The Elephant Sitting on Our Faces Since March, PART II
(9 min read)
I bit off a huge chunk in Part I of this post. Thank you for bearing with me. Writing at length and doing so consistently is a learned skill, and attempting to do so over these last few weeks has done more to grow my respect for the art than my close to two decades of working as a professional editor. Focus, method, consistency. Ah the great challenges of our age.
It’s Sunday again. We are working on the couch. Typing and reading and underlining are happing. Shortly my partner will be recording another lecture for the course she’s teaching. My son is upstairs, slaving away with intense concentration since close to an hour on a birthday drawing for my mom. It’s a quiet, subdued day. The first “presidential debate” happened since I last wrote. One of them has contracted COVID, and Merriam Webster informs us that “lookups for ‘schadenfreude’ have spike 30,500%” since the announcement. It’s a funny world.
At the end of Part I in last week’s post I was talking about media, and attempting to put into words my own description of the many factors adding up to what we collectively call our “post-truth” world. I want to re-iterate what I said at the beginning of that piece: that of all the angles from which one could begin to address the sh*t storm that is 2020, I chose the issue of truth and media first because I feel it is the one focus that “has a chance of truly mattering.”
The politicization of something as traditionally “empirical” and “objectively verifiable” as a virus constitutes a massive demonstration of the ever-emergent notion that Our Thoughts Create Reality. Some of us live in fear, taking enormous precautions and making huge sacrifices in the name of safety (our own and the safety of others). Others laugh in the face of it all, mock people wearing masks, and shake their heads in disbelief at the way so many people appear to be following and subjecting themselves to what seem to them utterly disproportionate measures. As for the causes and motives and schemes that might lie behind all of it, I won’t go into that here. I’ll let this wonderfully apropos analogy speak for itself (if anyone knows the source let me know so I can add credit):
Also, I know enough to know that reality is stranger than fiction, and wilder than any theory I’ve yet to hear. The universe is infinitely more interesting that any one of us is able to understand, more mind-blowing than most of us dare imagine. To give you a sense of the vantage point from which I like to look at things —I say “look at,” which does not require or imply “belief”—watch either this 6-minute medley by the inestimable Tom Montalk, or this more elaborate 12-minute video riffing on similar themes by the prolific Bernhard Guenther. Also, an excellent essay on the effects and the meaning of COVID that avoids the pitfalls of engaging with the contents of any one overarching theory is synesthete (she is naturally, and permanently, on an Ayahuasca trip) Teal Swan’s “The ‘Covid Conflict.’”
But I’m getting off track. I was talking about media and our relationship to truth—media being the medium through which we represent what is “real” to ourselves and each other. Before 2020 (or shall we say before 2016), when reality was more or less just limping along—for many questioning, seeking, spiritually conscious people it never really did that, but you know what I mean—with only the occasional upset or dissonance inducing hick-up we had no reason to pay much attention to the medium itself. It’s only when a movie starts glitching all over the place that we start to disengage from the fantasy on screen and begin wondering about broken projectors or men behind curtains.
The “limping along” has been (and always has been, I don’t buy this “things were better in the day” BS) so unsatisfying and offensive for conscious people that many of us never fully engaged with the media of our day, nor the politics of it (and what’s the difference?). Still, this reality-defining machine has been powerful enough to paint a realistic and convincing backdrop to much of our lives. Its paradigms, norms, and standards have deeply shaped our social existence, our sense of self, and our sense of what is right and wrong.
Whenever something big enough happens to draw the attention of even the most ardent disavowers of the mainstream—anything designed to re-engage our awareness and re-tether it to said paradigms, norms, and standards—like elections, “events” in identity-politics, scandals, real tragedies, and hyped-up cultural productions, we pay attention just long enough to feel. That’s often how we know that something has happened at all: Emotions abound. We do what comes most naturally to us beautiful humans: we have feelings. And then we move on. We don’t stop to think, we don’t question, and we certainly don’t look behind or above or below what has just “happened” for a deeper truth or a more all-encompassing explanation.
As regards media and world events / politics, etc. I used to deal with the sense that things can’t possibly be this idiotic and nefarious—we’re really still sending people to WAR? We’re really still LOCKING people up? We’re really subjecting our CHILDREN to this “system of education”? We’re really letting a universally acknowledged VICE (greed) run our economic system? All of us could go on . . . —with an internalized sense of shame that I was just not spending enough time researching and learning and becoming aware of the sheer volume of data and angles and nuances one would have to have absorbed in order to be able to have an intelligent, defensible position on any of it. But this is exactly how our technocracy is supposed to make us feel: You can’t possibly know enough, have standing enough, to participate in an assertive way (read: a way that yields POWER) unless and until you have jumped through all the institutional hoops and brainwashing stations (schools, colleges, corporate jobs, government jobs, elite clubs, and industry associations) to ensure that whatever you will now say or do will do nothing but serve the status quo and its profiteering masters.
The farcical natural of this system has become so untenable, so difficult to continue to take seriously, that its ridiculous premises and postulations have to be projected and screamed at us 24/7, in ever higher definition, at ever louder decibels, and ever more frequent outrage-provoking rhythms, lest it lose its hold on us. Technology permeates and drives all of this exponentially, but that’s a topic onto itself for another day. All I want to arrive at here is the suggestion that what we most need to do—yes, before protesting in the streets, before voting at the polls, and before gorging ourselves on the heaps of outrage and righteous indignation we are served daily—is to DISENGAGE from the external, DISENGAGE from all representations of reality, especially MSM, and go inward.
Recognize that, whether “Right” or “Left” leaning, you have been used as a host for an entire network of parasitic trigger points. You have been infected systematically with emotional and mental/ideological anchor points that make your viewpoints, reactions, and behaviors shockingly predictable. You have to disengage from the ENTIRE paradigm of binary divides, including, and especially, the side of it you’ve been identifying with. Recognize that we’re only rubbing up against each other because we’re stuck to the same coin. The logical conclusion of any either/or mindset (the essential political narrative) is that one side must cease to exist for the other to prevail. You know what worries me about this?
John Prideaux points this out in The Economist’s October 2nd e-newsletter: There’s a poll that’s been asking Americans the following question since January 2017: “How much do you feel it is justified for [your party] to use violence in advancing political goals?” In early 2017, 8% of responders felt violence could be acceptable. Today, that number stands at “more than 30%.” In other words, you put any ten Americans in a room and you’ll have three or four of them who’ll feel it’s only right that those who disagree with them be physically assaulted. Let that sync in.
Never mind fearing for survival and safety. I didn't come to Earth to survive. I came here to evolve, to help others evolve, and to participate in a gorgeous celebration of life and existence. No, what frightens the hell out of me is what this says about the state of so many people’s souls that they turn so willingly to violence, aggression, and hatred, when every single consciousness related body of wisdom on the planet unequivocally espouses peace, reverence, and love.
How do we have an entire generation of people “woke” to the fact that “what you resist persists,” yet when it comes to politics we do not apply this truth? How have we popularized this quote to quease-inducing ubiquity without applying it where it matters most?
“No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.”—Albert Einstein
So how do we escape the binary? How do we move forward?
Consider that the point of the binary divide is to elicit the greatest emotional response from us, which is what is necessary to makes us controllable and predictable. Stop hating. Start understanding. Seek to understand. I know many of us “smart people” do this in a lip-service kind of way. We turn on Fox News or read The Epoch Times or mildly indulge a differently identifying friend or relative on an issue, mainly getting through the exercise by suppressing our feelings or zoning out completely. That’s what would be called “staying in the same level of consciousness that created the problem.” The problem being the illusion of separation. The greater your investment in the illusion, the more intense will be your indignation at having it called that. The stronger your identification with the artificially grafted belief-system, the more you’ll feel attacked by this notion. And that is your sign, as well as your guide, for how to get back to yourself.
Stop going against. Ask yourself what you’re for. The quality of your truth is a reflection of the quality of your questions. Ask better questions. Recognize the difference between a genuine question and a veiled accusation: “What is wrong with these people?” is not a question. “What am I missing here?” is. Listen to the late civil rights icon John Lewis, who asked in this beautiful interview with Krista Tippett’s On Being: “What is America for?” What is it about what you think is or want to be true that is so important to you? What vision are you advocating for? You’ll notice when you start framing your position in terms of positives rather than negatives that we have more in common than what divides us. At heart we are the same. It is always more important for us to be able to love each other than to agree with each other. Direct the outrage at the forces that have managed to dupe us into believing HALF OUR NATION deserves our pity at best, a slow demise at worst. How horribly dehumanizing. How sad that we have let this happen. Stop attacking the ants who look different from us and start looking for the f**** who’s shaking the glass.
Media plays on our emotions because the forces protecting the status quo know that feelings precede reason. We have now been able to prove even “scientifically”—and blessed be the day when we outgrow that straight-jacket of a paradigm—that physiology precedes rationality. If you’ve done any therapeutic healing and self-awareness work at all you’ll know that emotional realities are what give rise to stated opinions. The stated opinions are formulated after the fact, and are an expression of a person’s underlying state of mind, not a description of state of affairs in the “outside” world. Nothing will ever be resolved by re-arranging the external furniture, or by putting a different puppet in a white house, or by a “scientific breakthrough,” or a “wonder drug,” or a “pill” that will make it all go away. Nothing will go away until you face it: at its source; which is always inside you. Inside us. Nothing will get better until we face it there. And heal.
