Living In Uncertainty

Right now, as of today, the 2023 Alberta, Canada wildfires have burned over 842,000 hectares that is casting smoke that can be smelled in Washington, DC.  
Meanwhile, Typhoon Mawar is bearing down on the island of Guam. This is a Category 4 Typhoon with sustained winds of 135 mph and storm surge expected to be as high or higher than roofs of one story buildings.
These are dangerous events that threaten lives and will destroy property totaling millions to billions of dollars. And these are just the latest in a series of serve weather events bearing down on the world--be it astounding flooding events, tornadoesderechos, fires, and many other severe weather events (click on link to see just the list of 1 billion dollar disasters in 2022).
Layered on to all this killer geologic events such as recent killer earthquakes in Turkey and Syria or the Hunga Ha'apai volcanic eruption and tsunami that impacted the entire Pacific Ocean in 2022. And now, Popocatépetl a massive volcano is waking up outside of Mexico City.
Mexico’s Popocatépetl volcano eruption prompts evacuation warnings
Layer onto theses events pandemics and lockdowns
Layered on top of these events are mass shootings in the USA...a civilization so polarized, it's paralyzed.
Layer onto all of this the War in Ukraine with 18,280 casualties (6,596 killed and 11,684 injured -- stats by Radio Free Europe) along with nuclear saber rattling by the crazy tsar Putin driving Russia into the ground and North Korea accompanied by Xi Jinping, China’s very uptight and control freak ruler, eyeing Taiwan

Human beings have always lived in uncertainty. It is only recently we feel it isn’t normal to feel uncertain about something.

But what if we need uncertainty to thrive?

Uncertainty has largely been replaced by routines made very predictable and reliable by all our technology. Living life today is so much more predictable than living it just 70 years ago, much less 150 or 700 years ago. Some may say modern human life is downright boring until something unexpected, unplanned, unpredictable occurs. Then, suddenly we may feel uncertain, anxious, uncomfortable, frighten. We want these feeling to go away because these aren’t the nice feelings we are suppose to feel in our technology rich, everything is at your finger tips society.

But wishing this to be so would be a huge mistake…

Do you want to know why?

Well, I’m not going to tell you. I’m going to let you dwell in a place of uncertainty and let you see what you find out.

However, I will provide a few road markers, if you are willing to take the voyage into the uncomfortable space of being uncertain, not knowing, a place that feels more than a little bit unhinged.

Are you a voyager?

E5 The look of today “Enigma” Unofficial Music Video

Let’s find out what your look of today really is? Let’s dive into if it may be possible to imagine and see a different look… another way to live a modern life? Does this make you feel uncertain? Is this a bad feeling or a good one? Why?

Let’s explore some more….

Constant Emergency

The first road marker on this voyage into uncertainty comes from Humankind Public Radio in an episode called Constant Emergency.


This audio documentary explores what constant emergencies do to people. It delves into what living in constant states of anxiety and fear does to a person’s psyche and sense of wellbeing. One thing we know is that constant states of emergency translates in our bodies as constant Fight or Flight mode. Being constantly in Fight-or-Flight can generate unrelenting stress and anxiety that can further translate into violent self-talk as well as violence to others.

Image from: HumanKind Radio | Constant Emergency
Have we entered an age of unrelenting chaos? As we grope for a “new normal”, has humanity reached a kind of turning point?
It feels that way — in the wake of the Covid pandemic, intensifying impacts of climate change, the war in Ukraine, mounting threats to our democracy, repeated mass shootings and so much more.
In this timely audio documentary, you’ll hear inspiring stories of survivors. We also listen to health care providers, clergy and others who offer specific guidance to help people navigate these choppy waters. They conclude that new, hope-giving possibilities are emerging.
You’ll learn about a fascinating group of caregivers who travel to trouble spots and train local residents in proven techniques that can help people to heal from trauma. In the lyrics of folksinger Carrie Newcomer: “there’s something holding steady and true, regardless of me and you.”
In this provocative Humankind program, we consider:
1) What resources are needed — for emotional and physical health and for the functioning of our communities?
2) What are ways out of thinking that, in all this commotion, we’re in a downward spiral, with no other options?
3) What simple self-care techniques can relieve the tensions now being felt my so many?

-- HumanKind Radio | Constant Emergency

Following are quick insightful impressions I gleaned while listening to the speakers:


Insights From Melissa Barnett

Each of us carry a full spectrum of emotions concerning our environment that range from love, fear, grief. And there is a lot of unmetabolized fear out there. My perception of the forest had changed after coming back from the fire. Instead of seeing quiet and green and calm, I saw fuel for fire resulting in panic. It was primal fear and hard to be there after the fire. After a catastrophe, isn’t having one’s faith shaken meant to do? Shouldn’t we re-think our patterns, our behaviors, or beliefs?”

“Working with children who came back after the fire, we did art, deep breathing, connection with animals, being outside and looking around their family and friends to see who is there to support them and thinking how they can help them.”

Peace begins with me.” — Say this as a mantra while you breathe

Melissa Barnett
yoga instructor Sonoma, California


Insights From James Gordon, MD

“Training people who are former caregivers (doctors, mental health workers) but also training teachers, preachers, household workers. First step is to shut up and focus on breathing, being here and now. This is a concentrative meditative exercise that calms down the flight or flight response. It lowers heart rate and blood pressure. It calms activity in the amygdala (responsible for violence) and places focus in Frontal Lobe (responsible for compassion, kindness). Deep breathing also activates cranial nerves (responsible for recognizing emotions in others) and frontal lobe come into function when we breathe slowly. When trauma is overwhelming, people go into freeze effect. People release neurotransmitters and disassociate from what is happened. It is a life saving response, but being constantly in freeze response it is deadly. We get people up and moving, maybe dancing, and something shifts inside. A man from Sarajevo who witnessed his entire family massacred after participating in Dr. Gordon’s deep breathing, relaxation, and dancing for the first time was not oppressed with visions of his family being killed.”

“To help people feel safe again in their lives requires hope, an internal shift that our lives can heal. Many people who have suffered trauma believe their is nothing they can do to change their lives. Trauma disables the healing aspects of our brains and minds.

James Gordon, MD
Center for Mind-Body Medicine, Washington, DC


Insights from Rev. Susan Beaumont

“For a vast majority of people living now there is a longing for simpler, easier, and more pleasant times. There are some eager to rush forward to resolution, but most want to turn back. There is a lost of hope. This is process of disintegrate of systems for new things to emerge. We have to live in this in-between place for the new thing to emerge. It is very hard to sit with Not Knowing. Lost of hope is biggest problem because we loss the ability to be creative in fixing what is wrong. In addition, there is a rush to restore the status quo. We have to remain unsettled so we keep creating, we keep innovating, but rather institute old practices as the New Normal (fueling the fire of collapse). For leaders finding the balance of feeling unstable and stable is very difficult.”

“New community needs to emphasize compassion and teach people how to sit with others and be present with each other in suffering without wrapping it up and putting a pretty bow on it. When people are in need, people benefit most simply from another person willing to listen and be present to the other person’s suffer and suffer it alongside of them… no solving, so strategy. We can be in it but not of it. We can surrender to the circumstances instead of rallying against them and then let it pass through us. A lot of our suffering comes from rallying against them.”

Rev. Susan Beaumont
Troy, Michigan


Insights From Nichole Warwick

“Grief is the BIG Elephant in the room. Not wanting to sit with our losses and our grief. Grieving is a sublet, multi-level process. Went through Al Gore’s Climate Change course, but after seeing so many images of devastation I was overwhelmed and grief struck but I couldn’t articulate it or see it in myself. So there was an element missing in the course for a long-time after I just couldn’t land what it was. A few weeks after the Climate Reality class, I was diagnosed with breast cancer, and then I understood what was missing. We live in a culture ill-equipped to deal with grief. Our culture wants people to hurry up and get back to “normal”. With this diagnosis, I didn’t have a choice about my grief. With the tsunami of feelings and emotions, I had to take my time and process is it all.

“It takes courage to see the things we don’t want to see. It take courage to act and show love to people in pain, experiencing loss, or trauma. Look for ways you can help others and this grows your courage to endure your own pain and trauma.”

Nichole Warwick
Sonoma, CA Community Resilience Collaborative


Insights From Sabrina N’Diaye

“Something amazing always grows from bad experiences. There is this tree that grows in the middle of abandoned buildings and rubble. I have witness the darkness and I have witnessed the beauty that rises through it. Sit with yourself, be with all of your feelings and emotions, do not run away so you can be there to see the tree when it rises. When I think of all the people I admire, all of them had to walk through trauma. When I’m doing my work, it is to remember I am supposed to have the experiences to make me afraid, angry, frustrated, joy, love, and laughter… (all of this teaches me who I am.)”

“When feeling overwhelmed, I let myself cry when I hear another person’s story of pain and trauma. I give myself permission to feel what the person is feeling. Also, so many leaders of countries are hurting people. I cannot change the President of Russia, but I can change how I talk to my husband and my children and everyone around me and this changes the energy around us.

Sabrina N’Diaye
Psychotherapist, Baltimore, Maryland

Zen Bones: Being in the Way

The next road marker comes from one of my favorite philosopher-entertainers, Alan Watts. This is a podcast series hosted by Mark Watts, Alan Watt’s son. This one in particular is essential for understanding the beauty and value and necessity of uncertainty.

Alan Watts: Zen Bones – Being in the Way Podcast Ep. 5 – Hosted by Mark Watts | Be Here Now Network

To learn more about this podcast series, visit the Be Here Now Archives.

Passionless Activity

The third road makers comes from the Library of Consciousness (I love the name of this website-resource). I was looking for something Alan Watts said for my story, so I have highlighted nibbles from this transcript from one of his lectures.

To read the whole transcript in its entirety, go to DO YOU DO IT OR DOES IT DO YOU?


On Living By Rules

“To act without being motivated by the fruits of action, [this is the way to get out of the wheel of karma.]”

“So long as you’re looking for results—be they good or evil—you’re still bound [by the laws of karma].”

“The word dharma—sometimes meaning “the Buddhist’s doctrine,” or a certain way of life when you talk about a person’s svadharma—you mean “their own function.” We would translate svadharma as “vocation.” Sva is the same as the Latin sus: “one’s own.” Dharma: “function,” in this case. “Operation,” “way of life,” “style of life,” “profession,” “trade,” “role.” It means all those things. And the one thing that dharma really never means is “law,” although it’s often translated that way.”

“Because, you see, you don’t get the idea of law until you move to a culture where order is based on the idea of obedience. In the West, you see, the origins of law spring from where? The laws of the Medes and Persians, the Laws of Hammurabi, the Laws of Moses, and later Roman law. The only healthy legal tradition we have in the West is British common law, which proceeds in an entirely different way from code law.”

“Because, you see, the difference between code law and common law is that code law is laid down by the wisdom of an all-powerful ruler who tells everybody how they must behave, and they must obey him. But common law is evolved by discussion of particular cases rather than referring all the time to abstract principles which are put down in words. And the judge—the good judge—is a wise man, a man with a sense of equity and fair play who arbitrates an issue which is debated in front of him. And from the precedent from which he creates by his decision, common law evolves. You see, that’s a more organic way of producing law. The code law system, which we inherit from our most ancient theological backgrounds, is a tyrannical method of law by imposition.”

“And so you must understand that—in both Hinduism and Buddhism—there is really no fundamental idea of obedience to a personal ruler. Certainly not in Buddhism. A little bit, sometimes, in Hinduism. But even then we get terribly mixed up because, for example, I was talking of the Bhagavad Gita: this is often translated “The Lord’s Song.” Now, for Bhagavān (or Bhagavāt in Sanskrit) “Lord”—as an English equivalent—is quite inappropriate. Because a lord is one who lords it over you. Bhagavān is a title of reverence and respect and love. “The Song of the Beloved” would be much better, in a way—although it’s not quite correct from a strict point of view. We don’t really have an equivalent for this word, the Bhagavān.”

“So although, you see, there has been—in India itself—tyrannical rule, and although the Arthaśāstra (as a manual of politics) gives directions to a tyrant as to how to govern by absolute power, going along with this exposition of this very Machiavellian point of view to government is the constant advice of the sage: yes, this is what you have to do in order to fulfill your office as a ruler, but never forget that you’ll never succeed. The more you try to rule things by force, the more you will stir up violence against you. And so you can never hold on to your power and your possessions; it will always flow away from you.

On Living With Uncertainty

“So there was one of those great rajas of ancient India who asked a jeweler to make him a ring that would restrain him in prosperity and support him in adversity. And the jeweler wrote on the ring: “It will pass.” But when we come to the deep cosmological and metaphysical ideas, we don’t have law in the Western sense, and therefore nature is not looked upon as something which is an orderly system because it is obeying a commandment.”

On Backward Thinking

And we get into the same confusion when we imagine, for example, that money is wealth. Here we have fantastic wealth, you know, and we have the technological possibility of making everybody on Earth the enjoyer of an independent income. We can’t do it because people say, “Where’s the money going to come from?” Because they think money makes prosperity. It’s the other way around: it’s physical prosperity which has money as a way of measuring it. But people think money has to come from somewhere, like hydroelectric power or lumber or iron, and it doesn’t. Money is something we invent, like inches. So, you remember the Great Depression; when there was a slump? And what did we have a slump of? Money. There was no less wealth, no less energy, no less raw materials than there were before, but it’s like you came to work on building a house one day and they said, “Sorry, you can’t build this house today. No inches!” “What do you mean, no inches?” “Just inches! We got inches of lumber, yes. We got inches of metal. We’ve even got tape measures. But there’s a slump in inches as such,” you see? And people are that crazy! They can have a depression because they have no inches to go around, or no dollars. That’s all a lot of nonsense!”

There Are No Separate Events

“There are no separate events. This is startling to people. But it’s really quite easy to see that there are no events in nature, because you can ask very simply—let’s take something called an event: how do we demark it from other events? At what point, shall we say, were you born? Were you born at parturition? Or when the doctor slapped you on the bottom? Or cut the umbilical cord? Or when you were conceived? Or when your father and mother were first attracted to each other? When was it? When did you begin? There’s no way of deciding except arbitrarily. And for legal purposes we say you were born at parturition. And that’s when the astrologer casts your horoscope—except that other astrologers disagree and want the conception time, and say that’s the real beginning. There isn’t a real beginning. It goes back and back and back in an inseparable continuity. When are you dead? That’s another big argument. And you can get all kinds of ideas about that.”

Point-Instants Are Imaginary

“So once you see that an event is a term in an intellectual calculus—calculus being the way of measuring, say, curved formations by reducing them to point-instants and counting it, you see? But actually, the point-instants are imaginary. The curve wiggles along and it doesn’t stutter from point to point. But in calculus you make it do that. So just as there are no point-instants in the curve, so there are no events in nature. Nature is a constantly fluctuating pattern. You can only designate particular wiggles in a pattern arbitrarily. You can count a convex formation as one wiggle or a concave formation as one wiggle. Then you decide if you call it—if you give the convex properties the title of “wiggle,” you have to deny it to the concave properties, and vice versa.”

Have You Ever Watched A Snake Swim?

“When a snake swims, there’s nothing more beautiful than watching a snake swim in water. Lovely motion! But, you see, it wiggles along. And its wiggle is conceivable, you see, as convex—or was it concave? This way and that way and this way and that way. Now, which side of the snake moves first hen it wiggles? See, it’s very easy to see there.”

Now When the World Moves, What Starts First?

“Now, when we interact with the world, what moves first? Who starts it? The objective world or the subjective world? But they are related as this to that. You can’t have an object without a subject or a subject without an object. Can’t have something known without the knower. And that gives the show away. There isn’t any real distinction between the knower and the known. There’s two ways of looking at something, yes; two poles of a single process. But the knower and the known are subsumed as the knowing. And all life is knowing, being, becoming. And it isn’t something, in other words, that works by the idea of “all this happens because someone shoves it.”

What Is Karma–Really?

But if it’s your karma, everything that happens to you—put it in another way: everything that comes to you is a return to you of what goes out of you. Yes, obviously that’s absurd if you confine the definition of yourself to your voluntary, conscious behavior. That’s a ridiculous definition of one’s self. One’s self, by any stretch of the imagination, must involve far more than the conscious and voluntary aspects of our behavior. And if we see that it involves, intimately and inescapably, the behavior of what we call the “other,” the “not-self,” the “environment,” and see that these two are moving together like the two sides of the snake when it swims, then you get a very curious feeling. And you have to be careful of it if you’ve got a Western background.”

Holier-than-thou People

“Because this is what happens to a lot of people who play around with psychedelic chemicals. There are many, many cases of inflation among these people. That is to say, when you get this sensation that the two sides of the world—the inside and the outside—are moving together, you may think: “I am ruling it!” “I am God” in the Western sense of the word. Therefore, your ego—instead of being, as it were, integrated and transcended with all this process—merely assumes vast dimensions, has megalomania, is blown up by the mystical experience. And so you get the holier-than-thou people going around who seem to think that they’re above all human conventions and have no obligations to anyone or anything: because they’re divine, and they can do as they damn please.”

Choosing the Lesser of Two Evils

What they haven’t realized is that doing as you will isn’t a new kind of behavior that you suddenly put on and say, “From now on, I’m going to go around doing as I will.” You have to realize first that that’s what you’ve always been doing. And you could look at this from a very simple point of view—it’s not a complete point of view—but you can say: “Well now, what about the people who did good and who did the things that they didn’t want to do?” You know, everybody’s mother said to us, “Darling, sometimes we have to do thing we don’t like.” Well, what about that? Well, you can always say the kid obeyed the mother and did the thing that it didn’t like because that was the better part of wisdom. In other words, if he hadn’t done that, something worse would’ve happened. And we choose the lesser of two evils. And when you find yourself in a situation where you have to choose the lesser of two evils, then you say, “I want out of here!” and you take the easiest way; you take the line of least resistance. So that’s your doing.”

Praising and Blaming

““That’s not my fault, that’s your fault!” And so we go around apportioning faults to everybody. Because if we’re going to apportion praise the good things people do, you can’t make praise mean anything unless you also go around blaming. Praise and blame go together. Supposing everybody was acting in a praiseworthy way and we praised everybody for everything—they’ll get tired of it. They wouldn’t even notice it anymore. So, so long as you’re going to get a kick out of being praised, you’ve got to go around blaming, too. It’s very simple.”

Sermon on the Mount

And Ananda Coomaraswamy once described the life of the liberated being as a perpetual uncalculated life in the present. And you say, “Wow! I don’t think I could do that.” That saying of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount about “be not anxious for the morrow.” The uncalculated life. “If God so clothed the grass of the field, will he not much more clothe you, faithless ones?” And I’ve never met a preacher yet who would really take that up. They all say, “Well, of course, that’s too hard a saying for most of us. It’s not practical. Everybody has to take thought for the morrow and calculate.”

We Are Just Kids WithPlastic Steering Wheels

“Well, at this point people can go in two directions. There’s one class of people who will say, “Alright, let’s live the uncalculated life. Let’s not make any plans.” And before you know where they are they’re living in a filthy pad, and scrounging around, and living on petty thievery, and so on. This is the usual thing. This has got into it the wrong way. The first thing to do is just as I said: whether you like it or not and whether you know it or not, the relationship between you and the environment is always one that is harmonious. So, in the same way, you are always living the uncalculated life. And you have to find out, first of all, that you’re always doing it, and that what you call your calculations and the things you did were funny little rationalizations. In other words, your ego has about as much control over what goes on as a child sitting next to its father in a car with a plastic steering wheel that is turning the car the way daddy drives it. Because, as I pointed out, most of the functions, most of the goings-on in you, around you, the circumstances of life, have nothing to do with your ego at all. And you don’t even know why you make up your mind to do certain things. We know superficially; we have a few ideas.”

The Pretender — “It’s All Fake”

“So whenever you do a thing like that, you see, you make a forced change. Now, if the change is to happen in the same way that a seed (at proper season) breaks open and sends up a shoot, see, it comes from the whole force of life itself. Now, when you see that, without your having to do anything—see?—you are living the uncalculated life and you’re only pretending you’re calculating it and arranging it, then—as it were—you will have a grasp of the total situation. And you can allow it to produce changes in action which are not forced. So this is why there is always a trend in every kind of spiritual doctrine which says something about grace. Divine grace. There must come about something in you, a change, which you can’t produce. And if you try to produce it you will be a victim of spiritual pride. But on the other hand, all teachers at universities are saying, “You’ve got to make an effort.” There’s some discipline. There is something you must do. Well, that’s the only way to get it across to people that you, as a separate effort-maker, are a myth, are a phantasm. Because if you really try to control your mind and only think the thoughts that you think are good thoughts to think, you will find that you’re going ’round in a circle. Krishnamurti’s awfully good at pointing this out. When people ask him, “How do you meditate?” he says, “Why do you want to meditate?” “Why are you concentrating?” “Why are you saying prayers?” “Why do you think you should believe in God?” And it always comes up: “Because I’m just a son of a bitch. I’m out for my own good, and this seems to be the way.” So he says, “You see? You don’t have any genuine love at all. It’s all fake!”

“My Basis for Moral Behavior Is Pure Selfishness”

And so you have to find, first of all, where the genuine love is. Now, you love you, don’t you? That’s genuine. I won’t argue about that. But then, when you start from this—I gave a talk some time ago to the Air Force; their camp or lab where they make weapons, do all the research. And they got a bunch of us there who were ministers and philosophers, and they had the nerve to ask us: what was our basis for moral behavior; personal moral behavior? Well, I said, “My basis for moral behavior is pure selfishness. And I’m talking, after all, to realistic people here, and I don’t think we need be sentimental and beat about the bush. After all, you’re all warriors and fighters and so on, and you know how rough things are. So I’m going to say to you, frankly: I’m out for me. But, of course, I don’t do it in a tactless way. I don’t go around and hit people over the head and say, ‘Give me this’ and ‘Give me that.’ I’m much more subtle. I say good manners, and ‘please,’ and ‘how nice you all are,’ and so on, and finally people feel massaged, psychologically, into a state where they’ll give.” But then I said after that, “There’s some things that bother me. The first one is: if I love me, what do I want? And furthermore, who am I?”

I Cannot Experience Me Without You — To Love Another, Is to Love Myself

“Because if I’m going to be realistic about getting what I want, I’ve got to be pretty sure what it is that’s me, and what is the state of desire in me. If I am desire, you see, if I am a center of desire, what’s it all for? Well, I think of all the things I want. Well, it so turns out that none of them are me. I might say, “I want dinner.” Doesn’t mean I’m going to eat me up. Any pleasure I can think of is the enjoyment of something that I haven’t thought of defining as myself. Because I like my sensations, I like what happens to my body when I take a fine wine and down it. But then, what’s the difference between my body and the wine? If I say I like the wine, I also mean I like me and the wine together; the mixture. But then I don’t eat you, or a friend, or a lover, in the same way as I drink wine. I live in association and like this. But then I’m loving things that aren’t formally supposed to be me. And as I go into it—in other words, as I investigate what I mean by “me,” I find that I can’t put any limits on it; that I cannot experience “me” without “you,” or without the “other.” They’re inseparable. But you don’t find this out until you investigate it, until you really go into the question: “What do I want?” And that’s the most important investigation anyone can make (which I’m going into in the next session): the question of power. And all these military men, they think they want power. And so I said to them some very subversive and undermining things without anybody knowing it until long after I’d left!”

What Do You Desire?

“Let’s go through with it. What do you want to do? And when we finally got down to something which the individual says he really wants to do, I will say to him, “You do that, and forget the money.” Because if you say that getting the money is the most important thing, you will spend your life completely wasting your time. You’ll be doing things you don’t like doing in order to go on living; that is, to go on living doing things you don’t like doing—which is stupid! Better to have a short life that is full of what you like doing than a long life spent in a miserable way. And, after all, if you do really like what you’re doing—it doesn’t matter what it is—you can eventually become a master of it. It’s the only way to become a master of something: to be really with it. And then you’ll be able to get a good fee for whatever it is. So don’t worry too much. Somebody’s interested in everything. And anything you can be interested in, you’ll find others who are. But it’s absolutely stupid to spend your time doing things you don’t like in order to go on doing things you don’t like, and to teach your children to follow in the same track. See, what we’re doing is: we’re bringing up children and educating them to live the same sort of lives we’re living, in order that they may justify themselves and find satisfaction in life by bringing up their children to do the same thing. So it’s all retch and no vomit: it never gets there!”

What Do You REALLY Desire

“And so, therefore, it’s so important to consider this question: what do I desire? Well, when we answer that question in a naïve way, we figure out that what we want is to control everything: to create girls that don’t grow old, apples that don’t rot, clothes that never wear out, conveyances that get from one place to another instantly so we don’t have to wait, power available to do anything that you could conceive and do it just instantly; like that. To get this funny technological omnipotence. But if you take time out to think about that, and really go into it with your full strength of imagination and find out whether that’s where you want to be, you will soon see: that’s not what you want. Because the moment you have a situation where you are really in control of things—that is to say, in which the future is almost completely predictable—you will see, as I said last night, that a completely predictable future is already the past. You’ve had it. And that’s not what you wanted. You want a surprise. You don’t know what that’s going to be because, obviously, it wouldn’t be a surprise if you did. You want a pleasant surprise.”

Putin’s HELL… And All Other Tyrants Who Want to Control Everyone

“Imagine the situation of Big Brother: Mr. J. Edgar Hoover, Heinrich Himmler. To be glued, day and night, to a highly defended office with telephones, television screens, watching, peeking, spying on everyone and anything. Getting all this information together. Why, you could never leave the office! I mean, a character, I suppose, like J. Edgar Hoover goes home in the evening. But when he’s back home, you know, there are guards sitting outside the door, there’s that hotline telephone going to something. He’s always having to be in control. And he can’t take any time off, he can’t go for a walk in the park with a friend, or go innocently to the movies, or sit down and just relax and have an undistracted party in the baths at Big Sur. What a pauper this guy is! Completely deprived! Because he wants to be in control, because he wants power. People are frustrated in love; if you’re jilted. There’s a natural tendency in a human being to seek power as a substitute. And that’s a very negative thing. It’s like having a bad temper, to seek power after you’re frustrated in love. You should try and get back on the love beam. Because nobody wants power!”

Psychic Technology — Now That’s Power!

“Now then, when Oriental philosophy and religion was first introduced to the Western world, it was introduced under the auspices of people who were fascinated with power. It was introduced in the latter part of the 19th century, when we had heard all about evolution and how the human race was going on to ever greater heights, and we would eventually develop superman according to Nietzsche or G. B. Shaw and H. G. Wells. Remember all that early fantasy of where evolution would lead through the development of technology. And so, at this time, people like H. P. Blavatsky were talking about the mysterious wisdom of the East, and they phrased it, they commended it to us, in a technological spirit: that there was psychic technology, that there was something, that you could go way beyond anything that could be done through the physical sciences. You could cause your physical body to disintegrate to another level of vibration, and then transmit it and reassemble it somewhere else. You could live as long as you like because you control the fundamental processes. You could determine, if you decided to die, where you would be reborn, exactly. You would be a complete master of life. And so there are still innumerable books being sold which present Oriental philosophy and religion in this light. That charlatan, Lobsang Rampa, who writes about Tibetan mastery—people read that because they think that there may be a way of beating the game.”

Thinking Psycho-Technology All the Way Through to the End…

“So, therefore, the wise men of Asia were represented through this kind of propaganda as masters of life; as, for example, people whose emotions didn’t bother them, who could put up with any amount of pain by simply turning off their feelings, who could foretell the future, who could read your thoughts, and who were above all kinds of ordinary human frailty. Well, when I first met Buddhist priests, Zen masters, swamis, all these wise men from the East, one of the first things that impressed itself upon me was that they were perfectly ordinary human beings. They had bad tempers, they were fussy about certain things, they just acted as I would expect human beings to act. And so, at first, I was very disappointed. I thought they had feet of clay, but they didn’t come up to these promises of psycho-technology.

But after a while I got to realize why not: that they had already thought all that through. They had thought through what might be done if one had all these powers, and had decided that wasn’t what they wanted. The powers of this kind, in Sanskrit, are called siddhi. But there is hardly one decent scripture or text on yoga that does not say, again and again: if you get siddhi, ignore them. Go on to something else. These are only the foothills. These are, furthermore, not only foothills, but they are seductive, blind alleys. Won’t take you anywhere at all.”

Do You Really Want That Plastic Doll? That’s All?

Now, I think that this is the greatest possible lesson for the Western world to learn, because we are so hung up on the idea of power, of control, of being able to make everything go the right way, and we’ve never thought it through. When you get control of it, what are you going to do with it? Supposing I’m an alchemist and I have a whole secret closet full of love filters; very potent ones. And if I see a desirable woman, all I have to do is to offer her a cigarette or give her a glass of wine with one of my secret potions in it, and instantly I’m her master. Now, when I think that through, what would I do with a situation like that? Because all I’ve got, again, is that plastic doll that, when I push it, it does what I tell it to and doesn’t have any comeback. What you always are looking for in things is where the surprise is there, where there’s a comeback. And you say, “My god, this thing is alive! It has a will of its own. It is not in my control. And I would like to have a relationship with something like that, because it would never be dull.” And also, you would feel true affection. After all, you can make love to yourself in a mirror. You can have one of those Dutch wives; you buy them in a place in Kobe, where you get these rubber girls that you fill with hot water. And sailors take them on long voyages. But what an awful thing, you know, when you realize that this thing has no surprise in it, no thing that it does on its own, you see?”

Pursuit of Pure Pleasure Leads You to the Naraka Worlds

Because, you see, pursuing pleasure beyond a certain place takes you into what the Buddhists call the naraka world; that is to say, to hells. When you have explored pleasure to its ultimate limit, the only thing you can get a kick out of is pain. So naturally, you descend from the deva world at the top of the wheel to the naraka world at the bottom, where it shows all these beings in states of torture. Now, of course, the priests say—when they’re bringing up children—if you do bad things you will end up in the hell world. But this is a very inadequate way of showing how one gets to the hell world. You get to the hell world as a result of not knowing what you want, as a result of thoughtless pursuit of pleasure which ends you, eventually, in the pursuit of pain. So if you’re in the hell world, that’s where you want to be!”

What Do You Really, Really Want?

So then, we ask the question: if the motivation of power-gaining disappears—you’ve seen through it and you know that’s not what you want—what other motivation takes its place as the origin of actions? And it seems to me that the answer here is compassion. Simply because, when you want to relate to another living being, what you really are asking of them is that they be in the same situation that you are. You want to meet and encounter someone else who has your problems, your fears, and your delights. You don’t want a doll, you want another “you,” another “self,” because that would be at least as surprising to you as you are. And so, then, at once, when you see that that is the case, and that the most interesting thing in the world is the relationship with these others, and you can see at once yourself in the situation of all the other people, and then you think: no, I don’t want to control these people. I would like them—yes—to be controlled in the sense that they were happy to do the things I would like them to do. But obviously, I can’t force that. Because if I forced it, they wouldn’t be happy.”

This Is the Magic We Have Lost

“But there is, despite a lot of foolishness that goes on this, is a sound thing, you see? That there really is no greater satisfaction that you can imagine than that kind of personal relationship wherein you can trust a being who is other than you and not under your control to do for you what you want—because they like it. As you, on your side, would want to do something for them in that way, and so as to give pleasure to the other person. Just take, in sexuality, where you get a kind of a critical example of this: the biggest fun in sexual relationships is giving orgasm to women. And if that doesn’t happen, many men feel disappointed. Because a thing that they really wanted to do was to give pleasure and get their own pleasure out of giving it.”

Othering of the World

“So you see, it’s really, in a way, the same idea as the Hindu idea. When the Christian speaks of God giving the creature freedom of will, the Hindu says: no, God gets lost in that person and gives up power. And it’s really the same thing. It’s the idea that the all-powerful surrenders power. So that the more you give the power away, what you’re really doing is you’re “othering” yourself. Now, the more you “other” yourself by giving power away, the more of a “self” you are. Because “self” and “other” are reciprocal. So you find that people who, through a sādhanā (a yoga-discipline), have overcome their ego, have transcended the ego, are tremendously strong personalities. You would think, theoretically, they would all be non-entities and to lack entirely what psychologists call ego-strength. But actually, they’re nothing of the kind. They are—every one of them—unique. They’re all quite different from each other. And they are very, very (what I would call) strong characters. Because the more they have given it up, the more they get it.”

A Lovely Irresponsible State To Be In

So, in this way of thinking—let’s put it in another dimension for a moment. Let’s suppose we’re thinking of a relationship that is not just of people. People are very obviously other and independent of one’s ego. But give it to everything. Say to everything—which, of course, is going to include as much of yourself as you can objectify. In other words, your stomach, your intestines, your everything, you see? Say to it all: “Now it’s your turn. Let’s see what you’re going to do.” Let it happen. You know? You do this complete let-off of control. And you find that you—I have to put it in a provisional way first—you get the sensation that everything else is living you. It lives you. That you’ve given away control, you see, to everything else. It’s a lovely irresponsible state to be in.

Bllwp! In giving away the control, you got it.

But then, you see, you do the flip. Bllwp! In giving away the control, you got it. You’ve got the kind of control you wanted. That’s to say, where you had a loving relationship to the world but you didn’t have to make up your mind what it should do. You let it decide. Now, do you see: that’s how your bodies work. You don’t have to make up your mind what your nerve cells are going to do. You’ve delegated all that authority. If the president the United States has to lie awake at nights thinking what every official under his command is going to do, he can’t be president. He’s got to make an act of trust in all those subordinates to be responsible and carry on their things in just the same way as you make an act of trust to all your subordinate organs to carry on their functions without you having to tell them what to do. And this is the secret of what we will call organic power, as distinct from political power. Lao Tzu puts it in this way:

The great Tao flows everywhere,
Both to the left and to the right.
It loves and nourishes all things
But does not lord it over them.
And when merits are accomplished
It lays no claim to them.

— Lao Tzu

“Let’s see what you’re going to do.”

The more, therefore, you relinquish power—trust others—the more powerful you become. But in such a way that, instead of having to lie awake nights controlling everything, you do it beautifully by trusting the job to everyone else, and they carry it on for you. So you can go to sleep at night and trust your nervous system to wake you up in the morning. You can even tell it: “I want to wake up at six o’clock,” and it will wake you up just like an alarm clock. This seems a sort of paradox to say this, but the principle of unity—of coming to a sense of oneness with the whole of the rest of the universe—is not to try to obtain power over the rest of the universe. That will only disturb it and antagonize it and make it seem less one with you than ever. The way to become one with the universe is to trust it as an other—as you would another—and say, “Let’s see what you’re going to do.” But in doing that, you see—in saying that to everything else (that you have been taught to think is not you), you are also saying it to yourself.”

All the segments above come from the Library of Consciousness assembled by Organism Earth. I stopped at 1:28:18.

History Is Over!

The final road marker comes from an episode from Throughline titled: History Is Over!

As the end of the 20th century approached, Radiohead took to the recording studio to capture the sound of a society that felt like it was fraying at the edges. Many people had high hopes for the new millennium, but for others a low hum of anxiety lurked just beneath the surface as the world changed rapidly and fears of a Y2K meltdown loomed.
Amidst all the unease, the famed British band began recording their highly anticipated follow ups to their career-changing album OK Computer. Those two albums, Kid A and Amnesiac, released in 2000 and 2001, were entrancing and eerie — they documented the struggle to redefine humanity, recalibrate, and get a grip on an uncertain world. In this episode, we travel back to the turn of the millennium with Thom Yorke and Stanley Donwood and the music of Kid A and Amnesiac.

Kid A & Amnesiac

Radiohead: The Making Of “Kid A” And “Amnesiac” | Throughline

Soundbites from this episode of Throughline

 “It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth.” — SOUNDBITE OF FILM, “THE MATRIX” FISHBURNE: As Morpheus

All I’m offering is the truth | The Matrix [Open Matte]

“I’m not a bum. I’m a human being.” — SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1

The meet-up of Neo & Trinity | Keanu Reeves, Carrie-Anne Moss | The Matrix Resurrections

  “What is internet anyway?” — UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3

unrecognizable hacker with smartphone typing on laptop at desk
Photo by Sora Shimazaki on Pexels.com

“You know, progress is not necessarily a good thing. Our success was not necessarily a good thing…” — YORKE

photo of golden cogwheel on black background
Photo by Miguel Á. Padriñán on Pexels.com

“Into the next century, anxieties will increase.” — UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #6

woman sitting in front of macbook
Photo by energepic.com on Pexels.com

“Fire coming out from all over.” — UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #7

fire burn wallpaper
Photo by Emma Henry on Pexels.com

The risk of the virus expanding worldwide.” — UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #8

people wearing diy masks
Photo by cottonbro studio on Pexels.com

New cold war.” — UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #9

an old soviet lun class ekranoplan on the ground
Photo by Ilya Sobolev on Pexels.com

A field of tears.” — UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #10

knitted hat lying among debris in ukrainian city
Photo by Алесь Усцінаў on Pexels.com

Sea level rise.” — UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #11

high rise buildings
Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

Millions still struggling to be free.” — UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #12

shirtless black man fighting with ropes in studio
Photo by Ayodeji Fatunla on Pexels.com

There’s no question that we must feed the monster. Because the monster has already won. It’s like a movie, but you can’t stop it unless you wake up.” — YORKE

a model covered with paint looking fierce
Photo by imustbedead on Pexels.com

Florida is where WOKE goes to die.” — Ron DeSantis

underwater photography of woman
Photo by Engin Akyurt on Pexels.com

You need to name it… name the fear, the dread… and it will begin to diminish.” — YORKE

grayscale photo of woman peeking on planks
Photo by Rene Asmussen on Pexels.com

There’s always a sense of dread and a need to get beyond that fear so we can imagine and express a world that can look different than now.” — YORKE

traveler standing on stone monument in desert
Photo by Spencer Davis on Pexels.com

One Last Thing to Ponder on Uncertainty

What is the opposite of space element?

Neither. Space is best thought of as an empty vacuum, and the opposite of space is density. It doesn’t matter whether it’s earth, water, gas… anything collection of atoms starts to develop a gravitational field, pulling more atoms in as well as space.

AnonymousQuora
gray and black galaxy wallpaper
Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

It really is quite spectacular that we are even alive at all. Perhaps, uncertainty is the rocket fuel that powers us into the unknown so we can know. And anyone who really pushes the limits and explores knows how much we need each other in this voyage… perhaps now more than ever before.

Feature Archetypal Animation

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Calculating Hate… It’s in Their Eyes

On April 25, 2023, Carolyn Bryant Donham died in Westlake, Louisiana. She was 88 years old.

Sixty-eight years earlier, as a 21 year old girl, she accused the black teenager Emmett Tilll of whistling at her, grabbing her hand, and asking for a date. All of this except maybe the whistle (which could have been someone else, even someone white) was a lie, but her husband Roy and his half-brother J.W. Milam took it upon themselves to mete out justice, Jim Crow justice, justice laced with hate and loathing.

With Carolyn in the car, Roy and Milam broke into Emmett’s uncle’s house, kidnapped him, then beat, shot, and lynched Emmett beyond recognition. They threw his broken body into the Tallahatchie River where it would not be found for days.

The year was 1955. Because of the bravery of Emmett Till’s mother who insisted on an open casket funeral, the lynching of Emmett Till in Mississippi ignited the spark for the Civil Rights Movement, which would crash across America trying to washout hate.

But hate is a mighty sticky thing. It clings to craggy rocks inside the mind that are full of grievances, grumbles, and grudges. White people cling to hate in order to feel important, in command, and confident about their place in the world. Having seizing power centuries earlier, White people have created tremendous systems of inequality and injustice. And now, White people cling to these corrupted systems for dear life!

They do so because they don’t know if they really can stand on their own two feet. They really don’t know if they can make it in the world where everyone has equal rights, equal opportunities, and true equity. White people are afraid of their own incompetence, ineptitude, and inadequacy. I am White. I know.

I also know hiding behind a wall of seething hate makes people feel powerful for a minute, but that feeling is fleeting. And hate is a very heavy thing. Hate drags people down into Pits of Ignorance. These are very deep, very dark, and very nightmarish place inside every human being, except we are too scared to look.

Notes for Book

But that’s the cure! Looking!! That is the only way to vanquish the haunting ghost of hate. Looking and confronting your own Pit of Hate, is the only way not to be controlled by hate. A person has to face it, to own it, and eat it. It is part of being a conscious being.

If you are human, you are processing all sorts of awful feelings and emotions that are in direct competition for your conscious attention. The only way not to get sucked in to one hole or another is to keep both opposites, both sides of yourself, within your gaze of conscious awareness.

Justice is a very important element in digesting consciousness and growing a stronger psychological-spiritual body over time.

Will There Ever be Justice for Emmett Till?

This undated photo shows Emmett Louis Till, who was kidnapped, tortured and killed in the Mississippi Delta in August 1955 after witnesses claimed he whistled at a white woman working in a store.
(  File / AP Photo ) | Photo from The Take Away, May 1, 2023

No, there won’t. They last person involved in his murder has died.

This is the woman responsible for telling the lie that got Emmett Till killed.

I only learned about Carolyn Bryant Donham’s death yesterday (about a week after she died). I was wrestling with a section in my book about hate. I heard about her death on the Take Away while taking a break trying to do a refresh of my muddled mind.

Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry was speaking with with Timothy B. Tyson who is the author of The Blood of Emmett Till and senior research scholar at Duke University. She was also speaking with Keith Beauchamp who is an award-winning filmmaker behind the documentary “The Untold Story of Emmett Till” and producer of the movie “Till” about what Bryant’s death means in the quest for justice in Emmett Till’s murder.

Side note: I am so disappointed with NPR for cancelling this show. We are living through times of unprecedented violence, ignorance, and hate. To survive such times, we need diverse voices. Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry through this show provides such a voice. It is a significant lost on the landscape of sanity, truth, and recovery from the fatal infection of hate.
This 1955 file photo shows Carolyn Bryant Donham, the white woman who accused Black teenager Emmett Till of making improper advances before he was lynched.
(Gene Herrick, File/AP Photo) | Photo from The Take Away, May 1, 2023

The Take Away — Emmett Till

Melissa Harris-Perry recounts the events of that fateful day in 1955.

On August 28th, 1955, two adult white men, Roy Bryant and JW Milam, kidnapped 14-year-old Emmett Till at gunpoint from his uncle's home in Money, Mississippi. It was the middle of the night. Bryant and Milam beat and shot Emmett. They used barbed wire to tie a cotton jean fan to his neck, and they threw him into the river. When Mamie Till-Mobley received her son's remains, the child was disfigured beyond recognition.
She made a choice so vulnerable and courageous; it altered the course of history. At her insistence, for five days, Emmett's mutilated body lay in an open casket. More than 50,000 people visited the Southside Chicago Church where he lay and millions more saw the shocking photos of the brutalized Boy in Jet Magazine. All bore witness to the stomach-churning realities of Bryant and Milam's racist violence.
Image from: Emmett Till’s Accuser Carolyn Bryant Donham Dead At 88
by The Michigan ChronicleApril 29, 2023
"When people saw what had happened to my son, men stood up who had never stood up before. People became vocal who had never vocalized before. Emmett's death was the opening of the Civil Rights Movement. He was the sacrificial lamb of the movement." -- Mamie Till-Mobley
Melissa Harris-Perry: Her steel-spined courage launched a movement for justice, but Mamie Till-Mobley never received even a modicum of accountability for the murder of her son. In 1955, an all-white Mississippi jury refused to convict the killers, and in 1956, Look Magazine paid the men $4,000 to print their confession to the murder. Throughout it all, there was a third co-conspirator, Carolyn Bryant now Carolyn Bryant Donham. It was Mrs. Bryant who told her husband and brother-in-law that Emmett Till whistled at her. It was Mrs. Bryant who told the 1955 Mississippi jury that Emmett physically accosted and sexually propositioned her.
It was Mrs. Bryant, who during the trial, brought her own young sons to the courthouse, dressed in their Sunday best. It's Mrs. Carolyn Bryant captured in a Black and white photo who stands with her head thrown back in laughter, embracing her husband Roy at the end of that farce of a trial. It's a photo that still haunts my dreams and my waking. Late last week, Carolyn Bryant now Carolyn Bryant Donham died at the age of 88 while in hospice care. Joining me now is Tim Tyson, senior research scholar at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University and author of The Blood of Emmett Till. Tim, welcome to The Takeaway.

You can read or listen to the entire interview here.


My Take Away of The Take Away

I zeroed in on a point in their conversation about how jovial and happy the defendants were when a white jury found Roy and Milam Not Guilty.

Several months after their acquittal, the two men with the help of their defense attorney sold their story to Look Magazine where they admit their guilt. They get even more recognition and celebration by vast swaths of the White Community bathing in racism and hate.

I had to find a picture of these jubilant hate-filled white people. I did. It is very jarring. They are so young, so jubilant, so ignorant (and happy of it). What is even more jarring is that Carol’s sister-in-law, Juanita, looked a lot like me when I was that age.

With that recognition, I immediately realized that if had I grown up in a community infused with hate and racism, I could have easily been that girl smiling so brightly in the courtroom knowing they had all just gotten away with murder.

This recognition of how easily I could have been her is frightening. It elicits a deep and profound feeling of disgust and self-loathing inside myself. I want to condemn her and them, but I know I need to be honest about my own ignorance and hate.

So how do I do that?

The first step is recognizing that hate lives inside of me. It lies in wait like a sleeping dog ready to jump up and bite anything that threatens me, rejects me, injures me, makes me feel bad about myself, threatens my family, threatens my livelihood, threatens my beliefs.

Hate lives inside all of us. If you are a human being who thinks, you are creating hate. It is a natural byproduct of thinking, just like pooping and peeing are natural byproducts of eating. We all produce it just by being human and thinking.

Thinking is division. Thinking is cutting the world up into smaller and smaller pieces to understand it, predicate it, and make it feel safer for us to exist. But when you split the world into pieces in an effort to control it, you always get opposites. We name these opposites Good and Bad, or you might know them as Us and Other (the Evil Other).

So, I recognized myself in the picture of Carolyn and her sister-in-law laughing in court. And then, I found this picture of Carolyn. This picture captures her hate. I see it in the rigid tilt of her head, the stiffness of her shoulders, the hardness of her face, and mostly, I see it in her cold pinpoint, hard eyes.

Woman whose accusation led to the lynching of Emmett Till has died at 88, coroner says | Image from CNN report on Carol’s death

When a person is calculating hate, their eyes narrow like slits. The pupils grow smaller and hard like bowling balls. Their glare hardens like ice picks. They are calculating how to kill you.

This the glare I see in this picture. It glare people recognize all over the world. When you see this glare, you should run!


Getting Away With Murder

Another source about Carolyn and the murder of Emmet Till is accounted by American Experience: Getting Away With Murder.

It turns out that Roy, Carolyn, J. W. Milam, and Juanita were poor, really poor!

American Experience recounts:

Carolyn Bryant, the daughter of a plantation manager and a nurse, hailed from Indianola, Mississippi, the nucleus of the segregationist and supremacist white Citizens' Councils. A high school dropout, she won two beauty contests and married Roy Bryant, an ex-soldier.
The couple ran a small grocery, Bryant's Grocery & Meat Market, that sold provisions to black sharecroppers and their children. The store was located at one end of the main street in the tiny town of Money, the heart of the cotton-growing Mississippi Delta. They had two sons and lived in two small rooms in the back of the store.
To earn extra cash, Roy worked as a trucker with his half-brother J. W. Milam, an imposing man of six-feet-two inches, weighing 235 pounds. Milam prided himself on knowing how to "handle" blacks. He had served in World War II and received combat medals.
On the evening of August 24, 1955, Emmett Till went with his cousins and some friends to Bryant's Grocery for refreshments after picking cotton in the hot sun. The boys went into the store one or two at a time to buy soda pop or bubble gum. Emmett walked in and bought two cents' worth of bubble gum. Though exactly what happened next is unconfirmed. She stormed out of the store. The kids outside said she was going to get a pistol. Frightened, Emmett and his group left. -- American Experience

Their collective act of violent hate made them popular! In fact, it made them celebrities for a minute.

Carolyn Bryant, Chicago Defender | Photo from American Experience — Getting Away with Murder
Some reporters talked about Roy and Carolyn's "handsome looks" and J. W.'s tall stature and big cigars. They even alluded to Carolyn as "Roy Bryant's most attractive wife" and a "crossroads Marilyn Monroe." -- American Experience: Getting Away With Murder.

She is pretty in this photo. The hate is not in her eyes. She looks soft and like a doll, which how women had to look back then. Even though women had won the right to vote several decades earlier, misogyny still ruled and ran rampant just like racism. Carolyn knew being pretty was her only asset.

During the trial, the families arrived with their sons dressed in their Sunday best, Roy and J.W. in starched white shirts while their wives donned cotton dresses. Many whites in the surrounding counties showed up to watch the show. They brought their children, picnic baskets and ice cream cones. Meanwhile, African American spectators were relegated to the back and looked on in fear.
Carolyn testified under oath, but outside the presence of the jury, that Emmett said "ugly remarks" to her before whistling. -- American Experience: Getting Away With Murder.

Making up her lie about Emmett Till lifted Carolyn above her station in life, which was a pretty poor station with very few prospects, despite being pretty.

She hadn’t even graduated from high school. Her biggest accomplishments up til this time was winning two beauty contests and marrying Roy, then popping out two babies all before turning 21.

But suddenly, she was popular! Really popular! Hate had made her Great! She was getting noticed and being showered with so much love by others harboring and clinging on to hate, which was most White people in the South just like her.

Now, fast-forward to May 3, 2023. Have we changed very much since this horrible crime?

Archetypal Animation from January 2022 blog | When Do We Get To Use Violence?

Hate Is Popular

Young protestors during the Birmingham Campaign in Birmingham, Alabama, May 1963. The movement, which called for the integration of African Americans, was organized by Martin Luther King Jr. and Fred Shuttlesworth amongst others. (Photo by Frank Rockstroh/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images) | From 1A; May 2, 2023

Emmett Till’s death ignited the Civil Rights Movement. And a little less than 10 years after his brutal murder, it would be written into law through the civil rights act of 1964.

But not before a lot of pain and suffering occurred as recalled in this interview on 1A.

Hate was popular,” Jeff Drew tells Jen White in an interview about The Birmingham movement, 60 years later produced by 1A. “What we were trying to do and continue to try to do is bring awareness that everyone is important. Every human being is important.”

On May 2, 1963, hundreds of school-age kids in Birmingham, Alabama, woke up with a plan.  
Through coded messages broadcast by local radio DJs, they were given the signal to leave the classroom and meet at the park for a peaceful protest against segregation in the city.  
“My mother said, ‘I’m sending you to school, don’t get in any trouble’,” said Janice Kelsey, who was a 16-year-old high school student in Birmingham at the time.  “I was going to school. I just wasn’t going to stay.” 
Jeff Drew also participated in the Children’s March. His parents were involved in the Birmingham movement for civil rights and hosted Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in their home.
“You cannot imagine the joy of being on one of those buses on your way to jail,” said Drew. “We were nearly dying to participate.” 
Janice Kelsey and Jeff Drew joined us at the Carver Theater in Birmingham last month for a community conversation on the fight for civil rights then and now. Their actions as students in the spring of 1963 brought national attention—and a new momentum—to the civil rights movement, support for which had been waning as more adults were jailed and reluctant to be arrested. 
Civil rights leaders, including James Bevel, recruited young people to participate in a peaceful demonstration on May 2, 1963 in what became known as the Children’s Crusade. Hundreds of kids were arrested by police for parading without a permit. Images of police dogs and firehoses being used on students in the city highlighted the injustices in Birmingham and prompted President John F. Kennedy to express support for federal civil rights legislation. 
On our trip to Birmingham, we also spoke to the next generation of activists. Ashley M. Jones is a Birmingham native and the Poet Laureate of Alabama. At 32 years old, Jones is the state’s youngest-ever poet laureate and the first person of color to hold the position. Birmingham Mayor Randall Woodfin also joined us to talk about how the city’s past informs his role today. 
This conversation was recorded in April as part of our Remaking America collaboration with six public radio stations around the country, including WBHM. Remaking America is funded in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

And, 59 years after the Civil Rights Act, White Americans are still rolling in raging pools of hate. Hate is still immensely popular, so popular, people are making tons of money selling it to all the grumpy people holding onto grudges and hurts and who need to take a daily swim in their pool of hate to feel better about themselves!

We have lots of new celebrities helping to spread and celebrate hate. Here are three who have recently been in the news. But there are tons more! We are literally being drown them.

The Donald, The Rupert, The Tuckered-out Carlson — Drawing by me

America has a huge problem with hate. We love it so much we want to tear our country in two again. The Civil War really did not end on April 9, 1865. It lives inside the minds of people who are swimming in their private pools of hate.

But, we don’t have to worry… collective hate is running rampant all over the world.

Hate remains really popular everywhere!

Collective Hate

So, let’s tackle Collective Hate.

We all know what it is. Collective Hate is when one group of people dreams about crushing another group of people because it makes them feel powerful (for a minute, this kind of power is fleeting too).

When a group of people full of hate actually act on their hate-filled fantasies, they act like fanatical freaks. That’s because they are… because they have drained the humanity from their being, leaving nothing but a husk that looks human but acts like raging monster crushing, killing, stealing everything from the people they hate.

Collective hate is visceral. It is so toxic it drives the people infected by it mad. Mad humans infected by hate will do the most vicious, brutal, savage things like Roy and Milam did to Emmett Till. Mad, hate-filled humans act in barbaric, fiendish, heinous, hideous ways. It’s an epidemic on Earth right now.

Let’s delve into how hate wraps around a person’s heart and mind to steadily squeeze the humanity out of them.


Carolyn Bryant’s Story (or More Aptly Her Great Disappointment)

Now, there is no way I can possibly know what Carolyn was thinking or feeling that terrible day, but let’s suppose, she was feeling a little bit sorry for herself and unhappy about her life. She was a beautiful woman. She knew she was a beautiful woman.

If only things had gone a little bit different 90 years earlier, which is when the Civil War ended (April 9, 1865), she would probably, no: most certainly, she would be living a completely different life right now! (Hate always happens in the Now)

Why instead of being the daughter of a plantation manager and a nurse from Indianola, Mississippi, Carolyn Bryant might instead be a beautiful, beguiling Southern belle like Miss Scarlett O’Hara! But, if only for one tiny, little glitch, that snatched her wonderful, beautiful life away like Gone With the Wind!

Of course the wind that blew her dream life away was that the Confederate lost the Civil War.

Scarlett O’Hara’s best lines (Gone with the Wind)

Because of this glitch, she was condemned to run a small grocery, Bryant’s Grocery & Meat Market, selling provisions to black sharecroppers and their children. She took turns with her sister-in-law, Juanita, watching their children and tending the store while their husband’s drove trucks to make extra money because they were all very poor.

The store was located at one end of the main street in the tiny town of Money, the heart of the cotton-growing Mississippi Delta. And also right next to Indianola, Mississippi, which was the nucleus of the segregationist and supremacist white Citizens' Councils. 

Carolyn was a high school dropout, she won two beauty contests and married Roy Bryant, an ex-soldier. They had two sons and lived in two small rooms in the back of the store. 
                          -- American Experience: Getting Away With Murder

This was not the life she was supposed to live. She was sure of that! And this made her mad, and more than a little bit grumpy as well as resentful.

These feelings are the perfect ingredients for hate to take root and grow. Combine her personal grievances with the steady drum beat of the Southern Segregationist and White Supremacists constantly spreading their toxic thinking far and wide and polluting the collective swimming pool of human connections that everyone needs to survive, Carolyn Bryant was the perfect instrument of hate.

She bought into the thinking that White people are suppose to give the orders and be in control. She bought into the feeling of being deeply wronged that White people couldn’t stack the social decks in their favor they way they used to do. She bought into the fantasy of yearning for and bringing back the old way of life in the deep South.

Carolyn Bryant was the perfect poster girl for Southern Hate.


Crash Course on Cognitive Dissonance

Segregationist and White Supremacists use cracks between reality and people’s dreams/fantasies to break social bonds. One of the things they work hard to increase in the hearts and minds of hurting humans is cognitive dissonance.

In the field of psychologycognitive dissonance is the perception of contradictory information and the mental toll of it. Relevant items of information include a person's actions, feelings, ideasbeliefsvalues, and things in the environment. Cognitive dissonance is typically experienced as psychological stress when persons participate in an action that goes against one or more of those things.[1] According to this theory, when two actions or ideas are not psychologically consistent with each other, people do all in their power to change them until they become consistent.[1][2] The discomfort is triggered by the person's belief clashing with new information perceived, wherein the individual tries to find a way to resolve the contradiction to reduce their discomfort.[1][2][3]
In When Prophecy Fails: A Social and Psychological Study of a Modern Group That Predicted the Destruction of the World (1956) and A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance(1957), Leon Festinger proposed that human beings strive for internal psychological consistency to function mentally in the real world.[1] A person who experiences internal inconsistency tends to become psychologically uncomfortable and is motivated to reduce the cognitive dissonance.[1][2] They tend to make changes to justify the stressful behavior, either by adding new parts to the cognition causing the psychological dissonance (rationalization) or by avoiding circumstances and contradictory information likely to increase the magnitude of the cognitive dissonance (confirmation bias).[1][2][3]
Coping with the nuances of contradictory ideas or experiences is mentally stressful. It requires energy and effort to sit with those seemingly opposite things that all seem true. Festinger argued that some people would inevitably resolve the dissonance by blindly believing whatever they wanted to believe.[4]    -- Wikipedia: Cognitive dissonance

Cognitive Dissonance in Politics

Cognitive dissonance theory might suggest that since votes are an expression of preference or beliefs, even the act of voting might cause someone to defend the actions of the candidate for whom they voted,[72][self-published source?] and if the decision was close then the effects of cognitive dissonance should be greater.
This effect was studied over the 6 presidential elections of the United States between 1972 and 1996,[73] and it was found that the opinion differential between the candidates changed more before and after the election than the opinion differential of non-voters. In addition, elections where the voter had a favorable attitude toward both candidates, making the choice more difficult, had the opinion differential of the candidates change more dramatically than those who only had a favorable opinion of one candidate. What wasn't studied were the cognitive dissonance effects in cases where the person had unfavorable attitudes toward both candidates. The 2016 U.S. election held historically high unfavorable ratings for both candidates.[74]
After the 2020 election, which Joe Biden won, supporters of former President Donald Trump questioned the results, citing voter fraud. This continued even after such claims were dismissed by numerous state and federal judges, election officials, governors, and government agencies as false.[75] This was described as an example of Trump supporters suffering cognitive dissonance.[76]

Cognitive Dissonance in Self-perception Theory

In Self-perception: An alternative interpretation of cognitive dissonance phenomena (1967), the social psychologist Daryl Bem proposed the self-perception theory whereby people do not think much about their attitudes, even when engaged in a conflict with another person. The Theory of Self-perception proposes that people develop attitudes by observing their own behaviour, and concludes that their attitudes caused the behaviour observed by self-perception; especially true when internal cues either are ambiguous or weak. Therefore, the person is in the same position as an observer who must rely upon external cues to infer their inner state of mind. Self-perception theory proposes that people adopt attitudes without access to their states of mood and cognition.[81]
As such, the experimental subjects of the Festinger and Carlsmith study (Cognitive Consequences of Forced Compliance, 1959) inferred their mental attitudes from their own behaviour. When the subject-participants were asked: "Did you find the task interesting?", the participants decided that they must have found the task interesting, because that is what they told the questioner. Their replies suggested that the participants who were paid twenty dollars had an external incentive to adopt that positive attitude, and likely perceived the twenty dollars as the reason for saying the task was interesting, rather than saying the task actually was interesting.[82][81]
The theory of self-perception (Bem) and the theory of cognitive dissonance (Festinger) make identical predictions, but only the theory of cognitive dissonance predicts the presence of unpleasant arousal, of psychological distress, which were verified in laboratory experiments.[83][84]
In The Theory of Cognitive Dissonance: A Current Perspective[85] (Aronson, Berkowitz, 1969), Elliot Aronson linked cognitive dissonance to the self-concept: That mental stress arises when the conflicts among cognitions threatens the person's positive self-image. This reinterpretation of the original Festinger and Carlsmith study, using the induced-compliance paradigm, proposed that the dissonance was between the cognitions "I am an honest person." and "I lied about finding the task interesting."[85]
The study Cognitive Dissonance: Private Ratiocination or Public Spectacle?[86] (Tedeschi, Schlenker, etc. 1971) reported that maintaining cognitive consistency, rather than protecting a private self-concept, is how a person protects their public self-image.[86]Moreover, the results reported in the study I'm No Longer Torn After Choice: How Explicit Choices Implicitly Shape Preferences of Odors (2010) contradict such an explanation, by showing the occurrence of revaluation of material items, after the person chose and decided, even after having forgotten the choice.[87]

There’s a lot more to cognitive dissonance, but I digress and I am sure you see how this is a very handy tool in sowing fields and polluting rivers full of hate.

Now let’s get back to hate mongers and how they used cognitive dissonance to grow huge toxic waste pits of fetid, stinking hate. That is because hate is a natural malodorous waste product of thinking. A normal healthy human being is supposed to poop it out, not eat it. But that is what hate mongers know how to do. They know how to make people eat their own shit.


Here’s How Hitler Did It — Hitler’s Ignis Fatuus

Let’s define Ignis Fatuus so you know what I’m talking about:

Ignis Fatuus is a mid 16th century word. It originate from modern Latin speakers amd literally means ‘foolish fire’ (because of its erratic movement). It has evolved to mean: something deceptive or deluding.  

This definition and images come from Oxford Languages Dictionary.  I kind of like Foolish Fire!  And I think men like Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Putin (some of the biggest killers) like it too!  It's like possessing the power of Dark Magic, knowing how to get people to believe Foolish Pipe Dreams... stuff men like Hitler can say, knowing he will never, ever deliver on the promises he is making to the masses.  They are illusions, delusions, nightmares cloaked by glitter and sickening charm.

So back to Hitler’s ignis fatuus. He was part of a great body of people who just suffered a huge lost. This big lost was due partly to a style of self-inflated vanity, stubbornness, snobbishness, and stupidity corrupting the German hierarchy, which led to a massive miscalculation that lost the war.

All Quiet on the Western Front | Official Teaser | Netflix

The war Germany lost was WWI. And they were punished by the victors, and rightly so, but like Carolyn Bryant and lots of White people who used to make lots of money using slave labor, some of the German people were sore losers.

Among these sore losers was Hitler.

Let me be very clear, not everyone who experiences trauma or crisis ends up becoming a sore loser. In fact, the vast majority of people do not, many even grow stronger and get even better at accepting and assimilating reality.

But there is also a percentage who don’t grow or can’t grow. This is who I am talking about here, Germans who could not accept and assimilate that they were wrong, they lost, they needed to change.

Among this group of sore losers is Hitler: a roguish, impish, and deceitfully deluded man as well as brash and brazen. He captivates just enough sore losers to gain some traction. One he got a little power, he leveraged it to get more.

Then, many more Germans flocked to him like some new, exciting lover. Not all, of course, many Germans were afraid and for good reason.

Hitler understood all this, and manipulate everyone to leverage even more power. One way he galvanized public support was creating a good foil/a scape goat. Hitler attacked the Jews and mongrels. He was going to make the world pure again.

This fantasy was the cornerstone of his convoluted ignis fatuss and the disaffected Germans fell for it–hook, line, and sinker.

Adolf Hitler came to power with the goal of establishing a new racial order in Europe dominated by the German “master race. -- United State Holocaust Memorial Museum -- 9/20/19
Adolf Hitler and the Nazis believed that the world was divided into distinct races. According to the Nazis, each race had its own traits. These ... -- Nazi Racism | Holocaust Encyclopedia -- 12/15/22
Hitler’s Plans for the World if He Won
Adolf Hitler Speech in 1935

Stalin’s Ignis Fatuus

Stalin’s ignis fatuus is similar, but he rode to power on the back of Lenin and the Russian Revolution, a wave that was sweeping across the world. It was a backlash to rapid industrialization and the ridiculous amount of power and wealth landing up in the hands of a very few; the rich, evil capitalists! See a pattern here?

Stalin carefully calculated his chances to take control of this great wave. When his chance came, he took it with tremendous ruthlessness–killing every rival in his party without mercy.

His passion for control mutated him into one of the world’s biggest control freaks. Russia still suffers to this very day from the devastation Stalin wrought. He is the very reason why Putin now controls Russia. Putin is imitating Stalin to a tee. Putin is pushing his foolish vision of a Great Russia once again on his poor, demoralized, broken, diminished people. They are so because Stalin killed so freaken many enlightened, differently thinking Russians.

Stalin's “revolution from above” sought to build socialism by means of forced collectivization and industrialization, programs that entailed tremendous human ... -- Library of Congress
Starting in the late 1920s, Joseph Stalin launched a series of five-year plans intended to transform the Soviet Union from a peasant society into an industrial ...  -- History Channel
Terrifying Story Of Joseph Stalin’s Rise to Power
A Day in The Life of a Dictator: Joseph Stalin
"Once he decided to attain absolute power, he would never relinquish it," observes Alexandre Allilouiev, nephew of Joseph Stalin. "He was a monster." In order to achieve his goals, Stalin set about re-imaging the vast empire in his own image, which included the extermination of all those who dared oppose or refused to adhere to his ideology. The film follows the activities of Stalin on November 24, 1938 - a crucial day that set in motion the end of his Great Purge. -- A Day in the Life of a Dictator: Joseph Stalin
He believes he's been chosen by providence to create the ideal socialist, communists society. To do this, he must destroy everything to recreate it.  He puts into action a scientific, systematic plan to purge unwanted peoples of Russia. - A Day in the Life of a Dictator: Joseph Stalin

Pol Pot’s Ignis Fatuus

Another brutal killer who cloaked his ugly shit under the same auspices of the Russian Revolution, the backlash to a rapidly changing, globalized world. Lots of people longed to go back to the old ways, the old life, the idealized past. And, this is what Pol Pot sold bundled up with with a lot of hate.

The Khmer Rouge, organized by Pol Pot in the Cambodian jungle in the 1960s, advocated a radical Communist revolution that would wipe out Western influences in Cambodia and set up a solely agrarian society. -- History Channel -- Jan 7
Pol Pot wished to create a state focused on their rural idyll, with all citizens pledging loyalty in a way which prohibited all ... -- Holocaust Memorial Day Trust
Pol Pot's objective was to construct a classless, communal and self-sufficient Kampuchea, unspoiled by foreign influences, intellectualism and ... -- Alpha History -- 9/12/20
In 1960, a small group of Cambodians, led by Saloth Sar (later known as Pol Pot) and Nuon Chea, secretly formed the Communist Party of Kampuchea. -- United State Holocaust Memorial Museum
The party's aim was to establish a classless communist state based on a rural agrarian economy and a complete rejection of the free market and ... -- Al Jazeera -- 2/3/12
World’s Most Murderous Dictator Pol Pot

Mao Zedong’s Ignis Fatuus

Moa Zedong also rode the Red Wave. He also sold an idealized, backwards looking China who would vanquish all the evil Capitalists and live happily ever after! Xi Jinping is riding on the back of Mao now.

Mao and his communist supporters had been fighting against what they claimed was a corrupt and decadent Nationalist government in China since the 1920s. Despite massive U.S. support for the Nationalist regime, Mao’s forces were victorious in 1949 and drove the Nationalist government onto the island of Taiwan. In September, with cannons firing salutes and ceremonial flags waving, Mao announced the victory of communism in China and vowed to establish the constitutional and governmental framework to protect the “people’s revolution.” -- Mao Zedong outlines the new Chinese government
Cultural Revolution: Mao believed that this would ultimately create a new society where there was no gap between urban and rural, laborers and intellectuals. What are some of the ... -- University of Washington
Communism, Capitalism, and Democracy in China: Mao wanted to eliminate capitalism and its emphasis on property rights, profits, and free-market competition. He followed the ideas of Karl Marx, who envisioned ... -- Constitutional Rights Foundation

Moa Zedong was willing to kill to make his dream a reality. He was willing to kill lots of people, and he did.

Why Mao Zedong Was The Most Brutal Tyrant

Putin’s Ignis Fatuus

Let’s play a different game with Putin! Let’s pretend he had an ideal childhood and experienced lots of love growing up and was surrounded by peace-loving, Earth-loving Russians. Perhaps the descendants of people Stalin was trying to kill but missed. This Putin is a happy, pot-smoking hippy!

Young Putin | 1967 Peace Rally on the Red Square

Yes! Before Putin was a KGB agent and mass murder, he was a happy, happy hippy!

It’s true! It’s written about right here in the The Unlikely Hippy Past of Vladimir Putin.

What nice eyes this young, happy, hippy Putin has!

If only we could have this Putin back!

But sadly yes, this is a deepfake. It is made with AI. I saw an interview with the man who is making AI deep fakes, but he’s hiding, so I can’t share it.

Collective Hate

Collective Hate rises from inside each and every individual. It is the collective accounting of grievances and wrongs every civilizations harbors, especially if they have been around for a long time. All civilizations go up and go down; the stock market goes up and down; all people’s lives go up and down; all living beings experience ups and downs… that is called being alive.

Hate attempts to grab hold of only one side of the wave. Haters only want to exist on the up part of the wave (the up and up, we’re going up, we’re on the rise).

But in order to do this, reality must be split into Good and Evil. Hate mongers step into the Good Fairy Bubble and spew the Evil they have cut off from themselves on everyone else.

They know the ordinary man and women are afraid of their own shadows. Of course they know this because most modern societies and civilizations teach people to be afraid of their own shadows!

Hate-filled fear mongers tap into this pervasive fear and anxiety that plagues pretty much ever human living in a civilization. They tell people how unfair the world is treating them. They get them really good and frighten about all the things coming to ‘get them like the boogeyman‘, and then tell them that the Evil Others did this to them. Then they tell them that they better fight like Hell to keep their lives the way they want it and get their fair share.

Really, what hate-filled fear mongers are really doing is getting people to eat their own shit. If there are people who don’t do as they are told, and if the hate-filled fear monger has power, the disobedient people are killed.

“Do as you are told or else!” — the hate-filled fear monger cries

This is a tale as old as time, which for human beings living in civilizations is about 5,000 years that when all this hate and fear and more hate and more fear really started to grow. You’ll have to read my book on why this is so.

But in the meantime, do we really want to live a world ruled by Shitty Ideas and Foolish Fires?!

Feature Archetypal Animation

Image From Funeral Home

Image From: CBS report | Grand jury declines to indict woman in Emmett Till killing

Image From: CBS report | Grand jury declines to indict woman in Emmett Till killing

Music: Jim Crow the Musical Add-2 | [9] Mama Said Skit


Second Archetypal Animation

Image From: Britannica

Image From: Stalin | Wikipedia

Image From: PBS | Who’s Who: Cambodia

Image From: Salon | The American Mao: Donald Trump has led the Republican Party into a cultural revolutionthat’s pretty fucking scary…

Music: It’s in Your Eyes | Disappeared Completely

I found this song entirely by accident. I love putting together ugly images with beautiful music. And this one matched better than I could ever have intended!

Lyrics by Musixmatch

You always do this stuff
We’ll never be enough
You were floating in the life
We were floating in the life
It’s in your eyes [Hate lives in the eyes]

You think that’s not fun, the day is done
With no other feelings
Just why are your eyes not shining in lights? [Hate shuts down life… the shining lights of life]
There’s more than one meaning
Just get what you want, but again you got numb, [Greed feds Hate]
It’s because of freaking illusion [Hate grows in Foolish Fantasies, delusions, and illusions]
That life is not fiction, the sense in the description of love, [Life is wiggly… it goes up and down… fiction tries to make life all up all the time… that’s a lie]
It’s an awful conclusion [No one likes to admit they have to poop and pee, but it is true — the origins of Shame another great catalyst of Hate]

You could always turn it back [Yes, turning back is always such a great idea! Look where we are as a world in the year 2023! It’s so Great!! Let’s do more turning backwards!]
Get another heart attack [Let’s see… there is the Putin heart attack, Xi Jinping heart attack, Trump heart attack… should I go on?!!!]
We roll!
We’ll find ourselves in love

Oh fuck… [Yep… we are pretty much fucked as a species due to our propensity to engage in Foolish Fantasies]

Unless….

What did the Lorax mean by Unless?

Image from: Are You a Lorax? | By  Jim Fitzpatrick – March 12, 2012 – Newport Beach Independent

This story had a deep and lasting impact on me. I was a child when it came out. I loved it the most of all the Dr. Seuss books. But it also troubled me. It felt very different from The Cat In the Hat, Green Eggs and Ham, or Oh the Places You’ll Go.

It felt like a puzzle that needed to be solved and time was running out!

I felt that the one word the Lorax leaves behind for the greedy, old Once-ler was the key to solving the puzzle! But, what does it mean? Unless…what?!!

Dr. Seuss tells us what the Once-ler thinks Unless means at the end of the story. The Once-ler thinks that unless someone like the boy cares a whole lot, the world will never change.

It seems so simple. Surely, I felt as a child, there are bunches of children just like me reading this book and understand the message and will care enough. Surely, we the kids of the 70s get it, and when we grow up, we will change the world and avoid catastrophe.

But, we didn’t. Here we all are, 52 years later, and the world has not changed course. It remains fixed on the same course that it was on back in the 70s when Seuss first published The Lorax. In fact, it feels that we are all speeding ever faster… and to what? The End?

Clearly, the Lorax means something entirely different in his silent message he leave to the selfish, self-absorbed Once-ler. Clearly, Unless means something different than what the Once-ler thinks. But what? What do we need to do as humans to avert total disaster… perhaps even the end of the world as we know it now?

Quick Recap of The Lorax

Image from: ‘The Lorax’: A Campy And Whimsical Seussical | By David Edelstein – March 2, 2012 – Fresh Air

The young Once-ler arrives in the forest where the lovely Truffula Trees look like lollipops and the cute fuzzy Bar-ba-loots bears play alongside the beautiful Swomee-Swans birds and lovely humming fish!

Image from: Dr. Seuss’ The Lorax: Movie Adaption Information | By Carey Bryson — 3/17/17 — LiveAbout

But instead of seeing the incredible beauty all around him, the young Once-ler cuts down one of the incredible Truffula Trees and makes a Thneed!

What really?! A Thneed… this is the thing that everyone needs!

Dr. Seuss uses the Thneed as a symbol for the modern world’s obsession with fossil fuels. And Seuss is certainly right about this, gas-fuel-oil is truly something everyone needs in the world we have made.

There are lots of Once-lers in the modern world making millions and billions of dollars harvesting fossil fuels for all the things we need in our slick, fast-paced modern world!

Image from: ‘The Lorax’ review: Surgery was done on this Dr. Seuss | Published: Mar. 01, 2012 — OregonLive

The Lorax confronts the young Once-ler saying:

"I speak for the trees, for the trees have no tongues.
And I'm asking you, sir, at the top of my lungs" —
he was very upset as he shouted and puffed —
"What's that THING you've made out of my Truffula tuft?"
Image from: The Badness of The Lorax Is a Shock | by David Edelstein – MAR. 2, 2012 – Vulture

But the Once-ler does not hear the Lorax. Or rather he hears him but ignores him proclaiming he has a right to make money from the trees!

Image from: The Lorax | IMDb

The Lorax rallies all the animals and tries again to make the young Once-ler listen and understand.

Image from: It’s Seusstastic! How The Lorax Saved Hollywood | By Richard Corliss – 3/4/12 – Time

But there’s no stopping the happy young Once-ler. He cuts and chops and build a factory to make even more Thneeds! And then the Lorax is forced to come back and to tell him this:

'I'm the Lorax who speaks for the trees which you seem to be chopping as fast as you please. But I'm also in charge of the Brown Bar-ba-loots who played in the shade in their Bar-ba-loots suits and happily lived, eating Truffula Fruits.'
Image from: the lorax | By Alison on June 18, 2011 – a tree grows in brookline and a teacher blogs about it

Nope, the Once-ler won’t listen. He builds an even bigger factory, and one even bigger than that one.

Images from: the lorax | By Alison on June 18, 2011 – a tree grows in brookline and a teacher blogs about it & Teaching Climate Change With The Lorax and The Jungle | By Mark Gozonsky on Getting High-School Kids to Read and Care About the Climate in Unconventional Ways — 10/21/19 — Literary Hub

Soon, the Lorax comes back with another dire message telling the Once-ler:

"Once-ler! You're making such smogulous smoke! My poor Swomee-Swans...why, they can't sing a note! No one can sing who has smog in his throat."
Image from: Final #PostABird fact for #BlackBirdersWeek Day 2. Do you know why the Lorax sends the Swomee-Swans away? Because there is too much smogulous smoke. | Twitter

The Once-ler shrugs and continues chopping down the beautiful Truffula Trees and making a Thneeds.

The Lorax returns again. Now it is the Humming-Fish who can no longer hum.

This time the Once-ler gets mad and shouts:

'Now listen here, Dad! All you do is yap-yap and say, 'Bad! Bad! Bad! Bad!' Well, I have my rights sir, and I'm telling you I intend to go on doing just what I do! And, for your information, you Lorax, I'm figgering on biggering and biggering and biggering and biggering, turning MORE Truffual Trees into Thneeds which everyone, EVERYONE, EVERYONE needs!'
Image from: THE LORAX BY DR SEUSS | Stella & Rose’s Books

Not long after this the Lorax does the thing that sticks in my mind and haunts me to this day. He builds a small platform underneath the Once-ler’s factory, waits for the Once-ler to look out, then without a word, the Lorax picks up the seat of his pants and flies away disappearing through the last blue hole in the polluted, ugly sky… and that is thatUnless...

Image from: THE LORAX BY DR SEUSS | Stella & Rose’s Books

So What Did the Lorax Mean?

Dr. Suess says many years after the last Truffula Tree is chopped down, the now very old Once-ler thinks the word Unless means:

Image from: THE LORAX BY DR SEUSS | Stella & Rose’s Books

But, it hasn’t worked. Hope is not enough. To fix this mess, it take action.

Are We Even Capable of Changing Our Fate?

Do we really need to destroy our planet before we care enough about it to fix it?

I know, I know, the seed the Once-ler throws down to the boy is a symbol of hope and we all need hope to Do The Right Thing. But quite honestly, do we really know what the right thing is that we should be doing?

And nature will do just fine after humans are gone. Kind of like 2067, an Australian SciFi film, where that is exactly what happens.

2067 – Official Trailer
Starring: Kodi Smit-McPhee, Ryan Kwanten Writer/Director: Seth Larney By the year 2067, Earth has been ravaged by climate change and humanity is forced to live on artificial oxygen. An illness caused by the synthetic O2 is killing the worlds’ population and the only hope for a cure comes in the form of a message from the future: “Send Ethan Whyte”. Ethan, an underground tunnel worker, is suddenly thrust into a terrifying new world full of unknown danger as he must fight to save the human race.

I think the Lorax is telling us something else. I think the Lorax is warning us about ourselves and that Unless we learn how to let go of bad ideas, we are doomed to create the world we are speeding ever faster towards making. The one that will kill us.

What Is the Lorax Warning Us About Ourselves?

I think it is Shame; toxic shame to be specific.

Shame is an emotion of civilizations. We feel shame, and it is necessary to feel it. Feeling ashamed motivates us to improve ourselves. It motivates us to take care of the people around us, so that we to treat them with kindness, dignity, and respect.

No one wants to feel shame. Of all human emotions, shame is perhaps the hardest one to endure. Because of this, it is one of the scariest, most loathed, most feared emotion in our human tool box.

If shame had a color it would be the color of pee. Listen to Snap Judgement, and you’ll understand.

My Big Pee Break

Actress Diona Reasonover was on the brink of her big break. But she never expected it to happen while she was on her vacation.
Diona Reasonover is an actress who lives in LA, you can check out her writing on “I Love You America” with Sarah Silverman on Hulu.
Produced by Adizah Eghan

Note: Diona had a knee injury and could not make it to the bathroom on the plane before others beat her to it. Then, the plane begins to descend and the flight attendant not very understanding. So you’ll need to listen to how Diona solves her dilemma.

Bearing Witness

The episode before this one is worth a listen too: Date With The Devil. This one touches on the topic of how ee always hear about the people who survive a disaster and who often give credit Jesus or God for their good fortune, but we never hear about the people who made the exact same calculations, believe just as much in a higher power, but ended up dead.

I think we have become a bit lopsided in thinking about our survival as individuals and as a species when we hear only miraculous stories of good fortune, good luck, or good timing that allows a person to avert a tragedy.

But what about the people who don’t avert disaster? What about the people who get killed?

D. Parvaz touches on this in a very different story. It is a scary, tormented, horrifying, heart-wrenching story about people (through no fault of their own) do not make it. Indeed, they are murdered by monsters. That’s what humans become when they don’t digest and assimilate all of who they are as a human being. This means seeing the good in one’s self as well as the bad in one’s self. And yes, shame is one of those things.

People who refuse to feel their shame, fear, guilty, or whatever makes them uncomfortable will project them onto other people. People who don’t feel shame will do shameful things, horrendous things. They are no longer human because they have thrown half of who they are away.

So, don’t thrown your shame away! You need it. You really, really do… and the Lorax understood how desperately humans need to feel shame and other parts of themselves that make them truly capable of being human.

The Hidden Shame That Threatens Our World

This article is about toxic shame.

John Amodeo (a psychotherapist for over 40 years) describes that how not dealing with our feelings of shame there are far-reaching, destructive consequences.

He says, “When shame lurks outside of our awareness, it can become the driving force behind the destructive rage, blame, and violence that is damaging our world.”

Have you ever encountered someone who is boiling with a seething rage bubbling just under their human-looking skin but really what is lurking underneath is a monster ready to explode at the drop of a pin?

Consider the shootings this past week.

  • A teenage honor student who knocked on the wrong door was shot.
  • Cheerleaders who accidentally opened the wrong door of a car late at night are shot.
  • Teenagers who pulled into the wrong driveway and were turning around were shot, one died.
  • Children playing basketball and their ball rolls into a neighbors lawn are shot at, one father lost a lung after getting shot in the back.

Amodeo describes shame as the felt sense of being defective and inadequate: “it as an “intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love and belonging.”

Shame has also been defined by Gerhsen Kaufman as a breaking of the interpersonal bridge. As human beings wired for connection, we dread isolation. Children fail to thrive when they don’t feel a safe and secure connection with caregivers. When healthy attachment is ruptured, a child feels unworthy of love and acceptance. This unbearable shame can lead to a mad scramble to prove our worth in distorted ways that often dehumanize others.
In a 2016 article, shame expert Bret Lyon, who leads Healing Shame trainings, describes how intolerable shame can be transferred to others:

“Driven by the need to keep the feelings of shame at bay and away from themselves, people can exult in their contempt and cynicism—finding a curious kind of gratification in it… In extreme cases, runaway contempt can cause people to lose sight of another’s humanity. Even their right to exist. This has led to extreme behavior, in Germany and many other places.”

The Hidden Shame That Threatens Our World

Amodeo drives home the point of toxic shame, the very same one that I think the Lorax is trying to drive home to us with his message Unless. Amodeo writes:

When the drive toward personal “success” or being superior becomes dissociated from our humanity, we seek gratification in ways that will never really satisfy us. We become disconnected from our souls, as our innate longing for love and connection curdles into a desire for status, money, or power. These substitute ways to seek gratification often spiral out of control—taking us on a perilous journey away from our fellow humans—and away from our true selves. This desire for a narrow self-gratification overlooks the reality that we are inescapably interconnected.
We can observe this shame-driven dynamic in our fraught politics, where looking good replaces being good (truly caring about others). We can see it in political and business leaders competing to amass the greatest wealth and power, which often translates into a race to see who can be the most contemptuous and divisive.
Some political leadersand followers who relish the thrill of belonging to a group that has special knowledge and that is superior to others—have so thoroughly dissociated from their vulnerability, their humanity, their hearts, and their souls, that they have no compunction to deny the rights of others, or, as we've seen in Ukraine and elsewhere, committing atrocities without any healthy shame to check their behavior.

The Big Choice

So… what are we going to do? Are we going to save our beautiful world full of life or are we all going to drown in a Yellow Sea of Seething Shame?

This is a job that requires every person on the planet to do. Every living individual needs to claim their shame and proclaim proudly: “I am human! I do stupid things! I learn from them! I become a better human because I use my shame to grow!”

Or, you can lock yourself inside a dilapidated husk of what used to be your humanity… deny your shame, cast it onto everyone else around you as you fake being a perfect human being.

But, your performance is nothing more than a rickety, glittery, shiny shell of who you used to be. Inside there is nothing to balance you out and make you human. You have become hollow; a garden hose flowing with seething shame disguised as rage.

On A Related Note

My college roommate from College of the Atlantic shared this story. It is closely related to the responsibility of each and every person to do the invisible work of sustaining and maintaining psychological as well as social health, which takes daily work.

Kicked out of the university lecture
Subject: Legal studies.
First lecture.
The professor enters the lecture hall.He looks around.
"You there in the 8th row. Can you tell me your name?" he asks a student.
"My name is Sandra" says a voice.
The professor asks her, "Please leave my lecture hall. I don't want to see you in my lecture."
Everyone is quiet. The student is irritated, slowly packs her things and stands up.
"Faster please" she is asked.
She doesn't dare to say anything and leaves the lecture hall.
The professor keeps looking around.
The participants are scared.
"Why are there laws?" he asks the group.
All quiet. Everyone looks at the others.
"What are laws for?" he asks again.
"Social order" is heard from a row
A student says "To protect a person's personal rights."
Another says "So that you can rely on the state."
The professor is not satisfied.
"Justice" calls out a student.
The professor smiling. She has his attention.
"Thank you very much. Did I behave unfairly towards your classmate earlier?"
Everyone nods.
"Indeed I did. Why didn't anyone protest?
Why didn't any of you try to stop me?
Why didn't you want to prevent this injustice?" he asks.
Nobody answers.
"What you just learned you wouldn't have understood in 1,000 hours of lectures if you hadn't lived it. You didn't say anything just because you weren't affected yourself. This attitude speaks against you and against life. You think as long as it doesn't concern you, it's none of your business. I'm telling you, if you don't say anything today and don't bring about justice, then one day you too will experience injustice and no one will stand before you. Justice lives through us all. We have to fight for it."
“In life and at work, we often live next to each other instead of with each other. We console ourselves that the problems of others are none of our business. We go home and are glad that we were spared. But it's also about standing up for others. Every day an injustice happens in business, in sports or on the tram. Relying on someone to sort it out is not enough. It is our duty to be there for others. Speaking for others when they cannot.”
                                      -- Shared by Liza Hall -- 12/4/22

Feature Archetypal Animation

Music: How Bad Can I Be (From “Dr. Seuss’ The Lorax”) — Geek Music

American War: A Novel About How Damage Begets Damage

I was captivated by another Throughline that aired on January 19, 2023. This episode explores possible Extremist Futures as envisioned by Omar El Akkad in his novel American War.

Omar’s novel is about America’s second Civil War. He imagines 50 years into our future. A time when climate change has turned Florida into an underwater theme park and climate disasters devastate the world. His vision is very similar to mine in my novel Sapience: The Moment Is Now (not yet published).

In American War, the world finally understands that it has to stop burning fossil fuels and bands them–but it’s too little too late. The US is the last to band fossil fuels. All states agree to switch to more sustainable energy except Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia. These three states take up arms, deciding they would rather secede than stop burning fossil fuels.

They lose, again, but what follows is a years-long insurgency. This is where his story is mostly centered.


Ignorance

Something Omar says in the beginning of this Throughline needs to be emphasized. He says, “We read to feel into another.”

This is how we come to know and understand each other. A country or a state (I’m thinking of you Florida) that bans books because they might be subversiveGod Forbid… they might give children ideas… is a system that seeks to keep its citizens in ignorance.

Break down the word: ig nor ance. States and countries that ban books are teaching their people to ignore what they see with their very own eyes.

And, people who are kept in ignorance are a heck of a lot easier to manipulate too!

He also says, “Story is the final act of Resistance!


Disturbingly Plausible

The New York Time’s describes his novel: “Omar El Akkad’s “American War” is a disturbingly plausible case in point — a tale of a future America torn asunder by its own political and tribal affiliations.

This is what caught my attention too.

Throughline plays some from the audio book of American War that includes sound effects. Had I not caught the beginning, I might have thought I was listening to real, on-the-ground reporting.

Omar’s story feels real, very real. It feels like it is already happening.

He grounds his story telling by his real life experiences as a boy in Lebanon where he was a witness to the devastation of war and what happens to people in refugee camps.

Omar says, “A society subjected by warfare is akin to moving backwards in time.”

Think of what Putin is doing to his people and to the beautiful people of Ukraine. Every image coming out of his sick ego trip is likened to images from WWI.

The Academy Award nominated movie All Quiet on the Western Front vividly paints the insanity of rich, powerful men who send other men to die for their personal power and glory. In this movie (and of course the book), Paul Bäumer and his classmates are just cannon fodder for a fatherland that has gone mad.

All Quiet on the Western Front | Official Trailer | Netflix

If you are having a hard time remembering the horror and senselessness of death of WWI, then watch All Quiet to remind yourself that quiet means dead. Watch as these young, gifted boys sign up for service and get pumped up by grumpy, old narcissistic men who stuff them full of overly romanticized, patriotic notions of war and how they are defending the fatherland. It’s on Netflix, so you have no excuse.


Euphemistic Fraudulence

Omar describes this souped-up patriotic messaging as euphemistic fraudulence.

Texas University’s McCombs School of Business published an article that was written by Robert Prentice titled: Euphemisms Inflict Collateral Damage on Integrity.

This article begins with the college admission scandal that caught up actress Lori Loughlin and fashion designer Mossimo Giannulli in acts of fraud to get their children into the best schools.

Robert writes, and this is important:

In an earlier blog post we suggested some reasons, grounded in behavioral ethics, that might help explain why reputable people and loving parents became involved in these frauds.  The conformity bias, the self-serving bias, and incrementalism all may have contributed. The evidence disclosed in the indictment offers additional clues.
A euphemism, say’s Webster’s, is “the substitution of an agreeable or inoffensive expression for one that may offend or suggest something unpleasant.”
Famed Stanford psychologist Albert Bandura writes of “moral disengagement,” suggesting that people, such as Loughlin and Giannulli, who think of themselves as good people can do something bad so long as they can selectively suspend morality for their activities. One way people do this is by use of euphemisms.  Bandura notes:

“Language shapes the perception of events and the thought patterns on which people base many of their actions. The personal and social acceptability of given activities, therefore, can differ markedly depending on what those activities are called. Euphemistic machinations are used widely to detach and depersonalize doers from harmful activities. Cloaking detrimental activities in euphemisms can be a powerful weapon.”

“Working the System” – Euphemisms Inflict Collateral Damage on Integrity
Examples of the “sanitizing and convoluted language” (Gambino) of euphemisms that have helped people make their peace with wrongdoing include the following:
  • Dead civilians = “collateral damage”
  • Mass firings = “right-sizing”
  • Lies = “alternative facts”
  • Burning down villages = “pacification”
  • Fraud = “creative accounting”
  • Genocide = “the final solution”
Empirical studies indicate that “euphemistic labels can psychologically sanitize unethical practices, facilitating our participation in them.” (Moore & Gino).

The World is Either Good or Evil

This is a lie. Every modern human being born today is told this lie.

Omar talks about how this idea is used to twist us into doing all sorts of evil things. It is a notion, an idea, a belief drilled into us since the day we are born until the day we are dead.

It is this very idea that the world can be cleaved into a good side and a bad side that allows us to be manipulated.

I would add it is precisely splitting the world into Good and Bad parts that lets us justify just about any abominable violence we can dream up.

It is also what allows ruthless rulers to turn plain, ordinary, decent human beings into killing machines and monsters.

Ruthless Rulers are already monsters and include men such as Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Ali Khamenei, Kim Jong-um, Denis Sassou Nguesso, Abdullah Aziz Al Saud, Bashar al-Assad, and there are many more (see the list of Current World Dictators).

World Dictators In 2022 By Location

We live with these monsters right here, right now on our planet. And they are pounding our world straight back to the Stone Age just as fast as they can.

This is a comprehensive, up-to-date list of the current world 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.

What do you think? Are they winning? The Red countries that is… are there more red countries than yellow or green?

That is exactly what they want you to believe. But, perhaps you are beginning to sense out it is precisely this idea of division that is the problem.


Empathetic Liars

One of Omar’s characters is an empathetic lair. He is the character that goes into the refugee camps and radicalizes the kids there.

Omar says there is no such thing as exotic suffering, but empathetic liars make you believe there is. Empathetic liars parse the fine threads of what we do and what is done to us. Empathetic liars play upon the lack of self-agency in a place like a refugee camp (or one of Putin’s prisons) and use it like a gleaming lure to hook their targets–kids (or Russian prisoners) whom they plan to turn into cannon fodder.

Omar says, “People go to bad place when their self-agency is taken away from them.” And the more damaged a person is, the more their circle of Trust closes in, making them extremely vulnerable to empathetic liars

And that is exactly what autocrats, dictators, and pretty much most of the Republican Party in the United States are doing. Whoever they are…all close ranks around their strong man, hype their followers up on Fraudulent Euphemisms, and close the circle of Trust until only one man can be trusted.

And, there sure are a lot of want-a-bee dictators who desire to be the one and only man the entire human race can trust–Putin, Trump, Xi Jinping, Ali Khamenei, Kim Jong-um, Denis Sassou Nguesso, Abdullah Aziz Al Saud, Bashar al-Assad, or pick your poison.

Yes, Omar is very right to envision the coming of America’s Second Civil War! Heck, we might be staring down the path to WWIII.

I think Empathetic Liars is another name for Dark Empaths. Dark Empathy is not a good thing. Dr. Ramani does a very good job in this video explaining why all of us need to be on the look out for Dark Empaths and Empathetic Lairs.

The Dark Empath VS the Narcissist: The Signs | Med Circle

Reality? What Reality!

Omar talks about when a group of people believe anything they want to believe is real… you’re living in a very dangerous place and time.

Add the element of violent insurrection being a central part of a country’s narrative, and you have a tinderbox waiting to explode.

He admits he’s been amazed how reality has out did his fiction.

He warns, “There is a particular Force that when it emerges within a group of people, it must be stared down directly.”

I would add that when this Force is encountered: You cannot blink. You cannot turn away. And, if you falter, it will destroy you.

I’m writing about such a force too. I was reminded of a prologue I was playing around with to describe my story. I realize it is exactly what Omar is warning us about.

The Last DJ on Earth | I wrote and read the beginning of this video. My husband plays the Last DJ and my friend Brain (who has since passed) plays the Persuader

Will we listen? Can we listen anymore?

Feature Archetypal Animation

Image from: American War by Omar El Akkad, book review: Should be read as a cautionary tale | The Independent — This impressive debut imagines a second American Civil War set from 2074 to 2095 and is set apart from other dystopian novels because of the fully realised plausibility of the scenario 

Image from: Penguin Random House Audio | “Powerful . . . As haunting a postapocalyptic universe as Cormac McCarthy [created] in The Road, and as devastating a look as the fallout that national events have on an American family as Philip Roth did in The Plot Against America. . . . Omar El Akkad’s debut novel, American War, is an unlikely mash-up of unsparing war reporting and plot elements familiar to readers of the recent young-adult dystopian series The Hunger Games and Divergent.”
—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

Image from: The American Civil War, a Summary | AAREG

Music: 1865: Songs of Hope and Home from the American Civil War Anonymous 4 | [15] Home, Sweet Home / Polly Put the Kettle On   

First Archetypal Animation

Music: Heaven Or Hell | Don Tolive | [1] Heaven Or Hell    

Monsters Are Made

We Make Monsters in our Heads

It is a few days after Halloween, and monsters seem to fit the season and the times we live in right now.

A few days before Halloween, I heard an interview on It’s Been A Minute called Our Undying Cultural Obsession with Vampires. And this got me thinking about monsters and how they are made.

In this interview, Kendra R. Parker, who teaches a class at Georgia Southern University about Black vampires in film and literature, discusses the long, sordid history of monsters, especially vampires, and our collective obsession with them.

It is she who said monsters are made. Think Frankenstein, definitely constructed by a human.

And we do this all the time…in our heads simply repeating the stories we tell ourselves that create indelible images, which we then project onto the world we live in. Or better said, the world we wish we lived in.


The Planet We Made

Cover of Time Magazine : The Planet We Made — The Planet We Need — Social Sculpture…How We Can All Participate in Protecting and Seeing Earth Anew — Artwork by Olafur Eliasson

Olafur Eliasson is an IcelandicDanish artist known for sculptured and large-scale installation art that employ elemental materials such as light, water, and air temperature to enhance the viewer’s experience. He designed the cover of Time this month to highlight our collective climate crisis that will affect and impact everyone on Earth. Rich or poor, everyone will pay a huge price for further dithering and delaying on taking immediate action Now.

Olafur tells Time to create the effect on TIME’s cover, he employed a technique called after imaging. By following the instructions on the cover, when the page changes, your eyes re-imagine our overheated planet in the healthy vibrant greens and blues we, the human race, were born into and began our journey as a species through time.


The Monsters We Make

This same elusive after imaging takes place inside our minds. The images that get stored inside our minds are created by the stories we tell ourselves and the images we consume as ordinary citizens.

These images, let’s call them cultural images, are stored in our minds as belief systems. Beliefs are vastly more complicated images than the one created by Olafur Eliasson for the cover of TIME. However, compared to reality, beliefs are pathetic and paltry.

Belief systems tend to leave far more outside (the evil other) than inside (the person who sees the the world like you do). All of us adopt and cultivate belief systems. They help us know who we can trust. And, they help us survive by acting as short cuts to reality.

By popping your beliefs into a situation, you can just get down to action. Or really reaction to a situation because beliefs allow you to skip the work of hard thinking, critical analysis, and feeling into what you are actually experiencing.

Systems of belief are informed by the families we grow up in, the cultures we live in, and the religions we participate in (or do not participate in). Systems of belief are further evolved and informed by friends, peers, teachers, clubs, politics, and media, among many other sources.

Whether you accept the stories and images imparted to you through these systems, whether you believe them or you don’t believe them, beliefs about how the world is or isn’t are formed and held in the mind very much like the phantom image Olafur Eliasson created on the cover of TIME.

Each and every belief are things you have choose to accept, to believe, and to store in your head. You choose to believe the things you think are true or what you don’t believe or believe to be not true, regardless of whether they are empirically true or not true.

Once you commit to a belief (in other words you swallow an idea hook, line, and sinker), it creates an indelible image of how the world is, which gets overlay onto everything you do and everyone around you. Very much like the elusive image Olafur Eliasson made for the November 2022 cover of TIME. You put them there, and then you project them on the world.

Beliefs are more likes wishes, fears, and desires. They accord with more how we want the world to be rather than how it really is. Our wish/fear/wants live inside our minds and are projected on the world every moment of our lives. They hoover and cling to everything and everyone we come into contact with like a ghostly aura. Depending on what our projected system of beliefs tells us we should believe about a person or a thing that comes into our narrow bandwidth of focused conscious attention, aligns our actions and behavior in the world.

This rather simple ability has oversized implications–some good, some bad. It is an ability that we take for granted as human beings. Our ability to create systems of beliefs is a form of ignorance (ignorance, what we choose not to see) and it has gotten the better of us. It is what allows us to turn ordinary human beings into monsters or our world into a wasteland.

Kendra R. Parker explains our creation of and fascination with monsters this way:

When Dracula appeared in the 19th century, there was all of this fear, the English were preoccupied with borders, boundaries and nationalism. Between like 1881 and 1900 there was an increase in the number of non-English Jewish people. There was this xenophobia, this fear of Jewish people, this sort of threat of external colonization. And so these fears about the threatening outsider, who is going to come in and disturb the national pure body, finds its way into Bram Stoker's Dracula. 
And if we come to the United States in 1898, we have newspaper images popping up out of North Carolina that depict Black men as vampires because there was this fear of Black men. There's this fear of black men being in politics and so that if you got black political power, then they're going to take over and destroy white women and all of that. And so you've got all of this propaganda. 
And there are two images in particular. One is called "The Vampire that Hovers Over North Carolina." It appears in 1898, and it's a Black male vampire coming out of a ballot box. And there's another image that same time period in North Carolina where you got vampires coming out of the grave to vote and they're Black. And so there's this fear that if you let these monsters vote, they will take over and destroy our way of life.
Image From: Southern Cultures: A War in Black and White: The Cartoons of Norman Ethre Jennett & the North Carolina Election of 1898

The Monsters We Are

When we use our system of beliefs to turn other human beings into monsters, it is ourselves who become the monster. When hate becomes our fuel, then the transformation is complete. The monster has been made.

It is a way of being in the world that leads to Hell. It is the path of destruction, of mayhem, and of death.

It is a way of being in the world that may begin by being suspicious, distrustful, and skeptical. But it can quickly eclipse who you think you are and make you into a person who takes pleasure in being cynical, ghoulish, grisly, and grotesque.

Such a journey is often summed up by the popular phrase — Take The Red Pill. This means a person that falls down a rabbit hole. They start out innocently following juicy breadcrumbs of gossip and plausibly outrageous happens that grow ever more implausible. But once you get hooked on these toxic breadcrumbs carefully left behind by Master Manipulators who are experts in making the implausible sound plausible. Indeed, the Truth that you are willing to die for.

Accused Pelosi Attacker Told Police He Was On A ‘Suicide Mission’

How To Make of a Monster

Step 1) Chop the world into absolutely good and absolutely evil, then choose a role to play in this absolute drama (it goes without saying that whatever side you play on… that is the righteous side, the good guys, the side that is going to slay absolute evil)

Step 2) Select a Mask for the role you will play in the absolute drama to rid the world of absolute evil (make sure you are the Super Hero of your story and everyone else is the bad guy)

Step 3) Strap Your Mask Tightly To Your Face So It Doesn’t Slip or Fall Off (you don’t want anyone to see you are merely human like the people and other living beings you are dehumanizing)

Step 4) Cut Up Bits and Pieces from the World and Other Stories, Then Mash Them Into Your Mask So You Become Unrecognizable Like Camouflage (it doesn’t matter if the bits and pieces make sense anymore, you are creating your super hero version of yourself!)

Step 5) Add Lots of Layers to Your Mask, Be Sure to Use Lots of Devilish Deceit and Deception, More Camouflage to Help You Better Play Your Role (God forbid anyone recognize that you’re really human behind your Fake Persona)

Step 6) Distort, Deform, and Mangle Your Mask to Create Fantastic New Levels of Distractions and Illusions, Even More Camouflage… Fighting Evil Isn’t for Sissies (this will draw others to you — your followers, your zombie army)

Step 7) Forget You Are Wearing A Mask: Now You Are A Monster

Image From: Metaflesh by Evan J. Peterson

I have not read this book, Metaflesh. But, the image of the cover is captivating. To me, it perfectly captures how we can turn ourselves into monsters using any system of belief, any one at all. In the land of make believe, nothing is sacred. Once we slip down a rabbit holes inside our minds, the inner Hellish landscape allows us to endlessly violently project onto others what we cannot admit to ourselves that we are.

This is a book review of Metaflesh from where I got the image:

Metaflesh is written by Evan J. Peterson, author of The PrEP Diaries: A Safe(r) Sex Memoir and DragStar!,  the world’s first drag performer role-playing game. Metaflesh is a book of verse and prose from the point of view of Frankenstein’s Monster. The reflections are inspired not only by Mary Shelley’s seminal work (double entendre fully intended) but also by the pop culture descendants of her novel. Sources include a wide variety of Frankenstein/mad scientist movies and song lyrics. The book also contains themes of Jewish folklore, queer culture, camp, and a lot of David Cronenberg-style body horror. The book covers the gamut of the Monster’s experiences through over a century of movies and songs, and portrays the Monster as both gender-fluid and a sort of chimerical film critic, reviewing portrayals of their self through lyric poetry and flash fiction.
This is an ingenious book of metafiction. Just as Dr. Frankenstein cut up different people and stitched the bits together, Peterson cut up and reassembled his sources, turning them into something greater than the sum of their parts. Borrowing from William S. Burroughs cut-up technique, he splices together Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein with F.T. Marinetti’s Manifesto del Futurismo (Futurist Manifesto) and with J. G. Ballard’s essay, “Why I want to F*ck Ronald Reagan.” He apostrophizes the sexually explicit films of avant-garde queer Canadian creator Bruce LaBruce and doesn’t forget to include General Mills’ Frankenberry breakfast cereal or select lines from Mommy Dearest and The Rocky Horror Picture Show.  The combined imagery of classical Greek mythology, white supremacy, drag queens, Judaism, and zombie erotica do not merge into a hot mess but meld together into a deliciously readable book.   
This literary retrospective is sad, funny, quirky, surgically precise, and captivating. I was never bored and didn’t skip through parts. I tore through my first reading at speed and have been taking my time through subsequent readings. The only spot which slows me down, pulling me to a frowning halt, is a simile in the poem, “His Name is In Me”:  “gross as the tallest savage.” Although I’m aware that white supremacist imagery is intentionally used throughout the book—punching up, not down—the use of the word “savage” feels out of place here. It is a racial slur used against Black and Indigenous peoples and stands out awkwardly in a poem strongly based in Judaic imagery. If it is a slur used against Jews, I am unaware, but this is my only quibble with the entire book.  -- Book Review: Metaflesh by Evan J. Peterson

Someone Once Told Me

Someone once told me that my blog The StoryTelling Species Series was just a story. He really just wanted to put it down and elevate himself because we were having a very strong disagreement about COVID. I knew he was wrong, but could not explain to him why he was so wrong then.

Now I can. I knew it is the stories we tell ourselves that make us into heroes or villains, good or evil, saints or monsters. Now I know how it happens inside our minds.

Given how susceptible we are to believe our own stories and lies about ourselves, it is best to give all other people the benefit of the doubt and trust they are not the monster you are afraid of… the one that lives inside of you. It is best just be human and to recognize that we have a little bit of good and a little bit of bad inside of us.

It is when we hang onto the evil inside of us and refuse to let go of it that we make ourselves into monsters and turn Earth into Hell. Trust that reality is far more interesting than the stories we tell ourselves about our selves and others.

Trust that you belong here and now with everyone else and that together we can heal ourselves. This is something we can only do together. And if we heal, Earth heals and our burning hot planet may once again shine in its brilliant, beautiful, life sustaining blues and greens!

Feature Archetypal Image

Graffiti Trump Melbourne Australia | ralfskysegel | Ralf Genge  •  Hannover/Deutschland  •  Member since July 23, 2017

Man Stylish People Putin The President Russia | Inactive account – ID 6964520

Devil Chaos Flames Hell To Burn Fire Inflamed | LeandroDeCarvalho | Leandro De Carvalho  •  Age 34  •  Cheyres/Suisse  •  Member since May 23, 2016

Image From: CNN SPECIAL REPORT: STEVE BANNON, DIVIDED WE FALL Reported by Drew Griffin & Free To Choose
Image From: Tahiti & the Thing | With that, the Old Lady Smiles | Gone, gone, Gone with the Wind
Music: We Are Monsters — Groundbreaking | [4] Fantasy    5:13

First Archetypal Image

Music: Earth — Lil Dicky[ 1] Earth   


Second Archetypal Animation

Music From: Vampire Movies Black Moon Lovers [5] Theme From Frankenstein    2:35

Third Archetypal Animation

Music From: Popular Monster — Falling In Reverse

Acting Without Doing Anything

Lesson from the Tao Te Ching

Microsoft Word – Tao Te Ching – trans. by J.H.. McDonald

Ancient wisdom blended with modern images and music.

Chapter 2

When people see things as beautiful, ugliness is created.
When people see things as good, evil is created.

First Stanza & Archetypal Animation

When people see things as beautiful, ugliness is created… | Music: The Beauty in Ugly – Ugly Betty Version | Jason Mraz

Being and non-being produce each other. Difficult and easy complement each other. Long and short define each other. High and low oppose each other. Fore and aft follow each other.

Second Stanza & Archetypal Animation

Being and non-being produce each other. Difficult and easy complement each other… | Music: High And Low by Andreas S. Möhle

Therefore the Master
can act without doing anything
and teach without saying a word.
Things come her way and she does not stop them; things leave and she lets them go.
She has without possessing,
and acts without any expectations.
When her work is done, she takes no credit.
That is why it will last forever.

Third Stanza & Archetypal Animation

Therefore the Master
can act without doing anything
and teach without saying a word…
| Music: The Giver | Livingston

For Chapter 1, see What Is Your Source of Energy?


Feature Archetypal Animation

Wall House Art Graffiti Elephant Decoration Home | RichardMc | Richard Mcall  •  Ireland/UK/Thailand  •  Member since Jan. 1, 2016

Rajasthan Camel Safari Trekking Evening Dusk | RichardMc | Richard Mcall  •  Ireland/UK/Thailand  •  Member since Jan. 1, 2016

Cobra Snake Reptile Basket Danger Serpent | RichardMc | Richard Mcall  •  Ireland/UK/Thailand  •  Member since Jan. 1, 2016

Art Painting Lady Woman Girl Head Shoulders | RichardMc | Richard Mcall  •  Ireland/UK/Thailand  •  Member since Jan. 1, 2016

Large Bronze Head Pietrasanta Plaza Italy | RichardMc | Richard Mcall  •  Ireland/UK/Thailand  •  Member since Jan. 1, 2016

Body Painting Makeup Cosplay Portrait Dark  | Vic_B | press 👍 and ⭐  •  Moscow/Россия  •  Member since Aug. 30, 2017  •  #12

Bulb Idea Fantasy Lighthouse Art Birds Beach | Vic_B | press 👍 and ⭐  •  Moscow/Россия  •  Member since Aug. 30, 2017  •  #12

Fantasy Space Stars Universe Starry Sky Galaxy | Willgard | Willgard Krause  •  Age 59  •  Lutherstadt Wittenberg/Deutschland  •  Member since Feb. 25, 2017  •  #449

Music: Time | Mr.Kitty | [15] Child of the Earth   


First Archetypal Animation

 Dandelion Seeds Dew Dewdrops Droplets Weed Plant | InspiredImages | UK  •  Member since Sept. 27, 2013

Art Portrait People Old Antique Retro Mirrors | SarahRichterArt | Sarah Richter  •  Deutsch  •  Member since Oct. 21, 2015

The Ugly Duchess Painting Portrait Quentin Metsys | Zephirx | Pascal  •  Age 23  •  Germany  •  Member since Dec. 17, 2020

Girl With A Pearl Earring Painting Portrait | Zephirx | Pascal  •  Age 23  •  Germany  •  Member since Dec. 17, 2020

Environmental Protection Environment The Atmosphere | Inactive account – ID 81349

Clown All-In-One Character Fun Evil Bad | isabellaquintana | Isabella Quintana  •  Cali/Colombia  •  Member since Sept. 22, 2014

Music: The Beauty in Ugly – Ugly Betty Version | Jason Mraz


Second Archetypal Animation

Woman Yoga Pose Wellness Well-Being Meditate | Pexels | English  •  Member since March 26, 2016

Star Child Star Children Angels Meditation Unity | PapaOsmosis | Anthony  •  United States  •  Member since Oct. 4, 2016

Maze Labyrinth Solution Lost Problem Challenge | qimono |Arek Socha  •  Stockholm/Sweden  •  Member since Jan. 27, 2016

 Giraffe Animal Mammal Tree Long-Legged Long-Necked | HowardWilks | English  •  Member since March 31, 2017

Danbo Nyangbo Figure Doll Gray-Scale Loneliness | IraEm | M K  •  Ch/Korea  •  Member since Feb. 3, 2014

Storm Sea Lightning Ship Adventure Ominous | ChadoNihi | Alexandr  •  Age 29  •  Cambridge/UK  •  Member since Dec. 8, 2014

 New York Sea City Skyline Buildings Cityscape | Pexels | English  •  Member since March 26, 2016


Music: High And Low by Andreas S. Möhle


Third Archetypal Animation

Hip Hop Dance Girl Woman Young Lifestyle Artistic | ArtTower | Brigitte Werner  •  Age 68  •  Canim Lake/Canada  •  Member since June 15, 2012  •  #72

Waters Move Flow Action People Rope Waterfall | Dieterich01 | Lothar Dieterich  •  Age 62  •  Germering/Deutschland  •  Member since June 26, 2016

Colorful Five Fingers Kid Fingers Playful Rating | yohoprashant | Prashant Sharma  •  Age 37  •  Bhaktapur/Nepal  •  Member since Feb. 22, 2018

Girl Cat Moon Wall Melancholy Sad Alone Romantic | Tumisu | Tumisu, please consider ☕ Thank you! 🤗  •  English  •  Member since Feb. 3, 2014

Child Girl Winter Snow Face Fairy Tale | Pezibear | Petra  •  Österreich  •  Member since Oct. 22, 2014  •  #82

Hand Gift Bouquet Love Congratulate Give Flowers | klimkin | svklimkin  •  Age 45  •  Moscow/Russia  •  Member since Aug. 13, 2015

Fantasy Galaxy Universe Stars Cosmos Night | JuliusH | Julius H.  •  Age 69  •  Niedersachsen/Deutschland 🇪🇺  •  Member since Dec. 4, 2016  •  #165

What Is Your Source of Energy?

Lessons from the Tao Te Ching

— Written by Lao-Tzu — trans. by J.H.. McDonald

Laozi and Mozi

The Tao Te Ching was written around 400 BCE by Laozi (also written as Lao Tzu). He is the founder of Taoism, which is one of the philosophies flourishing during the time in China known as the time of The Hundred Schools of Thought, which thrived from the 6th century BCE to 221 BCE.

According to Mozi, another of China’s great philosophers born c. 470 BCE and died to c. 391 BCE, the achievement of social goals necessitates the unity of thought and action by the people and their rulers. His political philosophy bears a resemblance to divine-rule monarchy: the population ought always to obey its leaders, as its leaders ought always follow the will of heaven.

He is the first major intellectual to rival Confucius, founding the school of Mohism during this period of The Hundred Schools of Thought. His teaching have been summed up into 10 theses that have since been extensively argued. His most famous these is that of:

Jian’ai: This is the injunction that one ought to be concerned for the welfare of people in a spirit of “impartial concern” (jian’ai) that does not make distinctions between self and other, associates and strangers, a doctrine often described more simplistically as “universal love.” -- Encyclopedia of Philosophy

It would not be long before how well the leaders of the people would (or could) follow the will of heaven would be tested.

The Rise of Strongmen and Ruthless Rulers

Qin Shi Huang is the second of the Ruthless Rulers I highlight in my book Sapience: The Moment is Now (not yet published, but soon).

He is the first of the feudal kings of China to conquer all of the Warring States in 221 BCE, which included six dynasties, to create the Qin Dynasty. These territories include most of what we consider modern China today. Upon doing this, he declared himself the first emperor of China and assumed a title implying he possessed divine powers. He begins his rule by persecuting monks and philosophers, which cumulates in the burning of the books and termination of the Hundred Schools of Thought.

Qin Shi Huang, portrait in 18th century album Lidai diwang xiang. Artist unknown.
"Beginning in 213 BCE, all classic works of the Hundred Schools of Thought — except those from Li Ssu's own school of philosophy known as legalism — were subject to book burning. "Qin Shi Huang burned the other histories out of fear that they undermined his legitimacy, and wrote his own history books. -- History of Information

It is a pattern that has repeated itself over and over and over again since the first Ruthless Ruler walked the Earth. The inability of the people to tolerate diverse groups of thoughts seems to lie at the heart of how and why Ruthless Rulers rise to power.

And yet walking alongside Ruthless Rulers are men and women of rich intellectual mastery and wisdom such as Mozi and Confucius, Plato and Aristotle, Laozi and Zhuangzi who are only a few of individuals who have delved deeply into the human psyche and wrestled with the unknowable.

More than any time in our collective history, we need so many more people to take the plunge and do the same. To wrestled with the monsters that live inside all of us. We need groups of people in greater numbers than ever before to contemplate, debate, mutter and muster greater understanding for the tremendous diversity of thoughts, ideas, and philosophies we are capable of conceiving and creating into reality using nothing more than our minds to imagine something different than nature would have previously allowed to exist. We must work and stretch our minds far beyond the simple ploys Strongmen use to generate arguments and embed slogans into minds meant to bend the into little boxes that are easy to control and use like disposable commodities.

This is what Strongmen do, as they endlessly dream of becoming the next great Ruthless Ruler.

We see it playing out again, right here, right now, in our own countries wherever they are as the tide of intolerance, bigotry, racism, nationalism, patriotism, partisanism sweep strongmen into powerful positions–Jair Bolsonaro, Viktor Orbán, Marine Le Pen, Rodrigo Duterte, Narendra Modi, Xi Jinping, Putin, and formerly Trump.

They use righteous ideas and righteous talk like jack hammers that steadily chip away at the unity of thought and action Mozi talked about centuries ago as essential for collective good of all. When their speech doesn’t flame the right pit of emotion and opposition arises, they use violence (if they can get away with it) to silence those who don’t agree with them.

Images from the bottom to the top:


What Will We Do?

Will we let ourselves be torn to pieces by ideas and thoughts flung about by Strongmen and Ruthless Ruler? It always ends the same way. They reign with terror tearing down and destroying anything good and wholesome a country or group of people has managed to achieve, turning on those who turn against them, annihilating anyone or anything who dares to question them. They tell their followers they have been sent here on a divine mission, they have been sent by God, or indeed, they are God and everyone must bend down before them.

It is for this reason I will highlight parts of Laozi’s book written so many centuries earlier. A man who was believed by the people to be a god and worshipped, though I suspect Laozi would have tolerated this as a bit foolish…he knew he was a man with faults and foibles…that is what his teachings are about navigating the stream we call ourselves full of faults and foibles, wisdom and knowledge, danger and destruction. He advocated the middle way. His system of thinking would serve modern men and women well right now in the dangerous tides we ourselves have created and now must swim.

Here is his first chapter of his masterpiece of thinking animated with modern images and music from our time now.

Chapter 1 — Tao Te Ching

First Archetypal Animation & Stanza

The tao that can be described is not the eternal Tao. The name that can be spoken is not the eternal Name.

The tao that can be described is not the eternal Tao… | Music: Tao of Healing Dean EvensonPond Reflecting Stars   

Second Archetypal Animation & Stanza

The nameless is the boundary of Heaven and Earth. The named is the mother of creation.

The nameless is the boundary of Heaven and Earth. The named is the mother of creation. | Music: The Other Side of Darkness — Guide Me Home (One Misstep)

Third Archetypal Animation & Stanza

Freed from desire, you can see the hidden mystery. By having desire, you can only see what is visibly real.

Freed from desire, you can see the hidden mystery. By having desire, you can only see what is visibly real. | Music: Freed From Desire Strange Fruits Music [1] Freed From Desire    2:24

Fourth Archetypal Animation & Stanza (also Feature Animation)

Yet mystery and reality emerge from the same source. This source is called darkness. Darkness born from darkness. The beginning of all understanding.

Yet mystery and reality emerge from the same source. This source is called darkness. Darkness born from darkness. The beginning of all understanding. | Music: Source of Energy | Clear Conscience[1] Source of Energy

Addition Relevant Resources

Our greatest weakness lies in giving up.
The most certain way to succeed is always
to try just one more time
.” — Thomas A. Edison

Hernan Diaz’s anticipated novel ‘Trust’ probes the illusion of money — and the truth

Scott Simon talks with Hernan Diaz about his novel, “Trust.” It tells the story of a New York tycoon who takes advantage of the 1929 crash, and his attempts to rewrite and control his own story. In this interview, Diaz tells Scott that power is the ability to bend reality and shape what others perceive as real. Power imposes someone else’s reality onto others. Wealth and money (and the desire to get more money) does this to people. They burn with the desire to have more of that kind of power over others. Great fortunes create a reality in and of themselves that others are eager to have a part or piece of.

Images from: The Power of Trust: How Companies Build It, Lose It, Regain It; Trust by Hernan Diaz; Power Wealth Classics; Money and Power: How Goldman Sachs Came to Rule the World


What Leadership Looks Like | Ted Radio Hour

From workplaces to schools to national governments, leaders everywhere are being called on to solve complex problems with humility and bravery. This hour, we consider what it takes to be a leader.  Guests include executive coach Patrice Gordon, organizational psychologist Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, First Minister of Scotland Nicola Sturgeon, and educator Shabana Basij-Rasikh.

I found the first interview particularly compelling as the speaker relates our ancient programming to have strong men leading a tribe or clan. These were times when groups were small and all members knew the integrity of every other member and whether they could be trusted or not. However, as our small bands and groups of people surviving together against vast and overwhelming odds have grown into vast civilizations, the qualities of a good ruler have shifted tremendously.

A good ruler today does not act on gut instinct, as would have been the right thing to do 10,000 years ago. A good ruler today actually must go against gut instinct to grasp the greater complexities of our modern realities and make more calculated, incremental moves that benefits all members of the collective, even those who are against the leader. But as people electing who to rule us, we are still vastly informed by our own gut instincts and emotions choosing ruler who we feel we could have beer with rather than rulers who could stare down the missile silo of a narcissist idiot threatening to use nuclear weapons on the world.

Images from: What Leadership Looks Like | Ted Radio Hour; Trump may tweet better. But nobody rides an ICBM like Putin; Russia nuclear threat: Putin’s deadly underwater nuke which can devastate US targets; Russia warns that it will see any missile launched at its territory as a nuclear attack; Russia has ‘unstoppable’ supersonic nuclear missile that cannot be traced by Western defence systems, says Putin; Vladimir Putin’s 4,000mph nuke can reach Britain in 13 MINUTES – and it CANNOT be stopped

What lovely, reassuring smile Putin has on that last picture!


The New Gilded Age | Throughline

“The World Economic Forum annual meeting at Davos, Switzerland, 2019 – an exclusive event where the world’s richest and most powerful people get together to solve the world’s problems. I was there when David Attenborough, you know, was showing his new film. The Garden of Eden is no more. Beautiful – you know, absolutely beautiful, stunning footage of how we’re wrecking the planet. And people were literally crying while they were seeing it. And I was thinking, but, guys, you arrived here in your private jets.”

Images from: File:World Economic Forum Annual Meeting 2005a.jpg; World Economic Forum Annual Meeting 2020; ‘Garden of Eden is no more’, Sir David Attenborough tells Davos; Prince William turns interviewer in Davos appearance with Attenborough; Too much money is bad; May 23, 1937: The Death Of The Ultimate Oil Man; The First Battle for Oil in Norway: The Long Arm of John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil; The Ultimate List of Corporate Philanthropy Benefits and How To Achieve Them; The Quick Fix: Why Fad Psychology Can’t Cure Our Social Ills; The Self-Help Myth: How Philanthropy Fails to Alleviate Poverty; Were the Titans of the Gilded Age “Robber Barons” or “Entrepreneurial Industrialists”?; Gilded Age Blog; Up To a Point: Robber Barons Make Way For Robber Nerds; The Modern Robber Barons; Ludlow Massacre; On This Day April 20, 1914: Remembering the Ludlow Massacre; Ludlow Massacre: PBS;


Why Russia’s military appears to be struggling in Ukraine

Aired May 1, 2022 on Heard on  All Things Considered

Why does Russia's massive and powerful military force continue to struggle against a smaller, less well-equipped opponent? Journalist David Volodzko wrote about this in a recent piece in The Daily Beast titled "The Embarrassing Truth Behind Putin's War Failures." He says the Russians appear not to have internalized the lessons they could have learned during other conflicts, particularly the civil war in Syria, where Russia backed the government of dictator Bashar al-Assad. -- MICHEL MARTIN, HOST
The problem is, in April 2021, I believe, the company that makes the Azart and its owner, Leonid Reiman, who's the former minister of communications, came under investigation for fraud. They had evidently been using cheap Chinese parts. This led to a bunch of problems, including the batteries didn't really work that well. So they've had to switch instead, and they're largely using mobile phones and things of that nature. And this is just one example of how corruption has left Putin and his army out in the open, in a sense, and exposed. -- DAVID VOLODZKO
I think that we all have overestimated Russia's military capabilities. And, I would add, I think that Putin did, too. One point that I make in the piece is that Moscow recently purged 150 Federal Security Service agents, and they sent the head of the FSB's fifth service, which handles counterinsurgency ops in Ukraine, to Lefortovo Prison. Now, there's a couple different theories as to why, and I'm inclined to go with the official explanation on this one, which is that Beseda lied to the state and stole funds. -- DAVID VOLODZKO
So again, as with the radio communications issue, we see corruption coming back to bite Russia. And as a consequence of that, Putin may have gone in on bad intel, thinking that the Ukrainians were going to be waiting with flowers instead of Bandera smoothies - which is, you know, Ukraine's version of a Molotov cocktail - and going in with bad gear, thinking that he had the best and the latest. And so as much as we fell for this idea of Russia being much more powerful than they are, much more capable than they are, Putin fell for that himself. -- DAVID VOLODZKO

Ridley Road | Masterpiece Theater

`Ridley Road' is the story of the 62 Group, a collection of anti-fascists who stood up against the rising neo-Nazi movement in Britain after World War Two, based on Jo Bloom's book of the same name, released in 2014. In the summer of 1962, twenty-year-old Vivien Epstein, a Jewish hairdresser from Manchester, arrives in London following the death of her father. Alone in the world, she is looking for Jack Fox, a man she had a brief but intense love affair with some months before. Her search leads her into the fight against resurgent fascism in East London, where members of the Jewish community are taking to the streets, in and around Ridley Road. -- Google Knowledge Panel

Note: This is 1962 this movies is about; just 17 years after Nazi Germany almost successfully invaded England.

Images from: Ridley Road; Ridley Road review – fascism thriller resonates in our current dark age; What is Ridley Road About?; Ridley Road: Viewers are all doing the same thing after episode two of the BBC drama; Ridley Road reviewfascism thriller resonates in our current dark age

Archetypal Animations

First Archetypal Animation

Buddha Yoga Meditation Relax Welfare Buddhism | PatrizioYoga | Patrizio  •  Italia  •  Member since March 21, 2018

Fantasy Transcendence Composing Magic Gold | KELLEPICS | Stefan Keller  •  Deutschland / Germany  •  Member since March 22, 2017  •  #240

Matrix Communication Software Pc Virus Computer | geralt | Gerd Altmann  •  Freiburg/Deutschland  •  Member since Sept. 15, 2012  •  #13

Music: Tao of Healing Dean Evenson [1] Gentle Season    6:46 [2] Clouds on Mountain    7:30 [3] Pond Reflecting Stars    6:14


Second Archetypal Animation

Astronaut Astronomy Satellite Moon Future | PIRO4D | PIRO  •  Heidelberg/Deutschland  •  Member since June 7, 2016

Background Stationery Guestbook Heaven Moon Swans | pixel2013 | S. Hermann & F. Richter  •  Germany  •  Member since April 9, 2016

Woman Mother Nature The Excitement Creation Birth | Ka_Nia | Katarzyna Micińska  •  Age 42  •  Częstochowa/Polska  •  Member since Sept. 25, 2017

Fantasy Dark Gothic Goth Surreal Ethereal | darksouls1 | Enrique Meseguer  •  Age 49  •  Madrid/España  •  Member since March 9, 2016  •  #812

Music: The Other Side of Darkness36 [1] Take Me by the Hand    9:42[2] Spinning Around    5:11[3] To Start Again    4:28[4] Shelter  3:09[5] Ripples    3:57[6] Past Self    5:12 [7] Guide Me Home (One Misstep)    4:53


Third Archetypal Animation

Portrait Look Red Scarf Mystery Hidden Eyes | lanamorphose | pamela laporte  •  Age 36  •  limoges/france  •  Member since March 5, 2017

Fantasy Surreal Mask Wall Eye Mysticism Girl | KELLEPICS | Stefan Keller  •  Deutschland / Germany  •  Member since March 22, 2017  •  #240

War Ukraine Landscape Girl Emotion Destruction | KELLEPICS | Stefan Keller  •  Deutschland / Germany  •  Member since March 22, 2017  •  #240

Surreal Eye Fantasy Mysterious Halloween | blende12 | Gerhard G.  •  Deutschland  •  Member since March 25, 2014  •  #149

Dove Of Peace Flag Symbol World Peace Ukraine | blende12 | Gerhard G.  •  Deutschland  •  Member since March 25, 2014  •  #149

Music: Freed From Desire | Strange Fruits Music[1] Freed From Desire    2:24


Fourth Archetypal Animation & Feature Animation

Hands Water Wash Color Source Hand Background | drfuenteshernandez | Manuel Darío Fuentes Hernández  •  Age 27  •  Guantánamo/Cuba  •  Member since Jan. 19, 2018

Nature Source Fountain Water Reflection Trees | Antranias | Manfred Antranias Zimmer  •  Chiemgau/Germany  •  Member since Aug. 27, 2013

Alive Energy Divine Body-Mind Mind-Body Faith | johnhain | John Hain  •  Age 72  •  Carmel/United States  •  Member since July 24, 2014

Woman Waterfall Naked Landscape Mountain | Mysticsartdesign | Mystic Art Design  •  Deutsch  •  Member since July 3, 201

Library Heaven Birds Mystical Clouds Sun | Mysticsartdesign | Mystic Art Design  •  Deutsch  •  Member since July 3, 201

Music: Source of Energy | Clear Conscience[1] Source of Energy    2:30

The Peace of Wild Things

Please note Chrome works best for the Archetypal Animations in this post.

— By Wendell Berry

First Archetypal Animation & Stanza

When despair for the world grows in me, and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children’s live may be,

When despair for the world grows…” | Music: Goodbye Then | Crippled Black Phoenix

Second Archetypal Animation & Stanza

I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.

I go and lie down…” | Music: Wild Imagination | Kurt Vile

Third Archetypal Animation & Stanza

I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief.

“I come into the peace of wild things…” | Music: The Peace Of Wild Things | Keith Kauspedas [1] Deep Echoing (Fox In The Snow)

Fourth Archetypal Animation & Stanza

I come into the presence of still water.

“I come into the presence of still water…” | Music: Watermark Enya | [9] River  

Fifth Archetypal Animation & Stanza

And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light.

“I feel above me the day-blind stars…” | Music: Stars Night Mantra

Sixth Archetypal Animation & Stanza

For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

“For a time I rest in the grace of the world,…” | Music: Peaceful Piano Musicals Cover Kid | La la Lu (From “Lady and the Tramp”)    

Reflections On Wendell Berry’s Poem to This Moment in Time

When the forces of man’s collective psyche gather into a maelstrom sending destructive vortexes this way and that into the world, it is hard not to feel as Wendell Berry begins his timeless poem:

...despair for the world grows in me, and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children's live may be...

Putin blows his devil’s breath from high within his isolated, depressing Moscow tower. A devil’s wind that makes his warrior vortexes go this way and that. Everywhere they go, the leave behind trails of blood, of dead bodies and blown up buildings, trees, and earth. Up there in his tower of desolation, he bloats in his madness as he congratulates himself over and over again about how he is getting away with unleashing his Hell-scape fantasies, deathly desires, and foolish folly into the world.

If you are a person with normal capacity for human empathy and compassion, then it is impossible to turn away and ignore what is going on in Ukraine. And you must not turn away.

We all must witness this wicked madness straight on, just as the Ukrainians are meeting Putin’s little devils straight on. If we don’t want to become like Putin, we must feel this destruction deeply and furiously. And we must feel down deep into our bones all the other tragedies unfolding in Afghanistan, the Middle East, Africa, Central America, South America, in the heart of all major cities and super rick countries in this world.

If you do, this means you are still human.

Wendell Berry describes the monsters inside us all. And he also tells us how to quell them and to sink into the peace that passes all understanding.

I wonder when was the last time Putin went down to where the wood drakes gather? When did he last lay down on his back, belly exposed to the light, the air, the sun, the stars and breathe in the beauty of this world? When did he last see a heron eat a snake or ponder the peace of still water? When did he last look up into the night sky and wonder about how implausible any of us are here at all?

When did Putin cut himself off from his curiosity, his wonder, his inner grace and awareness that he is alive in a magnificent world with enough bounty for all, if only we would tap into our inner wild nature where the wild wisdom of life runs free with the knowledge there is bounty all, if only we take our fair share? When did Putin become a narcissist blob cut off from his body, his heart, and his humanity? When did he become a monster?

Seventh Archetypal Animation | When Grace Is Lost

“And then the sun went out bright…” | Music: Dark Bloom | Darkness | The Sun Went Out Bright    

Putin lost his inner grace long ago, and now, alone and cold in a forbidding world, he opens a gate for devils to tumble and fumble their way out into this beautiful world. They rape women, shoot children, bomb maternity hospitals, children’s hospitals, and recreation centers where 1,000 women and children huddle in the dark and cold hoping they might just stop their bombing. Instead, they are crushed under the rubble of another bomb.

I hate Putin. I hate Putin’s army of dead and dying souls. I wish the Free World would grow a stronger backbone and kill this man who has become a Dracula overseeing an army of Zombies. But, we are playing on the “civilized” game board, while Putin plays on the barbarian game board.

However, he won’t win. He might kill a Hell of a lot of people. He might even launch a nuclear bomb, but like so many Ruthless Rulers before him, he will crumble into the dust bin of life. Ruthless Rulers always do.

Oh yes, they might win for a time. And, they might press their smelly likeness onto other human beings, adding to the blob, but he will never win. His zombies will never rule over the multitude as he has promised.

Evil never wins! At least not for long…not as long as there is life to live. Not as long as wood drakes sail on lakes or great herons hunt and devour snakes. Not as long as a single human being wanders down to the waters edges and wonders why this whole thing exists at all. Ponders why we are here amongst the divine majesty of the trillion billion stars above.


Being Human by Being Connected to Each Other & the World

My friend Karen shared this poem with me. We both feel deep pain for suffering the of the people of Ukraine. We both feel helpless in the face of such evil, and yet, we live…and…in the face of such horror, in retaliation to the demonic evil unleashing death, destruction and horror on Earth, Ukrainians fight! They live!

And yes, they are dying by the hundreds of thousands because Putin is a coward and his army is ill-equipped and ill-prepared, indeed, they are unwilling to wage this war, expect for the beasts he’s imported in and the degenerate ones who glory in the gross and disgusting side of life…the ones who are too afraid to love or to know who and what they really are.

Ukrainians know the price of this evil, and they stand against it, and they are winning! They are winning because they remained connected to their humanity and grounded to this Earth–our home, our mother, our true nature. They show us, the Free World, each and every day how to fight for what is right and how to be better human beings!

Fight for the people of Ukraine! Glory to Ukraine!

Feature Archetypal Animation

Covid 19 Coronavirus Dystopia Dystopian | toyquests | Elliot Alderson  •  Age 35  •  Los Angeles/United States  •  Member since March 31, 2020

Male Wood Duck Duck Animal Wildlife Drake Pond | muskrat55 | Robin Arnold  •  Age 66  •  Port Clinton/United States  •  Member since June 9, 2017

 Iceland Arctic Fox Fox White White Fox Canine | Inactive account – ID 12019

Rest Relax Lie Comfortable Sleep Man Person | Hans | Hans Braxmeier  •  Neu-Ulm/Deutschland  •  Member since Nov. 24, 2010

Composing Woman Fantasy Face Beauty Mystical Root | KELLEPICS | Stefan Keller  •  Deutschland / Germany  •  Member since March 22, 2017  •  #391

Sunset Tree Water Silhouette Tree Silhouette Dusk | Cleverpix | Cindy Lever  •  Age 57  •  Melbourne/Australia  •  Member since May 4, 2016

Meadow Green Meadow Flower Meadow Grass Nature | spirit111 | beate bachmann  •  Age 59  •  berlin/germany  •  Member since April 6, 2017

Seljalandsfoss Waterfalls Iceland Falls Cliffs | Inactive account – ID 12019

Music: The Peace of Wild Things | Wendell Berry

The Peace of Wild ThingsWendell Berry


First Archetypal Animation

Man Portrait Homeless Poverty Male Poor | Leroy_Skalstad | Leroy Skalstad  •  Age 74  •  Milwaukee/uSA  •  Member since July 14, 2015

Mental Health Brain Thinking Tree Branches Disorder | Tumisu | Tumisu, please consider ☕ Thank you! 🤗  •  English  •  Member since Feb. 3, 2014

Lights Candle Man Old Fire Flame Candlelight | Skitterphoto | Rudy and Peter Skitterians  •  Groningen/The Netherlands  •  Member since July 5, 2014

Covid 19 Coronavirus Dystopia Dystopian | toyquests | Elliot Alderson  •  Age 35  •  Los Angeles/United States  •  Member since March 31, 2020

Music: Goodbye Then | Crippled Black Phoenix


Second Archetypal Animation

Rest Relax Lie Comfortable Sleep Man Person | Hans | Hans Braxmeier  •  Neu-Ulm/Deutschland  •  Member since Nov. 24, 2010

Male Wood Duck Waterfowl Bird Swimming Wildlife | JamesDeMers | Charlottesville/USA  •  Member since March 6, 2012

Male Wood Duck Duck Animal Wildlife Drake Pond | muskrat55 | Robin Arnold  •  Age 66  •  Port Clinton/United States  •  Member since June 9, 2017

Heron Snake Wader Bird Kill Ardeidae Prey | mkzsfoto | steven arnold  •  reunion  •  Member since Sept. 11, 2018

Music: Wild Imagination | Kurt Vile


Third Archetypal Animation

Fantasy Butterflies Mushrooms Forest Insects | Stergo | Игорь Левченко  •  Age 32  •  Владикавказ/Россия  •  Member since Jan. 2, 2017

Composing Woman Fantasy Face Beauty Mystical Root | KELLEPICS | Stefan Keller  •  Deutschland / Germany  •  Member since March 22, 2017  •  #391

Tree Lake Water Nature Landscape Forest | Leslin_Liu | Shanghai/China  •  Member since June 16, 2017

Fantasy Eyes Forest Branches Face Portrait | KELLEPICS | Stefan Keller  •  Deutschland / Germany  •  Member since March 22, 2017  •  #391

Fantasy Deer Mammal Forest Nature Outdoors Light | peter_pyw | Peter  •  KUALA LUMPUR/Malaysia  •  Member since July 19, 2016

Fantasy Forest Dog Monster Girl Snow Winter | KELLEPICS | Stefan Keller  •  Deutschland / Germany  •  Member since March 22, 2017  •  #391

Nature Outdoors Ants Forest Light Bulb Light | peter_pyw | Peter  •  KUALA LUMPUR/Malaysia  •  Member since July 19, 2016

Music: The Peace Of Wild Things | Keith Kauspedas [1] Deep Echoing (Fox In The Snow)    6:06


Fourth Archetypal Animation

Still Calm Tranquil Moon Sunset Sky Ocean Lake | WelshPixie | Delyth Williams  •  Age 41  •  Western Cape/South Africa  •  Member since Sept. 14, 2018

Cutter North Sea Port Shrimp Fishing Vessel | ArtTower | Brigitte Werner  •  Age 68  •  Canim Lake/Canada  •  Member since June 15, 2012  •  #89

Sunset Still Water Splash Water Reflection Liquid | truthseeker08 | 🆓 Use at your Ease 👌🏼  •  English  •  Member since April 18, 2016

Still Calm Tranquil Sunset Sky Ocean Lake Water | WelshPixie | Delyth Williams  •  Age 41  •  Western Cape/South Africa  •  Member since Sept. 14, 2018

 Nature Waters Lake Island Landscape Thunderstorm | jplenio | Joe  •  Munich/Deutschland  •  Member since Jan. 9, 2018  •  #295

Sunset Tree Water Silhouette Tree Silhouette Dusk | Cleverpix | Cindy Lever  •  Age 57  •  Melbourne/Australia  •  Member since May 4, 2016

Music: Watermark Enya | [9] River    3:12


Fifth Archetypal Animation

Wall Blind Alley Dead End Impasse Lockup Deadlock | ChadoNihi | Alexandr  •  Age 29  •  Cambridge/UK  •  Member since Dec. 8, 2014

Red Planet Moon Alien Arid Abiocoen Ancient | ChadoNihi | Alexandr  •  Age 29  •  Cambridge/UK  •  Member since Dec. 8, 2014

Stargate Heaven Gate Science Fiction Futuristic | spirit111 | beate bachmann  •  Age 59  •  berlin/germany  •  Member since April 6, 2017

Meadow Green Meadow Flower Meadow Grass Nature | spirit111 | beate bachmann  •  Age 59  •  berlin/germany  •  Member since April 6, 2017

Wormhole Time Travel Portal Vortex Space Warp | Genty | English  •  Member since May 20, 2016

Galaxy Fog Kosmus Universe Milky Way Night Sky | spirit111 | beate bachmann  •  Age 59  •  berlin/germany  •  Member since April 6, 2017

Music: Stars Night Mantra


Sixth Archetypal Animation

Mountains Smoke Portrait Girl Field Romantic | manhhongdldhv | Hong Manh  •  Age 32  •  Vinh/Việt Nam  •  Member since July 4, 2020

 Sunset Mountains Trees Silhouettes Conifers | Inactive account – ID 12019

Mountains Hills Sky Clouds Sunset Dusk Twilight | Inactive account – ID 12019

Iceland Aurora Borealis Northern Lights Beautiful | Inactive account – ID 12019

Kingfisher Bird Close Up Perched Perched Bird | Inactive account – ID 12019

 Iceland Arctic Fox Fox White White Fox Canine | Inactive account – ID 12019

Seljalandsfoss Waterfalls Iceland Falls Cliffs | Inactive account – ID 12019

Music: Peaceful Piano Musicals Cover Kid | La la Lu (From “Lady and the Tramp”)    


Seventh Archetypal Animation

Black Hole Art-Optical Black White Contrast | dric | Français  •  Member since Nov. 30, 2016

Colour Farbklex Embroidery Blob Drops | Bru-nO | Bruno /Germany  •  Age 47  •  Thank you for your Donation!/Please like your download!  •  Member since June 29, 2015  •  #255

Abstract Astral Astrology Astronomy Background | Buddy_Nath | A Owen  •  Age 39  •  United Kingdom  •  Member since Feb. 4, 2016

Music: Dark Bloom | Darkness | The Sun Went Out Bright    

Human | Heaven | Hell

To Be in Heaven is to walk through love-filled lands ruled by no one and existence unfolds in endless goodwill and harmony.

First Archetypal Image | Love-Filled Lands

Love-Filled Lands | Music: Clear Your Mind | Deep Sleep Hypnosis Masters Tranquil Sleep | Spotify

To Be in Hell is to walk through infinite hate-filled lands ruled by vengeful hate-filled hearts.

Second Archetypal Image | As the Apocalypse Draws Near

As the Apocalypse Draws Near | Music: Sign of Evil | Andrey Avkhimovich

To Be Human is to walk a narrow path between the Esses.

Third Archetypal Image | To Walk Between the Esses

To Walk Between the Esses | Music: London Grammar – Who Am I (Áudio)

Some choose infinite hate.

Fourth Archetypal Image | | Dark Hearts

Dark Hearts | Music: UNSECRET X CECE AND THE DARK HEARTS – DARKNESS FALLS

Some choose endless goodwill.

Fifth Archetypal Image | | Land of Kindness, Tolerance, Understanding, & Love

Land of Loving Kindness | Music: Loving-Kindness · Vimassana

All are rivers of light weaving intersecting tangled webs of effervescent, fading light momentarily reconnecting the lost Heaven with the lost Hell through thoughts, words, and deeds.

Sixth Archetypal Image | | Weavers of Light — Creatures of Fate

Weavers of Light | Creatures of Fate || Music: Lost in Space · Bellows

It is a timeless dance remembering the primordial illustrious indivisible whole broken long ago so light could ride alongside the never-ending night.

Feature Archetypal Image

Image from: Axis Mundi ~ Understanding the Connection Between Heaven & Hell by Sonali Bansal | October 29, 2015

“No tree, it is said, can grow to heaven, unless its roots reach down to hell.”

~ Carl Jung

Image from: Angelica Zambrano 3rd Testimony of Heave and Hell | May 27, 2016 / Excerpt:

Evangelist Angelica Zambrano lives in Ecuador in South America. It was around midnight when her near-death experience & revelation of heaven and hell began.”

Image from: Does Heaven and Hell presently exist or not?  | September 29, 2015/in Religious Questions / Excerpt:

In accordance with Quranic verses and traditions, the promised Heaven and Hell are presently in existence and will be completely shown in the hereafter where man will be given his everlasting abode in relation to his beliefs, actions, and ethical traits. But, there has been another form of Heaven and Hell which can be seen in this world through mystical experiences (shahūd) or they will manifest themselves for mankind in the inter-world which will result in either pleasure or pain. There are differences of opinions in regards to the form of influence and relation that one’s beliefs and actions have on his condition in the hereafter and also in the explanation of Heaven, Hell, and their forms.”

Image credit: Heaven and Hell by

Jim Warren Studios
Studios | Recent Paintings

Image from: Get Here Judgement Day Images of Heaven and Hell | Other images from this blog:

Image from: It’s The Dog In You~ | Aug 15, 2016 | By Anthony Cloe Huie (Medium) Excerpt:

(The 3rd piece in our 6th mini series, “The Antagonist!”)

Your love is like a knife to the heart and 
a dagger to my soul. 
You will not be happy until I have lost 
all control
You see me in calm waters after drowning me
in your river of drama
So you continually…


Music: Meditative Dreamer by James Kenneth |Shamanic Journey 

Music: Meditative Dreamer by James Kenneth |Shamanic Journey (Healing Flute, Wind, Fire & Drums) | Available on Apple Music, Pandora, Deezer, and other streaming services.


First Archetypal Image | Love-Filled Lands

Image credit: sasint / 224 images

Image by Pixabay: 165106/2168

Image by Pixabay: 165106/2168

Image credit: sasint / 224 images

Image credit: sasint / 224 images

Image credit: sasint / 224 images

Image credit: sasint / 224 images

Music: Clear Your Mind | Deep Sleep Hypnosis Masters Tranquil Sleep | Spotify

Second Archetypal Image | | As the Apocalypse Draws Near

Image Pixabay: War Destruction Armageddon | TheDigitalArtist/ 7630 | Other images by Pete Linforth

Image Pixabay: Apocalyptic War Danger | hucky | Other images by Hucky

Image Pixabay: Disaster Apocalypse Apocalyptic | tomasvl

Image Pixabay: Man Mask Gas Mask Atom | artbox_at

Mysticsartdesign/ 1093 images

Image Pixabay: Apocalypse Neural Invasion | hucky | Other image by Hucky

Image Pixabay: Apocalypse Destruction Portrait | Mysticsartdesign/ 1093 images

Image Pixabay: Gothic Goth Fantasy Dark Apocalypse | darksouls1 /1362 images | This image was suppose to replace the children playing soccer | Other images:

Music: Sign of Evil | Andrey Avkhimovich | 15,353 views, Sep 7, 2015

Third Archetypal Image | | To Walk Between the Esses

Image Pixabay: Landscape Change Weather Nature | ELG21 (Enrique  •  Lorca/España  •  Member since Nov. 15, 2016) | Other Images by Enrique:

Image Pixabay: Lighthouse Starry Sky Universe | Kanenori, JAPAN, Member since March 7, 2017 | Other photos:

Image Pixabay: Halloween Fantasy Witch Horror | Tabor, Reinhold Silbermann, Deutsch

Image Pixabay: Fairy Tale Fantasy Forest House Queen Child | KELLEPICS, Stefan Keller, Germany

Image Pixabay: Fantasy Portal Man Statue | KELLEPICS, Stefan Keller, Germany

Image Pixabay: Fantasy Book Cover Skull Snail Butterfly | KELLEPICS, Stefan Keller, Germany

Music: London Grammar – Who Am I (Áudio) | 696,642 views, Jul 14, 2017

Fourth Archetypal Image | | Dark Hearts

Image: Félicien Rops, Satan Sowing Tare (Satan semant l’ivraie), Belgian, 1833 – 1898

Image from: They reveal the secret of the concoction that turned the Viking elite warriors into crazy and lethal, February 20, 2020

The sagas, a mixture of history and Norse mythology, describe Berseker with special ferocity. They affirm, with devotion, that they were “those whom iron cannot harm.” 

Image from: ‘Double standard’: Biden, Black lawmakers and activists decry police response to attack on US Capitol | Grace HauckDeborah Barfield Berry | USA TODAY | Photo Jerry Habraken, USA Today

Trump rioters storm the U.S. Capitol Wednesday afternoon as lawmakers inside debated the certification of the presidential election.”

Image from: This Viking Berserker Spirit Will Help You Out Of Adversities

“The answer to the question whether the Viking berserkers are historical or not remains a mystery. What we know about these figures lie in very few materials. The Viking berserkers are the ones who would wear no metal armour and enter the battlefield. They were armorless and still willing to join the battle to sacrifice not only for their clan but also for Odin the Allfather. Legend had it that the berserkers would howl and scream when they fought against their enemies. They were completely different when they joined the battle. These warriors would know no pain and no fire and flame could burn them.”

Image from: US Capitol riots: Police officer’s death intensifies Capitol siege questions | Jan 8, 2021

“Trump supporters near US Capitol where they stormed the historic building, breaking windows and clashing with police. They also erected a noose in the Capitol grounds. Photo / Getty”

UNSECRET X CECE AND THE DARK HEARTS – DARKNESS FALLS [OFFICIAL AUDIO]
25,965 views, Nov 1, 2021

Fifth Archetypal Image | | Land of Kindness, Tolerance, Understanding, & Love

Image Pixabay: Mountains Hills Sky Clouds Sunset | ID 12019 (Inactive | 10,259 pics)

Image Pixabay: Peru Woman Old Market | lauraelatimer0 | English  •  Member since Feb. 18, 2015

Image Pixabay: Buddhist Monk Novice Buddhism Bird | truthseeker08 🆓 Use at your Ease 👌🏼  •  English  •  Member since April 18, 2016

Image Pixabay: Monk Pilgrimage Path Sunset | josealbafotos
Jose Antonio Alba  •  Age 75  •  Lleida/España  •  Member since Nov. 10, 2015

Image Pixabay: Motherhood Kiss Romantic | iqbalnuril | iqbal nuril anwar  •  Age 27  •  Jakarta/Indonesia  •  Member since June 22, 2019

Loving-Kindness · Vimassana | 6,161 views, Sep 17, 2019

Sixth Archetypal Image | | Weavers of Light — Creatures of Fate

Image Pixabay: Nature Panorama Geology | jplenio | Joe  •  Munich/ Deutschland  •  Member since Jan. 9, 2018

Image Pixabay: Aurora Borealis Northern Lights Forest | ID 12019 (Inactive, 10,259 photos)

Image Pixabay: Aurora Sea Man Sunrise | AdelinaZw | Deutschland  •  Member since Sept. 4, 2013

Image Pixabay: Sea Sunset Boat Sailing Dusk | PublicDomainPictures |
English  •  Member since Dec. 11, 2010

Lost in Space · Bellows | 624 views, May 2, 2015

Happy New Years — 2022 | May your journey through space and time be blessed with kindness, wisdom, and balanced healing that brings grace and benefit to all.

How to Feel Better and Create A More Beautiful World

The Storytelling Species: Makers & Players of Reality Bubbles

Storytelling Species Series

In the previous pieces of the Storytelling Species Series, we have explored how individual attitudes, beliefs, and thinking styles can influences our individual perceptions of reality. We also looked at how stories can influence our understanding of reality (inner and outer). We even explored how stories can become shared narratives that serve as foundational building blocks of our great civilizations and complicated societies. We also looked at how other kind of stories (e.g., conspiracy myths) can pull us together and shred our shared reality. These types of stories are carefully crafted narratives created by people craving attention and power and such people make up stories designed to tear us apart and make us distrust each other. They do this because in a civilization that is in a state of chaos and distrust, it is much easier to carve out a group of people who they can manipulate and control.

Each and every person alive today contributes to the quality of our shared reality–at local levels, at national levels, and at global levels. It all begins with our individual understanding of reality (our inner world), which is contributed to our shared reality (our outer world) through our thoughts, words, and deeds (conscious and unconscious), through our feelings (conscious and unconscious), and through our sensations, specifically, what we pay attention to and what we ignore. We also contribute to our individual and shared reality through our instinctual and intuitive responses to what happens to us as we journey through space and time.

Many of us know thinking, feeling, sensation, and intuition as components of psychological tests like the Myers-Briggs Personality Type. Finding out what our default psychological operating system is can help us navigate the world better such as figuring out what kind of job or career we might be good at doing or happiest doing. Most of us consider this knowledge not much more important than knowing what our astrological sign is. But I suggest this knowledge is critical to understand not only how to navigate the outer world, but also how to navigate our inner world (the hidden world inside of us).

One of the most tragic aspects of being a modern human today is an all out denial of the reality of one’s inner world. Denying the reality of our inner world denies us the ability to navigate it. We must know our inner world in the same way we know the physical world (the outer world). We must know where the dangerous areas are inside of ourselves and why they are dangerous. We must know where the safe and nurturing areas are inside ourselves and how to navigate between these hidden places. Without this inner knowledge, we can feel lost, anxious, and fearful in the world.

Conversation with the Bubble Maker on How to Make An Awesome Batch of Bubbles

This is what crystalized for me the day I met the bubble maker. The quality of our individual batch of consciousness is how we know and understand our outer (physical) world as well as our inner world (hidden world). The quality of our stream of consciousness can be greatly influenced by how we employ our thinking style, or how much we allow our feeling style to help us understand the world around us. The quality of our consciousness can be increased or decreased by the degree of sensation information we pay attention to (e.g., who is around us, how are we feeling around them) as well as the degree to which we are aware of how we are responding to people and things around us (i.e., are we acting unconsciously, in an instinctual way to people and things around us). When we react unconsciously, this impacts how much intuition we can access in the moment.

Our individual batch of consciousness is constantly changing for it needs to be dynamically balanced moment by moment with what remains unconscious inside of us. Many of us who have grown up in modern Western society are taught from very young ages to deny the reality of our inner world. We were taught to do this to survive the ways in which power is wielded in our super-huge, mega system of consciousness. We have evolved these systems of being because they have been super successful strategies to survive in an unpredictable and complicated world. These systems have allowed human beings to dominate the outer world.

When we deny the reality of our inner worlds, we do not to stick out, we do not individuate (i.e., we do not become a singular and unique human being as we were meant to be). We do not grow up to become the person only we can be. By not being unique and different we fit nicely inside our system of consciousness that values sameness (i.e., people and things that are readily replaceable within the system). By being the same as everyone else, we do not draw undo attention to ourselves by individuals who are more powerful than us and who could do us harm. Especially if our uniqueness and difference threatens their view of reality or if our uniqueness threaten’s their power (watch out then!).

When we become a target of a more powerful person, it is bad. We all know this. So most of us go along with the system because it is easier, and we can have comfortable enough life doing so. If we play it right, we can even possibly grow to have more power in the system too. However, do not delude yourself that if you become a person with power that you are immune to the corrupting force of power. Power corrupts and corrupts completely. It takes a great deal of consciousness to withstand the corrupting force of power. This can only be done by balancing power with honesty and humility. Since most of us lack awareness of our inner worlds, it is rare to find powerful people who can balance power with honesty and humility. It is also rare because our current system of consciousness does not reward individuals for doing this.

In addition to being very vulnerable to the corrupting forces of power, when we do not know our inner world, our physical, psychological, and spiritual well-being is greatly diminished. We become victims to our own unconsciousness, which condemns us to a life of ignorance that can incur terrible damage to our psyche. This damage is readily visible to other people because unconscious people are much more likely to participate in spontaneous acts of violence that they inflict on “other” people because they have projected that part of themself on the “other”, refusing to see it lives inside them and it is themself they are destroying.

If you think our current system of consciousness stinks and needs to change, the only lasting way to change the system is to change yourself. You change yourself by knowing more about yourself inside and out, which means understanding your inner/hidden world is real and has a reality that impacts you in powerful and significant ways. Doing this can be painful for it means going into the darkness of your soul and finding your inner divide.

If you are human, you have an inner divide. It is what allows us to be conscious. It becomes dangerous for us and other when we remain ignorant of this inner divide because this is how our unconsciousness flows into the world (our shared reality). When it does, all sorts of mischief and mayhem happens. So, if you are serious about creating a more beautiful world, get busy getting to know what is living inside of you–the good, the bad, and the ugly. It is only by knowing all of one’s self that a person can balance the oppositional powers always moving and flowing inside of us. It takes an equal and opposite force inside of us to balance a powerful force. When we remain unconscious of the psychological forces inside of us, we weld power in lopsided and destructive ways that hurt us and hurt others.

Recipe for Making a Better Batch of Reality Bubble Mix

Step1: 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

The Bubble Maker

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.

The Bubble Maker — Photo by Bebe

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.


Step 2: Synthesize, ferment, and transmute your flow of consciousness.

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.

Venus-DiVinci-Kundalini — Drawn by Bebe

I imagined the human mind is like the wand the woman making bubbles was holding in the park. With our minds, we make bubbles of reality that we put out into the world, which are visible through our thoughts, words, and actions. Consciousness is like the bubble making mixture in the bucket. As human beings, we channel and distill consciousness continually as it flows through us as experienced by our circumstances, station in life, visions, and dreams (sometimes nightmares). The consciousness contained inside of us is used to generate ideas that inform our individual actions. Thus, the quality of our individual consciousness determines the strength of the mixture used to manufacture the ideas we put out into the world through our Wand of Mind. It is the same wand every human being uses to put out bubbles of reality into the world, but the mixture of consciousness used can be vastly between humans.

The Big Wheel — Photo by Bebe

Step 3: Explore, discover, repair, and revive your inner landscapes.

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.  

Promo for It Came From Inside — Drawn and created by Bebe

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.

Step 4: Be here, now, that is all we ever have… everything we know, do, feel, become is wrapped in the now.

It is up to each of us to find critical inner balances between the self of the present and the self of the future. It is simply the price of being a conscious creature, and so, it must be navigated. At times, it can be very hard navigating between the needs, desires, fears, and fantasies of present self with the concerns and needs of future self, but that is what we are called to do a conscious human beings who have the gift of knowing.

Following are some of the activities I do that have helped me navigate my inner divide, which exists inside every human being. Often, it comes down to calming down my self-talk (the thing we call thinking and prize so much as modern human beings). Alan Watts often says that thinking is a good servant but a bad master. This is a fundamental teaching of Buddhism that the Western trained mind has a very hard time understanding.

Nature Heals

Nature helps us see ourselves in balance with everything else. Being outside, we can step outside of our minds and open us to other ways of knowing and understanding ourself in relationship to everyone and everything else. But to do this, one must be willing to slow down and look! I’ve made a series of nature videos throughout the months of lockdown and social distancing due to the global pandemic, which required individuals to put the well-being and health of others ahead of themselves–that is why we were asked to wear masks and keep distances, not because we were being controlled by evil politicians and scientists. My goodness the stories circulating on the Internet are so creative and more entertaining in conspiracy myths than a Marvel movie. I would ask those flocking to such narratives, what is it inside of you that these stories are activating? If a story you read makes your blood pressure rise, your heart beat faster, your anger increase, who is trying to manipulate you to their point of view? Instead, go outside. Let your own inner truth rise. If you are holding your inner split in balance, you will feel peace, you will feel confidence, you will feel in control and trust yourself to know who is telling you porky (aka bullshit) and who is telling you something real (be it good or bad). Life is complicated. Nature is complicated. We are constantly surrounded by complications and need each other to understand and navigate a complicated world as we travel inside very complicated collectives (i.e., our super-huge civilizations). To see the full nature series, click here: Have You Been Outside Today?

Have You Been Outside Today Series

HiddenBrain

dog with brown faux fur headband
Photo by Gilberto Reyes on Pexels.com

Description: Think about the resolutions you made this year: to quit smoking, eat better, or get more exercise. If you’re like most people, you probably abandoned those resolutions within a few weeks. That’s because change is hard. Behavioral scientist Katy Milkman explains how we can use our minds to do what’s good for us.

Towards the end, Katy says, “So often we don’t understand the forces of opposition inside of us, such as the desires of present me (I want to eat that ice cream now) and the consequences of future me (I’ll have to deal with the extra load of calories and fat that might be bad for my weight, cholesterol, mood).” Through out the episode, she gives plenty of examples where her present me created problems for her future me. She said she found it far more productive to approach these situations as an engineering problem rather than falling back to judgemental self-talk (also known as thinking). To do this, a person needs to recognize the forces of opposition operating inside themself, such as Seinfeld’s conflict between Night Guy and Morning Guy and Day Guy. between present self and future self honestly and fully without judging them as lazy, no good, stupid, or anything else one has been told by family members, friends, and culture about the behavior.

Seinfeld – Night Guy, Morning Guy, Day Guy

Basically, my take away from Katy’s presentation is that anything that trips us up and subverts us from achieving our long-term goals is human. It is normal. And, it can be handled by understanding the inner conflict and engineering simple work arounds. To do this, we need to see the forces at work honestly and fully without judging them (e.g., I’m a lazy, no good, stupid *#$). Often we internalize negative self talk because we have been told this by family, friends, and our culture. It is easy to label and judge. It is much harder to see our internal conflict, which in an inner spilt due to being a consciousness creature, honestly and to accept it as part of one’s self that must be loved and nurtured just as much as the parts of ourself that are heralded as good traits (e.g., over-achieving guy or gal, bringing home the bacon guy or gal, or anything else we or others label as desirable behaviors).


Alan Watts

Ra’s Playlist of Alan Watts — Ra is an AI helping one of the characters in Sapience understand how to transform human consciousness on a scale never before achieved. Stay tuned, you will meet Ra soon in Book 1.

Watts often liked to ask in his lectures: “Why don’t you know what you want?”

“First, you don’t know what want because you haven’t thought about it or you’ve only thought superficially about it. Then when you somebody forces him to think about it and go through and say yeah I think I’d like this, I think I like that, I think I’d like the other as the middle stage. Then you get beyond that say: “Is that what I really want? The end news day, now I don’t think that’s it. I might be satisfied with it for a while and I wouldn’t turn my nose up at it, but it’s not really what I want.”

“Why don’t you really know what you want two reasons that you don’t really know what you’re not number one you have it.”

Number two, you don’t know yourself because you never can. The Godhead is never an object of its own knowledge, just as a knife doesn’t cut itself, fire doesn’t burn itself, light doesn’t illumine itself. It’s always an endless mystery to itself.”

“I don’t know.”

“And this I don’t know, other than the infinite interior of the Spirit, this I don’t know is the same thing as I love, I let go and I don’t try to force or control. It’s the same thing as humility, and so the Upanishads say, “If you think that you understand brahmin, you do not understand it and have yet to be instructed further.”

“If you know that you do not understand it (dharma), then you truly understand for the brahmin is unknown to those who know it and known to those who know it. And the principle is that anytime you as it were voluntarily let up control, in other words cease to cling to yourself, you have an access of power because you’re wasting energy all the time and self-efense trying to manage things trying to force things to perform (the way you think things ought to be–like Rush H. Limbaugh–lol!). The moment you stop doing that that wasted energy is available. Therefore, you are in that sense having that energy available. You are one with the Divine Principle. You have the energy.”

“When you’re trying however to act as if you were God–that is to say you don’t trust anybody and you’re the dictator and you have to keep everybody in line–you lose the divine because what you’re doing is simply defending yourself. So then the principle is the more you give it away, the more it comes back. Now, you say I don’t have the courage to give it away I’m afraid. And you can only overcome this by realizing you better give it away because there’s no way of holdings onto it.”

Alan Watts Chillstep – We’re All One | This is the lecture set to music which the above quotes come…

Haunted and the Edge

Lloyd’s Haunted & the Edge Playlist

The haunted and the edge offer much in understanding our inner realities better, but they are often taboo and little understood. This is a playlist created by the Last DJ of Earth who is trying to save survivors of Earth after a global catastrophe. He hacks Multinational satellites to broadcast his musical sermons, working day and night to bring down Earth’s new overlords–the ones who worship money. Consciousness is the key. The Sapience Series tells the tale. Follow Sapience: The Moment is Now for when Book 1 is available.


You are beautiful. You are vital to this now. So, take care of yourself. Stay safe, stay well, and find some time to cultivate your beautiful patch of consciousness for it connects you to me and to all of life and the natural world! This is how we create a more beautiful world by seeing the beauty in each other, even when we disagree about things.