BEING HUMAN

ARE humans are being lied to?  We humans have been lied to for millenia and so in this blog I just want to explore some of the topics that I feel are important to this issue and what I call ‘the apocalyptic age’.  I have chosen this term because when you understand the true meaning of this much used word ‘apocalypse’  in current parlance, and its relevance to this point in the history of the human race you begin to perceive what is happening on our planet now.  First, I want to stress that the word ‘apocalypse’ does not mean the end of the world.  There has been much written about 2012 and it’s association with a coming physical disaster to the earth as foretold in ancient writings and calendars.  I’m thinking specifically of the Mayan Long Count Calendar here which puts the end of the 5^th sun and the end of the 12^th baktun on the winter solstice or 21^st December 2012.  On this date our sun will be directly aligned with the galactic centre, which is a black hole, and this rare event only happens approximately once every 25, 680 years or so.  This cycle of time is known as the ‘Great Year’’ or the ‘’Platonic Year’’ after Plato who was, 600 years bce, aware of the cyclical nature of time.  Now, the end of the world is not nigh so sit back and relax while I take you through some of my thoughts and conclusions about what may really be happening.

What I hope to point out to people with this rap, is new ways of looking at the world in which we live.  Its basically thinking ‘outside the box’ and attempts to hold subjects up to the light to see them from a different angle and a new perspective, which is essentially a higher dimensional reality.  It is therefore sensible to be aware of how language becomes distorted, especially in the modern media, where the Ape of Thoth,  with its  umps, grumps and much gibbering, splatters our tabloid press and our tv screens with mis-representations of the truth.  

In ‘The Book of Thoth’ Aleister Crowley observed that Thoth/Mercury/Hermes, the messenger of the gods is shown to have more than one side to his nature.  In the Egyptian form of the God He is shown with the head of an Ibis. 

‘The Ibis is the symbol of concentration for it was supposed that this bird stood continuously on one leg, motionless. This is quite evidently a symbol of the meditative spirit’’

[Another] ‘’form of Thoth represents him primarily as Wisdom and the Word.  He bears in his right hand the Style, in his left  hand the Papyrus.  He is the messenger of the gods; he transmits their will by heiroglyphs intelligible to the initiate, and records their acts; but it was seen from very early times that the use of speech, or writing, meant the introduction of ambiguity at the best, and falsehood at the worst; they therefore represented Thoth as followed by an ape, the cynocephalus, whose business was to distort the Word of the god; to mock, to simulate and to deceive.  In philosophical language one may say: Manifestation implies illusion.’’

What might this 'illusion' mean for our discussion?

The nature of the media is to ‘transmit the will of the gods’ by the use of ‘speech, or writing’.  We are well aware that the press often go by the names of the God of communication such as ‘The Mercury’, ‘The Herald’ ‘The Messenger’ etc...  Remember that ‘’the use of speech, or writing meant the introduction of ambiguity at the best, and falsehood at the worst.’’  Can you see where I’m going with this?  Our media not only play the part of the ape but it’s owners have now grown into King-Kong sized corporations who ump, grump and gibber at us with misrepresentations of the truth.  In other words large media corporations are now engaged in the business of distortion, mocking, simulating and deceiving us with an illusion.

Furthermore the media uses a subverted form of sacred symbolism and images, which affect the mind at a deep primordial level – the reptilian brain.  See the work of Michael Tsarion – ‘’The Subversive use of Sacred Symbolism in the Media.’’  (Symbols now used to negative effect on the unconscious processes of the mind)

‘’Nothing of which we may speak can transcend the world of illusion, for words themselves were created to describe unrealities.  Therefore the unutterable is  the real and the unthinkable is the true; the utterable is the false and the thinkable is the phantom of a dream.’’ (Manly P Hall)

 So with that it mind now lets look at this word – apocalypse.  An apocalypse is a revealing of that which once was hidden.  In other  words it is the revealing of truth.  Profound truths are veiled from our eyes by these illusions of language and images.  We have seen that these are two very powerful tools that are used by the institution of media to keep our eyes firmly fixed on the illusion.  The illusion is created to  fool you into believing that what you perceive is not only real but the only reality that exists.  Modern institutions have crept into our lives and told us how to live our lives.  How to have a relationship, how to have a child, how to bring it up, how to have sex, how to live and how to die.  ‘Lifestyle’ – an abstaction  has replaced life,  which is the real thing.  So the first apocalypse that we must experience is the eureka moment when we finally tear down this most destructive veil of illusion and come into alignment with life as it really is.  As soon as this realisation hits us we can then start eating the dinner instead of the menu! 

Just to give you a better understanding of the eureka moment we call apocalypse I will try to expand on it a bit. 

The apocalypse is now; right now and right here where you are standing.  Just to reiterate because it is important; when an event is described as apocalyptic it means something like this.  That what was once hidden is now revealed.  We experience mini-apocalypes as eureka moments when we suddenly become aware of a profound truth that is emotional in character.  A form of knowledge that I call wisdom.  The comedian makes us laugh out loud with the punch line.  That’s what an apocalypse is. It’s the punch line at the end of the joke when you realise the absurdity of it all and in a split second a  flood of emotion rises up into consciousness and depending on how profound the last line is and how unprepared we are there is laughter and perhaps tears as ‘we laugh until we cry.’  The line between laughter and tears is finer than a hair’s breadth.  It is the role of the comedian (the fool, the jester) to punch our souls into the realisation that our relationship to life, the universe and everything is absurd and therefore we must not take it seriously.  For the jester the universe is the ‘Big Joke’ to be interpreted into the language of entertainment.  We are invited to enter into the bizarre,  the illogical, the peculiar.  We laugh, we sneer, we weep, we scoff but actually in the end the joke is on us.  We are the objects of our own ridicule for it is you and I who are the subjects of our own ignorance.  Every time we chuckle about Murphy, the Jew, the vicar,  the fat lady, the bald man we are unconsciously laughing at ourselves.  We project our own absurdities on to the other and firmly believe that all Irish-men are fools.  We kid around and butt the other not realising that we are the goats.  In our blindness we fail to see the ultimate truth that is being revealed to us, the apocalyptic moment of the punch line, when Punch hits Judy, the baby, the dog, the priest and the policeman and the irishman.  It’s a wake up call to come and see our own folly and how we allow ourselves to be bamboozled by the priest, the banker, the politician and the media spectacle.  Welcome to the illusion,  the circus, the theatre of Eros and Thanatos, of the angel of life and the angel of death, of acrobats and clowns, lion tamers and high-wire acrobats. 

So now lets say that we have experienced our first apocalypse.  We have seen the light – the true light shining through our own lenses of perception.  The veil has been parted revealing the theatre of lies,  the false lights of the tv screen with its flashing bright colours has been replaced by the clarity of our own reasoning and our own spectrum of colour and light.  We are now learning how to think for ourselves rather than being told what to think, which means we are probably turning off the tv, seeing through the game and making choices based on what we feel and know to be right for us and our families and communities instead of the get-a-this, get-a-that, do-it-like-this, do-it-like-that,  now breathe-in, now breathe-out culture that we’ve been accustomed to since before we could walk.  We are awake and have taken our lives back from a dying system that Terence Mckenna once said ‘’wants to turn us into half baked morons consuming all this crap’’.  We are now on our way to encountering ourselves as we were meant to be – fully alive, fully awake, fully human experiencing being in the world.

 When we begin to confront life as-it-is instead of life as-a–set-of-lifestyle-prescriptions, we face up to our true relationship to each other, to nature, to the earth and ultimately to our relationship to the universe.  Instead of  being split off from nature - nature being precisely that which we are -  we can now accept our nature and meet ourselves face-to-face as it happens.  We can discover  our own centres of existence and come into contact with that which is our particular, unique individual  point of being that is united with all other points of being in the cosmos.  What I want is to re-enchant the universe.  To bring back the spirit into the cosmos and to rediscover our souls and help them to be expressive of themselves.  To know without a doubt that we are all united by that which is behind the face, behind the mask, behind the ’ego enclosed in a bag of skin’.

Around the mid 1990’s I came into possession of a book; a well thumbed paperback, written in the sixties by Alan W Watts called ‘’The Book On The Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are’’.   The thesis of the book in the authors words...

‘’.....’the prevalent sensation of oneself as a seperate ego eclosed in a bag of skin is a hallucination which accords neither with Western Science nor with the experimental philosophy religions of the East – in particular  the central and germinal Vedanta philosophy of Hinduism.  This hallucination underlies the misuse of technology for the violent subjugation of man’s natural environment and consequently, its eventual destruction.’’ (preface)

This book was for me a first and major turning point in a life lived thoroughly in a fictitious and now crumbling ‘’ego enclosed in a bag of skin.’’  Watts goes on to discus our alienation from the cosmos, our ‘canned lives’’ and our anxieties  with  an elightening chapter called ‘’How to be a Genuine Fake’’.  He calls us to critically self-examine ourselves and the lives we lead in order to see through the ‘’big lie’’ and the hallucination of who we think we are.  In fact he invites us to ask the question - ‘Who am I’ and discusses some of the most ridiculous things we do and the lies we have been told (and continue to tell ourselves) to protect these delicate  and precious egos enclosed in bags of skin.  Alan Watts produced a huge body of work including  books, essays , lectures and seminars during his lifetime and I soon began collecting  his creations both written and spoken word on subjects such as comparitive religion, philosophy, psychology, psychedelics. Meditation, Zen, Vedanta etc...  This was the beginning of my journey to discover the truth. – my truth.

So we are beginning to realise that there is much more to being human than an ego that is separate from its environment and in  fact Watts states that we are separate in name only.

....’’the individual is separate  from his universal environment only in name.  When this is not recognised, you have been fooled by your  name.  Confusing names with nature, you come to believe that having a separate  name makes you a separate being.  This is – rather  literally – to  be spellbound’’

The Wound

Losing or letting go of the ego-self is no easy feat and is akin to a death and a rebirth.   Below is an extract from a book I am currently writing. Its main theme is ‘The Wound’ and the healing process and Mavis, like all of us is wounded and after a painful divorce and a number of major life-shocks she is ready to confront her wound, to own it and to fully enter into it so that she may find healing but more importantly – self-healing.  This wound is what we unconsciously pass on from generation to generation without ever reaalising what we are doing.

‘’Now Mavis saw another side to him (her ex-husband) which was kinder and which had evolved out of her own growth towards wholeness.  Now she saw his soul as one of many souls, all interconnected and broken just like her own had been.  She could see that everyone is wounded and that it is what you do with the wound that is important.  The first thing that happens during the transformation from blind and broken soul to the enlightened state is that you feel your own wound.  You seek everywhere for a cure in pills, alchohol, shopping, cleaning, sex and anything that will numb the pain and stop you from having to think about it or feel its reality.  Many people go through life not ever realising that the pain, fear and disatisfaction that they feel in this life is the wound crying out for attention.  She was amazed that even in the depths of despair, some people still refuse to look at their wounds, preferring as always to blame someone else or some other thing for their pain and hurt. 

Mavis had realised and acknowledged her own brokeness and had therefore begun her journey on the long and dark road back to health.  She had started to see a profound truth about the wound.  It was a process from beginning to end.  You felt it and you worked with it and sometimes you died a little but as long as you remembered that this was your very own wound and process you could get through it one day at a time.  The wound that Mavis speaks about is not the kind of wound that we feel when our best friend hurts us with unkind words or our boss tells us we need to work harder for less pay.  It’s not even the wound we suffer when our lover walks out of our lives without even saying goodbye...  Its much deeper even than the loss of a loved one and it festers in the primeval depths of our souls.  An angst that engulfs all light and drains all the life of existence from the mind, body and soul.  Over the years she had experienced various levels of this anguish in many forms.  Fear, nightmares, unable to hold down a job, agoraphobia, low self-esteem, unsociable behaviour, eating problems, sleeping problems,  swings from aggression to passivity to name just a few.  The more she tried to take control of her life, the more and faster everyting fell apart. Mavis found herself constantly on the edge of the battle field without a battle plan.  She began to feel that there was a hidden force that was hell bent on destroying her as all sense of well-being was stripped away from her leaving a rattling skeleton without any flesh on its bones.  It was at this point that the wound proved fatal and Mavis died.’’

I was going to say  that I think  all of this stuff about dying to the ego-self and discovering who we really are is a painful experience but actually I know that it is very painful to die to ego and go through the death/rebirth process.  I also know that it is the only way to to fully realise the extent of the lie about who we really are.  As soon as we realise fully ( and by that I mean to know it as a truth in the depths of our souls)  that we have been lying to ourselves and that our culture has been co-creating this lie we fall into what can only be described as the underworld.  Everything becomes dark and meaningless and there is a feeling that you are somehow on the route to madness. There is suffering and we have forgotten what it means to suffer and what its purpose is. As one of the enlightened beings said. ‘’To lose our life is to gain life.’’  Stanislav Grof has researched and written about what he calls the ‘psycho-spiritual death/rebirth process for over fifty years.  The death of the ego, he maintains, is not a pathological mental state or psychosis but the natural organic course of nature through the passing away of one state of being so that new healthy growth can follow.  So the way I see it is that the ego – the outer skin – is shed like the skin of a seed that falls into the dark soil (underworld) during the darkness of winter.  There it stays until spring arrives and the sun climbs higher into the sky when the new growth bursts forth from the split skin of the seed and reveals itself in its new found glory.  This growth cannot occur without suffering.  The myth of Persephone is a beautiful analogy for this process and was the basis of the esoteric and sacred knowledge of the mystery religions of Ancient Greece.  Its all about dying to the past so that we can grow toward the future.  To stop being driven by the past and allow ourselves to be pulled towards the light of the future. It is a rite of passage and operates on many levels of existence from the smallest seed through individual psychological growth, the rise and fall of civilisations and ultimately reaches out to major cosmic upheavals.

Death, I feel,  is one of the key problems of our age.  It has become the taboo.  Fear of death prevents us from growing out of our ‘skin encapsulated egos’  towards the light.  We are afraid of death and pain to the extent that as Alan Watts observed - society prefers to keep poor tortured organisms alive for months and months attached to life support machines fed with  tubes, wires and hypodermics rather than let anyone experience a natural passage.  It is only our vanity that prevents us from accepting the aging process as part of a beautiful adventure that leads us towards the greatest mystery of all.  We have been led to believe that life is a some kind of a fluke. Life in the universe has therefore become disenchanted and has lost its magic quality.  Alan Watts interprets the absurdity of this ‘fluke’  of an individuals experience of existence as nothing more than a flash of light between two eternal blacknesses.  There was nothing before we were born and there will be nothing when we die.  It reminds me of something I once read (and which I am unable to attribute at the moment) which goes...’’I am this, you are that, all this is that and that's all there is.’’ 

 Death is the bogey man in an age that has lost its way in life.  We must now begin to confront the face of the reaper - that angel of death who apparently awaits us at the end of existence - from a new and more healthy perspective.  The symbol of the reaper is not our adversary but our teacher.  During times of darkness in our lives let us try to remember something I was told by a close family member that ‘’the darkness seeks out those in whom it finds a worthy opponent.’’ This advice came to me at a time when the darkness was threatening to engulf my very being and I found myself its victim, cornered in a gaping black hole with nowhere to turn and nowhere to run.  It was at this point that I was able to pick up the sword again and fight my way back to the light, for I knew that the darkness would pursue me for all eternity until I found the courage to face it, to conquer it and to incorporate its lessons into my life.

I began to understand the difference between powerless as having no power and powerful as being full of power.  The difference between power and force is that power has always resided within the human psyche and always will.  Force is not power.  Force is the misuse of power.  The State has no power just as the bully has no power. Ghandi knew this to be true and used power without force to defeat the British Empire who were eventually turfed out of India.  The State has only the threat of  the force of law, armed forces, police forces but no power.  I know these things to be true.

To Know Or Not To Know... that is the question

My personal conclusions are that there is only that which we can know, that which we can experience.  There is no belief.  Belief, for me, is an acceptance of a statement, principle, idea or reality regardless of any emotional or intuitive experience of that statement, principle idea or reality.  There is only knowing, or its opposite, not knowing.  Everything else is doctrine, dogma and ideology.  For example; the belief in the scientific method has become so entrenched in modern civilisation that it now threatens to become equivalent to the dogma of the medieval church, when the bible – written in latin that no one understood – was chained to the altar.  The prospect of torture and death at the stake  prevented anyone from reading it or discovering any personal meaning from between its heavily shackled covers.  Compare this scenario with mathematical and scientific equations which Mckenna saw as ‘’so holy to this enterprise’’ of science.   What we are told then, is nothing to do with what we know,  because what we know comes from the core of our being.  With this in mind we can connect to this core of emotion and intuition and let it be the teacher. We discover ‘‘the ability to feel with rather than for.’’ It requires no religious faith and very little science.  In fact I would go so far as to say that knowing is the highest philosophical state of being that there is – the true light of understanding.  In his book ‘Lectures on Ancient Philosophy’, Manly P Hall, founder of the Philosophical Research Society has this to say about knowing...

‘’He who would know and comprehend must learn to think and dream and feel in the rhythm of the senses [emotion and intuition] for that vast ebb and flow of measureless eternity, for only when man ceases to be man is he not man’’.

In this knowing state of being there can be no lies for man and woman have become truly human.