Dealing with the psychological burden of knowing things our culture doesn't want us to know

From Era of Wisdom:

This is an incredibly real thread on Reddit, which you can find at this link.

This is the text of the original post, we recommend visiting the original post here and reading the valuable comments.

    “I’ve been here for 8 years on reddit, and things sure have changed a lot. /r/conspiracy is one of the few remaining places on reddit for real news. This sub looks like what the front page of reddit looked like for the first 3 years of its existence. It was about exposing things, the real truth, and learning about the world. This is what Aaron Schwartz wanted, before they killed him and killed reddit.

    All the uncomfortable truths are delegated to this ridiculous-sounding “/r/conspiracy” which drives people away who are on the fence. These things that are often talked about on this sub are conspiracies, but they’re also news, they’re speculation or facts about how the world actually works beyond the face of things as we see them. This label of “conspiracy” is a form of censorship in itself, it pushes all the big deal stories to this one small corner of reddit.
    
    If you’re newer to reddit, 4 years or less, I bet there was one day when you found this sub. I bet you went through the frontpage of this sub and couldn’t believe what you were reading. You probably thought “Why aren’t these things being discussed on the news subreddit or the politics subreddit, if they are true?” You may have looked in to a specific story or two, and started realizing that there is something to many of the things talked about here. So you subscribed to the sub, you started reading it regularly. Maybe you decided you don’t care about this divisive label of “conspiracy theorist”, that it means nothing to you. What idiot would be afraid of theorizing about potential conspiracies, given the endless lists of historical examples? What kind of sheep is so trained to be afraid of the truth that they run away from it thinking they’re doing themselves a favor? You start to question things in a deeper way once the tricks of culture become more obvious.
    
    Obviously not everything in this sub is true, far from it. But there are some startling facts that have been presented over and over and have basically been proven to be true. Things like the actions of the intelligence agencies in overthrowing and controlling governments of foreign countries. The funding and support of ISIS by the US and Israel, via Turkey and Saudi Arabia. The fact the BRICS banks and the IMF/World Bank are run by overlapping groups of people. The fact central banks and corporations have far too much control over government, wresting control of it away from the people. The US-Israel connection of funding and arms and police training. The connection of Greater Israel with Zionism and the six-day war. The drug trade from Afghanistan, where 90% of the worlds poppies are grown, for US pharma and illegal drug trade profits. The drug wars caused by the US in Central and South America, for profit. The way the biggest oil companies have infiltrated the governments of the world for their own profit. The demolition of Building 7. Regulatory capture. Compartmentalization. Divide and conquer.




    These things are very real. These things matter, and drive current events. They are generally provable to be true. They are “open secrets.”
    
    This is the difference between the MSM (including the front pages and main subreddits of reddit) versus places like this subreddit that actually care about the truth, is that they will actually look in to those open secrets. They will expose certain interesting tidbits that are selectively ignored by the corporate media.
    
    Once you start to realize this is the case, and that really sinks in, then if you’re anything like me you experienced a psychological trip of sorts where you realized how bullshit many aspects of our society really are. That deep down advertising is actually predatory and evil, it’s not that people just say that as a funny cliche. That there really are a bunch of psychopaths with no morality or compassion in many many positions of power, because those are generally the only people with the motivation and willpower to go to the terrible depths necessary to acquire a billion dollars or a high political position. They will sacrifice anything for it, including their morality and the lives of others. They have no problem sleeping at night.
    
    You see the ideologies people believe in, like Christianity, or nationalism/patriotism, or sports, or even scientism (belief in the findings of the scientific establishment above scientific theory itself). You see the greed, people borrowing and spending their lives away, trying to get some sort of emotional perk out of it to make up for the hours of drudgery they had to put themselves through to get the money in the first place. People trapped in cycles, in bad patterns that merely reinforce how fucked we are as a society. You see the denial, you see people shut down when you try to talk about the edges of what they think’s “allowed” to talk about. You see people safeguarding their emotions beyond what’s reasonable, beyond facts themselves.
    
    After a while, it crushes you to see it too openly, how many people fall for the bullshit. Everything is so messed up. It’s practically unbelievable. If you were like me, you are probably still in some stage of disbelief at certain aspects of reality even though they are provably true. Cognitive dissonance is something we all suffer from after living in this bizarre culture, the only difference is some of us try to rectify it and others just essentially distract themselves until they die.
    
    This is serious business. These topics strike at the heart of what we think about society, how we think we should treat each other, and what we think of ourselves. What we should be honest about, and what we should hide. What we consider important, and what we consider frivolous.
    
    We here are lucky to have the emotional motivation to seek out true important information, even if it is uncomfortable to digest. Others are not so lucky and hide from the truth out of fear, generally fear of losing social standing or losing income. You can lead a horse to water, but you cannot make it drink. You cannot save the willfully ignorant, they must save themselves. All you can do is actively make important information available to those who have not been exposed to it yet. There are many thirsty people out there who simply can’t find water, so to speak. If you’re “in the know”, it’s your job to share this information with others so that we can see our world and our human behavior more clearly. This is the information that our culture, media, and schools deliberately ignore despite being true. Once we can clearly see what we as humans are actually doing, then we can start to make adjustments and modifications to it that will have an impact. Otherwise we are just shouting at mirages and illusions.
    
    Did you know that 40,000 people worked on the atomic bombs that blew up Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but only a few hundred of them actually knew what they were making? This is the power of compartmentalization. Everyone makes their little part, and only certain people have the knowledge to see how all the parts come together. Those people are playing the rest, in a sense. Human society is like this in a way, we are all “making our piece” and the pieces come together in ways many of us don’t anticipate that profit a very few, like a war or bank bailouts. We each only see our little world, our motivations and fears in our daily lives. We react correspondingly to the avalanche as best we can. Few question where those motivations and fears came from in the first place, and fewer question if they’re even necessary at all.




    We program ourselves like a computer, our actions in the present create the conditions that allow the future to occur. “Be the change you want to see in the world” as Gandhi said. But also be the change you want to see in yourself. You can do it, you’ve been doing it your whole life. Just take their reigns of your own mind for yourself. Take off the training wheels of mainstream culture. It is not your friend, it is there to control you. To put your motivations and fears in to little boxes that serve the corporate and governmental machinery, all through your TV or internet connection. 5 corporations own 95% of American all media, from TV to movies to magazines. And it just keeps getting more propagandistic and consolidated, week after week. Did you see one of the biggest Hillary funders just bought The Onion?

    The first casualty of war is the truth. The time to talk is before there is a war. Now is the time to spread the truth.”

Bonus video: How to shut a conspiracy theorist up

Chapel Perilous

from tekgnostics

- Beware! -

If you value normalcy... if you value a comfortable, predictable world... turn back now.

Once you cross the threshold of Chapel Perilous, there is no going back... for to enter this portal is to enter into the realm of magick, meaningful coincidence and synchronicity. Here the laws of common sense do not apply. Chapel Perilous is guarded by that ancient trickster... Fate.

Should you proceed... you have been warned.

"Chapel Perilous" is an occult term referring to a psychological state in which an individual cannot be certain whether they have been aided or hindered by some force outside the realm of the natural world, or whether what appeared to be supernatural interference was a product of their own vivid imagination.

From the (Tek) Gnostic perspective, to enter Chapel Perilous is to come to the shocking realization that "the Gods are Crazy." This is the epiphanous moment when one realizes the ambivalent... or worse... malevolent nature of what the Gnostics identified as the Demiurge. This deranged entity is not to be confused with the ultimate, transcendent creative power, which cannot be named.

Chapel Perilous was used as a Discordian term by the late writer and philosopher Robert Anton Wilson in his 1977 book Cosmic Trigger. According to Wilson, being in this state leads the subject to become either stone paranoid or an agnostic... there is no third way.

The concept of "Chapel Perilous" was used by Antero Alli, in his 1986 book, Angel Tech: A Modern Shaman's Guide to Reality Selection which is based on Timothy Leary's Eight-circuit model of consciousness. In Alli's book, Chapel Perilous is regarded as a rite of passage, when moving between the four lower circuits of consciousness to the higher circuits. In Chapel Perilous, the integrity of the lower circuits is tested in preparation for activation of the higher circuits.

The term Chapel Perilous first appeared in Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur (1485) as the setting for an adventure in which sorceress Hellawes unsuccessfully attempts to seduce Sir Lancelot. T. S. Eliot used it symbolically in "The Waste Land" (1922).

Students of the Grail romances will remember that in many of the versions the hero... sometimes it is a heroine... meets with a strange and terrifying adventure in a mysterious Chapel, an adventure which, we are given to understand, is fraught with extreme peril to life. The details vary: sometimes there is a Dead Body laid on the altar; sometimes a Black Hand extinguishes the tapers; there are strange and threatening voices, and the general impression is that this is an adventure in which supernatural, and evil, forces are engaged.

- Jessie L Weston

The history of the term is interesting. Traditionally, the Chapel Perilous or Grail Castle has been the ultimate destination for knights questing after the Holy Grail. For most people of my generation, this brings up an image out (those great tekgnostic saints) of Monty Python, as well it should. The story has been around for a long time, though. The mystical experiences within this chapel are the climax of many an Arthurian adventure story. Those who entered were typically subjected to a rigorous battery of challenges, some of which seem to be training exercises of sorts, while others are ultimate tests of purity, conviction, and understanding.

Dangerous traps are to be found there, often tailored to force a confrontation with an individual knight’s personal weaknesses. Those who failed would not be allowed to access the Grail and might even be killed or driven mad in the attempt. On the other hand, a candidate who proved worthy might hope to be granted great power and priceless treasures.

The idea of Chapel Perilous as it is commonly used in psychedelic parlance comes from Robert Anton Wilson’s countercultural classic The Cosmic Trigger. Uncle Bob defines Chapel Perilous as: "A stage in the magickal quest in which your maps turned out to be totally inadequate for the territory and you’re completely lost." He has quite a lot more to say on the topic, having spent a good deal of time there himself:

"Chapel Perilous, like the mysterious entity called ‘I,’ cannot be located in the space-time continuum; it is weightless, odorless, tasteless and undetectable by ordinary instruments. Indeed, like the Ego, it is even possible to deny that it is there. And yet, even more like the Ego, once you are inside it, there doesn’t seem to be any way to ever get out again, until you suddenly discover that it has been brought into existence by thought and does not exist outside thought. Everything you fear is waiting with slavering jaws in Chapel Perilous, but if you are armed with the wand of intuition, the cup of sympathy, the sword of reason and the pentacle of valor, you will find there (the legends say) the Medicine of Metals, the Elixir of Life, the Philosopher’s Stone, True Wisdom and Perfect Happiness.

That's what the legends always say, and the language of myth is poetically precise. For instance, if you go into that realm without the sword of reason, you will lose your mind, but at the same time, if you take only the sword of reason without the cup of sympathy, you will lose your heart. Even more remarkably, if you approach without the wand of intuition, you can stand at the door for decades never realizing you have arrived. You might think you are just waiting for a bus, or wandering from room to room looking for your cigarettes, watching a TV show, or reading a cryptic and ambiguous book. Chapel Perilous is tricky that way."

I myself tend to think of Chapel Perilous as the place where you find yourself when the sheer absurdity of it all can no longer be ignored. When it all starts to add up and multiply while remaining somehow stubbornly indivisible. When synchronicity spirals out of control and you finally discover that you really are, in fact, the center and purpose of the universe after all. Either that or you’re stone-cold crazy. Or maybe it’s both. It’s the dark night of the soul, and it’s generally understood to be some kind of a trap. But it’s also a doorway, if one has the courage, strength, intelligence, and luck to pass through it.

- Teafaerie

CHAPEL PERILOUS is the place "souls" go after leaving their robot bodies...while these bodies are still alive and walking the planet's surface. Also known as "The Dark Night of the Soul." It relates to post-Factor X activities in that both refer to "out-of-body" states. However, CHAPEL PERILOUS is where souls go when they are lost and Factor X communications refer to how souls are found. Can also be seen as a negative activation of the "neurosomatic circuit," which is endured for as long as it takes the neophyte to effect a positive activation, or permanent body rapture.

- From The Game of Life by Dr. Timothy Leary

The strange case of Paul Hellyer

Paul Theodore Hellyer, PC (born 6 August 1923) is a Canadian engineer, politician, writer and commentator who has had a long and varied career. He is the longest serving current member of the Privy Council of Canada, just ahead of Prince Philip.

As Canadian Minister of National Defence in the cabinet of Lester B Pearson, Hellyer oversaw the drastic and controversial integration and unification of the Royal Canadian Navy, Canadian Army, and the Royal Canadian Air Force into a single organization, the Canadian Forces.

Hellyer contested the 1968 Liberal leadership election, placing second on the first ballot, but slipped to third on the second and third ballots, and withdrew to support Robert Winters on the fourth ballot, in which Pierre Trudeau won the leadership. He served as Trudeau's Transport Minister, and was Senior Minister in the Cabinet, a position similar to the current position of Deputy Prime Minister.

In early September 2005, Hellyer made headlines by publicly announcing that he believed in the existence of UFOs. On 25 September 2005, he was an invited speaker at an exopolitics conference in Toronto, where he told the audience that he had seen a UFO one night with his late wife and some friends. He said that, although he had discounted the experience at the time, he had kept an open mind to it. He said that he started taking the issue much more seriously after watching ABC's Peter Jennings' UFO special in February 2005.

Watching Jennings' UFO special prompted Hellyer to read U.S. Army Colonel Philip J. Corso's book The Day After Roswell, about the Roswell UFO Incident, which had been sitting on his shelf for some time. Hellyer told the Toronto audience that he later spoke to a retired U.S. Air Force general, who confirmed the accuracy of the information in the book. In November 2005, he accused U.S. President George W. Bush of plotting an "Intergalactic War". The former defence minister told an audience at the University of Toronto:

    "The United States military are preparing weapons which could be used against the aliens, and they could get us into an intergalactic war without us ever having any warning... The Bush Administration has finally agreed to let the military build a forward base on the moon, which will put them in a better position to keep track of the goings and comings of the visitors from space, and to shoot at them, if they so decide."

In 2007, the Ottawa Citizen reported that Hellyer is demanding that world governments disclose alien technology that could be used to solve the problem of climate change:

    "I would like to see what (alien) technology there might be that could eliminate the burning of fossil fuels within a generation...that could be a way to save our planet...We need to persuade governments to come clean on what they know. Some of us suspect they know quite a lot, and it might be enough to save our planet if applied quickly enough."

In an interview with RT (formerly Russia Today) in 2014, Hellyer said that at least four species of aliens have been visiting Earth for thousands of years, with most of them coming from other star systems, although there are some living on Venus, Mars and Saturn’s moon. According to him, they "don't think we are good stewards of our planet."

Spin

via The Arcane Front

In the early 1990s, director/producer/new media artist Brian Springer learned that it was possible to pick up and record raw satellite feeds created by TV networks, including behind-the-scenes signals sent to TV shows’ control rooms that aren’t intended for broadcast (e.g., talk show sets during commercial breaks, people waiting to be patched in for an interview with a news anchor, etc.). Springer recorded these feeds through the 1992 American presidential election campaign and went on to create “Spin”, a most revealing behind-the-scenes probe into the media maneuverings of glorified handshakers and newscasters alike by way of unintended television…

Psychic Abilities and the Illusion of Separation

via IONS

One of the key missions at IONS is to bring awareness of and engagement within the noetic sciences to younger generations by supporting emerging scholars and explorers. As part of this effort, Chief Scientist Dean Radin recently gave a talk at the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS), an innovative university in San Francisco that offers accredited programs in counseling psychology, clinical psychology, consciousness, and transformation.

Below is an outline of Dean's presentation, entitled Psychic Abilities and the Illusion of Separation.

0:00 Illusions and our perception of reality

3:52 Classical and quantum reality

5:48 Hints about reality

8:50 Going beyond the usual senses

10:17 Telepathy experiments using the ganzfeld

22:52 Replication by skeptical scientists

25:26 Precognition studies

41:25 Strong evidence of precognitive psi

43:20 Controversy and skepticism

44:16 Consciousness as fundamental?

Don’t Let Them Tell You You’re Not at the Center of the Universe

Dennis Overbye via The New York Times

Misconception: The universe started someplace.

Actually: The Big Bang didn’t happen at a place; it happened at a time.

“Where did the Big Bang happen?” I am often asked, as if the expansion of the universe was like a hand grenade going off and the solar system and our Milky Way galaxy were shards sent flying.

The universe didn’t start at a place, it started at a time, namely 13.8 billion years ago, according to the best cosmological data. It’s been expanding ever since — not into space because the universe by definition fills all space already, so much as into time, which as far as we know is open-ended.

It is true that everything we can see now, out to 13.8 billion years of light-travel time, was once the size of a grapefruit, buzzing with hideous energies, but that grapefruit was already part of an infinite ensemble with no edge, except one made up of time. When we look out, we look into the past, the farther we look, the more deeply into the past we see. At the center is the present. Alas there is no direction in which we can look to see the future — except perhaps into our own hearts and dreams. All we know is right now.

So where is the center of the universe? Right here. Yes, you are the center of the universe.

When Albert Einstein married space and time in his theory of relativity back in 1905, he taught us that our eyes are time machines. Nothing can go faster than the speed of light, the cosmic speed limit, and so all information comes to us, to the present, from the past.

And so Einstein’s relativity teaches us that the center of the universe is everywhere and nowhere. It is the present, surrounded by concentric shells of the past. History racing at you at 186,282 miles per second, the speed of light, the speed of all information. Your eyes are the cockpit of a time machine, filmy wet orbs looking in the only direction any of us can ever look: backward. Everything we see or feel or hear — now that gravitational waves have been discovered — took some time to get here, and so comes to our senses from the past. The moon, hovering over the horizon, is an image of light that left its cratered surface traveling at the speed of light a second and a half ago. The sun that burns your skin is eight minutes and nineteen seconds in the past.

The Jupiter we see, glowering orange at the zenith these nights, is about 414 million miles out there as of this writing, or 37 minutes away in the past. The light from the center of the Milky Way, hiding behind the thick star clouds and dust lanes of Sagittarius, takes 26,000 years to get here. While it was on the way the first primitive ice age villages grew into skyscrapered metropolises. Your lover, brushing your lashes with his or her breath, is a nanosecond gone.

This is more than poetry. Mathematically, in Einsteinian terms, all the information and history available at any one place in the universe is known as a light cone. Everybody has one and everybody’s is slightly different, which means in effect that everyone’s universe is a little different.

There will always be some piece of information that has reached your lover but not yet you, let alone E.T. over in the next galaxy. It gives a new definition to being alone with your thoughts.

As T.S. Eliot put it:

    We think of the key, each in his prison

    Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison

As a result every spot in the universe is unique. There will always be a piece of it you haven’t seen yet and a piece that you have seen but that nobody else has. There is no place to stand if you want to claim universal knowledge. We all need each other in order to overlap our knowledge. We don’t have to stay in our prisons. Working together and sharing, we can know everything.

Or as Bob Dylan once put it, “I’ll let you be in my dreams, if I can be in yours.”

“We are the death merchant of the world”: Ex-Bush official Lawrence Wilkerson condemns military-industrial complex

Ben Norton via Salon

Col. Lawrence Wilkerson is tired of “the corporate interests that we go abroad to slay monsters for.”

As the former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, Wilkerson played an important role in the George W. Bush administration. In the years since, however, the former Bush official has established himself as a prominent critic of U.S. foreign policy.

“I think Smedley Butler was onto something,” explained Lawrence Wilkerson, in an extended interview with Salon.

In his day, in the early 20th century, Butler was the highest ranked and most honored official in the history of the U.S. Marine Corps. He helped lead wars throughout the world over a series of decades, before later becoming a vociferous opponent of American imperialism, declaring “war is a racket.”

Wilkerson spoke highly of Butler, referencing the late general’s famous quote: “Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.”

“I think the problem that Smedley identified, quite eloquently actually,” Wilkerson said, “especially for a Marine — I had to say that as a soldier,” the retired Army colonel added with a laugh; “I think the problem is much deeper and more profound today, and much more subtle and sophisticated.”

Today, the military-industrial complex “is much more pernicious than Eisenhower ever thought it would be,” Wilkerson warned.

In his farewell address in 1961, former President Dwight D. Eisenhower famously cautioned Americans that the military and corporate interests were increasingly working together, contrary to the best interests of the citizenry. He called this phenomenon the military-industrial complex.

As a case study of how the contemporary military-industrial complex works, Wilkerson pointed to leading weapons corporations like Lockheed Martin, and their work with draconian, repressive Western-allied regimes in the Gulf, or in inflaming tensions in Korea.

“Was Bill Clinton’s expansion of NATO — after George H. W. Bush and [his Secretary of State] James Baker had assured Gorbachev and then Yeltsin that we wouldn’t go an inch further east — was this for Lockheed Martin, and Raytheon, and Boeing, and others, to increase their network of potential weapon sales?” Wilkerson asked.

“You bet it was,” he answered.

“Is there a penchant on behalf of the Congress to bless the use of force more often than not because of the constituencies they have and the money they get from the defense contractors?” Wilkerson continued.

Again, he answered his own question: “You bet.”

“It’s not like Dick Cheney or someone like that went and said let’s have a war because we want to make money for Halliburton, but it is a pernicious on decision-making,” the former Bush official explained. “And the fact that they donate so much money to congressional elections and to PACs and so forth is another pernicious influence.”

“Those who deny this are just being utterly naive, or they are complicit too,” Wilkerson added.

“And some of my best friends work for Lockheed Martin,” along with Raytheon, Boeing and Halliburton, he quipped.

Wilkerson — who in the same interview with Salon defended Edward Snowden, saying the whistle-blower performed an important service and did not endanger U.S. national security — was also intensely critical of the growing movement to “privatize public functions, like prisons.”

“I fault us Republicans for this majorly,” he confessed — although a good many prominent Democrats have also jumped on the neoliberal bandwagon. In a 2011 speech, for instance, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton declared, “It’s time for the United States to start thinking of Iraq as a business opportunity” for U.S. corporations.

Wilkerson lamented, “We’ve privatized the ultimate public function: war.”

“In many respects it is now private interests that benefit most from our use of military force,” he continued. “Whether it’s private security contractors, that are still all over Iraq or Afghanistan, or it’s the bigger-known defense contractors, like the number one in the world, Lockheed Martin.”

Journalist Antony Loewenstein detailed how the U.S. privatized its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in another interview with Salon. There are an estimated 30,000 military contractors working for the Pentagon in Afghanistan today; they outnumber U.S. troops three-to-one. Thousands more are in Iraq.

Lockheed Martin simply “plans to sell every aspect of missile defense that it can,” regardless of whether it is needed, Wilkerson said. And what is best to maximize corporate interest is by no means necessarily the same as what is best for average citizens.

“We dwarf the Russians or anyone else who sells weapons in the world,” the retired Army colonel continued.

“We are the death merchant of the world.”