“Begin then with a fracture, a cesura, a rent; opening a crack in this fallen world, a shaft of light.” Norman O. Brown, Love’s Body
Being sick for the past few weeks has had its advantages. It has forced me to take a break from writing since I could not concentrate enough to do so. It has gifted me with a deeper sympathy for the vast numbers of the seriously ill around the world, those suffering souls without succor except for desperate prayers for relief. And it has allowed thoughts to think me as I relinquished all efforts at control for a few miserable weeks of “doing nothing” except napping, reading short paragraphs in books, watching some sports and a documentary, and being receptive to the light coming through the cracks in my consciousness.
I suppose you could say that my temporary illness forced me, as José Ortega Y Gasset described it, virtually and provisionally to withdraw myself from the world and take a stand inside myself – “or, to use a magnificent word which exists only in Spanish, that man can ensimismarse (‘be inside himself’).”
But as I learned, being “inside myself” doesn’t mean the outside world doesn’t come visiting, both in its present and past manifestations. When you are sick, you feel most vulnerable; this sense of frailty breaks you open to strange and familiar thoughts, feelings, dreams and memories that you must catch on the fly, pin with words if you are quick enough. I’ve pinned some over these weeks as they came to me through the cracks.
“Broken flesh, broken mind, broken speech,” wrote Norman Brown when he argued for aphoristic truth as opposed to methods or systematic form. These days the feeling that everything is broken is the norm, that madness reigns, that truth is being strangled and all we have are lies and more lies. Carefully constructed arguments fall on deaf ears as dissociation of the personality, post-modern attention-disorder, gender confusion, and corporate/intelligence mass media propaganda techniques are used daily to sow confusion. In simple colloquial language, people are badly fucked up.
Much of the world is suffering from megrims. Bob Dylan puts it simply:
Broken lines, broken strings
Broken threads, broken springs
Broken idols, broken heads
People sleeping in broken beds
Ain’t no use jiving
Ain’t no use joking
Everything is broken.
Who can disagree? Everyone’s mind seems to be at the end of its tether.
Why? There are obvious answers, and while so many are true, they are insufficient, for they usually scratch the surface of a worldwide crisis that has been developing for at least a century and a half. That crisis is spiritual. Many can feel it rumbling beneath the surface of world events. It’s a rumbling in the bowels. It’s unspoken. It’s something very dark, sinister, and satanic. It seems to be a form of systemic evil almost with a will of its own that is sweeping the world.
For many decades I have studied, written, and taught in an effort to grasp the essence of what has been happening in our world. My tools have been philosophy, theology, literature, art, and sociology – all the disciplines really, including a careful study of popular culture. It was always a personal quest, for my “career” has been my vocation.
Being trained in the classics from high school through college, and then the scientific method and textual analysis, I adhered for the most part to logical analyses in the classical style. Such an approach, while possessed of a certain elegance and balance, has serious limitations since it suggests the world follows a neat Aristotelian logic and that there is a method to the world’s madness that is easy to capture in logical argumentation. Romanticism and existentialism, to name two reactions to such thinking, arose in opposition. Each offered a needed corrective to the reductive, materialist nature of a scientific method that became deified while dismissing God, freedom, and the spiritual as leftover superstitions from olden times.
But I have no sustained argument to offer here, just some scraps I gathered while enduring weeks in the doldrums. I sense these bits of seemingly digressive little flashes in the dark were telling me something about what I have been trying to understand for many years: the grasp the demonic has on our world today.
It is easy to dismiss the use of such a word, for it sounds hyperbolic, and it easily plays into the ridiculous themes of popular Hollywood and tabloid entertainment, which have also become staples of the formerly “serious” media as well. It’s all entertainment now, life the movie, the unreality of endless propaganda, sick, sordid, and what can only be termed “The Weirdness,” a term my friend the writer and playwright Joe Green has suggested to me. I think it would be a serious mistake to dismiss the demonic nature of the forces at work in our world today.
- Like Rip Van Winkle, I awoke one recent day, a few weeks after I wrote my last article before I got sick, to see that the corporate media/intelligence narrative on the war in Ukraine had taken an abrupt turn. I had written on May 13, 2022 that certain leftists were parroting the official U.S. propaganda that Russia was losing its battle with the Ukrainian forces. Noam Chomsky had claimed the U.S. media were doing a good job reporting Russian war crimes in Ukraine and Chris Hedges had said that Russia had suffered “nine weeks of humiliating military failures.” Now The New York Times, the Washington Post, etc. – mirabile dictu – have suddenly changed their tune and the Russians are winning after all. Who was asleep? Or was it sleep that prompted such obviously false reporting? For the Russians were clearly winning from the start. Yet we can be assured the authoritative voices will continue to flip the switch and play mind games, for shock and confusion are keys to effective propaganda, and American exceptionalism with its divine mission, its manifest destiny, is to demonically try to destroy Russia.
- The slogan that I learned when I was a Marine before becoming a conscientious objector came to me when I was feverish. “My rifle is my life.” I never thought so, but I did recall how when I was ten-years-old my cousin killed his brother with a rifle, and how I heard the news on the radio while talking with my father. The New York Times reported: “A 9-year-old boy was fatally wounded last night by his brother, 7, while the two were playing with a rifle in a neighbor’s apartment in the northeast Bronx….[the rifle] “was secreted in a bedroom” [under the bed] and was loaded.
- Report: Don McLean cancels his singing performance at the National Riffle Association’s convention following the Uvalde school shooting. What an act of moral courage! Ah, Don, “Now I understand/What you tried to say to me/And how you suffered for your sanity/And how you tried to set them free/They would not listen, they did not know how/Perhaps they’ll listen now” Let’s hope not to you.
- Watched the new documentary about George Carlin – “George Carlin’s American Dream.” I have always had a soft spot for George, a fellow New Yorker with a Catholic upbringing, and a good-hearted guy who generously offered to help me years ago when I was fired from a teaching position for ostensibly playing a recording of his seven words that you can never say on television. The real reasons for my firing were that I was organizing a teacher’s union and had brought well-known anti-war activists to speak at the school. But what struck me in this interesting documentary was George’s facile dismissal of God – “the God bullshit,” as he put it. Funny, of course, and correct in certain ways, it was also jejune in significant ways and threw God out with the bathwater. It was something I had not previously noticed about his routine, but this time around it hit me as unworthy of his scathing critiques of American life. It got laughs at the expense of deeper and important truths and probably has had deleterious effects on generations who have been beguiled and besotted by how George’s God critique consonantly fits with the shallow arguments of the new atheists. George was overreacting to the ignorance of his superficial religious training and not distinguishing God from institutional religion.
- Half-awake on the couch one day, I somehow remembered that when I was teaching at another school and involved in anti-war activities, a fellow teacher stopped me on a staircase on a late Friday afternoon when no one was around and tried to get me to join Army Intelligence. “You are exactly the type we could use,” he said, “since you are so outspoken in your anti-war positions.” I will spare you my reply, which involved words you once could never say on TV. But the encounter taught me an early lesson about distinguishing friend from foe; how treachery is real, and evil often wears a smiley face. The man who approached me was the head of social studies curricula for the Roman Catholic Brooklyn Diocese of New York.
- Al Capone, while speaking to Cornelius Vanderbilt, Jr. in 1931: “People respect nothing nowadays….It is undermining the country. Virtue, honor, truth, and the law have all vanished from our life.”
- I also read this from Literature and the Gods by Roberto Calasso: “… all the mythologies now pass a largely indolent life in a no-man’s-land haunted by gods and vagrant simulacra, by ghosts and Gypsy caravans in constant movement. They learn only to tell their stories again …. Yet it is precisely this ability that is so obviously lacking in the world around us. Behind the trembling curtains of what passes for ‘reality,’ the voices throng. If no one listens, they steal the costume of the first person they can grab and burst onto the stage in ways that can be devastating. Violence is the expedient of what has been refused an audience.”
- Lying in bed after a feverish night early on in my sickness, I looked up at the ceiling where a fly was buzzing. I remembered how years ago, when my father was in the hospital after a terrible car accident in which he smashed his head, he told me he was seeing monkeys all over the ceiling of the hospital room. Later, when I was out of bed, I heard the news reports about monkeypox and thought I was also hallucinating. I started laughing, a sardonic laughter brought to a feverish pitch after more than two years of Covid propaganda. These are the same people who hope to create a transhuman future – mechanical monkeys.
- On a table lay the third volume of a trilogy of books – Sinister Forces – by Peter Levenda. I opened it to a bookmarked page. Anyone who has read these books with a half-way open mind will be shocked by the amount of documented history they contain, history so bizarre and disturbing that reading them is not advisable before bedtime. Sinister forces that run through American history, indeed, but Levenda presents his material in a most reasonable and fair-minded way. I read these paragraphs:
The historical model I am proposing in these volumes should be obvious by now. By tracing the darker elements of the American experience from the earliest days of the Adena and Hopewell cultures through the discovery by Columbus, the English settlers in Massachusetts and the Salem witchcraft episode, the rise of Joseph Smith, Jr. and the Mormons via ceremonial magic and Freemasonry, up to the twentieth century and the support of Nazism by American financiers and politicians before, during, and after World War II, and the UFO phenomenon coming on the heels of that war, we can see the outline of a political ectoplasm taking shape in this historical séance: politics as a continuation of religion by other means. The ancillary events of the Charles Manson murders, the serial killer phenomenon, Jonestown, and the assassinations of Jack Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and Marilyn Monroe are all the result of the demonic possession of the American psyche, like the obscenities spat out by little Regan [The Exorcist], tied to her bed and shrieking at the exorcists. It is said that demonic possession is a way of testing us, and making us aware of the real conflict taking place within us every day….
The more I looked, however, the more I found men with bizarre beliefs and involved in questionable, occult practices at the highest levels of the American government, and buried deep within government agencies. I also discovered that occultism was embraced by the American military and intelligence establishments as a weapon to be used in the Cold War; and as they did so, they unleashed forces upon the American populace that cannot be called back….
One inevitably was forced back to the CIA and the mind-control experiments that began in the late 1940s and extended nearly to the present day [no, to the present day]. Coincidence piled upon coincidence, indicating the existence of a powerful, subliminal force working at the level of chaos – at the quantum level – and struggling to manifest itself in our reality, our consciousness, our political agenda.
If that all sounds too bizarre for words, unbelievable really, I suggest that one read these books, for if only a minority of Levenda’s claims are true, we are in the grip of evil forces so depraved that fiction writers couldn’t imagine such reality.
As I finish these notes, I am sitting outside on a small porch, watching the rain subside. The sun has just emerged. It is 5:30 P.M. and across the driveway and a lawn of grass, eights foxes have come through the bushes. The parents watch as the six kits jump and scamper around the ground level porch of a cottage that is unoccupied. The foxes have a den under the porch, and every day for a few months we have been privileged to watch them perform their antics in the mornings and evenings. Cute would be an appropriate word for the kits, especially when they were smaller. But they are growing fast and suddenly one sees and seizes a squirrel and worries it to death by shaking it in its mouth. Soon they are ripping it to pieces. Cute has turned deadly. But as the aforementioned Ortega Y Gasset says, while people can be inside themselves, “The animal is pure alteraciόn. It cannot be within itself.” This is because it has no self, “no chez soi, where it can withdraw and rest.” Foxes always live in pure exteriority, unlike me, who is sitting here with a small glass of wine and thinking about them and the various thoughts that have come to me over these past few weeks.
Before I came outside, I read this from a powerful new article by Naomi Wolf – “Dear Friends, Sorry to Announce a Genocide” – “It is a time of demons sauntering around in human spaces, though they look human enough themselves, smug in their Italian suits on panels at the World Economic Forum.”
In this piece she writes about what is in the 55,000 internal Pfizer documents which the FDA had asked a court to keep under wraps for 75 years, but which a court has released as a result of outside pressure. These documents reveal evil so depraved that words would fail her if not for her moral conscience and her growing awareness – that I share – that we are dealing with a phenomenon that demands an analysis that is theological, not sociological. She writes:
Knowing as I now do, that Pfizer and the FDA knew that babies were dying and mothers’ milk discoloring by just looking at their own internal records; knowing as I do that they did not alert anyone let alone stop what they were doing, and that to this day Pfizer, the FDA and other demonic “public health” entities are pushing to MRNA-vaccinate more and more pregnant women; now that they are about to force this on women in Africa and other lower income nations who are not seeking the MRNA vaccines, per Pfizer CEO Bourla this past week at the WEF, and knowing that Pfizer is pushing and may even receive a US EUA for babies to five year olds — I must conclude that we are looking into an abyss of evil not seen since 1945.
So I don’t know about you, but I must switch gears with this kind of unspeakable knowledge to another kind of discourse.
That discourse is religious, for Naomi has realized that our world is in satanic hands, and that only a recognition of that fact offers a way out. That those who wield weapons both medical and military can only be defeated by those who realize that a key part of the killers’ propaganda has been a long campaign to convince people, not only that God does not exist, but that Satan doesn’t either. This, while they assume the mantle of the evil one.
She says:
This time could really be the last time; these monsters in the labs, on the transnational panels, are so very skillful; and so powerful; and their dark work is so extensive.
If God is there — again — after all the times that we have tried his patience — and who indeed knows? – will we reach out a hand to him in return, will we take hold in the last moment out of this abyss, and simply find a way somehow to walk alongside him?
We will, but only if we also recognize the deeper forces informing our hidden history and haunting our present days. Sometimes an illness can crack you open to being receptive to shafts of light that can lead the way. Yet to do so we must go deep into very dark places. And since everyone and everything seems broken now – let’s say everyone is just sick in some way – maybe courage is what we need, the simple courage to open ourselves to the voices of the hungry ghosts that haunt this country. Norman O. Brown referred to them and our stage set this way:
Ancestral voices prophesying war; ancestral spirits in the danse macabre or war dance; Valhalla, ghostly warriors who kill each other and are reborn to fight again. All warfare is ghostly, every army an exercitus feralis (army of ghosts), every soldier a living corpse.
The U.S.A. and its allies are waging war on many fronts. It is a form of total war – cold, hot, medical, military, mind-control, spiritual, etc. – that demands a total response from us. None of us is completely innocent; we are all part of the deep evil that is happening all around us. But if we listen carefully, we might hear God asking for our help. For we need each other.
I watch in horror as the cute foxes kill their prey. I must remind myself that that is their nature. As for my fellow humans, I know that it isn’t nature that drives them to kill, maim, hurt, lie, etc.
Everything is truly broken, and I’m not joking.
But someone is laughing.
It’s not God.
Paul Levy does a fantastic job of illuminating the nature of evil in his two books on Wetiko. Having come face to face with evil, perhaps even what could be called the demonic, on several occasions over the years – I have found myself on a journey to understand its nature. So, as the heat of the corona mass deception raised in 2020 it seemed evident to me we had been captured in a carefully laid web of evil set up over the previous decades. Then, as the gaslighting and scapegoating kicked into overdrive in 2021 I felt the immediate brunt of the stick as I refused the coercive carrots on offer. My experiences with the evil of covert narcissistic abuse in child hood served as a fantastic boot camp training for this past year, enduring the same kind of abuse again on a broad social scale. The experience forced me indoors under German (everything old is new again) hygiene laws and inside myself as a result of the triggers set in childhood that I was experiencing. As part of the process I came to understand that the evil raging like a storm outside was pushing me through the pain to an unexpected kind of healing and strengthening of my own spirit. With it came a clear refusal to go along, to take the bait, to turn on my deep personal values for the sake of expediency or the permission to travel or eat in a restaurant. The grief of losing friends, family and colleagues to the mind virus was quelled with the emergence of new connections, deeper insight into my own wounds and healing process and a kind of tacit respect for the power evil has to reveal our shadow in the process of its integration.
Paul Levy’s explanation of Wetiko reflects this uncomfortable duality. As a sort of energetic parasite, it lures in the unwary and feeds off the chaos and pain it influences the creation of. But once one knows the ways of Wetiko it no longer has any power if you stay vigilant. And, in its unveiling, Wetiko functions like the dark side of a Yin Yang symbol – containing a speck of good in the evil. The good comes as a result of awakening to its existence – to seeing the path of painful healing it has dragged you along, caught up as you were on the rocks and thorns and shrubbery of your own shadow. As the specter of evil grows, more people are becoming aware of it. True, we have all but lost our ability to parse the unseen in a world where God is either dead, or held captive in the ivory tower of an organized religion. Demons? Laughable. Angels equally so – wrapped in the easily dismissible lavender mantel of new age spirituality. If it can’t be measured can it really exist? Our new gods have been summoned up through ones and zeros, right swiping and eternal scrolling. Dead Sea scrolls? Popycock. It’s the selfish gene that guides us. But as we threaten to lose our humanity to the hungry ghost in the machine, the cosmic bitch slaps get harder and with each one another person (or many) wake up from the stupor. We can’t overcome evil until we greet in our personal cave of shadows and own the parts that belong to us. Then we can recognize it at work in our lives and say – “Oh Wetiko you old goat… I see what you are up to and I say No to you. I choose differently – you can’t trick me now.” Each of us must go through this for ourselves . In a culture that pops pills, swipes Instagram and does anything possible to avoid the slightest pain, most aren’t up for the job of doing the hard work of being present inside themselves long enough to let their shell crack and let the light in. But the bitch slaps will keep coming until we each do the work and find the white speck of light in the sea of darkness. Keep ‘em coming – it’s the only thing that will shake humanity free. Now is the time for people wake up and do the work. It’s gonna hurt but the sunlight will be worth it.
Amy, Yes, the Native Peoples perspective of wetiko aka wendigo/windigo is akin to what Buddhists call the hungry ghost. Wrt “And, in its unveiling, Wetiko functions like the dark side of a Yin Yang symbol – containing a speck of good in the evil.” i would add that the dark of Yin doesn’t have a “dark side” or “evil” association, rather reflects the receptive, night, hidden, womb, etc. As for the “speck of good in the evil”, my go to analogy is that Hitler petted his dog. And excellent awareness, i agree with “…doing the hard work of being present inside themselves long enough to let their shell crack and let the light in.”
Thanks Prof. Curtin.
Late in the year 2019 I began compiling a political notebook, expecting that 2020, being an election year, would prove politically significant and that it would be useful to me to keep a record of my thoughts on what was happening. Like most people, I had no idea that the coming year would bring global lockdowns, or that the year that followed would see the introduction of “vaccines” that are arguably more dangerous than the disease they are purportedly designed to cure, along with civil penalties for those who refused to take them. I was aware that “Russiagate” had essentially no factual basis, that it was a media circus, designed by the forces-that-be to whip up popular hatred for all things Russian and for Vladimir Putin in particular; but I am not a prophet, and could not foretell that, early in 2022, a proxy war would break out between NATO and Russia, fought on the territory of Ukraine.
Over time, this journal began to look more and more like a scrapbook, as I printed out and pasted into it articles that I saw as especially significant, and that I thought would be worth rereading.
Three of your articles found their way into this scrapbook: “Denying the Demonic” (April 20, 2021), “What I know (and don’t know) about SARS-CoV-2” (June 20, 2021), and “On the Edge of a Nuclear Abyss” (March 11, 2022). The fact that these three articles are pasted in this notebook is a testimony to how much I have valued your insights over the past couple of years.
I would agree with you that, behind the various manifestations of falsehood and brokenness that seem to define our contemporary lives, there is a presence of radical evil. I would agree that an adequate vocabulary to talk about this evil is not furnished by social science or literature as usually conceived, but demands a kind of wrestling with the realities of theology, perhaps the kind of wrestling that Jacob did on the night before he went to meet his brother. All genuinely profound literature does this, in one way or another.
It is said, however, that looking too long into the abyss is spiritually dangerous. Evil can fascinate, and can thereby lead people to their doom. It is good to remember that Christian theology is not, fundamentally, a doctrine about evil: it is a doctrine about Christ’s victory over cosmic evil in all of its manifestations. The last word of history, like the last word in the Book of Psalms, is “Hallelujah.” God is victorious, and we, by faith, participate in God’s victory, a victory which is ongoing, happening now in the midst of the world’s darkness, in ways we don’t understand.
Praying for your health and well-being.
exercitus feralis actually translates to “brutal army”
We are in a battle for the very soul of this planet, that is for sure.
Since you obviously appreciate the Dylan song, I’d encourage you to listen to this cover by Kenny Wayne Shepard: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZXgtKUpu4Sw. By far the best version I’ve ever heard…it’s very hard rocking’ blues and I recommend listening at high volume if possible, so you can feel the bass thumping in your chest. Another great line in the song:
Seems like every time I stop and turn around,
Something else has just hit the ground.
Glad to hear you’re recovering well…keep up the great work!
An article of some pathos, though its gentle mood creates a comforting home. If I can share the final sentences of my book, The Pattern of History:
“Destiny and how the story ends can only be understood – sensed – through convergence, when people realize meaning is harmony, revealed succinctly in the truthful recognition of discord – the opposite. It is identified in the real use of symbol, beauty, coming together of past, present and future – desired state. The nearest the human spiritual journey will get to the eternal and divine, in this life only to be glimpsed as human intellect can get no nearer, is composed in a single feeling: love.”
https://patternofhistory.wordpress.com/
Keep fighting Ed!
https://odysee.com/@danmjohnson:c/Xavier-Rudd—Spirit-Bird:0
“You are not Christians. You are not Jews. You are not Muslims. And you certainly aren’t atheists. You all have the same god, and its name is ‘government.’ You’re all members of the most evil, insane, destructive cult in history. If there ever was a devil, the state is it. And you worship it with all your heart and soul.”
~ Larken Rose, The Iron Web
From Gary D. Barnett: “First, I am an anarchist, pure and simple, which means I am not conservative or “liberal,” (a misused word) not right or left, Republican or Democrat, or Libertarian for that matter. For those unable to comprehend proper language, or who are not willing to do the five minutes of research necessary to understand the real meaning of words, I will explain. Anarchy, from the Greek, French, and Latin roots of our language, means in essence, “without rulers or without rule,” nothing more. In other words, it means no belief in government, or any one or any group ruling over another. It does not mean total chaos, rioting, property destruction, violence, lawlessness, or any other such bastardized meanings falsely attributed by political propagandists and accepted by the ignorant populations of today.”
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2022/05/gary-d-barnett/i-do-not-give-a-damn-what-other-people-think-this-an-indication-of-respect/
In regards to “evil” and that it exists and has wrested power over “we the people”…the issue is certainly complex since this does not seem to be our nature, nor or natural existence amongst the entirety of life.
In this sense and under the conditions of “freedom to run your own life” (as noted in Paul Cudenec’s “Forms of Freedom”), humans are naturally good, just like lions or peacocks are good.
What makes us evil is that we are not living naturally but under oppression which began many centuries ago. Mass murders, war and horror are contrived within these structures.
I just heard a doctor-psychologist expert claim that the cause of the recent mass killings is due to the lockdowns and lack of structure!!! This is how the state wants us to think about what’s happening. The state is all about structure and pursuit of obedience… Pay no mind to the mass shootings prior to Covid (and exactly what is behind these shootings?)
As the US president and the state’s congress ships billions in weapons to kill mostly innocent people (over 20 million since WWII) we are incapable of connecting the obvious. (I don’t think these young (for the most part) mass killers are simply watching too much Top Gun, but it’s the methods and means of the state which directly lead to these shootings.)
Is the state evil? How did we wander so far from our natural order of freedom, “freedom to run your own life”?
Cudenec notes that this natural state, this goodness that is to be human comes from the need to cooperate to survive.
Thank you Art for this post. As we are now, it is easy to see we have ‘learned’ things that are not healthy for anyone or anything.
To simply focus on the present, meaning in this case approximately 500 years since neurotics conquered North America, we have continuously practiced violence, negligence It seems this condition only becomes worse with each year, each generation, though it also becomes quite confusing as other elements enter into this condition. It seems that we only notice violence in obvious physical form, fights, shootings, wars, but live violently, perhaps simply by going against our nature of simply being as a baby is simply being, innocent; until the program begins, starts dictating, starts confusing, starts fights, wars…, I think we are insane as a collective of humans !
Always good to have your comments, Joseph.
The US empire is a direct descendent of the British empire, perhaps there was a turn in the road in the beginning when the US formed its confederacy of colonial states (articles of confederation was the first documented US constitution). So, to understand the state mechanism of control we live under today, I think we need to understand how the world has been organized well before even the British empire – actually during the course of thousands of years.
The evil under discussion here was birthed over many millennia. My reading is that this state was not a straight trajectory from hunter-gatherer to the modern top-down authoritarian state (no matter the ism). How we settled (got stuck) here seems to be complicated, but there were many battles fought and mostly won by the elite rulers against the ruled along the way. The latter honed their means and methods of managing the masses.
Obedience has been a process of indoctrination through communication systems and education. These methods are run differently nation-state by nation-state, ideology by ideology, but all about domination by a few over the many.
No doubt the modern state (and its scientism) has displaced much of what we consider to be spirituality or belief in a spiritual being or mother Earth.
Larken Rose is definitely over the target but it still feels like we are missing the main piece to the grand puzzle.
For all recorded history populations have had their own views on what the best system or lack of a system should look like, but nobody seems to comprehend fully the actually physical setting for this game of life.
We don’t really know where we are, it’s a strange situation we find ourselves in when you really admit it.
We don’t get to play with a full deck of cards, it’s no wonder we find ourselves in cycles that reset & repeat.
I read your article since it was attached to Lew Rockwell’s site. It hit the nail on the head! I’ve been listening to Bernhard Guenther’s interviews on his website, veilofreality.com and your thoughts are mirrored in his work. I intuitively know that evil exists and it has made it’s presence known more and more on our earth. By the way, I was also raised Catholic and had 16 years of Catholic schools….even taught in a Brooklyn ‘high risk’ elementary school. After two years of that, I was ready for combat and joined the Navy! Life is a roller coaster for sure!
Good morning Mary Anne Schoultz…last evening, my mind went into the gutter…, I thought about the movie and ‘entertainment’ industry, Hollywood and all of that. What minds conjure up such sadistic, violent, acts against people, the environment, each other? Some 2 hour movies, I think could leave an individual traumatized for a life time! Then we turn the channel and watch someone, usually in a dark blue suit with a red necktie telling us what’s best for the nation? Can you imagine this person decides what is best for 300 million people and all the various life support systems including the food we eat? And how many people actually give credibility to this poor quality cartoon? I think most people do! Good grief I could scream !
I don’t know Joseph. Probably a bit of my parochial school brainwashing and a general belief (hope) that there is something more. I imagine there are many people who have similar thoughts about God.
The larger point I was trying to make is that atheists, and even people who have a vague sense of belief in God, are quickly turned off at the mention of God/religion. But I do see the value of discussing the possibility of an unaffiliated, evil spirit (for lack of a better description) that is influencing/infecting humanity.
oops.
Animals, as distinct from man, are not machine-like, not sadistic; their societies, within the same species, are incomparably more peaceful than those of man. The basic question, then is: What has made the animal, man, degenerate into a machine?” Wilhelm Reich, Mass Psychology of Fascism.
Foxes are “pure exteriority?” Respectfully, you don’t know that. I don’t know otherwise either, but in my experience (I’ve worked with wild, feral and domestic animals), that’s not the case. It’s also not the case for many indigenous societies, who consider animals as spiritual beings with agency and societies (See Nadasdy, Hunters and Bureaucrats).
I mention this not for any “pro animal” agenda (god forbid), but because the devaluation of the interiority or agency of the “other” is, I think, very related to the evil you’re talking about–it’s the Cartesian idea run rampant, that only humans matter. But from there it’s a short step to only male humans matter, only male ruling class man matters, etc. I’m pretty sure Klaus Schwab et al wouldn’t consider me to have any “interiority” worth preserving. Only a few hundred years ago women likewise were considered “purely exterior” (See Federicci, Caliban and the Witch).
And as to feeling horror that an animal kills to survive, humans used to do so, and some still do. Contrast that with the sadism of the factory farm system, in which billions of animals per year are processed. (it’s sadistic to the humans who work there too). Just so that we don’t feel anything when we eat the commodity produced.
The evil of industrial capitalism cannot be separated from that aspect–that we’ve removed ourselves from the land, the plants and animals, and taken away any responsibility we had to live in that world. We’ve made everything into commodity. Animals and humans. Now the Schabbies want to “financialize nature.” Fucked up beyond belief.
If, as the Kluane Nation people believe, animals are more spiritually powerful than man–that systematic abuse is a disturbance worth pondering. (and note that the Kluane are hunters, not vegans. They kill animals to survive.) It may be that the evil you’re talking about has a lot to do with our readiness to categorize the other as not worthy of respect, and simultaneously to widen the category of “other” while acting like we’re narrowing it.
Fucked up.
Thank you Lorie….the question what has ‘made’ the animal man degenerate into a machine? Good question ! My quick response and I have no idea what I am talking about…, at some point of human history, many, most humans somehow allowed themselves to become herded, directed by other humans and I have no doubt the directors used threat and fear and perhaps mysterious methods/trickery to subdue and direct the masses of humans. Perhaps some groups of human were too passive, too curious? And maybe the exact same methods are used today to control and manipulate. Perhaps we should ask the pope. Anyway, how will we know for sure? Perhaps some people do know exactly what happened. We don’t understand the planets either. Do we really understand anything?
But for the present, we have a societal disaster and how will we deal with this if we don’t put our foot down and say enough ! And of course this is scary without support from others. Hell, we can’t get 3 people to go to a town council meeting and tell the council to wake up, put down their iPods and consider other ideas! Oh, we are thoroughly trained, obedient creatures and this is a damn shame ! Worse yet, we genuflect to the town councilors, the priests, the police, the owner of jiffy lube; damn near any authority of any kind. This is gigantic mess that we have !
Yes, we don’t even understand our own oceans, and yet the oligarchs want to mine hell out of it for rare minerals. And new species are discovered every day, and yet Gates wants to release gene edited versions of everything. There’s a powerful disconnect going on. And Musk want to put 30K satellites into the sky, the night sky plants and animals and humans have depended on for millenia. Prehistoric pacific islanders could navigate thousands of miles in the Pacific, in canoes. I don’t know what happened either. Some put it with agriculture, I think that’s too pat. But you’re right. Something happened.
Yes, Lorie, Indigenous/Original Peoples’ respect for the other than humans is essential, and at least some consider e.g. the trees, the rocks, plants, animals, etc. as elders as they’ve been here longer, and human beings as the youngest. So getting away from that consciousness and way of life is one ‘place’ where things went awry.
This morning I wrote:
The corruption and deviance that is/has become the world of humanity reminds me of a Hieronymous Bosch painting. Only Nature, at its essence, remains pure.
Humans are part of “nature.” We’re not separate, despite all these weird ass attempts and coercion to make us think we are.
” I think it would be a serious mistake to dismiss the demonic nature of the forces at work in our world today.”
I agree with this, but I struggle with the idea of not holding individuals responsible for their evil, unspeakable actions. Blaming the “devil” instead of the billionaires, for instance, doesn’t seem like it will do much good and lets them of the hook. Although, blaming them personally isn’t doing any good either.
When God and religion are brought into any topic things get messy. The many atheists will immediately shut down dialogue. Organized religion will hijack any solutions being proposed. There will be interfaith conflicts etc.
While I believe in God, I’m not particularly religious. I thought Naomi Wolf’s article was excellent until she started talking about God and the old testament, I had an immediate and negative reaction. Honestly, I’m not sure I finished it. I’ll go back and read the rest, though. Could be I’m warming up to spirituality as a path for me at this point.
Ed wrote:
“We will, but only if we also recognize the deeper forces informing our hidden history and haunting our present days.”
This reminded me of an article, introduced to me by a commenter on another blog, called “Mud Shadows” by Carlos Castaneda. Even though, I’m sure he has been completely discredited, I thought he had some interesting insight here. I haven’t read anything else by him, but the way he wrote about the “predators” (evil mud shadows) made me think not of the devil or religion, but of some primordial force that is part of the universe. Another, less religious, way to get across the concept that in many ways we are all victims of evil forces.
https://www.restoration-activationproject.com/mud-shadows-by-carlos-castaneda.html
” By playing on our self-reflection, which is the only point of awareness left to us, the predators create flares of awareness that they proceed to consume in a ruthless, predatory fashion. They give us inane problems that force those flares of awareness to rise, and in this manner, they keep us alive in order for them to be fed with the energetic flare of our pseudo-concerns.”
. . .
” ‘There’s nothing that you and I can do about it,” don Juan said in a grave, sad voice. “All we can do is discipline ourselves to the point where they will not touch us. How can you ask your fellow men to go through those rigors of discipline?
“They’ll laugh and make fun of you, and the more aggressive ones will beat the shit out of you. And not so much because they don’t believe it. Down in the depths of every human being, there’s an ancestral, visceral knowledge about the predators’ existence.’ ”
. . .
” ‘The only alternative left for mankind,” he continued, “is discipline. Discipline is the only deterrent. But by discipline I don’t mean harsh routines. I don’t mean waking up every morning at five-thirty and throwing cold water on yourself until you’re blue. Sorcerers understand discipline as the capacity to face with serenity odds that are not included in our expectations. For them, discipline is an art: the art of facing infinity without flinching, not because they are strong and tough but because they are filled with awe.’ “
Shocker, Good quote, “discipline is an art: the art of facing infinity without flinching”. imho that’s why all those Buddha statues have that serene little almost smile. In my experience, and have heard others mention similar, religion and spirituality are two different ‘things’; religion is more about beliefs and rote rituals whereas spirituality is about direct experiences and wrt rituals allows for nuance/spontaneity. As for “predatory” energy, Buddhists mention the “hungry ghost” and Lakota the “fat-taker”.
Thank you shocker…, I am not being judgmental, critical. I want to understand what you said; “While I believe in God, I’m not particularly religious.” What does that mean ? I never know what a person means when using those words; god, religion. I think I understand sometimes how they are frequently used but I can’t assume anything.
I don’t know Joseph. Probably a bit of my parochial school brainwashing and a general belief (hope) that there is something more. I imagine there are many people who have similar thoughts about God.
The larger point I was trying to make is that atheists, and even people who have a vague sense of belief in God, are quickly turned off at the mention of God/religion. But I do see the value of discussing the possibility of an unaffiliated, evil spirit (for lack of a better description) that is influencing/infecting humanity.
Interesting work here on, “Bombshell: Sixty Years After Her Death, New Evidence Suggests Marilyn Monroe Was Murdered by Bobby Kennedy and LAPD Covered Up Murder,”
https://covertactionmagazine.com/2022/05/25/bombshell-sixty-years-after-her-death-new-evidence-suggests-that-marilyn-monroe-was-murdered-by-bobby-kennedy-and-lapd-covered-up-murder/
A new Netflix documentary, The Mystery of Marilyn Monroe: The Unheard Tapes, and a book published by former LAPD officer Mike Rothmiller and Douglas Thompson, Bombshell: The Night Bobby Kennedy Killed Marilyn Monroe (London: Ad Lib Publishers, 2021), puncture the official narrative about Monroe’s death, detail corruption in the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) and expose liberal icon Robert Kennedy as a murderer.
I am convinced that it was not Bobby Kennedy but the groups in the deep state who had been using Marilyn Monroe. She knew too much. Bobby Kennedy intended to target these elements within the government. Bobby would have exposed his brother’s killers. Mi
Have you read Dr. John Coleman’s “Conspirators Hierarchy: The Story of the Committee of 300”? From 1991, he describes much of what has gone wrong and how it all was planned methodically at a global level and for decades. It’s quite a disturbing read that exposes groups and names and is relevant to where we find the world today.
Salud. Interesting merrygoround here, Edward.
Maybe Thespis has us all snookered. I have been fired for organizing, speaking truth to the one not deserving power, for being too student entered and client oriented. I have been in rooms where the beautiful Professional Managerial Class, and Institutional Leaders, and VPs and Presidents and Provosts, all of them, slick, and using the skills of bullshit and luster. All one and all, Eichmann’s. A good one by Mason,
https://dissidentvoice.org/2021/06/a-nation-of-thespians/
Writing back in the 1940s, psychoanalyst Erich Fromm had already critiqued the rise of a new American character-type: the “marketing personality” — whose looks, smiles and jokes would be “selling points,” not only in politics, but infiltrating all aspects of social engagement. In short, not the real person and his values (if any), but a simulacrum or image fashioned to display pleasing, if insincere, demeanor, attitudes and opinions.
Sociologist Erving Goffman extended this much further, theorizing that social interaction is inherently “dramaturgic” (read: deceptive), and that those engaged in skillful “impression-management” would “get the job” (no matter how incompetent), and “successfully” persuade others (“leadership”) — into, one can now recall, disastrous debt, blood-drenched wars, and “national security” profiteering. Forty years ago, journalist Lou Cannon wrote his aptly titled book President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime. Hitler once boastingly called himself “the greatest actor in Europe.” As media critics from Marshall McLuhan to Jerry Mander have noted, the visual experience of the television-image has further blunted critical faculties, enabling even poorly skilled thespians such as Bill Clinton, Tony Blair and George W.Bush to nonetheless persuade most viewers of the veracity of their outrageous lies. (This, in part, can also be attributed to the relative credulity of most viewers, who are unlikely to conceive of the magnitude of brazen, cynical insolence exhibited.) Of course, the triumph of pleasing “image” over something called “truth” has long been normalized and accepted. Which candidate “performed” better in that debate (“fact-checks” notwithstanding)? A histrionic, rabble-rousing “performer” — now matter how ignorant, dishonest and uninformed — can provide sufficient entertainment to be elected president (read Trump). By now, movie and TV “celebrities” are often given equal-weight with scientific and scholarly experts, in the “court of world opinion.”
Are you aware of this: *Eduard Albert Meier, November 1947:
https://theyflyblog.com/2022/01/no-one-imagined-what-billy-meier-foretold-about-pandemic/
“This plague will be ‘invented’, spread worldwide and claim countless victims – hundreds of thousands and even many millions of human lives in total – when, through the hatred of one American, together with the approval of the Chinese authorities, the foundation stone for the plague is laid in the mid-1970s. This will break out in the new 3rd millennium with many mutations and claim many victims, and it will be the irresponsible and absolutely incompetent of the governments, especially in Europe and America, who will consider and enforce much that is unfair and, moreover, hostile to life, with regard to false and fearful security measures. They will fail completely at the expense of the populations and seek their refuge in measures by issuing vaccination cards, thus forcing the unwilling of the anti-vaccination movement to give up their free will and at the same time encouraging criminality. They will try to force the anti-vaccinationists into measures that will label them as second-class people and discriminate against them in an unlawful way that violates fundamental rights. Governments will induce vaccination with insufficiently tested vaccines as a way of masking their defining incompetence and fear.“
Also: http://www.librodellaverita.com/messaggi/VACCINAZIONE-GLOBALE.html from 2010
The same warning.
But also, as in Billy Meier’s Henoch prophecies, it is about nuclear energy, in power plants and weapons. The fact that man does not know everything about them or the real consequences.
This is the end because the entire earth will be destroyed because of man’s unreasonable attitudes about science, not being aware of the true consequences. They are playing with something that will destroy the earth and make it a dead planet.
God will have to intervene. This is the end. Fortunately, God can resurrect after 3 days and he can recreate a new earth and new bodies for everyone as well.
Hell was created when beings did destroy their entire planet, its physical dimension was obliterated. It won’t be allowed to happen again.
Once the nuclear energy goes down into the core of a planet, it will die, and they have already done it to the sun.
It began all here in 1954: https://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/exopolitica/esp_exopolitics_Q_0.htm
The ‘aliens’ they signed the treaty with, were the former inhabitants of that obliterated planet, some were here on earth when it exploded, some left for here when it did explode. They are the reptilians. They trade all this technology we now have, for something so horrible, and evil that nothing good will ever come from it, quite the contrary.
Good to hear you’re up and at it again, Ed! i’ve read that Shaitan (aka Satan) has to do with excrement and kinda the one who presides over ‘the stuff’; the modern vernacular would be “the shitshow”. Plus that gives a different meaning to: “Get thee behind me, Satan.” So literally that is a part of life we must deal with, yet some obviously don’t want to e.g. the toxic stuff that extractivism leaves behind, e.g. for winning a court case wrt the oil pollution in Ecuador, Steven Donziger was on house arrest then in prison b/c Chevron and the system are, pick your adjective, sinister, evil sociopaths, shitheads. There’s a natural cycle of birth and decay in the natural world but man in his/her/whatevergender arrogance has neglected respect for that. Plus i think that the everything that’s broken is the system, whereas e.g. in the backyard where am at, the azaleas bloomed just as the forsythia yellow was fading to green, right on time as they’ve been doing for many years. Yet of course some weather/climate patterns are messed up b/c of the aforementioned ne’er-do-wells.
Thanks for another wonderful essay. Glad you’ve recovered from your illness. Those of us who seek to wage peace in a multi-polar world realize the extent of the demonic nature of our times. I pray “without ceasing” for us all to find our way back to God.
Read Edward’s article on another site, and came here specifically to express the same. Amazingly, I was just wondering about you earlier today—wish you well.
Thank you Edward for all you write, and particularly, for not shying away from ultimate reality, from moral consciousness.
Good to hear from you Gregory. I hope that you and yours are well. In case you are wondering about the quotes around “without ceasing”, I was referencing an excellent short story by Wendell Berry titled “Pray without Ceasing” written in 1992. It can be found in the collection “The Best American Short Stories” of 1993, and was part of a collection “Fidelity: Five Stories”. It is one of my favorites.
Thank you Skip. I’ll follow your lead on the short story. In peace brother.
We have been divided by language as Love waits in our hearts.
Or, as Krishnamurti so elegantly put it:
‘When you call yourself an Indian or a Muslim or a Christian or a European, or anything else, you are being violent. Do you see why it is violent? Because you are separating yourself from the rest of mankind. When you separate yourself by belief, by nationality, by tradition, it breeds violence. So a man who is seeking to understand violence does not belong to any country, to any religion, to any political party or partial system; he is concerned with the total understanding of mankind.’
Thanks Edward.
Johnny…nice thought…, I agree with Krishnamurti. Why do we separate ourselves from others and then call this individual uniquenesses ? We are unique as individuals but do we really understand this correctly ? And why would we want to ‘feel’ or ‘be’ unique? I think we have a gigantic mess in front of us. The person in Minnesota wants to understand the problems in Malaysia but that person is not interested in the problems of Minnesota. How can problems be solved? Why are we not where our feet stand?
Here is a thought ,and not popular for sure. “The West must fall for the Antichrist to be revealed”. What we are living is the “how” of it. If God be real, and He is, and past, present and future are “now” to Him then He can prophetically tell us what is to come because He is already “there”, now. As Jesus said to his disciples “these things must be”, then, the only thing we can “do” is get right with Him, through repentance and faith. He will protect and provide and guide and sort this out. Once you lose the fear of physical death a peace comes over you. It is a gift from Him. M.
I agree. What are seeing in the world is the rejection of Jesus’ teaching made manifest.
Thank you Jack for your comment…, and I am confused ! Somewhere it states that Paul said; “For the man is not of the woman but the woman of the man.” Woman bears the pain but man takes the credit. And then we have St. Augustine stating that man, but not woman, was made in God’s image and woman therefore is not complete without man, while he is complete alone. And then Martin Luther stated in his writings that it was quite natural for women to be secondary to men.
And now I am told that John Calvin also spoke out against political equality for women, stating that it would be a “deviation from the original and proper order of nature.” There were many statements attempting to establish and program other people to think women were not as significant as men. Now at some point it apparently was established that men are superior, more privileged, more of many characteristics and if we agree with any of these people, we will create a divisiveness, between humans, between societies and countries, an antagonism, an aggression, a demanding to be in control and so we must reexamine the information that we have accepted to this point in time. Is this information accurate? What has caused the huge imbalances, inequities among humans everywhere. Our leaders obviously do not have the capacity to think coherently and speak honestly. I think the continuity of thinking and injustices through the centuries must be looked at and not supported!
“…American exceptionalism with its divine mission, its manifest destiny, is to demonically try to destroy Russia…”
I think to myself: “If Russia was powerful enough, would they not attempt to do the same? ARE they perhaps trying to do the same?”
The term “Balance of Power” appears often in diplomatic and geopolitical writing. Since at the peak of the power pyramid there are no “good guys,” it seems like the best that The Little People” can hope for is some kind of “Balance of Evil” where no one has enough power or authority to impose themselves on their opponents.
Nice piece.
Willem,
It’s not Russia, it’s whoever runs Runs Russia at a given time.
Good morning Willem…if non-human creatures could speak human languages, what might they say to, about us? Would their sentences contain mostly vulgar words. We live to look at iPods while walking in front of an oncoming dump truck. We watch various events that depict ‘us against them’ and cheer. We shop, We shop, We shop. We protect our pride with many empty words. We quote politicians who know nothing. We practice walking like Al Gore did so we can look stupid ! We respond to any external insanity while ignoring our real internal messages. We prefer lies over any truth. We buy things to kill other things without thought of just what we might be killing. ‘ It must be safe, it even says it is safe on the label ‘ Marketing Department cliches…, we are a walking, talking, dancing, dressing, breathing, gargling, brushing, mowing, eating, flying, driving, schooling, competing, warring, killing.., DISASTER!
To use another Carlinism: “It’s a big club and you’re not in it…”
I think there are secretes, games which are played by the “leaders” of nation-states, particularly the most prominent – USA and its vassals, Russia and China and their vassals (though these may have a different take).
These secretes are managed to keep their respective populations in line; most definitely with the use of fear. The USA leads the pack to be sure, but the others are clearly in on it and under the right conditions will exhort what is most likely to keep their clan on the “reservation”.
Ed regarding your recent bout with health – I refer to it as detoxification which is the body’s means of maintaining health, even when the symptoms are unpleasant. Detoxification is actually the opposite of being sick.