August 22, 2021

CAITLIN JOHNSTONE: “The End Of Illusions”

It happened suddenly and unexpectedly, as drastic changes often do.

You awoke in the morning from an unusual sleep, and something about your waking experience was very different. You couldn’t say what exactly, but there was a deep relaxation. A clenching you’d always carried with you simply wasn’t there anymore, a clenching you’d never even noticed until it was gone.

Everything was very still.

You removed your blankets and swung your legs over the side of the bed, just like every other morning before, but this morning something very different happened. When you stood up, “you” didn’t come with.

Standing happened. There just wasn’t anyone doing it. The body was upright, there was the experience of pressure on the bottoms of the feet and cool morning air on the skin. But it wasn’t happening to anybody.

The sensation of being a self wasn’t there anymore. The energetic contraction in the body around the belief in a separate “me” character had left and been replaced with nothing, leaving only wide openness and inseparability.

The eyes moved around the room, and rather than experiencing this as a person looking out at the world it was instead simply appearances appearing to no one in an inseparable field of experience, with the bridge of the nose no more personal than the wall. The bird songs and other morning noises arose in the same way: as impersonal appearances with no separate hearer.

Thoughts about what was happening began to flicker, but they sputtered out and lost their energy as quickly as they arose. They were premised on a context that simply wasn’t there anymore; without the thinker being experienced as a real entity, they simply showed up as mental noises, without being imbued with the power of belief. Thinking could certainly be used as necessary, but putting together a string of compulsive thoughts would’ve been like trying to build a tower on the surface of a bottomless lake. There just wasn’t any foundation to build on anymore.

Without belief in the thinking, knowing, labeling, dividing me-mind, life was suddenly experienced as a perfect mystery. Everything that arose was simply an impersonal appearance appearing to no one in a timeless, boundless openness, with no notion that anything needed to be done about it. Everything was infinite perfection.

This all came with a deep and profound peace, a peace that was clearly seen to have always been there all along, with only the belief in the mind and its incessant babbling stories about “self” and “other” obscuring it. This is the natural state of human consciousness. The unaltered state. The unconfused state. Not even truly hidden, simply overlooked because of its simplicity. The self which seemingly disappeared had never truly been there in the first place. It was all an illusion. A dream.

And it was immediately understood that this is the underlying cause of all misery in our world. Humans mistakenly believing their bodies and minds to be separate from the universe, separate from the swirling sea of life on this planet, constructing psychological me-characters to symbolize the plight of each human organism and then using believed thoughts to try and ensure the safety and security of that fictional character.

And from there those illusory mental ego constructs set about competing with what they perceive to be other selves out there in the world, trying to manipulate and control them to guarantee the me-character is safe from harm and always has enough of what it needs. The cleverest ego characters figure out how to manipulate people at mass scale, using their tendency to believe mental narratives against them and planting power-serving ideas in their minds.

And it was seen that this is all ultimately the result of being a species with a newly-evolved capacity for abstract thought giving birth to babies at a highly undeveloped stage due to the size of their newly-evolved brains relative to the size of the birth canal. We spend our formative years as helpless organisms surrounded by giants, and as our ability to think comes online we start trying to use it to protect ourselves from traumatic experiences like being startled or left crying in the dark a little too long. Before the age of two we’ve constructed a mental “me” character so that we can use various strategies for getting what we want, leading to the construction of more and more egocentric mental habits of increasing complexity that are all geared toward trying to keep us safe.

It’s simply an innocent mistake, made by very young members of a very young species. When people talk about the “ego” they are referring to something that has no actual independent reality; it describes a series of mental habits that are energetically imbued with the power of belief out of concern for the safety and security of the organism. Contrary to what some say, the path to peace is not to “get rid of the ego” or to “kill the ego”, but for life to open its eyes to the reality that the ego never actually existed as a real thing in the first place.

And it was seen that there’s not actually any reason humanity cannot collectively awaken to this perspective. The ability to awaken from the illusion of the mental self exists within us all, and probably exists for a reason. Every species eventually reaches a point where it must adapt to changing conditions in an ever-changing world, and with egoic consciousness threatening our existence with climate collapse and nuclear war we are most certainly arriving at that point today.

But it was also seen that if this does not happen, that too will be perfect. Only the ego seeks to control life against life’s will, and if it is life’s will that humanity go the way of the dinosaur then that will have the same thunderous beauty as every other appearance twirling within this eternal mystery void.

The eyes were open. Everything was clearly perceived. The illusions were no more.

~via CaitlinJohnstone.com

June 18, 2020

CAITLIN JOHNSTONE: “On Maintaining Perspective In The Year 20 F*cking 20”

Whenever an author, filmmaker or other artist sets out on the noble endeavor of pointing people toward the ideal of living life to its fullest, they usually wind up depicting a character going off on all sorts of wild adventures, skydiving, trekking across the Himalayas, and so on.

In my opinion reminding people to live life to its fullest is the artist’s single most important job, but this is also where most storytellers get it wrong. Most people who live wild, interesting lives sleepwalk through the whole ride just like everyone else; in the end they’re left with a few amusing anecdotes rattling around in their skulls and a secret sense of dissatisfaction.

This is because most people don’t really show up for life. Even if they’re outwardly doing all sorts of amazing things and racking up a bunch of impressive accomplishments, their attention was mostly consumed with babbling mental chatter almost the entire time. Whatever happens in their life, they weren’t really there for it.

The real way to live life to its fullest is to simply be present for it.

I point this out because, at the midway point of the year 2020, I think it’s extremely relevant.

For better or for worse, we are at a time of great change from which the world will likely never return. We are heading into what is probably the most significant period in human history to date, and it would be wise to pay attention.

But when I look at what people are talking about in my social media feeds, even relatively awake and tuned-in people, I see a lot of chatter about the same-old, same-old. People are still yammering on about the same old electoral politics they’ve been on about for years, still babbling about PC culture being out of control and how crazy some people’s gender pronouns are, still dunking on shitlibs for likes and retweets. Even my own articles I notice get a lot more shares and attention if they involve something that tickles mainstream partisan interests like criticizing Trump or bashing the Democrats.

And I just cannot for the life of me imagine continuing to hold such priorities halfway through the year 20-f*cking-20.

At this time we need to drastically change our perspectives and seriously re-evaluate our priorities. We’re all standing on a precipice together and we have no idea what the plunge will look like, and people are still babbling about whether or not you should wear a face mask at the grocery store. This, to me, is a nonsensical approach to our current predicament.

All the stuff that used to consume so much of our attention in the analysis of establishment power structures has been rendered far less important by recent developments. All these recent developments will probably be rendered less relevant by whatever major events are coming next. The only consistent pattern this year has been a greater and greater deviation from old patterns.

For that reason, it makes sense to do two things:

Shift toward emphasizing a bigger-picture perspective of what’s going on. Fixate less on smaller occurrences and pay more attention to broader overall trends. It doesn’t mean ignore the smaller things, it just means view them in the proper context of a world that’s moving into more and more unfamiliar territory in bigger and bigger ways.

Pay attention. Big things are happening right now, and it would be a damn shame to miss them.

We are experiencing something huge here, and it would be a shame to let it go to waste.

We should rather all approach our current situation at this point in history like someone who is trying to live life to its fullest: mindful, curious, not hung up on petty mental narratives, and appreciative of how lucky we are to be here right now to witness this thing.

And, much like the approach of the end of life, this moment in history should ideally cause us to cast aside petty differences and bring us closer together.

~via Caitlin Johnstone

March 26, 2020

CAITLIN JOHNSTONE: “Quarantine Meditations: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix”

The world is messed up because powerful people think in terms of narrative control, and ordinary people don’t. Change that and you change the world.

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Hot tip: Dump all stocks and invest in becoming the kind of decent human being who people will want to help in chaotic times.

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Let’s go humans! The sooner we can put aside our differences all around the world and unite to beat this virus the sooner we can get back to exploiting each other over an imaginary monetary system and murdering each other with bombs!

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FYI if your government is pushing the suspension of civil liberties before coming up with a healthcare plan or providing you with financial security in an unprecedented economic crisis, then their desire to suspend civil liberties has nothing to do with fighting the pandemic.

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Protecting the citizenry in situations like this is the thing governments are supposed to be for. It’s the single most compelling argument for their existence, by a very wide margin. Any government which doesn’t take good care of its people right now does not deserve to exist.

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If this virus hasn’t yet caused you to seriously re-evaluate your priorities in life, it should. For better or worse we appear to be standing on the brink of some very significant worldwide paradigm shifts. Where you choose to put your mental energy right now should reflect this.

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Powerful people will work to advance authoritarian agendas which they have no intention of reversing during this pandemic. They are working on it right now. This is not a possibility, this is a certainty.

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I love that so many people are pleading with the Trump administration to end Iran sanctions during the pandemic because it’s killing civilians, but it won’t work. They know it’s killing civilians, and they know it will kill a lot more. That has always been the objective. Pompeo has openly admitted that Iran is being sanctioned no so that its government will change its behavior, but so that the Iranian people will get so desperate from all the suffering and devastation that they rise up and overthrow their government. Sanctions are the only form of warfare where it is considered legal and acceptable to deliberately target a civilian population with deadly force. That’s what they’ve been doing this whole time. It’s what they want. The pandemic only helps them. Every single Iranian who is dying because of these sanctions is on Trump. The MAGA narrative that he’s better on war than Obama has been thoroughly invalidated by every metric.

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Humanity is uniting against this common crisis. We’re uniting in our desire to beat this virus and protect our more vulnerable populations, and in a shared awareness that this thing could technically kill any of us. If ever there was a catalyst for a shift in consciousness, this is it.

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We appear to be watching a confluence of factors on a trajectory to push the world toward vast changes which may leave it unrecognizable in some ways within a matter of months. Maybe we don’t need to pour as much mental energy as we used to into sectarian infighting and petty social media spats.

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Nothing’s the same and it never will be again. F*ck seizing the means of production. Seize this moment. Take back everything they took from us and refuse to give it back. Also seize the means of production because you can and why not.

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Every time there’s a major mainstream narrative shift half my mentions are people going “Caitlin I’m so disappointed in you for saying something I disagree with. Normally I agree with you but now here you are not agreeing with me, like you’re an independent person or something.”

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The nation that is circling the planet with hundreds of military bases and engaging in countless undeclared military operations around the world is the belligerent rogue nation. Everyone else is, at worst, acting in self-defense in response to this belligerence. Governments using force to dominate the planet put every human being on a trajectory toward extinction via nuclear armageddon, and should be vehemently opposed. One government is the worst offender in this area, by a very, very, very wide margin. And it ain’t China.

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Every few weeks, depending on who the empire is targeting at a given moment, I swing from arguing with liberals about a nation liberals hate to arguing with conservatives about a nation conservatives hate, or vice versa. And they always think they’re different from the others.

“Caitlin I normally agree with you, but I don’t know what’s gotten into you supporting Evil Nation X like this!” they say, firmly believing that they’re doing something original and unique.

“This Official Bad Guy is different from all the others, Caitlin!” they say. “This one’s real!”

It’s like listening to a serial loser-dater explain that her new boyfriend with the neck tattoos is actually a really great guy.

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I oppose warmongering against Venezuela and China and they say it’s because I love communism. I oppose warmongering against Iran and they say it’s because I love theocracy. I oppose warmongering against Russia and Syria and they say it’s because I love autocracy. Maybe I just oppose warmongering.

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Rank-and-file Dems unwittingly consented to cold war escalations against Russia out of concern for election interference. Rank-and-file Republicans are now doing the same with China out of concern for a virus outbreak. But both escalations were pre-planned by government agencies.

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The only reason people don’t worry about cold war escalations against China and Russia like they do about hot wars with non-nuclear powers is because we got lucky in the last cold war. But that’s all it was: sheer, dumb luck. No one was ever in control during that time. Not once. Nobody likes to think about the fact that we came within a hair’s breadth of total annihilation on multiple occasions during the last cold war due to communication breakdowns and tech malfunctions. That can easily happen again, but without getting lucky. People have a tendency to believe they succeeded because they were in control and lost because they lost control, but nobody was ever in control. We survived by sheer, dumb luck. With hot wars they take a few lives here, a few lives there. With cold war it’s an all-or-nothing dice roll that nothing goes wrong; no tech glitches, no miscommunications, even when things get very tense. And you roll those dice every single day. And with every escalation you add more dice.

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All arguments the US government makes against any “regime” it dislikes are completely invalidated by its alliance with Saudi Arabia alone, to say nothing of all the other tyrannical governments it’s allied with.

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If you find yourself thinking more thoughts about China’s authoritarian government than about the abusive authoritarian governments of US allies like Saudi Arabia, Israel, Turkey, Egypt, the Philippines etc, it’s because you’ve been propagandized to align you with US interests.

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Establishment narrative managers aim their publications not at their followers but at other establishment narrative managers, seeking their approval. Alternative media should always do the opposite and address the people; too many also engage in upward-looking approval-seeking.

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Everything’s been in a steadily accelerating pattern of unpatterning for a good while now, since well before the virus. There are people who think they’ll be able to shore up control through this thing, but you have no control in a tornado. Nature, which includes homo sapiens, wins out.

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