If you wanted to drive a people insane, you would deprive them of time and silence.
To deprive them of time, denude the value of their labor by devaluing the currency, slowly, and imperceptibly, as indeed has obviously happened. Even Milton Friedman accepted a slow erosion of the currency, but in reality, in a just society, the value of money would steadily increase, and our wealth would have increased vastly more than it has, for all but the connected few driving all this. As a general principle, the bank’s gain is a loss for the rest of us. If there is a villain in our system, it is the banks, not the creators and risk takers who get labeled “Capitalists”.
To deprive people of silence, push and fund every possible source of noise, and ideally get people addicted to noise as a distraction from the pain brought on by lack of time.
Then, to weaponize the madness you have created, blame everyone but the real culprits. For otherwise mostly sane people who have tools like religion and community to keep up, more or less, create enemies who seem to present an existential threat, such as terrorists. For those on the border between sanity and insanity, blame the System itself, without ever mentioning those who create and control the money supply.
And why would anyone want to do this? They are insane, too. They are merely trying to drag the world down with them. They are the rats in Utopia, who have lost the will to live, to procreate, to create, and in the end any residual sense of self and purpose.
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The purpose of being is being. I think often about what it may like to be an infinite, immortal soul. What is it like, to live 100,000 years, and know it is only a small drop in the endless expanse of time?
Even in a beautiful universe, is ennui–or something like it–impossible? I wonder. And as an immortal being, how would you commit suicide? Amnesia, that is how. Perhaps we all chose to forget: something.
I get and value Victor Zammit’s weekly newsletter. In some of the channeled sources they speak often of service as a purpose of life. But I wonder: if we created utopia, what then? If being needed is a purpose of life, then imperceptibly people would begin enabling, on an unconscious level, the problems of others. Call it spiritual codependence.
It seems more accurate to me to feel that service–helping, caring, carrying and teaching–is an outcome of a spirit which exists in its being, which feels the connections between all of us.
But the purpose of being is being. To exist, and to expand within ourselves what is beautiful. That is the main and best form of service.
Wisdom, perhaps most commonly, is leaving people to their own suffering, and their own overcoming of suffering. And if someone needs a helping hand out of a ditch, give it to them. Animals in general do not worry about other animals, but there are many videos out there of them helping each other. I watched one the other day of an elephant helping a man out of a river. Another, of a goat protecting a chicken from a hawk. Dogs helping dogs.
But death comes to us all. I was looking yesterday at a wooded area, and it is filled with both life and death. Trees, alive, but going to sleep for the winter, but also dead trees, rotting, feeding other life forms. Animals, likewise, that died one day because it was their time, feeding bacteria and fungi.
And I felt that death is as beautiful in its own way as life. It is a completion. We are born into this world, we live, and then we leave this world. This is just one arena, one place. We come in, we play a game, and then the buzzer goes off, and it is time to move on, to go back to wherever we came from.
And it is impossible to live without enduring pain, and causing pain. If even plants have feelings–and I think Cleve Backster, among others, clearly showed that in their own way they do–then we literally cannot maintain a pulse without inflicting at least temporary pain on living creatures.
I suppose we could try and live on apples and grapes and nuts and other things which, when harvested, do not kill anything, but it is worth asking if that is desirable or necessary.
Death is a defining feature of all life at this level. It will be my turn one day too. And all life is born able to endure death. Obviously, we can’t avoid it, but I am making a higher point: we all feel it the moment we are born. It is my destiny, and that of a cow, and a rabbit and chicken.
This means some cruelty, on some level, is a part of life too, but if not expanded radically, if minimized as much as possible, then it is consistent with the laws of this world, which we did not create.
I would posit that all life on some level chose to be here, to live within the constraints of this game.
And if you look at something like the Squid Game, it is perhaps for many equal parts horror and revelation. We are so disconnected from the core realities of life. Few people die at home any more, and in America at least we spend enormous sums of money, and expend enormous effort, buying weeks and months for people who in another time would most likely have died much more peacefully and naturally.
Few talk about it, but this is one very real problem with American healthcare in particular. Something like a quarter or more of our money goes to this extension of life at all costs. It is of course very profitable for Big Pharma, which is most likely a big reason it happens.
But if I define sanity as “peace within Truth”, then for our world to expand into generalized sanity–which is the core task of our time–we need to speak the truth, and accept it.
That is of course what I try to do every day.
Even if we build machines that somehow preserve some aspect of human consciousness, will they be eternal? Do we WANT them to be eternal? I would assert there is peace in death, too, particularly if we accept the overwhelming preponderance of scientific evidence that some part of us continues on. To what, for what: we don’t really know.
It is reasonable to suppose, though, that the universe has an order, that we can find tranquility accepting that order, and simply take things as they come, which will always be in a Moment. We flow, and there is no reason not to enjoy the ride, even when it hurts.
How is this: accepted necessary pain is limitations leaving the body.
Put another way: to expand into the joy and peace which is our natural birthright, we have to stop clinging to what is small and trivial and fleeting. Each in their own way, all the authentic spiritual traditions teach this.
And at root, what is Satanism–and I think something that may as well be called that underlies the globally coordinated activities doing so much to destroy the peace and prosperity of humanity–but an effort to build a world within fear? Fear rejecting Truth? Face rejecting, soul rejecting clinging? To live as an island in an endless river, never at peace, never at rest, fighting, fighting fighting?
If you reject death, would it not be possible to become addicted to it? We cling to what we don’t accept and process. There are many gates we must pass through, and I could see the very rich, particularly, being much too large to pass through that gate. They have more to lose than most of us, and so they lose everything.
Lao Tzu taught several thousand years ago that only by losing do we truly gain. I promise you are there are many, many, many people living in huts with dirt floors, for whom hunger is a continual threat, who have vastly more than Bill Gates, George Soros and the Rothschilds put together.
This is emotional logic. This is speaking to the content of an average day. The Four Greats are also the four true forms of wealth in this world: Joy, Compassion, Love and Tranquility. Everything else is a distraction, a mirage, an illusion, wasted time.
An honest life is simple but difficult. A dishonest life is also difficult, but very complicated. Lies beget lies, and soon you are lost, and then forget that you are lost, at which point life becomes burdensome, and an endless effort to deflect while trying to maintain some sense of balance, which has been made impossible by the lack of a stable reference point. It is falling, falling, falling, and trying to resist the falling.
Life has rules. Every bookstore on the planet has at least a few texts describing them, and every culture which has survived has developed some iteration of them. There are countless ways to be approximately right, to be good enough.
And I will repeat the old line that courage is the only reliable path to every other possible virtue, which is to say, to every other form of stability, connection, and purpose.