...
You don't seem to understand. You pat yourself on the back for keeping up with current events, for finding out what's going on in the world and then having an opinion about it. This makes you a good citizen, someone who's not going to sound like a dope in polite company. It makes you intelligent and concerned. It tells you all the right websites to visit.
It never addresses the problems. It also provides the medium for mindfuckers to delude you even worse than you already are. THEY know this about you. I know this about you. THEY use this knowledge to EXPLOIT you further. I don't do that. I try to point to its malign manifestation, try to talk you out of it.
Wealthy parasites who do not have your problems are out there overthrowing governments to gain control of the whole world. They are doing this by means of OUR military. Yes, yes, the bankers are hard at it, but when they can't get the control through head trips, through money, they set their destabilization troops to work. Nonviolent protests, LED BY NETWORKS IN THE SERVICE OF THE PARASITES, start showing up all over the place, dotting the landscape. Snipers shoot some of the protestors and blame it on the regime. If the regime doesn't dissolve on cue, drone attacks, bombs, death squads, ensue. Lies are put into circulation through the media to facilitate all this, to keep you having your opinions, keep you busily, exhaustedly busily, cranking out takes on each bit.
It doesn't matter whether you believe it or not, like it or not. [1] The point is to keep you busy opining and emoting. [2] It puts in all the perfect memes to keep the masses who are too busy to look in depth absorbing the lies through osmosis, catching them through bits of conversation, headlines read over the airwaves, the stuff that filters in even if you never pay attention. You are so busy congratulating yourself for looking in depth, instead of being a dumb rube, that you never SEE that it's NO more effective to be intelligent about this stuff than it is to be stupid about this stuff. Your intention has been to be intelligent, with the mistaken impression that is the way to fix things. NO. Yes, you must be intelligent to fix them, but YOU FORGOT THE PART ABOUT HAVING TO FIX THEM TO FIX THEM.
When anyone points this out, you start in with your crap about how busy you are, how you have a mortgage and car payments and kids and will lose your medical coverage, or your bad back prevents you from getting across town to depose the mayor, or whatever. My excuse is poverty and remoteness from any action.
It's all known to the parasites and used by them. They use it all. They set up the paradigm and they use every product of it to keep you ineffective. It's our whole society. For our whole lives. It's structured to provide this level of control and to keep you from effectiveness against whatever is awful about it. You are trained to ignore your greater sense from earliest childhood, by people who were trained to ignore their greater sense from childhood... stretching back for centuries. You can't EVER prevail over the parasites until you are clear enough in your intention to manifest it.
The cosmos responds to INTENT. You keep thinking everything turns out so crappy on you, despite your good intentions. YOU NEED TO LOOK INTO THOSE INTENTIONS SO MUCH MORE DEEPLY THAN YOU ARE EVER WILLING TO DO. You think this is preposterous, because, after all, you are you, and you have had a whole life of intimate acquaintance with yourself, and so I'm full of shit. You, in fact, start getting fairly pissed off at me for keeping at you about this. Vexed. Or you take the condescending attitude toward it. Whatever throws in that buffer from having to do the actual looking, the intense self-examination, the stopping of your WHOLE trip and looking at it objectively. Your ego thinks that's lethal. Your ego is the false identity that had to replace your greater sense from earliest childhood. You can barely distinguish your ego from yourself.
YOU DON'T KNOW WHO THE FUCK YOU ARE.
You never have.
For most of my life I felt things were wrong, but kept thinking it had to be me, that I had to try harder and things would start working. You don't know from trying. You can't imagine the power of my trying... like Joe's dream of me getting back up to keep running for him after being mowed down by a freight train... TRYING. I gave up on everything, EVERYTHING, even sex, despite my cosmic babetude, so sincere was my determination to figure it out, do right, do better. It didn't work. In 1989, I decided it had to be me, that I did not know myself correctly, that I was not going to buy into another bit from the world, not throw my titanic energies behind another thing other than finding the real nines. That, of course, sounded daffy to everybody, but, hey, what else is new?
I meant it. Every attempt was met with failure, abject failure, APPALLING failure. I got myself into this space where I very LITERALLY could not stop crying for a YEAR, could not hold still either. I kept driving away from everywhere. I was crying and driving away for so long that there ceased even to be anywhere from whence to drive. I drove. Goldie. I ended up at a Zen practice center, thinking that here would be the place to hold still, the place to concentrate on all that deeply true stuff Chogyam Trungpa had been saying in The Myth of Freedom. By that time I had been through at least three major revolutions of divestiture. I had, as they say, "left home".
AGAIN, I was faced with the brutal reality of this despicably deluded malignancy people call "the real world". The place was operated by a crew of charlatans so much more cruel than "the real world" as to make most people give up completely at that point. They were WORSE than corporate fuckers, CEOs, car salesmen, banksters, fucksters, faithless bastards everywhere, because they are billed as the renunciation of all this while being the embodiment of it... hidden under black robes. Bald guys in dresses pretending to be sages.
Did I give up? I did not. Now, after more failures than I could count, I swore to get it myself. If there was no one to teach me, I'd learn it alone. I began. I even told the jackass in charge of the practice center that I would help him learn it, that even as I didn't know it, I would know when we were on the wrong track, that I could learn by helping him find where he was erring. I don't give a shit how presumptuous this sounds, I meant it sincerely. I knew what I knew and knew how it could serve on the road to what I needed to find out. Every conceivable obstacle was put in my path, but the more I clarified my intent, the more helpful situations presented themselves to help me. You know that Bible story about Job? Well, there it was. No matter how difficult, I was not going to be swayed from my intent.
THE teacher of all teachers one could imagine in this walking around world called me on the phone... picked me.
This is how I know that the ONLY way we are going to have a decent world is to swear ourselves to it like I swore myself to waking up. My teacher did NOT wave a magic wand over me. That phone call set me into about three years of the most hellish self-examination you could imagine... no... pfeh... you can't even imagine... BECAUSE you're too fucking dead set against it before you will even let the mere thought of it enter your head. I was wretched. I kept going. On the other side of it, I looked back at all my Shakespearean travail and laughed ruefully. What a waste of fright and demoralization! What was my problem? Stupid, stupid, stupid.
YOU NEED TO FIND THAT OUT!
You need to do that and look back at your Shakespearean travail and laugh ruefully for the waste of your whole life. If you do not, this will NEVER get better.
Protest will fail, abjectly. You have to swear yourself to your intent and not let ANYTHING in the world turn you.
.