Swami at Conspiracy Con … Ssshhhh!

Posted on May 7, 2013 by admin

Swami Beyondananda To Speak At Conspiracy Con

Oh, and the Issue Isn’t Conspiracy … It’s Con’s Piracy

 

“Conspiracy?  It means breathing together.  If we all gather together under one big intent – to breathe in the love, and breathe out the fear – the whole world will breathe easier. –Swami Beyondananda 

 

Well, once again this year, the Swami has been invited to speak at the Conspiracy Con at the Crowne Plaza in Milpitas, CA June 1st and 2nd and the question is, what will he say?

Probably the same thing he said to the group five years ago:  “When I first heard the Conspiracy Conference, I was skeptical.  But now I’m a believer.  This conference didn’t just happen … it was PLANNED!”

That got a big laugh, and those folks who are most willing to look down the rabbit hole definitely need a laugh.  Swami then noticed that sitting at a front table was journalist Jim Marrs, who’s written extensively about the Kennedy assassination. Swami looked at him and said, “I know the REAL story.”

He was clearly intrigued, so Swami asked him a question, “What was it that John F. Kennedy didn’t do that broke precedent with every President before him?”

Magically, Jim Marrs knew the answer.  “He didn’t wear a hat.

“That’s right,” the Swami said.  “That’s why he was done in by the millinery industrial complex.”

Another big laugh … about a dark, dark subject.

So, seriously.  How can we, and why should we laugh at the darkness?  Well for one thing, hearty laughter puts us in the heart, and the heart (coeur) is the place of courage.  Laughter lights up the endarkened corridors of power, and gives us the courage to lift the veils in these apocalyptic times.

And as you probably are aware, the meaning of the word “apocalypse” is “the lifting of the veils.

Seeing the mechanisms of power “naked” can be shocking, to say the least.  So it’s understandable why the phrase “conspiracy theory” is used as a dismissal attack by those unwilling (or unable) to confront the unconfrontable.  I mean, if you have credible evidence that our government killed John Kennedy and Martin Luther King, or allowed the 9/11 attacks to happen, what do you do about it?  How do you “be” with it?  How do you deal with legitimate concerns about the illegitimacy of the powers in power?

Denial?  Paralysis?  Apathy?  Consuming rage that creates more heat than light?

It’s my contention that the body politic has been in a state of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder since JFK was shot nearly 50 years ago.  (In fact, one of the presentations at the Conspiracy Con is JFK:  50 Years Later, the Assassination of America.)

So I’m going to step away from the word “conspiracy” and create some space that should make the real issue clear.

Conspiracy? It’s Really a “Con’s Piracy”

What we are really confronting is a “con’s piracy.”  Our commonwealth has been stolen by a small group of sociopathic con artists who have successfully convinced the general public that their inhuman nature is our human nature.

Think about it.

As Stefan Verstappen points out in this must-watch 15 minute video psychopathic cheaters have a tremendous advantage over those who play by the rules.  Those who operate completely and utterly on individual self-interest, without conscience or care, have the least qualms about doing anything to anyone if it serves their interests.  A few years ago, it occurred to me that those who perpetrated the war in Iraq wouldn’t hesitate to do to any of us what they did to Iraqi civilians if we “got in their way.”

Is this paranoid?

Five years ago, it was easy to blame the neocons and villainize Dick Cheney.  Now?  Now that Obama has become O-bomb-a, it should be more clear that being in power in America DEMANDS sociopathic behavior.  It comes with the job, since the corporate state has become a fully blown sociopathic enterprise.

And the media?  They intentionally focus on the lowly criminal to divert our attention from the highly-criminal.

So, let’s pull our heads out of the rabbit hole and the ostrich hole and celebrate some good news.  I love it when someone insists that the entire world is being run by a tiny cadre of evildoers.  I say, “That’s GREAT NEWS!  It means there’s way, way, way more of us than there are of them.”

Remember what Tonto said when the Lone Ranger pointed out that they were surrounded by Indians.  He said, “What you mean WE, kemosabe?”

Until now, the majority of us have tacitly agreed to live by the psychopath’s rules.  Consider the popularity of the TV show, Survivor.  As Stefan Verstappen points out in the video, here is a show that celebrates and rewards lying, cheating, and cold-blooded manipulation.  The “nice guys” get exiled first, and the last sociopath standing is proclaimed King of the Island.

Likewise, consider the popularity of the TV series The Sopranos several years ago, where a mafia don who considers murder all in a day’s work is presented as having a “normal” family life.  Is this some kind of preparation for family values devolving into “Soprano Family values?”

So before we ask, “what do we do?” let’s ask the more primal question, “Who do we be?”

It turns out that modern science and ancient wisdom are curiously aligned on this one.  At the root of every religious and ethical tradition is some form of the Golden Rule, acknowledging that our health and sanity lies in connection, not in fighting other healthy “cells.”  And now evolutionary science is coming to recognize that cooperation has been a key component in human survival.

So, yes … who ARE we?  And living out of a more full and positive view of human nature, how do we activate a new world moral authority that is realized from the grassroots up instead of being imposed from the top down?

Maybe the answer lies in a REAL conspiracy.  The Swami will use the Conspiracy Con to call for a worldwide open conspiracy to breathe together as one sane and healthy human organism.  And then, instead of wasting energy and resource “fighting” evil, we will find nourishment elsewhere, and institutional evil will die of starvation.

Steve Bhaerman is author and humorist and also known by his cosmic comic alter ego Swami Beyondananda (http://www.wakeuplaughing.com/).  He is also author with Bruce Lipton of the paradigm-busting book, Spontaneous Evolution:  Our Positive Future and a Way to Get There From Here.

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Sometimes A Cigar Is Just A Cigar

Posted on April 20, 2013 by admin

By Steve Bhaerman

“The problem with knee-jerk reactions is that you too often end up kneeing the wrong jerk.” — Swami Beyondananda

In the wake of the tragic and senseless bombings in Boston this past Monday, three “usual suspects” emerged:

It was the Muslims.

It was the white supremacist gun nuts.

It was the government pulling off yet another false flag attack.

In this whodunit, each camp pre-concluded the perpetrator based on their worldview – or at least hoped out loud that their villain was the perp. Progressive journalist David Sirota, who otherwise seems to have his head on straight, wrote a piece for Salon entitled, “Let’s Hope the Boston Marathon Bomber is a White American,”  and those who know a little too much about “false flag operations” saw government conspiracy written all over it.

Now two Chechin brothers have been identified as the perpetrators, and that seems like a likely enough story.  As Freud supposedly said, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.  At the same time, given the way the government has used each incident to institute creeping martial law (in this case the lockdown of the entire city), it’s understandable why any official story might lack credibility.

Like the little boy who cried Wolfowitz, our government and military industrial complex has so often manipulated the facts, distorted the truth, and cultivated fear, division and disinformation that the body politic is suffering from what can only be called Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, probably dating back nearly half a century to the Kennedy assassination.

Because there is no longer a trusted arbiter of the “truth” people are free to believe whatever they believe and hunker into their “silos” and receive only the information that reinforces their preconceptions.

There are still people who believe that Muslims are the only villains out there, or America, or Obama or the NRA.  Here’s the inconvenient truth.  Villainy is an equal-opportunity employer.  The history of our so-called civilization has been so ruled by the “Rule of Gold Rule” (“Doo-doo unto others before they can doo-doo unto you”) that our collective unconscious is a seething toxic mass of unresolved grief, terror and rage.  As the unworkability of the whole thing becomes more and more apparent, the poison escapes – or explodes – out of any convenient pore.

As the media pulls us into the “details” of the story, we might do better by pulling ourselves out of the trees to see what the “forest” has to tell us.  And I see two key areas of “common ground” so that we can individually and collectively come to our senses and – as the Swami would put it – “turn the funk into function, and leave the junk at the junction.”

 

A Convenient Truth

The first is to appreciate and utilize a very convenient truth.  We have a deeply united body politic.  Regardless of where they line up on the political spectrum, the vast majority of ordinary citizens recognize that our government and corporate media cannot be trusted to tell us the truth, or even to call forth a constructive conversation.  Like the friend or family member who is possessed by alcoholism or addictive drugs, the government (actually, the corporate state – coercive power doing the bidding of big money) cannot “heal” itself.

What is required is an “intervention” where the addict’s loved ones come together to check the individual into a program.

America requires not just an intervention, but an “inner-vention” where we look inside ourselves to acknowledge the seeds of the evils we see “out there” and together in conversation – left and right coming front and center – we speak and listen together first to determine the “likeliest story,” and then to ascertain and call forth what we would like instead. In other words, the intervention and inner-vention should lead to IN-vention.

As Van Jones famously said a few years ago, Martin Luther King’s speech was not, “I have a complaint.”  We all have complaints, grievances, stories of injustice.  That is the history of humankind – or rather, human-unkind.

And there is a parallel story, which is our second hopeful area of common ground.

For millennia, our spiritual teachers have pointed us toward the notion that we are indeed all in it together, that as Jesus said, “What you do to the least of us, you do to me.”

It doesn’t matter what the religious or nonreligious ethical system is, at the foundation there is love and connectivity.  You can see here similar expressions of the Golden Rule in a number of different traditions.

As philosopher Alan Watts suggested, maybe it’s time for the religious people of the world to stop worshipping the finger and instead see where it is pointing.  This goes for fundamentalist atheists as well, whose belief in a non-God can be as fervent and rigid as any religious fanatic.  Even if they cannot believe in God, they can certainly believe in Good.  In the space beyond words and concepts, it’s the same thing.

So … what would it be like for Americans to step away from their screens (computer screens, TV screens, and the belief screens that shield us from novel ideas), and gather together in sacred space?  What would it be like to call forth that which exists beyond religion and non-religion, and ask ourselves to speak into and listen from that space?  There is no political, religious, economic, technical savior who can or will make things right.  And … by using the collected heart wisdom of humanity to properly focus our mental capabilities, we might actually be able to navigate the evolutionary passage in front of us.

Will we do it?  As baseball great Willie Mays once said, “That’s what we’re going to play the season to find out.”

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The Government Whisperer

Posted on March 7, 2013 by admin

By Steve Bhaerman

“We need a new precedent – government of, by, and for the people where the government does OUR bidding, not the bidding of the highest bidder.”
    – Swami Beyondananda

As a lifelong dog-lover, I’ve become a big fan of Cesar Millan’s TV show, The Dog Whisperer.  Millan, whose slogan is, “I rehabilitate dogs, I train people,” believes that in a healthy human / domesticated canine relationship, the human (i.e., the “master”) is the leader of the pack.

Customarily, Millan is called in when a dog owner is at wit’s end with a “problem dog.”  Whether the dog is overly-aggressive or overly-timid, Millan’s approach is not just to work with the dog, but to turn the dog’s human into a “calm-assertive pack leader.”

There is something about simultaneously projecting peaceful calm and firm assertiveness that puts the dog in the proper frame of heart and mind to become a healthy, happy, loyal, and reliable helper and companion.

After watching Cesar Millan in action for a month or so, it hit me.

What America needs is a “government whisperer.”

As I look at our toxically dysfunctional system of governance, I see a wild, out-of-control, confused beast who acts as if IT is the master – contrary to the wishes of the Founders of the United States, who saw “we the people” as the master, and the government as servant.

We can look at our government with disgust and shout, “Bad dog!” all we like, but the truth is if “we” are the master, we must learn to be masterful.  If our government is willful and disobedient, if it’s a watchdog that simply “watches” while the doggone commonwealth is stolen, if it bares its teeth when we get too close, maybe it’s time we calmly reasserted leadership of the pack.

And no, “putting the government to sleep” (or drowning it in a bathtub as Grover Norquist suggests) isn’t the answer.  The Founders of the United States – including the most liberty-loving among them – offered a distinct purpose and function of government, as expressed in the Preamble to the Constitution:  “ … to establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity …”

That sounds like a worthy mission statement for a functional nation of people, and it requires that the government doggedly guard freedom and justice, protect the commonwealth (and not just the uncommonly wealthy), bark loudly when necessary, and bite the burglar and not the postman.

For this ideal to become the real deal, two things are required.  First, we individually and collectively must take responsibility for having the exact government we “deserve,” based on our involvement or non-involvement.  The hopium has worn off, folks.  We are the leaders we’ve been waiting for.  Time to wake up, wise up, grow up, and show up

Second, we must understand, appreciate, and cultivate the entity called “We, the People.”

Who Is “We the People?”

No, that’s not a grammatical error.  What our Founders meant by “we the people” is singular, not plural.  It relates to the United States’ official motto, “E Pluribus Unum,” out of many, one.  The context “we, the people” is where every individual holds equal value, each a “sovereign soul-proprietor” and essential “cell” in the body politic.  When this aggregate of individuals is able to resoundingly “speak as one,” then we the people will be able to reassert our mastery, and transform bad dog into good dog.

How does this happen?  I’m glad I asked that question.

In Spontaneous Evolution, Bruce Lipton and I devote an entire chapter, “Healing the Body Politic,” to why and how groups of ordinary individuals are quite often wiser than any group of experts.  We cite the work of Tom Atlee, the wisdom councils sparked by Jim Rough’s work, and Richard Flyer’s “epi-political” (far above and beyond partisan distinctions) activities through the Conscious Community Network and Connecting the Good in Reno, Nevada.

Thanks to technology, the internet, and tele-conferencing, we can bring together large groups of individuals to discuss not just policy, but the fundamental issue of governance:  Who’s in charge of who’s in charge?

We have the wherewithal, and now what is required is the “aware-with-all.”  If we want a loyal and trustworthy government, not merely one who will “fetch” for whoever holds the biggest stick, then we must “become” We, the People by calling forth the virtues and values that the 90% of us who are not sociopaths hold dear.

Instead of falling for the divide-and-conquer tactics that have conservative libertarians blaming government, and liberal progressives blaming corporations … it’s time to look at the entire “elephant and donkey” in the living room – the corporate state, embodied by two corporately-owned political parties.  In combination, they are capable of far more damage than either could do on it’s own!

So, progressives and conservatives … here is an important point.

Government isn’t “bad.”  Corporations aren’t “bad.”  Like the dogs the Dog Whisperer is called upon to rehabilitate, these institutions must be “habilitated” (i.e., made fit) to suit a new standard.  They must be trained, and there is no one to train them but “us” – we, the people.

The only way to establish – let alone enforce – this standard is for a critical mass of the heretofore-uncritical masses to gather outside the current political matrix beyond the left-right divide, and begin a conversation about what a loyal, obedient, and functional governance might look like.  There will be much we don’t agree on.  However, I’m willing to bet that the vast majority of Americans want a government that is honest, transparent, and just.  They want the power of human persons to outweigh the power of corporate persons, and the power of money to be checked and balanced.  They are tired of the toxic divisiveness, and are ready to be functional and work together.

So … how do we put the bell on the cat (or, to keep with the metaphor, the leash on the dog)?

My friend and colleague Joseph McCormick and I put together an e-book two years ago, called Reuniting America:  A Toolkit For Changing the Political Game.  In it, Joseph describes his unique and remarkable journey from partisan “divider” to transpartisan uniter, and offers up the “Transpartisan Toolkit” as a context for respectful and fruitful engagement across political divides.

Although Joseph is currently on hiatus from his political activities, he has generously offered the e-book as a free download at this time because he believes this toolkit is a helpful “training manual” for we the people to effective train our government to serve US – rather than serving us up to the highest bidder.  You will appreciate Joseph’s personal story, and you will be inspired by the “What We All Agree On” statement issued by a politically-diverse transpartisan group that met for several months in Seattle.  And if you are inspired to engage, the toolkit will give you the ways and means.

One final word.

Every day, I get messages from this cause or that cause – ‘cause there is injustice and imbalance.  Every one of these issues – every one – boils down to one issue:  Who’s in charge of who’s in charge?  If the right wants justice and the left wants justice, we must identify the core of justice at the radical center, based on sacred values that transcend the mere power of money or muscle.

It’s up to us now, because the corporate state cannot reform itself.

Let’s get governance out of the doghouse, and calmly assert ourselves as leader of the pack – because the default system of “leadership of the PACs” is no longer workable.

Interested in the Reuniting America e-book?  You can download it for free right here.

Want to find out more about Spontaneous Evolution?  Please go here.

Steve Bhaerman is a writer and humorist based in Santa Rosa, California.  For the past quarter century he has written and performed comedy as Swami Beyondananda.   His blog, Notes From the Trail, appears regularly on the Huffington Post and numerous other online and print journals.

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