“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

Lolwah Al-Khater

This article follows "What lies behind Benjamin Netanyahu’s lies and Hamas’s dodges", by Thierry Meyssan, November 28, 2023.

Lolwah Al-Khater’s blunder

Lolwah Al-Khater, Qatari Minister for International Cooperation, visited Tel Aviv on November 25, 2023. It was the first time a Qatari official had visited Israel. She was received by the War Cabinet to resolve problems with the implementation of the hostage exchange agreement. She also visited Gaza.

Accustomed to discussions with Mossad director David Barnea, she didn’t seem to grasp that the war cabinet included not only loyalists of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. In order to gain time, she made decisions in the name of Hamas, without referring to it.

Members of the former opposition who joined the emergency cabinet and witnessed this discussion were shocked to see her step out of her role as mediator and reveal her links of authority over Hamas, the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood.

After the meeting, Joshua Zarka, Deputy Director General for Strategic Affairs at the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, declared that Israel would "settle accounts with Qatar" as soon as it had completed its role as mediator. Indeed, if Qatar can give orders to Hamas, it can no longer conceal its responsibility for the October 7 attack. Not only is it not a mediator, it is an enemy of the Israelis.

Let’s return for a moment to Qatar’s identity.

Qatar and the United States

Qatar only became independent from the British Empire in 1971. Its first emir, Khalifa ben Hamad Al Thani, turned to France. He developed his country, wary of easy revenues from hydrocarbons. But in 1995, he was overthrown by his son, Hamad ben Khalifa Al Thani. The new Emir signed gas and oil agreements, mainly with Anglo-Saxon companies (Exxon Mobil, Chevron Phillips, Shell, Centrica), French companies (Total), Chinese companies (China National Offshore Oil, CNOOC, Petrochina), Indian, South Korean and Japanese companies. The money is now flowing.

In 1996, in the wake of the Oslo Accords, Qatar teamed up with French-Canadian Jews David and Jean Frydman, friends of Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat, to set up Al-Jazeera, a pan-Arab television channel to confront Arab and Israeli viewpoints. It was an immediate success. However, the channel, which was intellectually involved in the Israeli peace movement, became the bête noire of the United States during its wars against Afghanistan and Iraq.

In 2002, the United States signed a military agreement with Qatar. They set up their Middle East command headquarters, CentCom, on the gigantic Al-Udeid base. It houses 11,000 soldiers and around 100 aircraft. To this end, they withdrew their men from Saudi Arabia.

The Pentagon then reminded the Emir that he was in no position to defy it: one morning, he was awakened by Special Forces in his bedroom. A US officer assured him that they have just protected him from an imaginary coup. The Emir understood the message and complied with the demands of his protectors.

In 2005, Al-Jazeera’s shareholder base was shaken by the boycott of Saudi advertisers. The Frydman brothers withdrew from the channel. It is completely reformatted by the JTrack consulting firm. JTrack placed Brother Wadah Khanfar at its head [1]. Gradually, he censored all criticism of "American imperialism" and even withdrew certain images showing US crimes in Iraq. Al-Jazeera, several of whose journalists were killed by US forces and one of whose contributors was taken prisoner and tortured at Guantánamo, became the mouthpiece of the Anglo-Saxon powers, giving a voice to Sunni Islamism. In 2009, Wadah Khanfar visited the United States, where he was received by all those who count among the ruling elite.

In 2008, the Emir enthroned a new president in Lebanon, in violation of the Constitution, in place of the outgoing president.

In 2011, the head of JTrack, Brother Mahmoud Jibril, suddenly became the leader of the opposition to the regime, of which he was a minister. Palestinian Brother Wadah Khanfar left Al-Jazeera to head a Turkish think tank, Al-Sharq Forum. The channel is taken over by the Prime Minister, Sheikh Hamad ben Jassem ben Jaber Al Thani. It instantly became NATO’s main propaganda tool in the Arab world. It gave a one-sided view of the conflicts in Libya and Syria, transforming itself into the channel of the Muslim Brotherhood. Imam Youssef al-Qaradawi became the channel’s official preacher. He explained to his listeners that Mohammed would undoubtedly be on NATO’s side today.

Qatar has become the main go-between in the Middle East. It negotiates peace agreements between Arabs wherever the United States asks, in Western Sahara, in inter-Palestinian rivalries, in Darfur, Eritrea and Yemen. But it can also use its power to restart wars. In 2012, for example, it gave Brother Omar al-Bashir’s Sudan $2 billion to recall his special envoy, General Mohammed Ahmed Mustafa al-Dabi [2]. General Mustafa al-Dabi, who until then had been widely appreciated for his peaceful role in Darfur, had been appointed President of the Arab League’s International Mission in Syria. He and his colleagues had access to everything they wanted to see. In a preliminary report, he concluded that the Western media were lying and that there was no revolution in Syria.

In 2013, the Emir abdicated in favor of his son, Tamim ben Hamad Al Thani.

The « Gulf crisis »

From June 2017 to January 2021, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates led a blockade of Qatar, paralyzing the Gulf Cooperation Council. This Cold War has been misinterpreted. According to the Financial Times, it was linked to a murky story of ransom payments, and according to others to a declaration by the Emir, Sheikh Tamim ben Hamad al-Thani, in favor of the political use of Islam as practiced by both the Muslim Brotherhood and Iran.
In fact, the President of the Arab Republic of Egypt, Abdel Fattah al-Sissi, had managed to obtain documents from the secret society that had ruled his country for a year, the Muslim Brotherhood. A former director of military intelligence, he had studied them. After US President Donald Trump’s speech in Riyadh against Muslim Brotherhood terrorism (May 21, 2017), he understood the use he could make of them. So he had sent the king the evidence in his possession hoping to gain his support in his fight against the Brotherhood. They contained evidence of a plot by the Brotherhood and Qatar to overthrow the King of Arabia, Salmane ben Abdelaziz Al Saoud. For the king and his son, it was a shock: not only was the Brotherhood, which the Kingdom had pampered for years, granting it a military budget larger than that of its own army, taking the liberty of supporting Daesh, but it was also attacking the monarch.

On June 5, 2017, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt and Bahrain, followed by the Yemeni government of Abdrabbo Mansour Hadi, the Libyan government in Tobruk, Mauritania, the Maldives and the Comoros broke off diplomatic relations with Qatar. These countries closed their land, air and sea borders to the emirate, suddenly strangling it. US President Donald Trump took sides, accusing Qatar of funding "religious extremism". The Emirate was supported by Turkey, Morocco, Hamas, Iran and Germany, where the Brotherhood’s National Guide, Ibrahim el-Zayat, has a seat at the Foreign Ministry. Niger and Chad supported Saudi Arabia.

Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt and Bahrain issued a 13-point ultimatum to Qatar [3]. The ultimatum was to break with political Islam and its supporters: Turkey and Iran.

The crisis was only resolved when US President Donald Trump attempted to reconcile Arab countries with each other and with Israel. He organized the rapprochement between Morocco and Israel, followed by the Gulf crisis. The controversy surrounding political Islam is muted.

The Emirate of Qatar and the Muslim Brotherhood

The Brotherhood (Ikwan) pursues the goal set by its founder, the Egyptian Hassan El-Banna, at the end of the First World War: to re-establish the Caliphate [4]. In a letter to the Egyptian Prime Minister of the time, he describes his three objectives:

• "a reform of legislation and the union of all courts under Sharia law ;
• recruitment into the armed forces by instituting voluntary service under the banner of jihad;
• connecting Muslim countries and preparing for the restoration of the Caliphate, in application of the unity demanded by Islam".

The Ikwan is a secret society organized on the model of the United Grand Lodge of England. As such, we only know about its activities from the testimonies of its former members, or from documents seized during its defeats.

As soon as it was created, the Brotherhood set up militias to assassinate its opponents. It developed first in Egypt, then throughout the Arab world and in Pakistan. The United Kingdom and the United States were quick to use its politicians (such as Brother Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq in Pakistan or Brother Mahmoud Jibril in Libya) and its militias, such as al-Qaeda, Daesh and the League for the Protection of the Tunisian Revolution. As soon as he arrived at the White House, President Barack Obama appointed a member of the Brotherhood, Mehdi K. Alhassani, to his National Security Council, in order to establish a permanent link with it [5].

When the United States began the Syrian episode of the "Endless War", it asked Hamas to move its office from Damascus to Doha. When Saudi Arabia definitively broke with the Brotherhood in 2014, Qatar spontaneously took its place. Without having the same resources as its powerful neighbor, the emirate became the big money-maker with the approval of the United States. In 2018, Qatar is paying the salaries of Hamas officials in Gaza. With the agreement of Benjamin Netanyahu, its ambassador travels there with suitcases full of $15 million in small bills. The operation will be repeated every month.

In 2022, U.S. President Joe Biden elevated Qatar to the rank of Major Non-NATO Ally, an honor reserved for only a dozen countries worldwide.

Lolwah Al-Khater’s blunder shows that Qatar is more than that. It exercises authority over Hamas’s political and military strategy.

Sinéad Murphy

On 6th November, Dublin launched its Autism Friendly City plan in a bid to become the world’s most autism friendly capital city.

‘It’s a really exciting day,’ Dublin’s Lord Mayor said. ‘I do hope where Dublin leads, the rest of the country can follow also because it’s so, so important that we are inclusive and, at the moment, we still have a long way to go.’

Sixteen years ago, the French collective The Invisible Committee predicted that imperial expansion in the twenty-first century would rely on bringing into the fold those previously on the edges of Western societies: women, children and minorities.

‘Consumer society,’ they wrote, ‘now seeks out its best supporters from among the marginalized elements of traditional society.’

The Invisible Committee summarized this latest phase of empire as ‘YoungGirl-ism’ – the strategic championing of young people, of women and of those disadvantaged by disability, illness, or ethnicity.

Though the aim of YoungGirl-ism is to bring the general population under a new kind of control, societies’ focus on cherishing previously marginal cohorts has the look of emancipation and progress. For this reason, The Invisible Committee explained, women, children and minorities ‘find themselves raised to the rank of ideal regulators of the integration of the Imperial citizenry.’

If the theory of the YoungGirl was unsettling at the time of its publication, its prescience is now borne out, as versions of the mechanism it describes dominate the societal breakdown that is the objective of government policies worldwide.

YoungGirl-ism has too many aspects to summarize here. Let it suffice to suggest the following:

• That the drive to nurture our children continues to license a level of surveillance of people and censorship of the materials to which they have access that ought to be anathema in any society purporting to be free, and that the messaging of the general population by government, corporations and legacy media has become so simplistic as to constitute a widespread infantilization.
• That the rage to acknowledge and be sensitive to women’s experiences supports the ongoing emotionalizing of work and of public debate and increases institutional control over human reproduction.
• That centralised solicitousness for those characterised as ‘vulnerable’ has excused a degree of micro-management of our lives hitherto unimaginable and is the ongoing rationale for biochemical interference with the healthy population including children and the unborn.
• And that the promotion of all forms of sexual expression and identification has robbed us of our most fundamental designators, making us a stranger in our mother tongue which regularly denounces us as bigots.

The Invisible Committee proposed their theory of the YoungGirl as what they called ‘a vision machine.’ There is no doubt that familiarity with its structure sheds much light on what might otherwise pass as disparate and well-meaning social and political enterprises.

Not least of these enterprises is Dublin’s new initiative to become the world’s most autism friendly capital city. Its programme of ‘inclusivity’ is YoungGirl-ism by another term, rolled out by a provincial official with neither the will nor the wit to understand the havoc he wreaks, his head turned by a cheaply bought appearance of virtue.

More than this, the growing concern to be inclusive of those with autism may be YoungGirl-ism in its most intense form, the condition of autism being peculiarly fitted to the dismantling of existing ways of life and submission to newly-invented social strategies that form the basis of the expansion of a new world order.

*

My son is autistic. My remarks here are made in the context of personal experience of autism and sympathy with those whose lives have been changed by the condition.

Firstly, let it be said that autism is a misfortune, not the less so for its often unfolding gradually in a young child, its profound diminution of life’s hopes and joys manifesting over time as an irresistible fate, slowly but surely eroding the energy and engagement of those who live with it.

This requires to be said because there is a vague consensus abroad that autism is not a misfortune – that it is just a different way of seeing things and doing things, even a better and truer way.

The language of ‘neurodiversity’ is partly responsible for this misapprehension, feeding the sentiment that it is only a matter of being more open to autism, of re-educating ourselves and reorganising our society.

But the misapprehension is also bolstered by the widespread and increasing institutional practice of giving a diagnosis of Autism Spectrum Disorder to those whose connection with autism is tangential, consisting in being a little inattentive, or somewhat solitary, or otherwise troubled in some way.

We are presented with celebrities who have received a retrospective diagnosis of autism, and we conclude that it is possible in a properly inclusive milieux to live a normal life, even an abnormally successful life, with the condition.

This conclusion is pernicious for all of those who suffer from what we are reduced to describing as ‘profound autism,’ ‘severe autism,’ even ‘real autism,’ whose alarming increase ironically is hidden by the ease with which the label is wielded among the general population.

A 2019 study at the University of Montreal, which reviewed a series of meta-analyses of patterns of diagnosis of autism, concluded that in less than ten years it will be statistically impossible to identify those in the population who merit the diagnosis of autism and those who do not.

As the descriptive force of ‘autism’ is eroded and the fiction put abroad that our main task is only to be inclusive of the condition, what is more and more concealed is the outrage of the rising prevalence of real autism among our children, the steady growth in the numbers of children whose life prospects are blighted by the condition, children who have little to no hope of being ‘included’ and whose being made the excuse for strategies of ‘inclusion’ is a travesty, children like my son who will never find gainful employment, never live independently, most likely never make a friend.

Autism is not a difference. Autism is a disability. It describes – and ought to be reserved to describe – a lack of capacity for meaningful experience of the world and those in it, condemning its sufferers to a life more or less bereft of significance and sympathy.

Autism may come with corners of aptitude, which we may like to call brilliance. But the reality is that these instances of aptitude are mostly remarkable because they occur in the context of blanket inaptitude, and at any rate that we no longer live in a society in which such uneven excellence is valued or can find an outlet.

My son can quickly add together any two of the same numbers, even very large ones, though he cannot do simple addition. The talent is mysterious and striking, but it occurs in the context of a general lack of ability at maths and, even if developed, would have no use in a world where computer calculation is ubiquitous and where a base level of skills is required to access any form of employment.

And yet the myth is perpetuated, that autism is a problem primarily because we are not inclusive of it.

In March 2022, The Irish Times published an article citing a report produced by Ireland’s national autism charity AsIAm, chiding its readers because 6 in 10 Irish people were found to ‘associate autism with negative characteristics.’

Rather than take this reasonable majority of the populace seriously, the article proceeded to support the view that Ireland requires enhanced policies and programmes to educate the general population that autism is in fact something between a talent and a blessing and to increase access of those with autism to all of life’s opportunities.

The negative characteristics that 6 in 10 Irish people associated with autism included ‘difficulty making friends,’ ‘not making eye contact,’ and ‘no to little verbal communication.’ This was reported in The Irish Times article as regrettable prejudice against those with autism, even though these characteristics are classic symptoms of autism and often the reason that autistic children are given the diagnosis. The Irish Times may as well have blamed the still-thinking Irish public for associating autism with autism.

The article went on to observe that the AsIAm report found that ‘people were less likely to know about the positive characteristics of autism, such as honesty, logical thinking and detail oriented [sic]’.

To describe these characteristics of autism as positive is to actively efface the reality of autism as a disability, obscuring the profound inability to attend to and understand context that is the condition of autistics’ honesty, logical thinking and attention to detail.

My son reminds me to serve him his morning tonic if I forget to do it, though he hates to drink it. This is surely endearing, but it stems from a total inability to identify his own interests, to act in accordance with them or to be strategic in any way. What we call honesty is admirable because it occurs in the context of possible dishonesty. My son is not capable of dishonesty or honesty.

Similarly, if autistic people are logical, it is likely because they have little or no understanding of context or nuance; without the ability to interpret or exercise judgement, everything is reduced to a matter of simple deduction or induction. And if autistic people are detail oriented, it is probably because they are unable to grasp any big picture; they are attuned to minutiae because they cannot be enchanted by the world.

Living with autism has its joys; the human spirit ekes energy and interest from all kinds of calamity and takes its pleasures even if sadly. But make no mistake: autism is a blight; the rise of autism, a tragedy.

*

In March 2020, NHS GPs in Somerset, Brighton and South Wales placed blanket Do Not Resuscitate orders on several support settings for those with intellectual disabilities, including one for autistic adults of working age.

Despite acknowledged objections at the time, during the second UK shutdown similar DNR orders were placed on similar settings.
For anyone who cares for a child with autism and who faces the unhappy prospect of her child being consigned to the state once she herself is infirm or deceased, little more requires to be said about the commitment to real inclusion of those state institutions that like to bandy the term.

Meanwhile, the frenzy of so-called ‘inclusion’ continues apace, and with an entirely other rationale than that of promoting health and happiness.

Quite the opposite. So-called ‘inclusion’ of those with autism is aimed at the breakdown of what remains of our shared world all the better to reconstruct it in accordance with the pursuit of hyper-control.

Children with autism are not worlded – above all else, that is what defines their situation. For whatever reason, the world – our world – does not speak to them. They are not carried along by the projects around them; they are not captivated by the scenes before them; they are slow even to discern the outline of another living being, often colliding with people and hardly ever hearing what they say.

Autistic children do not share our world. It is not only that they do not understand it – they appear not even to notice it.

So, what happens to a city when it commits to the inclusion of those whose situation is defined by exclusion? Anyone who spends their life in efforts at such inclusion knows very well what happens.

Because our world is not salient to young people with autism, the task for those who care for them is somehow to make our world salient, so that every event is not a shock, every arrival not a setback, every departure not a reversal, every meeting not an assault.

The task is a heavy one, requiring that you ceaselessly intercede between the world and your child so as to bring the world’s most vital aspects into a stark enough relief to break through autistic indifference.

On the one hand, you are a drill sergeant, reordering the world so that some of its patterns are made stable, relentlessly establishing and maintaining routines whose finest detail cannot be allowed to alter without meltdown. A door left ajar, a word carelessly spoken, a glove dropped, a Lego brick lost: grinding trivia are assiduously marshalled under threat of the kind of prolonged and impenetrable distress as will break your heart and theirs.

On the other hand – curious combination – you are a children’s TV presenter, advertising the highly-regulated scenes and scenarios produced by the drill sergeant with the most exaggerated facial expressions, the most simple and carefully articulated phrases, with pictures and signs, with the primary-coloured repetitiveness that is your only hope of selling the hyperbolic version of the world you have constructed.

Certainly, there is some success to be had through these means, though it is slow and halting. Also certainly, the need for such unrelenting efforts would be greatly relieved if our world were a more compatible one.

Children with autism – all children, no doubt – would be infinitely better off if they were surrounded by a stable cohort of familiar people; if the projects that supported them were grass roots; if their food came from the soil and their learning from routine; and if the rise and fall of season and festival were the rhythm by which they lived. Nothing would mitigate the effects of autism better than a fulsome way of life.

As it is, our world is almost the opposite of a way of life: precariousness carries the day, virtuality abounds, the human touch is reduced and anonymous, and what we eat and learn, highly processed and abstract.

Because of this, your efforts to get the attention of your child with autism cannot be suspended for a moment without threat of regression and despair, as you strive to bring our flattened-out, screened-off world up close enough and personal enough for the dawning of significance and sympathy.

And one thing is sure: only you can do it. You, who live by your child daily, who walk beside him with an arm ready to steer, who know just the hold to use to prevent destruction while allowing a modicum of self-determination, who wait just the right amount of time to let a thought reveal itself but not so long that it is lost in the mire. You, who rub along together with your child. You, who know him by heart.

Schools cannot do it, though they spend enough time describing it and documenting it and continue to relinquish their role of teaching children to read and write in their enthusiasm for recording the inventiveness of their inclusion strategies.

And – needless to say – cities cannot do it.

What, then, of the Autism Friendly City? What can it do, if it cannot include those with autism?

If we allow our energies and understanding to be directed at finding solutions to the apparently failing strategies of our Autism Friendly City, what we will miss is how successful its strategies really are – not at including those with autism, of course, which is an impossible task for our cities, but at controlling the rest of the population.

Something that is rarely mentioned and never broadcast is that the effect of your efforts at including your child with autism is that you yourself become excluded. As you translate the most important worldly possibilities into contrived routines with accompanying signals and slogans, the hold upon you of those possibilities is loosened. All that ought to be organic is programmed; all that should be spontaneous is controlled; all that is background recedes or is brought into too-brilliant relief; nothing is taken for granted; nothing relied upon as given.

As you strain to make the world of interest to your child, the world loses its interest for you. You become, well, like someone with autism.

Relationship breakdown is rife where there is a child with autism; some studies estimate that it runs at about 80 percent. No surprise, as shared experience is eroded by the requirement to reorder the world, to stay on message, and to start from zero a thousand times a day. Autism-for-two is no kind of companionship.

But what of autism-for-all, which is the inevitable effect of the Autism Friendly City? How might that play out, and what would its uses be in bringing the population under control?

Luckily in this regard, we have living proof of what the Autism Friendly City would look like. During Covid, quite startling strategies were implemented to seize the routines of human life, to regulate them artificially and promote them with simplistic messaging.

The Covid queue is an easy example, as an implicit human arrangement was taken hold of, made painfully explicit, administered beyond endurance and promoted as for nursery children. Large, coloured dots were stuck two metres apart to pavements outside of supermarkets, sometimes with cartoon feet depicted on them. Signs were posted showing two stick-men with an arrow between them and 2M printed on top.

Gone was the human queue, the rules for its formation embedded in a shared world, relying upon and testimony to the civilized self-regulation of a reasonable people, modified in ad hoc ways by everyone who joins it to give priority to those who cannot stand easily or who appear hurried, the occasion for chat on common subjects and assistance of those with a heavy load, shuffling along effortlessly in accordance with the knowledge inscribed in our bodies’ latent awareness of the proximity of those around.

Gone was one small performance of a shared world. In its place: a hyper-regulated routine, monitored by trumped-up officials, with no requirement for the exercise of judgement and every best impulse remade as a threat to order.

The Autism Friendly City would be the Covid queue writ large – seizing upon our human rituals, dismantling their organic reciprocity, undoing their taken-for-granted equilibrium, and remaking them without the human element in primary coloured inertia and infantile slogans. The mutual experience of formation in and by a shared world, rendered null and void by an artificially constructed submission to hyperbolic routines and their garish promotion.

It is true that children with autism are not easily attuned to the human queue, lacking receptiveness to the implicit judgements that order it, being largely unaware of the presence of other people before them or behind them, and, most of all, not being prone to waiting. You must keep a firm hold of them for many years before they get a feel for the human queue. But it is good formation for them, a chance to be in sync with those about them, to share in a worldly routine, and to realise – oh so slowly – that they must stand and wait and move and wait in concert with others around.

But children with autism have no chance at all of joining the autism-friendly queue, which lacks the physical scaffolding of nearby bodies and the purposeful hum of voices. They will not appeal to the coloured dots on the pavement with their abstract depictions of feet because they will not be looking for guidance on queue formation. They will not consult the signs with the stick men because they will not be seeking assistance with queue formation.

The autism-friendly queue only works for those who already wish to form a queue – who are already part of the world but suddenly unsure about the rules that apply there. For those who are not already part of the world, nothing could be less effective than the autism-friendly queue. Nothing could be less inclusive.

The Autism Friendly City would mean little to those with autism. It would mean control to everyone else. For, the Autism Friendly City is blatant YoungGirl-ism, cynically championing the disadvantaged in order to replace the humanness of our shared world a with top-down deadness overlain with primary colours and Tannoy infantilism.

Let us not forget the dystopia of the Covid queue. The hush where there had been hum. The inert progress, nervous and accusatory.

Let us not forget that as we inched forwards like automata, self-conscious and humiliated, we gradually ceased to make eye contact with our fellows, engaged in little to no verbal interaction and found it increasingly difficult to make a friend – those very characteristics that 6 in 10 Irish people associate with autism.

Beware the Autism Friendly City, which delivers autism for all.

Sinéad Murphy is author of Effective History (2010), The Art Kettle (2012), and Zombie University (2017), and co-editor of Pandemic Response and the Cost of Lockdowns (2022).

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

The inconsistencies of October 7: What lies behind Benjamin Netanyahu’s lies and Hamas’s evasions

The official version of the Hamas-Israel war raises more questions than it answers. Here, the author highlights seven major contradictions. On reflection, Hamas and Benjamin Netanyahu, far from being enemies, are acting in concert with no regard for the lives of Palestinians or Israelis. Behind them, the United States and the United Kingdom are pulling the strings.

Voltaire Network | Paris (France) | 28 November 2023

On September 22, 2023, 16 days before the attack by the Palestinian Resistance, Benjamin Netanyahu spoke at the United Nations in New York. He brandished a map of the "New Middle East" on which Israel had absorbed the Palestinian Territories.

We are reacting to the attack on Israel on October 7 and the massacre of Palestinian civilians in Gaza on the basis of the information available to us. However, we feel that the official version of the Israeli government and Hamas is a lie.

Seven major questions remain unanswered:

1. How did Hamas manage to dig and build 500 kilometers of tunnels at a depth of 30 meters without arousing suspicion?

   • Tunnel-drilling equipment is considered to have both civilian and military uses. It is not manufactured in Gaza and cannot be brought in under any circumstances, unless there is complicity within the Israeli administration.
   • The excavated earth (1 million m3) was not detected by aerial surveillance. Even supposing it had been scattered in many different places and mixed in with the soil from other construction sites, it is impossible for the Israeli intelligence services not to have detected anything for twenty years.
   • Tunnel ventilation equipment is not considered to be for military use. It is possible to bring it into Gaza, but the quantity required should have attracted attention.
   • The reinforced concrete needed to solidify the walls is not manufactured in Gaza. It too is not considered military equipment, but the quantity required should have attracted attention.

2. How could Hamas stockpile such an arsenal?

   • Hamas, the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, has large quantities of rockets and handguns at its disposal. Hamas may have manufactured parts of the rockets itself, but it has managed to import thousands of handguns into Gaza, mainly from the Ukraine, despite high-performance scanners. This seems impossible without complicity within the Israeli administration.

3. Why did Benjamin Netanyahu dismissed all those who warned him?

   • Egypt’s Minister of Intelligence, Kamel Abbas, personally phoned him to warn of a major Hamas attack.
   • His friend, Colonel Yigal Carmon, Director of Memri, personally warned him of a major Hamas attack.
   • The CIA sent Israel two intelligence reports warning of a major Hamas attack.
   • Defense Minister Yoav Galland was fired in July because he warned the government of the "perfect storm" prepared by Hamas.

4. Why did Benjamin Netanyahu demobilize the security forces on the evening of October 6?

   • The Prime Minister had authorized the Security Forces to stand down for the holidays of Sim’hat Torah and Shemini Atzeret. At the time of the attack, therefore, there were no personnel available to monitor the security fence around Gaza.

5. Why did security officials remain locked up at Shin Bet headquarters that morning?

   • The Director of Counterintelligence (Shin Bet), Ronen Bar, had called a meeting of the heads of all the security services for 8 a.m. on October 7, to examine the second CIA report warning of a major Hamas operation in preparation.

However, the attack began at 6.30 a.m. on the same day. Security officials didn’t react until 11am. What did they do during this interminable meeting?

6. Who triggered the "Hannibal directive" in this way, and why?
   • When the Security Forces began to react, the IDF was ordered to apply the "Hannibal directive". This stipulates that enemies must not be allowed to take Israeli soldiers hostage, even if it means killing them. An Israeli police investigation confirms that the Israeli air force bombed the crowd fleeing the Supernova Rave Party. A significant proportion of those killed on October 7 were therefore not victims of Hamas, but of Israeli strategy.
   • In theory, the "Hannibal directive" only applies to soldiers. Who decided to bomb a crowd of Israeli civilians, and why?

It is not possible today to determine with any certainty which Israelis were killed by the attackers and which were killed by their own army.

7. Why are Western forces threatening Israel?
   • The Pentagon has deployed two naval groups, around the USS Gerald Ford and the USS Eisenhower, and a cruise missile submarine, the USS Florida. Haaretz even mentioned a third aircraft carrier. America’s allies (Saudi Arabia, Canada, Spain, France, Italy) have installed fighter-bombers in the region.

These forces are not installed to threaten Turkey, Qatar or Iran, which the Western press accuses of being involved in the Hamas attack, but off the coast of Israel, in Beirut and Hamat. They are encircling Israel. And Israel alone.

What lies behind these mysteries?

Obviously the version defended by both Hamas and Israel is false. We must consider other possible explanations so as not to be manipulated by either one or the other.

Let’s formulate a hypothesis. There is nothing to say whether it is the correct one, but it is compatible with the factual elements, which is not the case with the version shared today by everyone. So it’s better than that one. It is obviously extremely shocking, but only those who are able to answer the previous 7 questions can dismiss it.

This interpretation is based on an analysis of the complex structure of Hamas, whose rank-and-file fighters are unaware of what their leaders are up to. There it is :

The entire operation of Hamas and Israel is led by Americans, perhaps under the direction of the Straussian Eliott Abrams [1] and his Vandenberg Coalition (Think Tank which succeeded the Project for a New American Century). The Muslim Brotherhood and the Revisionist Zionists, who apparently are waging a cruel war, are in reality accomplices at the expense of the rank-and-file Hamas fighters, the Palestinian people and Israeli soldiers. Here is their plan: Hamas is presented as the only effective resistance force to the oppression of the Palestinians, but it lets Israel liquidate the hope of a Palestinian state, while the Muslim Brotherhood, crowned with the sacrifice of the Palestinians, takes power in the Arab world.

The heads of Hamas’s military and political branches are both subordinate to the Guide of the Muslim Brotherhood in Gaza, Mahmoud Al-Zahar, the successor to Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, yet nobody talks about him. From his point of view, the Brotherhood will be the big winner of the "Flood of Al-Aqsa", even if Gaza is razed to the ground and the Palestinians driven from their land.

Mahmoud Al-Zahar, Guide of the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, i.e. Hamas. His authority is recognized by both the political and fighting branches of the organization. In December 2022, he declared: "The Jewish state is only the first objective. The entire planet will soon be under our rule".

Hamas is now divided into two factions. The first, under the leadership of Ismaël Haniyeh, follows the Brotherhood’s line. It seeks neither to liberate Palestine from Israeli occupation, nor to found a Palestinian state, but is dedicated to building a Caliphate over all the countries of the Middle East. The second, under the leadership of Khalil Hayya, has abandoned the Brotherhood’s ideology, and is fighting to put an end to the oppression of the Palestinian people by the Israelis.

The Muslim Brotherhood is a political secret society, organized by British intelligence services on the model of the United Grand Lodge of England [2]. It was gradually taken over by the CIA to the point of being represented on the US National Security Council. After the collapse of the Islamist regimes of the Arab Spring, the Brotherhood fractured into two trends. The London Front, led by Guide Ibrahim Munir (who died a year ago), proposed a way out of the crisis by leaving the political arena and securing the release of prisoners in Egypt. The Istanbul Front, led by interim leader Mahmoud Hussein, advocates, on the contrary, changing nothing and continuing the struggle to establish a Caliphate. A third group is attempting to establish an intermediate position, putting forward the idea of abandoning politics until the prisoners have been released, only to return to it at a later date.

Meeting at the US National Security Council, June 13, 2013 at the White House. Gayle Smith (second from right) and Brother Rashad Hussain (fourth from left) are recognized. National Security Advisor Tom Donilon also attended the meeting, but is not pictured. Above all, the Muslim Brotherhood representative and deputy to Youssef al-Qaradâwî, Sheikh Abdallah Bin Bayyah (second left with turban), can be recognized.

Source: Muslim Brotherhood

The Muslim Brotherhood is fighting to seize power in all Arab states, as it did in Egypt in 2012-13.
It should be remembered that, contrary to widespread opinion in the West, Mohamed Morsi was never democratically elected President of Egypt; that was General Ahmed Chafik. However, after the Brotherhood threatened to kill members of the Electoral Commission and their families, the latter, after 13 days of resistance, declared Morsi elected, despite the results of the ballot box. Subsequently, in 2013, 40 million Egyptians marched against him, calling on the army to deliver them from the Muslim Brotherhood. General Abdel Fatah Al-Sissi did just that.

Today, the Muslim Brotherhood is only in power in Tripolitania (western Libya), where it was brought to power by NATO. They are only welcome in Qatar and Turkey (which is not an Arab state). They are banned in the majority of Arab states, notably Saudi Arabia (whose monarch they tried to overthrow in 2013) and the United Arab Emirates (involving the crisis between Qatar and the other Gulf states). And above all in Syria (whose government they tried to overthrow in 1982 and to which they waged war, from 2011 to 2016, alongside Nato and Israel). They are about to do the same in Tunisia (which they ruled for a decade).

If the real objective of this massacre is not the status of Palestine, but the governance of Arab states, we can expect a wave of regime changes in the Middle East, each time to the benefit of the Brotherhood - in short, a kind of second "Arab Spring" [3].

As during the Arab Spring, the British services are responsible for the Brotherhood’s communications. We remember the way they promoted Brother Abdelhakim Belhaj in Libya [4] or the magnificent logos they designed for the host of jihadist groups in Syria. Leaks to the Foreign Office confirmed all this. This time, they created a new character, Abu Obeida, the spokesman for the fighting organization in Gaza. This man, unknown until recently, has suddenly become a star in the Muslim world, where posters of him are being snapped up. Well-trained in public speaking, he handles symbols with an ease unprecedented among Sunni leaders.

Arab governments are therefore acting cautiously, supporting the creation of a Palestinian state while keeping their distance from Hamas. While Hamas is doing everything to make the creation of a Palestinian state impossible.

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