Directing the Power of Conscious Feelings- Living Your Own Truth
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When a person who normally lives in the countryside first visits a big city the roar can be crushing. To survive the onslaught, the country person may quickly raise their numbness bar to block the assault or they won’t even be able to hear themselves think, let alone be able to sleep at night. Without blocking the avalanche of sensations they would go crazy.
In reverse, the city person visiting the countryside is struck by the thunderous silence, the awesome lack of sensations. To them, nothing is happening. Everything seems slowed down, almost stopped. A trip to the countryside can feel like entering a sensory deprivation tank. So much space and time can bring a city dweller into a fidget verging on panic. They can hardly wait to get back to the swarming city where something is happening!
A recent six-year study by a prominent cancer institute in India showed that some 70 percent of the population of Calcutta, both young and old, suffers from respiratory disorders caused by toxic air pollution. For the eighteen million inhabitants of Calcutta, the numbness bar must be desperately high, higher than the detector for personal well-being. In such a circumstance humans act like the proverbial frog, who instantly leaps out if dropped into a pot of hot water but sits placidly until boiled if the water is gradually heated. Children born into Calcutta regard shortened breath and shortened lifespan as normal. As they grow up, most of these children keep their numbness bar high and therefore find no reason to ever leave the contaminated city.
To modern people, so mesmerized by the idea of “progress” and “the good life,” the idea of becoming less numb may actually seem insane. Why would you want to remove a buffer that makes you more comfortable? Removing numbness could make everything hurt more. That is why we invented doctors, psychologists, and therapists, to make the hurt go away! Lowering your threshold of numbness to pain seems like a form of masochism. Is this smart?
AVOIDING CONSEQUENCES
Maintaining a high numbness bar promotes not having to feel the consequences of your behavior. If you do not feel the consequences of your actions, you can do horrendous things to yourself, to your environment, to other people, and to animals without feeling the pain of it.
For example, if your numbness bar is high, you can join the army and go to war to fight for your country or religion. Even more remarkably, you could enter war as your profession. You could become a police officer, a prison guard, a mercenary, a foreign legionnaire, a member of special operations, a member of the National Guard, SWAT, CIA, DIA, INR, NRO, NGA, NSA, FBI, OICI, OIA, TFI, and so on. (If you do not recognize some of these abbreviations for American organizations employing hundreds of thousands of people in the name of war, I invite you to look them up for your personal enlightenment.) If your numbness bar is high you could work as a double agent, or a triple agent, even as an assassin. You could work as a corporate headhunter, a drug dealer, a gun runner, a weapons manufacturer or transporter, a child-advertising specialist, a pimp for child prostitution, a banker, parochial school teacher, or lawyer.
Without the numbness bar set to a high level, such occupations could well be too painful to tolerate. If you allow yourself to feel your true feelings, you might have reason to change careers rather than continuing with whatever you must do or say to remain in one of these professions.
Numbness, once achieved, sustains itself forever. Or does it?
CONSCIOUSNESS EVOLVING
Things don’t seem to stay the same. If you search for an overall pattern in the universe there appears to be a trend for life to become more complex. From simple cells to complex cells to multicellular organisms. From cold-blooded simple hearts to warm-blooded four-chambered hearts. From simple clumps of nerve cells to complex brain structures. Increasing the sophistication of biological design increases its capacity to manifest consciousness.
Typical group photo from the late nineteenth century, courtesy of M. Reusser Collection.
Typical group photo from the early twenty-first century, courtesy of Expand The Box training.
You can see this if you study the faces of people in older photos compared to photos that are more recent. The psychoemotional personality of modern people is more multifaceted. The performance put on by ego is more complicated and versatile.
As consciousness develops you become more aware of the consequences of your actions. Increased awareness is both a benefit and a burden. For example, far more American soldiers returning home from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have committed suicide than were killed in battle.
As of this writing, eighteen US soldiers are committing suicide each day.
The American Veterans Health Administration confirms that an average of 126 veterans per week—6,552 per year—kill themselves. Actual numbers may be even higher than this because these statistics only include deaths reported as suicides. They do not include deaths reported as accidents or murders.
American A-10 Warthog designed specifically to fire Depleted Ura nium DU weapons.
One cause of these suicides may be consciousness expansion during battle experiences. Previously numb soldiers get sent into combat conditions. Suddenly they are faced with the shocking and perhaps gruesome consequences of their choice to be a soldier. Irrepressible feelings may arise about what they see, what they have done, or what happened to them, and they may have no idea what to do with these feelings, how to consciously feel them, or how to communicate their feelings to others.
Further reading in alternative news websites online will reveal another harrowing scenario unfolding. There are now tens of thousands of soldiers discovering the hard way that, as a consequence of choosing to participate in one of the various wars since 1991, they returned home contaminated for life with radioactive dust from Depleted Uranium (DU) weapons. These soldiers (both men and women) were neither warned about the health hazards of DU nor properly protected, even though the dangers have been known since 1945.
By following the orders given to them by military authorities these courageous young men and women have consigned themselves to a shortened lifespan and a drawn-out painful death without care or compensation from either the government they trusted or from the oil, weapons, communications, and construction corporations who financially benefited from the ultimate sacrifice these men and women made.
Exposure to DU dust can cause multiple simultaneous cancers and genetic disorders. Perhaps by now the soldiers have also contaminated their wives with DU, have had malformed miscarriages, or are caring for a child with horrible birth defects, just like mothers and fathers in Iraq, Afghanistan, Kosovo, Bosnia, Lebanon, and Gaza, where DU weapons have been (are being) heavily used by the US, UK, NATO and Israeli militaries.
Jayce Hanson at his father’s legs, from a Life magazine cover story, Children of the Gulf War. Photo © Copyright 2005 by Derek Hudson, all rights reserved
DU plays no favorites in terms of creating horrific genetic disorders.
If soldiers have pointlessly killed or hideously tortured other human beings in the name of following orders, they may be discovering that memories of having performed such actions can never be erased.
Blocking unwanted memories and feelings through the use of drugs, alcohol or adrenalin rushes from risky or violent behavior simultaneously blocks the possibility of intimacy, tenderness, vulnerability, acceptance and love.
After a while one might begin to question the value of a life without intimacy.
If your buddy is killed and you do not feel and express your feelings about his death, your numbness does not bring him back to life, nor does it fill the gaping hole in your heart where your friend used to be.
If you lose your self-respect by seeing the true motivations of the forces with which you have been naively collaborating and your numbness bar is so high that you cannot express your feelings even if you wanted to, the resulting self-hatred may become intolerable. Suicide may creep in as a preferred alternative.
Staying numb to the consequences of your actions does not avoid the consequences.
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br /> Ask the ostrich if it protects him to stick his head in the sand.
GOING BEYOND THE LIMITS OF MODERN CULTURE
The level of your numbness bar is not permanently set. It can be adjusted up or down to vary the intensity of sensations it allows you to perceive. However, the controls for adjusting the level of your numbness bar are not located within the comprehension of modern culture.
Gaining control of the numbness bar level involves extending your own personal capacity for responsibility and awareness beyond the reach of modern culture. What does this mean?
Unless you employ serious interventions, the culture you were born into and raised in largely determines how the world works for you. For example, the single strongest influence over a person’s choice of religions is the religion of their parents.
If you were born and raised in a modern society, then you hold the viewpoints of patriarchal empire. Patriarchal empire blatantly encourages maximum numbness. If you are numb, you will have no problem agreeing that having a franchise coffee shop and hamburger joint on every street corner in the world is a really good idea, even if it destroys local culture by forcing original neighborhood coffee shops out of business, multiplies methane greenhouse gas concentrations by maintaining colossal herds of hamburger cattle, uses slave labor to grow the sugar cane and coffee beans, generates millions of tons of nonrecycled plastic wastes, and burns the rain forests, killing the lungs of the Earth.
Modern culture declares itself to be the only culture worthy of calling itself a culture. According to modern culture:
• There is nothing beyond the reach of globalization.
• No other culture has ever equaled modern culture’s grand achievements.
• No other culture actually exists.
• In its own eyes, modern civilization is the ultimate triumph of humankind.
• Stepping outside of modern culture could only mean devolving toward the monkeys.
• Leaving modern culture equates to insanity, if not death.
This is really funny.
Think about it. If going beyond the limits of modern culture means that you abandon your security, you are thinking about the world in the same way that people five hundred years ago thought about it. You are still using the flat-world map!
On the flat-world map, if you sail away from known territory you will fall off the edge of the flat world and die. It’s funny to realize that you might still be thinking this way, and yet, most modern people still do think this way.
What other ways could you think?
Here is an experiment. Permit yourself to view the lifestyle of the culture you were raised in as merely one of many possible perceptions about the world, as if you were gazing upon only one kind of flower in a beautiful flower garden. When you look upon your culture as a flowering plant, you are suddenly outside of its grip. Stay out there and study it for a while. Take the time to examine the many strange and unique qualities of this cultural organism. Start with the most common things. Credit card shopping? Very strange. A supermarket? Supermarkets are one of the most unreal things in the world.
Plastic litter on the streets? Kids divided up into different age groups and forced to sit in rows in classrooms? A three thousand-mile supply chain for your Caesar salad? Pet dogs? Graffiti? A TV in every house? Advertisements for alcohol, cigarettes, casinos, new cars, penis enlarging pills, sex on computers? Large pharmaceutical corporations lobbying for favorable government regulations rather than for health? People working at jobs they don’t love just to earn money? Retirement homes?
See the whole thing as a package deal while you observe it from the outside. How long can you keep this perspective? How are you doing, standing outside looking in at your culture? Are you okay?
Seen from outside of a culture, the mythology that is believed within the culture to be unquestionably true (e.g., profit is good, free market capitalism serves humanity, America is a peace-loving democracy) is suddenly recognized as mere myth.
MYTH BUSTING
Myth busting is equivalent to naming a superstition as a superstition. For example, if I asked you to tell me a superstition about black cats, broken mirrors, or spilled salt, you would smile and relate what you would consider to be an old wives’ tale. The smile comes from being slightly embarrassed to think this way. We recognize these ideas to be superstitions. But before something is known to be a superstition it is known to be the truth. A superstition is not a superstition until it becomes a superstition. Before that, it is fact. The same is true of the myths that are inherent in every culture, including modern civilization.
As soon as you look at modern culture from the outside, as merely another set of superstitions, it loses its mafia-like grip on your perceptions. Your broadened vantage point permits you to inquire about modern culture in ways that modern culture itself would ordinarily forbid. You might, for example, start asking what may previously have been regarded as dangerous questions.
LEVEL OF RESPONSIBILITY
One such dangerous question might be about responsibility.
If a child makes a mess, who cleans it up?
If you ever lived with children the answer is obvious. Children do not have the capacity to be responsible for cleaning up their own messes. When a child makes a mess, even a teenage child, the adults are responsible for seeing that it gets cleaned up. Certainly, some children are trained to clean up some messes some of the time. Parenting is about creating environments where children can develop their muscles of responsibility. But until around the age of fifteen, children cannot be held responsible for their level of responsibility.
This distinction about levels of responsibility permits you to classify cultures according to the responsibility they take for cleaning up their messes—in other words, their sustainability.
Applying the level-of-responsibility test to modern society reveals that modern society makes huge messes with no intention of ever cleaning them up.
Think of the expanding dead zones in the world’s oceans. Think of the tons of permanently lethal nuclear wastes. Think of the US national debt. Think of children being given brain drugs that make them unfit even to join the army. Think of the gigatons of methane frozen forty thousand years ago under Siberian tundra now bubbling out as heat-capturing greenhouse gases.
When you position modern society on a graph showing the number of people and their average level of responsibility, you find modern culture centered directly on child level responsibility. Modern culture is a child level responsibility culture, far below adult level.
Modern society does not require that a person grow up prior to being given (or allowed to take) positions of responsibility. In general, even the most powerful leaders of modern culture—leaders of international corporations as well as in politics, the military, entertainment, religion, media, medicine and education—make their decisions and take actions with a child’s level of responsibility.
Our society makes messes without having consciousness of, or taking responsibility for, the consequences of those messes. For example, today’s business and government leaders specialize in externalizing costs. To externalize a cost means to create a devilishly clever excuse for passing the cost on to someone else. That “someone else” could be the consumer, the general public, the people living under corrupt governments, or even future generations.
MAP OF RESPONSIBILITY AND CULTURE
World Copyright © 2010 owner Clinton Callahan grants permission to use. www.nextculture.org
LEVEL OF RESPONSIBILITY
When a child makes a mess, who cleans it up? The adults clean it up. Modern culture is classified at child level responsibility because modern culture makes horrific messes with no intention of ever cleaning them up (e.g., nuclear wastes, children on brain drugs, deforestation, greenhouse gases, peak oil, over fishing, unsustainable lifestyles, etc.). Experiments with creating new sustainable cultures are becoming more plentiful and more powerful. For example, the number of known internatio
nal NGOs has grown from 6,000 in 1990 to 26,000 in 2000, to over 40,000 in 2008. (Sources: High Noon: Twenty Global Problems, Twenty Years to Solve Them, by J. F. Rischard, p.48,
Business and government collude to externalize costs, for example, the costs of cleaning up toxic wastes from coal- and oil-burning electric power plants. Power stations produce 70 percent of the sulfur dioxide in the acid rain that destroys wildlife, crops, forests and lakes, and strips minerals from topsoil. They also produce 40 percent of the carbon dioxide in ocean acidification, killing off coral reefs, shrimp, clams, crabs, lobsters, abalone, and krill, which is the main food source of some of the most magnificent creatures ever to have existed on Earth, the great whales. The financial consequence of so much unconscionable destruction is inestimably huge. Do power station directors and government officials think they can escape paying?
Externalizing costs creates the illusion of profit. If the manufacturer of an item, say a plastic bag used at a fast-food restaurant, was responsible for paying the full costs of their product, including collection after use, transportation, and recycling of the product (instead of merely burying it in a landfill and thinking this is responsible), there would be no profit. It costs seventeen times more to recycle a plastic bag than it does to make it in the first place. In a closed system, there can be no profit. Earth is a closed system. Modern society assumes it can ignore that the Earth is a closed system. That assumption is suicidal.