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/