You run into a lot of despair in this line of work. The more you learn about the mechanisms of power, the more hopeless things seem at first glance.
The political system is totally locked down, with anyone who tries to upend the status quo being aggressively sabotaged by the mass media and their own political party.
Technology, which futurists have long heralded as the deus ex machina which will liberate humanity from its self-destructive ways, is owned by plutocrats with a vested interest in maintaining the status quo, and is pervasively infiltrated by murderous intelligence agencies from top to bottom.
Even attempts to circulate information about the dangers of war, ecocide and oligarchy are consistently sabotaged by internet censorship, blanket de-platforming and mass media propaganda, and even imprisonment if one’s truth-telling becomes too successful.
Still, I remain unwaveringly hopeful. Not because I foresee any of those massive obstacles vanishing at any time in the near future, but because I see an escape route that none of them are blocking.
I have had a great many bizarre and utterly unanticipated experiences, some of them ongoing, which assure me beyond a shadow of a doubt that humanity is capable of far, far more than our consensus worldview about ourselves accounts for. Most of those experiences I will probably never share publicly, because, while I often venture well off the beaten path in my commentary, if I discussed those experiences people will think I’m way more insane than they already believe me to be. But I don’t mind sharing here that I know from my own experience that humans are capable of radically and permanently shifting into a much healthier and efficacious relationship with mental narrative, which happens to be the mechanism by which existing power structures keep us locked down.
Society Is Made Of Narrative. Realizing This Is Awakening From The Matrix.
This is the clearest I've been able to sum it all up so far.https://t.co/JqbZMKn7ov
— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) August 22, 2018
But so what, right? Just because an individual is capable of exiting the fearful egoic state of consciousness which propagandists and social engineers exploit to manipulate us into consenting to the status quo doesn’t mean that everybody is. People have been writing about spiritual enlightenment for millennia, and still we remain collectively asleep. Believing that such a shift is possible on a mass scale is childish and absurd. Right?
Well, maybe. That objection certainly makes sense from the perspective of our consensus worldview about what humans are capable of. Except people who’ve been coaching others into this shift for a long time say in no uncertain terms that it’s becoming more and more common.
“For the first time there is a large scale awakening on our planet,” spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle said in an interview last year. “Why now? Because if there is no change in human consciousness now, we will destroy ourselves and perhaps the planet. The insanity of the collective egoic mind, amplified by science and technology, is rapidly taking our species to the brink of disaster. Evolve or die: that is our only choice now. Without considering the Eastern world, my estimate is that at this time about ten percent of people in North America are already awakening. That makes thirty million Americans alone, and in addition to those people in other North American countries, about ten percent of the population of Western European countries are also awakening. This is probably enough of a critical mass to bring about a new earth. So the transformation of consciousness is truly happening even though they won’t be reporting it on tonight’s news. Is it happening fast enough? I am hopeful about humanity’s future, much more so now than when I wrote The Power of Now. In fact that is why I wrote that book. I really wasn’t sure that humanity was going to survive. Now I feel differently. I see many reasons to be hopeful.”
Tolle is easily the best-known teacher on the subject of enlightenment in the western world, and he’s been doing it for decades. There’s not much research available on this topic, but if anyone in the west has interacted with enough people and gathered enough experience to make such a declaration, it would be him.
But what if he’s wrong? Well again, maybe. But he’s not alone in this perspective.
“There’s a phenomenon happening in the world today. More and more people are waking up—having real, authentic glimpses of reality,” writes Adyashanti, another longtime popular awakening coach. “In the beginning of my teaching work, most of the people who came to me were seeking these deeper realizations of spirituality. They were seeking to wake up from the limiting and isolated senses of self they had imagined themselves to be. It’s this yearning that underpins all spiritual seeking: to discover for ourselves what we already intuit to be true— that there is more to life than we are currently perceiving. But as time has passed, more and more people are coming to me who have already had glimpses of this greater reality.”
Adyashanti gets a bit more specific than Tolle, saying that it’s non-abiding “glimpse”-type awakenings in particular that are growing more common, which often happen spontaneously without having been sought out.
“This glimpse of awakening, which I call non-abiding awakening, is becoming more and more common,” he writes. “It happens for a moment, an afternoon, a day, a week—maybe as long as a month or two. Awareness opens up, the sense of the separate self falls away—and then, like the aperture on a camera lens, awareness closes back down.”
Jac O’Keeffe, another awakening coach who’s been teaching for some time, has more to add on the subject. She said in a 2015 interview that the awakening process, which used to be a difficult and much more physiologically gruelling ordeal for humans, is coming to us more easily not just as a process, but in terms of how physically taxing it is as well.
“We live in an interesting time, and whether it’s a leap in the evolution of consciousness, or whether it’s because of the industrial age and the quickening that has come about in how we function as human beings; whether it’s unusual, or whether it’s a part of the pattern, I’m not sure,” O’Keeffe said. “However, what’s happening right now is that there’s a mutation happening because we’re not changing fast enough for the changing mechanisms that we have created in the world. And so the shift in consciousness that’s happening now, it’s phenomenally more rapid than how it used to be. Things are not as concrete and as solid, not as difficult to shift in folk’s perception as it used to be. That’s for sure, for sure.”
“The mechanism of which through this is seen also, there seems to be less of a trauma or a dramatic shift,” O’Keeffe added. “Spiritual shifts used to be really difficult on the body, really difficult on every level — they’re not now. And what is that? How come? It’s like our whole cellular structures are more susceptible to transformation, to the embodiment of a higher frequency, a higher vibration. And you know, while we have more toxicity, we also have more availability of hearing what’s beyond all of it, of information, of new influences, of education, you know? We’re learning how to use the mind at last. And so this is bringing about a quickening in the evolution of consciousness.”
Dr Jeffery A Martin, who has been gathering data on awakened individuals for the Center for the Study of Non-Symbolic Consciousness, told me via email that “We see an uptick in our data that starts about 1996. By this I mean the number of people saying they transitioned after that time versus before.”
“However it is important to note that we have a snowball sample, not a full population sample, so that could be a bias in our data,” Martin added. “If it is not, the only correlate we’ve been able to think of is that the Internet was reaching a level of connectivity and information sharing maturity starting about this time. So practices that were formerly secret or soloed were starting to become more available, and one of our key findings is that the best way to make progress is to find your fit from a practice standpoint.”
“I’m reasonably confident that significantly more people are coming to see True Nature than any other time in human history,” said awakening coach Fred Davis when I asked him for comment on the subject via email, adding, “I do think there are more clear beings on the planet than there were even ten years ago.”
Now obviously awakenings becoming more common than they used to be wouldn’t by itself mean much; humanity overall remains deeply unconscious and we appear to be bound for either extinction or Orwellian dystopia if we continue on our current trajectory at its current rate. But the fact that this phenomenon seems to be getting more common and more easy in various ways indicates that something is up. Something entirely unanticipated, from way out of left field which neither the revolutionaries nor the propagandists have foreseen.
But why would we be experiencing a sudden shift in consciousness? Darwinian evolution doesn’t explain it, since if this phenomenon is real it’s moving far too quickly and without natural selection eliminating the unenlightened from the gene pool at any noticeable rate.
Well, maybe as O’Keeffe suggested it’s got something to do with the industrial age and how it’s changed the way we function as a species, or as Martin theorized is due to the increased availability of spiritual teachings online. We now after all have over 4.5 billion human brains connected to each other by the internet with well over half our world’s population now online, which by itself is per definition a shift in human consciousness without adding any fancy stuff about spiritual enlightenment. It’s hard to imagine such a drastic change not having a significant impact on the way our minds operate collectively. So that could be part of it.
It could also have something to do with the fact that, as Adyashanti once suggested in an interview, we’re all aware on some level that we’re at a point of crisis where we’ll either change or go extinct.
“Crises are often the catalyst for change,” he said. “And I think as humanity is in general we can all start to agree, I hope we’re starting to agree, that we’re coming to a place of crisis. That… we’re coming into contact, not just with our own personal mortality, but our mortality as a species. That we as a species may not survive. And that can provide, just like individual mortality, [that] can lead to a change of consciousness because we realize time’s run out. There is no more time. So in that ‘no more time’ sometimes consciousness can shift. And as humanity I think we’re rapidly approaching that same kind of imperative. Time is running out and so quite naturally there is tremendous pressure on humanity and on humanity’s consciousness right now. We all feel it, right? This tremendous pressure to evolve, to awaken, because somehow intuitively everyone knows that if there’s not some rather dramatic shift in consciousness then this opportunity will be missed.”
Another potential explanation for our apparent “quickening” is the possibility that we’re all a lot more interconnected than we assume we are. Some strange and unexpected anomalies in scientific studies have poked a few uncomfortable holes in the consensus worldview about organisms existing as wholly independent individuals on this earth, which opens up the possibility that one person’s awakening could in some ways inform the level of consciousness of the whole of humanity.
Scientist Rupert Sheldrake has been documenting the curious way animals sometimes appear capable of picking up new skills in ways that learning and genetics don’t seem to account for, like the strange case of laboratory rats around the world suddenly getting better at navigating water mazes from generation to generation following a water maze study in the 1920s by psychologist William McDougall. Sheldrake’s theories are often rejected by mainstream scientists with an extreme emotionality which reveals an egoic fixation on dogma rather than scientific objectivity, but if you’re curious about his ideas he had an interesting appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience a few years ago which outlines his thinking more clearly than any other video I’ve found.
If this is true, if humans are interconnected in such a way that one person’s awakening could be informing the rest of the species, then this could indicate that we are on track for a exponential awakening event of the kind that could transform us as a species overnight.
When futurist Roy Amara said “We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run,” he wasn’t really making a statement about technology, he was making a statement about human cognition. We’re pattern-seeking creatures whose minds tend to think in linear terms within the near future, a tendency which served us well in our evolutionary history when trying to predict when it’s safe to reproduce and where the mammoths will be, but which is absolutely useless in predicting large-scale movements which may be nonlinear. It’s possible that the only reason the predictions the hippies were making about the “great awakening” that started in the sixties was solely because of this cognitive bias Amara spoke of. Perhaps we overestimated the short-term effects of that shift and underestimated its ongoing effects in the long term.
I personally don’t know quite what to make of any of this, which could end up being a good thing. If our future depends on us finding a way out of this ecocidal, omnicidal status quo that the propagandists and manipulators can’t anticipate and slam the door on, it’s going to have to come from an unexpected and mysterious direction. Something does appear to be stirring deep within our species, and for me that’s enough reason to hold out hope and keep pushing for real change. Maybe this shift isn’t what it appears to be from my point of view, and even if it is that doesn’t mean it will necessarily start happening quickly enough, but it’s enough to take a stand on. I believe we’ll either transcend our old self-destructive patterns or perish, so we might as well say “Damn the torpedoes” and sprint toward that transcendence at full speed.
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45 responses to “The Humans Are Waking Up”
There are two forces at work here. One is simple and is merely the sine wave of the human species. After a long dark period the species as a whole is craving order and harmony. This will take us to a so called golden age, but that, too, will get old and in time the species will begin hungering for disorder and disharmony and the cycle will be complete. These movements are like a sine wave that lasts ten or more thousand years from peak to peak. Humans crave novelty and this sine wave describes our need for change. The second force is from outside this material realm. It is sometimes called the Tree of Life. The greatest extinction ever occurred when the plants took over the land. They poisoned the atmosphere with oxygen and killed off most living things. That oxygen was necessary for the arrival of the energy hungry mammals and the steps getting us there were pre-planned. Nothing arises here without a cause from outside this realm. We exist amidst pure illusion. No real cause can be generated from this plane. This entirely unreal world is perhaps a hell of some real world, or perhaps it is a novelty popular at parties and carnivals. Five minutes of trance allows 70 years on “Earth”. Such novelty! We like to imagine that a golden age is lovely harmony and order, but it is a stifling condition, where the most creative act is to invite all the right people to a party, seat them ideally, serve the ideal food and drink, and initiate the right conversation. Ho hum. Right now is the best environment for individual creativity. However, don’t expect money or applause. The good feelings surfacing now are akin to the onset of spring following winter. The movement from one to the other is accompanied by relief, but the big picture remains the same; it is only the changing of a season. Before long we will be weary of summer and be craving the season of fall.
Hi, Caitlin!
Never forget Joe Hill`s Words: Organize the working people !
In a chapter titled The Science of Liberty, in a biography titled EMERSON: The Mind on Fire, what Caitlin is describing is really rocked, as Emerson is railing against the fugitive slave act.
Here’s a quote, regarding Emerson’s essay on Fate(the subject of said chapter): “We can only lead moral lives if we can choose. We can only choose if we are free to do so. *Choosing or acting in the soul is freedom.* [. . . ] At this point “Fate” takes its most interesting and original turn. Emerson asks whether “seeing these two things, fate and power, we are permitted to believe in unity.” He adds, pointedly, “the bulk of mankind believe in two gods. ” Emerson rejects this middlebrow Manichaeism; his real answer comes as he describes the complex interplay of opposites. He describes a world in which fate opposes power, nature opposes thought, determinism opposes freedom, circumstances oppose will.”
The end of the age we’re living in is coming to an end. That’s why an awakening is taking place worldwide. It’s almost time for us to go home. Back to our real home in the stars. Back to our real selves in the higher dimensional realms.
When the change happens, all souls on Earth will remember their past lives and their immortality. (There’s no such thing as death.) We’ll reunite with our families in the cosmos and continue our journeys through eternity.
And we have divine and sacred help in this process. We’re not alone and we’ve never been. Heaven’s got our backs. What’s coming is more wonderful than anyone realizes. Trust me, you’ll see…
Sheldrake’s results have not been replicated by any scientist, but you don’t even need science to see his stuff is nonsense, just common sense. No, all animals of a certain species do *not* automatically learn what other animals of the species have learnt – don’t you think trainers of dogs and horses would have noticed such a thing by now? Duh. But if one absolutely wants to make up a version of reality that one likes instead of recognising actual reality, one can always find a pretext somewhere. Refusing to recognise reality and pretending that it is what one would like it to be is like refusing to recognise ethical and ideological principles and always choosing to do what one feels like doing instead. It all boils down to extreme infantile narcissism – nothing trumps what *I* feel like. There are no facts and no rules, there’s just glorious, world-sized, prince(ss) Me and whatever the f**k I want and make up. (Of course, what this deified Me wants and feels like is still, objectively, simply a product of various real-world facts.) That’s a very morbid and noxious, albeit unfortunately common, tendency, since it naturally and inevitably leads to people’s harming other people as well as themselves.
Caitlin wrote: “It could also have something to do with the fact that, as Adyashanti once suggested in an interview, we’re all aware on some level that we’re at a point of crisis where we’ll either change or go extinct.”
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Yes, and at least in the international relations side people around the world are also waking up:
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“Thirdly, all the countries in the world are now clearly aware of what would happen to them, if they give up and get ‘liberated’ by the Western empire. Iraq, Honduras, Indonesia, Libya and Afghanistan, are the ‘best’ examples.
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“Submitting themselves to the West, countries can only expect misery, absolute collapse and the ruthless extraction of their resources. The poorest country in Asia – Afghanistan – has totally collapsed under NATO occupation.
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“The suffering and pain of the Afghan and Iraqi people is very well known to the citizens of Iran and Venezuela. They are not giving up, because no matter how tough their life is under sanctions and the West-administered terror, they are well-aware of the fact that things could get worse, much worse, if their countries were to be occupied and governed by the Washington and London-injected maniacs. . . .
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“This is a tremendous moment in human history. For the first time, Western imperialism is being not only defeated, but fully unveiled and humiliated. Many are now laughing at it, openly.”
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Suddenly, Western “Regime” Changes Keep Failing – OffGuardian
https://off-guardian.org/2019/08/26/suddenly-western-regime-changes-keep-failing/
Ah, the ‘Hundredth-Monkey’ Syndrome. As in, when enough people attain a higher state of consciousness, it will build up to a critical mass and everyone will attain it, and then real change can finally take place. Will that happen? I certainly would like to think so.
However, my beliefs (if you want to call them that) are way more outrageous than yours, Caitlin. I do think that if what you speak of doesn’t happen and we fail as a species and go extinct, we’ll reincarnate en masse as a new intelligent species, either here on Earth or elsewhere in the Universe, and the entire process of building civilizations, creating art and science etc etc will then begin anew. And if this new species again goes extinct through its own folly, well, then, there’ll be yet another mass reincarnation as a new species, and so on until we finally collectively goddamn learn what we need to learn. Think of it as a cross between Olaf Stapledon and Vedanta.
What makes me think my belief is not entirely implausible? Firstly, reincarnation is already a respectable thesis thanks to the work of people like Ian Stevenson, who has amassed voluminous anecdotal evidence in support of it. (If the ‘scientific establishment’ won’t buy reincarnation, screw them; they’ve already thrown their own credibility out of the window by believing in things like alternative universes and dark matter which actually can’t be observed — and the existence of which therefore can’t be established — and yet rejecting things like psychokinesis for which hard evidence abounds.) Secondly, if the Universe can give rise to an intelligent species once, namely us, then I fail to see why It can’t do it again, and again and again. Third, if we reincarnate individually, I don’t see why we can’t do so collectively as well.
I’m not here to debate with anyone, much less start a flame war or convert anyone to my belief. I just want to share some crazy ideas of mine (actually, why should they be considered crazy?), a perfectly legit thing to do surely. Certainly at this sorry juncture in the ‘evolution’ of our species it is given to me to grant my indulgence to some rather unusual ideas.
End of rant.
Dear Caitlin,
You are at the leading edge of the zeitgeist, you are the only “political” commentator who sees through the lens of real human and spiritual awareness.
I 100% agree with you that the humans are waking up and I feel that the source of it is none other than the numinous divine reality itself breaking through our crust of dried up human brains to open the heart of humanity.
May it be so and thank you for always being your authentic truly human self
Just exactly HOW are these billions of newly-woke folk going to conduct their day to day business/lives? What is going to be the foundation stone of this new, completely-woke, in-touch-with-my-inner-self existence? Is everyone going to have a garden, a few chickens and some milk and beef critters in their back yards (Central Park)? Are there going to be large, automated factories that reduce the need for grinding, mind-numbing manual labor and, if so, just exactly WHO is going to OWN/CONTROL those factories? Is there going to be an internet, similar to the present one, in Woke World, and, if so, who is going to maintain it for what remuneration/reward? Will there be cars and trucks and planes and trains in Woke World? Is drinking water going to still come out of taps and , if so, who’s going to maintain that system? Roads/bridges/infrastructure going to maintain themselves? Are the woke folk going to continue to use “money”?
..
Maybe these are questions that don’t even need to be asked, let alone answered, in a world in which people are perfectly tuned into themsleves and perfectly aware of the foibles of their overlords.
..
Now I understand why Jesus and Tony Robbins did so well.
Yes, Peter and you are talking about is called REVOLUTION.
Americans did it starting in 1776 and lost it in 1812 CIVIL WAR followed in 1871, with the creation of the ORGANIC ACT.
What we have now, with the CHAOS, is the CONSEQUENCE
When I see order followers stop following orders and start breaking ranks, then I would be sure it is happening. Someone already put it right to the point here:
I would suggest two further reasons why people are waking up. The first is psychedelics. Therapeutic psychedelic usage has increased dramatically in the last five years in my observation. I speak in particular of ayahuasca and psylocybin and MDMA, used not for recreation but for emotional and spiritual growth. A lot of people are having their ideas about the world and consciousness radically altered. The second reason is 9/11 Truth. The truth about 9/11 has permeated the population largely through the internet and is radically altering peoples ideas and beliefs about power structures and the wisdom and goodness of the elites.
I don’t share your false hope that somehow millions of people will become more aware of the criminal insanity we have been conditioned to take for normal and will change their minds and behaviors and that that will slow down or even stop the current destruction of society and biosphere. I wish you were right, as you mostly are, but this time I think wishful thinking must have gotten the better of you.
An unrelated remark, if I may. When someone threatens my life, killing the assailant can be called self defense.
What about threatening ALL life, then? Could “neutralizing”” the assailants – industry and olgarchs in cohoots with governments – not be construed to be a (class) act of self defense also? Especially as all other means of dissuading the murderers are (made) ineffective.The only difference I see is scale.
Sorry for being off topic.
In 1957 Smiley Blanton published a book with a title that perfectly sums up or modern crisis, it’s cause and it’s solution: LOVE OR PERISH. This law, which holds true for emerging intelligent life anywhere in any universe, is of course true for us today. This law is the key to understanding all our escalating problems and their possible solution.
Well, yes, Cait, the species has been getting more awake recently and ready for a change. The problem is a lot of them are really being herded into a new and even more pernicious narrative. It is often being framed in a lot of quasi religious mystical crap.
You keep referencing my favourite movies, the Matrix trilogy. If you think about these flicks a bit, you realize that they only make sense if these ‘red pill’ people are really being moved into another manufactured reality. The thing is, if a human society is going to function, there has to be shared narrative about reality. The problem is, who makes the narrative?
There is no way for humans to see reality as it is. This is because it is just too damned complex; too much information to process. But us human critters have evolved this advanced nervous system which enables us to draw an internal map of the external reality around us, and from this to plan for survival.
This does not mean we are self contained units. We are a highly social species, evolved for cooperation. We would never have survived without working together. But this requires a commonly held internal model of reality.
The most successful human societies have been ones in which children are taught the right use of their brains; the cognitive cycle. Then from that, the scientific method. Such societies develop a consensus around a really useful model or narrative.
This is how the pathocracy works; it makes sure people fail to learn the right use of their brains. It imposes false narratives, usually wrapped up in a lot of mystical, religious, ideological crap.
People have been waking up since about 1500, the start of the scientific revolution. We are getting to some kind of tipping point. People of good character and intellect, with good narratives, need to create government.
I do mean government. It isn’t going to happen magically. Going off into a new kind of mysticism, even of the Buddhist variety, is not going to help anything.
The point of such a government is to create the conditions for the scientific revolution to really take hold among humans, and for mysticism and pathocracy to dissolve.
People with an anarchist frame of mind are not going to want to hear this. Such people are generally social misfits looking not to find a more sane reality, but to escape all reality, return to an infantile state. That you can have any human society without an effective government is the post contemptible of delusions.
Such people can be useful tools in creating a new kind of pathocratic hegemony much more vicious than what we have now. Or we can have the kind of governance described above. Which are we waking up to, really?
What if waking up to the limitations of the scientific paradigm is necessary for a higher level of consciousness and bonding with the deeper reality? Science does not hold the answer to it’s deadly consequences – it takes something deeper than science for that. Einstein discerned this correctly.
The loss of mysticism in modern thought is a soul loss that Nietzsche described as the death of God. We are now suffering the inevitable karmic results of this loss of appreciation for this essential dimension of ourselves.
Yeah, the world was so great back when mysticism gave us human sacrifice, All Authority Is From God, the Islamic Conquests, the Crusades, the burning of heretics etc. It was all very ‘soul’-ful and had no ‘deadly consequences’ at all. Or perhaps those were ‘the wrong kinds’ of mysticism – except that somehow there happens to be no objective way to find out *which* mysticism is ‘the right one’, and precisely that absence of objective criteria happens to be a defining – and dare I say slightly problematic – characteristic of all mysticism.
If each of the 10% made the effort to educate and wake up those around them it would
soon be 20%.
Hope springs eternally in the human heart. First we dream our highest hopes, then we get to work realizing and sharing them. Any message that tells us not to dream is false. But to dream, and then not to do the work is worse than futile. If we don’t know how to work for our better world, then work to find out how best to do this work. With enough of us dreaming and working to see our dreams manifest, who knows what wonders may come about? We will never know unless we try……
Human life is an experiment. We make grand hypotheses, then we try them out. This is how the truth is uncovered and realized. On with the great experiment!
Our knowledge of our ignorance is the source of our hope. Who knows the limits of possibility? No one can say.
“To venture is to risk defeat, but not to venture is to lose one’s Soul.” (Kirekegaard)
As I’ve mentioned in a comment before, there is a really straightforward way to explain people waking up, if that is happening – memes. The philosopher Daniel Dennett covers these well and described them as like apps on your necktop – your brain is the hardware and memes can be like new software, allowing your brain to do, see, understand new things. The propagandists understand the power of memes well (especially the fact that some can spread rapidly through cultures). The battle against the narrative woven by the propagandists will be more effective if we understand the power of the meme.
Sheldrake’s ideas fall in the category of extraordinary claims, which require extraordinary evidence. Last time I looked into his ideas (a long time back) such evidence had not been provided.
If wars can be started by lies, peace can be started by truth.
— Julian Assange
What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the wish to find out, which is the exact opposite.
— Bertrand Russell
In oneself lies the whole world and if you know how to look and learn, the door is there and the key is in your hand. Nobody on earth can give you either the key or the door to open, except yourself.
— Jiddu Krishnamurti
Those who have failed to work toward the truth have missed the purpose of living.
— Gautama Buddha
The truth shall set you free.
— Jesus of Nazareth
Caitlin. Welcome to left feild! Critical mass out here=1; and there’s still “plenty of time”. I come and go; you’re always here. Thank you.
No doubt you are one of the great intellectuals of our time, even if you’re not Jewish, and most assuredly you will be remembered with the giants such as Plato, Aristotle, Mohammed, Jesus, Buddha, and George Carlin; but this thing that you refer to as the, ‘awakening’, I think is really just the first phase of, ‘mass hysteria’, a phenomenon of mental illness, brought on by intense stress and manifests itself as mysticism and delusional fantasies, a sort of opiate for the mind; a different sort of propaganda that is being pumped out by the oligarchs puppet writers.
“…even if you’re not Jewish”?? Please expound.
Caitlin, re your “many bizarre and utterly unanticipated experiences” that you don’t want to go public with because people will think you even more insane, can i please at once respect that choice but also urge you to reconsider. People following your (awesome) writings may be less easily shocked than you think. And realize, as C.W.King said, that “In an insane world, a sane person must appear insane”. It may also embolden others who’ve had similar experiences to openly share. I wonder, could it be the use of psychedelics or entheogens? Either way, total respect and thanks heaps for another inspiring article!
In my daily existence I find the average person, and our New York City society, becoming more barbaric every day. In the United States of America mass killings and senseless violence are not rare but common place now. It may be that these United States are falling apart so that the rest of humanity, and our planet, can survive!
At any rate Ms Johnstone, I really hope that you are correct.
I am not a human battery!
I am not a human battery!
I am not a human battery!
Please turn the lights off when you leave. Thank you.
Thank you, Caitlin Johnstone, this is the most hopeful news I’ve read in quite a long time ! And unexpected and surprising. As you cite much more than one source, your essay is filling me with the joy of hope.
I believe 10% is the ‘critical mass’ magic numero… where the ‘ hundredth monkey ‘ effect kicks in.
Creator didn’t bring us this far to let it all slip away i can assure you that… tho it’s likely to get messy.
We need to know to ‘come to rest’ in awareness. Awareness isn’t active, it is the great stillness underlying all movement. It’s always there. Dis-covering it IS the awakening. We can be ‘still’ when moving. Tolle discovered this for himself, and writes about the power it has. That’s great, but it’s not new. It’s the very nature of pure consciousness ( ie consciousness not identified with anything ) and it powers everything, and always has. It IS our unity with all humanity and ultimately the cosmos. Yes, there’s a local personality, called ‘me’, with its body-psyche set up, but underlying that is something much greater, something vast, unlimited. THAT is who we really are, and that is certainly not subject to propaganda, manipulation, distress, or enslavement.
I Am, is the way the truth and the light. Ignorance of this is to a surprisingly large extent an active supporting of a mental paradigm which is not serving us well, either personally or collectively. Come out of the cave. There’s nothing to fear, only daylight. The cave has only a shadowy illusion to offer. It masquerades as reality, as sanity, but is neither. Our heritage is to be whole, pure, wise, strong, happy and of great service to ‘others’. The journey towards home starts with inquiry…..’who am I”.
I appreciate this comment very much, Shilo. You cut through the concept of awakening. Not hiding behind concepts, we become more fully human.
http://www.johndayblog.com/2019/08/under-hood.html
Thanks Sister, Caitlin, and Thanks Coconut.
I read Eckhart Tolle’s “The Power of Now” also, in the late 1990s, and found several of the practices in it, like seeing something as beautiful, in order to transform it in the world, were remarkably powerful.
I’m not sure about “awakening”.
We are not just in these separate bodies. I feel people angry at me in traffic, and I feel the intensity of the motorists rushing by as I bike commute.
One might easily say that these are normal feelings for a person to have, mere perceptions, not reflections of some ESP actually connecting us in traffic.
I can’t refute that pervasive assertion, but I’m not bullied by it anymore, either.
I’m 61, and I took my mind out and played with it pretty freely sometimes in high school and college, and now I practice compassion, at work, when bike commuting, and increasingly when I’m already tired, but some neediness me connects with me, and I’m giving again.
The little stage of enlightenment I’m going through right now is that “being aware” is exhausting, because I’m aware that I’m swimming in an ocean of vast suffering, frustration and despair, and that being aware means being with it, and being with it, and being with it.
There’s not some solution, not some cure.
Feel the anguish long enough and you may have let somebody off the cliff edge for awhile.
Occasionally, I can generate a little warm, fuzzy love into the feeling space, for some suffering consciousness.
Sometimes I have a feeling that it is a certain patient, or another. Often, I just don’t know.
Supposedly, embracing this until you puke may predispose you to the next level of conscious awareness, with the motivation to be able to actually soothe and heal the vast suffering, instead of just experiencing it.
Not quite there yet.
I suspect it just reveals more hard work to do, but what else is there?
Sex and drugs and rock-and-roll played out a long time ago, and the second time jumping out of an airplane was like the second time doing a gymnastics move, nothing special.
Doing the work is all that seems worthwhile.
Maybe we’ll all graduate and become Aquarians, the Stewards of Life on Earth.
Might as well die trying.
Oh, we’re all always dead. That was an epiphany I had about 16 years ago. It’s just that sometimes we’re also incarnated in human bodies, which is TOTALLY DISTRACTING!
So good, Caitlin! We are waking up and a new day is coming!
Kick down the door, and throw away the key! Some might just call it Faith. Faith in creation itself. Faith in goodness, in beauty, in this glorious reality. I’m with you, Cait, is not a rational decision, its a whole being thing!
I hope you are correct. Sometimes it is really difficult to hang onto hope that humans will change. I know many intelligent, educated people who are aware of the issues, even some activists, who regularly eat meat and drive & fly all over the place. Their actions say–these issues have nothing to do with me; everyone else has to change.
Good article as always. Yes consciousness can bring about change. But I think we need the equivalent of the Berlin Wall coming down for people to really see tangible results. Surely the US will vote for a progressive president this time round (they have got it wrong many many times so far!) Capitalism will have to get a social conscience. Though rich people are going to hold onto wealth like its a security blanket.
Its is such a big change needed though! Are we actually going to embrace social capitalism? Have we got leaders who will do this? We can only hope that events such as the Summer heat waves, and Brazils deliberate fires will show those who have all the power in our society that change is needed or rich and poor will die side by side, and money won’t be of any use whatsoever.
I am fortunate to live in America and born when I was. This is because I saw an authentic counter-culture movement. It was born in spring, and I was born too late to really see the peak of it. But it was still around by the time I left the nest, so I was able to be a part of it and experience.
Thus, I have seen with my own eyes and soul what can occur when tens of thousands of people give up on the narrative of the oligarchs and choose to gather together for a week exploring their own narratives. It was a truly amazing sight. People working together and litterally building a small town in the forest for a peaceful gathering, then when it was done cleaning it up and leaving nothing behind but footprints. I have seen what happens when people gather and jointly accept and explore a narrative of peace, love, generosity, kindness and what is known as a gift economy.
It was always interesting, because you always arrived uptight. You’d had to get ready for the trip, then drive across several states. Then run the gauntlet of police and roadblocks and checkpoints and searches that the corporate state erects to keep people away. So, the first day, I at least was always uptight from all of this. But to wake the next morning, in a beautiful place, surrounded by beautiful, kind people. To be greeted with friendship and generosity when going in search of a morning coffee. I always then slid into this world, and before I knew it by defenses were down, I was no longer in a state of combat with the world, and I could then greet others with kindness and generosity and friendship all openly on display. To see what could occur when 20,000 people all start following that sort of narrative, and you get everyone trusting that those around them will be kind and friendly and generous as well as being playful and happy. Everyone drops their defenses and everyone acts very differently. One could then see with their own eyes and soul that another way is very, very possible.
There is nothing natural about people acting the way they do in this corporate world with the oligarchs narratives driving everything. In fact, it is very unnatural, and it is very different from the way people have lived and worked and played and loved for generations. At such gatherings as I was fortunate to attend, it was obvious that it was very possible to live a different narrative with values different from those enforced by the oligarchs.
It was a wonderful tradition to meet new arrivals at a gathering with “Welcome Home.” And so, I extend that greeting to the wonderful Caitlin and those who read here with an open mind and and open heart and don’t feel it necessary to post how it can’t ever happen. It can happen. I’ve seen it and experienced it myself. So, Welcome Home!
One thing that always gives me great hope is the massive amount of money and effort being spent on lying to us, controlling us, and blocking any political paths to real change. Remember, the oligarchs hate to waste money on other things than million dollar wedding parties and the like. If they are spending all these billions and all this effort to block and disrupt any movement towards real change, that means that they are scared to death that it is likely to occur.
They are not going to stop spending that money, because what they are doing is working.
Their number one message is always that resistance is futile. That no other world or way of living is possible. Give up. Do not try to change anything It is all hopeless.
I lived a lifetime among that message, and had a lifetime’s worth of wonderful and happy experiences doing that which I was always told was impossible to do.
You may be hopeful, but that is because you are fortunate enough to not live in the US. If you did, as I do, you would understand how hopeless the situation really is.
Agree. I’m a retired engineer (civil, then IT).
–BEGINNING OF RANT
Caitlin, I get the desire to see a way out of this. The reality is that in a matter of decades this planet will be uninhabitable by humans because of greedy psychopaths. E.g. the reactors that detonated at Fukushima have been gushing an obscene amount of radiation into the oceans and atmosphere since 3/11/2011. Not just a lot, but unheard-of numbers. Like 1 million bq/kg hitting the US west coast. One bq is one isotope decay per second, you know, a “click” on a Geiger counter. Ten clicks is a lot, 100 is very high, but 1 million per second?? There were 15 meltdowns, by the way, not 3, because 650km of shoreline, miles inland, was chewed up by the tsunami as if by a wood chipper, destroying the power grid. Shortly after the reactors blew, all radiation monitoring stations in North America were turned off. Why would they do that? I think I know. Obama took his family on a little vacation to Brazil, and Hillary told her State Dept employees to change clothing before entering the office. If a nuclear power plant loses electricity for the cooling water pumps, it will start melting down within hours. We hear about cesium, iodine, tritium, et al, but those are just tracers. Those plants are hemorrhaging about 1200 isotopes many with half lives in the 100,000’s or millions of years. The science to stop this doesn’t exist yet. The Pacific is dead, with the other oceans not far behind. No more insects on my windshield this summer. Fisheries have collapsed. Sea mammals continue to wash ashore emaciated because the oceans contain no food, and the government says they don’t know what’s causing it.
My wife and I fought a 10-year battle with the US medical cabal trying to get her care. It ended in her agonizing death in December after a 41-year marriage. She had CRPS, the worst pain there is. The Miller pain scale shows it’s at the top, above child birth and WORSE THAN AMPUTATION WITHOUT ANESTHESIA. 24/7, for 8 years. Two doctors told her the pain is all in her head. I used to think they couldn’t treat the pain, but I now know they WOULDN’T. Caitlin, you’re fortunate to have universal healthcare. Not here in the US. My 34 year old daughter is very sick. Last week she found a lump on her thyroid. Her primary doc palpated her, then said, “Oh, don’t worry, it’s not big enough to be concerned. Besides, you’re too young to be sick.” WTAF? She also has Lyme disease, and was bitten again June 16. No doctor is willing to give her the one IV antibiotic that works, just amoxicillin. As the treatment window closes.
I used to think that people who believed in a depopulation agenda were out of their minds. Now I see it. I’m sure I don’t need to tell you, but even leaked internal government documents show a target US population of about 50 million in 6 years, with a similar percentage reduction around the world. Just ask Gates.
And that’s not even talking about GMOs, chemtrails, 5G, and on and on.
Caitlin, I know you are well-versed on these issues, probably better than I. I’m having trouble reaching that retrospective, almost sanguine “we have to believe it’ll be ok” place. It’s hard for me to see the interconnectedness of all humans when criminals are trying to, and succeeding at, killing us off. This is made harder by inserting wedge issues that keep us apart and not noticing what’s going on. Yes, I’m angry right now, but the anger is not going away the way it used to. We’re in an all-out war, but very few know it.
–END OF RANT