Occupy Reality!

It seems quite fortuitous that I have started posting my video blogs here on my blogspot page as I am currently having a problem adding text to my YouTube upload.

In support of the Occupy Monsanto demonstrations around the world today a I suggest we all occupy our own realities with autonomous thought and action rather than allow corporate entities to take over and monopolise our existences.

We need to regain a sense of our own agency which has been depleted by the social brainwashing of popular culture as well as sociological theories which try to persuade us that there is no ‘doer’, only an intersection of social variables, the ultimate argument of despair and nihilism.

It is a clash of worldviews as those who operate under a paradigm of hierarchical dominance continue to try and establish and maintain control of systems that had evolved with inner adaptive control measures that are flexible and resilient.  Each monad of consciousness acts autonomously and responds to the whole in order to remain in equilibrium rather than to always direct the responses of others.

We are Doers, and we are Agents, as each of us follows a unique path of experience which gives us the opportunity to grow.  We define ourselves by the choices we make.  The quality of the space we create, the reality we occupy is the manifestation of who we really are.  ‘Know thyself’.  ‘To thine own self be true’.  If we allow others to occupy that space with their domination then we are abdicating our sovereignty.  This has been going on for a very long time, we have sleepwalked into this for generations.

The answer lies within us as we become aware of ourselves and begin to take responsibility for how we deal with the challenges which face us, but the mettle of the inner person is only brought forth by the facing of the external events.  Those that deny the importance of what happens in the world are missing the point.  We cannot wholly control what arises from external situations, but we can control our own responses to them.  The hero need not be undefeated, only undaunted.  This is what the monopolists cannot abide.  Material domination is only the lesser half of what they seek ~ the greater half is the domination and subjugation of the will.  Occupy the space within yourself, within your consciousness and your heart and you will be part of that great wave which is spreading around the world and becoming ever stronger as we all reinforce its field.

Spirits In The Material World

Reflecting on things that I have experienced over the last week I am reminded of how things that come into our worlds change us.

If we have some spiritual practice then we aim to develop that core within us which is beyond the material conditioning we have all received through our incarnation and external life influences.

Finding a place within ourselves which seeks to balance and stabilise how we relate to the troubling events outside is the first step towards having a more benign effect in the world than if we simply respond from a level of information and material control based on desires and the effort to fulfill them.

Becoming more ourselves is to bring spirit into matter.  Matter is a good servant, but a tyrant of a master.  In Tolkien's 'The Children of Hurin' which I am currently reading it is stated that Melkor the Morgoth, the fallen angel to whom Sauron was merely a vassal in the First Age of Middle-Earth which is recounted in the Silmarillion, has become so attached to domination of the world that he has become trapped in incarnation.

To submit that spirit entirely to matter not only in the unavoidable reality of our own incarnation, but to seek to live only through that, and not in some higher meta level of reality that brings more to matter than its own substance is to lose oneself.  Although I do not mention it in the video blog, it is of course the case that consciousness actually creates reality, the appearance of matter and so on as demonstrated by quantum physics and the observer effect.  So for consciousness to seek a complete fulfillment in matter alone is to get trapped in the mirror rather than to see the meaning of the image.

Diverse forms of spiritual practice enable us to get beyond this limitation by allowing us to experience altered states of consciousness which can then lead us to understand that we are not the contents of our consciousness, but that we are some continuum beyond that which evolves through assimilating and interpreting what passes through it.  The discipline of practice, whether in ritual form or simple mindfulness leads us beyond slavery to the external world and leads us into service through a recognition that we are all eyes of the same consciousness ~ In Lak'ech

The transhumanist movement, which only sees humanity as something to be improved, made more efficient and productive fails to see that it would remove us from the very process of learning and evolution which informs our ascending metaview of reality and how it unifies all thing.  If all we were to become was a machine which could not help but to love its servitude, then we would have lost who we are and become more and more separated from the sea of universal consciousness and existence.

Better to evolve organically, spiritually and in our consciousness and this will allow us the perfect freedom of choice through discipline and respect for higher laws rather than slavery to lower ones.  The more we choose to do that which is good for all, then the greater freedom we create for all, contrasted with the agendas whereby all would serve the intent of a few in which even those who are served become ever more limited in their own slavery to self.  The sterility of the latter eventually limits itself out of existence while the former is the basis of life, ecology and limitless inner and outer growth.

The Nature of the Game

Tonight I try to address the accusations I have received that I am fear mongering.  Either I have need of refining what I am trying to say about dealing with the spiritual challenges we each face daily, or my critic has misunderstood me when I talk about the existence of the darker side of our world.

Or perhaps a bit of both.

To me the challenges are about accepting them without getting trapped in predetermined responses or apprehensions about the future based on past experience.  Consciousness is fluid and we can mold it into any shape.  We can face our difficulties with courage or we can face them with fear.  This is why I begin the talk with the Bene Gesserit Litany Against Fear.

Like mediaeval alchemists transforming themselves we must look our demons in the eye, we must face them, not deny their existence and turn our backs on them because then they will haunt our footsteps and we will always have them at our heals.  They are only a denied and discarded part of us anyway.  This is the Trickster side of the Ego which plays tricks on us, confusing and puzzling us, to either trap us or encourage us to evolve and is at the core of the game of existence and consciousness that we are engaged in ~ it is the Nature of the Game, as Jagger and Richards put it so many years ago in the controversial 'Sympathy for the Devil'.

The spiritual warrior faces the responses in themselves evoked by external experiences and so grows.  It is not promoting fear to look at the evil about us, it takes courage to face these things rather than ignore them and deny them.  By seeing our own responses to facts and situations we can gain insight into our own natures.  This is the Jungian approach to uncovering the archetypes which hide within the unconscious, especially the Shadow ~ that part of ourselves that we are most ready to deny.

By this we learn to grow spiritually and become empowered.

When we have begun to transform our inner selves, then we are able to start effecting transformation in the outer world.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h_pf6MsQC-0

Disclosure is Happening, Gradually and Controlled