Surviving an opened mind in the Age of Deceit

Three rabbis endeavoured to see the face of God, goes the old fable. One was killed instantly, another went mad and the third achieved enlightenment.

In some ways, searching for the Truth amidst the global miasma of industrial-scale lies, deception, half-truths, organised debunking, psyops, propaganda, post-modern relativism, astroturfing and sock puppetry spewed out by a host of think tanks, brains trusts and manufactured fronts via co-ordinated denialism, trolling, bought-off bloggers, embedded agents, Third World click farms, provocateurs, spooks, sleepers, disinformation stooges (willing and unwilling), sociopaths, patsies, dupes, loons, eccentrics and misguided idiots, in fake news and paid-for opinions…

…is the contemporary equivalent of looking for God: immensely difficult, spiritually challenging, no guarantee of success, dangerous. I know, because I’ve searched and have indeed felt close to death, madness and enlightenment – sometimes all on the same day.

ACCEPTING THE CHALLENGE

Even so, it’s a search I suggest we are all obliged to undertake. For a start, a desire to live truthfully is one our most fundamental urges, the denial of which means we’re living somebody else’s lie. I believe we are hardwired to perceive truth, beauty and authenticity but we’ve denied these instincts for so long they’re damaged.

Even the most casual of glances will highlight the lack of health in our individual, social and natural environments, to the extent that not only is the social contract between state and citizen broken, but everything – everything – is seriously fucked-up as a result of the lies we’ve been fed.

Any attempt to put ourselves back on the right track demands that we first have an accurate appraisal of what is really going on, what track might be right, and who ‘we’ even are. (I suggest it’s the 99.9999% who are not determining which economies will rise and fall or when wars will be fought, who profit when food prices are manipulated upwards, and who force us to buy bottled water in toxic plastic bottles because they made the rest too poisonous).

Let’s not flatter ourselves; we are not the first generation to realise that we’re being lied to on a daily basis on an incomprehensively vast scale by our politicians, economists, bankers, corporate-owned media and law enforcement agencies. Feel the outrage, but don’t imagine it was not always so.

GRAND THEFT AUTOCRACY

What is unique though is the vast range of sources literally at our fingertips (for now at least), our capability to spot and share lies we’ve discovered, and the speed with which lies (and debunkings) can spread. Only 20 years ago, the search for truth meant a lifetime’s work of diligent scholarship and scouring of obscure printed sources. Now we have near-infinite and instant information with a mouseclick.

And therein lies the danger. Today’s interconnectivity means if you pull at any thread of truth a whole tapestry of new, old, declassified, whistleblown, occult, alternative, revelatory information comes spooling through our screens and into our poor, unprepared minds.

Because what’s also unique to these times is our knowledge of just how extensively we have been, are, and will continue to be lied to. In addition to the usual banksters, mainstream hacks and lobbied politicos:

• We’re lied to by the makers of our food and drugs, the scientists they fund, the medical establishment and agencies supposed to govern them and protect us (but which serve to protect monopolies at our expense)

• We’re lied to about the reasons for and conduct of multiple wars: not just those in Iraq and Afghanistan, but the war on drugs, the war on poverty, the war on obesity, the war on hunger – in fact, anything our leaders claim to be at war with, you can guarantee that the exact opposite of what is being said is happening, with 180-degree opposite outcomes. We’re fatter, more drugged up, poorer, stupider, and tolerate more global hunger than ever before.

• Terror threats, Fukushima, oil and fracking, the bullion markets, the nature of physical reality; the list is endless. Don’t even get me started on false flag attacks.

As the crud piles up, it creates dissonance with the conventional consensus reality we’ve constructed from friends and family, the media, neutered religions and state education. The mind’s instinct is to withdraw to protect itself; our laughing corporate masters know it, and a lot more about how we tick besides.

Choose to let these memes in and the resulting discordance is quite literally mind-blowing, and arguably, necessarily so. A mind needs to be blown – repeatedly – in order for it to open.

As you may know, Apocalypse means ‘revealing, unveiling’ and it’s hard not to assume we are indeed living through a time of revealment. About the way things really are, where we really come from, what our potential is, and who is stopping us from reaching it.

OPEN SOURCE OPEN MIND SURGERY

I’d like to share some observations on how to undertake your personal apocalypse safely, with the mantra: ‘Data can be stored, knowledge can be simulated, but wisdom can only be embodied.’

A journalist since the late 80s, I’d always had a pretention towards truth seeking. By 1990 I was living in Amsterdam working for the pre-startup phase of a magazine that was going to be called Wired, enjoying the coffeeshop life and local rave scene. Life was pretty sweet and I could see that if I just kept to the script and drank the same techno-evangelical Kool Aid, it could stay sweet.

It’s hard to remember how much optimism there was even among the traditionally techno-skeptic alternative/left back in the early 90s. Hard as in difficult, and hard as in painful.

Hypertext would revolutionise knowledge storage and transmission; virtual reality would give us whole new universes in which to work, play and love. Multiple online personas would free us of traditional class and gender roles; governments would cower at the collective power of the Cyberpunks. Disintermediation would give us unparalleled economic opportunities. And so on.

To be fair, it did give us some of what it promised, even if warped by the commercial imperative. What the visionaries failed to mention, though, were dead high streets and towns with no book or music stores, anonymous Twitter rape threats, orchestrated online mob lynchings and teen suicides, 40-hour workweeks for the few, zero-hour contracts for the many and the evaporation of creativity as a non-parentally-subsidized way of life.

Plus they accidentally forgot to tell us about the unprecedented erosion of privacy (and if anyone’s thinking they haven’t done anything wrong so have nothing to fear – that’s the logic of the rapist. Do as we say and you won’t get hurt.)

Having got into the revolutionary potential of information technology early, I got out again just as early. Or rather, I kept using the tools but the revolutionary optimism was short-lived.

SELF-PROCLAIMED STEAMROLLER GODS

If I try and put my finger on why my hackles first rose, I’d say two oft-repeated quotes from the Californian zealots did the trick. One was Stewart Brand’s “We are as gods and we have to get good at it” shtick. Now I had the greatest respect for Brand and his wonderful Whole Earth Catalogue, but this line stuck in my mind as the utmost hubris and arrogance.

The other quote – I’m not sure who coined it but you could usually rely on some smug prick to spout it at every tech conference: “When the steamroller of technology comes towards you, if you’re not part of the steamroller, you’re part of the road.”

They always failed to extrapolate that whether you’re the roller or the road, the result is the same: you’re squashed, the driver sees you as nothing but a bug and the road they’re building is one way, to a dystopian oligarchy the breadth and depth of which is unmatched in human history.

But back in the early 90s, it was hard to argue that technology was not accelerating us towards some kind of Renaissance. The Cold War was over, the brief Gulf War suggested that some sort of Pax Americana might be acceptable. Personal tech was getting smaller, cheaper, faster, cooler and beginning to network.

Labour had ousted the Conservatives at last, the EU still looked like it was a civilising, uniting force for good, electronic dance music was speciating into ever wilder, more diverse branches. Life was still good – as long as I kept forcing down the They Think They’re Gods Driving Steamrollers! anxieties.

A KINDER, GENTLER TECHNOS

I tried to address my concerns in November 1993 when I hung out in London with a bunch of techno-hippies, old punks and more enlightened ravers who coalesced around the underground club scene. Their inchoate vision of a fluffier, more evolutionary-oriented technological trajectory was an appealing – and necessary – counter-vision to the body-phobic, transhumanistic vision gaining pace in the US.

By the time Wired chose to splash the story on their front page in May the following year, the mass discovery of what we were now calling the World Wide Web was well and truly underway. When I arrived in San Francisco myself to observe how the ‘Zippy Invasion of America’ was faring in July, there were billboards for Netscape on Market Street and Wired was about to launch HotWired on something called the Internet.

Well, as history can attest, once the money boys discovered the Net, we were locked into the version of networked humanity that prevails today: more Borg than techno-hippie, our life essence milked, monetized and data-debased.

It was no longer interesting to write about the wonders of technology, though I still did for the money; we were all in love with it by now and there was an ample market for fairy stories. I tried a couple of Luddite rants but my heart wasn’t in it, and the following year (1995) I took the chance to decouple completely by visiting the Brazilian Amazon and taking ayahuasca with the Santo Daime church.

BITTER PRELUDES

I had originally wanted to start this essay by comparing the ayahuasca ritual with the intellectual search for truth. Both start with a bitter drink, offer visions that can be divine or hellish, and threaten to make you vomit as a prelude to having your mind blown for life-changing illumination. But I thought it was a bit too contrived.

One way, you do months or years of work before the mind-blowing illumination; the other way, you start with the blown mind and then do the work. Boy, do you do the work.

Imagine having the revelation that nature is conscious, plants have intelligence, the jungle is alive, humans are divine, and that the technological nexus is destroying it all, and then returning to live in a world awash with rampant, late-90s capitalist triumphalism. Could you get back onboard the Optimism Express?

I couldn’t. Rather than joining the start-up frenzy I started a family. Becoming a part time writer/househusband allowed me to dodge the question of "if not tech, what?"

ENCOUNTERS WITH THE WEIRD

Another factor in my disillusionment, I only recently came to appreciate, was an innocent enjoyment of weird and offbeat facts and theories. In 1990, I stumbled across a copy of Fortean Times, the journal of anomalies set up by a Victorian cataloguer of the strange, Charles Fort. I subscribed immediately, being a bit of a neophile and lover of marginalia.

I’d devour the stories on cryptozoology, crop circles, ancient technologies, alien abductions, conspiracy theories and other excursions from accepted truth in monthly bites. It felt good to stretch the limits of credulousness, kept the mind muscles supple and provided ample fuel to stoke the pre-Millennial excitement. The X-Files would come along a couple of years later and blow much of it mainstream, but for a short period it did feel like a thrilling fringe enlightenment.

The ayahuasca experiences changed my filter settings for this stuff from my factory defaults. Right around the time the monthly snack became an all-you-could-eat smørgasbørd of synchronistic sinisterness.

WAR AT HOME & ABROAD

Then came that biggest of historical punctuations, 9-11, the American response, terrifying in its unanimity and speed, and the first real glimpse of the Satanic face behind the smiley tech evangelists. The Fortean tales of Rothschilds & Rockefellers, of symbolism in the Vatican and other Luciferian rumours I’d so innocently enjoyed took on a darker tint of urgency.

My divorce the following year didn’t help either. Removed from the insulating domesticity of family life, the fears and doubts that had scabbed over returned rawer and itchier than ever.

Searching for meaning in a post-everything world, desperate for clues as to where the War on Terror was going to take us (and we’ve seen what happens with our declared wars), I put my Fortean background and my technological disillusionment and ayahuasca visions together, cracked my knuckles, and pried open the casket marked Conspiracy Theories.

DONNING THE TINFOIL HAT

At first you marvel at its contents. Your suspicions were correct! It flatters you, draws you in deeper. Genetic modification, Big Ag, Big Pharma, Masonic networks, Kennedy and the Mafia, yep, yep, yep. HAARP and MK Ultra mind control? More proven than you originally thought. False flag attacks, deliberate infection and poisoning of black and poor communities? Many times. Nazis in America? Project Paperclip!

You rummage a little deeper. Corporate takeover of the planet? Of course. Massive fraud, the LIBOR scandal, rigging of bullion markets? Take it from here poacher-turned-gamekeeper Max Keiser! Suppression of free energy science? Yes, according to the Thrive documentary.

Agenda 21, the Georgia Guidestone, Denver Airport – wait a minute, this is getting a bit scary – Bill Gates and the eugenic agenda in Africa? Binary kill weapons and race-specific viruses? Shh, people die for even talking about this shit.

You start listening to Alex Jones, who turns out to be a Christian-Libertarian, yes, but also smart, funny, humane and credible. Your eyes pop out at the daily catalogue of police and bureaucratic violence, instigated by what you now refer to as the NWO (as Illuminati sounds too contrived).

Your friends make cracks about tinfoil hats and you smile and think, no, something like a Faraday cage would be more useful; haven’t you read what wi-fi, phone masts and the other electromagnetic nasties are doing to you? You get defriended.

You scrabble to grasp onto some objectivity, fact checking, analysis and perspective. Your anxiety will abate if you trust in them, right? The thing about the families, that can’t be true. Surely we’d know. But no, it turns out to have been spelled out in Pravda and, if that’s too ideological, proven by dry Swiss scientists.

SAVE ME, SCIENCEMAN!

In fact, even science has been corrupted beyond being an independent arbiter of truth, bought by corporate finance and selectively abused for political ends. In our Neo-Lysenkoist world, science is a crooked language trotted out to justify whatever it is the paymasters wish it to mean, and their opponents are always “anti-science” (boo!).

Even when critics use good, solid science, the researchers are vilified and careers ruined. Similarly, anthropology can’t allow itself to entertain the science-backed alternatives to the story of our origins as a species. Training and selection of doctors in the dominant allopathic tradition has ensured older, equally effective if not better philosophies are not taught (orchestrated by one of those well-known, wealthy families).

There is no solid ground, you realize, feeling dizzy. No system is unaffected, no discipline untainted. Your ears are buzzing. No virtue in public life left, no one to trust. The basket that had been so filled with wonders and truths now turns out to be an addictive, soul-wrenching box of terrors. You are free to vomit, but there’s more to come.

LOOKING TO THE MYTHOS

You try to mellow out with some alternative human history; let’s get to the bottom of all this, you think. Hindu myths, Greek gods, Sumeria, the Great Flood. Surely this is all safely in the past. But no, you soon stumble into how aliens may have been involved, hybrid clones, reptilian bloodlines and control by a small number of families not for hundreds but thousands of years.

You realise that having basked in the risk-free ‘spirtual, not religious’ box for most of your adult life, you are now being confronted with genuine, soul-searching questions – and this time you’re not on psychedelics. Is the Bible really just fairy stories? Is there a better occult reading? What happened to the Essenes, the Druids, the Rosicrucians? What is a ‘Christ,’ actually? Is evil running the world? Good question, there’s this website…

No, no, NO. This is not what you were looking for. This is making it worse. Now you’re not just worried about your liberty and health and the future but your possible immortal soul. Your mind won’t let it go; with each answered question, new ones raise their heads: who is doing this and why? Why are we being lied to about everything?

STEP. AWAY. FROM THE THEORIES

The sensible thing here would be to wash your hands of the whole thing, declare them all nutjob conspiracy theories, walk away and pour scorn on anyone who tries to drag you back there. Maybe Alex Jones and all the others are ignorant dupes, plants, lunatics, and agents of disinformation THEMSELVES.

In fact, you will largely find that thinking about a conspiracy is associated with lunacy and paranoia. Some websites suggest it as an illness. It is also not surprising to see so many people on the internet writing about conspiracy theories in a condescending tone, usually with the words “kool-aid,” “crackpot,” or “nut job” in their articulation.

But no, you’re not mad. In fact you’re saner than the “conventionalists” who angrily insist that two skyscrapers and the Pentagon were taken out by a bunch of boxcutter-wielding, laws-of-physics-defying goat herders in planes they could never have flown. When we have already seen how politicians lie and do really bad stuff, isn’t believing their contrived story a bit like believing a report debunking organised crime written by the Mafia?

WALK AWAY? WHERE TO?

You see, there is no walking away. The surveillance state has assured that there is no ‘away’ any more. The toxins and waste, accidental and deliberate, are out there and coming for you. Fukushima, Epicyte sterility genes, Roundup residue, God knows what else. Your car’s tracked and hackable, cameras in your smart TV can be turned on remotely, and blimps, drones and satellites hover overhead. Fucking chemtrails!

Whatever is going on, it is going to affect you, whether you look into it or not. Sheeple, nut jobs, awakened individuals – we are all in this together. Maybe your economy will be Greece-ified. Maybe your kid will get cancer from the food and vaccines you were told were safe. Maybe you’ll Google the wrong thing.

Nor can you balance on the fence, committed neither way, since to do so will be simply to comply with a corrupt global system with eco-cidal logic. You come across a quote that sums up the situation: “Anyone who has proclaimed violence his method inexorably must choose lying as his principle. Violence can only be concealed by a lie, and the lie can only be maintained by violence.” – Solzenitzin, The Gulag Archipelago.

And so it goes… A claustrophobic dread and sense of helplessness descends. Depression cannot be far away. You find yourself wondering if you have actually died and this is all a purgatorial test (Christian), or some Bardo state from which you will be reborn (Buddhist), or whether you have in fact gone mad.

That’s because you ignored the first rule of conspiracy research! You have to balance the dark with the light. There are good conspiracies too, you see. And bad conspiracies that, when made public, can be used for good.

AFTER THE PARANOIA, PRONOIA

So you hit on some good conspiracy stuff: maybe there is a benign God/Intelligence/Alien creator race ready to step in and stop Them from killing us and the planet. This planet – Gaia – conspires daily with the Sun to keep us alive and wrapped in her loving embrace. The cosmic energy in this sector of the universe is raising the vibrational frequency of our planet and our DNA in a process of ‘Ascension’ to a new dimension of love, peace. etc.

Why not? It’s as valid as any of the scary theories and conveniently half-baked official stories you’ve given credence to. And by all means deploy all the skepticism at your disposal, for black, white and gray theories.

“Skeptics are important in achieving an objective view of reality, however, skeptism is not the same as reinforcing the official storyline. In fact, a conspiracy theory can be argued as an alternative to the official or “mainstream” story of events. Therefore, when skeptics attempt to ridicule a conspiracy theory by using the official story as a means of proving the conspiracy wrong, in effect, they are just reinforcing the original “mainstream” view of history, and actually not being skeptical. This is not skeptism, it is just a convenient way for the establishment view of things to be seen as the correct version, all the time, every time.” There are plenty of ‘conspiracy theories’ that turned out to be true, this author points out here.

Remember, besides the out-there theories there are great real, tangible things happening and great new truths to help turn the tide, like this and this.

THE NUMBERS DON’T LIE

If you want fundamental patterns, look up sacred geometry and the music of the spheres, or astrotheology. If you require a sense of greater agency in your life, read some of the occult sites that have un-occulted the techniques with which to take responsibility for your own conscious creation of reality. Take responsibility for your health and happiness out of the hands the white-coated priesthood. Find a yoga or meditation class you can bear to attend.

If you want real journalism listen to Greg Palast, Truthout.org or Abby Martin on RT.com and pray that they and other brave writers and whistleblowers sacrificing their jobs and lives are not intimidated in sufficient numbers. Demand some answers about the death of Michael Hastings. In fact, make demands, period. Just don’t lose sight of the good being done in the world.

In fact, rule number 2: get out more. Like math and geometry, plants don’t lie. Spend time with them, pay them attention, make use of them – it’s what they want. Any healthy ecosystem is a tangled knot of symbiotic conspiracies; fungi help plants, plants help each other and feed insects and animals.

What E. O. Wilson terms ‘biophilia’ is the natural state that we have been driven away from, had wrenched out of us. Rebuild the link, with permaculture gardening, foraging for autumn fruit, bird watching; start small, but start. It worked for me.

ANARCHO-HERBALISM

A year ago I idly went along on a burdock seed-gathering trip and ended up coming home with hawthorn berries too. I made tinctures from them both for the blood & lymph system and for the heart, respectively. Check it out – it’s true. I can’t tell you anything more because I’d be breaking the law. Really.

But I left asking for an apprenticeship with Jennie, the wild weed woman who guided the tour, and 12 months later I’ve gathered more than 30 species’ flowers, leaves, seeds or roots for a range of teas, foods, tinctures, syrups and jellies, for pure enjoyment (cocktails, garden party), health (heart, brain, blood and lymph systems, anti-virals) and nutrient-rich foods. I started as a forager and ended the year as an ‘anarcho-herbalist.’

More importantly, it has changed how I look at, move around and value my city. I now consider several of these species my friends, and I have a greater appreciation of their life cycles, interdependency, and benefits to humans. I feel my synaesthetic sense of ‘biognosis’ has been engaged. I’ve never looked at nature so closely, been so observant of the seasons. I’ve finally heeded the call of the jungle and given plants their proper place in my life. I’m healthy – and it helps with the night sweats.

Even here in deepest ‘nature woo,’ there’s a symbiotic role for the mind. My understanding of what I was engaging in while spending 6 hours freezing in a wood in March has been immensely enriched by writings like this amazing essay on the lost language of plants.

DETACH, WITHDRAW CONSENT

This contact with nature will also help you to detach and withdraw your consent from the dying model being propped up by lies, debt, violence and developing world misery. And detach we must. A new world is coming whether we want it or not, but we still have time to make it a better one rather than the infinitely worse one that appears to be planned for us.

I don’t want to end on too alarmist a note, but it appears that we are living under a near-perfect SuperFascism, and the next round of international trade talks will close the door on us for good. Unlike regular fascism where the corporate-state merger was still nominally run by the state, SuperFascism is now dictated entirely by the corporations.

The state has been skewered on the stake of international trade treaties like the WTO, and if the looming Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) and the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) get through, that’s it for the nation state and democracy.

The US Congress, parliaments and the global public have been shut out of the negotiations, but more than 600 corporations and industry trade groups have a seat at the table.
 We will eat what they say, follow their health instructions - and their drug regimes when these fail, as they continually do.

There will be no public discourse or legal remedy, no alternative allowed. There will be no new social contract negotiated but a technocrat-run serfdom at best, and a genocidal cleansing of ‘useless eaters’ at worst.

The complexity and enormity of understanding what’s happening and what’s at stake make a listening heart essential to cut through the lying words and scientific ‘proofs’ of language. Truth, as we’ve seen, is an elusive concept and it’s only grasped with the full power of our intelligence: the heart-mind working in harmony.

Then we have to act. You live in your truth and act.

What do you think?

Are we living under a near-perfect SuperFascism that fucks everything up or are we able to fight and change the world into a better place that’s really worth living in?

For inspiration check out the resources on Storify.