Comment to Soulful Toz Books that have Healed Me Video

Hi Laura.  I hope you and little Kitty Moon are doing well. I have an observation that came to mind in the aftermath of watching your recent video.  I looked up the reviews of Adyashanti’s “The End of Your World”, which you discussed, and that lead me into this huge New Age cat fight about exactly what constitutes ‘enlightenment’.  It’s a familiar debate.  There is no consensus.

Perhaps the greatest philosopher in regards to Enlightenment Theory, Aurobindo, muddied the waters more than anyone.  Back in college about 40 years ago I read his books.  I was a philosophy student back then and was smarter than a lot of people, but eventually I got to the point where I simply could no longer follow all of his fine distinctions between all the various discrete levels of enlightenment (and now I find myself ashamed that I did not confess as much to my Academic Advisor at the time.  Now I realize that Aurobindo’s continuous elaborations, may have sourced from a psycho-dysfunctional compulsion which could have borne some scrutiny, and that my objective should not have been to ‘understand’ Aurobindo but instead to present the hypothesis that his elaborations defied comprehension and merely indicated that much of Indian Philosophy may owe more to active conceptual imagination then to any intellectual or scientific rigor.  But I was much younger then… ).

 

Out in the grass roots of actual New Age People from the various Organizations, there was some agreement about who was actually enlightened – Ramakrishna (1836 – 1886), Ramana Mahaharshi (1879 – 1950), Sai Baba of Shirdi (? – 1918), Meher Baba (1894 – 1969), but little agreement regarding most of the other semi-big second magnitude names in the enlightenment constellation.  I myself was affected with such skepticism.  For instance, I myself was sort of marginalized even within the Kundalini Organization that initiated me into the Kundalini because I wouldn’t even dream of supposing that my own Guru was in any great degree ‘enlightened’ (and I myself wondered about the delusions of all the other members.  Were they meeting with and talking with the same Guru I was?  Yes, I had great respect for him, but this Guy was no World Messiah.  After a while I suspected that it is a form of self-aggrandizement, to claim that one’s personal Guru is the greatest of all Gurus).  There is also the case in which I found no recent philosopher more fascinating and accessible than Swami Vivekananda, while at the same time concluding that he was too coherent and intellectual to be enlightened

 

You know, incidentally, that Vivekananda did more than anybody to open up the West to Indian and Yogic ideas and traditions, but it was Yogananda, who took up a kind of Vivekananda-esque business plan, that has the dubious distinction and demonstrating that a ‘rock star’ fortune could be made in being a popular marketable ‘guru’.  This all lead to the marketization of the New Age Movement.  Yes, one might suppose it a good thing that the colossal forces of Capitalism could help in advancing an enlightened perspective, but at the same time, we must wonder how much actual ‘enlightened perspective’ can actually get through such a market-based popular opinion based set of dollars and cents filters.  Then we have what troubles me the most, and that is the insularity of what we can call the New Age Echo Chamber where there is nobody, and I am talking about all of the “experts”, who seems to be expected to demonstrate the truth of any assertion, but only needs to show that some previous New Age expert-author had said the same thing before.  So all the New Age Truths simply circle back upon themselves, solipsistic tautologies, with new assertions anchoring their support upon older assertions.   For instance, in regards to the Kundalini, everybody is still parroting Charles W. Leadbeater’s pamphlet, “The Chakras”, but the guy was never more than a hack who had had the luck to be swept up in the skirts of Madame Blavatsky, who had been the first and still the best fraud in the New Age Tradition and had carried the Theosophical Society on her broad shoulders.    But now whenever anybody has an awakening in their Kundalini and reads anything from the New Age Echo Chamber, then all their own personal and genuine observations get derailed as they attempt to make their personal truth line up with the effectively authoritarian and settled dogma of what the chakras are officially defined to be … all sourcing back to that pamphlet that Leadbeater had probably jotted out on some vacant afternoon, being pressed into a momentary fit of activity because he had already spent the last advance from his publisher and needed to submit something new before he could beg the next advance.  So our experiences of the chakras are mostly guided by our expectations, inclusive of what colors from the visible spectrum we should expect to see (!?! And why should we expect any light to be ‘visible’?) as well as ‘seed sounds’ that correspond to Sanskrit magic words, but whose pronunciation varies across India depending upon the various local patois, whereby these archetypal sounds don’t necessarily sound the same from one village to the next, but they become uniform in the West where we only have Leadbeater’s seemingly inspired word to go by (and why should energetic Sounds come across as linguistic syllables?  Wouldn’t they be more buzzy and electrical, like different tones from a keyboard synthesizer?).   I even remember nonsense from my hero Vivekananda who published a translation of Patanjali which presented detailed techniques and methodologies on how to levitate or become as hard as granite.  I myself would have been embarrassed to reproduce such a book unless I could fly the manuscript to the publisher and then break down his door with my rock-hard fist in order to get it on his desk.  As it was Vivekananda seemed only to present Patanjali, to any discerning reader, as the most time honored crank of Hindu-Vedantic Tradition.   And Vivekananda was usually very careful intellectually.  This only shows the ingrained tendency, and accepted tradition, for Spiritualists and Eastern Philosophers to think it sufficient only to quote some previous quote in lieu of any actual demonstration of validity for the ideas they present. 

 

This troubling observation was one of the reasons why I found your advent upon the scene so promising.  This is because your insights into the Kundalini could be understood to be sourced out of an unbiased and unprejudiced purity of raw personal awareness.   Well, that lasted a while, and your early videos should be archived and chronicled as being uniquely genuine.  But now, as you make more and more social connections within the new age business community (those making money and those who want to make money) you will find yourself walking and talking just like everybody else.  Where I would tend to see any difference between what you say and what Everyone Else says as a kind of proof that YOU are genuine, you are likely to see it the other way around, and then , following the herd instinct, conform in order to fit in.  You would fail… you apparently are failing… to see that that would strip you of any significance you might have had.  The World could only count on one more bird in the already vast and growing flock of vain, useless, self-seeking market-driven predatory parrots.    And you are not alone, though you do stand out from the crowd as seeming to have more of a golden diamond center.   If you track other recent Video ‘Comets’ who had started by reporting enlightenment or enlightening experiences, they tend to track along the same trajectory.   The genuine experiences drop away and we soon just have somebody else spouting astrology¹, declaiming about crystals and then flipping through decks of tarot cards.  And what does the World gain by all this New Age enlightenment?  The World is on the brink of disaster, and the New Age seems intent only upon simply stroking and preening their ‘more enlightened than thou’ egos.  If the New Age will not eventually manifest as a Collective Political Social and Economic Movement, aimed at forging and founding the first Enlightened Civilization, then it will merely continue on registering as an annoying distraction, a drain of talent and a showcase for the vanity of snot, intellectually vacant  dilettantes.   Ofcourse, Laura, you are a smart girl and I suppose you’ll soon enough realize as much.  And you are still young enough to do something about it when you do finally arrive at that realization.       

 

¹ Yes, I would willingly believe in the validity of the Astrological Assumptions, whatever they are, if I could first find any two astrologers who independently agree upon the significance of the very same celestial-planetary alignments while being able to present congruent quantitative analyses for their findings.  This problem of noticeable inconsistency in what is presented as a System was also noticed by the Medieval Monarchs who began to be suspicious of patronizing astrologers who could never seem to sing the same songs under the same stars.  Then of course we all must wonder why the night skies did not rain blood-red meteors, comets collide, and Mars appear to swallow Venus on the day that Adolf Hitler was born.  Certainly if the Constellations can’t presage the most World Shaking Events, then how could we expect the stars to be moved by the fate of the infinitesimal bugs that are the normal people that pay the Astrologers fees?      

The World Needs to Unite Against USA

I believe I had read that the operative philosophy governing the size of the American Military Forces is that they must be sufficient to for defeating all of the other military forces on Earth put together.  You know, I would think that the rest of the World might find that troublesome.  Now, yes, before the Trump Administration, the previous Presidents along with bipartisan support made what seemed like sincere arguments that convinced some other important World Powers that America was using its Military colossus altruistically in their support.  For instance, it was argued to Britain and the EU that America only wished to overbalance Russia for the sake of European Freedom, and, likewise, in Asia that overbalancing China was necessary for securing Japan, the Chinese breakaway province of Formosa and Australia.  But over time, and especially since the Collapse of the Soviet Union, when America now no longer has to pretend to be the Good Guys in contrast to the Communist Bad Guys, well, American motives are much more worrisome to the World Community.   For example, presently America seems poised for war against China over the issue of the Chinese buildup in the Sea of China, where America claims that it only wants to be able to keep the International Trade Routes open and secure.  However, the capacity of the American Navy to close any sea route in the World has not been in question since World War II.  So it is the Chinese who have a legitimate concern about America being able to shut down the Trade Routes.   Such concern by the Chinese seems to be warranted given the fact that America increasingly is using Economic and Trade Warfare against other World Powers for increasingly less and less significant excuses.  Yes, Economic and Trade Sanctions might certainly be interpreted as being only political prods, but realistically we can suppose that if Products and Services provided by one particular Nation are barricaded from the World Market, that other Nations could step in and take up the slack.  For instance, when sanctions were slapped against the sale of Iranian petrol, the price for America’s own ‘fracking’ oil spiked high enough for it to become a highly profitable venture when before the sanctions it was barely marginal.  But even when the use of Trade War is purely and sincerely political, still it must be worrisome in the sense that simply the principle of ‘Trade War’ militates against the cohesion and viability of a Global Economic System where everybody is a supposed to be a Winner.   Indeed, that kind of all-inclusive guiding principle is one that the Trump Administration has roundly rejected, and now counters by undisguisedly maintaining that America is seeking World Dominance¹.   After all, isn’t “Make America Great Again” harking back to the time just after the World had suffered the devastating double body blows of the First and Second World Wars², whereby America, whose mainland with its well fed population had remained untouched by any bomb or even a single hostile foreign bullet, was able to claim by a kind of default the honor of being “King of the World”.  America climbed to the top of its “Greatness” over the vast piles of the World’s dead.   American Manufacturers and Enterprise competed against the war-torn economies that had been stripped of their hard currencies, and where much of their industrial capacities had been bombed out, and where mostly only women survived to provide any kind of Work Force.   So when America says it wants to be great again, are they indeed arguing that all other Major World Powers should have their currencies stripped away, their industries destroyed, and their work forces decimated?  Well, we can hardly suppose Trump himself could put together such a logical sequence of thoughts, but, still, it must be troubling to the rest of the World that the Populism that brought Trump to Power in America may still exist long after Trump has been tossed out in disgrace for other lesser reasons.   America’s next Populist President, coming to power after America’s better institutions had already been shaken, may have more success in consolidating a program for implementing the destruction of the rest of the World which the American’s would see only in terms of assuring America’s renewed Ascendency. 

Yes, this presentation of America as being the World’s most immediate threat is in stark contrast to our old understandings.   America had been perceived through the 20^th Century as being almost naively Idealistic, though there seemed a perceptible evolution where Ideals became less and less substantial but where more and more cynical policies were implemented that flew the banners of Ideal Justifications, such as by especially targeting Communist Regimes where specific American Corporate Interests had a stake at the table.   But now even the pretense to  Idealism is gone, and we can see that America is taking such steps that Historically had signaled trouble before.    For instance, if we may look at Roman History, at the period of Rome’s expansion into Gaul and the Iberian Peninsula, the Roman Administrations had made themselves appealing to those whom they were invading by extending the promise of Roman Rights and Citizenship.  For instance, one story about Julius Caesar sticks with me, that after he conquered Gaul and established terms of Peace, a delegation of Gauls came down to Rome where several within their group had been attacked by a Roman Mob which apparently was still stirred up by war time propaganda or even perhaps personal animosities.   Well, Caesar, who worried more for the integrity of his Imperial Expansion then for his polling numbers in the Capital, came down hard on the side of the Gauls, which underlined to everybody in the Empire that all Roman Citizens, no matter where they lived within its sprawling expanses, were equal before the Roman Law and that receiving the status of Roman Citizenship was not just an empty charade.   So Rome grew and for a while prospered.   But add a few hundred years to History and Rome took to treating newly conquered areas as Occupation Zones where all those who could not successfully run and hide were captured and enslaved to become product in Rome’s most flourishing market, the Slave Market that fed into the Plantations, the Mines, and the Gladiator Sports and Entertainment Industries.    Then as the Rome’s Legions weakened, because there were no longer very many Roman Free Men qualified to enlist for them, the borders were hardened, and the Expansionist Ideal of making the Entire World a Land of Roman Citizens died out. Rome then only wanted to hold onto and protect their current holdings.  Well, as far as the Forces of History go, if you aren’t moving forward, then you are moving backwards.  Rome became unsustainable and it collapsed.   

Then we have the example of Athenian Ascendency after their victories in the Greco-Persian Wars.  They had set themselves up as having been the saviors of all the other Greek City States³.   We can clearly see the parallels between Athens after the Greco-Persian Wars and the United States after the Great Wars of the 20^th Century.  And like America, Athens almost immediately began to weaken its position of influence by being plainly exploitative, such as by demanding tribute and contributions from all the other Greek States for the “Common Defense” but using much of the treasure for aggrandizing Athens.  The Golden Age of Pericles was financed from every coffer in Greece except that of Athens itself.   Eventually Greece rebelled and we had the Peloponnesian War.  When we read Thucydides, who was himself an Athenian, it is difficult not to root for the Spartan League, who were themselves militaristic slave drivers.  So that is how bad Athens was perceived to be when even Sparta could look good by comparison.   Oh, incidentally, Sparta won.  But it was a pyrrhic victory.  All of the Greek States had been so severely weakened, it allowed for the ascendency of the Macedonian hinterlands which would bring forth the Alexandrian scourges from which the World still suffers today (see note 3).  

Of course, citing these two examples may actually be arguing against my premise that the World should stand up to America.  Yes, Rome collapsed, but it collapsed into a sea of Barbarism.  We would scarcely want the same thing for ourselves.  It would be like bringing down America only so the entire Global Infrastructure could be pulled down with it, which would cause a massive die-off of I would estimate to be in excess of 4 billion people.  So, no, we don’t want to get rid of the ugly Deck Chairs by sinking the Titanic.  But the example of Athens is less extreme, and perhaps it is only the fault of the Victorious Peloponnesian League in not consolidating their win by establishing a better unified confederacy with a unified military command and one distinct foreign policy in relationship to the Outside World, whereby rogue States like Macedonia could easily have been contained.  

That reminds me of America’s own Great Civil War, which was a Constitutional Crisis where the lessons learned were largely wasted because they weren’t subsequently written into the Constitution which had caused the problems to begin with.   You see, America was a federation of States that were autonomous even to the extent that the individual States kept their own Military Regiments.  And the States were permitted to indulge notions of State’s Rights, which were not explicitly rejected by the Constitution which had replaced the previous “Articles of Federation”.   The combination of States Rights with each state having its own Army invited a War between the States.  So much for the much vaunted ‘Wisdom of America’s Founding Fathers’ who should already be tainted in our regard because even back as they lived, the institution of Slavery was being renounced throughout the rest of the Civilized World.   

Of course, after the Civil War there were reforms to the Military which placed even the State Guard and Reserve Units under the Central Government’s Chain of Command.  Also, in the Army itself, recruits from every state were intentionally mixed together in order to create the sense in the Soldiers of being an ‘American’ Army.  Indeed, the social fact we have today where nearly every American sees his or her self as being an American first and a citizen of a particular State second may well be due to the fact that so many American’s throughout the 20^th Century had been processed through the ‘American’ Army.  As they said after World War I, “You can’t get the boys back on the farm once they’ve seen Paris”.  The Greater View eclipses the parochial one.  

So, perhaps we can see the World today in that same context, where America, just one state among many of the World States, has this State’s Rights fetish and has been allowed to create its own vast Army… and Navy… and Air Force… and the Marines⁴.   The World needs to come to terms with the idea that it has become necessary to unite for the sake of Collective Security.  In the Globalized World there are no longer any Outside External Threats.  All threats are now Internal and should be viewed as insurrectional and rebellious.  America wishing to go it alone and profit from the rest of the World’s loses should be viewed as an interference in commerce and as an exceptionally large instance of disturbing the common public peace.   In order to institutionalize its Unity the World must advance along several fronts.   First, the World must adopt a single currency which is not the American Dollar.  Second, the World will have to create its own Army with a unified Chain of Command.  The United Nations needs its own teeth and claws.  Third, the United Nations must be reformed, especially in regards to tossing out the Security Council with it enshrined American Veto Power.  If America wants out of the U.N., then, fine.  And the the U.N. should clear out of America in order to assure that America and Americans cannot obstruct the daily business of the U. N. Diplomats.  Move everybody and everything out and demolish the Building, so it isn’t allowed to stand as a target for American derision and mockery.  Allow the most respected Country to host the U.N, which ever Country that might be.   Fifth, institute some basis of an International Language, which a World Conference of Linguists can design, probably built from a skeleton of English, since it is already so prevalent, but cleaned up of all grammatical, syntactical and spelling inconsistencies and unnecessary complexities and elaborations.   But the Language Conference might be decide to start over fresh with a blank slate   I had read of that one ‘Constructed’ Language that was created years ago to be a Universal Language, Esperanto, and that because of its intuitive structure it was considered very easy and people could pick it up a great deal more quickly than the traditional languages that come encumbered by thousands of complexities that defy justification or easy comprehension.  One of the problems with Esperanto was that it was heedless of so much of the World’s store of what we could call “Really Cool Words and Phrases”.  Some words just have a certain ring to them, which already cause them to easily cross international boundaries.  And any designed language for be vast enough to allow for changes of mood.   I always enjoyed the quote by Charles V, “I speak Spanish to God, Italian to women, French to men, and German to my horse”.   But designing and creating a language would only be its start.  One has to let that genie out of the bottle.  No language can be a fixed standard for long.  What you teach in the schools will echo back strangely from the streets.   Regional variations will crop up.   The best that can be hoped for that by flooding the Global Media with the same exemplar uses of the New Language, people will all begin to talk in the same phrases with the same usages.   For instance, France, at the turn of the 20^th Century had still been rife with hundreds of patois from every region and people could hardly understand each other, but after just a few decades of Radio and then TV, even with the interruption of the two Wars, the French Language suddenly just unified – suddenly everyone in France was speaking French.  This is what I hope for the World, with whatever language the World decides.  But the World will need a Common Language if it is to have a Common Army without organic loyalties to certain home regions.   Even China, in regards to just itself realizes the importance of a single language and has therefore implemented a program of making Mandarin the common language of the Chinese, with its simplified ideographic script which is still a hundred times more complicated to learn than is necessary⁵.   But perhaps our most instructive example in regards to Language is India, who after tossing out the much hated and despised English Colonial Masters, nonetheless retained English as its effective Common Administrative Language, in order to assure that no single Indian State could secure an ascendency over all the others by imposing its own provincial tongue on the entire Sub-Continent.  The use of English, a language that nobody would have preferred but which was already widely known among the Bureaucratic Government Service Classes, created a Level Playing Field.   So, yes, a Global Civilization would have to do its level best to create that same kind of Linguistic Level Playing Field among all the World’s Peoples.  It would also be a huge Artistic Poetic Opportunity.  Finally songwriters would not have to strain quite so hard to come up with words that almost rhyme.  

Anyway, with just those 5 Changes we would see within just a generation or two or, three the first true World Civilization.  Maybe America could be brought into it, perhaps as reluctantly as the Southern Rebel Slave States came back into the present United States, only so they could drag their feet and foment discord for the next two centuries, or America, unless deemed to be as enthusiastic as the rest, could be cordoned off.  Maybe a Wall could be built, but for keeping the Americans in.   Then there is the problem with the American Client States, and those Nations that have traditionally been everybody else’s enemies.  For instance, Britain is both an American Client and, when one reviews European History, a seemingly relentless enemy to the Continent it floats up against.  When Britain had found it impractical to dominate the Continent with land armies, it settled into a kind of diabolic methodology of pitting the various European Powers against one another in order to keep them all weak.  Today’s Friend would be Tomorrow’s Foe according to whatever the momentary Balance of Power happened to be.⁶   Japan holds the same relationship to Asia, but is younger in its role.   Britain’s “100 Years  War” was in the 14^th and 15^th Centuries, one of the most salient events being that the English burned a French Virgin at the stake, the heroic Jeanne D’Arc.  There the English learned the high cost of fighting land battles at the terminal ends of precarious supply lines.  The Japanese only learned that lesson recently in the 20^th Century, after having brutally and callously predated all across East Asia and then being run out and back to its Island.  Almost the entire Asian Continent, for all their differences, agree on one thing, that they all loath Japan, not because they  morally and consciously chose to, but simply from a visceral response to their recent History, and are suspicious of ever trusting them again, as I suppose all Europeans must feel about England.   However, it is a healthy sign for Asia and Japan that Japan sided with Asia against America with the TPP Accords.  It is disquieting, however, that Britain has once again declared War against Europe with its rebellion against and withdraw from the EU.  Perhaps never having committed to the Euro was a sign that sinister and conniving England never had any real intent toward forging a working European Unity and only saw its EU membership in terms of assuring some high quarterly returns for a few of its big banks, and once their investments bore their profits then they could pull the plug and short-sale their way out the Continent, and make as much money going down as they did going up⁷.   But perhaps England will be saved by its ability to calculate its own advantages.  Now that it is clear that America is no reliable Patron, England might decide that going with Europe is better than going it alone.  After all, we must suppose that if the World finds the Will and Determination to stand up to and isolate America, it seems certain that America’s Faithful Clients will be isolated out also.  So Britain and Japan have choices to make.   I would be afraid that Israel is inseparably married to America whether it likes it or not⁸.  However, I shouldn’t assume that Israeli Politics is as monolithically conservative as I have been portraying it, though I should wonder how any Jew whose family was not in Palestine prior to the Zionist surge that started in the mid-nineteenth Century can have the balls to claim a right to take up Palestinian Land with the argument that it is their own ancestral heritage, even while they still speak their Hebrew with a Yiddish Accent from Amsterdam, Kiev, Brooklyn or Warsaw.   Perhaps Israel’s and Americas other Clients will grow more and more disenchanted with their Deals with the American Devil because the Terms of the Contract for their Souls has been revising less and less to their advantage.  For instance, America used to give Guaranteed Zero Interest Loans⁹ to its Clients for the Retail Costs of weapons systems that the Clients were permitted to manufacture themselves at Wholesale.   They could keep the difference between their own Wholesale costs and the Retail Prices they would charge themselves, which would be equal to whatever was written on the American checks.   This was a very popular system for the Israeli Arms Makers, and therefore the primary reason for the growth of the Pro-Israeli Lobby in America which was funded with those proceeds.¹⁰   But American Politicians under pressure from their own local Arms Dealers and Manufacturers were now stipulated in their Loan Agreements with their Clients that they buy specific Weapon’s Systems from specific American Retailers, thus entirely cutting  their Clients out of the ‘action’.  I supposed the American Arms Merchants promised to continue giving the Politicians the same ‘skim off’ that the Israelis and others had been shelling over, which has been made a whole lot easier since the Supreme Court legalized domestic bribery (see note 10).  Europe now insists that every NATO Weapon’s system must contain a certain amount of European Content.  South Korea and Japan are also bulking at America only giving away Free Weapons.  You can’t eat a Free Weapon or use a Free Weapon to buy a yacht or bid for a Matisse or a Picasso.  Oh, wait, I have heard that the Government in Afghanistan turns around and sells the free shipments of American Weapons Systems.  It’s selfish for America to think it is the only People entitled to make money off of war.  But, yes, America seems to be becoming too stingy and greedy to maintain its Client Network.  Besides, all that money presently going toward enriching the American Arms Trade is only adding to the deficit.  Sooner or later the bill for all that will come due and the American Dollar will collapse.  

Perhaps the most cogent reason why the World should take careful and deliberate steps now to isolate away from America is exactly because the dollar is certain to collapse someday.  It would be best for the World to face that inevitable crisis now, while they still have their own Markets, Economies and Currencies.  It will be far worse if they wait tobe taken by surprise later.  Remember how sudden the 2008 Economic World Crisis struck.  It happened practically overnight.

         

¹  Though Trump magnanimously concedes that every country owes it to themselves to conduct War against every other Country, even while nobody expects anybody but America to win such battles.

² I believe that future Historians will come to see World War I and World War II as a single conflict that had been suspended and put on hold in 1918 owing to the facts at the time that all of the Great Powers except America had already buried the flower of their fighting manhood, and that their civilian populations were being devastated by the Spanish Flu.  Once the Flu cleared up and another generation of young men grew up and took their places on the set, the fighting picked up again almost immediately.   

³ Though Persia was actually the more Civilized Power and probably would have been far better for overall World commerce and development. Also, had Greece at that time been put under Persian Administration it would have saved the World some centuries later from the devastating depredations inflicted by Alexander the Great, which so much weakened Persia that it never fully recovered which allowed for the Muslim Persian Conquests of the 7^th Century, where basically nomadic barbarian tribes were able to ride out of the Arabian desert and subjugate a once Great and exceptionally Moral Civilization, a subjugation that continues on to this day, though with the delusional support of even the Persian-Iranian People.  One can only shake one’s head and wonder at it.  After all, the Persians had had Zarathustra, arguably the most Moral Religious Leader in History, and they traded him for a foreign prophet that was foisted on them at the point of a Sword.  Persia had been far greater under their own Religion than they ever would be while being held as second class citizens by the Arabs.  Even today Saudi Arabia would destroy Iran if it had the chance.  Iran should respond by going back to their original Religion where World Righteousness had had its first beginnings. If they wish to continue to regard the Arab Prophet favorably, giving him the respect they think his due, well, that would be all well and good. But why do they have to renounce their own Prophet in order to bow down before another?  If Humility and Self-Effacement were the primary virtues then it would be self-evident that the Iranians are the Most Virtuous People in today’s World.  Everything in their Ancient Religion and Culture that would rightly give them a sense of pride and a warranted feeling of self-esteem, they have renounced and turned their back on, while they follow a Religion of a people who despise them and wish them all dead.  Well, I hope I am exaggerating.    

⁴ The Marines, whatever they are.  Someone needs to explain why the Marines even need to exist. We could understand the Marines back in the days when they were contingents of Troops that were used as land support for American Ships that docked in hostile ports, but nowadays the Marines are deployed in exactly the same way as the Army is deployed, and for exactly the same missions.  That goes for Seal Team Six too.  It seems that the American Military is just needlessly multiplying its Organizations, probably in order to open up Career Opportunities for thousands of duplicated Officers that aren’t strictly necessary.  If America wanted to provide Jobs on the Public Payroll, then rather than bloating the Military, more assets could go toward Infrastructure and Social Services. Also being a Medical Professional on the Public Payroll might come with less cases of Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome than being a professional mercenary who, when not inflicting outrages, is being inflicted against.  I hear that the Military is developing a new medication designed to reduce Post-Traumatic Stress.  It is a pill that soldiers take when they come back from a mission, after they have been debriefed.  The pill wipes out short term memory going back a few days, or that is what it is supposed to do… they’re still working on it.  The idea is that what a Soldier doesn’t remember won’t hurt him, and, inversely, well, unless a soldier can forget what his Country made him do, it is likely to have a terrible psychological impact on himself and the family and society he returns to.         

⁵ With the phonetic languages that have alphabets it takes only a few years to teach little children how to read any word, and then it becomes only a problem of teaching them what all the words they hear and read mean.  But with the Chinese Ideograms, being able to read words is a lifetime labor, and may account for China’s inability to attain to any high degree of manufacturing quality, as not only do their workers not fully understand the written instructions placed before them, but that we can expect that many of the engineers are also scratching their heads and wondering what certain 22 stroke words mean.  For example, we can site the Baby Milk Poisonings in China a few years ago.  Are we to believe that certain Chinese businessmen with the concurrence of their workers were able to deliberately concoct poison baby milk which would kill babies and would then be traced back to them, leading to their disgrace and imprisonment, or would it be easier to believe that some supply clerk in the supply chain somewhere got a character wrong that represented a hundred 50 kilo sacks of some kind of white powder, and since the character one clerk would trip up on was probably so obscure that other clerks would trip over it too, that it went unchecked until there were dead babies all over China.  The Chinese are not a monstrous people, but their language is a monster to learn.    

⁶  As evil as were Britain’s designs, their cunning and calculated evil may have been less damaging than America’s stupid, blundering, and clumsy evil.   You see, Britain retained no permanent ‘Client States’.  They focused on the goal of assuring that all rival powers remained equally weak.  America, on the other hand, seems intent upon creating insuperably powerful Clients which therefore become powerful enough to be threats in their own right even to America.  For instance, I can’t imagine how America could mobilize and deploy enough troops and equipment to launch a successful punitive expedition against its Client Israel.  America, in effect, created a monster.   The same process is now going forward with Arabia, the Chinese provincial island of Formosa, and South Korea.  Also, since America has sworn loyalty oaths to all of its little Clients, if any of these Countries, which are independent and autonomous Nation States, grow frenzied or feverish because of their possession of Weapons Systems they could never have procured on their own, and instigate an attack against any other significant World Power, well, America would automatically be dragged into the conflict.  Does America really want Israel or Formosa or South Korea to be able to Declare War for the United States?  America has given them the military power and the diplomatic assurances that would allow them to.  Britain, to my recollection, never made that same mistake.  Even with World War I the British were the last Great Power to get locked in by some silly alliance.     

⁷ Perhaps one of the most destructive weapons in Capitalism’s arsenal is the form of trading known as the Short Sale, or Selling Short.  It allows Capitalists to make money in declining markets.  What they do is they ‘borrow’ a block of stock equities or commodities, and then instantly sell them, and then wait for the price of these goods or equities to decline, so that they can buy them back at the lower price and return what they borrowed, pocketing the difference.  Small traders are institutionally forbidden from being able to sell short, as it would create havoc in the Market if everybody were allowed to bet profitably on the Market collapsing, and so only the largest Banks and Investment Firms are allowed to make Dooms Day Profits.   One would think that it is the larger Banks and Investment Firms that should be forbidden to do Short Selling, because it is they who are large in influential enough to cause a Crash they could make a profit from.  For instance, in 2001 when the Tech Bubble Burst and the Market lost 400 Billion Dollars in one day, people asked where all that money went.  Well, it went into the pockets of the Big Investment Houses who bought up every tech option on the Street before pushing the Nasdaq over the cliff.   Oh, one can understand a lot about a Declining Market by understanding Short Sales.  For instance, Markets seldom drop precipitously and linearly because the Short Traders have to jump in at some point, where they ‘pick their bottom’ and buy up the shares they need to settle their Short Contracts.   If many Short Traders pick about the same “bottom” then all that ‘price target selected buying’ causes a momentary leveling off, or even creates a brief climb or up-tic in the Market.   Such interruptions in a systemic collapse of a market are called “dead cat bounces”, or false floors.  I wish I had read about it first.  I had learned about it the hard way.

⁸  We can only smile when we imagine how pleased the Religiously Conservative Zionist Jews must be that their comrades in arms against the rest of the World will be a bunch of bigoted Christian Evangelicals who with one breath will glorify the descendants of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob as the Chosen People and admit that Christians might only stand a chance of surviving Armageddon and the Day of Judgment by virtue of fighting side by side with Israel, and yet they will still insist that the Jews will go to Hell for not believing in a Christ who would be willing to overlook Sin for the sake of his own self-aggrandizement.  I would suppose that the Israeli State and Media go to incredible lengths to prevent America’s Red Neck Evangelicals from finding out what many Israelis really think of them.  As for the Christian Evangelicals who suppose their alliance with the Jews in some Last Battle would in any way impress an All Mighty God who wouldn’t, by divine definition, need their help, well, these Gentile Evangelicals should get serious as to what the God of the Old Testament must have intended by making the Descendants of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob the Chosen People.  It is in their Blood Line!   These Evangelicals should have no trouble understanding that it is a Racial Distinction, but this time they are the ones who are the ‘wrong’ Race… the shoe feels tighter when it’s on the other foot, doesn’t it, Billy Bob?   Nothing Jesus ever said and nothing Paul ever said (not that Paul counts) was intended to incorporate Christians into the umbrella coverage of Jewish Chosen-ness.   Indeed, in the Book of Acts where we find mention that Paul was given a dispensation by a Council of Jewish Christians for establishing Christian Churches among the Gentiles, it was explicitly understood that there would continue to be the distinction between Jew and Gentile.  The groups were understood to be separate and in no way established a Community of Faith.  In short, the Jewish Christians did not forbid Paul from taking money from the Gentiles, a percentage of which he skimmed back to the Official Jewish Church, a fact also mentioned in the Book of Acts.   Apparently the Gentiles didn’t see or perhaps even understand the rejection implied by their limited acceptance.  Besides, they were Greeks who did not want to be Jews anyway.   If they did then they should have demanded to be circumcised immediately, but circumcision never became an issue for the Greek Christians.  So, yes, while the Christian Armies may indeed fight alongside the Jewish Forces in some Last Battle, we must suppose that some Primitive Tribal Hebrew God of War  would decide the details and the outcome, and so perhaps the Christian columns and divisions would last only long enough to be sacrificed as bait or decoys, allowing only the Jewish contingents to survive into Lasting Glory.  Anyway, if Evangelicals ever bothered to put on their Thinking Caps it would soon dawn on them that if they are not to expect to be doomed by their own World View, which classifies themselves as inferior to Jews, then they must modify their view, by evaluating their scriptures exegetically and in regards to their historical contexts.  For instance, if they don’t trust Catholics now, then why do they trust Catholics back then to have not given into the urge to make the Truth even better with some creative scripture writing?   Also, if they would just monitor how much lying and deception they tolerate in their own lives and communities, then they might extrapolate to the days of the Early Greek Church, and suppose that those people were probably not much more morally stringent than themselves, especially if they also were assured that they would be forgiven of all Sins.   You really can’t apply moral standards to people who think they are absolved of Moral Responsibility, can you?  You know, Jesus was purported to have said that “The wheat must be separated from the chaff” and yet these Christians unconditionally believe everything that is put in front of them, even material written by Greeks and for Greeks.   And, yes, being critical may not come easy for them.  For Centuries since the murderous Protestant Rebellion it has been Protestant Doctrine that every word in the Bible is the sacred Word of God, but they should come to terms with the reason for that Doctrine, which was in fact to effectively deify Paul who never in his life quoted Jesus or even directly referred to anything Jesus ever said.  Basically that ‘Word of God Doctrine’ was a Coup to supplant the Teachings of Jesus with the inventions of Paul.   One must wonder how the Evangelicals have not figured that one out.  Or maybe they didn’t want to know.  After all, Paul tells them that God forgives them of all their Sins, while Jesus expects them to act righteously and purely.  Then there is the fact that their Salvation is predicated on Jesus having had to suffer extreme tortures, humiliations and a ghastly death in order to implement it.  So to ask for Salvation one must be willing to be complicit in a horrifying atrocity.   One would think that any decent Human Being would rather jump into Hell on his own then be complicit in the torture and murder of a Good Man in in order to evade taking responsibility for his own moral choices. One must only assume that Evangelicals read very little, even out of their own Bibles, and think about it even less.    

⁹ Zero Interest Loans are actually free money.  Because one only needs to pay the interest on a loan to maintain it from going into default, effectively a zero interest loan is one that one does not even have to pretend to begin paying back because no interest ever becomes due.     

¹⁰ While Israelis could not directly contribute to American Political Campaigns, they could launder the money through American Citizens.  For instance, there was a scam in place by perhaps the best known of the American Jewish Lobby Organizations, the United Jewish something or another, and what they would do was use its phone banks to call America Jews and arrange for them to receive and then sign checks over to their Organization.  The money to cover the checks would stay in some shady slush fund and would not be transferred to under the name of the American Jew until the check was already going through the clearing process.  Anyway, knowing how both Politics and Capitalism works, the Jews funneled a significant percentage of their Weapon’s Profits to their American Political Partners.   I suppose it was the same for the other American Clients.  Oh, even the American Defense industry would have White Collar Only Dinners and pass out checks to thousands of their employees that were to be signed on the spot and endorsed  over to the local Congressional Reps and Senators.  But American Business Interests no longer have to go through such gyrations to bribe politicians, since the Supreme Court Ruling in 2016, McDonnell vs. the United States, now classifies bribery as a legitimate form of Free Speech.  But so far the Supreme Court has not ruled on the rights of foreign powers to bribe American Politicians.  I suppose it won’t be long before the Supreme Court rules in favor of allowing legal arguments to take the form of stacks of hundred dollar bills.

Collective Consciousness Moral Revolution Past and Present

As it often happens that one writing project gives one ideas for the next.  The other day I was talking about how the primary center for Humanity’s first moral distinctions came out of Persia through the Zoroastrian influences from Zarathustra, and how moral Persian influences had greatly affected that entire cosmopolitan zone including the Hebrews.   That paper was already getting quite involved and so eventually I had to cut off any further thoughts and connections and just hit the ‘Publish’ key.   But I had been doing for quite some time a great deal of thinking around the idea that there is, or could be, a tangible and accessible Collective Consciousness.   One thought I had in support of such a contention, came to me in the form that other significant Moral manifestation had been cropping up at approximately the same time that Zarathustra lived in and was expressing his own epiphany regarding Morality (that the Spiritual World was not some amoral monolith, but was distinctly divided into a Realm of Goodness and Light on the one hand, and an abyss of Evil and Darkness on the other.  Also that that the Pantheon of Gods was not so much a grouping of substantially similar Gods or Demigods, but of Angels of Light on the Side of Good and Demons and Devils on the Side of Evil.  Oh, of course the Demons do their best to appear appealing to the Humans who encounter them in Visions, but these Devils or Jinns cannot conterfeit actual Light, and so the Demons make use of polished metallic surfaces and mirror-like finishes to reflect as much light as they can.  So when appraising Spirits for their Moral Quality, one should look for Auras and Glows and intrinsic qualities of Radiance, and be very suspicious of any ‘knight in shining armor’, whose glow is only by reflected light).

Perhaps reverberating from out of the Collective Consciousness of the time we had the eruption of Greek Philosophy from out of a culture that had seemed only nasty and barbaric.  With the Greeks we had have the first Historian, Herodotus, who was also the first to ever write and speak a narrative that was often clearly morally didactic (oh, I had looked up Herodotus on line to see what I’d get and I found references to “moral relativism”.   Hmmmm.   The use of the word “moral” in “moral relativism” often does not refer to actual morality at all, that is of motivational inclinations in people either towards the Good – cooperation, empathy and a collective and civilized assistance, or towards the Bad – selfish, predatory and barbaric rugged individualism.  The phrase “moral relativism” is found in many instances to address only various social norms such as how people can properly dress, bury their dead, or which hand to use to bring the fork to their mouths, which are clearly not ‘moral’ issue.  But yes, sometimes the term “moral relativity” is used correctly.  For instance, a savage coterie of American Politicians and Government Service People believe it a virtue to torture, mutilate and dehumanize ‘enemies’(a set of policies that would assure of plenty more enemies ), a ‘moral’ stance which they have in common with some of history’s most savage Tribes of Native Americans, or the barbaric Mongol Hordes.  So yes it is a big problem for us that those who are Evil have ‘virtues’ that would make Good People shudder, which is why we need to be specific as to what we intend by the word “Morality”.)     

Also, at about the same time as the Persian and Greek Moral flowerings we had Confucius in China who did for the East what Zarathustra had done for the West, but perhaps with greater overall success.  There are two standout points regarding Confucius.  The first was that he refrained from trying to give any simple definition of Moral Righteousness, instead preferring to offer thousands of examples of Righteousness in action, which made for so many of his quotable anecdotes.  The second was his clear distinction between the Law which was merely proscriptive (all the Shall Not Does, and one can never enumerate everything that is Evil, which is why Lawyers can always find ‘Loopholes’, which in fact was the primary argument of the Confucians against Legalism even back then in an Ancient China that undoubtedly prided itself as being a Nation of Laws) as opposed to Morality which is prescriptive and affirmative.  We can see the fruits of the Confucian Influence in the high levels of Civilized Cooperation that have been demonstrated by Chinese Civilization, throughout its ups and downs.  It can be argued quite plausibly that the Moral Revolution has taken deeper root and flourished more in East Asia than in the West, where both had often been faced with barbaric reactions, which seemed to have been better resisted in the East than the West, but this may only be the fault of a Great Wall that sent the lion’s share of China’s problems to the Wild West of its day.  But, then again, the subjugation of Moral Persia by Macedonian-Greek Barbarism was well before the Wall.  So, in addition to the Eastern Hordes who found China too great a challenge, the West had and still has plenty of homegrown predators.  

Now we come to Gautama Buddha, whose lifetime may have overlapped that of either Zarathustra or Confucius, whose moral insights may have been very profound, but unfortunately their effective impact was severely crimped because an amoral Reactionary Movement set in very quickly and quashed, by co-option, the better part of his Teachings (similar to the way Paulism largely obliterated or nullified the Teachings of Jesus).  By piecing together what we can by inference, Gautama actually arrived at Morality by an indirect route.  His primary concern was in advancing a skeptical attack on Vedantic superstitions, especially the notion of Karmic Reincarnation where it is supposed that the Rich and Powerful, despite every appearance of being grasping and evil, had gotten their ascendant positions over the mass of Humanity because they had been most uncharacteristically virtuous in some previous lifetime and were therefore being divinely rewarded with births into Rank and Privilege,  and inversely that those who are born into servitude, degradation or crushing poverty fully disserve their fates as just punishments for the evil actions they had committed in prior lifetimes.  Gautama had the moral insight to see all of this as a sham and a scam for maintaining a Social Engineering biased greatly in favor of the dominant Aryan Race, that is, the Brahmins who hogged all the high positions at the time.   Buddha’s essential Teaching was therefore NOT that one had to go through any elaborate practices to transcend the hamster Wheel of Reincarnated Lives, but that people only had to realize that there was not any hamster wheel of rebirths to begin with.  If people would only shake off the Pro-Aryan Superstitions they would realize they were free and liberated already.  But Gautama recognized that the idea of Karma, in that it would promote Cooperative Behaviors over those that were purely selfish, could not be rejected entirely out of hand without substituting some moral injunction in its place.  So Gautama took the hocus pocus out of ‘karmically’ driven morality and simply advocated for “Right Living” as a Moral Duty or an Obligation to the Greater Collective Life, and not just as a means for attaining some semi-sensual Nirvana Enlightenment Experience, that is, some bliss-filled borderline orgasmic ecstatic swoon (though who doesn’t like a good rush every now and then?  There are lesser things I would pay a hundred bucks for).   

These separate pop-ups of Moral Awareness, all occurring simultaneously, in the geological sense, indicate positively for the presence of a Collective Consciousness.  But does this Collective Consciousness do the Influencing or is it in fact the Thing being influenced?  Does the control come from above or below?   

I’ve dealt with the issue before that there would have to be a distinction between a useful Collective Consciousness and a more all-embracing Consciousness of All Things which would be too much of a data overload and leads to Unforgettable but Indescribable experiences, what they call “ineffability”.   Collective Consciousness would have to have some mental and psychological compression, filtering, and organizing principle that is Species Specific.  I think we have that kind of Mental Psychological distillation of the Collective Consciousness in our dreams and visions of Angels or of the Pantheistic Gods (who are the ‘angels’ in the Persian sense).  You see, the Angels are unmistakably anthropomorphic (that is, they look like and relate to human beings).  Their concerns are for Human Beings and Human Societies.   This selection and focus within all the possible Life Consciousness Data would be very helpful if any human being could experience some kind of a comprehensible interaction with the Collective Consciousness.   Imagine experiencing  the Collective Consciousness only to be overwhelmed with the concerns of every bacteria, cockroach, corporate leader and right wing talk show host?  

Often I wonder whether it is correct to talk about the ‘Next’ Step in Moral Evolution when perhaps I should be acknowledging that the real push should be in supporting the Moral Revolution that is now more than 2500 years in the making but has still to consolidate its gains.   Yes, Modern Societies do have a certain level of cooperation, as no society can exist without some cooperation, but often the forces of Barbarism sweep back to the fore and willing cooperation is supplanted by forced subjugation.  We can see this today with the insight that the vast majority of Wage Slaves in the World would likely abandon their Jobs in a millisecond if the Ruling Class of Predatory Huns and Barbarians did not arrange to have starvation, homelessness, social ostracization and the withholding of health care as a kind of Apocalyptic Four Horseman alternative to reporting to work everyday.    Even in the individual workplaces, the Bosses try to replace the moral-social manifestations of Cooperation with ‘friendly’ competitions, which only go to show what the Bosses understand and don’t understand.  

So yes, I believe that our present Evolution cannot be separated from the First Moral Revolution.  We should see our present Moral Struggle as kind of like a Second Wave that supports the First.  Also, while it is hard to argue that the most transcendent and Unknowable God is not Eternal and Unchanging, we should recognize that the Angels are step below that unapproachable Transcendence and must be simply in order to engage with Humanity and have any Providential influence.  And part of their connectedness is that they Evolve side by side with us.   The Angels of today certainly have a more evolved outlook then those of the 5^th Century B.C.   Those of us who look for our Religions in Ancient Texts, even the Pre-Moral ones (Pre-Babylonian Captivity Hebraic, Vedantic and all of their New Age derivatives) should realize that not only has our Human Development evolved a long way since then, but that even Heaven above has evolved.   The Material and the Spiritual must be Evolving Together, no?  “As above, so below”, yes, but it is also very unlikely that Men and Women should ever develop higher moral scruples than even the Angles in Heaven without being immediately emulated for it.  We could therefore expect that any unique Act of Human Kindness would inspire even the Angels to a higher moral vision.  

Kundalini True Discernment Vs New Age Faith Vs Hope

I’ve been following the vlog of a young woman who experienced a Kundalini Awakening a few years back, Vanessa Ooms.  Apparently a Kundalini Awakening can be very life-disrupting.  She has gone from an almost ecstatic bubbling exuberance in the beginning to a gloomy sullenness, and her tone is often carping and sharp (hmmmm, not that I am claiming to be any Mr. Sunshine).  For about a year recently she seemed stuck in a negative social context with herself dropping old friends and old friends dropping her or least growing distant and critical.  She seemed to feel persecuted and isolated and struggling to deal with that.   Given her collapsing social circle she had only her own intellectual Inventory to fall back on which she must have felt so insufficient that she reached out for more mental content.  This got her caught up in the New Age spider web.  Her Page is cluttered with the stuff and her most recent vlog was entitled “The Law of Attraction” which she said was inspired by some new generic New Age author she had just found.  She was basically declaring that she was now reduced to being some non-entity’s New Age parrot.   

 

This is all very disappointing for me.  You see, I wanted to believe that the Kundalini would bring some kind of Light of Truth.  But poor young Madame Ooms, even after what describes objectively as an entirely genuine Kundalini Awakening, is simply now circling the drain and is well on the way to becoming totally insignificant.  Of course, such is not the necessary outcome of a Kundalini Awakening.  At roughly the same time another young woman, Soulful Toz, had a Kundalini Awakening.  But her life situation was significantly different. She was with a very wide well educated and well-traveled social circle that gave her plenty of support, even at times when her personality seemed entirely imploded and she could only manage to stare at the walls with her mouth hanging open – for days on end.  It was the Nightmare Worst Case Scenario of Transcending the Ego.   Nothing inside of her was left in charge.  But her friends made her eat.  Her friends brushed her hair, made her brush her teeth, and made her change her cloths once a week whether she needed too or not.  Anyway, her personality, given the exemplary social context she live in, came back brilliantly re-organized.   Rather than stewing in isolation, she traveled the World, and her series of vlogs goes on like a travel log.  One can imagine all the intellectual influences that come her way at this time.  Now Madame Toz is doing extremely well, and my only complaint with her is that she may have become too normalized, and I would wish her to be more of an activist.  So a morose self-isolating paranoia, as per young Madame Oom, is not Kundalini’s necessary outcome.

 

But that still leaves me with my disappointment.  If the Kundalini does not present a Vision of Truth, well, what does it do?  Oh!  I think I once got an answer for that in a dream.   I was in a large field where I used to take walks when I was a child, and this woman who was singing and playing guitar came walking by.  She was extremely coarse, round in all the wrong places, and ugly, but her playing and singing was angelic.   Then a group of young men happened by (it seemed very busy for an isolated grassy field) and they were all pointing and laughing and ridiculing this lady.  That irritated me no end and I turned on them and snapped with a snarl in my voice that they should all shut up and listen and they’d hear the loveliest song they ever heard.  Apparently my response triggered the dream’s denouement.  The dream scene of the Field flashed away and that Lady was now standing very near me, facing me, looking me in the eyes and she said “The Faculty most worth Cultivating is the Faculty of True Discernment”.  Then suddenly I was transported into a moonlit arbor where a very beautiful Goddess Diana, the patron Goddess of the Hunt, was strolling amongst the trees.  Then a proud, arrogant, and undeniably good looking hunter came along and decided to flirt with her by bragging about himself.  He said that he was out hunting but that he was so skilled with the bow and arrow that he felt it was not giving the poor animals a chance.  Without saying a word she pulled a very crooked and malformed arrow out of her quiver and loaded it into her bow.  She pulled back the string, and looked away from where the bow was pointing, even closing her eyes, and let the arrow fly off into a nearby bush.  She then walked over to the bush where we could see the end of the shaft and the feathers sticking out, and she retrieves the arrow, and on the very end was a dead grouse.  She turns towards my Point of Perception and says “Chance? Nothing happens by chance.”

 

Now, this dream, or dreams, but they came as a unified couplet, came after my own Initiations into Kundalini by a few years.  Apparently what the dream was telling me was that the Kundalini brings no positive Truth, but it does enable the capacity to Discern the Truth, and the methodology for exercising and strengthening this capacity for Discernment is the presumption that there is a Truth behind everything that occurs.  Yes, some things are in fact random, but the constant practice of seeking the Meaning in Things will “cultivate the faculty”. 

 

I took that dream to heart and over the years I have found that I did indeed seem to be possessed of the Faculty of True Discernment.  It was not so much that I would ever think of or get some vision of the Truth, but that I would Know the Truth when I saw it or heard it.  But, perhaps more importantly, in the absence of the Truth, I would experience a Doubt Sensation.   Indeed, decades ago I came across what is now an obscure book of Zen Teachings by Huang Po which had several stand out elements which got my attention.  He talked of the importance of the Doubt Sensation – that one arrives at Enlightenment by a practice of clustering and intensifying Doubt, which he describes as a tangible feeling in the forehead – what many people today would take for a headache.    In Kundalini parlance, it is an open Ajna Chakra.   Anyway, what we can take away from Huang Pu is that by short circuiting Doubt by clinging onto a Faith, as a drowning man will clutch at a straw, we are doing exactly the WRONG thing in our pursuit of Enlightenment.  For the Faculty of True Discernment to kick in and work for us, we need to be able to first of all know when certain things are NOT true.   The Discernment of the Truth works in two ways – positive affirmations of the True, and negative denials of the Not True.  There are the rare ‘eureka’ moments when we  come across something and we Discern it to be True, but then there is almost everything else in our social and intellectual discourse which elicits Doubt.  We would be doing away with more than the better half of the Faculty of True Discernment if we shut ourselves off from Doubt.  And often this is what the New Age recommends, claiming that doubt is negativity and we need to be positive about everything.    For instance, our Madame Oom, with her parroting of the old worn out “Law of Attraction” chestnut, she is telling us that by admitting Doubt we are attracting the Doubtful.  But Huang Pu would say she has it all wrong.  One can only arrive at the Truth by first actively rejecting all that is not true, and that is a heck of a lot that needs to be rejected.  To go through the Forest we need to get past all the Trees.

 

Yet when we look at the New Age Intellectual Infrastructure it is largely based on Faith, which is the diametric opposite of Doubt.  And this New Age stress on Faith seems to source directly from Paulist Christianity’s emphasis on Faith that was most distinctively found in Post Reformation Protestant Christian Doctrine.  Here it is appropriate to look more closely at the origins of this concept of Faith.  Paul was the first significant proponent of the Faith Idea and so we need to put Paul into his proper context.   The most important thing to know about Paul was that he was not a follower of Jesus, but he was the founder and head of the Greek Mystery Religious Sect that co-opted the fame of Jesus of Nazareth.  To understand Paul’s disproportionate influence over ‘Christian’ Doctrine one only has to realize that within 40 years of the crucifixion of Jesus, Judea was marched upon by a pincer movement of several Roman Legions and Jerusalem was completely razed.  You see, Jews throughout the Roman Empire had over the previous years gone into insurrection where wild blood lusting Jewish Mobs had committed vast genocides upon various Greek Communities throughout the Empire – millions of victims were killed and even entire cities and regions had been entirely depopulated by the massive slaughters.  So the Roman’s aim in marching on Judea and Jerusalem was to eradicate the threat – to kill all Jews who could not run and escape from out of their reach, out of  Roman jurisdiction.  Well, the True Followers of Jesus were after all Jewish and so they were either all slaughtered or they scattered and fled to Damascus and points Eastward.  That left only the phony derivative Greek Mystery Sect founded by Paul to represent ‘Christianity’ and Jesus to later ages.  Paul is largely thought to have limited his influence to only his Letters which are contained within the New Testament, but all of the 4 Gospels had been either written by avowalled Paulists or they were edited, amended and appended by avowalled Paulists.  Perhaps the only Biblical Record of what Jesus really taught is the Sermon on the Mount, cited by only one of the 4 gospels.   You can find it in Mathew Chapters 5 thru 7.

 

We can acquire a great deal of insight into Paul’s Doctrine if we come to realize one fact, that in all of Paul’s writings he never quoted Jesus even once, and not once did he ever refer to anything Jesus ever said.  He did not even bother to lie and make things up.  He simply turned the discourse away from Jesus and limited Doctrine to what he could make up on the spot.  And it is clear that Paul’s Doctrines change from letter to letter depending most probably one what he believed would most appeal to the target demographic he was addressing at each point in time and place.  

 

 However, when you place Jesus into historical context, we find that he was from out of what then was a recent development in Hebrew Religiosity – Religion for the first time in Human Evolution encompassed a Moral Vision – it was the Invention of the Moral Distinction between Good and Evil.  The Persians had been the avant garde in that respect, with Zarathustra being first to equate God and Religion with Morality (dividing the Polytheistic  Pantheon of various Pre-Moral Gods and Goddesses into two camps – the Angels on the Good Side of Light, and the Demons on the Evil Side of Darkness.  Incidentally, the Hindu Pantheon got really trashed, whereby the Gods of Hinduism show up as the Devils of Zoroastrianism).   This Persian Zoroastrianism had a profound influence on the Hebrews.  Adam and Eve, the Garden, the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil are all straight out of Persia.     Then recent to the time of Jesus himself we have in Hebraic Tradition the actual first use of the term “Messiah” to refer to the Persian King, Cyrus the Great, the first Righteous King (and I hope not the last).   Jesus was greatly impacted by this Evolution toward Morality.  So we can see in his Sermon on the Mount a very challenging demand for the highest moral standards, in both conduct (that had previously been covered by the Law) but also in regards to thought and disposition.  Morality had to be all pervading.  The Kingdom of Heaven that Jesus spoke of was to be reserved only for those who were worthy of entering it – the Righteous.  If one looks exclusively at the actual Teachings of Jesus, there is no ‘Salvation’.  Sinners would not be allowed into any Heaven of Light and Goodness because just their presence would pollute and darken it and it would no longer be much of a Heaven of Light and Goodness.  Wherever Sinners go, that is by prima facie logic what we would more correctly refer to as Hell.  It can be compared to what Groucho Marx said about Country Clubs, that he would not wish to belong to one that would take himself as a member.   So if Heaven is full of Sinners, well, no thank you.   But the vast majority of Christians don’t seem to have a problem with it.   

 

Perhaps we should make it more clear exactly what Paul wanted his people to have Faith in.  To keep it short, what Paul did was to take the Moral Religious Revolution of Hebrew-Persian origin and transport it to Greece where they reacted to it by stripping out all of the moral requirements, and returned everything to the Pre-Moral Religious Mystery formulas familiar to the Greeks where the Ultimate Religious Experience was mostly about getting really drunk at orgies.  Sins were forgiven, cancelling out the need for Morality, and Eternal Life attained by the easy formula of getting baptized (and Secular Catholics, outside of the Religious Orders of Monks and Nuns, likewise believe that Salvation comes by simply participating in the Sacraments).  In one of Paul’s secondary doctrines, Salvation and Eternal like could also be obtained by avowalling the belief in Jesus as Divine and therefore able to remit sins.  It is interesting when we consider that they found it necessary to make Jesus equal to God Almighty because it suggests that it was understood that God Himself would never consent to any idea smacking of Free and Condoned Sin.  Also notice that people were only required to make the declaration of faith, that is, they only had to say the words.  No one then ever expected anybody to truly believe such nonsense.  Faith and Belief are two different animals.  It was simply a Magic Formula that appealed to the Greeks then and still has a massive appeal today.  It seems that next to nobody bothers to ponder the Moral Implications involved with telling people it is a Core Religious Principle that they are not held to the slightest Moral Responsibility.   There is even the Doctrine of Original Sin, which we can’t blame on Paul himself, but on his greatest advocate, the satanically clever ‘Saint’ Augustine.  The Doctrine of Original Sin sets forth the notion that people are not only expected to sin, but that sin is inevitable, and that the only Unforgivable Sin is to maintain the possibility that a man might be able to refrain from sin by using will power and a pretense to moral fortitude.   Augustine had invented the Doctrine of Original Sin in order to prosecute a rival Bishop, Pelagius, whose crime was to suggest that Old Men, who know when the impetuous flames of their youthful inclinations have died down somewhat, should make the effort to live righteously.   What we need to carry away from this tale, is that according to Modern Christian Doctrine and Beliefs, Pelagius would still be wrong.  We should therefore all be frightened of our Christian friends and neighbors.  The more religious they are the more we should depend upon them to stop at nothing, and to sin against God and Man as though they thought it some kind of sacred duty – to absolutely prove their faith in Christ’s infinite capacity for  forgiveness (and  by implication, God Almighty’s total surrender of His Heaven to the Pall of Evil).    My only conclusion would be that Paul was the Anti-Christ and Augustine his right hand man, or I should say left.  

 

But for our present purposes we need to appreciate why Paul created this notion of Faith in the first place.  You see, Paul had his own ideas about the Religion that he wanted to sell and its primary requirement was that it would have to be both attractive, and easy.  He must have felt that Jesus with his strict moral requirements was chasing away too large a share of the Market.  However, this was a cosmopolitan period and region that Paul lived and dealt in, and so his target audience was likely to have heard about what Jesus actually said, did, and about what the True Apostles of Jesus were teaching and able to accomplish.  They probably heard a lot about the idea of the Holy Spirit and its attributes.  So Paul’s devotees were probably given to complaining that Paul’s Church was exhibiting none of the known attributes of the Holy Spirit.   Paul responded in two ways, first, he redefined the Holy Spirit to mean that it was only a kind of a feel good sensation and that it should encourage them toward the normal social virtues, especially in regards to being open to giving freely to others (particularly to himself), and secondly he blamed the people themselves for their not having the Holy Spirit (and here he meant the real Holy Spirit – the Miraculous Holy Spirit that they had heard so much talk about).  It was because they lacked Faith.  The Paulists even rewrote much of the gospels so they could put the same words into the mouth of Jesus.  This created an obvious contextual contradiction.  We are presented with Christ’s ability to take thousands of people totally by surprise with inexplicable Miracles, and then almost simultaneously we are asked to believe that Jesus insisted that none of these miracles would have been in the least bit possible unless every one of those thousands of people had absolute diamond pure Faith that the ‘Miracles’ had been entirely possible all along.  It’s a contradiction, right?  A True Miracle does not happen BECAUSE of Faith.  A True Miracle happens Despite Doubt.   Paul’s Doctrine of Faith can then be seen as a reduction to the dynamic of  “Blaming the Victim”.   We can imagine Paul telling his clients “It only seems like I am taking all of your money for nothing but you would have plenty of results except that you do not have enough Faith”.   But Jesus would have been too busy feeding the masses with multiplied fishes and loaves, healing the lame, cleaning the lepers and giving sight to the blind.  Even Paul’s devout followers cannot site even one Miracle that they can attribute to Paul.  By current Vatican Policies regarding the issuing of Sainthood Status, Paul would be rejected at the very first screening.  Not only did he not have any miracles under his belt, but he was known to be nasty, ill-humored, violent, bad tempered, greedy and mendacious, which were all attributes widely accepted as natural enough in the Greek World in which he flourished, but not what we would nowadays think characteristic of a Saint.  European Catholic Civilization had discerned this ‘truth’ about Paul and therefore Paulist influence declined and the influence of the Moral Religious Order ascended.  But the Protestant Rebellion brought Paulism back to its old zenith.  Protestants are supposed to read their Bibles, and you would think they would notice what a prick Paul is.   

 

That brings us to the New Age. Firstly, the “New Age” is a serious misnomer. The origins of what we now refer to as the New Age Philosophy and Spirituality source out of the seminal writings of Madame Blavatsky and Anne Bessant (who, taken in the Artistic and Literary sense, wrote at levels quantums above the 4^th grade level New Age pulp being turned out nowadays.  You know, if people want to read that New Age crap, they might as well read the highest quality crap that’s available, and you can’t find better than Blavatsky and Bessant).  Both Blavatsky’s and Bessant’s Ancient Wisdoms jump back to before the Evolutionary Leap of Moral Consciousness arose into Human Consciousness.  Apparently the 5^th Century B.C. was not Ancient enough for either of them, are perhaps in deliberate reaction against the strict Moral Standards of the Victorian Era, their snub of the basic concepts of Good and Evil was intentional.   So the New Age Movement grew out of Pre-Moralism and has been stuck there ever since.  We can see this in what so often are the New Age ‘crowd pleaser concepts and sales pitches’ – “Attract Wealth” which translates to encouraging predatory greed and mendacity in Business People, and “Attract Relationships” which is code for how to become a successful sexual predator. The New Age also has a very dark side with those who attempt to amass Personal Power with the deliberate and focused intent on ‘Weaponizing’ it, through spell casting, hexes and curses. One of the biggest names in 20^th Century New Age Thought was Carlos Castaneda who basically issued manuals for sorcery. Compared to that, the Pre-Moral Greek Religious Ideal of ‘getting really drunk at orgies’, is relatively benign and harmless. The New Age Doctrines are in many ways a return to pure Tooth and Claw.  It’s unfortunate that so many people who find themselves with newly Awakened Kundalini use the New Age as their first stop for ‘grounding’ themselves.  Hmmmm, ‘Grounding themselves”… strange expression.  They should prefer to take wing and Fly.  

 

 Anyway, I had been often curious about what happens at New Age Seminars… you know, how New Age authors write books and then go on book signing tours, and at each whistle stop, they contract with various local hotels or resorts to conduct Weekend Seminars, which are the real money makers for those with New Age Business Plans.   So I went to a few of these Seminars and time and time again the same issue would come up with people saying in effect “Your stupid ideas don’t work. I think you are just a big Rip Off”.  The answer back would always be along the lines of “it’s all your own fault you stupid idiots.  You just need Faith.  Look at me!  It works great for me.  I got plenty of money (well, plenty of other people’s money.  Hmmmm, well even that must be a lie, because nobody with a lot of money would be on the road, hustling suckers and living out of a suitcase)”.  Oh, by the way, these Seminars can really get bazaar.  I went to one Seminar on Channeling and found out the big secret to channeling – that the Inspiration comes when you just start Making Stuff Up as you go along.   So the New Age Secret to Channeling Inspired Truth is to be a well-practiced Liar… well that may be a bit harsh.  Let’s use a euphony and call it ‘Story Telling’.  But it was well worth my 300 bucks to be made privy to that particular Truth regarding foundational New Age Philosophy.

 

Anyway, now let’s take a look at the Law of Attraction.  When you think about what that must mean you get the idea that the Universe is Structured entirely around each Individual, and it is the Attitude and Expectations of each Individual that pulls all of the Universal Strings.  Well, the contradiction there is that not EVERYBODY can be the single most central point of the Universe.   In all of the Moral Mystical Religious Spiritual Traditions we have the notion of opening up to the Higher Truth and to a Collective Understanding which is transcendental to the Individual Self.  We are expected to get beyond  Ego-Centric notions.   I was once told in a visionary dream that “Birth is but an illusion and Christ is the Life in All Things”.  As far as the Higher Truth is concerned THERE ARE NO INDIVIDUALS.  There is only One Great Life Force.   In that sense we can see that the Doctrine of Law of Attraction is an appeal to our delusional sense of separateness.  Basically it appeals to the animal impulse for seeking rewards and gratifications.  If we are looking for the Next Big Evolutionary Step for Humanity, we won’t find it in the impulse for instant self-gratification.  Even my house cats are more evolved than that.   But perhaps young Madame Ooms, who seems to have grown bitter and suspicious of her social circle, and who undoubtedly has suffered a lot because of it, is due some simple animal satisfactions at this point just so she can keep up the will to continue going forward.  But I certainly hope she doesn’t get stuck at that level.  And I would hope that the Kundalini’s Doubt Sensation will be too overwhelming for her to be able to override with fabricated and artificial notions Faith in all that New Age hocus pocus and snake oil promises.  I think that will be so.  In that recent vlog she freely acknowledged how silly and cliché she must have sounded.  Yeah! That was her Doubt Sensation talking loud and clear.       

 

Now let us take a look at the concept of Hope.  A lot of people think they require Faith because they see it as a Positive Idea, despite the real world fact that Faith is always cited in the Negative, in the sense that Lack of Faith is why we never get anything we want.   Faith is Supposed to Get us Everything, but the catch there is that it just so happens that nobody ever has quite enough of it.  For instance, of the millions of people who have dropped hundreds or even thousands of dollars on New Age clap trap, we can point to no success story beyond the ordinary – people who fish every day will eventually catch a fish; people who practice at being convincing liars and swindlers will eventually get good at deceiving people and make a place for themselves with the Local Chamber of Commerce;  and people who constantly  troll the clubs until closing time will eventually get laid and find the romance they had been seeking.  If people want anything more than that ordinary kind of stuff, Faith is not how they will get it but the purported lack of faith will be sited as the reason why they don’t.   This applies especially in regards to people’s honest and worthy desire for Enlightenment.  It has often been mentioned by many of those who belonged to vast Religious Spiritual Organization run by this or that New Age Guru, that in the decades in which they were actively involved, they never met a single Member or Devotee who attained Enlightenment… and the more they got to see of their Gurus, the less they seemed to be as Enlightened as they claimed to be.   The conclusion is obvious.  All that Faith multiplied by millions was good for nothing. 

 

But don’t we need something positive in our lives.  Well, yes.  Hope. Nobody will ever throw hope back in your face as an accusation, as they do with faith. Faith makes promises it can't keep.  Hope is above all that.  Hope is the quintessential life affirming attitude.  Hope is never giving up.  Hope is believing that we will always find a way.  Hope is crawling blind through a smoke filled burning house and reaching up to feel for a door handles.  Hope is stopping to help somebody out of a free-fire machine gun kill zone, and then, once clear, going back to help somebody else.  Hope is in advancing an Idea for an entire lifetime and not getting anywhere with it but still believing that long after you’re dead, somebody else will be carry on with your same Idea or something even Better… that the Idea, or I should say ‘Ideal’, has a Life of Its Own.  So Faith just trips us all up and ends up betraying our trust in it.  What we really want and what we really need is for everybody to Hope for the Best.