Week 25, 2020
MONDAY, 15 JUNE 2020
In the Soviet Union, especially in the 1920s or 1930s, people were pressured by the Dominant Organisation of the Day to submit to their political worldview and policies. In Maoist China especially in the sixties and early 1970s, the Dominant Organisation also forced people to submit to their radical understanding of things.
In reality, fear, and the possibility of being tortured or executed for some imagined crime against the state compelled many people to submit. But at least in theory people could have argued they weren’t that hung up on class warfare or being accused of being a running dog of the capitalist West.
People who lived during those historical eras could claim later they only submitted because they feared for their lives. They would not later have been criticised for not wholeheartedly submitting to the Bolshevik or the Maoist worldview.
During the Middle Ages, people were pressured to submit to the Spanish Inquisition and their radical understanding of Christianity. Again, these people could later claim they only submitted out of fear, and not because they truly agreed with the Inquisition’s theology.
But what if the Dominant Organisation of the Current Day accused you of racism or white supremacist tendencies if you refused to submit to their demands, if you refused to bend the knee, if you refused to ritually wash their feet, or if you refused to donate money to their organisation? Very few people are racist these days, and even fewer hold white supremacist views – in the ways these concepts have been understood by mainstream society for the last seventy or eighty years.
Most people – dare I say especially white people – have a genuine fear of being called racist. Racists tend to be shunned by co-workers, neighbours, and even family. And it’s even worse to be called a white supremacist. These are double-barrelled shotgun accusations. If you are a white supremacist or if you are comfortable with racism, you deserve pushback for following stupid ideologies. But if you are not racist or white supremacist, and you do not want to be suspected of these things, being thus accused is incredibly powerful. Powerful enough to force you to bend the knee and to promise obeisance to the Dominant Organisation whose leaders or followers point their fingers at you.
Would you submit, with bended knee, to a political organisation that called you an Enemy of the Working Class, or Counter-revolutionary? How would you feel if wild-eyed youths called you a Running Dog of Capitalism? Would you start kissing the bejewelled fingers of the local cardinal with tears in your eyes if he called you a Sinner Against the Blood of Christ? I bet you wouldn’t take their demands or accusations seriously. Again: What if they accused you of racism instead?
Most of us alive today would probably have submitted in past eras to powerful political or religious organisations if we feared for our lives or limbs. We might have done so without true regard to political or religious ideology. But in the third decade of the twenty-first century most people are primed to not be racists, or white supremacists.
The time, therefore, is ripe for an organisation to exploit this situation: Submit to us, bend the knee before our banners, wash the feet of our leaders, support us financially, or you are racist, and probably white supremacist too.
People in their thousands are submitting and swearing allegiance to a radical political organisation claiming to be the guardians of civil rights and advocates of antiracism. Why are these people not secure in what they know about themselves to simply declare they are not racist, and leave it at that? Why do so many people need the assurance of a radical political organisation that they are not racist – or then anti-racist, as the terminology goes these days? Or do they actually consider themselves non-racist, but they need to signal to friends and family, or co-workers or fellow students, how committed they are to not being racist? And how many people are bending the knee and licking the boots of members of the Dominant Organisation of the Day out of fear for their lives, or fear for their livelihoods?
TUESDAY, 16 JUNE 2020
It is true that countries like Taiwan, Japan and Korea have for decades been home to newly graduated Westerners who have to start earning money, but who don’t want to exchange the freedom they knew as students for the stiff culture of the office or company.
I found a home in Northeast Asia. I have been able to earn enough money to pay off my student loans, travel from time to time, and spend hours every day on creative projects.
Eccentric people don’t bother me. People with strange ideas are not a threat to me. And while I won’t dye my remaining strands of hair blue, shoot my face full of metal and paint my arms full of dragons or flowers, I don’t have a problem if that’s what you want to do.
What does make me sit up is a threat to the values I consider sacred. The freedom to think, say, and write what I want, as long as it doesn’t impede your right to think, say, and write what you want. The freedom to refuse to bow to a political organisation – any political organisation, left or right. Then there is the Truth: Pure water boils at sea level at 100 degrees Celsius. One of the results you get when you mix baking soda and vinegar is carbon dioxide. Throw an ordinary coffee mug hard enough against a rock, and chances are that it will burst into pieces. Put two apples with two other apples, and you have four apples. The coffee mug will not react differently with the rock because a white or black person throws it. Baking soda and vinegar are not going to turn into sea sand because a trans woman of colour has mixed it together. Pure water is not going to suddenly boil at sea level at 37 degrees Celsius because a Fourth Wave Feminist has done the boiling. And just because a member of the Dominant Organisation of the Day says two apples plus two apples are seven bananas is not to say it’s suddenly true.
Political organisations and movements that force the individual to bend the knee and lick the boot, and ideologies that reject verified and verifiable facts as useless or even harmful have the same effect on the mind and well-being that a biological virus has on the lungs, or other organs.
* * *
Summer is a good time for a cultural revolution. But in a few months, it’s going to be colder, and there is at least a chance that political leaders in the West will crawl out of their bomb shelters and start clearing up what has been devastated in the past few weeks. The parents of revolutionary white graduates now marching through the streets and burning down shops and spraying statues full of graffiti are also going to be less enthusiastic about maintaining their offspring for another year, and at the same time being shouted at across the dining room table about how racist they are for asking for law and order.
“Get yourself a job!” the parent will tell his or her 30-year-old child.
Of course, jobs will no longer be so widely available in the local economy – partly because too many businesses have been burned down, and partly because thousands of revolutionary recent graduates have no skill other than marching angrily through the streets and torching other people’s businesses.
This is where countries like Taiwan, Japan and Korea come in, where young graduates who aren’t able to find work in their own countries, or who don’t want to do the work that is available, find a home as English teachers. A good thing, in principle – just like entrepreneurs, businesspeople and artists from Taiwan, Japan and Korea find opportunities in North America or Europe or Australia that they might not enjoy in their own countries.
It’s at the end of the day how culture and ideas spread, and how people learn from each other. Unfortunately, it is also how cultural and political viruses spread.
WEDNESDAY, 17 JUNE 2020
What is your worldview? What are you? How do you function? What do you need to live optimally? Do you want to live optimally, or is it okay to wander around lost in the sea of hours and days and weeks and years that make up your life?
Ask yourself: Are the ideas in the following video valuable on a practical level? Can I use these ideas in my daily life to improve the quality of my life? Can I use it to improve my habitat – the rooms where I spend my days, and other environments where I spend time? Can I use this understanding of things to improve the lives of people who matter to me?
How to REPROGRAM your mind – Bruce Lipton
THURSDAY, 18 JUNE 2020
Yesterday’s lessons on subconscious programming are useful, but if this is your first acquaintance with the ideas, it may sound like nonsense. Watch the video again, and consider the possibility of a different way of thinking. Also read Bruce Lipton’s book, The Biology of Belief. For someone like me who hated Biology in high school, it was a surprisingly interesting and extremely educational book.
To make the video even easier to follow, I’ve highlighted some ideas:
For the record:
subconscious: [adjective] Existing in the mind but not immediately available to consciousness.
unconscious: [adjective] Occurring in the absence of conscious awareness or thought.
Each person is an energy field vibrating at a different frequency to the person next to them.
Receptors on your cells respond to different environmental signals that the receptors on someone else’s cells.
Each of us is receiving something like a broadcast that is running our consciousness. This consciousness is not physical; it’s an energy.
Human beings create. If you create things in the right way, you get “heaven on earth”. Create things the wrong way, you struggle.
If you don’t know your creations are being controlled, you become a victim of a world out of control.
If we give in to other people’s beliefs, we are creating not with our wishes and desires but with a program written by other people.
Where’s the program taking us right now? Fear, shutdown, loss of community, breakdown of the system.
You can take your power back.
* * *
The brain of a child under seven is in a lower vibrational frequency.
Before you can become conscious, you need programming. If your mind is not programmed, what are you going to be conscious of?
To survive on this planet, and to be a functional member of a family and a community the young child have to learn countless rules. To learn these rules, they observe their parents, siblings and other members of the community. Both positive and negative actions, views and beliefs are taken in (or “downloaded”).
Example: You come from a poor family chances are you would struggle your whole life to try and get rich but you probably won’t succeed. You come from a rich family you can be stupid your whole life and make it because of unconscious behaviour that was downloaded from your family. Kids from rich parents unconsciously make the right moves. Same thing with poor people. Poor people downloaded destructive beliefs from the family that would not support financial success: “You can’t make it,” “Life’s a struggle,” “Things are hard,” “Who do you think you are?”
If that’s the program you get then you will sabotage yourself whenever you try to improve your life beyond a certain point. That’s why poor people often stay poor and rich people often stay rich – because of subconscious programming.
A significant part of our lives results from programs in the subconscious versus a much smaller portion of our lives where we are using our conscious, creative minds.
You may think you’re living your life exactly like you want but you don’t see that your life is to a large extent a printout of your subconscious programming.
Take a look at your life. The things you like that come into your life come in because you have a program that supports them. Anything you struggle with and put a lot of effort into making it happen is because you have a program in your subconscious that doesn’t support that conclusion. You’re trying to override the program.
The conscious mind is creative and can learn in a number of ways: reading a self-help book; going to a lecture; listening to audio recordings. The conscious mind will end up getting some awareness of things. But the subconscious mind doesn’t learn that way.
The subconscious mind learns in two fundamental ways: natural hypnosis which happens in the first seven years; after that you have to put new programs in through repetition and practice.
“Fake it ‘till you make it” – if you’re not a happy person and you repeat all the time to yourself that you are a happy person you are talking to the subconscious. Eventually there will be a point where the subconscious gets it: “I am happy.” You don’t have to keep repeating it.
People do affirmations and gratitude journals because if you do that daily you reprogram the subconscious. Things like putting sticky notes on the refrigerator are more like suggestions. So these actions don’t work as well as repetition.
* * *
When your conscious mind is focused on a task you’re in absolute control – wishes and desires, everything you want. But when your conscious mind go off into thinking about other things, it let’s go of the wheel and the autopilot takes over.
When you’re in love, it keeps you mindful. You stop playing the program in your subconscious mind. You’re operating from your conscious mind which is creative, which by definition is wishes and desires.
The honeymoon doesn’t last because you still have to think about your job, your chores, things you have to do at some point. Once you start thinking about other things, the conscious mind is shut off and all those negative behaviours in the subconscious mind show up. You stop being mindful.
Keep the honeymoon alive by changing the subconscious program.
If you took your wishes and desires and turned them into subconscious programs, you won’t have to consciously think about them. You would automatically be playing behaviours for significant parts of the day that would manifest your wishes and desires.
When you fall in love, the cocktail of chemicals coming out of your brain makes you healthier and happier. But if you open your eyes and see something that scares you, stress hormones and inflammatory agents are going to be released instead of those love chemicals.
In experiments with cells, the composition of the culture medium controls the fate of the cells. In the same way, the composition of your blood controls the fate of your cells. And the composition of your blood is based on the picture in your mind. Change the picture and you change the chemistry.
* * *
Almost everybody has the same wishes and desires – to be in love, to be happy, to be healthy, to live peacefully.
If we all lived with those wishes and desires, our world would experience a transformation. We would have harmony, peace, community, and a clean environment.
Until we change destructive, negative subconscious programs, we are victims of the programs and not creators of our life. (The primary question: Do you want to be a creator of your life, or is it okay to be the victim of how other people programmed you?)
People need to understand they have a choice to either play the programs that lead to negative results or rewrite those programs and take their power back.
“I am not what happened to me,” Carl Jung said. “I am what I choose to become.”
* * *
Knowledge is power but more importantly a lack of knowledge is a lack of power. Science is revealing a whole new understanding of who we are. We’ve been programmed to be victims and yet science and quantum physics and the new science of epigenetics especially reveal that we are not victims but creators.
FRIDAY, 19 JUNE 2020
If it is true that we are programmed with beliefs from childhood, and with rules on how to behave in a wide range of situations, and with what to expect from life, and with a worldview that explains how things work, isn’t the broad, so-called Social Justice movement right to force people to undergo reprogramming? After all, it will be for the people’s own good if their subconscious bad coding is modified.
There are two problems with things like Mandatory Implicit Bias Training, and other training that people in many companies and businesses in the West currently have to undergo:
1. The ideology behind the training is toxic and immoral, despite being sold as antiracist, and as a mere attempt to get people to get along better – two values with which no civilised person has any problem. Read the literature behind the Social Justice Movement, and you will see that white people (not sure how they are going to classify people as white or black or brown – are they going to run pencils through people’s hair like in Apartheid South Africa?) are considered racists, who cannot help to be racist and biased towards people with other skin colours. (Again: White? Black? Brown? What about millions of people on the colour spectrum who don’t fit into one of the categories? “Uhm, yes, I just want to say I identify as brown from today. As you can see, I have more of a natural tan than my older sister.”) According to White Fragility author Robin DiAngelo, the standard white person is either racist and they know it and admit it, or they are racist, and they are too fragile to admit it. There is no way for a white person not to be racist. You were born guilty, and you will die guilty. All you can do is actively participate in the fight against “racism”. In short, the white person must be treated as guilty because he or she is white.
2. It takes away from the individual the right to define him- or herself as they wish. If you are black and you want to see yourself as strong and independent, with the ability to reach incredible heights, you are likely to be accused of believing in white supremacy. If you furthermore believe that every person should take responsibility for their own actions, and not be criticised or punished for things over which you have no control (such as race or gender), or for something you didn’t do yourself, you will be called an “Uncle Tom”. The only acceptable classification for the black person is that he or she is a victim under the thumb of the powerful white person, and that the white person owes the black person happiness and well-being. Is there a possibility that this gifted black person with his own abilities and talent and willpower and personality can succeed? Probably not, says the ideology. The white man and woman are too strong. They are going to hamper the efforts of the poor black person. Better for the black person to see him- or herself as a victim, and to merge with the group so that the group can extract power and resources from the white person … Who is powerful and has far too many resources – because he is white. No matter how poor or stupid or talentless he actually is.
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