The War on Consciousness

I believe I first viewed this as a TedX talk years ago, and I probably latched onto Graham's statement about converting the Amazon Rainforest, the lungs of the planet, into hamburgers but I swear I just viewed this again after using basically this same language to describe the situation in my recent My Thoughts on Religion and Society at this Critical Juncture post, which seems to be getting the most pageviews. 

If youre unfamiliar with Graham Hancock, he gained fame and notoriety with his seminal work 'Fingerprints of the Gods', a book that I cannot recommend high enough. 

Although I am a proponent of most of the message here, particularly how mainstream society seems to condone only those mind affecting substances that either augment robot-like busy-body consciousness ("Let's convert this marshland into a WalMart parking lot so we can sell plastic stuff made by wage slaves in China! Yeah, that's a great idea!) or as a means of numbing ourselves to it all I encourage attaining higher states of enlightenment naturally through Right Action and mindful awareness.

The "elites" sure went out of their way to ensure that the drugs that might induce a state of mind that makes people ponder why things are the way they are, particularly Marijuana (my personal favorite, no more than once a week or every 10 days in edible form) or natural hallucinogens be deemed illegal with heavy legal penalties for possession. These forms of drugs became a big problem because the counter-cultural revolution of the 1960's is widely attributed to them and this is what the "War on Drugs", the conservative backlash, was all about. It was about criminalizing behavior that was threatening to the Status Quo, the .01% economic elite and filling the prisons with slave labor. 

What were the people protesting in the 1960's? Ah yes, that's right, an illegal war, justified by the "Gulf of Tonkin" incident, which, just like the Reichstag Fire that the Nazi's used to justify a crack down on the Communists, was a fabrication (the Nazi party set fire to the Reichstag building and blamed it on the them, sound familiar? It's a really old and hackneyed strategy at this point, hence the need for a new scare, a "pandemic"). The U.S. Navy claimed that two of it's vessels were torpedoed when in fact they weren't.  

If you want to see what alcohol does to someone, go have a look at the Lakota Sioux, or have a look at most homeless people on the street. Alcohol, unlike Marijuana, destroys. People get drunk and pass out. People take Marijuana and start to ponder things and write blogs (like this one). They absolutely DO NOT want you to do anything other than drink alcohol, because then you might start thinking INDEPENDENTLY. 

NO YOU MUST REMAIN A ROBOT. 

Anyhow, I limit my form of recreational drug use to edible marijuana and I only do it sparingly. I'm an advocate of reaching higher states of consciousness through meditation, mindful awareness practice and most importantly right action. 

This is another gripe I have with Judeo-Christianity that I neglected to touch on in my "My Thoughts on Religion and Society at this Critical Juncture" post.

The central tenet of Buddhism is Right Action. You can read about impermanence, about karma (now a staple of Neuro-science, through repetitive behavior, be it positive or negative mental and emotional states, you wire the brain and strengthen synapses, it's called Psycho-neuro-immunology now but for hundreds of years the Buddhist's have known this as Karma: mental, physical, and emotional karma, all of which are interrelated, if you neglect to exercise it will affect your emotional and mental well being, conversely if you aren't practicing mindful awareness that will affect your physical well being and invite disease etc.) and how fundamentally we are all interconnected on a spiritual level but if you fail to apply this understanding to your daily lives, if you continue to treat others, the environment, and your own mind through your negative, habitual thoughts and actions in a way that causes you to resonate more in a state of fear, then you are not doing it correctly, for the goal is to quiet and calm the mind (Buddhism terms this state of consciousness "Monkey Mind"), be kind to all life, and to this end reminding oneself that although this life is impermanent, spirit, who you really are, is eternal. 

When you shed this absurd notion that you have this one and only 50-70 avg year life experience as a bipedal hominid on one of near limitless number of habitable worlds in a near limitless universe that goes on for eternity, the seriousness of it all, and the consciousness choking survival instinct that is an unfortunate bi-product of that limited perspective, is subsumed by this elevated understanding, even if only on a conceptual level. Another way to look at it is like a video game. Life in this world at this point in time is like playing the final level and youre approaching the final sequence of events where your very behavior may determine not just the future of your species but the evolution of your soul. Your goal in this life on this world is to BECOME Christ-like, to BECOME Buddha-like, not simply to go to church one day a week and then "prep for the apocalypse" including trying to figure whether or not 7.62mm will be better than 5.56mm to penetrate armor or a windshield and kill someone, including remaining willfully ignorant of the plight of the natural world and all of it's inhabitants, both human and non-human, due to your unconscious life-style decisions. 

It's been said that there is an inverse relationship between religiosity and spirituality, that the more religious one becomes, the less spiritual they are in practice. 

The root of the problem with Man's view of separateness and superiority to all life on this world starts with this edict: 

"Go forth and multiply and subdueth all that walketh, all that flyeth, all that swimeth" etc. 

Contrast this with the worldview of the indigenous on this continent which is best summarized with the aphorism"Unto the seventh generation". And that meant, take care of the land and all of its inhabitants, for it is sacred, leave it in better shape than you found it, so that seven generations from now your great-grandchildren have a healthy land that they can thrive in. 

We all know what happened. "Civilization",  which could only have spawned from the perverse misperception that Man is separate and superior to other lifeforms and the environment happened. 

Look at how wonderful it is, shopping malls demarcated by muffler shops and fast food restaurants, a built urban environment around the automobile! 

George Carlin really does a better job at describing this madness: 

Derrick Jensen does a good job of describing the difference in the two forms of consciousness, that of the colonizer and the indigenous, with his historical recounting of prisoner exchanges. 

The early English colonists would on occasion capture various tribe members and vise versa and they would have prisoner exchanges. During these exchanges the indigenous would sprint back to their tribe and the British colonists, they were dragged kicking and screaming back to their colonies. They didn't want to go back. 

I mean go watch Avatar for crying out loud. That affected people deep down on a fundamental level, those who viewed it fell into depression after leaving the theaters, for we know what we are doing to each other and this beautiful world is absolute madness. 

https://derrickjensen.org/endgame/

Right now you as an immortal spiritual being have chosen to incarnate here on this planet, during this incredibly trying time in the existence of this species to grow on a spiritual level. Will you awaken to that reality? Will you walk the walk and BECOME Christ-like, BECOME Buddha-like? Or will you continue to read about the life experience of someone who lived 2000 years ago, memorize the various pages and chapters, the various Psalms but continue to not apply any of it to your actual behavior? 

Or maybe you could, I don't know, drop that book and explore a different one? 

Nope, can't do that! All other forms of religion are "Satanic"!

Again, look at the result of the consciousness embodied in Western "Civilization". 

Environmental ruin. 

Pain and suffering felt by everyone, all life. 

Fear. 

Essentially and ironically Hell on Earth is the result of the guiding consciousness of Western "Civilization" which starts here with this statement that the Christian Bible opens with: 

"Go forth and and multiply, be fruitful, subdueth all that walketh, swimeth, flyeth" 

Yeah, that's a strategy that will work for a while but then you wind up where we are now, a form of social and physical organization that resembles Stage 3 cancer. 

It's the final level and we are approaching the final event, the last boss, will you awaken to the reality that your actual goal here was to be kind, to resonate in love irrespective of the challenges presented to you, to see yourself in ALL OTHER LIFE? 

Mass Extinction of a collective shift in consciousness? 

"Be the change that you want to see in the world" - Mahatma Ghandi