Probably the most famous actor and theater man in Germany, Dieter #Hallervorden, has unexpectedly clearly, albeit in subtle lyrics, sided with the people bombed in the #Gaza Strip. The video shows harsh images with a sensitive song, not only for the Palestinian people, but also for a peaceful future for Israel.

RIP Refaat in Gaza

Sad news:

Muhammad Shehada @muhammadshehad2 - 19:52 UTC · Dec 7, 2023

Israel killed Prof. Refaat al-Areer, one of Gaza's most prominent writers, poets & activists who spent his life trying to get Gaza's voice to the outside world.

He was killed in a targeted airstrike on his sister's home that also killed his brother, sister & her 4 kids...

Refaat's pinned tweet:

Refaat in Gaza 🇵🇸 @itranslate123 - 13:01 UTC · Nov 1, 2023

If I must die, let it be a tale.

#FreePalestine
#Gaza

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Refaat's last tweet:

Refaat in Gaza 🇵🇸 @itranslate123 - 5:00 UTC · Dec 4, 2023

The Democratic Party and Biden are responsible for the Gaza genocide perpetrated by Israel.

Quote
Vice President Kamala Harris ...
Embedded video

His writing:

My Child Asks, ‘Can Israel Destroy Our Building if the Power Is Out?’ - NY Times - May 13, 2021

By Refaat Alareer
Mr. Alareer lives in Gaza and is the editor of “Gaza Writes Back,” a collection of short stories.
...
On Tuesday, Linah asked her question again after my wife and I didn’t answer it the first time: Can they destroy our building if the power is out? I wanted to say: “Yes, little Linah, Israel can still destroy the beautiful al-Jawharah building, or any of our buildings, even in the darkness. Each of our homes is full of tales and stories that must be told. Our homes annoy the Israeli war machine, mock it, haunt it, even in the darkness. It can’t abide their existence. And, with American tax dollars and international immunity, Israel presumably will go on destroying our buildings until there is nothing left.”

But I can’t tell Linah any of this. So I lie: “No, sweetie. They can’t see us in the dark.”

Lectures:

English Poetry Lecture 1/28: An Introduction to Poetry (video) - Refaat Alareer / eLearning Centre - IUG

On air:

_Palestine voices on Israel's war against Gaza - Usefull Idiots - Oct 13, 2023
This week’s interview with Refaat Alareer, Yumna Patel, and Muhammad Shehada
video_

How Refaat was murdered:

شهداء غزّة Gaza martyrs @Gaza_Shaheed - 12:54 UTC · Dec 8, 2023

Important information on Refaat’s assassination:
The day before yesterday, Refaat received a phone call from the Israeli intelligence about locating him in the school where he took refuge. They informed him that they were going to kill him. He left the school not wanting to endanger the others, and at 6 p.m. his sister's apartment was bombed, where he was killed, his sister and her four children

Obits:

In memory of Dr. Refaat Alareer - The Electronic Intifada - 7 December 2023

‘If I must die, let it be a tale’: a tribute to Refaat Alareer - Max Blumenthal - December 7, 2023

Related:

The “Hunt for Hamas” Narrative Is Obscuring Israel’s Real Plans for Gaza - Adam Johnson / The Nation - Dec 7 2023
The US press and politicians are trying to fit the attacks on Gaza into a Zero Dark Thirty mold, but it’s something much simpler—and sinister.

> America’s media and political class is analyzing, debating, and shaping a narrative in Gaza that’s entirely different from the one being discussed in Israeli media and among Israeli political leaders. This gap, born from casual racism, deliberate credulity, and reflexive alignment with the US government’s party line, is creating a media failure the likes of which we haven’t seen since the run-up to the Iraq War. ... <

A dear friend of Moon of Alabama tweets:

annie fofani🇵🇸 @anniefofani - 22:08 UTC · Dec 7, 2023

I miss you so much Refaat. i assume you sent me this so i could pass it on after your death. so, here it for the world. click, the date is at the base.

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Rest in peace.

Posted by b on December 8, 2023 at 10:44 UTC | Permalink

Back in the late 1980s and early 1990s, a spate of books and articles extolling the word “soul” became the rage in the United States. Soul became the chic word. It popped up everywhere. Everything seemed to acquire soul – cars, toasters, underwear, cats’ pajamas, assorted crap, kitsch, etc. Soul sold styles from boots to bras to bibelots from The New York Times to O Magazine.

The vogue in soul talk spread to every domain as everyone was commodified and capital was financialized. While political, economic, and ecological reality spun out of regular people’s control and they felt unable to feel connected to a religious tradition that cut through the materialistic and war miasma, they were ravaged with a hunger to devour, to consume. It was soul propaganda, highbrow New Ageism at its finest, the religious equivalent of an old-fashioned Ralph Lauren interior. It was the era of consuming souls in a society that had become a spiritual void. At least for those who had become divorced from their bodies and tradition at its best. Fantasy started to rapidly replace reality.

The great popularizer of this new sense of soul and self (though no-self would be more accurate) was Thomas Moore, the author of the best-selling book – Care of the Soul, “a pathbreaking lifestyle handbook” and soon to be soul franchise (The Soul of Sex, Soul Therapy, The Soul of Christmas, etc.) His works replaced the idea of an existential self with a precious, epicurean conception. “You have a soul, the tree in front of your house has a soul, but so too does the car parked under the tree,” he said, adding that things “have as much personality and independence as I do.” Ah, soul!

Not soul as I once learned in Catholic school: the essence of human freedom and consciousness in God united with the body.

Definitely not soul as the essence of a person bound by conscience to God and other human beings.

Not soul as in “For what shall it profit a man if he should gain the whole world and lose his soul.”

Not even soul as the dictionary defines it” “the immortal essence of an individual life.”

Although I have seen this soul-talk used for decades now to sell all sorts of bullshit and thought I couldn’t be surprised by any more usage, I just stumbled on one that took my breath away. I read in Life Undercover, a memoir by RFK, Jr.’s presidential campaign manager, daughter-in-law, and former CIA spy under nonofficial cover in the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and North Africa, Amaryllis Fox (Kennedy), that CIA work is “soulful work.” I didn’t know this. I thought its job was to spy, kill, and foment chaos for its Wall St handlers (with certain exceptions being some analysts who gather information). I recall former CIA Director Mike Pompeo saying, “I was the CIA director. We lied, we cheated, we stole. It’s – it was like – we had entire training courses. It reminds you of the glory of the American experiment.” Or as my friend Doug Valentine, an expert on the CIA, puts it, the CIA is “Organized Crime,” not a bunch of soul-force workers out to feed the hungry and clothe the naked. He writes:

CIA and military intelligence units now operate out of a global network of bases, as well as secret jails and detention sites operated by complicit secret police interrogators. Their strategic intelligence networks in any nation are protected by corrupt warlords and politicians, the ‘friendly civilians’ who supply the death squads that in fact are their private militias, funded largely by drug smuggling and other criminal activities.

Yet Fox effusively thanks her CIA colleagues for their great work and for making her the woman she has become. “Your allegiance is to the flag, to the Constitution, to some higher power, be that God or Love,” she writes in gratitude.

For some reason, I don’t think the assassinated JFK or RFK would buy her love talk; rather, they may quote another eloquent Irish-American, the playwright Eugene O’Neill: “God damn you, stop shoving your rotten soul in my lap.”

The man Fox is trying to elect president of the U.S., Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., also wrote a memoir – American Values – that revolves around an indictment of the CIA for an endless series of crimes: “What are we going to do about the CIA?” he quotes his father saying to his aide Fred Dutton at the beginning of JFK’s presidency, before both Kennedys had yet to be killed by the soulful CIA. Kennedy, Jr. writes:

Critics warned that the ‘tail’ of the covert operations branch would inevitably wag the dog of intelligence gathering (espionage). And indeed , the clandestine services quickly subsumed the CIA’s espionage function as the Agency’s intelligence analysts increasingly provided justification for the CIA’s endless interventions.

Fifty-six years later his campaign manager Fox Kennedy – you can’t make this weirdness up – married to RFK, III, is touting the soulful work of the Agency. She replaced Dennis Kucinich, who was a strong a supporter of the Palestinians. Is Fox and RFK, Jr.’s relationship a matter of what the Boss says to Luke in the iconic movie Cool Hand Luke – “What we got here is failure to communicate” – or the kind of communication that takes place in elite circles behind closed doors?

Sometimes sick people utter truths that lead to sardonic assent. They remind you of history that is so shameful you cringe. Fox and Pompeo also seem to live in separate realities, their psyches twisted by some deep evil force for which they both worked.

And here we are in another presidential election year. When you think about presidential politics, you have to laugh. I like to laugh, so I think about them from time to time. It’s always a bad joke, but that’s why they are funny. It makes no difference whether the president is Ford, Nixon, Carter, Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Clinton, Bush Jr., Obama, Trump, Biden, or anyone who tries to square the oval office for their special sort of big change that never comes. Those who tell you with a straight face that the lesser of two (or more) evils is better than nothing have not studied history. They choose the evil of two lessers and wash their hands. They live on pipe dreams, as Eugene O’Neill put it in his play The Iceman Cometh:

To hell with the truth! As the history of the world proves, the truth has no bearing on anything. It’s irrelevant and immaterial, as the lawyers say. The lie of a pipe dream is what gives life to the whole misbegotten mad lot of us, drunk or sober.

I am reminded of advice I was given during the immoral and illegal Vietnam War when I had decided to apply for a discharge from the Marines as a conscientious objector. But if you don’t go to the war, people said to me with straight faces, some poor draftee will. The military needs good people. To which I would often respond: Like the country needs good commanders-in-chief such as Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon. It’s like what people say about buying a lottery ticket when your odds are 1 in 500,000,000 – someone has to win. Ha! Ha! Never reject the system is always the message.

Contemplating U.S. history for the past fifty-five plus years confirms the continuity of government policy for war and economic policies that enrich the wealthy at the expense of the working class and massacre the innocent around the world. But we can pretend otherwise. For an egregious recent example, the three leading candidates in this year’s election – Biden, Trump, and RFK, Jr. – all stand firmly behind the Israeli genocide in Gaza that any human being with a soul would condemn.

That these men are controlled by the Israel Lobby is obvious, but we can pretend otherwise.

That this is corruption is obvious, but we can pretend otherwise.

We can pretend and pretend and pretend all we want because we are living in a pretend society.

What’s that old Rodney Dangerfield joke: the problem with happiness is that it can’t buy you money? Well, the problem with presidential politics is it can’t buy you the truth, but if you do it right it can fetch you money, a lot of corrupt money to help you rise to the pinnacle of a corrupt government. For the truth is that the CIA/NSA run U.S. foreign war policy and the presidents are figureheads, actors in a society that lost all connection to reality on November 22, 1963.

Scotte Ritter has recently written the following about the CIA and its spearheading of the U.S. war against Russia through Ukraine:

Now, amid such a tense environment, it appears the C.I.A. has not only green-lighted an actual invasion of the Russian Federation, but more than likely was involved in its planning, preparation and execution.

Never in the history of the nuclear era has such danger of nuclear war been so manifest.

That the American people have allowed their government to create the conditions where foreign governments can determine their fate and the C.I.A. can carry out a secret war which could trigger a nuclear conflict, eviscerates the notion of democracy.

If this is soulful work, God help us.

Ask the 32,000 + dead Palestinians in Gaza whose voices cry out for justice while the top presidential contenders cheer on the Israeli/U.S. slaughter.

“The terrible truth is,” writes Douglass Valentine, “that a Cult of Death rules America and is hell-bent on world domination.”

And yes, presidential politics is a funny diversion from that reality. Eugene O’Neill could be humorous also. He played the Iceman theme to perfection, the Grim Reaper of two faces.

There was a tale circulating in the 1930s that a man came home and called upstairs to his wife, “Has the iceman come yet?” “No,” she replied, “but he’s breathing hard.”

Sometimes it takes our bodies to return us to our souls. And our little pains to remind us of the indescribable pain of the savage killing and dismemberment of innocent children and adults in Gaza and many other places by U.S. weapons produced in clean factories by people just doing their jobs and collecting their pay at “defense” contractors Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, Pfizer, etc. Abstraction is the name of the game as human bodies are torn to pieces “over there” and the obscene profits are transferred at the computer terminals day and night.

Living in a technological world of the internet divorces us from real life as it passes into inert, abstract, and dead screen existence. It should not be surprising that people grow sick and tired of the steady streams of “news” that fills their days and nights. So much of the news is grotesque; propaganda abounds. Stories twisted right and left to tie minds into knots. After a while, as Macbeth tells us, life seems like “a walking shadow, a poor player, that struts and frets its hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more. It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

Being sick and out of it for a while allows one a different perspective on the world. This is especially true for those of us who often write about politics and propaganda. A recent illness has forced me to step away from my usual routine of following political events closely. Fleeting headlines have been all I’ve noted for the past two weeks. While lying around waiting for the illness to leave, I would drift in and out of reveries and memories that would float to semi-consciousness. Feeling miserable prevented any focus or logical thinking, but not, I emphasize, thinking in a deeper, physical sense. But it also gave me a reprieve from noting the repetitive and atomizing nature of internet postings, as if one needs to be hammered over the head again and again to understand the world whose realities are much simpler than the endless scribblers and politicians are willing to admit.

Jonathan Crary, in a scathing critique of the digital world in Scorched Earth, puts it thus:

For the elites, the priority remains: keep people enclosed within the augmented unrealities of the internet complex, where experience is fragmented into a kaleidoscope of fleeting claims of importance, of never-ending admonitions on how to conduct our lives, manage our bodies, what to buy and who to admire or to fear.

I agree with Crary. During my sickness, I did manage to read a few brief pieces, an essay, a short story, and a poem. Serendipitously, each confirmed the trend of my thinking over recent years as well as what my bodily discomfit was teaching me.

The first was an essay by the art critic John Berger about the abstract expressionist, avant-garde painter Jackson Pollock, titled “A Kind of Sharing.” It struck me as very true. Pollock came to prominence in the late 1940s and early 1950s. He was described as an “action” painter who poured paint on large canvases to create abstract designs that were lauded by the New York art world. Some have sold for hundreds of millions of dollars. The description of Pollock as an untalented pourer, Berger says, is false, for Pollock was a very precise master of his art who was aware of how he was putting paint to canvas and of the effects of his abstractions. His work made no references to the outside world since such painting at that time was considered illustrative. Berger says that Pollock’s paintings were violent in that “The body, the flesh, had been rejected and they were the consequence of this rejection.” He argues that Pollock, who died in a drunken car crash in Easthampton, Long Island on August 11, 1956, was committing art suicide with his abstract paintings because he had rejected the ancient assumption of painting that the visible contained hidden secrets, that behind appearances there were presences. For Pollock, there was nothing beyond the surfaces of his canvases. This was because he was painting the nothingness he felt and wished to convey. A nihilism that was both personal and abroad in the society.

Pollock’s story is a sad one, for he was praised and used by forces far more powerful than he. Nelson Rockefeller, who was president of the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) that his mother had cofounded, called Pollock’s work “free enterprise paintings,” and the CIA, through its Congress for Cultural Freedom, secretly promoted it as a Cold War weapon against the Soviet Union’s socialist realism art, even as right-wing congressmen ripped Pollock as a perverse artist. So in the name of openness, the CIA secretly promoted Pollock’s avant-gardism as real America art in a campaign of propaganda, while the right-wing bashed him as a perverted leftist. This sick double game became a template for future mind-control operations that are widespread today.

As was his habit, Berger brilliantly places Pollock’s work within social and political history, a description of a time very similar to today when the word “freedom” was bandied about. Then it was the freedom of the Voice of America extolling the Cold War tale of freedom of the “Free World”; freedom for artists to be free of rhetoric, history, the past, and to jettison the tyranny of the object; freedom of the market amidst a strident yet incoherent sense of loss. He writes:

At this moment, what was happening in the outside world? For a cultural climate is never separate from events. The United States had emerged from the war as the most powerful nation in the world. The first atom bomb had been dropped. The apocalypse of the Cold War had been placed on the agenda. McCarthy was inventing his traitors. The mood in the country that had suffered least from the war was defiant, violent, haunted. The play most apt to the period would have been Macbeth, and the ghosts were from Hiroshima.

Today’s ghosts are still from Hiroshima and Macbeth is still apposite, and the ghosts of all the many millions killed since then haunt us now if we can see them. Although their bodies have disappeared out the back door of the years – and continue to do so daily – true art is to realize their presence, to hear their cries and conjure up their images. While the word freedom is still bandied about in this new Cold War era where the sense of social lostness is even more intense than in Pollock’s time, it often comes from a nihilistic despondency similar to Pollock’s and those who used atomic weapons, a belief that appearances and surfaces are all and behind them there is nothing. Nada, nada, nada. A society that Roberto Calasso calls “an agnostic theocracy based on nihilism.” Berger concludes:

Jackson Pollock was driven by a despair which was partly his and partly that of the times that nourished him, to refuse this act of faith [that painting reveals a presence behind an appearance]: to insist, with all his brilliance as a painter, that there was nothing behind, that there was only that which was done to the canvas on the side facing us. This simple, terrible reversal, born of an individualism that was frenetic, constituted the suicide.

This short essay by Berger about Pollock’s denial of the human body struck me as my own body was temporarily failing me. It seemed to contain lessons for the augmented realities of the internet and the new Cold War being waged for the control of our minds and hearts today. Inducements to get lost in abstractions.

Then one day I picked up another book from the shelf to try to distract myself from my physical misery. It was a collection of stories by John Fowles. I read the opening novella – “The Ebony Tower” – haltingly over days. It was brilliant and eerily led me to a place similar to that of Berger’s thoughts about Pollock. Fowles explores art and the body against a dreamy background of a manor house in the French countryside. As I read it lying on a couch, I fell in and out of oneiric reveries and sleep, induced by my body’s revolt against my mind. Trying to distract myself from my aches and pains, I again found myself ambushed by writing about corporality. Both Berger and Fowles sensed the same thing: that modernity was conspiring to deny the body’s reality in favor of visual abstractions. That in doing so our essential humanity was being lost and the slaughters of innocent people were becoming abstractions. Then the Internet came along to at first offer hope only to become an illusion of freedom increasingly controlled by media in the service of deep-state forces. Soon the only way to write and distribute the truth will be retro – on paper and exchanged hand to hand. This no doubt sounds outlandish to those who have swallowed the digital mind games, but they will be surprised once they fully wake up.

Fowles’s story is about David, an art historian who goes to visit a famous, cranky old painter named Henry Breasely. The younger man is writing about the older and thinks it would be interesting to meet him, even though he thinks it isn’t necessary to write the article he has already composed in his mind. The art historian, like many of his ilk, lives in his mind, in academic abstractions. He is in a sense “pure mind,” in many ways a replica of T.S. Eliot’s neurotic J. Alfred Prufrock. The old painter lives in the physical world, where sex and the body and nature enclose his world, where paint is used to illuminate the physical reality of life, its sensuousness, not abstractions, where physical life and death infuse his work, including political realities. Obviously not new to William Butler Yeats’ discovery as expressed in the conclusion to his poem “The Circus Animals’ Desertion”:

Those masterful images because complete
Grew in pure mind but out of what began?
A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street,
Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can,
Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut
Who keeps the till. Now that my ladder’s gone
I must lie down where all the ladders start
In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.

The old man fiercely defends the “foul rag and bone shop of the heart” against all abstractions and academic bullshit, which are the young man’s métier. He accuses the young critic of being afraid of the human body. When the critic responds, “Perhaps more interested in the mind than the genitals,” the caustic and funny painter says, “God help your bloody wife then.” He accuses the younger man of being in the game of destruction and castration, of supporting abstractions at the expense of flesh and blood life. “There are worse destroyers around than nonrepresentational art,” the critic says in his defense. To which the painter roars, “You’d better tell that to Hiroshima. Or to someone who’s been napalmed.”

Back and forth they go, as a nubile art student, who is there to help the elderly artist, acts as a sort of interlocutor. Her presence adds a sexual frisson throughout the story, a temptation to the milk-toast critic’s life of sad complacency. The wild old man’s rants – he calls Jackson Pollock Jackson Bollock – are continually paraphrased by the girl. She says, “Art is a form of speech. Speech must be based on human needs, not abstract theories of grammar. Or anything but the spoken word. The real word. . . . Ideas are inherently dangerous because they deny human facts. The only answer to fascism is the human fact.”

The old painter’s uncensored tongue brought tears of laughter to my eyes and a bit of relief to my aches and pains. I was primarily taken aback by the weirdness of haphazardly reading a second piece that coincided with my deepest thoughts that had been intensified by my body’s revolt. The narrator’s words struck me as especially true to our current situation:

What the old man still had was an umbilical chord to the past; a step back, he stood by Pisanello’s side. In spirit, anyway. While David was encapsulated in book knowledge, art as social institution, science, subject, matter for grants and committee discussion. That was the real kernel of his wildness. David and his generation, and all those to come, could only look back, through bars, like caged animals, born in captivity, at the old green freedom. That described exactly the experience of those last two days: the laboratory monkey allowed a glimpse of his lost true self.

The Internet life has made caged monkeys of us all. We seem to think we are seeing the real world through its connectivity bars, but these cells that enclose us are controlled by our zoo keepers and they are not our friends. Their control of our cages keeps increasing; we just fail to see the multiplying bars. They have created a world of illusions and abstractions serving the interests of global capitalism. Insurgent voices still come through, but less and less as the elites expand their control. As internet access has expanded, the world’s suffering has increased and economic inequality heightened. That is an unacknowledged fact, and facts count.

Toward the end of my two-week stay in the land of sickness, I read this poem by the Palestinian poet Refaat Alareer, who was killed in Gaza by an IDF airstrike on December 6, 2023 along with his brother, nephew, sister, and three of her children. My sickness turned to rage.

“I am going to use that marker to throw it at the Israeli soldiers, even if that is the last thing that I do,” Refaat Alareer vowed in one of his final interviews.

My friend Refaat Alareer was murdered by Israeli invaders in Shujaiya, east of Gaza City, on December 6. He is now among the more than 16,000 civilians killed by Israel in the besieged enclave since October 7.

Our correspondence continued off-and-on for the past nine years. In our final exchange, on November 27, as the bombing grew closer to his home, he told me, “Everything is running out. Food. Water. Cooking gas. Israel is bombing all sources of life. Solar panels, water tanks and pipes. Not one bakery is functioning.” 

Refaat was an author and educator who taught English literature at Gaza’s Islamic University, which has been completely destroyed. “Israel wants us to be closed, isolated—to push us to the extreme,” he explained to me. “It doesn’t want us to be educated. It doesn’t want us to see ourselves as part of a universal struggle against oppression. They don’t want us to be educated or to be educators.”

In one of his last public interviews, with Electronic Intifada, Refaat vowed that, if necessary, he would die by the same pen by which he lived: “I’m an academic. Probably the toughest thing I have at home is an Expo marker. But if the Israelis invade, if the paratroopers charge at us, going from door to door, to massacre us, I am going to use that marker to throw it at the Israeli soldiers, even if that is the last thing that I do.”

Refaat was a model of the resistance which Israel and its patrons aim to destroy. I tell his story in the passages below, which are excerpted from my 2015 book, The 51 Day War: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel.

The Teacher

Just a few months before I traveled to Gaza to cover the 51 Day War, I was dining with the literature professor Refaat Alareer, who usually lives in Gaza City, at an upscale Italian restaurant in Berkeley, California. We had been invited there by the Lannan Foundation, a Santa Fe, New Mexico–based foundation that supports a mix of artistic endeavors and progressive political causes. I had just delivered a talk on my book, Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel, in San Francisco, beside the Palestinian-American author and journalist Ali Abunimah. For his part, Refaat had been touring the US with a group of Palestinian authors from Gaza to promote the compilation of essays he had edited, Gaza Writes Back.

We had followed closely on each other’s heels throughout our book tours that spring. When I spoke at Western Washington University, a picturesque campus on the US border with Canada, I was peppered with questions by a Jewish-American undergrad who seemed to have never encountered a critical analysis of Israel and Zionism. A week later, I learned from Refaat that the student had cried openly as he and two other young writers from Gaza, Yousef Aljamal and Rawan Yaghi, described growing up under siege to the campus audience.

By the time we gathered at the long dining table in downtown Berkeley, everyone seemed to be struggling with varying levels exhaustion and bewilderment from our long cross-country tours. I felt slightly uncomfortable seated beside three young people on a brief furlough from the Gaza ghetto before white tablecloths spread with crystal goblets of Merlot and smooth wooden boards of artisanal cheeses. But I quickly forgot my discomfort as I fell into conversation with Refaat.

We spent the next hour chatting about his impressions of the vast and blindingly colorful country he had just barnstormed across. The American landscape had offered Refaat the chance to meet Jews who did not greet him from behind the barrel of an M-16, from inside the cockpit of an F-16, from the turret of a Merkava tank, or behind an occupation administrator’s desk. Refaat described it as his “Malcolm X moment.”

“When Malcolm X was in prison, his sister told him, ‘Elijah Muhammad said Islam is the true religion of black people and the white man is the Devil.’ He thought of every white person he had ever met in his life and realized that he had been harmed in one way or another by every one of them,” Refaat explained. “This is what’s happening to us in Palestine, because you never come face-to-face with a Jewish person who’s not armed to the teeth trying to kill you. And that makes it very hard to break with your prejudice.”

It was not until Refaat visited the United States that he came face-to-face with a Jew who sympathized with his plight as a Palestinian. “When you talk to Jewish people about their lives, they host you in their homes, you spend time with their families, they can educate you in ways beyond imagination because they know about Israel, about Jewish life, about Zionism,” he marveled. “You learn so much because they are insiders. It was the tour to America that changed me in so many ways.”

Even as it stimulated his imagination and broadened his perspective, Refaat’s trip to the US summoned pangs of regret. Like any other Palestinian academic, the occupation had cost him countless opportunities to study abroad and form relationships with his intellectual counterparts. In 2005, Israeli authorities refused to allow him to complete his master’s degree in the UK. He lost an entire year of his studies along with his scholarship. Over the following two years, the Israelis refused to allow him to leave Gaza on ten separate occasions. He remembered telling them, “If you have something against me, just put me in prison!”

When Refaat finally managed to secure permission to travel to the US in 2014, Sarah Ali, a twenty-two-year-old English literature student and teaching assistant at Islamic University who had contributed to Gaza Writes Back, was refused a permit to join him on the book tour. Thus, at events around the country, Refaat and his fellow Gaza writers, Yousef and Rawan, delivered lectures next to a chair with a cardboard cutout that read: “Sarah Ali Should Be Here.”

“Israel wants us to be closed, isolated—to push us to the extreme,” Refaat reflected. “It doesn’t want us to be educated. It doesn’t want us to see ourselves as part of a universal struggle against oppression. They don’t want us to be educated or to be educators.”

When Refaat returned to Gaza from the US, he redoubled his efforts to educate Gaza youth out of the narrow prejudices spawned in the seedbed of siege and occupation. At Islamic University, the conservative higher education institution co-founded by the assassinated Hamas leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin in 1978, Refaat introduced his students to Hebrew literature. Among the Jewish Israeli writers he assigned them was Yehuda Amichai, the legendary poet whose famed work, “God Has Pity on Kindergarten Children,” tells of short lives consumed in war and punctuated by intimate encounters with violence. The poem’s opening stanzas resonated easily with Refaat’s students:

God has pity on kindergarten children,
He pities school children — less.
But adults he pities not at all.
He abandons them,
And sometimes they have to crawl on all fours
In the scorching sand
To reach the dressing station,
Streaming with blood.

Refaat also assigned his students The Merchant of Venice. He encouraged the class to view Shylock, Shakespeare’s Orientalized, avaricious Jewish character, as a sympathetic figure who was struggling to retain a modicum of dignity under an apartheid-like regime.

When his students completed the play, Refaat asked them which Shakespearean character they sympathized with more: Othello, the Venetian general of Arab origin, or Shylock, the Jew. He described their response as the most emotional moment of his six-year teaching career: One by one, his students declared an almost visceral identification with Shylock.

In her final paper, one of the Refaat’s students reworked Shylock’s famous cri de coeur into an appeal to the conscience of her own oppressors:

Hath not a Palestinian eyes? Hath not a Palestinian hands, organs,
dimensions, senses, affections, passions; fed with
the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject
to the same diseases, heal’d by the same means,
warm’d and cool’d by the same winter and summer
as a Christian or a Jew is? If you prick us, do we not bleed?
If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us,
do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?

Refaat stored his students’ papers in his desk at Islamic University’s English Department like small treasures. Then, on August 2, the Israeli military bombed his department along with the university’s administrative offices, sending those papers up in flames. The office where students met him during office hours was pulverized and the student library next door was decimated. When Israeli army spokesman Peter Lerner claimed that the air force had targeted a “weapons development center” in the school, Refaat’s students responded with a wave of jokes about PMDs, or Poems of Mass Destruction. “Open minded Palestinians are more dangerous,” Refaat said. “That’s why [Israel] attacks the Islamic University. That’s why it attacks other colleges. Of course, they lied when they attacked it.”

  Refaat had seen his school attacked by Israeli forces before, and he watched it be rebuilt. But there was little that could console him over the violence that sheared branch after branch from his family tree. During the war, he lost his brother-in-law, who also happened to be his best friend. He learned that his cousins were massacred in Shujaiya — Fathi al-Areer was among the survivors of Refaat’s extended family whom I interviewed in the rubble on August 14. Next, he received news that his brother was killed.

In the months after the war, his brother’s young son, Ranim, slipped into desolation. “I hate Dad,” Ranim muttered on a routine basis. “He won’t come back.”

Holy work

In early 2015, as electricity shortages plagued Gaza, I struggled to stay in touch with Refaat. His electricity came on for less than six hours at varying times depending on which day it was, leaving us with only a brief window of time to connect on Skype. When I finally reached him in late January, I found him coping with the malaise spreading through Gaza after the war. His house and his neighbor’s house had been bombed, forcing him to spend days at UNRWA offices attempting to negotiate the reconstruction process. It had taken three months to demolish a section of his family’s home that threatened to collapse atop passersby. “If it took that long, imagine how long the bureaucracy of getting it built again will take,” Reefat sighed.

One of Refaat’s brothers lost his job when the ice cream factory he worked in was bombed by Israel. He was left to scramble to collect enough money just to pay his monthly rent. His father, who had not been able to find work in twenty years, depended on help from his unmarried sons. But they considered themselves lucky compared to the thousands of government employees who had not worked in months and had no family assistance. “We always ask ourselves how they survive,” Refaat said of the unpaid workers. “You get to the point that you will do anything for a buck. It’s no surprise that crime is up, that domestic violence is up, that divorce is skyrocketing. Does the PA or Israel understand that sooner or later this will lead to an explosion?”

With the Rafah border crossing almost hermetically sealed by the Egyptian junta, Refaat had little chance of escaping Gaza to complete his PhD. His only release from frustration was in the classroom. As the siege tightened in the immediate aftermath of the war, he returned to Islamic University and redoubled his efforts to expand his students’ intellectual horizons. “I find myself releasing most of my anger at the situation by teaching young people about the struggle and about being creative in the way we fight for our rights and freedom,” Reefat said. “It’s very rewarding.”

In December 2014, Refaat’s class played host to my colleague Dan Cohen. Dan observed as Refaat presented his class with a story by one of his students, Noor Elborno, written from the perspective of an Israeli veteran of an assault on the Gaza Strip. The soldier had returned to his family in Israel plagued with post-traumatic stress disorder and consumed with nightmares about the children he had killed back in Gaza. As the Palestinian children in his nightmares turned to his own, the soldier descended into madness. If the story had been written by an Israeli, it would have fit neatly into the country’s hackneyed shooting-and-crying literary sub-genre, the most notable example being Waltz With Bashir, in which soldiers sought personal absolution through anguished confessions of crimes they committed against Palestinian refugees in Lebanon. Authored by a young Palestinian in Gaza taking on the perspective of an Israeli directly engaged in violence against her society, however, it reflected an unusual yearning to understand the psyche of the occupier.

Refaat turned to his class and asked them if they could sympathize with the soldier in the story. Some among the class said they might be able to, but only on the condition that they were released from the bonds of occupation. Others protested that the soldier was complicit in their oppression, and that he was a baby killer who deserved to suffer for his crimes. The angry voice of a young woman suddenly rose above those of her classmates. “I hate them all!” she exclaimed. She emphasized that she was referring to all Jews.

Refaat emphasized to the class that not all Jews were Zionists, and challenged them not to implicate an entire group for the cruelty of a state that claimed to be acting in their name. “I told my students about my time in the US staying with Jewish friends, being with their families, about seeing them defend Palestinians,” he recalled. “It’s abstract to them because Israel won’t even let my students travel to meet other people. Actually, three of my students have been prevented from leaving recently. But if these kinds of discussions help ten percent that’s wonderful, because later on, when they get to break the walls of isolation the occupation and Egypt are creating, when they meet Jewish people who are working for our cause, it’s going to make all the difference.”

Towards the end of the class, Refaat asked his students to raise their hands if they had lost their home or friends and family during the war. Most in the room threw a hand in the air. The young woman who declared her hatred for Jews had, in fact, lost her home in Shujaiya and witnessed the death of family members and neighbors. “It clearly showed how Israeli violence is pushing everyone to the extreme,” Refaat remarked. “This war was so horrible, it really touched everyone.”

When class was over, fifteen young women in colorful headscarves and long dresses approached Dan all at once, peppering him with questions. “The class had apparently known that I was a Jew,” Dan told me, “and they wanted to know what I thought about them, about Gaza, about my life in the US. They had never met a Jew before and they really showed me a lot of respect.”

The following day, the young woman who declared her hatred for Jews approached Refaat to express regret. Hearing herself verbalize her resentment left her feeling ashamed, she told him. And the meeting with Dan after class had provoked her to consider redirecting the anger that had gripped her after the war.

“Gaza is the most maligned place in the world, and if we were to believe what we’re told by established Jewish groups in the US and mainstream media, we would think that a Jew in Gaza would be ripped apart, that Gazans are running around looking for a Jew to kill,” Dan reflected later. “In this supposed hotbed of anti-Semitism, everything was completely the opposite of the way I was told it was going to be. What I found were people like Refaat fighting to keep the violence that had consumed the physical lives of his students from consuming them internally. What he’s doing is holy work.”

Days before his death, Refaat pinned the following poem he wrote to the top of his Twitter/X timeline:

If I must die,
you must live
to tell my story
to sell my things
to buy a piece of cloth
and some strings,
(make it white with a long tail)
so that a child, somewhere in Gaza
while looking heaven in the eye
awaiting his dad who left in a blaze—
and bid no one farewell
not even to his flesh
not even to himself—
sees the kite, my kite you made, flying up
above
and thinks for a moment an angel is there
bringing back love
If I must die
let it bring hope
let it be a tale

This is the transcript of our film “Love, Reality, and the Time of Transition“.

Written, narrated and audio editing by Bernhard Guenther.
Visuals and video editing by Humberto Braga.

Youtube Link

“Love, Reality, and the Time of Transition” has been selected as the #1 film 2011-2012 of the “Top 100 Global Development Movies”.”The best positive, inspirational, thought-provoking movie of our times.”

– RYB TV

Love, Reality, and the Time of Transition – Transcript

By Bernhard Guenther, October 2011

It is true, all we need is love. But do we really know what love is? Love is a word that is sung about in songs, written in poems, talked about a lot and it is something many people long for one way or the other, mostly in the form of a partner. We hear it a lot these days: “Be heart-centered” and “Be love”, “Love is the answer, because love always wins!”, “Send Love and Light!” and so on. People use it casually in conversations in their every day lives. It is seen as the solution to all the world problems. All you need is Love!

If that’s so easy, how come nothing has changed fundamentally on planet earth despite the obvious technological progress? ?We still see genocide, oppression and wars happening. Hundreds of thousands of children and civilians have died in the Middle East and around the world because of the war machine under the control of psychopathic leaders who couldn’t care less about anyone who holds up a peace sign with a proclamation of love as the force for change. ?Looking at it more closely we can see that “Love” is one of the most abused and misunderstood words.

We mistake things like gratification, sentimentality, obligation, duty, passion, desire, and other superficial emotions, ideas and conditioned concepts as “Love” in order fill something that is ultimately lacking within us. These distortions are also used mostly unconsciously as buffers to avoid facing reality as it is by looking at the world with rose-colored glasses on, instead of seeing oneself and the world more objectively beyond appearances.

“For the great majority of mankind are satisfied with appearances, as though they were realities, and are often more influenced by the things that seem than by those that are.”

– Niccolo Machiavelli

There is personal love between humans, motherly love, love of family and community, love for oneself, love for something greater than the self, love for god and even love for man-made ideologies and concepts such as for a nation and country.? So what is love? How can we describe or define such a powerful force? Words are very limiting and can only point to it, but are not it. Maybe we can start by examining what love is not.

When it comes to interpersonal relationships we often see control games, jealousy, and envy which is obviously not love, but expressions and behaviors based on fear and need. ??Love is related to emotions and feelings, but they can be merely based on chemical reactions in the brain that result in a “high”, where people feed off each other which is also be the basis for psychic vampirism. Many relationships are based on this feeding mechanism, which has nothing to do with love, but is a parasitic need resulting in co-dependance. Sexual attraction is also mistaken for love at times. Many people get into relationships for the wrong reasons, be it to escape their loneliness, to fill a hole in their lives or feed off another person. For the most part this happens unconsciously and so people tend to lie to themselves about love and their relationships in many ways, not seeing the other person as he/she is and not even seeing themselves clearly as they are.

“People convince themselves of their own lies, becoming victims of their own inventions as they begin to direct their lives by standards of behavior, ideas, feelings, or instincts which do not correspond to their inner reality. What is truly serious in this matter is that the individual loses all points of reference regarding what comprises truth, and what comprises lies. He becomes used to considering as true only that which is convenient for his personal interests; everything that is in opposition to his self-esteem or in conflict with already established prejudices, he considers false.”

– John Baines

To truly love another person we need to see the other as he/she is without trying to change that person. That is the basis for unconditional love, but for that to happen we also need to know ourselves and see us as we truly are , so we don’t fall into the trap of illusory projections which only result in disappointment and hurt once the romantic phase is over. It’s about acceptance and consideration, being able to give and receive, to be externally considerate and not expect anything.?? But beyond personal relationships, the idea of love has also been distorted and used superficially as slogans. It is equated with being positive, open, friendly, not saying or focusing on anything “bad” or “negative”, to be always cheerful and have a smile on ones face. Of course there is nothing wrong with kindness and friendliness as well as positivity, but it must be based on truth and reality, not lies, self-calming rationalizations or avoidance, including political correctness which only leads to complacency and ignorance.

Some people say we need to be more heart-centered, loving and compassionate. Yes, obviously we all need to connect more to our heart, show empathy and compassion, especially extending it the whole world, beyond our close friends and family. ??But what does that really mean? Many people seem to associate love with emotions and feelings or niceness, but is it not more than that, like a higher state of consciousness and being??? We seem to mistake many things for “love” and even judge the intellect as “bad”, mistaking it for the monkey/predator mind, hence many suggest that we should “think” with our heart and do what we “feel” like doing, which mostly results in mere self-deception and lack of critical thinking. It’s about aligning the heart with the intellect, intuition with logic, mysticism with science.

Many people seem to force themselves into this artificial and superficial state of love through contrived affirmations and “feel good” spirituality, ignoring anything that may be a threat to their “positive” life view. ??Ultimately this results in suppression and armor that is manifested by denying the shadow part of themselves and the world as they ignore objective reality. On the surface they don’t even think that anything is “wrong” with them. It’s very much a blissful ignorant state, trying to stay high on artificial emotional projections, avoiding anything that may give them a downer and living in a subjective tunnel vision with blinders on.

One can see this kind of attitude in many self-proclaimed “aware” and “conscious” people who follow shallow New Age teachings and pop psychology resulting in self-calming but lacking deeper healing, growth and essentially real love.

“We’ve all met people who seem too sticky and gooey. They are “too nice” and sickeningly sweet. We sense that they are somehow being fake when we are around them and we feel we never really know them. They are, as the saying goes, “too good to be true.” These people are barricaded behind their mask or persona. They will deliberately avoid any kind of negative reaction or emotion. They refuse to be real and suffer the acceptance of their own dark side and this can be a dangerous thing.”

– Rebeca Eigen

“The Shadow describes the part of the psyche that an individual would rather not acknowledge. It contains the denied parts of the self. Since the self contains these aspects, they surface in one way or another. Bringing Shadow material into consciousness drains its dark power, and can even recover valuable resources from it. The greatest power, however, comes from having accepted your shadow parts and integrated them as components of your Self. Everyone carries a Shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is. At all counts, it forms an unconscious snag, thwarting our most well-meant intentions. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.”

– Carl G. Jung

Love is not merely an emotional state, but a state of consciousness. Just like there are different levels of consciousness, there are also different levels of love one can access on the spectrum of consciousness based on ones level of being and awareness. ?There is carnal love based on the sexual center and animal part in man which is the biological drive to procreate, ensuring that organic life on earth continues. This drive is mechanical tied to the esoteric meaning of the General Law and waking sleep state homo sapiens is under.

“As a cell of humanity, man forms part of organic life on Earth. This life in its ensemble represents a very sensitive organ of our planet, playing an important role in the economy of the solar system. As a cell of this organ, man finds himself under the influence of the General Law, which keeps him in his place. In fact, this law leaves him a certain margin or tolerance. It allows him some free movement within the limits it sets. Within these boundaries, which are very limited objectively although subjectively they appear vast, man can give free rein to his fantasies and his ambitions.

Without going too far into the definition of these limits and detailed description of the components of this General Law, we can say as an example that one of those factors is hunger: the servitude of working to assure our subsistence. The chain: sexual instinct; procreation; and the care of parents for their children, is another factor. The esoteric maxim that applies to this aspect of life is conceived thus: carnal love is necessary for the general good.”

– Boris Mouravieff, Gnosis

Then there is courtly love based on the higher centers, which is a higher state of being that can only be accessed through sincere self-work, not giving in to mechanical driven behaviors and choices. Essentially for true love between two people to manifest there needs to be a connection and matching on all centers: physical, sexual, emotional, intellectual and spiritual.

We need to continually work on ourselves to bring the centers into balance, so no one feeds of the other, but both compliment each other. Love, in its truest sense means to see the world, oneself, and others more objectively. From an esoteric perspective it’s about evolving towards this objective love. In other words, the more we are objective with ourselves and the world, raising awareness and see things as they are, the higher the degree of love we can access. It is based on knowledge, being and understanding, not merely emotional states and “happy thoughts”.

Subjective love is attached to one’s own idea of the other or to what can be gained or obtained from the other. People call the most various desires love. These can have to do with social status, addiction to power over or domination of another, sexual interest and so forth. The emotion fluctuates between satisfaction of getting and fear of losing and is generally centered on the self. Subjective love seeks to somehow forcibly appropriate another into one’s extended self. One example of this is showing off what a clever or good-looking partner or child one has in order to somehow increase oneself. Any games of domination or co-dependence which often involve the term love fall in this category.

However, by doing the work towards objective love one shouldn’t ignore or suppress anything that doesn’t live up to the ideal of higher love beyond the self. Everyone is on a different level of being with different lessons to learn and integrate. ?It seems to happen very often in spiritual and esoteric circles that people claim attributes to themselves and inflate their being above the actual state of where they are and what they need to learn and confront in order to grow and evolve. ??Objective love is not a detached unemotional state of existence. It simply means to act from one’s true self beyond conditioning, programming and projections, but with a “clean” emotional center, not one that is shut down.

Our emotions are the gateway to love, but they are not love. It’s about opening up to vulnerability and not suppressing negative emotions such as anger, sadness, jealousy, grief, but work through them which leads to compassion and empathy, not only for oneself or close friends and family but for the world and humanity at large. ??This also means to experience and feel emotions so we can let them go without suppressing them or projecting them on someone else. There are many ways to do this. Art, music, journaling as well as breathwork, bodywork and other healing modalities can help in the process of transmuting the shadow into light through emotional cleansing. It’s a delicate and deep process that doesn’t happen over night.

In that sense relationships are also lessons in love and not an end in itself, but can help us to learn more about ourselves. People and friends who are also engaged in sincere self-work can show us valuable lessons as they serve as mirrors and can help to expose parts of ourselves we wouldn’t be able to see since we all have subjective blind spots. A mirror generally is perceived as shocking or socially disagreeable. This comes from the fact that if the mirror is any good, it will conflict with the subjective filters of perception most people maintain concerning themselves. In other words, people’s self image is more or less based on lies to self and in the degree the mirror reaches its intended truthfulness, it will challenge these lies.

“According to the Great Work, a friend is one in which you support and encourage the others expansion in either the mind or the spirit.Otherwise they are people you are sentimentally attached to it because they would eat cinnamon bun with you. And they will say ‘hee, hee, hee’ aren’t we having fun”. Drug addicts do the same thing. Drug addicts want to be around people who will support them and be away from real friends. Do you know why? Because it feels good. To be a member of a mystery school can be catastrophic to the ego and to the ego’s habits and to the propensity for mediocrity. No one ever cried striving for excellence. They only cried when their mediocrity was taken away from them and pointed out to them.”

– Jerhoam

The more lessons are learned, the more knowledge gained, understood and applied, the more we purify our emotions, the more one’s being and awareness raises as the higher centers are activated and the more we can “see the unseen”. However, this is a process that is different for each depending on many factors.

Psychopaths on the other hand (about 6% of humanity) have no capability to experience anything close to love, compassion and empathy by birth. It’s not a psychological disposition but a genetic one. That is another topic which is very misunderstood and ignored, especially since most psychopaths can appear as “normal” through their “mask of sanity“. They are not necessarily criminals in prisons, but can be CEO’s, politicians, spiritual leaders, a husband, wife, child or the neighbor next door. They can tell you exactly what you want to hear, appear compassionate, empathetic and understanding without meaning or feeling it one bit.

To assume that we are all the same and that everyone has access to this higher love (or any form of love) is self-deceiving at best and we can see those kind of assumptions in the oversimplified idea of “we are all one!”. You cannot BE what you’re not, nor can you give what you don’t have.

We are all one, but we are not all the same. There seems to be some major blind spot and oversimplification about the idea of “we”. This has nothing to do about “us vs. them”, but understanding how complex humanity actually is, what we choose to believe and wish for and what we avoid to look at and confront, within and without.

“Too many people hold the idea that psychopaths are essentially killers or convicts. The general public hasn’t been educated to see beyond the social stereotypes to understand that psychopaths can be entrepreneurs, politicians, CEOs and other successful individuals who may never see the inside of a prison.”

– Dr. Robert Hare

“It feels more democratic and less condemnatory (and somehow less alarming) to believe that everyone is a little shady than to accept a few human beings live in a permanent nighttime. To admit that some people literally have no conscience is not technically saying that some human beings are evil, but it is disturbingly close. And good people want very much not to believe in the personification of evil.”

– Dr. Martha Stout

If one looks into the accounts of Near-Death experiences (NDE) and what some people have seen or realized, there is a common theme:? This profound experience of objective Love, which is not related to the Love as the human personality experiences it. It is for example, as one person who had a NDE said, not a sentimental, get a tear, ‘feel someone’s pain’ feeling, not an emotion. It is beyond sentiment or feeling someone else in this form, but relates more to an all expansive, knowing and understanding.

“The problem is not the term “love”, the problem is the interpretation of the term. Those on third density have a tendency to confuse the issue horribly. After all, they confuse many things as love. When the actual definition of love as you know it is not correct either. It is not necessarily a feeling that one has that can also be interpreted as an emotion, but rather, as we have told you before, the essence of light which is knowledge is love, and this has been corrupted when it is said that love leads to illumination. Love is Light is Knowledge. Love makes no sense when common definitions are used as they are in your environment.? To love you must know.? And to know is to have light.? And to have light is to love. ?And to have knowledge is to love.”

– from the Cassiopaean sessions??

Ultimately there is no love where there is no truth and knowledge. Love entails seeing the world as it is- not as we like, want it or assume it to be. Hence, true love is essentially linked to how much one can access objective reality.

“You know the consciousness movement has let us in to create a kind of a hybrid spirituality that is mixed with a very toxic degree of narcissism and we need to look at that . It has made us very hyper sensitive and not very strong. I would say to you what has it made us conscious of because if it made us that conscious of the world we wouldn’t be in this state we’re in. If it made us that conscious of the world, we wouldn’t have dropped the ball on the management of freedom and the bill of rights, but we did. We’ve lost our civil rights. We dropped the ball. We dropped the ball on the management of the earth’s creatures and we got a hundred and fifty chimps left.

What have we become conscious of these last fifty years? Where have we been? We’ve been processing wounds. I know people who say I’m working to become conscious but I won’t look at the TV and I won’t read the news. Then what are you becoming conscious of? Myself. Now I have to tell you something, that’s exactly the formula through which you cannot heal. You cannot heal. Do you… Can you understand that? That kind of narcissism is the classic formula for fueling your own rage. Your own rage. Narcissism and it’s about me, it’s about me, it’s about my time, my space, my needs, my this, my wounds, my this. I have to tell you, that the ungenerous heart and the narcissist go to the hospital and get your meds, because you cannot, it is not possible to find yourself healing from the serious disorders that require an emergence into a cosmic level of consciousness.”

– Caroline Myss

In order for love to be the agent of change towards a better world and to bring about positive change we also need to acknowledge the darker side of life and the world we live in, the things and issues many people look away from, believing that by simply focusing on the “good” and “positive” there will be a shift in consciousness. This kind of thinking is the blind spot in many New Age teachings these days, which actually results in the opposite of what is intended for the unacknowledged shadow grows bigger and stronger, manifesting itself unconsciously through our collective. As the saying goes, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

“An Ideal is merely an escape, an avoidance of what is, a contradiction of what is. An ideal prevents direct action upon what is. To have peace, we will have to love, we will have to begin not to live an ideal life but to see things as they are and act upon them, transform them.”

– J. Krishnamurti

The many ideas of just focusing on love and how people interpret that, or sending love to the world leaders and humanity or even to the planet are not acts of real love, but merely emotional projections which are self-deceiving and put man more into sleep, believing he’s actually doing something and bringing about positive change. True love respects free will and one cannot give or send love to someone who didn’t ask for it.

One has to wonder when people talk about world peace and love, but still vote for Obama and believe the lies we’re being told by our governments, be it about 9/11, the war on terror or anything else that has been clearly used for social control. One can have as many positive/loving/nice thoughts and emotional highs as one like, but if one still believes in lies, follows teachings based on lies, there will be no raise in consciousness nor access to a higher love that can actually be a true agent of healing and awareness. On the contrary, believing in lies feeds entropy, no matter how well-meaning the intent.

Love is beyond words and no change is going to happen if people simply repeat that “love is the answer” or “all you need is love” while still clinging to illusions and not engaging in sincere self-work. Without a deep understanding and knowledge of what love truly is and entails, we just keep going in circles as history is repeating itself. If we really want a shift in consciousness then we need to take a look into the mirror and also do the work to see the world as it is without ignoring things that may not look that “pretty”. There is still much we have to confront before we can enter a new world based on love, peace and truth.

“Love is not a behavior, an attitude, a mannerism. It is not etiquette. It is not convention. Love may express itself in many different ways—softly or forcibly. Love can appear meek. Love can appear strong. Love can challenge you. Love can criticize you. Love can expose your illusions, your fantasies and your self-deception. Love is not what people really mean when they talk about love, in nearly all circumstances. Real love emanates from Knowledge. It, in essence, is the expression of Knowledge. Only Knowledge can take you there. Knowledge can bring two people from opposite ends of the world together for a greater purpose. That is the power of the Great Love. And the Great Love is what the world needs now.”

– Marshall Vian Summers

There also seems much confusion about what is supposedly positive or negative, subjective or objective. Some people claim that there is nothing like objectivity and all is subjective. Everything depends on how we look at things and quantum mechanics, so they say, shows us that there is no objective reality or truth, but there is only “my” or “your” truth and we create our own reality by the thoughts we have, what we like to see and what we focus on. But is that really so?

It seems that the science of quantum mechanics has been oversimplified into sales-bits in the new age arena and movies like The Secret. This doesn’t mean throwing out the baby with the bath water, as our perception does seem to have an influence on reality, but maybe it’s not as simple as we have been made to believe by many bestselling “self-help” gurus these days.

“For the record: Quantum mechanics does not deny the existence of objective reality. Nor does it imply that mere thoughts can change external events. Effects still require causes, so if you want to change the universe, you need to act on it.”

– Lawrence M. Krauss, professor of physics

The question about the existence of an objective truth is a tricky one to answer. Philosophical views on truth and criteria for knowing it vary with the old dispute between rationalism and empiricism.

However, beyond philosophical or scientific discussion, there usually seems to be one element that is barely questioned in more depth: the state of being/awareness of a person which relates to how much objective reality he/she can actually access. In our current state of being and existence we cannot perceive objective reality fully, however we can work towards objectivity and expand our understanding of reality and ourselves accordingly. A “shift in consciousness” and “awakening” implies a higher state of awareness, which means to become more aware or it all, which implies again to see the world and oneself more objectively, without blinders on. This doesn’t happen by itself, but requires sincere effort and work to separate truth from lies, within and without. That is the basis of esoteric work which relates to gaining self-knowledge in order to raise awareness and consciousness to a higher level of Being.

“To search means, first, I need Being, Truth; second, I do not know where to find it; and third, an action takes place that is not based on fantasies of certainty— while at the same time a waiting takes place that is rooted not in wishful thinking but in a deep sense of urgency.”

– Jacob Needleman

Subjectivity is the preference to rather consider one’s favorite beliefs than the external world. Such a tendency is generally backed by a strong emotional attachment to these beliefs. Wishful thinking, assumptions and opinions based on reactive behavior directly relate to it. Objectivity is the ability to see things as they are, not as we envision them to be, like them or want them to be. The ability to perceive objective reality depends upon one’s ability to clearly receive . To reach a higher state of objective awareness, one must first see themselves clearly and that entails to work through one’s lies, illusions, buffers and self-deceptions.

“The survival of the ego is established pretty early in life by our parental and societal programming as to what IS or is NOT possible; what we are “allowed” to believe in order to be accepted. We learn this first by learning what pleases our parents and then later we modify our belief based on what pleases our society – our peers – to believe.?[…]?One of the first things we might observe is that everyone has a different set of beliefs based upon their social and familial conditioning, and that these beliefs determine how much of the OBJECTIVE reality anyone is able to access.

Suffice it to say that, under ordinary conditions of reality, we almost never perceive reality as it truly IS. There are thousands of different little “hypnotic suggestions” that have taken hold of us from infancy on, that determine, in any given moment, what we believe or think or think we believe or believe we think.”

– Laura Knight-Jadczyk

It’s easy to over-philosophize the idea of objectivity vs. subjectivity without considering some very practical applications. For example, regardless of what one believes to be “one’s truth” or what one is thinking about and visualizing, if you walk off a cliff, won’t gravity pull you down? Isn’t one plus one two, and not three? Is the world round or flat?

And in regards to global issues: Is the official 9/11 story true or have we been lied to? Was it a false flag attack? Are we losing our basic rights for our protection from the so-called “terrorists” or is there a different reason? Is Obama telling the truth or is he lying? These question can be answered objectively if proper research is done.

However, the truth may not necessarily agree with one’s preferred beliefs, opinions or assumptions. So it is important not to fall into denial or avoidance when some of our core beliefs are being challenged, especially if one is emotionally attached to them and the ego tries to (unconsciously) defend the lies in order to be “right” as the truth may open up a can of worms one is not ready to handle.

Moreover, no matter how much one tries to close oneself off from the “outside world”, believing that nothing will affect them as long as one focuses on “positive” thoughts and what one “likes” to experience, the bigger issues of the world still have an effect on us all, precisely because we are all one and everything is connected. No man is an island and no one’s reality is isolated from the Whole.

A fatuous paradigm that is currently running amok though the New Age community for quite a while is better known as You Create Your Own Reality (YCYOR) and is deliberately creating a lot of confusion. YCYOR is a very misleading and tentative paradigm with a certain half-truth in it, that is never expressed in this way in the Esoteric Traditions. Michael Topper brings some common sense to this issue:

“What makes the YCYOR (You Create Your Own Reality) evangelist fatuous is precisely the fact that all such personal decreeing, positive thinking and confident imagining takes place in an inevitable context. There are implications! There are repercussions! No one decrees in a personal or private, solipsistic vacuum. There is a variegated World of myriad “pulls” and “claims” coexisting along with the private desires and designs of the given ego-subject.

But “so what?” we hear the die-hard “reality-creator” claim “don’t we remain untouched by those ‘co-existents’ as long as we keep secure in the confidence of our own private deservedness, our own authoritative affirmations and specific commissions of positive thought-re-inforcement?”

No. Man does not live by “commission” alone. This is why you do not create your own reality, but merely generate reality-hypotheses or scenarios which are continuously reflected and tested against the Whole; and the Whole, being inseparable from the Potential of your own innate-global Being, is constituted by the explicit and implicit alike, by that which is produced through active or positive commission and that which results from the gaps, blind-spots and vacuums of interpretive omission. All the lines, potential and actual, exist within one’s being and are inevitably calculated into the total account! This is what it means when we say there’s a context in which all our desire-formulation and “decreeing” takes place.

This is a Deity-centered reality, not an ego-centered reality. Only the totality of the soul-nature is in touch with the Totality of Spirit-being. Anything else necessarily involves a partial perspective, a conceptual self-estimation producing inevitable blindspots.

What you have selectively omitted from “your reality”, is manifested as well! We can of course say the “victim” still deserves his fate or has drawn his fate to himself by a quality of callousness embedded in his characteristic thought-formulae; and occasionally this interpretation may touch on some real factor involved in the negative effect. But neither the simple presence of some attitude toward elements of the ultimate negative resultant, nor explanations of residual “karma” (or anything of the kind) may adequately account for all cases in the same category.

It is just simply not true that every rape victim somehow “invited” the experience as a personal form of “commission”.

The converse implication of this, of course, is that only in alignment and integral consonance with the Whole-value of Being may Reality be accurately manifested through the medium of “personal expression” for then there is no discrepancy between “personal” and Universal, the perspectival “part” and the indeterminate Whole. It is under this condition that the “impossible” can be manifested (i.e. that which is self-evidently beyond the power of anyone to “personally” manipulate or control).

For, understood in this way (and only in this way) it may be seen that unimaginable effectiveness results when the expression of one’s “personal” will is not different than or removed from the Spirit of Divine Will, i.e. the Will to reveal Spirit as the Truth and authentic character of everyone’s illimitable Being. This means that, in terms of “personal will”, only the Spirit of the Teaching Function remains. There is no will remaining in the repertoire of “personal will” except that which expresses perfect alignment, integration and identity with Divine Will.

Contrary to unwarranted popular opinion, such initiated alignment with the Will of Absolute Spirit-being does not result in “working one’s will unopposed”. On the contrary, the very presence of the Awakened Truth in the form of the Spiritual adept has always generated immediate opposition; it has always “awakened” a corresponding reaction from the collective ego’s self-protective slumber.

Initiated alignment of will with the creative Whole doesn’t guarantee “smooth personal circumstances”; on the contrary, look at the story of every adept, examine the events surrounding the Masters known to history. Rather it ensures that such events will possess the character of an authentic teaching-demonstration, to all who have the Soul to see. It ensures the Will of the Whole is always done, regardless the partiality and prejudice by which that Whole may be perceived in any given case.”

– Michael Topper

There is an objective truth outside the context of what our little “I” perceives. It seems a tendency in certain Conscious Movements to overgeneralize and distort spiritual “higher” truths and quantum physics with an oversimplification of: All Truth is relative! ?Hence some people unconsciously (or consciously) use this explanation as an excuse and justification for the atrocities in the world or for whatever one may want to believe in one’s own little subjective world, no matter how illusory, false and based on pure wishful thinking or emotional projections it may be; even to the point of declaring that it is all just about “my” or “your” truth and there is no objective truth.

Obviously we all have our own personal lessons to learn and talents to develop, which could be interpreted as one’s “personal truth”, however that doesn’t exclude oneself from the collective lessons we all “need” to look at if we want to evolve consciously as ONE.?? Simply acknowledging that we are all one, separation is illusion and seeing everything as “Light” while focusing on what one believes to be “positive” and ignoring what one perceives as “negative” does not result in change for the better.?? Conversely, by insisting on what one would like to see, as opposed to seeing the world as it is, is coming into conflict with creation, which then results in entropy and MORE suffering on a global scale, not less.

A deeper insight into this gives the Event Enhanced Quantum Theory developed by physicists Ark Jadczyk and Philip Blanchard. Its conclusion in a nutshell:

“Everyone who “believes” in an attempt to “create reality” that is different from what IS, adds to the increase of chaos and entropy. If your beliefs are orthogonal to the truth, no matter how strongly you believe them, you are essentially coming into conflict with how the Universe views itself and I can assure you, you ain’t gonna win that contest. You are inviting destruction upon yourself and all who engage in this “staring down the universe” exercise with you.

On the other hand, if you are able to view the Universe as it views itself, objectively, without blinking, and with acceptance of the reality and appropriate responses to how things really are, you then become more “aligned” with the Creative energy of the universe and your very consciousness becomes a transducer of order energy, and your actions are consonant with what is. Your energy of observation, given unconditionally, matched by the appropriate actions, can bring order to chaos, can create out of infinite potential.”

– from “The Secret History of the World” by Laura Knight-Jadczyk

Some people seem to mistake objectivity for negativity and wishful thinking for positivity. Most of what people see as negative or positive are their subjective projections and opinions that don’t really reflect the world as it is. Without Truth and Objectivity there won’t be a change for the “better”, nor a raise in consciousness, within and without.

In that sense, many well-meaning and good-hearted folks who want a better world actually do more harm than any good by ignoring and denying aspects of our reality that may not fit into their subjective “positive” world view; instead believing that by shutting the so-called “negative” out and just seeing everything as “One” and “Light”, visualizing, meditating on world peace and projecting “love and light”, it will create peace and harmony. Nothing could be further from the truth and that is actually exactly what certain forces, who do not wish humanity to awaken for their own interests, want us to do and believe. It ties in with how religious and spiritual values have been corrupted.

In other words, the ones exposing the lies and atrocities in the world, the ones looking at the world as it is with all the different “faces of god” including the unpleasant ones which many people perceive as “negative” and hence like to ignore, are actually doing LIGHT WORK in the true meaning of the word: Making the darkness conscious, raising awareness and shining Light into it. Light is information and knowledge, not just making things “light” in the sense of being “nice” or “kind” and “loving” without saying anything “bad” or “heavy”.

“When we talk about compassion we talk in terms of being kind. But compassion is not so much being kind; it is being creative [enough] to wake a person up.”

– Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoch

“Real compassion kicks butt and takes names and is not pleasant on certain days. If you are not ready for this FIRE, then find a new-age, sweetness and light, perpetually smiling teacher and learn to relabel your ego with spiritual sounding terms. But, stay away from those who practice REAL COMPASSION, because they will fry your ass, my friend.”

– Ken Wilber

This contrived “niceness” seems also very common in today’s conscious movements, where people don’t want to say anything “negative”, in their subjective understanding of it of course. In general, some folks hide behind a social etiquette and mask without wanting to say anything bad or touching on any taboo subjects. They speak around issues in order to be spiritually or politically correct so as to “not step on anyone’s toes”.

Of course, that doesn’t mean that one should be mean, aggressive and rude or push information on someone who didn’t ask for it. It simply means to be sincere and honest with conscience and awareness. There is a time to speak up and a time to be silent. And sometimes you have to be direct, call a spade a spade and give the lie what it deserves: the truth, regardless of what others may think, even if it doesn’t sound “nice” and it doesn’t conform to what someone “likes” to hear. You can be considerate and still speak the truth, even if others see it as “negative” from their conditioned point of view.

“Cowardice asks the question: “Is it safe”?? Expediency asks the question: “Is it politic”?? Vanity asks the question: “Is it popular?”?But conscience asks the question: “Is it right?”?And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular?but one must take it because one’s conscience tells one what is right.”

– Martin Luther King, Jr.

There are many so-called conscious festivals these days with music, art, workshops and lectures. Lots of pretty people in hip clothes, feathers, furry hats and much eye candy, supposedly representing the “counter-culture” of aware people. There is nothing wrong with dressing up, partying and having a good time, however, when looking at the program of talks and workshops of some of these festivals something seems to be missing, mainly the topics we need to become aware of as a species if we want to make the right turn.

At any festival that claims to be “conscious” and “spiritual” and is supposedly the reflection of the “counter-culture”, one must ask why are there no workshops or lectures about the genocide in Palestine, the crimes by the US government aka Military Industrial Complex, the idea that psychopaths without conscience seem to rule our world and institutions, that 9/11 is a lie that has cost oppression and misery all over the world based on a fake war on terror, that Obama is a corporate puppet just as the old “boss”, that UFOs may not be signs of our “space brothers” coming to help us but that we are actually “food” in many ways, or that we are not “one big human family”, but that there may be souled and soulless humans and many other issues? ……all these topics are part of being aware and conscious, are they not?

It seems that conscious festivals like that are becoming more and more a hip thing rather than using it to truly help people become aware of the shadow that needs to be made conscious of and shined light into. It’s not just about doing yoga, eating raw food and knowing permaculture, nor is it simply about being “positive” for the sake of being positive or learning about how to manifest your desired income.

“We’re very much grounded within the counter culture of the 1960s of which this festival is indeed a legacy and an extension historically, and talk to you about some of… I don’t really want to talk to you about the similarities because you know what the similarities are…the similarities are mainly cosmetic.
And there are some other philosophical similarities which I’ll discuss but one of the things that I’d like to talk with you about are some of the differences. In the 1960s, the counter cultural movement had at its core, we have the music yes, we had the drugs which was not in all ways a high side of it.

There was the music, there was a definite sense of counter culture, there was a definite repudiation of certain values which people deemed to be obsolete and unsustainable. But it bears noting that there was also at it’s core the repudiation of a war and ultimately the ending of a war, which means that the counter culture at that time was making a serious stand against something new on the planet; something horrible on the planet called “American military domination of anything it cared to dominate”. And that gave a moral authority to the counter culture of the 1960s, and I would hope that a festival like this does not- in a heart that brings us here, the consciousness that brings us here- I’m reminded of a line in “A Course in Miracles” where it says, “You cannot bring the light to the darkness you must bring the darkness to the light“.

Dream and I were having an interesting conversation… we were talking about this festival and she said people just wanted to be in the light for a few days…But I say to you as your sister, as your spiritual companion, embedded in the principles of “A Course in Miracles” and in my own spiritual search, but I know that there is only one truth spoken in many different ways…There is a difference between transcendence and denial…and if the consciousness that brings you to a festival like this, is one in which we feel- as Americans, as men, as women, as citizens of the planet- that we can be here, that this can be anything with true gravitas or moral authority and we are forgetting the fact that our country has turned into a permanent war machine, then there is something very sad about this festival rather than happy for me.

Now we were talking about, earlier, we were talking about the fact that men in…about the feminine power…and the divine feminine…and it was another I heard someone say that the men here are holding the space for the feminine ,which is very beautiful, it’s a very beautiful thing the, the mix of, you know- obviously there are men and women here, and both for the women who want to hold the space for the divine feminine, and as well for the men who want are holding the space for the divine feminine, thank you so much.

I’d to talk to you for a moment about the divine feminine because the divine feminine has a fierce aspect. The divine feminine is not just dressing up, the divine feminine it’s not just getting pretty in whatever pretty of the day is, whether it’s big boobs or feathers. It’s all just cosmetic… hello… The divine feminine cares about the fact that 17,000 babies die on this planet everyday of hunger. The divine feminine cries, the divine feminine shrieks when she has to. You know if you… there is an interesting anthropological characteristic of every advanced mammalian species that survives and thrives; and that is the fierce behavior of the adult female of that species when she senses that there is a threat to her cubs that whether it’s the mama bear or the tiger or a lion. Did you know that even among the hyenas the adult female hyenas encircle their babies, encircle the cubs while they’re feeding and will not let the adult males of that species anywhere near the food until the cubs have been fed.

Surely the women of America could do better than the hyenas. And the fact that collectively, not in terms of our hearts, our hearts are good, and I know that the heart that draws us to a place like this today is good, but we have to ask ourselves at what point, whether you’re in therapy or your at a festival like this, at what point do you stand in that place which is not comfortable, do you stand in that place which is not comfortable and not turn away? Because if a counter cultural movement, such as this at least externally represents here today, is one, I asked earlier, I said “Hmm. Is there anything political going on here today?” and I was told “No, these are just people who are ready to transcend.” And let be very clear once again about that difference between transcendence and denial because if the counter cultural movement in 2011 is one in which it is deemed for whatever reason acceptable to look away from the fact that tremendous amounts of unnecessary human suffering occur on this planet and in this country for no other reason than that so a relatively few people on this planet and in this country can have all the money they want. That is not service, it is NOT counter cultural, it is the the epitome of being co-opted by the very culture that we seek to counter.

Now you might say to me “What do you want us to do?” I don’t know what your supposed to do… None of my business what your supposed to do. But I’m asking you as Jesus said to the disciples the night before the crucification in the garden of Gethsemane, “Please do not go to sleep. Do not go to sleep in the hour of my agony. Remain awake!”… That’s what they do to you. They put you to sleep! The system would love this festival! The system would love this festival because its not saying “Fuck you!” to anybody. And there’s a sense that that is somehow spiritual. There’s a sense that that is somehow spiritual, and I believe deeply that, as “The Course in Miracles” says, “Look at the crucification but do not dwell on it.” I’m not saying let’s dwell on what’s bad, because if you dwell on what’s bad then it’s true, that is you just focus on it and make more of it. But to not look at it at all… to not look at it at all, there’s not the divine feminine about that.

The divine feminine… if there was a starving child here…somebody tell me…if there was a child here or if anyone- god forbid- let’s just talk about our deep humanity… Let’s say right here right now- god forbid- somebody, uh, had a heart attack or something. Well the fact that I’m speaking up here would be irrelevant. Somebody would yell out say, “Is there a doctor here?” We would all get deeply human very quickly wouldn’t we? Are you with me? Now this is an interesting thing about our country, if you look and see, I always say that if I’m if I’m on an airplane somewhere, anywhere in the world… I love to sit next to an American …I… characterologically we’re cool people and we care. We’re not, you know… We’re human beings and there’s a spunkiness and it’s a coolness. But our collective capacity for denial and grandiosity is frightening and perilous….”

– Marianne Williamson

In the end most people are only afraid of the unknown and what they don’t understand. Once we make the effort to deprogram ourselves from our conditioning and gain knowledge and understanding within AND without, shining “LIGHT” into darkness, our awareness/consciousness rises and we start to SEE in alignment with who we truly are, beyond preference, wishful thinking or denial and then can act in alignment with our Higher Self and the Universe.

If we truly love life, the world we live in and want positive change, then this also implies to look at the issues and injustices in the world so many of us like to ignore or deny. This is not being “negative”, but the work to be done during this Time of Transition

“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it. ”

– Martin Luther King Jr.

Seeking truth and making the darkness conscious needs to happen within AND without, not just one or the other. Activism and spiritual self-work go hand in hand. It’s not separated but interrelated.

The problem that comes with truth seekers and activists who only focus on the outside is that they can easily fall into the trap of disinformation or they resonate with lies because their “Reading Instrument”, the Self, is not “tuned” correctly through sincere self work which would help their critical thinking abilities. It becomes harder to separate truth from lies and one may even spread disinformation unknowingly because one is less likely to see the “unseen” or the “devil in the details” so to speak, resulting in oversimplifications, assumptions, and misconceptions. In other words, I need to understand my “machine”, my habitual way of thinking and how my emotional reactions and attachments can distort things, how I take in information and how my own bias and conditioned beliefs filter information which can result in cognitive dissonance.

“Sometimes people hold a core belief that is very strong. When they are presented with evidence that works against that belief, the new evidence cannot be accepted. It would create a feeling that is extremely uncomfortable, called cognitive dissonance. And because it is so important to protect the core belief, they will rationalize, ignore and even deny anything that doesn’t fit in with the core belief.“

– Frantz Fanon

“In order to understand the interrelation of truth and falsehood in life, a man must understand falsehood in himself, the constant incessant lies he tells himself.”

– G.I. Gurdjieff

According to the mystic and spiritual teacher George Ivanovich Gurdjieff, the human organism is constituted by two fundamental functions: essence and personality. Essence is what we are born with, the raw material of one’s being. It includes the physical body, genetic make-up, energy metabolism, the inborn capacity for emotions and sensations. There are also external influences that affect us, such as planetary vibrations, present in the immediate environment at conception, during the fetal stage, and at birth. An astrological birth chart can give some insight into that.

As we grow, our essence is molded by cultural influences. It can mature along the lines of its inherent nature and potential, or it can become blocked in its maturation and hence form something that works against its inborn potential. Essence would evolve in societies where essential practices and values predominate, such as sincerity, love, truth, compassion, knowledge, and so on. Obviously we live in a world where such values have become distorted and ponerized, meaning that our society at large has taken on pathological values that are seen as normal and people can no longer make the distinction between healthy and pathological thought processes and logic. One is no longer able to draw a line between correct thinking and deviate thinking. The influence of higher density beings and forces may also have an effect on us in that regard as explored in UFOs, Aliens, and The Question of Contact.

Personality is the mask we carry over our essence. The vehicle for essence to work through so to speak. Our personality is conditioned and programmed through upbringing in a society that is built on lies, and the stronger the programming, the harder it is for essence to come through. Hence, de-programming and facing the lies of one’s personality is key so it becomes a direct reflection and expression of essence, which ultimately leads to conscious actions based on one’s inherent potential. In a mature person, essence and personality form one continuous “I”, which is to say that the person is unified.

“People are always infused with all kinds of fantastic ideas about themselves, the world, people, love, idealism, society, etc. Led by his eagerness to evade a disagreeable reality, man gives free rein to his imagination and is inclined to believe the first agreeable lie he encounters along the way. The individual projects his personal illusions onto a cold and immutable reality, and thus deceiving himself, he endeavors to contemplate reality through rose-colored glasses. “Disillusion” is a painful process and can be prolonged, depending on how much time the individual takes to realize he is living artificially and that this condition is a product of his internal dreams. Great courage is required to face reality and to destroy the mirage of a pleasant dream.”

– John Baines

On the other hand, many spiritually inclined people only focus on the self, believing that will change the outside eventually, without making the effort to look at the world more objectively and acting upon it. Gandhi’s call to “be the change you want to see in the world” has also been misunderstood that way. First of all the “kind of change” people want to see is different for each based on one’s subjective understanding of it, which can be very distorted, especially if one is avoiding seeing the world as it is, believing in lies and just projecting one’s desires and hopes that are based on the conditioned personality, resulting in wishful thinking. For example, just being “nice” because I want to see a “nice” world does not automatically make the world so, especially since some humans are “wired” differently.

Another issue is that many people try to explain everything through one system or teaching and do not see its limitations or even distort it to mold it into their belief system. For example, not everything “negative” in the world is a manifestation of our shadow material, nor is everything that happens to us our karma, nor do we attract everything with our thoughts. Sure there is truth to the idea of karma, but using that explanation to justify all the atrocities in the world is short-sighted and misses the point as we still have to act and learn our lessons, not just “turn the other cheek” or stand by and keep silent, saying “oh it’s just your/their/my karma”.

We are not the peak of God’s creation and so special and holy that nothing other than ourselves would harm, control or manipulate us. It’s actually quite arrogant and anthropocentric to think that way. We don’t do everything to ourselves. It’s not about blaming, but getting out of our self-centered view of reality and the universe. There are other forces acting on us, just as we influence, consume and to a certain extent control lower life forms such as plants and animals. As above, so below.

“There are a thousand things which prevent a man from awakening, which keep him in the power of his dreams. In order to act consciously with the intention of awakening, it is necessary to know the nature of the forces which keep man in a state of sleep. First of all it must be realized that the sleep in which man exists is not normal but hypnotic sleep. Man is hypnotized and this hypnotic state is continually maintained and strengthened in him. One would think that there are forces for whom it is useful and profitable to keep man in a hypnotic state and prevent him from seeing the truth and understanding his position.”

– G. I. Gurdjieff

The learning never stops and humanity still has much to confront and learn about that may require a whole new understanding of reality, just like there are different or expanded views now in science compared to what Einstein and Newton had discovered.

There is always more to learn and find out that requires an adjustment and new understanding, expanding our view and understanding of reality. It is what raising consciousness implies. People who are stuck in one idea or teaching and try to explain everything through it are building their own limited reality box. This also relates to psychology, astrology, philosophy, the healing arts, spiritual practices or any religion (east and west) where many “experts” in any of these systems are looking through one lens (many of them distorted/false to begin with), not realizing that this approach can easily lead to distortion and a tunnel vision. It can also become an egotistical point of pride preventing that person to admit to him/herself that there is maybe more to the story which one hasn’t considered before, especially when they have written books about it, their career depends on it and they have an image to sell/live up to.

One can see these fallacies with many popular spiritual teachers, researchers, visionaries, therapists and self-help gurus, where career and image seem to take precedence over truth and reality. There are many topics that affect us more than many of them are aware of, be it the idea of hyperdimensional manipulation, genetic psychopathy or soulless humans. But instead of being more open to such topics and looking into them sincerely and unbiased, these seemingly intelligent and aware individuals ignore or debunk them right off-hand exposing their own lack of critical thinking.

Awareness and study of the aforementioned topics and also looking into the “taboo” subject of conspiracies would actually help and expand their knowledge and ability to truly help others and society at large.

Many people tend to laugh at the term “conspiracy theories” and even use it with a negative, condescending tone. The social reality that they are taboo solidifies this also deeper into people’s minds, subconsciously. Nobody wants to be called a “conspiracy theorist.” It’s like calling somebody a “wacko” and commonly used as an ad hominem attack that lacks critical thinking. Most people don’t have a true understanding of what the word “conspiracy” actually means. Historian Richard M. Dolan brings some common sense to this issue:

“From a historical point of view, the only reality is that of conspiracy. Secrecy, wealth and independence add up to power. Deception is the key element of warfare, (the tool of the power elites), and when winning is all that matters, the conventional morality held by ordinary people becomes an impediment. Secrecy stems from a pervasive and fundamental element of life in our world, that those who are at the top of the heap will always take whatever steps are necessary to maintain the status quo.?[…]? The very label ‘conspiracy’ serves as an automatic dismissal, as though no one ever acts in secret. Let us bring some perspective and common sense to this issue. The United States comprises large organizations – corporations, bureaucracies, ‘interest groups,’ and the like – which are conspiratorial by nature. That is, they are hierarchical, their important decisions are made in secret by a few key decision-makers, and they are not above lying about their activities. Such is the nature of organizational behavior. ‘Conspiracy’, in this key sense, is a way of life around the globe.“

– Richard Dolan

“Do I believe in conspiracies? Naah! Do I believe that powerful people would get together and plan for certain outcomes? Naah! Do I believe that powerful interests would operate outside the law and maybe even kill people? Naah! Do I believe secret government agencies might feel the need to assassinate a person and cover it up? Naah! I think everything in America is open and clean and above board and powerful people always play by the rules.”

I think the system contracts and expands as it wants to. It accommodates these changes. I think the civil rights movement was an accommodation on the part of those who own the country. I think they see where their self-interest lies. They see a certain amount of freedom seems good, an illusion of liberty. Give these people…give these people a voting day every year so that they’ll have the illusion of meaningless choice… meaningless choice that we go like slaves and say, “Yeah, I voted.”

The limits of debate in this country are established before the debate even begins and everyone else is marginalized and made to seem either to be communists or some sort of disloyal person, a “kook”- there’s a word- and now it’s “conspiracy”, see? They’ve made that something that should not even be entertained for a minute; that powerful people might get together and have a plan. Doesn’t happen, you’re a kook, you’re a conspiracy buff!

– George Carlin

Our views on life and existence, science and religion, spirituality and evolution, consciousness and psychology as well as reality as we know it would take on a whole new understanding when looking deeper into the topics we dismiss so easily simply because we don’t “believe” them to be true. Let’s not forget, not too long ago we believed that the earth is flat.

“Consciousness means, literally, “knowing-together.” A development of consciousness would therefore mean knowing “more together,” and so it would bring about a new relationship to everything previously known. For to know more always means to see things differently.”

– Maurice Nicoll

We’re being lied to in virtually all areas of our lives and our attention is being vectored away from the truth. The corruption of science plays a big part in it as well. As a matter of fact, those who get too close to the truth are often attacked and ridiculed. Truth is no good for business in a ponerized society with psychopaths in power, steering the ship where pathological traits have become the accepted norm in our official culture.

The work to seek truth within and without is not for everyone, nor can everyone engage in it since people are different inside, some lacking the “seed” so to speak. Not everyone is a Warrior (as coined by Carlos Castaneda) and everyone has different lessons to learn and talents to develop with a different “inner wiring”. Nobody is better or worse, it’s just what it is in this evolutionary cycle we’re in. For that reason there also won’t be a collective awakening where everyone is all of a sudden “enlightened” or “aware”. Many folks who are waiting for 2012 for that to happen will be greatly disappointed. Awakening implies evolving consciously. Now is an opportunity (not a guarantee), a “window” to move up a level so to speak, but it doesn’t happen by itself. Conscious effort and work are needed to counter the forces of entropy for there is a way up and down as the Hopi Indians said about this Time of Transition.

“What is difficult to understand is that without conscious effort, nothing is possible. Conscious effort is related to higher nature. My lower nature cannot lead me to consciousness. It is blind. But when I wake up and I feel that I belong to a higher world, this is only part of conscious effort. I become truly conscious only when I open to all my possibilities, higher and lower. There is value only in conscious effort.”

– Jeanne De Salzmann

Many are called, few are chosen [or choose to answer the call]. Now is the time for the ones who feel “called” to ask themselves, what am I doing with my life, where is my attention and focus? Am I doing the best I can to help in this time of transition in terms on working on myself and seeking truth? Conscious Reality Creation happens when we are connected with our true self/higher self and we become a vessel for higher energies to work through us which are in alignment with the universe and one’s soul’s purpose, not the desires, wants and needs of the conditioned personality. If our actions and beliefs are in alignment with what IS, we become transducers of energies that not only benefit us individually but the world at large, bringing order out of chaos.

It is important that the ones who are sincerely engaged in seeking truth connect with others who are like-minded, so we become collinear and act as alarm clocks for each other, keeping each other awake and help in the process of separating truth from lies. A nucleus of truly conscious people, acting as conscious transducers of higher energies and seeing the universe as it sees it self, working towards objectivity, can provide the qualitative frequency resonance vibration that will create the template for the new world. The more people do this work consciously the better, but it is about quality over quantity.

There are countless distractions, temptations and deceptions that keep the seeker away from Truth and Awakening in this Matrix Control System with various forces acting on humanity to keep us asleep. It comes down to discernment and without inner work in order to see the unseen we cannot raise our Being to truly BE the change we want to SEE according to our higher nature and not our conditioned personality. At the same time Being the change entails facing reality and see things as they are, not as we hope, wish or want them to be. It’s a holistic approach. Just as we need to cleanse and detoxify our body and give it the proper nutrition, we also need to detoxify the world “out there” by separating truth (nutrition) from lies (toxins).

This has also nothing to do with trying to “save the world”, but simply engaging in the process of conscious evolution, nor is it about “controlling external reality”, but acting in alignment with the universe. And we only become truly aligned if we engage in the work to see the universe as it sees itself. Being entails seeing the world as it IS. That is the path towards healing, wholeness, conscious reality creation and essentially true Love. It’s a process that is different for each as we all have our own lessons to learn, karma to work out and talents to develop in this time of transition.

In that sense everyone also has unique skills which he/she can contribute to the whole, so we can support each other, moving from Service to Self and competition towards Service to Others and sharing. It’s about working together creating synergy, but also respecting each others individuality and process at the same time. What may work for one, may not work for another. But to know this, we need to know our true self and also make the effort to see the world as it is, so our actions have real impact and power beyond self-gratification or senseless rioting.

“Every man has his own vocation. The talent is the call. There is one direction in which all space is open to him. He has faculties silently inviting him thither to endless exertion.
He is like a ship in a river; he runs against obstructions on every side but one; on that side all obstruction is taken away, and he sweeps serenely over God’s depths into an infinite sea.
This talent and this call depend on his organization, or the mode in which a general soul incarnates in him. He inclines to do something which is easy to him, and good when it is done, but which no other man can do.
He has no rival.
For the more truly he consults his own powers, the more difference will his work exhibit from the work of any other. When he is true and faithful, his ambition is exactly proportional to his powers. By doing his work he makes the need felt which only he can supply.”

– Ralph Waldo Emerson

The more we are collinear and SEE the world as it is and act as ONE, the “easier” the transition to a better world for all of us. We do create our reality and our consciousness has an effect on the outside world, but we need to be in alignment with the Universe, otherwise we will increase entropy and chaos, which also manifests in earth and climate changes, as we can see already happening. Increased awareness combined with action based on truth could mitigate any upcoming cataclysms that seem to be right over the horizon. It’s up to each one of us and all of us together.

“With the approach of the era of the Holy Spirit, everything must be gradually brought to the light of day, not only the secrets of the laboratory but the deepest meanings of esotericism. The same must happen with illusions, errors and lies, which must also be revealed so that they can later be rectified.

The world is suffering from a lack of harmony which gets deeper on every plane, and this is a serious danger to the moral and spiritual recovery of humanity. It also involves a serious risk of failure in the last stage of this Time of Transition that we are now entering, If this risk is not overcome, the Deluge of Fire awaits us. We will have to make an immense effort to ward off this fate, and we have very little time in which to do it.

Man has only himself to blame for the greatness of the effort needed: this is a result of his obstinate refusal to heed the warnings that have been addressed to him time and again by the Divine Voice, just as he continues today to blind himself to the fact that the Deluge of Fire is being made ready.”

– Boris Mouravieff, Gnosis II

On January 8, 2023 the US has to release a federal prisoner who is known as one its most notable opponents of treatment of Cuba since its revolution. She is Ana Belén Montes, and she will be freed after over 21 years in a federal military prison.

She was a top official on Latin America in the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) who, solely out of moral conviction, gave Cuba information on top secret US military plans and operations. Unrepentant in her trial, she defended herself saying, “I obeyed my conscience rather than the law. … I felt morally obligated to help the island defend itself from our efforts to impose our values and our political system on it.”

Ana Belén is one of the many Americans who have taken a moral stance in opposition to the actions of their government, and who were subsequently hunted as traitors or spies. Edward Snowden was another such figure, having exposed how the National Security Agency’s spying on the US population and leaders of other countries. Rather than spend much of his life in a federal prison, Snowden has opted to live in exile in Russia.

While the US movement in defense of Cuba did not champion the case of Ana Belén as with the very similar situation of the Cuban Five, she is recognized as a hero in Cuba. In 2016, the famed Cuban singer-songwriter Silvio Rodriguez dedicated a song to her, explaining, “The prisoner I mentioned yesterday… is Ana Belén Montes and she was a high official of the US secret services. When she knew that they were going to do something bad to Cuba, she would pass on the information to us. That is why she is serving a sentence of decades…Much evil did not happen to us because of her. Freedom for her.”

Silvio Rodríguez le dedicó esta canción a la presa política del imperialismo Ana Belén Montes, quien saldrá libre este fin de semana después de pasar 20 años de prisión en aislamiento total #FreeAnaBelen #FreeLeonardPeltier #FreeJulianAssange #FreeAlexSaab pic.twitter.com/4OphzkUXVp

— Roi Lopez Rivas (@RoiLopezRivas) January 4, 2023

Ana Belén did not receive any money from Cuba for her 16 years of work. Knowing the dire risks she faced, she acted out of a belief in justice and solidarity with Cuba. For over 60 years, the country has suffered under a US blockade – repeatedly condemned by the United Nations – imposed in retaliation for choosing national sovereignty over continued neocolonial status. US supported terrorism against Cuba has killed 3,478 and caused 2,099 disabling injuries over the years.

One of the charges brought against Ana Belén was having helped assure Bill Clinton and George W. Bush that Cuba represented no military threat to the US, and therefore contributed to avoiding another US regime change war that would have meant the death of countless Cubans. She also acknowledged having revealed the identities of four American undercover intelligence officers working in Cuba.

“The Queen of Cuba” hailed from a family of feds

Born in West Germany on February 28, 1957, a Puerto Rican citizen of the United States, and a high official in the Defense Intelligence Agency, Ana Belén was convicted as a spy for alerting Cuba to the interventionist plans that were being prepared against the Cuban people.

In 1984 while working as a clerk in the Department of Justice, Ana Belén initiated her relationship with Cuban security. She then applied for a job at the DIA, the agency responsible for foreign military intelligence to the Secretary of Defense and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The DIA employed her in 1985 until her arrest at work 16 years later. She became a specialist in Latin American military affairs, was the DIA’s principal analyst on El Salvador and Nicaragua, and later Cuba.

Because of her abilities, Ana Belén became known in US intelligence circles as “the Queen of Cuba”. Her work and contributions were so valued that she earned ten special recognitions, including Certificate of Distinction, the third highest national-level intelligence award. CIA Director George Tenet himself presented it to her in 1997.

“She gained access to hundreds of thousands of classified documents, typically taking lunch at her desk absorbed in quiet memorization of page after page of the latest briefings,” which she would later write down at home and convey to Cuba.

Avoiding capture through discretion, until the intercept came

On February 23, 1996, the Cuban Ministry of Defense asked visiting American Rear Admiral Eugene Carroll to warn off Miami Brothers to the Rescue planes that planned to again fly over Havana. Carroll immediately informed the State Department.

Instead of ending the provocations, the US let the planes fly, and two “Brothers to the Rescue” planes were shot down over Cuba the next day. The US exploited the flare-up to sabotage the growing campaign to moderate the US blockade of the island. The US official who arranged Admiral Carroll’s meeting was Ana Belén. Her explanation that the date was chosen only because it was a free date on the Admiral’s schedule was accepted.

Nevertheless, a DIA colleague reported to a security official that he felt Ana Belén might be under the influence of Cuban intelligence. He interviewed her, but she admitted nothing. She passed a polygraph test.

Ana Belén had access to practically everything the intelligence community collected on Cuba, and helped write final reports. Due to her rank, she was a member of the super-secret “inter-agency working group on Cuba”, which brings together the main analysts of federal agencies, such as the CIA, the Department of State, and the White House itself.

The Washington Post reported, “She was now briefing the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the National Security Council and even the president of Nicaragua about Cuban military capabilities. She helped draft a controversial Pentagon report stating that Cuba had a ‘limited capacity’ to harm the United States and could pose a danger to U.S. citizens only ‘under some circumstances.'”

Rolando Sarraff Trujillo, a US agent in Cuba’s Ministry of Interior that Cuba had uncovered and imprisoned, was released and traded for three of the Cuban 5 in 2014. He had “provided critical information that led to the arrests of those known as the “Cuban Five;” of former State Department official Walter Kendall Myers and his wife, Gwendolyn Steingraber Myers; and of the Defense Intelligence Agency’s top Cuba analyst, Ana Belén Montes.”

In 1999 the National Security Agency intercepted a Cuban communication. It revealed a spy high in the hierarchy, who was associated with the DIA’s SAFE computer system. It meant the spy was likely on staff of the DIA. The suspect had also traveled to Guantánamo Bay in July 1996. Coincidentally, Ana Belén worked in the DIA and had traveled to the Bay on DIA business. The spy was using a Toshiba laptop, and it was discovered she had one. A decision was taken to break into her flat and copy the hard drive.

Since the case being put together indicated she was providing information to Cuba, she was arrested by FBI agents on September 21, 2001 while in her DIA office. She was charged with conspiracy to commit espionage for Cuba. “She told investigators after her arrest that a week earlier she had learned that she was under surveillance. She could have decided then to flee to Cuba, and probably would have made it there safely.” But her political commitment made her feel “she couldn’t give up on the people (she) was helping.”

Nigerian commentator Owei Lakemfa presented ten reasons he thought Ana Belén Montes avoided detection during her 16 years in the DIA. Among the most important was that she was extremely discreet and kept to herself. She lived alone in a simple apartment north of the US capital, and memorized documents, never taking any home. And she never received unexplainable funds.

Ironically, her brother was an FBI special agent, and her sister an FBI analyst who “played an important role in exposing the so-called Wasp Network of Cuban agents [the Cuban 5 and 7 others] operating in Florida.”

Ana Belén avoided the death penalty for high treason, highly likely in the post September 11 atmosphere, by pleading guilty before the US federal court handling her case. Since she acknowledged her conduct, and told the court how she worked, she was sentenced to “only” twenty-five years. However, she was imprisoned in conditions designed to destroy her, as the case with Julian Assange today. She was sent to special unit of a federal prison for violent offenders with psychiatric problems.

“I obeyed my conscience rather than the law”

In her October 16, 2002 trial statement, she declared that she obeyed her conscience:

“There is an Italian proverb that is perhaps the one that best describes what I believe: The whole world is one country. In that ‘world country’, the principle of loving your neighbor as much as you love yourself, is an essential guide for harmonious relations between all our ‘nation-neighborhoods’.

This principle implies tolerance and understanding for the different ways of others. It mandates that we treat other nations the way we wish to be treated – with respect and compassion. It is a principle that, unfortunately, I believe we have never applied to Cuba.

Your Honor, I got involved in the activity that has brought me before you because I obeyed my conscience rather than the law. Our government’s policy towards Cuba is cruel and unfair, deeply unfriendly; I feel morally obligated to help the island defend itself from our efforts to impose our values ​​and our political system on it.

We have displayed intolerance and contempt for Cuba for four decades. We have never respected Cuba’s right to make its own journey towards its own ideals of equality and justice. I do not understand how we continue to try to dictate how Cuba should select its leaders, who its leaders cannot be, and what laws are the most appropriate for that nation. Why don’t we let Cuba pursue its own internal journey, as the United States has been doing for more than two centuries?

My way of responding to our Cuba policy may have been morally wrong. Perhaps Cuba’s right to exist free of political and economic coercion did not justify giving the island classified information to help it defend itself. I can only say that I did what I thought right to counter a grave injustice.

My greatest wish would be to see a friendly relationship emerge between the United States and Cuba. I hope that my case in some way will encourage our government to abandon its hostility toward Cuba and work together with Havana in a spirit of tolerance, mutual respect and understanding.

Today we see more clearly than ever that intolerance and hatred – by individuals or governments – only spreads pain and suffering. I hope that the United States develops a policy with Cuba based on love of neighbor, a policy that recognizes that Cuba, like any other nation, wants to be treated with dignity and not with contempt.

Such a policy would bring our government back in harmony with the compassion and generosity of the American people. It would allow Cubans and Americans to learn from and share with each other. It would enable Cuba to drop its defensive measures and experiment more easily with changes. And it would permit the two neighbors to work together and with other nations to promote tolerance and cooperation in our one ‘world-country,’ in our only world-homeland.”

Brutal prison conditions aimed to destroy Ana Belén

Jürgen Heiser of the German solidarity Netzwerk-Cuba reported that “Ana Belén has been isolated in conditions that the UN and international human rights organizations describe as ‘cruel and unusual punishment.’ and torture. Her prison conditions were further exacerbated after her trial, when she was placed in the Federal Medical Center (FMC) in Carswell, outside of Fort Worth, Texas. The FMC is located on a US marine compound and previously served as a military hospital… It includes a high security unit set aside for women of “special management concerns” that can hold up to twenty prisoners. A risk of “violence and/or escape” are specified as grounds for incarceration in the unit. This is where the “spy” Ana Belén is being held in isolation, in a single-person cell.”

Her cell neighbors have included one who strangled a pregnant woman to get her baby, a longtime nurse who killed four patients with massive injections of adrenaline, and Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, the Charles Manson follower who tried to assassinate President Ford.

The Fort Worth Star Telegram has regularly covered the abuses against the women inmates at Fort Carswell Carswell prison, which has also housed two other political prisoners Reality Winner and Aafia Siddiqui. Detainees have suffered gross violations of their human rights, including documented cases of police abuse, suspicious deaths where the investigations into them have been blatantly obstructed, deaths due to the denial of basic medical attention, rape of prisoners by guards, and exposure to toxic substances. In July 2020, 500 of the 1400 prisoners had Covid. The Star Telegram reported “the facility showed a systemic history of covering misconduct up and creating an atmosphere of secrecy and retaliation…”

Ana Belén wrote, “Prison is one of the last places I would have ever chosen to be in, but some things in life are worth going to prison for, or worth doing and then killing yourself before you have to spend too much time in prison.”

She has been subjected to extreme conditions in that prison, akin to those imposed on Assange. The Federal Bureau of Prisons has reported that:

She can only have contact with her closest relatives, since her conviction is for espionage.

No one can inquire about her health or know why she is in a center for people with mental problems, when she does not suffer from them.

She cannot receive packages. When her defenders sent her a letter, it has been returned by certified mail.

Only people on a list (no more than 20 who have known her before her incarceration and have been approved by the FBI) ​​can correspond, send books, and visit Ana. Few people have visited her besides her brother and niece.

She cannot interact with other detainees in jail, and was always alone in her cell.

She is not allowed to talk on the phone, except to her mother once a week for 15-20 minutes.

She could not receive newspapers, magazines or watch television. After a dozen years in prison, the restrictions were slightly relaxed.

Karen Lee Wald noted in 2012, “If she is taken out of her cell in the isolation unit for any reason, all other prisoners are locked in their cells so they cannot speak to her. Basically, she has been buried alive.”

David Kovics, the renowned leftist songwriter, was moved to pay tribute to her in song. Oscar Lopez Rivera, who was jailed by the US during his fight for Puerto Rican independence, said, “I think that every Puerto Rican who loves justice and freedom should be proud of Ana Belén. What she did was more than heroic. She did what every person who believes in peace, justice and freedom and in the right of every nation to govern itself in the best possible way and without the intervention or threat of anyone, would have done.”

The Monastiraki Kitchen wanted to present the best Christmas dinner ever (until next Christmas) for our clients. The Big Feast. A meal for Kings and Queens. Partly because of our Automatic Earth readers’ donations, I think we got quite a ways there. Even if the dinner happened yesterday, December 31, instead of Christmas.

The Automatic Earth readers were responsible for buying €450 worth of steaks, meaning a good sized steak for 450 people (sometimes we make good deals). And we also bought tons of cookies, and charcoal, etc. Ask Filothei, she knows the details. I decided I’ll let the photos tell the story this time, not me. Here we go:

Apart from the usual food, and this time the steaks, Christmas at Monastiraki is always a time for gift bags. Hundreds of them. They contain lots of sweets, but also soaps, shampoo, warm socks and gloves etc. Very popular. We are so grateful to all those who contribute.

Really, lots of gift bags.

A crazy amount of sweets. Carloads.

And the steaks. Ever tried to prepare 450 of them?

It’s a lot.

Did I mention there were sweets? The bakers who donate these are saints. We are dealing with homeless people, for whom steaks and cakes and good chocolate are dreams. Well, Christmas is the time to make dreams come true.

And all this is dragged to the square by the crew.

Who then do the last preparations.

Yeah, Monastiraki Square is a bit magical at times.

And it’s also busy…

Before the food arrives. Gift bags! We have gift bags!

Yes. Popular.

The girl crew.

Did I mention we have sweets?

Thank you all soo much for making this possible. It counts. It makes a real difference. It’s a community effort. Even if you’re in Tennessee, you are part of that community.

I’ll end with the usual play:

Most of you will know the drill of this by now: any Paypal donations ending in $0.99 or $0.37 go straight to the Monastiraki kitchen, while other donations go to the Automatic Earth -which also badly needs them. (Note: a lot of Automatic Earth donations also end up at the kitchen).

I dislike few things more than asking people for money, even though the Automatic Earth now runs primarily on donations, and there’s some sweet justice in that as well, in depending on people’s appreciation of what we do, instead of ad revenues.

But I cannot do this on my own right now. The Monastiraki kitchen will realistically need about €1,500 per month (not all from my readers). I don’t have that to spare. So I’m calling on you. Unashamedly, because I know there is no reason to be ashamed of the cause.

I love all you people, and I’m sorry I can’t thank you all individually who have supported -and still do- the Monastiraki kitchen and the Automatic Earth all this time, and I ask you to keep on doing just that. The details for donations on Paypal and Patreon, for both causes, are in the top of the two sidebars of this site. Could not be much easier. If you’d rather send a check, go to our Store and Donations page. Bitcoin: 1HYLLUR2JFs24X1zTS4XbNJidGo2XNHiTT.

Love you. Thank you. This kitchen would not exist without you, these people would not get fed.

Analytics

26/09/2022

I have been telling the story of what is happening in Lugansk for three years. The war I live in, my sorrows and joys. A year ago, the Myrotvorets website put my details in the public domain. I wrote many letters to world leaders and artists in Western countries. I had only two requests: to delete the data of all children from Myrotvorets and to help the children of Donbass to return to a peaceful life, so that we are not killed. When the confrontation with Myrotvorets started, my Ukrainian journalist friends asked me why I had not written to Zelensky, but only mentioned him in my interview. At the time, it was difficult for me to answer. I still naively believed that there could be peace between Ukraine and Donbass, and that UN Secretary General Guterres and UNICEF, as internationally renowned organisations, would help me. But, unfortunately, I was wrong. Everything I asked for was ignored by these organisations, and Ukraine decided that we could be taken back by force. My efforts and dreams remained dreams. The only thing I am glad about is that I did not write to Zelensky at that time. And now I understand why: you cannot write and ask not to kill children to the one who gives orders to bomb Donetsk, Gorlovka, Altchevsk and other cities. You can’t write to the president who sends thousands of his soldiers to their deaths, who doesn’t spare them, who gives orders for terrorist acts and the killing of children. One should not write to the president who started this massacre and who has lost half of his country. You can’t write to a loser. Every day children are dying in Donbass, in Kherson and in the Zaporozhye region. And he has only himself to blame. A president who will lose everything…

What about UNICEF, the UN, Amnesty International? Have they said anything about the children killed by the Ukrainian army? No, of course not. Like in the Myrotvorets story. They know. But they remain silent or express their concern. They are silent, always and everywhere. When children in Yugoslavia, Syria, Palestine, Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya were killed. And if such respected organisations turn a blind eye to the brutal murder of children, do they have anything to say about the story of Myrotvorets? I don’t think so. After all, we are the wrong children, born and living in the wrong place, according to UNICEF and Amnesty International. In one of my essays, it is said that the children of war are silent because the adults do not listen to them. This is so. Unfortunately, we – the children – are uninteresting to them. We are not like them. They seem to think that we can be killed, that we just have to do it quietly, so as not to disturb others with our cries for help. I am sorry that this is happening. I am sorry that the country where I was born is bombing and trying to destroy everything I hold dear and everything I love, under the approving smile of those who can but do not want to stop this war. Unfortunately, all those who help Ukraine do not realise that the war is coming to them.

Ordinary citizens in the United States and Europe are mostly unaware of the atrocities committed by the Ukrainian army, the brutal bombing and killing of civilians. People are told that we are bombing ourselves or that the Russian army has been shooting at us for eight years. Apparently, that’s why we were looking forward to his arrival in 2022, yeah. Another reality.

Traduction de la lettre de réponse du Pape :
Bonjour Faina.
Le Secrétariat d’État a reçu la lettre que tu as récemment adressée au Saint-Père.
Le Pape François n’est pas indifférent à la détresse des gens, en particulier de ceux qui souffrent et qui traversent des moments difficiles.
Sa Sainteté, confiant toute l’humanité au Seigneur, t’invite à te joindre à ses prières pour la paix dans le monde.
Salutations de Pâques
Monseigneur L. Roberto Cona

But I’m sure it won’t always be like this. The truth will always win out. The hardest thing is not to get discouraged when everything you do doesn’t work. You are not being listened to. Just when you think it’s no use, something happens that helps you believe again that you’re not doing it for nothing. That’s what happened with the Pope’s letter. When I was in Moscow, I received a reply from Pope Francis. According to my Italian friends, he rarely replies to anyone, but he suggested to pray for peace with me. I don’t know if he answered himself or if the answer was written for him, but the important thing is that the Pope paid attention for the first time to the request of a child from Donbass and wanted to pray with someone who is considered an enemy in Ukraine. He offered to pray for me, a child who is not considered a human being in Ukraine. And I will certainly pray with him for the hundreds of children killed by Ukraine and for the peaceful life we all need.

Faina Savenkova
Translation by Christelle Néant for Donbass Insider
English translation: Vz. yan for Donbass Insider

Twice in the late winter and early spring of 2018, I climbed the stairs to the fourth floor of the Fisher Fine Arts Library, a Venetian-Gothic jewel box designed by Frank Furness as the main library of the University of Pennsylvania’s West Philadelphia campus in 1890. It had been years since I’d been inside the building whose open stacks of books I haunted in the early 1990s as a graduate student in the historic preservation program. It is there, for better or worse, that I learned about decoding symbols and interpreting diverse landscapes of industrialization and predatory finance.

I hold a crisp memory of my thesis advisor, a striking German woman with long white hair tucked into a tidy bun originally from the Palatinate who relocated to Oley, PA. We were walking down Walnut Street when she paused to look at me, put her hand on my shoulder, and tell me that one day I would see it; that my family would be protected because I could see it. Thirty years later the ability to sense worrisome artifacts lurking behind consensus reality is a burden I’d like to abandon, but I can’t. I’m still waiting for the upside. I don’t feel protected at all, and my family doesn’t understand me.

The account that follows isn’t about placing blame. I recognize we’re all caught in a terrible machine. Some of us are enmeshed more deeply than others. Some of us are more vulnerable than others. My ability to keep a roof over my head is intimately intertwined with the fate of Philadelphia’s largest private employer. If you believe the press releases, it is one of the best big employers in the nation. I am doing my best to complicate their contrived narratives. My lot is being a gad fly for Ben Franklin’s big project, the University of Pennsylvania.

I consider myself fortunate to have the stability to witness and tell the stories I tell. I harbor some guilt, because many people I care about don’t have that luxury. Still, there is nothing to do but forge ahead honing our skills, learning from our missteps, being human. Hanging back because we are afraid to fail is not an option. So, I choose to chip away at the foundation upon which my world rests with stories and felt dolls and dandelions. This anti-life egregore is nothing you can disarm by military force. Fritz Kunz and Piritim Sorokin were searching for the power of eros, the creative force of the universe. I’ll settle for a tonic of philia, affectionate love, appropriate to Philadelphia.

My significant other regularly points out this institution, one from which we both hold degrees, is not a monolithic presence. Rather it is more like a fractious collection of feuding fiefdoms. The right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing, which is exactly how systems of power like it. University culture is a civilizing force that rewards deep, narrow, often polarizing inquiry. Academic pecking orders are determined by books published, conference papers given, grants secured, patents filed, the robustness of one’s network. Virtuosos of cultivated ignorance are lauded; plausible deniability abounds. Behind ivy-covered walls chosen ones are conditioned to look to experts to define the contours of their character even as the system guts them and hollows their minds to make room for infusions of submission coding.

Look everywhere but inside your heart where you might unearth your moral compass. Ignore the elephants in the room as the acrid odor of dung fills your nostrils. The war on consciousness and natural life is well underway, but few retain sufficient clarity of thought or a firm enough backbone to call a spade a spade. Their boning knives are so sharp, and the cuts so deft, many victims never realize they’ve been gutted. That was me for decades – the good student, the good mom, the good co-worker, plowing ahead until a lattice of fine cracks began to widen revealing socially conditioned “goodness” to be a flimsy veneer under which a deep psychic wound festered.

And it wasn’t one wound, but many wounds. It was a pervasive network of woundedness, riddled with rot, and papered over with progressive social policy. The prognosis is not good. There’s not yet a cure for chronic domination disorder though symptoms may temporarily be alleviated through superficial social justice performances enacted even as most participants know deep inside nothing is actually meant to change. Cycles of harm run on repeat with increasing intensity, a perpetual gas-lit charade.

On that day, February 20, 2018, Neil Kleiman, NYU professor of “what works” government would be presenting on “A New City O/S.” At the time I was new to Twitter, and I distinctly remember tweeting the question, who decided to put behaviorists in charge of our cities? Who had ordered up this new operating system, which I now understand will be blockchain vending machine e-government tied to digital ID and smart sensor networks?

I grabbed a chair up front to record the presentation and got several pointed questions in at the end about social impact finance. As usual, the self-proclaimed experts seemed to know nothing about what was actually going on, upholding the ruse for an audience who would leave thinking they’d learned something when they were simply being managed through fanciful stories.

A lot more ...

I feel I’ve provided a pretty good tour of the University of Pennsylvania. I hope you have gained an understanding of how I see things – cagey financiers, delusional do-gooders, crafty policy makers, ambitious scientists, and digital storytellers each of whom is living their own drama where they hope to be the hero. So why have I taken you down this winding path? Well, I wanted to let you know that Zane Griffith Talley Cooper is the reason I chose to separate myself from Silicon Icarus.

I’d had some communication failures with Raul the previous month, and when I saw his story highlighting Cooper’s work in Greenland my heart dropped. Not because it wasn’t a well written piece or that rare earth mineral mining wasn’t a concern, but I knew that the Annenberg School of Communication, created by Sir Walter Nixon’s ambassador to England and heir to the Daily Racing Form / TV Guide fortune, was a mouthpiece for social impact propaganda. I’d written about it in 2018, including their push for blockchain media and sham social justice outlets. I’d sent Raul the link to, “Don’t Let the Impact Investors Capture the Non-Profit Activist Media,” a week or so prior to his article coming out.

I asked if we could have a conversation about Cooper, because the nature of his inclusion in the piece didn’t make sense to me. Nor did the shout-out given to him on Twitter. It was not the way Raul normally operated, and I pretty much read and uplifted every piece he’d written over the course of the year. I’m not one to let things fester. You may say I’m blunt or direct or even rude. I’ll own that. But I don’t play games, and people know where I stand.

I never got that conversation. The door was closed, a brief message exchange abruptly ended, and at that point I said I felt we were on different paths and it was probably appropriate to remove me as a contributor. Raul never opened the message I sent saying I hoped our paths would cross again, and that I wish him open pathways on his journey. I’m sure he will continue to do important work. I’d love to think impact finance will be a part of it, but it’s not the first time people I thought understood ended up pulling back and repositioning. As I said in the beginning of this post, this is not about assigning blame. I’m in this machine as deeply as anyone. I even have empathy for Zane Talley Griffith Cooper. It can’t be easy on the soul getting paid to study Web 3 while being expected to be an anti-imperialist in your academic circles. But he did do Beckett naked, so I suspect he’ll probably make it through.

https://www.zanegriffintalleycooper.com/pastzane/when-i-used-to-do-commercials-and-make-movies-sometimes

I stepped away from Silicon Icarus not because Raul interviewed Zane or wrote a piece I felt pulled punches, but because my request to talk about it was rejected. I didn’t have ten pages of thoughts when I made that ask, but there were things on my mind – serious things. To my way of thinking friends, real friends, should have enough trust and respect in one another to do the hard work of being human, which can be messy. Two years of support deserved better than ghosting, but we never know what it’s like to walk in another person’s shoes. I know he’s facing challenges. I don’t regret making that ask, because I wouldn’t be me if I hadn’t. The hardest part is not knowing if we ever were really friends, and that is the sickness of the Internet folks. It can be a real mind fuck.

But if the past few years have taught me anything, the universe operates according to purposeful if mysterious plans. I’ve had people arrive in my life to teach me and then abruptly leave. Still, we are all connected and so I will end with this passage from Louise Erdrich that I read this past week about waves. The waves are the key – periodicity, cycles, harmony. Edward Dewey knew some things. This paragraph is from “Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country,” page 64.

“Waves – On our way to visit the island and Eternal Sands we experience a confluence of shifting winds and waves. Tobasonakwut shows me how the waves are creating underwaves and counterwaves. The rough swells from the southeast are bouncing against the rocky shores, which he avoids. The wooded lands and shores will absorb the force of the waves and not send them back out to create confusion. Heading towards open water, we travel behind the farthest island, a wave cutter. We slice right into the waves when possible. But we are dealing with yesterday’s wind and a strong north wind and swells underneath the waves now proceeding from the wind that shifted, fresh, to the south. I think if what Tobasonakwut’s father said, “The creator is the lake and we are the waves on the lake.” The images of complexity and shifting mutability of human nature is very clear today.“

Perfect Louise.

Your words touch my heart.

I wish a wave cutter island for everyone who needs it right now – each and every one.

Hug your people.

You never know what tomorrow will bring.

Meeting the Goddess Gaia in a Supermarket, Italy. Frankly, as a mystical experience, it left much to be desired.

On September 13, 258, Cyprian, bishop of Carthage, was imprisoned on the orders of the new proconsul, Galerius Maximus. The public examination of Cyprian has been preserved.

Galerius Maximus: "Are you Thascius Cyprianus?"
Cyprian: "I am."
Galerius: "The most sacred Emperors have commanded you to conform to the Roman rites."
Cyprian: "I refuse."
Galerius: "Take heed for yourself."
Cyprian: "Do as you are bid; in so clear a case I may not take heed."

Galerius, after briefly conferring with his judicial council, with much reluctance pronounced the following sentence: "You have long lived an irreligious life, and have drawn together a number of men bound by an unlawful association, and professed yourself an open enemy to the gods and the religion of Rome; and the pious, most sacred and august Emperors ... have endeavoured in vain to bring you back to conformity with their religious observances; whereas therefore you have been apprehended as principal and ringleader in these infamous crimes, you shall be made an example to those whom you have wickedly associated with you; the authority of law shall be ratified in your blood." He then read the sentence of the court from a written tablet: "It is the sentence of this court that Thascius Cyprianus be executed with the sword."

Cyprian: "Thanks be to God.”

There are plenty of documents about martyrs from early Christianity that look to us as naive and exaggerated. But this one, no. This is so stark, so dramatic, so evident. You can see in your mind these two men, the Imperial procurer Galerius Maximus and the Bishop of Carthage, Thascius Cyprian, facing each other in anger, a clash that reminds to us the story of the aircraft carrier that tried to order a lighthouse to move away. It was an unstoppable force, the carrier, meeting an unmovable object, the lighthouse. It is the kind of clash that leads to human lives blown away like fallen leaves in the wind.

Galerius plays the role of the carrier, bristling with weapons, power, and movement. He is not evil. He does what he has to do. For him, just as for most Romans of the time, performing the "sacred rituals" was a simple way to show that one was part of society, willing to do one's duty. It implied little more than small offerings to the deities that would bring luck and prosperity to everyone. Doing that was the basis of the virtue carried "pietas," a virtue that later Christians would call "Caritas" and that in our terminology we might call "empathy." Why would anyone refuse to do such a simple thing? He had to be truly evil, wicked, and a criminal.

But Galerius must also see that he has a force in front of him that he cannot overcome. The lighthouse doesn't move. It cannot be moved. A man like Cyprianus, alone, was worth more than a Roman Legion. It was worth more than all the Roman Legions. A few decades later, the Empire would be ruled by a Christian Emperor, Constantine. More decades in the future, the Empire would collapse and be replaced by Christianity to start the flowering of that delicate and sophisticated civilization we call the "Middle Ages" in Europe.

In the end, the essence of the conflict that put Galerius and Cyprianus in front of each other was about the role of a totalitarian state. By the 3rd century AD, when this story took place, the Roman Empire had been a prototypical totalitarian state for at least three centuries. It means that the state recognizes nothing but itself as a source of law: there is nothing, strictly nothing, that can stop the state from doing what the state wants to do. In the Roman laws, there was no such thing as "human rights," and nothing like a "Constitution." The law was the law, and it had to be obeyed.

It was only much later that the Roman Emperors started understanding that the laws that they cherished so much had been turned into a tool of oppression and mistreatment of the poor and the weak. It was Empress Galla Placidia the first to say that "That the Emperor profess to be bound by the laws is a sentiment worthy of the ruler's majesty, so much is our power dependent on the power of law and indeed that the imperial office be subject to the laws is more important than the imperial power itself."

Nowadays, we tend to see religion as a set of various superstitions, something that gives people some delusionary belief on the after-death world, maybe some philosophic reasoning on how to live a virtuous life. But if you think about the clash between Galerius and Cyprianus, you see what it was about. Religion was a tool to keep people free from the arbitrary laws of the totalitarian state. Christianity established the basic dignity of every human being, and gave people an alternative social structure that they could use to fight back. The holy books were the "Constitution" of the Christian state.

Over the years, this concept of what it means to be a Christian in a secular state has been gradually lost. The last time when Christianity and the State clashed against each other was with the "Controversy of Valladolid," when the Christian Church tried to prevent the European States from enslaving and exterminating the Native Americans. It was a victory for the Church that led to its disappearance as an independent force in the Europe we call "modern." Under the onslaught of the state propaganda that completely inverted the roles in the common perception, we thought that we needed different structures to defend the people from oppression. That the totalitarianism of the state could be kept at bay using popular parties, constitutional laws, statements about human rights, and the like.

It didn't work, Today, we find ourselves in exactly the same situation as when Emperor Decius imposed on every Roman Citizen to demonstrate his/her pietas by performing sacrifices to the sacred deity that, in our case, is called "science." But, unlike the times of Decius, we have nothing to oppose to the totalitarian machine of the state that is marching on to crush all of us.

I have been thinking a lot about the Gaian religion, fashionable among Western intellectuals. Would anyone follow the example of Cyprianus and offer his life for his Gaian faith? Right now, obviously not. Gaians had a good occasion with the Covid story to take an independent position about an issue that the ordinary Christian religion was not equipped to take. Facing an epidemic, Christianity could only say that it was the result of the wrath of God because someone had sinned heavily. Gaianism has much more powerful intellectual tools that could have been used. Gaians could have told people that they were damaging their health just while trying to save themselves. That their immune system is a gift from Gaia herself that they must keep strong by keeping it in contact with the external environment. Exactly the opposite of trying to isolate themselves by wearing masks, disinfecting everything, and keeping social distance.

Unfortunately, right now Gaianism is little more than a vaporous set of good feelings. But it is shallow, lightweight, and easily blown out by the first serious gust of wind created by the state machine. And yet we desperately need something that will save us from being crushed by these monstrous machines we call states that are destroying everything. Will Gaia ever gain the strength of Christianity? I am doubtful, but also not without some hope. Things always change, sometimes so fast.

Here is a reflection on Gaianism that I published two years ago on my "Chimeras" blog when the situation was not yet as dramatic as it is today.

Gaia, the Return of the Earth Goddess

House founded by An, praised by Enlil, given an oracle by mother Nintud! A house, at its upper end a mountain, at its lower end a spring! A house, at its upper end threefold indeed. Whose well-founded storehouse is established as a household, whose terrace is supported by Lahama deities; whose princely great wall, the shrine of Urim! (the Kesh temple hymn, ca. 2600 BCE)

Not long ago, I found myself involved in a debate on Gaian religion convened by Erik Assadourian. For me, it was a little strange. For the people of my generation, religion is supposed to be a relic of the past, the opium of the people, a mishmash of superstitions, something for old women mumbling ejaculatory prayers, things like that. But, here, a group of people who weren't religious in the traditional sense of the word, and who included at least two professional researchers in physics, were seriously discussing how to best worship the Goddess of Earth, the mighty, the powerful, the divine, the (sometimes) benevolent Gaia, She who keeps the Earth alive.

It was not just unsettling, it was a deep rethinking of many things I had been thinking. I had been building models of how Gaia could function in terms of the physics and the biology we know. But here, no, it was not Gaia the holobiont, not Gaia the superorganism, not Gaia the homeostatic system. It was Gaia the Goddess.

And here I am, trying to explain to myself why I found this matter worth discussing. And trying to explain it to you, readers. After all, this is being written in a blog titled "Chimeras" -- and the ancient Chimera was a myth about a creature that, once, must have been a sky goddess. And I have been keeping this blog for several years, see? There is something in religion that remains interesting even for us, moderns. But, then, what is it, exactly?

I mulled over the question for a while and I came to the conclusion that, yes, Erik Assadourian and the others are onto something: it may be time for religion to return in some form. And if religion returns, it may well be in the form of some kind of cult of the Goddess Gaia. But let me try to explain

What is this thing called "religion," anyway?

Just as many other things in history that go in cycles, religion does that too. It is because religion serves a purpose, otherwise it wouldn't have existed and been so common in the past. So what is religion? It is a long story but let me start from the beginning -- the very beginning, when, as the Sumerians used to say "Bread was baked for the first time in the ovens".

A constant of all ancient religions is that they tell us that whatever humans learned to do -- from fishing to having kings -- it was taught to them by some God who took the trouble to land down from heaven (or from wherever Gods come from) just for that purpose. Think of when the Sumerian Sea-God called Aun (also Oannes in later times) emerged out of the Abzu (that today we call the abyss) to teach people all the arts of civilization. It was in those ancient times that the Gods taught humans the arts and the skills that the ancient Sumerians called "me," a bewildering variety of concepts, from "music" to "rejoicing of the heart." Or, in more recent lore, how Prometheus defied the gods by stealing fire and giving it to humankind. This story has a twist of trickery, but it is the same concept: human civilization is a gift from the gods. Now, surely our ancestors were not so naive that they believed in these silly legends, right? Did people really need a Fish-God to emerge out of the Persian Gulf to teach them how to make fish hooks and fishnets? But, as usual, what looks absurd hides the meaning of complex questions.

The people who described how the me came from the Gods were not naive, not at all. They had understood the essence of civilization, which is sharing. Nothing can be done without sharing something with others, not even rejoicing in your heart. Think of "music," one of the Sumerian me: can you play music by yourself and alone? Makes no sense, of course. Music is a skill that needs to be learned. You need teachers, you need people who can make instruments, you need a public to listen to you and appreciate your music. And the same is for fishing, one of the skills that Aun taught to humans. Of course, you could fish by yourself and for your family only. Sure, and, in this way, you ensure that you all will die of starvation as soon as you hit a bad period of low catches. Fishing provides abundant food in good times, but fish spoils easily and those who live by fishing can survive only if they share their catch with those who live by cultivating grains. You can't live on fish alone, it is something that I and my colleague Ilaria Perissi describe in our book, "The Empty Sea." Those who tried, such as the Vikings of Greenland during the Middle Ages, were mercilessly wiped out of history.

Sharing is the essence of civilization, but it is not trivial: who shares what with whom? How do you ensure that everyone gets a fair share? How do you take care of tricksters, thieves, and parasites? It is a fascinating story that goes back to the very beginning of civilization, those times that the Sumerians were fond to tell with the beautiful image of "when bread was baked for the first time in the ovens," This is where religion came in, with temples, priest, Gods, and all the related stuff.

Let's make a practical example: suppose you are on an errand, it is a hot day, and you want a mug of beer. Today, you go to a pub, pay a few dollars for your pint, you drink it, and that's it. Now, move yourself to Sumerian times. The Sumerians had plenty of beer, even a specific goddess related to it, called Ninkasi (which means, as you may guess, "the lady of the beer"). But there were no pubs selling beer for the simple reason that you couldn't pay for it. Money hadn't been invented, yet. Could you barter for it? With what? What could you carry around that would be worth just one beer? No, there was a much better solution: the temple of the local God or Goddess.

We have beautiful descriptions of the Sumerian temples in the works of the priestess Enheduanna, among other things the first named author in history. From her and from other sources, we can understand how in Sumerian times, and for millennia afterward, temples were large storehouses of goods. They were markets, schools, libraries, manufacturing centers, and offered all sorts of services, including that of the hierodules (karkid in Sumerian), girls who were not especially holy, but who would engage in a very ancient profession that didn't always have the bad reputation it has today. If you were so inclined, you could also meet male prostitutes in the temple, probably called "kurgarra" in Sumerian. That's one task in which temples have been engaging for a long time, even though that looks a little weird to us. Incidentally, the Church of England still managed prostitution in Medieval times.

So, you go to the temple and you make an offer to the local God or Goddess. We may assume that this offer would be proportional to both your needs and your means. It could be a goat that we know was roughly proportional to the services of a high-rank hierodule. But, if all you wanted was a beer, then you could have limited your offer to something less valuable: depending on your job you could have offered fish, wheat, wool, metal, or whatever. Then, the God would be pleased and, as a reward, the alewives of the temple would give you all the beer you could drink. Seen as a restaurant, the temple worked on the basis of what we call today an "all you can eat" menu (or "the bottomless cup of coffee," as many refills as you want).

Note how the process of offering something to God was called sacrifice. The term comes from "sacred" which means "separated." The sacrifice is about separation. You separate from something that you perceived as yours which then becomes an offer to the local God or to the community -- most often the same thing. The offerings to the temple could be something very simple: as you see in the images we have from Sumerian times, it didn't always involve the formal procedure of killing a live animal. People were just bringing the goods they had to the temple. When animals were sacrificed to God(s) in the sense that they were ritually killed, they were normally eaten afterward. Only in rare cases (probably not in Sumeria) the sacrificed entity was burnt to ashes. It was the "burnt sacrifice called korban Olah in the Jewish tradition. In that case, the sacrifice was shared with God alone -- but it was more of an exception than the rule.

In any case, God was the supreme arbiter who insured that your sacrifice was appreciated -- actually, not all sacrifices were appreciated. Some people might try to trick by offering low-quality goods, but God is not easy to fool. In some cases, he didn't appreciate someone's sacrifices at all: do you remember the story of Cain and Abel? God rejected Cain's sacrifice, although we are not told exactly why. In any case, the sacrifice was a way to attribute a certain "price" to the sacrificed goods.

This method of commerce is not very different than the one we use today, it is just not so exactly quantified as when we use money to attach a value to everything. The ancient method works more closely to the principle that the Marxists had unsuccessfully tried to implement "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs." But don't think that the ancient Sumerians were communists, it is just that the lack of a method of quantification of the commercial transaction generated a certain leeway that could allow the needy access to the surplus available, when it was available. This idea is still embedded in modern religions, think of how the Holy Quran commands the believers to share the water of their wells with the needy, once they have satisfied their needs and those of their animals. Or the importance that the Christian tradition gives to gleaning as a redistribution of the products of the fields. Do you remember the story of Ruth the Moabite in the Bible? That important, indeed.

But there is more. In the case of burnt sacrifices, the value attributed to the goods was "infinite" -- the goods consumed by the flames just couldn't be used again by human beings. It is the concept of Taboo used in Pacific cultures for something that cannot be touched, eaten, or used. We have no equivalent thing in the "market," where we instead suppose that everything has a price.

And then, there came money (the triumph of evil)

The world of the temples of the first 2-3 millennia of human civilizations in the Near East was in some ways alien to ours, and in others perfectly equivalent. But things keep changing and the temples were soon to face competition in a new method of attributing value to goods: money. Coinage is a relatively modern invention, it goes back to mid 1st millennium BCE. But in very ancient times, people did exchange metals by weight -- mainly gold and silver. And these exchanges were normally carried out in temples -- the local God(s) ensured honest weighing. In more than one sense, in ancient times temples were banks and it is no coincidence that our modern banks look like temples. They are temples to a God called "money." By the way, you surely read in the Gospels how Jesus chased the money changers -- the trapezitai -- out of the temple of Jerusalem. Everyone knows that story, but what were the money changers doing in the temple? They were in the traditional place where they were expected to be, where they had been from when bread was baked in ovens for the first time.

So, religion and money evolved in parallel -- sometimes complementing each other, sometimes in competition with each other. But, in the long run, the temples seem to have been the losers in the competition. As currency became more and more commonplace, people started thinking that they didn't really need the cumbersome apparatus of religion, with its temples, priests, and hierodules (the last ones were still appreciated, but now were paid in cash). A coin is a coin is a coin, it is guaranteed by the gold it is made of -- gold is gold is gold. And if you want a good beer, you don't need to make an offer to some weird God or Goddess. Just pay a few coppers for it, and that's done.

The Roman state was among the first in history to be based nearly 100% on money. With the Romans, temples and priests had mainly a decorative role, let's say that they had to find a new market for their services. Temples couldn't be commercial centers any longer, so they reinvented themselves as lofty places for the celebration of the greatness of the Roman empires. There remained also a diffuse kind of religion in the countryside that had to do with fertility rites, curing sickness, and occasional cursing on one's enemies. That was the "pagan" religion, with the name "pagan" meaning, basically, "peasant."

Paganism would acquire a bad fame in Christian times, but already in Roman times, peasant rites were seen with suspicion. The Romans had one deity: money. An evil deity, perhaps, but it surely brought mighty power to the Romans, but their doom as well, as it is traditional for evil deities. Roman money was in the form of precious metals and when they ran out of gold and silver from their mines, the state just couldn't exist anymore: it vanished. No gold, no empire. It was as simple as that.

The disappearance of the Roman state saw a return of religion, this time in the form of Christianity. It is a long story that would need a lot of space to be written. Let's just say that the Middle Ages in Europe saw the rise of monasteries to play a role similar to that of temples in Sumerian times. Monasteries were storehouses, manufacturing centers, schools, libraries, and more -- they even had something to do with hierodules. During certain periods, Christian nuns did seem to have played that role, although this is a controversial point. Commercial exchanging and sharing of goods again took a religious aspect, with the Catholic Church in Western Europe playing the role of a bank by guaranteeing that, for instance, ancient relics were authentic. In part, relics played the role that money had played during the Roman Empire, although they couldn't be exchanged for other kinds of goods. The miracle of the Middle Ages in Europe was that this arrangement worked, and worked very well. That is, until someone started excavating silver from mines in Eastern Europe and another imperial cycle started. It is not over to this date, although it is clearly declining.

So, where do we stand now? Religion has clearly abandoned the role it had during medieval times and has re-invented itself as a support for the national state, just as the pagan temples had done in Roman times. One of the most tragic events of Western history is when in 1914, for some mysterious reasons, young Europeans found themselves killing each other by the millions while staying in humid trenches. On both sides of the trenches, Christian priests were blessing the soldiers of "their" side, exhorting them to kill those of the other side. How Christianity could reduce itself to such a low level is one of the mysteries of the Universe, but there are more things in heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy. And it is here that we stand. Money rules the world and that's it.

The Problem With Money

Our society is perhaps the most monetized in history -- money pervades every aspect of life for everyone. The US is perhaps the most monetized society ever: for Europeans, it is a shock to discover that many American families pay their children for doing household chores. For a European, it is like if your spouse were asking you to pay for his/her sexual services. But different epochs have different uses and surely it would be shocking for a Sumerian to see that we can get a beer at the pub by just giving the alewives a curious flat object, a "card," that they then give back to us. Surely that card is a powerful amulet from a high-ranking God.

So, everything may be well in the best of worlds, notoriously represented by the Western version of liberal democracy. Powerful market forces, operated by the God (or perhaps Goddess) called Money or, sometimes, "the almighty dollar," ensure that exchanges are efficient, that scarce resources are optimally allocated, and that everyone has a chance in the search for maximizing his/her utility function.

Maybe. But it may also be that something is rotten in the Great Columned Temple of Washington D.C. What's rotten, exactly? Why can't this wonderful deity we call "money" work the way we would it like to, now that we even managed to decouple it from the precious metals it was made of in ancient times?

Well, there is a problem. A big problem. A gigantic problem. It is simply that money is evil. This is another complex story, but let's just say that the problem with evil and good is that evil knows no limits, while good does. In other words, evil is equivalent to chaos, good to order. It has something to do with the definition of "obscenity." There is nothing wrong in human sex, but an excess of sex in some forms becomes obscene. Money can become obscene for exactly this reason: too much of it overwhelms everything else. Nothing is so expensive that it cannot be bought; that's the result of the simple fact that you can attribute a price to everything.

Instead, God is good because She has limits: She is benevolent and merciful. You could see that as a limitation and theologians might discuss why a being that's all-powerful and all-encompassing cannot be also wicked and cruel. But there cannot be any good without an order of things. And order implies limits of some kind. God can do everything but He cannot do evil. That's a no-no. God cannot be evil. Period.

And here is why money is evil: it has no limits, it keeps accumulating. You know that accumulated money is called "capital," and it seems that many people realize that there is something wrong with that idea because "capitalism" is supposed to be something bad. Which may be but, really, capital is one of those polymorphic words that can describe many things, not all of them necessarily bad. In itself, capital is simply the accumulation of resources for future use -- and that has limits, of course. You can't accumulate more things than the things you have. But once you give a monetary value to this accumulated capital, things change. If money has no limits, capital doesn't, either.

Call it capital or call it money, it is shapeless, limitless, a blob that keeps growing and never shrinks. Especially nowadays that money has been decoupled from material goods (at least in part, you might argue that money is linked to crude oil). You could say that money is a disease: it affects everything. Everything can be associated with a number, and that makes that thing part of the entity we call the "market". If destroying that thing can raise that number, somewhere, that thing will be destroyed. Think of a tree: for a modern economist, it has no monetary value until it is felled and the wood sold on the market. And that accumulates more money, somewhere. Monetary capital actually destroys natural capital. You may have heard of "Natural Capitalism" that's supposed to solve the problem by giving a price to trees even before they are felled. It could be a good idea, but it is still based on money, so it may be the wrong tool to use even though for a good purpose.

The accumulation of money in the form of monetary capital has created something enormously different than something that was once supposed to help you get a good beer at a pub. Money is not evil just in a metaphysical sense. Money is destroying everything. It is destroying the very thing that makes humankind survive: the Earth's ecosystem. We call it "overexploitation," but it means simply killing and destroying everything as long as that can bring a monetary profit to someone.

Re-Sacralizing The Ecosystem (why some goods must have infinite prices)

There have been several proposals on how to reform the monetary system, from "local money" to "expiring money," and some have proposed simply getting rid of it. None of these schemes has worked, so far, and getting rid of money seems to be simply impossible in a society that's as complex as ours: how do you pay the hierodules if money does not exist? But from what I have been discussing so far, we could avoid the disaster that the evil deity called money is bring to us simply by putting a limit to it. It is, after all, what the Almighty did with the devil: She didn't kill him, but confined him in a specific area that we call "Hell" -- maybe there is a need for hell to exist, we don't know. For sure, we don't want hell to grow and expand everywhere.

What does it mean limits to money? It means that some things must be placed outside the monetary realm -- outside the market. If you want to use a metaphor-based definition, some goods must be declared to have an "infinite" monetary price -- nobody can buy them, not billionaires, not even trillionaires, or any even more obscene levels of monetary accumulation. If you prefer, you may use the old Hawai'ian word: Taboo. Or, simply, you decide that some things are sacred, holy, they are beloved by the Goddess, and even thinking of touching them is evil.

Once something is sacred, it cannot be destroyed in the name of profit. That could mean setting aside some areas of the planet, declaring them not open for human exploitation. Or setting limits to the exploitation, not with the idea of maximizing the output of the system for human use, but with the idea to optimize the biodiversity of the area. These ideas are not farfetched. As an example, some areas of the sea have been declared "whale sanctuaries" -- places where whales cannot be hunted. That's not necessarily an all/zero choice. Some sanctuaries might allow human presence and moderate exploitation of the resources of the system. The point is that as long as we monetize the exploitation, then we are back to monetary capitalism and the resource will be destroyed.

Do we need a religion to do that? Maybe there are other ways but, surely, we know that it is a task that religion is especially suitable for. Religion is a form of communication that uses rituals as speech. Rituals are all about sacralization: they define what's sacred by means of sacrifice. These concepts form the backbone of all religions, everything is neatly arranged under to concept of "sacredness" -- what's sacred is nobody's property. We know that it works. It has worked in the past. It still works today. You may be a trillionaire, but you are not allowed to do everything you want just because you can pay for it. You can't buy the right of killing people, for instance. Nor to destroy humankind's heritage. (So far, at least).

Then, do we need a new religion for that purpose? A Gaian religion?

Possibly yes, taking into account that Gaia is not "God" in the theological sense. Gaia is not all-powerful, she didn't create the world, she is mortal. She is akin to the Demiurgoi, the Daimonoi, the Djinn, and similar figures that play a role in the Christian, Islamic and Indian mythologies. The point is that you don't necessarily need the intervention of the Almighty to sacralize something. Even just a lowly priest can do that, and surely it is possible for one of Her Daimonoi, and Gaia is one.

Supposing we could do something like that, then we would have the intellectual and cultural tools needed to re-sacralize the Earth. Then, whatever is declared sacred or taboo is spared by the destruction wrecked by the money-based process: forests, lands, seas, creatures large and small. We could see this as a new alliance between humans and Gaia: All the Earth is sacred to Gaia, and some parts of it are especially sacred and cannot be touched by money. And not just the Earth, the poor, the weak, and the dispossessed among humans, they are just as sacred and must be respected.

All that is not just a question of "saving the Earth" -- it is a homage to the power of the Holy Creation that belongs to the Almighty, and to the power of maintenance of the Holy Creation that belongs to the Almighty's faithful servant, the holy Gaia, mistress of the ecosystem. And humans, as the ancient Sumerians had already understood, are left with the task of respecting, admiring and appreciating what God has created. We do not worship Gaia, that would silly, besides being blasphemous. But through her, we worship the higher power of God.

Is it possible? If history tells us something is that money tends to beat religion when conflict arises. Gaia is powerful, sure, but can she slay the money dragon in single combat? Difficult, yes, but we should remember that some 2000 years ago in Europe, a group of madmen fought and won against an evil empire in the name of an idea that most thought not just subversive at that time, but even beyond the thinkable. And they believed so much in that idea that they accepted to die for it

In the end, there is more to religion than just fixing a broken economic system. There is a fundamental reason why people do what they do: sometimes we call it with the anodyne name of "communication," sometimes we use the more sophisticated term "empathy," but when we really understand what we are talking about we may not afraid to use the word "love" which, according to our Medieval ancestors, was the ultimate force that moves the universe. And when we deal with Gaia the Goddess, we may have this feeling of communication, empathy, and love. She may be defined as a planetary homeostatic system, but she is way more than that: it is a power of love that has no equals on this planet. But there are things that mere words cannot express.

The tao that can be told
is not the eternal Tao
The name that can be named
is not the eternal Name.

The unnamable is the eternally real.
Naming is the origin
of all particular things. Free from desire, you realize the mystery.
Caught in desire, you see only the manifestations.

Yet mystery and manifestations
arise from the same source.
This source is called darkness.

Darkness within darkness.
The gateway to all understanding.

Regarding the video above, you have to have a little fun with things now and then! If you don’t you’ll go crazy.

I could easily spend my entire day linking to the latest pandemic and political commentary given the flood of information coming from all directions. However, I trust that most of you are already following other sources on these matters, and division of labor is a wonderful thing.

It seems that the devil has got his tail in the sand and the world is going into a kind of cursed future where the other and the connections became, overnight, virtual, it is hard to go through, hugs are missing, work is missing, we are full of uncertainties.

But as long as we have the earth, the sun and the air, we will have bread, the seeds will germinate, the flowers will be reborn. As humanity we live through terrible injustices, wars, hunger, genocide, femicide.

Let us change the course of this system that hanged us until we reach this moment, where a virus leaves us in the fields and the road, because the health systems collapse, because those who have been governing the world are killing us for a long time.

Let's reflect about consumption, let's go back to the essence to be reborn from the ashes, let's take care of the planet, let's take care of others, let's have empathy with the one next to us.

Let's take care of life, as long as we keep breathing. It is our turn to stay at home, until the long-awaited hugs come back, and finally meet again with our loved ones.

May the world find us changed, to transform it into a more humane world.

Let's keep on fighting for the noble cause.

Florencia Amengual - May 10, 2020

I live in downtown Ottawa, right in the middle of the trucker convoy protest. They are literally camped out below my bedroom window. My new neighbours moved in on Friday and they seem determined to stay. I have read a lot about what my new neighbours are supposedly like, mostly from reporters and columnists who write from distant vantage points somewhere in the media heartland of Canada. Apparently the people who inhabit the patch of asphalt next to my bedroom are white supremacists, racists, hatemongers, pseudo-Trumpian grifters, and even QAnon-style nutters. I have a perfect view down Kent Street – the absolute ground zero of the convoy. In the morning, I see some protesters emerge from their trucks to stretch their legs, but mostly throughout the day they remain in their cabs honking their horns. At night I see small groups huddled in quiet conversations in their new found companionship. There is no honking at night. What I haven’t noticed, not even once, are reporters from any of Canada’s news agencies walking among the trucks to find out who these people are. So last night, I decided to do just that – I introduced myself to my new neighbours.

The Convoy on Kent Street. February 2, 2022.

At 10pm I started my walk along – and in – Kent Street. I felt nervous. Would these people shout at me? My clothes, my demeanour, even the way I walk screamed that I’m an outsider. All the trucks were aglow in the late evening mist, idling to maintain warmth, but all with ominously dark interiors. Standing in the middle of the convoy, I felt completely alone as though these giant monsters weren’t piloted by people but were instead autonomous transformer robots from some science fiction universe that had gone into recharging mode for the night. As I moved along I started to notice smatterings of people grouped together between the cabs sharing cigarettes or enjoying light laughs. I kept quiet and moved on. Nearby, I spotted a heavy duty pickup truck, and seeing the silhouette of a person in the driver’s seat, I waved. A young man, probably in his mid 20s, rolled down the window, said hello and I introduced myself. His girlfriend was reclined against the passenger side door with a pillow to proper her up as she watched a movie on her phone. I could easily tell it’s been an uncomfortable few nights. I asked how they felt and I told them I lived across the street. Immediate surprise washed over the young man’s face. He said, “You must hate us. But no one honks past 6pm!” That’s true. As someone who lives right on top of the convoy, there is no noise at night. I said, “No, I don’t hate anyone, but I wanted to find out about you.” The two were from Sudbury Ontario, having arrived on Friday with the bulk of the truckers. I ask what they hoped to achieve, and what they wanted. The young woman in the passenger seat moved forward, excited to share. They said that they didn’t want a country that forced people to get medical treatments such as vaccines. There was no hint of conspiracy theories in their conversation with me, not a hint of racist overtones or hateful demagoguery. I didn’t ask them if they had taken the vaccine, but they were adamant that they were not anti-vaxers.

The next man I ran into was standing in front of the big trucks at the head of the intersection. Past middle age and slightly rotund, he had a face that suggests a lifetime of working outdoors. I introduced myself and he told me we was from Cochrane, Ontario. He also proudly pointed out that he was the block captain who helped maintain order. I thought, oh no, he might be the one person keeping a lid on things; is it all that precarious? I delicately asked how hard his job was to keep the peace but I quickly learned that’s not really what he did. He organized the garbage collection among the cabs, put together snow removal crews to shovel the sidewalks and clear the snow that accumulates on the road. He even has a salting crew for the sidewalks. He proudly bellowed in an irrepressible laugh “We’re taking care of the roads and sidewalks better than the city.” I waved goodbye and continued to the next block.

My next encounter was with a man dressed in dark blue shop-floor coveralls. A wiry man of upper middle age, he seemed taciturn and stood a bit separated from the small crowd that formed behind his cab for a late night smoke. He hailed from the Annapolis Valley, Nova Scotia. He owned his own rig, but he only drove truck occasionally, his main job being a self-employed heavy duty mechanic. He closed his shop to drive to Ottawa, because he said, “I don’t want my new granddaughter to live in a country that would strip the livelihood from someone for not getting vaccinated.” He introduced me to the group beside us. A younger crowd, I can remember their bearded faces, from Athabasca, Alberta, and Swift Current Saskatchewan. The weather had warmed, and it began to rain slightly, but they too were excited to tell me why they came to Ottawa. They felt that they needed to stand up to a government that doesn’t understand what their lives are like. To be honest, I don’t know what their lives are like either – a group of young men who work outside all day with tools that they don’t even own. Vaccine mandates are a bridge too far for them. But again, not a hint of anti-vax conspiracy theories or deranged ideology.

I made my way back through the trucks, my next stop leading me to a man of East Indian descent in conversation with a young man from Sylvan Lake, Alberta. They told me how they were following the news of O’Toole’s departure from the Conservative leadership and that they didn’t like how in government so much power has pooled into so few hands.

The rain began to get harder; I moved quickly through the intersection to the next block. This time I waved at a driver in one of the big rigs. Through the rain it was hard to see him, but he introduced himself, an older man, he had driven up from New Brunswick to lend his support. Just behind him some young men from Gaspésie, Quebec introduced themselves to me in their best English. At that time people started to notice me – this man from Ottawa who lives across the street – just having honest conversations with the convoy. Many felt a deep sense of abuse by a powerful government and that no one thinks they matter.

Behind the crowd from Gaspésie sat a stretch van, the kind you often see associated with industrial cleaners. I could see the shadow of a man leaning out from the back as he placed a small charcoal BBQ on the sidewalk next to his vehicle. He introduced himself and told me he was from one of the reservations on Manitoulin Island. Here I was in conversation with an Indigenous man who was fiercely proud to be part of the convoy. He showed me his medicine wheel and he pointed to its colours, red, black, white, and yellow. He said there is a message of healing in there for all the human races, that we can come together because we are all human. He said, “If you ever find yourself on Manitoulin Island, come to my reserve, I would love to show you my community.” I realized that I was witnessing something profound; I don’t know how to fully express it.

As the night wore on and the rain turned to snow, those conversations repeated themselves. The man from Newfoundland with his bullmastiff, a young couple from British Columbia, the group from Winnipeg that together form what they call “Manitoba Corner ” all of them with similar stories. At Manitoba Corner a boisterous heavily tattooed man spoke to me from the cab of his dually pickup truck – a man who had a look that would have fit right in on the set of some motorcycle movie – pointed out that there are no symbols of hate in the convoy. He said, “Yes there was some clown with a Nazi flag on the weekend, and we don’t know where he’s from, but I’ll tell you what, if we see anyone with a Nazi flag or a Confederate flag, we’ll kick his fucking teeth in. No one’s a Nazi here.” Manitoba Corner all gave a shout out to that.

As I finally made my way back home, after talking to dozens of truckers into the night, I realized I met someone from every province except PEI. They all have a deep love for this country. They believe in it. They believe in Canadians. These are the people that Canada relies on to build its infrastructure, deliver its goods, and fill the ranks of its military in times of war. The overwhelming concern they have is that the vaccine mandates are creating an untouchable class of Canadians. They didn’t make high-falutin arguments from Plato’s Republic, Locke’s treatises, or Bagehot’s interpretation of Westminster parliamentary systems. Instead, they see their government willing to push a class of people outside the boundaries of society, deny them a livelihood, and deny them full membership in the most welcoming country in the world; and they said enough. Last night I learned my new neighbours are not a monstrous faceless occupying mob. They are our moral conscience reminding us – with every blow of their horns – what we should have never forgotten: We are not a country that makes an untouchable class out of our citizens.

Our resident physician John Day in Texas comes with an update on his situation. It seems his clinic no longer seeks to fire him for refusing to be vaccinated, they now claim it’s for cause (it’s not). A doctor who has been free to decide medical treatments for and with his patients for many years, all of a sudden cannot decide that for his own body.

And of course it’s not just America, and it’s not just doctors, it’s also pilots and nurses and soldiers and police men and women, and vaccine mandates are being introduced in many countries. That will deprive many fields in our societies of their leaders, and leave them occupied by followers only.

People who think for themselves, and wish to decide for themselves (as is their right), are being put out by the curb, and by the thousands. The resulting changes in society will be devastating. Losing all those years of experience and wisdom and kindness and intelligence will make us all a lot poorer. And why? It’s obviously not about logic, and it’s not about health. John:

John Day MD: Precariously Supported,

Yesterday was an odd day in several aspects. I had worked a long Friday at the clinic again, which did not go badly. I left nothing unfinished. We drove to the Yoakum homestead Friday night and got a good night of sleep.

Somehow, I felt very heavy and slow on Saturday and Sunday, so I trudged through three to four hours of pushing the little Honda mower, and did work in the garden, but ploddingly. I planted garlic for the winter/spring season, and tended the garden.

I continued to feel a weight of unease, and as we started the drive back to Austin, Sunday afternoon, I had a sense that I should really buy winter veggies to put in at the clinic garden, which I started in 2016, and tend for my coworkers. Putting things off until the end of the month, in my last two weeks of work there, seemed awkward.

We picked up a lot of winter greens and salad starts in little pots on our way into Austin, some for our Austin kitchen garden, but most for the clinic garden. I did a last harvest of the blackeyed pea row, then cut down the vines, and took them to some chickens that a friend of Jenny’s raises.

Yesterday (Monday) morning I worked in our kitchen garden again, preparing the beds for fall and winter, cleaning up the summer debris, and also planting an orange seedling in the bed in front of the house, where the February freeze had killed the one fruitful tree.

After eating, I went over to the clinic with an orange seedling, to replace the two that the February freeze had killed, and all of the winter salad and cooking-green seedlings to fill a couple of rows. I went through the entrance, put on a mask, and went through to the garden in the break area, with shovels and clippers, saying “hi” to a few people and smiling with my eyes. I went out through the garden gate, and brought in the orange tree, then the veggie starts.

The orange tree needed to go in the large bed, which has a Mexican avocado seedling tree, and a banana plant that actually survived February. Mainly it has a lot of sweet potatoes. It’s a fairly large bed, and this has been a very good year for sweet potatoes. I filled the three gallon bucket that the tree was in with sweet potatoes, from just a few square feet that I cleared and dug up, before planting it, maybe one percent of that bed.

While I was digging up the sweet potatoes and digging the hole to put the orange tree in, my flip phone rang. I figured it was Jenny. I brushed some of the dirt off my hands and answered it. It was the nice and very well-mannered youngish man, who is currently Director of Human Resources, telling me that my last day of work had been changed from the last Friday of October to the Friday just passed, which was different from what I had been told last week, when the reason for my firing was changed from vaccine-mandate non-compliance, to all of the wrongs I have committed in the period of time since that mandate was announced.

It was a lousy spot for him to be put in, and he seemed uncomfortable having to put it into polite words. He had been trying to call me while I was working on our home garden, but I had not been carrying the phone. I told him that I was at the clinic garden, putting in some things for winter, and that he could talk to me in person. My presence in the garden was unanticipated, though I have worked on my day off frequently in the past couple of months.

We talked as I planted the orange tree and put the big sweet potatoes in the pot, handing it over to a couple of nurses taking their lunch. They had helped dig sweet potatoes last year, and I knew they wanted some. He politely explained that I was not to re-enter the building, and that my desk would be cleared out and boxed for me. The explanation was so polite that I sought clarification. I did negotiate that I could pick up a few notes at my desk with his presence and supervision, which we then did. My badge didn’t let me in this time. He had to use his. As we walked through the clinic to my desk, most people had their eyes down. A few coworkers looked me in the eyes, and I smiled with my eyes. I was comfortable in myself, and emanated that (I think).

We grabbed a few boxes and made short work of the packing-up. I got everything, and we carried the three boxes to my little twenty four year old Ford Ranger pickup truck together. We went back to the garden and break-area through the gate, He thought it best that I just leave without planting the vegetables, but I prevailed upon him to keep his agreement to let me clean out the rows and do the planting.

He actually had a fair number of gardening questions, which I answered as I cleared the rows and planted for winter. I worked expeditiously, taking about twenty to thirty minutes, as I explained the quality of the soil, and how building soil is one of the main objectives in successful gardening. If you don’t have enough garden to out produce what the squirrels, birds and other critters can eat, they will eat it all. You need a big enough garden patch.

We walked back to the truck with shovels and clippers, talking about what’s next. The clinic will still pay me for these last two weeks of October, but my patients who are scheduled will not get to see me for a last visit. I have been doing everything possible to avoid leaving loose ends, and to write thorough chart notes, so it will be easy for the next doctor. I have tried to make suggestions for which doctor or practitioner might best match the needs and personality of each patient. I passed my list to give to the Director of Adult Medicine, who has been working hard and well on this transition. It’s not a complete list…

I am left to wonder why the clinic took surprise action to remove me from patient-care, while still paying my salary for two weeks. I suspect there was free-floating anxiety about what I might say or do. I had been informing people of the actual circumstances of my leaving, being fired for non-compliance with mandatory vaccination. The management has been consulting with attorneys the whole time, and somebody else is contesting her firing for non-compliance with that mandate, I am told. Governor Abbott did say that vaccine mandates are not tolerable in Texas, Monday of last week. I suspect that my being fired-for-cause, other than non-compliance with COVID vaccination might be more plausible when the date of my firing is moved forward from the prior date of my termination for non-compliance

I do not intend to contest my firing through recourse to the law. The only law I am really, currently concerned with is the Law of Karma, and I am very concerned with that law. I am constantly aware of the implications of Karma as we wade further into this rip-tide of history.

Human Horticulturist

As the pandemic rolled into its second year, I became concerned that the psychosocial fallout of the pandemic, and especially the response at the global and local levels, could represent an existential threat to permaculture and kindred movements. At one level, this threat is the same as that to families, workplaces, networks and organisations more generally, where a sense of urgency to implement the official response, especially lockdowns and mass vaccination, is producing a huge gulf between an ever more certain majority and a smaller minority questioning or challenging the official response.

My aim in this essay is to focus on the critical importance of using all our physical, emotional and intellectual resources towards maintaining connections across what could be a widening gulf of frustration and distrust within our movement, reflecting society at large. I want to explore how permaculture ethics and design principles can help us empathetically bridge that gulf without needing to censor our truth or simply avoid the issues.

While the pandemic and the responses to it will pass in time, I believe the future will be characterised by similar issues that test our ability to tolerate uncertainty and diversity and to thus exercise solidarity within kin, collegiate and network communities of practise.

International Permaculture Day May 2013 Daylesford Community Garden

Future Scenarios and the Brown Tech future

The positive grounded thinking that characterises permaculture has always been informed by a dark view of the state of the world and long-term emerging threats. Future Scenarios is my 2008 exploration of four near-future ‘energy descent’ scenarios driven by the variable rates of oil and resource depletion on the one hand and rate of onset of serious climate change on the other. Six years later, I wrote the essay ‘Crash on Demand: Welcome to the Brown Tech Future’ where I ‘called’ Brown Tech as being the already emergent scenario.

In the longer version of this ‘Pandemic brooding’ essay, I review and reinterpret this work in light of the pandemic and responses to it.

Permaculture pluralism

Anyone involved in permaculture knows that permies can come to quite different conclusions about what is the most ethical and practical solution to the same problem. For example faced with marauding wildlife, some will go to considerable expense (and resource consumption) building elaborate fences, anti-aviaries and other deterrents to separate wildlife from food. Others will treat the wildlife as another abundance of the system to be harvested. Various permaculture principles, as well as the fundamental ethic of Care of Earth, might be invoked to support both approaches.

Likewise, many permies believe taxation is essential to redistribute resources from places of abundance to those of scarcity and as an expression of solidarity essential to any functioning, let alone ethical, society. Others see almost all the expenditure by governments of tax revenues as representing rape of Mother Earth’s abundance and theft from Indigenous peoples, and further as either downright evil or at best a bandaid covering festering wounds. An ethical response is to minimise taxpaying (by reducing income and consumption). Again, design principles and ethics can be invoked to support either position.

From my perspective, grappling with the ethical and systemic issue is more important than the notion that there might be a correct answer, and therefore a wrong answer, to the challenge. In the past, there have been heated debates, and agreements to disagree, but rarely would participants in permaculture design courses, convergences or networks see the answers of others as reasons to reject permaculture. Many celebrate personal actions as small-scale experiments with their good, bad and interesting outcomes informing other experiments, especially the next generation’s, as we muddle through energy descent to hopefully more benign, or at least less-bad, futures.

Pandemic flavoured Brown Tech

I believe the pandemic and the responses to it represent a major turning point in crystalising the Brown Tech future. It ticks so many boxes:

• a nature-driven crisis which has been long predicted, and to some extent, planned for
• rolling uncertainty that progressively breaks down past expectations
• a crisis which, like a war, requires the suspension of normal economic activity, personal rights and governance processes
• a demand for strong action by government for the common good informed by science
• a revival of Keynesian policies including a massive increase in government debt
• an enemy (the virus) that can be easily demonised without there being too many defenders to ignore or silence
• strong censorship of broadcast media and novel efforts to censor social media to sideline debate that could undermine the rapidly emergent and evolving program.

If the crisis is not solved, then demonisation progressively shifts to those resisting the plan.

This situation is creating the fork in the road where some permies will find themselves (perhaps surprisingly) following the program, while others will have become certain that they will at least quietly resist complying to some degree or other, right up to a radicalised public resistance, whether that be through resigning from work, street protest or satirical art.

We can learn and gain, individually and collectively, from these increasingly divergent paths – but the learnings could be painful. Let’s consider the benefits that might have led permies down one or another path, perhaps unwittingly, to increasingly polarised positions.

The mainstream plan

Although there are differences of emphasis and policies around the government responses to the pandemic, these debates are around the margins, even if they are at times heated. Most fundamentally, the mainstream plan, informed by the scientific and medical establishment, takes the following as self-evident:

• The virus is an existential threat to society that must be contained and disarmed if not eliminated before an establishment of some hoped-for, tolerable new normal.
• Social distancing, disinfectant cleaning, testing, contact tracing, masks and various levels of quarantine, border controls and lockdowns are the only mechanisms available to prevent collapse of the health system and deaths escalating to horrific levels in the short term.
• Novel vaccine technology is the only real hope for a tolerable new normal.
• To achieve effective herd immunity and minimise death, some great majority of the adult population and probably children need to get vaccinated as soon as possible.
• The adverse effects of these provisionally approved vaccines are minor and/or rare and much less than the risk of the disease.
• Preventative and early treatments are at best of marginal value, or more likely based on false hope and fraud.
• The suspension of normal civil liberties is a necessary, albeit temporary, measure to achieve the plan in a timely fashion and reduce the suffering both from the virus and the plan itself.
• People who actively resist the plan need stronger social, economic and, where necessary, legal sanctions to ensure their actions don’t prevent the plan from working for the common good.
• Apart from debate around the margins about how best to respond to these givens, debate and questioning at the level of science, logistics, economics, law, politics, media and social media is not just unnecessary, but an existential threat to the plan and society at large, so must be prevented by unprecedented means.
• It is the responsibility of every citizen to play a part in the plan, be bold in convincing those who are hesitant, and challenging those not following the plan, especially those actively resisting it.

Permies following the plan are likely to see themselves as being part of a society-wide collective effort to minimise pain and suffering in the aged, the disadvantaged and those in poor health; a choice in favour of collective and longer-term gain at the cost of individual and short-term sacrifice. For many of us, this is a perfect metaphor for what is needed to address the climate emergency. By accepting what appears to be a broad consensus of global, national and local medical and scientific experts, we avoid the protracted debate and lack of a technical consensus that has stymied governments in initiating strong action to address the climate emergency.

For permies in despair about the waste and dysfunction of the consumer economy, the closure, albeit temporary, of many discretionary services and businesses is a taste for how we might need to decide what is important; maximum consumer choice for the affluent versus the provision of basic needs for all. The personal sacrifice and adaptation to difficulties, including stay-at-home lockdown, have been opportunities to focus more on the important things in life and get a taste of what social solidarity feels like.

Reports of contrarian views seem to mostly come from sources contaminated by association with climate denial and other views we categorically reject. The resisters’ outrage looks to many like just more selfish, science denying and ignorant right-wing rednecks, trying to prevent collective wisdom and social solidarity from working. Familiar powerful bad players in global corporations or nation states have been replaced by much more immediate angry undesirables, who without much power or vision, could wreck the hard work of the collective to create a workable new normal.

The dissident view

It is more difficult to generalise about those who question or reject the program. A great diversity of views, explanations, feelings and actions flourish in an environment of unprecedented censorship. While there is great sensitivity about the term ‘censorship’, let alone ‘propaganda’ by those supporting the plan, for those on the other side, it is astonishing how rapidly the axe has fallen on enquiry, and debate, in the mainstream media, social media, workplaces and families, let alone in defence of what – until very recently – most of us took as our inalienable rights.

For many permies, the pandemic seems another example of hyped threat like the ‘war on weeds’, ‘war on drugs’, ‘war on terror’ used to manipulate the population to comply with some version of disaster capitalist1Disaster capitalism feeds off natural (climate change) and other disasters to provide recovery and reconstruction services funded by the public that typically benefit the corporate providers and contribute to ongoing dependencies. The term was used by Naomi Klein to describe the evolution of late stage capitalism over recent decades. solutions. Most sceptics acknowledge the virus as real, but not as dangerous as the cure in lockdowns and other draconian measures. The ‘war on the virus’ seems just as futile or misguided as all the other wars on nature, substances and concepts. So much for trying to have nuanced discussions about viruses as an essential and largely symbiotic mechanism for the exchange of genetic material and mediation of evolution!

While the closure and loss of cafés, gyms and hairdressers might not be a great loss, except to those directly affected, many of us have noticed that the official response to the pandemic tends to follow a pattern of support and strengthening of dominant corporations while leading to the weakening and likely collapse of small business and community self-organised activities.

During the first lockdown, ‘stay at home in your household’ was celebrated as a great plus for people getting the RetroSuburbia message. More recently, the messaging about the problem of shared and multi-generation households being suspect has been building, especially in the working-class western suburbs of Sydney and Melbourne where many of essential and less well paid workers live. We have shifted from a joke about ‘which permie created the pandemic?’ to a gritted teeth recognition that the response to the pandemic is working to vacuum people into another level of dependence on techno-industrial systems.

Many permies have taken advantage of the shift online to network more effectively around the country and the world, but we are deeply troubled by our increasing dependence on mediated experiences and what seems like draconian regulation of informal engagement with people and nature. The concerns for what this is doing to children are far more serious than the loss of the regulated version of social interaction that children get at school.

For many of us, it is completely natural to be sceptical about one big fast answer provided by the giants of the pharma industry, while they have been granted legal immunity for the consequences of their novel products. Many have made the rational assessment that the very low risks of the virus (for most of us at least) seem better than the unknown of a novel technology approved and pushed on a frustrated and frightened population in record time. Some in this camp were sceptical about vaccines in general but most have been influenced by the largely censored views from some leading global experts, that these vaccines are in a totally different risk category to all previous vaccines.

While waiting and seeing what happens next may look selfish to the majority, the difficulty in getting access to data and unbiased interpretation drives many to rely on their gut feelings. One or more examples of spin and manipulation of data by officials, and especially the media, leads to a general collapse in trust about any, and even all, aspects of the official story. For instance:

• Many of us have seen evidence that existing low cost and low risk treatments are available and used effectively in some countries resisting the ‘no available treatment’ orthodoxy.
• Most understand that while the vaccines seemed to give some protection from more severe effects at least in the early stages, they do not appear to stop transmission, at least of the latest variant.
• Many wonder why the build-up of natural immunity from prior exposure to the virus is not considered as part of the solution that should at least be discussed before vaccine passports are implemented.

Concerns about more serious adverse effects of the vaccines, as predicted by some experts, have developed into alarm, anger and resistance as both the evidence increases and efforts at cover up and spin become worse. Extreme consequences that many of us dismissed early on as highly unlikely are now showing up in hard-to-read scientific papers, clinical reports and official records and databases.

A similar process has happened with the official responses. For example vaccine passports are now widely discussed and debated as part of the attempt to get as many people vaccinated as possible, as the efficacy of vaccines falls and concerns about adverse effects lock in resistance by a minority. At the start of the pandemic this possibility was decried as paranoid conspiracy theory.

France has been leading the charge to impose vaccine passports for many public and work spaces including hospitals. It’s hard to assess how large the resistance will be in different countries and circumstances but there are already signs that whole industries will lose a significant part of their workforce as some substantial minority of the population withdraw their work, consumption and investment in the system rather than getting the vaccine. Whether by design, policy stupidity or the unexplained viral power of censored scientists and vaccine doubters to overcome the largest public health education/public relations/propaganda effort in history, it is conceivable that the result could be economic contraction on a much larger scale than has occurred as a result of lockdowns so far.2 I can’t help but see what is unfolding as a bizarre version of my ‘Crash on Demand’ scenario

Economic contraction could mostly be in the discretionary economy, but how would the health system cope with a loss of staff, especially if some combination of ineffective vaccines against new strains and antibody-enhanced disease lead to medically informed people losing faith before the general public? Part of the solution might be doctors and nurses from overseas,3In the week since I wrote this sentence, doctors from overseas are now part of the plan for Australia or the adoption of treatment options for Covid currently being used with success in countries like Mexico and India.

Australia and New Zealand seem to be something of a test bed for the most authoritarian regulations in an attempt to keep Covid as close to zero as possible (and failing). Large numbers of people in other countries see us as a police state and wonder why there hasn’t been more resistance Down Under.

Some of us have noted plans promoted by the World Economic Forum for a Global Reset that will require a command economy to respond to the climate emergency, and that the pandemic is an opportunity to implement some of the structures and processes needed to create what some fear is a global new world order.

For many people, the trajectory from trust to mistrust often leads to either deep depression or an energised anger, mostly focused on the authorities but often expressed to friends and family at great cost to all concerned.

Although I have some of those thoughts and feelings, I mostly feel a great tension between a deep and somewhat detached fascination with the big picture and the sense of urgency I habitually feel in spring to get fully cranking with the seasonal garden and generally keeping our home at Melliodora shipshape. I feel like I finally have a box seat to watch the train of techno-industrial civilization hitting the Limits to Growth stone wall and breaking apart, all in slow motion.

The rapidly evolving situation and all its psychological, sociological and economic dimensions suggest an expanding field of possibilities. These could include:

• a cyber pandemic that crashes the global financial system,
• a short war between China and the USA4Part of my ‘A History from the Future’ story happening in 2022
• rapid reduction in consumption of oil and other critical resources and consequently greenhouse gas emissions as a result of the virus,
• plus of course accelerating climate disasters.

In different scenarios, concern about the virus and the ability to implement the plan could become ever more intense, or alternatively, be shunted offstage or metastasised into dealing with the next crisis. Consequently, the details of what worked, what didn’t, who takes the credit and who gets the blame, would probably all be lost in the swirling muddy waters of compounding crises.

A personal view of the pandemic

Up until this point, I have not indicated my personal interpretation of either the virus or the response because I wanted to focus on the bigger systemic drivers without getting muddied in the good/bad, right/wrong, us/them polarities. However we all have to face what life throws in our path with whatever internal and collective resources we have at hand. As is my lifelong habit, I have done my own ‘due diligence’ to understand and guide my personal decisions. In the past I have always been open about my conclusions and decisions, whether around the campfire or on the most public of forums. I have often joked about the comfort I feel in being a dissident about most things including being beaten up at primary school in the early days of the Vietnam war for being a ‘commie traitor’ to being ostracised in the 1990s for opposing the ‘war on weeds’ orthodoxy of the environmental mainstream. But today being a dissident is no joking matter. Unfortunately the psychosocial environment has now become so toxic that the pressures to self-censor have become much more complex and powerful. Much more is at stake than personal emotions, ego, reputation or opportunities and penalties.

Following my instinct for transparency, I will state my position, which has been evolving since I first started to consider whether the novel virus in Wuhan might lead to a repeat of the 1919 flu pandemic or even something on the scale of the Black Death. I can summarise my current position and beliefs as follows:

• The virus is real, novel and kills mostly aged, ill and obese people with symptoms both similar to and different from related corona viruses.
• It most likely is a result of ‘Gain of Function’ research at Wuhan Institute of Virology in China supported by funding from the US government.
• Escape rather than release was the more likely start of the pandemic.
• Vaccines in use in western world countries are based on novel technology developed over many years, but without resulting in effective or safe vaccines previously.
• The fear about the virus generated by the official response and media propaganda is out of proportion to the impact of the disease.
• Effective treatment protocols for Covid-19 exist and if those are implemented early in the disease, then hospitalisation and deaths can be greatly reduced, as achieved in some countries that faced severe impacts (especially Mexico and India).
• The socioeconomic and psychosocial impacts of the response will cause more deaths than the virus has so far, especially in poor countries.
• The efficacy of vaccines is falling while reported adverse effects are now much greater proportionally than for previous vaccines.
• The under-reporting of adverse events is also much higher than for previous vaccines, although this is still an open question.
• The possibility of antibody dependent enhancement (ADE) leading to higher morbidity and death in the future is a serious concern and could be unfolding already in countries such as Israel where early and high rates of vaccination have occurred.

Given the toxic nature of views already expressed about (and by) people I know and respect, I am not going to engage in an extensive collating of evidence, referencing who I think are reliable experts and intermediaries who can interpret the virus, the vaccine or any of the related parts of the puzzle. Outsourcing personal responsibility for due diligence to authorities is a risky strategy at the best of times; in times of challenge and rapid change the risks escalate. I do not want to convince anyone to not have the vaccine, but I do want to provide solidarity with those struggling (often alone and isolated) to find answers, so the following are two starting points that I think could be helpful:

• For those trying to understand the vaccines, their efficacy and risks, ‘This interview could save your life: a conversation with Dr Peter McCulloch’ provides a good overview with full reference to official data, scientific papers and clinical experience.
• For those focused on treatment options, the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance (FLCCA) physicians are a good source on this rapidly emerging field of clinical practise.

As a healthy 66-year-old I am not personally afraid of the virus, but if greater virulence and death rate do emerge with new variants, I might consider the preventative regimen recommended by the FLCCA doctors. There is no way I will be getting any of the current vaccines in the foreseeable future, no matter what the sanctions and demonisation of my position on this matter.

At this point there may be readers who decide to ignore anything and everything I have written as obviously deluded. These are the costs of transparency.

Valuing the Marginal

Tolerance, let alone celebration of diversity, is not the easy permaculture principle many of us assume. Valuing the marginal can be even harder, especially if we study the darker periods of human history.

Over most of history, minority ethnicities and subcultures lived in ambiguous complementarity with dominant majorities. For hundreds, if not a thousand, years my Jewish ancestors made valuable contributions to European culture while managing to maintain their own culture to an extraordinary extent. They lived in ghettos not just for protection from the eruptions of intolerance in the dominant Christian communities but to ensure their language and culture wasn’t swamped by that of the majority. While the Jews carried the elitist belief that they were God’s Chosen People, they didn’t attempt to gain converts and were naturally respectful to the majority Christians. They survived through all but the worst of antisemitic pogroms by not antagonising the majority, largely accepting the restrictions placed on them by society. What else could they do?

Similar dynamics could emerge from the virus and the vaccine, where a subculture of home birth, home education, home food production and alternative health brings together people of previously diverse subcultures, including permies, who are excluded from society. That exclusion will seem self-inflicted to the majority, but for those excluded it will feel critical to both survival and identity.

Is it sensible to plead for tolerance in line with sensitivities to the rights of other minorities? Or is that just an invitation to be stoned to death, if not literally then virtually, on social media?

Unfortunately one of the weaknesses of western culture, which shows up in both Christian and Muslim traditions, is the idea that if a particular path is the correct one, then everyone should follow it. From the perspective of east Asian philosophy and many Indigenous traditions, harmonious balance is more important than the right way. The yin yang symbol showing each polarity containing the seed of its opposite encapsulates this critically important antidote to the recurring western theme about the triumph of good over evil. In The Patterning Instinct Jeremy Lent explores how these different world views have shaped history and that any emergent ecological world view will foreground the importance of harmonious balance.

The wisdom of the collective

I want to lead by example in trying to understand and articulate why it is good that the majority of the population appears to be strongly behind the official plan and that maybe it is even good that a majority of my permaculture colleagues might be lining up to get vaccinated, when I have no intention of doing so.

Firstly, I acknowledge the obvious reason that if the official story is right, the majority getting vaccinated will combine with naturally acquired immunity and control the worst effects of the virus without the need to get every last dissenter vaccinated.

Secondly, given the pressure to push the vaccination rate in every way possible, encouraging some extra hesitators to resist will only increase the pressure and possibly lead to harsher sanctions as well as more broken family relationships, reputations, pain and suffering, which could be worse than potential adverse effects of the virus, or the vaccine, on those people.

Thirdly, because so many people I respect as intelligent and ethical are following the plan, I won’t fall into the trap of losing respect for who they are, what they have done and what else they might do in the future. And if it turns out this is the start of a more permanent hard fascist command state, then we need people of good values on the inside to keep open whatever channels of communication remain possible.

As systems unravel, the stories that make sense of the world also fall apart and in the desperate search for mental lifeboats, different stories come to the fore. The mainstream story around the pandemic is one such mental lifeboat that allows people to maintain faith and function. Without the renewed source of faith and order from rational science guiding technological wizardry, the psychosocial shock from a pandemic could be enough to create social, economic and political chaos on a historically unprecedented scale, at least in long-affluent countries like Australia.

Whatever the nature of the next crisis, I think it will require citizens to by and large accept that the behaviours, rights and freedoms we took for granted are artifacts of a vanishing world. Further, it will provide a harsh reality check on how dependent most of us are on systems we have no control over, so most will find they have little choice but to accept the new state of affairs.

While I might resent what I see as unnecessary sanctions on those resisting, I accept than in the early stage of Brown Tech energy descent, harsh and by some perspectives, arbitrary, controls on behaviour will be part of our reality and are arguably necessary to maintain some sort of social order (even if short-sighted or not sustainable in the long run). My aim is to focus on how we ameliorate the adverse effects of a predicament that humanity cannot escape.

More philosophically, the virus and the response to it could be seen as a meditation practise showing us how no one is an island separated from the whole of life. To break down the toxic notion that we are free agents to do as we choose without consideration of consequences, especially for future generations and the wider community of life, is something permaculture teaching has tried to bring to daily life. How we do this in meaningful ways is a constant challenge.

Sympathy for the devil

Having at least had a go at seeing the good in the mainstream plan, I now want to articulate quite passionately why the majority should at least tolerate and not seek to further punish the minority for their resistance. To advocate for this within the permaculture movement, I appeal to our pluralism in celebrating the diversity of action. This is especially where permies take the risk of being the unvaccinated guinea pigs, who can at least be a control group in this grand experiment on the human family. Beyond that, I hope our colleagues inside the tent will see the need to express solidarity with our right to chart our own course and not feel they have to be silent for fear of being cast out of the tent.

While I respect the younger permaculture folk following the plan for the common good, I still believe the most creative deep adaptations to the Brown Tech world will be crafted at the geographic and conceptual fringes by younger risk takers coming together in new communities of hope. While the paths to the armoured centre and the feral fringes both have their risks, those on the inside, especially older people, should accept that the young risk takers on the fringes might create pathways though the evolutionary bottleneck of energy descent more effectively than the best resourced and rationally devised plans from within the system of thinking that has created the civilisation crises.

Whether or not the pandemic will lead to the flowering of creative light-footed models for adaptation, the larger energy descent crisis for which permaculture was originally designed (that most permies recognise as the ‘Climate Emergency’) needs these responses at the margins. If the permaculture movement cannot digest this basic truth and at least defend the right of people to craft their own pathways in response to collapse of all certainties, then our movement will have failed the first great test of its relevance in a world of energy descent.

Some permie dissidents will double down in their focus on preparation to survive and thrive in spite of the sanctions, while others will be energised by non-violent direct action to resist what they see as draconian and counterproductive collective punishment. In doing so they may draw on past experience, or inspiration, from the frontlines of anti-war, environmental defence and free communication resistance.

In the past, more apolitical permies trying to introduce permaculture to socially conservative punters could still acknowledge, at least privately, the element of truth in the quip ‘permaculture is revolution disguised as gardening’. In today’s climate, can permies inside the tent accept and appreciate their colleagues on the frontlines of a new resistance movement that might moderate the extremes of how society navigates the larger climate emergency? Or will they flip and decide permaculture was, after all, mostly hippy nonsense now further contaminated with toxic right wing conspiracy madness, so must be dumped as unfit for purpose in our new world?

In saying this, I’m not suggesting we should all follow suit, let alone belittle or demonise those who don’t take the walk on the wild side. That would also be a contradiction of permaculture ethics and design principles. As we have always taught, ethics and design principles are universal but rarely lead to clear and conclusive solutions. Strategies and techniques vary with the context; wonderful elegant design solutions for one context can be hopeless white elephants, or worse, in another. Context is everything and as colleague Dan Palmer has so effectively applied in his Living Design Process, the people context is as complex, subtle and diverse as that of the land and nature.

The sovereignty of persons to choose freely how they grapple with the tension between autonomy and the needs of the commonwealth is not just an ideal from western Enlightenment civilisation working out how to apply the gift of fossil fuel wealth. It is a fundamental expression of how the ecology of context is constantly shifting, and that all systems simultaneously express life through bottom-up autonomy of action and top-down guidance of collective wisdom.

In times of great stability, the distilled wisdom of the collective, embodied in institutions, carries human culture for the long run. Sometimes the sanctions on the individuals who rejected the rules of the collective were harsh and, according to modern thinking, arbitrary but over long periods of relative stability, those rules kept society working. In times of challenge and change it is, ironically, dissidents at the fringes who salvage and conserve some of the truths of the dying culture into the unknown future to craft new patterns of recombinant culture.

What we call ‘science’ had its origins in what Pythagoras salvaged, almost single handedly, from the decadent and corrupt theocracies of ancient Egypt of which he was an initiate, before he walked away from the centre to the margins of civilisation. Major failures in the application of so-called trusted science have been a feature of our lived experience. Tragically, science could be one of the casualties as humanity passes through the cultural evolution bottleneck of climate chaos and energy descent. Permaculture was one attempt to craft a holistic applied design science grounded in observation and interaction, taking personal responsibility and accepting (negative) feedback, designing from patterns to details, and creatively using and responding to change. I still believe that salvaged and retrofitted versions of practical science crafted at the margins will serve humanity better than rigid faith in the priests of arcane specialised knowledge maintained by an empire of extraction and exploitation. Can we be sure what the father of science and mathematics would do in this time of turmoil?

Whatever the historical significance of these times, maintaining connections across differences of understanding and action within permaculture and kindred networks will strengthen us all in dealing with the unfolding challenges and opportunities of the energy descent future.

David Holmgren
Melliodora
September 2021

Painting by Carmen Costello Calligraphy by Ari Honarvar

Rumi’s Desert

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field. I’ll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass, the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase “each other” doesn’t make any sense.

Translated by Coleman Barks

This is one of the most popular Rumi quotes in the west. This translation finds itself recited at wedding ceremonies, when intellectuals have a particularly contentious debate, and in therapists’ offices and meditation halls all over. When I speak of my love of Rumi, a common response is to inquire whether I know this poem.

And to be frank, until recently I hadn’t come across this poem in Farsi. I eventually did some research and found these verses:

از کفر و ز اسلام برون صحرائی است
ما را به میان آن فضا سودائی است
عارف چو بدان رسید سر را بنهد
نه کفر و نه اسلام و نه آنجا جائی است

When I translate these verses, I arrive at a very different place. Not the attractive field where we drop all of our ideas and disagreements into the grass in which we lay and become filled with oneness, but a stark desolate land of disillusionment:

Out beyond wrongdoing and right doing, there is a desert
The desert beckons us as if it were the oasis
We long to hold one another in its lush grass
and drink from the clear spring
The moon whispers in my ear:

I have one foot in that desert
But don’t ask me to meet you there
For in that desert of disillusionment,
just as with right and wrong,
you and I and even oneness
cease to exist.

This poem has brilliantly tapped into both the dissatisfaction and the illusion-conjuring power of the mind. It is as if the poet has gone through different stages of seeking and has found each stage a mirage and unsatisfactory at its core. First, seeking the love of others, becoming dissatisfied, and turning to fame and wealth as salvation. And when that failed too, the seeker turns to spirituality, but that can become a mirage too. In the end, it is the great illusionist of the mind that takes on the challenging feat: To make an illusion of disillusionment.

The desert beckons us as if it were the oasis…

In this verse, Molana Rumi hints at the desperation and longing of a man who has gone through all the stages of seeking and has arrived at the final one. But before entering, non-duality is seen as a state in which one can comfortably take a neutral stance at every happening since, after all in this land, no wrongdoing or right doing exists. This illusion, like all illusions, is a deeply personal one in which we seek and ask God, the universe, and the saints to grant us the winning lottery ticket, making us the chosen one, so through our wealth, insight and in this case enlightenment, we can truly help others. In essence, this illusion is trickle-down economics at its finest, in its most grand and exulted conclusion. In this luxurious land, no hardship of life can touch us and this can only be good because others can only benefit from being in our presence.

The moon whispers in my ear…

Here, Molana Rumi talks of the realized one. In my translations, I use the metaphor of the moon as the witness, the realized one. She knows that in a non-dual state, there is only emptiness. There is no grass, no clear spring and no lovers to be united. It is the greatest disillusionment, naked, unadorned, and devoid of everything, including love.

So if we dare to venture into the barren land of Nothingness as Attar, Rumi’s teacher, wrote about it in the “Seven Valleys of Love”, yes, we must forego the ideas of wrongdoing and right doing. But unlike a personal illusion, this land is the embodiment of the impersonal. There is no family, no friends, no personal comfort, and no You or I. We must abandon everything and everyone we know and love. Still eager for your jaunt into that grassy field?

Here’s a recording of the poem in Farsi

Ari Honarvar

Speaker, performer, refugee advocate | @guardian @washingtonpost and more| The author of Rumi’s Gift and upcoming novel, A Girl Called Rumi rumiwithaview.com

Raminder Mulla

In the Hindu tradition, there are four stages to life.

One of learning how to be a citizen, one of householding, where one works and contributes to their community. Then comes retired life in which one starts to withdraw from the world. There then comes a state of renunciation, where one abandons all worldly possessions and spends all their time in spiritual practice.

These stages seem a reasonable way to conduct a life, and honour the flow of nature.

Time and energy are invested in our young, that they may grow into people capable of nourishing and sustaining the world around them as socialised adults. Over time, their power to give reduces, until there is only the self left to give. Even this, will wither in time. This is true of all living things.

Over time, my desire to give, as a householder, has waned. Now I desire retirement and renunciation. My ability to give is leaving me.

Dear Society,

It’s time for us to part. We’ve both changed and I don’t think we can be together anymore. When we first met, you were huge, radiant, so full of promise. I still remember the words you said to me; It didn’t matter that you said them to so many others.

’If you work hard, be kind, and look after others, then life will be good. I will look after you.’

For quite a while, you did and everything was good. I worked hard in our younger days in the hope that all that I learned could be used to for you. So much of it was for you. I even tried to bring some new knowledge into the world, since I thought you’d rather like that. It sounded like you did, but actions speak louder than words, and I could always feel your gaze drifting to that one in the corner with the sharp suit and a tongue to match, who often told you he’d like to chop you up and sell bits of you back to yourself.

I suppose that should have been a red flag.

Why stick around when that’s what you want?

I suppose, I thought I could change you.

I used to think lovers who thought they could change their partner were insane. Perhaps I’m insane myself. I tried to put everything into you once again. Played by your rules and respected your boundaries. You didn’t do the same. This, I can’t forgive. You decided that what I wanted simply didn’t matter, despite our promises.

It’s become all about you. Not about us.

You told me who I could and could not see. I went along with it, after all, your friends told me you were under a lot of stress. That it would only be a few weeks and would really help you. Fine, I suppose we all need to compromise once in a while. Then it started getting really strange. You started talking about amputating bits of yourself and casting them aside. It looked like you already tried, with the many self-inflicted cuts and grazes I saw you with one night.

You said to me: ’My limbs would grow back,’ and that ’they weren’t essential.’ Remember that? Maybe I should have left then, or at least tried to get you some help. Plenty of people make it through such dark thoughts.

Your friends told me that all of this talk of breaking yourself apart was necessary, that you weren’t safe without doing this and would build back better. Ultimately, you hadn’t fallen in on yourself yet. In sickness and in health, after all. I could ignore it for a while. I have my friends too, and while they didn’t all agree on how to deal with you, many of them told me to be patient. Others told me I was being hysterical.

Can never really know what to do, can you? One of the tragedies of our shared life is that the people we both know don’t really want to tell the truth. It’s too much responsibility.

Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonour others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs.”
1 Corinthians 13:4-8

Summer came and things calmed down. We could think about a future together, years, decades ahead. You told me you learned from your mistakes. When I asked someone wise about that, he wasn’t so sure.

Winter followed and then you obsessed over yourself again. You muttered the same phrases over and over. Kept asking me where I was going, and what I was doing. You asked me to treat our children as vermin. To stab and suffocate them for you – for your own protection, you said.

Why?

Why, did you keep picking at your scars and scabs, over and over and over again?

Your friends told me that this time, it was my fault. They pointed at me, and called me selfish. Evil. That I ought to get over myself. If I did as I was told, you’d be back to who you once were. How could I be to blame? All I ever did was love you.

Finally came the needles. How often did we lament those we lost along the way to addiction, putting things they had no idea about into themselves in the hope they might escape reality for a few moments? How tragic it was that they resorted to the syringe, the bottle, the pills, the pipe, just to be OK? Why did you think you would escape their fate? Why so many needles into yourself and into your friends too? Why our children?

After all we talked about, why try to drag me into it? Misery needing company?

You told me, if I loved you, I’d take the needle. For a moment there, you had me. I needed you that much. Now, you’ve decided you don’t want anything to do with those who don’t shoot up, I suppose we’re done. We never were a two-way street, were we?

I see you now in the cold light of day, and I don’t know you anymore. You were once strong and kept your promises. You helped me and I helped you. You listened to those who had hard truths to tell and learned from them.

Now, you are withered, starved and addicted. So many pieces of you that once shone are missing. Lost forever. The light has gone from your eyes. You look only for control over others, and use your friends in your games. You hate those who aren’t obsessed by the things you are, the needle, the fear, the self-destruction. You do not know love anymore.

You move towards those who wish you ill more than those who love you. I will not watch you decline a moment longer.

I cannot be here.

Goodbye.

Raminder Mulla is a scientist by trade and training. He is also interested in philosophy and creative expression. More of his work can be found on his website.

What follows is the seventh and final instalment of When Sons Become Daughters, a Quillette series that explores how parents react when a son announces he wants to be a girl—and explains why so many of these mothers and fathers believe they can’t discuss their fears and concerns with their own children, therapists, doctors, friends, and relatives. To find out more about how the author collected and reported information, please refer to his introductory essay in this series.

“What are your preferred pronouns?” I ask Rene Jax, somewhat in jest. The answer: “Your Imperial Majesty. Look, you call me what you want. I don’t care. My friends say I’m half this and half that.” Rene (a real name, unlike the pseudonyms I’ve generally been using to describe others) is a 60-year-old male-to-female post-operative transsexual who looks both like a woman (hair, clothing, style of glasses) and a man (hands, Adam’s apple, jawline). My question felt farcical to both of us because Rene has written openly about the pathway that led to transition—and then to regret.

I decide on “he,” since the more we talk, the more I become convinced that our points of agreement and dispute are grounded in the common experience of male sexuality. In some ways, it’s a coin toss. But he likes to tease me, and we’re becoming friends, so I think we can both live with the potential impoliteness of male pronouns.

Rene’s prolific output has included not only autobiographical fare, but also polemics on a wide array of subjects. Perhaps his most well-known work is Don’t Get on the Plane, a 2017 book that implores those toying with the idea of sex reassignment to accept the fundamentals of their biology. (The subtitle is “Why a sex change will ruin your life.”)

Rene even extends his mantra of biological determinism to homosexuality. (He tells me I should find myself a nice girl, which I find a little rude given that he hasn’t even met the more-than-nice guy I’ve already found.) On plenty of issues, we disagree, often profoundly. But if anything, I find our exchanges invigorating: we can both engage in these conceptual debates without taking offence, which is refreshing in an era of misgendering and hate speech. Rene also happens to be a gold mine of knowledge on transgenderism, having spoken to (by his count) more than 2,000 parents whose children were planning to take hormones and have surgery.

In progressive circles—and even among many doctors—it’s become taboo to mention the negative medical consequences of sex reassignment. American detransitioner Sydney Wright puts the situation in stark terms: “I tried my best to find books that discussed the issue critically and offered opposing views, but all I found were pro-transgender authors. That left me with the obvious conclusion: If all the ‘experts’ were in favor of transition, why not do it?” (A detransitioner is someone who reverses his or her former transgender identification or transition.)

Leigh, the female detransitioner who educated me on trans anime culture (as discussed in a previous essay in this series), told me that the clinicians who treat young people too often say little to nothing about the future hurdles they might encounter. In her case, she was told that a synthetic phallus is indistinguishable from its organic counterpart. Many interviewee parents told me that having a candid discussion with their sons regarding the risks and downsides associated with transition is almost impossible; as the sons’ baseline knowledge tends to come from Internet activists who prime teenagers to regard any form of hesitation or caution as thinly disguised transphobia.

When I ask Rene about what these risks entail, he does not trade in euphemisms. Transsexuals who have undergone vaginoplasty (the creation of an artificial vagina) often suffer fistula, the rupture of the colon. This can be triggered by vigorous sex, or simply by a bowel movement, and results in fecal matter being discharged via the neo-vagina. It is a serious medical problem that sometimes is discussed in the media in the context of obstetric fistulas, which typically afflict women in extremely poor areas of Africa and Asia; but whose gruesome details are very much off-message from the glamorous, made-to-order bodies that young men think about when they imagine their transition. How many of them would hesitate if they knew they might defecate—in extraordinary pain—from their neo-vaginas during sex?

The neo-vagina is made from the inverted skin of the penis, presenting another sexual problem: Unless the young man has been especially blessed by nature, there probably won’t be enough material to create an orifice with enough depth to accommodate the average man, making sex painful, even in the absence of a fistula. The neo-vagina lacks elasticity. Nor can transsexuals orgasm, unless the word “orgasm” is defined very abstractly as a general wave of sexual pleasure. Without the sense of release that accompanies ejaculation, the act of coitus can be not only agonizing but unsatisfying.

Then there’s the issue of breasts, which typically develop following the introduction of estrogen into a transitioner’s body. But they often don’t look like normal female breasts, and instead seem more like large swellings around the nipples. They also tend to be in the wrong place for breasts, being closer to the edges of the torso in men than they would be in women. (“They look okay in a sweater,” says Rene. “Not so much without one.”) And so many MtF (male-to-female) transsexuals then go on to get silicone implants, which come with their own costs and medical risks. Overall, the transsexual body tends to require constant attention, updates, and corrections. That’s why Rene wrote his book. “Why increase the chances of your body failing?” he asks.

In many—perhaps most—cases, it should be said, trans-identifying young men don’t have any interest in interfering with anything below the waistline. (An example here is Ellen’s son, Sam, whom I discussed way back in part two of this series.) But it isn’t just surgery that puts the body at risk. “I was speaking at an event with three male-to-females,” Rene recounts. “Every single one of us had a retina come loose at some point or another. It can’t be a coincidence.” He explains that estrogen doesn’t protect the male body from decay in the same way as it protects the female body. “It’s like putting gasoline in a diesel tank,” is his analogy.

Rene is now almost entirely blind in his left eye. He keeps an eyepatch in the glovebox of his car, as the blurry images from his left side are more a distraction than anything else. His retina has detached no fewer than five times; and each time, he’s needed a general anaesthetic to repair it. The process is invasive, and the period of recuperation painful. This isn’t an obvious consequence of reassignment (as opposed to, say, infertility). And it’s important to note that there haven’t yet been any long-range studies on the phenomenon, so the link I am reporting here is strictly anecdotal. But what’s notable is that 20- and 30-something influencers on YouTube don’t even seem to want more medical information. They aren’t thinking about fistulas or fading vision. After all, the most popular figures are the ones living through their early period of euphoric transition into exciting new, female forms. And in any case, young people (trans or not) tend to behave as though they’ll live forever.

Rene is scathing about the contradictions and hypocrisies at play here. “Half of these parents won’t even let their kids eat chickens reared on hormones,” he says. “But they’re seriously considering them for their kids.” He points out the risks of hypertension, which also happens to be a serious comorbidity factor when it comes to COVID-19. “You have to remember,” he says, “We’re dealing with [one of the rare] medical treatments that doesn’t try to return the body to its original state of health.” Cosmetic surgery is another exception, of course. But even in that case, the results are expected to be stable, and not to cause a lifetime of medical follow-up and pharmaceutical dependence.

Our conversation moves from the biological downsides to the social downsides, which, for Rene, are equally worrisome. The transsexual dating pool is vastly reduced; he believes that the resulting relationships are fragile, as they’re built on the knowledge that one of the two bodies is compromised. I find this point a bit bleak; but, as my interview with Menno showed (he was the 40-something gay Dutch man with the cheeky YouTube channel), many people just can’t find the physical form of the transsexual to be alluring, particularly once the underwear is off.

Rene urges me to delve deeper into the social downsides he lists, including the elevated rates of prostitution among transsexuals. But I can only cover so much ground, and many parents are too concerned with the urgent medical risks associated with transition to turn their mind to a child’s later romantic and professional life. But whether the risks we’re discussing are medical or sociological, the same principle applies: candid guidance is in short supply.

This marks out transgenderism as an outlier. Elsewhere in the practice of medicine, there is an expectation that all data will be considered before a patient makes a life-altering decision. Young men questioning their gender are therefore trapped between two extremes: true transphobes who dismiss them as freaks and deviants, and those who are so eager to “affirm” their trans identity that they skip over the health consequences. Each of these two groups poses a risk to trans-identified youth, and each deserves to be held to account.

* * *

Many of the parents I’ve spoken to describe their children as though they were becoming members of a different species. Their sons are renaming themselves after fictional anime characters, and planning to remodel their bodies in acts of homage. The language of transgenderism is often starkly spiritual, suggesting that we are disembodied spirits whose relationship to one’s body is that of mere tenant. Puberty has become a countable noun—“I don’t want to be put through a puberty I don’t want”—as though it’s the soup option on a table d’hôte menu. “If you didn’t like male puberty, what makes you think you’re gonna like the female version?” one mother asked her son. She never got an answer.

Teenagers are being told that puberty is a time for them to make decisions about sex and gender, this at a time when they have none of the life experience that would be necessary to make such existential choices. The fixation on identity labels, coupled with the social isolation and sexual delay that often go along with distress about gender, sometimes results in paralysis. Gender-questioning males who are “hyper-ruminative” (as I described them in the sixth instalment) are often perpetually stuck in setup mode, defensive in regard to whatever tentative decisions they’ve made, but never quite decisive enough to get on with the actual business of living the life they say they want.

This brittleness and delicacy isn’t confined to trans-identifying children, but is a defining quality of this whole generation. And who can blame them for being fearful in the social-media age? A girl in Utah tweets out a picture of herself in a Chinese-style dress and faces hundreds of thousands of micro-acts of disapproval in response. A Scottish teenage lad meets a girl online—except that it turns out not to be a girl. It turns out to be an online blackmail gang, which threatens to release compromising videos of him performing sexual acts on camera, and so he throws himself off a bridge, to his death. Even those of us who are still in our 30s and 40s—hardly senior citizens—will find it almost impossible to imagine what kind of pressures these children face.

Many of the parents I interviewed did manage to bridge the divide, and had relationships with their children which are mostly healthy. When they’re not talking about gender, these parents get along with their children, who inspire and entertain them, and are often great sources of pride. But even in these cases, the parents still feel an underlying sense of anger and frustration. They can’t take on their kids’ schools, even when the schools go against their wishes. They don’t feel like they’ll be fairly treated if they talk to a local journalist covering the gender beat. When their workplaces go in for LGBT consciousness-raising sessions, they’re walking on eggshells, even though none can be described as homophobic (nor anything-phobic, for that matter). They feel that there’s not much point in contacting their political representatives. Aside from anything else, they don’t want a lecture.

This fear can have terrible and unexpected consequences. A Scottish detransitioner called Sinéad Watson has recently written about the effect of her journey on her mother. While Sinéad was going through her original reassignment process, her mother was deep in grief, yet couldn’t articulate this, being afraid that their relationship might deteriorate if she did so. So Sinéad’s mother put a brave face on it, supporting her daughter even as she was doing what she believed was the wrong thing. As Sinéad writes:

She was a grieving mother with nobody and nowhere to turn to, because her grief was painted as transphobic and hateful, when in fact it was the opposite. It was unconditional love for her daughter that forced her to support me and stay by my side even though it hurt her. Nobody ever asked her how she was. Nobody ever checked in to see how she was handling the loss of her youngest daughter. People just kept saying “good for her,” while she cried herself to sleep after looking at my baby pictures. My mum didn’t question or challenge me because she didn’t want to lose me. [But] the gender clinic had no such pressure. It was their job to question and challenge me—to evaluate my (clearly) poor mental health and treat me accordingly. Instead, they handed me HRT [hormone replacement therapy] and surgery … The parents of trans people receive so little support or compassion. It is not transphobic for you to grieve, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

There seems to be little point in blaming either parent or child in this situation. If Sinéad and her mother had been living in a culture where the prospect of such drastic medical changes could be discussed freely, the outcome for their family—and for Sinéad’s body—might have been radically different.

In an online study I conducted, 185 parents answered a range of questions about their children, all of whom had declared a new gender identity of some kind, such as “trans,” “non-binary,” or “gender fluid.” This was a self-selecting group, I should note, as these were all parents who were at least somewhat sceptical enough of the received wisdom in this area, and had taken steps to seek out web resources to help them to understand the phenomenon. But the results are worrying nonetheless. Only 18 percent of parents answered no when asked whether they believed their children saw sexual relations and romantic love as separate or even unrelated concepts. Nearly half attributed their children’s changes in identity, at least in part, to a desire to be part of a positive social movement. Nearly half suspected that their children were trying to get attention. Four-fifths thought that their children had been influenced by spending too much time online. Parents have been complaining about their kids’ lifestyle choices and political convictions since the dawn of time, of course. But rarely have such choices involved committing oneself to the possibility of sterility and a lifetime of medical therapies.

The findings are striking when it comes to differences between males and females. On one hand, there was no statistically significant difference between the sexes in regard to the influence that parents attributed to pornography, sexual abuse, or eating disorders. But the parents of sons were far more likely to describe their child’s dysphoria as being linked, in some way, to online gaming culture. More than one young man told his parents he wanted to be a woman so he wouldn’t end up wielding straight male privilege. Of all the parents of boys who participated in the survey, only half thought their sons actually believed they could really become a member of the opposite sex; and the boys who did believe that such a literal transition was possible were significantly more likely to have received an autism-spectrum diagnosis. Overall, more than 80 percent of boys’ parents reported that their sons were typical boys—in terms of gender norms—in their earlier years, displaying no particularly effeminate traits. Neuro-atypicality, emotional detachment, and fear of sexual development are common characteristics. But contrary to some of the more lurid examples of trans women discussed on social media, these are not sex-obsessed males, let alone budding predators. Just the opposite: they seem terrified of sex.

The typical hyper-ruminative gender-questioning boy, as psychotherapist Stella O’Malley and I call him, is smart, with communication and intellect out of proportion to his social skills. He’s excellent at mathematics in particular, and often in academic pursuits more generally, although this isn’t always reflected in grades. As noted above, he’s likely to have a diagnosis of autism, Asperger’s syndrome or ADHD. He’s sometimes irritated by certain types of clothing; by people yelling; by ticking clocks or rustling noises. As puberty progresses, his psychosexual development lags. He’s very imaginative, and able to construct an alter-ego with extraordinary levels of detail. His Internet usage is even higher than that of his peers, and his online activity causes him to spend even more time thinking about himself. He’s obsessed with anime, and especially anime-themed gaming. But he’s also interested in big questions: Who am I? What could I be? What’s right and what’s wrong? He has a mixed-sex peer group, and often one particularly influential female friend who is even more motivated by social justice and gender revisionism than he is. He seeks approval, not only from friends and online contacts, but also from schoolteachers, counsellors, and therapists. He seems scared of sexual activity and exploration, and sometimes even scared of romance. Maybe he’s been bullied. And he wants an explanation for why he doesn’t fit in, especially one that comes in a form that his friends and classmates will readily understand. Not all of these features are present in every case, of course. But the prototype I am describing will ring true for most of the parents I’ve spoken with, all of whom have come to believe that instantly affirmed sex reassignment is the wrong pathway for their sons.

I stated in my introductory essay, back in early April, that my role was that of a “storyteller.” But in the story I am telling, I am also something of a protagonist manqué: Like Menno, I believe I would have been tempted to follow this same transition pathway had I been born a few decades later than I was.

I had strongly dysphoric feelings in my teenage years, as a consequence of the trauma of parental bereavement. These feelings took well over a decade to process, and perhaps even closer to two. For many years, I could not look in a mirror (I still shave with my eyes closed, by habit). Had the option of quitting my own sex been available to me when I was 14 or 15, I would—in Stella’s words—“have swum across seven oceans” to seize it. As a young man, my misguided efforts to understand what I was suffering took me into the most lightless corners of the Internet, where I made myself the target of grooming at the hands of older, predatory males who encouraged my self-destructive urges, much like Natalie’s son Luke (whom I described in the fourth instalment).

Over the years, I have seen remarkably little effort undertaken by tech giants to stamp out this phenomenon (even as they have moved with lightning speed to censure anyone accused of misgendering). It’s depressing to watch detransitioners who have been exposed to grooming—as well as their parents—doggedly reporting social media account after social media account while billionaires kick back their heels and pronounce themselves LGBT “allies.” It’s equally depressing to hear the political Right blame parents for their intelligent kids’ foolish adventures in the wild west of the online world. These days, a child’s academic success is increasingly predicated on Internet access. Several of the parents I’ve discussed in this series have tried to limit their sons’ online presence. It rarely worked out. (And when it did, the required effort was Herculean.)

There is no doubt that my own experiences biased my approach to the subjects I have explored—though I also think I have been forthright and self-aware about the nature of those biases. In any case, a blindness to the dangers of online grooming is only one of the many unforeseen consequences of affirming all things “trans” on a no-questions-asked basis. It isn’t just predatory behaviour in Internet communities that gets papered over by the most militant trans-advocacy groups; but also depression, anxiety, eating disorders, and early-years trauma, not to mention the profits made by surgeons and hormone providers.

When people who once had dysphoria interact with trans-rights activists, we often are told that we are “jealous” that we didn’t have the “courage” to change sex. To be instructed that the dysphoric ideas that stalked us for years were actually correct all along is insulting, especially coming from strangers: Not only does it imply that the bodies and faces we have come to love are indeed the “wrong” bodies and faces; it also speaks to the spirit of ruthless narcissism that animates many of these activists. Yet it is to these individuals that our media often turns when it is time to “celebrate trans lives.”

If you know parents going through this, talk to them. More importantly, listen to them; provide them with an opportunity to articulate, in Diane’s words, their right to their own souls. If you know a teacher or a doctor or a counsellor or a therapist who feels bound by affirmation dogmas, encourage them to read this series of essays, or Abigail Shrier’s Irreversible Damage, or any of the various excellent analyses that Quillette has made available to the public.

There is a middle ground between dismissing trans-identifying youths as “deviants” and celebrating invasive medical practices as though their consequences were trivial. I would urge everyone to help us reclaim this middle ground, a process that will involve putting aside differences of opinion about what is causing this surge in trans identification. Regardless of what one thinks about Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria, autogynephilia or any other related issues, one thing is becoming clear about the way we are addressing transgenderism among today’s teenage boys: We have made a mistake.

With thanks to Rene and everyone else who took the time to speak to me—and to Ioana for her help with data analysis. The choice of pronoun I made to refer to Rene in this essay turned out to be prophetic: since writing this final instalment, Rene has surgically detransitioned, and is starting to live again as a man.

Angus Fox (a pseudonym) is an academic working in an unrelated field of study. He can be contacted at gcri@protonmail.com.