wake up

The decline of our civilization is happening on an unprecedented scale and with unprecedented speed. We have to look into the mists of time, to the legend of a decadent Atlantis sinking beneath the waves, to find anything that parallels what we are now witnessing.

The seeds of the spectacular end game were sown with the rise of Darwinism and scientific rationalism in the 1800s. We became full of our own cleverness, and lost respect for spirituality and for nature. We started seeing ourselves as masters of the Universe. The agricultural revolution mechanized and centralized agriculture, as we turned nature's gardens into chemically enhanced food factories. Hot on the heels of this abomination came the industrial revolution, whereby our modern industrialized economies grew rapidly, like a cancer on Mother Earth, creating ever more powerful machines and methods to rape Mother Earth and to feed our own vanity and conceit.

The USA emerged from the ashes of the European empires, as the epitome of the modern way - the American Dream was sold across the entire planet, and gradually was embraced by all, as the modern idea of paradise on Earth: a big car, a spacious house, electrical appliances to serve our every whim, and toys galore to play with.

The USA grew fat and powerful, taking the lions share of the spoils of two world wars, and leading the world in adopting ever-more artificial lifestyles, based on conspicuous consumption of manufactured goods. The eminence of manufacturing in the west was gradually eclipsed by the rise of services, primarily financial services: as the US and western Europe grew fat, the more hungry India, Japan, and China started beating western manufacturing at its own game.

Having already lost much of its manufacturing capacity to Japan in the 1980s and China in the 1990s, the USA continued growing fatter by equipping the Chinese with all of the machine tools and technology they required to become a mega industrial engine for the World. Meanwhile India's burgeoning workforce, being much better educated than that of the US, and prepared to work for a fraction of the money, began sucking up the service jobs that the post-industrial west had been relying on for economic health.

Meanwhile, entering this new millennium, the apparent wealth and living standards of the west continued to grow, apparently defying gravity. Where was the money coming from? Now we know. We borrowed it from the Chinese. They lent us the money to buy their goods, and we maintained an appearance of credit worthiness by inflating our asset values - first it was a technology stocks bubble, and then, fatally, the biggest financial bubble ever seen in the history of mankind, our fabulous multi-national housing bubble.

The trickery and deception, greed, and downright dishonesty of the financial sector, which fueled this bubble, through fantasy economic modeling and false accounting on an unprecedented scale, was a marvel to behold: the last grand hurrah of the old paradigm. They created a gigantic pyramid of fake money, and consumed the entire inside of the pyramid in commissions, salaries, fees, bonuses, and dividends. Now only the hollowed out shell remains, with new burnt out holes appearing day upon day - there is still the appearance of a financial sector, functioning national economies, and functioning currencies, but anyone who looks closely can now see what a fragile sham it all is. There is no question as to whether it will all collapse: it is simply a question of when - and it cannot last for very long.

Meanwhile the banking titans are now staggering about in a panic, sucking up government money as fast as the printing presses can run. And our corrupt political leaders, taking advice from these same banking titans, and from our staggeringly incompetent mainstream economists, seem more than willing to keep shoveling money into the furnaces with complete abandon. There is no sign anywhere of any regard for our future, let alone the future of our children and grandchildren. Bluntly, there is no future for any of us, under this fatally damaged and rapidly collapsing system.

It is utterly futile to try to fix any of this. It is broken irreparably. It is a dead loss. The process of entropy is reducing order to chaos, and simplicity to complexity. We must not waste our time trying to fix our broken economic and political systems. It is too late for that. We have had a farewell party of exceptional extravagance and decadence, and soon we will be surveying the wreckage in the aftermath, but meanwhile we cannot see the mess for the seething masses of drunken partygoers continuing on their self-destructive binges. Soon they will all have fallen over, comatose, and very sick. I suspect that the clean-up operation will be well beyond our capacity - we will have to rely on Mother Nature to clean up the devastation we have caused to planet Earth.

So what will be left for those of us that survive this coming apocalypse? I don't think any of us can know for sure - we are entering a new paradigm, much of which is still beyond our comprehension. We cannot understand the new by using the mindset of the old. We must start again, by dispensing with scientific rationalism, and embracing our inner nature. We must move from left-brain dominance to a balance between left and right: from cold rationalism, to warm and intuitive empathy for our fellow beings. We may have big brains but we remain mammals, dependent on Mother Nature to survive. If we keep poisoning our food, and feeding ourselves with chemicals, we will keep getting sicker. If we keep torturing and murdering the animals, and then consuming their corpses, we will keep increasing our own inner torment.

Children of my generation grew their hair long, and wore beads, and flowers in their hair. Children of today stick needles in their bodies and cover themselves with tatoos. Is this progress? Or is it a collapse from love and hope into forlorn self-hate? This is just a symptom of the sickness of our society. We are now living in Hell. And we have created it ourselves. And it is only going to get worse, unless we waken up to the madness of what we are doing with the planet, and vow resolutely to change our ways. I do not envisage most of mankind taking this vow. Instead there will just be complaining and blaming, from the vast majority. And the complaints will escalate into abject fear and panic when there is no fuel available for our cars, and no food in our supermarkets, and the Army is patrolling the city streets and shooting at their own people. And billions will be starving, and billions will be sick. This is the new world we are now accelerating towards.

And yet, we do have an option, a much better option. Only a few of us can even see it. We can turn our back on our industrial and artificial existence. We can stop buying things we don't need. We can stop being consumers, and start being people again. We can stop vandalizing our homelands, and start nurturing them. We can free ourselves from the yokes imposed on us by our political and corporate overlords - they have already lost control of their infernal systems, and they are powerless now to stop us from turning our backs on them. We can stop feeding them with our labour and our earnings. We can stop giving them any attention whatsoever. Let them rot. We can focus our attention on our families, friends, and neighbors. We can grow our own food, and keep ourselves healthy by living outdoor lives and eating what nature provides. This lifestyle is good enough for the animal kingdom, and it will be better for us than our current wage slavery. We will be happier without telephones and televisions. We will not need make-up or fashion accessories, other than to play games. Life can go on, without our economic and political infrastructures, and such a life can be much more fulfilling than our current stress crazed confusion.

This is what lies ahead, for those of us that survive the meltdown. A simpler life. A life closer to nature. A life based around local communities, and real human interaction with our neighbors. A life based on giving and sharing, and enjoying what we have. A life lived now, in the moment, and not in the endless seeking of imaginary future pleasure. A life filled with joy and laughter. The more we give to each other, the more we receive ourselves - this is a natural law, and we should start paying attention to it. Some of us are already living such a life: they are the blessed and happy ones, who will be least affected by the coming changes. The rest of us must start mending our ways, or we are going to receive some very unpleasant shocks.

Our "leaders" cannot help us any longer, even if they wanted to (and believe me, they don't). We have to help ourselves. We have to move from complex ways to simple ways, from decadence and dissolution, to purity and honesty. We have to change our focus from global to local, and from machines to beings. Waken up people, waken up. We do not have much time left to ready ourselves for the big shift that is coming.

the paradigm shift

The new paradigm seeks to regain balance between our physical aspects (human) and our spiritual essence (being). Over millennia we, the human race, have gradually lost touch with the spiritual reality of our nature. Increasingly we have embraced rationality, and artificiality, while losing sight of our place in nature and in the natural universe. We have rejected whatever science cannot explain, and in doing so we have rejected our true nature.

The old paradigm that has taken us to this sleepwalking state, is biased heavily towards material values, wealth and power. Our obsession with the mundane has taken us away from spiritual understanding. We have lost respect for Mother Nature, and worse still, we have forgotten that we are spiritual beings. Instead, we have let scientists teach us that we are biogenetic machines, and we have come to identify ourselves with the short-lived bodies that we inhabit.

The old paradigm is based on fear and on ignorance. Fear is the basis of control, and the old paradigm is all about controlling us. We are treated like mushrooms: "keep them in the dark and feed them on bullshit". Everything is judged in terms of physical attributes: we are taught to value property, wealth, and power, and to devalue ethics, morals and virtue. The structures of our societies are rigid, hierarchical, power based structures, where change can only happen very slowly if at all, and where an elite few prosper on the breaking backs of the many.

Our focus is on work and on strife. We are born, we struggle, and we die. And death is a blessed release from the fear of death that dominates our lives. Those who think at all are fixated with finance, economics, politics, commerce - that is, in the occasional moments when we can rise above the instinctive calls of sexuality and consumption. Even science and the arts are seen primarily as branches of commerce, while spiritual beliefs are seen as a form of dementia. All of this is unnatural, and we are doing our utmost to re-create the world in our own image, as an artificial wasteland, where everything is controlled, adulterated, and abused in a mechanistic way. In our ignorant folly, we are raping Mother Nature in a systematic and deliberate way. Not content with destroying and poisoning ourselves, we are making sure we take all of the Kingdoms of Nature with us. We have created Hell on Earth.

Fortunately for us, there are forces more powerful than we are, that maintain balance in the universe and the cosmos. These forces are manifesting in the rising swell of the new paradigm, as it gradually takes over from the breaking waves of the old.

Accordingly, those of us who wish to survive must turn our backs on the ways of the old paradigm, the legal systems and political and commercial structures that are now failing us abjectly, and we must embrace the ways of the new paradigm.

This new paradigm takes us back towards the wisdom of the ancients. We are regaining contact with our original true nature of eternal spiritual beings, with the inherent spiritual qualities of love and light, in other words compassionate love and spiritual power. These bring inner peace with them: serenity and bliss. They also bring inner strength. And most importantly we realize that, at the spiritual level, the level of being, we are all interconnected: we are all one. This interconnection means that we get what we give. Through giving we receive. Through helping each other, we ourselves are helped. This is the universal law of balance, the "law of karma".

Under the new paradigm we act as a unified collective of empowered individuals, each living in harmony with nature and with each other. This is not an option for us, but a certainty. The old paradigm is dying and will in due course be cremated. Those who don't shift to the new paradigm will die with the old. We have shat in our own bed, and now the bedding must be replaced. There will be major upheavals, and there will be widespread death and destruction, as Mother Nature clears away the old rubbish to make way for the new garden.

The new world will not be about politics or finance or conflict. It will about enlightenment, balance, and harmony.

The shift to the new paradigm is not easy. We will encounter much ridicule and cynicism, from the many who are locked into the old ways of thinking. It takes great courage to think anew, to re-evaluate, and to start over, flying in the face of the established orthodoxy. This is not just about knowledge or understanding: we must embody the new ways - we must become enlightened. Our egos will fight against us, trying to take the easy way out, and to avoid true transformation. We must be disciplined in exploring what is true. We must seek guidance and feedback from trusted sources. We must be willing to question everything. We must strive continually to refine our intellects, and to become loving embodiments of spirituality. We must not allow ourselves to make excuses or use delaying tactics. We must become intuitive: this means surrendering our egotistic personalities to the inner wisdom of our higher selves, the wisdom of the soul. The ego will not relinquish control without a struggle, but instead will seek to squeeze whatever remaining pleasure it can from the old paradigm ways. But we must rise above the preferences of the selfish ego, and we must take the plunge and embrace inner change.

So, the shift from the old paradigm to the new is not simply a change in external circumstances: the real shift must come from within each of us.

If we each focus on changing ourselves, then we will find the world changing with us, rather than against us.

one door closes

Jefferson's Guardian said...

Although it goes by many different names; A New Paradigm, the Age of Aquarius, and a multitude of others, it seems we're near the transitional point of a totally new experience. It's something that can't be intellectualized; it's a feeling.

Yes - the "Age of Aquarius", the new age, or whatever we choose to call it, we can indeed feel it. We sense it rather than understanding it. Our intuition tells us that we are heading for more enlightened times. And this enlightenment is not evolving from the old ways, but rather it is the fresh vibrant growth of a new sapling, as the diseased old tree withers away and rots from within.

One door closes, another one opens....