being_scientifically_suppressed

General science of how the human race is being scientifically suppressed and manipulated

https://www.phoenixregenetics.org/resources/dna-monthly/212#awakening

A Whole Branch of Science Turns out to Be Fake

Jon Rappoport

Devotees of science often assume that what is called science is real and true. It must be. Otherwise, their faith is broken. Their superficial understanding is shattered. Their “superior view” of the world is torpedoed.

Such people choose unofficial “anti-science” targets to attack. They never think of inspecting their own house for enormous fraud.

For example: 😃

An open secret has been slowly bleeding out into public consciousness for the past ten years.

THERE ARE NO DEFINITIVE LABORATORY TESTS FOR ANY SO-CALLED MENTAL DISORDER.

And along with that:

ALL SO-CALLED MENTAL DISORDERS ARE CONCOCTED, NAMED, LABELED, DESCRIBED, AND CATEGORIZED by a committee of psychiatrists, from menus of human behaviors.

Their findings are published in periodically updated editions of The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), printed by the American Psychiatric Association.

For years, even psychiatrists have been blowing the whistle on this hazy crazy process of “research.”

Of course, pharmaceutical companies, who manufacture highly toxic drugs to treat every one of these “disorders,” are leading the charge to invent more and more mental-health categories, so they can sell more drugs and make more money.

But we have a mind-boggling twist. Under the radar, one of the great psychiatric stars, who has been out in front in inventing mental disorders, went public. He blew the whistle on himself and his colleagues. And for several years, almost no one noticed.

His name is Dr. Allen Frances, and he made VERY interesting statements to Gary Greenberg, author of a Wired article: “Inside the Battle to Define Mental Illness.” (Dec.27, 2010).

Major media never picked up on the interview in any serious way. It never became a scandal.

Dr. Allen Frances is the man who, in 1994, headed up the project to write the latest edition of the psychiatric bible, the DSM-IV. This tome defines and labels and describes every official mental disorder. The DSM-IV eventually listed 297 of them.

In an April 19, 1994, New York Times piece, “Scientist At Work,” Daniel Goleman called Frances “Perhaps the most powerful psychiatrist in America at the moment.”

Well, sure. If you’re sculpting the entire canon of diagnosable mental disorders for your colleagues, for insurers, for the government, for Pharma (who will sell the drugs matched up to the 297 DSM-IV diagnoses), you’re right up there in the pantheon.

Long after the DSM-IV had been put into print, Dr. Frances talked to Wired’s Greenberg and said the following:

“There is no definition of a mental disorder. It’s bullshit. I mean, you just can’t define it.”

BANG.

That’s on the order of the designer of the Hindenburg, looking at the burned rubble on the ground, remarking, “Well, I knew there would be a problem.”

After a suitable pause, Dr. Frances remarked to Greenberg, “These concepts [of distinct mental disorders] are virtually impossible to define precisely with bright lines at the borders.”

Frances should have mentioned the fact that his baby, the DSM-IV, had unscientifically rearranged earlier definitions of ADHD and Bipolar to permit many MORE diagnoses, leading to a vast acceleration of drug-dosing with highly powerful and toxic compounds.

Here is a smoking-gun statement made by another prominent mental-health expert, on an episode of PBS’ Frontline series. The episode was: “Does ADHD Exist?”

PBS FRONTLINE INTERVIEWER: Skeptics say that there’s no biological marker—that it [ADHD] is the one condition out there where there is no blood test, and that no one knows what causes it.

BARKLEY (Dr. Russell Barkley, professor of psychiatry and neurology at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center): That’s tremendously naïve, and it shows a great deal of illiteracy about science and about the mental health professions. A disorder doesn’t have to have a blood test to be valid. If that were the case, all mental disorders would be invalid …There is no lab test for any mental disorder right now in our science. That doesn’t make them invalid.

Without intending to, Dr. Barkley blows an ear-shattering whistle on his own profession.

So let’s take Dr. Barkley to school. Medical science, and disease-research in particular, rests on the notion that you can make a diagnosis backed up by lab tests. If you can’t produce lab tests, you’re spinning fantasies.

These fantasies might be hopeful, they might be “educated guesses,” they might be launched from traditional centers of learning, they might be backed up by billions of dollars of grant money … but they’re still fantasies.

Dr. Barkley is essentially saying, “There is no lab test for any mental disorder. If a test were the standard of proof, we wouldn’t have science at all, and that would mean our whole profession rests on nothing—and that is unthinkable, so therefore a test doesn’t matter.”

That logic is no logic at all. That science is no science at all. Barkley is proving the case against himself. He just doesn’t want to admit it.

Psychiatry is all fraud all the time. Without much of a stretch, you could say psychiatry has been the most widespread profiling operation in the history of the human race. Its goal has been to bring humans everywhere into its system. It hardly matters which label a person is painted with, as long as it adds up to a diagnosis and a prescription of drugs.

300 so-called mental disorders caused by … what? No lab evidence. No defining diagnostic tests. No blood tests, saliva tests, brain scans, genetic assays. No nothing.

But psychiatrists continue to assert they are the masters of causation. They know what’s behind “mental disorders.” They’re in charge.

What about the generalized “chemical imbalance” hypothesis stating that all mental disorders stem from such imbalances in the brain?

Dr. Ronald Pies, the editor-in-chief emeritus of the Psychiatric Times, laid that hypothesis to rest in the July 11, 2011, issue of the Times with this staggering admission:

“In truth, the ‘chemical imbalance’ notion was always a kind of urban legend—never a theory seriously propounded by well-informed psychiatrists.”

Boom.

Dead.

The point is, for decades the whole basis of psychiatric drug research, drug prescription, and drug sales has been: “we’re correcting a chemical imbalance in the brain.”

The problem was, researchers had never established a normal baseline for chemical balance. So they were shooting in the dark. Worse, they were faking a theory. Pretending they knew something when they didn’t.

In his 2011 piece in Psychiatric Times, Dr. Pies tries to protect his colleagues in the psychiatric profession with this fatuous remark:

“In the past 30 years, I don’t believe I have ever heard a knowledgeable, well-trained psychiatrist make such a preposterous claim [about chemical imbalance in the brain], except perhaps to mock it … the ‘chemical imbalance’ image has been vigorously promoted by some pharmaceutical companies, often to the detriment of our patients’ understanding.”

Absurd. First of all, many psychiatrists have explained and do explain to their patients that the drugs are there to correct a chemical imbalance.

And second, if all well-trained psychiatrists have known, all along, that the chemical-imbalance theory is a fraud …

… then why on earth have they been prescribing tons of drugs to their patients …

… since those drugs are developed on the false premise that they correct an imbalance?

The honchos of psychiatry are seeing the handwriting on the wall. Their game has been exposed.

The chemical imbalance theory is a fake. There are no defining physical tests for any of the 300 so-called mental disorders. All diagnoses are based on arbitrary clusters or menus of human behavior. The drugs are harmful, dangerous, toxic. Some of them induce violence. Suicide, homicide. Some of the drugs cause brain damage.

So the shrinks have to move into another model of “mental illness,” another con, another fraud. And they’re looking for one.

For example, genes plus “psycho-social factors” cause mental disorders. A mish-mash of more unproven science.

“New breakthrough research on the functioning of the brain is paying dividends and holds great promise …” Professional PR and gibberish.

Meanwhile, the business model demands drugs for sale.

So even though the chemical-imbalance nonsense has been discredited, it will continue on as a dead man walking, a zombie.

Two questions always pop up when I write a critique of psychiatry. The first one is: psychiatric researchers are doing a massive amount of work studying brain function. They do have tests.

Yes, experimental tests. But NONE of those tests are contained in the DSM, the psychiatric bible, as the basis of the definition of ANY mental disorder. If the tests were conclusive, they would be heralded in the DSM. They aren’t.

The second question is: if all these mental disorders are fiction, why are so many people saddled with problems? Why are some people off the rails? Why are they crazy?

The list of potential answers is very long. A real practitioner would focus on one patient at a time and try to discover what has affected him to such a marked degree. For example:

Severe nutritional deficiency. Toxic dyes and colors in processed food. Ingestion of pesticides and herbicides. Profound sensitivities to certain foods. The ingestion of toxic pharmaceuticals. Life-altering damage as a result of vaccines. Exposure to environmental chemicals. Heavy physical and emotional abuse in the home or at school. Battlefield stress and trauma (also present in certain neighborhoods). Prior head injury. Chronic infection. Alcohol and street drugs. Debilitating poverty.

Other items could be added.

Psychiatry is: fake, fraud, pseudoscience from top to bottom. It’s complete fiction dressed up as fact.

But the obsessed devotees of science tend to back away from this. They close their eyes. If a “branch of knowledge” as extensive as psychiatry is nothing more than an organized delusion, what other aspect of science might likewise be parading as truth, when it is actually mere paper blowing in the wind?

Copyright © Jon Rappoport. All Rights Reserved.

The author of three explosive collections, The Matrix Revealed, Exit from the Matrix and Power Outside the Matrix, Jon Rappoport was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for thirty years, writing articles on politics, medicine and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, SPIN Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free emails at www.nomorefakenews.com. To read about Jon’s mega-collection, Exit from the Matrix, click here.

3 Characteristics of a True Political Awakening

Sigmund Fraud, Waking Times

History is written by the winners, or so they say, but there is an agreed upon version of our story that is taught to us in school and reinforced in everyday life by the media and government propagandists. Coasting through life haphazardly believing in this standardized version of reality is a form of consciousness, a contemporary way of relating to a world where the individual is consumed by the group, and truth becomes evermore out of reach.

The typical level of political awareness in our society is fairly basic, simplified and incomplete, but it serves as a functional trap for the mind and the imagination, pigeon-holing individuals into a conformist. This psychological trap preys upon two basic human traits: conservatism and progressivism. And because these traits are biologically hardwired into the human psyche, they are exploited as a fissure to create disharmony and division amongst the public.

Many people only rise to a level of political consciousness which allows them to understand their predisposition to one or the other of these traits. Awareness often ends here, with extreme devotion to one side of the publicized political spectrum.

The truth is that human societies have always needed an even distribution of people with each of these idealogical tendencies in order to achieve a balance between our need for external and internal control, protection and care. Political awakening involves rising above the prescribed psychology of division, into a position of appreciation of the qualities which unite us all.

This idea is enumerated in the following three characteristics of true political awakening.

Trust in the Statist System Collapses

To continue to trust and support a consistently abusive master is often referred to as Stockholm Syndrome. When a person experiences a true and deep political awakening, it is not longer possible to excuse any of the crushing affronts to human rights and human dignity that are intrinsic to state power.

State power is historically abusive. The manipulation of our money supply, endless wars, wasting of public resources, corruption, permitting the destruction of the natural world, terrorizing citizens with abusive police and punitive tax codes, and limiting prosperity with regulatory overkill are all standard operating procedure for the state.

In a statist world, the awakening individual is tasked with the challenge of seeing through all of this in order to free the mind and see the greater possibilities for freedom and cooperation in the human story.

The Biggest Scam In The History Of Mankind - Hidden Secrets of Money

https://youtu.be/iFDe5kUUyT

So-called Leaders Are Seen as Puppets of Division

Watching the pendulum of public opinion and discourse swing violently back and forth between the merits of two political parties is comical once you’ve recognized just how predictable and destructive it is. We are goaded into engaging in the divisiveness, encouraged by the rhetoric of the political establishment.

It is our unity they fear most. Falling into the trap of politically dogmatic ideological fortifications is more dangerous to our society than just about anything else, and the truly politically awake fly above the argumentative mentality of those who are trapped in the two-party paradigm.

Recognition That Politics Is Heavily Influenced by Powerful Forces

If politics is the arena of government, and government is clearly influenced by corporate interests, intelligence agencies and deep state operators, and supranational organizations, then it makes no sense to pretend that we have power in the political system. It makes no sense to pretend as though politicians are acting in the true interest of actual people. It makes no sense to pretend that we can save ourselves by calling on members of the state to represent us in their corrupt scene.

It is commonly known that politicians are beholden to special interests, and while they never talk openly about this influence, so many people carry on with the charade that politicians can wield power over these organization, for the benefit of the plebs. They cannot, for these forces are beyond their control. The politically awakened understand that the plots against humanity extend way beyond the political scene.

Final Thoughts

Unity is the one thing that any political elite has always feared the most. Without smashing down the perceived barriers in contemporary political consciousness we can only expect our society to become more fractured, chaotic and dangerous. Trust in that which deceives and harms us is simply not possible for the truly politically awakened.

This article (3 Characteristics of a True Political Awakening) was originally created and published by Waking Times and is published here under a Creative Commons license with attribution to Sigmund Fraud and WakingTimes.com. It may be re-posted freely with proper attribution, author bio, and this copyright statement.

Sigmund Fraud is a survivor of modern psychiatry and a dedicated mental activist. He is a staff writer for WakingTimes.com, where he indulges in the possibility of a massive shift towards a more psychologically aware future for humankind.

Intelligence

Christina Sarich, Waking Times

Our intuition develops when we are babies, long before are indoctrinated into Newtonian physics—which largely prohibits us from understanding the quantum world. Ironically, one of our first intellectual abilities—intuition—may be one of the greatest forms of intelligence we will ever experience in a “grown-up” world.

In the quantum world, there are no “positions” or “speed.” These are classical, mechanical terms for a world that doesn’t really exist. Yet, as tiny babies we understand how things work without having a clear grasp of certain intellectual realities.

Psychologists Susan Hespos from Northwestern University and Renee Baillargeon of University of Illinois found that this physical intuition kicks in as early as two and a half months, and other scientists think that intuition is probably present from birth.

Gerd Gigerenzer, a director at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, argues that intuition is less about suddenly “knowing” the right answer and more about instinctively understanding what information is unimportant and can thus be discarded, but even if we have intuition even at birth, one could argue that we have yet to develop the intellectual capacity to learn which information can be discarded.

Yet innate notions, plus “elaborations” born from watching and interacting with the world, add up to a sort of “naïve physics” that we all grasp before having a single physics lesson.

Max Born, who received the 1954 Nobel Prize for his contributions to the foundation of quantum mechanics, felt that our minds just weren’t up to the task of “intuiting” quantum physics. As he wrote in Atomic Physics, first published in English in 1935,

“The ultimate origin of the difficulty lies in the fact (or philosophical principle) that we are compelled to use the words of common language when we wish to describe a phenomenon, not by logical or mathematical analysis, but by a picture appealing to the imagination. Common language has grown by everyday experience and can never surpass these limits.”

Aristotle’s 2,300-year-old theories, in which heavy objects fall faster than light ones and objects in motion ease to a stop unless you keep pushing them, have been our assumption until now, but in the quantum world there is no friction. Objects can appear and disappear merely with our observation of them.

Some of Our Biggest Life Decisions Are Based on Intuition

The fact that our minds have evolved past avoiding being eaten so that we can also appreciate a great symphony or a breathtaking sunset might also account for the development of our intuition—or be explained further by quantum consciousness.

Gerd Gigerenzer, author of the book Gut Feelings: The Intelligence of the Unconscious, says that he is both intuitive and rational. He states,

“In my scientific work, I have hunches. I can’t explain always why I think a certain path is the right way, but I need to trust it and go ahead. I also have the ability to check these hunches and find out what they are about. That’s the science part. Now, in private life, I rely on instinct. For instance, when I first met my wife, I didn’t do computations. Nor did she.”

In fact, some of our biggest life decisions are based on a “hunch” and not some Newtonian calculation of reality. And that hunch is often extremely successful at telling us what to do in many varied, hands-on, real-life applications. Why?

Quantum Computing Merely Mimics Quantum Intuition

It all makes more sense once we understand the latest research into quantum computing.

Regular computers use bits for processing. Everything is either a 1 or a 0, and from this foundation all letters and numbers can be created, and mathematical and logical problems solved.

When an atom replaces the bit, however, a 1 or 0 can be both a 1 or 0 at the same time. This means that complex mathematical calculations which might take millions of bits, and take up tons of storage space in a regular computer, can be compacted and done simultaneously, thus freeing up memory, and performing calculations at an unbelievable speed. However, our innate intuition may work in the very same way—tapping into the Quantum Intelligence that permeates all things.

If the Universe is indeed fractal, and connected and holographic, it would mean that a single atom contains the information of every Universe.

Since we are nothing more than a compilation of atoms (the wave-particle phenomenon notwithstanding) then we can tap into a quantum information/energy field. To use quantum computing terms, we could intuitively process large pieces of information or complex information in the blink of an eye because we are utilizing this field rather than some clunky 1s and 0s.

Physicists Use Human Intuition to Develop Better Quantum Computing

Interestingly, and quite a slap in the face to Max Born who proposed we were incapable of quantum intuition, physicists recently used human intuition and intelligence to create a better quantum computer.

150,000 people played a game called Quantum Moves several million times to help physicists to best determine real-world questions in their field.

Just playing a game, players solved real research questions in quantum physics, and found solutions that were better than trained physicists or state-of-the-art algorithms could find.

That’s worth a moment of reflection.

While this proves human intelligence is still better than AI, it also suggests that intuition is likely derived from the quantum field, of which we are all a part.

This article (Why Your Intuition May Be the Highest Form of Intelligence) was originally created and published by Waking Times and is published here under a Creative Commons license with attribution to Christina Sarich and WakingTimes.com. It may be re-posted freely with proper attribution, author bio, and this copyright statement.

Christina Sarich is a staff writer for Waking Times. She is a writer, musician, yogi, and humanitarian with an expansive repertoire. Her thousands of articles can be found all over the Internet, and her insights also appear in publications as diverse as the Weston A. Price Journal, Nexus, Atlantis Rising, and the Cuyamungue Institute Newsletter, among others. She was recently a featured author in the journal Wise Traditions in Food, Farming, and Healing Arts, and her commentary on healing, ascension, and human potential inform a large body of the alternative news lexicon. She has been invited to appear on numerous radio shows, including Health Conspiracy Radio, Dr. Gregory Smith’s Show, and dozens more. The second edition of her book, Pharma Sutra, will be released soon.

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The Path to Liberating Humanity Is the Same as the Path to Liberating the Individual

Caitlin Johnstone

The path to enlightenment is the process of becoming clearly aware of all the different aspects of the way you operate inside, which enables you to relate to life as it’s actually appearing instead of through the filters of old conditioned mental habits. The path to the liberation of our species is the process of collectively becoming clearly aware of the reality of our situation as opposed to the false narratives about it, so that we can begin solving our problems as they actually are instead of the way the establishment media describes them. These two processes are recursive mirrors of each other; one describes the process on the micro scale, the other on the macro, but they occur in the exact same way.

People sometimes complain that I talk about the problems that humanity faces without ever offering any solutions. I disagree with this criticism; I talk about the solution to our problem all the time, using plain language that anyone can understand. It just often goes in one ear and out the other, because it’s not the sort of answer that people have been conditioned to listen for.

When people ask for solutions to our problems, they’re conditioned by the standard rhetoric of our time to get an essay about labor organization, political activism, consumer activism, cryptocurrencies or technological innovations, depending on where they’re at on the political spectrum. What they are not conditioned to listen for is the most direct and honest answer that I am able to give them: that we’ve got to move from an unhealthy relationship with mental narrative into a healthy one.

This is not some lofty or impractical suggestion, it’s just the thing that we need to do in order to pull up and away from our ecocidal, omnicidal trajectory and move into a healthy collaboration with each other and with our ecosystem. As long as our minds are susceptible to the manipulations of the powerful people who rule us by controlling the dominant narratives in our world, we’ll be bent to the will of sociopathic plutocrats and opaque government agencies until we plunge forever into the darkness of extinction or dehumanizing dystopia. Individuals are capable of transcending the unwholesome relationship with mental narrative which dominates conventional human consciousness, so that’s a potentiality which exists within our species as a collective as well.

This is the only off-ramp that I can see from the armageddon superhighway. It’s impossible to get the people to use the power of their numbers to unseat their oppressors as long as their oppressors are able to control the thoughts that they think in their heads. Political organization and activism can be thwarted by mass media campaigns which manipulate the majority into continuing to support the status quo. Cryptocurrencies and technological innovations are impotent as long as those in power can control the stories that the majority tells itself about how they work and what should be done with them. You won’t engage in revolutionary behavior if you’re being manipulated into not wanting to. So we’ve got to become impossible to manipulate.

This is the solution, and it’s very achievable. For millennia humanity has been writing about the capacity within all of us to transcend our old conditioning patterns and perceive the world free from the filters of mental narrative. They wrote about it within the limitations that existed on their expression at the time, coloring their descriptions with their respective religious beliefs, linguistic and cultural conventions, and what understanding of the mind they had access to in a pre-science world, and their ideas were generally cloistered within small esoteric circles due to the limited nature of communication, but the underlying message was always the same: reality is not what our thoughts describe, and we are all capable of perceiving beyond that mental veil.

Up until now, the phenomenon of what many refer to as enlightenment has been a fairly rare occurrence within our species (though I suspect not quite as rare as some claim). According to some teachers who’ve been coaching people through the process for decades, it seems to be happening more and more frequently today. The teacher Adyashanti writes the following:

There’s a phenomenon happening in the world today. More and more people are waking up—having real, authentic glimpses of reality. By this I mean that people seem to be having moments where they awaken out of their familiar senses of self, and out of their familiar senses of what the world is, into a much greater reality—into something far beyond anything they knew existed.

These experiences of awakening differ from person to person. For some, the awakening is sustained over time, while for others the glimpse is momentary—it may last just a split second. But in that instant, the whole sense of “self ” disappears. The way they perceive the world suddenly changes, and they find themselves without any sense of separation between themselves and the rest of the world. It can be likened to the experience of waking up from a dream—a dream you didn’t even know you were in until you were jolted out of it.

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.

Renowned author and teacher Eckhart Tolle agrees:

I see signs that it is already happening. For the first time there is a large scale awakening on our planet. 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.

You are of course free to believe these guys or not, but I personally don’t see any incentive for them to be disingenuous about what they’re seeing in their field of work. The best way to make a fortune as a spiritual teacher is to gather a large cult-like following around yourself under the presentation of having attained something exceedingly special and rare, not to say essentially, “Yeah this is happening all over the place now; it’s no big deal. What happened to me is becoming as common as grass.”

So why the change? Why after millennia of enlightenment remaining a rare phenomenon are we suddenly seeing it becoming more common?

I don’t know. Maybe it’s got something to do with the fact that we’re at evolve-or-die time as a species, and something primal deep within us is leaping to clear that hurdle in the same way all organisms fight to survive with everything they’ve got. Maybe it’s got something to do with our exponentially improved ability to network and share information, making useful pointers and teachings which guide the way to enlightenment vastly more accessible. Maybe our unprecedented access to information itself is the cause; billions of human brains suddenly connected to mankind’s entire collective archive of knowledge is in and of itself a drastic change in human consciousness. Maybe it’s all three. Maybe it’s something else we can’t see yet. But it does appear to be happening.

So what is enlightenment? There are as many answers to this question as there are people interested in it. Many will tell you that it’s a “merging with the divine” or some other unhelpful word salad of metaphysical specialness. Others will tell you that it’s a recognition of your own true nature as pure awareness which witnesses the play of forms. Others will say it’s the awakening of an energy in the spine known as kundalini, whose rise up through the crown of the head transforms your way of functioning. Others will say it’s simply seeing life as it is, unfiltered by mental conditioning. Go to online spiritual discussion forums and you’ll find people arguing about this question with the same vitriolic fervor as you see between different political ideologies in the forums you’re probably more familiar with.

Personally I haven’t found it very useful to talk about enlightenment as one specific thing that happens in one specific instance, like a lightbulb flicking on once and then you’re done. There are many different aspects to the human condition, and you can be very conscious of the way some of them are happening and deeply unconscious of others. The fiery shopkeeper guru Nisargadatta Maharaj, for example, was profoundly lucid on the nature of awareness and the field of consciousness which appears within it, able to speak with earth-shaking clarity that radically changed people’s lives despite having little education. But he was also a chain smoker and died of lung cancer, unable to bring clear seeing to that particular unwholesome aspect of his functioning. Neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor had a stroke in a specific part of the linguistic center of her brain, permanently changing her relationship with mental narrative and bringing her a tremendous amount of inner peace, but she can’t teach people how to get there for themselves because she didn’t consciously walk through any path to get there.

Enlightenment is more like the process of turning on the lights in a very large house, room by room. For some people the kitchen light is on, but the entire upstairs floor is dark. Others have the lights on in the master bedroom and the basement, but everything in between is endarkened.

Some people have a very clear understanding of the nature of awareness and thought, which tends to get the most play in the discussion of spiritual enlightenment. But others have flicked the lights on in the way their bodily energy systems operate, able to experience and use those energies in a way that other people just aren’t conscious of. Others have enlightened their previously repressed childhood traumas, and are able to clearly understand how their experiences in life have shaped the way they’re conditioned to think and behave. Others have enlightened their emotionality, and have a deep, emotionally rich relationship with life while others sedate and ignore their emotions. Others have enlightened their inner guidance system and are able to perceive a tug toward wise decisions which lead them to take beneficial actions. None of these are any more special or important than the other, they’re just different rooms in the house that either have the lights on or off.

Whenever you hear about a spiritual teacher conducting themselves in a way that could be described as unenlightened, sleeping with students or having childish temper tantrums, it doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re not enlightened in some sense. It could just mean that they’re enlightened in one way but not in another. In one way they’re able to relate to life with great clarity, and in another they’re just as confused and clumsy as anyone else. The lights are on in the attic but not the living room.

And, to bring this home to the opening paragraph of this essay, the same is true of the process of enlightening the world. There are a great many ways in which humanity is asleep at the wheel, and we’re going to have to bring the light of truth to all of them.

We’re going to have to bring the light of truth to the ways we’ve all been lied to by our teachers, by our politicians and by our media. We’re going to have to bring the light of truth to the horrors of war and the sinister motives behind it. We’re going to have to bring the light of truth to what we’re doing to our ecosystem and the forces which incentivize us to play along with ecocide. We’re going to have to bring the light of truth to the ways we enslave and are enslaved by each other in our interpersonal relationships, and how we enslave and are enslaved by our current social systems. We’re going to have to bring the light of truth to racism, sexism and other forms of bigotry and the ways that they prevent us from having wholesome relationships with each other. We’re going to have to bring the light of truth to the manipulations of the financial sector, money in politics, the evils of factory farming, the prison system, the war on drugs, and the structures which keep economic injustice in place. We can’t fight problems if we can’t see them clearly, so we’ve got to help each other turn the lights on in all of those areas. We’ve got to enlighten them.

None of the steps taken on this path toward the enlightenment of humanity are any more or less important than any other. One rebel may spend their energy exposing the false narratives of the news media. One rebel may bring attention to the plight of the Palestinians. One rebel may spend years making a documentary exposing the senseless butchery of dolphins in Taiji. One rebel may help film the unseen cruelty of factory farming. One rebel might share her story and expose the reality of rape culture. One rebel might help show everyone all the genocide and exploitation that went into creating their country as it currently exists, and help them come to a mature relationship with and response to that reality. One rebel might make art encouraging people to open their eyes to what’s really going on. Each of these small rebellions help flick on the lights of the house that is our world, and we need all of it.

With intense, sincere inner work, we can flick on the lights of our inner world room-by-room so that we can relate to life as it actually is in more and more ways. With intense, sincere outer work, we can flick on the lights of our outer world room by room and begin solving the problems that had previously been obscured by blackouts and propaganda disinfo. These movements are fundamentally the same. They both complement each other, and they’re both indispensable.

This article, republished under a creative commons license, originally appeared here.

Caitlin Johnstone is a rogue journalist, bogan socialist, anarcho-psychonaut and guerrilla poet.

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