Sacred Economics

I attended a Skype discussion with Charles Eisenstein last night (March 7th) on Chico State campus.  While the "panel" hosting the event was disgracefully unprepared and wasteful of Mr. Eisenstein's time (which he was "gifting" to us), I still walked away from the discussion fully inspired by a powerful intellect who fully understands what we have lost as a species and how we might take it back.

You can read Eisentein's entire book, 'Sacred Economics', online for FREE.  It is an important and relevant work that, unfortunately, will go unheeded by most.

The Most Important Art You May Never See

I realize that this will be difficult to believe.

I would go so far as to say… for many of you, the reality expressed below will be more easily labeled as delusional than intellectually accepted, and I cannot blame anyone who (consciously or subconsciously) chooses to lock themselves into that position.

Writers Charlie Brooker and Konnie Huq have presented the human species with the ultimate reflection of our current cultural existence.  They achieved this with their contribution to a UK television mini-series ‘Black Mirror’, specifically Season 1, Episode 2 entitled ‘15 Million Merits’. 

I must emphasize now that to view Brooker and Huq’s art as a “television show” in the pop-culture sense would be committing a crime against the artists and, perhaps more importantly, inflicting serious psychological damage upon yourself.  The most relevant art of our time is no longer produced with a pencil or paint brush.  The cultural impact of such artworks has nearly been nullified by recorded images and audio.  Film, television, photography, music… these are the artworks that drive our culture, and in turn, drive the future of our civilization.  If you do not understand that culture is the dominant force shaping humanity’s future, it is time to open your mind’s eye and look more closely at the history of our world.

The story ’15 Million Merits” is one of those rare works of art that expresses the truth of our time with such unflinching honesty that few allow themselves to recognize it as the reality in which they daily participate.  The reason for this unwillingness to view a television show as anything more than a fantasy constructed for entertainment and profit is simple:  It hurts.  The truth of humanity’s current condition creates in us pain of a magnitude that we are unequipped to deal with.  This causes most of us to psychologically reject this valid work of art as a mere “T.V. show”, a medium which has produced an ocean of drivel and only a few isolated ripples of brilliance. 

Do not make the mistake of invalidating the philosophical value of ’15 Million Merits’ simply because it happens to be a television show.  Brooker and Huq’s story transcends its medium in every way, as all culturally relevant art tends to do.

Set aside 1 hour of your life and view this story.  Watch it not as a throw-away television show that has been produced to kill sixty minutes of your time, but as a work of art offering up a highly sophisticated mirror.

CONCLUSION

If you are unable to recognize the reality depicted in this artwork as metaphorically identical to the reality you currently exist in, it is because you are not mentally prepared to see it.  Give it time.  Wait a few days.  Think through it from different internal perspectives.  Watch the show again. 

I will be deconstructing ’15 Million Merits’ in a future blAHg, analyzing it as best as I can given the limitations of my own culturally conditioned perspective.  While I do recognize this as an important and highly relevant work of art, I have myself been a prisoner of this American culture for nearly 37 years.  My process of demanding reality rather than a fabricated distortion of it is still very much in progress—though I will say that once a particular psychological breakthrough has been made, the process shifts from painfully slow to uncomfortably fast.

I would appreciate hearing from you in regards to your interpretation of ’15 Million Merits’.  One of the most important aspects of advancing human knowledge is opening the mind to as many cultural perspectives as possible.  The more perspectives a mind gains access to and understanding of, the greater that mind’s ability to arrive at innovative and insightful conclusions about the reality of their world.

Please share this page with others, or encourage others to view this incredible piece of art.  

The Future of Language = The Future of Humanity

In the future, you will not be you and I will not be I.

In the future, nothing will be the same.

Wait for it….

There!

Did you feel it?

Everything just changed.

There!

Again.

That’s the thing about the future, it happens every passing moment.

Measured from the instant your eyes first began reading this blAHg entry, you have become your future self, measurably different in countless ways at the molecular, microscopic level, but perhaps in other ways more difficult to quantify in scientific terms. 

Keep that in mind while you are holding a grudge against someone.  That person is not the person they were ten years ago, ten minutes ago… ten seconds ago.  You are holding a grudge against your imperfect memory of a person that no longer exists.

We are prisoners of our primitive language.  The language I am attempting to leverage at this very moment cannot possibly express its own inherent shortcomings… which is what we’d call ironic.  I prefer calling it tragic. 

If the human species continues to define its perception of reality with this primitive language, we are doomed to repeat the same cycle of self destruction until 1) We consciously formulate a new method of communication that parallels reality rather than contradict it or 2) We wipe out every last scrap of our own genetic existence.

In order to transcend our completely medieval systems of money as debt, politics, and control via militant force, etc., we must first evolve our language beyond the medieval comprehension of reality’s structure. 

A future truly defined by freedom, liberty, and abundance for all is possible.  The first step is admitting that we cannot get there by clinging to primitive languages and highly destructive notions of good vs. evil and the permanence of any idea. 

If words define who we are and what we believe in, should not those words resonate with the same truth as the universe itself?

Is That An Uprising In Your Pocket, Or Are You Just Glad To See Me?

Have you noticed the high number of entertainment titles that have made use of the word “rise” in one form or another?  Below are some examples:

300: Rise of an Empire

The Dark Knight Rises

TRON: Uprising

Rise of the Guardians

Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines

Rise of the Planet of the Apes

G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra

Rise of the Foot Soldier

Mongol: The Rise of Genghis Khan

Underworld: Rise of the Lycans

Fantastic 4: Rise of the Silver Surfer

Hannibal Rising

Van Wilder 2: The Rise of Taj

Carlito’s Way: Rise to Power

And on and on and on…. There are quite a few more.

Is it possible that the ever compassionate and creative minds at the helm of the entertainment industry are trying to convey a message of some kind?  Keep in mind that the vast majority of mainstream entertainment is funded by a surprisingly small number of influential individuals and/or corporate entities.  Consider how often the name Harvey Weinstein shows up in film credits… the man is listed on the IMDB website as having 264 producer credits.

Of course, to imply that our corporate funded “art” is actually a vehicle for rather ominous forecasts of a post-apocalyptic future would be utterly insane, I suppose.  After all, art is nothing more than a distraction, right?  It couldn’t possibly be relevant to our, I don’t know, reality.  It’s not as though we look to the artistic creations of our ancestors in order to determine what was important to them or to understand how they viewed themselves and the world…  OH.  Wait.  That’s exactly what we do.  Well, no matter, I’m sure our present day art is meaningless drivel meant only to turn a profit and nothing more.  Certainly these projects that cost hundreds of millions of dollars to produce and distribute have nothing to tell us about ourselves or the reality we are blindly racing toward.

By the way, here are some other things on the rise:

Civil unrest around the globe

Extreme inequality

Inflation

Religious fanaticism

Global water levels

Ignorance

And…drum roll please…

The “New World Order!”

Gasp.  Yep.  I went there.  I know, I know, it’s that conspiracy-theory-paranoid-fear-that-elitist-douchebags-are-attempting-to-control-the-entire-globe nonsense…another mind bites the dust!  Admit it, that’s your well conditioned, knee-jerk response to the term “New World Order”.  Never mind the reality of global events.  Never mind the painfully obvious push toward a one world government with military power as its core component of control.  Never mind the world’s absolute subservience to a monetary system of debt gone completely insane.  In fact, never mind the entire ocean of reality swimming right outside your front door.  I’m sure there’s another movie about the end of the world you could be watching rather than reading this delusional blAHg.

I am continually amazed that—no matter how many times throughout history governments are caught red handed with their hands in the cookie jar stealing from and/or manipulating “the people”—we still cling to a childish trust in our “leaders”.  When I use the term “leaders”, I also refer to those individuals who shape and drive our culture via mass media etc., because in the end it is our culture that defines how we view our world and react to any given situation.  It is your culture that is shaping your reaction to this essay right now.  Human beings are incapable of thinking beyond what they have had access to in terms of knowledge and awareness.  You think exactly the way all the inputs you have absorbed over the course of your lifetime direct you to think. 

So… the word “RISE”…

What is Hollywood’s obsession with it?

If you really want to know, it is important that you go back to the first film that defined the concept of a powerful elitist orchestrating an uprising of the people in order to be justified in destroying them: The 1927 cult classic Metropolis.  You watch that 85 year-old movie and tell me it is not a blueprint for a great many of the films we have seen since, especially in recent years.

Feel free to disregard this as you no doubt disregard everything that doesn’t remain nicely wrapped up in the bow provided by mainstream culture. 

I’m sure the economy is fine and that our peace-loving, fair-minded “leaders” are working around the clock to ensure we all enjoy long, meaningful lives.

Happy Rising!

Trained For Submission?

“If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em!”

It occurred to me recently that my brain has absorbed this life “lesson” thousands of times thanks to the brain-dead characters from the Looney Tunes pantheon. 

When confronted with challenging opposition, the wise advice of Porky Pig or Daffy Duck (or whichever moronic representation of human incompetence it may be) is to simply join our “enemies” rather than continue the struggle.

I’m not sure how this “philosophy” coincides with the win-at-all-costs competitive spirit that exists at every level within our culture, but apparently it is of crucial importance that a human child believes it is best to join the “winning” team rather than continue to pursue personal victory.  I suppose the obvious connection is... it is better to "win" even when that means changing sides, though this is clearly contradictory to the idea that competition and earning victory is supposed to "build character". 

I’m sure this attitude of “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em!” is ideal for Wall Street trading and backroom deals in which a select few win while the vast majority lose.  Sadly, when a motto as pathetic as this forms the pinnacle of wisdom offered by our childhood “entertainment”, we all lose in the end.

When are we going to wake-up to the fact that we’ve been conditioned for submission our entire lives?  It started with mind-numbing cartoons and continued through our entire educational process. 

Sit down.  Shut-up.  Memorize this fake history.  Eat your num-nums.  And whatever you do, make sure you’re on the winning side, even when the winners hate everything you stand for.

Treat Yourself To A Moment of SANITY

OK, let’s not get ahead of ourselves…

More than likely, you will need to engage and process some vital information before enjoying even a single moment of actual sanity.  After all, the odds are quite overwhelming that you’ve been trained to be pathological since birth, especially if you are an American citizen.

That moment of sanity isn’t going to create itself!  Let’s get started:

1) Purchase and read Selections from Science and Sanity by Alfred Korzybski.  In fact, read it twice.  Better yet, read it periodically for the rest of your natural life.  The book deals with General Semantics, revealing that human beings—mostly due to the unnatural Aristotelian approach to knowledge, thought, perception, and language—still react to the world via our primitive and animalistic nervous systems.  The good news is, we can overcome this with a bit of knowledge and conscious effort.

NOTE: Most of you will not purchase and read Korzybski’s work, and will therefore never enjoy the aforementioned moment of sanity.  Bummer for you.

2) Everything you believe about America, to one degree or another, is completely false.  As an absurdly brief introduction to this concept, listen to this interview with Antony C. Sutton, a professor at California State University, Los Angeles and a research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution from 1968 to 1973. 

NOTE: Even if a mere 25% of his statements are true, the history taught in American schools is a total distortion of reality.

3) Jacque Fresco is the originator of the term “Resource-based Economy”, a completely reimagined global system in which the resources of Earth become the common heritage of every human being alive and are scientifically managed to provide abundance for all.  The video below is a brief lecture Fresco gave at Nichols College on February 02, 1999.  In terms of length and concentration of ideas, it is a powerful place to start in terms of understanding why human beings find themselves in such dire straits and how we can “design the future” to do away with nearly every socio-political problem we face today.

4) Watch the BBC documentary The Century of Self, which will give you a strong background regarding the psychological warfare that corporations and governments have used against you and everyone you know.

NOTE: Below is Part 1 of the series.  Parts 2 through 4 are available online if you are interested in viewing the entire documentary.

CONCLUSION

Unfortunately, many of you are so reliant on the false reality that has been fabricated to keep you ignorant and easily manipulated that—even if you make an effort to understand the wealth of information contained in the suggestions above—your nervous systems will reject it as a threat to your very survival.  I know this because I was one of you just a handful of months ago.  I had no intention of “waking up” to reality… I assumed that I had been a part of reality my entire life.  It came as quite a shock to my system to realize that the culture I perceived as reality is, in truth, nothing more than an elaborate and (sadly) malicious fantasy designed for one thing: Control.  If this sounds ridiculously similar to the science-fiction trilogy The Matrix, well, all I can say about that is… “Duh.” 

The truth is most definitely out there. 

That moment of sanity… followed by many, many more… is yours for the taking.

The question is, are you content being the victim of a false reality designed to keep you ignorant and controllable?  Or do you demand MORE for yourself?

As always, the choice is yours to make.