How To Be A Living, Breathing Dreamcatcher: A Conversation With Rachael Rice
January 14, 2013 § 10 Comments
Rachael Rice is an Oklahoma-born, Vermont-bred dream coach, artist, digital media maven, teacher and dreamcatcher maker — featured in the likes of People Magazine– living in Portland, Oregon. We met at an event offering free workshops for women — I was leading a poetry workshop and she was teaching a class on making dreamcatchers. Her creations and creative spirit alike are inspiring to behold.
Rachael, I’ve been calling 2013 the year of the dream. I saw the other day on your Facebook page that you’ve coined the same term! Dream actualization is in the air! Transformative culture is on the rise. What are your thoughts on this moment of history in which we find ourselves and the role of the dreamer in the modern age?
Well I think it’s some pretty intense karma to be alive now. I mean, now we really know about the consequences of our actions: 
how unlimited growth doesn’t work in a closed system like Earth, how coal and combustion engines make polar bears grip their tiny ice shards. We have more awareness than ever of the scope of human suffering — AND potential.
I choose to put all my energy into working with others who are building whatever is coming next. I don’t get real upset about politics because I don’t think the answers to the world’s problems are going to come from the government (although it would benefit greatly I think from a presence of women commensurate in proportion to its electorate) — I think the answers to the world’s problems will come from creatives: artists, dreamers, song-singers, and the like.
Can you tell us more about Cosmic American Dream Support?
So I began to notice that I’d sit down with someone to talk about her website, and we’d end up talking about whether or not she wanted kids, or the fact that she really wanted to forgive her sister, or quit her day job and be a writer. So the conversation about branding quickly turned to the Big Dream, what we want out of life, and I found that I was pretty good at using the online branding process to help clients achieve more clarity about what they really wanted to be doing. Now I have a group of women that I coach in what I’m calling Dream School: A Solopreneur Salon for Creatives. We get together and use various tools — everything from smudge sticks to Danielle Laporte’s Desire Map to Seth Godin’s blog to Tara Gentile‘s writing about money to Pixie Campbell‘s SouLodge animal wisdom teachings. It’s a very spiritual, very practical approach to running a business as a creative person.
Can you give us more insight into the traditional uses of dreamcatchers, as well as what they mean to you?
Well the dreamcatcher originated with the Ojibwa Nation and were often used above a child’s cradle, as a mobile to capture and filter out the bad dreams (there are various iterations of this theme). The Pan-Indian movement of the 60′s and 70′s saw the dreamcatcher popularized as a uniting image, and it has certainly become quite commercialized and appropriated by white girls like me since then. I grew up in a time when “multiculturalism” was part of arts education and I learned to make them in Oklahoma, much as you would learn to make snowshoes or Ukrainian eggs.
Then I became a public school art teacher and explored all manner of 
indigenous and non-western art and craft. Now there’s a lot more mindfulness (or there should be) around cultural appropriation so I understand it’s tricky to create art inspired by Native American imagery. The spiritual nature of the objects I create exists only as an expression of what I think is beautiful, I claim no heritage other than the space occupied by my own heart. They are not marketed as sacred objects (though they are to me, but so is my guitar). I use mostly salvaged materials, and as much as possible I source my feathers from happy birds on farms. I donate to the Native American Youth and Family Association of Portland, as a token of thanks.
What advice would you give to people trying to break through issues of anxiety, depression, creative stagnation and/or self-doubt?
I share this issue. I would call it a spiritual assignment. I’ve had some serious trauma in life that has resulted in the need for clinical support. I do believe in therapy (I’m a fan of the alphabet soup evidence-based therapies like CBT, DBT, and especially ACT). But therapy is like food, you have to try a lot of it to find out what you like. And some of us need medication, as over-prescribed as it is. Prozac is my friend. I haven’t tried ayahuasca yet but certainly psychedelic drugs have influenced my capacity to wonder.
I love 12-Step work, because of its accountability, and its helpfulness in dismantling egoic narcissism. You don’t have to believe in God(s) to have a higher power, you know? I adore the work of Pema Chodron, Thich Nhat Hahn, Eckart Tolle and all those folks talking about the nature of the soul. I think body centered practices like EFT tapping, yoga, and other healing modalities can get to places that talk-based therapies can’t reach. You know, none of these approaches work unless you’re really willing to be very, very VERY uncomfortable. And a lot of people aren’t. They’re very attached to their stories about themselves, their Pain Bodies, the narratives imposed upon them by the operating system downloaded into their bodies by their DNA, their parents, their society.
My advice is to stay away from alcohol and read about Acceptance & Commitment Therapy. Get a sense of the Observer Self that’s there all the time, no matter how you’re feeling. Cultivate gratitude. Every single day. We have every modern convenience, every imaginable advantage. If you don’t believe me, go turn your water on and off. There is no excuse to not have a life that is meaningful and rewarding, full of connection and service.
We over-emphasize the mind in our culture. We think it’s important to not have negative thoughts a lot. Well, some of us were programmed to have a lot of negative thoughts. That’s not such a big deal. The sun will become a red giant and in 10,000 years none of it will matter, you don’t have to take your negative thoughts and feelings so seriously. Pay attention to the activities that make time fly by, to the things that give your life meaning. And choose behaviors that align with those things, no matter what your mind may be doing. This will often be really uncomfortable. It’s the yoga of the development. But the amazing thing is that, if you choose different behaviors, you’ll have different feelings!
Try to view all your relationships as assignments from your soul. Entertain the possibility that your soul chose this body, and these circumstances, at this time, to best learn how to be at home in your own heart.
You’ve described yourself as a “living, breathing dream catcher.” I love this idea. Can you describe for us how others might achieve this?
Figure out how you want to feel (specifically, not just generically) and identify actions that create those feelings. Like, I want to 
feel expanded, inspired, abundant, divinely feminine, and useful. I can’t feel that way and have a normal day job. But other people can.
My new thing is to buy the coffee of the person behind me in a drive-through, especially if I’m feeling particularly contracted around money. It shifts everything for me, and I get to drive away before they can even thank me! Awesome!! Abundance is a feeling, and I have plenty. Pay attention to how your body feels in reaction to your environment. To the food you eat. To the conversations you have. If you’re unsure of your soul’s purpose, try to help others in some way. Be of service. Don’t take yourself too seriously. Surround yourself with people who make you feel more like yourself. I spend 80% of my time alone, and that’s ok. I’m sensitive. Always be asking, “why do I want this?” And notice, right in this moment, you are safe.
Is there a particular philosophy by which you live your life?
I dig engaged Buddhism. I think it’s important to know the land we walk on, to re-indigenize ourselves: where my water comes from, what plants are edible, who was here before me, from which direction do storms blow in. I believe in forgiveness.
What would you say is your number one inspiration?
The natural world. Or Lady Gaga. It’s a toss-up.
Starseeds, Cosmic Consciousness and the Galactic Generations ~ Part 1
August 11, 2012 § 17 Comments
Some part of our being knows this is where we came from. We long to return. And we can. Because the cosmos is also within us. We’re made of star-stuff. We are a way for the cosmos to know itself. ~ Carl Sagan
We are stardust ~ billion year old carbon. We are golden ~ caught in the devil’s bargain. And we’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden. ~ Joni Mitchell
Long before man went to the moon, he looked up at the stars and pondered his place in the cosmos.
Many a soul has looked up to the shimmering panorama of the night sky and felt a kinship, perhaps with a certain star or constellation. Many experience a sense of longing, as if some key to their existence might be hidden there.
It’s not just a poetic line. In a very real way we are made of stardust.
All the elements necessary to create life — carbon, nitrogen, iron, to name a few–were first forged in the nuclear furnace of a stellar explosion. And so every atom in the human body came, originally, from a dying star, propelled outward into the universe.
Countless books, movies, songs and legends reflect our sense of kinship with these burning bodies of celestial light, so seemingly different from our own bodies of flesh and bone…From radio hits about being “all made of stars” to Native American oral traditions, which describe human origins and helpers from the heavens.
In the past century, we have witnessed a renaissance of human thought, now aided by the information age. At the same time, we have seen an incredible amount of bloodshed and suffering. Is it getting better or getting worse? Apocalyptic prophesies abound. But so does talk of an awakening.
Over the past half century, connected with this idea of awakening, the terms “Starseed,” “Starborn,” and “Star Children” have become a part of the fringe cultural dialogue.
The idea has formed within this multi-generational conversation that some souls are “not from here.” Many mystically inclined would argue that none of us are spiritually “from here,” and the starseed concept is compatible with this idea. The theory goes that these souls, the starseeds, have incarnated more often in other solar systems; that earth is not their home planet.
According to Scott Mandleker, Ph.D., author of From Elsewhere: Being ET in America, recurring themes among starseed identified individuals include feeling alien to contemporary human culture; disconnection from, and even disgust with, accepted norms…a deep spiritual longing and the sense that, not only is there more to life than meets the eye, but they have a mission to fulfill. Many have had extra-dimensional or ESP encounters, which have affirmed their sense of differentness and sensitivity.
There is usually a strong connection with nature and the stars, an interest in space, science fiction, other worlds, ancient cultures, environmentalism and human potential…perhaps even homesickness for a place they’ve never known in this life.
Many starseeds feel they have chosen to forget their other worldly origins in order to grow up on human terms and blend into the culture — though most feel the intention was to eventually “wake up” to their true calling as paradigm-pushers and ‘spiritual beings having a human experience,’ (as the Pierre Teilhard de Chardin quote goes.)
Though in some rare cases, starseeds feel they’ve been exiled to earth, the majority feel their intergalactic mission stems from the compassionate desire to help nudge humanity onto the path of its destined awakening.
Starseeds, without fail, intuit the civilizations from which they’ve come have moved beyond earth’s current state of divisive turmoil into a phase beyond war, disconnection and bloodshed. For this reason, starseeds invariably find themselves looking to serve humanity, choosing vocations which center around healing, teaching, human potential, the arts, environmental assistance and social outreach.
Most feel their own path of awakening, their spiritual journey, is of utmost importance in order to truly live the new paradigm they wish to exemplify.
Though the stuff of science fiction, and many would say wishful thinking, the phenomenon has been felt by so many isolated individuals, unprompted – only later to be united by a website, a conversation, or a book — that it truly deserves some investigation by the open minded among us. And it could be science fiction itself is a product of productive starseed types, exploring inner worlds which lead them inevitably to worlds beyond their own.
The most common take on this intuitive knowledge is that these interstellar souls have come as artists, visionaries, dreamers and pioneers of thought to assist in humanity’s impending rebirth, to act as midwives through the inevitable labor pains.
Psychedelic icon Timothy Leary may have been the first to use the word “Starseed” in his short work, “Starseed: Transmissions from Folsom Prison.”
He penned “Starseeed” while serving time on charges of marijuana possession, for which he was issued a 95 year sentence — an unheard of amount of time for the crime committed. While officially held on drug charges, at the hearing the judge remarked: ”If he is allowed to travel freely, he will speak publicly and spread his ideas.” (Jesse Walker, “The Acid Guru’s Long Strange Trip.”)
President Richard Nixon had earlier labeled Leary “the most dangerous man in America.” (“Tim Leary, Pied Piper of Psychedelic 60′s.”) To have the president of the United States call a pacifist author-philosopher by this title should tell you something about the repressive state of affairs in which free thinkers find themselves.
Yet the irrepressible psychedelic spiritualist continued his work from jail, writing in 1973:
“This signal is being transmitted from a cell in Folsom Prison, which is the Black Hole of American society [...] Some cosmologists suggest that Black Holes [...] may be passageways to another universe, just as the manholes in Paris lead to a world beneath the street. Well, the maximum security prision is a fine place from which to scane the universe [...]
“Out here, beyond good and evil, one sees America in pain, injured nervous systems propelling robot-bodies in repitiuous, aimless motion along paths labeled rights and wrong…”
Yet Leary remained fiery with optimism:
“The entire universe is gently, rhythmically, joyously vibrating. Cosmic intercourse. This is a message of hope and interstellar love from the Black Hole. Irrepressible optimism. Yes, it is true that repressive pessimists now control planetary politics. This is a larval phase.”
At this time, Leary had begun receiving what he believed were telepathic messages from outer space, presumably the genesis for “Starseed.” He began to see man’s true means of spiritual transcendence as coming from the stars:
“[...].certainly the anticipation of ‘saucers’ transporting humanoid bodies is naive. It is more likely that extra-planetary contact will be received by the instrument which was designed over three and a half billion years ago to pick up electro-magnetic vibrations. The human nervous system itself [...]
“This message of neurological resonance can be censored, imprisoned but cannot be crushed because it comes from within, from the DNA nucleus inside each cell, from the evolving nervous system. The Higher Intelligence has already stepped on planet earth and its script is writ within our bodies, emerging in every generation.” ( Click this link to read the full piece online.)
(He did end up getting an early release, after five years, and resumed his energetic career, this time with emphasis on man’s place within the cosmos.)
To take the Starseed Test, click here! (Normally, I don’t put much stock in these, but this is a good one, composed by licensed psychologist and writer, Scott Mandleker, author of From Elsewhere: Being ET in America, which we’ll examine in the next installment of the Parallax starseed series.)
Part 2 of Starseeds, Cosmic Consciousness and the Galactic Generations to come soon! 
America’s Vanishing Civil Liberties & The Controversy of Indefinite Detention
April 19, 2012 § 15 Comments
“Our defense is in the preservation of the spirit which prizes liberty as a heritage of all men, in all lands, everywhere. Destroy this spirit and you have planted the seeds of despotism around your own doors.” ~ Abraham Lincoln
“Those who would sacrifice essential liberty to obtain security deserve neither and will lose both.” ~ Benjamin Franklin
“The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground.” ~Thomas Jefferson
Ironically, America’s War on Terror has become a source of terror itself. Terrorism, as defined by Webster’s Dictionary, is “the systematic use of terror, especially as a means of coercion.”
It is a definition upon which much depends, considering that as of December 31st 2011 the United States government has codified into law the ability to indefinitely detain US citizens suspected of terrorist involvement without trial, a provision to the National Defense Authorization Act that gives US military the power to carry out domestic anti-terrorism operations on US soil .
This effectively means that, in theory, if the US government wanted me gone, I could be taken from my home via military force and detained indefinitely. Under the 2012 provision of the National Defense Authority Act, all they would have to do is call me a terrorist suspect — no proof needed, no rights enforced — and just like that, I could disappear. Legally.
President Obama admits to having “serious reservations with certain provisions that regulate the detention, interrogation and prosecution of suspected terrorists,” noting that the fact that he “supports this bill as a whole” does not mean that he “agrees with everything in it.” (Somehow that doesn’t make me feel any better.)
In the same statement, the president goes on to contradict direct lines from the controversial Act, assuring us that “administration [ ...] will interpret section 1021 in a manner that ensures that any detention it authorizes complies with the Constitution, the laws of war, and all other applicable law” (italics mine.)
Apart from the fact that the president’s use of the word “interpret” acknowledges the room for flexible reading of the NDAA, and setting aside the fact that Mr. Obama has made other promises he did not keep — for instance, the termination of Guantanamo Bay — his statement only applies to his administration.
As Senator Bernie Sanders asserts: ”The legislation could give future presidents the authority to throw American citizens into prison for life without charges or a trial.”
I should note that Obama has made some effort to improve the controversial aspects of this bill, though the essential problems remain (see comments section.)
“In a country famous for the belief that one is innocent until proven guilty,” observes Alton Lu in the Huffington Post, “this is an upsetting change that is being foisted upon the American people with many unaware of what it means.” He continues:
“The Fourth Amendment grants liberty from unreasonable seizures, while the Sixth guarantees every U.S. citizen a trial in front of a jury. No matter what supporters of the bill might have said about the provisions being misunderstood, the simple fact is that it is unconstitutional.”
For an exhaustive yet readable breakdown of the NDAA, I recommend Glenn Greenwald’s article “Three Myths About the National Defense Authorization Act.”
The War on Terror has been bad news for civil liberties from the beginning, starting with Bush Jr.’s Patriot Act – which made it legal for the FBI to spy on Americans and search telephone, email, and financial records without a court order.
The Act also contained provisions allowing for the indefinite detention of any alien whom the Attorney General believed may cause a terrorist act. And now, with the new provisions added to the NDAA, this will apply to US citizens as well.
The very fact that I am able to criticize this new act, and post critical tongue-in-cheek pseudo-propaganda political cartoons is a testament to the America I cherish. I don’t want to lose that America.
Yet the fact that I am wondering if tags from this blog post could possibly land my name on some FBI worker’s hard drive is cause for serious concern.
Currently, the legal definition of a terrorist is defined by “premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets by subnational groups or clandestine agents.” However:
“Controversy centers on the loose definition of key words in the bill,” relates The Guardian‘s Paul Harris. In particular, vague terms like “associated forces” have many wondering exactly what constitutes a terrorist tie. Harris notes that “civil rights experts have said the lack of precise definition leaves [the NDAA] open to massive potential abuse.”
Because of this, many fear the provision could extend to journalists, authors, peaceful activists and academics. For writer and political consultant, Naomi Wolf, fear of the NDAA’s vague wording has already effected her ability to do her job as a journalist:
“My understanding of the bill has forced me to decline to meet with certain newsworthy individuals, [to report] on facts and stories that I otherwise believe are newsworthy, and contribute to a healthy national discourse – for no other reason than to avoid potential repercussions under the bill.”
Among others, she sites declining to interview controversial internet activist Julian Assange of the international whistleblower site, Wiki-leaks, because of statements made by high-level United States officials regarding their views of Assange as a terrorist (Joe Biden has called him a “high-tech terrorist”.)
Unfortunately, America is not above guilt by association witch hunts.
My paternal grandparents were both blacklisted for a decade from working in Hollywood (which was their livelihood) during the McCarthy Era Red Scare, simply for running in a circle of actors and artists, some of whom had communist ties — though my grandparents themselves did not. The nail in the coffin happened when my grandmother, an activist and humanitarian, gave a speech for the Red Cross at a podium at which, hours later, a communist speech was delivered by a person totally unrelated to her.
Even though my grandfather, Eddie, was a war hero who had volunteered to serve his country, he and his wife, Margo, were interrogated by the House of Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and officially barred from working in Hollywood. Overnight they became unemployable pariahs. People became afraid to associate with them, lest they invite the same fate upon themselves, and like other blacklist victims, they became public faces for people’s fear: when the newly married couple stepped out of St. Patrick’s Cathedral on their wedding day, people spit on Margo’s white dress in the street.
They were forced to create a Vaudeville-style husband and wife act, performing in night clubs across the country until the ban was lifted, almost a decade later.
Witch hunts of a far more brutal caliber have happened, to be sure. Yet these people had done nothing wrong and they were put on Kafkaesque trial by the US government for no good reason. I’ve read the transcripts. They’re chilling: pummeled with leading questions and manipulative interrogations, suddenly held accountable for every casual comment they ever made and forced to justify their choices — in friends, in social clubs — to total strangers.
And that was before the information age.
How can America thrive when freedom — the very force that made her special — is vanishing one Patriot Act, one National Defense Authorization Act, at a time?
Then there’s the anti-protesting law (officially, the Federal Restricted Buildings and Grounds Improvement Act of 2011) challenging Americans’ constitutional right to assembly, the freedom of the individual to come together and collectively express, promote, pursue and defend common interests. Up until now, the freedom to assemble has been recognized as a human right in America.
“The House of Representatives approved a bill that outlaws protests in instances where some government officials are nearby, whether or not you even know it [...] That means disruptive activity, to whichever court has to consider it, will be a federal offense under the act.” “ (Source)
This literally means that booing presidential candidates could land you in jail.
At least SOPA – which would allow the government to effectively “shut down” websites – didn’t pass. Yet.
With acts like the NDAA and the anti-protest law passing, I’m frankly surprised.
The National Defense Authorization Act has been strongly opposed by the ACLU, Amnesty International, Human Rights First, Human Rights Watch, and The Center for Constitutional Rights.
To find out what you can do to fight for American liberty, and to discover coalitions in your area, visit The People’s Campaign for the Constitution (www.constitutioncampaign.org)
Stay informed and write your local representatives, urging them to take this incredibly important issue to the Supreme Court — which is our only hope at a repeal. As Forbes‘ Erik Kain notes: “people concerned with civil liberties should begin to walk away from the old left-right dichotomy entirely and focus on electing civil libertarians to congress.” If our civil liberties vanish, the social issues close to our hearts will become moot points.
Ironically, America’s War on Terror has become a source of terror itself.
As Erik Kain observes: ”Each time we allow our fear to undermine our freedom we concede to the very terrorists we hope to defeat.” But fear is not the only obstacle; apathy, denial, self-absorption and laziness are our greatest enemies. In a country rich with unprecedented privilege, opportunity and freedom, we have frankly become complacent; even cocky. We feel that it will never touch us. But it already has. And, unchecked, the threat will only continue to advance, like a shadow across the land.
International readers, what does our situation look like from the outside? And what’s your situation like at home?
American readers, if you choose one issue to become active on this year, make it this one. Civil liberties are the bedrock of our nation. Without them, we lose everything.
Mind Control in the Music Industry
February 22, 2012 § 31 Comments
“As an artist, I think delusion is the greatest gift that you can bear.” ~ Lady Gaga
You’re not supposed to take pop music seriously. By definition, it is fluff; pure sugar. But sugar, sweet and insubstantial as it is, can be a dangerous thing.
Music is a powerful force. And pop music holds great influence over the masses. It’s worth noticing, then, what kind of messages are being broadcast to our minds via the pop music industry.
As the slew of buzzing conspiracy sites can attest, there has been a distinct and disturbing trend in the music imagery of the past several years, which propagate the glamorization of mind control themes.
Whether it’s Lady Gaga portraying an insane asylums through a high fashion lens in “Marry the Night,” or Britney Spears posing as a laboratory marionette with tubes coming out of her bandaged fingers in “Hold it Against Me,” pop stars are all pumping out the same recycled slew of mind control themes.
Many people may not realize that the practice of trauma-based mind control has a chilling history in the US: in the 1950′s and 60′s the CIA conducted covert and illegal experiments on unwitting citizens, now declassified and known as project MK ULTRA.
If you’re not familiar with this subject, be prepared to discover a disturbing facet of American history. The image below is shocking–it’s the only photographic image I can find online from the MK Ultra files, most of which were destroyed–but I offer it under due consideration to substantiate the argument that conspiracy theories of trauma-based mind control are not so far fetched.
The published evidence indicates that Project MK ULTRA was a government-funded operation created with the goal of studying various methods of mind control, using the surreptitious administration of drugs and other chemicals, hypnosis, sensory deprivation, isolation, verbal and sexual abuse, as well as various forms of torture.
Project MK ULTRA was first brought to public attention in 1975 by the U.S. Congress, through investigations by the Church Committee, and by a presidential commission known as the Rockefeller Commission.
Although the CIA insists that MK ULTRA-type experiments have been abandoned, 14-year CIA veteran Victor Marchetti has stated in various interviews that the CIA routinely conducts disinformation campaigns and that CIA mind control research continues. In a 1977 interview, Marchetti called the CIA claim that MK ULTRA was abandoned a ‘cover story.’ (Source)
So why does the fashion and music industry glamorize these atrocities? The question, complete with spooky implication, remains. But that such themes recur with bizarre and increasing regularity, should be of interest, not just to conspiracy buffs, but to every thinking citizen.
According to experts, one of the consequences of trauma-based mind control is the creation of several different personalities, called alter egos. This deliberate compartmentalization and fragmentation of the whole person allows for more control over the subject/victim: one alter ego, for instance, could hide something from another. So, in theory, a “dark” alter ego could be created to carry out actions distasteful to the dominant personality.
Considering this, it’s odd to note how many celebrity recording artists have publicly discussed their “alters” as though it were the most natural thing in the world.
“This alter ego takes over when I am on stage. She is really wild and daring and a much more impulsive performer than I am. Her name is Britannia. When I am her I feel I can take on the world, normally I am pretty shy.” ~ Britney Spears
“Slim Shady is just the evil thoughts that come into my head, things I shouldn’t be thinking about.” ~ Eminem
“I had to separate the two because Mary is nice, you know, intelligent. Brook-Lynn is crazy and ignorant and she don’t care.” ~ Mary J. Blithe
“I have someone else that takes over when it’s time for me to work and when I’m on stage, this alter ego that I’ve created that kind of protects me and who I really am. When I’m onstage I’m aggressive and strong and not afraid of my sexuality. The tone of my voice gets different, and I’m fearless. I’m just a different person.” ~ Beyonce
The Beyonce/Sasha Fierce phenomenon has been particularly driven home, as can be experienced during this odd footage glamorizing the splitting of personalties, shown at a Beyonce concert.
Notice the two Beyonces are quite obviously divided into “pure/innocent/good” Beyonce and “sexy/corrupt/dark/bad-in-a-good-way” Beyonce. Obviously, the former is portrayed as a goody-two-shoes and a wimp, and the vixen wins our favor with her superior, fierce fashion and high-powered queenly self-possession. We can hardly help but feel our sympathies allied with the dark Beyonce, aka Sasha Fierce. But who is Sasha Fierce?
“Many years ago,” Beyonce explained to the press, “I named my alter ego Sasha and it’s something that stuck. So when I was trying to decide the title of my album. I realized it had two different sounds. One represented who I really am and one sounded like my alter ego, so I decided to split it into two. Because I feel like Sasha is a big treat for my fans. It’s definitely exciting being able to have an excuse to be so over the top.”
Anyone with knowledge of psychology knows that splitting the personality into “good” and “bad” is an unhealthy coping mechanism.
“Splitting can be seen as a developmental stage and as a defense mechanism. In psychoanalysis, there are the concepts of splitting of the self as well as splitting of the ego. This stems from existential insecurity, or instability of one’s self-concept. The borderline personality is not able to integrate the good and bad images of both self and others, so that people who suffer from borderline personality disorder have a bad representation which dominates the good representation.” (Source.)
As humans we have both positive and negative impulses. We should foster self-acceptance and positive action, not internal division. To promote compartmentalizing, rather than integrating, these conflicting inner aspects is to advocate a problematic road.
“What I feel onstage,” says Beyonce, “I don’t feel anywhere else. It’s an out-of-body experience. I created my stage persona … so that when I go home, I don’t have to think about what it is I do. Sasha isn’t me. The people around me know who I really am.”
It seems odd for the singer to describe wanting to “forget what it is she does,” like she is some kind of sex worker. Not to mention the feeling of being outside her body while channeling a personality, which she has described in interviews as “someone I wouldn’t want to meet on the street,” sounds notably dissociative.
I won’t get into the whole demonic possession thread, but hey, it’s understandable why some folks would go there. Beyonce went from the girl next door to a vixen sporting satanic goat skull imagery overnight. Now Beyonce has told presss: ”Sasha is done. I killed her.”
These sound more like the words of a troubled teen than a world-renowned performer in her thirties. And troubled teens everywhere are hanging on her every word.
Nicki Minaj, known for her brash style, multiple wigs and personalities, describes her alter ego “Roman Zolanksi” as, “a crazy boy who lives in me and says the things that I don’t want to say. He was born just a few months ago. I think he was born out of rage. He was conceived in rage. So he bashes everyone. He threatens to beat people and he’s violent.”
The interviewer, of course, treats all of this like it’s perfectly normal and even funny, despite Nicki’s strangely expressionless delivery: “That must be nice,” he says off camera, “to have, like, an ignorent loud mouth so you can just sort of blame every–” Nicki Interjects: “He wants to be blamed. I don’t want to blame him. I ask him to leave. But he can’t. He’s here for a reason. People have brought him out. People conjured him up and now he won’t leave.“
(Just disregard all the sensationalist text added to the video below; I couldn’t find a clip of the interview without it.)
The fact that she concludes another interview by snarling demonically and proclaiming that “anybody who ever doubted Roman is going down in a coffin” is seen by the world as harmless theatre. More recently she has been quoted as saying that Roman is her favorite of all her different personalities because “everybody else started to like Roman, so he became my favorite.”
In a recent interview with Ryan Seacrest, Minaj details creepily: ”He wanted to show that not only is he amazing, but he’s never going to be exorcised, even when they throw holy water on him, he still rises above.”
That the scratchy-voiced singer chanting “Take your medication, Roman! Take a long vacation, Roman!” while handcuffed to an upright table, electroshock -style, and surrounded by hooded figures has been touted by the press as a “show stealer” at the recent Grammy Awards ceremony shows the sad state of pop music today. (She has called the performance “Roman’s coming out party.”) That she is shouting “Stop! Get me out of here!” in the beginning of the performance is emblematic of a troubling trend.
Electroshock therapy imagery is everywhere these days. It’s hard to find a Lady Gaga video without it. She skirts the issue in “Yoü and I,” a video fraught with mind control imagery and multiple selves, including Gaga’s recent alter ego, a greasy Italian dude she calls “Jo Calterdone.” In interviews she says the video is about “the crazy things people will do for love.” She explains the weird scenes in the barn, when her lover straps her down by the wrists and ankles to an upright table, as being about her “mad scientist boyfriend turning her into a mermaid.”
But throwing in fanciful ideas like mermaids doesn’t change the undeniably disturbing nature of being strapped down in a barn and experimented on; adding the fact that the mad scientist is supposed to be her character’s boyfriend only ups the creep factor.
And why is the version of Gaga narrating the conclusion wearing weird straps and wires on her jaw like it’s the latest trend?
You might recognize this look from the earlier MK ULTRA image (echoed quite directly in the image of Gaga at the top of this post.) But this video is about the crazy things we do for love, right?
The shock pop star’s video “Marry the Night” starts out in a Girl Interrupted-style insane asylum, where Lady Gaga is being wheeled in on a gurney in post-surgical garb after apparently having had her spine removed. The voice over notes:
“When I look back on my life, it’s not that I don’t want to see things exactly as they happened. It’s just that I prefer to remember them in an artistic way. And truthfully, the lie of it all is much more honest because I invented it. Clinical psychology tells us arguably that trauma is the ultimate killer. Memories are not recycled like atoms and particles in quantum physics. They can be lost forever. It’s sort of like my past is an unfinished painting and as the artist of that painting I must fill in all the ugly holes and make it beautiful again. It’s not that I’ve been dishonest, it’s just that I loath reality.”
Later, looking wearily up at her nurse, a traumatized-looking Gaga says she is going to be a star, because she has “nothing left to lose.”
“See the girl to your left?” she asks the viewer as the nurses wheel her into a spooky psychiatric ward of half-naked, tranced out, trouble women…”She ordered gummy bears and a knife a couple hours ago. They only gave her the gummy bears. I wish they’d only given me the gummy bears.”
Gaga has told press that the video is intended for ‘art to imitate life’ and depict her journey to stardom. For those wondering what left Gaga so traumatized on that journey, MTV.com has the artist’s official answer: ” The video is a metaphor for how she felt when she was dropped from her first record label, Island Def Jam, before landing at her current home at Interscope.”
A statement that leaves us wondering exactly what that transition from Def Jam to Interscope entailed!
The Perversion of the American Dream: Black Friday, Getting Darker Every Year
November 26, 2011 § 35 Comments
“It is advertising and the logic of consumerism that governs the depiction of reality in the mass media.” ~ Christopher Lasch
“Who covets more, is evermore a slave.” ~ Robert Herrick
There’s a term for it now. Police are calling the consumer frenzy that broke out today across America’s Black Friday sales “shopper’s rage.”
So named to imply the state of profit for retailers known as being “in the black,” Black Friday, which should perhaps be renamed Bloody Friday, is getting darker every year.
in 2008 a 34-year-old Long Island Wal-Mart employee was trampled to death by a crowd of product-and-savings-crazed customers who pushed the door off its hinges before the store was open, chanting, “Push the doors in.”
This year a woman in a Los Angeles Wal-Mart pepper sprayed a crowd of people in the store – including children –to get at the Xbox 360 she was apparently ready to do bodily harm to obtain.
“She was competitive shopping,” quipped Los Angeles Fire Captain, James Carson. But it has apparently become a bloody sport.
In San Leandro, California, a family was accosted by two men demanding their recently purchased products in a park. In what could be called misguided attachment, the family refused to fork over the loot, and the assailant opened gunfire. The victim was rushed to the hospital in critical condition.
In a less bloody but equally poignant example of the madness, a grandpa in Phoenix, Arizona, was slammed to the ground by amped up police for putting a game in his waistband to lift his grandson up over the crowd.
People are blaming the economy, but in this author’s opinion that’s a flimsy excuse. We’re not talking about food here. We’re talking about stuff. Gadgets, games, flat screen TVs. These are luxury items. And yet the madness is being framed increasingly in the light of class.
A conspiracy theorist might point out how much more convenient it is for us to turn on each other than to recognize the problem of our blatant overconsumption.
Yesterday, The New York Times, for instance, commented that,”Budget-minded shoppers will be racing for bargains at ever-earlier hours while the rich mostly will not be bothering to leave home.”
The rich, and also the wise, not willing to suffer the bloody sport of “competitive shopping” in the name of material acquisition.
In an article for Business Week elaborating on the class angle, Dan Beucke discusses the subject with Marshal Cohen, the chief industry analyst of The NPD Group, which studies consumers and retailing:
“Time and again, Cohen saw consumers whose shopping reach had exceeded their spending grasp. A credit card maxes out and a member of the shopping party is sent outside to collect another card from the waiting car. Or the cashier offers up a sub-total and the shopper starts striking items until the bill fits the cash on hand.”
The story is supposed to illustrate the budget-strained struggles of a pressured working class. But is there a deeper story going on?
It seems more symptomatic of a mentality that people are willing to spend their last dollar on, go into debt for, “stuff.”
Again, these are luxury items people are buying. They are not necessities. The perversion of the American dream has resulted in a bloated, yet ever-hungry consumeristic monster.
The only difference between the Black Friday people pinning sales clerks against the wall in their rush to snatch their plastic prize and the consumers who stay home and buy their shiny toys another day is spectacle.
To call this simply an issue of recession is to read the situation on a very superficial level. Rather, we must assume it is indicative of a gross misplacement of priority. What else can we call it when people become so crazed for things that a fellow human being becomes just one more obstacle between themselves and an XBox?
As economist Paul Heyne notes, ”The gap in our economy is between what we have and what we think we ought to have – and that is a moral problem, not an economic one.”
Chuck Palahniuk of Fight Club fame muses:
“Experts in ancient Greek culture say that people back then didn’t see their thoughts as belonging to them. When ancient Greeks had a thought, it occurred to them as a god or goddess giving an order. Apollo was telling them to be brave. Athena was telling them to fall in love. Now people hear a commercial for sour cream potato chips and rush out to buy, but now they call this free will. At least the ancient Greeks were being honest.”
And so we, as conscientious dreamers, must ask ourselves, as the crazed shoppers of Black Friday do not, what are we really hungry for? And what should we truly be feeding that hunger inside?
I say feed it experience, feed it human relationship, feed it books (you don’t have to buy them, go to the library!) feed it art (every museum has a free admission day!) feed it good music (in the city weekly papers, there are always free music events!) Feed it the sound of the wind in the trees, and rivers running. Feed it campfire stories, the sky and the stars. Feed it significance through reading, thinking, dreaming. Feed it love. Feed it beauty. Feed it knowledge.
We are hungry, but as a nation we are stuffing ourselves with metaphorical and literal junk food. If you’re reading this, you already know this. So what can we do?
In the bracing and vitalizing words of fellow journeyer Terrence McKenna:
“We have to create culture, don’t watch TV, don’t read magazines, don’t even listen to NPR. Create your own roadshow. The nexus of space and time where you are now is the most immediate sector of your universe, and if you’re worrying about Michael Jackson or Bill Clinton or somebody else, then you are disempowered, you’re giving it all away to icons, icons which are maintained by an electronic media so that you want to dress like X or have lips like Y.
This is shit-brained, this kind of thinking. That is all cultural diversion, and what is real is you and your friends and your associations, your highs, your orgasms, your hopes, your plans, your fears. And we are told ‘no’, we’re unimportant, we’re peripheral. ‘Get a degree, get a job, get a this, get a that.’ And then you’re a player, you don’t want to even play in that game. You want to reclaim your mind and get it out of the hands of the cultural engineers who want to turn you into a half-baked moron consuming all this trash that’s being manufactured out of the bones of a dying world.”
What form does this take? You decide.
For me it takes the form of writing this blog and informs the direction of my work. It takes the form of conversations with fellow journeyers and conscious decisions to identify, and sometimes curtail, the buying urge that’s been implanted in my brain via psychological programming. Of recognizing and celebrating my difference from mainstream consumer-based culture and its distorted value system, and in further investigating how I can be part of creating something better.
For George Carlin, it took the form of fantastically searing philosophical comedic diatribes:
Related articles: Invisible Architects & The Engineering of Human Desire.
The Outsider
October 29, 2011 § 46 Comments
“I see too deep and too much.” Henri Barbusse
“The visionary is inevitably an outsider.” Colin Wilson
“It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.” Jiddu Krishnamurti
“I get a kick out of being an outsider constantly. It allows me to be creative.” Bill Hicks
The outsider, by definition, is isolated in some way from the dominant thrust of society. They do not, like the majority, expect to find satisfaction in striving for material success and status, seeing these limited focuses as necessarily generating a mediocre and myopic existence.
What others accept easily, the outsider has trouble accepting. They tend towards pressing the issue — “But why does it have to be this way?” And so within the restlessness of the outsider rests the seed of the visionary.
But no great visionary is comfortable in their time, or they wouldn’t be a forward-thinker in the first place. We are the misfits for whom the world feels strange. Common to this personality type is often a prevailing sense of dislocation, a feeling perhaps that home is somewhere but not here.
“What can be said to characterize the Outsider is a sense of strangeness, or unreality,” details Colin Wilson in his fascinating and influential book, The Outsider. ”This is the sense of unreality, that can strike out of a perfectly clear sky.”
“Good health and strong nerves,” Wilson continues, “can make [this sense of unreality] unlikely; but that may be only because the man in good health is thinking about other things and doesn’t look in the direction where the uncertainty lies. And once a man has seen it, the world can never afterwards be quite the same straightforward place.”
Literature is rife with stories of outsiders experiencing this moment in which the world is turned on its head, assumptions fall to pieces, and the truth of society’s blindness revealed — from Holden Caulfield to Siddhartha. Philosophy, and its accompanying questions of being and meaning, go hand in hand with the great literary tradition of the lonely hero who undergoes this disorienting transformation of consciousness.
Classic existential novels such as Sarte’s Nausea and Camus’ The Fall explore this relationship between the outsider and the crisis that awakens him from the sleep of the average citizen. A more modern example would be Haruki Murakami’s Toru Okada in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles.
Common to the outsider and the existentialist is the feeling, as Colin Wilson mentions, of unreality. Described below in an excerpt from T. S. Elliot’s classic poem, The Waste Land:
Unreal City,
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.
Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,
To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours
With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.
Here we see the poet as outsider watching the daily trudge to work of the average citizen and feeling the life of the city somehow “unreal.” He notes how “each man fixed his eyes before his feet,” and that the sound of the clock striking nine o’clock, signaling the start of the work day, has a “dead sound.” Elliot is not — and does not wish to be — one of them.
Colin Wilson expands, “the Outsider is a man who cannot live in the comfortable, insulated world of the bourgeois, accepting what he sees and touches as reality. ‘He sees too deep and too much,’ and what he sees is essentially chaos.
“[...] When he asserts his sense of anarchy in the face of the bourgeois’ complacent acceptance, it is not simply the need to cock a snook at respectability that provokes him; it is a distressing sense that the truth must be told at all costs, otherwise there can be no hope for an ultimate restoration of order. Even if there seems no room for hope, truth must be told.
“[...] The Outsider is a man who has awakened to chaos. He may have no reason to believe that chaos is positive, the germ of life (in the Kabbala, chaos—tohu bohu—is simply a state in which order is latent; the egg is the “chaos” of the bird); in spite of this, truth must be told, chaos must be faced.”
The person who finds themselves alienated from the dominant thrust of society tends to have a more responsive emotional life, a more vivid imagination, a hungrier mind than their peers. Because of this sensitivity, they are more affected by the world around them than others — more easily hurt, but also more discerning, more astute.
Most outsiders don’t decide to be outsiders, but are born with an inner sense of difference, a sense of seeing or feeling, observing, more than others, often with a driving sense of purpose (however vague) and a lack of interest and/or ability to conform with the expectations of the status quo. Others are made into outsiders because of a particular experience which separates them from the average person’s experience of the world — perhaps an early encounter with loss, a difference in appearance or desire.
Whether the cause for their difference is a priori or posteriori, the outsider is invaluable to society. As Wilson asserts: “The vitality of the ordinary members of society is dependent on its Outsiders. [...] It is their strenuousness that purifies thought and prevents the bourgeois world from foundering under its own dead-weight; they are society’s spiritual dynamos.”
As Arthur O’Shaughnessy wrote in his lovely Ode:
We are the music makers,
And we are the dreamers of dreams,
Wandering by lone sea-breakers,
And sitting by desolate streams;—
World-losers and world-forsakers,
On whom the pale moon gleams:
Yet we are the movers and shakers
Of the world for ever, it seems.
The qualities for which the outsider is ridiculed may prove to be his greatest asset – his difference from others, obsessions, introversion, unconventional perspectives, all fuel the landscape of creation. In his article, “Creative Thinking,” Michael Michalko muses, “Genius often comes from finding a new perspective that no one else has taken.”
Click here for Part 2
The Politics of Normalcy
July 6, 2011 § 41 Comments
“…if you are not like everybody else, then you are abnormal, if you are abnormal , then you are sick. These three categories, not being like everybody else, not being normal and being sick are in fact very different but have been reduced to the same thing.” Michel Foucault
Perhaps you noticed it, too. The word ‘anxiety’ appearing more and more in conversation, ads and media. People talking, not about ‘being anxious,’ (a moment that can pass) but about ‘having anxiety’ (a permanent affliction).
In “The Age of Anxiety,” a poem written in 1947, W.H. Auden links modern angst with man’s quest to find substance and identity in a shifting and increasingly industrialized world: …It is getting late / Shall we ever be asked for? Are we simply / not wanted at all?
Writer-philosopher Albert Camus dubbed the 20th century “The Century of Fear.” One wonders what he would say about the 21st.
Writer Herman Hesse, exploring the age of angst in his novel Steppenwolf, attributes the feelings of isolation and loneliness in his protagonist to the breakdown of repressive bourgeoisie values, which let loose the wild, irrational forces within man without offering a new standard or value system for support, thereby creating an uneasy limbo, lacking guidance and direction.
Though the subject has been explored for centuries by writers and philosophers, social anxiety disorder did not officially exist until it appeared in 1980′s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, the DSM-III — the psychiatrist’s bible of psychological afflictions — under the name “social phobia,” the same book which once classified homosexuality as a mental disorder.
Not that the problem didn’t exist before — it was the ancient Greeks, after all, who coined the word agoraphobic — but during the latter half of the 20th century, anxiety seems to have shifted culturally from a covert issue to an overt one.
By the 1990′s pharmaceutical companies received F.D.A. approval to treat social anxiety and poured tens of millions of dollars into advertising its existence. In 2002, Anxiety Disorders Association of America reported that 19.1 million (or 13%) of adults ages 18-54 were affected with a form of anxiety disorder. Now the percentage has climbed to 40 million (or 18%) of the population.
The current version of the DSM-IV describes diagnosis as warranted when anxiety “interferes significantly with work performance” (italics mine) or if the sufferer shows marked distress about it.
So in other words, according to the DSM, if you can’t adjust to your life as an employee, you may have a disorder. If it affects your productivity within the system, that’s the true indicator of a problem.
Of course, this makes sense on an individual basis — why wouldn’t job performance be an issue for individual workers? We all have bills to pay.
But on a broader level, from the perspective of analyzing cultural trends and messages, it strikes me as eerily dystopian that humans should be viewed like malfunctioning robots who need repair because their efficiency has faltered, rather then looking into possible problems with the work places themselves (environment, demands, etc).
Not “Maybe we need more breaks to maximize efficiency,” but “Maybe you have a problem. Take a pill and get back to work.”
There is a lack of humanity in the description, an emphasis on product over person.
In Madness and Civilization, Michel Foucalt notices the link between society’s labor needs and their attitude towards the socially maladjusted:
Before having the medical meaning we give it, or that at least we like to suppose it has, confinement [of the insane] was required by something quite different from any concern with curing the sick. What made it necessary was an imperative of labor. Our philanthropy prefers to recognize the signs of a benevolence towards sickness where there is only a condemnation of idleness.
I want to be clear that I am not criticizing individuals for taking anxiety medication. I am not telling anyone to stop taking their medication or saying it’s weak or wrong to do so. It’s a personal choice. We need all the help we can get, and I understand that medication is one form of help for many people.
My interrogation, rather, is aimed at our perception of anxiety as a society — our knee-jerk reaction of repression over investigation, of labeling the feeling a disorder, rather than seeing it as a potential initiation into deeper mastery of ones will and character, or as a symptom of an imbalanced social system.
Interestingly, angst as put forth by the existential philosophers refers to the spiritual dread one experiences in the face of one’s own freedom. As Kierkegaard said in The Concept of Dread:
”I would say that learning to know anxiety is an adventure which every man has to affront if he would not go to perdition, either by not having known anxiety or by sinking under it. He therefore who has learned rightly to be anxious has learned the most important thing.”
In that context, there begins to appear something ominous about the medication of such a feeling, which may be uncomfortable, but also suggests the presence of our own grand possibility. If anxiety is a natural reaction to the experience of our own overwhelming freedom, what will it mean to repress that sensation?
Some might take issue with the fact that I am not drawing a distinct line between philosophical anxiety and physiological/psychological anxiety. I am aware that our society sees them as different issues — one as garden-variety-human-condition-angst, which everyone experiences to some degree, and the other as the more pathological, in-need-of-medication-chemical-imbalance anxiety. This is because I don’t believe they are different. Rather, I think they are gradations of the same experience.
I see the varying interpretations of anxiety by different fields as exactly that: interpretations. The difference between, say, a poet’s description of an elephant and a zoologist’s. The elephant remains the same.
Just because one field has identified the chemicals related to the feeling does not mean the chemicals are the beginning, or the end, of the story.
Social anxiety is often linked with introverts — incidentally, a much misunderstood personality type within our modern culture.
“The day may come,” says Susan Cain in her recent New York Times article, “Shyness: An Evolutionary Tactic?” ”when we have pills that ‘cure’ shyness and turn introverts into social butterflies [...] [But] the act of treating shyness as an illness obscures the value of that temperament.”
As a culture we need both the shy, sensitive introverts to ponder the deeper meanings of things and the assertive, bold extraverts to take action and get things done. Diversity in a species is an evolutionary advantage.
Case in point: evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson performed a simple but telling experiment on a school of unknowing pumpkinseed sun fish. About 15-20 % of animals display introvert characteristics of caution (interestingly, the same percentage as in humans,) called “sitters,” compared to the more curious, assertive “rover” types…
The biologist lowered a metal trap into the water and a large number of ”rover” sunfish went inside to investigate — only to be caught. While the more tentative “sitter” sunfish, who sat back and watched, remained free.
“Had Professor Wilson’s traps posed a real threat, only the sitters would have survived,” points out Cain. “But had the sitters taken Zoloft and become more like bold rovers, the entire family of pumpkinseed sunfish would have been wiped out. ’Anxiety’ about the trap saved the fishes’ lives.”
Wilson then caught all the sunfish and took them back to his lab. The rovers acclimated faster, eating a full five days earlier than their sitter brethren. In this case, the rovers had the evolutionary advantage.
“There is no single best … personality,” Professor Wilson concludes in his book, “Evolution for Everyone,” “but rather a diversity of personalities maintained by natural selection.”
Yet we live in a culture which treats the sitter personality as freakish. “Just do it!” our slogans roar. Action is prized over contemplation, assertiveness over timidity. One way we manifest this bias as a society is by encouraging perfectly healthy shy people to see their tendencies as problematic, needing to be cured.
Studies show that introverts, who tend to digest information thoroughly, do better in school than their extroverted peers, despite having the same I.Q. The careful, sensitive temperament from which both shyness and anxiety can spring is not only rich in observational skill, insight and inner vision, it may well be essential to the survival of our species — a point well illustrated by our friends the pumpkinseed sunfish.
As science journalist Winifred Gallagher points out: ”The glory of the disposition that stops to consider stimuli rather than rushing to engage with them is its long association with intellectual and artistic achievement. Neither E=mc2 nor ‘Paradise Lost’ was dashed off by a party animal.”
I’m not saying that people who take medication are doing so to “conform to the status quo,” (obviously they are doing it to feel better and to function more effectively in their life) but the increase of medication use in the Western world does suggest the possibility of an increasingly homogenized human experience.
Though some might argue that such “increased homogeny” is just fine if it entails a more well-adjusted life experience, I am suspicious of terms like “well adjusted,” because they require that we hold a yardstick up against the majority to measure the minority; it fails to account for individual temperament or the gifts that come with eccentricity.
Back to the original thought: being anxious vs having anxiety. This is a shift of language I have witnessed in my lifetime. And what a consequence the simple replacement of “having” with “being” implies: one is an emotion that passes through you, another is something you are stuck with, a state, part of your personality, even your identity.
And could it have anything to do with the multi-million dollar pharmaceutical companies filling the airwaves with the language of “having?”
What great symphonies, works of literature and philosophies would not have been created had the sensitive temperaments creating them been medicated? And what will our society look like in 100 years if it continues down its current trajectory?
The Mad Cult of the World
June 16, 2011 § 40 Comments
“Our society is run by insane people for insane objectives.” John Lennon
“Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.” Edgar Allan Poe
“The world we see that seems so insane is the result of a belief system that is not working. To perceive the world differently, we must be willing to change our belief system, let the past slip away, expand our sense of now, and dissolve the fear in our minds.” William James
Imagine how our world would look to an alien observer. The notes taken by an evolved and sensitive species might look something like this:
Humans appear to be creatures of routine — the majority wake up before they have rested sufficiently, needing a loud beeping alarm to prematurely stir them from their slumber, and a liquid stimulant to force them into unnatural alertness. They then get into small metal vehicles, which emit toxic gasses and were assembled by mostly miserable factory workers.
A large number of humans take these small metal vehicles to small, sterile cubicles, where they stare at a small rectangular screen for eight hours, pressing buttons, with one hour off to eat.
For their time in front of the screen, they receive tokens (some people have their own private cubicle and receive more tokens than the rest,) which they exchange for shelter (which is left empty most of the day, while they go off and earn the tokens which obtained it in the first place).
Other items of interest requiring tokens are packaged food of mostly poor quality and various large unnecessary upgrades to their stronghold of posessions, the desire for which is stimulated by large rectangular screens in their shelters, for which they exchange a large amount of tokens willingly.
On these screens (which most humans watch, mesmerized, for hours at a time, when they are not staring at the screen in the cubicle) they see images designed to simulate reality (a form of entertainment which has all but replaced the experience of reality) and stimulate covetousness, which seems to mesmerize them into exchanging their hard-earned tokens for items which appear to have social significance for them.
Another large percentage of the population goes to work in factories which produce (or stores which feature) these coveted and mostly useless items.
This exchange is considered desirable. The rationale is that it creates more jobs and keeps the economy in good health. No one seems to question the point of this self-perpetuating wheel of psychological enslavement, and those who do are deflected and dismissed.
The primary activities expected to be carried out by these adult humans seem to be almost unanimously joyless, but the tokens received appear to be incentive enough.
Individuals who refuse to conform and pay homage to the tokens are almost unanimously ridiculed as lazy, good-for-nothing, mentally unsound, losers, etc. Unless individuals can find some way to earn tokens, they can not afford to buy or rent shelter and as a result become cemented in their roles as social pariahs.
Often these pariahs abused liquid downers to numb their misery in the world described above. Their status as shelter-less social rejects only fuels their need for this numbing agent. It seems reasonable to blame the numbing agent, or the individual’s inability to cope with reality. However, few blame the reality which made them have to cope to begin with.
Such probing strikes close to home: as every socially functional person is aware, there is no escape from the need to conform to the all-consuming demand of the token. And so those who do put forth the effort to work are forced to ennoble their enslavement, calling it a good hard day’s work.
Though hard work is a virtue, there is a stickier truth surrounding this truth, which is more convenient to ignore.
If our ET observer were to have read up on the nature of cult indoctrination, he might notice what writer Bettina Drew observes, “[...] there are similarities between corporate indoctrination and what’s thought of as organizational brainwashing.”
In her interesting article on the mind control techniques of cults, writer Amy Sillup elaborates:
“The victim must first be isolated from society, so that the cult or other coercive entity need not compete with outside influences. Access to outside information must be eliminated or at least rigidly controlled; the information is then reinterpreted according to the precepts of the cult. Questions from the victim are not be tolerated, nor are replies given.
During the early isolation period, certain psychological pressure or even physical torture techniques are usually employed. These measures can include [...] sleep deprivation [...] humiliation [...] and constant repetition of indoctrinating ideas.
Repetitive tasks may be assigned to dull the senses and reasoning skills, while also hastening the breakdown of the will. Threats of violence, death, or destruction of the victim’s soul if she rebels against the “groupthink” are frequently utilized. A period of punishment followed by the doling out of small rewards or privileges keeps the victim off-balance.”
Sensory overload, such as drugs, flashing lights and overwhelming visuals, she notes, are also employed.
To our old friend the alien observer, the Westernized world itself could seem like a kind of cult.
Repetitive tasks? Check. Small rewards? Check. Sensory overload? Check. Drugs? Check (Prozac anyone?) Sleep deprivation? Check. Limited access to information? In a sense: while the modern world does have access to international media in most cases, the information itself is limited to the focus of our contemporary culture. Those with ideas not in line with the accepted reality face the threat of social rejection — in the past they have even been put to death, and still are in some parts of the world. Threats of death? Check.
Studies show that “the same regions of the brain that become active in response to painful sensory experiences are activated during intense experiences of social rejection.” So in a very real way, the threat of outcast status can act with the same coercive force as threatened physical violence. Threats of pain/humiliation? Check.
The average American watches more than 4 hours of TV each day, which adds up to two months of non-stop TV-watching per year. By age 65, that person will have spent 9 years watching television. 99 % of American homes own at least one television. Sensory overload and repetition of ideas? Check.
As social media mogul Joe Summerhays points out:
[During the advent of the industrial revolution] gin carts filled the street of London, numbing the dehumanizing pain of mindless factory work into submission. The 1800′s lacquered workforce lubricated the march of industry [...] As the efficiency of industrialized society produced more free time, the gin cart became television. This new lubricant oiled things into the late 20th century.
And so our sensitive and saddened extraterrestrial anthropologist would have to report that humans have essentially cornered themselves into having to conform to an insane system, where they are required to spend the majority of their lives gritting their teeth through joyless activities to earn tokens to support their enslaved existence.
It appears we have built a society where, in order to survive, we must, in effect, build our own cages, even paying to consume our own propaganda.
If our unearthly observer had researched earth’s database of great philosophers, he might compare the current situation of the world to the allegory of the cave, Plato‘s wisdom seeming more penetratingly apt now than ever.
Our interplanetary visitor might feel obliged to make one final note in his evaluation of 21st century human culture:
It appears, none the less, that some individuals are not entirely hypnotized. They still feel and turn inward to the private flickerings of their dreams, which whisper of possibilities greater than the reality before them.
If the human spirit can find happiness and gratitude against these odds, imagine its potential?
In the immortal words of John Lennon, ”You may say that I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one…” There is strength in numbers.
May we see the shadows on the walls for what they are and turn away, leaving the cave for the sunshine of fresh thought.
The Role of the Dreamer and The Falseness of Civilization
December 24, 2010 § 18 Comments
“We are the music-makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams. ~ Arthur O’Shaughnessy
We live in a world of dead men’s dreams. Our reality, the society that has been conditioning our perception from the day of our birth, is a construction built upon a construction built upon ideas from other minds, long dead. Their creations compose our world and make up the maps of our psyches, a collective human inheritance.
Today, staring at a red light in the shape of an arrow, waiting to get on the freeway, I was suddenly struck by my — and everyone’s — trancelike acceptance of the symbol. I noted how automatic my responses to the direction had been: I stopped calmly and waited until the light turned green, a perfectly reasonable thing to do, except, in that moment, I felt unusually aware of the lab rat-like nature of my obedience. Stranger still, I realized I had never noticed the phenomenon before, because it had always been that way.
Green light: go. Red light: stop. Yellow: slow down. It’s as if we are on a motorized conveyer belt with an array of endless arrows telling us where to go. Apart from the occasional miscalculation, our roads, our cities, our skies, run like the inside of a well-oiled machine. Sitting there, waiting for the arrow to go green, I imagined looking down from an airplane at the grid-work of cities, the straightness of sidewalks, the neat ribbons of car rooftops. Stop. Go. Cogs and wheels. The machine of the city, like the inside of a clock.
It is no wonder I feel most peaceful in nature — a thing not of man, pure; from before him and beyond him.
Our education starts young. We are groomed for the world from the age of three or four: sit quietly, yield to authority and accept the accepted view of reality. Anything that falls outside of this perimeter is systematically dismissed. If we persist in perceiving differently, the acid rain of materialist reality is released upon us “for our own good.”
We aren’t taught to ask questions but rather to regurgitate articulately. We go to school and learn the rules. Then, when we’re of age, we get a job and try to play the learned rules better than our peers so we can make money and survive.
In a basic sense, this rule playing to survive is the only option given us. The alternative is homelessness, insanity. There are other options, of course, and many brave souls do live the unfettered life of the irrepressible spirit within these thinly populated margins. But it’s damn hard, against the grain, and the majority of people get funneled into the general conveyer belt of The System, spending all day at work in order to afford the house or apartment they leave empty five days a week to go to work.
As we all know, but rarely stop to consider the wild absurdity of, part of the Education involves some very highly regarded paper notes printed by The System to represent worth. We are told that some of these notes are worth more than others. Some are worth enough to exchange for a yacht and others are worth enough for only a cup of coffee. The only difference between these two notes is the symbols on their faces.
I think despite our Education everyone has had the passing thought that we’ve been duped. As we all know, this Monopoly money isn’t even backed by it’s worth in gold anymore. Though gold has its own hollow ring — you can’t eat it, it provides no information, and functions solely as a signifier — at least it has a tangibility. But The System ran out of gold years ago, and just kept printing bills. So after spending all day at work we are given a handful of Monopoly money for our trouble. “Here ya go!” says The System, patting Its worker bee on the head. “Some nice crisp colored paper!!! Isn’t it pretty?”
Once we are equipped with our colored paper symbols, we are bombarded by advertisers who seek to steal our image of ourselves as we exist without their product, and sell it back to us, “upgraded,” in exchange for the paper notes we have earned with our labor. Far from inspired to grow vivid dreams, we are encouraged by media everywhere to overeat bad food and shop our cares away. It’s not personal, it’s marketing. But how many commercials does an average American watch in a lifetime? Billions. It would be impossible to be completely unaffected by such a bombardment.
MBG recently underwent some criticism for creating a commercial that literally burned the image of their logo onto the inside of movie-goers retinas, utilizing the phenomenon that happens when you look at the sun and then close your eyes, leaving an ‘after-image’ for several moments on the inside of the eyelids. But how different is this really from what regular commercials are doing everyday?
In this world of advertisers who steal our images of ourselves, this time of speedy sound bites and cheap entertainment, a newer/bigger/faster culture of diversion seems to be developing. Writer Nicholas Carr speculates that our constant Internet trolling is remodeling our brains to make it nearly impossible for us to give sustained attention to a long piece of writing. He wonders if modern man’s addiction to technology is weakening his ability to engage in deep thought.
Tests show that internet perusal activates the “seeker” instinct in man left over from foraging days, so that when a quest for online information is initiated, the promise of obtaining a new nugget of social interaction or trivia sets the dopamine flowing in our brains. But research suggest that, chemically, the actual payoff is less exciting than the anticipation. In affect, an obsessive loop can be activated, leaving us continually pressing the lever for another crumb.
Modern culture seems to do everything it can to ignore feeding the imagination. While some films do generate spectacular visuals, and even mental-emotional exploration at their best, movie-viewing is a passive experience. The image is generated for us by other minds, and viewers become happily immersed in an alternate reality. With the rising popularity and marketing push behind 3D movies, today’s cinema experience is beginning to look more and more like a “feely” out of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.
“Going to the Feelies this evening, Henry?” enquired the Assistant Predestinator. “I hear the new one at the Alhambra is first-rate. There’s a love scene on a bearskin rug; they say it’s marvelous. Every hair of the bear reproduced. The most amazing tactual effects…”
In our tick-tock world we are encouraged to function like clockwork, prescribed medication when we aren’t integrating well with society, and given our jollies at the feelies.
“We have been metamorphosised from a mad body dancing on hillsides to a pair of eyes staring in the dark.”
– J. Morrison
For centuries, the medicine men and women of ancient indigenous cultures have utilized the dissociative affects of psychotropic substances to step outside of the hive mind and brush with possibility; to travel in inner space and bring back dreams and stories to stimulate the imagination of the tribe. I find it interesting that these substances, which might open up new ways of thinking, are illegal in our culture, but consumption of the cancer-causing distraction of cigarettes and the numbing agent of alcohol is legal and actively encouraged (shades of 1984‘s Victory Gin.)
What is to be done then, once it becomes clear that we are living in a reality inherited by long dead others? The first thing is to step outside of it as much as possible. Awareness is key. And then what, after deconstruction? Endless analysis? What really can be done? Society will not disappear. Enter The Dreamer.
The role of the dreamer is the same as the philosopher, the artist, the social critic, the wizard or shaman, and s/he has had the same noble destiny for all of time: to stimulate the imagination of society.
During times when philosophical complacency runs high and value for the arts and the humanities runs low, it is the moral and metaphysical obligation of every Dreamer to speak their truth as best they can in whatever medium most excites them. It is the destiny of every Dreamer to bring aliveness to the mechanized time, provocation to the complacent culture.
In order to engage in the original thought necessary to provide the world with stimulating observations, The Dreamer must affectively step outside of the mental grid of society and perceive the world from a birds eye view.
We must question everything we have been taught and hereto assumed. We must seek new information of worth and be on a constant mission to set the imagination on fire. There is so much beauty available, so many notes left behind by others before us who have questioned the way we live. To combat the mechanized plastic consumeristic worldview infiltrating our minds everyday from the outside, we must consciously seek experiences that feed the soul.
We must give ourselves time to dream, to exist in undisturbed silence and nature, to ruminate on our lives and question reality.
As the advertisement-driven Western World slowly succeeds in covering the globe with McDonald arches and brand name blurbs, as people become more and more addicted to the instant gratification of pop technology, we are increasingly in danger of losing the impulse to dream. Without vision, without self-questioning, we lose our way.
Dreamers are in high demand these days. This is a call to arms. Can you be a professional dreamer? I for one am certainly going to try.
Starseeds, Cosmic Consciousness and the Galactic Generations~ Part 2
September 22, 2012 § 28 Comments
By Tai Carmen
If you haven’t read Part 1 ~ CLICK HERE
“The whole universe exists inside you. Ask all from yourself.” ~Rumi
“And we, we who embody the local eyes and ears and thoughts and feelings of the cosmos, we have begun at least to wonder about our origins — star stuff contemplating the stars, organized collections of ten billion billion billion atoms, contemplating the evolution of nature, tracing that long path by which it arrived at consciousness here on the planet earth, and perhaps throughout the cosmos.” ~ Carl Sagan, Cosmos: Who Speaks For Earth
Ken Carey had been off the grid for a decade, living a simple farm life in harmony with nature, when, in a state of high fever, he penned the slim classic Starseed Transmissions in 1978. Carey’s description of the experience proceeding his dictation echoes the transpersonal state of transcendent awareness long reported by mystics:
“Everything that touched my senses, every nuance of sound and light, every object in the room felt as intimate to me as the lungs through which I breathed, as inseparable, as personal. Insights did not come as flashes but as things I had always known, truths so obvious it was hard to believe I could have forgotten them.” (The Starseed Transmissions, introduction, 1995 edition.)
The narrator identifies itself as a force that “comes from the Presence where there is no time but the eternal now,” describing itself as a member of a race of spirit beings who have been evolving alongside humanity in a parallel universe of non-form:
“We are you, yourself, in the distant past and distant future. We are you as you were, would have been and still are, had you not fallen from your original state of grace.”
The angelic messenger from the stars describes this falling from grace, not as moral corruption, but as the state of fear and disconnection humans entered as they became lost in the” materializing process,” forgetful of their spiritual counterparts and interconnected origins. In effect, the book purports to be a voice from the realm where our spirits wait, calling us home.
The narrator describes a state of harmonious connectivity in which humanity would flourish:
“In the fallen state of consciousness, each human being functions in disregard of the song of Life that is going on in others. There is no harmony, no direction, no arrangement. You are like the random notes of an orchestra before the conductor unifies the instruments in symphony. The Grand Conductor is calling everyone to attention, calling now to remembrance of unity and purpose, reminding all that the time has come to stop tuning separate instruments and begin to accept the direction of One who understands the whole.
“As you begin to pay attention to the direction of the Conductor within, you will begin to play to the rhythm of the Planetary Symphony, harmonizing with the others of your species and with all of life.” (Ken Carey’s, Starseed Transmissions.)
In many ways, Ken Carey’s Starseed Transmissions echoes Timothy Leary’s “Starseed: Transmissions from Folsem Prison,” published five years prior. Obviously, the names are similar, though it is unclear whether Carey had ever read Leary’s piece. It seems unlikely that Carey would have been exposed to Leary’s short, pamphlet-like work, as Carey was undergoing a decade long media fast on a farm in rural Missouri at the time of writing Starseed.
The central theme of both starseed works is that humanity’s destiny lies in the stars. Both imagine a future galactic human, evolved past our current point, who would ascend into the heavens and begin what both texts describe as our true quest…An image we see appearing even earlier, in 1968, in the last scene of Stanley Kubrick’s acclaimed “2001: A Space Odyssey.”
So according to Ken Carey’s angelic/extraterrestrial messenger, we are all Starseeds. We all have other worldly origins and the homesickness we feel is spiritual in nature, a longing for divine reconnection.
The primary criticisms lobbied against starseed-identified individuals is that it is escapist, and originates out of the desire to feel special. Though many starseeds keep their thoughts about their identity to themselves for that very reason, there are many who build elaborate sites detailing rank, home-world histories, etc.
Usually those who get into details of hierarchical order describe a “Galactic Federation of Light,” the “Galactic Council” or “The Ashtar Command.” Many channelers claim to be in touch with beings from other planets in our solar system, describing a leader named Sunat Kumara – details about which a surprising number of people agree. Personally, I don’t relate with these very specific renderings — but perhaps those people who do, have reason to do so.
Scott Mandelker, Ph.D. author of From Elsewhere: Being ET in America, notes ”… I found that within the group of people who recognized themselves as cosmic visitors were individuals both clear and confused, humble and grandiose, active in service or passive in self absorption. Like any other group of people, I found all types – yet those who I considered a bit off-balance did not detract from the genuine reality of extraterrestrial incarnation. Even ET souls are not perfectly enlightened — and even less so when they take human form!”
Yet many “men and women…never spoke about being from such and such planet, unless somebody directly asked them. They had no need to impress anyone with rank or title… They made no big deal about being different; they were too busy teaching, writing, healing, counseling, creating, planning and organizing activities that might be of benefit totheir community.” (SOURCE)
Lately, ET culture has gone so mainstream that Katy Perry is singing pop songs about alien abduction: In “E.T.” she describes the ambiguity, fear and romantic draw surrounding this newest of cultural obsessions: “You’re so hypnotizing/Could you be the devil?/Could you be an angel?…”
The chorus is particularly troubling: ”Kiss me, kiss me/Infect me with your love and/Fill me with your poison/Take me, take me/Wanna be a victim/Ready for abduction…”
While most likely just a sign that the fringe-dweller’s sci-fi fascination has reached mainstream status and is currently “on the collective mind,” many find the weird romanticization of abduction propaganda-esque.
Predator/prey imagery, featuring wild carnivores chasing and consuming defenseless herbivores, are spliced in among eroticized alien-human relations, resulting in Perry appearing, in the last scene, with goat-legs. She is also notably featured as a romanticized Gray alien being flung through the far reaches of the cosmos, imploring Kanye West, playing an alien, to “take her, infect her with his poison, abduct her,” etc.
Perhaps the somewhat grotesque portrayal of cosmic themes in videos like Perry’s is due, less to nefarious connections, and more to the inevitable sensationalism and debasement of consumer-based production.
However, imagery like this, combined with the perceived onslaught of alien invasion films in the past decade, have many wondering if they are being brainwashed or desensitized in preparation for a coming ET event. There are numerous online sites dedicated to keeping an eye on the progress of this theory.
It is possible that both the creepy, conspiracy “alien agenda” angle and the love-based-starseed-in-service-to-the-planet slant are two sides of the same coin. Perhaps the love-based starseeds have come in special numbers at this time as a line of defense. But it’s easy to get lost in labyrinthian conspiracy theories…
Panning back from this micro-focus, we see that it is not so odd that we should be culturally obsessed with our identities in relation to the larger galactic picture…
We are the first waves of humans, that we know of, to have come of age in an era where space travel is a natural part of life, and images of our place in the universe, via Hubble Telescope photography, is available for everyone to see.
Whether or not you believe the surrounding mythos, it seems significant that sites like www.starseed.net has 7000 + members; www.ashtarcommandcrew.net boasts a community of over 10,000 members! The shared goals of those identifying with this burgeoning movement of cosmic consciousness is consistently transformational in nature. All feel innately within the core of their being that we live in a time of great change, great potential and certainly, also, danger — though it is the possibility upon which most choose to focus their energies.
People associated with transformational culture invariably feel that they have a mission to be of service to the planet at this time. Inevitably there is a call towards compassion, justice, harmony, community, freedom, self-expression, environmental awareness, personal growth, the presence of the divine within all things and the connectedness of all humanity. Whether these worthy goals are fulfilled, or remain intentions only, the inspiration behind them seems culturally progressive.
Whether these galactic generations feel the affinities they do because their souls are truly extraterrestrial, or because the stark gap between their ideals and the reality of the world makes them feel alien to modern culture, seems less important than the fact that this is a genuine, far-reaching movement with apparently positive ideals.
In many ways cosmic language has replaced religious terminology. People will say “one with the Universe” in the same way that they used to say “one with God;” terms like “universal love” replace phrases like “God’s love.” This is just semantics. Understandably, many in the cosmic generations feel the word God has been abused in the name of unloving principals. In these cases, secular language feels more fresh and personal, but it is no less mystical a statement to assert one’s connection with the universe, particularly when most mystical traditions agree that God is within all.
On a personal note, as a child I had never heard of of”star children” or “starseeds,” yet I felt instinctively that I was from elsewhere and that I was on a mission. I also saw a UFO as a child, in broad daylight; a slim silver disc, which appeared not horizontal but upright and emitted a beautiful rainbow contrail. The sighting was serendipitous, as I only saw it fly over my head because I had slipped on a rock. I’ve had other paranormal experiences throughout my life — clairvoyance, seeing energy and auras. So in light of this, I do find this subject — which I can easily imagine seeming totally “out there” for many people — fascinating.
Whatever the details, we find ourselves now in a unique position: the first series of human generations to grow up knowing what our galaxy looks like; knowing there are more galaxies than grains of sand in all the worlds beaches, and as many possible worlds. We feel ourselves in the growing pains of transforming from what humans have been, to all we seek to become.
*Parallax Give-Away: make a comment on this post (click on “comments” under the title) and win a copy of Ken Carey’s Starseed Transmissions. (Names of all who comment will be placed in a drawing, one name selected.)