The sleep of reason begets monsters

[starroute]

I've been developing a sense of something disquieting going on in American culture. This is just a first try at expressing it -- I may or may not be able to get across what is really bothering me. But I'll do the best I can.<br><br>It has to do with the fundamental question of how do we know what we know and what kinds of knowledge do we consider reliable. The great intellectual revolution of the 17th and 18th centuries was based on a cultural consensus to accept as true only that which could be experienced directly or proven rationally. This had the positive effect of clearing out a lot of intellectual deadwood and social inhibitions and laying the basis for the expansive modern world of science and democracy.<br><br>That was on the whole a good thing, but the downside was that reason and empiricism alone have never been sufficient for a complete accounting of human experience. Inner knowledge, in particular, is something that can neither be proven nor demonstrated to those who lack it. As a result, there have been periodic attempts over the last 200 years to get beyond the sterility of rational empiricism and into something broader.<br><br>The trouble is that those attempts always seem to lead back into the horrors that rational empiricism was designed to get us out of: Uncritical faith in "authority" rather than science. A fascist emphasis on "blood" and instinct in place of reason. People who confuse their own prejudices with the will of god. "Culture wars" based on kneejerk sexual insecurities. A tendency to see monsters under the bedclothes and evildoers lurking in every alleyway.<br><br>There are certain biases that I think are at work in discussions of these issues even on this board. When we speak of fundamentalism, we tend to assume it's natural that ignorant rednecks would be taken in by elaborate end-times scenarios. And when we speak of New Agers, we are surprised that apparently educated, intelligent people would fall for tall tales about space aliens and Mayan prophecies. But really one is no different from the other. There's a flight from reason taking place across the culture as a whole.<br><br>A part of this flight is the exalting of "beliefs" as something sacred and untouchable. There's a growing insistance that people have a right to believe whatever they choose, that to question their beliefs is to insult them personally, and -- at least by implication -- that one belief is as good as another. That intelligent design is as good as evolution and white supremacism as good as . . . well, there isn't a word for not-being-a-racist, is there?<br><br>Deconstructionism has something to answer for here as well, and my understanding is that there's more than a whiff of fascism around the edges of deconstructionism.<br><br>There's been a lot of discussion at this board about whether or not we can defeat the monsters who are trying to control us. My answer to that is that we can never defeat them as long as we think in the patterns which give them power -- but also that they can never control us as long as we think in the patterns which deny them power.<br><br>I got into a long rap here last week about the importance of believing in progress and how cynicism and lack of hope for the future make us weak. But I'd say now that even more fundamental than the historically-conditioned concept of progress is a simple faith is that certain paths lead towards someplace better and we have to follow those paths in preference to those which do not.<br><br>For every kind of knowledge, there needs to be some sort of test to tell us whether we can rely on it and confidently pass it on to others. For those kinds of knowledge which cannot be tested scientifically or intellectually, the best test is often to ask, "does this lead to someplace better." If it seems to lead to very dark places -- or if it asks us to endorse dark deeds in the name of eventually getting to someplace better -- we should know to refuse it.<br><br>In particular, any "knowledge" which tells us that the greater part of the human race must perish so that a small minority can live -- or must suffer so that a small minority can thrive -- or must be damned so that a small minority can be saved -- or must be enslaved so that a small minority can have freedom -- or must fail so that a small minority can succeed -- is of the realm of lies and should be rejected along with those from whose mouths it issues.<br> <p></p><i></i>

[israelirealities]

Thanks, I like this post and the issues it brings out. there is a sense that middle ages are returning, briefly, to remind us how unattractive it is to be ruled by demons and superstition. <br>However, the modern reliance on rationalism and scientific ideas is the one responsible for the eugenics themes. One can "scientifically" pose scenarios and offer "rational" solutions that happen to benefit one group at the expense of the other, but than "Rationally" they will tell you any solution will do that per force.<br>So we do have to invoke some higher/non rational faculty that sanctified ANY life. THis is not driven by rationality (Kant was the peak of the attempt to find a rational source for ethics I think). this is what we call God, in our culture. <br>Problem with mysticism and occult knowledge - devoid of religious dogma and traditions/institutions, is that by definition it claims to be beyond ethics. Therein lies the danger of occult/new age alligned with fascism. However, this can also be only a stage, of releasing old religions and rediscovering more humanity without external controls. Birth of new consciousness was always brought about by blood bath, prior to the breakthrough. <p></p><i></i>

[Trifecta]

Everything at some level is myth and we decide through our knowledge, experience and activity what fits our myth today, we have the ability to adjust as new infomation comes in and should we let go of an attachement to our ideas/ideals/ethics/moral stand points of whatever floats our boats.<br><br>Descartes had the right idea, he hid himself away and worked on what he really knew to be his truth, how I wish we could conduct ourselves in this way today, but given the amount of information, misdirects, lies and ism's implanted to divide and conquer, it seems to me anyway another planet all on my own, a memory wipe or a rebirth into a world of senses inhabitited with pure survival would be the only recourse.<br><br>But, then we have dreams, experiences beyond concensus reality, we invent our own rites of passage and an individual faith builds, we can constuct our own myths to thwart or null the self destruction we swim in and the mystery of life become ever more awsome.<br><br>The thing really is not to loose your sense of humour <!--EZCODE EMOTICON START :lol --><img src=http://www.ezboard.com/images/emoticons/laugh.gif ALT=":lol"><!--EZCODE EMOTICON END--> <br><br>DIVIDE AND CONQUER OP<br><br>NOVEMBER 18, 2005. A brief note. Every polarizing op based on race or color has an underlying principle. Focus all the attention ON THE BODY. <br><br>The type of body. The color of body. Body features. Blood. <br><br>Who falls for this op? Those who can only think of the spiritual in terms of the body. Who think the body holds the secret to the spiritual. <br><br>And then, imprisoned behind the bars of distorted and flattened perception, the frustration builds. There is no way out, because the person doesn't grasp that he is working from fractured and severely limited perception. <br><br>So, to assert power, he says he is superior, and the "others" are inferior and must be caged up or eliminated. This is how he feels power. <br><br>Every divide and conquer op based on race and color is about limiting power while seeming to increase it. <br><br>IT'S ABOUT MAKING POWER SEEM SCARCE. <br><br>This breeds desperation. <br><br>WHEREAS, POWER IS ACTUALLY ABUNDANT. <br><br>IT DOESN'T NEED DIVIDE AND CONQUER TO MANIFEST. <br><br>Only in the perverse collective thought forms of Earth culture is power distorted in this way. <br><br>JON RAPPOPORT www.nomorefakenews.com <br><br><br>Good thread. <p></p><i>Edited by: <A HREF=http://p216.ezboard.com/brigorousintuition.showUserPublicProfile?gid=osculuminfame@rigorousintuition>Osculum Infame</A> at: 11/18/05 3:29 am<br></i>

[sussurus2]

Good thread, and wise reply, thanks.<br><br>Yes, as someone who bears witness to that abundance, available every moment "at hand" it is clear to me that almost every one of these past 50 to 300 years' "consensus" realities, academic specializations, political positions, etc. have been AT LEAST corrupted, if not entirely co-opted in order to feed the over-arching lie of the scarcity-based universe. <br><br>Which is a crock of shite.<br><br>Whatever's true about this life, this universe, I've learned that being open to the full spectrum of vibration & resonance (emotional; spiritual; physical) are, ahem, key to accessing awareness of that fundamental bass note, and sweet, pervasive harmony... <br><br>And like a lot of things, some people are born naturals, and for the rest of us it takes practice.<br><br>What burns my toast is how much harder They make it by brainwashing everyone to think the opposite is true. <br><br>S. <p></p><i></i>

[Bismillah]

But power is being <i>made</i> scarce, and increasingly so - that's the problem. (I'm talking about financial, and therefore political power.) And precisely how scarce it's being made is very hard to imagine, or visualise. Take a look at this, and follow the link to David Chandler's site: <br><br><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK START--><a href="http://qlipoth.blogspot.com/2005/11/millionaires-and-billionaires-what-are.html">qlipoth.blogspot.com/2005...t-are.html</a><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK END--><br><br><br><br> <p></p><i></i>

[sunny]

Very good thread, I've been thinking along these lines for some time. Two reasons for hope: As long as there are enlightened people, the genie of reason and true spirituality can never be put back in the bottle. Also, coming from a position of love, compassion, kindness, & adherence to justice will never fail to shed light, even if only in one's own small circle. <p></p><i></i>

[AnnaLivia]

i have simply GOT to make supper this minute or get sick from not eating, and need to be two people to catch up with all the terrific stuff in this forum.<br><br>the people in this place are <br><br>just<br><br>flipping<br><br>AWEsome <p></p><i></i>

[manxkat]

starroute, very nice. I particularly relate to this part of what you touched on:<br><br>". . . -- that one belief is as good as another. That intelligent design is as good as evolution and white supremacism as good as . . . well, there isn't a word for not-being-a-racist, is there?"<br><br>This is my main beef with the mainstream media, especially television. In their effort to be "fair and balanced" (not just Fox, btw) they always bring on some complete irrational kook as if his/her opinion is somehow an equivalent balance. It's so out of control -- they'll give equal time to crazies like Falwell or the like. Correction, they now seem to use the kooks as the authorities and the rational people for balance (if at all). Actually, I can't bear to watch TV, but from the snippets I see on-line occasionally, and the excellent work of MediaMatters.org, it's clear to me that mainstream media has become a cesspool (maybe it always was, but my perspective has just changed). Unfortunately, mainstream media still holds the keys to waking the sheeple up. Maybe we're making progress with the internet..... I mean, remember how it was before we had forums like this? Speaking for myself, the waking up I've done wouldn't have happened without the 'net.<br> <p></p><i></i>

[Sweejak]

Wasn't it Descartes and his followers who believed that by chopping things into smaller and smaller pieces we could understand the whole? Reductionism.<br>Where is the logic in that? Oh it's very useful no doubt and has led to many discoveries but ultimately it deconstructs things and you lose something on the way back up to find the whole. Descartes compared animals to a clock .."wheels and springs","I consider the human body as a machine... my idea of a healthy man... a well made clock". This is pretty useful but what when you consider man nothing but a machine? Or the Newtonian universe, one huge mechanical system. Is that all? Still, of Newton; "There is no reason to suppose that Sir Isaac Newton was a believer in the doctrines of alchemy," .... these words don't hold up so well. Not only was he a believer; he was, in secret, the most complete and knowledgeable alchemist of his time."... "He was the last of the magicians, the last of the Babylonians and Sumerians, the last great mind which looked out on the visible and intellectual world with the same eyes as those who began to build our intellectual inheritance rather less than 10,000 years ago." <br><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK START--><a href="http://www.slate.com/id/2108438/">www.slate.com/id/2108438/</a><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK END--><br><br>Fritoj Capra says that this Cartesian view collapsed with the rise of the "New Physics".<br>"the fact that all the properties of particles are determined by principals closely related to the methods of observation would mean that the basic structures of the material world are determined, ultimately, by the way we look at the world; that the observed patterns of matter are the reflections of the patterns of the mind"<br><br>Well, at the risk of taking those observations of particles and extending them up to human thought; there we are.<br><br><br> <p></p><i></i>

[robertdreed]

"Deconstructionism has something to answer for here as well, and my understanding is that there's more than a whiff of fascism around the edges of deconstructionism."<br><br>Hail, yes. Not to mention pronounced tendencies toward rrationality and solipsism. <br> <p></p><i></i>

[Dreams End]

I now have my own pet theory that I'm using as a guidepost when trying to get at the big picture. I see ALL these seemingly disparate areas putting out this irrational (and often demonstrably wrong) material that supports a mythology that anticipates destruction and (perhaps) rescue by enlightened ones...be they aliens, Atlanteans, or Aryans.<br><br>This theme is freaking EVERYWHERE. In fact, it is SO widespread that I am starting to get really freaked..as in, if there IS such an agenda...they are making real progress.<br><br>I"ve been reading "stargate conspiracy" and I think they are getting close. I think the authors posit an actual extra-terrestrial force at work here, but I'm going to put that idea aside for now. Let's start with the earthly.<br><br>Stargate only focuses really on the Egyptian side of things...how so much energy in the intelligence and military industrial research communities has been put into advancing an agenda that Egypt has an alien connection and that they are a comin' back. Or already here. Why was SRI excavating at Giza? Why did Hoagland get invited to Nasa, whom he continually trashed, to discuss the Egypt/Mars "connections"? On and on.<br><br>But that's just PART of the story. similar themes, not necessarily involving Egypt can be found in all sorts of New Age thought. I've been focusing on New Dawn, a magazine in Australia that for reasons I can't fathom, seems to be mainly a shill for the Eurasianist mythos. <br><br>But on the "pro-Rockefeller" globalist side of things, you have Maurice Strong, for example. Trilateralist and aid to Rockefeller, who starts all kinds of new age weirdness and builds a compound to await the end times.<br><br>And the 2012 movements of various types, etc, etc, etc.<br><br>My working theory is that all of this is coordinated, perhaps loosely and perhaps often by simply getting money and spotlights on particular people who already have these views, as a sophisticated program of "sapping."<br><br>Sappers, you may know, were used in a siege against a castle to tunnel under and greatly compromise the structural integrity of walls and battlements. <br><br>I think this is ideological sapping. I say this because much of the actual content of this stuff is self-contradictory or often even demonstrably false. The idea is just to throw as much verbiage out there with certain key themes repeated. I think that the point is to undermine intellectual, cultural, political and even spiritual resistance to a right nasty agenda. And the point is not to expose the full agenda just yet, but to merely prepare for the destruction of this "wall" of rational resistance. <br><br>Several threads just at this moment get at this theme. It goes beyond COINTELPRO. It involves infiltrating the weirdest sorts of places, or at least getting them noticed. It involves the wholesale creation of cults to churn out some spokespeople and "stormtroopers" for these ideologies. richard Heinberg is likely such a person who is being used in this way.<br><br>Is the actual ideology important or just the "anti-ideology"...that is, is the agenda to actually PROMOTE these ideas or just diminish other "dangerous" ideas? <br><br>Well, I think the agenda includes the specific message, which, fairly put, is that a New World Order is coming. The alternative is mass destruction. You must not question. You must believe..and the Ascended Masters have asked US to lead the way.<br><br>Maybe the particular mythos has evolved because this is so heavily influenced by the intelligence community which is, in turn, has been so infested with Nazis since V-Day. I don't know how big the "master plan" is...maybe there have been several and they just haven't been succesful yet.<br><br>Will there be an actual "Maitreya" moment, when all the bad guys behind the scene unveil our new leader? I doubt it. I don't think things work that neatly and I don't think THEY think things work that neatly. <br><br>And who knows, maybe it really IS aliens controlling all this, but they sure say some silly things. But the more I look into this the deeper I think it goes. The walls may not hold for long.<br><br><br> <p></p><i></i>

[Sweejak]

"It is time to move beyond mere observation of scientistic cults and use the knowledge we have gained of recruitment strategies, cultural innovation, and social needs to create better religions than the world currently possesses. At the very least, unobtrusive observation must be supplemented by active experimentation. Religions are human creations. Our society quite consciously tries to improve every other kind of social institution, why not religion? Members of The Process, founded mainly by students from an architecture school, referred to the creation of their cult as religious engineering, the conscious, systematic, skilled creation of a new religion (Bainbridge 1978<br><br>I propose that we become religious engineers." <br><br>- William Sims Bainbridge, New Religions, Science, and Secularization, in Religion and the Social Order, 1993 <p></p><i>Edited by: <A HREF=http://p216.ezboard.com/brigorousintuition.showUserPublicProfile?gid=sweejak@rigorousintuition>Sweejak</A> at: 11/20/05 9:20 am<br></i>

[Qutb]

DE - sapping - that's it. That is what it's about, I think. The agenda/"masterplan" - if there is such a thing and these aren't just spontaneous social "trends", which all this spook activity perhaps indicates that it isn't - is to break down the resistance of the rational intellect to whatever we are served. There has also been a world-wide emergence of "völkisch" ethnicity/religious-based nationalism which has been coterminous with this rise of unreason and irrationality. These - irrationality and völkisch, aggressive, xenophobic nationalism - are, of course, the two key components of the European fascism/Nazism of the 1920s-30s. Incidentally, they are also two social "trends" that are ideally suited for a financial/industrial/political ruling class in "managing" their relations with the working/middle classes (and, increasingly, the non-working underclass which Brzezinski prophecized will soon encompass 80% of the population...). <br><br>Deconstructivism/post-modernism is a big part of this intellectual current, with its attack on the idea that there is an absolute truth, or that the term "absolute truth" has a meaning. If you lose this belief, you're left with opinions and bias, one opinion being as good as any other, and that's what I'm seeing in American culture today. And this has specifically ben the agenda of the Republican party and the rapture-ready right. The guy who wrote the "Left Behind" series, for instance, is a Republican operative. <p></p><i></i>

[anonymous]

<!--EZCODE ITALIC START--><em>"Actually, I can't bear to watch TV..."</em><!--EZCODE ITALIC END--> -- manxcat<br><br><br>Me either. So try this to either review daily, or you can sign up for an e-mail newsletter:<br><br>"News Hounds"<br>"We watch FOX so you don't have to."<br><br><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK START--><a href="http://www.newshounds.us/">www.newshounds.us/</a><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK END--> <p></p><i></i>

[Sweejak]

I think there is a little more to it. The rise in nationalism is a response to the dissolution of nations and the furtherance of a NWO. The rise in ethnicity and 'community' is a respose to left hand nanny statism. As usual, if a legitimate social movement rises it will be hijacked and also these movements will naturally attract real racists, fascists and the rest. What we are mostly talking about is hijacking, not necessarily the ideas and beliefs involved.<br><br>I have something of a test for phony religions. I don't think it's very good, but if the new religion proposes that evil lies entirely outside of us than flags are raised.<br><br>If our beliefs must be limited to facts obtained by direct experience it would be a very small world. Other 'facts' are merely taken as the truth. One needs only to look at how many scientific facts have been 'proven' wrong. It is continually revised. People have to come to conclusions and do so by either blind belief or by connecting the dots, for those the quality of the information is key. Somewhere a leap of faith is taken for things outside our personal experience.<br><br>"... modern day science is everything we haven't proven false yet?"<br>-- Unknown Philosophy of Science student. <p></p><i></i>