Conscious Being Alliance

       [Contribution to the Reimagining Society Project hosted by ZCommunications] 

When we talk about "re-imagining society" it seems we need to first articulate the boundaries of such a project to mean re-imagining western society. I have a fantasy which, translated into action, might be synonymous with this. I call it a Conscious Being Alliance.

CONSCIOUS is a prerequisite to both BEING and ALLIANCE. One has to be awake, aware, conscientious. How does one find awakening? How does fear control our choices? How does propaganda control our subliminal desires and everyday actions? Where in the hierarchies of oppressors (oppressing others) and victims (being oppressed) do I reside? Where do you reside?

BEING is a way, a path. It is both a noun, and a verb, and it is a cosmological state of existence. CONSCIOUS BEING then is a noun, as in HUMAN BEING, but CONSCIOUS can also be interpreted here as an adjective defining a way of BEING, where BEING is a verb. CONSCIOUS BEING stands in sharp juxtaposition to UNCONSCIOUS being. We all suffer greater or lesser states of consciousness. Our consciousness can be raised and lowered. My experience in the world is that many people do not actively pursue an awakening of their SELF, though many certainly do.

ALLIANCE is a joining, a working together, a finding of common ground, a submission to greater good and relinquishing of control, a forging of strength. It is a subordination of the self to higher forces. It is also a position of power, the flourishing of the individual within a community, a tribe or a network, based on a higher good. Alliance is SOLIDARITY.

 

THE SITUATION OF SELF

To begin with, I've read many of the opening essays of this project, and I have a hard time getting through them. Many seem irrelevant, out of touch with reality, or too theoretical; others appear to be continuations of some ongoing discourse, or the defense of some position or other, where the average reader is assumed to know all the ins and outs of a protracted discussion they (likely) have not been part of. Some appear to be myopic, others ethnocentric.

I feel that many of the essays don't speak to the common people, to practical needs, and some seem to skirting around obvious realities. Of course, people may say the same about this essay. While I respect the extent to which such interpretations may indeed reflect my own unconsciousness, I also recall the scathing criticism of Fanon.

"It so happens that the unpreparedness of the educated classes, the lack of practical links between them and the mass of the people, their laziness, and, let it be said, their cowardice at the decisive moment of the struggle will give rise to tragic mishaps."[i]

If there were a decisive moment, it would be now, but it has been now for quite some time, and decisive to the point of the murder of millions of people.

I understand little about Marxism, never studied it, but I have been declared a Marxist leftist. I spent time in prison, so I am qualified to speak about prison reform, but I also received a full legal pardon from Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis and, earning a Master's in Electrical Engineering, worked for the aerospace and defense sector. Much later I worked for the United Nations.

Everyone is a critic. By some people's standards my (expunged) record disqualifies me on moral grounds to speak about anything at all, while my collaboration with the UN provokes a similar reaction, but from a very different set of (anti-establishment, anti-imperialism) people.

I, I, I.

I am one of the only subject I am really qualified to speak with absolute certainty. But it seems the irony (‘i' again) of this statement will be lost on many readers, because our ‘dead' culture has so many taboos and contradictions regarding the positioning of the self that many or most people quickly succumb to little personal fascisms on reading the "I" in anything.

Me, me, me. It's all about me. Isn't it?

My iPod, my iPhone, my iTunes, my FACEBOOK profile. Will you FRIEND me? (Not after this essay.) Why do we call it YouTube and not iTube when it is merely another nihilist project meant to Broadcast Yourself ^TM ?

How about u-Boob and i-Boob? More and more we can witness how people in western ‘society' have completely lost the capacity to think for themselves. Everything is becoming standardized or computerized. Maps and mapping—dashboard GPS or GIS devices—have taken over people's lives with out any requisite understanding of what is being lost. People don't miss what they never had, and youth today—no matter all the devices to ‘find' or position one's self—couldn't be more fucked up in their interpretations of social responsibility and the meaning of their lives.

Who fucks up youth? Society...

The absolute bondage of student loans is indeed the death knell of our culture because it is the killing of youth, freedom, truth, creativity and the subsidizing of permanent warfare, on all levels, from the mis-education in the university to the every day bondage created by the debt.

Are we a ‘dead' culture? Or a cyborg society?

 

OBLIVIOUS INDIVIDUALISM

It is no longer necessary that anyone have any grounding in personal experience (fact) of a subject to become an expert, or an arbitrator, about it and anyone who makes enough noise in this world, deploying all the new electronic mediums and technologies, can rapidly gain a following, a dedicated readership, no matter how fallacious are the arguments or the "facts". Fiction breeds upon fiction until even the manufacturer (journalist, editor, blogger, writer, speaker) has transformed their fiction, in their own mind, into undeniable fact.

The U.S. Government should not only have a Department of Peace but a Department of Intuition. Because everyone can hear the truth if they quiet their mind long enough. Instead we have perpetual noise generators all around us, drowning out the obvious truths, perpetuating the obvious lies.

White men need to shut up, and (recognizing the hierarchies of oppression) plenty of white women too, and I find it perfectly reasonable for those people attuned to the expropriation of space to demand it. However, in articulating the problem we become it. That is why obliviousness and consciousness must be radically addressed.[ii]

We need to hear from the people involved in the struggles in Congo and Peru, Indonesia and Mongolia. We need to embrace the leadership and wisdom and passions and experience from the Rest, and reverse the direction of exchanges from South to North, from the Rest to the West.[iii] We don't need any more laziness or excuses why this is not possible or practical.

We need people capable of both listening and hearing.

We live in an era of pronouns that greatly makes the "we" of doing anything impossible, unless "we" speak about oppression, which "we" don't honestly do, even though "we" all participate in it.

I can cite the very poignant contemporary examples of the Save Darfur Movement, the Save Tibet campaign, or the Raise Hope for Congo initiative, all of which are examples of massive co-option of {1} popular discontent (about someone's unmitigated suffering); {2} popular sympathy (for some victim somewhere); and {3} popular compassion (we all want to help).

All of these campaigns have been presented and re-presented to the western news-consuming public by the corporate propaganda system, and this corporate propaganda filters its way down and infects virtually everyone—or, well, it virtually infects everyone as the new mediums proliferate faster than society can accommodate or assimilate them.

Of course, this is definitively NOT true of social movements elsewhere, but we are so depressed by propaganda that we don't have any consciousness that an elsewhere exists. Meanwhile, elsewhere, Sudanese Christians (e.g.) adopt the language, modalities and prerogatives of the Empire in the struggle to salvage an identity from the wreckage of Western predatory "humanitarianism" delivered to them as a byproduct of decades of covert Anglo-American-Israeli war in Sudan.

What is ‘society'? The word conjures up the scene in the Hollywood film, INTO THE WILD, where the protagonist (Chris McCandless) and his employer/drinking buddy (Wayne) suddenly start shouting: SOCIETY! SOCIETY! SOCIETY! While the mantra is obviously intended to be anti-establishment, the film is not. It is another piece of propaganda utilized to manufacture consent, manipulate consciousness and insure social control. The near complete whiting out of Hollywood's alliance with the Pentagon, for example, is another successful element of propaganda. (The film Lion King is a subversive anti-immigration work, on one level, and can be unpacked for its imperial race and gender stereotypes about Africa on other levels.)

I deactivated ‘my' FACEBOOK account because it started to take over my life. I don't subscribe to any of these new technologies of hubris and nihilism, and don't want to, but my capacity to choose is increasingly under assault: every ten minutes it seems there is some new software update with some Trojan horse of advertising hidden inside, where some purchase or other becomes compulsory. Video games are a lethal poison to children (and adults) and they bespeak the real problem of parent's not making time for their children. By spending increasingly large chunks of one's life in the virtual world the intelligence of  ‘our society' becomes increasingly artificial.

Want to re-make society? Exit the matrix. Tune out, turn off, unplug—and then plug-in to the abundance of possibility.[iv]

I agree with much of Robert Jensen's "Life in A Dead Culture." In particular, "The ultimate test of our strength is whether we can recognize not only that we live in a dead culture but also that there may be no way out."

On so many levels we are facing the need to be really honest and authentic about what is really happening and how to prepare for it. On a completely different level—reflecting the koan of all things—anything can happen, the possibilities are unlimited, yet we are constrained by our life situations and society.

Given either reality, what we can do as individuals is re-imagine, re-make and re-learn the ways we each are in the world, how we treat others, how we live and how we love. This means exploring new ways of being, finding the courage to stand strong even when we stand alone, because there will be many little battles to fight, losses to mitigate, liberties to protect. It also means making sacrifices, something people seem universally unwilling to do. Many people are in positions where sacrifices would be easy; for others sacrifices would mean honestly giving up something that is desirable or perceived to be necessary or desirable; and for those that have little to begin with, well, they make profound sacrifices every day.

Even some of us who spend our time exposing the nature of the beast will never comprehend the depth of the rabbit hole: humanity may never know the truth of historical and contemporary events due to covert operations, the cults of secrecy, the arrogance of science, document shredders. Instead of questioning these realities we—people of all political stripes—help to sanction them every time we consume propaganda.

Again the issue reverts to a contemplation of fear: people fear the ways their lives would change if they made decisions in alignment with their professed values. People perceive and fear losing—based on material realities—and fail to grasp the potential spiritual gain. No gift given is worth anything if the gift was not anyways somehow precious to the giver. Letting go is a beautiful thing.

 

SACRED TIME, SACRED SPACE

People have increasingly become slaves to electronics, no matter that the real slaves remain hidden by the new virtual technologies. To "re-imagine" society is to absolutely DEMAND an end to planned obsolescence and the perpetuation of the junk and waste culture. How do we do this? First, we organize the way people in Latin America are organizing and, second, we stop consuming.

There should be a law that forbids hardware stores from throwing away mis-tinted paint, gaining a ‘credit' by dumpstering gallon after gallon, and institutions like Trader Joe's should be boycotted out of existence for militantly guarding their dumpsters from dumpster-divers. What can be done? I saved 16 gallons of paint, and will paint a barn with salvaged dumpstered paint, and I'm happy to eat pancakes topped with real maple syrup from expensive little pint bottles—discarded because they were sticky on the outside—scavenged from Trader Joe's dumpster. Meanwhile, my neighbor has received a government grant for $50,000 to increase maple syrup production and he spent part of it on a logging skidder. The world is indeed upside-down, but we don't have to be.

When we have to possess something we want—paint, Internet connection, lover—we have to have it now. There's no room in that equation for spirit, for synchronicity, for allowing the universe to unfold into our lives the way it is destined to. This is part of our pathological relationship with Time. The corollary is that people from the West are unwilling to give anything up—and our models of selfishness and greed are infecting The Rest largely due to Western propaganda but also due to Western charity and an oblivious militant humanitarianism premised on our supposed goodness and innocence.

It's a thousand little actions in an individual's daily life choices that can make a difference in this world. Every engagement with mass media is an agreement to kill part of your self and be complicit in killing others, while every disengagement is a choice to love your self and all life.

Greed arises from the false economies of scarcity: those worthless little rocks of desire (diamonds) and tinfoil metals (gold) are only as valuable as we make them. The idea that we have to have our daily dosage of world news (read: malicious corporate propaganda) is also premised on scarcity, but at its core are anxieties inculcated by that very propaganda, especially anxieties about self-image and self-identity.

Ride a bicycle. Imagine all the excuses people utter to dismiss the bicycle as a reasonable choice for most people. Most of these revolve around privilege, convenience, and Time. People fail to understand the profound freedom brought about by reliance on a bicycle as one's predominant mode of transportation. They fail to understand the intersection of exercise with personal health and wellbeing. On the other side of the coin we have the petroleum genocides occurring all over the place, hidden from site, in many cases, by the propaganda system. Imagine the profound transformation of your immediate life potentially caused by a flat tire... you might actually be forced to stop and...breathe relaxation into your life. And maybe someone, somewhere, would survive another day because you and I didn't today participate in this nasty system.

Time!

We need a complete revision and reorganization of the ways we look at and deal with Time. For example, at first call I crafted an email response to the Re-Imagining Society Project explaining why the project was interesting to me but why I would not participate. (I changed my mind, something I like to retain control of.) Time: the deadlines and structure of the project are mapped out in the terms of the western cartography of schedules and urgency, of linear time. If we wanted to re-imagine society—or remake it—we would attack the standardization of time and space just as we—some of us—attack the process of globalization: one sprang from the other.

(It's the same with the word count restrictions. This is a phenomena with alternative media today: stories have to be short. Project Censored can't evaluate a story if its too long, no matter how censored, because student evaluators don't have time. Well, this Opening Essay is exactly as long as I think it needs to be to get my points across. Every time an editor censors my work based on its length they are killing truly independent thought.)

Of course, a redefinition of time would be wasted without redefining work, labor and leisure. Propaganda compels people to participate in a system of hopelessness and slavery. It indoctrinates people, turning them into drones. It uses stereotypes, sound bites, irrational jingoisms and outright lies to convince the Jones's that they too can rise above the (enforced) poverty of our system, if only they work harder.

It's clear that people can't simply be compelled to ‘stop working' for this system, that alternatives must be provided. On the other hand, the economics of unlimited growth translated to the household have people complaining that they can't pay the bills even as they lust over, and purchase, unnecessary technologies (SUVs, iPods, iPhones, snowmobiles, HD TVs, etc.). If people downsized their lives by rejecting consumerism and, especially, the manipulation of their desires, they could upsize their free time and their joy.

How many readers say to their self: "this doesn't apply to me" ? (It doesn't apply to me.)

There are alternative perspectives of being, radically different cosmologies. The universe is not—contrary to the imperialism of Greenwich Mean Time and the Prime Meridian—based in linear time.[v] Breathwork as a personal healing modality, for example—like ayuasca, iboga and LSD—offer the opportunity to experience what Stanislav Grof has defined as the transpersonal and perinatal dimensions of the human psyche.[vi]

Propaganda, addictions, diversions, shopping, incessant talking, travel, fucking, watching films, listening to music, driving all over the place... re-imagining society involves ratcheting down one's life to be in the NOW. It means stopping on one level, but more deeply interpreted it means redefining our ways of BEING. Existing for the sake of it. Redefining our inner selves such that we, at least, understand who WE are as individuals and what motivates us at every turn, and what our life means, and how to make it meaningful. How many people have explored the inner terrain of their psyche?

A fish doesn't know water until is discovers air. What is consciousness?

The success of the propaganda system can be gauged by the massive hysteria about issues that are, for another set of examples, irrelevant to our lives, in comparison to those that are crucial to the ecological and biological integrity of all life.

It was Jacques Ellul (Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes, 1963) who elucidated the psyche's susceptibility to the workings of modern propaganda, and it is not surprising that so many people who think they are awake are asleep. Ellul felt that even those who understand propaganda are susceptible. In other words, most of the readers and writers of this narrowly proscribed project are as susceptible to propaganda as anyone else.

People are people. We make mistakes. Some people (leftists) refuse to accept such a simple truism. They expect everyone to be impeccable, and would never apologize if they were in error, and would use someone else's honest apology against them to perpetuity. Imagine, for example, that I have recently been accused of being an agent of the U.S. government merely because I privately challenged China's roll in Africa. These are pathological behaviors, the product of pathological society.

The propensity of people to dismiss the truth is not new. Denial is a powerful force, and the oppressor—you, me, society—wants to deny its role in oppression and will offer the most obtuse internal, self-directed arguments rather than accept his/her complicity in, or benefits from, oppression.

Around 1874 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe returned from his lengthy sabbatical in Switzerland (was it?), where he formulated his holistic ideas on plants, and announced to "enlightened" (Victorian) society that "plants have a soul." Of course, even his most "enlightened" peers ridiculed Goethe (into silent resentment and a profound sadness): stick to poetry they told him. They had popularly eaten of Newton's apple, and it didn't occur to them that reductionist Newtonian science couldn't explain how the apple got up the tree in the first place (though Goethe's holism could).

Goethe's poetry applies more profoundly today than ever, to most everything we are engaged in, because society as we know it revolves around reductionism and dissolution of the sacred:

Who would study and describe the living, starts

By driving the spirit out of the parts;

In the palm of his hand he hold all the sections,

Lacks nothing but the sprit's connections.

People reject the transpersonal realm—higher dimensions of consciousness, past life experiences, cosmic consciousness—and refuse to explore anything that can't be dissected or rationally explained. (At the same time we can identify an abundance of paranoia.) We suffer from spiritual poverty in parallel with all forms of religious fundamentalism, including the most widely practiced religion: the arrogance of humanism.[vii]

In 1945, Wilhelm Reich authored his response to the same phenomenon—where arrogance and ignorance and ego amongst people who haven't much more than a shred of comprehension combine to deny the obvious truth of someone who has done the work—in Listen Little Man, which he never intended to have published. Reich wrote about projections by the common man, cast out of ignorance and fear (manipulated and amplified by propaganda). Of course, we are talking now about the Mass Psychology of Fascism (1936), another of Reich's suppressed works, and the phenomenon we are everywhere experiencing.

The fact that I have personally interviewed the survivors of the Gukurahundi—the literal translation is "the rain that washes away the chaff," a reference is to the genocidal atrocities committed by the Robert Mugabe government against the Matabele people in Zimbabwe from circa 1981 to 1989—seems to mean nothing to leftists championing the idea that President Robert Mugabe (Zimbabwe) and Hugo Chavez (Venezuela) deserve equal respect and unflinching support in the face of the more recent ongoing capitalist onslaught against them. History suddenly means nothing. Amongst some of the leading proponents of this fiction are people who have never set foot in Zimbabwe (some have never set foot in Africa). Such hubris never stopped a white man (or woman) before.

Through this narrow example I am identifying the intersection of propaganda and whiteness (people of color also support and entrench white supremacy). In The Falsification of Afrikan Consciousness, Dr. Amos Wilson wrote: "The projection of propaganda into our minds as mythology is a way of repressing truth within our own minds and within our hearts as people."

Of course, Wilson was speaking to people of color, about white supremacy, hysteria, amnesia and mental illness, about understanding propaganda such that people of color can throw off the yoke of oppression. Wilson wrote about the importance of understanding history, because false solutions will be built on false delineations of the problems we face, and our identities revolve around understanding who we are, and there is nothing the ‘system' would like so much as to keep us ignorant of our true history and herstory.

And then we have the entire humanitarian misery sector, which, again, premised on private profit, adventure and privilege of whites, and absolute misery of people of color, remains a somewhat sacred cow above reproach even amongst progressives. Why? Because so many of us are participating in the exploitation: profits, caring, fear, propaganda, denial, compassion, assumptions of superiority. All mingled together in a rich mix that paves the road to hell with good intentions.[viii] 


Our society is suffering from a massive amnesia and mental illness. I reject the idea that we all understand what the problems are—if that were true then truly ‘progressive' people would cease their consumption of commodities that make them mentally and physically sick. Yet addictions abound, left, right, center.

If you are reading the New York Times you are contributing to your own mental illness. However, to narrowly attribute the pathologies of propaganda to a single mainstream institution (e.g. NYT) is to lead the confused reader into the complex terrain of hierarchies.

There are hierarchies of oppression and hierarchies of suffering and hierarchies of privilege. The New York Times—the establishment press—is certainly at the hierarchical pinnacle of oppression. But what about magazines like Orion? In These Times? The Sun? The Nation? Mother Jones? Harper's? National Geographic? What's the link between the writer who gave us INTO THE WILD and the National Geographic as a vanguard of Western conquest? [ix]

I know one ‘progressive' who lauded the Atlantic Monthly as an example of honest, progressive, free press type stories. (This person actually works for a media accountability project.) If you are reading the Atlantic Monthly—just look at the advertising!—you are contributing to your own mental illness. Ditto the New Yorker. Indeed, every magazine uses trees and all come from forests but when is the last time you saw a magazine unpack its supply chain for its reader-consumers?

Follow the money. It always leads back to some compromise somewhere. Whether it's my personal compromise to get published or the editorial compromises not to offend readers or the institutional compromises of foundation funding. Of course, the left won't touch this one.[x]

After nearly 13 years of direct effort to raise the specter of the western—read: our—perpetuation of suffering, war, sexual violence and plunder in central Africa, I have yet to really unpack the structures of oppression at work, because the discussion remains aborted due to the effects of propaganda. I have written article after article, naming names, receiving threatening letters from corporate Canadian lawyers and Israeli diamond kingpins, presenting at colleges and universities. Why Congo? It is the darkest (sic) story of exploitation running and the West—you and me—is responsible. Ten million dead, at the very least, since 1996, but you see almost nothing about this story in such magazines, and when you do it is mostly white nonsense. To try to explain this to the producers of the nonsense is impossible: there is no accountability, but there is an (subjective) assumption of absolute moral license.

Imagine for a moment that the Jane Goodall Institute is backing guerrillas (murder) in the Congo. I have reported this previously. I can back up this claim. No one has challenged it, and no one says anything about it. Why? Because people are so completely out of their minds, due to propaganda, that unless such a claim appears in a newspaper or magazine they (mistakenly) respect it must not be true. Why don't you see such a story in In These Times? (Ask the editors.) And if people did read about it, well, they dissociate it from the reality they want to believe: Jane Goodall is a saint.  Should someone, anyone, be held accountable? If so, who? Maybe the editors of progressive or alternative media venues? Maybe Jane Goodall?

I've decided that almost every magazine out there is part of the problem, not the solution. Almost all magazines and newspapers operate with some kind of profit motive, but even those that don't often (not always) have a bias. I can offer examples, but as soon as I do I shoot my self as a writer (and such is the power of self-censorship). I agree with Andre Vltchek ("Fighting Propaganda") when he states that "we are even turning against those few who are still left standing tall and defending common sense and truth and what can be seen with the naked eyes but is denied in the name of freedom, democracy and objectivity."

People always complain: "If we can't read the mass media what SHOULD we read?"

Read The Kingdom of God is Within You (Tolstoy) or A Testament of Hope (Martin Luther King) or Walden (Thoreau). Read the Upanishads, The Great Cosmic Mother, or In the Spirit of Crazy Horse (Matthiesen)... and help both your self and Leonard Peltier to become free.

In Letters to A Spiritual Seeker (1853) Henry David Thoreau wrote: "Stop reading the newspapers."

And this raises another tendency: people not only complain, they expect others to do their work for them. Another sense of entitlement. People, especially students—possessing the fire and passions and unlimited energy of youth—expect everything delivered on silver platters. At the same time they are starving for leaders they can believe in, and for truth, and we have to teach them that it is not necessary to know all the dirty details before taking heart-centered action. Young people, old people, more and more virtual society means that people have lost a sense of initiative, or protest, a connection to their own feelings, and they don't, for example, appreciate the personal liberation of putting a brick through a storefront window or grinding compound in the orifices of a (illegal) logging skidder. Rather than attributing such actions to ‘Black Block' anarchists or environmental terrorists—that's how the government spin media depicts these forms of legitimate social protest—people might educate themselves about Suffragette militancy in 1900 or the Penan genocide today and, having done so, take some appropriate action.[xi]

You wouldn't see Zapatistas complaining about what needs to be done, and you don't see Subcomandante Marcos organizing his life around a photo-op or press conference with the New York Times. What you see, if you look beyond the Western propaganda, is that people outside of the western systems of exploitation are organizing the First Nations of the Americas. Similarly, the poorest most downtrodden people on earth—in Congo—don't stand around and wait for someone to tell them what to do: they blockade illegal western logging companies. Ditto the indigenous Penan in Malaysia. But their voices and actions are drowned out by the white obliviousness inculcated by the Western environmental non-government (sic) organizations sector.

Stop consuming mass media! The propaganda system has even convinced leftists that it's a bad thing that newspapers are going out of business! It's a wonderful thing. And it is not about what you read, in any case, but about what you choose to do with the essence of your precious, sacred life.

 

A HIERARCHY OF MORALITY

Have you ever seen a story about the Penan logging blockades? What about the Congolese people protesting the Blattner slave plantations in Congo? Don't make the mistake of thinking people outside of the United States will not fight for what is theirs merely because you and I can't figure out how to tie our Chinese-made shoes. In the hierarchies of suffering we—you and me, most of those whom I expect will read this, and you know who you are—have it easy.

And yet, all life is suffering.

We are all suffering, but to run out and acquire the bells and whistles of Buddhism, and/or to use our purchasing power and imperial privileges to commodify spirituality, is a symptom of our spiritual poverty. We can BUY-WITH-ONE-CLICK (Amazon.com) the Dalai Lama's most recent sacred text on LOVE, but without first understanding the history of oppression in Tibet, or the Dalai Lama's trysts with the Central Intelligence Agency, or the CIA's provision of weapons—through the Dalai Lama's brother—to Tibetan guerrillas (so-called ‘liberation fighters') sent secretly into Tibet, or the gender inequalities, child abuse and sexual violence in Tibetan Monasteries, is to condone violence, if not indirectly support terrorism. Of course, confronted with reality, people subjectively assign values to the dimensions of their lives. Thus the Dalai Lama's alliance with the CIA must be a singular example of the Central Intelligence Agency's goodness. Of course, many people coming into contact with such information dissociate. Such is the nature of fear, of interests, of denial.

Combined with alcohol and drugs (both ‘recreational' and pharmaceutical) propaganda wins, and it will always win. You can count on succumbing to indoctrination. Consciousness is a choice.

As far as Prozac, Ritalin and other life-numbing pharmaceutical drugs, suffice to say that modern contemporary clinical psychiatry is, for the most part, insane. What are commonly diagnosed and chemically treated as pathologies, in many cases, arise due to emotional and spiritual crises resulting from the uncaring and insensitive onslaught of all kinds of structural violence perpetrated against us as we struggle to negotiate the wastelands of commodification, consumerism, propaganda, moral hypocrisy, subliminal sexuality and permanent warfare. It is easy prescribing pharmaceutical products for anxiety, without understanding the dynamics of a personal life situation, but a radical (going to the roots) understanding of our ‘society' means an appreciation and creation of space for spiritual death and rebirth. Ditto women's moon cycles and the rampant gender inequalities perpetuated everywhere. Again we come back to the reorganization of time and space and appreciation for the sacred.

People fear the unknown, rightly so, and this is precisely where the power of spiritual seeking lies, ready for the unfolding. You have to go through it: you can't cheat the great cosmic mother. Everyone who tries to do so merely cheats themselves, their friends, their family, the truth. People need to experience the death of the false ego(s) and mundane perceptions. It is called spiritual emergency, and if you have been through it you know what I am talking about.

Conditions "diagnosed as psychotic and blindly treated by suppressive medication are actually difficult stages of a radical personality transformation and of spiritual opening. If they are correctly understood and supported, these psychospiritual crises can result in emotional and psychosomatic healing, remarkable psychological changes, and consciousness evolution."[xii]

And so I here revisit the concept of sloth, of spiritual and emotional laziness—coupled with physical addictions and all kinds of other ‘society' induced disorders. Even without the additional mind-numbing effects of such substances and their addictions it is almost impossible for the average citizen to comprehend the nature of propaganda as a mind and attitude control project. And if the mind and attitudes are controlled, there is nothing left for action. There is instead what we see today: widespread ignorance, arrogance, apathy, greed, selfishness, denial, privileged justifications of entitlement, and the unconscious participation in oppression even while we the oppressor's salute each other and proclaim our successes in (supposedly) dismantling institutions of injustice.

There are all kinds of institutions involved in oppressions, all kinds of layers and hierarchies, and even many of us who believe we are ‘progressive'—that we are indeed breaking down walls and challenging oppressions—are as often as not serving to entrench systems of power and our own privileges. Obliviousness is a choice.

Beyond the obvious commodities involved, propaganda sells fear, hopeless, insecurity, self-hatred, anxiety, and delusion—a slew of pathologies that inhabit the psyche of everyone who comes into contact with it. It is ubiquitous, and there is nothing so beautiful as the Afghan countryside, even the cities, where I witnessed the near total absence of western propaganda—or any significant propaganda.

It's seems that I can easily imagine what a just society would look like, and even some of the how-to-do-its about getting there. However, I am unable to imagine that people are serious about it, that people will address the really difficult questions, both personal and communal, or that people who have the capacity to make a serious difference will actually give up anything significant to make it happen. I don't feel compelled to re-imagine society (I can do that) as much as I feel compelled to articulate and practice clear and concrete steps to re-make it.

Want to re-make society for the better?

Learn to BE.

In the imperative form it suggests a ‘doing'—which is an inherent contradiction, but it's not about doing, but not-doing—and it refers to you, not to anyone else. I accept that I suffer from the nested pathologies of doing and not being. For those who understand the challenge no further articulation is necessary. Many or most westerners have no idea what this entails, because most westerners have a serious resistance to examining their internal (a.k.a. emotional, psychological, and biophysical) landscapes.

Most of us, for example, don't understand Wilhelm Reich's pioneering concept of body-armoring. Some of the most committed activists I know—whether Christian fundamentalists, peace activists, labor organizers, media critics, etc. etc. etc.—have insurmountable resistance to healing their self, though they routinely put their "self" out in public as supposed saviors of the planet, crusaders of truth, liberators of some sort or other. On a personal note, it is, again, quite literally, all about ‘me'.

If you are not in therapy on a regular basis perhaps it would serve you well to think about it, at least. If you are in therapy and have been for some time, you are probably your own worst enemy. Walk into the fear. But there is also the propensity for therapists to milk their clients instead of helping them heal. Consciousness involves awakening, or, in the words of Stanislav Grof's psychology of the future, moving toward wholeness.

We need a radical revisioning and investment in technologies of the sacred. Money should not be required, but like anything else the sacred is commodified and controlled. Again, some readers will have no idea what I am talking about, so alien is the arena of personal healing. On the other end of the spectrum we have the unconsciousness so deeply manifested in the "New Age" circles. (Indeed, I have recently begun teaching the ‘head in the sand' yoga posture.) This is not to dismiss or deride the power of yoga, but rather to articulate the capacity for unconsciousness to exist anywhere.

If yoga weren't so powerful the U.S. government would be less inclined to regulate it with the kind of ruthless fascism we are currently seeing. And that's the rub: anything that is worth anything is ruined by our culture. It is commodified, co-opted, privatized, polluted, assimilated, indoctrinated, managed or regulated out of its original authentic beingness. And then—after it is dead and buried—it is celebrated, repackaged, marketed as some sort of oddity, icon or trend. The hubris of the propaganda system reveals itself in articles decrying the forceful organized reaction of yoga practitioners who fought back. The nasty insinuation is that yogis are supposed be docile, meditative, reflective, equanimous—not fight back against unjust, infantile officials.[xiii] The koan in this equation is the amount of money involved in yoga and posh retreats—the opposite kind of moral and spiritual scandal.

Organic farming offers another example. There's a lot of hype and propaganda about supporting organic farmers (by progressives) but also huge contradictions. U.S. government organic certification is not nearly so stringent as my own organic standard and so I refuse to play the game. Meanwhile, the prices for (true) organic produce do not change regardless of the costs of production. My carrots are sacred, but undervalued, as is my labor, even—if not especially—by those with the economic power to make a difference. There was no ‘S' in my experience of Community Supported Agriculture, only an exchange of money and, when the weather prevailed, that was not enough.

Consider a hierarchy of morality. We are often hesitant to embrace leaders or expect that leaders will reveal themselves to us. For example, recently both James Lovelock (Gaia Hypothesis) and Dr. Andrew Weil came out very clearly in support of an inappropriate and devastating technology: nuclear power. Both individuals are widely respected for their teachings and contributions to our enlightenment. Another example is Dr. Paul Farmer: while embracing the opportunity to be funded for his work, Farmer is compromised by his ties to the Clinton's, and he has a home in Rwanda, and he is silent about the killing machine of Paul Kagame and its U.S military alliance. However there are teachers out there, people who have the capacity to lead with greater wisdom and grace, where other's do not. To put everyone on a supposed ‘level' playing field is as problematic as its opposite problem: the hierarchies of power as we know them. Wisdom, truth, authenticity, honesty, right livelihood, there are many good reasons for people to embrace leadership in the form of truly wise spiritual teachers.

"One who recognizes a superior is engaged in an act of faith and trust. He or she functions from judgments that are both cognitive and visceral—cognitive because one sees in reason the necessity for moral and spiritual emulation. One knows that one cannot be the source of all of the knowledge that one needs to matriculate successfully in life. One carefully evaluates the hierarcher before whom one surrenders... The openness of the submissive is an act of enlightened humility. Enlightened because one knows that one is unable to acquire even an infinitesimal amount of evolutionary consciousness entirely on one's own. Cognitive narcissism is replaced by respectful symbiosis."[xiv]

Everything is interconnected and the hierarcher and hierarchee share a mutual respect and admiration for one another. It is ego and division that keep us from working together, and intellect that stifles the opportunities to manifest solidarity.

 

MOVING TOWARD WHOLENESS

My life today is dominated by two nearly non-intersecting arenas, both of which attest to who I am and what is important to me, to my moral standards and ethical values, the knowledge and experience base that informs my daily decisions and greater life choices, and my cosmological philosophies as an embodied being struggling to survive planet earth, 2009.

One of these is my political work contesting official narratives of genocide, for example, or exposing the white-owner plantation slavery producing Congolese chocolate sold by Belgian firms to Whole Foods, for another example, in the ‘middle of nowhere' in the Congo. This work dissects language and deconstructs propaganda, but it brings the on-the-ground stories to light. Honesty and consciousness require that I situate my self in everything, such that my position as a white male is articulated clearly.

The second is my work as a healer, a motivational speaker, a yoga and meditation practitioner.

These two forms of consciousness work, in sharp contradistinction to each other, both offer me hope and meaning in this life. It is through my immersion in holotropic breathwork (non-ordinary states of consciousness), and my studies of Stanislav Grof's work that I am able to move my self toward wholeness. As it is now, the two arenas are not integrated, just as my self is not integrated, but remains to greater or lesser extent, depending on the moment, or the day, or the week, disintegrated—a product of the traumas in my own life. I'm a work in progress.

Our society is comprised of dissociated and disintegrated individuals, some moving toward personal wholeness and others toward personal fascism.

This is the arena that I feel people need to address. Call it the re-imagining or re-making of the self. The raising of personal consciousness that will allow us to speak the truth to each other, and to listen and hear other's realities, with compassion, with wisdom, with hope, without fear. Being an adult means that we have to take responsibility—there is no freedom without responsibility—but its truly hard fro many leftists to be adults.

People have all kinds of excuses, as I said, and all kinds of rationalizations of why such a project does not or should not apply to them. People's capacity for happiness, to more fully be IN this world, and to maximize their personal potential and achieve their highest self-realization is greatly enhanced through personal healing work. When people operate from places of personal disintegration of the psyche the world appears hopeless, fractured, disintegrated.

We don't know what is coming down the line. The reality of the unknown can be projected both optimistically and pessimistically. (However, I completely reject the scientific worship of technology as the answer to any problem it also has created.) Optimistically, a great awakening might be nearby. Pessimistically, it's all going to shit, we see it all around us.

It's easy to envision the four horsemen of the apocalypse, for one example, and massive oil scarcity, for another, and I would contend that these are somewhat hysterical themes now embedded in the psyche by the projections of propaganda. They serve a certain purpose. Outside of the box, without fear, working together, maybe we can mitigate the ills that we might experience. Maybe not. Operating from a place of fear is pointless. Being aware of reality is essential (there is plenty to be afraid of).

I can make a difference every day. I am not helpless. It is not hopeless. Everything I do may be meaningless, on an existential level, but I must do it (Gandhi). And it is not meaningless, in any case, to the people whose voices are unheard, who are rendered invisible by whiteness; refugees and internally displaced people, Congolese and Ethiopian and Gabonese citizens who thank me in emails every day for saying what they cannot—are not allowed to, don't have resources to be able to, can't get access to media for—say. At the same time, it is essential that I honestly position my self in the race and gender power relations of Empire.[xv]

Want to re-make society (for the better)?

[1] Disengage with the media. Stop consuming propaganda. Never play video games—and don't let children. Shut off Disney. These are addictions, almost all them, and they are poisons that infect and contaminate the psyche, and make us sick.

[2] Refuse to pay (war) taxes.  A coordinated movement to cease all war tax payments would change the world. It is no accident that General Alexander Haig said: "They can march all they want as long as they pay their taxes."

[3] Don't take out student loans. Think it's too late? It's not. Stop paying them back. We could call for government amnesty to forgive or cancel student loans (don't hold your breath). In fact, a coordinated campaign against taxes and student loans could shift militarism toward education.

[4] Reduce alcohol consumption to zero (sic). I anticipate the "everything in moderation" argument and reject it here, because it is a common excuse for unconsciousness and spiritual laziness.

[5] Eliminate ‘recreational' drugs from your life (reduce marijuana consumption for non-medical purposes to zero, cut out caffeine) with the possible exception of appropriately guided mystical journeys involving plant spirit medicines. (Beware the expropriation and commodification of indigenous cultural rites.)

[6] Take your self and children out in nature, real nature, without any machines or technologies; let children and self be free of control. Support, nurture and manifest the University of the Wild concept of educator and visionary Dr. Larry Buell.[xvi]

[7] Reduce your energy footprint: ride a bike more often, or walk, walk, WALK upon the blessed land. The more you bike the better you feel; the farther you can go; the more you will enjoy your bike. It's a cycle of positive reinforcement. It's pure unadulterated freedom.

[8] Relocate to a localized lifestyle of simplicity: you don't have to ‘go' anywhere. As in everything else, it's about letting go (of stuff, perceptions, assumptions, false identities).

[9] Engage your spiritual awakening. Open up your heart and break your SELF down. Do a ten-day Vipassana meditation sit. Practice yoga. Experience holotropic breathwork. See a therapist. Unlock your potential. Make sacrifices for others.

[10] BE.

Nothing is absolute, and neither are my ideas. In the end, everyone just wants to be loved. We all know how to do this, but we have forgotten how to listen, and we can't hear our selves for all the noise, noise, noise generated by our egos—and our other pathologies—by propaganda, entertainment, by technology and the other machineries of fascism.

"Chatter, chatter: liberty, equality, fraternity, love, honor, patriotism, and what have you."[xvii]

In linear time, we are born, we live, we die. For many of us, today is the first day of the rest of our lives. For far more people, it is the last. To operate from a place of fear is to operate in linear time. I will die when I am supposed to die. My belief system tells me that. (Of course, I strive to maximize my life span.) That is not a linear, but a cosmic assessment. So why fear taking the appropriate actions right now? Stand up for what is right, but do it for the right reasons, from a place of consciousness, and from a place of self-integrated strength. In the words of Dr. Enoch Page: "Are you going to sacrifice your children to save your body?"

 

 

 

 

[i] Franz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, Présence Africaine, 1963: 148. 

[ii] See: Sullivan and Tuana, Eds.,  Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance, Suny University of New York Press, 2007.

[iii] See: Chinwezu, The West and the Rest of Us: White Predators, Black Slavers, and the African Elite, Random House, 1975.

[iv] keith harmon snow, "Exit the Matrix, Enter the Abundance of Possibility," 2004, http://www.allthingspass.com/journalism.php?catid=2.

[v] See, e.g., Karen Piper, Cartographic Fictions: Maps, race and Identity, Rutgers University, 2002.

[vi] See, e.g., Stanislav Grof: Psychology of the Future (2000), Realms of the Human Consciousness (1975), or The Adventure of Self-Discovery (1988).

[vii] David Ehrenfeld, The Arrogance of Humanism, Oxford, 1978.

[viii] Michael Maren, The Road to Hell: The Ravaging Effects of Foreign Aid and International Charity, Free Press, 1997.

[ix] See, e.g., keith harmon snow, "The Crimes of Bongo: Apartheid and Terror in Africa's Garden's of Eden," published by Cyrano's Journal, Dissident Voice, Black Agenda Report, and others.

[x] See: Joan Roelofs, Foundations and Public Policy: The Mask of Pluralism, State University of New York Press, 2003.

[xi] See: www.bmf.ch.

[xii] Stanislav Grof, Psychology of the Future: Lessons from Modern Consciousness Research,  State University of New York, 2000.

[xiii] A.G. Sulzberger, "Yoga Faces Regulation and Firmly Pushes Back," New York Times, July 10, 2009.

[xiv] Jason D. Hill, "The Key to Evolving Consciousness," EnlightenNext, December 2005.

[xv] See: keith harmon snow, Towards An Anthropology of White Man in Africa: A Call to Explore the Militarized Western Project of Dark Continentalism, paper presented at the American Anthropology Association annual meeting, December 2007.

[xvi] The University of the Wild is a project of the Institute of Environmental Awareness, Petersham, MA, http://www.instituteforenvironmentalawareness.org/uofw .

[xvii] Jean-Paul Sartre, preface to Franz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth, 1963.