WORLDVIEW WARFARE
by Iona Miller
A world view is a set of presuppositions (or assumptions) which we hold (consciously or subconsciously) about the basic makeup of our world. Everyone has a world view, whether he can explain it or not. It can be likened to a pair of glasses through which one views the world. It is important to have the right prescription, or reality will be distorted. Modem man is faced with a supermarket of world views; all of them claim to represent reality, but they are points of view about reality -- mental constructs, beliefs. Psy-Strat is more interested in the potential effects of beliefs than doctrines or worldviews.
EVOLUTION OF BELIEF PARADIGMS
Stage 1: Archaic: Survival, the Ground Zero of Existence. Self-preservation, isolation; antisocial. Paranoid or idiosyncratic beliefs.
Stage 2: Tribal: Truster/Trickster. Social; love, belonging. Self-sacrifice vs. selfishness. Transgression; taboo. Ethnocentric magical and superstitious beliefs.
Stage 3: Egocentric: Power; Esteem; Autonomy, heroic. Unscrupulous Competition/Hero. Shame vs. honor. Exploitation vs. Respect. Mythic beliefs.
Stage4: Moral/Patriotic. Rules; Initiative. Shame and guilt vs. conformity and conventionality; purpose, virtue. Systematized truths. Emotional, nostalgic beliefs.
Stage 5: Materialist. Reasoning; mental analysis. Rational beliefs, truth; goodness; consumerism, greed. Head vs. heart. Progressive if rewarded, compulsive, workaholic. Perspective. Rational beliefs.
Stage 6: Wise Empath. Service, rapport, intimacy, empathy. Politically correct.. Inner wisdom, meaning. Self-actualization. Intuitive, mystical beliefs.
Stage 7: Distancer/Self. Paradoxical; individuated, reclusive; universalist. Deconstruction and Synthesis, gestalt, the big picture. Integral, synergetic beliefs.
Stage 8: Global Village. Complex Dynamic Beliefs. Post-Metaphysical Integrative Spirituality. “Express Self Now, but not at the expense of Others or the World, so that Life May Continue.” Integrative Sustainable beliefs.
EVOLUTION OF BELIEF PARADIGMS
Stage 1: Archaic: Survival, the Ground Zero of Existence. Self-preservation, isolation; antisocial. Paranoid or idiosyncratic beliefs.
Stage 2: Tribal: Truster/Trickster. Social; love, belonging. Self-sacrifice vs. selfishness. Transgression; taboo. Ethnocentric magical and superstitious beliefs.
Stage 3: Egocentric: Power; Esteem; Autonomy, heroic. Unscrupulous Competition/Hero. Shame vs. honor. Exploitation vs. Respect. Mythic beliefs.
Stage4: Moral/Patriotic. Rules; Initiative. Shame and guilt vs. conformity and conventionality; purpose, virtue. Systematized truths. Emotional, nostalgic beliefs.
Stage 5: Materialist. Reasoning; mental analysis. Rational beliefs, truth; goodness; consumerism, greed. Head vs. heart. Progressive if rewarded, compulsive, workaholic. Perspective. Rational beliefs.
Stage 6: Wise Empath. Service, rapport, intimacy, empathy. Politically correct.. Inner wisdom, meaning. Self-actualization. Intuitive, mystical beliefs.
Stage 7: Distancer/Self. Paradoxical; individuated, reclusive; universalist. Deconstruction and Synthesis, gestalt, the big picture. Integral, synergetic beliefs.
Stage 8: Global Village. Complex Dynamic Beliefs. Post-Metaphysical Integrative Spirituality. “Express Self Now, but not at the expense of Others or the World, so that Life May Continue.” Integrative Sustainable beliefs.
Draconian Utopia
DRACONIAN UTOPIA:
http://ionamiller2010.iwarp.com/whats_new_34.html
What Are We Left With When ConsPIRACY Proves Right?
By Iona Miller, March 2010
Geopolitical events have cast a deep pall across our lives. Social Insight is the Third Eye of the new Mystery. Only a top-down visionary perspective can begin to capture the Big Picture.
The formula “They have the power” may have its value politically; it does not do for an historical analysis. Power is not possessed, it acts in the very body and over the whole surface of the social field according to a system of relays, modes of connection, transmission, distribution, etc. Power acts through the smallest elements: the family, sexual relations, but also: residential relations, neighborhoods, etc. As far as we go in the social network, we always find power as something that “runs through” it, that acts, that brings about effects. It becomes effective or not, that is, power is always a definite form of momentary or constantly reproduced encounters among a definite number of individuals. Power is thus not possessed because it is “in play,” because it risks itself. –Michel Foucault, Power, Truth, Strategy (1979)
We should admit…that power produces knowledge (and not simply by encouraging it because it serves power or by applying it because it is useful); that power and knowledge directly imply one another; that there is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations. –Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish (1975)
All that is ConsPIRACY is Not Theory
Formerly marginalized “Conspiracy Theory” has become mainstream with celebrity players such as Governor Jesse Ventura, Alex Jones, Mike Ruppert, Art Bell and George Noory. Multimedia has discovered there’s gold in ‘them thare conspiracies’ or it wouldn’t be producing these stories which have been underground issues for years. The trouble is, they tweak their stories for dramatic effect, often egging on those they interview into overstatements and deliberate distortions of the facts to "sell more soap". This is a parasitic process that turns truth-seeking into a media meatgrinder that chews participants up and spits them out for fresher stories. Some are forced to confabulate to keep their Q-ratings high. Simultaneously, the government is attempting to outlaw all conspiracy theories, making those who believe them criminals — terrorist enemies of the state. Reminiscent of blacklisting in by-gone eras, it sounds beyond Orwellian.
We might ask how we came to this paradox wherein the Overworld both promulgates and attacks dissent. In the end, it adds to the general confusion and obfuscation. Approximately 90 percent of the public now believes there was some kind of conspiracy to kill JFK. In the midst of “Climategate” and flu vaccine recalls, mainstream media is shamelessly profiteering from the pioneering efforts of veteran writers and media producers from the niche genre, popularized by radio shows and publications such as “Coast to Coast,” Nexus Magazine and Paranoia Magazine.
The highlight of any drama is the reveal. “Conspiracy theory” is inherently revelatory, potentially salvific – but what constitutes “correct” and “incorrect” revelation? And who is the arbiter of that consensus? Perhaps its great critique is that the genre offers few answers to its persistent questions and no adequate plan for the future.
Conspiracy knowledge should be distinguished from conspiracy theories — organized criminal enterprise, deliberate systemic fraud, doctored records, incorrigible delusions and paranormal phenomena. Sociopolitical conspiracies are a 'peopolitical' fact, not fantasy or theory, even if this history is suppressed.
Utopian Subversion
Before WWI, social engineers Bertrand Russell and H.G. Wells first promoted utopian ideals, world government and “open conspiracy.” Echoing Sir Francis Bacon’s esoteric notions of a ‘New Atlantis,’ the British Fabian Socialist Society was organized around 1883 by George Bernard Shaw, H.G. Wells, Sidney Webb, Annie Besant, and others. Bertrand Russell joined the organization sometime later. With fellow Fabian socialists, they adopted the long view — tactics of delay and gradual penetration.
Wells is arguably the first futurist, a pioneer of future studies as demonstrated in Anticipations of the Reactions of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon Human Life and Thought and The Discovery of the Future. Attempting self-fulfilling prophecy, Wells created utopian-socialist visions in little-known works including A Modern Utopia (1905) and Men Like Gods (1923). In the Days of the Comet (1906) he resorted to changing human nature with personality-improving gases shed by a comet’s tail, ushering in his Utopia of universal free love. Utopias promise a measure of meaning and autonomy in our lives. Yet, Wells wrote propaganda during WWI.
After World War I ended, members of Cecil Rhodes’ Round Table Group met with The Inquiry, led by Colonel Edward Mandell House. Working with the Fabian Socialists, they established the Royal Institute of International Affairs and its American branch, the Council on Foreign Relations. InThe World of William Clissold (1926), Wells turned to the idea of an “open conspiracy” spearheaded by multinational corporations. He foresaw how gradual extension of corporate power worldwide might entirely usurp the role of governments. What Wells had only anticipated is documented now in the work of the Trilateral Commission.
Russell advocated world government in The Impact of Science on Society. In 1928, the predictive writer Wells wrote The Open Conspiracy: Blue Prints for a World Revolution. By then he had broken with the Fabians, not in terms of their goals, but only in believing that they should be open about their plan to synthesize western capitalism with eastern communism, and create a world socialist government.
In a later book titled The New World Order (1939), Wells said, “There will be no day of days… when a new world order comes into being. Step by step and here and there it will arrive, and even as it comes into being it will develop fresh perspectives…. Countless … people will hate the new world order … and will die protesting against it.” United Nations “Agenda 21″ from 1992 reiterates these ideas. It depicts the entire world, its people and resources, centrally organized under “world controls”.
Millennial Hegemony
The problem is an ideal social order doesn’t equate with global hegemony, once called Imperialism. One world government is a British-shaped scheme. What makes Wells’s “Open Conspiracy” open, is not the execution of some secret masterplan, nor revealing the membership roster of some inner sanctum of the rich and powerful.
Global change agents know this is not the secret to power in the world. Power leverages our future shock and grief. The stages of grief are Anger, Denial, Bargaining, Depression and Acceptance. They don’t always express themselves linearly in that order. They can cycle back and forth between the stages depending on the outside triggers of the process. We’ve been traded a Bill of Goods for the Bill of Rights.
As the social engineering shown above demonstrates, power lies in understanding that ideas, philosophy and culture control history. What constitutes a conspiracy, for good or evil, is a set of ideas which embody a concept of what it is to be human, and a conception of our role in universal history. Yet these are precisely the forces that led to the Cold War and today’s Long Crisis. But this thinking is flawed in a fundamental way. From Stranger in a Strange Land to Star Trek, utopian ideals have remained more scifi carrots on a stick than realizable values.
The Millennial version is sold with memes, disaster capitalism, sloganeering and phoney grassroots movements. Now utopian ideals like globalization, one world religion, depopulation and eugenics are mobilized against us. Universalist and Panpsychic sentiments are exlpoited for transnational corporate interests, as in the latest scifi blockbuster, Avatar.
They’ve fed us occulture, pop culture, cults, drugs and greedy consumerism as remedies for induced alienation, dissociation, dystopia and destabilization. The more electronically connected we are, the more disjointed our society becomes. Instead of socialism, we get sociopathy. Add high tech and we get highly technological sociopathy. Civilization does not equal Monsanto, Dow or Eli Lilly. Nor does the scientific molding of populations into a World State.
Conspiracy Knowledge
A covert agenda was instituted to replace the overt global control of the deflated British Empire. To maintain British supremacy, the US was enlisted to fight its wars, pay its bills and strongarm the rest of the world. Germany, France and Russia were played against each other. Russell believed these aims could be accomplished through psychological warfare run by intelligence.
After WWII this hidden agenda and covert mission was largely turned over to the futurist globalist thinktank, Tavistock Institute, and its champions from Freud and Jung to its heir RAND Corporation. One of Tavistock’s Directors, the guru of counterculture, Aldous Huxley, declared, “The future is the present projected.”
Huxley framed our projected hopes and fears in Brave New World (1932), as an antidote to planless incoherence and the horror of the Wellsian Utopia. His transhuman vision and psychological conditioning has proven uncannily correct. Perennial Philosophy (1944) is mirrored in the New Age. His Doors of Perception (1954) swing so wildly, they smack us in the face.
Conspiracy embodies specialized knowledge about the field of power — who has it, who manipulates it and how, and who doesn’t. That field may or may not include an esoteric dimension. What we are really talking about is a field of relative points of view (POV). The power of conspiracy is the power of the common cause.
Conspiracy knowledge shatters the old grid of false representation. Power structures have become radically altered, leaving only simulations of reality. Power is reinforced by its false claim to reality with the language of crisis, forcibly exiling us from our national interests. Yet, the promise of a “free-market” Utopia has failed, edged out perhaps by dreams of post-cataclysm society.
Cultural Cold War
The tyranny of the One is that of the official, spin-doctored version of past and current events, and future potentials – the fabricated consensus. Conspiracy collides with Reality by exposing its naked underbelly. Like all trends and most news, conspiracy has been co-opted. Isn’t co-opting conspiracy’s oldest weapon, followed closely by willing somnambulism and tacit collusion?
Suppression and marginalization usually follow co-option, but in this case we simply become bored by conspiracy with its ubiquitous symbolism, rationalizations and minutiae. We are programmed to ignore such ideas, even when we acknowledge their large-scale dynamics. Penetrating to its core, we find a cancerous heart. Knowing hurts. Our individualism urges us to rebel against the conformity imposed by centralized power. Most people don’t go looking for conspiracy until they find it somehow impacting their lives.
You no longer need to believe doomsday scenarios, be stockpiling gold, food and weapons or joining a militia to realize that the world according to mainstream media is largely propaganda and a sales job. There is no Consumer Utopia. Most of us probably recognize that, but the effects remain in effect.
When conspiracy theories stand up to scrutiny we accept them without astonishment as a fact of life, rather than the wild tales they once seemed. But we can’t blithely dismiss them with a bland, “we know.” Common truths are becoming more common. Repo men and crippling credit debt aren’t fantasies.
The Pax Americana has not delivered. The ‘liberal’ and progressive Left is being calculatedly played against the Right. The fusion coalition (three distinct political-intellectual movements on the right: the neoconservatives or pro-Cold War social democrats and liberals, the religious right and the libertarians) survived the end of the Cold War, but not the presidency of George W. Bush.
What we are seeing now, in the second decade of the 21st century, is the rise of the Ayn Rand-inspired libertarian right, at the expense of the neocons and social conservatives. It was Rand’s hatred of religion and her praise of selfishness that irked Buckley and the movement conservatives, who were more concerned about preserving what they saw as Western civilization from communism and relativism than with creating a free-market utopia.
Forbidden Knowledge
Suppression is a pre-emptive strike at forbidden knowledge. Conspiracy harbors the seductive promise of hidden knowledge. Yet, above all, conspiracy is a human rights issue. Policy and propaganda go hand in hand. Skepticism, not gullibility, makes us to look deeper. Conspiracy is not a folly of deranged thought but an explorative examination of the challenges that confront us and vie for our acceptance, including rule by deceit. If some of these theories evaporate under scrutiny, they also provide evolving narratives to frame unforeseen scenarios.
Denials cannot be taken at face value in an era when “plausible deniability” has become virtually unnecessary and meaningless. Control mechanisms are overt and relentless. Opinion poles and phoney grassroots “movements” are created to manipulate and channel dissent. We have met the enemy and it is “us,” from terrorism to transhumanism, preying upon our own hopes and fears.
Collectively, the dynamic field of paranoia is the unconscious shadow condition of mass institutions. Paranoia is a disorder of meaning. Cognitive dissonance dwells somewhere between the ideal and the actual. Paranoia has become the background of our experience – the experiential ground. Is there any greater monomania than globalization at any human cost?
Our government is paranoid. It’s tinfoil hat, HAARP, sits in Alaska on its crown. Trapped in its own greedy delusions, leadership is caught in the first trick of the collective unconscious: acting out its Shadow as The Shadow Government, the cryptocracy. The light and the dark meet in the Twilight Zone of liminality, which has its own Uncertainty Principle. Truth always hides just around the corner. Nothing is real in the imaginal world, or everything real is illusory. Things are not what they seem.
Suspiciousness based in experience is not paranoia. Paranoia is only unfounded or exaggerated distrust. In today’s volatile world, hell-bent on globalization, paranoia may simply be prudence – care, caution and good judgment. It is foresight, sagacity, insight, and informs us what appropriate actions are in any time and place. It is a survival mechanism – sound judgment in practical affairs. Prudence also implies caution (risk-mitigation), an understanding of first-principles and open-mindedness.
Disenchanted
This is the paradox of our time – those accused of being paranoid are the only ones who are fit to judge certain issues, having bothered to acquaint themselves with all sides of each issue (circumspection). The problem with burdensome knowledge is, what are you going to do about it? That answer determines how radical you are, from depression to militancy. Today’s ‘paranoia,’ neither irrational nor delusional, originates in the erosion of civil rights by corruption. Political paranoia is not phobic. It is the only congruent existential response to the modern environment.
Once called “crazy” or “paranoid,” watchdogs willing to dig behind the obvious propaganda and put themselves at risk have been vindicated. Their accusers would probably balk at being called “stupid” or “greedy” for failing to “get it” sooner. Still, some say searching is ‘tilting at windmills,’ a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you go looking for something, chances are you will find it. But it is also a fact that many seemingly “unfortunate accidents” are quite contrived, in fact, engineered.
There is always dirt to dig up, beyond both the “official” and “cover up” theories and litany of the Triple K Assasinations (JFK, RFK, MLK) and 9/11. Perennial categories include such sweeping themes as End Times, The Occult, Suppressed and Forbidden History, Transnational Corporations, Zionism, Surveillance, Secret Societies, NWO, Suppressed Science, Mind Control, Food Control, Weather Control, Crypto-Eugenics, Superweapons, Intelligence “Dirty Tricks,” Financial Crisis, Catastrophes, Drug War, Class War, War on Terror, and Exopolitics.
‘Theory’ is not a bad word. Most of our scientific notions are theories, or best-practice models of the ways in which things must work. All “conspiracy theories” are not created equal. Some are more alarmist or credible than others. For example, even if we have set foot on the Moon, that alone does not negate unrelated conspiracy theories. All that is conspiracy is not theoretical, as global government takeover has shown. The economic crisis is about power, not money.
There is plenty of credible evidence and plausible conclusions for those not programmed into tunnel vision or turning a blind eye to what is going on around them. Yet there are ‘traditional’ and ‘liberal’ conspiracy theories rooted more in lifestyle paradigms, values and expectations than consensus reality. Are there then patriotic and anarchistic conspiracies? We all operate from a worldview that conditions what we see and accept.
America was originally a colonization scheme — the vision of New Atlantis. The web of power is a complex tapestry. Expansive and sinister schemes do exist. Most conspiracy stories are based on revisioned history, timelines and bullet points, each of which require careful examination, beyond mere ‘belief.’
Despite suppression and cover stories, the truth about events such as Iran-Contra, biowarfare, and MK Ultra experimentation on civilians has come into the light. Deliberate propaganda is called ‘disinformation’ and may be disseminated by agent provacateurs. Truth is the only weapon against shared delusions. But how do we know what’s right and how do we determine what’s true when even consensus doesn’t make it so? What does it mean to be independent in the appropriate fashion?
One Global Nation Under GOD
Civilization itself is a conspiracy. Gold, Oil and Drugs (GOD) reign supreme at the top of the foodchain. Anyone who knows the “usual suspects” – Bilderbergs, Trilaterals, and Bohemian Illuminati – needn’t cast their nets any further than the top of the hierarchal pyramid, the Banksters. The Illuminati conspiracy has taken on mythic dimensions with Masonry caught in its web.
But holographic power structures do control society at every level, each of which has its own truths and lies. It operates silently, secretively. In democracy the use of power therefore is always an abuse of power. Deleuze claims that a theory does not totalize; it is an instrument for multiplication and it also multiplies itself. It is in the nature of power to totalize and theory is by nature opposed to power.
Derrida speaks of pure sovereignty, the very “essence of sovereignty” (Rogues, p. 100). On the one hand, in order to be sovereign, one must wield power oneself, take responsibility for its use by oneself, which means that the use of power, if it is to be sovereign, must be silent; the sovereign does not have to give reasons; the sovereign must exercise power in secret. In other words, sovereignty attempts to possess power indivisibly, it tries not to share, and not sharing means contracting power into an instant — the instant of action, of an event, of a singularity.
The big takeover is over. Yet, even within the Plutocracy or oligarchy there are many competing globalist factions, including Mega-Drug Groups and other criminal enterprises. There is no single protagonist, no single ideology, nor overarching plot. Chaos crystallizes in the epic plot — a struggle between good and evil which has taken on esoteric as well as religious overtones. Political extortion is terrorism.
Utopia is the vantage point from which we judge our society and find it wanting. It fires the imagination to see how things might be different. We are forced to see our way forward through blurry vision. The Utopian spirit has fizzled out. The perfect society remains a latent possibility, because we are inherently flawed. Therefore, Utopia is nowhere, yet NowHere as a measure of our pain at being separated from the visionary ideal. But who’s ideal? Utopias are idiosyncratic. Even the New World Order was someone’s grandiose utopian vision.
Escapist and mystical Utopias evade the problems of political life today. In a world that has run out of political ideas and no longer harbors any utopian visions, real political opposition is no longer possible. Along with the vision, we lose the passion, yearning and striving. Does the impulse move us forward or tighten our chains? We tend to think there is nothing we can do about it. Leftist intellectuals and critics no longer envision a different society, only a modified one. The left once dismissed the market as exploitative, but now honors it as rational and humane. Meanwhile, the free-market economy has failed of its own bloat.
The left used to disdain mass culture, but now celebrates it as rebellious. The left once rejected pluralism as superficial, but now resurrects pluralist ideas in the guise of multiculturalism. Even techno-utopian dreams have their dark side — transhumanism, irradiation, mind control, frankenfood, etc. Video Games program children to be better soldiers. Electronics joins drugs as a soporific.
Power-Grab
Perhaps the best-kept secret — that the “Tavistock Agenda” generates the new-paradigm memes — remains the main untold story of maniuplating thinktanks, academia and thought police. It is no theory that the Police have merged with Intelligence to form Fusion Centers. We find ourselves, therefore, in a suppressive, militarized state that can be oppressive.
An even more arcane tale is that of “Tavistock West,” the tentacles of Tavistock in the United States that manipulates the polarized system from cradle to grave. Both the Left and the Right have their own orchestrated versions, from Militia, Born-Agains, Tea Parties and Birthers to New Agers, Disclosure, Ascension, Global Warming, Food Conspiracy and other eco- conspiracies.
Buzzwords like “2012,” “Peak Oil” and “Climate Change” have created obfuscation designed to confuse the whole range of the political spectrum. Because we have learned to distrust authority, we all yearn to discover the Truth, even if the news is not good. “Shock and Awe” has come home to roost. And the biggest casualty is the U.S. Constitution.
Is politics over? Apathetic silence can also have a conspiratorial effect — surrender. Such issues are far beyond the category of “Urban Legends,” or mythic anthropological narratives. We have to be honest with our own biases and prejudices. We need new research criteria for connecting the dots. Some things are safer to believe than others.
Bursting Bubbles
A series of bursting financial bubbles is finally awakening the public. Yet, long-time investigators take little satisfaction that their seed-thoughts sown in the wilderness have finally taken root. We have moved from an era of spectator democracy, to globalization or ‘corporate feudalism’, into the institutionalization of World Government – the “New Atlantis” of the Draconian Utopia of full-spectrum dominance by the Powers That Be (PTB). No superpower has remained immune from the vast restructuring. But the formerly disbelieving public has become an apathetic herd, resigned to their fate so long as endless electronic gadgets continue to flow their way.
Widespread knowledge of the hidden agenda is literally a day late and a sliding dollar short, much like the naked stock shorting that led to the current debacle – the latest bursting bubble, in a long trail from S&Ls, to Real Estate, to Wall Street, to the Gold Rush, to the Security Economy. We’ve been reluctant to believe an in enemy whose devotion to killing us goes far beyond what our generation has ever known. Those who once drank the Kool Aid have now thrown it up again.
Revisionist History
As obvious now as Watergate, who could fail to doubt the truth of such once-rumored conspiracies as the Mafia, MK Ultra, Operation Mockingbird, Air America, Iran-Contra, COINTEL PRO, the Manhatten Project, Project Paperclip, Operation Northwoods, BCCI Scandal, Federal Reserve, Operation Gladio, or The Roundtable? Electoral coups and disappointed Hope have revealed that both parties serve the dark side of global politics.
Anyone doubting the effects of the Shadow Government can quickly get up to speed with a few Googles to more reliable sites. But, be careful, because Big Brother is watching in the full-surveillance society. Who you are, what you do, and who your family and friends are is carefully monitored, as well as your travel, buying habits, and financials.
Collective Psyche
Our collective aspirations are guided by archetypal fantasies. Our disenchantment and collective grief is arguably over loss of the world soul. The collective psyche points toward and guides us through the transition period we now face. New images are arising, reframing the future. Images have healing properties. They speak to us in our sleeping and waking dreams, forging shared stories relevant to everyone in the process as well as the Cosmos itself.
We cannot separate our psychophysical symptoms from the collective environment. There is a missing dimension in our worldview and mindscapes. We sense it, even though the market and media have attempted to drain all depth from our experience. Emergent events are not merely responses to economic and climatic conditions or social engineering, but eruptions of the collective unconscious.
Mobilized, the archetypal dynamics and creative forces of the collective psyche perturb psychosocial trends, creating new possibilities. Archetypes are the psychic skeleton fleshed out by events that matter. We can’t keep our collective skeletons in the closet anymore. We can no longer charge the future to pay for our past. The marks have wised up and no longer trust the control systems.
What doesn’t effect the Collective Psyche? Perhaps humanity has never faced more multi-dimensional challenges. We need to retrieve and upgrade our human survival technologies for our metamorphosis. Healing emerges from pathology. Edge artists are the shamans of the new millennium.
Maybe we are still addicted to the Hermetic myth of futurism when we need to live in the here and now. Like Hermes, the future is a perennial Trickster: this is what you want, this is what you get — lowered expectations. Why do we hurry to live in the future? Futurism speculates about the unknown, robbing us of the present and its opportunities.
There is no quick cure for collective ills but we can find new metaphors, deeper meaning and more relevant stories. There is no therapy but moving forward creatively into the future, experimenting with solutions. Inspiration can emerge from infinite potential in any instant.
Participatory Wisdom
The only certain way to heal the personality or the world is getting to the source of wisdom. Collective consciousness is tied to the health of each individual. Healing power emerges from integration. Looking within, we arouse our tacit knowledge for participatory wisdom — the active wisdom of the collective psyche.
The same patterns are at work in the individual and collective psyche, something ungraspable in the depths. Larger patterns are at work in the collective. Global awareness, multiculturalism and multinationalism are basic to the collective psyche. But we fear the loss of old boundaries. Is this our collective Borderline disorder, emphasizing relationship disturbances that challenge our beliefs about ourselves? Is it the source of our unremitting crisis and vulnerability?
Joy is the only antidote to anxiety. We need new models for creative art and science that move us beyond the nihilism of postmodernism into the transmodern era. The exhausted culture must die for the new to emerge from its ashes. The collective death-wish plays out in a myriad of ways. The psyche is not amenable to reduction. It cannot be contained or restricted.
The Collective Psyche is a reservoir of experiences. In Jungian psychology, the collective unconscious is a part of the unconscious mind, shared by our whole species, or a society, a people, or all humankind, that is the product of ancestral experience and contains such concepts as science, religion, and morality. Jung believed this uber-consciousness is the primitive source of archetypes or universal dynamics and symbolism found in legends, poetry, and dreams. Thus, art, including technoetics, has the capacity to reveal the collective psyche.
A world view is a set of presuppositions (or assumptions) which we hold (consciously or subconsciously) about the basic makeup of our world. Everyone has a world view, whether he can explain it or not. It can be likened to a pair of glasses through which one views the world. It is important to have the right prescription, or reality will be distorted. Modem man is faced with a supermarket of world views; all of them claim to represent reality, but they are points of view about reality — mental constructs, beliefs.
EMERGENT PARADIGM: The new paradigm embraces chaos, complexity, emergent creativity and self-organization. We all participate in the evolution of consciousness, whether our transformations are conscious or unconscious. Conscious Evolution is the ethical, philosophical, intentional governance of human change and cultural engineering.
We can each conduct ourselves compassionately with spiritual responsibility for the health and unfolding of human progress. Thinking and behaving with creative intent, we form a graceful society, approaching our ideal, incorporating loving, harmonious methods also in harmony with nature. The post-metaphysical desire is to contribute to the spiritual fulfillment of all people. The needs of the many resonate with the needs of the one.
COMMITMENT TO TRUTH: What is our shared vision today? Shared visions arise from those truly committed to their personal visions. What is the true nature of this “reality” we are creating? Are we on purpose and achieving our collective destiny or has our country been hijacked by special interests? Why do we obsessively overwork, overspend, cover up, get aggressive and perpetuate sick organizations? How can we let go of our old national identity, pass through the ‘neutral zone’ and experience transforming rebirth? We need a paradigm that superimposes the new on the old. First comes a change in attitudes or worldview that embodies a different set of values in cultural rebirth.
CREATIVE STRATEGIES: How can we raise the bar? Shared vision uplifts our aspirations, gives us courage and ignites our spirit. It pulls us toward an overarching goal. It creates room for risk taking and experimentation by fostering long term commitment. We can extend principles and insights from personal mastery into the world of discipline, collective aspiration and shared commitment. The vision may come before its time is ripe, but we have to try, even to fail. We need a transition plan or crisis and confusion will arise. We can look to the past to get to the root of the problem.
~ by ionamiller on March 16, 2010.
http://ionamiller2010.iwarp.com/whats_new_34.html
What Are We Left With When ConsPIRACY Proves Right?
By Iona Miller, March 2010
Geopolitical events have cast a deep pall across our lives. Social Insight is the Third Eye of the new Mystery. Only a top-down visionary perspective can begin to capture the Big Picture.
The formula “They have the power” may have its value politically; it does not do for an historical analysis. Power is not possessed, it acts in the very body and over the whole surface of the social field according to a system of relays, modes of connection, transmission, distribution, etc. Power acts through the smallest elements: the family, sexual relations, but also: residential relations, neighborhoods, etc. As far as we go in the social network, we always find power as something that “runs through” it, that acts, that brings about effects. It becomes effective or not, that is, power is always a definite form of momentary or constantly reproduced encounters among a definite number of individuals. Power is thus not possessed because it is “in play,” because it risks itself. –Michel Foucault, Power, Truth, Strategy (1979)
We should admit…that power produces knowledge (and not simply by encouraging it because it serves power or by applying it because it is useful); that power and knowledge directly imply one another; that there is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations. –Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish (1975)
All that is ConsPIRACY is Not Theory
Formerly marginalized “Conspiracy Theory” has become mainstream with celebrity players such as Governor Jesse Ventura, Alex Jones, Mike Ruppert, Art Bell and George Noory. Multimedia has discovered there’s gold in ‘them thare conspiracies’ or it wouldn’t be producing these stories which have been underground issues for years. The trouble is, they tweak their stories for dramatic effect, often egging on those they interview into overstatements and deliberate distortions of the facts to "sell more soap". This is a parasitic process that turns truth-seeking into a media meatgrinder that chews participants up and spits them out for fresher stories. Some are forced to confabulate to keep their Q-ratings high. Simultaneously, the government is attempting to outlaw all conspiracy theories, making those who believe them criminals — terrorist enemies of the state. Reminiscent of blacklisting in by-gone eras, it sounds beyond Orwellian.
We might ask how we came to this paradox wherein the Overworld both promulgates and attacks dissent. In the end, it adds to the general confusion and obfuscation. Approximately 90 percent of the public now believes there was some kind of conspiracy to kill JFK. In the midst of “Climategate” and flu vaccine recalls, mainstream media is shamelessly profiteering from the pioneering efforts of veteran writers and media producers from the niche genre, popularized by radio shows and publications such as “Coast to Coast,” Nexus Magazine and Paranoia Magazine.
The highlight of any drama is the reveal. “Conspiracy theory” is inherently revelatory, potentially salvific – but what constitutes “correct” and “incorrect” revelation? And who is the arbiter of that consensus? Perhaps its great critique is that the genre offers few answers to its persistent questions and no adequate plan for the future.
Conspiracy knowledge should be distinguished from conspiracy theories — organized criminal enterprise, deliberate systemic fraud, doctored records, incorrigible delusions and paranormal phenomena. Sociopolitical conspiracies are a 'peopolitical' fact, not fantasy or theory, even if this history is suppressed.
Utopian Subversion
Before WWI, social engineers Bertrand Russell and H.G. Wells first promoted utopian ideals, world government and “open conspiracy.” Echoing Sir Francis Bacon’s esoteric notions of a ‘New Atlantis,’ the British Fabian Socialist Society was organized around 1883 by George Bernard Shaw, H.G. Wells, Sidney Webb, Annie Besant, and others. Bertrand Russell joined the organization sometime later. With fellow Fabian socialists, they adopted the long view — tactics of delay and gradual penetration.
Wells is arguably the first futurist, a pioneer of future studies as demonstrated in Anticipations of the Reactions of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon Human Life and Thought and The Discovery of the Future. Attempting self-fulfilling prophecy, Wells created utopian-socialist visions in little-known works including A Modern Utopia (1905) and Men Like Gods (1923). In the Days of the Comet (1906) he resorted to changing human nature with personality-improving gases shed by a comet’s tail, ushering in his Utopia of universal free love. Utopias promise a measure of meaning and autonomy in our lives. Yet, Wells wrote propaganda during WWI.
After World War I ended, members of Cecil Rhodes’ Round Table Group met with The Inquiry, led by Colonel Edward Mandell House. Working with the Fabian Socialists, they established the Royal Institute of International Affairs and its American branch, the Council on Foreign Relations. InThe World of William Clissold (1926), Wells turned to the idea of an “open conspiracy” spearheaded by multinational corporations. He foresaw how gradual extension of corporate power worldwide might entirely usurp the role of governments. What Wells had only anticipated is documented now in the work of the Trilateral Commission.
Russell advocated world government in The Impact of Science on Society. In 1928, the predictive writer Wells wrote The Open Conspiracy: Blue Prints for a World Revolution. By then he had broken with the Fabians, not in terms of their goals, but only in believing that they should be open about their plan to synthesize western capitalism with eastern communism, and create a world socialist government.
In a later book titled The New World Order (1939), Wells said, “There will be no day of days… when a new world order comes into being. Step by step and here and there it will arrive, and even as it comes into being it will develop fresh perspectives…. Countless … people will hate the new world order … and will die protesting against it.” United Nations “Agenda 21″ from 1992 reiterates these ideas. It depicts the entire world, its people and resources, centrally organized under “world controls”.
Millennial Hegemony
The problem is an ideal social order doesn’t equate with global hegemony, once called Imperialism. One world government is a British-shaped scheme. What makes Wells’s “Open Conspiracy” open, is not the execution of some secret masterplan, nor revealing the membership roster of some inner sanctum of the rich and powerful.
Global change agents know this is not the secret to power in the world. Power leverages our future shock and grief. The stages of grief are Anger, Denial, Bargaining, Depression and Acceptance. They don’t always express themselves linearly in that order. They can cycle back and forth between the stages depending on the outside triggers of the process. We’ve been traded a Bill of Goods for the Bill of Rights.
As the social engineering shown above demonstrates, power lies in understanding that ideas, philosophy and culture control history. What constitutes a conspiracy, for good or evil, is a set of ideas which embody a concept of what it is to be human, and a conception of our role in universal history. Yet these are precisely the forces that led to the Cold War and today’s Long Crisis. But this thinking is flawed in a fundamental way. From Stranger in a Strange Land to Star Trek, utopian ideals have remained more scifi carrots on a stick than realizable values.
The Millennial version is sold with memes, disaster capitalism, sloganeering and phoney grassroots movements. Now utopian ideals like globalization, one world religion, depopulation and eugenics are mobilized against us. Universalist and Panpsychic sentiments are exlpoited for transnational corporate interests, as in the latest scifi blockbuster, Avatar.
They’ve fed us occulture, pop culture, cults, drugs and greedy consumerism as remedies for induced alienation, dissociation, dystopia and destabilization. The more electronically connected we are, the more disjointed our society becomes. Instead of socialism, we get sociopathy. Add high tech and we get highly technological sociopathy. Civilization does not equal Monsanto, Dow or Eli Lilly. Nor does the scientific molding of populations into a World State.
Conspiracy Knowledge
A covert agenda was instituted to replace the overt global control of the deflated British Empire. To maintain British supremacy, the US was enlisted to fight its wars, pay its bills and strongarm the rest of the world. Germany, France and Russia were played against each other. Russell believed these aims could be accomplished through psychological warfare run by intelligence.
After WWII this hidden agenda and covert mission was largely turned over to the futurist globalist thinktank, Tavistock Institute, and its champions from Freud and Jung to its heir RAND Corporation. One of Tavistock’s Directors, the guru of counterculture, Aldous Huxley, declared, “The future is the present projected.”
Huxley framed our projected hopes and fears in Brave New World (1932), as an antidote to planless incoherence and the horror of the Wellsian Utopia. His transhuman vision and psychological conditioning has proven uncannily correct. Perennial Philosophy (1944) is mirrored in the New Age. His Doors of Perception (1954) swing so wildly, they smack us in the face.
Conspiracy embodies specialized knowledge about the field of power — who has it, who manipulates it and how, and who doesn’t. That field may or may not include an esoteric dimension. What we are really talking about is a field of relative points of view (POV). The power of conspiracy is the power of the common cause.
Conspiracy knowledge shatters the old grid of false representation. Power structures have become radically altered, leaving only simulations of reality. Power is reinforced by its false claim to reality with the language of crisis, forcibly exiling us from our national interests. Yet, the promise of a “free-market” Utopia has failed, edged out perhaps by dreams of post-cataclysm society.
Cultural Cold War
The tyranny of the One is that of the official, spin-doctored version of past and current events, and future potentials – the fabricated consensus. Conspiracy collides with Reality by exposing its naked underbelly. Like all trends and most news, conspiracy has been co-opted. Isn’t co-opting conspiracy’s oldest weapon, followed closely by willing somnambulism and tacit collusion?
Suppression and marginalization usually follow co-option, but in this case we simply become bored by conspiracy with its ubiquitous symbolism, rationalizations and minutiae. We are programmed to ignore such ideas, even when we acknowledge their large-scale dynamics. Penetrating to its core, we find a cancerous heart. Knowing hurts. Our individualism urges us to rebel against the conformity imposed by centralized power. Most people don’t go looking for conspiracy until they find it somehow impacting their lives.
You no longer need to believe doomsday scenarios, be stockpiling gold, food and weapons or joining a militia to realize that the world according to mainstream media is largely propaganda and a sales job. There is no Consumer Utopia. Most of us probably recognize that, but the effects remain in effect.
When conspiracy theories stand up to scrutiny we accept them without astonishment as a fact of life, rather than the wild tales they once seemed. But we can’t blithely dismiss them with a bland, “we know.” Common truths are becoming more common. Repo men and crippling credit debt aren’t fantasies.
The Pax Americana has not delivered. The ‘liberal’ and progressive Left is being calculatedly played against the Right. The fusion coalition (three distinct political-intellectual movements on the right: the neoconservatives or pro-Cold War social democrats and liberals, the religious right and the libertarians) survived the end of the Cold War, but not the presidency of George W. Bush.
What we are seeing now, in the second decade of the 21st century, is the rise of the Ayn Rand-inspired libertarian right, at the expense of the neocons and social conservatives. It was Rand’s hatred of religion and her praise of selfishness that irked Buckley and the movement conservatives, who were more concerned about preserving what they saw as Western civilization from communism and relativism than with creating a free-market utopia.
Forbidden Knowledge
Suppression is a pre-emptive strike at forbidden knowledge. Conspiracy harbors the seductive promise of hidden knowledge. Yet, above all, conspiracy is a human rights issue. Policy and propaganda go hand in hand. Skepticism, not gullibility, makes us to look deeper. Conspiracy is not a folly of deranged thought but an explorative examination of the challenges that confront us and vie for our acceptance, including rule by deceit. If some of these theories evaporate under scrutiny, they also provide evolving narratives to frame unforeseen scenarios.
Denials cannot be taken at face value in an era when “plausible deniability” has become virtually unnecessary and meaningless. Control mechanisms are overt and relentless. Opinion poles and phoney grassroots “movements” are created to manipulate and channel dissent. We have met the enemy and it is “us,” from terrorism to transhumanism, preying upon our own hopes and fears.
Collectively, the dynamic field of paranoia is the unconscious shadow condition of mass institutions. Paranoia is a disorder of meaning. Cognitive dissonance dwells somewhere between the ideal and the actual. Paranoia has become the background of our experience – the experiential ground. Is there any greater monomania than globalization at any human cost?
Our government is paranoid. It’s tinfoil hat, HAARP, sits in Alaska on its crown. Trapped in its own greedy delusions, leadership is caught in the first trick of the collective unconscious: acting out its Shadow as The Shadow Government, the cryptocracy. The light and the dark meet in the Twilight Zone of liminality, which has its own Uncertainty Principle. Truth always hides just around the corner. Nothing is real in the imaginal world, or everything real is illusory. Things are not what they seem.
Suspiciousness based in experience is not paranoia. Paranoia is only unfounded or exaggerated distrust. In today’s volatile world, hell-bent on globalization, paranoia may simply be prudence – care, caution and good judgment. It is foresight, sagacity, insight, and informs us what appropriate actions are in any time and place. It is a survival mechanism – sound judgment in practical affairs. Prudence also implies caution (risk-mitigation), an understanding of first-principles and open-mindedness.
Disenchanted
This is the paradox of our time – those accused of being paranoid are the only ones who are fit to judge certain issues, having bothered to acquaint themselves with all sides of each issue (circumspection). The problem with burdensome knowledge is, what are you going to do about it? That answer determines how radical you are, from depression to militancy. Today’s ‘paranoia,’ neither irrational nor delusional, originates in the erosion of civil rights by corruption. Political paranoia is not phobic. It is the only congruent existential response to the modern environment.
Once called “crazy” or “paranoid,” watchdogs willing to dig behind the obvious propaganda and put themselves at risk have been vindicated. Their accusers would probably balk at being called “stupid” or “greedy” for failing to “get it” sooner. Still, some say searching is ‘tilting at windmills,’ a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you go looking for something, chances are you will find it. But it is also a fact that many seemingly “unfortunate accidents” are quite contrived, in fact, engineered.
There is always dirt to dig up, beyond both the “official” and “cover up” theories and litany of the Triple K Assasinations (JFK, RFK, MLK) and 9/11. Perennial categories include such sweeping themes as End Times, The Occult, Suppressed and Forbidden History, Transnational Corporations, Zionism, Surveillance, Secret Societies, NWO, Suppressed Science, Mind Control, Food Control, Weather Control, Crypto-Eugenics, Superweapons, Intelligence “Dirty Tricks,” Financial Crisis, Catastrophes, Drug War, Class War, War on Terror, and Exopolitics.
‘Theory’ is not a bad word. Most of our scientific notions are theories, or best-practice models of the ways in which things must work. All “conspiracy theories” are not created equal. Some are more alarmist or credible than others. For example, even if we have set foot on the Moon, that alone does not negate unrelated conspiracy theories. All that is conspiracy is not theoretical, as global government takeover has shown. The economic crisis is about power, not money.
There is plenty of credible evidence and plausible conclusions for those not programmed into tunnel vision or turning a blind eye to what is going on around them. Yet there are ‘traditional’ and ‘liberal’ conspiracy theories rooted more in lifestyle paradigms, values and expectations than consensus reality. Are there then patriotic and anarchistic conspiracies? We all operate from a worldview that conditions what we see and accept.
America was originally a colonization scheme — the vision of New Atlantis. The web of power is a complex tapestry. Expansive and sinister schemes do exist. Most conspiracy stories are based on revisioned history, timelines and bullet points, each of which require careful examination, beyond mere ‘belief.’
Despite suppression and cover stories, the truth about events such as Iran-Contra, biowarfare, and MK Ultra experimentation on civilians has come into the light. Deliberate propaganda is called ‘disinformation’ and may be disseminated by agent provacateurs. Truth is the only weapon against shared delusions. But how do we know what’s right and how do we determine what’s true when even consensus doesn’t make it so? What does it mean to be independent in the appropriate fashion?
One Global Nation Under GOD
Civilization itself is a conspiracy. Gold, Oil and Drugs (GOD) reign supreme at the top of the foodchain. Anyone who knows the “usual suspects” – Bilderbergs, Trilaterals, and Bohemian Illuminati – needn’t cast their nets any further than the top of the hierarchal pyramid, the Banksters. The Illuminati conspiracy has taken on mythic dimensions with Masonry caught in its web.
But holographic power structures do control society at every level, each of which has its own truths and lies. It operates silently, secretively. In democracy the use of power therefore is always an abuse of power. Deleuze claims that a theory does not totalize; it is an instrument for multiplication and it also multiplies itself. It is in the nature of power to totalize and theory is by nature opposed to power.
Derrida speaks of pure sovereignty, the very “essence of sovereignty” (Rogues, p. 100). On the one hand, in order to be sovereign, one must wield power oneself, take responsibility for its use by oneself, which means that the use of power, if it is to be sovereign, must be silent; the sovereign does not have to give reasons; the sovereign must exercise power in secret. In other words, sovereignty attempts to possess power indivisibly, it tries not to share, and not sharing means contracting power into an instant — the instant of action, of an event, of a singularity.
The big takeover is over. Yet, even within the Plutocracy or oligarchy there are many competing globalist factions, including Mega-Drug Groups and other criminal enterprises. There is no single protagonist, no single ideology, nor overarching plot. Chaos crystallizes in the epic plot — a struggle between good and evil which has taken on esoteric as well as religious overtones. Political extortion is terrorism.
Utopia is the vantage point from which we judge our society and find it wanting. It fires the imagination to see how things might be different. We are forced to see our way forward through blurry vision. The Utopian spirit has fizzled out. The perfect society remains a latent possibility, because we are inherently flawed. Therefore, Utopia is nowhere, yet NowHere as a measure of our pain at being separated from the visionary ideal. But who’s ideal? Utopias are idiosyncratic. Even the New World Order was someone’s grandiose utopian vision.
Escapist and mystical Utopias evade the problems of political life today. In a world that has run out of political ideas and no longer harbors any utopian visions, real political opposition is no longer possible. Along with the vision, we lose the passion, yearning and striving. Does the impulse move us forward or tighten our chains? We tend to think there is nothing we can do about it. Leftist intellectuals and critics no longer envision a different society, only a modified one. The left once dismissed the market as exploitative, but now honors it as rational and humane. Meanwhile, the free-market economy has failed of its own bloat.
The left used to disdain mass culture, but now celebrates it as rebellious. The left once rejected pluralism as superficial, but now resurrects pluralist ideas in the guise of multiculturalism. Even techno-utopian dreams have their dark side — transhumanism, irradiation, mind control, frankenfood, etc. Video Games program children to be better soldiers. Electronics joins drugs as a soporific.
Power-Grab
Perhaps the best-kept secret — that the “Tavistock Agenda” generates the new-paradigm memes — remains the main untold story of maniuplating thinktanks, academia and thought police. It is no theory that the Police have merged with Intelligence to form Fusion Centers. We find ourselves, therefore, in a suppressive, militarized state that can be oppressive.
An even more arcane tale is that of “Tavistock West,” the tentacles of Tavistock in the United States that manipulates the polarized system from cradle to grave. Both the Left and the Right have their own orchestrated versions, from Militia, Born-Agains, Tea Parties and Birthers to New Agers, Disclosure, Ascension, Global Warming, Food Conspiracy and other eco- conspiracies.
Buzzwords like “2012,” “Peak Oil” and “Climate Change” have created obfuscation designed to confuse the whole range of the political spectrum. Because we have learned to distrust authority, we all yearn to discover the Truth, even if the news is not good. “Shock and Awe” has come home to roost. And the biggest casualty is the U.S. Constitution.
Is politics over? Apathetic silence can also have a conspiratorial effect — surrender. Such issues are far beyond the category of “Urban Legends,” or mythic anthropological narratives. We have to be honest with our own biases and prejudices. We need new research criteria for connecting the dots. Some things are safer to believe than others.
Bursting Bubbles
A series of bursting financial bubbles is finally awakening the public. Yet, long-time investigators take little satisfaction that their seed-thoughts sown in the wilderness have finally taken root. We have moved from an era of spectator democracy, to globalization or ‘corporate feudalism’, into the institutionalization of World Government – the “New Atlantis” of the Draconian Utopia of full-spectrum dominance by the Powers That Be (PTB). No superpower has remained immune from the vast restructuring. But the formerly disbelieving public has become an apathetic herd, resigned to their fate so long as endless electronic gadgets continue to flow their way.
Widespread knowledge of the hidden agenda is literally a day late and a sliding dollar short, much like the naked stock shorting that led to the current debacle – the latest bursting bubble, in a long trail from S&Ls, to Real Estate, to Wall Street, to the Gold Rush, to the Security Economy. We’ve been reluctant to believe an in enemy whose devotion to killing us goes far beyond what our generation has ever known. Those who once drank the Kool Aid have now thrown it up again.
Revisionist History
As obvious now as Watergate, who could fail to doubt the truth of such once-rumored conspiracies as the Mafia, MK Ultra, Operation Mockingbird, Air America, Iran-Contra, COINTEL PRO, the Manhatten Project, Project Paperclip, Operation Northwoods, BCCI Scandal, Federal Reserve, Operation Gladio, or The Roundtable? Electoral coups and disappointed Hope have revealed that both parties serve the dark side of global politics.
Anyone doubting the effects of the Shadow Government can quickly get up to speed with a few Googles to more reliable sites. But, be careful, because Big Brother is watching in the full-surveillance society. Who you are, what you do, and who your family and friends are is carefully monitored, as well as your travel, buying habits, and financials.
Collective Psyche
Our collective aspirations are guided by archetypal fantasies. Our disenchantment and collective grief is arguably over loss of the world soul. The collective psyche points toward and guides us through the transition period we now face. New images are arising, reframing the future. Images have healing properties. They speak to us in our sleeping and waking dreams, forging shared stories relevant to everyone in the process as well as the Cosmos itself.
We cannot separate our psychophysical symptoms from the collective environment. There is a missing dimension in our worldview and mindscapes. We sense it, even though the market and media have attempted to drain all depth from our experience. Emergent events are not merely responses to economic and climatic conditions or social engineering, but eruptions of the collective unconscious.
Mobilized, the archetypal dynamics and creative forces of the collective psyche perturb psychosocial trends, creating new possibilities. Archetypes are the psychic skeleton fleshed out by events that matter. We can’t keep our collective skeletons in the closet anymore. We can no longer charge the future to pay for our past. The marks have wised up and no longer trust the control systems.
What doesn’t effect the Collective Psyche? Perhaps humanity has never faced more multi-dimensional challenges. We need to retrieve and upgrade our human survival technologies for our metamorphosis. Healing emerges from pathology. Edge artists are the shamans of the new millennium.
Maybe we are still addicted to the Hermetic myth of futurism when we need to live in the here and now. Like Hermes, the future is a perennial Trickster: this is what you want, this is what you get — lowered expectations. Why do we hurry to live in the future? Futurism speculates about the unknown, robbing us of the present and its opportunities.
There is no quick cure for collective ills but we can find new metaphors, deeper meaning and more relevant stories. There is no therapy but moving forward creatively into the future, experimenting with solutions. Inspiration can emerge from infinite potential in any instant.
Participatory Wisdom
The only certain way to heal the personality or the world is getting to the source of wisdom. Collective consciousness is tied to the health of each individual. Healing power emerges from integration. Looking within, we arouse our tacit knowledge for participatory wisdom — the active wisdom of the collective psyche.
The same patterns are at work in the individual and collective psyche, something ungraspable in the depths. Larger patterns are at work in the collective. Global awareness, multiculturalism and multinationalism are basic to the collective psyche. But we fear the loss of old boundaries. Is this our collective Borderline disorder, emphasizing relationship disturbances that challenge our beliefs about ourselves? Is it the source of our unremitting crisis and vulnerability?
Joy is the only antidote to anxiety. We need new models for creative art and science that move us beyond the nihilism of postmodernism into the transmodern era. The exhausted culture must die for the new to emerge from its ashes. The collective death-wish plays out in a myriad of ways. The psyche is not amenable to reduction. It cannot be contained or restricted.
The Collective Psyche is a reservoir of experiences. In Jungian psychology, the collective unconscious is a part of the unconscious mind, shared by our whole species, or a society, a people, or all humankind, that is the product of ancestral experience and contains such concepts as science, religion, and morality. Jung believed this uber-consciousness is the primitive source of archetypes or universal dynamics and symbolism found in legends, poetry, and dreams. Thus, art, including technoetics, has the capacity to reveal the collective psyche.
A world view is a set of presuppositions (or assumptions) which we hold (consciously or subconsciously) about the basic makeup of our world. Everyone has a world view, whether he can explain it or not. It can be likened to a pair of glasses through which one views the world. It is important to have the right prescription, or reality will be distorted. Modem man is faced with a supermarket of world views; all of them claim to represent reality, but they are points of view about reality — mental constructs, beliefs.
EMERGENT PARADIGM: The new paradigm embraces chaos, complexity, emergent creativity and self-organization. We all participate in the evolution of consciousness, whether our transformations are conscious or unconscious. Conscious Evolution is the ethical, philosophical, intentional governance of human change and cultural engineering.
We can each conduct ourselves compassionately with spiritual responsibility for the health and unfolding of human progress. Thinking and behaving with creative intent, we form a graceful society, approaching our ideal, incorporating loving, harmonious methods also in harmony with nature. The post-metaphysical desire is to contribute to the spiritual fulfillment of all people. The needs of the many resonate with the needs of the one.
COMMITMENT TO TRUTH: What is our shared vision today? Shared visions arise from those truly committed to their personal visions. What is the true nature of this “reality” we are creating? Are we on purpose and achieving our collective destiny or has our country been hijacked by special interests? Why do we obsessively overwork, overspend, cover up, get aggressive and perpetuate sick organizations? How can we let go of our old national identity, pass through the ‘neutral zone’ and experience transforming rebirth? We need a paradigm that superimposes the new on the old. First comes a change in attitudes or worldview that embodies a different set of values in cultural rebirth.
CREATIVE STRATEGIES: How can we raise the bar? Shared vision uplifts our aspirations, gives us courage and ignites our spirit. It pulls us toward an overarching goal. It creates room for risk taking and experimentation by fostering long term commitment. We can extend principles and insights from personal mastery into the world of discipline, collective aspiration and shared commitment. The vision may come before its time is ripe, but we have to try, even to fail. We need a transition plan or crisis and confusion will arise. We can look to the past to get to the root of the problem.
~ by ionamiller on March 16, 2010.
Guerrilla Information War
THE GUERRILLA INFORMATION WAR
“Paramedia” describes what happens when peers come together in networks of influence, using media innovation. In the era of USER AS CONTENT, self-organizing people with the status skillsets of traditional media and access to media publishing tools converge in mutually-reinforcing, democratic and purposeful new ways beyond journalism and the shameless self-promotion of "Web 2.0" and other non-compliant media and distribution channels.
DIY Media: Paramedia, including desktop cinema, is the medium of the "Naughties." Arguably, it is the single most important factor in current social evolution, light years beyond the offerings of dry pedagogy and endless Power Point presentations. It penetrates deeply into the gaps of conventional culture, rigidity and atrophy, bursting it apart at the seams, like overripe fruit. It is a chaotic factor mirroring the criticality of our times, and magnifying its influence through the butterfly effect of info-memes.
Infowars: Taking its message directly to the people who either actively seek it or come upon it synchronistically, it is a new way of teaching and learning that suits our busy lifestyles and our infolust for concise, up to the minute reportage, analysis and application. As with all media, once you digest the content, you are invited to make up your mind for yourself.
Paramedia Ecology describes the peer-to-peer world of subtle interactions of the sum of all such evolutionary media interactions, networks of influence, and peer relationships. It includes social and political potential, agitprop, blogging, podcasting, videocasting, network nodes, tiny TV, YouTube, and the next thing we haven't heard about yet but will soon all be doing.
• Paramedia is a form of media that applies the training that has been largely restricted to journalists, artists and storytellers by limited access to the tools and channels for making and distributing messages;
• Paramedia operate beside, between, above and below the traditional practitioners of media and the paramedia channels enjoy an increasingly similar access to audiences through distribution channels.
• Paramedia can be dysfunctional; the assumption by established media is that paramedia is essentially flawed by a lack of professionalism. Paramedia people, likewise, believe the conventional media they supersede is dysfunctional. (Ratcliffe).
"McLuhan believed that electronic environments were molding people on a scale that was greater than any artwork, and that, therefore, artists should embrace the technologies of the future," says Paramedia Ecologist, Bob Dobbs."By this, he meant that in mass media environments, people are molded not only by the content but by a sensory bias specific to the medium," says Dobbs. For digital media, he adopted a different adage, that the "user is the content."
McLuhan's "put on" is the mysterious process of continual mutual transformation, resulting from a reciprocal dynamic whereby a reader's perceptions are altered by putting on a mask or poem, and a writer or maker puts on the reader, having to project his own image as the mask of the user or reader. McLuhan would later note that the "complexity of this process is such that even literary critics have despaired of ever unravelling it. Critics of the press, on the other hand, are accustomed to label the whole thing as degrading…" given that in the commercial sphere, the process can be referred to as "giving the public what it wants." He continues, "this process is at the very heart of any communication activity…It is certain to remain the central issue so long as readers are human and not merely robots." -Andrew Crystall
STAY TUNED
Now, it's time for the TAKE OFF, as we all GET REAL, online or off, once again ~ what is called in media ecology, the ANTHROPOMORPHIC PHYSICAL (AP), the physical body - not just the chip-body.
The audience is US, the users, the DOWNLOADABLE HUMANS.
MYTH IS the pattern of information/culture/community/technology and words/archetype/story/passion. Previously myth was imposed, now it is evoked. Instead of ruling people by controlling their passions, we rule through their passions. Myth is passion and under the electric myth all passions are retrieved and recycled simultaneously as software "form" (to live in on a long-term basis) and as hardware "content" (short-term and temporary lifespan). In terms of communication, which is what a medium is - it's shared information, it's community - shared communities and archetypes are talking, living out loud.
"We are polluting Art as fast as we are tidying up Nature. The people of the Earth are encouraged to engage in an experiment of utmost urgency. We must turn off the electric environment for a period of one week to perform a cleansing of mass-man's mind, body and spirit. We must get back to our bodies, lest we forget they are still there! Imagine the freedom to be experienced as the top-down cultural control of civilization is eradicated for even the briefest period! If everyone did participate in the media Fast, how would we know it happened? Stay tuned..." ~ Bob Dobbs
Who are we?
What we need is a new existential paradigm, a design pattern for putting knowledge into action. Doctors tell us we don't know the simplest things like how to eat or sleep properly. Psychologists tell us we don't know how to behave and politics shows us we don't know how to get along. Pundits and talking heads tell us we don't know how to think critically. We don't know what to believe, and fall victim to mind control, the spiritual supermarket, memes, agitprop and propaganda, and our own outworn childhood scripts.
We need a new Participatory Wisdom for how to be and how to get along in our rapidly changing world. We need to change the architecture of our participation with self, others and world for a richer user experience, an attitude not a technology. Science isn't the panacea. Soon it will make us Borg, transhumans with bioelectronic supplementation. Science still doesn't know what energy, matter, electricity, life, or the cosmos is, but the secret of the Universe is that IT's ALIVE! And so are we.
Calm Passion
It is that very nonmechanical liveliness, the joi de vivre of passion that best communicates our holistic Presence to others, to the world. In ancient times, wisdom was thought of as the type of knowledge needed to discern the good and live the good life. It was one of the four virtues, including justice, moderation, and courage which comes from the heart as the root 'couer' shows. The pursuit of wisdom comes from a willingness to expose the pretenses of wisdom wherever we find it, even in ourselves. It gives us the infallible judgment to discern what is worthy of pursuit.
The "courage to be" -- what we potentially are, our mission and raison d'etre -- is essentially an ethical act of affirming our identity despite any shortcomings or the possibility of dreadful outcomes. It is embodied in two basic life strategies, which can be summed up as, "Say it then play it" or "Play it and then say it."
In the former we declare our intent. We begin with an inspiration, fantasy or desire, name it then go about the process of making it so. In the later, we place ourselves in the matrix of spontaneous events and find ourselves living larger than life, and then maximize that fortune to parlay it into further opportunities for fantastic experiences. Wisdom is developed through experience, insight and reflection -- the common sense of foresight, or "connecting the dots."
Philosophy as the love of wisdom is a metaphysical pursuit which opens the depth dimension. Sure, each of us can be wise in our craft, but that is merely a steppingstone to the greater accomplishment of a well-lived life, optimizing our talents and opportunities for expression. Knowledge is the basis for making good choices. Without the right information, we are stuck in the "garbage in/garbage out" modality.
Participatory Wisdom
Practical wisdom, then, means the disposition and skill to use knowledge in the right ways -- fully actualized power. Skepticism toward rigid dogmas and even our own beliefs helps us stay quietly open to the opportunities which might otherwise be lost. In this mode, faith comes from a solid connection with the nurturing Ground of our Being, the inherent power of self-affirmation, despite the threat of nonbeing.
Faith in oneself pragmatically confronts and transcends both theism and mysticism with a skeptical eye toward their limiting content. In this regard, it affirms radical freedom. This is a freedom to simply be what we are, more fully, without cultural or "imported" conditioning. Insecurities remain, but are no longer paralyzing. When the inner aim is true, we cannot help but be drawn forward toward our own Truth. Aligning ourselves with others who appreciate the fundamental interconnectedness of life helps us thrive. It opens the door to both learning and mentoring others.
Courage in the face of the unknown is a gift of our Spirit. This strength of mind and heart is our Essence, our essential nature, which can neither be taught nor learned, but is a grace. It means power over oneself to muster and self-regulate inspiration, mood and creativity. It gives us the will to surpass ourselves, and joy in doing so. Without courage, we can tolerate neither failure nor success. With it, we can face the prospect of setbacks, guilt, condemnation and even death, for our lives are not empty nor meaningless...but a grand work of art, an artfully lived life with the acceptance that what IS-IS.
Thus, seeking and promoting wisdom means the capacity to realize what is of value in life for oneself and others, including knowledge and technological know-how, but much else besides that is the domain of aesthetics - Art with Heart.
“Paramedia” describes what happens when peers come together in networks of influence, using media innovation. In the era of USER AS CONTENT, self-organizing people with the status skillsets of traditional media and access to media publishing tools converge in mutually-reinforcing, democratic and purposeful new ways beyond journalism and the shameless self-promotion of "Web 2.0" and other non-compliant media and distribution channels.
DIY Media: Paramedia, including desktop cinema, is the medium of the "Naughties." Arguably, it is the single most important factor in current social evolution, light years beyond the offerings of dry pedagogy and endless Power Point presentations. It penetrates deeply into the gaps of conventional culture, rigidity and atrophy, bursting it apart at the seams, like overripe fruit. It is a chaotic factor mirroring the criticality of our times, and magnifying its influence through the butterfly effect of info-memes.
Infowars: Taking its message directly to the people who either actively seek it or come upon it synchronistically, it is a new way of teaching and learning that suits our busy lifestyles and our infolust for concise, up to the minute reportage, analysis and application. As with all media, once you digest the content, you are invited to make up your mind for yourself.
Paramedia Ecology describes the peer-to-peer world of subtle interactions of the sum of all such evolutionary media interactions, networks of influence, and peer relationships. It includes social and political potential, agitprop, blogging, podcasting, videocasting, network nodes, tiny TV, YouTube, and the next thing we haven't heard about yet but will soon all be doing.
• Paramedia is a form of media that applies the training that has been largely restricted to journalists, artists and storytellers by limited access to the tools and channels for making and distributing messages;
• Paramedia operate beside, between, above and below the traditional practitioners of media and the paramedia channels enjoy an increasingly similar access to audiences through distribution channels.
• Paramedia can be dysfunctional; the assumption by established media is that paramedia is essentially flawed by a lack of professionalism. Paramedia people, likewise, believe the conventional media they supersede is dysfunctional. (Ratcliffe).
"McLuhan believed that electronic environments were molding people on a scale that was greater than any artwork, and that, therefore, artists should embrace the technologies of the future," says Paramedia Ecologist, Bob Dobbs."By this, he meant that in mass media environments, people are molded not only by the content but by a sensory bias specific to the medium," says Dobbs. For digital media, he adopted a different adage, that the "user is the content."
McLuhan's "put on" is the mysterious process of continual mutual transformation, resulting from a reciprocal dynamic whereby a reader's perceptions are altered by putting on a mask or poem, and a writer or maker puts on the reader, having to project his own image as the mask of the user or reader. McLuhan would later note that the "complexity of this process is such that even literary critics have despaired of ever unravelling it. Critics of the press, on the other hand, are accustomed to label the whole thing as degrading…" given that in the commercial sphere, the process can be referred to as "giving the public what it wants." He continues, "this process is at the very heart of any communication activity…It is certain to remain the central issue so long as readers are human and not merely robots." -Andrew Crystall
STAY TUNED
Now, it's time for the TAKE OFF, as we all GET REAL, online or off, once again ~ what is called in media ecology, the ANTHROPOMORPHIC PHYSICAL (AP), the physical body - not just the chip-body.
The audience is US, the users, the DOWNLOADABLE HUMANS.
MYTH IS the pattern of information/culture/community/technology and words/archetype/story/passion. Previously myth was imposed, now it is evoked. Instead of ruling people by controlling their passions, we rule through their passions. Myth is passion and under the electric myth all passions are retrieved and recycled simultaneously as software "form" (to live in on a long-term basis) and as hardware "content" (short-term and temporary lifespan). In terms of communication, which is what a medium is - it's shared information, it's community - shared communities and archetypes are talking, living out loud.
"We are polluting Art as fast as we are tidying up Nature. The people of the Earth are encouraged to engage in an experiment of utmost urgency. We must turn off the electric environment for a period of one week to perform a cleansing of mass-man's mind, body and spirit. We must get back to our bodies, lest we forget they are still there! Imagine the freedom to be experienced as the top-down cultural control of civilization is eradicated for even the briefest period! If everyone did participate in the media Fast, how would we know it happened? Stay tuned..." ~ Bob Dobbs
Who are we?
What we need is a new existential paradigm, a design pattern for putting knowledge into action. Doctors tell us we don't know the simplest things like how to eat or sleep properly. Psychologists tell us we don't know how to behave and politics shows us we don't know how to get along. Pundits and talking heads tell us we don't know how to think critically. We don't know what to believe, and fall victim to mind control, the spiritual supermarket, memes, agitprop and propaganda, and our own outworn childhood scripts.
We need a new Participatory Wisdom for how to be and how to get along in our rapidly changing world. We need to change the architecture of our participation with self, others and world for a richer user experience, an attitude not a technology. Science isn't the panacea. Soon it will make us Borg, transhumans with bioelectronic supplementation. Science still doesn't know what energy, matter, electricity, life, or the cosmos is, but the secret of the Universe is that IT's ALIVE! And so are we.
Calm Passion
It is that very nonmechanical liveliness, the joi de vivre of passion that best communicates our holistic Presence to others, to the world. In ancient times, wisdom was thought of as the type of knowledge needed to discern the good and live the good life. It was one of the four virtues, including justice, moderation, and courage which comes from the heart as the root 'couer' shows. The pursuit of wisdom comes from a willingness to expose the pretenses of wisdom wherever we find it, even in ourselves. It gives us the infallible judgment to discern what is worthy of pursuit.
The "courage to be" -- what we potentially are, our mission and raison d'etre -- is essentially an ethical act of affirming our identity despite any shortcomings or the possibility of dreadful outcomes. It is embodied in two basic life strategies, which can be summed up as, "Say it then play it" or "Play it and then say it."
In the former we declare our intent. We begin with an inspiration, fantasy or desire, name it then go about the process of making it so. In the later, we place ourselves in the matrix of spontaneous events and find ourselves living larger than life, and then maximize that fortune to parlay it into further opportunities for fantastic experiences. Wisdom is developed through experience, insight and reflection -- the common sense of foresight, or "connecting the dots."
Philosophy as the love of wisdom is a metaphysical pursuit which opens the depth dimension. Sure, each of us can be wise in our craft, but that is merely a steppingstone to the greater accomplishment of a well-lived life, optimizing our talents and opportunities for expression. Knowledge is the basis for making good choices. Without the right information, we are stuck in the "garbage in/garbage out" modality.
Participatory Wisdom
Practical wisdom, then, means the disposition and skill to use knowledge in the right ways -- fully actualized power. Skepticism toward rigid dogmas and even our own beliefs helps us stay quietly open to the opportunities which might otherwise be lost. In this mode, faith comes from a solid connection with the nurturing Ground of our Being, the inherent power of self-affirmation, despite the threat of nonbeing.
Faith in oneself pragmatically confronts and transcends both theism and mysticism with a skeptical eye toward their limiting content. In this regard, it affirms radical freedom. This is a freedom to simply be what we are, more fully, without cultural or "imported" conditioning. Insecurities remain, but are no longer paralyzing. When the inner aim is true, we cannot help but be drawn forward toward our own Truth. Aligning ourselves with others who appreciate the fundamental interconnectedness of life helps us thrive. It opens the door to both learning and mentoring others.
Courage in the face of the unknown is a gift of our Spirit. This strength of mind and heart is our Essence, our essential nature, which can neither be taught nor learned, but is a grace. It means power over oneself to muster and self-regulate inspiration, mood and creativity. It gives us the will to surpass ourselves, and joy in doing so. Without courage, we can tolerate neither failure nor success. With it, we can face the prospect of setbacks, guilt, condemnation and even death, for our lives are not empty nor meaningless...but a grand work of art, an artfully lived life with the acceptance that what IS-IS.
Thus, seeking and promoting wisdom means the capacity to realize what is of value in life for oneself and others, including knowledge and technological know-how, but much else besides that is the domain of aesthetics - Art with Heart.
YOU REPRESENT; THEY RECOGNIZE
"Association with pupils keeps one's work youthful. Critiquing others keeps one's point of view clear." (William Merritt Chase, 1849-1916)
MENTORING is the art of giving and receiving wisdom; guiding, nurturing and enabling others to realize and develop their full potential with respect for their own journey. It celebrates an extension of self-cultivation with kindred spirits in soulful relationships.
Mentoring is a means of expressing and receiving feedback from many points of view (POV). It is a mode of knowing and learning with. We find our identities in “mirroring”, empathy, mind-sharing and the struggle with different points of view.
Mentoring is individualized and tailored. Instructables means sharing what you make and how others can make it: step-by-step collaboration and nouveau niche opportunities - status skills. Once you find your niche, phreak it!
Now, consumers and "trysumers" can acquire as many skills as they want, but equally important is showing-off what you've learned and created. Don’t forget: without ‘the others’ seeing, tasting, hearing or smelling your skills, without the inevitable story-telling, there is no status coming your way!
The anti-trend to status skills is LACK OF TIME, balancing skill time and consumption time. Where on earth will consumers find the time to actively acquire these new skills? Infolust drives status skill-building and trend immersion.
The intergenerational "group leader" is a very busy and observant character, anticipating and even creating trends. While alternately bombarding the viewers and leaving them in pregnant silence, her approach is nevertheless anticipatory and dependent on the will of individuals within the group. This goes a long way toward avoiding the toxicity of recipes, the flapdoodle of stating the obvious.
The mentor must be able to think on her feet, with fluid concepts and creative analogies, and thus make it a learning experience for herself as well. Her job is to inspire, encourage and validate, to give authoritative crits, tips, demos, as well as input from Leonardo, Andy, Vincent, Georgia and others. It's good to instill and cultivate a feeling of the historic brotherhood and sisterhood. Newbies benefit when they keep their pride and lose their inhibitions.
Teaching can stealthily eviscerate your own need for art-making. Of course, there are those who find teaching a stimulus. Because many of us have a hard-wired need to share--and teaching is an obvious vehicle--we need to find ways of satisfying this need. Teaching art and hypermedia is not like teaching accounting. In the first place, individuals in an art community are likely to have vastly different expectations, potentials, aesthetics, icon repertoires, and prior experiences.
Because everybody is on a different page, you need to adjust your methodology. A feeling of "We're all friends here" must be established. In a game-like environment and an urgent atmosphere, all the participants start by going to work on current projects at their own level of proficiency. When the mentor feels that some direction can be reasonably offered, she engages on a one-to-one basis.
Students, collaborators and colleagues may gather or disperse. On occasion the mentor may pontificate for the whole group. She may quickly demonstrate her own or another's work for whoever may be interested. Examples of work, good and bad, finished or not, are held up for quick discussion. There's an ongoing interactive crit, a celebration of individuality within the joy of the group.
Attentional Processes: Beyond the Consumer Dream
Attention shuttling is self-soothing - a positive coping mechanism of resilient individuals, shifting attentional focus between the cognitive and emotional regulatory process. It is more akin to multitasking than the pathology of ADHD. It allows us to correct imbalances in our immediate environment by finding wider frames of reference that meet our needs better. It stimulates inner dialogue that often can’t be reduced to a single viewpoint from different perspectives.
Based on his work in creativity and with gifted children, John Curtis Gowan developed a model of development, which bootstrapped off Piaget and Erikson, but included adult development beyond the ordinary or "normal" adult successes of career and family building, extending into the emergence and stabilization of extraordinary development and mystical states of consciousness.
Gowan described the entire spectrum of available states in his classic Trance, Art, & Creativity (1975), with its different modalities of spiritual and aesthetic expression. He devised a test for Self-Actualization, called the Northridge Developmental Scale. http://www.csun.edu/edpsy/Gowan
Gowan outlines a developmental theory whereby we may tap our latent creative potential and self-actualization, organically growing toward the psychedelic or soul-revealing and illuminative states. He describes these states most fully in Development of the Psychedelic Individual (1974) and in Operations of Increasing Order. His use of the term 'psychedelic' does not connote drug use; quite the contrary he is strongly opposed to the developmental forcing and disintegration drug-use brings.
He describes how dyplasias between cognitive and affective growth can bleed off developmental energies, resulting in dysphoria and displacements, leaving us feeling unintegrated, blocked or stuck. He carries developmental theory past the concept of a strong coping ego. Fearing the loss-of-control by our egos, we may be reluctant to enter the soul-revealing stage of psychedelia and remain content to re-experience successes at our familiar or comfortable level of experience--usually expressed by the metaphor of "the American Dream,"--a cultural myth.
Gowan considers plateauing out before these upper stages to be akin to lack of sexual maturation in an adolescent. Clearly, resilience is the ability to continually redefine oneself and experience are fundamental to this life-long process of connecting with Source and Spirit. One of these means is finding more resilient ways of processing information through emotional and spiritual intelligence.
Emotional Intelligence
Emotional intelligence is demonstrated by the individual who is able to interrupt the emotional feedback loop as needed in order to allow the brain's logical functions to assess the situation. The techniques by which this is adaptively and intelligently accomplished are what psychology calls "positive coping mechanisms." Maladaptive coping mechanisms include those which succeed in circumventing emotional over-reactions at a cost of psychophysiological health to the individual, (Goleman, 1995).
Goleman's expanded model of intelligence thus presents a compelling argument that it is actually intelligent emotions rather than intelligence alone which forms the core of human coping skills and thus makes it a "master aptitude," (Goleman, p. 80).
Summary
We can fulfill the developmental process and develop our emotional intelligence to help us become more resilient. This facilitates information-shuttling between left and right hemispheres which intuitively facilitates the intelligent sequencing of information so that we more resiliently make use of our human emotions. From this enhanced state, intuitive information-sequencing facilitates evolution of resilient personality traits and adaptive coping styles. We become increasingly conscious of our own ability to effect positive outcomes within our worlds.
We can mirror the optimistic positive attitudes and aptitudes of our mentors. The process of co-consciousness or mindsharing involves a shared reality in which the integrity of the mentor stabilizes the journeyer even though they may be moving through the fear and pain in a highly emotional state. The empathic sensing, "mind reading," and compassionate reassurance of the mentor sustains the dynamic momentum of the process as it moves spontaneously toward natural healing.
Mindsharing comes down to us from the ancient shamanic tradition of spiritual healing.. "A shaman is someone whose specialty is induction of a well state, someone who may help either through research or treatment to induce a state in someone else's brain that will produce health," according to psychiatrist Arnold Mandell. "But the brain is an open, instrinsically unstable system, and if its higher level order is perturbed enough, it gets more and more turbulent. It fractures, then organizes into a new regime.
By directing our attention both inwardly and outwardly, we connect with the eternal source of wisdom and our intuition comes to the fore. An inherent part of the process of changing from the inside out is that as the deepest self transforms, downline faculties such as beliefs, thoughts, feelings, and behavior, as well as psychosomatic condition, automatically change as well. Thus, resilience can be seen as the ability to dynamically change at the most fundamental level toward a more adaptive way of being in the world.
Individuals can develop a sense of wholeness on all three levels of their identity: 1). the egoic, which requires a more adaptively cohesive sense of self identity with and yet separate from the world; 2). the existential, which while encompassing the egoic state, also requires a more coherent sense of one's individuated state within the human conditions; and 3). the transpersonal, which requires that one transcend the egoic, existential identities and enter into a heightened awareness of essential unity with all human beings, living things, and perhaps the cosmos.
"Association with pupils keeps one's work youthful. Critiquing others keeps one's point of view clear." (William Merritt Chase, 1849-1916)
MENTORING is the art of giving and receiving wisdom; guiding, nurturing and enabling others to realize and develop their full potential with respect for their own journey. It celebrates an extension of self-cultivation with kindred spirits in soulful relationships.
Mentoring is a means of expressing and receiving feedback from many points of view (POV). It is a mode of knowing and learning with. We find our identities in “mirroring”, empathy, mind-sharing and the struggle with different points of view.
Mentoring is individualized and tailored. Instructables means sharing what you make and how others can make it: step-by-step collaboration and nouveau niche opportunities - status skills. Once you find your niche, phreak it!
Now, consumers and "trysumers" can acquire as many skills as they want, but equally important is showing-off what you've learned and created. Don’t forget: without ‘the others’ seeing, tasting, hearing or smelling your skills, without the inevitable story-telling, there is no status coming your way!
The anti-trend to status skills is LACK OF TIME, balancing skill time and consumption time. Where on earth will consumers find the time to actively acquire these new skills? Infolust drives status skill-building and trend immersion.
The intergenerational "group leader" is a very busy and observant character, anticipating and even creating trends. While alternately bombarding the viewers and leaving them in pregnant silence, her approach is nevertheless anticipatory and dependent on the will of individuals within the group. This goes a long way toward avoiding the toxicity of recipes, the flapdoodle of stating the obvious.
The mentor must be able to think on her feet, with fluid concepts and creative analogies, and thus make it a learning experience for herself as well. Her job is to inspire, encourage and validate, to give authoritative crits, tips, demos, as well as input from Leonardo, Andy, Vincent, Georgia and others. It's good to instill and cultivate a feeling of the historic brotherhood and sisterhood. Newbies benefit when they keep their pride and lose their inhibitions.
Teaching can stealthily eviscerate your own need for art-making. Of course, there are those who find teaching a stimulus. Because many of us have a hard-wired need to share--and teaching is an obvious vehicle--we need to find ways of satisfying this need. Teaching art and hypermedia is not like teaching accounting. In the first place, individuals in an art community are likely to have vastly different expectations, potentials, aesthetics, icon repertoires, and prior experiences.
Because everybody is on a different page, you need to adjust your methodology. A feeling of "We're all friends here" must be established. In a game-like environment and an urgent atmosphere, all the participants start by going to work on current projects at their own level of proficiency. When the mentor feels that some direction can be reasonably offered, she engages on a one-to-one basis.
Students, collaborators and colleagues may gather or disperse. On occasion the mentor may pontificate for the whole group. She may quickly demonstrate her own or another's work for whoever may be interested. Examples of work, good and bad, finished or not, are held up for quick discussion. There's an ongoing interactive crit, a celebration of individuality within the joy of the group.
Attentional Processes: Beyond the Consumer Dream
Attention shuttling is self-soothing - a positive coping mechanism of resilient individuals, shifting attentional focus between the cognitive and emotional regulatory process. It is more akin to multitasking than the pathology of ADHD. It allows us to correct imbalances in our immediate environment by finding wider frames of reference that meet our needs better. It stimulates inner dialogue that often can’t be reduced to a single viewpoint from different perspectives.
Based on his work in creativity and with gifted children, John Curtis Gowan developed a model of development, which bootstrapped off Piaget and Erikson, but included adult development beyond the ordinary or "normal" adult successes of career and family building, extending into the emergence and stabilization of extraordinary development and mystical states of consciousness.
Gowan described the entire spectrum of available states in his classic Trance, Art, & Creativity (1975), with its different modalities of spiritual and aesthetic expression. He devised a test for Self-Actualization, called the Northridge Developmental Scale. http://www.csun.edu/edpsy/Gowan
Gowan outlines a developmental theory whereby we may tap our latent creative potential and self-actualization, organically growing toward the psychedelic or soul-revealing and illuminative states. He describes these states most fully in Development of the Psychedelic Individual (1974) and in Operations of Increasing Order. His use of the term 'psychedelic' does not connote drug use; quite the contrary he is strongly opposed to the developmental forcing and disintegration drug-use brings.
He describes how dyplasias between cognitive and affective growth can bleed off developmental energies, resulting in dysphoria and displacements, leaving us feeling unintegrated, blocked or stuck. He carries developmental theory past the concept of a strong coping ego. Fearing the loss-of-control by our egos, we may be reluctant to enter the soul-revealing stage of psychedelia and remain content to re-experience successes at our familiar or comfortable level of experience--usually expressed by the metaphor of "the American Dream,"--a cultural myth.
Gowan considers plateauing out before these upper stages to be akin to lack of sexual maturation in an adolescent. Clearly, resilience is the ability to continually redefine oneself and experience are fundamental to this life-long process of connecting with Source and Spirit. One of these means is finding more resilient ways of processing information through emotional and spiritual intelligence.
Emotional Intelligence
Emotional intelligence is demonstrated by the individual who is able to interrupt the emotional feedback loop as needed in order to allow the brain's logical functions to assess the situation. The techniques by which this is adaptively and intelligently accomplished are what psychology calls "positive coping mechanisms." Maladaptive coping mechanisms include those which succeed in circumventing emotional over-reactions at a cost of psychophysiological health to the individual, (Goleman, 1995).
Goleman's expanded model of intelligence thus presents a compelling argument that it is actually intelligent emotions rather than intelligence alone which forms the core of human coping skills and thus makes it a "master aptitude," (Goleman, p. 80).
Summary
We can fulfill the developmental process and develop our emotional intelligence to help us become more resilient. This facilitates information-shuttling between left and right hemispheres which intuitively facilitates the intelligent sequencing of information so that we more resiliently make use of our human emotions. From this enhanced state, intuitive information-sequencing facilitates evolution of resilient personality traits and adaptive coping styles. We become increasingly conscious of our own ability to effect positive outcomes within our worlds.
We can mirror the optimistic positive attitudes and aptitudes of our mentors. The process of co-consciousness or mindsharing involves a shared reality in which the integrity of the mentor stabilizes the journeyer even though they may be moving through the fear and pain in a highly emotional state. The empathic sensing, "mind reading," and compassionate reassurance of the mentor sustains the dynamic momentum of the process as it moves spontaneously toward natural healing.
Mindsharing comes down to us from the ancient shamanic tradition of spiritual healing.. "A shaman is someone whose specialty is induction of a well state, someone who may help either through research or treatment to induce a state in someone else's brain that will produce health," according to psychiatrist Arnold Mandell. "But the brain is an open, instrinsically unstable system, and if its higher level order is perturbed enough, it gets more and more turbulent. It fractures, then organizes into a new regime.
By directing our attention both inwardly and outwardly, we connect with the eternal source of wisdom and our intuition comes to the fore. An inherent part of the process of changing from the inside out is that as the deepest self transforms, downline faculties such as beliefs, thoughts, feelings, and behavior, as well as psychosomatic condition, automatically change as well. Thus, resilience can be seen as the ability to dynamically change at the most fundamental level toward a more adaptive way of being in the world.
Individuals can develop a sense of wholeness on all three levels of their identity: 1). the egoic, which requires a more adaptively cohesive sense of self identity with and yet separate from the world; 2). the existential, which while encompassing the egoic state, also requires a more coherent sense of one's individuated state within the human conditions; and 3). the transpersonal, which requires that one transcend the egoic, existential identities and enter into a heightened awareness of essential unity with all human beings, living things, and perhaps the cosmos.
