Be Vigilant
I have been quieter, less vocal about the swirling forces that are dramatically changing the future, my and your children will inherit. After forty-five years, sitting at the feet of David Bohm, J. Krishnamurti, Joseph Chilton Pearce, and several hundred other visionaries; Jean Liedloff, Gabor Mate, Darcia Narves, Ashley Montagu, John Taylor Gatto, practitioners of radical alternative education, prenatal consciousness and more, my view, what I see and feel, stands on this amazing foundation.
David Bohm and Krishnamurti began their most incisive dialogues regarding the nature of human consciousness, intelligence, and the limitations of thought, by asking the question; “Humanity must have made a wrong turn?” See “The Ending of Time.” Darcia Narvaez explored this theme in a paper titled “The Missing Mind.” For 95% or more of human existence, the mind and consciousness of humanity were vastly different than today. Approximately 10,000 years ago something happened; agriculture, domesticated livestock, civilization, and trade. Embedment in the egalitarian, cooperative, reciprocal web of nature was replaced by “mine,” conquest, plunder, and conversion. In the year 451 C.E., an alien God in the sky so possessed our mind that we murdered Sophia, the mother, nature, Gaia, represented by Hypatia, High Priestess of the Mystery Schools of antiquity, with the Gnostics being the elite keepers of this transcendent, organic wisdom. And thus we plunged into the Dark Ages, from which we have yet to awaken.
As chance might have it, “The Lives of the Stoics,” 334 BC – 121 AD, by Ryan Holiday, bridged this same period. In an interview with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., he mentioned the Stoics being the inspiration for a book his father handed him at the age of fourteen, a few days before his father was murdered, most likely by the CIA.
Years earlier, interviewing John Taylor Gatto, author of “Dumbing Us Down,” and other works, John described how elites divided humanity into farmers and pigs, a paraphrased metaphor. The role of a ruling-class farmer is to keep the pigs from ruining everything. It is their moral and ethical responsibility. After all, we, the majority of human beings, are pigs, functionally uneducable, or so judged by the conquers; Calvin, Spinoza, Darwin, Rockefellers, the founders of compulsory schooling, Gates, DARPA, WEF, WHO, etc.
We must be distracted, our energies drained fighting among ourselves. Compulsory schooling was born, a system of conditioning designed to prevent most from having the capacity to imagine doing “anything,” other than what they are told. Followed by mass media, television, corporate digital media, etc. As John notes, all of these forms are designed to do the same thing; mind control, brainwashing, “Dumb Us Down,” etc.
Reading “The Live of the Stoics,” Darcia’s and other works, describing this monumental shift in human consciousness, from prehistoric to perhaps 600 BC through the fall of the Roman Empire 480 AD, it became clear that current events are simply a continuation of our past. Different faces, new logos, and weapons, but the underlying forces have not changed. Narcissists Trump and Nero, for example. Corrupt Reagan, the Clintons, and Epstein, along with the present, and the morally bankrupt Roman political system and Senate. And the Stoic Rebel Alliance, holding tightly to authentic transpersonal human values, embodied nature, and deep ecology, celebrated by Pagans and the Gnostics.
And here we are, trying to do the right thing. I wrote Ryan Holiday, author of the Daily Stoic.
Virtue, doing the right thing? Does right action emerge epigenetically, by modeling, or even deeper from “transpersonal insight,” or is virtue one part of the intellect battling other drives and forces?
Embodied goodness, virtue, is fundamentally different from virtue and goodness as a concept. Just look how effective Stoic mentors were for Nero, for example. Embodied wisdom and virtue imply, does it not, aligning behavior with empathic appropriateness found in our body and blood, which are nature, not isolated cultural or intellectual ideas. What do the Stoics have to say about goodness, virtue, and doing the right thing because that is our deep and true, authentic nature, which is nature? Not just a good idea.
Now to the point. The title of my book, “Always Awakening, Buddha’s Realization Krishnamurti’s Insight,” refers to the ever-present nature of awakening, of making the right transpersonal choices, every day, grounded in our true nature, which is nature, and not some abstract concept. To do this we must be grounded in that embodied reality and its empathic wisdom. AND, be ever-vigilant of world events; alertly watchful, especially to avoid danger.
Most important of all, balancing being vigilant by breathing deeply, by celebrating the miracle that life and being fully human represent. Our task is to model peace, beauty, happiness, and play, every day, even, or especially, in the face of fierce and dangerous dragons. Be vigilant.
Michael Mendizza
