@RealSteveHolmes – – 40 years of exploring ideas and now for 20 more

9.

The Climate of Lie is all pervasive, tantamount to a plague that pollutes everything that is possible for human beings. It’s like a form of deadly radiation that imprisons the spirit, dis-eases the body, perverts the emotions, addles the brain and directly causes the mood of resignation that is the unmentionable presence among us – as we nevertheless try to make the best of life: to pretend, to be cheerful, to find excitement, to plan for something better that never comes.

There is nobody alive who is not hoping to be happier and there never has been. Contentment is a myth created by eastern religious memes and available only as an illusion through rigid discipline and thought control, let only body control. For most of us, moments of bliss and peak experiences are just passing accidents that we cannot repeat, even with drugs, dangerous sports, ridiculous sex, unbelievable wealth, total control, a semipro handicap, an immaculate home and our perfect children, designed for an even happier future life. It all goes nowhere and we still suffer shock, loss, disappointment, fear and eventually cancer.

Yet most people, believing already that they are sufficient unto the day with their hard-won, hard-baked imitation “personality” locked around them as armour, most people will attack you viciously if you suggest that they may not be OK as they are and that things could be otherwise. Their happiness, which they parade to themselves during the good days, is so very shallow and brittle that they will murder the messenger who brings them any different news. Most of the time it is all they talk about: their plans, their achievements, their cleverness, their wonderful things and children, the brilliant decisions they have made. Or, if life is not so good, they embroil you in their issues and problems and creative solutions. And then they start giving you advice you never asked for. That adequately describes most of the conversation I have ever had, except when I’ve been with a joker who laughs at life, a vampire who murders everyone around them or a person who really does have cancer and needs to hear the sound of their own denial in order to find it more convincing.

In the Climate of Lie people are locked inside themselves. They don’t share the space with your soul, our space, the common space. They find ways to control and dominate, sometimes by being kind and motherly with good advice, sometimes by obviously dominating “male” behaviours and frequently just by talking on automatic about themselves. Anyone who can do more than this is a rare gem; someone who can consistently stay in the shared space and actually share it is a miracle; a being who can inhabit shared outer, perceptive space and even wax inventive with the discovery that is perhaps the greatest gift of all that mankind is refusing, well that person is, for the time being, blessed. If you aren’t there, for at least a part of every single day, then you are missing out on feeling truly human.

Why does everyone know this but hardly ever act on it? Why does serious shock and loss bring people closer to the great truths about their own nature, only to subsequently cover them over as soon as they begin to feel OK? The obvious answer that even Freud could have given was repetition compulsion by conditioning, a state of being where you have unconsciously learned behaviours that revolve around the traumas of your childhood so that they secretly haunt you ever more, causing inexplicable, self destructive, repetitious responses, which, like a gambler on a losing streak, you think will finally rescue you this time.

Wilhelm Reich would say, “Oi, Sigmund, hold on there guy. It’s a bit worse than that because the dis-eased responses pattern themselves in to the body structures and congeal, harden, tighten, tense and cause to malfunction vital pathways and organs so that free flowing life energy is blocked…” Jung and his countless admirers might say that it’s all a trip through our own mythical stories where everything is both good and bad at the same time and life is life a narrow path where you fight your way through a dangerous jungle being an archetypal hero.

In fact lots of gurus have said lots off stuff around these issues of happiness and Werner Erhard himself, not realising what he was doing, finally admitted, over and over again in monotonous drawl at an unscripted “Special Guest Seminar” for the faithful that he didn’t really believe in the hope he’d been peddling as he salted the cash away in Switzerland but had now almost realised that, erm well, he didn’t quite know, but he implied as usual that if you didn’t get it there was something wrong with you. As I said, ontology is a treacherous game, handled best obliquely by great literature, not pseudo scientists.

So, are you starting to accept that there really is a climate of lie to be dealt with before any progress can be made? Because I have seen the promised land, oh yes, and I think I can show you the door to a state of being that fully engages your innate curiosity in such a marvellous way that you will actually be able to feel like the creator you sometimes dream of being. But it won’t be easy. Stick with Guru Tolle if you want to treat it as a game.

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I often sit reading a dictionary for fun. Sometimes a word will especially catch my imagination and I want to share it.

The word for today is VERSATILE

First used around 1605, apparently, derived from a Latin root meaning either many-sided or capable of turning depending on where you look, but surely so much richer since it became a common term and so much deeper in meaning than a word like adaptable because it hints at a gift or a power in the person you attach it to that I think crude is its true opposite.

A person with only one track in terms of ideas or behaviours, someone who prides himself on being consistent, that person seems pitiable to me. But the versatile person can produce different moods, different approaches, different ways of thinking and even different behaviours in an appropriate way that the boring among us just cannot do.

There, that should upset somebody who mistakenly thinks I’m getting at them.