The Free Radical

(Author narration with musical accompaniment)

Seven billion truths knocking about, and most tacitly claiming to be the real one… or at least a superior one– I’m sick of it! Hey, all you science types who love to enforce your relative truths upon others, it’s time to upgrade your operating systems. Jump ahead a hundred years and join the rest of us who actually espouse a modern scientific viewpoint!

‘The truth’ does not exist! Or to be more precise, ‘the truth’ presents differently to every observer/participant, hence the term ‘relative truth.’ It was Einstein who demonstrated this about a hundred years ago with a famous thought experiment which has become a staple in physics textbooks ever since. The experiment is called Relativity of Simultaneity. The undeniable and universally agreed-upon conclusion of this thought experiment is that the sequence of events for any occurrence is dependent upon and unique to the relative motion of individual observers. In simplest terms, ‘the truth’ is relative to the circumstances of one’s observation; there is no singular objective truth to be found… anywhere… so stop looking… and stop insisting that your red herring stinks any less than my red herring!

(For a full– but brief– description of the Relativity of Simultaneity thought experiment, you may wish to consult my previous essay Once (More) and for All (Time). That essay deals extensively with the quantum mechanical implications for ‘objectivity’ and consciousness.)

Ego is the aspect of consciousness we utilize to operate within the realm of relative truth. Within that realm of human experience, ego is perfectly necessary. Ego’s chronic tendency, however, is to overstep or overstate its own significance, and to misapply its discoveries (relative truths) upon All That Is. The irony of this oft-repeated ‘mistake’ is that whatever relative truth is being promulgated is exactly correct and true for the ego espousing it in that moment… but only for that ego’s unique perspective in that moment. It can’t necessarily be applied to anyone else, or their unique circumstance.

What ego has such difficulty understanding is that we don’t live in a universe of events of which we are the perceivers. Instead, we live in universes of experiences in which we participate. Experiences are the basic building blocks of reality, not the events associated with matter and energy interacting in time and space. Those ‘events’ only exist as unique and individual experiences. No experiencer = no event. The only ‘place’ in which any events occur– ever– is in mind/perception. They don’t occur ‘out there’ because, quite simply, there is no ‘out there.’

Objective reality is an abstraction, or an illusion, if you prefer. In many, many instances, in the course of regular life, it is a very useful abstraction, and quite regularly we should make full use of it. An obvious example of this is forensics. As long as we engage a crime-and-punishment model, forensic science is indispensable. The ‘objective’ reality it appears to investigate, however, is merely a useful abstraction. The only ‘place’ the crime exists is in the experiences of those involved. We can study the evidence, the artifacts, of the experiences in question… and they will suggest to us a story, and the only ‘place’ that story will exist is in the minds of all those who have come to know of the crime… and each person will have a slightly different interpretation of the story suggested.

What we so casually perceive as this ‘objective’ reality is a consensus. We agree (subconsciously) on certain parameters of shared experience in order to give consistent context for our experiential explorations… together… but each one’s experience is unique. This is the realm of relative truths– our current experience here.

There is no end to relative truths, and there is no linear depiction that can represent them all in any meaningful way. Science embraces its role when it actively shapes the consensus of relative truths we– collectively as a world– accept, according to the stories the evidence suggests.

I hope you will agree that there cannot be a linear depiction of ‘falling in love’ that might ever be equivalent to the actual experience of falling in love. Only the actual experience can live up to the actual experience, and it’s not linear, rational or logical; and it can’t be faked. Only experiences are real, and we create virtual worlds of text and context, man and soul, to further our explorations, understandings. But the worlds are not real– they’re not out there; all the worlds are abstractions of our minds.

Events occur only in consciousness, and nowhere else; all else is pretense.

We can use the abstraction to deepen our understanding, or, if we’re forgetful, we can fall into pretense, and the pretense can be used to befuddle our understanding. If we place too much of our attention on the world, we’re pouring energy into an abstraction. Instead, we should place our attention directly on our experience of the abstraction, for that, and that alone, is real… and amendable. We can change our experience, always, as a matter of choice. But we cannot change the world directly… only how we experience it.

The world (the consensus) responds to the growth in/of our experience. Experience here is gathering relative truths, or belief systems– if you will. But once a significant portion of the world’s populace begins to see through the ultimate futility of amassing relative truths, the consensus necessarily breaks down. The exploration of that type of experience comes to a natural close. The Big Shift is the new consensus we will reach: what sort of New Earth will we create? But before we can get there, there’s the little shift first. We have to stop giving precedence to the world itself over our sacred experience of the world. Less focus on the abstraction… more energy vitalizing the experience– the actual scientific reality.

So go ahead and slog it out over these relative truths about the world, our consensus. And when you’re done arguing, just ask yourself quite simply “Is that really the experience I want?” And that’s it, you’ve made the little shift. You now are ready to allow your experience to be the vehicle for Truth to come into Being, not the gathered truths from amongst the shared abstraction, the world, from which you’d stitched the quilt of ego.

Your experience lies in the seventh direction: inward. Your heart is your journey’s guide through experience. (The mind navigates abstractions– outwardly.)

Your heart desires love; it knows the experience, and promises to deliver it… to the extent that you will venture in.

And all I’ve given you here is one more linear depiction, another relative truth, I know. But that’s the difference– I know! I promise not to tackle you and try to cram my latest relative truth down your throat; I know that you can only come to it… in your own time, in your own way, once you’re honestly done with the realm of relative truths. This promises to be the last one.

So there’s not one that stands for them all, but there is One Truth which transcends them all… and It’s always available, no matter where you are.

End of the Line (Linearity)

Well, it seems this is the moment I’ve been waiting for… for the last twenty-odd years. I haven’t exactly been sitting on my hands though, so ‘waiting’ might not be exactly right. I knew that at some point there would be a palpable shift in the way I perceive the world, and I suspected that many others would share in that shift in perspective roughly simultaneously too. It’s happened.

Up until this point, my target audience for these seemingly endless writings has been ‘those who are not quite convinced that anything out of the ordinary is happening at all.’ I’ve tried to the best of my ability to lay down a foundation for understanding what’s been bubbling beneath the surface of world events for these past few decades. I’ve come at this idea of the Slow Apocalypse from virtually every angle I could think of, purposely steering away from the wildest and most controversial conspiracy theories along the way. Admittedly, I’ve had to touch upon more than a few conspiracy theories, but to pretend that the geopolitical stage is utterly bereft of any and all conspiracy would be naive in the extreme. It is what it is.

The world is now being pulled apart. This is the breakthrough, the bifurcation, the stratification of the densities, of the supportive energies. We, the populace of Earth– the creators of this day-to-day world through our shared beliefs and subconscious agreements– are being separated into two primary camps. The one is the traditional hierarchically-structured system of domination and control which we’ve historically called civilization, or alternatively what I’ve called the World-Devouring Machine. The other camp consists of those who are ready to move on to civilization 2.0. We’re done with unsustainable geopolitical and economic systems which have failed us and are therefore doomed to complete failure. We’re done with social conventions and conditioning which undermine our own best interests. We’re the brave ones who are prepared to roll up our sleeves and move on into a world of shared, sustainable vision founded upon a diverse unity.

This Movement, this Shift has largely focused upon a singular mission to this point: to try and inform others of what we believe is going on. It has been the inevitable question whenever someone new is exposed to the very idea of an apocalypse: “Okay, if what you are saying is true, what do we do about it?” So far, the standard answer has been to spread the word or wake up the others. That was Phase One– telling the world of the coming ‘end.’

Phase Two moves directly into what comes after. Phase Two is the actual building of the New Earth. We can no longer be concerned who and how many believe what we’re saying. In fact, it is time now to prove to ourselves that we know what we’re talking about, by demonstrating it. We have to show that there is indeed a viable, sustainable, peaceful and loving world quite possible after the slow-motion destruction we’re witnessing right now… and it lives inside of each one of us… as it always has.

Prior to this moment of demarkation, the prospect of trying to implement sane and loving systems in an insane world run by psychopaths has proven to be nearly impossible. But the psychos have effectively lost their grip; it was a matter of their own prolonged survival. Their elaborate systems of domination and control had to release us now, as we’ve seen right through them. We’re free to pursue the alternative without nearly as much interference as we’ve traditionally had to deal with. The controllers and manipulators are concentrating their doomed-to-failure efforts on retaining what little support they still have among the contented sleepers. Energetically, we’re essentially outside of their system (the Matrix) now.

So this Newsletter is about tying up loose ends. These are the last foundational stones that needed to be set in place completing the bridge between the Old Earth and the New Earth– all the rationalizations, philosophies, narratives and pithy phrases supporting this (bowel) Movement. Hereafter, my focus will shift from enumerating all of the tragic flaws and self-destructive tendencies inherent in the World-Devouring Machine, and will henceforth focus more exclusively on creating the New.

The many thousands of pages of original work I’ve penned so far can stand on their own as a lifeline– straddling the two worlds– to those who will yet awaken in the future, desperately seeking a way out of the horror. And I, along with many others, will exercise our loving arms in the meantime in order to offer that alternative embrace when the moment comes.

This week’s topic was Intuition.

Originally, I had a lovely little story in mind about the intuitive message I received at the very first meeting with one of my best friends. However, when I sat down at the computer to write it, my intuition grabbed hold instead, and I ended up writing this:

FreeLovingWill

Faith:
Love is not a choice;
it is the end of choice.
Surrender.

Love can only Be,
and its Being is only loving,
so every choice is already made.

It may seem that freewill is nullified,
but if Love is our true nature,
Mightn’t it Be that our Will is loving too?

Every choice for an unloving journey
leads equally away from freedom
than from our inherently loving Will.

Unloving journeys lead to narrow,
tight,
desperate choices:
the whole world teeters upon the shaky fulcrum
of the ‘one right decision’
…over and over.

The ways of loving are infinite…
while unloving choices yield diminishing returns…
burning bridges…
making islands.

Now, I can only choose to surrender
to my own FreeLovingWill.

Faces in the smoke!

Now, who am I to argue with my intuition… especially about intuition? Honestly, I can only refer to the above ‘poem’ as proactive intuition, as opposed to the kind usually associated with passively waiting to receive intuition’s infrequent whispers. Perhaps intuition is an entire realm we can choose to inhabit, like an open field of wildflowers where our intuitive knowing is the constant supply of honey oozing into our minds.

And now get this. After I posted the above to the Mystical Masters Facebook Group, I was intuitively impulsed to add the video of Dexter’s Elixir Part 1. That’s one of those old songs of mine that’s been around for at least a couple of decades. When I wrote it, I was always sure that I’d gotten the lyrics ‘right,’ but I never really had a clue as to what they were about. I know it’s a bit of a stretch, but could it be that the odd relationship between these two creative works– separated by many years– is the full explanation of what they each mean… in providing context for each other? Nevertheless, one thing is clear: creativity is by no means a linear thing!

Video: Dexter’s Elixir Pt. 1

Now, that all seemed a bit ‘out there’ for such a straightforward topic like intuition– although it is what my intuition had to say– so I then went ahead and wrote the original story I had planned earlier.

What follows is an excerpted chapter from a book that hasn’t been written yet: R Nt U Missing Peace 2? The book is about my band and our consistently outrageous adventures; this chapter is about meeting the lead singer and my best friend at the time, Shane.

“Shenanigans!”

I had just completed the second phase of my life, although it would still be quite some time before I’d notice the periodic occurrences of thirteens, marking those phases.

My head was a-swirl, having lost faith in the value of everything I’d learned in my first twenty-six years. I had bought the indoctrination and now it looked fake. My education and the fulfillment of my highest potential seemed to be two mutually exclusive things… and that didn’t seem right!

Besides, I had graduated magnum cum laude from the Academy of Conceit with a special dispensation for spewing bullshit on command. I should have been rewarded…

I was cutting through the lobby on my way to the hot pools where I worked as a lifeguard. I would often go early before my shift to swim some laps in the cool pool. He was sitting in a chair, there in the hallway beside the lobby. He was wearing a t-shirt, worn jeans and cheap canvas sneakers, yet somehow I pegged him as a rich kid. He was probably booked into a room with his filthy rich parents; I saw his apparent poverty as some lame rebellion; I had him pegged alright; I was smart– like a judge… He barely looked up when I walked by…

And as I looked down the snout of my condescension, my intuition flared… Fuck no. You gotta be kidding me! The message I received was absurd. I had to call shenanigans on my own intuition.

“This is your new best friend.”

Had I been drinking a beverage at that precise moment I would have certainly booger-hosed it all over myself and the hallway. Thankfully I was able to stifle my snorts of derision, and eventually settled on a quiet chuckle once I got outside.

Hah! My best friend… shenanigans indeed! Oh intuition, you nut.

The pools are outside. I think it was April. After I’d finished my laps, I went straight over to where the entrance to the hot pool is, like I always do. And before I knew what was going on, my co-worker Deanna introduced me to the filthy little rich kid from the lobby.

“This is Shane Hagan…”

Shenanigans!

“…he just started work here… in the dish pit.”

So it began. Shane sang along with Eddie Vedder to Pearl Jam’s Ten, as I wrote strange poetry on his chalet room walls. Once I was done being perfectly self-absorbed in my own brilliance for those verses wrought, I was forced to take notice of the guy swaying in his chair and singing right into the face of that ghetto blaster, if indeed, ghetto blasters had faces. He had some attitude. But what’s more, that kid could sing! And he wasn’t afraid to… whereas I…

“Um, I write songs. I play guitar,” I said shyly.

He sang the shit out of my songs, giving them melody where I could just follow the rhythm. (Singing and playing at the same time are hard, you know.)

But as nice as it was that we could share musical adventures together, I think that our friendship was founded on something else. Our mutual superhero power was that we could see through each other’s bullshit.

Do you know how awesome it is to have someone who can find an infinite number of ways to say “Yeah, so you’re smart; so fucking what!”? When book-smarts meet street-smarts, nobody’s really impressed, either way.

I bought him his first guitar for his birthday. A few months later he had written half the songs on Missing Peace’s debut album; the other half were mine. We were yinning and yanging, making wholes in all sorts of cardboard cutout dreams.

For years we played an instrumental piece of mine that everyone knew as QC & the EF. One day I was finally asked “What does QC & the EF mean?”

Quietly Courageous and the Essential Friend… the answer to the question didn’t seem to really answer the question, so I further explained. “Quietly Courageous” is my friend from Germany, and the “Essential Friend” is Shane. That information was reiterated by other bandmates to Shane when we went through some adversarial times with each other– which we periodically did ‘cause when two guys can consistently see each other so naked, and only one of them is gay, some weird tension’s gonna arise. Haha…?

Some people unexpectedly show up in our lives and a whole series of events ensues, such that the mere possibility of imagining our lives without them cannot even begin to arise. They become Essential Friends.

Entanglement complete.
__________________________________________

The track I selected to accompany this piece is a live track from 1998 in Banff at the Rose and Crown. It provides the whole yin and the whole yang of it, starting off with an instrumental I wrote, and then segueing into an old Pearl Jam cover. Shane was often his enthusiastic best live.

The hero’s paradigm is fraught with paradox. As a society, collectively, we are ever in search of the latest-greatest hero who might soothe our societal ills, and yet the very structure of our societal institutions serve the function of ensuring that extraordinary heroes cannot arise. Our fostering systems, whether educational or political– or any other– operate on a conformity of thought, action and behaviour. At every turn, individuals are rewarded for ‘playing along,’ for following the rules, and only if you are exceptionally good at obeying the contrived system, might you eventually excel within it. Conversely, those who choose to operate outside of the system’s checks and balances, those who might wish to bring much-needed overhaul to those very systems– through conceiving a better way– are dutifully marginalized and ultimately outcast, their radical ideas tossed to the scrap heap. It is a situation of malaise, stagnation and impasse.

We are stuck searching for heroes within a matrix which promises to crucify him as soon as he raises his voice… leaving us utterly dependent upon the one thing we can never have.

Hero-worship has been sold to us relentlessly. In politics, religion, entertainment, even in the love quests of our personal lives, only the appropriate hero can fill our pathological need. Hero-worship is borne out of polarity. Heroes are needed to balance the inevitable rise of villains. The hero-villain dichotomy is the basis for our societal morality. Good must oppose bad; there is simply no other way– or so we are told again and again. As such, a foundational belief underpins our entire societal structure: that all action in a civilized world is rooted in conflict and attempted conflict resolution.

We consequently imagine that the very best in each of us is drawn out only through competition and hardship. After all, the hero can only become a hero through impossible struggle, right? We see fighting as a necessary aspect of character-building. Our tacit acceptance of such a doctrine causes us to view the world through tinted glasses, where wild animals are seen as ferocious beasts in endless pitched battles with one another. And yet, that’s not what our (updated) sciences tell us at all; it is in fact co-operation and nurturance that are the primary driving forces of natural evolution. Our experience too consistently contradicts this notion of nature waging perpetual war. When we go for a walk in the woods, or go camping, or fishing– we do so generally because we appreciate the deep balance and peace nature provides. Certainly, conflict arises in the cycle of predation, but its incidence is minuscule compared to the deep harmony of nature’s community. The forest’s critters do not live in a general state of fear; they do not have chronically elevated cortisol levels!

Nature has no heroes. Can you imagine if nature’s sublime balance relied upon the actions of heroic individuals? Evolution would not have occurred. Evolution is a product of community, but real community has always stood apart from the Hero’s Quest.

As individuals continually seeking out the heroic, we ever fail to recognize any need to fully take responsibility for our lives and their circumstances. In a world searching out heroes, victimization is an inevitability. The very search for heroes requires victims.

And the other side of the coin, when the hero is found, if he be truly worthy of the designation ‘hero,’ he then spends considerable energy battling the appellation. He insists that “Indeed, I am no hero. It’s not about me at all. It is my message and my behaviour which seem so praiseworthy; the man before you is irrelevant.” But as a society we are deaf to this brand of sanity; we place heroes upon pedestals… from which they must eventually fall, for they were indeed correct in pointing away from themselves, in telling us that we mustn’t invest our hopes in fictitious characters. We are fools.

And there is none more foolish than the one in love; experience bears this out. Could it be that our insistence on the quest for Hero has distorted our very conception of love, that we know not what it truly is nor where to find its everlastingness? Here, I know, I stand on dangerous ground. The ideas of soul-mates, twin-flames, and the exclusionary nature of romantic love have been sold to us at every turn. Marriage vows typically contain the phrase “to the exclusion of all others.” Is this truly love? Truly? Is it a rare and precious thing which can only seldom occur between two extraordinarily lucky individuals, and must be defended by any means necessary from the infiltration of the unloving? Really? Do you see? Our very conception of the supposed highest love is itself undeniably unloving! We wrap our arms around our sacred beloved and declare “This is mine and mine alone; everyone else fuck off! And I mean it!” This is our typical view of our most passionate, romantic love. Does anyone else see a flaw in this?

And how do we view it when our sacred beloved leaves us for the love of another? They have made the ‘difficult’ decision to pursue their own happiness with someone else… and we are left crushed, devastated, betrayed and utterly stripped bare of any love we might have thought we once had. Let me reiterate: this is the inevitable result of our former lover pursuing their continued happiness, further exploring love– a very positive thing by any objective reckoning– and yet it destroys us! Something is very wrong here.

The social engineers of domination and control are quite content to let us battle it out with each other for an eternity, scrapping over this misconception of love’s true nature. We imagine that if we were to learn to extend our highest love– that which we feel for our special beloved– to include all others, then we are betraying and diminishing the ‘specialness’ we share. Of course, such an action can be no diminishment at all, primarily because the exclusivity of our ‘love’ is not love at all; it lies squarely within the realms of relative truth… Whereas love the transcendent, the Absolute, can only be actualized through just such an indiscriminatory application of universal acceptance and being. When we fall in love with that special someone, that is a taste and an invitation to learn how to properly apply that feeling, that state of being, to everyone we encounter, to allow it to become the full flowering of love. It is our deep-seated need for hero-worship which distorts our greatest opportunity for learning into a self-destructive fortress of preferential treatment and regard. And it’s pathological.

We cannot be complete in ourselves. None of us is ever good enough. We endlessly seek out the other to fulfill all that we refuse to acknowledge and develop in ourselves. We must rely upon the special knowledge of experts in every aspect of our lives. We refuse to take responsibility for our own health and eventually we must seek out the heroic doctor who can save us from our own foolishness. We get into trouble with the law and only a heroic lawyer can save us from the ruination of our lives. The invocation of the necessity for heroes finds endless examples in our current society. Is it any wonder that we’ve become so unskilled at building community? Virtually everything we think and do stands in opposition to the very idea of loving community.

And finally, to answer the inevitable question: Yes, indeed, I have fallen in love before. It was undeniably the most profound experience of my life. It was a very long time ago however. And in the meantime, I have created the space in consciousness to revisit that tumultuous episode. What is undeniable now is that when I was in love I was completely insane. I was literally incapable of making rational decisions consistently. I had lost any semblance of a balanced view of reality… And at the time, I was sure that it was the most wonderful experience a human being can have! And now I see it as the basis for the mess we’re in.

There is a fundamental misunderstanding lying at the heart of civilization in its current incarnation. Perhaps it’s time we got past our petty jealousies and the need for someone to repair the inevitable wounds which result, hm? We are community; we already have everything we need; no heroes required. Who’s with me?