- Boot up, and be instantly swept away down the data stream.
Poor mind, paddling hard at the keyboard to stay afloat in the flood of
fact and fiction. A truism to say, the Internet always did present a serious
test of self-control. Forget the unintelligent usage department- the addiction
to inane games and to the far worse subhuman zones. Even the most serious
information is a highly problematical commodity, needing careful scrutinizing.
How do we ever know what is true in these levels, and even more, what will
still be true next year? In the realm of assessing the meaning of data,
facts and figures, even our best conclusions inevitably undergo unexpected
and uncomfortable metamorphosis. Today's new information frequently and
unceremoniously tramples right over yesterday's assumptions.
-
- Truth always was a moving target, from the strictly human
perspective of facts, and on the Internet it moves much faster than ever.
Yet through this high-speed process of continually accepting and discarding
information, we are developing new forms of perceptual survival skills.
This compulsory refining of the discriminative faculty constitutes one
of the greatest underlying values of the net. Naturally, there is wariness
and weariness in the realization that the world of Internet information
is a sea of uncertainty, and that there will be no end to the necessity
for applied perception. Nevertheless, there's no need for discernment s
steep learning curve to give information itself a bad name.
-
- Throughout history there has never been a substitute
for developing one's own mental acuity. This is just learning, and the
process has always called for sifting through information thoughtfully,
the hard way. The most dangerous so-called 'authorities', in any field,
are always those who try to prevent others from undergoing the process
of learning to think. Whoever overtly or covertly demands unquestioning
belief in their version of information and truth does not want others to
exercise personal judgment. Because the first rule for maintaining control
over other human beings is to powerfully discourage individual mental development
through impressing the notion of superior external authority .
-
- The Internet is accelerating the evolution of intellectual
know-how and conscious discrimination in the best sense of the word. We
don't have much choice but to hone evaluative skills when the alternative
is being perpetually fooled. This becomes a process that one can learn
to thoroughly enjoy. Anyone who can remain in high good humor as a pet
belief is challenged or unexpectedly exploded can thrive in this mental
maelstrom. After all, turning raw information into wisdom has always been
the grand human necessity. All that has changed is the suddenly abundant
quantity and quality of the available raw material.
-
- Undigested information is obviously not wisdom, love,
understanding, revelation, realization, or the power to transform oneself
or the world. But neither is any other food of much use until the human
body converts it into the energy to act, feel, think and plan. Information
is the basic fuel of all mental development. Without a nourishing diet
of tasty information, the intellectual processes have nothing to chew on,
digest, assimilate and convert to higher forms of energy and consciousness.
Even the most exalted states of consciousness, of wordless direct communion
with sublime spiritual levels, have their roots below, in the preparatory
stages of the discerning mind.
-
- There are many these days that fancy they can skip right
over the difficulties of self-development in mental realms. It is a common
fallacy of those who wish to be more spiritual to imagine it is possible
to live from the heart without bothering to refine intellectual skills.
But this has never really worked in the long run: the fact that we have
minds at all points to the natural requirement to develop this capacity
to its fullest extent. The mindless heart and the heartless mind are both
equally useless to the soul. We are obliged to use both heart and mind
to the utmost when traveling through this vast new territory of ours, The
People's Republic of Information.
-
- The observation that accurate information on the Internet
is hard to come by is true enough from the perspective of the hard work
of developing personal inner acumen. Yet it is also true that the Internet
is a wondrous source of accurate and vitally important information. What
we are capable of perceiving as accurate and important will certainly change,
and this is the very point of the exercise. As little as we may like to
keep this in mind at all times, none of us are infallible in terms of assessing
data at any level. We have not in the least uncovered the last level of
truth. Awareness expands as we exercise it, and the whole world- let alone
mere items of information- will continue to be subject to being seen in
an entirely new light.
-
- Aside from individual opportunity to sharpen and deepen
perception, the potential benefits of the Internet for larger segments
of humanity are incalculable. At this point in history it is even more
critical than many fervent advocates realize. We clearly live in extremely
dangerous times, in every imaginable way. The power to manipulate minds
is becoming so sophisticated that only the most circumspect are surviving
as reasonably free thinkers. As increasingly diabolical power consolidates
in fewer and fewer hands, access to alternative information becomes a determining
factor in human life. The world of information is assuming a new significance.
Access to alternative information, in one form or another, is now a matter
of life and death.
-
- That Thing out there still referred to as a civilization-
the Corporate/Military/Government Mind- has been methodically laying waste
to reality in every respect. And its main technique is through incessantly
feeding the public an entire world-view made out of toxic substitutes for
information and truth. The 360-degree, surround-sound World Lie most people
are walking around believing is built and sustained by the nonstop flow
of highly purposeful, integrated and carefully directed fabrications. This
body-and-soul-devouring Ersatz Earth life is constructed by astronomically
large number of unrealities that have no beginning or end. As a whole,
they form what most people think of, if they think of this at all, as the
real world . But reality, in any meaningful degree, has been carefully
excised from the world of common national life. The spirit of truth has
departed, the virtue has gone out of it, and all that is left are the suffocating
fumes of the decomposing corpse of a dead culture. And underneath this
noxious decaying body of the old culture, an upgraded version of global
totalitarianism has been coalescing into a new world-encompassing death-grip
on human freedom.
-
- The People's Republic of Information, although requiring
a selective eye, offers instantly available alternatives to the tender
mercies of Big Brother Behemoth. Mass media, shoveling its daily ration
of mind-mess, with its minions feeding us a line of larceny on every wavelength,
is little but a fatal consensus stupor. The world has effectively split
into two divergent versions, based on two quite different states of awareness.
Large numbers of individuals, wide-awake, in a heightened state of observation,
are no longer buying into Drone-World. The sheer momentum of unstoppable
degeneration currently energizes the United Trance States of America. The
mammoth structures of this manipulated version of reality are already very
shaky, inevitably undergoing erosion from within by the corrosive substance
of the lies they are built with. Yet the very dark shadow of what is being
built to replace it, ready to step into the inevitable rubble, falls on
us all in the here and now. When the last pretences of the viability of
the current accepted version of the 'real world' fall away, as they will,
what will smoothly step in to 'correct and fix' the problems we will face
will be worse than before.
-
- In every respect, on every level, our present civilization
has devolved beyond being merely unhealthy. By any sane definition, it
is in a condition of putrefaction. Diseased and disease-enhancing substances
are deliberately peddled for profit as food and water and medicine. Nature
has been polluted to the point of wide-scale transformation into eerie
unknown forms of itself. All natural systems are saturated with mankind
s waste products, and therefore can no longer be filtered out of the chain
of life. What has gone around is now coming around, inescapably, to everyone.
Alternative ways of living are no longer optional. To keep pace with the
rapidly changing facts of life here, and to be in a position to discover
a way through increasing chaos, the most accurate information is the key
to survival. Therefore it is crucial to support, in every way we can, those
who are making the effort to supply us with informational choices. In our
corners of scattered stubborn resistance we are living in a separate yet
interconnected world where basic sanity still rules. We inhabit a separate
parallel nation alongside Thing World because this is all we can do. And
the bedrock of this new healthy common ground is not a contiguous physical
land, but The People's Republic of Information.
-
-
-
- Comment
-
- A New Cyber-Constitution?
-
- By Brenda Livingston
living@airmail.net
3-8-1
-
- As Diane Harvey recently stated in "The People's
Republic of Information" on Rense.com this week:
-
- "...We clearly live in extremely dangerous times,
in every imaginable way. The power to manipulate minds is becoming so sophisticated
that only the most circumspect are surviving as reasonably free thinkers...
We inhabit a separate parallel nation alongside Thing World because this
is all we can do. And the bedrock of this new healthy common ground is
not a contiguous physical land, but The People's Republic of Information."
-
- I celebrate everyday the opportunity of trying to meet
the challenge of diciphering and incorporating information on the InterNet...but
I have great concerns...
-
- How Will We The People of this Republic Protect Our Rights
To Information To Digest, Interpret and Exchange?
-
- The Big Brother Behemoth...continues to drive onward
to repress... particularly those who have somewhat secured their brains
and heart from the Divide and Conquer Propaganda Machinery (which has many
believing one political party or the other is its brain-child).
-
- The power to suppress is secretively located in that
adrenalin rush of surfing the media we all know so well...the staccato
of packaged "news", the veiled messages of relig-politico self-righteousness,
the upsurge of 'acceptable' violence (even by our caretaker police) followed
by that obscuring numbing separation and haze...
-
- Even as we sift through the plethora of information on
the net.. we see...
-
- ~Clipped, snipped, censored, rearranged, forbidden unaccessed,
suddenly disappearing bits of data preventing the re-access and substantiation
of information necessary for sanity and sound research of any topic --
-
- Books (remember them?) had to be both burned and erased
from publisher's and library file in the Tangible Kingdom of Old to fully
censure the transgressions of 'free-thinkers'. Tis no longer so with electronic
info, data, books, magazines...all can drift off the screen unnoticed in
the obscurity of air and numbers.
-
- ~Monitoring through data-mining techniques and The Thing,
Carnivore now Omnivore? clearly watching every move of many citizen's keystrokes
and mouse moves. This domestic spy technology grows exponentially as we
speak (or type I should say...)
-
- ~Interference with email communication and locking up
browsers periodically (some of us attempting research/communication over
the net are experiencing unnerving Interference)--firewalls protection
be damned
-
- ~Big Bro 'setting up' all internet users as potential
ter-orists (even feel I have to use a hyphen!) Stories in the "news"
of well-known websites being used to encrypt ter-orist messages and hackers
deemed 'ter-orists' of the cyberworld in UK law and threatened with treachery's
death end
-
- ~V chips pre-installed in every new computer soon becoming
X chips roving through our information wonderland continually signaling
the Information Police to falsely arrest net junkies during the night
-
- This Republic of Information has no Constitution or organ
of law or even enough social integration to keep the information free or
flowing. What we are seeing is university...research and development...corporate
advertising/sales...government overt/covert communication being overrun
by those fiesty independents taking advantage of the last vestiges of free
speech in this totalitarian wasteland!
-
- It seems the Great Machine Of Scattered Perceptions is
ever having to stretch its tendrals to control and separate the "large
numbers of individuals, wide-awake, in a heightened state of observation,
[who] are no longer buying into Drone-World..."
-
- We are seeing our freedom of speech and press continuously
manipulated for the benefit of an oligarchic few... and our abilities to
find out facts and share information is caught up in a continuous quagmire...
"White Walled" into oblivion.
-
- Where are the true investigative reporters of the past--those
that actually risk life and limb to ferret out the facts to inform the
citizens? Does this cyberland encourage or discourage the sharing of in-depth
political information about repression of the freedom to connect and associate?
-
- Of course, even during the 60's and 70's these brave
reporters were pressured and directed by the boys upstairs -- used to discredit
wayward Presidents so they did not have to meet with yet another kind of
violence (and do note that assasinations are covered as accidents these
days). At least this great abuse of power did get exposed to the public...
the smell of which quickly faded with a simple re-direction of the Prop
Machine to bright days and economic bliss.
-
- If the investigatives are another urban legend then what
can we do as denizens of this infoworld do to protect our freedom to connect?
-
- Let us at least not just accept the superficial drivel
and pablum drueled upon us everyday.... Might we at least dig a little
deeper...a little quicker to the scene before even the idea of "facts
and evidence and truth" are some distant memory?
-
- I do applaud those of us who are willing to resound our
sacred Thoughts and Spirit Communication via any connectivity and be willing
to sacrifice what is left of our individual freedom to challenge those
who try so hard to suppress our communication Links -- through pen, air
or electronics!
-
- As always, the first large step is to become of this
New World around us -- though changing faster than we can speak, exploring
fully what we do have and sharing what we can is our only hope to regaining
our expression rights that are being incrementally 'chipped' away...
-
- As we continue trying to connect and connect to pieces
of information and fleetingly to one another with little continuity or
depth of understanding of the speed-of-light world around us... we do wish
some history of our passage.
-
- What will be our new historical record -- our means of
learning from the past -- our building on our present understandings? Does
expression require a hard copy for existence?
-
- How Do We Preserve The Ultimate Freedom -- The Freedom
To Connect?
-
- No doubt that there are forces out there -- technology
without forethought, clandestine censorship tactics, pressures to accept
the latest "poli-talk" as fact, high or low tech mind control,
obsession w/one's own naval to name a few -- that effect our ability to
speak our minds and hearts and share in depth and meaning.
-
- Freedom to make mistakes or play the fool and thus grow
-- requires that we have alternative thoughts, actions and ideologies that
we can freely choose from... and that takes their protection and an awareness
that these exist. Once we start forgetting alternate ways of being, seeing,
sharing and living -- we can only stay within the line that those with
this memory/knowledge (who have found ways to erase it) have drawn for
us.
-
- I hope through the coming foggy freedom of choosing to
breathe deep the Soma drifting in the air as we sleep at night and in our
freely flicking from one short superficial clip of Big Brother propaganda
to another as we surf the web, radio or TV -- that we know something more...something
beyond this material plane of living...that will move us to evolve in the
eternal. As there is a universe beyond this planet...there are streams
of awareness that connect us if we choose to explore them.
-
- It always seems that it is in the intangible we carry
the torch onward through the nights we create for ourselves... and perhaps
it is through our striving for compassion and connection through these
nights... we grow in the ways that matter...
-
- Besides influencing law-making regarding spy or privacy-invading
technology of our homes and computers and keeping the net in private hands
-- we do still have power in numbers and in the amount of sheer information
sharing.
-
- But it is not only the quanity that matters here...it
is the quality of what we share that can be a cornerstone to a new kind
of freedom expressed through this ever evolving brain prosthesus and spirit
connector. This media is our creation -- perhaps we should give some real
thought and soul to its protection...
-
- And perhaps a new Cyber-Constitution is in order...one
that is as free and growing and changing as the next keystroke. We are
--ready or not-- moving into a new era of the mind where structures and
systems of the past no longer fit or can keep up to control.
-
- We just might be moving into a new type of freedom whose
protection is not only found in its usefulness to the corporate state but
in the very fabric of its massive connectivity and our boundless participation...
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