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- What we desire, we become. There is no disguising the
outcome of our inward life. We can pretend all we like, but Life is never
fooled. Each of us unerringly manifests the results, to one degree or
another, of what it is we are seeking. What we want, both to give and
to get, powerfully shapes our destinies. There is no escape from desire,
and no way to hide these motivating secrets of our innermost nature. Existence
itself knows what we are really like, whether or not our own conceptions
of ourselves are accurate. In the same way, nations, like individuals,
follow the desires which determine their fates. A nation is not a thing
apart from human beings, after all. It is simply what a large number of
people are up to together through time.
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- What we are up to together lately is the dissolution
of the soul of our nation. As a people, we have turned our proud, shallow,
contemporary backs on everything which relates us to any spiritual impulses.
And we have gone much further than that: we are now speedily devolving
downward and backward, past basic human common sense. We the People are
nearing wholesale soul-suicide. This is the inescapable fruit of all that
we have been ardently desiring. Sixty years ago we desired to save the
world from totalitarianism, and its regimented unholy materialism. That
sacrificial desire resulted in the momentary triumph of the soul of humanity
over the powers of darkness let loose on this planet. And all who are
alive and still thinking today try to fathom what happened next. How on
earth did we get here from there to here in the blink of an eye?
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- We have had a great deal of help. There are always two
opposing forces, two paths, two plans, two directions to choose from,
individually and therefore also collectively. There was already a dark
plan in place, just as the forces of light are ever-present. Even before
that great war for human freedom was over, the forces of totalitarianism
were busy behind the scenes, redeploying their assets and developing a
new strategy for enslavement. This strategy is obvious in retrospect.
The war for ownership of human souls was transferred from crude physical
warfare to the arena of a new and more enticing breed of materialism.
It isn't necessary to go to all the trouble to enslave the physical bodies
of human beings. If you can entrain their desires downward far enough into
dense matter, humans will exchange their souls gladly for the sake of playing
with toys and passively devouring clownish spectacles. Once the individual
soul's creative spiritual purpose is traded for a "lifestyle",
the forces of darkness have won. People are then eager to ignore the voice
of conscience in order to spend their lives buying what you want to sell
them. This is a perfectly balanced ecological system from the point of
view of the dark forces. Through advances in techniques of the manipulation
of human desire, we were carefully conditioned, bit by bit, right out
of our souls. However, this could not have happened without our enthusiastic
cooperation. In the end, humanity is always the deciding factor in the
endless battle between material and spiritual forces. We choose our heights
and depths, and the entities that accompany us along the way. Angels or
devils: the nature of our desire decides. Many people choose not to know
the difference, and thus never acknowledge that their guiding angels are
actually horned.
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- Our country has become a busy, hard-working and thriving
desolation. We are slaves to The Empire of Empty Words and Meaningless
Gestures. We have come to the end of this particular form of our body
politic, our larger destiny. Surface movement and shine is now enough
to please the undiscerning eye of most Americans. Life lived inside a
thin layer of veneer is deep enough for most, so long as the picture changes
fast enough. The sixteenth-of-an-inch deep offerings of the entertainment
industry, Hypnosis Unlimited, are avidly welcomed. The newer-better-bigger-louder-faster
Department of Unquestioned Materialism is always hiring. Not many citizens
of this spiritually gutted, hollowed-out nation protest. They have mostly
all bought stock in America, refusing to notice that it is now a wholly-owned
subsidiary of Planetary Totalitarianism, Inc. To admit what is happening
might endanger one's comfortable "lifestyle", and this cannot
be. To see through the surface might mean to feel obliged to do something
about it in some small way, and that would interfere with the job in the
corporation, the plans for buying new stuff, the retirement plan, and
television-trance-time. Better to not know, better to surrender to the
hypnotic messages and the everyday passive states, because they feel so
comfortable. Better when experiencing the chilly touch of the meaninglessness
of all this to quickly go shopping again, or eat another ice cream, or
submit what is left of one's mind to screaming soul-obliterating sounds
and the charm of hideous images. Better to work harder, to make more money,
to buy more matter, to be more entertained, to sink ever deeper, in order
to work harder, to make more money, to buy more matter, to be more entertained,
to sink ever deeper. And the great sought-after prize in all this: to
be able to do nothing at all. The freedom to be absolutely useless is
now considered to be the highest form of human life. We now actually believe
the underlying message of the dark forces, which is that Receiving Everything
+ Giving Nothing = Success. The message is that perfect freedom to consume
equates to perfect enjoyment of existence. This is the life demonstration
of absolute greed. It is all the desire for the little self to have have
have. And afterwards: death.
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- Greed was once an obvious and, on the whole, socially
unacceptable disease. There was little difficulty distinguishing between
normal human desires for civilized comfort, and the pathological out-of-control
desire nature of the relatively few. In the last few decades however,
the infection of greed has managed to stealthily mutate into a virulent
and deadly new form. Greed has developed a protective coating which reflects
a sheen of normal respectability, and is no longer even recognizable.
A lifestyle based on Getting-and-Having is now enthusiastically embraced
as a particularly All-American virtue. Greediness is not merely psychologically
fashionable now: it is well established in the American psyche as the
summum bonum of our special rights. The original spiritual promise inherent
in the phrase "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness" has
been dragged down into the uttermost basement of meaning. The new version
of our basic "rights" consists of the dictionary definition
of pure greed: "Excessive desire for acquiring or having". We
don't believe in any such thing as "excess" now. And the result
of this is a nation suffering from a fatal illness, but which does not,
on the whole, even comprehend it is sick. The occasional lip-service given
to deploring our raging materialism is a useless noise drowned out by
the yowl of advertising. Seen from space, Earth's once lovely face is
stamped with the corporate logo of the Ferengi.
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- As the current version of the Roman Empire, just short
of the inevitable disastrous collapse, we export the florid excrescences
of our decaying culture to an eagerly awaiting world. At the present rate,
consumerism will shortly be a global plague in the human species. The
consequences of this rampant disease on a planetary scale are evident.
Too numerous to be supported by rapidly diminishing resources, greedy
humanity becomes a kind of flesh-eating bacteria on the surface of the
planet. One can only wonder if subconsciously our civilization registers
its coming inevitable disintegration, and chooses to dine on as many hummingbird
tongues as possible before the end. Destined sooner or later to meet the
results of its actions, the United States of America perhaps tries to
escape its logical conclusion through fevered immersion in ever-more idiotic
and demeaning distractions.
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- Such a level of alarm is no exaggeration. A wholesale
metamorphosis from homo sapiens into homo consumerus will be fatal. The
reasons for this are numerous and readily understood by all those as yet
uninfected. First of all, greed is not a sort of evolutionarily harmless
childhood disease, merely appearing on a larger scale. If it spreads to
the extent of taking over the entire psyche of a nation, it will kill
the host. We see from the historical evidence that a small percentage
of greedy people cannot harm a country whose numerous healthy cells, average
sane citizens, function as a powerful immunological protection. But if
an entire people succumb to irrational levels of desire for getting-and-having,
then the cancer will spread until the body dies.
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- Desire, after all, when allowed to focus overmuch on
the material world, does have a tendency to get out of hand and to imperceptibly
sink downward into thoughtless and endless Wanting. Whoever has no self-existence,
no inner desire to become creative and useful, must fill this vacuum with
a passive other-directed life. Unless our normal desire-capacities flow
first into their natural circulatory channels of intelligent love, the
energy of desire itself becomes problematic. Most of us have had the experience
of our desires leading us, temporarily at least, along paths which lead
nowhere, ending in the unpleasant swamps and deserts of hard lessons. The
energy of desire leads us all onward, one way or the other. Choked off
into the single narrow dead-end road of Stuff, desire itself becomes a
toxic substance. It's not just that materialism doesn't buy happiness:
it will actually destroy us. We are not, as a nation, even considering
what the nature of our collective desire is, what it is for, and where
it will take us.
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- It is quite telling that we don't all indignantly and
vigorously object to being constantly referred to as "consumers"
rather than human beings. Perhaps the actual meaning of the word will
serve as a reminder of the new image we have accepted of ourselves. The
definition of consume is "to eat, use up, destroy; to spend wastefully,
squander (time, energy, money, etc.); syn. swallow up, exhaust, expend,
lavish, dissipate, burn." A consumer is "1. one who consumes,
spends, wastes, or destroys; that which consumes. 2. in economics, a person
who uses goods or services to satisfiy his needs rather than to produce
other goods with them." In short, to passively allow oneself to
be thought of as a consumer is to accept oneself rather literally as a
gobbling cancer cell in the body of humanity. It means to deny the fundamental
spiritual truth behind all religion and spiritual life: "It is better
to give than to receive". To be a consumer is to forgo expressing
one's gifts and talents, except insofar as the corporate world wishes to
approprate them to its purposes. To consume is to forget that the whole
point of being human is to create something useful and beautiful which
serves others as well as oneself. To be merely a corporate paradigm slave,
a consumer, is to be a useless two-ended tube, and a willing carrier and
transmitter of a disease which has the potential to destroy us all.
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- Of course, once the greed-virus takes over there is
little consciousness left to discriminate between rational desires and
endless greed. And one marker of this virus is a complete disinterest
in the sources and actual human costs of what we want. Our nation consumes
30% of the entire planet's resources? Then we must surely deserve it,
right? Refusal to see the chain of materialism for what it is is a sure
sign of subconscious greed. If we still buy, say, redwood and don't want
to know where it came from, then there we are. We can no longer see the
forest for the furniture. There are unfortunately endless similar examples,
of course, of refusal to know the cost to the planet of what one wants
for oneself. History records that quite a few civilizations disappeared
with astonishing suddenness through consuming their surroundings. Here
today, gone tomorrow: no more nature left to support life. This is going
on today on a global scale for the first time. It's inconceivable to us
that one day we will wake up and there will be no more forests, no unpolluted
water, no clean air, no natural food. Yet as the Chinese saying goes "Unless
we change direction we are likely to end up where we are going." We
don't care at all, we just Want. The logical conclusion of our greed will
be a planet covered with a skin of asphalt, with human habitations, factories,
and shopping malls in a nightmarish unbroken globe-girdling city. Inside
their houses, humans will be riveted to the giant wall-tv, watching other
humans hunt each other for food. So much for the human race. Once it gave
rise to divinely inspired cultures: art, music, architecture, gardens,
beautiful objects for everyday use, and all the other blessings of civilized
comfort. Now we only create money, stupidity and ugliness.
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- One of the oldest prophecies on earth refers to our
moment in time, here and now. It comes from the Vishnu Purana, written
no-one-knows how many thousands and thousands of years ago. In it the
writer is describing what he forsees at the end of the age known as Kali
Yuga: the Age of Iron. Ancient eastern wisdom describes unimaginably (to
us) vast cycles of time, called "ages", which succeeed one another
in descending into materialism and loss of spirituality. The cycle begins
with a Golden Age, when human beings are bright with spiritual awareness
and promise. It ends, several million years later, in the depths of decay.
The following prophecy certainly sounds familiar:
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- "There will be be contemporary monarchs, reigning
over the earth: kings of churlish spirit, violent temper, and ever addicted
to falsehood and wickedness. They will inflict death on women and children,
they will seize upon the property of their subjects, and be intent upon
the wives of others; they will be of unlimited power, their lives will
be short, their desires insatiable....People of various countries intermingling
with them will follow their example. Piety will decrease until the whole
world will be wholly depraved. Property alone will confer rank; wealth
will be the only source of devotion; passion will be the sole bond of
union between the sexes; falsehood will be the only means of success in
litigation; and women will be objects merely of sensual gratification....External
types will be the only distinction of the several orders of life;...a
man if rich will be reputed to be pure; dishonesty will be the universal
means of subsistence, weakness the cause of dependence, menace and presumption
will be substituted for learning; liberality will be devotion; mutual
assent, marrriage; fine clothes, dignity. He who is strongest will reign;
the people, unable to bear the heavy burden of taxes, will take refuge
among the valleys...Thus, in the Kali Age will decay constantly proceed,
until the human race approaches its annihilation." At which point,
according to these ancient scriptures, a great descent of divine power
takes place again, and the seeds of the new cycle, the beginning of the
next Golden Age, are sown.
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- Since all forms of life are cyclic, perhaps this ancient
prophecy merely describes a kind of inevitable end to our civilization.
Yet always the choice remains: free will exists, and no human being is
obliged (yet) to cooperate in spiritual self-destruction. Furthermore,
even when a civilization flowers and then falls to the ground and decomposes,
one may choose to become a seed of the future culture. This is strictly
a matter of individual desire. We can go with the flow, down the drain,
or fight the uphill battle to claim our souls and the life of the heart
and mind. There is a great war unfolding within us and all around us,
and we are all participants, whether we have the courage to admit it or
not. This simple choice is the hardest we will ever make: to recognize
the virus of selfish materialistic consumption for what it is, and to reject
it. Despite the pressing dark force of increasing greediness, we still
have the power to insist on expressing our individual gifts and talents.
The price of this is high: it often means a life of struggle. But at this
point only darkness and the status quo offer the certainty of cheap mindless
comfort. Light, love and creative intelligence only offer themselves,
and the eternal promise of being unfolded into an ever-greater livingness.
Every moment of our lives we are desiring, we are choosing to attach ourselves
to the downgoing darkness of materialism or to the upwelling light of
the soul. And when death comes, the sum of all our desires and subsequent
choices will determine our next destination. There is no religion or spiritual
path which does not teach this, for reasons which ought to be quite clear
to us all. It is the truth.
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