Heartland Security And the Heart of Darkness

Posted on January 18, 2012 by admin
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By Steve Bhaerman

“The more the world crises come to a head, the greater the need for Humanity to come to a heart.”       — Swami Beyondananda

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

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

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

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

Confronting Not-Seeism

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

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

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

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

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

The Heart of Darkness and the Light of Love

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

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

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

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

 

A Reader’s Response to “On Thrive and Thrival”

Dear Steve,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I hope you see this message, and while it would be nice to get a response, none is required if you are too busy. I’m busy too, finishing my book!

Stay well, stay joyful no matter what, and my deep gratitude and blessings to you for having the courage to see what is happening in the world and address it in your wonderful and unique way.

Very Warmly!

Niara Terela Isley

Niara’s website can be found at: http://encounterswithhealing.wordpress.com/

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On “Thrive” And Thrival

Posted on January 10, 2012 by admin
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By Steve Bhaerman

“It’s time to evolve Darwinism from survival of the fittest to thrival of the fittingest.”

– Swami Beyondananda

Early last month, I posted a piece recommending the “Thrive” movie, thrivemovement.com, produced by friends and colleagues Foster and Kimberly Gamble.  While most of the post-article response was positive, several of my correspondents objected, some vociferously (as vociferously as one can in an email without using CAPITAL LETTERS).  A few questioned the science, specifically the possibility of zero point energy and “perpetual motion machines” (although you have to wonder why, if that’s so impossible, inventors are being silenced – temporarily or permanently – because of their inventions).

My friend Mark Robinowitz (Oil Empire), who is one the most astute sniffers of “the likeliest story” I know, was skeptical of the free energy claims and felt inclusion of certain interviewees was a “discredit” to the film:  “It’s irresponsible to mix together leading environmental thinkers and doers with clowns who claim the world is run by reptiles from other planets (Mr. Icke).”

(If you happen to be a reptile from another planet, please don’t be offended … those are Mark Robinowitz’s words, not mine.)

Seriously, I highly recommend taking a journey through Mark’s Oil Empire website; it will help you develop your discernment muscle and better understand how disinformation, misinformation and missing information are used as weapons of mass-distraction.

Peace Activist On the Warpath!

Kerfuffle-wise, I have to say that I wasn’t prepared for what happened when I attended the Praxis Peace Institute’s annual pre-holiday celebration at Murphy’s Pub in Sonoma.  When Trudy and I arrived, we discovered that another good friend and co-heart, Praxis Peace founder Georgia Kelly had declared war on the movie “Thrive,” and that the entire focus of the afternoon celebration was to debunk the film (based on the last 3-5 minutes of the movie, which was the only part shown).

Georgia told the assembled that she “agreed with 97% of the movie,” but she took extreme issue with the end of the film, which she termed “reactionary libertarian propaganda.”  You can read her Huffington Post post here and if you scroll down, you’ll find Foster Gamble’s response.

Now it’s not my intention to get in the middle of this “peace-ing match” between two friends and colleagues (although if you read Foster’s response, the tone is entirely different than Georgia’s).  Something I would love to see come about is what Georgia suggested at the Sonoma event – a dialogue about the movie which would include airing her concerns about libertarianism, particularly as it relates to the seeming contradiction between the “Thrive” movie’s intention of a “world that works for everyone” and the individualist libertarian approach.  And of course, Foster would have a chance to respond.  If the audience is very fortunate, the conversation would yield more light than heat, and people in the room would leave with new and helpful distinctions.

Now … something I noticed about the Sonoma gathering was that other than the waitress taking our orders, no one in the room was under 50 years old.  While we didn’t do a poll, my sense was that most of those in the room agreed with Georgia and felt anything remotely smacking of libertarianism stood in direct opposition to their progressive, social justice sensibilities. Younger folks, however, don’t have the same ideological investment, and seem more willing to investigate outside the box of already-established ideas. They tend to recognize that any real solutions will not be found in current positions, but rather in the evolution of these positions into a truly emergent politic.  If this seems abstract, please check out Charles Eisenstein’s critique of the film, “The Story Is Wrong, But the Spirit Is Right.”  Notice that the critique is of the message, not the messenger … and that the disagreements of the minds are held in the context of the agreement of the hearts.

And yes, even though I am a Libra / Enneagram 9, I do understand that not every conflict can be reconciled.  However, thanks to my work with Joseph McCormick on transpartisan politics, I recognize that conflict necessarily provides the energy for change – provided that conflict is “held” in the appropriate container.  And that container is love and respect, and the understanding that while we may be separated by the beliefs in our head, our heart is the source of unity.

The Heart of the Matter Is the Matter of the Heart

As Bruce Lipton and I discovered in Spontaneous Evolution, in order to make it through the current evolutionary passage, we humans have to begin to “think like a species” – meaning, we now have such a collective impact on life on the planet that unless we trust ourselves to hold species-wide intentions, and adopt species-wide policies and practices, we are doomed to live out a dystopian nightmare … or be eradicated from the earth entirely.

Those who can see beyond the boundaries of left and right recognize that such an evolutionary understanding must necessarily mean that both the individual and community must thrive.  Just as surely as a healthy body is composed of healthy cells, a healthy body politic involves aware, connected, free individuals being who they were born to be.  If this sounds idealistic or utopian, consider this.  What we call “utopia,” our body calls “health.”

As we begin this “precedential year” – which Swami has declared a “Quantum Leap Year” – I’ve been deeply considering the best way I can serve the scene at this time, to use my gifts and talents to move the “upwising” forward.  For the past four years or so, the one idea that always seems to pop up is the notion of “Heartland Security.”  Three years ago, I began building a website and network – and got stalled by my own and society’s financial issues.

Over the past months, the idea has been unfolding, and I have taken care not to turn it into a “thing” until it shows me what it wants to be.  What’s clear to me is that the heart – the power of love, coherence, connectedness, health, sanity and goodness – is the prime human resource to cultivate right now.  As the Swami has said, “Our true security is in the land of the heart.”

Isn’t it becoming clear how universal human aspirations are?  We want clean air, water … good food, adequate shelter … a loving partner / family / community around us … a way to give our gifts, and participate.  Now certainly a proportion of humankind has been so afflicted by violence and deprivation, that their behavior has been toxically distorted.  Nonetheless, the vast majority of us – 80% to 90% — are capable of recognizing our common self interest, and are potentially willing to live accordingly.

Modern science is pointing us in the same direction as ancient perennial wisdom:  We are all connected.  We are all cells in the body of humanity.  We are all in it together … in other words, thrival for all.

So … once again using Swami’s words … it’s time for humanity (or those who humans who hear the call and want to play) to “gather under One Big Intent.”  This intent must be so big, so all-encompassing that it holds and contextualizes all ideas, projects, organizations, business endeavors that seek the thrival of the individual AND the thrival of all. When we recognize that these are not mutually-exclusive, but go hand-in-hand, we enter a truly new world. Think of this discovery and worldview as the spiritual equivalent of discovering how to harness fire.

This time, we are learning to harness the fire of our individual and collective creativity to create a world that we’ve been told is impossible – but is now completely necessary.

Below, for what it’s worth, is the mission statement I created for myself as we enter a time when the old story dies under its own weight and a new story emerges.  I am holding it as the mission for Heartland Security, however that idea plays out:

“To inspire a worldwide movement to unite Humanity around our highest virtues and values, so that we act wisely and lovingly to thrive together in harmony with the natural world.”

That’s a big order.  It will take all the chutzpah and all the humility we can muster.  Anybody wanna play?

 

If you want to find out more about Heartland Security, please go here.

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A Special Holiday Message: A Gift of Franken Sense … From the Land of Punt

Posted on December 20, 2011 by admin
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“If Thomas Jefferson were alive today, he’d say, ‘Forget the airline passengers.  Let’s strip search the government.’”     — Swami Beyondananda

“You can’t wake a person who is pretending to be asleep.”      — Navajo Proverb

We have a body politic that has – until now – largely chosen to stay asleep as the Constitution has been de-constituted and the Bill of Rights has devolved into a bill of wrongs.  Take the USA Patriot Act – please!  And now, adding injury to insult, comes the National Defense Authorization Act, which has a provision that would allow for “indefinite detention of U.S. citizens without charge or trial.”

Why have we allowed that?

Well, first who would want to believe that a government constituted to serve “we the people” would instead sacrifice us if it served their interests?  Most non-paranoid people have a hard time accepting that our government would use that power against you or me or Aunt Sally.  This willful unwillingness to look inconvenient truths in the eye was best demonstrated by a woman I overheard several years ago.  After being presented with evidence of nefarious abuses of government authority, she said, “Well, it may be true.  But I don’t believe it.”

And then, when people do admit to themselves that the evidence certainly points to huge and toxic abuses of the public trust, the next cause of paralysis is the simple question, “What can I do about it?”  Indeed, what can anyone do about it?

Fortunately, that question is being addressed in more and more conversations, from Tea Party gatherings to Occupy demonstrations … and even in conversations involving both (see here Jeff Golden hosting a dialog with two from each side).

In spite of those who insist on sleeping through every alarm, as we stand on the threshold of a truly “precedential” year, people are waking up “left” and “right.”  We are in the midst of an evolutionary upwising.  The veils are dropping everywhere, and who knows?  Maybe 2012 is the year the Irony Curtain finally falls, and truths – convenient or not – reveal themselves.

But before it does, one additional “irony supplement.”

The bill was passed on Bill of Rights Day.

OK, OK.  So where and what is the holiday message?

13 Wise Men, Franken Sense, and the Land of Punt

Well, first let us celebrate the gifts of 13 wise men who voted against the bill, including Sen. Al Franken (D-Min), who offers this bit of Franken sense:

With this defense authorization act, Congress will, for the first time in 60 years, authorize the indefinite detention of U.S. citizens without charge or trial, according to its advocates. This would be the first time that Congress has deviated from President Nixon’s Non-Detention Act.  And what we are talking about here is that Americans could be subjected to life imprisonment without ever being charged, tried, or convicted of a crime, without ever having an opportunity to prove their innocence to a judge or a jury of their peers. And without the government ever having to prove their guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.

I think that denigrates the very foundations of this country. It denigrates the Bill of Rights. It denigrates what our Founders intended when they created a civilian, non-military justice system for trying and punishing people for crimes committed on U.S. soil. Our Founders were fearful of the military–and they purposely created a system of checks and balances to ensure we did not become a country under military rule. This bill undermines that core principle, which is why I could not support it.

Yesterday was the anniversary of the ratification of the Bill of Rights, and this wasn’t the way to mark its birthday.

OK, Franken sense.  Ha-ha.  But folks, it gets funnier than that.  Here is the Wikipedia quote on the origin of frankincense:

Frankincense has been traded on the Arabian Peninsula and in North Africa for more than 5000 years. A mural depicting sacks of frankincense traded from the Land of Punt adorns the walls of the temple of ancient Egyptian Queen Hatshepsut, who died in 1458 BCE.

The land of Punt.

Isn’t Washington, D.C. the “land of punt?”  When faced with tough opposition, instead of persevering to a worthy goal, politicians have learned to punt.  Let the next guys deal with it, after I am safely retired and my golden parachute has landed me inside a gated community (with the locks on the inside, thank you, not on the outside).

Here are the Senators – six Democrats, six Republicans and one independent – who refused to punt and voted against the bill:  Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), Ben Cardin (D-Md.), Al Franken (D-Minn.), Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Jim Risch (R-Idaho), Rand Paul (R-Ky.), Mike Lee (R-Utah), Jim DeMint (R-S.C.), Mike Crapo (R-Idaho) and Tom Coburn (R-Okla.).

Don’t like Al Franken?  No problem.  Check out Jon Stewart’s clip of Sen. Rand Paul opposing the bill.

Will We Change the Political Game in 2012?

As to what will happen, don’t ask the Swami to make a prediction.  He doesn’t want to jeopardize his “non-prophet” status.  But here’s a hint:  Paraphrasing Pogo, “We have seen the savior, and it is us.”

We the people – from all sides, and from every angle – have to “reoccupy” America, by occupying the public discourse like never before.  It’s great that Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert and Bill Maher have been using comedy to deconstruct a system that has outlived its uselessness.  Comedy is great.  However, it is now time to be able to air truths without the veneer of fiction or comedy.  Forget reality TV, folks.  This is reality.

To do so, we will have to “overgrow” the blame game and rigid positionality.  We will have to gather together in sacred circles (the new “cells” of a revitalized body politic), and then we will have to circle up our circles with other circles that will necessarily include folks from a different political tribe.

Here is one prediction, though.  2012 will provide perhaps the biggest test the United States has faced since its inception:  Will a critical mass of the heretofore uncritical masses awaken to the clear and present danger, and set aside significant differences to gather under “one big intent?”

Will we finally establish the heart and soul of we the people at the center of public policy and discourse?  Can we actually have government of, by and for the people, where the government does OUR bidding and not the bidding of the highest bidder?

To quote Willie Mays, “That’s what we’re going to play the season to find out.”

 

Yes, we still have tons of copies of my e-book with Joseph McCormick, Reuniting America:  A Toolkit for Changing the Political Game in our awarehouse.  Inspire yourself for a truly new New Year for just $9.97.   Click here.

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