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Author
Background Material
Introductory Study
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If we ask the average person why he believes his ordinary consciousness is veridical, he'll say that it puts him in touch with reality in a way that "works" for him. "My usual way of thinking enables me to deal with objects, persons, and events in a manner that leads to successful outcomes. Since it 'works' for me why would I even consider the silly idea that I'm living in an illusory world or a dream state? I'm free from any such absurd restriction."
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." |
The difificulty is that the ordinary person isn't able--or willing--to acknowledge when his habitual consciousness (the dream state) leads him astray; when his view of the world causes him to mistake a dictatorial police state for a democracy, a mindless tyrant for a "fearless leader," and a pre-emptive, unjustified war for a struggle against terrorism and for the spreading of democracy.
The dream state of ordinary life is, of course, different from dreaming during regular sleep. This special state of dreaming sleep is an extraordinarily difficult condition to become aware of--or acknowledge. People in this dream world take it to be reality; they don't believe they're asleep--in fact they'll argue strenuously with anyone who says they're asleep and dreaming. This unusual dream world becomes a mass delusion when enough people accept the illusory domain as real. The demonic cabal presently creating this dream world can define reality for the sleepwalkers.
Wake up! Snap out of it! Something's going on and you need to wake up! You've fallen into a trance or something, and you need to
rouse yourself. You think you're awake but you're not - and as you've been sleeping, all kinds of hideous things have been happening.
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Because our habitual state of dreaming sleep is so difficult to recognize and acknowledge, we'll
need to examine this condition in detail and in as much depth as possible. The most insightful analysis of this state was carried out by Plato in a number of his dialogues. When we study Plato's dialogues mindfully we discover they possess an advanced technology enabling a prepared person to achieve a higher state of waking consciousness. We'll concentrate on Plato's Theaetetus and Commonwealth, 
because they refer directly to the ordinary state of dreaming sleep, reveal the nature of this condition, and provide the means of rising above such a state of delusion.
In the Theaetetus, Socrates asks: "How can you determine whether at this moment we are sleeping, and all our thoughts are a dream; or whether we are awake, and talking to one another in the waking state?"Theaetetus: "Indeed, Socrates, I do not know how to prove the one any more than the other, for in both cases the facts precisely correspond; and there is no difficulty in supposing that during all this discussion we have been talking to one another in a dream; and when in a dream we seem to be narrating dreams, the resemblance of the two states is quite astonishing."
Socrates: "You see, then, that a doubt about the reality of sense is easily raised, since there may even be a doubt whether we are awake or in a dream. And as our time is equally divided between sleeping and waking, in either sphere of existence the soul contends that the thoughts which are present to our minds at the time are true; and during one half of our lives we affirm the truth of the one, and, during the other half, of the other; and are equally confident of both."
The feeling of certainty we have about our experience--whether awake or asleep--is the same. It's naive for us to assume that our mere feeling of confidence is enough to assure the veracity of our experience.
Many people wonder why Plato insisted in the Commonwealth that educational and artistic material used with young people should be strictly supervised. This wonderment arises from our naive assumption that our American public educational system is free from control by ideological dogma.
In fact, the opposite is true: American public educational institutions are entirely dominated by a system of misinformation and anti-intellectualism which has been imposed by the cabal which took control of education in the first decades of the twentieth century. The result has been just what they planned for: large masses of American citizens who are certifiably illiterate and lack any ability to think for themselves, thus allowing a criminal gang to take political and economic control of our nation.
Plato insisted that educational and artistic material be supervised because young people learn from role models and become the kinds of people they read about and see in their everyday life.
"Since our students, the future leaders of the nation, imitate from their earliest childhood we should choose appropriate models for them to emulate, namely people who are courageous, self-controlled, virtuous, and free. We shouldn't encourage them to embody or imitate what is illiberal or shameful behavior because imitation gives rise to desire for that kind of reality. Imitation, continued from an early age, turns into habits and dispositions--of body, speech and mind." Commonwealth III (395 c-d)
Instead of adopting Plato's teachings, Americans have allowed a depraved junta to seize control of the four most powerful brainwashing technologies in modern history: education, television, popular music, and movies. Through the insidious use of these instruments, American young people are programmed to value greed, egomania, money, power, fame, and cleverness in unscrupulousness, and are conditioned to crave and embody violence, ignorance, and anarchy.
"The average person in the US watches about four hours of television each day. Over the course of a year, we see roughly twenty five thousand commercials, many of them produced by the world's highest-paid cognitive psychologists. And these heavily produced advertisements are not merely for products, but for a lifestyle based on a consumer mind-set. What they're doing, day in and day out, twenty-five thousand times a year, is hypnotizing us into seeing ourselves as consumers who want to be entertained rather than as citizens who want to be informed and engaged. We need to take back the airwaves as a sphere of mature conversation and dialogue about our common future." 2
"Experiments conducted by researcher Herbert Krugman reveal that, when a person watches television, brain activity switches from the left to the right hemisphere. The left hemisphere is the seat of logical thought. Here, information is broken down into its component parts and critically analyzed. The right brain, however, treats incoming data uncritically, processing information in wholes, leading to emotional, rather than logical, responses. The shift from left to right brain activity also causes the release of endorphins, the body's own natural opiates--thus, it is possible to become physically addicted to watching television, a hypothesis borne out by numerous studies which have shown that very few people are able to kick the television habit. |
To comprehend the dream state of ordinary life we have to understand the distinct nature of the immature mind and how this mind is formed and controlled. In speaking of the undeveloped mind, Socrates says:
"The immature are incapable of judging what is the underlying meaning of an allegory (hyponoia) and what is not and the beliefs they absorb at that age are hard to erase and apt to become unalterable. For these reasons, then, we should take the utmost care to insure that the stories and myths that depict virtue are the best ones for them to hear." Commonwealth II (378d)
Plato uses the Greek word hyponoia, 3 which refers to the hidden meaning of a myth, the meaning and understanding coming from below. "Hypo" means "under," and "noia" is thought or mind. So hyponoia is literally "hidden, deeper, or underlying thought or meaning to which an allegory refers." This word has the same stem as that used to refer to hypnosis: a process in which a person is able to affect you in a strange way by somehow coming in under the radar of your own critical thinking, placing your ordinary consciousness in a state of suspension.
Plato is saying that an immature person cannot recognize that a myth or allegory is something that has a hidden, deeper, or underlying meaning and effect. The immature person is unable to recognize what that deeper meaning or effect is, what the story or myth or allegory is about, what it's doing. This peculiar lack of orientation and inability to distinguish meanings and detect effects is constitutive of the immature and infantile mind. In the cognizance of an undeveloped mind, myths or allegories float free of their deeper symbology and inducement, they float free even of the recognition that they have deeper significance and control.
The mature, awakened mind possesses an exceptional capability of self-awareness, the "witness" aspect that allows it to stand apart and observe, ascertaining what is going on from a higher position of attentiveness. It is this extra-dimensional capability of awareness which Plato's dialogues enable us to develop, as they teach us to reflect on all aspects of our experience, not "falling asleep" in the immediacy of our sensations and thoughts.
To explain what immaturity means, Plato introduces us to a specific psychic type in the opening passage of Book I of the Commonwealth: the elderly person who's never achieved intellectual or psychological maturity. Cephalus, an older man, acknowledges that the stories and myths he experienced in his early years now haunt him, causing him to fear the retribution for sins which the myths have caused him to believe will occur after death. Cephalus, like millions of people in the modern world, never matured emotionally and mentally: fantasies frighten him because he cannot tell the difference between myth and reality. He never understood what those early brainwashing fables did to him and didn't work to overcome their negative effect.
Socrates explains that the impressions immature psyches take into their minds and emotions have a tendency to become fixed beliefs and habits, difficult to eradicate or change. A mature psyche has the capacity to distinguish truth from mere fantasy and appearance, propaganda from truth, to recognize stories as stories--and develop out of infantile illusions. Immaturity is the state of being asleep but presuming that you're awake; it is the inability to tell that you're NOT awake. Maturity is the capacity to distinguish true waking from vivid dream experiences. It's this discriminating capacity that goes to sleep when you go to sleep intellectually and emotionally. It's precisely because we can't tell that we're NOT awake that dream-experience has such power over us.
The American Condition
"The essential problem is that Americans have been lying to themselves for so many years now that they are completely incapable of telling the difference between the rather frightening truth and their mythological view of America. The roots of the problem go back to the 1930's, but the real problems began right after the Second World War, when the American government came under the control of the group of thugs who still run the country.
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In Book V (476c) of the Commonwealth, Plato explains that the incapacity of the immature mind to distinguish truth from fancy is essentially what it means to be in a dream state. While dreaming we take the dream-image of a person to be a real person. We take something similar to be the very thing to which it appears similar. His exposition explains how we can distinguish between the true waking state and the dream state.
"What about someone who believes in beautiful things, but doesn't believe in Beauty itself and isn't able to follow anyone who could lead him to the knowledge of this Form? Don't you think his life is a dream rather than a wakened state? Isn't this dreaming: whether asleep or awake, to mistake resemblance for identity, to liken dissimilar things, to identify the expression of the Form as the Form itself, to think that a likeness is not a likeness but rather the thing itself that it is like? . . .
"But take the case of the other, who recognizes the existence of Beauty and is able to distinguish the Form from the objects which participate in the Form, neither putting the objects in the place of the Form nor the Form in the place of the objects--is he a dreamer, or is he awake?
"He is wide awake.
"And may we not say that the mind of the one who knows has knowledge, and that the mind of the other, who opines only, has opinion?
"Certainly."
So, to become mature we must learn how to:
Maturity or awakedness is the capacity to stand apart from the immediacy of our experience and observe sensations and thoughts as they occur, reflecting on them, evaluating them, and thoughtfully choosing what our response will be. Plato assists us in attaining this kind of intellectual, emotional, and social maturity through his dialogues--but also through myths and fables as well.
"Fables should be taught as fables, myths as myths, and miracles as poetic fancies. To teach superstitions as truths is a most terrible thing. The child-mind accepts and believes them, and only through great pain and perhaps tragedy can he be in after-years relieved of them. In fact, men will fight for a superstition quite as quickly as for a living truth - often more so, since a superstition is so intangible you can not get at it to refute it, but truth is a point of view, and so is changeable." |
Plato is not suggesting that developing minds not be given myths, allegories, and fables from which to learn. He himself uses myth to teach and transform his readers. As with all elements in the terrestrial world, the use that is made of myths and allegories is the key. Hyponoia--myths with deeper meanings deposited under the literal surface--have a noetic character: the reader or listener has to think his way across a semantic bridge, beyond which lies a realm of transcendent knowledge. Plato's myths and dialogues--which are stories--are highly advanced devices through which we are enabled to ascend to a higher consciousness.
Plato's use of dialectic and myth is so extraordinary that we have to work assiduously to grasp their deeper meaning and effect. The transformative elements of Plato's wizardry appear within the narrative of his dialogues, so it's easy to overlook them if we're not attuned to their characteristics and effects. We can learn a great deal by exploring Plato's strange myth which he develops in Book III of the Commonwealth (414c +). He refers to this myth as a "useful fiction" (not a lie 5) and says it is similar to old Phoenician tales about humankind's origin which people were encouraged to believe.
The "useful fiction" or myth is to be told to all the people, informing them that their early life was a dream, that the education and training which they received was initiation into an illusory dream world. In reality, they will be told, during all that time they were actually being formed and nurtured in the womb of the earth. When they were fully formed, the earth, their mother, caused them to ascend to a higher realm. So, the earth and their country being their mother and their teacher, they are responsible for defending her against attack, and her citizens are all to be regarded as a part of their earth family.
Plato's "useful fiction" also involves telling the people that God has framed them differently. Some have the power of command, and in the composition of these he has mingled gold, wherefore they are to receive the greatest honour. Others he has made of silver, to be auxilaries. Others again who are to be husbandmen and craftsmen he has composed of brass and iron. And God proclaims as a first principle to all the people that their primary duty is to preserve the human species.
This myth fits into Plato's discussion of how the best kinds of humans can be produced through education and training--one of the major themes of the Commonwealth. Part of the educational process consists in observing students to see how their experiences affect them: who they know, what they read, and how they act. Do they, for example, swallow nonsense which is handed them and allow their beliefs to be formed by falsehoods?
We must first recognize that Plato is presenting a myth about a myth: a story about how a story might be told to the people. Why would Plato possibly tell such a fable to the populace? What effect would Plato be trying to produce in the people to whom this myth was told? Why is he telling the story to his dialectical fellow-participants?
Part of the people's evaluation will be to see how they react to this story. Far from wanting the people to believe such a "useful fiction," Plato is encouraging a questioning attitude in them concerning how they were raised and what effect all the cultural "received truths" (principles, axioms, laws, customs, structures) had on them. He is showing that their culture's "useful fictions" have shaped all their beliefs, habits, values, tastes, desires, self-estimation, and countless other elements. "Who am I?" Plato wants them to ask; "How was I formed by my culture?" "What response have I made to the cultural myths which shaped me?"
Plato is encouraging them to question all their cultural values. "Why are there these class distinctions?" "For what purpose did my culture shape me in this particular way?" "How can I improve and transform myself, now that I have awakened to how I was structured by my culture?"
"What is so deceptive about the state of mind of the members of a society is the 'consensual validation' of their concepts. It is naively assumed that the fact that the majority of people share certain ideas or feelings proves the validity of these ideas and feelings. Nothing is further from the truth. Consensual validation as such has no bearing whatsoever on reason or mental health. Just as there is a 'folie a deux' there is a 'folie a millions.' The fact that millions of people share the same vices does not make them virtuous, the fact that they share so many errors does not make the errors to be truths, and the fact that millions of people share the same forms of mental pathology does not make them sane." |
The myth is meant to awaken people to question what has happened to them, what is currently happening to them, and what intelligent response they can make to their cultural engendering. It shows how easily public myths can, in some instances, completely structure the personality and social constraints of a culture. They are encouraged to become aware that they were earlier in an unrecognized state of sleep, were caused to ascend to a higher plane of awareness, but must now investigate and study their current state of consciousness to detect aspects of sleep or immaturity now present.
Maturity or awakedness is the constant, unending endeavor of discovering aspects of immaturity or sleep in yourself and rising above those to a higher awareness. One of the essential ways of telling if you're asleep is if you're regularly discovering traits and behaviors in yourself of which you were previously unaware, negative elements that controlled you without your being cognizant of them. For example, you may discover that you previously had fooled yourself into believing that you wanted to understand what is going on in the world, and you realize you hadn't really wanted to at all--as evidenced by your mindlessly accepting the cabal's propaganda.
Plato is using this unusual myth to explain the evolution of human experience. We're born as infants with very little self-awareness, living almost entirely in our immediate sensations and desires.
"The narcissistic orientation is one in which one experiences as real only that which exists within oneself, while the phenomena in the outside world have no reality in themselves, but are experienced only from the viewpoint of their being useful or dangerous to one. The opposite pole to narcissism is objectivity; it is the faculty to see people and things as they are, objectively, and to be able to separate this objective picture from a picture which is formed by one's desires and fears." 6
As we grow older, we enter what is called "adult life" and embrace the cultural myth that we've wakened to a new form of conscious awareness. But part of what Plato's myth is telling us is that credulously swallowing this "adult life" myth involves merely "waking up" from one level of dream-life to enter another one. We are like someone in a dream who dreams that he wakes up. Thus although he considers himself awake, in reality he's still in a dream. As "adults," we're encouraged to believe that we're fully mature, that we now know what life is all about and have a total awareness of reality. The cultural myth of adulthood conditions us to believe that we've been initiated into the realm of civilized life and are heir to all the "received truths" which make us "enlightened" and "awakened."
Plato's "useful fiction" helps us realize that most cultural myths are for the purpose of "putting us to sleep," making us believe we're mature and awake when we're not, making us assume we understand reality fully when we don't. Plato's myth helps us make the comprehensive distinction between appearance and reality, myth and truth, cultural conditioning and true maturity. It makes us aware that most of life is mere appearance, a dream meant to keep us asleep and ignorant. Thus this "useful fiction" is psychologically and metaphysically revolutionary. It sows seeds of critical awareness and healthy skepticism at a "mythic level," making us wary of both the myths we've experienced and any future myths we might encounter. We seek to understand what it is to be truly awake and fully in touch with reality. And as we attain awakedness and genuine maturity, we enter an entirely new world.
"The breakdown of the infantile adjustment in which providential powers ministered to every wish compels us either to flee from reality or to understand it. And by understanding it we create new objects of desire. For when we know a good deal about a thing, know how it originated, how it is likely to behave, what it is made of, and what is its place amidst other things, we are dealing with something quite different from the simple object naively apprehended. |
As Plato's myths make clear, we are the victims of a cultural trance. Whereas in hypnotism, we're aware that someone is trying to influence us, with our cultural conditioning the situation is the opposite.
"Our consensus trance is not voluntary; it begins at birth without our conscious agreement.
"All authority is surrendered to the parents, family members and other caretakers, who initially are regarded as omniscient and omnipotent.
"Clinical therapists would consider it highly unethical to use force, but our cultural hypnotists often do -- a slap on the wrist, or severe reprimand for misbehaving. Or perhaps more subtle, but equally powerful, emotional pressures -- 'I will only love you if you think and behave as I tell you.'
"Finally, and most significantly, the conditioning is intended to be permanent. It may come from the very best of intentions, but it is, nevertheless, meant to have a lasting effect on our personalities and the way we evaluate the world.
Developing this higher level of awareness and discernment requires not only a positive expansion of our understanding and capabilities but ridding ourselves of negative elements. For example, we can only gain increased powers of discernment if we're unreservedly honest about ourselves and constantly seek to discover personality features that hold us back. We learn to recognize when we're rationalizing, equivocating, lying, projecting, or acting defensively.
Plato explains--and effects--escape from sleep in Socrates' discussion with Theaetetus and Theodorus in the dialogue Theaetutus. Cultural "sleep" in Plato's day as in ours is created by people becoming literally possessed by the Protagorean/Thrasymachan ideology:
Plato's discussion of relativism 8 is of immediate relevance because it has currently become the reigning ideology of American society. According to this creed, there is no way to determine the truth; truth is merely what a person happens to believe or what is imposed on society by the dominant powers; justice is the interest of those in power. Truth, under the rule of the current demonic cabal, is whatever they say is true. If they say there are weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and we must invade Iraq to make us safe from terrorists, then by golly, that's the truth. If that proves not to be born out by inspection, so what. The truth is what they say is the truth. Dubya's allowing the NSA to spy on Americans is legal--because he says it's legal.
We can best get a sense of the fantasy-based non-thinking of the Bush cult from an article by Ron Suskind in the New York Times:
"In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn't like about Bush's former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House's displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn't fully comprehend -- but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency."The aide said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. 'That's not the way the world really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.'"
It's interesting that Plato's refutation of relativism now has a modern application, because Protagorean relativism has seized the mind of many Americans:
then no person can assess another person's judgment and see if it is right or wrong, so intelligent investigation of the truth becomes nonsense
Plato anticipated another contemporary falsehood: truth as determined by public opinion poll.
"Theodorus: 'That would follow if the truth is supposed to vary with individual opinion.' "Socrates: 'And the best of the joke is, that he acknowledges the truth of their opinion who believe his own opinion to be false; for he admits that the opinions of all men are true.' "Theodorus: 'Certainly.' "Socrates: 'And does he not allow that his own opinion is false, if he admits that the opinion of those who think him false is true?' "Theodorus: 'Of course.'" (170e-171a) |
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"An opinion on a point of conduct, not supported by reasons, can only count as one person's preference; and if the reasons, when given, are a mere appeal to a similar preference felt by other people, it is still only
many people's liking instead of one. To an ordinary man, however, his own preference, thus supported,
is not only a perfectly satisfactory reason, but the only one he generally has for any of his notions of
morality, taste, or propriety, which are not expressly written in his religious creed." |
The cultural sleep state many Americans have allowed themselves to fall into involves the belief that truth is whatever their "leaders" tell them and right behavior is however their "leaders" act. It's okay for "leaders" to "out" a CIA agent if they don't happen to like what her husband says about their lying about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. It's legal to allow elections to be fixed in Florida and Ohio and elsewhere because Bush and his supporters say it's legal.
The absolutely fatal danger of this kind of non-thinking inculcated by a culturally-induced dream state is beyond measure. The very life and death of Americans is now being determined by such a cultural sleep state:
"How is it possible that the strongest of all instincts, that for survival, seems to have ceased to motivate us? One of the most obvious explanations is that the leaders undertake many actions that make it possible for them to pretend they are doing something effective to avoid a catastrophe: endless conferences, resolutions, disarmament talks, all give the impression that the problems are recognized and something is being done to resolve them. Yet nothing of real importance happens; but both the leaders and the led anesthetize their consciences and their wish for survival by giving the appearance of knowing the road and marching in the right direction. |
What Plato's dialogues provide us--especially in such critical times as these we're living in--is a clear vision of what life is all about and a reassuring sense of the ultimate victory of transcendent, timeless truths. In the Theaetetus, Socrates finds two persons--Theodorus and Theaetetus--who have allowed themselves to be almost completely possessed by Protagorean relativism. This is similar to the situation in which we now find ourselves, when we encounter millions of Americans who have allowed themselves to be culturally brainwashed into a mindless relativism: whatever leaders say is the truth is the truth.
But even in persons who have allowed themselves to be enslaved by destructive ideologies (think "compassionate conservatism") there are still deep, foundational soul-elements through which to assist them to regain a truth-affirming self-empowerment.
"We compel [the members of the jury] to hear both sides before casting their vote. We compel them to hear those two sides according to some rational rule of evidence and advocacy; and then, having taken these precautions, we take the further precaution of having the evidence summarized by an expert in the shape of the judge, who shows its relation to the law. Only then have we some hope that their decision may be broadly a sound one." |
From their own knowledge of mathematics, Theodorus and Theaetetus understand that there are experts in the area of ethics or morality as in all other fields. They're aware that truths--such as mathematical truths--are not determined by subjective whim and that a person can't merely make something true by saying it is. From their understanding of mathematics, they recognize that they are not knowledgeable in certain other areas, for example, in the field of determining what is true justice. They recognize that there are experts, such as Socrates, in the area of virtue, justice, and wisdom.
From their insight into geometry and other mathematical sciences, Theodorus and Theaetetus understand that one must have the humility of "knowing that one does not know" which makes a person ready to learn. They recognize that such psychological capacities constitute a kind of moral prerequisite in one's character, different from competence or expertise in a particular subject matter such as geometry. They agree with Socrates that morality is as stable and real a dimension of human knowledge as mathematics.
Socrates finds it possible, with such intelligent persons as Theodorus and Theaetetus, to clear up the smoke and mirrors of cultural relativism--the mind-state of being asleep instead of aware. From their knowledge of mathematics they know that there are principles that exist outside the terrestrial realm--Forms which are expressed only imperfectly through mundane entities such as the image of a triangle drawn on a sheet of paper. They realize that when they see geometric images with their eyes, they are also--more importantly--seeing noetic Forms with their higher intellect. They know that geometric truths are not private understandings (whims or declarations) subject to public controversy, but universal conceptions valid for all. By extension, they are able to comprehend that there are similar universal and unchanging structures--such as justice--in the field of morality.
| What Socrates is able to effect, through dialectic, is the ascent of Theodorus and Theaetetus from the subterranean cave of myth-thinking and relativism to an awareness of their Higher Self which recognizes excellence in humans and the transcendental existence of Forms which are manifested in mundane entities. |
"Real ability is to respect relative truth without damaging oneself by refusing to realize that it will be superseded. When you observe that today's controversies often reveal not relevance but the clash of the untaught with the wrongly taught, and when you can endure this knowledge without cynicism, as a lover of humankind, greater compensations will be open to you than a sense of your own importance or satisfaction in thinking about the unreliability of others." |
Plato is telling us that although we've awakened to a certain level of conscious experience, we must now develop the capacity to recognize life as a higher form of allegory. Waking up to conscious adult social life has involved merely entering a dream at another level where we're unable to distinguish between physical objects and the Forms which they manifest.
We must now move on to the next level where we acquire the ability to recognize terrestrial objects, events, and persons as higher allegories (hyponoia) pointing to deeper, hidden meanings. Earthly entities--such as beautiful people--are in fact manifestations of the Form Beauty.
Only if we make a concerted effort to examine our lives for elements which impede our development and keep us asleep, can we attain a higher state of awareness and awakedness to who we really are and the ability to understand life in higher terms:
| Nasrudin on phone: "Hello, psychiatric ward, my wife needs some psychiatric help."Nurse on phone: "What's the problem?" Nasrudin: "Well, she thinks she's not a manifestation of the Divine, but just a physical being." Nurse: "Okay, we'll be right there to get you, uh, her." | |
What is the wise response to the collapse of our everyday world? We certainly don't want to bury our heads in the sands of indifference or ignorance, like so many who are now acting like mental ostriches. We can't escape into a fantasy realm, pretending that the ordinary world doesn't exist. At the same time we don't want to become so mentally brutalized by the daily horrors of the ordinary world that we allow their negative energy to create fear and hatred in us.
"We are such stuff as dreams are made on; and our little life is rounded with a sleep." |
We must recognize that the present political-economic-religious-social reality is merely a temporary scene in a vast drama being played out on Reality's eternal stage, that humankind's experience within history is being used to bring about its spiritual evolution.
If the current mindless rulers delude themselves into believing that they control human life and human destiny, we're able to see through this chimera. We don't have to be taken in by their distortion of Reality. We can retain our own humanness, our ability to understand and our capacity to care for one another even in the face of the prevailing dog-eat-dog ideology.
We see, for example, that the cabal junta isn't interested in saving the lives of service personnel in Iraq; they have the technology to destroy 90% of the roadside bombs, but haven't taken this technology to Iraq. These inhuman creatures haven't sent humvee armor or body armor to soldiers in Iraq. They simply don't care if Americans--in Iraq or in the United States--live or die.
We see the true purpose of their militaristic imperialism when we read--almost every day--that they have let out a new no-bid contract to Haliburton or one of the other corrupt corporations that support them.
"The illusion from which we are seeking to extricate ourselves is not that constituted by the realm of space and time, but that which comes from failing to know that realm from the standpoint of a higher vision. We are at length restored to consciousness by awakening in a real universe, the universe created by the One Mind as opposed to that perversion of it which has been created by our egocentric selves. We then see the visible world as the expression of the immanental life of God, the Divine in manifestation. In relating ourselves to it we live in that Presence subjectively in the depths of our mystical being. And in the properly integrated personality the two processes have become one." |
Beyond seeing through the cabal's propaganda haze that attempts to keep people ignorant and asleep, what are the higher purposes which Transcendental Power is realizing through this present world-anarchy? In what way is this seemingly totally negative power structure being used to further human evolution?
To enact once again what our Declaration of Independence calls for:
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness."
"The dreamer is not awake, he who is awake dreams not; for these things are the opposites of each other. |
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Specific initiatives for Americans who awaken from their culturally-induced sleep state:
Notes
1 Simon Hunt, Spiritual-endeavors.org
2 Duane Elgin, "On Simplicity and Humanity's Future," IONS, Noetic Sciences Review, December 2002
3 The word "allegory" (allegorķa) was used in ancient Greece, but it was a late (Alexandrian) coinage. An earlier word used in the same context was hyponoia, which had the connotations of "deep meaning" or "underlying sense." Augustine observes in his De doctrina (2.7-8) that "when something is searched for with difficulty it is, as a result, more delightfully discovered."
4 http://www.xymphora.blogspot.com
5 Plato's concept of a "useful fiction" was deliberately misinterpreted by such non-thinkers as Leo Strauss and Karl Popper as a policy of lying to the people to keep them under control. Shadia Drury, professor of political theory at the University of Regina in Saskatchewan, quite correctly argues that the use of deception and manipulation in current US policy flow directly from the doctrines of the political philosopher Leo Strauss (1899-1973): The Political Ideas of Leo Strauss (1988) and Leo Strauss and the American Right (1997). As we saw in an earlier essay, Strauss and Popper were put into positions of influence by the demonic cabal.
6 Erich Fromm. The Art of Loving
There has been a carefully planned program of complete domination of all sources of information through total media control, the creation of the 'think tank' system to manufacture policy, the establishment of entrepreneurial right wing religion as a method of political control, the use of political contributions to buy politicians, and, if all else fails, simple violence. It is now a country where anyone who could do good is marginalized or assassinated, and changes in government are at least as likely to occur by coup d'etat than by the operation of democracy. There is no longer even the necessity to hide the fact that the country is run entirely for the benefit of certain large pools of capital. The essential lies that Americans tell themselves, which mainly have to do with class structure and, even at this late date, race, infect every major political issue in the country - crime and the incarceration industry, health care, the 'war on drugs', education, immigration including the racist response to 9-11, the environment, poverty and the extraordinary creation of what is really a new caste system consisting of a permanent underclass (something that has happened, unnoticed, only in the last few years), and even American foreign policy. Each year since around the time of Sinclair's broadcast [Gordon Sinclair's famous broadcast from radio station CFRB in Toronto in 1973] the situation has gotten worse, but lately the rate of deterioration appears to be increasing rapidly. Things have gotten so bad that the government is now fronted by a retarded (and I use that word in a technical sense) clown, who everyone treats as if he were a real President (the worst lie to yourself is when you have to pretend that the obvious idiot who leads you is entitled to do so). The lies are so deeply ingrained into American thought that the vast majority of the population apparently is incapable of seeing that there is anything wrong, meaning that there is no possibility of change." 