth, getting thrown off it can mean physical death.
With the arrival of COVID-19, millions and millions of people are experiencing the cruel realities of the systems they are trying to exist inside. It’s not their fault they have lost their jobs. This is a novel virus running its course through the human race. It’s not their employer’s fault either for letting them go–many small to mid-size businesses are facing extinction themselves due to the massive economic crisis created by this global disaster. It’s not even the fault of our fearless leaders. This is because each and every one of them is playing a well-defined role inside our system of consciousness: the one we choose long, long ago to exist inside as individuals. (See Weaving Reality — So Many Humans, So Many Versions of Reality & How Did We Get Here?, go down to: ‘How To Make A Slave’ Author On The Advice That Changed His Writing Career, and then down to Alan Watts for what I mean by this.)
Divergence on Why Cruel Systems of Consciousness Evolved
Long ago, when humans were confronted with deadly realities abounding in the natural world, people found it tremendously advantageous to belong to a collective (i.e., family group, clan, tribe, dynasty, empire, nation). A breathtaking amount of groups emerged around the world over vast amounts of time that grew into thriving cultures and civilizations. Many ways of life have risen and fallen since humanity stepped into itself most sacred ability of all human abilities and this is living in a state of consciousness defined as a state of knowing that one knows. To accommodate this state of knowing, humans devised collective states of consciousness. This would be systems that organized conscious states of being into complex orders and arrangements that benefited the entire group. Heretofore, no collective system of consciousness has achieved perfection. And thus it falls upon the individual to struggle forward in imperfect systems of consciousness to try to help the collectivized systems of being conscious in the world evolve. There have been vastly wiser and more compassionate collectives that have existed in the world. Some still exist now. But most have been devoured by Western Civilization, which dominates the collective world order of consciousness on Earth today. It has distilled and achieved incredible heights of knowledge and understanding about this world as it has evolved. But it has also demonstrated incredibly cruel, brutal, and heinous capacities. Just like individuals, collectives exist with expansive reservoirs of unconsciousness. If this unconsciousness is artificially left in the dark and not allowed to be distilled, refined, processed, and synthesized by individuals using their individual light of consciousness, an imbalance can grow that can warp the trajectory of the entire system of consciousness towards a destructive course.
So, this is where our leaders find themselves now. They are embedded an ever evolving system of consciousness that has become warped and each are playing rigidly defined roles that have grown out of this system and have been played out many times before. In a sense, they are stuck in deep rivulets of being that have been carved out inside the system over vast amounts of time. These rivulets as patterns of thought, of behavior, and of action–each something that has been performed many times before in the earlier existence of this system. When an individual steps into a collective role, they activate powerful reservoirs of inner mental energy that has been poured into that role by all the members of they system. The outer manifestations of a high ranking collective role are fairly obvious. A CEO oversees all the operations of a corporation, a boss oversees the employees under him, a President or King oversees a nation. What we have forgotten a Modern people is that when an individual steps into a collective role, they also activate and have access to inner psychic-mental energy that all members of the society have contributed to the role. This energy is invisible, but it is powerful for it holds power over the hearts and minds of the members of the clan or civilization. Some individuals in powerful collective roles play despicable character. Others play more benevolent parts within the system. All jiggle and jive for power. When one side becomes too powerful, it can lock all roles into rigid, entrenched patterns of behavior that if left unbalanced will grow hopelessly lopsided: a condition, that if not corrected, will lead to system collapse (i.e., the system of consciousness will devour itself).
Because I have suffered cruelty inflicted by the economic and social systems dictating our shared collective reality, I have become more sensitive to the suffering of others who have long suffered the inequalities and brutalities of our current system of being conscious. It is something that I have been waking up to over decades, but this year was supercharged with the barbaric murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer. My hometown in Minneapolis. I know the architecture of that city. I know its streets, its ways, its movements, its pulse and its rhythms. I felt its pain along with hundreds and thousands of individuals bearing accurate witness to this heinous, barbarous, savage reality of our modern western system of life. (See After Math: The Magical Calculus of Consciousness, Introduction about bearing accurate, insight provided by Barry Kort.)
This murderous, brutal collective reality has been normalized and thrust back into the mainstream of American society, especially in the last 4 years by the Trump Administration. >>has cumulated in a recognition that I was born into and have grown out of the cultural bowl that has given rise to the MAGA movement. I do not like or support this movement or Trump in any way; however, when I went down to film the first MAGA rally after Trump lost the 2020 election, I recognize myself in the people I was filming. I grew up in this culture. I could pass for a MAGA supporter and move within its currents easily and without being questioned until I opened my mouth and stated my opinions and beliefs. Only then would I be labeled other.
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(see Black & Brown Live Matter) dramatically pulled my attention from my own inner suffering to be an accurate witness to this collective injustice Western Civilization has been conducting for centuries (See After Math: The Magical Calculus of Consciousness, Introduction about bearing accurate, an insight of Barry Kort).
I confronted for advocating for myself and others. I had been punished in other systems of work for not going along with the crooked warp of those who had power over me. So all this punishment meted out by the system that demanded blind obedience left me crushed with unbearable feelings of abandonment, failure, disillusionment, and despair. And so with the arrival of Corona, I had to find ways to replace the last two routines keeping me sane: going to the gym and going to the pool. Being outdoors made the most sense to me, even in the heat, rain, wind, and now cold. I found I could adapt. I began noticing all the life around me, and as I did, I felt less anxious and less depressed and more connected to life. This allowed a sense of belonging to slip back into my devastated inner world.
This feeling of consecutiveness extended beyond myself, my family, and what I was noticing. It extended to everyone and from here it was an easy jump to understand wearing a mask and maintaining social distance were easy actions I could take to contribute to a better shared reality for all of us, especially vulnerable individuals (like the cleaning lady who probably died of Corona at my gym). And after spending those 10 days with dad, I knew how hard the doctors and nurses work to save people. So, this is something I could do to help them. I also kept myself informed by listening to trusted sources of information. To me, a trusted source is a scientist, a doctor, or an individual who is deeply involved in the subject (an expert) being discussed (see Resilience Resources: Weaving Reality — So Many Humans, So Many Versions of Reality & How Did We Get Here?; go down to: The Highly Involved vs The Not So Highly Involved).
This year in particular, I have been shocked by how many of ‘my friends’ have discarded science as elitist hogwash and labeled experts as evil beings who are out to murder all of humanity, preferring to believe in and peddle stories of alternative realities. I will return to this in a little bit, but first, I will talk about how going slower helped me survive 2020.
Internal Change 2: The Gift of Going Slower
Helped me See More of Nature!
As just mentioned, one of the first things I began to notice was the wonder and beauty of nature. The slower I went, the more I saw. I began taking pictures and videos documenting some of these beautiful moments on my rides that transported me to inner Islands of Tranquility. This took more time to stop and take pictures, but it was utterly worth it because I saw things I would never have seen going faster. One such moment was a fight between a bee and a wasp on a patch of Goldenrod!
On this day I filmed the war between the bee and wasp, news broke President Trump and First Lady Melania tested positive for COVID-19. It was exactly one month and 1 day before the Nov. 3 election. Who would have guessed battles for power happen everywhere, on every scale, every day?!
Seeing simple moments like this playing out in nature thriving in a super city like DC rekindled my own interest to survive, even thrive, during a time of crisis and adversity.
Helped me Revive Beloved Memories!
My bike rides also revived lovely memories with loved ones that spontaneously bubbled up into my field of awareness, perhaps stimulated by a smell or something I saw. Each revived memory helped me reconstruct my life raft needed to float on my overwhelming inner Sea of Grief and Pain.
Most people mistakenly think I got stuck in grief after my father’s death. But they are wrong. His death was a mysterious, horrific, beautiful, and terrifying all at the same time, an experience that defies my ability to adequately describe to you. The overwhelming pain and grief I have been enduring stems from systematic cruelty baked into every system existing inside of the dominate system of consciousness most people exist inside: Western Civilization. This includes work, school, family systems, friendship systems; it effects how one plays, how one lives, how one relaxes (or does not relax); it slips into every aspect of being human and one’s sense of wellbeing.
In the beginning, Western Civilization emerged just like every other great civilization that evolved on Earth. All collectives began with the simple and good intentions of looking out for and protecting the wellbeing of every member of the group. But, as some grew big and strong, cracks emerged within the systems allowing corruption to seep inside. The corruption is simple. It is an overwhelming need or desire that fills an individual to want and have more than another human being. It is force that makes the individual warp reality so that they divert the blessings meant for others onto themselves. Anyone, rich or poor, can be infected by the corruption.
And so human reality became vastly more complicated. My dad understood this, and yet he treated everyone with respect, trust, and compassion–even when they took advantage of him. He was not afraid to sit in the Mud of Misery with someone enduring a terrible time in their life. He knew doing this was one of the most powerful things one human being can do for another. He knew this is what held a civilization together, not money, nor power, or prestige. He was a humble man, a gentle man. Some might have judged him a weak and unsuccessful man, but my father would never abandon someone who was suffering. He would stand with them and check on them until they could begin to take their first steps out of the Dirt of Devastation & Destruction that had visited them.
So when I lost dad, I lost a powerful source of gravity that had kept me safe, held me in love, and grounded me to the Goodness of Earth. This gravity is unconditional love. I didn’t even know he was providing this until he was gone. And so, this is why memories of my dad are particularly healing on my rides, and many have emerged.
Some of these happy memories are woven into another series of videos I’ve making called Have You Told Your Beloved Ones You Love Them Today?
This is one of my favorites from this series:
helped me Sink Deeper into My Imagination!
My bike rides helped me sink deeper into my imagination too. I need to do this to finish the story I’m writing about Climate Change and Consciousness. I won’t bore you with details of this story, but the timeline begins in 2020. And so I feel tremendous pressure to go faster, but I know now is when I need to go slower.
Imagination requires time to digest ideas coming to me from my daily reality as well as through me. As modern humans, we are pretty ignorant about the need to digest consciousness daily. It is very much like digesting food required to sustain our bodies, but instead, we digest ideas, dreams, visions, inspiration to sustain our minds. This is how we sustain and grow our individual light of consciousness. Our ancestors understood this, but we have forgotten us.
This is one of the videos I made emerging from my imagination digestion process:
helped me Digest the Daily News!
Lastly, my bike rides give me time to digest the news and information I consume about the world and current events. Information surrounds us and is embedded in everything we see, hear, touch, and experience in the world. But having obtained consciousness, human being also have information coming from inside of them, making it necessary to weave together one’s inner reality with one’s outer reality. This is a timeless act of one person reaching out across the void of self and other to share ideas, experiences, and feelings of what it is to alive in this world in this moment of time.
Over time, we have amassed beautiful pools of knowledge: complex thought made visible through art, music, philosophy, theology, and many other systems of consciousness we have evolved to distill, sort, digest, and transform consciousness. An International Baccalaureate (IB) blog defines fields of knowledge this way: There are 8 Areas of Knowledge, these are: Mathematics, the Natural Sciences, the Human Sciences, History, The Arts, Ethics, Religious Knowledge and Indigenous Knowledge.
Some forms of knowledge help to elevate our own individual well of consciousness. Other forms are designed to depress it. Some are even designed to misinform, mislead, and deceive consumers of it. These have a dangerous distorting effect on our collective understanding of our shared reality.
Relative reality is a luxury modern human beings are indulging in more and more. Thousands of years ago, human beings were preyed for more powerful creatures. One of the most fascinating stories I heard on this topic was about a young hominid child of the species Australopithecus africanus, which is a direct precursor species that lead to Homo Sapiens. His small scratched skull was discovered in 1924 along with the mangled remains of many other bones of small to medium-sized animals, as described in an article written by By Ross Pomeroy (RCP Staff) in What Hunted Ancient ‘Humans’? Pomeroy says, “the best explanation for the skull and the accompanying collection of skeletons is that they were gathered by an ancient, large bird of prey – the leftovers of many, many meals.”
Our ancestors needed a keen, accurate understanding of reality because if they didn’t they would very likely become dinner for giant birds, crocodiles, and leopards, early humans likely had to contend with bears, sabertooth cats, snakes, hyenas, Komodo dragons, and even other hominids. I write about this in my story, so again, I will not delve into this now other than to suggest the information we consume daily has to be digested into the lite of our inner consciousness. Eating a daily diet of outrage, inflation, and purple prose will result in a mind molded to these ways of being in the world. Humans are not immune to reality.
Now, I back to trusted sources of information.
Part 2: Collective Storytelling
Conspiracy Myths
— There Are Myths that Help Us Hold onto Goodness & There Are Myths that Rip This Goodness from Our Soul and Stomp All Over It
Conspiracies Fall into The Destructive Myths
This Section is About the Good, The Bad & The Ugly Myths, especially Conspiracy Myths that Always Rise during Times of Great Change and Crisis
When did scientists and doctors and individuals of expertise turn into monsters in the eyes of many living inside Western Civilization? It is a current that has been at work washing away the undergirding of the massive civilization for some time now. Perhaps this is partly because Western Civilization has not conducted a full and accurate reckoning of its centuries of cruelty, blood-thirst for power, and chronic infection of corruption coursing through its veins of commerce, which supply all beings living within it the means to survive. It is entirely an artificial survival. One Homo sapiens invented with its very clever mind. But it is not the only one. There have been many civilization born by man–each unique to its people, its place, and its time. The tremendous diversity in how man self-organized to sustain himself and his newly found abilities of consciousness cannot be understated. It has been profuse and prosperous in the most fantastic ways.
But, in the last few thousand years, this cornucopia has been steadily devoured by one kind of being in this world. The way of being dictated by the rules, norms, customs of Western Civilization. I understand the deep desire to find the corrupting forces in this system we are all forced to live inside and hold them accountable. But, doing it stupidly is going to result ignorant, foolish, idiotic, wooded-headed, ill-advised, ill-considered, inept, and dam-fool action in this world. Such bovine, pig-ignorant, half-baked actions result in calamity for everyone because no one can make an action that does not touch and affect other people and other beings–only death releases us from our responsibility and debt to others for our own wellbeing.
with its underside of consciousness. at I mean by a trusted sources of information is a first-hand account from an individual experiencing a situation, a doctor, a scientist, or someone who is highly trained in a field of knowledge or expertise in a way that is aligned with shared reality.
So what is not part of shared reality?
Well, everything is part of our human created reality, but more and more information is flooding into our communication channels that is meant to misinform, mislead, and deceive. Much of this sort of information ranks closer to entertainment, advertisement, and propaganda. They are designed to evoke emotional responses and trigger systems of belief into rigid postures. While distracted by inner and outer turmoil whipped up by disinformation, the deceivers are stealing your time, your money, and your soul.
Most alternative realities have nothing to do with reality. They are simply good stories being told by ordinary people who are entertaining themselves by their abilities to deceive or more deviously, feeding on other people’s trust in them.
How do I know this?
Because I edited one of these fictional bubble worlds that was being created by very ordinary human beings. I had received an invitation to edit a group document from a “friend” on Facebook who had been very kind to me a while back when I posted a tribute to my father. I was very touched when this friend shared my tribute. None of my other friends did this. In fact, hardly any of Facebook “friends” watched more than 3 seconds of the tribute I made for my father after a year of horrible suffering, which they knew about because I shared my suffering on Facebook. But that’s not what Facebook is for I learned… because most of us go there to exist in Fake Realities and Escape Reality… thus, it should really be named Fakebook.
But, it was because of this kindness that made me pay attention to the link provided that took me to a document and undisclosed group was editing. I found the document immediately confusing, but I saw some easy fixes and offered suggestions for a few paragraphs. I messaged my friend asking what the intend and purpose of this document was. I got no reply. So, I edited it a little more, noting all my previous edits had been accepted without question, and attempted to decipher its intent on my own. I concluded it was about the Coronavirus and it was making the case to be on guard for a mind virus that would spread across the world infecting minds, making people think the Coronavirus was a hoax. I stopped editing since I got no communication from anyone in this group. Then, a little bit later, I was shocked to see my “friend” had invited me to edit an anonymous letter promoting the “Plandemic“!
I just about threw up upon realizing I’d been editing a document supporting ideas I absolutely do not believe in or support in any way. However, this was an opportunity for me to realize that every human being is complicated… very complicated! Now, I must find a way to hold the deep gratitude and respect I still held for this person for sharing the tribute I had drawn and then made into a fairly lengthy video about my father… I will never forget this… alongside this new experience that feels diametrically opposite to this because it feels like a betrayal of trust.
But you know… that is pretty much what reality is… a complex mish mash of good things and bad things. And that is what being human is… being a creature consisting of a complex medley of good impulses and kindness as well as bad desires and disservices. We all are this way… there’s no getting around this complexity of being human or really being alive. We live in the middle of polar opposites all the time. That is the flow of time. One of the tricks for not slamming into the Rock of Reality (which are very hard) is to stay in the middle of the flow–like all Great Masters have taught since humans could see and understand such things.
The Road to Here describes what the core message of this chill mix of Alan Watts is about by quoting one of these Great Masters of Consciousness who said: “If you are depressed you are living in the past. If you are anxious you are living in the future. If you are at peace you are living in the present.” ―Lao Tzu
It’s taken me quite a while to understand what Watts was saying in a way I could actually feel in my every day life. I understood the middle way intellectually, but I did not feel it in my being until experiencing this and thinking about it in my slower mode of being in the world these days. Then, it snapped into place. And, it is all so obvious. We are all good and bad inside our heads. We all do good and bad things through time. A Real Relationship with another human being accepts the goodness and the badness in the other person knowing full well that the same goodness and badness exist inside oneself. The trick is holding these opposites in dynamic balance in your mind. This is how you stay in the middle of things. This is how you maintain Real Relationships with other people. You talk with each other about things you have done to each other that felt good and felt bad. If it’s only good, good, good with your “friend” or “significant other” or it’s only bad, bad, bad… it’s probably not a Real Relationship… or at least not a very healthy one.
I will return to this idea at the end of this digression when I talk about splitting and projection.
Today, anyone can be a Magician of Reality and create elaborate illusions that entertain, distract, distort, and misguide the masses. Some even become Masters of Illusions who conduct their mischief with fowl and evil intent. Trump is a prime example of such a person warping reality for personal benifit. And he has shown us how much power he has amassed with his Warped Reality Shows by what happens to his followers when some inevitably wake up and counter his illusions. When this happens, a Master of Illusions simply dumps his failed follower into the Bad Bubble of Reality he has himself created. By doing this, he doesn’t even have to lift a finger to silence his failed follower because his true believers will carry out the consequence for not believing in the mass hypnosis.
Michael Blume is a political scientist who serves as anti-Semitism commissioner for the government of Baden-Württemberg against anti-Semitism since 2018. His Ph.D. dissertation explored theories of religion in the brain sciences (“neurotheologies”). In a recent interview, he says:
“Supporters of conspiracy myths believe that evil powers rule the world, says Michael Blume, who has just written a book on the subject. It is not a question of education: “You can have an engineering degree, a PhD or a professor’s degree and use all your intelligence to sink all the deeper into conspiracy myths. With regard to the QAnon conspiracy myth, Blume predicts that the movement will disintegrate after the US presidential election. The remaining followers will, however, become more radical, he fears. ‘It cannot be ruled out that further violence will result from this conspiracy movement.‘”
Interview with Michael Blume — https://www.n-tv.de/politik/Verschwoerungsmythen-immer-gefaehrlich-article22098011.html and ‘The anti-Jewish myth links the far right, radical Islamists and far left’
In another interview, he was asked:
So you’re not surprised about some of the statements being spread in these demonstrations? [referring to Germany’s anti-lockdown movement “Querdenken 711” (“lateral thinking 711”)]
“Yes, it’s always been like that. Whenever a pandemic has occurred in history, we have had two possibilities. Either we face the fear and uncertainty and inform ourselves, while living with the fact that we don’t have any ready answers. For example, we do not know when the vaccine will be available. And the other option is simply to block it out: I don’t accept the fear, I look for a group to blame. All I have to do is shout at them and go out into the street. And then everything is supposed to be fine.
Many of these conspiracy myths already existed in the 15th to 19th centuries. Sometimes it even gets a bit boring, because they are always the same building pieces. People demonstrate together, whether they are left, center, or right, but what connects them is their image of the common enemy. And that is the important thing: People are so fixated in their fears that it is not even creative. They never come up with a Brazilian world conspiracy or a world conspiracy of Quakers or the Muslim Brotherhood. It’s always, always, always Jews and women behind it.“
Let’s Dig Deeper into the Plandemic Myth
The myth that COVID-19 was planned follows the classic pathways of myth creations humans have been using since we began telling stories about ourselves and what has happened to us as we journeyed through time and space. It uses pseudo sources of trusted sources of information about the coronavirus. One such pseudo experts is the radiologist that Trump appointed to the U.S. Corona Task Force. Trump appointed this idiot because he preaches about the benefits of herd immunity–something Trump was preaching in his vain effort to get re-elected. To Trump, the Coronavirus was an unwelcome reality check that pulled the covers off his levees of lies and levers of deception he was using to hoodwink his supporters into believing he was looking out for them. But, he wasn’t. He doesn’t look out for anyone but himself. Every moment of his life is a transaction he must win. So, Anthony Fauci’s science-based knowledge about what was happening to us was inconvenient to Trump’s failed narrative of how he would Make America Great again. Thus, enter the pseudo expert, a radiologist with no knowledge or understanding of infectious diseases spouting off the lies Trump wanted you to believe.
Or the doctor Trump retweeted promoting hydroxychloroquine as a legitimate treatment for Coronavirus despite overwhelming evidence this immunosuppressive drug normally used as an anti-parasitical treatment for malaria had significant risks of triggering a heart attack in Coronavirus patients. In this same video the Trump greatly amplified through his mindless retweet, this pseudo doctor blames America’s current health problems on demon sperm. I’m not exaggerating…I really, really wish I was, but Trump really retweeted this doctor.
Trevor Noah says it more plainly.
As you know, this sort of crazy thinking is not contained only to the United States and is spreading globally like a goopy goo crisscrossing the glove through social media channels–being spread through anonymous document like the one I got hoodwinked into editing. It is absolutely a mind virus spreading and has many names; the most popular being “Plandemic“.
One story line of the Plandemic (there are many out there depending on who you want the enemy to be) goes something like this: There is a group of global elites who created the virus and unleashed it on the world to make more money. There is something incredibly glittery about pinning all the ills of the world on some super elites (and I agree they do share a bigger burden for perpetuating many of our current problems), but it’s too glittery, too black-and-white, too clean and neat… and reality is not clean and neat, it is messy and confusing, and confounding most of the time. But that is the appeal of myths, they make sense out of ignorance, mindlessness, folly, foolishness, idiocy, imbecility, incapacity, senselessness, and stupidity. >>> that global elites don’t have anything better to do with their lives than commit mass murder is as short-sighted as preaching about demon sperm being responsible for the world’s current ills.
The Q Myth
Another popular conspiracy myth circling the globe centers around a dude named Q.
Who is Q?
No, Q is not the beloved, mischievous character from Star Trek. Although one might just consider this for a minute. I bet the Star Trek Q is exactly who the Russian Special Disinformation Agent known as Sergei was thinking of when he scribbled out a scrappy story for his Internet disinformation campaign he had been assigned to back in 2016.
Sergei just happened to hit gold dust when he scribbled down and spewed out his fictional character Q onto the social media channels he had been assigned to pollute. Oh how the angry Americans he was interacting with gobbled Q up in the lead up to the 2016 election. Sergei crafted his mysterious Q to have mysterious access to all the dirt on Hillary Clinton. Since then, Q has evolved into the great peculiar leader of QAnon, a conspiracy theory/myth alleging there is a battle between good and evil in which the Republican Mr. Trump is allied with the former.
Sound familiar?
It should be. It is the classical story arch all great stories and myths follow. Returning to our good friend Mr. Trump, it is as if he found and is guarding the good bubble of reality for all of us to step into and be safe just like Glinda the Good Witch of the South who arrived just in the nick of time to help Dorothy survive the land of Oz.
But if you have a good bubble and a good witch, there must be a bad bubble and a bad witch, right?
The Wall Street Journal reported on this newest strange myth birthed in America, but now spreading around the world, saying: “QAnon followers are awaiting two major events: the Storm and the Great Awakening. The Storm is the mass arrest of people in high-power positions who will face a long-awaited reckoning. The Great Awakening involves a single event in which everyone will attain the epiphany that QAnon theory was accurate the whole time. This realization will allow society to enter an age of utopia.”
So, Sergei still sits in his sod hut somewhere on the Siberian Tundra typing out tangy new details about Q while chomping on Spicy Cheetos and shooting down shots of vodka. Sergei is particularly proud about how QAnon has inspired enthusiastic new believers to carry out a despicable vandalizing attack on 3 galleries in Berlin. These vandals used some oily substance, which they threw on ancient artifacts such as Egyptian sarcophagi, stone sculptures and 19th-century paintings held at the Pergamon Museum, the Alte Nationalgalerie and the Neues Museum sustained visible damage during the attack on 3 October, as reported by The Guardian. Reportedly, they did this because these museums were thought to be one of the centre of ‘global satanism’.
This is crazy stuff, right? But it is happening now in 2020 landing it right up there with the man who drove up from North Carolina, entered a beloved family pizza place called Comet Ping Pong, and shot off rounds from his rifle. Terrified families threw themselves and their children under tables while he babbled about freeing the fictional children enslaved in the basement of the pizza joint by Hillary Clinton and other Democrats elites. It is a very sad moment now known as Pizzagate.
Splitting — The Magic Ingredient of Conspiracy Bubbles
To spin his illusions Sergei counts on our human fallibilities that get heighten during times of highly charged social unrest such as current American politics or the pressures of globalism or the looming calamities Climate Change promises to rain down on us. Sergei knows when humans feel stressed and not in control of their stress, he can prey upon the looming hopeless and despair threatening to crush them. When people feel like this, it is easy to lure them back into an immature and destructive psychological defense mechanisms called splitting.
Splitting allows humans to make just about anyone or anything into an instant enemy. Sergei knows this and makes his mysterious Q just vague enough so people project whatever they want into his fantasy character. Once frighten desperate people have their leader, it is very simple to create an enemy out of just about anyone or anything in 4 easy steps:
Step 1) Take ordinary reality and cut it into good and bad parts,
Step 2) Walk inside the good bubble created by splitting reality into polar opposites,
Step 3) Inhabit your good bubble and invite your friends, then zip up your bubble,
Step 4) Everything remaining outside of your good bubble is the enemy, this is the bad bubble that must be popped.
Anyone can do this. In fact, we have all done this because it is a normal psychological defense mechanism all children pass through on their way to becoming adults. It becomes a maladaptive psychological defense mechanism when adults continue to do it long into their adult years. When it becomes the only thing they do to deal with the unpleasant aspects of reality it can be pathological. One of the best write ups I have read describing psychological defense mechanisms (i.e., they range from the most highly evolved and mature mechanisms to the most neurotic, immature, and pathological mechanisms) is this excellent blog simply titled: Defence Mechanisms.
Part 3: Mixing Our Individual Stories with the Collective Stories We Consume Is How We Create the Reality Bubbles We Put Into the World
— Figuring Out How to Mix a Better Batch of Reality by Finding the Right Balance Between the Stories Rising Inside of You and the Ones Swirling All Around You, Especially the Ones You Choose to Eat, Is How to Create Better Bubbles of Reality
The Bubble Maker
Thank you for indulging my digression. Now, let’s return to Reality Bubbles and the Bubble Maker who I met on my last bike ride!
On this day, I biked to the Big Wheel at National Harbor in Maryland, going across the Woodrow Wilson bridge. On some days when I cross this bridge when the wind is blowing it feels like flying. It was on my way back after this wonderful ride that I meet this extraordinary woman making gorgeous giant bubbles.
Earlier that day, I wished I had asked a group of men who were practicing a dance with scarfs that they waved above their heads if I could film them. The dance was so beautiful, even though I thought it was quite feminine for men to be dancing with scarfs. But I was too scared to ask them. Then, on my way home, I saw two construction workers horse playing after work. One held his hands up like a boxer looking for a good punch on his friend. His friend waved his t-shirt at him to distract his friend from landing a good punch. They were laughing…that’s how I knew they were playing around. And then, I knew what the men dancing with scarfs were doing–it was a highly ritualized war dance!
So, when I saw the Bubble Maker, I said to myself… ‘I’m not going to let this one by!’ I asked her and she said yes. We had such an amazing conversation as I filmed her making beautiful bubbles. She told me this batch bubble making solution was not her best batch. She explained each bubble mixture is a little different. Some batches make bubbles better than others, so she was struggling with this one. Despite this, she was a master bubble maker, and I got many beautiful shots of giant bubbles. It was magical in every sense of the word.
Bubbles of Consciousness
As I watched her, I thought about a conversation I was having with my good friends in Germany about how the human mind is capable of crafting and believing such fantastic versions of reality. I began to think of these bizarre versions of reality were like bubbles created by the mind. Thus, the idea of Reality Bubbles popped into my mind. Some mind bubbles are very stable and last for a long time. Other Reality Bubbles are inherently unstable and pop almost as soon as they leave our minds. Most Alternative Reality Bubbles will pop soon after leaving the mind because the Rock of Reality is very hard.
So, I imagined further, the human mind it like the wand the woman was using to make the bubbles. Consciousness then is like the mixture in the bucket. As human beings, we channel and distill consciousness continually. It flows through us and it is around us always. The consciousness contained inside of us is used to generate our ideas that inform our actions. Thus, our inner mixture of consciousness determines the strength of the mixture used to manufacture the ideas we put into the world through the Wand of Mind. This wand is the same for every human being, but the mixture between human beings can be vastly different.
Reviving Our Lost Inner Landscapes
This mixture also forms our inner landscapes, mind-scapes. These inner landscapes are illuminated by the light of our conscious understanding. This is how we come to know who we are. This inner light of consciousness is what we inherited when we stepped across the threshold of consciousness many thousands of years ago. Despite all this time, this part of our consciousness is the smallest part of us. Vast amounts of every human mind remains cloaked under the darkness of inner unconsciousness.
But this is what we are here to do–to explore, discover, and claim inner landscapes by illuminating them with the light of our awaken consciousness. The more unconsciousness contained inside your mind, the less stable your inner landscapes will be as well as the bubbles of reality you manufacture with your mind and put into the world through your actions.
This is why it is important to see more of who were are as a human being, which always includes good and bad parts of ourselves. To make stable bubbles that are able to last through time, we need to maintain dynamic balances between good and bad elements existing inside of us and flowing all around us all of the time. We get glimpses of these cloaked areas through thoughts, dreams, and visions. But more often we become aware of our unconsciousness because we get triggered by the unconscious content living inside of us. They pop up just like instincts pop into action due to environmental stimuli that spurs an animal into action. When an animal acts based upon their instincts, nature has already worked out the dynamic balances over billions and billions of years evolution.
However, as newly awaken conscious beings, we have a lot to understand and work out dynamic sustainable balances. This is hard work and it is far easier to revert back to simpler ways of seeing the world such as black and white, right and wrong, good and evil, and then choose one side or the other side to rally along side. But, ultimately all opposites are inseparable because inside goes with outside, up goes with down, light goes with night. Every opposite is inseparable from its other side just like the other side of a coin. You can cut off the other side, but it is still there…the coin is simply thinner… and that is exactly what we do when we split reality and exist in only one side–we make it smaller. Another serious problem of existing only on onside or the other side of the Coin of Reality is a fatal lopsidedness will result. Living in our huge human collectives with lots of technology can delay the consequences of this fatal lopsidedness, but not forever… that is the Gift of Reality… it will always flow towards balance in the end, and as you are carried in this flow, you will hit the Rocks of Reality along the way.
So, think about your thoughts and how they are turn into actions in the world, which shape and create our shared reality.
I know this is all pretty abstract, but perhaps you will read the story I am writing about this when I finally finish it (Sapience: The Moment is Now). For now, I continue to make these mini movies to help me feel grounded to the Earth and connected to all the beautiful life around me and inside of me. By appreciating the beauty of Earth, I am able to continue gathering inner strength to pull back the projections I have put out into the world. As I pull them back, I find my inner reservoir of consciousness is replenished, which helps me endure.
Projecting our consciousness out into the world is perfectly natural because we cannot see ourselves when we are first born into the world unless we look in a mirror. That is what projections do. They allow us to see ourselves through others.
The trick is seeing: “Oh – that is me!” And, reclaiming that part of ourself that has been temporally lost into the world as a project. This is your power. This is all in my book… but I still must find deeper calm to write again since the latest calamity befell me and my family.
To see the full series, click here: Have You Been Outside Today?
Stay safe and well — and find some time today to cultivate your beautiful patch of consciousness and connect to the natural world!
