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]

TERROR AS A GEOPOLITICAL TOOL (reprise)

"Strong, credible allegations of high-level criminal activity can bring down a government. When the government lacks an effective, fact-based defense, other techniques must be employed. The success of these techniques depends heavily upon a cooperative, compliant press and a mere token opposition party." - David Martin

Whenever you come across the word TERROR check if it’s being associated with the Islamic jihad. The fanatical religionist is the latest bogeyman, very useful for the insidious purpose of injecting intense fear and paranoia into the hearts of the masses.

The intention is to make people cut off all feelings of goodwill and compassion they might otherwise feel towards other humans in particular, and other lifeforms in general. Who would wish to stop us from being loving, compassionate and noble? Who would desire to make us distrustful and anxious, readily agreeing to be microchipped and to endure all manner of “beefed up security” - including 24/7 electronic surveillance and abruptly curtailed civil rights?

People, this may sound like science fiction, but I assure you that mind-control techniques have been in use for a very long time and are sufficiently sophisticated to make it not only possible - but inevitable - that suicide killers are being programmed and trained by covert agencies and then unleashed on unsuspecting populations at strategic times and places.

Security and defence personnel like the police and military already undergo rigorous training to program them into obedient, unquestioning enforcers of official authority.

However, their training stops short of completely dehumanizing them. Those who have been processed through police or military discipline are generally still able to return to civilian life without too much trouble - unless they are shell-shocked from exposure to the apocalyptic horrors of dirty "wars" like Vietnam or Iraq. Transforming a confused and angry young person into a kamikaze killer is something a great deal more extreme. But it appears that some covert agencies are expert at it:

A recent Carol Valentine article puts forth ample evidence that MANY, if not ALL, so-called "suicide bomber" attacks supposedly carried out by "Palestinian terrorists" are in fact being perpetrated by the Mossad-supported "Hamas" and similar bogus front organizations. This assessment indeed correlates EXACTLY with information conveyed to us from a DoS source and published in a TOP VIEW bulletin on April 14: information that an alleged "suicide bomber" attack in a Jerusalem market that Friday was perpetrated - like most of these supposed "suicide bomber" attacks - by a brainwashed/mind-controlled zombie killer under the control of Israeli/CIA intelligence units.

But why would ANYONE wish to turn human beings into killer zombies via hypnotech voodoo? This practice is hardly new. In the 11th century, a Persian mystic and spiritual master named Hasan-i-Sabbah perfected a method of indoctrination whereby he was able to create an army of fearless hashishin (from which the word assassin derives). Hasan built an impregnable fortress flanked by two mountains where he created a paradisal garden...

"The garden lay in a beautiful valley nestled between two high mountains. Here he had imported exotic plants, birds, and animals from all over the world. Surrounding the garden were luxurious palaces of marble and gold, decorated with beautiful paintings and fine silk furniture. Streams of milk, wine, and honey flowed throughout this earthly paradise, while fountains gushed with wine and pure spring water.

The initiate, after being knocked out by a powerful potion mixed with hashish, would be carried into the garden. When he awoke from his slumber, he would be greeted by a host of beautiful teenage girls (houris), who sang and danced and played lovely instruments for him. As he drifted into an ecstatic daze, the girls would go to work on the initiate, giving him a full-body tongue massage, while one girl performed oral sex on him. Eventually, the bedazzled young man would climax into the girl's mouth "as softly and slowly and blissfully as a single snowflake falling." (Robert Anton Wilson, from Prometheus Rising) No wonder Hasan could demand absolute loyalty from his followers, no questions asked..." (Wes Moore)

Moore goes on to say: "Our modern day 'assassination cults' (the FBI, the CIA, etc.) have incorporated many of the Hashishins' techniques into their methodologies. In a CIA training manual titled A Study of Assassination, you find traces of the Assassins' influence throughout. Hasan-i-Sabbah is even mentioned in the document, which is a must read if there ever was one."

Most of us would vehemently deny it if somebody showed us incontrovertible evidence that our fathers or husbands have been leading a double life as Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Since the state is for many an extension of the father, it's difficult for the majority to believe that our own governments are capable of sacrificing the lives of any number of citizens just to stay in power.

Operation Northwoods is solid proof that such things happen more often than we would like to know. In 1962 the Joint Chiefs of Staff proposed to fake terror attacks on their own citizens and blame it on Fidel Castro. This was to justify declaring war on Cuba. Good thing defense secretary Robert McNamara shot the atrocious idea down. But 39 years down the line with Donald Rumsfeld as defense secretary and Dick Cheney as vice-president, another preposterous false flag operation was given the green light: the world knows this scenario as the 9/11 terror attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

"The Illuminati, Freemasonry and the other secret societies use symbols and perform ceremonies that perpetuate the generational transfers of arcane knowledge that is used to keep the ordinary people in political, economic and spiritual bondage to the oldest bloodlines on earth." - Don Harkins

Lee Harvey Oswald (above) was perhaps a classic example of a programmed assassin, used as a patsy and scapegoat in the plot to assassinate John F. Kennedy, 35th US president on 22 November 1963. Deathbed disclosures by former CIA agent E. Howard Hunt implicate George H.W. Bush in the elaborate conspiracy.

Sirhan Sirhan has been languishing in jail since 5 June 1968, the night Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. Investigators say Sirhan has absolutely no memory of what happened that fateful day.

Mark David Chapman shot John Lennon on 8 December 1980 outside The Dakota in New York City. He was 25 at the time and was carrying a copy of J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye, which some investigators believe was used as a programming tool by whoever set Chapman up to take out Lennon, who was perceived by the FBI to be a major threat to public sentiment over America's military program.

US military training incorporates mind-control techniques developed by MK-Ultra during the 1950s. Some say dangerous psychotropic drugs like crystal amphetamine are routinely used to desensitize airforce crews on bombing missions and afford combatant troops a false sense of invulnerability.

It's important to bear in mind that the secretive power cabals responsible for staging false flag operations like 9/11, the Madrid and Bali bombings, and the 7/7 terror attacks in London are NOT bound by national or racial considerations. We must be careful not to blame Americans or Israelis or Brits or Pakistanis or Saudis or French or Chinese or Japanese or Russians or Serbs or Albanians for these atrocities.

Although these diabolical stratagems often involve the use of covert agencies like the CIA, FBI, Mossad, MI6, KGB, ISI, ASIO, BIN, SB, or whatever - the operatives themselves are usually in the dark as to the overall plan and ultimate purpose of their clandestine commando activities. Since these power hierarchies function strictly on a need-to-know basis, only the topmost echelons of authority have access to the game plan formulated by the inner circle of power players. In effect, even as we discover more about who and what actually makes the world go round, this knowledge will be irrelevant and useless if it makes us feel antagonistic towards Americans or Jews or Arabs or any other ideological or ethnic group.

The enemy, as it turns out, is embedded within our own genetic architecture, hard-wired into the most primitive, reptilian region of our brains where our deepest, darkest fears reside. And we can experience no greater fear than the fear of our own non-existence as individualized egos.


Take the vicious, gory and totally senseless Mumbai attacks, for example. Why might the CIA, Mossad and MI6 collaborate on such an evil program to strike fear into the Indian government specifically - and the rest of the horrified world in general? What have they accomplished by wreaking such newsworthy carnage and killing nearly 200 innocent bystanders?

Today even in remote villages you will find the occasional satellite dish and hordes of relatives crowded around the TV set every night. Most humans have, in fact, been conditioned to become passive consumers of news bulletins broadcast 24/7 by commercial networks like CNN, the BBC, Fox News, Aljazeera, and so on. It has become so easy to project a specific thought-form or perception into the mass consciousness, provided one has the colossal resources required to produce, direct and stage-manage "the news."

Knowing we are unable to look away from carnage and catastrophe, TV camera crews are on constant standby to arrive at the scene of any visually horrifying incident within hours or even minutes. Bombarded as we are by daily reports of accidents, floods, earthquakes, explosions, murders and massacres, it gets harder and harder to feel positive about humanity's future. Indeed, when violent death can strike suddenly, unexpectedly, and for absolutely no reason at all, most people begin to accept the notion of a totalitarian government where stringent security measures will ensure that they are at least safe from harm - so what if they have to sacrifice their individual liberty and childhood ideals of a just and united world?

"May 13 and 9/11 have one common feature: they were cunningly and ruthlessly crafted public traumas designed to concuss, confuse, and confound the masses - and, while the voters were in temporary shock, they would be robbed of any control over their own future. That's right, folks: the name of the REAL game is "Hand over all your power!" - Antares

Some of you may remember a 1997 movie called Wag The Dog - or the 2004 remake of The Manchurian Candidate. Well, both movies do a good job of illustrating the methodology of spin and those who routinely use it to manipulate public opinion and behavior.

Instead of panicking and worrying where the world is headed, I suggest you remain perfectly calm and do some serious research into what’s REALLY going on behind the surface of what the mass media reports. Begin by clicking on these recommended links:

What is MK-Ultra?

Who's Behind All These 'Random' Bombings?

Are the CIA and MI6 working with Mossad?

What's going on in Palestine?

Osama bin Laden, interviewed on 28 September 2001: "I had no knowledge of these attacks, nor do I consider the killing of innocent women, children and other humans as an appreciable act. Islam strictly forbids causing harm to innocent women, children and other people. Such a practice is forbidden even in the course of a battle."

From The Daily Mail Online, 29 November 2008. First posted 29 November 2008. Reposted 1 August 2014, 25 July 2015 & 16 July 2018]

John Lennon would be celebrating his 73rd birthday right now....

But I doubt he would have enjoyed turning into a grouchy old fart like Bob Dylan.

Happy Birthday, Johnny... wherever you are.

Why is Zbigniew "Deeply Troubled"?

Is it because nobody can pronounce or spell his fuckin' name? Check out The Truth Seeker and spice up your reality!