A Kingdom Of Conscience and Tales Of The Teapot
I particularly enjoy sitting at the local coffee house during the early morning hours and quietly watch the world rush by me in that morning madness called rush hour. I enjoy this since it's like a form of meditation for me, a rare time for me to be silent and simply watch and observe the world around me without thinking about it. I strive for an inner quietness amongst all this outer chaos and try not to think too much but just try to look and observe.
Sometimes I think I'm quite crazy since it seems that so few people see the same things that I see in the world around me. It’s like I live in a different world. People may agree with what I say but I often wonder if they really see these things with any great clarity. But most of the time people aren't very much interested in what I have to say since they see what I say as too negative, too bleak.
They won’t hesitate to tell me so.
Sometimes I even believe them and I think that maybe I'm nuts and that perhaps my outlook of the world is just too grim and maybe I'm simply not seeing things right. I sometimes listen to these people and then I feel like I might be “off my rocker” because I'm always seeing such grimness around me. Then I may even start to believe what people might say, since they say it with such a mind bogglingly certainty and I think that I may really be deranged andh surprisingly, I even become comfortable in accepting this possibility as an actual fact.
But then, invariably, I find that I’m not as deranged as I thought since I again see what I have been seeing before. I “re-see” what I have seen before without really wanting to. The seeing repeats itself. My seeing of reality reconfirms itself without me really wanting it to be reconfirmed. This is how I know that I may be seeing things more or less objectively about certain things going on in the world around me.
Repetition makes it possible for something to exist. Repetition makes for something to be real in our existing world. If something did not repeat it would vanish and blink out from our world never to be seen again. If I repeatedly see the same things over and over again then I’ll investigate it further, providing that I'm not afraid to look.
While sitting in the coffee shop I'll often look at the faces of the people around me and I often wonder how many of them question, truly question, where they are all going with all this rushing about.
Do robots ever question anything apart from that which they are programmed to question?
I sometimes see these people acting like programmed reaction machines hypnotically rushing about willy nilly and really doing nothing, creating nothing, coming from nowhere and going nowhere and yet there is some kind of sensitive intelligence, a sentient thing, a masked malevolent hunger, that is working inside them as a group mind that makes them appear to be alive and aware and intelligent.
However, in the end, the sum total of all their actions comprises a psycho-dynamic null-process, forming a null world composed of nullities and null forces, where everything reacts and nothing can act on its own power and the end result is a cancellation to zero. Any creativity that is accidentally generated within this process is quickly absorbed into this null world and makes it even more chaotic then before. If more people could see this then perhaps things could be different.
That's why I blog. Maybe it will help others to see. But I cannot anticipate any outcomes. I blog because I have made a decision to do so and it's about as simple as that.
In this null world everything inverts itself and neutralizes itself. In this world we act and imagine we are doing ‘good’ but the results we produce are often ‘bad.’ The ‘good’ action, or our actions to do good, originate in the imagination but the resulting ‘bad’ action has REAL consequences. They cancel each other out. Our imagination and the actual reality do not align in this null world due to our absence of objective consciousness.
We may be able to create functional things in this world but we are incapable of creating a future for ourselves primarily because of our delusions about good and evil.
And it is here, in our deluded understandings of good and evil, where true objective evil can have its play and play its game in our psyche, a game that it played within our very delusions of what is really real. The game is played within the arena demarcated by these delusions.
As I watch this morning madness I get the impression that we are governed and ruled by some kind of alien malevolent plague, some dark deceptive sentient force, some evil magician who is a wolf in sheep's clothing, that feeds on all this madness and has somehow rendered the majority of the people around me into an unconscious state of automatism and it is this underlying force that's really governing and pulling the strings within their lives for it's own self serving purposes, and that this malevolent governing force poses lies and deception into the minds of these unconscious automatons and hypnotizes them into believing that those forces that run and govern our lives actually oppose lies and deception while the truth of the matter is that this governing force really poses those very things that it says it opposes.
Do I make sense? Think about it a little.
That’s how I see it. That's how it looks to me.
And in all our mad rushing we create a society based on the big lie that says that we govern ourselves and that those who govern us have our best interests at heart.
We are led to believe that we are really going somewhere in all this madness and the end result is that the world in which we live is really a collective madness which lives in a collective delusion thinking that all this rushing about is achieving anything real.
And in this delusion we think that we can rule the dimension of time and go beyond it in all our rushing and vain pursuits that really go nowhere.
What are we all trying to catch with all this rushing about to nowhere? Are we trying to catch time itself? Do we think we can overrun it and conquer it? Do we think we can condition that very thing which really conditions us? It seems to me that the faster we chase time, then the faster time will elude us, much like quicksilver, and it's as if time is always one tick ahead and we are always one tock behind, and no matter how fast we chase it, no matter how fast we may stalk it, chasing time is much like the coyote chasing the road runner; it never gets caught, and the ever elusive time always looks back, laughing and laughing, at the utter inanity and futility of our pointless hot pursuits to catch up to it.
It’s like time looks at us through a window that’s getting thinner and thinner. We can see it’s reflection but it cannot be touched.
Indeed, time makes an ass of us all and it doesn't even exist anyway (at least as we understand it)!
We are outfoxed by an imaginary fox that we call time. We are outsmarted by this imaginary beast behind which hides the real beast who is that master of deception that I mentioned above, and which claims to oppose deception while really posing it, and who deceives us into thinking that the imaginary beast is the real one.
We fear what we imagine.
In our collective delusion we make imaginary efforts for peace with very REAL results, resulting in more war.
Who or what profits from all this? Look in the mirror and ask yourself.
And we seek to catch this imaginary beast with real efforts to conquer it and in the end it is we who become the conquered and in the end we are simply wasting our time, energy and humanity by fighting figments of our own imagination.
Look at the people around you, running to work and then rushing home, all rushing here and rushing there to save valuable time, and the faster they rush and chase after this slippery thing that we call ‘time’ then the more elusive it becomes, and nothing, much less time itself, ever gets caught.
Do you see how we are all in some kind of big lunatic asylum rushing to go nowhere apart from running faster and faster into the deeper abyss and recesses of the asylum itself?
When you look at our situations on this ‘ill-fated’ planet as Gurdjieff so astutely calls it, you realize that in the overall scheme of things we have so little time to accomplish what we really wish to accomplish in our short lifetimes.
As Osho says:
“Just look at your life. Half your life is simply wasted in sleeping, taking baths, eating food, changing clothes, shaving your beard. The most important years of life are wasted in learning all kinds of rubbish: geography, history, geometry. By the time you come out of university you are almost thirty. If you have gone on to attain a Ph.D. or D.Litt., you are thirty. The best time of your life has gone down the drain. And now you have to get married, and the wife, and the children, and the service, and the politics... all your time is taken up.
“If you count, you will not find even seven hours in seventy years which are absolutely yours. No, life keeps you engaged... in the movies, with the television, with the radio, in the churches, in the synagogues, in things in which perhaps you are not interested at all... in God.... I can't think what kind of a man is interested in God. And why? What wrong has he done to you? You don't even know whether he exists or not but you listen to sermons on God every Sunday. People are reading the same Bible, the same Gita, every day continually, their whole life. And how much life you have got? Only seventy years.
"One day just sit down and note how your life is being wasted, and how much time is left just for you. You will not find seven hours. I am absolutely certain it will be impossible to find seven hours in seventy years of life. If sometimes you have some time, then friends are there, picnics are there, football matches are there, Olympics are there. From every direction you are being called.[...]
Indeed, as Osho says we have so little time to pursue those things that are not related to the ever increasing demands of life.
It's almost as if it's by some conscious design.
Our available time is “farmed out” to the outside world and our only value is what we can produce for the Great Machine called “life.” In the short time that is allotted to us on this planet we spend the vast majority of our time maintaining some big machine that eats our very life and soul so as to keep itself running smoothly and efficiently for its own self serving purpose. It's like society is some great whale and all of us are moving around inside it's belly, going here and going there, doing this and doing that, doing good or doing bad, making love or making war, making things better or making things worse, speaking lies or speaking truth, talking about God or the devil, politics and religion and so on and so forth, and we are all thinking that we are actually doing something and going somewhere in the belly of the big mammal, while the big whale continues to dive deeper and deeper into the dark abyss of the sea while we are all slowly being digested inside its big belly and becoming a part of own essence while losing touch with our own. It's a slow digestive process that moves slowly and imperceptibly into total absorption and oblivion without our conscious awareness of the fact that we are being slowly devoured.
We have so little time for ourselves to pursue those things that interest us so as to investigate the nature of this lunatic asylum we are in and how we may escape from it. We are taught the “value of education” and the “value of knowledge” in our schools.
Lot's of lips service is given to this, both in the media and the corporate world, but as we get older these values invert themselves in the great machine that we call life and now this “value” of knowledge and education degenerates in a competition or game to get ahead of the other guy so we can increase our own personal ‘values’ in the bank account.
It’s easy to talk to children about higher values and then read them fairy tales. But as they become adults we put the books of fairy tales and their childish memories in some bottom shelf somewhere far away, and along with that we put our talks about higher values in that same resting place next to the fairy tales.
Now, as we get older, we are then told that it’s now time to “get real” and make money to live. Heck, there's really nothing really wrong with money but we become obsessed with it and now these childlike values that we were taught in our youth now become a bank account and our childlike knowledge now becomes a means to make a bigger value in the bank. Success is determined more so by what we have then what we understand.
Welcome to the corporate world. We have now all “grown up.”
Reality has now inverted itself.
In elementary school we pledged allegiance to the flag. Remember? I remember how I used to feel when I did this. I felt proud to be an American although I wasn't quite sure exactly what an American really was. But I felt honor, joy, love and obedience during my participation in the pledge to my country and I liked this feeling which put me more in touch with my deeper essential nature. I felt “more real” when I felt this faint echo of essential values enter the mainstream of my everyday consciousness while taking the pledge.
Then something happens as we get older. The symbolic flag of essential values that we all have pledged to as children now begins to represent something more concrete and tangible. Now it began to represent the glory of war and of death and destruction.
Our essential feelings relating to the unseen world of essential values now gets cross linked to the visible cult of death and destruction in the ‘real’ world and our pledges of our youth now invert themselves and aligns itself with this same death cult.
The mentality and worship of war has now taken over the rules of our lives.
This mentality of war also applies to the cooperate world which day by day becomes
more and more psychopathic. Actually, this psychopathic mentality within these
huge corporations is becoming more visible because a psychopath will manifest his psychopathy if he can get away with it and is not to be held accountable. Accountability and the fear of consequences keep the psychopath in check. Inner conscience is simply not a factor to balance the equation. Since the war mentality has been so acceptable to the US population, which has led us into the present horrors of Iraq, then it can be seen that this psychopathic mindset is now becoming more acceptable in the corporate environment since it is the cooperate environment that benefits the most from all this killing and bloodshed.
And are we to assume that we benefit also in all this?
That's the big joke. We don't even benefit in all this horror. Only the corporations do.
But we suffer the consequences.
The chief motto of our entire cooperate structure is:
Better it should happen to you then it should happen to me…
This is really the ‘golden rule’ that America lives by. This is the rule by which we all live.
After 911 we wanted “payback,” we wanted blood revenge for our pain.
But was it for payback or secretly did we just want an excuse to “get paid”?
Is there really a difference?
Blood revenge will just perpetuate the grief, perpetuate the pain.
I have seen this psychopathic mindset become more and more evident in any job that I have had after the 911 attack. And it gets worse and worse. It's like we are caught in some kind of movie script and there is some “program writer” out there, somewhere, writing scripts of war, revenge and destruction that is somehow molding the events that we see unfolding before us today.
I was recently watching a movie called ‘The Interpreter.’ It packs a rather powerful political statement relating to how we Americans handle our grief in such destructive ways when we take revenge on the world so as to relieve our pain. (That is, I’m talking about those people who have the ability to feel deep pain. Some people only know profits and can feel no deep pain).
The movie makes a strong political statement on the politics of war. I have included below a brief excerpt of the movie in one particular scene where Nicole Kidman is speaking to an FBI agent (Sean Penn) on how we often try to relieve our deep grief and pain by perpetuating it:
(Nichole Kidman speaking)
“Everyone who loses somebody wants revenge, on God if they can't find anyone else.
“But in Africa, in Matobo, the Ku believe that the only way to end grief is to save a life.
"If someone is murdered, a year of mourning ends with a ritual that we call the Drowning Man Trial.
“There's an all-night party beside a river. At dawn, the killer is put in a boat.
He's taken out on the water and he's dropped. He's bound so that he can't swim.
The family of the dead then has to choose. They can let him drown, or they can save him.
“The Ku believe that if the family lets the killer drown, they'll have justice but spend the rest of their lives in mourning.
“But if they save him, if they admit that life isn't always just...that very act can take away their sorrow.
“Vengeance is a lazy form of grief. [...]
I even see this war mentality even in the job I have now. I often get the feeling that the horrors of the so called “detainment” camp called Guantanamo Bay is simply a sad reflection of what America really is. This prison mentality, based on the fruits of blood revenge, is taking over the rule of our lives. I feel it daily at work.
Before taking my present job at the Home Depot we were given three full days of orientation. At the very beginning of this extremely long orientation process the instructor first asked us to take a piece of paper and fold it into a paper triangle and put our names on it and seat it on the desk in front of us facing the instructor.
Right from the start I felt humiliated. I had the feeling that I was in the fifth grade again where we were all given name tags to pin on our shirts so the teacher could know who we are. They then had us stand up and introduce ourselves and they tell us all to say “I am Home Depot” at the end of our introduction……a pledge of allegiance to the cooperate world.
They showed us several corporate tapes on proper safety rules and spent many hours talking about it. In fact, they seemed to be obsessed with safety, as if safety is their chief concern for both the workers and for the public that shops at their stores.
Then there was much talk on the virtues of the company such as how they serve the community by offering jobs, on how they are government contractors and how they serve the public with their low prices. They even showed tapes of the company giving checks to the people of the Katrina disaster. The instructor even had tears in his eye when he watched it. Yes indeed, this company was very good at praising their own virtues.
But when I actually started on the job working in the warehouse everything was different. Even though they over emphasized safety in the three day long drawn out orientation it didn't seem to apply to their attitude to their workers at all. The warehouse work at this Home Depot is certainly not easy. It’s constant backbreaking work, non stop, all night long. I remember being put on a job loading very heavy boxes of drywall screws for several hours and was told that I was not going fast enough since they needed to put me elsewhere (such as in the doors and windows dept) doing equally heavy labor. Then when I was done with the boxes of drywall screws, without missing a beat, they would put me elsewhere doing equally heavy work and so on and so forth until the end of the shift. That's the way it is in that warehouse.
It's always emphasized to me to move faster even though it’s near impossible to keep such a pace up for 8 hours. It does not seem to matter to them. No matter what we do it’s not good enough or fast enough. If you don't move fast enough then they always threaten, directly or indirectly, that you will be fired. They are rather skilled at psychological intimidation. Psychological intimidation works most effectively when the recipient of the intimidation is exhausted.
They want more and more, faster and faster, with little pay and little regard for the fact that we are often climbing high ladders and using a sharp box cutter knife and we are putting ourselves in physical jeopardy if we go at too fast a pace. So, if you ask me, all this talk about physical safety at orientation was pretty much a ruse to impress themselves. At least this is how it seems to me.
When I first started work I remember seeing the big orange bay doors close and then all the outside doors locked to start the beginning of the third shift. I initially got the distinct impression that we were in some kind of prison lockdown. Along with that, I had the very odd feeling that we were in some kind of movie where the big bay doors represented the movie screen descending in some kind of giant movie cinematic theater. I thought of the movie The Truman Show and I was reminded of the some of the lyrics from a song by the rock group ‘War’:
”I was once out strolling one very hot summer's day
When I thought I'd lay myself down to rest
in a big field of tall grass
I lay there in the sun and felt it caressing my face
And I fell asleep and dreamed
I dreamed I was in a Hollywood movie
And that I was the star of the movie
This really blew my mind, the fact that me,
an overfed, long-haired leaping gnome
should be the star of a Hollywood movie”
I then looked up and saw all the cameras hanging on the ceiling that were individually enclosed in these bubble pods that looked like little moons hanging above me. There were LOT’S of’em, lots of these cameras all arranged in a grid like matrix throughout the entire store and all hanging by a long tube that went to the ceiling. Not all of pods had cameras in them, many were dummies, but there were enough real cameras to cover all areas of the store. There was not an inch of the store was not seen by those cameras. (Now tell me, is it really necessary to have all these cameras in a store? And if it is then maybe the store is just TOO darn big anyway).
Do you ever get the feeling you are being watched?
Well, I stood there looking at the ceiling, feeling that I was in a Hollywood movie, watching the watchers watch me while I watched them back.
Well, while I was looking at all these pod cameras and the tubes that connected them to the ceiling, the Matrix movie and the image of the battery pods came to mind:
MORPHEUS
The human body generates more bio-
electricity than a 120-volt
battery and over 25,000 B.T.U.'s
of body heat.
Outside, spreading all around the power plant, beneath a
breathing greenhouse, are the growing fields.
MORPHEUS
We are, as an energy source,
easily renewable and completely
recyclable, the dead liquified and
fed intravenously to the living.
Huge farm-like reapers are harvesting the crop.
MORPHEUS
All they needed to control this
new battery was something to
occupy our mind.
We see inside a clear tubular husk. Floating in viscous
fluid, there is a human fetus; its soft skull already
growing around the brain-jack.
MORPHEUS
And so they built a prison out of
our past, wired it to our brains
and turned us into slaves
Then I look at one of the workers who looks exactly like Colonel Sanders and this brings to mind that statement from Morpheus about “huge farm-like reapers are harvesting the crop.”
Indeed I felt like I was in some kind of chicken coop and a star in a show called the Truman Show.
But yet there is still more.
I look around once more and my attention rests on all the different types of forklifts that we use in the warehouse at night. So I’m looking at all these different types of forklifts in the big warehouse and suddenly the warehouse scene from the movie Aliens comes to my mind where in the final scene Ripley (Sigouney Weaver) battles the Alien Predator in a cargo bay on a very powerful forklift.
Yep, call me crazy but all of that is what flashed through my mind.
When the big bay doors closed I took a little trip into an imaginary wonderland, but yet, indeed, the strenuous work in the warehouse is very, very real.
Then, finally, my attention rests on one particular forklift that constantly runs around the store picking up pallets of merchandise from the delivery trucks that are to be stocked away onto the shelves. These machines are called ‘Order Pickers’ (they are referred to as OP’s by the store personnel).
These Order Pickers are particularly distracting, since they are always being driven around the warehouse at fairly high speeds and the drivers are always honking their horns like crazy while a most irritating flashing strobe light is always flashing. It is all so distracting and irritating to me when I’m trying to do my job.
Well, once again my active imagination went into overdrive as I gazed upon these Order Pickers. These constantly moving Order Pickers reminded me of how everything in our lives is seemingly designed to distract us from coming to the realization that we are all born in some kind of prison and that we are all born and bred to feed our life force into some vast pool that feeds some great machine. Like a magician who might dangle a shiny swinging object before his subject, our time is consumed and fixated on these shiny dangling distractions that this great machine supplies to us so as to distract us from figuring a way out.
As that Order Picker was driving by and honking its horn with its hypnotic strobe light, I started to think and dream a little. I was thinking that there are two kinds of people on this planet. The first type is lacking in what you would call that faculty commonly known as conscience. It is as if there is a large segment of the population that is organically incapable of “connecting” to this higher faculty that makes it possible to experience such higher values as joy, concern, love, etc. They appear to be hypnotically drawn to all those things that seek to distract themselves and others from seeing the reality of the human condition as it is. Games, sports and simple survival appear to be their only reality.
They appear to get their energy from an outside source called the “group mind” and they are not interested in anything beyond the walls of the prison itself, only because they cannot conceive of anything beyond it. Like the battery powered Order Pickers these types of people know nothing outside the walls of the warehouse itself. They are sustained by a pool of energy which appears to flow through the group mind and this energy supports their sense of reality and in turn it is this sense of reality that feeds their “sense of self”.
For this type of person to have no external energy source means to have no self.
Thus, they must always identify with the external energy pool, for it is the life within this pool that sustains their sense of self. To be disconnected from the life of the pool means certain death...non existence. They care only for themselves, since they are imprisoned and consequently entombed within the shell of their own self centered thoughts. They cannot think or feel “outside the box” of their own self centered thoughts and as a result they are without conscience, apart from what they could imitate by those who have it. All they could do is what they must do so as to simply survive or get ahead within the prison wall enclosure. Their motivations are based strictly on fear and punishment.. All of what they do is subservient to these primal motivations. They cannot envision a life outside the prison walls that is not based on these primal motivations and primitive instincts. These people are like some vast ocean where all the drops lose their identity into one solid mass called the group consciousness.
I once new a guy in high school who would always say that he wants to build up memories in his life so that when he gets older he could look back at all the things he has done and bask in his accomplishments and sit back in his old age and enjoy the day dreams of his many cherished memories. Memories were very important to him. This type of thinking fits in well with the type of people I mentioned above. Like a cup of water poured back into a bucket, such memories will simply be poured back into an energy pool at his death, perhaps tinting the pool ever so very slightly, but there would be no individuality left behind after the memories dissolve back into the vast reservoir of the collective pool. He would have unknowingly given all his “life” over to the big pool while thinking all the while that he was doing it for himself, when in fact the energy pool and he himself were really one and the same.
Then there is the second group of people who have the capacity to separate from this collective pool and they can sense some higher divinity within themselves and it is this inner divinity, this inner conscience, this inner connection to something higher, which connects them to a source of inner energy that stands outside the collective pool. They have the capacity to hurt for another person and this alone gives them the possibility to think beyond and pass through the entombing walls of their own self reflections.
They can be compared to a water spout that is formed in the sea when the clouds above effect the waters below, eventually forming a cone that connects the winds of the sky with the waves of the sea and brings them closer together until a connection is made. The new existence formed from this new connection between the sky and sea is neither the cloud nor is it the sea but stands between the two partaking in the nature of both.
For the second group this inner connection to something higher is called conscience.
It seems to me that the entire cooperate world is run by those who mostly belong to the first group of people. The second group of people, those who have the capacity to feel conscience, are simply asleep, sleeping soundly while they are watched and manipulated by a malevolent hunger, a dark force, that primarily works through the nature of the first group.
All of this went through my mind as I watched the Order Picker’s drive by.
At the Depot we are “asked “ at the end of the shift to stay late since
they need to have all the aisles clear when the store opens at 6am, although there is no requirement that we stay late at the end of the shift. But we all know that if we do not do bas we are “asked” and leave at our normally scheduled time then we will be fired. Maybe it won’t be for leaving at our scheduled time since they can’t force us to work overtime but they’ll just find dome technicality to fire us on. I remember asking the supervisor as to why they have less then the required amount of people working for them for our shift, since this puts an almost impossible burden on their existing work crew. He looked annoyed and said that they can’t find anyone to pass the drug test.
Well, if you believe that then I have some swampland in Texas to sell you ...
The fact is they would have no problem finding people. What they really want is to maximize worker output with a minimum of cost expenditure.
But it goes much deeper then just economics. They could easily add on a few more workers in our store and the costs would still be negligible for a corporate behemoth like Home Depot.
So what do they really want?
Profits?
Not quite.
They really want STRESS AND profits.
But, I think, if there was a choice between stress and profits they would choose stress. That’s the impression I get. They really enjoy the emotional stress of those who work under them.
It feeds their sense of self just as fried chicken feeds our belly. It makes them feel alive.
After all, what is money really worth if it can’t buy a human life?
We can see this in Iraq.
What better way for those in corporate power to properly gauge the real value and worth of the American dollar?
Yes indeed, it seems like some dark force, some evil malevolent dark psychological alien plague, is infesting the upper management of many of these big US corporations
and it seems to me that they enjoy the misery and pain that they cause even more so then the profits that they produce.
This is the “life” that present day corporate America gives to this country. I see it from first hand experience while working for the big cooperate machines.
They give deep emotional stress by exploiting others while at the same time concealing their true motives with a false veneer of normalcy. They squeeze the life force out of the population to further their own profit and egotistical empowerment.
And as the life force is being slowly sucked out of our beloved American dream
the corporate profiteers stand watching in silent glee as the sociological structures within the country dry up, until it becomes just and empty crusty shell of it’s former self, where there is nothing left but an existential form with no essential content, and then the slightest tap, the littlest nudge, will cause it to crumble into a kind of controlled demolition, and down it goes back into the mountain of dust from whence it came.
Can you see why nobody will listen to me? They think I’m too negative.
But positive or negative really has nothing to do with it.
It’s simply what I see...
I close my eyes because I don’t want to believe it.
But when I open my eyes I see it again and again.
Look at what is around you. Stop listening to what you are told. We are told a big lie.
Again and again we are told this lie until it becomes real.
Do not listen when you should be looking.
That would be my simple advice.
The men at the top realize that the US economy is being primed for such a controlled demolition, much like the WTC towers of 911, and they will squeeze what they can out of the population before the big show commences.
Take the money and run and everyone else can go to hell. They ‘do unto others’ as it pleases them regardless of the consequences while putting on a veneer of sanity by preaching to the workers the golden rule ‘do unto others as you would have them do unto you'.
It appears that psychopaths, those without conscience, have taken over the rule of our lives and some dark alien malevolent plague is pulling their strings and playing the music that they are all dancing to.
Of all that I have written about this subject Laura Knight Jadczyk has covered and investigated this subject more thoroughly then anyone I have yet to come across. Thanks to her stupendous efforts, this subject which has most relavence in today’s times has been brought much more into today’s mainstream consciouness. Even in the movies I hear them using the term psychopath, a term that I have not heard much before.
In her latest article on political ponerology she has more then confirmed my own observations that it is the pathological types who are most rewarded in our present culture and because of this these types rise to the top in the cooperate environment. I have seen this again and again and this is one very horrible truth that many refuse to see. Oh yes, some may talk about it, but they don’t really feel the terror of it. They will not believe it. In the same way they might say how the media is corrupt and full of lies during fancy conversation but then they go home and believe everything they hear on TV.
I’ll post an excerpt from Laura Knight’s latest article on
Political Ponerology: A Science on The Nature of Evil adjusted for Political Purposes
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Andrew M. Lobaczewski, Nov. 2006
Pathocracy is a disease of great social movements followed by entire societies, nations, and empires. In the course of human history, it has affected social, political, and religious movements as well as the accompanying ideologies… and turned them into caricatures of themselves…. This occurred as a result of the … participation of pathological agents in a pathodynamically similar process. That explains why all the pathocracies of the world are, and have been, so similar in their essential properties.
…Identifying these phenomena through history and properly qualifying them according to their true nature and contents - not according to the ideology in question, which succumbed to the process of caricaturization - is a job for historians. […]
The actions of [pathocracy] affect an entire society, starting with the leaders and infiltrating every town, business, and institution. The pathological social structure gradually covers the entire country creating a “new class” within that nation. This privileged class [of pathocrats] feels permanently threatened by the “others”, i.e. by the majority of normal people. Neither do the pathocrats entertain any illusions about their personal fate should there be a return to the system of normal man. [Andrew M. Lobaczewski, Ph.D. (psychology); Political Ponerology: A science on the nature of evil adjusted for political purposes]
The word “psychopath” generally evokes images of the barely restrained - yet surprisingly urbane - Dr. Hannibal Lecter of “Silence of the Lambs” fame. I will admit that this was the image that came to my mind whenever I heard the word. But I was wrong, and I was to learn this lesson quite painfully by direct experience. The exact details are chronicled elsewhere; what is important is that this experience was probably one of the most painful and instructive episodes of my life and it enabled me to overcome a block in my awareness of the world around me and those who inhabit it.
Regarding blocks to awareness, I need to state for the record that I have spent 30 years studying psychology, history, culture, religion, myth and the so-called paranormal. I also have worked for many years with hypnotherapy - which gave me a very good mechanical knowledge of how the mind/brain of the human being operates at very deep levels. But even with all of that background, I was still operating with certain beliefs firmly in place that were shattered by my research into psychopathy. I realized that there was a certain set of ideas that I held about human beings that were sacrosanct. I even wrote about this once in the following way:
…my work has shown me that the vast majority of people want to do good, to experience good things, think good thoughts, and make decisions with good results. And they try with all their might to do so! With the majority of people having this internal desire, why the Hell isn't it happening?
I was naïve, I admit. There were many things I did not know that I have learned since I penned those words. But even at that time I was aware of how our own minds can be used to deceive us.
Now, what beliefs did I hold that made me a victim of a psychopath? The first and most obvious one is that I truly believed that deep inside, all people are basically “good” and that they “want to do good, to experience good things, think good thoughts, and make decisions with good results. And they try with all their might to do so…”
As it happens, this is not true as I - and everyone involved in our working group - learned to our sorrow, as they say. But we also learned to our edification. In order to come to some understanding of exactly what kind of human being could do the things that were done to me (and others close to me), and why they might be motivated - even driven - to behave this way, we began to research the psychology literature for clues because we needed to understand for our own peace of mind.
If there is a psychological theory that can explain vicious and harmful behavior, it helps very much for the victim of such acts to have this information so that they do not have to spend all their time feeling hurt or angry. And certainly, if there is a psychological theory that helps a person to find what kind of words or deeds can bridge the chasm between people, to heal misunderstandings, that is also a worthy goal. It was from such a perspective that we began our extensive work on the subjects of narcissism which then led to the study of psychopathy.
Of course, we didn’t start out with such a “diagnosis” or label for what we were witnessing. We started out with observations and searched the literature for clues, for profiles, for anything that would help us to understand the inner world of a human being - actually a group of human beings - who seemed to be utterly depraved and unlike anything we had ever encountered before.
Imagine - if you can - not having a conscience, none at all, no feelings of guilt or remorse no matter what you do, no limiting sense of concern for the well-being of strangers, friends, or even family members. Imagine no struggles with shame, not a single one in your whole life, no matter what kind of selfish, lazy, harmful, or immoral action you had taken.
And pretend that the concept of responsibility is unknown to you, except as a burden others seem to accept without question, like gullible fools.
Now add to this strange fantasy the ability to conceal from other people that your psychological makeup is radically different from theirs. Since everyone simply assumes that conscience is universal among human beings, hiding the fact that you are conscience-free is nearly effortless.
You are not held back from any of your desires by guilt or shame, and you are never confronted by others for your cold-bloodedness. The ice water in your veins is so bizarre, so completely outside of their personal experience, that they seldom even guess at your condition.
In other words, you are completely free of internal restraints, and your unhampered liberty to do just as you please, with no pangs of conscience, is conveniently invisible to the world.
You can do anything at all, and still your strange advantage over the majority of people, who are kept in line by their consciences will most likely remain undiscovered.
How will you live your life?
What will you do with your huge and secret advantage, and with the corresponding handicap of other people (conscience)?
The answer will depend largely on just what your desires happen to be, because people are not all the same. Even the profoundly unscrupulous are not all the same. Some people - whether they have a conscience or not - favor the ease of inertia, while others are filled with dreams and wild ambitions. Some human beings are brilliant and talented, some are dull-witted, and most, conscience or not, are somewhere in between. There are violent people and nonviolent ones, individuals who are motivated by blood lust and those who have no such appetites. [...]
Provided you are not forcibly stopped, you can do anything at all.
If you are born at the right time, with some access to family fortune, and you have a special talent for whipping up other people's hatred and sense of deprivation, you can arrange to kill large numbers of unsuspecting people. With enough money, you can accomplish this from far away, and you can sit back safely and watch in satisfaction. [...]
Crazy and frightening - and real, in about 4 percent of the population....
The prevalence rate for anorexic eating disorders is estimated a 3.43 percent, deemed to be nearly epidemic, and yet this figure is a fraction lower than the rate for antisocial personality. The high-profile disorders classed as schizophrenia occur in only about 1 percent of [the population] - a mere quarter of the rate of antisocial personality - and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say that the rate of colon cancer in the United States, considered "alarmingly hight," is about 40 per 100,000 - one hundred times lower than the rate of antisocial personality.
The high incidence of sociopathy in human society has a profound effect on the rest of us who must live on this planet, too, even those of us who have not been clinically traumatized. The individuals who constitute this 4 percent drain our relationships, our bank accounts, our accomplishments, our self-esteem, our very peace on earth.
Yet surprisingly, many people know nothing about this disorder, or if they do, they think only in terms of violent psychopathy - murderers, serial killers, mass murderers - people who have conspicuously broken the law many times over, and who, if caught, will be imprisoned, maybe even put to death by our legal system.
We are not commonly aware of, nor do we usually identify, the larger number of nonviolent sociopaths among us, people who often are not blatant lawbreakers, and against whom our formal legal system provides little defense.
Most of us would not imagine any correspondence between conceiving an ethnic genocide and, say, guiltlessly lying to one's boss about a coworker. But the psychological correspondence is not only there; it is chilling. Simple and profound, the link is the absence of the inner mechanism that beats up on us, emotionally speaking, when we make a choice we view as immoral, unethical, neglectful, or selfish.
Most of us feel mildly guilty if we eat the last piece of cake in the kitchen, let alone what we would feel if we intentionally and methodically set about to hurt another person.
Those who have no conscience at all are a group unto themselves, whether they be homicidal tyrants or merely ruthless social snipers.
The presence or absence of conscience is a deep human division, arguably more significant than intelligence, race, or even gender.
What differentiates a sociopath who lives off the labors of others from one who occasionally robs convenience stores, or from one who is a contemporary robber baron - or what makes the difference betwen an ordinary bully and a sociopathic murderer - is nothing more than social status, drive, intellect, blood lust, or simple opportunity.
What distinguishes all of these people from the rest of us is an utterly empty hole in the
psyche, where there should be the most evolved of all humanizing functions. [Martha Stout, Ph.D., The Sociopath Next Door] (highly recommended) [End quote]
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Indeed, as Gurdjieff has said, if we realized just how many of the people who rule and govern our lives are psychopaths, who completely lack that guiding conscience or “north star” within them that guides them to ‘do the right thing,’ then we would go mad with horror.
Gurdjieff says:
“Moreover, it happens fairly often that essence dies in a man while his personality and his body are still alive. A considerable percentage of the people we meet in the streets of a great town are people who are empty inside, that is, they are actually already dead. It is fortunate for us that we do not see and do not know it. If we knew what a number of people are actually dead and what a number of these dead people govern our lives, we should go mad with horror. And indeed people often do go mad because they find out something of this nature without the proper preparation, that is, they see something they are not supposed to see. In order to see without danger one must be on the way. If a man who can do nothing sees the truth he will certainly go mad. Only this rarely happens. Usually everything is so arranged that a man can see nothing prematurely. Personality sees only what it likes to see and what does not interfere with its life. It never sees what it does not like. This is both good and bad at the same time. It is good if a man wants to sleep, bad if he wants to awaken. [Ouspensky, quoting Gurdjieff, 1949]
Laura Knight also has a most enjoyable and readable article in her most recent Halloween article about how this lack of conscience in people contributes to those loss of inner restraints that permits us to destroy ourselves in the madness of reciprocal destruction. The fact that we are mass murdering in Iraq shows us clearly which group of people have the control over our lives.
Laura Knight’s recent Halloween and
last years Halloween articles show extremely well how the lack of inner conscience and our lack of objectivity are the two key elements that have allowed the sociological structure of the United States and much of the world to fall into a state of ‘pathrocacy’ leading to social ruin and decay. I strongly recommend the reading both of her articles. It will shine some light on why things are as they are in the world today. They are real treats!
Clearly, all of life is arranged so that we are conveniently distracted from the fact that we are ruled by people, the walking dead as Gurdjieff says, who have no real conscience and who pose deception while posturing to the public that they had the hearts and souls of the highest saints.
This is the true terror of the situation as the articles above state so well.
Those psychopaths who have most influence on our lives cannot see suffering as a totality. They cannot transcend their ordinary organic personal suffering and see anything beyond the limitations of their own organism. They are organic men and organic men they will always be. They cannot INCLUDE their own personal suffering along with the suffering of others and feel the pain that they feel. All suffering beyond the suffering of them own organism is excluded from their world view and they cannot fathom what their acts and choices may have on the suffering of others or their fellow men. Their understanding of religion and of Christ's teachings concerning the Kingdom Of Heaven is based on the idea of “perpetual pleasure” since they cannot imagine any suffering beyond their own organic pleasures and pains.
Conscience is something that the strictly organic man cannot understand. It is indeed unfortunate for this ill fated planet that we allow those with no real conscience to govern our destiny for it is only a KINGDOM OF CONSCIENCE that can ever bring us to what can be really called The Kingdom Of Heaven.
Sometimes I think I'm quite crazy since it seems that so few people see the same things that I see in the world around me. It’s like I live in a different world. People may agree with what I say but I often wonder if they really see these things with any great clarity. But most of the time people aren't very much interested in what I have to say since they see what I say as too negative, too bleak.
They won’t hesitate to tell me so.
Sometimes I even believe them and I think that maybe I'm nuts and that perhaps my outlook of the world is just too grim and maybe I'm simply not seeing things right. I sometimes listen to these people and then I feel like I might be “off my rocker” because I'm always seeing such grimness around me. Then I may even start to believe what people might say, since they say it with such a mind bogglingly certainty and I think that I may really be deranged andh surprisingly, I even become comfortable in accepting this possibility as an actual fact.
But then, invariably, I find that I’m not as deranged as I thought since I again see what I have been seeing before. I “re-see” what I have seen before without really wanting to. The seeing repeats itself. My seeing of reality reconfirms itself without me really wanting it to be reconfirmed. This is how I know that I may be seeing things more or less objectively about certain things going on in the world around me.
Repetition makes it possible for something to exist. Repetition makes for something to be real in our existing world. If something did not repeat it would vanish and blink out from our world never to be seen again. If I repeatedly see the same things over and over again then I’ll investigate it further, providing that I'm not afraid to look.
While sitting in the coffee shop I'll often look at the faces of the people around me and I often wonder how many of them question, truly question, where they are all going with all this rushing about.
Do robots ever question anything apart from that which they are programmed to question?
I sometimes see these people acting like programmed reaction machines hypnotically rushing about willy nilly and really doing nothing, creating nothing, coming from nowhere and going nowhere and yet there is some kind of sensitive intelligence, a sentient thing, a masked malevolent hunger, that is working inside them as a group mind that makes them appear to be alive and aware and intelligent.
However, in the end, the sum total of all their actions comprises a psycho-dynamic null-process, forming a null world composed of nullities and null forces, where everything reacts and nothing can act on its own power and the end result is a cancellation to zero. Any creativity that is accidentally generated within this process is quickly absorbed into this null world and makes it even more chaotic then before. If more people could see this then perhaps things could be different.
That's why I blog. Maybe it will help others to see. But I cannot anticipate any outcomes. I blog because I have made a decision to do so and it's about as simple as that.
In this null world everything inverts itself and neutralizes itself. In this world we act and imagine we are doing ‘good’ but the results we produce are often ‘bad.’ The ‘good’ action, or our actions to do good, originate in the imagination but the resulting ‘bad’ action has REAL consequences. They cancel each other out. Our imagination and the actual reality do not align in this null world due to our absence of objective consciousness.
We may be able to create functional things in this world but we are incapable of creating a future for ourselves primarily because of our delusions about good and evil.
And it is here, in our deluded understandings of good and evil, where true objective evil can have its play and play its game in our psyche, a game that it played within our very delusions of what is really real. The game is played within the arena demarcated by these delusions.
As I watch this morning madness I get the impression that we are governed and ruled by some kind of alien malevolent plague, some dark deceptive sentient force, some evil magician who is a wolf in sheep's clothing, that feeds on all this madness and has somehow rendered the majority of the people around me into an unconscious state of automatism and it is this underlying force that's really governing and pulling the strings within their lives for it's own self serving purposes, and that this malevolent governing force poses lies and deception into the minds of these unconscious automatons and hypnotizes them into believing that those forces that run and govern our lives actually oppose lies and deception while the truth of the matter is that this governing force really poses those very things that it says it opposes.
Do I make sense? Think about it a little.
That’s how I see it. That's how it looks to me.
And in all our mad rushing we create a society based on the big lie that says that we govern ourselves and that those who govern us have our best interests at heart.
We are led to believe that we are really going somewhere in all this madness and the end result is that the world in which we live is really a collective madness which lives in a collective delusion thinking that all this rushing about is achieving anything real.
And in this delusion we think that we can rule the dimension of time and go beyond it in all our rushing and vain pursuits that really go nowhere.
What are we all trying to catch with all this rushing about to nowhere? Are we trying to catch time itself? Do we think we can overrun it and conquer it? Do we think we can condition that very thing which really conditions us? It seems to me that the faster we chase time, then the faster time will elude us, much like quicksilver, and it's as if time is always one tick ahead and we are always one tock behind, and no matter how fast we chase it, no matter how fast we may stalk it, chasing time is much like the coyote chasing the road runner; it never gets caught, and the ever elusive time always looks back, laughing and laughing, at the utter inanity and futility of our pointless hot pursuits to catch up to it.
It’s like time looks at us through a window that’s getting thinner and thinner. We can see it’s reflection but it cannot be touched.
Indeed, time makes an ass of us all and it doesn't even exist anyway (at least as we understand it)!
We are outfoxed by an imaginary fox that we call time. We are outsmarted by this imaginary beast behind which hides the real beast who is that master of deception that I mentioned above, and which claims to oppose deception while really posing it, and who deceives us into thinking that the imaginary beast is the real one.
We fear what we imagine.
In our collective delusion we make imaginary efforts for peace with very REAL results, resulting in more war.
Who or what profits from all this? Look in the mirror and ask yourself.
And we seek to catch this imaginary beast with real efforts to conquer it and in the end it is we who become the conquered and in the end we are simply wasting our time, energy and humanity by fighting figments of our own imagination.
Look at the people around you, running to work and then rushing home, all rushing here and rushing there to save valuable time, and the faster they rush and chase after this slippery thing that we call ‘time’ then the more elusive it becomes, and nothing, much less time itself, ever gets caught.
Do you see how we are all in some kind of big lunatic asylum rushing to go nowhere apart from running faster and faster into the deeper abyss and recesses of the asylum itself?
When you look at our situations on this ‘ill-fated’ planet as Gurdjieff so astutely calls it, you realize that in the overall scheme of things we have so little time to accomplish what we really wish to accomplish in our short lifetimes.
As Osho says:
“Just look at your life. Half your life is simply wasted in sleeping, taking baths, eating food, changing clothes, shaving your beard. The most important years of life are wasted in learning all kinds of rubbish: geography, history, geometry. By the time you come out of university you are almost thirty. If you have gone on to attain a Ph.D. or D.Litt., you are thirty. The best time of your life has gone down the drain. And now you have to get married, and the wife, and the children, and the service, and the politics... all your time is taken up.
“If you count, you will not find even seven hours in seventy years which are absolutely yours. No, life keeps you engaged... in the movies, with the television, with the radio, in the churches, in the synagogues, in things in which perhaps you are not interested at all... in God.... I can't think what kind of a man is interested in God. And why? What wrong has he done to you? You don't even know whether he exists or not but you listen to sermons on God every Sunday. People are reading the same Bible, the same Gita, every day continually, their whole life. And how much life you have got? Only seventy years.
"One day just sit down and note how your life is being wasted, and how much time is left just for you. You will not find seven hours. I am absolutely certain it will be impossible to find seven hours in seventy years of life. If sometimes you have some time, then friends are there, picnics are there, football matches are there, Olympics are there. From every direction you are being called.[...]
Indeed, as Osho says we have so little time to pursue those things that are not related to the ever increasing demands of life.
It's almost as if it's by some conscious design.
Our available time is “farmed out” to the outside world and our only value is what we can produce for the Great Machine called “life.” In the short time that is allotted to us on this planet we spend the vast majority of our time maintaining some big machine that eats our very life and soul so as to keep itself running smoothly and efficiently for its own self serving purpose. It's like society is some great whale and all of us are moving around inside it's belly, going here and going there, doing this and doing that, doing good or doing bad, making love or making war, making things better or making things worse, speaking lies or speaking truth, talking about God or the devil, politics and religion and so on and so forth, and we are all thinking that we are actually doing something and going somewhere in the belly of the big mammal, while the big whale continues to dive deeper and deeper into the dark abyss of the sea while we are all slowly being digested inside its big belly and becoming a part of own essence while losing touch with our own. It's a slow digestive process that moves slowly and imperceptibly into total absorption and oblivion without our conscious awareness of the fact that we are being slowly devoured.
We have so little time for ourselves to pursue those things that interest us so as to investigate the nature of this lunatic asylum we are in and how we may escape from it. We are taught the “value of education” and the “value of knowledge” in our schools.
Lot's of lips service is given to this, both in the media and the corporate world, but as we get older these values invert themselves in the great machine that we call life and now this “value” of knowledge and education degenerates in a competition or game to get ahead of the other guy so we can increase our own personal ‘values’ in the bank account.
It’s easy to talk to children about higher values and then read them fairy tales. But as they become adults we put the books of fairy tales and their childish memories in some bottom shelf somewhere far away, and along with that we put our talks about higher values in that same resting place next to the fairy tales.
Now, as we get older, we are then told that it’s now time to “get real” and make money to live. Heck, there's really nothing really wrong with money but we become obsessed with it and now these childlike values that we were taught in our youth now become a bank account and our childlike knowledge now becomes a means to make a bigger value in the bank. Success is determined more so by what we have then what we understand.
Welcome to the corporate world. We have now all “grown up.”
Reality has now inverted itself.
In elementary school we pledged allegiance to the flag. Remember? I remember how I used to feel when I did this. I felt proud to be an American although I wasn't quite sure exactly what an American really was. But I felt honor, joy, love and obedience during my participation in the pledge to my country and I liked this feeling which put me more in touch with my deeper essential nature. I felt “more real” when I felt this faint echo of essential values enter the mainstream of my everyday consciousness while taking the pledge.
Then something happens as we get older. The symbolic flag of essential values that we all have pledged to as children now begins to represent something more concrete and tangible. Now it began to represent the glory of war and of death and destruction.
Our essential feelings relating to the unseen world of essential values now gets cross linked to the visible cult of death and destruction in the ‘real’ world and our pledges of our youth now invert themselves and aligns itself with this same death cult.
The mentality and worship of war has now taken over the rules of our lives.
This mentality of war also applies to the cooperate world which day by day becomes
more and more psychopathic. Actually, this psychopathic mentality within these
huge corporations is becoming more visible because a psychopath will manifest his psychopathy if he can get away with it and is not to be held accountable. Accountability and the fear of consequences keep the psychopath in check. Inner conscience is simply not a factor to balance the equation. Since the war mentality has been so acceptable to the US population, which has led us into the present horrors of Iraq, then it can be seen that this psychopathic mindset is now becoming more acceptable in the corporate environment since it is the cooperate environment that benefits the most from all this killing and bloodshed.
And are we to assume that we benefit also in all this?
That's the big joke. We don't even benefit in all this horror. Only the corporations do.
But we suffer the consequences.
The chief motto of our entire cooperate structure is:
Better it should happen to you then it should happen to me…
This is really the ‘golden rule’ that America lives by. This is the rule by which we all live.
After 911 we wanted “payback,” we wanted blood revenge for our pain.
But was it for payback or secretly did we just want an excuse to “get paid”?
Is there really a difference?
Blood revenge will just perpetuate the grief, perpetuate the pain.
I have seen this psychopathic mindset become more and more evident in any job that I have had after the 911 attack. And it gets worse and worse. It's like we are caught in some kind of movie script and there is some “program writer” out there, somewhere, writing scripts of war, revenge and destruction that is somehow molding the events that we see unfolding before us today.
I was recently watching a movie called ‘The Interpreter.’ It packs a rather powerful political statement relating to how we Americans handle our grief in such destructive ways when we take revenge on the world so as to relieve our pain. (That is, I’m talking about those people who have the ability to feel deep pain. Some people only know profits and can feel no deep pain).
The movie makes a strong political statement on the politics of war. I have included below a brief excerpt of the movie in one particular scene where Nicole Kidman is speaking to an FBI agent (Sean Penn) on how we often try to relieve our deep grief and pain by perpetuating it:
(Nichole Kidman speaking)
“Everyone who loses somebody wants revenge, on God if they can't find anyone else.
“But in Africa, in Matobo, the Ku believe that the only way to end grief is to save a life.
"If someone is murdered, a year of mourning ends with a ritual that we call the Drowning Man Trial.
“There's an all-night party beside a river. At dawn, the killer is put in a boat.
He's taken out on the water and he's dropped. He's bound so that he can't swim.
The family of the dead then has to choose. They can let him drown, or they can save him.
“The Ku believe that if the family lets the killer drown, they'll have justice but spend the rest of their lives in mourning.
“But if they save him, if they admit that life isn't always just...that very act can take away their sorrow.
“Vengeance is a lazy form of grief. [...]
I even see this war mentality even in the job I have now. I often get the feeling that the horrors of the so called “detainment” camp called Guantanamo Bay is simply a sad reflection of what America really is. This prison mentality, based on the fruits of blood revenge, is taking over the rule of our lives. I feel it daily at work.
Before taking my present job at the Home Depot we were given three full days of orientation. At the very beginning of this extremely long orientation process the instructor first asked us to take a piece of paper and fold it into a paper triangle and put our names on it and seat it on the desk in front of us facing the instructor.
Right from the start I felt humiliated. I had the feeling that I was in the fifth grade again where we were all given name tags to pin on our shirts so the teacher could know who we are. They then had us stand up and introduce ourselves and they tell us all to say “I am Home Depot” at the end of our introduction……a pledge of allegiance to the cooperate world.
They showed us several corporate tapes on proper safety rules and spent many hours talking about it. In fact, they seemed to be obsessed with safety, as if safety is their chief concern for both the workers and for the public that shops at their stores.
Then there was much talk on the virtues of the company such as how they serve the community by offering jobs, on how they are government contractors and how they serve the public with their low prices. They even showed tapes of the company giving checks to the people of the Katrina disaster. The instructor even had tears in his eye when he watched it. Yes indeed, this company was very good at praising their own virtues.
But when I actually started on the job working in the warehouse everything was different. Even though they over emphasized safety in the three day long drawn out orientation it didn't seem to apply to their attitude to their workers at all. The warehouse work at this Home Depot is certainly not easy. It’s constant backbreaking work, non stop, all night long. I remember being put on a job loading very heavy boxes of drywall screws for several hours and was told that I was not going fast enough since they needed to put me elsewhere (such as in the doors and windows dept) doing equally heavy labor. Then when I was done with the boxes of drywall screws, without missing a beat, they would put me elsewhere doing equally heavy work and so on and so forth until the end of the shift. That's the way it is in that warehouse.
It's always emphasized to me to move faster even though it’s near impossible to keep such a pace up for 8 hours. It does not seem to matter to them. No matter what we do it’s not good enough or fast enough. If you don't move fast enough then they always threaten, directly or indirectly, that you will be fired. They are rather skilled at psychological intimidation. Psychological intimidation works most effectively when the recipient of the intimidation is exhausted.
They want more and more, faster and faster, with little pay and little regard for the fact that we are often climbing high ladders and using a sharp box cutter knife and we are putting ourselves in physical jeopardy if we go at too fast a pace. So, if you ask me, all this talk about physical safety at orientation was pretty much a ruse to impress themselves. At least this is how it seems to me.
When I first started work I remember seeing the big orange bay doors close and then all the outside doors locked to start the beginning of the third shift. I initially got the distinct impression that we were in some kind of prison lockdown. Along with that, I had the very odd feeling that we were in some kind of movie where the big bay doors represented the movie screen descending in some kind of giant movie cinematic theater. I thought of the movie The Truman Show and I was reminded of the some of the lyrics from a song by the rock group ‘War’:
”I was once out strolling one very hot summer's day
When I thought I'd lay myself down to rest
in a big field of tall grass
I lay there in the sun and felt it caressing my face
And I fell asleep and dreamed
I dreamed I was in a Hollywood movie
And that I was the star of the movie
This really blew my mind, the fact that me,
an overfed, long-haired leaping gnome
should be the star of a Hollywood movie”
I then looked up and saw all the cameras hanging on the ceiling that were individually enclosed in these bubble pods that looked like little moons hanging above me. There were LOT’S of’em, lots of these cameras all arranged in a grid like matrix throughout the entire store and all hanging by a long tube that went to the ceiling. Not all of pods had cameras in them, many were dummies, but there were enough real cameras to cover all areas of the store. There was not an inch of the store was not seen by those cameras. (Now tell me, is it really necessary to have all these cameras in a store? And if it is then maybe the store is just TOO darn big anyway).
Do you ever get the feeling you are being watched?
Well, I stood there looking at the ceiling, feeling that I was in a Hollywood movie, watching the watchers watch me while I watched them back.
Well, while I was looking at all these pod cameras and the tubes that connected them to the ceiling, the Matrix movie and the image of the battery pods came to mind:
MORPHEUS
The human body generates more bio-
electricity than a 120-volt
battery and over 25,000 B.T.U.'s
of body heat.
Outside, spreading all around the power plant, beneath a
breathing greenhouse, are the growing fields.
MORPHEUS
We are, as an energy source,
easily renewable and completely
recyclable, the dead liquified and
fed intravenously to the living.
Huge farm-like reapers are harvesting the crop.
MORPHEUS
All they needed to control this
new battery was something to
occupy our mind.
We see inside a clear tubular husk. Floating in viscous
fluid, there is a human fetus; its soft skull already
growing around the brain-jack.
MORPHEUS
And so they built a prison out of
our past, wired it to our brains
and turned us into slaves
Then I look at one of the workers who looks exactly like Colonel Sanders and this brings to mind that statement from Morpheus about “huge farm-like reapers are harvesting the crop.”
Indeed I felt like I was in some kind of chicken coop and a star in a show called the Truman Show.
But yet there is still more.
I look around once more and my attention rests on all the different types of forklifts that we use in the warehouse at night. So I’m looking at all these different types of forklifts in the big warehouse and suddenly the warehouse scene from the movie Aliens comes to my mind where in the final scene Ripley (Sigouney Weaver) battles the Alien Predator in a cargo bay on a very powerful forklift.
Yep, call me crazy but all of that is what flashed through my mind.
When the big bay doors closed I took a little trip into an imaginary wonderland, but yet, indeed, the strenuous work in the warehouse is very, very real.
Then, finally, my attention rests on one particular forklift that constantly runs around the store picking up pallets of merchandise from the delivery trucks that are to be stocked away onto the shelves. These machines are called ‘Order Pickers’ (they are referred to as OP’s by the store personnel).
These Order Pickers are particularly distracting, since they are always being driven around the warehouse at fairly high speeds and the drivers are always honking their horns like crazy while a most irritating flashing strobe light is always flashing. It is all so distracting and irritating to me when I’m trying to do my job.
Well, once again my active imagination went into overdrive as I gazed upon these Order Pickers. These constantly moving Order Pickers reminded me of how everything in our lives is seemingly designed to distract us from coming to the realization that we are all born in some kind of prison and that we are all born and bred to feed our life force into some vast pool that feeds some great machine. Like a magician who might dangle a shiny swinging object before his subject, our time is consumed and fixated on these shiny dangling distractions that this great machine supplies to us so as to distract us from figuring a way out.
As that Order Picker was driving by and honking its horn with its hypnotic strobe light, I started to think and dream a little. I was thinking that there are two kinds of people on this planet. The first type is lacking in what you would call that faculty commonly known as conscience. It is as if there is a large segment of the population that is organically incapable of “connecting” to this higher faculty that makes it possible to experience such higher values as joy, concern, love, etc. They appear to be hypnotically drawn to all those things that seek to distract themselves and others from seeing the reality of the human condition as it is. Games, sports and simple survival appear to be their only reality.
They appear to get their energy from an outside source called the “group mind” and they are not interested in anything beyond the walls of the prison itself, only because they cannot conceive of anything beyond it. Like the battery powered Order Pickers these types of people know nothing outside the walls of the warehouse itself. They are sustained by a pool of energy which appears to flow through the group mind and this energy supports their sense of reality and in turn it is this sense of reality that feeds their “sense of self”.
For this type of person to have no external energy source means to have no self.
Thus, they must always identify with the external energy pool, for it is the life within this pool that sustains their sense of self. To be disconnected from the life of the pool means certain death...non existence. They care only for themselves, since they are imprisoned and consequently entombed within the shell of their own self centered thoughts. They cannot think or feel “outside the box” of their own self centered thoughts and as a result they are without conscience, apart from what they could imitate by those who have it. All they could do is what they must do so as to simply survive or get ahead within the prison wall enclosure. Their motivations are based strictly on fear and punishment.. All of what they do is subservient to these primal motivations. They cannot envision a life outside the prison walls that is not based on these primal motivations and primitive instincts. These people are like some vast ocean where all the drops lose their identity into one solid mass called the group consciousness.
I once new a guy in high school who would always say that he wants to build up memories in his life so that when he gets older he could look back at all the things he has done and bask in his accomplishments and sit back in his old age and enjoy the day dreams of his many cherished memories. Memories were very important to him. This type of thinking fits in well with the type of people I mentioned above. Like a cup of water poured back into a bucket, such memories will simply be poured back into an energy pool at his death, perhaps tinting the pool ever so very slightly, but there would be no individuality left behind after the memories dissolve back into the vast reservoir of the collective pool. He would have unknowingly given all his “life” over to the big pool while thinking all the while that he was doing it for himself, when in fact the energy pool and he himself were really one and the same.
Then there is the second group of people who have the capacity to separate from this collective pool and they can sense some higher divinity within themselves and it is this inner divinity, this inner conscience, this inner connection to something higher, which connects them to a source of inner energy that stands outside the collective pool. They have the capacity to hurt for another person and this alone gives them the possibility to think beyond and pass through the entombing walls of their own self reflections.
They can be compared to a water spout that is formed in the sea when the clouds above effect the waters below, eventually forming a cone that connects the winds of the sky with the waves of the sea and brings them closer together until a connection is made. The new existence formed from this new connection between the sky and sea is neither the cloud nor is it the sea but stands between the two partaking in the nature of both.
For the second group this inner connection to something higher is called conscience.
It seems to me that the entire cooperate world is run by those who mostly belong to the first group of people. The second group of people, those who have the capacity to feel conscience, are simply asleep, sleeping soundly while they are watched and manipulated by a malevolent hunger, a dark force, that primarily works through the nature of the first group.
All of this went through my mind as I watched the Order Picker’s drive by.
At the Depot we are “asked “ at the end of the shift to stay late since
they need to have all the aisles clear when the store opens at 6am, although there is no requirement that we stay late at the end of the shift. But we all know that if we do not do bas we are “asked” and leave at our normally scheduled time then we will be fired. Maybe it won’t be for leaving at our scheduled time since they can’t force us to work overtime but they’ll just find dome technicality to fire us on. I remember asking the supervisor as to why they have less then the required amount of people working for them for our shift, since this puts an almost impossible burden on their existing work crew. He looked annoyed and said that they can’t find anyone to pass the drug test.
Well, if you believe that then I have some swampland in Texas to sell you ...
The fact is they would have no problem finding people. What they really want is to maximize worker output with a minimum of cost expenditure.
But it goes much deeper then just economics. They could easily add on a few more workers in our store and the costs would still be negligible for a corporate behemoth like Home Depot.
So what do they really want?
Profits?
Not quite.
They really want STRESS AND profits.
But, I think, if there was a choice between stress and profits they would choose stress. That’s the impression I get. They really enjoy the emotional stress of those who work under them.
It feeds their sense of self just as fried chicken feeds our belly. It makes them feel alive.
After all, what is money really worth if it can’t buy a human life?
We can see this in Iraq.
What better way for those in corporate power to properly gauge the real value and worth of the American dollar?
Yes indeed, it seems like some dark force, some evil malevolent dark psychological alien plague, is infesting the upper management of many of these big US corporations
and it seems to me that they enjoy the misery and pain that they cause even more so then the profits that they produce.
This is the “life” that present day corporate America gives to this country. I see it from first hand experience while working for the big cooperate machines.
They give deep emotional stress by exploiting others while at the same time concealing their true motives with a false veneer of normalcy. They squeeze the life force out of the population to further their own profit and egotistical empowerment.
And as the life force is being slowly sucked out of our beloved American dream
the corporate profiteers stand watching in silent glee as the sociological structures within the country dry up, until it becomes just and empty crusty shell of it’s former self, where there is nothing left but an existential form with no essential content, and then the slightest tap, the littlest nudge, will cause it to crumble into a kind of controlled demolition, and down it goes back into the mountain of dust from whence it came.
Can you see why nobody will listen to me? They think I’m too negative.
But positive or negative really has nothing to do with it.
It’s simply what I see...
I close my eyes because I don’t want to believe it.
But when I open my eyes I see it again and again.
Look at what is around you. Stop listening to what you are told. We are told a big lie.
Again and again we are told this lie until it becomes real.
Do not listen when you should be looking.
That would be my simple advice.
The men at the top realize that the US economy is being primed for such a controlled demolition, much like the WTC towers of 911, and they will squeeze what they can out of the population before the big show commences.
Take the money and run and everyone else can go to hell. They ‘do unto others’ as it pleases them regardless of the consequences while putting on a veneer of sanity by preaching to the workers the golden rule ‘do unto others as you would have them do unto you'.
It appears that psychopaths, those without conscience, have taken over the rule of our lives and some dark alien malevolent plague is pulling their strings and playing the music that they are all dancing to.
Of all that I have written about this subject Laura Knight Jadczyk has covered and investigated this subject more thoroughly then anyone I have yet to come across. Thanks to her stupendous efforts, this subject which has most relavence in today’s times has been brought much more into today’s mainstream consciouness. Even in the movies I hear them using the term psychopath, a term that I have not heard much before.
In her latest article on political ponerology she has more then confirmed my own observations that it is the pathological types who are most rewarded in our present culture and because of this these types rise to the top in the cooperate environment. I have seen this again and again and this is one very horrible truth that many refuse to see. Oh yes, some may talk about it, but they don’t really feel the terror of it. They will not believe it. In the same way they might say how the media is corrupt and full of lies during fancy conversation but then they go home and believe everything they hear on TV.
I’ll post an excerpt from Laura Knight’s latest article on
Political Ponerology: A Science on The Nature of Evil adjusted for Political Purposes
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Andrew M. Lobaczewski, Nov. 2006
Pathocracy is a disease of great social movements followed by entire societies, nations, and empires. In the course of human history, it has affected social, political, and religious movements as well as the accompanying ideologies… and turned them into caricatures of themselves…. This occurred as a result of the … participation of pathological agents in a pathodynamically similar process. That explains why all the pathocracies of the world are, and have been, so similar in their essential properties.
…Identifying these phenomena through history and properly qualifying them according to their true nature and contents - not according to the ideology in question, which succumbed to the process of caricaturization - is a job for historians. […]
The actions of [pathocracy] affect an entire society, starting with the leaders and infiltrating every town, business, and institution. The pathological social structure gradually covers the entire country creating a “new class” within that nation. This privileged class [of pathocrats] feels permanently threatened by the “others”, i.e. by the majority of normal people. Neither do the pathocrats entertain any illusions about their personal fate should there be a return to the system of normal man. [Andrew M. Lobaczewski, Ph.D. (psychology); Political Ponerology: A science on the nature of evil adjusted for political purposes]
The word “psychopath” generally evokes images of the barely restrained - yet surprisingly urbane - Dr. Hannibal Lecter of “Silence of the Lambs” fame. I will admit that this was the image that came to my mind whenever I heard the word. But I was wrong, and I was to learn this lesson quite painfully by direct experience. The exact details are chronicled elsewhere; what is important is that this experience was probably one of the most painful and instructive episodes of my life and it enabled me to overcome a block in my awareness of the world around me and those who inhabit it.
Regarding blocks to awareness, I need to state for the record that I have spent 30 years studying psychology, history, culture, religion, myth and the so-called paranormal. I also have worked for many years with hypnotherapy - which gave me a very good mechanical knowledge of how the mind/brain of the human being operates at very deep levels. But even with all of that background, I was still operating with certain beliefs firmly in place that were shattered by my research into psychopathy. I realized that there was a certain set of ideas that I held about human beings that were sacrosanct. I even wrote about this once in the following way:
…my work has shown me that the vast majority of people want to do good, to experience good things, think good thoughts, and make decisions with good results. And they try with all their might to do so! With the majority of people having this internal desire, why the Hell isn't it happening?
I was naïve, I admit. There were many things I did not know that I have learned since I penned those words. But even at that time I was aware of how our own minds can be used to deceive us.
Now, what beliefs did I hold that made me a victim of a psychopath? The first and most obvious one is that I truly believed that deep inside, all people are basically “good” and that they “want to do good, to experience good things, think good thoughts, and make decisions with good results. And they try with all their might to do so…”
As it happens, this is not true as I - and everyone involved in our working group - learned to our sorrow, as they say. But we also learned to our edification. In order to come to some understanding of exactly what kind of human being could do the things that were done to me (and others close to me), and why they might be motivated - even driven - to behave this way, we began to research the psychology literature for clues because we needed to understand for our own peace of mind.
If there is a psychological theory that can explain vicious and harmful behavior, it helps very much for the victim of such acts to have this information so that they do not have to spend all their time feeling hurt or angry. And certainly, if there is a psychological theory that helps a person to find what kind of words or deeds can bridge the chasm between people, to heal misunderstandings, that is also a worthy goal. It was from such a perspective that we began our extensive work on the subjects of narcissism which then led to the study of psychopathy.
Of course, we didn’t start out with such a “diagnosis” or label for what we were witnessing. We started out with observations and searched the literature for clues, for profiles, for anything that would help us to understand the inner world of a human being - actually a group of human beings - who seemed to be utterly depraved and unlike anything we had ever encountered before.
Imagine - if you can - not having a conscience, none at all, no feelings of guilt or remorse no matter what you do, no limiting sense of concern for the well-being of strangers, friends, or even family members. Imagine no struggles with shame, not a single one in your whole life, no matter what kind of selfish, lazy, harmful, or immoral action you had taken.
And pretend that the concept of responsibility is unknown to you, except as a burden others seem to accept without question, like gullible fools.
Now add to this strange fantasy the ability to conceal from other people that your psychological makeup is radically different from theirs. Since everyone simply assumes that conscience is universal among human beings, hiding the fact that you are conscience-free is nearly effortless.
You are not held back from any of your desires by guilt or shame, and you are never confronted by others for your cold-bloodedness. The ice water in your veins is so bizarre, so completely outside of their personal experience, that they seldom even guess at your condition.
In other words, you are completely free of internal restraints, and your unhampered liberty to do just as you please, with no pangs of conscience, is conveniently invisible to the world.
You can do anything at all, and still your strange advantage over the majority of people, who are kept in line by their consciences will most likely remain undiscovered.
How will you live your life?
What will you do with your huge and secret advantage, and with the corresponding handicap of other people (conscience)?
The answer will depend largely on just what your desires happen to be, because people are not all the same. Even the profoundly unscrupulous are not all the same. Some people - whether they have a conscience or not - favor the ease of inertia, while others are filled with dreams and wild ambitions. Some human beings are brilliant and talented, some are dull-witted, and most, conscience or not, are somewhere in between. There are violent people and nonviolent ones, individuals who are motivated by blood lust and those who have no such appetites. [...]
Provided you are not forcibly stopped, you can do anything at all.
If you are born at the right time, with some access to family fortune, and you have a special talent for whipping up other people's hatred and sense of deprivation, you can arrange to kill large numbers of unsuspecting people. With enough money, you can accomplish this from far away, and you can sit back safely and watch in satisfaction. [...]
Crazy and frightening - and real, in about 4 percent of the population....
The prevalence rate for anorexic eating disorders is estimated a 3.43 percent, deemed to be nearly epidemic, and yet this figure is a fraction lower than the rate for antisocial personality. The high-profile disorders classed as schizophrenia occur in only about 1 percent of [the population] - a mere quarter of the rate of antisocial personality - and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say that the rate of colon cancer in the United States, considered "alarmingly hight," is about 40 per 100,000 - one hundred times lower than the rate of antisocial personality.
The high incidence of sociopathy in human society has a profound effect on the rest of us who must live on this planet, too, even those of us who have not been clinically traumatized. The individuals who constitute this 4 percent drain our relationships, our bank accounts, our accomplishments, our self-esteem, our very peace on earth.
Yet surprisingly, many people know nothing about this disorder, or if they do, they think only in terms of violent psychopathy - murderers, serial killers, mass murderers - people who have conspicuously broken the law many times over, and who, if caught, will be imprisoned, maybe even put to death by our legal system.
We are not commonly aware of, nor do we usually identify, the larger number of nonviolent sociopaths among us, people who often are not blatant lawbreakers, and against whom our formal legal system provides little defense.
Most of us would not imagine any correspondence between conceiving an ethnic genocide and, say, guiltlessly lying to one's boss about a coworker. But the psychological correspondence is not only there; it is chilling. Simple and profound, the link is the absence of the inner mechanism that beats up on us, emotionally speaking, when we make a choice we view as immoral, unethical, neglectful, or selfish.
Most of us feel mildly guilty if we eat the last piece of cake in the kitchen, let alone what we would feel if we intentionally and methodically set about to hurt another person.
Those who have no conscience at all are a group unto themselves, whether they be homicidal tyrants or merely ruthless social snipers.
The presence or absence of conscience is a deep human division, arguably more significant than intelligence, race, or even gender.
What differentiates a sociopath who lives off the labors of others from one who occasionally robs convenience stores, or from one who is a contemporary robber baron - or what makes the difference betwen an ordinary bully and a sociopathic murderer - is nothing more than social status, drive, intellect, blood lust, or simple opportunity.
What distinguishes all of these people from the rest of us is an utterly empty hole in the
psyche, where there should be the most evolved of all humanizing functions. [Martha Stout, Ph.D., The Sociopath Next Door] (highly recommended) [End quote]
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Indeed, as Gurdjieff has said, if we realized just how many of the people who rule and govern our lives are psychopaths, who completely lack that guiding conscience or “north star” within them that guides them to ‘do the right thing,’ then we would go mad with horror.
Gurdjieff says:
“Moreover, it happens fairly often that essence dies in a man while his personality and his body are still alive. A considerable percentage of the people we meet in the streets of a great town are people who are empty inside, that is, they are actually already dead. It is fortunate for us that we do not see and do not know it. If we knew what a number of people are actually dead and what a number of these dead people govern our lives, we should go mad with horror. And indeed people often do go mad because they find out something of this nature without the proper preparation, that is, they see something they are not supposed to see. In order to see without danger one must be on the way. If a man who can do nothing sees the truth he will certainly go mad. Only this rarely happens. Usually everything is so arranged that a man can see nothing prematurely. Personality sees only what it likes to see and what does not interfere with its life. It never sees what it does not like. This is both good and bad at the same time. It is good if a man wants to sleep, bad if he wants to awaken. [Ouspensky, quoting Gurdjieff, 1949]
Laura Knight also has a most enjoyable and readable article in her most recent Halloween article about how this lack of conscience in people contributes to those loss of inner restraints that permits us to destroy ourselves in the madness of reciprocal destruction. The fact that we are mass murdering in Iraq shows us clearly which group of people have the control over our lives.
Laura Knight’s recent Halloween and
last years Halloween articles show extremely well how the lack of inner conscience and our lack of objectivity are the two key elements that have allowed the sociological structure of the United States and much of the world to fall into a state of ‘pathrocacy’ leading to social ruin and decay. I strongly recommend the reading both of her articles. It will shine some light on why things are as they are in the world today. They are real treats!
Clearly, all of life is arranged so that we are conveniently distracted from the fact that we are ruled by people, the walking dead as Gurdjieff says, who have no real conscience and who pose deception while posturing to the public that they had the hearts and souls of the highest saints.
This is the true terror of the situation as the articles above state so well.
Those psychopaths who have most influence on our lives cannot see suffering as a totality. They cannot transcend their ordinary organic personal suffering and see anything beyond the limitations of their own organism. They are organic men and organic men they will always be. They cannot INCLUDE their own personal suffering along with the suffering of others and feel the pain that they feel. All suffering beyond the suffering of them own organism is excluded from their world view and they cannot fathom what their acts and choices may have on the suffering of others or their fellow men. Their understanding of religion and of Christ's teachings concerning the Kingdom Of Heaven is based on the idea of “perpetual pleasure” since they cannot imagine any suffering beyond their own organic pleasures and pains.
Conscience is something that the strictly organic man cannot understand. It is indeed unfortunate for this ill fated planet that we allow those with no real conscience to govern our destiny for it is only a KINGDOM OF CONSCIENCE that can ever bring us to what can be really called The Kingdom Of Heaven.
posted by Capricious Mad Hatter @ 4:48 PM
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