Category: Culture

Posted on

Wildcrafting Freedom

Freedom

Freedom is found nowhere but in the now-here.

wilderness

At the heart of human freedom lies the core of our nature, which is not specifically human at all: the spirit of wilderness. But what is wilderness? Is it just one of those endlessly debatable concepts like Love, Truth, God… or Freedom itself?

When I lived in the BC interior, on the edge of the officially designated “Purcell Wilderness Conservancy,” my community wrangled for years over government plans to log on the western side of the mountain range. On its eastern side, pristine values of trail and wildlife were compromised by hunting and horse access. On one all-day hike up 9000’ Mt. Willet, I approached the summit with its stunning view of wild peaks all around… and suddenly was buzzed by a helicopter, twenty feet over my head.

Same story in the remote Kalalau Valley of Kauai, Hawaii, where I hiked in on a rain-muddy trail with my daughter… only to be greeted by periodic sorties of tour helicopters over the stretch of otherwise paradisiacal beach.

After two decades living on the edge of wilderness, I moved to the city of Victoria. But even there, you can stand on the shore along Dallas Road, with the city not even visible beyond the vast Beacon Hill Park at your back. Looking out at the ocean (or part of it) stretching forty kilometers to another country—the snowcapped mountains of Washington’s Olympic Peninsula—you can feel directly in touch with wild nature.

Is wilderness, then, just a conditional lens of circumstance, a given visual frame within a sanctuary of passing time? Is it a state of mind? An aspect of our bodily life, below our consciousness, which yet connects us with all we cannot touch?

responsibility

Being in touch with wilderness, we owe a responsibility to it. It remains part of our family, and we of its family, though we might be far estranged in a digital, commercial, social, industrial, virtual version of reality, perhaps not even aware of our estrangement.

We might own a “parcel” of land, or think we do. But that doesn’t mean we are wedded to the wild. Honestly, we are deluding ourselves in treating land as a commodity, something we possess. Soon enough we will be buried there, somewhere, and it will repossess us. Or our ashes will be scattered, or potted, upon it.

We don’t own the land, in its own right, any more than it owns us, in our own right. It remains free, and so do we. Yet in the relationship is a live connection, a duty of care.

Reconciliation is about land… If we only look at land as property then it is a possession, and if it’s then a possession it is a resource or commodity. We should be looking at it more as having a relationship, because we are all affected by the harm we cause to the land. It means all of us changing how we think about, interact with and consume land. —Carey Newman, Coast Salish artist

empowerment

People in power always punish freedom with death. —Labyrinth of Cinema (film)

Key to our realization and manifestation of freedom is our sense of empowerment. Alienated from our true nature by fear of external, imposed control, we are disempowered, without means to exercise our inherent natural freedom.

Living in human society, of course, demands tradeoffs and compromise, even appropriate restrictions and impediments to pure freedom. It goes with the territory—even living with one other person in a single shelter in the woods. Likewise, in wilderness we are not abstractly free, in a void of concern, but bound to a web of respect for the other living things and for all the elements of nature: predators and pests, rocks and weather, cycles of plant life, the limits and possibilities of textures and tools.

We are empowered not only by the pure impulse of freedom beating within us, but by our knowing grasp of available resources, their gifts and limitations. We are empowered by our choices, and also by the clarity of accounting for consequences. We are empowered by playing freely in the field of common synergy, and by the truth of clear seeing.

Personal Evolution

No one can map your future but you.

All tyranny begins with the desire to coerce others for the greater good.—@Naval, Twitter

Engineers occasionally joke, “If it doesn’t fit, force it.”

The fundamental problem with universalism is that so few things really are widely agreed upon. Universalists exhibit a special kind of hubris, one that smacks of neo-colonialism: the insistence that others must believe as we do, if only we show them the obvious superiority of our thinking. —Iain Davis, “COVID World – Resist!”

owning the wound

If you’ve ever tried to be creative or productive when you’re in a bad mood, you know there’s more work to do… on the inside. Water can’t flow through clogged pipes. Personal evolution depends to a large extent on naming one’s wounds, which is to say, acknowledging and owning them.

It can be a lifetime process (or more), to release the bounds of the past—buried or fresh, karma or trauma, slights or vendettas. But with or without a self-help guru, it is within your power to affirm the process by which your pain happened, and to enlist in a courageous act, out of isolation, the help of others in supportive community. You have within you the freedom to heal that wound and move on to a more free-flowing, natural life. In doing so, you may discover or reengage with the work you can offer to the world—a gift arising perhaps even from that place of hurt within the psyche.

Meanwhile, back on Planet Covid, the larger collective drama plays out, in which the very soul of humanity is wounded to its heart. And that very process of owning and naming is outlawed, prohibited, canceled.

Decades of dumbing down the populace through government run public school indoctrination disguised as education, has produced millions of non-critical thinking barely sentient consumers who have their beliefs fashioned, choices formed, and opinions dictated by manipulative men operating in the shadows.

Those pulling the strings understand the psychological processes, societal relationships, and technology driven social media addictions of the masses. They know how to sell a narrative based upon the emotions, feelings, fears and biases of the masses. With so few capable of critical thinking and seeing through their deceptive manipulation of the story-line, complete control over mainstream and social media gives those pulling the strings tremendous power over the direction of society.

And if they can keep the majority at each other’s throats, distracted by trivialities, minutia, false narratives, and unable to decipher the truth, they can keep us subjugated and constrained while they pilfer and pillage the wealth of the nation. It is a despicably audacious plan but is working to perfection. But, as always with humans, their hubris and myopia have convinced themselves they are infallible and immune to defeat. Their greed and arrogance will ultimately lead to their downfall.

—Jim Quinn, https://www.theburningplatform.com/2021/03/22/who-is-shaking-the-jar/

The silver lining in our mass oppression is the blindness of our oppressors to their own wounded nature. They might scheme and rage at full throttle now, but the black empty heart of their enterprise can only implode in time, like every empire before it.

Under the boot of global fascism, we conscious souls still have the freedom, the responsibility, and the power to call out the civilizational sickness upon us, to diagnose clearly the social cancer. Canadian Doctor Roger Hodkinson nails it thus:

You’ve got to get a grip on this. There is utterly unfounded public hysteria driven by the media and politicians. It’s outrageous. This is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on an unsuspecting public…. It should be thought of as nothing more than a bad flu season. This is not Ebola. It’s not SARS. It’s politics playing medicine and that’s a very dangerous game. There is no action of any kind needed other than what happened last year when we felt unwell. We stayed home, we took chicken noodle soup, we didn’t visit granny and we decided when we would return to work. We didn’t need anyone to tell us.

mapping the future

Facebook company slogan: “Move fast and break things.” (John Durant, The Paleo Manifesto, 87)

The movers and shakers of the World Economic Forum, the UN, the EU, the World Bank, the WHO… they’ve long ago gamed their strategies for global control. Their future for us—all of us, no exceptions allowed—is already mapped out under Agenda 2030, or inscribed on the Georgia Guidestones, or modeled on DARPA supercomputers. So where does that leave our paltry notions of individual freedom and personal evolution?

Reality creation cuts both ways. We have already witnessed, through 2020’s mass masquerade, the all-important role of narrative management by Big Government, Big Media, and Big Tech, in collusion with Big Pharma. And what is narrative? Nothing more than a story, a string of words with meanings reassigned, for desired effect.

The faked story has no weight except in popular belief. That is still our domain as sovereign humans, even under the weight of lifelong indoctrination. A single spark of a true idea can dispel a lifetime of illusion.

Truth is truth, one, alone; it has no sides, no paths; all paths do not lead to truth. There is no path to truth, it must come to you. Truth can come to you only when your mind and heart are simple, clear, and there is love in your heart; not if your heart is filled with the things of the mind. When there is love in your heart, you do not talk about organizing for brotherhood; you do not talk about belief, you do not talk about division or the powers that create division, you need not seek reconciliation. Then you are a simple human being without a label, without a country. This means that you must strip yourself of all those things and allow truth to come into being; and it can only come when the mind is empty, when the mind ceases to create. Then it will come without your invitation. Then it will come as swiftly as the wind and unbeknown. It comes obscurely, not when you are watching, wanting. It is there as sudden as sunlight, as pure as the night; but to receive it, the heart must be full and the mind empty.

—Elva Thompson, Making Contact with Elementals

Attuned to the wild spirit of freedom within, we embark on a journey of self-discovery, revealing doors of creation and transformation—of ourselves, and of the world we once called home. The wild is calling us back now… back to all we might be.

—Zachary Stein

—

Nowick Gray writes from Salt Spring Island, BC. His books of genre-bending fiction and creative nonfiction explore the borders of nature and civilization, imagination and reality, choice and manifestation. Connect at NowickGray.com to read more. A regular contributor to The New Agora, Nowick also offers perspectives and resources on African drumming, and helps other writers as a freelance copyeditor at HyperEdits.com. Sign up for the “Wild Writings” email newsletter for updates and free offers.

 

Posted on

Fake Democracy vs. People Power

In this brief survey I will outline first the pitfalls of our taken-for-granted system of massive government, then entertain an alternative approach addressing issues locally.

Part 1. Fake Democracy

Voter Fraud

The most crucial function of a corrupt mass media is to help engineer the outcome of rigged elections. This maintains a veneer of legitimacy for the criminal ruling class. —Martin Geddes

When we think of voter fraud, it’s usually abuses within the system of voting itself: ballot stuffing, hanging chads, software and hardware hacks, enrolling the dead or the undocumented. But the greater fraud is the fraud of voting itself. When the system is run by big money interests, a fundamental flaw in large nation states calling themselves democracies, corruption is the rule; and the operative fraud is the very premise that voting will change anything meaningful in the structure of power, or the entrenchment of the deep state.

Controlled Candidates, Rubber Stamp Law

When all the major candidates are bankrolled by megadonors and lobbied by all-powerful industry shills, their policies will reek of insider influence, regardless of whatever popular campaign bromides are shown by big data to sway the most votes. And besides the temptations of official or unofficial bribery, there are the barbed stings of blackmail, of the Epstein–Maxwell variety. No politician can escape the trap of the honeypot, once snared. And those who follow higher moral dictates are controlled by the ultimate sanction: assassination or, at best, an engineered coup. Meanwhile, in the halls of congresses and parliaments, the machinery of corruption rolls out tailor-made laws and regulations by the corporations, for the corporations.

Rule by Decree: “Emergency Powers”

When checks and balances get gummed up by popular appeals, legal challenges, and demands for accountability, the whole show is put on hold, switched to rule by decree, under all-purpose emergency powers, opaque and untouchable. The missing 2 trillion dollars in the Pentagon budget spring to mind, publically confessed the day before 9/11, and never heard from again. And of course the entire Western world, most notably the so-called liberal democracies, have fallen under the boot of corona lockdown, tasting the totalitarian essence of modern government (under the ever-reliable banner of “public safety”).

A Century of Propaganda

For the populace of this “democracy” theme park, nonstop daily injections of propaganda have finally brought to fruition the technocrats’ wet dream: herd immunity against truth. Since the early twentieth century, the art and science of propaganda has seen exponential growth in research, sophistication, technological gain of function, and scope of implementation. Combined with a parallel consolidation of control over mass media, funding of academia, and infiltration of both institutions by intelligence agencies, the masses (plebes and self-styled elite alike) are groomed from birth to be compliant, even eager, servants of the governing matrix.

False Flags and Red Herrings

To keep the fires of misdirected patriotism alive in the hearts and minds of the citizenry, the powers that be have recourse to that tried and true formula, the false flag. While red herrings are the milder form of corrupted rhetoric, with the false flag the entire narrative landscape is transformed into the illusion most fit to foment fear and loyalty. 9/11 again is the prime example, along with the Covid conspiracy: both successfully engineered to reshape the global reality for desired ends: the War on Terror (AKA conquest of the Middle East), giving way now to The Great Reset and Agenda 2030.

Mind Control Technologies

In the age of digitalisation, mind manipulation and thought control – especially through electromagnetic radio waves – have become ubiquitous reality. Only a conscious turning away from the ideology of digitalisation can save us from degrading into totally monitored robot humans. It is high time to stop this inhumane process and return to divine nature, because otherwise humanity will digitize itself away. —Karl Hecht, The Hidden Danger: Digitalisation and Mind Control. ‘The Prerequisites for Total Dictatorship.

As if complete narrative control (buttressed by censorship) wasn’t enough, the final frontier is found within the human body and mind. Technologies such as nanobots, biotransmitters, and 5G frequencies are now converging to enable both surveillance and direction of emotions, dreams, memories, and thought itself. In the end transhumanism aims to eviscerate the organic human being altogether, to leave Homo sapiens  behind in the dustbin of history.

Planetary Pasteurization

What we are undergoing now is the attempted pasteurization of the planet. At the heart of the supposed science behind the alleged covid pandemic is germ theory. We take it for granted that “germs cause disease,” but this is essentially (to borrow a phrase) a conspiracy theory cooked up in Louis Pasteur’s lab. The competing paradigm was “terrain theory,” which gave more credit to conditions in the body and the health of the immune system. Championed by Pasteur’s rival Antoine Bechamp, terrain theory was quashed in favor of Pasteur’s story.

Rockefeller money followed, sniffing a lucrative investment, and in short order the Western medical establishment was created out of this fiction, the evil empire of germs. Pasteur on his deathbed confessed it was a sham and that Bechamp was correct; but no matter, the wheels were already set in motion on the modern medical juggernaut.

Today Big Pharma is reaping the harvest: vaccination, antibiotics, mood-altering drugs, opioids… and the world economy has been hijacked with a toy gun called Covid-19. Worse, both human beings and our environment have been indelibly branded as unclean, unfit, unhealthy… an existential threat to the survival of the pure: the masked, the distanced, the vaxxed, the compliant, the pasteurized.

For contemporary discussions of germ vs. terrain theory see Bush, Kaufman, Young. The most concise explanation is given in this presentation called Pandemic Truth Warrior 1: “You cannot catch a virus”; because a virus is a solvent, made by the cell to clean up toxins. It’s a symptom of toxicity, not a cause of disease.

No wonder it’s never been possible to create an effective vaccine against the coronavirus (common cold). But what a tricky innovation, that alternative “therapy” now being jabbed wholesale across the globe. Since the body cannot “catch” a virus from the outside, the cells are instructed on how to make them, from the inside. Brilliant! Take that, you virus-deniers!

As a bonus, the geniuses of global control get to complete the trifecta of antidemocratic takeover: 1) psychological engineering, 2) social engineering, and 3) genetic engineering.

In their psychopathic dreams.

 

 

Part 2. Grassroots Local Action

At the forefront of the political problem is the factor of scale. In a nation of forty or four hundred million, it seems inevitable that a national media will require big bucks to operate, and therefore central control comes with the territory—whether corporate, as in the case of the six US conglomerates, or governmental, in the case of the CBC (the Canadian Brainwashing Corporation).

In an era when many cities in the world exceed ten million citizens, the same principle would apply. You might say that Homo urbanus, the urban human, is already in a sense transhuman, stripped of our natural rights and attributes, and endowed, augmented, enhanced (i.e., degraded) with a substitute set of controls and privileges, powers and disabilities, perks and dysfunctions.

So to consider political alternatives, the natural route to follow is back to our grassroots, the local and rural scale, where personal space and identity still have meaning, and collective decisions can still be made face to face (if we still have the courage to insist on such humanity, renouncing current dictatorial prohibitions). Here are a couple of examples of local grassroots action, in action.

Democracy vs. Republic: The Kootenay Diversion

Back in the nineties the megaplanners schemed to dig a canal linking the Kootenay and Columbia Rivers in southeastern BC. The Kootenay Diversion, as it was called, met with widespread disapproval by citizens of the region, upwards of 90 percent in opinion polls. Yet some Nelson city councilors favored the project, no doubt slavering over lush benefits accruing to certain well-placed interests including their own.

I called one such politician to account, citing the popular will and the principle of democracy. In response, he pooh-poohed my notion as naïve: “We don’t have a democracy. It’s a republican form of government. That means it’s the elected representatives who are empowered to make the decisions, not the people in general.” Duly chastised, I reminded him that it was still his duty to respect the will of the people who elected him; and if not, he would surely be booted out of office at the next opportunity. Sure enough, local democracy won out, and the misguided scheme to join the two great rivers was shelved.

Kootenay Forestry: It’s the economy, stupid.

Another conflict in the same era arose over the plan by BC Forestry to spray toxic pesticides in Kootenay watersheds—not only Roundup (proven now as carcinogenic), but 2,4-D, recognized even then as dangerous for the cancers it had caused as the active ingredient of Agent Orange in Vietnam. Head-to-head meetings with the district manager revealed the rationale at work: to maximize profits from logging. Never mind that the logs were mostly shipped raw to Asia—in effect subsidized by the BC government doing its best banana republic imitation. The bottom line was jobs, and spinoffs to the provincial economy. The health of local watersheds, and their logger-or-hippie residents, be damned.

Our only recourse then was direct action. Roadblocks with diaper banners; coordinated campouts on forestry sites; circles of children around spray helicopters to prevent them taking off. This war of the woods was won on the ground where we lived; and the G-men and their evil machines slunk away, in search of easier pickings.

In the bigger picture, that was just one battle, and the war goes on. Governments love to preach “public input” and faith in the representative model. Meanwhile, any legislation favoring sustainable ecosystems is quietly blocked or overridden. Concerned citizens are invited to view “development” plans, or wooed into conference rooms to hear assurances from panels of bureaucrats and hired experts. Nonviolent activists who go further in demanding change are characterized by government and the media as “eco-terrorists.” The public at large is muted, numbed by an oppressive sense of powerlessness.

Adding to the age-old asymmetrical imbalance of power is the complexity of current issues such as pandemics, genetic engineering, and telecommunications.

5G Knocking on Our Door

[Elon] Musk has invented a neuralink the size of a euro coin and is in the process of placing it on the skull with an incision through the scalp. This would create a connection or interface between the brain, this neuralink and a computer or mobile phone. According to Musk, this connection between brain and computer is necessary for mankind to keep pace with artificial intelligence (AI). Electromagnetic radio waves and the installation of the 5G mobile phone standard, even in space, are indispensable for this. —Prof. Karl Hecht, in “The Hidden Danger: Digitalisation and Mind Control. ‘The Prerequisites for Total Dictatorship.”

Two years ago residents where I live (Salt Spring Island, BC) were alerted to plans to upgrade the emergency communications system with a tower that could be used for 5G transmissions. Concerned citizens rose to the challenge by investigating the issue, inviting renowned scientist Dr. Martin Pall to present his findings on the serious potential harms of this novel technology to human and other biological systems. At a public meeting the local council took the concerns seriously, given that their mandate already contained the “Precautionary Principle” of putting public safety first in the face of potential risks.

Now a fresh proposal comes to locate a new telecom tower on the island, again with the capability to include 5G transmission. This new proposal requires public input by April 16, so it is unknown whether public concerns will win the day once more.

The telecommunications industry has been ceaselessly lobbying government at all levels to push 5G, which is not just “faster than 4G.” It is a new, untested technology with a radically different range of frequencies, effects, and applications. Touted to usher in a new age of the Internet of Things, 5G is not the inevitable result of consumer demand. It is being imposed from above to integrate us all into a digital grid of surveillance and “smart cities” (and apparently, “smart rural islands” too). In this looming vision, humans and all other living things become just that—Things—vibrating points in an infinitely expanding, interactive database. (To become better informed about all aspects of the 5G issue, see CALM – A Call to Action to Limit Microcells.)

The challenge in facing every issue, from global to local, is immense: to turn the dinosaur of top-down government on its head.  But the political potential is also immense, and at this late date in political and environmental history, the time has never been more ripe. While local communities deserve local control of resources and policy, local authority needn’t be absolute. It could be weighted in a proportional balance giving input to more distant political interests, at the regional, provincial, national and international levels. But local voices do need to be decisive, for a change. The time has come to hear people say, “My voice matters. The wishes of my community will be respected in the place where I live.”

Bearing Witness

The first and necessary step in a grassroots political movement is awareness. Just as important for a society in denial as it is for an addict in treatment, acknowledgment of the problem is key. From this awakening to reality—in front of our eyes, in our back yards, in our faces, on our streets and in our homes—comes action grounded in that truth.

How we describe the problem, of course, is a matter of interpretation. Not so easy to pin down, when words are chosen for effect. Unconsciously we shape meaning to fit our personal worldview. And unconsciously we absorb the meanings overwriting our reality, imposed by the masters of spin and engineering our synthetic views of the world.

Reality is reliable if we can come to it clear. The problem is overcoming collective bias when it’s been media-monopolized, homogenized, and now thoroughly, seemingly without redemption, Pasteurized.

In this climate of hegemony, the winner takes all.

Dialogue:
A. “You are a danger to our society.”
B. “No, you’re the one who’s a danger to our society.”

Poll:
A: *6 votes (*in dispute)
B: 4 votes

Result:
A. “You are a terrorist, so we’re taking you out.”
B. [fill in the blanks]

The Quakers (Religious Society of Friends) are long known for their exemplary commitment to “bearing witness” to violence and injustice. Not intended as merely a sectarian practice, this principle applies to every person of conscience. It requires courage, first, to witness and acknowledge a problem as it is, in reality. Then conscience of its own accord will move the spirit, and the willing body, to action: to bear witness.

“Action,” in the writer’s vocabulary, means either physical action or speech. Likewise the lexicon of the activist features another notable Quaker maxim, “speaking truth to power.” This personal scale of democracy is not fake but authentic, when a person heeds the undeniable call of conscience.

Historically Christian, Quakers also stress, like Gandhi, the inherent divinity or “light within” their opponents, despite differences on any given issue. But then, even Jesus had his limits. When the moneylenders have taken over the temple, it comes down to the imperative: “Get out!”

—

image credits:

(feature): Protest: David Molko, CTV News
Conspiracy: Caitlin Johnstone
Henry: Nowick Gray
Truman: GreenMedInfo
Goebbels: AZ Quotes
Mind Control: https://gizadeathstar.com/mindcontrol/
Gates:  diarioliberdade.org/
Roadmap: DissidentSignPosts.org

—

This post also appeared in The New Agora.

 

 

Posted on

Breaking the Spell

The mess we’re in from the mass delusion of 2020 is far from over. While clear problems remain, and the war on humanity escalates on many fronts, there is also a groundswell of consciousness rising, a “great awakening” beyond the swamp of status quo politics. Of first importance is to recognize the nature of the trap, its origin and agenda for control of our future. Then we can call on the appropriate skills and wisdom to break the spell, invoking our own powerful magic of transformation.

Dominion over the earth

In this brief survey I review some current media lenses through which to assess the spell-binding, and seek to harvest a ray of light with which to begin to open the trap.

Garrett Ziegler

Former White House staffer Garrett Ziegler gives an inside view of the last days of the Trump administration. As the days in office counted down, the president found himself increasingly isolated, abandoned in the face of inertia and self-serving betrayal of the establishment political class, careerists who sided instead with maintaining the status quo. As for the military option for saving the Republic from the Biden coup, this hail-Mary too was out of the question, as the brass maintained allegiance instead to that old-school leftist ethos, “Invade the world; invite the world.”

Catherine Austin Fitts

Former Assistant Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Catherine Austin Fitts is wise to all facets of the current war on humanity, waged against “those who earn money by those who print it.” Thus it’s no surprise that Bill (where have I heard that name before) Gates has recently become the largest owner of US farmland. The rest of the economy—particularly the vanishing middle class, thanks to lockdowns—is also at the mercy of the uber-rich, who are hell-bent on buying up the lion’s share of real assets with all of their pumped-up volumes of fake money.

Clash of the Empires

In this lowest of the low-budget action thrillers, a dwarf cousin of Homo sapiens, Homo floresiensis (AKA Flores Man) faces brutal oppression from the bestial tribe of Java Men, and turns to a tribe of early humans for help. At first feeling the depression of yet more bad news about the perils of human nature, I stuck it through to the end, when the film almost redeemed itself with a hopeful outcome: the humans were the good guys, vanquishing the Java Men and letting the Flores Men go back to the forest to live in peace.

Too bad actual history tells a different tale, of Homo floresiensis leaving only traces in that contested habitat (Flores Island, Indonesia), once modern man arrived on the scene. Typical H. sapiens: project our own genocidal tendencies on another evil force (the subhuman Javans), and hold ourselves up as the reigning “master race” with God-sanctioned “dominion” over the earth.

From prehistory to hyperhistory

Power politics, as described above, is as old as human memory. Today, however, we are on the verge of a leap beyond history, beyond humanity altogether. Edward Curtin warns of a “digital dementia”: “Flesh and blood life is being sucked into a whirlpool… ‘a universe of disembodied data.’  Mediated reality is replacing physical reality as the world’s elites attempt to sell their packaged and commodified stories to publics ensnared and enamored by the technology that is entrapping them.”

Kingsley Dennis outlines the choice before us, where passive adaptation—once a positive hallmark of evolution—now means surrender of our very humanity: “Connecting into the power-machine will become the new cartography of the ‘human reality.’ Living ‘manually’ will become one of the last few remaining sites of resistance as human life becomes regulated-by-automation…. By doing nothing, we are allowing our behavior to be modified and our self-identities to be splintered.  In these post-pandemic landscapes, the choices we make will be choices that, like never before, determine our future as a human species.”

Resistance or slavery

Our mortal enemy is our own individual apathy. If we simply allow a new abnormal global society to be constructed by a minuscule gaggle of immensely wealthy power brokers, that society will serve them and enslave all of us and our children for generations to come… The new biosecurity State the authorities are building is for everyone. Resistance or slavery are your only options.
—The Disillusioned Blogger, https://newagora.ca/for-those-about-to-question-authority-i-salute-you/

If adaptation to a single imposed future implies unthinkable surrender, it’s clear we must widen the scope of our adaptive strategies to reach outside that black box of digital slavery. That means going also beyond traditional responses to oppression, and diving deeper into our creative imagination.

The courage to resist

Why live if you have to spend all of your time and energy focusing on negative stuff or living in fear? Why have so many people stopped living? Stopped laughing? Stopped exploring? If we stop living, evil wins. Guidance and solutions will evolve from THIS PLACE. Banging our heads against the wall to resist, run, or fight back isn’t bringing resolution, it’s bringing a lot of frustration and depression for a lot of people, while keeping everyone on the negative energy hamster wheel, which is exactly where they want you. Rise above.

In this space is where creation evolves, light shines through, and the universe works with us. Remaining in this state of mind will manifest the best possible future. Whereas logic, common sense, practicality, and analysis are all incredibly important tools in the toolbox, without imagination and creation, the toolbox doesn’t exist. Instead of battling and tearing down, we need to build up and CREATE, together.

—Corey Lynn, The Calm Through the Storm [my emphasis]

Given that we start from where we are, and grassroots resistance can have limited success, let’s review the familiar strategies Corey Lynn mentions: resist, run, and fight back.

  1. Resist: Noncooperation

Noncooperation means not confronting authority directly, but finding workarounds, loopholes, exemptions. Keeping your mask off on the ferry by nursing a hot drink. Having group meetings in a restaurant. Entering stores and claiming legal exemptions.

Here are two such useful exemptions in recent BC health orders:

  • Gathering in residences allowed for a “purpose that is not social in nature.”
  • Masks exempt if you have “(i) a psychological, behavioural or health condition, or (ii) a physical, cognitive or mental impairment.”

Noncooperation and noncompliance hinge on the very dynamic of power, which is its Achilles heel: “We are sovereign spiritual beings… If we don’t obey, there are no rulers” (Iain Davis).

  1. Run: Avoidance

Like Flores Man, we are on the run from those who would enslave us and exterminate our sovereign, creative essence. If there is somewhere to run and hide, a forest deep and dark and remote enough, then that escape route can provide some respite from the war, at least in the short term. Off-grid living also presents the benefits of creating a more sustainable future in harmony with our natural past and the living earth. Which is not to say it’s an easy path to avoid the tentacles of the beast.

Jim Quinn outlines a wide array of options which he calls “passive noncooperation,” but which might better be described as ways to extricate oneself from an oppressive matrix of control (i.e., avoidance). Such tactics include: Reduce taxes, buy local and pay in cash, cancel Big Tech, boycott social re-engineering, learn practical skills, grow food, barter, bank locally, avoid debt, own alternative currency, use encrypted messaging, reject masks and fake vaccines, ridicule sheep, move out of the city, and prepare to defend your home.

As a pacifist I might take issue with the last advice (armed defense), but in doing so I would reiterate the approach of avoiding confrontation (and violence) as much as possible. The same debate (violence vs. nonviolence) would carry into the next strategy.

  1. Fight Back: Confrontation

Obviously fighting fire with fire will prove the disadvantage of the side that is outgunned. Not to mention the drawback of historical revolutions: even if they are successful, they usually serve to bring a new regime of violence and oppression into power; or they must defend themselves, thereafter, from the revenge of the ousted ruling powers (see Cuba, Venezuela, Iran).

The irony of nonviolent direct action today is that, while it has a notable history (from Jesus to Gandhi to King), the covert forces of empire have co-opted the strategy to promote selective regime change through mostly “nonviolent,” but infiltrated and orchestrated popular uprisings, now branded as “color revolutions.” Which only reinforces the legitimate potency of such tactics for a genuinely popular cause.

Confrontation thankfully can take place also in the narrative space… at least until censorship is total. Speaking truth to power, even with righteous anger, is a vital arena of fighting back against lies and injustice.

Once again Corey Lynn expresses this imperative well: “Everyone needs to feel the sense of betrayal and being a victim to find the rage within. This is righteous anger and it needs to be acted upon, not through violence, but most definitely not through silence. If people do not take a stand now, the middle class will be entirely wiped out, the ‘elites’ will continue to syphon all the wealth, and the poor will remain poor.”

A more conventional form of confrontation can take place even within the democratic political arena. Surprising to some, Trump’s champion General Michael Flynn, far from promising a military salvation for the legion of patriots in the wake of Trump’s ouster, advises a rather tame program of localized change:

  • Organize & get involved in your city/town and in your state.
  • Run for a local position in your city.
  • Demand local and state officials take measures for election integrity.

Regardless of the level of resistance once feels called to engage in—whether it means to resist, to run, or to fight back—the necessary fuel is provided by courage. “America’s general” would well understand that requirement, in extoling a Plan compatible with the level of courage most people can access.

Whatever you do, you need courage. Whatever course you decide upon, there is always someone to tell you that you are wrong. There are always difficulties arising that tempt you to believe your critics are right. To map out a course of action and follow it to an end requires some of the same courage that a soldier needs. Peace has its victories, but it takes brave men and women to win them. ― Ralph Waldo Emerson

Returning to Corey Lynn’s opening plea, all the energy we spend on changing the world, coping, adapting, or surrendering to it, risks spinning the hamster wheel, if we don’t also open space to create. This takes another kind of courage, a loyalty to life itself, to imagine miracles worthy of wise Nature.

The power to create

This is the realm of the metapolitical, beyond government. It is the playground of the artist, the prayer rug of the mystic, the knowing soul in each live denizen of earth. Both paths, of art and spirit, can apply the same strategies as we use to resist on the political plane, but from a higher, deeper place, in service of common harmony and not divisive ego.

Art

Art, besides casting its vote for intrinsic beauty, can approach political issues of the day in creative ways—whether destructive or constructive, as needed.

Confrontation: mockery, memes, caricatures, satire, eloquence

Workarounds: more subtle memes and satire, exposing by analogy and inference

Avoidance: art for art’s sake; celebrating the essence of life’s beauty and our compassionate humanity

Spirituality

As with art, a spectrum of approaches is available, according to one’s inclination and talents:

Confrontation: speaking truth to power, nonviolent action witness, civil disobedience, hunger striking

Workarounds: demonstrating, to “enemy” and “sheep” alike, our life-honoring humor, empathy, shared humanity, natural truths

Avoidance: donning the cloak of invisibility; developing “spiritual immunity”; feeding the flame of purest truth and spirit; cultivating acceptance; embracing wholeness

In all of these “metapolitical” ways, the strategies of resistance can play out relatively indirectly, but infused with a lightness and brightness of being. That kind of courage to create can inspire a new world worth imagining, beyond more rhetoric about one’s party or race, nation or creed. Its power and responsibility are exercised in the personal sphere, where it is up to the individual to open up space, to stop the march of time, to dissolve the stress and pressure of the linear push to a forced reset.

And how do we do this magic trick? By flipping the hourglass.

The Hourglass Effect

History is unfolding in real time. Events are pressing in upon us—welcome to the unbearable intimacy of planetary catastrophe. I have never been through a civilisation-wide transformation before, and neither have you; we are in uncharted waters together. There is a war taking place in heaven concerning the soul of humanity, and it will be fought in each person’s heart, every day, without rest, and into the foreseeable future. —Zachary Stein, Covid-19: A War Broke Out In Heaven

The war on humanity is fought now as a war on our consciousness, and on our relationship to time. To fight this war it is necessary to defuse this weaponization of time, and of our psychic integrity. Carlos Castaneda emphasizes the duty of the spiritual warrior, before all else, “to rest.” To recharge through quiet reflection and openness to the creative force of the universe, always in gestation, always birthing.

Yes, this is a revolutionary time—just as there are such moments in geological history, from cometary catastrophes to pole shifts, ice ages, continental drift. Yet in our human realm we can contain and plumb the depth of it all, we can become the scope and the largeness of it all, and in that transcendence which is greater inclusion, we can be part of the healing. The growth of identification to the whole, from the singular log being pushed down the river, to the river itself, the sea, or the whole hydrological cycle, is a relief from disaster, from death. It’s a sacrifice of self, a gift back to the natural force of Life to heal, to express the divinity of the whole through all its parts.

Fear, stress, “deadlines”… picture these as sand squeezing through the narrow neck of an hourglass. Time is running out. Time is money. Attachment, achievement, identity… not enough. Never enough… to redeem or perfect yourself, your life, or the world.

But consider:

Time instead as an opening, a railroad track disappearing to a distant point on a field of timelessness. The sand in the hourglass slips through… into freefall…

… space, possibility, freedom

… release from time

… it settles to stillness

… being, nondoing, innate perfection

… then: flip!

The hourglass turned upside down recycles the static, the inert… to rebirth, reincarnation.

The operating system is rebooted, to a greater level of freedom (movement) and perfection (stasis), and a synthesis of the two, a dynamic and unitary vision of the whole living cycle.

In this larger vision we take the quantum human leap from apprehension of our own mortality, to the scope of the current threat to our species, and the earth we share with others. Zachary Stein calls this awakening a “second dawn” in human awareness—though it doesn’t come without birth pangs: “It is an age in which heaven competes with hell for a chance to be born.”

With the hourglass turned upside down, Stein says,

The passing of time feels different and days matter more as they start becoming too full of experience and dense with meaning. It feels like a sprint—and sprinting right now makes sense for some—but the full arc of this journey cannot be sustained at this pace. What is happening is more of a pilgrimage or exiled wandering, beyond roads and maps. No one can go it alone in this wilderness between worlds.
…
This is it: we have arrived at the end of the world. Finally. Now we can start to build a new one. (Covid-19: A War Broke Out In Heaven)

New to the world, the creative vision of our positive future, by its very nature, is open-ended. From where we stand we can give it any number of names:

  • The Age of Aquarius
  • The Great Awakening
  • The Greater Reset
  • The New Earth positive timeline
  • The Hundredth Monkey
  • Goddess Alive, Magic Afoot

Guided by our heart, art and spirit, we traverse our way between the worlds, to the land that time forgot. We find sanctuary in the forest of our birthright. There we make alliance with humans of good intention. We dare to thrive.

—

image credits:

(feature) Moses: Maverickmemez
dummies: MerkAvot Media
posthuman: metaphysicalmusing.com
No thanks: RealStewPeters, Telegram
sheep/dog: Charlie Ward, Telegram
BS first aid: Bernie Sanders, Twitter
hourglass: Charlie Ward, Telegram
Humanity: Paul Levy

This article first appeared 4 March 2021 in The New Agora.

Nowick Gray writes from Salt Spring Island, BC. His books of genre-bending fiction and creative nonfiction explore the borders of nature and civilization, imagination and reality, choice and manifestation. Connect at NowickGray.com to read more. A regular contributor to The New Agora, Nowick also offers perspectives and resources on alternative culture and African drumming, and helps other writers as a freelance copyeditor at HyperEdits.com. Sign up for the “Wild Writings” email newsletter for updates and free offers.