Constructive Moping for the Downtrodden
By Diane Harvey [abridged text]
The specialized definition of downtrodden here is: people with sense forced to observe a large portion of mankind continually trying to pinch its own head off. The goal of the rationally downtrodden is to somehow wrestle the insane bits to the ground before they kill us all. Collectively, the eminently reasonable constitute an unorganized worldwide militia of common sense, called upon by the force of events to maintain Madman Watch. And naturally enough, understanding the possible results of the current trend toward dedicated mutual annihilation is hard on the sane. Continually flying in the face of so many embodiments of geopolitical dementia is tiresome as a way of life. Therefore moping, or episodes of gloomy and listless melancholy, is the all-too frequent result of intelligent and loving concern for the future …/
And, en masse, the victims are still being wonderfully cooperative in the concerted effort to reduce human creativity to meaningless preprogrammed two-dimensional thoughts and activities.
Who are we then, to try cruelly to yank out so many intravenous feeder lines? Why should we incessantly emit alarmed noises in the tranquilized faces of convocations of sleepwalkers? What’s it to us if most human beings these days have traded their very lives for the simpleminded relief of being willfully ignorant and remotely controlled? Such may be the typical late night thoughts of the downtrodden, after a hard day trying to transmit yet more unwelcome information to the unwilling and uninterested. Tired thoughts of renunciation of responsibility may come creeping in, after one too many conversations in which plain statements regarding the facts of our overall predicament are greeted with derision, indifference, and outright threats …/
[Yet] we live, we breathe: we are thinking human beings, and that means we are already too far gone to duck back under the blankie. …We can’t unknow what we know, or unsee what we see. … [and] the bright flares of intelligent minds are lately appearing in unprecedented outbursts, offering excellent alternatives to the pleasures of endless war, suffering, destruction and death.
The ongoing experience of outraged sanity we are plagued by is merely an exaltation of common sense. But we knew that already. Intermittent periods of understandable moping notwithstanding, the choice between being an activist and being a passivist is still the same old choice between being awake or asleep. Here and now, for better and worse, we are necessary advocates of one kind or another of pro-evolutionary anti-devolutionary activity. … To truly live means to act consciously in the world, and to manage the impacts as best we can. …/
Temporary immersion in waves of acute misery due to the state of the world is almost impossible to avoid. But even so, this can be taken as a useful signpost pointing to its own opposite. If being sick doesn’t energize new strategies for staying healthy, we missed the point. The point of being miserable is to notice that we are temporarily out of touch with reality. And reality means Reality, not the consensus nonsense making all the trouble. If we didn’t already possess an innate inward sense of what is ultimately real, the dangerous and ignorant display of the power of the unreal at large in the world would not trouble us in the least. Depression is the symptom of having been gobbled up by the gaping, fanged, drooling mouth of raving Unreality. But tickle its gorge and it will spit you back up more or less intact, other than the thin coating of slime, which washes off. [phew!]
To turn episodes of bone deep hand wringing to constructive account, we might dwell at length on one of the most useful observations ever made. No problem is ever solved on the level at which it occurs. Consciousness is designed to be opened, expanded, and ratcheted up a notch or three on a regular basis. The mind is a cosmic cargo container, an infinite direction finder, and an instantaneous teleporter. It holds the keys to every possible path and destination, and automatically leads us anywhere we decide to go. The darkest hells and the illuminated heavens begin between our ears. We are the ones who program the direction, with every thought we think. One of the greatest wonders of our construction is that the mind is not meant to be heartless. The mind contains a heart, with all the energies we associate with the heart fully present. To think with and through the heart of the mind is entirely different from thinking without it. And heartless thoughts are the point of origin of most of our species’ self-induced agony.
Thinking with the heart of the mind does not mean abandoning discernment. The real meaning of the word “discrimination” has been much abused, and deserves to be restored to its original condition. To discriminate simply means to have the capacity to perceive subtle distinctions and differences among all created forms of life. The absence of the discriminative faculty results in the inability to register subtleties at all, which is hardly a virtue. Discernment and love go hand in hand, or one falls into the pit on either side. “Love your enemies” doesn’t mean it is never necessary to fight for what is right. By all means, whip the moneychangers out of the temple.
And when unregenerate humans become professional predators, to remove them from incarnation with dispatch, for the common good, can also be a form of love in action. Intelligent love is not stupid or suicidal. It is not an enabler or an excuser, or blind to the machinations of criminal intent. Nevertheless, we are required to love our enemies, and to forgive them, even while cracking the whip at their backsides as they scurry out of the temple. Love is the energy that can understand the long evolutionary story of the human soul, including the worst souls can fall into here, and the inevitable consequences of the worst. Love bears with us all as we undergo the trauma, delight, mess and enjoyment of working through the net of illusions. We live and die and live again, and sooner or later we begin to notice our own continuity. The wisdom of love reveals that nobody really dies, and our extremities of grief about death have been a case of mistaken identity. There is a great deal more to every one of our earthly dramas than meets the outward-directed eye: there are levels upon levels of meaning which only reveal themselves as we go along, a little at a time. The heart of the mind knows this, and in knowing this, can still find joy in the midst of chaos and confusion, and even in pain and the death of the body. Saints who could sing while being burned at the stake were certainly not pretending.
Behind, above, and beyond the zones of our gloomy ruminations, there are other and far more real dimensions of existence. Infinite spiritual potential co-exists with the sorrowful events of our times. It is not a matter of either/or. We cannot thrive by choosing only one: either spending our lives struggling for the sake of sanity in the world, or withdrawing from the common ground and exploring our glorious personal evolutionary possibilities. This is the cycle of both/and. To be whole, we must embrace both the external and internal complexities, and move into the totality. Whoever wishes to enjoy the light, while evading the responsibility for also facing the dark, will in the end be forced back into a tardy confrontation with all that was avoided. But those who are willing to address the full extent of the spectrum of light and dark, and assume the burdens of working in the world and on themselves simultaneously, will more quickly transcend the limitations we are accustomed incorrectly to thinking of as the human condition. There is nothing exotic about this: it is even obvious. Wherever we exist, and whatever we participate in, we must eventually improve to the best of our ability. This is just what being human means. The refining process begins and ends with ourselves, yet the world is carried along with us.
We aren’t easily going to be able to manage the oppressive atmosphere of a world run by the criminally insane without a viable connection to living spiritual energies. Concerned consciousness too often runs in ruts, jerking its knees at every passing nightmare folly, of which there is far too overwhelming a selection. … living through this prolonged siege between devolution and evolution is extremely wearing and tearing. Let us therefore give serial melancholy its due; yet take great care not to be permanently brought low by the effects of gravity and the reign of unreason.
There is that in us which has the power not only to face the worst, but also to overcome it. It is folly to unconsciously commit oneself to personal wretchedness in the name of the cause of human enlightenment. Whoever has chosen to be a part of the effort to alter the wildly dangerous course of history at this time is also simultaneously undergoing a process of intense spiritual stimulation. And while these words are inevitably platitudes on one level, they refer to the most vividly meaningful experiences on another. We are learning to be and to act and to feel in this world, while nevertheless remaining detached from it in spiritual being. We are learning to evolve consciously, under increasingly terrible circumstances. And while no one knows the details of the immediate future, it seems highly likely that most of us will live out the rest of our brief lives here within this fundamental and ever-intensifying duality.
This is clearly a crossroads of criticality in the age-long human story of physical and spiritual striving toward freedom. In such a context, the spiritual awakening of each individual becomes far more important to the whole than it would be in a less critical period. The value of every person attempting to explore and employ untapped spiritual power has never been greater. At the same time, there has been an unprecedented explosion of helpful forms of guidance and information, available to anyone and everyone. While it is in the nature of any field of information to be a complex mixture of truth and untruth, sorting through the field is the eternal test of applied discernment. When it comes to spiritual teachings, all are on their own recognizance. We can perceive only that level and those qualities of reality about which we are already at least partially conscious. … The possibility of spiritual progress is being freely offered to all, but genuine achievements are not the products of mere optimistic and overactive imagination.
Spiritual dimensions are real, and their principles, laws, energies and existent inhabitants are also real. At the same time, the potential for illusion also persists. Being free to a certain extent to create one’s own reality also means being free to create elaborate encapsulated unrealities as well. This includes enormous and longstanding fantasies being generated and maintained by large groups of temporarily deluded souls in nonphysical realities. There is nothing new in this tendency. Innumerable mental and emotional worlds on earth are built of these same types of warring paradigms of the unreal, embraced by multitudes of adherents. Subtler worlds are subject to the same conditions. Caveat Emptor is a multi-dimensional cautionary statement. Those who become addicted to merely feeling good, at the expense of developing the difficult power of spiritual discernment, will not enjoy the long-term results, either in or out of the physical body.
We are being given generous access to a treasury of old and new spiritual technologies, in order to counteract the advances in technology being used against us. No effort is being spared in the program to annihilate freedom, and to curtail the manifestation of the human spirit on this planet. Equally, no effort is being spared to provide us with ample resources to counteract the onslaught. It is no accident that both the ancient wisdom of the East and the most modern advances in quantum physics reinforce one another’s conclusions as to the primary nature of reality. It is not by chance that the hidden ancient wisdom of the East is being made available to the West, just as modern physics has reached the startling realization that the universe is far more malleable than we thought. These two far-flung ends of human enquiry meet, the oldest and the newest, and in their similarities a powerful and useful spiritual direction is indicated.
We are finally realizing in significant numbers that the human race is creating and sustaining a large part of its own misery, out of the plenum we call thin air. We are learning to understand the significance of living in an ocean of astonishing energies, readily available for any purpose whatsoever. There is nothing inherent in this universe to prevent us from completely transforming ourselves and our species’ prevailing attitudes and behavior. We are in essence perfectly free to recreate our world in the light of as much beauty, and goodness, and truth as we can handle. What prevents this is first of all the general utter ignorance of the latent spiritual powers within human beings: ignorance deliberately and ferociously maintained by all those who wish to use humans as energy-slaves.
The masterminds of our enslavement are deadly opponents, but not on their own. They are, after all, comparatively few, while we are a multitude. The effectiveness of their rule is based on the extensive mass hypnosis and conditioning that keeps a large percentage of the human population at any given time in a state of cooperation. The main source of the power of the forces of devolution comes not from themselves, but from successfully enlisting a massive army of unconscious and half-conscious enablers. We have basically handed over our planet to various types and degrees of conscious and unconscious dark forces simply because we have not yet become sufficiently awake and unified, and therefore strong enough, to stop them. The cunning of the powerful, combined with the total weight of hapless slave-consciousness, is no weakling: it is a formidable enemy. As a result, the usual fate of those who have come along periodically to tell humanity the good news has not been wonderful. Nevertheless, Schroedinger’s cat is out of the box: human beings are endowed with unused but formidable creative powers for good as well as evil. And too many of us know this now for the liberating awareness to be effectively suppressed, at least as things stand now. A vitally useful proportion of the human race is rapidly maturing into functional levels of creative self-awareness, little though that is outwardly obvious on the world stage. And one of the signs of this is that what was once of necessity esoteric knowledge, simply because so few could be trusted to understand it, has now become exoteric, and freely available to anyone alert enough to recognize it.
There are urgent reasons to get beyond the condition of personal misery under stressful conditions as a psychological lifestyle. The duration of this battle for sanity is unknown, but Madman Watch will continue, and intensify. No amount of personal unhappiness and despair will change one iota of what we are facing. Sustaining negative energy currents is damaging to oneself and others: it’s that simple. Fear, anger and depression are the best destroyers of the very energies we need to survive. Love cannot reach us though these blots on consciousness, neither from within nor from without. It takes effort to root out such subconscious conditioning forces, because these negative reactions form a line of least resistance for the human psyche. Nevertheless, they are easily enough replaced by positive energies, once we remember we have the choice and gain a little practice in turning ourselves around. It is technically not very difficult to switch channels; it is only the accumulated brute power of long-held subconscious habits that makes this feel so overwhelming.
The lines of probability, which connect the world we have now to our vision of a decent future, are constructed of quantum particles at the deepest level, and are subject to instantaneous alteration by emotion, thought and intention. The human race is being run along these lines of probability. Our relatively accessible higher faculties can be set free to reconfigure this world to a higher standard and into a generally positive direction. The alternative is that those who wish to institute wholesale imposed control for the worst possible motives will overtake all hope of effective human freedom for a long time to come. Although the forces arrayed against the successful introduction of higher energies seem enormous, a meaningful level of transformation in the way human beings live together here is not only quite possible, but absolutely necessary. Setting aside all premature expectations of a miraculous earthly paradise just around the corner, the practical potential for mitigating a great deal of unnecessary human suffering is still nearly limitless. If enough of us choose to understand what we are all capable of, and strenuously pursue and encourage the development of inherent spiritual attributes, we can change humanity’s present dead end destination, by energy-fiat. This is basic material and spiritual physics, and has nothing to do with imagination operating outside the laws of matter, energy and consciousness.
Meanwhile, bouts with the old reactionary ego will no doubt continue to bedevil us, while increasingly conscious relations with our good angels and the joys they bring demonstrate the alternative. Both types of experiences serve to remind us of the energies we are either inflicting or bestowing on ourselves and others. And moving in tandem with efforts to master our own complex energy systems, Madman Watch must likewise be assiduously kept. We are asking a great deal of ourselves by being here now, and being a minority who are conscious of all that is at stake. But we would not be here, immersed in this magnificent and terrible time, if we did not wish to be put to this very test. We are here now because we know that our collective intention to transform ourselves, and the course of human history, is of the utmost significance- and we accepted the challenge.
Whether we win or lose the struggle in the short run is not a foregone conclusion. We know this. Increasingly sophisticated forms of techno-totalitarianism could succeed in shutting down the human race for a long time to come. The eventual result of the present battle for control of this world will have consequences beyond our imagination, either way. We have understood that, if and when we can learn to align and coordinate our energies in sufficient numbers, we can succeed in making a degree of reason and love the most powerful determining energies on earth. When, where, how and if the required percentage of dedicated souls here will manage to unify and synchronize, effectively asserting our transformative power and tipping the balance in this cycle, we do not know. But we do know that we have pledged ourselves to become embodiments of consciousness and love and life in the midst of a maelstrom of ignorance, hatred and death. All this we have freely chosen in the light of our souls. Therefore let us take heart, keep faith, renew our minds, and abide with our decision.