- We are a species whose determinative gift is the
notoriously
two-edged sword of intelligence. This is combined indissolubly with the
necessity to choose continually how to wield the gift. We are reasonably
free (so far) to apply our innate intelligence toward the goal of becoming
wise. We are obviously equally free to employ ourselves inventing ingenious
methods of degradation, degeneration, and destruction. Intelligence joined
to free will is the fundamental construct of our existence, whether we
like it or not. We are therefore obliged at every moment to be moving
toward
either greater ignorance or greater wisdom. According to how we are using
our minds, we will be heading toward either the creative or the destructive
ends of the spectrum. Provided we are conscious at all, intelligence is
always in operation, in individuals and in groups, and having its effects
accordingly. That we have a genius for the pursuit of wisdom has been amply
demonstrated in the brilliant achievements of individuals throughout
history,
and periodically in larger groups and entire cultures. That we display
an equal capacity for racing downhill toward wholesale annihilation has
also been repeatedly proven. And right now, the sum total of our choices
is adding up to extraordinary peril. If our civilization could be perceived
as an individual, it would present the spectacle of a genius, dead drunk
and staggering around the edge of the Grand Canyon in the throes of
delirium
tremens. That the innate intelligence is still there somewhere is hardly
a cause for self-congratulatory rejoicing.
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- No matter how intrinsically intelligent we are, we are
nevertheless a civilization in the process of dying of a case of
stupiditas.
The word stupidity comes from the Latin word stupiditas, meaning senseless.
To be senseless means: acting without sense or sound judgment;
unreasonable;
meaningless; having no power of sensation or perception; unconscious;
incapable
of sensation or feeling; contrary to reason. People suffering the deadly
ravages of stupidity are unconscious, disconnected from the meaning of
their own perceptions, and incapable of normal sensation. They are devoid
of the power of judgment, and lost in meaningless behavior. Such a
situation,
however much we are accustomed to seeing it, actually describes a
catastrophic
mental illness. The physical body may live, but normally functioning human
awareness is not present and accounted for. The person may act, emote and
speak, but all too often this constitutes mere "sound and fury,
signifying
nothing." Sensitive responsive consciousness has departed and has
left walking, talking, passively conditioned Homo roboticus behind to go
through the motions.
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- Our so-called mass culture is little but a gargantuan
petri dish overflowing with the virus of contagious stupiditas. Lethal
germs of stupidity flourish in each crevice of its glittering crackpot
surfaces. And the root cause of such overpowering levels of fatal ignorance
is clearly observable. Mass stupification arises directly from the base
motives infesting nearly everything manifested all around us.
Cause-and-effect
is one single inevitable movement in time and space, from start to finish.
The end of any activity is hidden in the beginning, in the hidden seed
of intention. It is true that the best of intentions may have unexpected
and unhappy consequences. Nevertheless, these are nowhere in the same
category
as the prolonged and wretched material, psychological, and spiritual
results
of dishonest and corrupt intentions. Any activity of any kind that
originates
from the motives of greed, selfishness, arrogance, and the will to
manipulate
others will eventually bear the bitter fruit of self-destruction. This
is the underlying natural law that no individual or group can escape
forever:
what we sow, we reap, to the last decimal place. The simplest fact of life,
this is, and understood for millennia, yet our entire civilization pretends
never to have heard of it. Of course, all are free to deny the reality,
if they care to, of enthusiastically participating in a runaway materialism
of ravenous greed and supernatural levels of stupification. And all are
free, should they wish to do so, to feign ignorance of the ever-increasing
degeneration emerging from every particle of this mass culture. What people
say to themselves or others in self-justification for enjoying it is
neither
here nor there. Their intelligence will suffer regardless of what
self-serving
expurgated version of truth the conscious mind is dutifully reporting.
What any of us say we are up to when we hope to disguise a grubby motive
from ourselves or from others is irrelevant. Life itself registers
everyone's
intentions at every moment; commensurate effects are thereby set in motion,
and no hoodwinking has ever been possible, nor ever will be
possible.
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- The conscious intention to create distortion, addiction,
weakness and uniformity of profitable behavior is at work behind the scenes
everywhere. The basis of our entire civilization is the direct control
and manipulation of the whole human being in order to wring yet more profit
from deliberately confused, enfeebled, and entranced human souls. So far
relatively few of the total numbers existing within this horrific system
seem even to be aware of the fundamental assault on human value and dignity
inherent in such a bottomless pit of a bottom line. Nevertheless, it is
this primary intention that has resulted in the manufacture and
distribution
of the contemporary spiritual plague of Hemorrhagic Stupiditas. To
acquiesce
and to freely participate in the deadly end products of a culture founded
on the extremes of ruthless greed is fatal to natural intelligence. Nearly
every corporate/military/government/social offering is deeply rooted in
festering greed, and is therefore crawling with the highly contagious
micro-vermin
of profoundest ignorance. Short of merciful death, it is becoming
impossible
to avoid spending a great deal of time and energy trying to avoid direct
contact with that which will make you stupider if you so much as touch
it.
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- These days stupidity itself is becoming a cradle-to-grave
condition of seemingly outwardly normal existence. Nothing else describes
accurately what has happened to so many human beings, no doubt originally
born endowed with normal human capacities. This civilization is oozing
stupidity at every pore. The vital organs of the State, the legislative,
executive and judicial members of the Body Politic, are fatally infected.
All the social constructs running our lives are reaching the end of
viability
in a slow agonizing convulsion of idiopathic idiocy. The remorselessly
self-serving, willfully insolent and shortsighted greed-eaten motives of
powerfully criminal fools will certainly result in increasing suffering
on a vast scale. Our entire world is presenting symptoms of rapid onset
of the final stages of death by senselessness. Nature itself is unraveling
by the day. We have rotting, dying, fished-out oceans, sterile toxic
used-up
soil, no more fresh water, a deforested and ever more lifeless planet,
and incalculable quantities of innumerable poisonous substances
metastasizing
everywhere and in everything. And even at that, apparently the thickening,
sickening, enveloping fog of stupiditas was not quite complete. To entirely
finish off the last of the natural systems we depend on, a hidden coterie
of Big Brains is secretly altering the entire atmosphere with
non-breathable
deadly materials in order to deploy new weapons and communications
technology.
Human nature, that very potent aspect of the web of life, has fallen into
the final convulsion of pretending it is separate from all other life,
and therefore expects to be excused from obeying the laws of nature.
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- Incessantly mutating forms of the virus of irrationality
are proliferating unchecked. The invisible germs of stupidity instantly
attack when anyone has a close encounter with almost any product of our
overflowing petri dish of ruthlessly enforced meaninglessness. And
"any
product" means just that. Near-fatal introductory levels of unreason
are offered through the direct intravenous feed of the "educational
system". Massive doses of the stupiditas bacilli offered as
"education"
at early ages are all too often quite sufficient to ensure life-long
crippling
levels of hopelessly conditioned passivity. Then there is the beloved
practice
of voluntarily sustaining repeated and deliberate brain damage by means
of offering the poor mind itself on as a sacrifice to television.
Television
is nothing but the primary bioreactor for the manufacture and distribution
of the plague of stupiditas. It effectively dilutes what little
self-awareness
and potential for wisdom remains after being mangled by the constricting
torments of educational procedures.
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- Then there is the way so many people are forced to
undergo
the torments of the damned, stealthily referred to as "earning a
living".
It is worth noticing that just as being naturally and fully alive is
becoming
more and more difficult, the pressures to reduce our existence to the goal
of earning money, as a substitute for living, are becoming ever more
demanding.
In other words, to earn a living is increasingly meaning being obliged
to act directly contrary to spiritual common sense in order to be allowed
to exist here at all. Many thus give way to the ocean of meaninglessness
in order to satisfy the dark side's plan for us all: to become perfectly
unconscious lifelong consumers of pointless "lifestyles". And
of course, ever-present throughout the petri dish world, are the specially
concentrated forms of the virus: the stupid-pills disguised as corporate
food and drink, which keep a steady flow of concentrate-of-dumbdown moving
right along through the cultural bloodstream.
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- Well, but we are so used to all this, and that is the
very worst of the outwardly banal appearances of business-as-usual all
around us. People really believe: "This is just our culture, yes?
Surely it can't be all bad." But it is in fact shockingly stupefying.
It is simply difficult for most to see through the heavy protective shell
of numbing custom to the writhing vitals within. The nature of all viruses
is to wear protective coverings that hide their true activities from their
hosts. As it is, too many people do not perceive the ghastly gist of it
all. Therefore they do not act to correct the fundamental problems, but
spend their best energies vainly trying to satisfy the insatiable appetites
of degenerative materialism. Unfortunately, little of the underlying causes
of our predicament are ever noticed precisely because the awareness
necessary
for noticing has already been diluted to infinitesimal proportions.
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- The only remedy for the raging disease of contagious
stupiditas resides in the individual ability to remove oneself and one's
family from the sources of contamination as much as possible. As more and
more people do this, very beautiful new ways of living are slowly emerging
from the ashes of force-fed mass ignorance. These new experimental ways
of life tend to subtly combine the most sensible forms of past ways of
living with the technological advances of the present. There is an
ever-growing
army of souls in active rebellion against the death-wish petri dish
stupidity-culture,
and their achievements are quietly rippling out across the globe as waves
of sane intention. The common key to any and all useful new forms of life
is wise sustainability, and this is true in all levels of our existence.
Physical health absolutely requires the health of nature, and there is
no possible avoidance of this basic truth. Human profit motives that
destroy
nature simply destroy human nature simultaneously. Therefore we will either
creatively work out new forms of co-existence that support a flourishing
natural world, or die out altogether, as so many other civilizations have
before us. The same requirements hold true for our emotional lives.
Negative
emotions do not sustain a human being in health or happiness, and yet so
many still cling, in the throes of stupiditas, to a multitude of degrees
and kinds of emotional negativity as if our lives depended on it.
Fortunately,
at the same time, rebels for greater livingness are willingly learning
to live in the harmonious and sustaining emotions of loving kindness,
trust,
loyalty, caring, sacrifice, and mutual good will. As emotional wisdom
deepens,
our abilities to maintain and strengthen worthwhile relationships, while
instinctively avoiding debilitating ones, are rapidly evolving, and in
this is the hopeful path to sustainable relationships.
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- Mental sustainability is founded on the capacity to think
clearly without being rushed to conclusions by overpowering emotional
attachments
to the answer. We cannot be said as a species to think well yet, and these
days what passes for the thinking process bears less resemblance than ever
before to the real thing. What we (unthinkingly) call thinking is often
merely a reformulation of second-hand thought-wads. Original thinking is
still quite rare, yet each individual is in fact an origin of thought of
some kind of another. Words pass through our minds constantly, and they
need not be turgid streams of other people's used mental waste products.
Although it takes effort to learn to do our own thinking, we are all more
or less capable of learning the process, given half a chance. And lastly,
when the topic of spiritual sustainability arises, this remains as ever
the most crucial requirement of freedom of conscience. To encroach unasked
upon the personal sacred territory existing between each one and the
Creator
of all is an unthinkable act of totalitarian arrogance. And although the
fanatical wars of groups of belief systems still destroy the happiness
and very lives of countless members of the human race, some day humanity
will awaken from this ignorant and fear-driven stupor as well. In the
meantime,
the highest sanity most of us can attain is a basic realization that this
is dazzlingly enormous, complex, multileveled universe. The Mind and Heart
and Purpose of the Creator of countless galaxies are obviously very
capacious
indeed.
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