Wherever you are, you’re already here. There are no expenses, save for your attention, which I hope you will come to understand is infinitely more precious than any amount of money.
You don’t require fixing, you simply require understanding, which necessitates awareness on your part. This consists in a shift of your attention to what is true, in this moment. It is reality. It is not a spiritual reality, or a scientific reality, or a Buddhist reality or a Christian reality, or an Indian reality or a Chinese reality. It is the one alive, indivisible Truth. All of it is here. It is neither theology or philosophy. The common theme that religious and mystical traditions point to, namely awareness, is the living edge of truth.
The beginning and the end go together hand in hand. Do you recall the lightness, openness and freedom of being a child? Isn’t it odd that we consider an early school environment where the educational focus on a child’s future potential is regarded as more important than Being in the immediacy of the present moment?
As if, perhaps one day when they have had an education and a well-paying job then they will finally be entitled to return to the lightness, freedom and happiness they once experienced as children.
The world teaches us to succeed by striving for what we don’t have, and for what we have been taught to want. Struggle is so commonplace that we take it for granted that it is indispensable. We are taught what we seek should bring us happiness, fulfilment, freedom. But where are these benefits? Didn’t we leave that behind when we left childhood to move into more serious, adult concerns involving strain, stress and discontent? Where are these mythical achievements that are supposed to give us lasting fulfilment, peace and happiness? Why is it that even those who have achieved the most worldly success possible are still looking to the next thing, whether it is a new relationship, the colonization of Mars or becoming the President?
The cultural educational process of our lives is marketed as an existential solution, although it never quite seems to deliver in its promises. We long to return to the freedom of childhood because it was then that we were least distant from the untarnished truth of our being, before experiences such as hurt, shame, disapproval and failure conditioned us to harden our hearts and submerge our inmost light in order to navigate a dysfunctional world.
And yet all of the things we consider to be the very fruits of personal success were present right at the beginning of our educational journey, the time where we should have known the least in our lives! We are told that if we ever want to reach the states we experienced in the beginning of our waking lives again, we need to have deserved it by playing according to the rules. We are told we must forego our intuitive sense of value and the immediacy of truth in order to ‘make something of ourselves’, which is how we have been conditioned into a state of believing that peace, contentment and well-being must be seen as earned and stamped with a seal of approval by our benefactors.
Even through all of this discontent, disillusionment and loneliness, that which our hearts most deeply yearns for is still within us, whoever presumes to tell us we are deserving. Happiness is our birthright. There is no moment in which we are cut off from the possibility of remembering the infinite abundance of our true nature. One of the reasons we don’t look at what we actually have is because we are trained to overlook anything that inherently belongs to us. If we ceased to do this, we would learn the value of contentment, and the hungry fire to go on pursuing the next illusory milestone would diminish. We have also inherited the assumption that if everyone has something, or has the same access to it, then that thing must be worthless. Ego rates it as being without value, because it cannot be manipulated in such a way one person or group could hold advantage over another.
The darkness of an insane world needs light, and you are that light. First and foremost, you are awareness itself, undivided and eternal. There is no higher state than to attend to this awakening. It is a suchness to which nothing may be added, and it is neither dependent on nor diminished by anything. None of our words, concepts, or contrived means of objectification catch it.
This is the ancient value we have been taught to suppress in order to render us obedient and industrious. Enculturation puts us to sleep to breed discontented shadows who are encouraged to accumulate, strive and toil to no definitive end. This is to be in a state of hypnotic disconnection, to be ‘cut off from the vine’. I propose that your highest priority in these times, should you feel the call to truth, is the sacred task of remembering of your deepest self as living awareness, as one with your source. I propose that the unexamined life is not worth living.
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Simon P Murphy is a Nelson-based esotericist and philosopher, and author of His Master’s Wretched Organ, a brilliant collection of weird fiction stories.
As VJM Publishing readers will be aware, the Establishment is currently in a state of panic. Thanks to decade after decade of constant lying, the mainstream media is starting to lose control of the narrative, and with it the ability to manufacture consent for Establishment plans. This has led to them running a series of hit pieces against alternative media figures. One recent piece was so shamelessly biased that it’s worth examining it as an exemple of propaganda.
Nadine Porter is a propagandist for Stuff news. Her reporting appears to be little more than a series of hatchet jobs against anti-Establishment figures. She recently published an article smearing CounterSpin co-host Hannah Spierer. Porter’s piece is one of the most egregious examples of attack propaganda ever published outside of wartime. Because of this, this analysis will break it down line by line.
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She was once Auckland University’s campus co-convenor of the Green Party who spoke out about Islamophobia – so what happened to Counterspin co-founder Hannah Spierer? NADINE PORTER investigates.
Porter sets the tone of this hatchet job from the opening sentence. There’s something wrong with Hannah Spierer, and Porter will now tell you what that is.
“Let’s raise our girls to be mothers,” the eloquently spoken voice says to a large crowd in Wellington.
“And to want to be homemakers and be family orientated,” the woman continues. “Because at the end of the day that’s what all this gender confusion is about.”
Here Porter is trying to associate Spierer with the Gloriavale stereotype of submissive breeding sow. This is the first of a slew of insinuations made in this piece.
The audience welcomes Hannah Spierer’s speech, especially the many middle-aged women.
“I personally think it’s time we stopped pushing feminism,” the 37-year-old proclaimed earlier in her speech, glancing over at her assenting partner Kelvyn Alp before going on to denounce Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern as a toxic feminist.
Porter, like most hacks who have spent decades in the mainstream media bubble, evidently believes that feminists are the good guys fighting back against male supremacism. Spierer has sinned by daring to question this Establishment dogma. The reality – that feminism has done little to benefit actual women – is strenuously denied by Establishment voices.
Any mention of Ardern elicits the biggest applause, and prompts Alp to further denigrate the PM and suggest New Zealand’s “woke” military leaders should be decapitated. He then clarifies he meant this figuratively – due to the danger of being arrested.
At this stage in the piece, Porter slips from dealing in facts to dealing in assertions. Stating facts, such as that Spierer is 37 years old, creates the impression in the reader’s mind that this is an objective piece that deals in facts. So the reader is lured into accepting the unsupported assertions made here and later in the piece.
In all of it, Spierer stands beside her man, nodding as she has done on their Counterspin Media platform for over a year.
Here Porter is trying to create the impression that Spierer herself has been mindlessly sucked into a world of lies. As if a puppet, and not a free-thinking person like Nadine Porter, Spierer merely nods. This is an attempt to delegitimise an opponent of the Establishment.
There the pair have been vocal spreaders of misinformation and conspiracy theories.
This is the first blatant and outright lie in this piece. What constitutes misinformation is up to every person to decide for themselves. It’s not for Nadine Porter to dictate from her mainstream media pulpit. Moreover, conspiracy theories describe reality more accurately than their competition, coincidence theories.
Porter is a member of the same mainstream media that lied for decades about how cannabis causes mental illness and is not medicinal, happily running Family First ads during the cannabis referendum that were pure misinformation. Stuff itself runs a million times more propaganda than CounterSpin does, as this piece exemplifies.
It’s a disturbing departure from Spierer’s youth and the “excited bright” student she was described as by a former lecturer.
Why “disturbing”? A moment’s thought is enough to understand that, through using terms such as this here, Porter has abandoned any pretense at writing fairly and accurately. “Disturbing” is a loaded term intended to manipulate the reader into seeing danger where it doesn’t exist. Its use here reveals that this piece is simply a hatchet job (and it gets worse).
Studying politics at Auckland University, Spierer’s leadership ability came to the fore. In 2006, she became the International Affairs Officer for the university’s student association. A year later she began to make her mark as the association’s environmental affairs officer and the Green party’s co-convenor on campus.
In June 2007 she was vocal against Islamophobia and co-signed a letter to Investigate magazine criticising a piece by Ian Wishart alleging, without evidence, that some of the world’s most extreme Islamic preachers had infiltrated New Zealand’s Muslim community.
Again, Porter goes back to detailing some actual facts, in order to soften the reader up for the insinuations and lies that follow later.
Yet 16 years later, Spierer found herself in a Christchurch courtroom being dragged to the dock on charges believed to be related to Counterspin sharing “objectionable material”.
Realistically this should be a story about Spierer’s moral fortitude. From getting sucked into Establishment politics as a university student, Spierer wisened up and realised that the Establishment is actually the enemy of all honest, free-thinking people. It’s really a heroic story, but for Porter, Spierer is a slave who has escaped the plantation.
Every free-thinking person understands that a Government setting the legal system onto someone for sharing a link to a documentary video is a clear example of tyrannical evil. Yet Porter cheers for the tyrant, and excoriates Spierer for defying it.
It is unclear if the charges relate to Counterspin’s publication earlier this year of excerpts from the March 15 terrorist’s livestream as part of a documentary making false claims about the terror attack .
This was something a competent journalist would clear up beform writing a piece about someone. But Porter could well be getting money from the Public Interest Journalism Fund to write a quota of hit pieces on Establishment figures, and so she has to churn them out to a deadline. Hey, Nadine, can you do VJM Publishing next? We need the publicity!
Little is known of the intervening years between university and Spierer reemerging as Sarah Smith in 2019 except that she worked as an assistant at a Rudolf Steiner kindergarten.
Considered a special character school, Steiner practices anthroposophy, a “spiritual science” in the education of children.
Here Porter is trying to smear Spierer as a kook, a crazy hippie. As VJM Publishing has previously discussed, mainstream media hatchet jobs smear their targets as either evil or insane. Porter’s approach is evidently to cast Alp as the evil one and Spierer as the crazy one.
Anthroposophy is indeed a spiritual science, and if Spierer knows about it she will be much better informed about the challenges facing humanity than the average person. Rudolf Steiner had incredible insight into the human condition, and his schools are vastly superior to the cruel Rockefeller model that New Zealand schools are based on.
However, Spierer’s transformation is most likely to have come at the hands of QAnon – an American conspiracy that began in 2017. Believers thought President Donald Trump was fighting a secret society that included Democratic politicians and Satan-worshipping paedophiles who trafficked children.
“Most likely” here is bullshit. Here, Porter is pushing the Deep State trope that “conspiracy theorists” are responsible for turning Western populations against their governments, and not decades of mismanagement and arrogance.
Anybody who doesn’t think that many Democratic politicians are in secret societies is a clown. Many of them flew on the Lolita Express, child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein‘s private plane, including none other than former President Bill Clinton. In 2019 the supposed “conspiracy theory” that Epstein was a child sex trafficker turned out to be 100% true. This is a matter of public record, and by denying it, Porter herself is pushing misinformation.
Note that Ghislane Maxwell’s client list of influential Westerners who purchased sex with trafficked children has not been made public.
The group was initially a far-right internet forum but grew in scope as it peddled disinformation including the nonsensical conspiracy theory that 5G towers were spreading coronavirus and that Covid-19 was pre-planned or a hoax.
Here Porter exaggerates for the sake of sensationalism. Very few people in any movement believed that 5G towers spread coronavirus. Some believe that Covid-19 was a hoax, but many believe (quite reasonably) that Western governments exaggerated the effects of Covid for the sake of increasing control over their populations.
Some New Zealanders starting heading down the QAnon tunnel of misinformation in 2018 and began adapting it on these shores. By 2020, and on the back of Covid-19 lockdowns, the movement adopted an anti-authority, anti-Government view.
Spierer appears to have been one of the early local adopters, judging by her Twitter social media posts. It almost certainly laid the path towards far-right activism for her and many other Kiwis.
The Western Establishment loves to push the trope that their management of society is flawless, and so any criticism of them must be astroturfed by foreign intelligence services. Hillary Clinton started this particular line of misinformation when she claimed that Russian troll farms were responsible for her loss to Donald Trump in the 2016 American Presidental Elections.
By complaining about an “anti-authority, anti-Government view” among wrongthinkers, Porter implies that the correct view is to be pro-authoritarianism. This reveals her intent in writing this piece – to protect the Establishment by attacking its detractors. “Almost certainly” is used here in the same sense as “most likely” above. Porter has no idea – she’s simply throwing shit and seeing what sticks.
“QAnon has always been an umbrella for all conspiracy theorists,” a Fighting Against Conspiracy Theories Aotearoa spokesperson told Stuff.
An unnamed spokesperson. Why is Porter quoting an organisation that doesn’t even have named spokespeople? The fact is that FACT is another Establishment-funded quango that was created to destroy freethinkers.
Spierer quickly became prominent under her alternative name Sarah Smith in the Mothers Who Stand For Freedom (MWSFF) group, as the pandemic wore on. Once a self-described “leftie” who had considered joining a feminist movement, Spierer may have carried her anti-vaccination views from her past.
There’s nothing nefarious about vaccine skepticism. The mainstream media tries to create the impression there is because the mainstream media is to the Establishment as the sheepdog is to the farmer: they earn their meal ticket from herding the masses wherever the farmers want them herded. At the moment, the farmers want their livestock vaccinated.
A decade ago, people against vaccinations were often left leaning, but the pandemic and QAnon quickly amalgamated them into a melting pot of conspiracies – and it seems Spierer suffered the same fate.
Writing from Nelson, I can tell you that many people against vaccinations are still left-leaning: the kind of natural-living organic food-eating, weed-smoking hippie that Nelson is known for is stridently anti-vaxx.
The rest of this paragraph is nonsense.
After this week’s Christchurch court appearance, Spierer’s QAnon based beliefs were evident. She told supporters the Great Awakening was coming – a conspiracy theory that incorrectly forecast that Joe Biden and other politicians would be arrested before his inauguration and Trump reinstated as US President. Then she claimed the real pandemic was child trafficking and child abuse – the initial QAnon conspiracy.
The Great Awakening is an occult concept that predates QAnon by centuries, which is why there’s an entire chapter about it in Clown World Chronicles. The idea is a variation of the common millenarian belief that the human race will awaken from delusion and finally come to terms with the true nature of reality. The hope is that this awakening would lead to justice for the child rapists on Ghislane Maxwell’s client list.
Pedophiles at the top of Western countries isn’t even a conspiracy theory – it’s an established and documented fact. The American Establishment protected Jeff Epstein and Ghislane Maxwell, the British Establishment protected Jimmy Savile and continues to protect Prince Andrew, the Australian Establishment protects Cardinal Pell (who is a free man despite that his lawyer admitted that Pell sexually penetrated a child), etc.
Porter is herself serving to protect these people by claiming that those who talk about them are conspiracy theorists.
In the MWSFF group that was heavily supportive of Voices for Freedom, Spierer openly shared her negative views on transgender issues, calling today’s reality “an insanity taking our children’s minds”.
Is Spierer wrong here? The transgender hysteria has every sign of being a social contagion and not a real thing, as evidence by the enormous numbers of detransitioners, most of who deeply regret having transitioned in the first place, and who wish someone would have stopped them. Porter is grasping at straws by trying to make Spierer look bad for opposing this.
The group also pushed the disproven satanic ritual abuse conspiracy that has lingered since the 1980s – and forms part of Spierer’s child trafficking views.
Spierer might be wrong to jump on the Satanic ritual abuse conspiracy bandwagon, but this is hardly cause for opprobrium. It’s just not a big deal.
In December 2020 Alp spoke to the group, but it is unclear if the pair met before that.
It’s unclear what Porter intends by mentioning this.
Two months earlier, Spierer, as Smith, posted an eight-part YouTube series on “the flaws of feminism”.
In it, she derides her mother and grandmother as being women who enjoyed “wearing the pants” in their relationships and claimed feminism was making men and young boys less like alpha males and “more like women”.
Again, is Spierer wrong here? The average Western woman is not any happier in the workforce, being dependent on an employer who hates her, than she is at home with a family, being dependent on a husband who loves her. And even if she was, surely it’s permissible to question it without getting a hit piece written about you in the mainstream media?
Men are more like women than they’ve ever been, that’s an easily-observed fact. Masculine qualities, such as the ability to impose order upon one’s own emotions, are not valued anywhere near as much as they should be. What’s wrong with pointing that out?
Spierer has also proclaimed herself a sovereign citizen – a fringe movement that began in the United States in the 1970s. It believes ultimate power is vested with individuals, and the state and its institutions are illegitimate. The pair tried to claim this status at their Christchurch District Court appearance, to no avail.
The State and its institutions are all predicated on violence, every single one. Many people, such as the thousands who have been imprisoned for growing medicinal cannabis, have very good reason to consider the State their enemy.
Sovereign citizens might be anti-social and dangerous as a general rule, but if Kate Hannah can openly admit to being a Cultural Marxist and still get paid by the Government to target wrongthinkers, then no-one should be having hit pieces written about them just for claiming to be a sovereign citizen.
In the early days of Counterspin – Alp’s far right platform – Spierer has connected and praised known white supremacists and racists including Lee Williams and Kyle Chapman.
This paragraph is just shameless smearing, using all the Marxist buzzwords – “far-right”, “white supremacists”, “racists”. Porter seems to think that it’s a crime to platform people that the Establishment doesn’t want platformed.
Spierer has been enthusiastic about Christchurch’s far-right fraternity and has termed the city an “inspiration” in a social media post. That welcoming audience may explain why the pair were in the city when they were arrested.
I earned two degrees in Christchurch and found the city an inspiration for being the place where Ernest Rutherford conducted his early experiments. Is it far-right to think that? Absurd. Here Porter is pushing the hoary old North Island narrative that Christchurch is a city full of rednecks.
Now bailed to a Woolston house that also hosts a commercial alternative medicine practice, Spierer will face her second court appearance on September 21 where she will enter her plea.
Another attempt to smear Spierer with the “crazy hippie” narrative that the mainstream media also uses on Voices For Freedom. Alternative medicine works out a lot better for people than allopathic medicine.
If found guilty she and Alp could face up to 14 years in jail and a significant fine.
Once upon a time, journalists saw them as freedom fighters against oppression. Back then, they would have been outraged that someone risked 14 years in jail for sharing information – an act that harmed no-one. But today, in the time of the Public Interest Journalism Fund, journalists bay for the blood of anyone the Establishment wants destroyed.
For well-known lecturer and former friend Paul Buchanan, the change from a bright young energetic student who looked likely to become an environmental activist, to the conspiracy theorist Spierer is today, is unfathomable.
“What happened to her?… It’s deeply disturbing.”
It’s hardly unfathomable that a bright young student, brainwashed into supporting globalist causes, would eventually wisen up and realise there was more to things than surface appearances. But this execrable hatchet job would imply that Spierer must have gone mad, or turned to the dark side somehow.
In summary, this propaganda piece is designed to do one thing: make the rest of the slaves too afraid to leave the plantation, as Spierer did. It reveals in ghastly detail how low the standards of modern journalism have fallen, and serves as a crystal-clear example of stochastic terrorism. That the political Establishment is using taxpayers’ money to fund hit pieces against their enemies should deeply concern everyone.
I was raised in a Christian denomination called Roman Catholicism. Despite this influence, I had no understanding of what a religious outlook meant. Frankly, I had no idea I was participating in a religion, nor did I have any idea that I was ensconced in a denomination within that religion. It was just the world around me, like the sky, the grass, and neighbourhood cats.
I did suspect that there was probably something very deep and meaningful behind all of the imagery present in church. There was something inscrutably mysterious about Jesus hanging on the crucifix up behind the altar, his smooth white limbs pinned to beams of wood, his gaze directed steadily toward the sky.
Since I was an attendant of a Catholic church as well as the attached school, I had no formal exposure to other religious or spiritual systems. In a world predating the Internet, my education was limited to the school library. My world was fairly closed in that regard. There was no competition for explanations of the world.
I have no doubt that you would find this kind of cloistered childhood environment, accidental or premeditated, represented in nearly every religious tradition of the world. The closed nature of this education was not unique to any form of Christianity. From the earliest age, I felt a calling to deeper understanding that I find difficult to express in words.
That a faith should outgrow its parent religion now seems to me as natural as that love should outgrow the bonds of its limitations. This is why Buddhism has an image of using a raft (symbolizing methods, techniques, and religious instruction) to cross to the other shore, only to let the raft go once it has served its purpose.
There was a hymn that resonated with me in childhood. It presented the imagery of leaving one’s boats behind on familiar shores, and setting the heart across the deep. This metaphorical imagery was profound to me in value. It was one of the first times I felt the pull of mysticism hidden amongst the ordinary. I realised even from within the confined structure of Roman Catholicism there was suggestion of something so deep and valuable that even that which was conventionally accepted would need to be left behind in order to come into contact with that which was true.
It was like a crack of mystical light shining though the otherwise banal woodwork. This is a theme that would follow me for decades, and an attitude of reverence and mystery that accompanied me into my much later readings in the Buddhist tradition, where I started to learn more about the role and function of an authentic teaching. Such a teaching doesn’t exist purely in and of itself – in order to close the circle, it requires one who is ready and willing to attend the lesson, to listen with every fibre of one’s being as though one’s soul was filled with nothing but eyes and ears.
I would like to share two significant spiritual experiences from childhood that suggest to me that the there is a universality in divine symbology, comprehensible even to a child instructed in limited ways. It may also point to prior existences or learnings. In any case, the point I would like you to remember is that my spiritual education was limited to the mythology presented in Christianity, specifically the version espoused by the Roman Catholic Church. I didn’t even know there were alternative views. That was the cultural framework with which I had to understand what I heard, read, saw and experienced as a child.
I did, however, have television.
There was a critical moment in an animated movie I watched. I believe my age would have likely been four or five. I never usually knew what was happening in movies because I have never had a particularly good attention span. What happened in this movie was that a young boy was stabbed by a sword at sea, on a boat. His lifeless body fell into the water, surrounded by ribbons of red blood. I remember this scene filling me with such a deep sadness as I related to the boy, wondering what it would mean to me and my family if such a thing were to happen to me.
A later scene toward the end of the movie showed the opening of the petals of a flower, and inside was a baby. I had no idea what the movie was about, but I understood intuitively at that moment that this same boy had been reborn into a new form. I suddenly knew the heart of reincarnation without terminology, instruction or cultural framework. It was as clear as watching a new dawn, or hearing the clear peal of a bell. It is difficult to describe what arriving at such an understanding is like, particularly when there is no pre-existing spiritual or religious framework to assimilate the experience. It was, and still is, one of the most profound and spiritually resonant experiences of my life.
The other experience was also due to watching a movie, in this case ‘The Dark Crystal’ on television on Christmas Eve. I believe I may have been between five and six years old. From the opening credits of that movie, I was utterly engaged and entranced. It was as though some vital instructions from the distant past had been set up to examine everything that was to follow in full awareness.
Again, lacking any of the framework which I now see clearly laid out in other traditions, I came across a profound experience of what seemed a soul-level comprehension. As the movie concluded, there was presented what I now recognise as the very distinctively Eastern, very substantially deep Advaitic notion that the duality present in the world expressed in the polarity of good versus evil is actually due to a vital division at the core level of our being.
Insofar as childrens’ movies are concerned, we were typically fed on the standard narrative about the battle between the forces of good and evil, with good always prevailing, and any other result being a kind of sacrilege or a cause for nihilistic despair. The message of ‘The Dark Crystal’ was categorically different, and it left me speechless – really in a state of what I would describe as transcendent awe.
It wasn’t preaching the usual polarity of good versus evil, it was suggesting that the reason there was even a split into this apparent duality was due to a fundamental wound, a core separation. It was further suggested that the healing of this rift not only collapsed the apparent duality of good and evil, but restored to its natural state that which was itself neither intrinsically good nor evil, but whole and therefore inclusive of every possible expression.
Now, I could never hope to explain this to anyone as a child, because I didn’t have the words, only the realisation – but the understanding of the concept of nonduality had shaken me to my core. I believe these two experiences were necessary to awaken me to a lifelong gravitation toward the mystical traditions in which I found gentle directions homeward to that which can never be satisfactorily expressed in words.
There is a point of spiritual maturity at which we forego our preoccupation with good and evil and begin to level our gaze toward wholeness and completion.
It is the stamp of a parent’s spiritual integrity that they give their child permission to find their own path to the truth. To fail to do so speaks to a level of relative immaturity. I had many childhood friends who were home-schooled because their parents did not want their intended course of development to be affected by alternate viewpoints or ‘negative influences’. For the most part, those friends were successfully indoctrinated into adulthood views resembling the closed and limited views of their parents.
I remember well the rationale woven into the mindset across families at the time. It was always some form of: ‘we have been reassured that our views are correct, because the word of God as presented in the Bible is infallible, therefore we reserve the right to override our childrens’ choices and freedoms on the authority of superior access to knowledge. The value of this is that we are only sparing them from error in advance, since any movement away from the path will be error, so in restricting their freedoms we are actually giving them the highest service of love and care’.
Only a lack of faith and a disrespect for human freedom would insist on a child’s staying put in a servitude of blind devotion. Yes, these parents love their children and want what is best for them. This is not a guarantee that they are seeing clearly. Even when superficial systems of inquiry are promoted, one is encouraged to arrive at the ‘right’ answer. Perhaps the reason that fundamentalist religion in every form the world over is so offended by the principle of evolution by natural selection is not so much that it removes the role of a creator, but more that it implies that some form of change might be central to the function of reality.
What could offend a fundamentalist religion more? It consists of an ideology of belief structures which are so fragile, and are up against the weight of the entire universe which is a spiritual masterclass in change itself. Such an ideology is dead and fixed, not fluid and alive, and the significance of this is that you have to work with a system that is completely incongruent with the fabric of reality. This is why those systems of belief must be endlessly promoted and reinforced through indoctrination (our ideas must be right, discard your objections), evangelism, browbeating and wrongheaded pressure to procreate.
Imagine being told that you should morally be bringing another life in the world just as another vector for ignorance and unconsciousness to survive in some form. The value of that life is not intended to be a loving celebration of life and freedom, but a pawn of flesh and bone. It is a powerful trance indeed that would convince a parent to bear children with the lowest, most shadow-enshrouded motivations and still dress it up as obedience and sanctity. To forbid abortion is a perversion of the same reasoning.
Which is not say that such a tradition cannot be composed of beautiful, kind-hearted people, and genuinely loving families. I have found such people in all walks of life. These people are often natural mystics. The knowing of divine truth is not upended by any religious or doctrinal brutality inflicted upon them. Perhaps they can only have continued to survive under such conditions because they have found the means by which their souls find nourishment from within. Perhaps they are divinely called to serve in such dark corners of the world to support similar growth in others.
I remember meetings in which people who had decided to leave were renounced. Different members of the church would have the opportunity to voice what they believed were the persons shortcomings as a Christian and a church member, and I remember feeling that there was a great sense of fortitude amongst the church, establishing who they were defined as, as opposed to who they were not. The ostracizing of the outgroup is in the same movement the building up of the in-group, and everyone felt very cohesive, righteous and proud.
This is a clear example of the ego’s masterful illusion of seeking to establish a sense of unity through separation, or other-making. It may look cosy on the surface, but it is poisonous. This is because in exchange for the precarious sense of cohesion it affords, it demands a human sacrifice. The same thing is ubiquitously present in modern social politics. You are cajoled by your peers to throw the least of your brothers under the bus so that you can feel a fleeting sense of unity.
It is said that the devil’s greatest trick was to convince mankind that he did not exist. I do not think this is very clever at all, and I would have to admit that I think the devil would be far more nefarious in his approach. I think it would be more accurate to suggest that the greatest trick the devil could ever play would be to so convince people that they are on the side of truth, good and righteousness, that they are prepared to close their hearts and minds to those who occupy perspectives different from their own.
The people who either left the church group or were excommunicated were openly decried and generally not tolerated to be spoken to again by other members, even though most remained committed to the Catholic faith. You will find the same blindness in groups the world over, religious or otherwise.
We aren’t talking about good versus evil, right versus wrong. We are talking about educational levels not being universally applicable. And no, I am not claiming that one life philosophy or religious tradition is kindergarten whilst another represents university. My experience has been that wherever you find yourself, in whichever time or space, you will unfailingly find the highest level of education available to you, as befitting your needs.
I believe the syllabus of these educational needs are often far more complex and occluded than we are privy to at the human level. I would never assume someone is either unsophisticated or indifferent to their soul’s education because they adhere to one system versus another, nor would I assume another to be advanced for the same reasons.
Both fools and wise men wear exceptionally convincing disguises in this world.
One of the most prolific theologians of the west, Thomas Aquinas, was an example of a prodigiously educated mind who speculated on the nature of the divine for a lifetime. By some, he is seen as a sainted father of the Catholic faith, a Church Doctor and master theologian whose work is mentioned in the same breath as Aristotle and Plato. Others, particularly those of a more mystical than philosophical persuasion, might be inclined to say that such a person may have been little more than a windbag for most of their life.
Towards the end of his life, however, Aquinas effectively retracted his theological views. He indicated that nothing he had said about anything had touched upon the truth and that all we could know about the divine could not be formulated in words, and in doing so, he took a vow of silence that reputedly lasted the remainder of his life.
I have come across few consistencies in this strange universe, but one of them is that all things contain at their core a valuable lesson, whether a relationship, a miracle, an illness, a disaster, a birth or a death. The opportunity to learn (or unlearn) is never absent. Another is that all things are in a state of constant flux – everything that arises will also pass away. The third is that there is no situation in which waking up to your true nature is anything but beneficial.
You may not like it, you may not be ready for it yet, you may not want it at all – but the path of awakening to truth and setting foot on the path of the Dharma can only bring medicine to the soul.
You could assemble a symposium of the brightest minds on the planet arguing why a plant shouldn’t thrive on sunlight, but this would not impact one single plant’s most fundamental requirement for sunlight. Waking up to your true nature is no different. You can wake up in a church, a mosque, a kindergarten or a psychiatric hospital. There is no prescription for what that should look like, or how that should pan out over the course of that lifetime.
In my own experience, it has been a little like the mind over the course of a lifetime was caught within an artificial hurricane in a cylinder with a separate person in the middle being hit by thousands of chunks of debris hurtling around at tremendous speed.
The noise and chaos force you to cringe, cower and spend your time covering your most sensitive areas, including of course your eyes. You might think such a situation would be like hell, but if you didn’t know any different for 20 or 30 years, it would just be assumed that that was the way things are. Then one day, in some unpredictable and graceful moment out of time, the power to the hurricane machine is suddenly switched off. It just happens – you didn’t do it.
Then, all of the debris that has been flying around punishing you and attacking you loses its momentum and falls to your feet. What would you think, or feel, or conclude if that happened to you? There are no accurate words here. We have all had this revelation to some degree, it is just a matter of how it has caught your attention. You tend to notice it very clearly if you have been involved in turbulent suffering and discord. Other times it will just casually drop in uninvited.
The point is, once you settle into what this realisation has to offer, everything changes. Your entire outlook of reality changes, from the ground up. Now you are looking at a world that was not designed to cause you suffering. How could that even be possible?
You change by degrees at the very centre of your mind and your heart, with no effort on your part, only a willingness and an availability. All of those vulnerable and sensitive areas of your body (yes, including your eyes) are no longer in danger, and so inch by inch, you begin to trust that you can correct your posture of cowering and uncover your eyes. Now what does the world look like?
You are tasked with the discovery of something of critical importance in this world.
I will continue to be drawn to the Sun-like beauty of truth until breath leaves this body. I will continue to explore the depths the great teachers pointed to, even if only through the silence of my being. Beyond that, I neither need nor ask for knowledge, because the light they speak of, the same light I speak of, is unmistakably present here and now. Place your trust in what is real, that which echoes through the halls of your being. You can be very surprised by reality, even shocked, but you cannot be led astray by it.
Hold this lightly as you place a foot into the darkness.
The supreme intelligence inseparable from us is not here to brutalise us into compliance. Only we do that to ourselves, and we are consummate masters at it. It makes no difference which religion or lack thereof someone tells you they are. See the one who comes before you.
As the philosopher Douglas Harding put it so eloquently, to lack divinity is to lack being. This love that is here does not play by the rules we humans have set up – exclusion, denial of affection to manipulate, conditional love. This misunderstanding, this ignorance, is the source of the majority of self-created psychological suffering.
There are at least two things I know would be wrong for me to accept. Firstly, it is that there is anyone in the universe we should harden our hearts to, anyone who is not merely a messenger of the divine in a clever disguise. To accept this would be wrong-minded to me.
The second is that there is anything worth grasping onto for dear life, anything however true or noble, that is not ultimately worth letting go of into the ocean of Truth. Beautiful as they may be, they are all fingers pointing to the moon. They are all contrived means and methods of directing one home to reality.
Liberation isn’t partial, and it isn’t locked away in some imaginary future heaven for nice or obedient people – it is fully here, now, present and ongoing. We only come to it by meeting our present conditions fully and unreservedly. It is there for the just and unjust, the pure and impure. If it wasn’t, what would support reality? Upon what foundations would the universe rest?
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Simon P Murphy is a Nelson-based esotericist and philosopher, and author of His Master’s Wretched Organ, a brilliant collection of weird fiction stories.
As Western society continues to collapse, the psychological health of Westerners continues to worsen. As it does, the rate of Loser Syndrome increases, which is the main reason why there’s so much visible trashiness in society today. This essay looks at the causes and effects of this phenomenon.
Loser Syndrome can be found wherever a person has a negative effect upon their social environment because of a weak psychological makeup. Losers are those who cause their family, community or nation more problems than they solve, usually because of a shitty attitude that makes them refuse to put their ego aside long enough to make any positive contribution to anyone else’s life.
It’s not fair to call people losers if they were born with genetic conditions or if they were abused or neglected as children and left with traumatic stress disorders. Such people may be unlucky, but they’re not necessarily losers, as they are still fully capable of entertaining the gods through striving to overcome their conditions. The loser does not strive to overcome; true Loser Syndrome can be understood as a psychospiritual phenomenon.
There are two aspects to Loser Syndrome.
The first is giving up on life. This involves rejecting the reality about life and its temporary nature. The loser has no ambitions apart from vague power fantasies. He mumbles, doesn’t make eye contact when talking, disrespects people, and generally lowers the tone of any environment he’s in. His eyebrows are either knotted in a surly scowl or relaxed in a dimwit gaze. He has surrendered.
Some losers are narcissistic enough to dress and groom themselves well, but give themselves away both through body language and through a child-like solipsism that makes them act as if they were alone in the world (a.k.a. Main Character Syndrome). A predilection for destruction over creation is typical of someone who has given up. As such, Loser Syndrome acts like a cancer in the wider social body, preventing it from thriving.
The second, and most important aspect, is an expectation that others will also give up on life. Anyone who tries hard to achieve something, anyone who strives, is sneered at and ripped down by those afflicted by Loser Syndrome. They would rather that everyone else sink to the lowest level of society, and become like them.
If the loser themselves cannot be venerated, no-one can. So anyone who venerates someone else has to be torn down. Such is the viciousness and depth of the resentment that Loser Syndrome is fuelled by. Those with it are always unhappy to see other people do well. The successes of their friends and family bring them no joy. In fact, such successes can often create further resentment.
Herein it’s clear that Loser Syndrome is a slave morality. Like the other slave moralities, Loser Syndrome lifts up the lowest and most execrable (other losers) and pushes down the honourable and the good (non-losers). The more society hates you, the more the loser likes you, and vice-versa.
If misery loves company, so does trashiness.
To some extent, Loser Syndrome and trashiness are similar things, however Loser Syndrome is unique for its aggression. Many trashy people are happy-go-lucky, whereas the genuine loser strives mightily to take everyone else down. Anyone happy, especially if they’re happy about themselves, has to be attacked.
In this sense, Loser Syndrome can be conceptualised as an advanced form of trashiness, in the same way that psychopathy is an advanced form of narcissism. Trashiness can be fun and light-hearted, but Loser Syndrome is a pathological intensification of trashiness that emanates low vibrations. Normal people can have trashy friends, but they can’t have loser friends, because those losers will either rip the Normies down or find a reason to turn on them.
Unfortunately for us, increasing economic pressures mean that Loser Syndrome is predicted to become more common.
The harsher the economic climate becomes, the fewer people get to enjoy a dignified standard of living, which means the more resentment exists. When inequality reaches such a degree that those born without talents see no hope of climbing the ladder, the destructive intent characteristic of Loser Syndrome will fully explode.
Loser Syndrome is ultimately a social contagion that is emblematic of collapse. No-one in authority seems to give a shit, so why should anyone else? Unfortunately, when someone does start giving a shit, and drives the losers out, chances are they will be an authoritarian psychopath who causes tremendous collateral damage. The loser, therefore, is the harbinger of widespread suffering.
