- "To see the universal and all-pervading Spirit of
Truth face to face, one must be able to love the meanest of all creation
as oneself."
- --Mahatma Gandhi
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- Late last week, I returned home to Portland, OR, after
attending a three-day conference on the Electric Universe in Las Vegas,
NV. The event brought together an impressive array of scientists, authors,
and independent researchers from many different disciplines and walks
of life, all unified in their quest to develop a better understanding
of the cosmos and our place in it.
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- Throughout the event, I had the privilege of interacting
with some very accomplished scholars in such seemingly disparate fields
as electrical engineering, physics, plasma physics, geology, and comparative
mythology. In every instance, I was very pleased to find that I was treated
as an equal, even though I claim no special expertise on the topics discussed.
This lack of pretension on the part of the "experts" enabled
a very free and comfortable flow of ideas amongst all participants, specialists
and laymen alike.
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- In Wallace Thornhill's introductory presentation, he
repeatedly used the word "convergence" in describing the interdisciplinary
nature of much Electric Universe research. Specialists with very different
areas of expertise have found themselves growing increasingly DEPENDENT
on one another, and of each has been required an openness to previously
unconsidered ideas, and a willingness to be proved "wrong" on
many points.
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- In my own intellectual and spiritual endeavors, I have
sought convergence, or a unified perspective that can be applied to most
every problem the world seems to face. In examining current events presented
in both alternative and mainstream media, I see recurring themes and patterns
that seem point to a fundamental, underlying cause of human suffering
and insanity in its every form. Consider these recent news items, which
at first glance may not seem to have any direct relation to one another:
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- In Knoxville, Tennessee, a white couple named Christopher
Newsom and Channon Christian were carjacked, abducted, sexually tortured
and murdered by a band of criminals who are black. The case itself garnered
no immediate "mainstream" media attention, and in fact, one
prominent black social commentator, Leonard Pitts, argued that the case
should be completely ignored nationally. "It always amazes me when
white people put on the victim hat," wrote Pitts in his syndicated
column. Pitts described whites' outrage over the case as "mewling
noises from that subset of my white countrymen who feel put-upon by big,
bad racial minorities." Pitts went on to directly equate "white
supremacists and conservative bloggers," making no attempt to delineate
the two.
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- On May 24, 2007, the Associated Press reported there
have been at least six attacks against homeless people in Cleveland, Ohio
since February of this year. According to one homeless advocate, "...there
have been bands of males carrying baseball bats and pipes confronting
homeless people." These attacks could be viewed as part of a national
trend of increased violence against the homeless. According to the National
Coalition for the Homeless, there were 142 attacks against the homeless,
20 resulting in death, in 2006 in the United States. That is a 65 PERCENT
increase over the total in 2005.
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- On June 8, in Selmer, Tennessee, a woman who blasted
her husband in the back of the head with a shotgun was found guilty of
voluntary mansalughter and sentenced to three years in prison. However,
she must serve only 210 days before she can be released on probation,
and she receives credit for the time she has already spent in jail (five
months). According to news reports, the remaining 60 days of her sentence
may be served in a mental health facility.
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- On June 10, 2007, a leading proponent of the Anti-Zionism
Orthodox Jewish Movement, Rabbi Yisroel Dovid Weiss, attended a rally
on the West Lawn of the U.S. Capitol, voicing his support for the freedom
of the Palestinian people. In an interview now posted on You Tube, the
Rabbi stated, "We are forbidden to oppress another people, to subjugate,
to make another people suffer. Just as God is compassionate, we have to
be compassionate. So what is being done in the name of Judaism, in the
name of the Torah, the occupation of the whole of Palestine, the Zionists...don't
represent the Torah, they don't represent Godliness, they don't represent
the Jewish people. They have stolen our name, we our humiliated by what
they're doing with our name...(W)e suffer with the Palestinian people."
(The interview may be viewed here: http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=QCKD6u1gGzs)
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- On June 8, millionaire heiress and national icon Paris
Hilton was ordered back to jail to serve the remainder of her sentence
for violating probation on a reckless driving case. Hilton reportedly
screamed and cried for her mother while being escorted from the courtroom.
The celebrity court drama has been the overwhelmingly dominant "news"
story of the last week.
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- An apparent black-on-white "hate crime." Attacks
on the homeless. A man shot to death by his wife. A rally against the
Israeli occupation of "Palestine." Paris Hilton.
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- Do you see the common thread in each of these stories?
If so, I will shake your hand and buy you a beer over a lengthy discussion
on the meaning of life. Give up?
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- From my perspective, each of these items reveals the
ongoing denial by human beings of intrinsic equality with one another.
Popular media in the U.S. is governed by the principles of "political
correctness," but the self-styled PC arbiters seem to have no true
idea of what they stand for. One would think that in a climate of "tolerance,"
the unconditional recognition of human equality would be the most PC position
a person could take. It isn't. In fact, the opposite is presently true.
It is not politically correct to argue that all human beings are created
equal, irrespective of race, nationality, religion, creed, and/or sexual
orientation. Rather, the popular culture in the U.S. at every level --
media, academia, religion, and government -- attempts to instill in us
values of preferential hatred. Equality is not part of the picture.
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- Consider the story of the Tennessee murders. Political
correctness dictates that racially motivated white-on-black crime is somehow
worse than racially motivated black-on-white crime. This bias is supposedly
justified because the ancestors of white people mistreated the ancestors
of black people, and whites still experience an overall better quality
of life today. As illogical, inhuman, and overtly bigoted as this position
is, it is the one adamantly argued by most self-styled "civil rights"
advocates in the U.S. today (including the aforementioned Leonard Pitts).
And it is the unspoken position of mainstream "news" media,
which alone explains why stories like the Tennessee murders receive little
or no national attention.
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- A person who believes in intrinsic equality (as I do)
can only feel outrage over racial double standards, "reverse"
bigotry, and racial violence. All human beings are created equal, and
are deserving of equal rights and protections under the law. Period. Racial
vengeance can never be condoned within this paradigm. What does it say
about the tenability of "political correctness," that those who
believe as I do are frequently branded as "racist," while the
Leonard Pitts of the world are presented as champions of "equality"?
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- These same bigoted double-standards are seemingly revealed
in the Selmer, Tennessee case. A woman shot her husband in the back of
the head as he lie sleeping in bed, and a jury ruled it "voluntary
manslaughter." It now appears that she will serve no significant
jail time at all. She was purportedly "driven" to the crime
by her husband's physical abuse. But we must ask ourselves, how might
we interpret the case differently if the respective genders of killer/
victim were reversed? Uncounted men suffer physical and verbal abuse at
the hands of their spouses. At what point does abuse justify a husband
killing his wife?
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- Remember Lorena Bobbit, anyone? A woman cut off her husband's
penis and threw it out a moving car, then claimed abuse as her defense.
Instead of outrage, the national response -- largely evoked by PC media
coverage -- was amusement, and occasionally even approval. Now imagine
the media coverage if a purportedly "battered husband" cut out
his wife's sex organs and tossed them on the side of a road. Uh...not
too funny, is it?
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- Consider also the recent trend of increased violence
against the homeless in the U.S. This pathetic phenomenon is possibly
being fueled by such underground videos as "Bum Fights," and
"Bum Hunts," which feature homeless men and women being violently
targeted for the viewers' amusement. Perhaps not coincidentally, in major
cities like Las Vegas and Orlando, FL, it is now considered a CRIME to
be homeless -- police regularly arrest people for "vagrancy"
if they have no money in their pocket and no valid I.D. Of course, nothing
in natural law requires any human being to have legal tenure on his person
at all time. But this blatantly illegal and unconstitutional practice
is viewed with little apparent outrage in the United States. In fact,
in Las Vegas, the city's Mayor, Oscar Goodman, is an extraordinarily popular
figure, despite (or perhaps because of) his refusal to recognize the right
of homeless citizens to exist.
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- Why do Americans increasingly hold the homeless in contempt?
I think the answer is obvious. The homeless represent a "threat"
to the ideals that Americans have been programmed to value for the last
hundred years or so. In our media/celebrity dominated culture, "success"
is measured in terms of personal wealth, social stature, and physical
attractiveness. To achieve the American Dream is to rise above the unwashed
rabble and be judged by society as a Very Special Person. The homeless
are defined by their LACK of specialness -- no money, no stature, and
overt physical decay. So of course we hold them in contempt. They embody
everything we have been trained to fear and avoid at all costs.
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- This human need for individual and collective "specialness"
-- racial, geographic, and spiritual -- is the undeniable taproot of
the endless Israeli/Palestinian conflict. Undoubtedly, many will label
Rabbi Weiss an "anti-Semite" or a "self-loathing Jew"
for his adamant criticism of the Zionist State of Israel. But what does
the Rabbi stand for that any sane person could find objectionable? He
has very humbly (and correctly) stated that as a Jew, he is not superior
to Palestinians, nor does he have any special claim to ownership of a
particular geographic region. Of course, he is correct. Jews are not "special."
Neither are Christians, nor Muslims, nor Hindus, nor Buddhists, nor Sufis,
nor atheists. But in our present "politically correct" environment,
those who question the tenability of Zionism (i.e. imagined Jewish racial
supremacy) and the Israeli occupation of Palestine are routinely labeled
"bigots" and "anti-Semites."
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- This is not to suggest that Judaism is the only religion
to be corrupted by ideas of Divine exclusivity. Far from it. In our purportedly
"Christian nation," the mainstream Church doctrine has strayed
so far from the actual teachings of Jesus as to boggle the mind. Self-styled
pious leaders inform their flocks that a day of Terrible Judgment is rapidly
approaching. Only the few who repent their sins and beg God's forgiveness
have the chance of eternal reward. But one is very hard-pressed to find
support for this weird picture in the words of Jesus himself.
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- In addition to being an unconditional pacifist, Jesus
spoke for a spiritual path that is pleasant (MT 11:30: "For my yoke
is easy and my burden is light"), uncomplicated (MT 11:25: "...You
have hidden these things from the wise and intelligent and have revealed
them to infants"), and undemanding of personal "sacrifice"
(MT 11:28 "Come to Me, all who are weary and heavy laden, and I will
give you rest.") Jesus never spoke for the vengeful god of the Old
Testament, nor did he speak of original sin, or bizarre and frightful
concepts like "hell" and "satan." And he repeatedly
emphasized the need of the individual to recognize the intrinsic equality
of all his brothers and sisters. What else could he have meant when he
advised to "love thy neighbor as YOURSELF"?
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- If ours was truly a Christian nation, the name Paris
Hilton would not be on the lips of every American man, woman, and child.
Nothing in our culture is a more obscene denial of equality than the
national obsession with celebrities. What makes Paris Hilton more "special"
than you or me? Nothing. And surely, the unraveling of this illusion contributed
to Paris' own great trauma over her confinement. Poor Paris Hilton, and
I do not say this the least bit sarcastically.
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- The myth of celebrity has been mercilessly drilled into
your mind from the day of your birth. This phenomenon is clearly reflected
in the reported growing "narcissism" amongst American youths
(See Young People More Narcissistic Than Ever, http://www.rense.com/ general75/more.htm).
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- Should it surprise us that hordes of young American men
are picking up baseballs bats and hunting the homeless for a bit of "sport?"
We have all of us been programmed to live in active resistance to the
principle of equality -- a principle so inarguable that our forefathers
deemed it "self-evident." In the popular culture, the only way
to win love and admiration is to stand out from the crowd and achieve
personal "specialness." Fundamentally, this is the belief that
superiority over others must be achieved as a defense against inevitable
defeat, inferiority and aloneness.
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- This human error has been rampant for thousands of years,
and its source has been widely debated. Why is human consciousness dominated
by a thought structure that seeks to conquer, defend against, place blame,
and inflict guilt? This question was briefly discussed at the aforementioned
Electric Universe conference. Some suggested that the celestial and global
catastrophes first proposed by Velikovsky embedded in the collective consciousness
a terrible trauma from which we have never recovered. We still fear the
angry god that reigned in the heavens, and imagine that we must win "special
favor" to avoid his frightful wrath.
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- A purely spiritual perspective, one presented in many
religions and teachings, is that mankind (or human consciousness) existed
in an original state of grace from which it has fallen. What precipitated
this fall was a single incorrect choice, the consequences of which have
yet to be corrected. Some imagine God "rejecting" the human
family out of disapproval and disgust over our "wickedness."
But I prefer the notion that we created for ourselves a thought structure
that made the experience of heaven impossible (this concept probably
has its origins in Eastern teachings, and is the basis for the contemporary
spiritual manual, A Course in Miracles). Somehow, the soul's natural inclination
toward inclusion, unity, sharing, and harmony, was replaced by a belief
in competing interests. Maybe a single mind introduced this belief by
simply pausing to wonder, "What if?"
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- What if...I can be worse than, or better than?
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- If it's possible to be "worse than," then the
natural impulse of any consciousness is to FIGHT to be "better than."
The key to becoming sane is to recognize that the fight itself is unnecessary
and harmful. One need not be superior to find safety and love, because
the threat of inferiority is a fiction of the mind.
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- At the level of appearance, there is no equality and
never will be. But so what? We don't need a world of human beings who
are all physically and intellectually "equal" -- a grotesque
and bizarre science fiction fantasy. And we cannot reasonably expect a
world where everyone lives with equally evolved integrity and morality.
But we can strive to correct within ourselves the fallacious perception
that equality is fearful, and must be raged against. And this is a great
challenge, because it goes completely against the thought structure that
has dominated humanity for eons.
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- We wondered, What if I can be better than, or worse than,
and the result has been endless human suffering and death. Perhaps it
is time for each of us to wonder over new questions, ones that challenge
the very premise of the initial doubt. These questions might be, What
if I have nothing to fear from my brothers and sisters, because their
interests and mine are one and the same? What if winning and losing are
both impossible, because peace and safety are already mine? What if giving
and receiving are truly the same, and to deprive my neighbor is to deprive
myself?
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- If a question based on fear was enough to drive us from
heaven, perhaps one based on love will be enough to lead us back.
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