Imagine waking up one day in prison and realizing that all along you had the keys to the cell you have been in for decades. They were right there, under your nose. They didn’t look like normal keys, so you can be forgiven for being fooled. But sure enough, they opened the doors to the prison cell and you had them in your possession. You can imagine how upset you would be – to have had the source of your freedom at your fingertips but unable to recognize it for what it was. Yet for year after year, you toiled away in the prison accustomed and perhaps even, “well adjusted”, to your fate.
Why, you didn’t even think of your life as being in a prison. People helped you understand the good sides of your existence and the “realities” of life. In time, you became comfortable and understood where you stood versus others in the prison. You “adapted”, understood the prison rules, and in fact, came to even be a promoter of those “rules” to others as those rules kept the place functioning in a somewhat organized way.
The prison warden and guards loved the system they created as the inmates themselves policed each other and kept themselves in line. In return, the one’s that followed and enforced the rules and norms of the prison were given special privileges by the guards. You quickly learned that keeping the system going was the least painful way to exist in the prison. The system fed and housed you, and if you played by its rules and kow-towed to the right people, it would keep you “safe”. You could survive and thrive.
Yes, not everyone did as well as you did. There was violence all around you and a constant degradation of human life. At times, it would get to you. You wanted to help and wished things were different. But you couldn’t really do anything about it, so why bother?
As new inmates came into the prison, through the kindness of your heart, you taught them the ways of the prison. Over time, they would come to support the prison system as well. As a good mentor to the others, you were rewarded with an “upgrade” to a bigger cell and nicer surroundings. Why, you even got access to the “elite prisoner’s club”! The club was an enjoyable diversion from the degraded conditions of the majority of the prison and you could interact with other “elite” cell mates, not the run of the mill riffraff.
At the club, you were shown a side of prison life you had no idea that existed. There were actual businesses running inside the prison! Your elite mentors showed you the ropes on how to participate in this most entrepreneurial of activities. In fact, you could run any type of business you wanted, the sky was the limit. There was only one requirement – the warden, the guards, and the senior “elite prisoners” all got to take a cut of your profits.
You winced at first, but then came to see the wisdom of their system. Those individuals were entitled to a cut as they kept the “system” running so that you could run your business in peace. And, if you played your cards right, worked hard, followed the rules, “disciplined” other prisoners as necessary, and didn’t ask any questions about the ingredients and chemicals in the products you were selling, why you too could become one of the “senior elite prisoners” and get a cut of everyone’s profit as well. How egalitarian you thought! A system that recognizes merit, fair play, and clean living. What else could I want?! After a while, you even forgot you were in a prison. You were your own man, running a business, you had friends, and a structured existence in which you could achieve the “good life”.
The warden and guards all seemed to be very happy. You often noticed them smiling and laughing and thought to yourself how amazing that they ddidn’t mind working in a prison environment. They actually seemed to be getting a kick out of what was going on everyday.
Why wouldn’t they … they had created a system where the prison in-mates policed each other and kept the prison functioning on their own. Very few of the prisoners realized that they were actively participating in the imprisonment of each other and themselves. The warden and guards on the other hand keenly understood that with the proper “incentives” people could be kept in a state of perpetual work towards those incentives. The perpetual carrot-stick incentive model overcame the desire for true freedom. They had mastered the concepts of Divide and Conquer and Mis-Direct and Control. A perfect and elegant combination of tools to en-slave a prison population.
“It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a sick society.” ~ Jiddu Krishnamurti
Could the story above be a metaphor for our modern day global society?
Most of us would be hesitant to agree that our lives are like those of prison inmates. Many of us own homes, drive nice cars, eat delicious food at good restaurants, go on a vacation once in a while, and so on. We have money to buy those things and we operate in a ‘free-society’ where there are laws that both protect and serve us. Moreover, for the most part, we operate in society as we please. And, if we do things that injure ourselves or others accidentally, well, that’s our concern. As long as we have the money for it, we can fix our problems through the medical or legal systems. What’s not to like?
But, are we really free, or are we operating under a very sophisticated control mechanism that gives us the illusion of un-impeded choice-making?
Furthermore, do our “free-choices” actually prop-up a system that keeps us and our fellow citizens in an externally imposed, yet virtually invisible state of control, fear, anxiety, suffering, and poor health? If so, then Seattle University professor Cynthia D. Moe-Lobeda would argue we are participating in and enabling Structural Evil within our society.
Professor Moe-Lobeda implies the term Structural Evil means that destructive outcomes for each other are an inherent part of participating in the society we currently live. Even with good intentions and caring towards others, just by following the basic and legal norms in our world, we end up hurting others and ourselves on a daily basis.
Let’s take a look at a few modern day examples:
- The ultra low-cost material goods people buy at big box retailers are made in countries with lax safety standards. We get low prices, but the people where they product is manufactured, though they get a ‘job’, they also get horrid working conditions and shortened life spans. At home, we got a very low price, but someone here lost their job because their company couldn’t compete on price. A little time down the road, since these ultra low-cost products are engineered specifically to have short life spans (so you can soon buy them again) they will be dumped into landfills and some will wind up as sludge in the oceans which will destroy marine life. That marine destruction will affect the lives and professions of much poorer people in developing countries. Their food and water supplies will be affected and they suffer. At home, those low prices require low wages for the people working in the stores that sell them. The low wages, means little or no health care and inability to purchase healthy food and get adequate time off and rest. Families suffer and mental and physical illness spreads. Not surprisingly, none of this was advertised in the shiny, happy circular for the big box retailer…
- As most Americans have to have both parent’s work in order to have an acceptable lifestyle (75% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck with little to no savings), young children (20% of whom live in poverty in the U.S., with much worse numbers in many other parts of the world), often do not receive the critical care and love so necessary to their development. Many parents cannot afford high quality day care and early childhood education opportunities, so the children’s brain and emotional development suffers. Those children then are un-prepared when they enter kindergarten at age 5. It is easy for them slip behind, and they ultimately may not be able to read effectively at grade 3. If that happens they will fall behind further and will need remedial instruction. As they are not keeping pace, the teacher will be have to spend more time with them and less time with others and the whole class will be dragged down. This is why the U.S. K-12 educational system is the most expensive and least competitive against the top 30 industrialized nations. Lastly, as those kids fall behind, they veer off towards drugs, teen sex, alcoholism, crime, and eventually cost society and themselves in ways that far transcends a dollar value. They also grow up to be parents themselves one day…and the the cycle continues. Yet most Americans don’t see the need to fund universal child care and education as do many of the world’s advanced economies do such as Germany, Sweden, and Japan nor ensure that all citizens have adequate food, shelter, and education.
- Our food, water, consumer goods, and pharmaceuticals collectively contain over 80,000 different chemicals of varying toxicity. Those toxic chemicals are a key reason why 50% of the U.S. population will get cancer in their life time and the other 50% will get heart disease. Yet, we as a group don’t object too loudly about the corporations introducing these toxic killers into our bodies nor the government agencies that continue to approve these products. In fact, on the contrary, collectively we support the capitalist model that protects those companies, get them to sponsor our charities, sports, educational, and art events, and proclaim that to do anything contrary would be un-patriotic. We even create new start-up companies daily whose sole source of revenue is from the advertising dollars the corporations use to sell their toxic products. A vicious cycle repeats over and over again supported by everyday people participating in the system who would never want to harm anyone else, but are just following the “norms” established by the system. And, if you were to get a serious illness (which the system is engineered to provide to you), well that’s the big bonus the “system administrators” have been waiting for. Now, you can enter the medical system where through a clever web of legal, business, and government relationships between hospitals, pharmaceutical, and insurance companies, your “care” can be monetized to astronomical levels all in the name of “helping you get better”.
In all of these examples, there is a web of interconnected effects that are not easily visible to most people. As a result, we tend to only look at a piece of the situation (the good or the bad) and blissfully ignore the rest. If we looked at the situation holistically, we would see those connections, and it would be difficult for us to ignore the problematic aspects of either of the above three situations (nor the many, many more that could be easily described).
The truth is that most of us are not hard hearted and callous. We would never desire to harm people on purpose. But through our “normal” day-to-day actions, we end up doing just that. Our actions prop up a system that gives the illusion of being efficient, full of choices, and providing continual material progress.
Yes, the material does progress (for some people), but underneath there is a web of human moral and ethical degradation that severely erodes the basic spirit of humanity.
Yet, we readily participate in the ‘System’
Through daily societal conditioning, we become great proponents of the system and see no other way to give us the life we want. Even when there are openly shared clues that should wake us from our slumber, many of us look away and gloss over in-convenient facts which would challenge our established world-view. The system, of course, is highly engineered for us to do just that. Sophisticated distraction and mind-control techniques are used via advertising, television, media, and other “entertainment” to distract us from the reality underneath the glossy exterior. Even much of our food and personal care products are engineered to disable our cognitive abilities to a level where critical thinking is hampered [GMO’s, pesticides, and chemical additives].
The character Morpheus from the movie The Matrix:
The Matrix is a system, Neo. That system is our enemy. But when you’re inside, you look around, what do you see? Businessmen, teachers, lawyers, carpenters. The very minds of the people we are trying to save. But until we do, these people are still a part of that system and that makes them our enemy. You have to understand, most of these people are not ready to be unplugged. And many of them are so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system, that they will fight to protect it.
But yet, we conform to the system, we fall in line. Why?
To answer that, Resisting Structural Evil includes a very incisive quote from sociologist Erich Fromm on possible explanations:
“Erich Fromm dedicated himself to understanding how and why people collectively conform to ways of thinking and living that reinscribe existing power structures and belief systems, even where they are socially destructive. He worked in the context of rising fascism in mid-century Europe and sought to unravel the tangled roots of what he called “automation conformity”, a social character to conform to and adopt ideas and practices that reinforce existing structures of power and privilege, all the while under the impression that they are “following their own will”.
Conformity may be driven by the hunger for approval. Socialization into attitudes and habits geared toward gaining social approval is also socialization into patterns of extraordinary consumption. Normalizing degrees of consumption previously unheard of in human history proceeds without people’s full awareness. Through a ‘complicated process of indoctrination, rewards, punishments, and fitting ideology,’ Fromm writes, ‘most people believe they are following their own will and are unaware that their will itself is conditioned and manipulated.
The sources of social manipulation in our context are not coercive but seductively persuasive. They are a complex array of anonymous influences, the persuasive power of which remains largely below the consciousness of the public. They include public opinion, conventional wisdom, political spin, ideological manipulation, the normative ‘scripts’ of one’s family and subculture, the availability of consumer goods, and perhaps more powerful than all else, advertising in its many forms.
One key factor in producing widespread conformity, in Fromm’s analysis, is modern capitalism and its need for people who ‘cooperate in large numbers, consume more and more, [and] have standardized tastes, to a degree unknown in most cultures.’ Capitalism, he argued, needs people who are ‘malleable consumers…[who] equate living with consuming, gain identity from brand names’ and can be persuaded to conform to the market’s aim of maximized profit. The directives to consume are (using Brookfield’s term) inscribed in the cultural DNA.
The values and practices of capitalism in its neoliberal form infiltrate all areas of life and are universalized as the only normative way to live. We conform to these norms unwittingly, assuming their universal normativity. The result is a ‘fog’ of moral oblivion that wipes away awareness of the dramatic amputation of alternatives…
Conscience, Fromm points out, is a casualty of automation conformity. ‘How’, he asks, ‘can conscience develop when the principle of life is conformity? Conscience, by its very nature, is non-conforming; it must be able to say no, when everybody else says yes…To the degree to which a person conforms, he cannot hear the voice of his conscience, much less act upon it.’
Likewise, critical thinking shrivels under the pressure to conform. Disabled conscience and critical thinking curtail the questioning of existing structures of injustice that are not readily visible to people who are advantaged by them. ‘Automation conformity’, then, is a potent and vital ingredient of the moral oblivion that invites evil to parade as good.”
The Use of Misdirection and Misperception (also known as Magic) to Control a Population and a Planet
You may be thinking to yourself, well, I’m a lot smarter than the average Joe. I do my research – I watch all the right programs and read the right media articles – I can’t be easily fooled. Yet, if you or I were to watch a typical magic show, say the famous Penn & Teller act in Las Vegas, we would easily be fooled the vast majority of the time. Even, when we were intensely concentrating to try and “catch” the tricksters at their act.
Magic, when it’s a form of harmless entertainment, is no problem. But, the principles magicians use to make their tricks effective have their roots in how the human brain and human perception works. And, if you could use those same principles to convince people who are ‘“watching intently” that you are doing one thing, while actually doing something else, you’ve got the basis for how dark actors around the world use the principles of magic through the avenues of television, advertising, “news programs”, “government meetings”, and other “stage-craft” to trick your mind into thinking it’s seeing and understanding one thing, when in actuality, behind the scenes something completely different is going on.This is how you can be convinced something good or necessary or meaningful is taking place, while the reality is quite the opposite.
Teller of Penn & Teller actually wrote an article in Reader’s Digest providing the principles of brain deception he uses in his magic – Magic Tricks Revealed, By Teller: 7 Ways to Fool the Brain.
- Exploit pattern recognition.
- Make the secret a lot more trouble than the trick seems worth.
- It’s hard to think critically if you’re laughing.
- Keep the trickery outside the frame.
- To fool the mind, combine at least two tricks.
- Nothing fools you better than the lie you tell yourself.
- If you are given a choice, you believe you have acted freely.
Magic is an art, as capable of beauty as music, painting, or poetry. But the core of every trick is a cold, cognitive experiment in perception: Does the trick fool the audience? ~ Teller
Now imagine, if governments, intelligence agencies, corporations, and militaries around the world used these principles in conjunction with sophisticated electrical and biological technologies that average citizens never get to see and also had complete control of all major media outlets and financial institutions. You can start to sense the level of deception that is possible and power available to create a virtual prison planet…
Still not convinced? Watch the very entertaining, but full of truth movie Wag the Dog – with Robert De Niro and Dustin Hoffman. Parts of Hollywood once in a while let us in on how the “trick” is done…
The Key to Unlocking the Prison
Returning to our story from the beginning of this article, I wrote that you’ve had the key to unlock the prison cell all along. That ‘key’ is inside of you – the ‘Key to the Kingdom’ so to speak. It is the consciousness that creates all life and when you re-connect with it, and allow it to flow through you without resistance, it unlocks the doors to the virtual prison cell created by our ego-driven minds. The ego that says you must remain in a frightened state because there are limitations and dangers everywhere. It continually reminds you that there is ‘you’ and everything outside of you. You are a separate entity and those people and things outside of you are not you and have no real connection to you. Therefore, in order to be ‘safe’, you need to protect yourself from those things outside of you. This translates into a ‘you versus them’ state of mind, where whatever is best for you is the logical conclusion. It leads to a mindset of “service to self’ versus ‘service to others’. It takes no account of the creative source consciousness within all, that connects all, and that creates all.
Consciousness Transformation: A fundamental shift in perspective or worldview that results in a clearer and more expanded understanding of Self and the nature of reality. Such transformations can lead one to a greater sense of meaning and purpose, and a reorientation of priorities toward the health and wholeness of both self and the larger community.
You reach the Divine Source through significantly increasing your level of awareness, your insight and understanding – your consciousness. How does one increase their level consciousness? There are multiple paths, but here are few that I believe are critical:
- Question Everything. We cannot rise in our awareness if we stay tuned into a level of understanding that has been programmed into us from our earliest years. We need to shift from a reactive, media consumption mode, to a proactive knowledge and wisdom acquisition one. Go back to the core principles of real investigative journalists – Who, What, When, Where, and Why – and then start putting the pieces of the puzzle together. This is the last thing the prison warden and guards want you to do – that’s why you must do it. And, be like the famous TV Detective Columbo – he didn’t take information from just one source (or in our case, one type of Media outlet)- he took information from a wide variety of different and un-related sources and verified over and over so as not to get fooled. He also paid close attention to small, seemingly insignificant clues (the bad guys can’t think of every detail…). In addition, the magicians are very good at giving things (people, news outlets, programs, institutions, corporations, etc) the illusion of professionalism, respectability, and integrity while the true reality is far from that, so true vigilance and discernment is required. And lastly, regarding media, though someone may be “truthfully” reporting on a subject, if what they are reporting is itself full of un-truth and deception, has the reporter given you truth? No, they’ve just been a reliable amplifier for the false. This is why dark forces insist on controlling the media…to get seemingly legitimate people amplifying the false thereby giving it an air of respectability.
- Remove the Noise in your Mind. Accessing the truth requires taking the the things out of our mind that are hindering our ability to connect with what’s real. The mind-manipulators in our society are masters at appealing to our ego and causing us to be distracted from the true source of reality. Meditation and Mindfulness practices are the best way to quiet the mind and access the Truth that is the space between our thoughts.
- Reconnect with Nature. As everything is energy in our world, the place where that energy is least disturbed and distorted is in Nature. The truth exists there and that unadulterated energy can flow throw you, cleaning your energetic fields, and allowing you to shed harmful energetic distortions in your mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual energetic bodies.
- Cleanse Your Body of all Toxins. We are receivers and transmitters of consciousness. But if our bodies are full of toxic contaminants from our water and food supplies, pharmaceuticals, personal care products, and air, then connecting to higher energetic states (consciousness), becomes very difficult.
- Gain the Understanding of all Reality as Energetic Vibration. Everything in our material world is at its underlying core, vibrating energetic frequency. This is the key thing the prison masters never want you to learn. For if you understood it, then all of their illusions of how the human body actually works and your true reality as spiritual energy would free you from your prison shackles very quickly. You would realize everything we’ve been taught about our world and the Universe we live in is incomplete at best and at other times untrue. The lack of this understanding is what allows the illusion of man as an isolated and separate being from others, from nature, and certainly from any Divine Creator has been able to be maintained for thousands of years. Without knowing our energetic reality man can be convinced that he is here for only one lifetime on a planet with limited resources and thus is justified in “getting what he can” in the limited time window given to him. Fortunately, there are many, many cracks in this illusion as progressive scientists, medical professionals, and others who have broken free of the Matrix have emerged to re-aquaint us with our true reality. See the resources at the bottom of this article – Maximizing your Vibrational Energy, the True Source of Power – to understand more of this concept.
If you do the above items, you will start to reconnect to the Divine Source Energy that seeks to flow through all of us. If you could strongly re-connect with that power, then you would take your rightful place as a Divine Co-Creator with the Source. You would come to realize your inherent power through the capability of your Heart and Mind to create anything in your reality. Nothing could imprison you, because you would have broken free from some external force restricting your mind and instead joined forces with the only real Power that exists. You would be Free at Last.
You would break free of the Structural Mind Matrix established to limit and hold you hostage in a prison of your own making. An act of truly evil genius meant to replicate its self-generating and self-sustaining evil through closing your mind through distraction, poisoning your body through toxins so that your divine transmitters and receivers would be impaired, and closing your heart towards your brothers and sisters through economic and cultural systems meant to promote an incessant level of competition, hatred, and violence.
The good news is that there is too much Truth now for the Matrix to survive. The key to accessing the Truth is going within, quieting the mind through dedicated meditation, releasing Eg0-based thoughts and allowing the Divine Source the space and quiet to emerge through you into its rightful place as your Co-Creator of a Brave New World.
But it is a Choice. Will you choose to exit the prison through Love, or remain within it via Fear?
Darkness can only be defeated once Heart and Mind strongly join forces to operate at the level of Truth.
If you choose Love, then this recent post will point out some next steps on the Path: Maximizing your Vibrational Energy, the True Source of Power.
Lastly, there is Truth and Un-Truth in everything. When you connect to the Divine Source, the glaze from your eyes is removed and your ability to clearly see the Truth is instantly restored. The magician’s deceptions and mind-distractions become in-effective. Your mind moves beyond relying on the “small hard-drive” in your head that can be easily fooled and connects to the vast and limitless “cloud-based” knowledge base that is your true source of wisdom and Truth. You regain your true Self and life becomes an infinitely much more enjoyable and effortless experience. Here’s hoping you get to experience your true potential in the very near future.
~Jay Kshatri
www.ThinkSmarterWorld.com
For further exploration:
- If you would like to explore this topic in more detail, read the excellent January 2017 article on Poverty Consciousness by Lisa Renee at the Energetic Synthesis website. Lisa’s work is superb. You can also listen to it in podcast form here.
- At the heart of the magician’s control mechanism is money. See how a loving, yet technically advanced and abundant world is possible through a different system – UBUNTU – A World of Unlimited Abundance and No Money
- Wag the Dog – with Robert De Niro and Dustin Hoffman
- Resisting Structural Evil: Love as Ecological – Economic Vocation, by Professor Cynthia D. Moe-Lobeda
