Steve Bhaerman on the Heart of Darkness (repost)

Heartland Security and the Heart of Darkness
By Steve Bhaerman

"The more the world crises come to a head, the greater the need for Humanity to come to a heart." ~ Swami Beyondananda

I was having dinner with a friend the other night, and he was reflecting on a reunion he had recently with fellow (and gal) participants in a well-known self-help seminar they all took some 30 years ago. He found these folks to be largely successful, intelligent, compassionate, and committed to a world of peace, justice and sustainability. And yet -

And yet, he told me, they hadn't a clue about what it would really take to have what Bucky Fuller called "a world that works for everyone." Why? Because their own belief in the "goodness of human nature" blinds them to our just-as-prevalent "inhuman nature" - to the evils humans are capable of perpetrating, and the even greater evils enabled by "good" people who refuse to look "the heart of darkness" squarely in the face, consequently allowing the dark forces to proceed unchecked.

The classic example, of course, are the "good Germans" who went along with Nazism because they couldn't believe their leaders were capable of exterminating an entire race of people. My wife Trudy, who was born in Germany, returned to visit as a teenager. When she asked her relatives if they knew about the death camps, the response was, "We were told that was American propaganda, and we believed it because frankly, the prospect of it being true was too horrible to contemplate."

Not even the Jewish community in pre-war Germany was willing to face what the Nazi government was capable of doing. Despite the shattering of illusion that happened on kristallnacht, many Jews continued with "business as usual" until they were rounded up.

Confronting Not-Seeism

Now fast forward from Nazi Germany to Not-See America, where we have a mass media that purposely protects us from seeing the gunk on the "underside of our karma" - and diverts our unspoken despair to focus on the lowly criminal, conveniently side-stepping the highly criminal. As the Irony Curtain shows signs of fraying, we are getting glimpses at the disturbing patterns of abusive power - the most recent being the passage of the National Defense Authorization Act, which legalizes indefinite detention of American citizens.

However, the letter I just received in response to my most recent posting, On Thrive and Thrival, posits a far darker prospect. By way of introduction, I attended a conference over 15 years ago that I immediately termed "the Paranoids Conference," because of some of the outlandish reports and theories. So dark and unspeakable were some of the things I heard there, I simply had no "place" to put them. One of the presenters was a woman who told of being a combination "human tape recorder and sex slave" for U.S. military intelligence. She said she was "programmed" to commit suicide at 30, but somehow evaded that part of the program. I had to face two conflicting questions: How is something like this possible? ... and ... Why would she make up such a story?

Then last year, a friend who I've known well for more than a dozen years confided some things about her own childhood. She was raised in a military family back in the 1960s, and as young children she and her brother would go off to "swimming lessons" with lots of other young military children. She now believes these were part of mind-control experiments conducted during that period. Later - when she and her brother were approaching puberty - they were instructed to go down to the basement of their home. Doing what her father instructed, she was to lay face down on the basement floor, wearing a short dress. Her brother was also there, face down. In walked a high-ranking military officer, who "chose" her brother, ostensibly for sexual gratification, but spared her. The brother later took his own life.

Is this real? Is this some movie fantasy augmented by a vivid imagination? What do we do with this information? And why should we do anything with it, particularly if we see no way to do anything about it?

As you read the letter below, here is the "take away" I hope you will take away. We CANNOT heal the body politic or approach the kind of world we know is possible without "truth and reconciliation." Truth is required, because without truth there is no trust. The primary reason for the Truth and Reconciliation program conducted in South Africa in the 1990s was to establish a common, trustworthy story ... so that future trust could be built. The "reconciliation" part reflects the evolutionary understanding that for most collective "crimes," reconciliation is more helpful than punishment. It allows us to collectively own our species' darkest tendencies, and to identify "sociopathogens" not just as "bad" individuals but as persistent institutionalized behaviors enabled by our silence.

The Heart of Darkness and the Light of Love

There is no "heartland security" without our facing the heart of darkness and the "heartless minds" that have stepped into the moral vacuum left when science and religion went their separate ways. As I have said many times, because we Americans have been divided into two rival cultural and political "tribes," we haven't until now been able to gather around the virtues and values we have in common and establish a moral "bottom line" as a foundation for our collective behavior.

So ... is there a way to "metabolize" these toxins in the body politic, so that we can indeed emerge to a healthy new order? I am reminded of something called the "3 A's" that I've seen from a number of different sources: Awareness, Acknowledgment and Acceptance. These simple three steps may hold the key to the spiritual / political transformation that is necessary for our species to graduate from surviving to thriving. But here is something very important. These three steps must not merely be intellectual understandings, but involve heartfelt experience. It requires "staying in the room" as we become aware of these perpetrations, acknowledge our entire system's compliance with them, and then accept that (and here is the challenge) these horrors are part of our species' learning process called "evolution."

That is, provided we learn from them. The joke is, history repeats itself because we keep flunking it and have to take it over. As soon as our species collectively gets the "lesson," future lessons in this regard are unnecessary, and we can move on to greater expressions of our human potential. And the "organ" best suited for transmuting the "residoodoo" created by thousands of years of rule by the lowest common dominator? The heart. Only through the presence of the light of love - characterized by Plato as "truth, beauty and goodness" - can we establish a field that can "overgrow" this past dysfunction, and create a new standard for relating to one another and the whole of Creation.

May 2012 be a year of truth, and may we gather enough love to face the music ... and dance together.

A Reader's Response to "On Thrive and Thrival"


Dear Steve, I hope you personally get to see this email. I've subscribed to your emails for quite a while now, because I am a person who is deeply spiritual (from the cradle up pretty much) AND because I have seen the writing on the wall in the USA and the world for a long time... my own wake up call was delving into 3 months of missing time from my USAF days in 1980, and a subsequent long trek down a very deep rabbit hole. Finally circumstances in the world compelled me to go public with this, even though I dug my heels in for many years and just wanted to live a "normal" - whatever that used to mean - life. But today, none of us can hope to live a normal life of liberty and pursuit of happiness if we do not act with conscience and discernment. 

I have watched through many many years a gradual convergence between what spiritual teachers and personal growth gurus of the world impart, and the "conspiracy theory" factions, as what has been happening on our world becomes harder and harder to ignore. For a long time, it seemed that the love & light, law of attraction folks were going to try and ignore the darker elements of what is happening on our world, I suspect out of fear of acknowledging the dark because it might undermine their intention-law of attraction process. How does one reconcile the dark with the light. I'm doing my best to reconcile the two in a book I'm writing that will be out in a couple of months.


I completely applaud Foster and Kimberly Gamble for the film they have created and especially for touching on the UFO material. It is just the very beginning of a vindication and validation for me of information I've had to carry around since I had hypnosis in 1994 to retrieve some chunks of my lost memories - of being taken out in the middle of the night while in the USAF, instructed to try and track extraterrestrial or back-engineered ET space craft, then later brutally worked over with drugs and sexual assault to get me to bury the memories through inducing trauma. I am far from being the only one this has happened to also.

Imagine what it is for people like me to see the disasters of the Gulf oil spill and the Fukushima nuclear "accident" visit such devastation on the people who live in the path of the destruction and to KNOW, down in my very bones, that such disasters never had to happen. That so much human and animal suffering never had to occur because free, clean energy is possible - if only the oil cartels and those who have commandeered so much economic power had not kept it secret and killed or harassed those who came up with such energy systems themselves. Yet they have, and We the People keep paying the price for their secret attempts to keep us all under their control. Thrive's commentary on the elite of this world being parasites on the larger host population of all of us regular folks is spot on.

David Icke

As to David Icke, I respect people's right to disagree with him on certain points. Yet, he was a groundbreaker on shadow governments and the New World Order long before it was in any way socially acceptable. He has relentlessly kept at it and now much of what he warned us about is established fact. He has done exhaustive and extensive research into his topics and they deserve serious attention and cross-checking by fearless and unbiased others. I know he discusses reptilians, and I do not doubt what he has to say, though I don't put too much of my focused attention on it. My philosophy is to keep a weather eye on what's wrong on Planet Earth, while keeping the majority of my attention on what I want to create in the world through love. And never to turn away from any disturbing information out of my own fear, but to face my fears and move through them, otherwise what I would like to envision, intend and create in this world will be undermined by that fear.

My own experience with reptilians: While investigating my 3 months of missing time, driven to find some answers, and before having my own hypnosis, I attended a lecture by another reptilian researcher, John Rhodes. Much of it was fascinating, but I just could not buy the reptilian idea - I walked out thinking this guy had watched too much scifi. Then, much later, my own hypnosis yielded up 2 reptilian encounters, minor ones, but there. One was passing a laboratory where a reptilian being was overseeing two other researchers, and one on a flying saucer. Under hypnosis, seeing them took my breath away, and it was hard to get it back. They looked terrifying to me.


Being of a scientific inclination, I have researched and cross-checked and correlated my memories with other information and testimony over many years to try and understand what I re-experienced under hypnosis. This includes working to understand the political and social context in which such things could even occur - which led me to the same places that Foster and Kimberly Gamble have reached and put into their film Thrive. I know that some people regard hypnosis with suspicion. That's fine. But when the information together with my own experiences is checked and cross-checked and correlated - volumes of it - lead to the same place, and some people remember without hypnosis, then you have to give it serious consideration at the very least. I now conclude that reptilians exist. I respect Mr. Icke's research and knowledge on this subject while reserving the right to my own conclusions based in my own experiences and study.

Jacque Fresco's Utopia Town

UFO secrecy is free energy secrecy. Free energy secrecy is directly related to severely curtailing the freedom of people like you and me and the general population, because if people had free energy, the cost of producing goods and services and transporting them would fall to next to nothing and the economic empire that exists on a foundation of oil would collapse. People would then be truly free, to live, to breathe, to create, to love and build connection rather than be indoctrinated to divide and conquer each other. Greed would be unnecessary in a world where such freedom existed. As visionary and futurist Jacque Fresco of the Venus Project teaches, the environment shapes the people who live in it... how could people be shaped in a world where abundance is so plentiful that everyone thrives? What place would greed have in such a world? None. Greed and hoarding is only necessary when some want to control everyone and everything else.

I hope you see this message, and while it would be nice to get a response, none is required if you are too busy. I'm busy too, finishing my book! Stay well, stay joyful no matter what, and my deep gratitude and blessings to you for having the courage to see what is happening in the world and address it in your wonderful and unique way.


Very Warmly!
Niara Terela Isley


[First posted 21 January 2012, reposted 2 June 2014 & 18 April 2017]

Talking the Not-So-New Age Blues (Once Again!)

An epic freestyle poem by Antares

---

"What's truly funny is that something momentous is happening, and it's so real that the media can't see it. Here it is, the biggest story of all time, and it goes unreported. If you're continually focused on this and that media event, the latest celebrity scandal, the scattered wars of duality, the deceitful maneuverings of selfish politicians, and the shifting state of a false world economy, you just might miss the greater story. And this greater story is why we are here and what gives our lives meaning."
- Solara, How to Live Large on a Small Planet, 1996

---

Here are a few questions you could ask
(If you haven't already done so ages ago):
How old is the New Age?
Is it really NEW?
Huh? WHAT New Age?
Isn't it always "A New Age" every time a century turns?
How about a stiff shot of HISTORY (while it lasts)?
Because serious rumor in the mystery circles says
History ends when we break through the Veil of Time
And find ourselves (our True Selves, I mean)
Beyond Euclidean Space.


TWENTY TWELVE, the Daykeeper nods, consulting his cosmic
Calendar, the Mayan Tzolk'in. (Turn the world around and you'll
See Linear Time's expiry date: 21 DECEMBER 2012.)
And then what? GALACTIC SYNCHRONIZATION!
We reconnect to the core of the Milky Way,
Though what that means I cannot say.

"Excuse me, Sir, I am begging to differ," declares Mr Thambyvelloo,
"Actually our Tathu Year will be TWENTY FOURTY-THREE."
But Mr Gopala Das interjects: "Nonsense! MY calendar says 5113!"
"FOURTEEN THIRTY-THREE is how WE put it,"
smiles Professor Haji Abuhasbin.
"Nevertheless we conduct business by the International Calendar."
"In other words," Pope Gregory grins, "you mean 2012 A.D."

Doesn't matter WHEN, it's happening NOW!
Though it may not be happening to everybody
At the same time.
Or in the same way.
But as the Beatles say:
"Having been some days in preparation
A splendid time is guaranteed for all."

[A QUICK SCROLL DOWN THE SCREEN
TO SEE HOW LONG IT'S BEEN...]


A New Age might have been in sight
When Pharaoh Akhenaton ruled Egypt,
Thirty-three hundred and seventy-nine years ago
(If historians are correct) in 1370 B.C.
But alas it was not to be,
For the King was poisoned in his palace
By ruthless generals and greedy priests
Before his mission was complete.
Akhenaton's task was to prepare the world
For the arrival of Lord Sananda,
The Cosmic Christ foretold.


And so, fourteen centuries down the line,
Another attempt was made in another land
To restore Love as Law and the Path of Light
Upon this Earth: Palestine under Roman rule,
Where corruption and hypocrisy reigned supreme.
Some middle-class Jews were put to shame
When the Messiah came and castigated
The merchants in the temple.
"Oy vay, don't rock the boat!" they pleaded,
And as their pious petitions went unheeded,
They charged him with subversion and
Crucified him with unholy haste.
And once again all hope of a Golden Age
Was brutally laid waste
(Even if, as some aver, the Crucifiction was
Just a Catholic joke in very poor taste).


However, the Christ Seed had been planted
In the human gene pool - though it must have felt unwanted.

Rewind the tape of time five centuries or so
To ancient China, where "Old Boy" Lao-tze
(Archetypal wild sage of the mountains)
Successfully summed up reality in 81 verses
Called the Tao Te Ching.

While in Greece Pythagoras held the Beam
With his mathemagickal mystery school,
Using tools like the Golden Mean
And hypotenuse rules, even as he danced
To the Music of the Spheres.


In India Queen Maya bore a Prince:
Siddhartha was his name. Instead of fortune and fame
He sought enlightenment and freedom from the game
Of personal karma. As Buddha he taught us the dharma,
That this illusory world is just 4D melodrama.

Rather than beat an ignominious retreat
Sweet Socrates (that old pederast)
Took his hemlock neat (and his die was cast);
To his health we shall drink eternally.


All these heroic individuals have been named
As Keepers of the Sacred Flame
That came through the Sun
From beyond the stars: they were
Beacons of truth and harbingers
Of an approaching New Aeon.

Bold troubadours in post-Arthurian tales
Sang to us about the Quest for the Grail:
How the valiant Knights of the Table Round
Sought the greatest treasure to be found -
That pot of gold at the Rainbow's End -
The descent of the Dove
And the Rule of Love,
As enemies turn to friends.


The most fleeting glimpse was all we were shown
As we drew the sword of intelligence from the stone;
And then the vision of the Holy Grail
Vanished behind a misty veil
Of nightmarish mayhem and massacre.
Rival factions plunged the world into bloody war,
Screaming, "Dominion over others by fang and claw!"

Meanwhile in the Middle East the stage was set
For yet another crusade on this poor planet.
The portals of belief saw heavy traffic.
As images of love turned pornographic.
The Spanish Inquisition was thrown in purely for luck,
To ensure that the status quo didn't come unstuck.
"Nine Hells have arrived," Aztec priests cried,
"Exactly as Quetzalcoatl prophesied."

Came the Renaissance, a brilliant flash
Of inspiration, giving rise to a dream
Of a world reborn through Alchemy, Science and Art.
The Word now passed from ear to eye
As scriptures were read instead of heard.
The past age of spiritual darkness and doubt
Gave way to Copernicus, Bruno, and Galileo -
Who advocated logic, reason and laboratory testing
As the most reliable method of finding out
What Life on Earth was all about.


Angels and demons filled the atmosphere,
And spoke to Michel Nostradamus the famous seer.
They told him of the long dark night
Of humanity's soul in its headlong flight
Towards the final Apocalypse.

Mountebanks and sorcerers, mystery men and mages,
Took their turn upon the stage of history:
Cagliostro and Saint-Germain,
Eliphaz Levi, Messrs Kelly and Dee
Held sway in the courts of Europe,
Hinting of a New Jerusalem and the
Rebuilding of Solomon's Temple.

Christian Rosenkreutz published the Rosicrucian Manifesto,
Heralding the advent of Liberty, Fraternity, and Equality;
While in 1776 Adam Weishaupt of Ingolstadt
Founded the Ancient Illuminated Seers of Bavaria -
Whose illustrious members, apparently,
Included the likes of George Washington, Tom Jefferson,
And Ben Franklin - progenitors of the American Dream
Of Novus Ordo Seclorum - a New World Order, no less:
A New World for a New Age -
Governed by a global Freemasonry!


Another page turns in the Book of Changes:
America the Dream goes to Hollywood,
Gets hijacked and featured in National Geographic,
Serialized in Reader's Digest;
And now the movie rights are owned by Walt Disney,
While the Bill of Rights waits at the Gates
of Heaven.

In Persia the Bab was born: and in May 1844 proclaimed
The imminent approach of the Imam Mahdi,
Ultimate prophet of God - but the Shah had him shot
For disrespect towards Worldly Authority.
Then his followers established the Baha'i movement,
Which advocates world government on a Unified Earth,
And a new age of Universal Justice.

Newton, Darwin, and Faraday were an ad agency for
Progress through Science: understand how the universe works
And a New Industrial Age begins.
It all started with a Big Bang and everything since
Has been winding down like a clockspring.


At the height of our collective infatuation
With Machines and Automation,
Blavatsky, Leadbeater, and Olcott - NOT your typical firm of
Chartered Accountants - went to India and Tibet where they met
Ascended Masters of the Trans-Himalayan Brotherhood,
And were assigned the task of introducing
Ancient wisdom to the modern world.
Proclaim the advent of a New Aeon, they were told,
And groom Jiddhu Krishnamurti for the role
Of planetary savior.


Their Theosophical Society was inaugurated
In 1875 and found an eager following in the West,
While in the East the Sun still rose
And shone upon the sleeping millions.

Secret Societies sprouted like mushrooms
In the moldy moral ground of Victorian times, and
Ritual magic enjoyed a fairly brisk trade.
Messages from the Spirit World
And all varieties of psychic phenomena
Caught the fancy of bored housewives and
Wayward intellectuals.


The Who's Who of arcane knowledge and esoteric lore
Included names like W.B. Yeats and Claude Debussy,
Victor Hugo and Conan Doyle, Bulwer-Lytton and Liddell Mathers,
Aleister Crowley, the Marquis de Sade, and many more.
"Practitioners of Evil, Satanists, Lucifer's Friends, and
The Antichrist" were epithets flung at some of these pioneers.
But the tide of evolution was rising fast:
It spawned the glamorous Order of the Golden Dawn
And magickal offshoots like the O.T.O. (Ordo Templi Orientis) and
Argenteum Astrum (the Silver Star).


Some followed Rudolf Steiner into Anthroposophy,
And joined the tug-of-war between Ahura Mazda and Ahriman.
Others were captivated by G.I. Gurdjieff and his school
Of Modified Sufi Dance, but found themselves bewildered
By his Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson: a rambunctious and
Somewhat Rabelaisian dissection of the human experiment
Seen through the extraterrestrial eyes of a former
Colonial Administrator of Earth.


Adolf Hitler and Company had their ill-fated Third Reich:
Hoping to govern the world by high-tech voodoo and
A fanatic belief in Aryan supremacy.
But the Fourth Reich (propounded by Wilhelm,
Psychoanalyst and discoverer of Orgone energy
Who authored Function of the Orgasm)
Might have been a lot more fun
If Dr Reich hadn't been hounded out of Europe
By his erstwhile colleagues in the psychiatric profession,
And finally assassinated in a US prison by
What he called the HIGs - Hoodlums In Government.


(We're not talking ancient history here:
This happened in the 1950s!)

Anyhow Reich tried to alert the US Air Force
To the suspicious activity of UFOs - only to be subjected
To intense harassment by the FBI and the MIB
Who, for some reason, wanted to see Reich discredited or dead.
In retrospect, it appears that Reich was perceived
As a threat to the Military-Industrial Complex's covert program
Of "scientific collaboration" with the Zeta Reticulan Greys -
A technically advanced but spiritually retarded race,
Desperately seeking a cure for terminal infertility
Before their species became extinct.


Which brings us to the era of Star Trek, Star Wars,
Close Encounters, ET, X-Files and Virtual Reality.
Also crystal gazing, holistic healing,
Wheeling and dealing gurus,
Group meditations, Earth activations,
Celestine Prophecies and TM levitation,
Swift mutations and transmutation...
Hey, are there any experts left with reputations?
When there are more Channels than TV sets,
You find more confusion than the United Nations.
What you believe is what you get;
Anything goes these days.. who knows?
Anything can happen yet!


"Oh, the Sirians will save us!" some Brethren shout.
"No, only Jesus Christ can!" the Born-Again spout.
Others laugh: "It's the Pleiadian Plan - a total rout!"
"Save our streams before there are no more trout!"
The angelic anglers scream.
So is the New Age just a dream
From which Old Age awakens
With a terrible hangover?

Wait and see, nothing will change -
That's what the so-called Realist thinks.
Life will always be unfair,
You gotta be quick and grab a chair
(Let the rest drop dead, it's their affair!)
Money, not love, makes the world go round -
Excuse me, can I convert my ringgit to pounds? -
Gotta ride that crazy merry-go-round
Till you're six feet underground.
Let me ask you: is there any proof at hand
That God can also be a Man?
You say every woman is the Goddess,
But all I care about is the size of her bodice.
And I wanna know just how many Harmonica Virgins
Blew their minds at Harmonic Convergence!


Don't talk to me about Tectonic Plates,
Electromagnetic Grids, Pole Shifts, Zionist Plots,
Precessioning Equinoxes, Photon Belts, and
Why your paternal grandma was a Celt.
Do you wanna know when I last cried?
It was the day my pet canary died.

Well, well, well, what have we here?
Keep your mind and heart open
And have no fear.
The worst that could happen is...
NOTHING.


What the New Age really means is a Quantum Leap -
From Global Village to Local Galaxy at the sound of a beep.
Better get ready or go back to sleep...
Carry on, Mr Accountant,
Count your sheep.

[Written in June 1996. First posted 2 August 2009, reposted 1 July 2014  & 15 October 2017]

TRANCE-FORMATION ~ a movie by Maxwell Igan (repost)

"Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience. Our problem is that people all over the world have obeyed the dictates of leaders and millions have been killed because of this obedience. Our problem is that people are obedient all over the world in the face of poverty and starvation and stupidity, and war, and cruelty. Our problem is that people are obedient while the jails are full of petty thieves and the grand thieves are running the country. That's our problem." ~ Howard Zinn

Visit The CrowHouse!

[Note: This was posted sometime in April this year but I don't think anyone actually viewed it. Maybe over the weekend? It's worthwhile! First posted 14 September 2012]

What On Earth Will It Take? Find Out More!

THRIVE is an unconventional documentary that is being released online on 11.11.11 at http://thrivemovement.com/.

THRIVE lifts the veil on what's REALLY going on in our world by following the money upstream - uncovering the global consolidation of power in nearly every aspect of our lives. Weaving together breakthroughs in science, consciousness and activism, THRIVE offers real solutions, empowering us with unprecedented and bold strategies for reclaiming our lives and our future.

Get on the THRIVE mailing list here!