You Cannot Fit God and His Way, Into You and Your Way

By Sri Dava Prakasha

You are narcissistic by nature. You live on the island of self, and, moreover, you are the island of self. You also see things and events as revolving around you, and you perceive things and events as either existing for your use, or as undesirable for your use, or in terms of how they may or may not affect you or those you love. You also perceive life through the filter of your own mind, according to your genetic and learned predisposition. Your subtle and gross actions are always that of adding to you and your life: adding experiences, ideas, knowledge, objects, and other people. You are the self, the ego, and your perception, thinking, and actions are that of constant self reference. Your life is about you, your ideas, your knowledge, your preferences, your stuff, and your way of living. Your life is also about constantly adding to you and your way of life, and is about constantly integrating more and more into you and your way of living. Your life is also about protecting you, and is about protecting your current experiences, ideas, knowledge, preferences, plans, stuff, and way of living. It is about protecting the experiences, ideas, knowledge, objects, and other people you have already added to, and already integrated into, you and your way of life. You are also, by nature, self-reliant. You are about you and your way of living. You are about the natural business of adding to you and your way, and integrating into you and your way, and feeding you and your way. You are also about protecting you and your way, and all that feeds and supports you and your way. And, you accomplish all this adding, integrating, self-feeding, and self-protecting, by relying on yourself, by self-reliance.

However, take note of two key characteristics of all the stuff that you add and integrate into you and your way. New ideas, things, and people are beyond or outside your small, isolated world of self. New ideas, things, and people are also other-than or different from you and your way of living.

But the above two facts pose a problem for you: You need ideas, things, and people to feed and protect you, and they are beyond and other-than you and your way of living. Yet, your nature is not to submit or adapt yourself and your way of living to that which is beyond and other than you and your way. This is the crux of the problem: How can you add and integrate them into you and your way of living, in order to use them, without submitting or adapting yourself and your way to them? So, how do you solve the problem?

Much that is beyond or outside you and your way, and much that is other-than or different from you and your way, must be re-shaped by you in order to fit, and to be integrated into, you and your current way of living. You must alter, re-shape, bend, and mold much of that which is beyond and other-than you, so that it can be comfortably added and integrated into you and your way of life, and can thereby feed and protect you and your way of living. The answer, therefore, is simple: In order for many new ideas, things, and people to be added and integrated into you and your way, you must try to alter, re-shape, bend, and mold them to fit your current ideas, preferences, and way of living. Simply change and adapt that which is beyond and other-than you and your way of living, so that it can submit to you, and to your ideas, and to your way, rather than you submitting or changing yourself, your ideas, and your way of living.

Some new ideas, things, and people already fit well into you and your way of living, so they require no fundamental change for you to add and integrate them into you and your way of living. They are already compatible with you and your way. However, if they do not already fit, or if you cannot successfully modify that which is beyond and other-than you and your way, then you will reject it. Your nature is not to submit or adapt yourself and your way of living to that which is beyond and other-than you and your way. Your strongest tendency is to seek that which already fits into you and your preferred way of living. But, if a new idea, thing, or person does not already fit, you will either try to alter, re-shape, bend, and mold it to fit you and your way, or, if that cannot be accomplished, you will reject it.

The above facts are not to suggest that you never adapt, submit, or compromise. However, your adaptations, submissions, and compromises are only very superficial, and are allowed only within a very narrow range of possible behavior within that superficial layer. Your adaptation, submission, and compromise with that which is beyond and other-than you, are superficial in depth, and narrow in range.

What does that mean? Your adaptation, submission, and compromise are superficial, because they never reach into the depth and most essential foundation of you and how you live. They are never allowed to go so deep, that they touch the core of you, and are never allowed to interrupt your basic way of living.

First, you never allow you, the separate consciousness or individual that you are, to be threatened, harmed, deprived, or insulted. You make sure that your individuality remains intact, fed, and respected. You never adapt, submit, and compromise to a depth that completely denies you your basic egoic needs of survival, pleasure, and vanity. Moreover, the core-level state of individuality, and your core-level motivation of survival, pleasure, and vanity, are not only never compromised, but are fed and protected by your superficial adaptation, submission, and compromise.

You typically adapt, submit, and compromise to the superficial depth that you do, in order to get those needs met, and not for any altruistic reason. Your flexibility is typically for the sake of getting your needs met, and not out of total, or even partial, selflessness. Second, you never allow your basic way of living to be interrupted, by any adaptation, submission, or compromise. What is your basic way of living? Clinging, selfish taking, and self-reliance, all for the sake of feeding and protecting your survival, pleasure, and vanity. Using self-energy, you cling to self and to all that feeds and supports self. You cling to self, and to all that is beyond and other-than self, if that other serves one or more of your three needs. Your subtle and gross actions are also that of constantly taking, adding, and integrating into you, your mind, and your being, all the ideas, objects, and people that feed and protect you. You are always pulling-in to yourself, all the ideas, objects, and people that ensure your survival, pleasure, and vanity. In any given moment, you are doing that on both subtle and gross levels, or just on the subtle level using self-energy and the mental process of perception and experience. And, you rely largely on your own ideas, schemes, and efforts, in the ongoing process of clinging and taking for the sake of meeting your three needs. You never adapt, submit, and compromise to a depth that completely interrupts your basic way of living, which is clinging, selfish taking, and self-reliance in order to ensure your survival, pleasure, and vanity.

Your adaptations, submissions, and compromises are superficial, because they do not go so deep as to threaten your survival, pleasure, and vanity, and do not go so deep as to interrupt your clinging, selfish, and self-reliant way of life. Moreover, not only are your adaptations, submissions, and compromises superficial, and not only do they not threaten your survival, pleasure, and vanity, but they are typically for the very purpose of feeding and protecting self. Also, your adaptations, submissions, and compromises are narrow in range, because your fear, and your clinging to the appearances and personal habits of your life, will not allow you to engage actions that are beyond or other-than a very small scope of possible behaviors. You will typically go “only so far” to get your needs met. But, if great calamity or desperation were to befall you, you may find yourself acting in ways you never imagined. In general, your strongest tendency is to look for ideas, objects, remedies, activities, and people that already fit into your notions of how things should look, and into your specific habits of living. You are looking for compatibility. If they do not already fit, then you may try to make them bend, change, and submit to fit your ideas and preferences. You will try to make them compatible. But, you will reject those ideas, objects, remedies, activities, and people that do not already fit, or will not bend, change, and submit. After all, you, by nature, are not willing to adapt, submit, and compromise beyond a certain superficial depth and narrow range. Even when you do, it is still for the sake of self-feeding and self-protection, and usually only when desperate. Regardless of your delusions to the contrary, you are extremely inflexible and unyielding; but you expect all the stuff and people you need and want, to fit, bend, or submit to you and to your specific ways of living. You want the world closest to you, which is the stuff and people that you use for self-feeding and selfprotection, to fit your ideas and preferences of how it should look.

New ideas, things, and people are beyond or outside your small, isolated state of self, and are other-than or different from you and your way of living. For you to be willing to add and integrate them into your life, they must either already largely fit your ideas and ways, or they must bend, change, and submit to fit your ideas and ways. However, if they do not already fit, or do not bend, change, and submit enough to suit you, then you will reject them.

The implications of the above information are profound, for the serious seeker, and for the true follower. During your spiritual search, you gravitated toward teachers, teachings, paths, and practices for which you already had a large affinity: those that already largely fit into your general mind-set of how a spiritual teacher, teaching, path, or practice should look, operate, and “feel”. You were willing to accept variations within a certain comfortable range, but a general “good fit” or compatibility was required for you to embrace a specific teacher, teaching, path, or practice. Therefore, you completely rejected those that did not fit very well, and from which you could draw no or few ideas or practices that seemed to “resonate” with your pre-existing ideas and preferences. You were looking for yourself and your ways, to be reflected in the spiritual teachers, teachings, paths, and practices you investigated. Only when you saw yourself, your ideas, your preferences, and your ways largely reflected in a given teacher, teaching, path, or practice, did you embrace it. You have sought, added, and integrated only those spiritual teachers, teachings, paths, and practices for which you already had a large affinity, and have rejected or simply ignored all others.

A long-term spiritual seeker has added and integrated many teachings, paths, and practices into his pot of self, and they have only reinforced himself and his general way of living. He is an ego, a separate consciousness, and his general way of life is that of clinging to self and to all that protects and feeds self, and self-reliance. His actions are only that of clinging, which is observed as self-protection, self-feeding, and self-reliance. His state and actions are about preventing God, by merely being himself, and by clinging to self so as to protect and feed it, and by relying on self so as to ensure his needs are met. His delusions about his spiritual status do not change the facts. Regardless of the superficial variations, every spiritual teacher, teaching, path, and practice has offered him only another means to protect, feed, and rely on self. That which you exercise becomes stronger, and that which you feed thrives. The very subtle and gross actions of self-protection, selffeeding, and self-reliance, merely maintain and strengthen those same actions. In other words, the natural, inherent, and ongoing habit-pattern of clinging, taking, implosion, self-feeding, selfprotection, and self-reliance, is reinforced by clinging, taking, implosion, self-feeding, self-protection, and self-reliance. Also, the core-level self, or ego, that is protected and fed through those actions, is strengthened and thrives. His spiritual teachers, teachings, paths, and practices have only strengthened himself, and have only reinforced his natural, clinging, taking, selfprotecting, self-feeding, self-reliant, imploding, and constricting way of living. His spiritual endeavors have actually taken him even further from the very God he professes to seek. But, the seeker also realizes another consequence of his years on the spiritual circuit, and of adding and integrating spiritual paths that fit his ideas, preferences, and natural way of living. He indeed unwittingly strengthens his natural mental habit-pattern of self-protection, self-feeding, and self reliance, but he also creates a damaging association of ideas in the mind. Under the influence of his natural state and ways, and by reinforcing of his natural state and ways on the spiritual circuit, his vague ideas about God, and about seeking God, and about a path to God, have become even more deeply associated with clinging, self-protection, self-feeding, and self-reliance. In other words, his in-born nature or tendency is to protect, feed, and rely on self. Spiritual teachers, teachings, paths, and practices merely provide more means to engage that which he is already tending to do by nature. He walked onto the spiritual circuit already inclined to seek a teacher, teaching, path, or practice that would help him protect, feed, and rely on self, and they sold him that for which he was seeking, and in a package that was at least close to his ideas, preferences, and general way of living. He now, therefore, even more powerfully associates ideas of God and a path to God, with his inherent state and ways of clinging, taking, implosion, self-protection, self-feeding, and self-reliance. Religion and spirituality are good commerce, because they sell people that which they, by nature, already want and are already doing, only wrapped in a religious or spiritual package.

However, the most damaging outcome for the serious seeker, of adding and integrating spiritual paths into himself and his way, and of his own in-born nature, will be realized if and when he happens to stumble across True God and The Teaching of Freedom.

God and His Way of Freedom do not nourish your natural, inherent predisposition for clinging, selfprotection, self-feeding, and self-reliance. And, unlike the spiritual circuit, True God and His Way do not offer you any means to do that which you, by nature, are already doing: clinging, self-protection, self-feeding, and self-reliance. God and His Way have nothing to do with the teachers, teachings, paths, and practices found on the spiritual circuit, as evidenced by the fact that they merely offer you a variety of ideas and practices that only exercise and strengthen your inherent subtle and gross

actions of clinging, self-protection, self-feeding, and self-reliance, which also reinforces your core level state of individuality.

To the contrary, True God is opposite to your natural state of individuality, which is limitation and suffering. God is Formless, Infinite, Blissful, and Supreme Power and Intelligence, while you are the exact opposite. And, His Way of Freedom is opposite to your constant actions of clinging, self-protection, self-feeding, and self-reliance. The Way of Freedom is profound Sacrifice, Faith, and Prayer, while your natural way is the exact opposite: clinging, self-protection, self-feeding, self-reliance, and communication with only yourself or other aspects of nature.

Me and My Way are opposite to your nature, and are opposite to the spiritual teachers, teachings, paths, and practices found at the spiritual trough; and I clearly illuminate the striking contrasts. Nothing is more opposite than Me and My Way, and you and your way. Nothing is more opposite than Me and My Way, and the thousands of spiritual teachers, teachings, paths, and practices. Nothing is more opposite than Me and My Way, and nature and its way.

Nothing is more beyond and other-than you, than God. No way of living is more beyond and other-than your way of living, than The Way of Freedom that God has Designed for humanity. Nothing is less like you and your way, than God and His Way. Nothing is less familiar and less comfortable to you, than God and His Way. All else in nature, including anything in the ordinary life, and any spiritual teaching, teacher, path, or practice you may investigate, is far, far more like you and your way, and is far, far more familiar and comfortable to you, than God and His Way. Furthermore, True God and His Way are un-compromising, in that they do not change for any reason, including to fit the ideas, preferences, and ways of humanity. Also, no person, or nothing else, is capable of altering, modifying, bending, or molding God and His Way to be other-than that which they are. God and His Way are un-compromising, un-changeable, immutable, and,therefore, absolute.

If and when a seeker stumbles across Me and My Way, he is usually, and at least initially, very much offended. He is offended that The Teaching of Freedom is not spiritually-correct, because it offers observable, logical, and valid criticism of the natural life, and spiritual teachers, teachings, paths, and practices, by clearly explaining how they not only do not help the seeker Realize God, but how they actually serve to prevent God-Realization. He also reads in The Teaching that all paths do not lead to God, and that, no, you cannot Realize God by your own way or on your own terms. He is told that he and his life are currently Godless, and that he understands very little about God, himself, or The Way to Realize God. He hears that he is not already Enlightened, and that he is just a miserable, limited, selfish, mean, suffering creature. He is asked not to be concerned about an afterlife or reincarnation. He is offered no congratulations. Moreover, this “person” says he is God and God Incarnate, and that the seeker must be in relationship to True God via a True Incarnation in order to be under Grace and Grow. How dare he. It sounds as if he is either psychotic, or has knowingly fabricated a bold and brilliant means of self-promotion. But, in a fleeting moment of weakness, he may ask himself, could He be Speaking the Truth? He also eventually finds that God and His Way do not fit into him and his way. He discovers that he cannot simply add and integrate God and His Way, into himself and his natural way of living, like he has done with all his spiritual teachers, teachings, paths, and practices, and like he does with all else. God’s Way is contrary to his natural ways, which have been exercised and reinforced using his spiritual teachers, teachings, paths, and practices, and in his ordinary life. God and His Way are contrary to the very state and ways that the seeker is wanting to protect, feed, exercise, and strengthen. His ideas of God and paths to God, have also become associated with teachers, teachings, paths, and practices which offer only more ways to cling, and to protect, feed, and rely on self. He learns that God is completely Beyond and Other-Than him, and that God’s Way is totally opposite to how he currently lives his ordinary and spiritual life. He reads that God is not like him, and that he is not already God. He discovers that The Way of Freedom does not offer any strategy, method, practice, or technique for protecting or feeding self, and offers no tool with which to engage clinging or self-reliance. He also discovers that True God and His Way are completely contrary to all his previous spiritual teachers, teachings, paths, and practices. The seeker’s inherent and learned tendency, is to approach any teaching referring to “God”, including The Way of Freedom, exactly as he approaches all else in his ordinary, spiritual, or religious life. He wants to use God, The Teaching, and The Way to protect, feed, and rely on self, and he wants to add and integrate them into himself and his way for that purpose. But, he finds that he cannot take, add, or integrate God and His Way as they are, into himself and his way. He also finds that he cannot alter, modify, bend, or mold God and His Way, to fit into himself and his way of life. God and His Way do not come ready to fit you and your way, and neither can they be altered to fit. Most spiritual seekers will accept only those spiritual teachers, teachings, paths, and practices that come off the rack and are already largely ready to wear. However, neither can he add and integrate himself and his way as they are, into God and His Way. Moreover, neither can he alter, re-shape, bend, or mold himself and his way, so that they fit into God and His Way. He discovers that he must Faithfully Sacrifice himself, and his clinging, selfprotective, self-feeding, and self-reliant ways, into God, thereby allowing God and His Way room to Exist In and Through his being and life.

God and His Way, and you and your way, can never integrate, neither as you and your ways currently are, nor with any mere alterations of you and your ways. You must Faithfully Sacrifice your state and ways, and you must allow your state and ways to be Replaced by God and His Way. You must Faithfully Sacrifice yourself, and your clinging, self-protective, self-feeding, and self-reliant ways, into the Infinite Deep of God, thereby allowing God and His Way to Replace you and your way. You must become an empty vessel: only then can God Replace you with Him, and your way with His Way. Nothing is more beyond and other-than you and your way, nothing is less familiar and comfortable to you and your way, nothing is less yielding and compromising to you and your way, nothing is less protective and nourishing of you and your way, and nothing requires more of you and your way, than God and His Way. Therefore, if a serious seeker comes across True God and His Teaching of Freedom, the most damaging outcome for him, of adding and integrating spiritual paths into himself and his way, and of his own inborn nature, is that he will be prone to reject Me and My Way.

He reacts violently to The Teaching because of the many spiritually-incorrect and offensive statements I make, and because The Way of Freedom is contrary to his inherent and reinforced natural ways, both ordinary and spiritual. God and His Way offend, shock, and frighten him like nothing else. So, his mind and heart are prone to forever close to Me and My Way. He has spent years seeking, and the Object of his search has unknowingly been found, but he may reject it. If he does, nature wins the battle for the preservation of form and individuality, and God cannot Use that mind and body for the Incarnation of Himself. But, some seekers may console themselves, by rejecting only certain parts of The Teaching, and by accepting those aspects with which they are more familiar and comfortable. But, they may as well reject the entire Way of Freedom, because the amount of clinging and self-reliance they are maintaining, or the amount of surrender they are refusing, will be enough to prevent profound Growth and God-Realization. You cannot hold to any of you and your way, you cannot be full of yourself and your way, while simultaneously allowing God and His Way. The two can never be added to one another. They also cannot be integrated into one another, and mixed together. Neither one can ever be modified in order to fit into the other. There is you and your way, and there is God and His Way; and the two shall never harmonize, integrate, or become identical. Your state can never become, realize, or grasp God’s State; and God’s State can never shrink, weaken, darken, dumb-down, and die in order to become or fit you. Also, your way of clinging, self-protection, self-feeding, and selfreliance can never be or allow God’s Way of Freedom; and God’s Way of Freedom can never change or compromise in order to become or integrate with your way of clinging, self-protection, self-feeding, and self-reliance. You and your way, and God and His Way, are in no way, and to no degree, compatible. God does not Give Himself and His Way to you and your life, so that you can try to make them compatible. God Gives Himself to you and your life via Incarnation, so that you are in a realrelationship to That to which, and in which, you can increasingly Sacrifice yourself and your ways. God also Gives Himself to you and your life, because it is Him, and not you, that Conducts the Work of Purification and Change that ultimately leads to the Incarnation of not other-than Him. God is not Given to you and your life, so that you can try to add or integrate Him into yourself and your ways, either as He is, or by your attempts to change Him. God is also not Given so that you can learn how to become identical to Him. God does not Give Himself, so that you will continue to communicate only with yourself and other parts of nature. God is not Given for you to ignore, by relying on yourself, your ideas, and your efforts for your Growth.

God Gives The Teaching of His Way of Freedom to you, so that you can see and understand that which prevents God, and so that you can understand how to Faithfully Sacrifice, or stop doing, all that prevents Him. His Way is not Given to you for you to pick-and choose which parts you like, and which parts you do not like. God’s Way is not Given to you, so that you can add or integrate it into your natural way of living. God does not Give Himself or His Way, for you to ignore either. God does not submit Himself and His Way to you and your way, neither for your approval, nor for your modification and integration, nor for you to become Him or like Him. He Gives Himself and His Way to you, so that you can completely submit to Him and His Way, through utter Sacrifice, Faith, and Prayer.

Therefore, I am here, and I Offer Me and My Way to those few who would surrender to Me as I Eternally Am, and who would use the one Way of Freedom completely and only as the vehicle for their surrender. I am the Infinite Ocean without bottom or surface, and The Way of Freedom is the vessel that carries you to this Other Shore where I Stand and Wait. But, I do not Wait for you, but I Wait for you to allow Me in and through the mind and body you now call your own, yet while never being less-than That which I Eternally Am. Your departure into the Infinite Deep, concludes with My Arrival at the Place where I always and already Stand.

Juggernaut Rising:

The Disintegration Of Dystopia

Part I

By Diane Harvey

[Dystopia: a depressingly wretched realm whose people lead a fearful existence and where all is, contrary to common belief and expectations, in the worst possible condition.]

As a category of human communication, disaster prediction is flourishing, and with excellent reason. Emerging from widely different perspectives and employing different approaches, many of us unhappily sense exponentially growing difficulties looming on the murkily complex horizon. Differences in individual awareness, experience and psychological bias very naturally preclude agreement about the gory details. We even argue about the basic meaning and potential for damage of the events we are observing. But perhaps all who perceive the likelihood of oncoming catastrophes might at least agree on this much: the majority of human beings do not even begin to comprehend the actual significance of what is going on all around them. We might agree that what appears blithely disguised as business as usual on the surface of the world is, in reality, a bizarre and ultimately hopeless global network built entirely on the denial of the law of cause and effect.

No matter how assiduously the daily industrial-strength tissue of lies is spun, denying the discernible deterioration of our sick civilization, and no matter how many have invested their lives in believing and sustaining these lies: unpleasant realities are lumbering inexorably toward us. Experts in all fields are dogtrotted out by the truckload, and dutifully trundled through the mills of mass media, in order continually to bury and re-bury any signs of incipient awareness in the populace that all is not well. Official repertoires consisting of studied stupidities, frank falsehoods, diagrams for dummies, simpering smirks and posturing pomposities are designed to semaphore to a somnambulant citizenry that everything is under control. In fact, mounting evidence points entirely to a contrary conclusion. And in the face of our stunningly complicated world problems, the toddler's cartoon version of life, offered by those in power through the mass media's obedient mouth, is one of the most shocking aspects of our predicament. Of a multitude of symptoms indicating rampant human lunacy presently operating on a grand scale, the continual insulting offerings of Frankenspeak in lieu of meaningful communication is perhaps the most directly alarming, disgusting and telling.

It is not hard to fathom the hidden political and economic causes of the oncoming upset of our earthly applecart. At the same time the material achievements of the 20th century have brought incalculable temporary benefits to many, conveniently ignoring the hidden costs of such progress has eroded human consciousness to a degree beyond all our reckoning. It is not that material comfort need ever have been purchased at the price of sane and ethical existence - but that is nevertheless the path that was taken. It is not that a decent standard of living is a problem per se, or that in and of itself reasonable levels of civilized materialism represent some sort of inevitable wrongdoing. The criminal activity was all in how we got here, in the forms our corporate-born standard of living has taken, and in how we have allowed worldly powers to sustain themselves. It is everything we have chosen to ignore along the way, in order to enjoy prosperity at all costs, that has added up to our coming undoing. Our collective complacent refusal to look behind the scenes into secret and wholly unregulated corporate, government and military activities has resulted in a nightmarish world where the actual state of things is the polar opposite of what is told to and subsequently believed by the majority of the public.

This civilization of ours, so outwardly attractive to so many, has been constructed over a hidden foundation of widespread institutional theft, deadly levels of pollution, illegal secrecy, drugs and armaments empires, draconian legalisms, and the extraordinarily cynical manipulation of large segments of the population through highly sophisticated forms of genuine mind control offered as "news" and "entertainment". Behind the scenes this is no utopia, as advertised, but dystopia: a realm where all is, contrary to expectations and common belief, in the worst possible condition. Furthermore, dystopia is disintegrating before our eyes, and out from under our feet, even as the absurd efforts to pretend that all is well redouble. We see the ever-more-desperate desire of the many to mutually sustain their belief in a doomed system of interlocking institutions fuelled by ruthless and unregenerate human greed and the unbridled lust for domination. It is not that most people are innately incapable of observing the crumbling foundations of their own unthinking dependencies. Rather, people are still subconsciously choosing to avoid the pain and fear of confronting what is already well underway. Most of the so-called grown-ups on our planet still fearfully turn their minds away from the unwanted spectacle of oncoming troubles. A large percentage of the human race, facing the necessity of giving their highest quality attention to our common dangers, is instead frantically increasing the dosage of self-delusion.

On the whole, people have been avoiding all honest investigation into the genuine causes of galloping disintegration in human institutions. Yet this will change, and is clearly changing now, as vast shadowy shell games are inevitably exposed to glaring broad daylight. No sooner is the essential trickery-fakery of an institutional lie exposed, than people reel with shock and outrage. Yet it is precisely a long collective agreement to invest blindly in institutionalized criminal greed, and the refusal to know what corporations and governments are actually doing, that inevitably results in the very disintegration now so indignantly confronted. Anyone who wanted to could easily have understood this inevitable scenario long ago. If you asked individuals whether or not they believed their lives could safely be built on criminal or unethical activity, almost all would scoff and say "Of course not." Yet people have pretended that these same basic principles mysteriously do not apply to large human institutions and governments. As if humans in groups might magically be exempt from the great moral necessities of life governing all individuals who wish to live sanely.

By their own decisions and consensual collusion, many intelligent people have preferred to ride the greed-powered national gravy train, in self-willed blindness to the visibly immoral and ugly underpinnings of longstanding government, corporate and military chicanery. Naturally, as institutions begin to come unglued, we will all pay dearly for the willful self-deception of those of us who chose to hitch their earthly welfare to the dark forces of "civilized" corruption. There will be ever-louder howls of injured innocence from the hordes of victims as our dystopia comes apart at the seams. Yet one might give most normal human beings credit for the ability to discern the difference between ethical and unethical practices on many levels, if and when they care to do so. The alternative is to believe that the majority of people are far too stupid to tell the difference between nominally ethical behavior and rank criminality. On the face of it, while possible, this appears unlikely. Rather, most people seem to have assumed the ostrich position for the sake of short-term personal benefits, and then are astounded and outraged when reality brutally overtakes the forces of denial.

It is not only dysfunctional human institutions that are breaking down, despite all efforts to pretend otherwise. The Earth's natural systems are in a state of breathtakingly rapid degradation and subsequent mutation into who-knows-what new versions of themselves. The Earth as a whole is simultaneously undergoing both dramatic climate change and a systemic breakdown from toxic shock. And yet such a rapid accumulation, combining, and coalescing of disastrous forces is not causing the slightest change yet in collective human behavior at levels where it might make any difference. If ever there is a setting in which calamities are most likely to befall the human race, it is the current one. A sinister synergy is underway, composed of corrupt worldly authorities, a relatively apathetic and self-victimizing populace, severe spiritual and physical pollution resulting from a world powered by uncontrolled greed and totalitarian tendencies, and drastic changes occurring in the Earth's natural systems.

Recipes for disasters don't come with more potently volatile ingredients than these. And for some, no sudden catastrophe or combination of disasters will come as any surprise. A certain percentage of human beings throughout history, aware of being caught in cyclic periods of wholesale degeneration, have always instinctively felt the truth that life itself will never suffer the proliferation of human insanity beyond a certain point. The sole remaining question some of us ask ourselves these days is exactly what that point might be. In all human cultures, there have always been those who have warned people again and again that we cannot live on lies or thrive on degeneration. We have always been free to ignore such warnings, but we certainly have never been free of the fatal consequences of such ignorant decisions. Whenever human beings abandon the principles of reality for the foundationless hallucinations of egotism, willful ignorance, selfishness and greed, disaster must and will come to raze such illusions to the ground. This is as implacably true for civilizations as it is for individuals.

Mankind is inherently designed to understand what it means to live an honorable life. The suffering required before human beings freely accept this fact might be long and terrible, yet this reality must and will be made manifest. We may only shorten, or lengthen interminably, the quality and quantity of misery involved in accepting the fact that we are meant to become decent, reasonable and just. Humanity's age-old self-serving habit of offering meaningless lip service to spiritual truth is having very bad results. Whether we wish to acknowledge it or not, we are endowed with conscience, intelligence, free will, the capacity to love, and the commensurate responsibilities for manifesting these astonishing gifts we have been given. Spiritual stewardship includes direct responsibility for the right employment of all of our capacities, in every aspect of our lives here. There is no such thing as being spiritual, for instance, while blissfully ignoring the implications of the present cesspool civilization has become. This world is one House and the inhabitants and systems it depends on are woven into a single interactive web of life. All efforts to pretend otherwise, in order to avoid the strenuous difficulties of solving seemingly intractable problems, are doomed to eventual destruction.

The general attitude of obliviousness and refusal to regulate worldly authorities has generated a thick psychic fog in which malevolent forces have been operating with near-perfect immunity. Most people are still settling for a position of complete passivity in relation to the entire external world, as if half-watching a rather boring television show. Extremes of disgraceful behavior, manifesting everywhere in the highest levels of military, government and corporate power, have been accepted, or barely registered, or excused as "the price of doing business", or perceived as a disgusting display about which nothing ever can be done. Meanwhile, suggestively interconnected natural and human systemic failures, likely to be of immense consequence to us all, are perceivable everywhere, and increasing by the day. As it is, those of us considered "alarmists" are dismissed with a sad shake of the head as psychologically malconditioned doom-mongers. And far worse yet, many are now summarily categorized as "traitors" for having the temerity to observe and comment in public on various outrageously wicked, dangerous and idiotic activities underway in the name of preserving "civilization". When venal, frightened, hopelessly dishonest and secretive authorities designate the most thoughtful and concerned segment of a population as "traitors", we may take it as one more certain sign that the disintegration of dystopia is proceeding apace.

Juggernaut Rising: Unraveling Into The Unknown

Part II

By Diane Harvey

The stark raving evidence of complexly collapsing global systems is not difficult to come by. Indeed, waking consciousness is hard put not to stumble over the wretched truth wherever it goes: our earth, air and water are polluted to the point of toxicosis. Increasingly ferocious weather events indicative of climate change frequently displace awareness of the underlying sickness of the elements involved. Yet weather, and the distressed condition of the basic elements that create weather, are inextricably one. However often climate change and the pollution of the world are discussed as if somehow separate, these permutations of a single planetary system are not divisible. Other than in a shortsighted human mind, there is no place on Earth where the reality of severe pollution and observable climate changes can be teased apart into discrete, reliably identifiable, and provably non-interacting categories.

The deeply disturbed condition of nature has profound implications for our future, and therefore needs to be addressed openly, thoroughly, and immediately. Yet comprehensive analysis and a sense of reasonable urgency are almost entirely missing from the mass media's marketplace of over-the-counter mind control. Mainstream corporate news-midgets do not consider exploring the facts of our situation in depth to be suitable material for the carefully-controlled pomp and twitter of public interest pseudo-discussions. More honest brokers of reality, speaking from outside the ongoing services in the Church of the Bottom Line, are trying to convey the crucial missing sense of concern. They know that no one in military, government or corporate sectors has any intention of telling unsettling truth to that all-important devotee: the Constant Consumer. But the problems inherent in effectively communicating vital messages are themselves difficult to overcome, even for the most dedicated. How is it possible to transmit even the most important message, in such a way that the frantic cacophony of daily life does not cause people utterly to fail to be moved by it?

The blaring babble and hyperactive racing pace of television deliberately drown the discriminative senses of most minds willingly and witlessly tethered to it. Unfortunate slaves to that brutalizing conditioning so accurately referred to as "Programming, have accepted the mass murder of meaningful mental activity, in the name of "relaxing enjoyment". "Entertainment" and "infotainment" (that is, outright brainwave entrainment) have successfully seduced and stunned the guards once standing alert before the doors of perception. Never-ending parades of staccato visual and audio processionals trumpet and trample across the beaten-down ground of captured and conquered mass consciousness. By day and by night the addictive and punishing pummeling continues, until the average person is thrashed into a permanent state of undiagnosed emotional and mental senselessness. Ceaseless sensory overload eventually causes a condition of apparent functionality amounting to rudimentary Safe Mode. This is the emergency retreat into desensitized numbness taken by desperately overloaded psyches, which sooner or later becomes a permanent coping strategy. In far too many of us, the natural and appropriate emotional and mental responses to unfolding events have long ago been undermined, overwhelmed, overthrown, and replaced by wooden replicas.

Even the ancient human survival mechanism has been badly damaged by the modern reprogramming of so many human beings into an army of obedient automatons: usefully mindless and helpfully senseless Consumer Clones. And those most afflicted are, as a matter of course, the most unaware that any such deadening dysfunction has crept in. The primary human ability to correctly assess the meaning and significance of very different kinds of events has too often been eroded to a dull throbbing nub: the vague sense of unease. The power to correctly evaluate information has been overwhelmed by the incessant broadcasting of particular classes of rhythmic sounds and images, specifically calculated to undermine and eventually anaesthetize the faculty of reason. Under the pounding torrents of deliberately polluted streams of popular entrainment, the ability to discern what is meaningful and what is not is being lost. Far too many people have been trounced into passive submission by a frantic flux of the jumbled images and sounds of catastrophes and crimes, half-truths and trivia, trash and triumphalism. So much so that by now most incoming data, whether true, false, vital or meaningless, is received by overloaded perceptions almost as if it all had the same level of importance. The result of all this, in gruesome combination with a fiendishly corporatized educational system and corporately harnessed working life, is a kind of widespread "socially acceptable" psychotic break. This is the paralyzing psychological and social dislocation resulting from large numbers of people devoid of the ability and even the desire to think for themselves.

There are many of us who conclude, based on the evidence, that we have precipitously entered into the most hazardous time in human history. We trust that communications about what we observe will somehow thread their way through the impenetrable thickets of noise, into the minds and hearts of those who still retain a capacity for evaluating information, feeling the import, and acting on it. While no one knows the details of the future, a brew of elements has been coalescing which is bound to result in extreme difficulties for the human race. Above all else, for the last fifty years or so, civilization has been enthusiastically promoting the unification of ethical and spiritual degeneration with extraordinary advances in material technology. This is inarguably a fatal symbiosis; what remains to be seen is the extent and duration of the damaging effects. We have been subjected to greatly debilitating psychological manipulation in the past five decades. At the same time our capacity for harming all forms of life and causing vast and critical alterations in nature have been accelerating. The signs and symptoms of incipient social and planetary breakdown are everywhere. Yet even now, the majority of the most privileged human beings who have ever lived are still sleepwalking through existence in the typical consumer's Lifestyle Trance. We have been so appallingly conditioned to behave as if we were able to live apart and aside from our context in the natural world, that even as our vital living context mutates under our feet, we can hardly take it in. The problem then, in communicating the immense problems we face, is not so much that of avoiding causing useless fear and over-reaction in the average person. Rather, it lies in the inability of the raw facts, with all their implications, to make much of an impression on the public at all.

Here then is the basic message, yet again, for what it is worth. Because even those of us who think we already know, and believe we understand, cannot possibly encompass the full meaning and ramifications of this fact:

The intricate web of life on Earth is unraveling.

What this will eventually come to mean in practical terms to individuals and families and nations is incalculable. Here in the western world, terrorism notwithstanding, our unconscious underlying presumption is that we are relatively secure in our wealth, infrastructure, government, social structures and technological know-how. Do we not subconsciously feel this to be so, even as we observe the telltale patterns of increasingly brittle fragility everywhere? But this impressive camouflage of a superstructure amounts to a thin smear of protective routines spread over the foundations of a vast living world that is coming apart at the seams. The delicate balance of nature as a whole is undergoing a process of increasing disturbance, and falling away from the relative background stability that our global civilization takes for granted. We are seeing alterations on a grand scale directly due to human pollution, at the same time we are undergoing the unsettling influence of what we are supposing must be a natural cycle of change. Just how natural and unrelated to human activity the systemic changes underway really are remains to be seen. Yet rather than being investigated thoroughly and without preconceptions, this most dangerous situation has been reduced, for the most part, to the status of fodder for interminable human argument by various vested interests. Unimaginably complex natural systems are tilting out of harmony, toward climate, weather, and other types of extremes few people are willing to assess with sufficient sobriety and lack of prejudice. Pollution of these same life-support systems has reached levels that threaten the health, to one degree or another, of a significant percentage of the life forms on this planet. The natural environment that has given rise to and supported the lives we expect is diseased, disrupted and degenerating. This reality is currently coinciding with unknown degrees and unidentified causes of climate change, and no one really knows what all this might add up to, or where it all might end.

The rate, for instance, at which the atmosphere is degrading is a very well kept secret that is right out in the open, well-protected by near-wholesale indifference. The facts are available for all to see, yet the public does not desire, or even retain much capacity at this point, to comprehend what this means. The oceans are sick, but the typical self-centered human being is already tired of hearing about it. The Earth is groaning with its load of toxic materials, but the public has heard all this before. We are, as a species, remaining curiously unmoved by the factual truth of our vulnerability in relation to our own festering garbage. What most people do not wish to fathom, and what the ruling powers will never helpfully prepare them for, is that underneath the veneer of normality, the world mankind has always known and depended on is unraveling. And there are synergistic effects of entirely unknown timing, complexity, and magnitude well underway.

There are sinister reasons why, even as each day brings its further proof of widespread systemic breakdown, the general population remains disinterested and entirely unable to respond rationally to such enormous potential catastrophe-in-the-making. First of all, if people understood the significance of what was happening all around them, the business of business-as-usual would be dramatically impacted. This is the basic motive behind the relative silence of the government/corporate/military/media world about our underlying predicament. Worldly authorities, the Elders of The Church of the Bottom Line, have declared an anathema on all that would deflect the populace from their worshipful devotions to shopping. Our economy these days is unusually dependent on the production and consumption of sophisticated luxuries and fripperies, corporate concoctions, military expenditures, and on non-renewable energy gluttony. We have no foundation whatsoever in the sane development of ecologically viable basic necessities for all. In the area of life's fundamental requirements there is a very dark cloud on the horizon. Available water is drying up, and even much of what is peddled as safe to drink is distinctly unwholesome. Energy requirements are rising, right along with the number of unsafe power plants and the mountains of brooding nuclear waste. Corporate agriculture has severed relations with nature and is betting the economic farm on criminally greedy and ruinous attempts to simulate edible food. The unspeakable hells of factory farming continue unabated, with the average devourer of such nightmarish suffering and disease blithely unconcerned. Modern medicine has mutated into a callous drug dealer with a lifetime pass into schoolrooms, and a runner in every doctor's office. The basic necessities of food, drink, and medicine have been transformed for the most part into exceedingly ugly inversions and perversions of the originals. In many or even most cases, the adulterated chemical stews people are addicted to or dependent on for basic survival are directly destructive to health and life, and of value only to their stockowners and shareholders.

Most of those who run this planet as a feudal fiefdom, benefiting mainly themselves, probably do see the dark shadow of things to come. In any case, they know something of the potential for downward spiraling, and have some idea of what the future might have in store. They also realize that there is probably nothing they are going to be able to do about it. Some of those in positions of influence and power have reacted by retreating behind the usual human mechanism of denial. They hope we will be able to adapt at the last minute to whatever natural and unnatural catastrophes are on the way. They hope that disasters arise sequentially, and only regionally and locally, as they have in the past, and that somehow or other, this level can be "managed". This is archetypical human shortsightedness, and a refusal to understand that the patterns of the past no longer suffice to forecast the future. Others in power have a clearer and far more cold-blooded grasp of the most probable future. The most heartless and soulless simply intend to squeeze the last penny out of the human race, every step of the way down. They are attempting, so far successfully, to own the world's water, to own the basic seed stocks, to own the means of food production, to own the land, to own all energy production and infrastructure, and to own all the other necessities of sheer existence. As nature continues to die off, they expect to benefit hugely from their relatively unchallenged ownership of what amounts to human existence. They obviously plan to increasingly insert their worthless factory substitutes for all forms of nature into the human chain - at the usual exorbitant profit. But what the shortsighted, corporate-owned so-called "leaders" of government, industry and the military think is not our major concern. We already know the gist of their attitude to humanity: fundamentally, as a flock to fleece. The point is that no "authority" has any intention of adequately preparing us either psychologically or physically for future problems. Reports of various kinds of extreme conditions will continue to increase; yet no overall picture will ever be presented of the ominous proportions of the unraveling. It is up to the individual to make the effort to examine the scattered bits of data, put the pieces of the puzzle together, and to try to understand the meaning of the partially completed picture.

For example, we almost never consider what could possibly go too far wrong with what we are breathing. Even as the cities continue to deliver deadly fumes on a daily basis, we try to ignore it. We are thoroughly conditioned to believe that this is the price of "progress". We therefore more or less take what we breathe for granted. But ground-level ozone and other types of air pollution are unquestionably causing wide spread illness and premature death. This has found "acceptable" to the majority of human beings, so far, since we have been conditioned to believe this is merely the cost of doing business on Earth. The proof of this strange acceptance is that people have never yet been up in arms about this reality in any large numbers. On the whole we have preferred to pretend that the effects of air toxicity must be somehow bearable, and that our children will somehow manage to thrive in it, even when statistics demonstrate exactly the opposite conclusion.

Already the atmosphere is so heavily freighted with adulterants, and the ozone layer so frayed, that people, animals and plants are being very seriously affected. The UV levels across the globe are consistently so high right now that in many parts of the world people should not be staying outside for more than fifteen minutes. But what would happen to agriculture, construction, and all the rest of the outdoor work on Earth, if everyone were fully aware of this danger? Are there really any effective remedies to this growing danger, aside from staying indoors? Even if it was possible to issue sunscreen to everyone in the world, such chemical lotions are yet more questionable pharmaceutical items, with unknown long-term side effects. And what of that other infamous "sunscreen", Edward Teller's idiotic plan for a highly toxic chemical aerosol "protection" from the ravages of ozone depletion? We might reasonably suppose that this lunatic concept forms a large part of that incessant noxious drool from the skies called chemtrails. But whatever chemtrails are supposed to be for, we know for certain that this program is already having extremely bad results. We are clearly being accumulatively poisoned by these illegal aerosol dispersal operations, seen stealthily deployed and creepily oozing down all over this continent and elsewhere. The health complications already arising from this so-called sunscreen, if that is what it is, are already disastrous. And these terrible effects would certainly go a long way toward explaining the reasons for the impenetrable wall of silence, secrecy, relentless disinformation, and preposterous and insulting lies surrounding the blatant reality of chemtrails.

Furthermore, the electromagnetic and chemical weaponization of the atmosphere is also well underway. This too involves drastically meddling with the air, and further saturating it with deadly chemicals and wildly pumped-up levels of electromagnetic energies. All this mad frankenscience at work has, as usual, entirely unknown long-range effects and side effects. Furthermore, the ionization of the atmosphere, potentially dangerous in itself, says nothing about the unknown results of implementing the mysterious new types of scalar weapons technology in such a drastically altered atmosphere. Without the slightest public discussion, our entire atmospheric envelope is being ruthlessly transformed into, among other things, a high-tech chemical and electromagnetic weapons, communications, and control platform. Meanwhile, even the results of increased normal air traffic alone have seriously damaged the chemical balance of the air we breathe. This is the dirty little fact about air travel, which no one from the congregation of Lifestyle Uber Alles has the slightest desire to face. And of course no one knows what sorts of unintended consequences will arise through inevitable photochemical mutations in an already sick atmosphere. Pouring large amounts of yet more toxic chemicals into a system already mutating because of pollution with toxic chemicals is so far beneath reason as to render a sane person speechless. Yet this is exactly what is being done. It is therefore best to realize that madmen are in charge here at present, and to take our future into our own hands as much as possible. We must study, research, think for ourselves, and prepare as best we can for significantly changing conditions. Because the only alternative is to actually believe that as natural (and political) systems become increasingly chaotic, the government will, if called upon, take good care of us, in a place and in a way that we will find quite bearable. And if we should be capable of believing this, then we might want to take the time to think through the actual logical scenario of possible social upheaval, and how the government and military would be likely to respond to it.

Each day brings new data about the shockingly deteriorating and distressed conditions in the oceans of the world. These bits and pieces of critical information arrive one or two at a time, and make little impression on the majority of busy hard-working people. Apparently it is going to take outright calamity before most people finally realize what nature is, what has happened to it, and how far out of balance it is. Modern "civilized" people dispensed with awareness of the natural world some time ago, other than as a kind of backdrop to our own ego-stories. Modern so-called lifestyles insist on and depend on our willingness to ignore all the unpleasant details about where things come from and how they are made, and what their hidden costs are. Our civilization is built for the most part on the sands of instant gratification and the purchase of shiny surface surroundings. Nevertheless, we remain forever woven into an incomprehensibly complex and dynamically balancing unified field of livingness. We have slowly come to believe the fatal illusion of ourselves as exempt from the natural laws of our own living context, but that does not make it true. Decades of deliberate conditioning have intensified and solidified such ignoring, bringing the human species to the point of near-perfect insanity in terms of its overall direction and habitual heedless behavior. But it is hardly surprising that modern humanity has fallen into various degrees of sleep, folly, and semi-functional dementia. We have been, painstakingly and cleverly, over the course of several generations, psychologically engineered away from all relation to reality. The reasons for this are obvious: truth does not lend itself easily to manipulation for excessive profit.

That which we have always taken for granted, for generations upon generations, can no longer be taken for granted. Mere money cannot create a safe atmospheric envelope as we continue to load it with corrosive substances when it is already saturated with toxins and badly tattered. Money alone will not create sufficient pure air, pure water, and pure food for all, when these are already approaching the beginning of the end of their availability. Money cannot cause climate changes to halt in their tracks. No amount of money will be able to force genetically modified food to become nourishing to the human system. Money won't prevent these monstrosities from escaping and interacting with normal food plants, with easily foreseen disastrous results in the long run. Money will not convince increasingly violent weather to calm down. We have pretended to ourselves for a very long time that we are separate from and superior to the intricacies of the web of life itself. We still generally believe that our wealth and technology will always rise to the occasion to save us from our mistakes, no matter what. But we are about to discover the obvious flaws in our civilization,s ravenously self-serving and willfully ignorant substitutes for understanding.

All who thoughtfully address the prospect of serious alterations to the way we live will have their own individual set of circumstances to consider. Each will have a unique set of ideas about what is most likely and least likely to happen in the years ahead, and what, if anything, they care to do about it. There is no one "answer" to the problems we face, caught up as we are in far too Interesting Times for easy answers. In terms of both material and spiritual preparation and security, all of us have our own innate inclinations, established relations, and future possibilities. We might remember that our excursions here in these temporary forms are relatively brief in any case. There never was anything more to lose than were obliged to leave behind us here anyway, sooner or later. Certainly worry and fear are not reliable guides to anything besides worry and fear. It is always possible to attain such a consistent awareness of the spiritual realities in back of bodily existence that much of what might otherwise frighten and worry us yields to higher and deeper truth. Peace of mind and heart need not be dependent on circumstances, as the history of the human spirit rising to the occasion proves. Trying times are well known for offering great spiritual opportunity, however much we might well have understandably mixed reactions to this idea. Most of us are accustomed merely to reading and hearing about those who have had to live up to and through extreme circumstances. Now it looks as if it may well be our turn to manifest physical resourcefulness, emotional equanimity, intelligent activity, and spiritual truth in the face of unforeseen difficulties. If it turns out that this is indeed our future common destiny, we may - and indeed we must - seek strength in the fact that such a situation has always been, is now, and forever will be, a great and worthy test of the intrinsic mettle of human souls.

The Culture of Selfishness

Standing on tiptoe, one cannot remain upright. Taking strides which are too large, one cannot walk.

He who wishes to radiate light is not enlightened. He who wishes to be the true human being will not surpass others. Boasting, he gains no merit. Reaching for the top, he is not superior.

Compared to Tao, this behaviour is like left-over food or other decaying remnants, which are always abhorred.

That is why those who live in Tao do not concern themselves with it.

       Tao Te Ching, chapter 24

THE MEANING OF CHAPTER 24 OF THE TAO TE CHING is very clear. In a few simple lines, Lao Tzu sketches the habits of the ordinary, dualistic human being. He does it in a way that is so striking, so relevant to us now, today, that we are left wondering what should astonish us the most: the fact that Lao Tzu was able, thousands of years ago, to depict so accurately the 21st-century human being, or the fact that throughout all those thousands of years nothing about the psychology of the fallen human being seems to have changed!

But our astonishment will rapidly fade if we are willing to realise that, in fact, the psychological disposition of fallen mankind is not susceptible to fundamental change. External conditions may alter, but undivine human beings remain inescapably true to their nature, which is essentially selfish. Selfishness, in its various gradations, is the primal urge of all fallen nature. It is not possible for human beings to free themselves from it unless they give up the self completely.

The deepest and most crystallised form of selfishness is that of the rock-hard, I-central human being who, from the cradle to the grave, is totally absorbed in his own personal interests. Such an individual does not maintain a single emotional tie; no family ties - such as a bond with his mother, marriage partner or child - affect him. This form of selfishness, which shuts out everyone and everything, is below even the animal level, for even in the animal kingdom ties of instinctual love are formed, albeit temporarily, between the mother animal and her young, and the mother may often perform acts of self-sacrifice in order to protect her offspring. That is why, nowadays, people who show this form of selfishness - giving themselves up completely to their sub-animal lusts and desires - are regarded as being mentally disturbed.

Yet, nonetheless, in all countries in the world there is today a rapid increase of this type of selfishness. This is proof that humanity is fast descending below the level of what can still be called human, and it is a clear indication of the approaching and necessary end-phase of the present world cycle.

A higher form of selfishness is the kind that includes the family, although the self remains the central factor. In this group, for a shorter or longer period of time, blood-ties speak a clear language. This language is easy to explain because caring for members of one's family and doing things for them is obviously self-actualising and self-reinforcing, and therefore has the effect of considerably expanding the ego. It is a kind of selfishness in which all the highly prized virtues of fatherhood and motherhood are expressed.

Familial selfishness has been subjected to various forms of cultural conditioning and is regulated and supported by many man-made laws. The fact that it is a form of selfishness is evident from the joys and exertions, the eulogies and pride people show when their family members achieve success in life, even if this success is not always gained on a proper ethical basis.

When two families squabble because they both want the same thing, the fact that selfishness is at the root of family ties becomes even more clearly evident. The two families may be quite good, individually, but nevertheless a fierce conflict develops between them, and such conflict has the same emotional foundations, is fed by the same astral forces that once roused the primitive cave-dweller to action. The forms of the conflict may differ, but the essence and the results always remain the same combat, defeat, futility.

Selfishness can also expand to include a whole group, nation or race. We know the results of this kind of selfishness only too well, and war never solves anything. If an individual is infected by the selfishness-psychosis of a group or nation, it is certain that the other forms of selfishness will not be far away. On the contrary, they can be aroused by it, for the interests of the individual human being can very easily be threatened by those of the group. The forces of selfishness in the individual are then put under much greater pressure, and the result is inevitable an outbreak of conflict!

However, if we are to understand properly what Lao Tzu means in chapter 24, we should not forget that when selfishness is cultivated in the upward sense, this is always accompanied by a moral development. Countless are the examples of human beings who sacrifice their own personal interests for those of their family, group, country, nation, or even their race. World-literature is full of such heroic tales. Perhaps it would be prudent to take many of them with a pinch of salt, however, because the readiness to make sacrifices is so often interwoven with some form of selfishness. But nevertheless the fact remains that the higher forms of selfishness can go hand in hand with moral development, stimulated by religion and humanism and supported by legislation.

So now humanity is at last approaching the highest rung on the ladder of selfishness-culture, which is naturally camouflaged by various forms of morality. After having reached that highest rung, naturally whilst retaining all the lower rungs - because that is how ladders work - human beings will discover that there is no higher rung to which to climb. This will signal the end of the whole Aryan era, just as we have now come to the end of a phase in that Aryan era. This highest rung of the ladder has to do with the merging, the integration, the unification of the whole human race. First it is the individual, then the family, then the tribe or nation, then the race, and finally the whole of humanity. In every era, and in every phase within an era, this entire course of development is followed to the end. The final phase is when all distinctions between nations, communities of nations and races are removed.

Signs of this approaching world-revolution are already clearly evident today. People are clamouring more and more loudly for total integration. All over the world church members are campaigning for the removal of religious differences. Political power blocs have already been formed and we may clearly distinguish numerous different interest groups into which humanity is split. All groups know that, if they keep on maintaining their own selfish standpoints, the whole human race will be annihilated. Meanwhile, it is becoming clear that gone for good are the times when there could be a front line where the dead and wounded fell, with the staff quarters for the war directors safely behind it, and an even more heavily protected nest for the various governments and leading economic groups still further away, for today the real enemy is rising up from within everyone in accordance with cosmic radiation laws and the cyclic redemption; evil always turns in on itself. Furthermore, modern technological equipment has eliminated the possibility of one side being able to annihilate the other by surprise. Therefore, since the fundamental principle of selfishness is self-protection, both sides will be obliged to unite. Hence the mostly surreptitious organisation today worldwide of the 'New World Order'.

A large group of authorities is deeply convinced of the need for a new order of things to be established in our times. Also, there is actually a daily, unbroken contact between the top groups from the two camps, both political and religious, even though most of these exchanges are not publicised by the world media. Their question is not 'Shall we do it?', but 'How shall we do it? How shall we get the people - the masses - on our side and justify this enormous about-face of all the values we formerly taught them to regard as sacrosanct?'

But essentially, there is no choice, because the whole human race is standing with its back to the wall. At first people imagined that the effects of exploding a nuclear bomb could be confined to the enemy, but now they realise the full extent of the risk, and that is why the whole choir will soon have to sing 'All men will become brothers'. Many churches and religious movements, too, are seeking enforced unification.

Why is all this happening? Because the culture of selfishness, the struggle for existence, the fear of death and destruction, are driving humanity toward this final step. Forced unification or mutual destruction: humanity will have to choose between these two extremes!

Driven by need and fear, humanity is choosing the former alternative. When it is attained, the limit of human selfishness-culture will have been reached. But bear in mind that the other, lower aspects of selfishness will still go on existing, for in duality they are ineradicable.

So the great unity of nations and races will only be able to be maintained through the use of force, with the co-operation and guidance of all the authorities. The world-government of the end-phase will therefore be fascist, and all people will be forced to become 'brothers' the final clause in the law of self-maintenance.

Meanwhile, everyone is standing on tiptoe, stretching and straining as much as they can, so as to grab as much plunder as possible. They are trying to take huge strides, so as to reach their goals as quickly as possible. In the beginning the churches will, in their delusion, speak about nothing else than the light that will now be able to shine throughout the world, the light that is the Will of God. But the fierce battle will rage on. In their monster corporations the practitioners of selfishness will now exploit humanity wholesale. This is, of course, already happening today, despite the extensive worldly research offered to the general public by dedicated investigators such as David Icke.

Anyone who observes this race to the abyss with any measure of soul-quality, and hence objectively, will feel nauseous at the sight of such great deception. Compared to Tao, this behaviour is like left-over food or other decaying remnants, which are always abhorred.

So we can clearly see where human selfishness must ultimately lead. One may complain about it, particularly if one has to taste defeat in the struggle for existence or in a conflict of interests, but the fact remains that selfishness, I-centrality and hence FEAR are essential characteristics of the human being born into the universe of death. Wherever life awakens in duality, it is always surrounded by danger, and in this way selfishness, the survival instinct, automatically emerges. As creatures of the fallen kingdom, all human beings, without exception, are inherently selfish, for fear is an in-built instinct of survival in all dualistic existence.

Now, as you read this you are probably being stirred by a range of feelings and thoughts, because you do not find it pleasant to be called selfish. Perhaps you feel rather insulted. Unless you belong to that large group of people who are so deeply absorbed in their fallen state that they find the essential characteristics of human nature completely acceptable, you are bound to feel somewhat stung when you hear these sober facts about selfishness.

That, in itself, is remarkable, for a reaction like that is not characteristic of ordinary fallen human instincts. We are not talking about the resentment some people feel as the result of some past defeat in the business of selfishness, but the feeling of disappointment, the feeling of being unmasked, of being thrown off a pedestal. One of the causes of that pain is our knowledge of the Universal Doctrine, which clearly shows selfishness as the source of all unholiness and suffering. Another cause is the voice of the divine spark in us, the voice of our conscience, which constantly appeals to us on account of our behaviour, a behaviour which no amount of self-focus can ever avert.

The result is that a constant flow of thoughts surges through our minds: 'I really should do this differently. I should do this better. That must disappear, as soon as possible and this should replace it.' In this way, an inner conflict develops between our moral aspirations and our selfish behaviour. We will certainly have come across a whole range of moralists who, from mystical, humane and other angles, encourage us to continue with this inner struggle.

However, the struggle is hopeless, for undivine human nature cannot be changed in any fundamental way. It is impossible. Whenever, as is so often the case, we experience the conflict between morality and selfishness, we try to settle it in favour of morality. But we shall find that we always suffer defeat, and we remain the same as before.

We may well possess a relatively high morality. This is something that can be learned; driven by necessity and suffering, one can train oneself to act in a moral way, just as one can learn the habits of civilisation. One can learn to act as if one is radiating light; one can learn to be pleasant, and to appear spiritually illumined. This is not a question of hypocrisy, but we are capable of imagining how an enlightened, reborn soul-being, might behave.

In this way we learn how to seem personable and kind, even popular, and we learn to put on spiritual airs. But selfishness cannot be destroyed. It is an integral part of fallen human nature. It was Lao Tzu's aim in chapter 24 to make this clear to his pupils. So many wandering in the spiritual supermarket today are also trying to use their moral aspirations not only to keep themselves under control but also to walk the Path of Redemption. Impossible!

Mankind does not understand that its efforts to impose moral behaviour upon itself are serving no other purpose than the defence of a certain aspect of selfishness. This is humanity's line of reasoning: 'It would really be wonderful if I could be a good pupil; if I were to possess the new soul-state; if I were to comply with the requirements for candidature for harvest; if I were to attain this or that in the sense of the Gnosis', and so on. Mostly, mankind replaces the word 'I' with 'we', because it sounds better and more spiritual. But 'we' - or in other words 'I' - do not have any success, because everything I want and desire is nothing else than an effort to lodge the I safely in a particular aspect of selfishness.

This urge for self-preservation fills humanity's whole being. It makes man exert himself to the utmost. We stand on tiptoe and stretch upwards as far we can, in order to grasp what we desire. But we cannot keep it up. We cannot remain upright. We try to bring some speed into our lives and we endeavour, as far as possible and as far as our legs can stretch, to drive ourselves in the desired direction. But to no avail.

After numerous failures, we begin to take it easier on ourselves, for we soon realise that all the others have not succeeded with their moral rearmament either. Then the I starts to put on an act. It talks about light, and 'radiates' so-called light, and what then emerges is an astral state that has nothing to do with true Light at all. It is just another of our range of moral armaments, and we placate ourselves with it. We become very busy; we undertake all kinds of activities for seemingly genuine spiritual groups and organisations and their work, and we reaffirm our personality, our I, in everything we do.

We try to personify the true, divine Human Being, but without success. We talk a great deal about our dedication, about how we intend to serve or are serving Christ, but it does not have the desired results. Straining ourselves, we leap as high as we can, but we land, time and time again, on the hard ground of our fallen state of being. Whatever we do, the end is negative. This kind of psychology is exemplified perfectly and glaringly in the New Age movement, but it is nothing new, and has also been repeatedly demonstrated throughout history by humanity in so many fields of endeavour, and yet still mankind continues to play the game of moral rearmament. But the armaments turn out to consist of nothing but gilded cardboard and delusion. So we are obliged to draw the conclusion: Compared to Tao, this behaviour is like left-over food or other decaying remnants, which are always abhorred.

Anyone who attempts self-realisation in this way will end up following the course of primitive individualism, which terminates in a state of enforced unification.

But there is an entirely different state of Life. There is another Morality, which one neither may nor can call 'morality' any longer, for it has nothing to do with morality as mankind interprets that word; it is the Mysterious Virtue, and can be attained only in self-surrender. That means subordinating our entire life, all our personal interests, everything that typifies selfishness, in the most individual as well as in the broadest sense, in personal as well as in impersonal things, to the life in Tao, to the essence of Tao. It means subordinating our whole being to the Gnosis. It means being, like the young Jesus, immersed completely in the things of the Father. It means saying, if necessary, to our natural, selfish urges what Jesus said to his mother: "Woman, what have you to do with me? Must I not be about my Father's business?" That is the life in Tao. That is how one gains participation in the divine Kingdom not of this world. That is how to liberate the soul, and that is the only sane choice left to man once he has gained self-knowledge.

 Not by Force of Arms

Those who help the government of the people through Tao do not subject the kingdom by force of arms.

Whatever people do to others rebounds on them.

Thorns and thistles grow wherever armies have been.

   Years of famine follow every major campaign

Tao Te Ching, chapter 30

IN CHAPTER THIRTY OF THE TAO TE CHING, Lao Tzu deals with an issue which has been very topical during this last century, the controversy about the rights and wrongs of using weapons to settle disputes.

In fact, this controversy reached its peak several decades ago. Older readers will remember the campaign for disarmament waged by a variety of idealistic groups using the methods of non-violence. It was a movement that appealed to the minds and hearts of many millions of humane, thinking people, and it lasted such a long time that, in certain parts of Europe, for example, a law was passed allowing those who, for religious reasons, did not want to bear arms, to be exempted from conscription.

There are also those great, world-famous visionaries who, by their ideals and their personal example, have profoundly moved huge numbers of people, inspiring them to adopt a highly moral standpoint. Nevertheless, it is a fact that the time of practical idealism, which inspired the hope of so many young people during the earlier years of this century, is over. Practical idealism has been rendered out of date by a flood of world events that have made the majority of human beings so implacably 'realistic' that it was as if idealism had been swept away by a storm, having been proved powerless to restrain the alternation of antitheses.

This was because the concepts on which idealism was founded, though excellent in many respects, lacked certain essential values and certainties. Perhaps you yourself have experienced that when you have high ideals that are not absolutely consistent and well-founded in every respect, it is rather like having built a house of cards the whole edifice is bound to collapse sooner or later. Idealism can only become realism when it is absolutely free of conformity to the fallen world and its values, and is attuned solely to the Divine Plan underlying the genesis of the true Human Being.

The idea, the slogan, 'no more war' arose from a heartfelt yearning for true human genesis. But how can such a yearning ever be satisfied if people do not understand the Plan underlying that genesis, and if, lacking such Knowledge, they merely adapt their ideals to the way of life in the emergency order? It is like a person who sets fire to his house and afterwards sits down in the ruins and prays 'O Lord, give me a house'. Whereas a person who knows and experiences the reality of our times understands that, if he persists in his ordinary approach to life, war and the rumours of war and all the related tensions and phenomena, will continue to exist. This point of view is also expressed in the Bible, for example in Matthew 24, which says "You will hear of wars and rumours of war. This must take place, but the end is not yet". Why must these things take place?

To answer this question let us remind ourselves of something that Hermes Trismegistus said: "The sun's creation of life is just as lasting as its light. Nothing can stop it or restrain it. Countless multitudes of lifewaves throng like a company of guards around the sun. They remain close to the great immortals and from there they also watch over human concerns. They carry out the divine Will, by means of thunderstorms, fireballs and calamities, and also by means of famine and war, as a punishment for godlessness".

At first glance, this reads rather like something from the Old Testament, evoking ideas of avenging divine justice. But in reality it concerns the scientific fact that the whole solar macrocosm - the entire solar system and everything it contains - forms one formidable and very varied life-system, guided and governed by a single, central Law.

Now, if an entity within this macrocosmic system violates the system's laws, reactions are bound to ensue; they cannot be avoided. However, they occur not as a punishment, but as an automatic adjustment to rectify the imbalance caused by the transgression. The solar macrocosm is a self-correcting divine system, which simply does not allow any permanent irregularity. So events that we on Earth experience as affliction are natural adjustments made by the solar Deity's self-rectification system in order to restore the intercosmic equilibrium. This natural law, which always operates to restore balance, may sometimes include an element of violence, not as a deliberate aim, but as a means of ensuring the safety of the beings whose life-demonstration reflects the one, divine Purpose of fallen existence.

If one understands the irresistible truth of this law, then whenever one experiences any affliction, whether as an individual or as part of a group, nation, or community of nations, one will ask oneself this single, all-decisive question 'What standards, what approach should we choose, what measures should we take, to avoid the consequences of such a Logoic reaction in future?' People do ask these questions, repeatedly, but not in the right way. Think, for instance, of the lethal way in which certain nations have been arming themselves against one another as a means of 'keeping the peace'. But some of these modern armaments can produce such terrible effects that none of them would dare to use them. At the moment, their only function is to serve as deterrents. But anyone with the slightest understanding will realise that the thoughts, intelligences and forces behind this whole lethal arms industry must stir up such astral turbulence that this alone would be sufficient to threaten humankind with disasters much worse than wars!

These disasters have already been generated to a certain extent. The world is divided into many opposing camps. Humanity is split into various factions, and all the means of modern civilisation are being used to maintain this split. The authorities in all camps support the division on the grounds that if the other groups were to take control, everything would be lost. Most groups are armed to such an extent that no one dares to attack the other with nuclear weapons. In this way, a state of extreme tension is engendered in the mighty astral currents emanating from the solar macrocosm the dualistic tensions of good and evil.

So there you have Gog and Magog, as described in the Book of Revelations. These two astral tensions surround the whole world and everyone in it. Every single mortal being is involved, regardless of where he lives. So there are two fiery forces, stoked from below, as it were; two fiery poles, inextinguishably ignited. It is Armageddon, arms concentration, the end of an epoch. It is total liquidation, the end of those who place all their hopes in the fallen world. It means the restoration of equilibrium in the solar macrocosm by setting the degenerated Earth on fire.

Does the Universal Gnosis proclaim these tidings of doom? Is that the inevitable outcome? Well, that is up to you, to us, and to our fellow human beings. All these things will have to happen, unless, through the efforts of as large a group as possible, a different outcome, a different solution, can be brought about. But who is optimistic enough to believe in that? Should we not 'first tether our camel before worshipping God?' Would it not be more practical to follow the Path of Liberation with both feet on the ground? This has been the sentiment of ignorance in similar periods throughout humanity's past. 'A harvest has always been brought in from the fields', as one might say in poetic terms. But the number of those who remain behind is not to be counted.

Since the days of Lao Tzu, disasters and violence have assailed humankind time and time again, and have become more and more widespread. There is mounting evidence - for those who have ears to hear and eyes to see - that the kingdom of humankind cannot be reorganised by force of arms. Whatever people do to others, rebounds on them due to Law of Cause and Effect. Wherever armies have fought, thorns and thistles grow. Wars are always followed by periods of disaster, and it can only end in one final crisis, a global Armageddon.

Gog and Magog constitute the signature of this crisis. They represent a definitive restoration of the age-long disturbance in the solar macrocosm, and the discharge of astral karma into the astral body of our planet, and therefore into the life-field of humankind.

Having heard these facts, there are certain conclusions it would be helpful to draw. As we have seen, the whole world is divided into two essential factions, and the 'Gog and Magog' situation is clearly evident. Also, fallen humanity's astral life-field is one with all this upheaval and is therefore utterly poisoned, to the extent that only people with a strong new Soul-Power will be able to avoid being harmed by it. Meanwhile, the current astral conditions will ensure that everyone else is drawn right into the situation we have been describing, at the cost of much suffering.

People often regard with disapproval anyone who does not want to be drawn into this conflict or to take sides in it.  For example, the New Age people all over the world today cry out for world peace and often condemn injustice when they themselves, in their ignorance and 'good' works, are contributing towards Armageddon. Then there are the more passive adherents of some of the many 'new teachings' that are on offer worldwide. These contemplatives often silently pride themselves in having nothing to do with the New Age furor, while they remain in selfish inactivity, awaiting their own personal salvation by some imagined and hoped-for grace.

Now, if our work were restricted to contemplation of the immovable Kingdom, which we do not possess, which we do not see, with which we have no affinity whatsoever according to our dualistic nature; if we were merely to concern ourselves with numerous philosophical speculations and say 'It is like this or like that,' while remaining in our fallen state, what difference would there be between our group of servants and other dualistic religious, spiritualistic or New Age groups?

The inner band of our group has, in this incarnation, re-consecrated itself unconditionally to its remembered duty in the fallen world. Ours is an uncompromisingly vertical focus, and so all aspirants who earnestly reflect upon the conditions and requirements of the True Path and actually resolve to walk it with us should clearly understand that from the very moment they make their solemn commitment, they will begin to undergo vital changes in consciousness and perception. This is how one knows that he has found the Path.

However, in order to find the Path, it is first necessary to fully understand the fundamental requirement for a yearning after Salvation in one's inner being, and to realise that Liberation cannot be achieved with the old, dualistic faculties. That which is mortal cannot put on that which is immortal. The old electromagnetic radiation field with its attraction and repulsion according to duality is of no use to us. A new electromagnetic radiation field must be prepared from divine-magical forces. This is being tirelessly and dutifully carried out by the Power of the central Electromagnetic Field of the Christ-Hierarchy today, and it is from this divine Sun that the Call to Service, and so also Redemption, issues forth.

All those who have ears to hear, let them hear.