Ken and I met at Occupy and got to know each other through Critical Thinking which started at the Bank of Ideas. Ken recently emailed this extract from Facebook and asked what I thought of this article and the video: Windows on the World INSIDE OCCUPY AND BANK OF IDEAS.
Confession: while I encountered resistance and hostility when sharing information on climate science at Occupy and had reservations about some of the “facilitation” and the obsession with consensus, I wasn’t sufficiently “aware” to realise Occupy was a PSYOP. In retrospect, it’s hard to refute Kelfin’s and Dom’s assertions. More importantly, Occupy has paved the way for another PSYOP, Extinction Rebellion (XR); was that Occupy’s purpose all along?
Not only has XR attracted similar followers; it uses the same Common Purpose, NLP, Delphi and mind control techniques. XR is “controlled opposition”. Not least because it’s not opposing (or rebelling against) anything! XR’s agenda is in lock-step with that of corporate greenwash and the new world order backed by every corrupt institution, including big oil. The “climate crisis” (from global warming) has been manufactured and has no basis in fact. The reality is that we’re entering a solar minimum which could herald another Little Ice Age.
Systemic Risk and Climate Change – What if the claimed consensus is wrong?
What is apparent, in both Occupy and XR, irrespective of protestations to the contrary, is hierarchy and it is all the more insidious through being obscured by lies and deception.
What both Occupy and XR aspire to is scale, ie. mass “protest”, and that’s really the point; to create or accelerate momentum for change through mass movements which aren’t spontaneous or “grass roots” but carefully infiltrated, choreographed and orchestrated.
Critical Thinking’s final iteration of political economy, refers to three stages of learning on the journey of discovery; the first stage is what most of have experienced at school and university – trained ignorance. Many, or even most, of those involved in Occupy and XR have yet to progress beyond trained ignorance. The aggression and hostility towards “non-believers” is demonstration of their fears – threats to their “world view” and fear of the consequences of facing up to reality.
We’re not referring to the hierarchy (although they too, would think and behave differently, if they progressed beyond trained ignorance) but the thousands of people who sincerely want to make the world a better place; by “pulling on the wrong levers for change” they are making things so much worse.
In How we live, Critical Thinking highlights this problem of trained ignorance and refers to Fear as the biggest obstacle to change. This fear arises from Ego and the many I’s or parts that we play in our lives. As parents, siblings, in our work and socially, we adopt personas to protect ourselves – we are frightened of exposing our real selves to almost everyone.
Gurdjieff refers to our need to shed the “I’s” to expose our innermost core or self. This video uses the analogy of a horse and carriage to explain – who’s riding in your carriage?
CoCreative Learning principles refer to “wholeness” which is a similar concept – the most successful self-organising companies share three principles or traits:
Self-organisation
Wholeness
Evolutionary purpose
Rather than aspiring to grow into a mass movement, Critical Thinking created and relied on “circles of trust” – a distributed network of co-creative learning. This is described in How we live as the second stage of learning – expanding understanding. “Wholeness” in this context is exposing our inner core and disregarding the fears relating to how others see us. Exposing our vulnerabilities is an essential part of forming circles of trust.
This also requires that we suppress or control our ego – humility is essential, if we want to learn.
In Zen Flesh, Zen Bones (by Paul Rep) there is a section entitled 101 Zen Stories. Here a tale is told of a University professor who visits Nan-in, a Japanese Zen master. The professor says he wants to learn about Zen, but is filled with his own knowledge and opinions. Nan-in pours tea into his cup and does not stop so that it begins to overflow.
“What are you doing? It is overfull. No more will go in!” yells the Professor. “Like this cup,” Nan-in said, “you are full of your own opinions and speculations. How can I show you Zen unless you first empty your cup?”
The final stage of learning referred to in How we live is spiritual exploration. Much of the territory to be explored is beyond the reach of critical thinking, empiricism, logic or deductive reasoning. We need to nurture our intuition or inductive reasoning capacity to tap into the world of esoteric knowledge and wisdom.
However, in spite of the limitations of deductive reasoning, Critical Thinking and Daily Pickings were, in large part, guided by forces beyond our control or understanding. When writing Daily Pickings I came to rely on intuition to guide what events or issues to write about each day, and the words seemed to come from “outside” rather than inside my head. I came to trust the forces that drove Critical Thinking, beyond the people directly involved.
Trusting in universal consciousness is an act of faith. And that is why spiritual exploration is beyond the reach of critical thinking and deductive logic. If we want tangible proof of its power, we’re not going to find it. However, if we remain open to the possibility, we become progressively conscious of this positive driving force.
Religions urge their followers to “put their trust in God” – literal interpretations, often distorted to fulfill institutional agendas, are unhelpful in this regard. We can trust universal consciousness, only if we maintain a pure, unselfish motivation for truth and understanding. Universal consciousness is of little value to those who are motivated by greed or lesser ambitions. Universal consciousness is not a one-stop shop to satisfy our desires.
How we live refers to the reality gap – the yawning chasm between most people’s world views and their living reality. To close the reality gap we need to shed our fears and the key to shedding those fears is spiritual awareness. What we find is that in beginning to close the reality gap, through co-creative learning, we enter an expanding spiral of understanding which resonates with others. This virtuous spiral is progressively reinforced as our understanding grows. From a state of fear, we are transformed into a state of sublime power. It may not be consistent and at times we may despair either at the world or our own situation but over time those feelings of empowerment grow and become more frequent.
In summary, the essential lesson is to relax and let go. Learning and change have a natural rhythm – go with the flow and let go. Accept that we are all fallable and prone to weakness and acts of selfishness – we are human. We’re not expected to be perfect but if we aim for perfection, we’ll be better than we were. When we let go, we often find issues and problems resolve themselves – worry changes nothing. Let go and trust your intuition and universal consciousness.