Fighting the Good Fight

It is obvious that Western Society is sick.  And in no country is this sickness more apparent that the USA.  Most of our populace is drugged out, either on prescriptions that fill pharmaceutical company coffers, or through their own effort to use whatever drugs are at hand to escape.  The average USA citizen watched 5+ hours of TV.  While drugs or TV are not bad in of themselves, there can be no excuse for this mass numbing of the American populace.  It is obvious that the populace is allowed, even encouraged, to remain this way because it allows those in control of government and money to do what they wish with little opposition.  I myself often feel trapped by this system, and, although, I have given up TV and drug addiction I find it hard to fight back without feeling hopeless.  Much like a fly caught in a giant web of a much larger spider; the harder we fight the system the more easily it absorbs us.  So I have assembled a small list of things that don't feed into the system and fight FOR positive things, rather than, against the negative.

Dropping Out
Leaving greater society to join various countercultures, either permanently or temporarily, helps one feel free to live without feeding into the machine.

• Attending music festivals such as Burning Man help one to see how humans can create culture in new ways even if its for as little as a week....A video on the meaning and effect of festivals...Transformational Festivals
• Joining communities which attempt to be as self-sustaining as possible and have different cultural values....List of intentional communities of this nature Intentional Communities Network

New Media

Find, create, and support new modes of expression

• Create more media than you consume.  A great way to generate your own media and opinions and make sure you are an individual person with their own artforms
• Use the internet more than TV...Internet, although not free from it, has much less brainwashing propaganda and advertising than TV
• Don't go with the crowd trends...seek out community arts that YOU enjoy...
• Local theatre and music
• Support local visual artists by buying their productions rather than factory made object
• BLOG!...it is free and is a great way to verbalize your views and get them out into the public.  Some people even make a living off their Blog

Avoid Corporate Entanglements

Certain things are offered my big business to make your life easier yet swell their profits and end up hurting you in the long run

• Give up credit cards, or use them minimally.
• Make your own fun through support of local arts or by exploring nature
• Try to avoid big debts of all kinds
• Get only the insurance and other monthly expenses you need
• Don't pay for music make or find your own
• Most books are available free online

Self-Improvement

Be the person you always dreamed of

• Learn something new everyday, go to the library, use the internet, or talk to someone knowledgeable
• Exercise!  Just ten minutes of walking or running a day can make a huge difference in quality of life
• Give up addictions...don't let a chemical run your life more than your own willpower...You are always stronger...The internet has tons of methods and support groups for dropping any addiction
• Create your own art...every person is an artist even if you start small...if you do something you enjoy it will snowball into something bigger and better
• Organized religion does little for people but make them Sheep to a belief system(Just look at history to see the evidence)...Give up BS(Belief systems) and form your own opinions of the world.  Pick and choose from the thousands of religions on earth and create your own  cut and paste view of reality.
• Use yoga, meditation, and psychedelic drugs as a personal practice of self-discovery and relationship with spirit.  These methods are much older than any organized religion and their belief in Dogma from written word

Don't try to change society, that's impossible, just CHANGE YOURSELF!

The Final Frontier

During the 1950's and 60's Outer Space was being heralded as the final frontier for man to conquer.

We had emerged out of the trees and onto the grasslands.

We had left the grasslands of Africa for lands unknown.

We had built sea-sailing vessels to cross the great oceans.

And we had mastered aeronautics and created airplanes, blimps, and helicopters.

The next logical step was outside of our planet's atmosphere and into the great black abyss.

Baby steps were made, we landed on the moon and sent out hundreds of probes.

But, unlike all other arenas of human technology, space exploration did not have an explosive acceleration, but rather, withered and came to a virtual halt.  Why was this?

Some say it was lack of competition with the Russians, or, impossibly large budgets.  My bet was that the engineers and scientists along with the upper echelons of American government realized that Space travel had little to offer present day man.  The ships and programs were prohibitively expensive and the programs themselves seemed to produce little of scientific or material value.  A combination of these drawbacks caused man to withdraw his full effort from space.  Technology and resources went towards communications(The Internet, TV, music) and to an ever more powerful military technologies.  Leaving man without an [obvious] frontier.

The hidden frontier is within our own minds.  The same hyperspatial reality that was plumbed by Shamans, medicine men, and mystics throughout history.  It can be accessed with meditation, yoga, breathing, and any number of hallucinogenic substances.  Isn't it strange that the very government that was so for Space Travel is against this other alien frontier?
     In Space Travel they saw possible material gain and strategic military advantages.  The only treasures that one can plunder from the interior of the mind are new ideas or modes of being.  These are of no interest to those who hold our material lives in check.  This is why they have begun an inquisition and repression of the exploration of this new interior frontier.

Good luck psychonauts.

Why Don't We Walk Away?

“If the world is saved, it will not be saved by old minds with new programs but by new minds with no programs at all.”
― Daniel Quinn

Our society is not working, most of the world will agree.  No matter how many more police we hire, gadgets we create, or TV shows we watch nothing improves.  The programs those who wish to control enact upon us only plunge us deeper into collective apathy and ennui.

Most of America is populated by homeowners with several children who are vaguely aware of the fact that our way of life is not sustainable, keeps billions in poverty, and is poisoning the very planet we live on.  Most of these people just continue to watch TV and hope that someone smarter than them is solving the problems.

Is this a world we want to leave our children with? A big crowded and polluted mess of a planet.  Where the rich live like they are apart from the rest of the world in their pleasure dome fantasy houses.  The middle-class is educated enough to be aware of these facts but feels powerless to help.  Not to mention the poor who live in such a state of despair that the intensity of deprivation can not even be fathomed by the rich who pay thousands for therapists because they are not happy in their mansions.

What is this great social machine we are all apart of?  Why do we feel locked into its mechanisms?

This social machine is much like every other government/economy in history, a method to funnel wealth from the masses, to those in power at the top of the pyramid.

While certain parts of the society are integral to keeping the world fed most of the jobs within the social construct are extraneous and harmful.

Think, does your job help other people to enjoy their lives?

Does your job help to advance the consciousness of humanity?

Does your job atleast help to advance your own consciousness?

If not, then why do you continue to show up?

Because the food in this society is under lock and key.  And if you don't feed your productive value into the system you will struggle to find food or end up hungry.  This method of keeping food protected against all those who don't contribute to the system causes despair in the poor and obliges everyone else to continue in the jobs they hate.

There is only one sane solution, walk away.  We don't need any of this.  Mankind was not made to slave away for another man in order to survive.  Work is a part of life but life isn't work.  Life is about interpersonal relationships and raising your own and others' consciousness.  Obligatory work in meaningless fields and positions arises from the greed of those at the very top.  This "1%" has risen to the top because of a combination of old money and sheer disregard for the well being of fellow people.  The most ruthless and psychotic among us rule us.  Does this society have any kind of long-running future?  I hope not.

So This is It?

The car is on fire, and there's no driver at the wheel...And we're all on so many drugs with the television on and the curtains drawn.  We are trapped in the belly of this horrible machine, and the machine is bleeding to death.

This is how it is when the west falls.

American's are drowned in a deep abyss of technological apathy.

Young people pay more attention to the short and pointless messages on their mobile phones than the actual live humans who surround them.

Text messages have sucked the intensity and reality out of conversation and make people believe that their feelings are reducible to curt messages of internet slang.

TV commercials have higher and higher production values all in an attempt to brainwash the populace into buying more crap they don't need.

Who needs a new car every year?

Or that new prescription pill that has worse physical and mental side effects than any disease it treats.

As children starve for both food and education our tax dollars go towards more bombs and tanks in order to secure the American Empire.

America's armies secure opium fields in Afghanistan in order to sedate the already apathetic masses into a downward spiral of drug addiction.

The bright and hopeful youth of the middle class, seeing no good future in sight turn to addiction in an effort to escape this soulless society.  And in so doing, become soulless themselves.

Xanax a mind-numbing and addictive substance is the number one prescribed medicine in the USA.
It helps to keep people's minds off the rising tide of shit that continues to surround them.

Cannabis, a drug used by humans for thousands of year, is illegal and heavily enforced with millions going to prisons every year for being involved with this substance which is perhaps the most benign drug on Earth.

The prison system swells with the casualties of the drug war.  And has use of hard drugs gone down?....No it has only escalated.  Stranger still, these prisons are run as businesses!

The prisons are just another appendage of the ruthless capitalist fat cats that the rest of us call, The 1%.

Why do these people feel the need for more and more wealth?  In the end when we die is it really a contest over who has the biggest pile of shit accumulated in their mansion?

The Northeast is full of "climbers" the members of the middle class who are never happy with their status and continue to strive to become the capitalist big wigs that they both loath and envy.

When will this all end? Hopefully soon.