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  • The Coming World Government

    The Coming World Government

    This article was published in New Dawn Special Issue 18 (Dec 2011). While much of the information relates to events of the period, the trend towards greater global control continue. The question remains: who will ultimately call the shots in the post-2020 world?

    Lucid and aware people observing world events unfold over the past decade or so – say, since September 11, 2001 – will have surely asked themselves what on Earth is going on here? We see ever-growing violence, war, outright lies, invasions, false flags, social upheavals, poverty, ruin and the death of millions… The world’s become a pretty dangerous and pitiful place to live in, and it only gets worse…

    Which leads us to the obvious question: Why? Why is all this happening? Can we explain it away as Man’s wicked nature? Or his folly and ignorance? Perhaps just a series of bad mistakes and wrong turns on key issues?

    Most everybody will have a ready reply, no doubt coloured by his or her own philosophical outlook. The more rational will say it’s just wrong decisions taken by normal people in an environment of growing complexity. Optimists will shrug their shoulders playing things down with the quaint statement that there’s always been war, persecution, poverty and corruption… Pessimists, as always, will complain that we’re all doomed, especially if they are “2012-repent-the-end-of-the-world-draws-nigh” types. What, then, should we think?

    First, A Word About “Conspiracies…”

    If you don’t buy any of the above explanations, and you feel that today’s calamities are being purposefully engineered – that some group of people somewhere control the course of world events – then be careful because you risk being branded another paranoid, hallucinating, conspiracy theory kook.

    Don’t let that worry you too much because those who disqualify as mere “conspiracy theories” any attempt to put together an alternative model of how global power really works are either, (a) blissfully ignorant and believe in the “world according to CNN and FoxNews”; (b) near-sighted on key long-term geopolitical processes; or (c) purposely deceptive and thus have an axe to grind protecting the Global Power Elite, which always reacts with uneasiness whenever someone shines a light on them. I will only deal with the last of these options.

    Debunking “conspiracy theory” accusations is really not all that hard because what is thus branded is really just normal human behaviour. Or should we yell “Conspiracy!” every time two or more people having common interests and goals come together to coordinate and articulate their actions, joining forces to promote such goals and objectives more easily and with a higher degree of certainty? We see this at work in our community, schools, even in our own families. Such normal human behaviour is so ubiquitous that nobody bothers to mention it – that is not until you point out the highest echelons of world power also do exactly the same.

    Every time somebody says very powerful individuals and entities quite predictably also engage in common actions, planning, and agreements in order to achieve common goals, the “C-word” kicks in with all its might ready to kill any such line of thought or investigation dead in its tracks.

    How dare you say that global bankers plot to manipulate money and finance so they can control economies, markets, governments and the media! How dare you insinuate that the rich and powerful create organisations like the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) or the Trilateral Commission to do their geopolitical mega planning supporting long-term Global Power Elite interests bent on imposing World Government on Mankind! How can you be so paranoid as to even suggest that Money Power uses its clout to place “their people” in the White House, Parliament, Downing Street, the Casa Rosada, and Editors’ desks in all major media outlets?

    That is the mainstream reaction whenever we speak of bankers, oil men, defence contractors, politicians, journalists and their respective corporations, organisations, banks, lobbies, lodges, armies – who all most clearly do have common interests and objectives – coming together and using their vast money flows to exert iron-fist control over society. This is all so obvious that only very naïve people (or very cheeky “analysts” on the Elite payroll!) conclude otherwise. What is really naïve is to think that George Soros never picks up the phone to discuss mutual plans with Sir Henry Kissinger or Christine Lagarde; or that David Rockefeller never dines with his Rothschild, Morgan and Warburg brethren.

    Don’t be taken aback by the “C” word. Whoever uses it to silence lucid and aware people do so because they know nothing is more dangerous to them than… lucid and aware people! 

    Let’s now take a look at how the world really works, call it “conspiracy” or otherwise.

    World Government

    The dream of erecting a world government controlled by a very small, extremely powerful and elusive minority goes back several centuries. Its roots lie not just on the political stage but, more so, in social, cultural and religious spheres, often with symbolic, “occult” overtones.

    In our time it has been variously described under the guise of “New World Order,” “One World,” “Over-World” and, more recently, “Globalisation.” Call it what you will, the facts are that national sovereignty, which is the ability of the People to organise around nation-states, to make the final decisions on their own affairs, from being a sharply defined concept is now so eroded and diffuse that no one can readily define exactly what sovereignty means today.

    Maybe this would be acceptable if national sovereignty were lessened for the sake of better coping with global problems affecting Mankind as a whole – for the Common Good – however increasing famine, disease, contamination and war shows a very different picture. Why? The reason is that basically World Government is not emerging around robust global public institutions that have (or should have) the Public Good of We the People in the forefront, but rather around private organisations that have sectorial profit and interests at their forefront. In fact, the World Government we see rising before our eyes has one key, seldom mentioned, characteristic: it’s private.

    Private Power

    Let’s start from basics: what drives the world today is not justice, it’s not the pursuit of the Common Good, nor international law, nor ethical values, nor democracy. What governs the world is Power and today Power has been illegitimately amassed in the hands of a tiny usurping minority. What do we mean by “Power”?

    Firstly, Power is the concrete ability to plan, promote, organise, and carry out actions, the results of which invariably lead to specific and desired objectives and goals in the short, medium and long terms. Power is the capacity and ability to make certain things happen irrespective of any resistance, and at the same time blocking certain other things from happening irrespective of their force; if need be by war…

    This definition spans political, economic, industrial, financial, business, technological, cultural, psychological and (usually, in the last instance) military stages. The exercise of Power requires coordinated and intelligent use of all resources at hand – whether plentiful or lean, physical or virtual – with the view of achieving concrete objectives and goals.

    Secondly, we should differentiate Formal Power from Real Power. What the media show us are the very high profile visible results of actions carried out by Formal Power structures, i.e., national governments, financial markets and the media. However, Real Power levers that make things happen are far less visible. They plan out what happens in the world, when it happens, where, and who makes it happen. Symmetries between Real Power and Formal Power help explain how our global system works. Let’s recap:

    Real Power is centred on discrete proactive structures and organisations that drive concrete and effective political, economic and social processes in a nation, a region, a social class, a public or private institution, or a combination of these. Its effectiveness stems from its continuity in time that allows it to grow and leverage its capacity for world domination. Real Power structures drive causes which, although themselves not visible, nevertheless generate highly visible results.

    Formal Power is centred on structures that are for the most part reactive executors of strategies and decisions emanating from Real Power structures. These include high profile structures like major multinational corporations, transnational banks, multimedia monopolies, key universities and the top echelons of government in all countries (presidents, cabinet members, congressmen, judges). Formal Power structures are accountable for high-profile effects that have their roots in low profile causes emanating from Real Power structures.

    The conquest and use of power has much in common with surfing: a dangerous staying balanced, a perilous not falling off the board, a flexible control of speed, direction and pitch. Good surfers “ride the wave” just as Italian philosopher Julius Evola recommended we learn to “Ride the tiger...” Come to think of it power also seems to have a feline, hunting and preying style and gait to it.

    This leads to the need of clearly grasping a fundamental and harsh “Law of Power”: Those who have Power use it to promote and drive their objectives and interests; those who do NOT have Power must suffer the consequences of the actions of those who do have the Power to promote and drive their objectives and interests. 

    Here lie the roots of the dramatic situation most countries suffer today because power is no longer in the hands of people and organisations working towards the Common Good.

    The Pyramid

    It helps to approach Power from a Corporate viewpoint. After all, the modern corporation developed, thrived and survived enormously over centuries of time becoming a key driver in the on-going shift that “privatised” power, transferring the reins of control from public political institutions to eminently private economic structures articulated in three vertical hierarchical levels:

    Shareholders, who are the real owners and controllers of the Corporation, even if they seldom or ever become involved in its operational and administrative processes. Shareholders focus on finance, not economic production;

    Directors, who represent shareholders and supervise/oversee the correct, efficient and proper operation of the Corporation in accordance with shareholder interest. They are accountable for ensuring maximum growth of present and future stock yields with minimum expense, thus making the capitalist corporation intrinsically an antisocial agent.

    Managers, who are well-paid employees accountable for the day-to-day running of the Corporation. Normally, they are trained and hard working specialists who add value to the Corporation through their talent, organisational skills and discipline.

    Today the superstructure of a veritable World Government already exist, but for the most part we do not recognise it as such because the paradigms normally associated with the concept of “government” are not readily visible. Rather, since power has become privatised, today’s World Government has much more in common with traditional private power structures described above. This lies at the very foundations of “globalisation,” where power is private and “democracy” is the preferred political system through which private power structures control public government i.e., through money.

    Therefore public power – “government” – in almost every country can only occupy the lower level of decision-making (President, Prime Minister, Congress, Parliament, etc.). Medium and upper level decisions all lie above or outside national governments and countries, so we the People have no access or control over them, even though they deeply affect us all. Let’s have a closer look at how this hierarchy of global power plays out in practice:

    Top Level Decisions (i.e., the “Owners” of this world) – Geopolitical Scope

    In the private corporate world, upper level decisions are taken by shareholders. In the public World Government this is done by the Global Power Elite. Save in major countries as the US, UK, Russia, China and France, national governments have little or no access to this upper decision level where the “Masters of the World” wield Real Power. This is all coordinated by and grouped around the following major axes dealing with the geopolitical:

    Think Tanks – A compact, hierarchical, seamless and very powerful global network of geostrategic planning centres – so-called “think tanks” – notably, the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), Trilateral Commission (TC), Bilderberg Group, Royal Institute of International Affairs (“Chatham House”), World Economic Forum, Project for a New American Century (PNAC), amongst others. Their job is to plan out the long-term development of complex political, economic, financial, technological, military and cultural processes, integrating them into consistent, sustainable and complex geopolitical models, geared to achieving growing long-term national, regional and global domination.

    Finance Dynastic Families wielding immense economic, financial and social power and fortune since generations, even centuries: i.e., Rothschild, Rockefeller, Morgan, Mellon, Bin-Laden, Bush, Buffet and others.

    Royal Dynasties and Noble Bloodlines who wielded social, economic, religious and financial Power for centuries (i.e., the ruling nobilities of Britain, Holland, Spain, Belgium, as well as the “uncrowned nobilities” in France, Germany, Austria, Italy and Portugal). They closely link-in with their counterparts in Islamic sheikdoms and patrician financial “nobilities” in the US and Far East.

    Religious Organisations – Political structures of key religious faiths, notably The Vatican, Church of England, Lutheran and Calvinist Churches, the Jewish Sanhedrin, Evangelical and Pentecostal organisations, many of them staunchly pro-Zionist;

    Supranational Political Structures – Freemasonry, Zionism, International Social Democracy, International Christian Democracy, various NGO’s and lobbies. Here we find the highest echelons of global power coming together at its pyramidal apex. No doubt, whatever lies behind “Illuminati” tradition dwells here: a compact Round Table of “Elders” representing money power, Dynastic families, Kings, Queens and Sheiks, Vatican priests, Rabbis, Lutheran and Anglican clergy, and the bloodlines from where the future “King of the World” shall arise. The buck stops there.

    Organised Crime – Not surprisingly organised crime interacts with “legitimate” power structures and may even be created by them under various “operational agreements.” This brings under the fold various Mafias, arms dealers, drug cartels, money launderers, plus their respective financial managers. Boundaries are not clear-cut because organised criminal groups seem to have successfully embedded themselves into “legitimate” organisations, including the CIA, MI6, Mossad, DEA, FBI, SEC, financial institutions, stock exchanges, and armed and security forces. The New World Order power structure contains pacts and agreements forged with major criminal organisations willing to respect and abide by unwritten guidelines and rules of engagement.

    Mid-Level Decisions (the “Deciders”) – Strategic Scope

    In the private corporate world, these are in the hands of the Directors. In the public World Government this refers to a set of major players: multinational corporations, transnational financial institutions, media monopolies, major universities, and specific sectors in all national governments, notably in the areas of foreign policy, economics and defence.

    They direct and channel huge resources to finance political campaigns that promote previously screened, selected and approved political parties and candidates, maintaining a credible balance and image in order to ensure the electorate always have the – albeit, false – impression that “the people elect those who govern them”: let’s call this the “democracy game.”

    Monopoly multimedia organisations, in turn, execute intense short-term PsyOps campaigns (e.g., right before an election), whilst the educational system executes medium- and long-term psychological pressure to ensure the population at large believe, accept, embrace and play the “democracy game” questioning little or nothing about it.

    Lower Level Decisions (Day-to-Day “Operators”) – Operational Scope

    In the private corporate world, these are in the hands of Managers. In the public World Government, these are “the Authorities”: i.e., governments, law enforcement agencies, armed & security forces, controlling and supervisory entities, and the like. It includes “The President” or “Prime Minister” as head of the Executive Branch, Congressmen and women (or Parliamentarians) in the Legislative, and judges in the Judiciary branches of public government.

    A nation’s president or prime minister is thus limited to merely executing short-term management level decisions during their short tenures in office (usually, three or four years with, perhaps, one possible re-election term: clearly too short a span to consolidate continuity of power). They can be described as the “CEO’s” of our countries with clipped wings and permanently challenged by a similar tightly controlled group of pre-selected “opposition” candidates, also canvassed, screened and approved by the “Directors” and “Shareholders” of the Global Power Elite who control the whole democracy game, financing costly election campaigns and media-based PsyOps.

    Dynamics

    Another major cause of violence and conflict today is that financial, economic and social processes have very different dynamics and their own “time” factors, so to speak:

    Finance (High Speed Change) – Modern technology allow finance to move instantaneously as financial operators and players around the world speculate, invest, divest, migrate from one market to another, from one currency to another, using extremely powerful computer, software and telecom networks at the speed of light, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

    Dynamics: Finance’s “time” runs in seconds and minutes, and has become highly automated. This huge advantage helps to explain why Finance today reigns supreme over us all.

    Economy (Moderate Speed Change) – Economic processes run at a much slower pace because building cars, airplanes, and TV sets; manufacturing cookies and clothing; rendering services, erecting plants and factories; training and recruiting workers, requires planning, knowledge, time and effort.

    Dynamics: Economy’s “time” runs in days, weeks, months, even years. The Real Economy thus operates at a slower speed than Virtual Finance to which it is unnaturally subordinated.

    Societal (Slow Speed Change) – Collective processes governing changes in mental paradigms, ethical values, social customs, habits and styles, etc., are much, much slower still. Today, we experience unprecedented social and cultural “re-engineering” on a planetary scale. The two main instruments driving Social Change are:

    The School System – Education on social, cultural, economic and political matters has become distorted, contaminated, deconstructed, eroded, emptied of content and turned upside down, on all manners that need accommodating and alignment to support and promote the mental profile that Global Power Elite planners demand.

    The Media – Aside from distorting our world view of reality through the press, it also uses “entertainment” and “show business” to promote demoralising, destructive, often perverse content, inspired by the age-old collective dumbing-down method prevalent in the latter days of the Roman Empire – panem et circenses: bread and circuses – with the “added value” of today’s technologies.

    Dynamics: Social and cultural change is very slow. Its “time” runs in decades, generations; even centuries.

    The “Wheel” of World Power

    Today’s global geopolitical power architecture would look something like this:

    Major Multinational Industrial Corporations – The Fortune 500 of industry, services, retailing, oil, energy, mining, R&D, defence, aerospace, foodstuff, agricultural, chemical, construction, shipping, consulting, etc.

    Private Financial Institutions – Inter- and trans-national banks, financial consultants, risk-rating agencies, stock exchanges, fund managers, insurance and reinsurance companies, pensions and investment funds, etc.

    Multilateral National and Supranational Entities – The International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank, Inter-American Development Bank (IADB), Bank of International Settlements, all national central banks, notably the US Federal Reserve Bank and the European Central Bank, the United Nations, and others.

    Universities and Academia – In political science, international and government relations, and economics (i.e., Harvard, MIT, Columbia, Princeton, Yale, Johns Hopkins, Chicago, Stanford, Georgetown, Oxford, Cambridge, London School of Economics).

    Multimedia Monopolies – The New York Times, Washington Post, Newsweek, CNN-Time Warner, CBS, MSNBC, Fox, BBC, The Economist, Der Spiegel, Foreign Affairs, Reuters.

    Government – Key domestic and foreign policy, economic, financial and monetary posts.

    In order to serve New World Order goals and interests, this “Wheel of Power” must spin in a specific direction, steered from its hub which is controlled by a discrete, though not secret, network of think-tanks and geopolitical planning centres, acting flexibly, sequentially and consistently. It gives each of the major axes of power their specific “libretto,” to act out so that each, at the right time, does what it needs to do within a much wider plan spanning the world for decades to come.

    This is a highly hierarchical, disciplined, pyramid-like scheme and as we observe its operators and players further down the pyramid they become increasingly numerous and less aware of the “full picture.” As in the intelligence community, each player operates on a “need to know” basis, where only those at the very top or near the apex can have a bird’s eye view of what is happening, and how everything ties in neatly into a long-term Master Plan. For those with a taste for the symbolic, that’s the All-Seeing Eye symbol on the US one-dollar bill…

    Big Money Power

    Big money power is profoundly anti-democratic. It has always surprised me the way politicians, the media, “intellectuals,” academics and opinion-makers speak mouthfuls about “democracy” insisting it be imposed upon everybody everywhere and yet we never hear a word about the urgent need of democratising finance and the economy. There’s a taboo around that idea, even though it is absolutely plain for all to see that finance and the economy are governed by strict authoritarianism of a most undemocratic flavour. However, none of the people who should point this out to global public opinion – journalists, analysts, politicians – dare do so.

    “Poderoso Señor es Don Dinero” – Money is a Powerful Lord – wrote Spanish poet Don Francisco de Quevedo y Villegas four centuries ago. And it is certainly sobering to see how this powerful gentleman, “Lord Money,” marches ever so strong in our terrible 21st century.

    World Government is already upon us. For many decades it has functioned as a sort of global “shadow government” preparing to take a major leap to become a formal and “legally” binding World Government. It confronts the world with a system of thought in which “democracy” and capitalism contain their own values, which means that in order to participate in them, we must accept those values; even transcendental values on such matters as justice, happiness and the like. Citizens must therefore give up their minds to the System, which is neither political nor economic, but rather a system of consciousness.

    Democracy and capitalism are systems of consciousness. People do not realise this but their minds are determined by these systems. This is why democracy and capitalism represent a totalitarian regime. Totalitarianism means total control of society… never has there been totalitarianism as strong as we have today. The totalitarianism of the democratic and capitalist systems is so sophisticated, that even our desires are determined by the System. We desire that which society wishes we desire.

    It cannot be said loud enough. If true democracy is government of, by and for the majority of We the People for the purpose of protecting and promoting the Common Good, and the “democracy game” we’re all forced to play today is fully subservient and subordinated to UNdemocratic money power, then it follows that there is NO democracy, anywhere.

    Not to understand this is not to understand how the global power system really works which, in turn, means not being able to arrive at a correct diagnosis as to why things are going badly in this world. And if we don’t get our diagnostics right, then no cure will ever be found for this sickly state of affairs. It’s high time we open our minds and eyes to this!
    [alert type=”general” dismiss=”no”]This article was published in New Dawn Special Issue 18.[/alert]

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  • Behind the Mask: Aliens or Cosmic Jokers?

    Behind the Mask: Aliens or Cosmic Jokers?

    From New Dawn Special Issue 17 (Sept 2011)

    In the 1970s, when we first became fascinated by the UFO phenomenon, opinion among researchers was divided between two views: the Extraterrestrial Hypothesis (ETH) – UFOs are spacecraft from other worlds; and the ‘Magonian Hypothesis’ (after the 1970 book by the intelligent Ufologists’ hero Jacques Vallée, Passport to Magonia). Pro-Magonians believe something from Earth is behind UFOs, a race of tricksters that surface from time to time as alleged angels, visions of the Virgin, demons, fairies – and now, space-travelling aliens? They’ve just updated their image.

    The theory acknowledges the close parallels between alien encounters and experiences with non-human entities that litter the annals of folklore. But it also recognises the often-reported absurdity and pointlessness – the ‘high strangeness’ – which challenge the simplistic notion of UFOs as technological craft crewed by biological entities. It was this Monty Pythonesque quality that led investigator John A. Keel to develop his ‘ultraterrestrial’ hypothesis – the aliens are visitors from another plane of existence – outlined in the 1973 classic UFOs: Operation Trojan Horse.

    However, since 1980 this approach has lost ground to the ETH – a pity, as it offers a more complete explanation of the whole phenomenon. Even ETH-ers usually acknowledge a paranormal component in alien contact, most obviously in the mental manipulation of abductees, often at a distance. There’s also the most direct psychic contact, the channelling of alleged extraterrestrial entities.

    The ETH has become so dominant partly because the Magonian approach challenges our cherished consensus reality so outrageously, whereas the concept of space ships from other planets doesn’t. Also, high-profile cases such as Roswell, Area 51 and Majestic 12 – all firmly based on the ET interpretation and centred on government conspiracies and cover-ups – came to dominate Ufology in the 1980s. But paradoxically they derive from the very agencies allegedly behind the conspiracy. In fact, trace any famous case back to its source and you will find that one way or another it originated within the military and intelligence community.

    (It always amazes us that Ufologists often obey the unwritten rule: never believe anything that anyone in government, the military or the intelligence community tells you – unless it’s that UFOs are real ETs in secret contact with world authorities. Then believe everything they tell you…)

    In fact, far from trying to cover up the existence of UFOs, government agencies have actively encouraged belief in them – specifically the ETH. Our own research has convinced us that this ‘Federal Hypothesis’ is the most accurate, and indeed there is a groundswell of similar opinion, as seen in Mark Pilkington’s recent Mirage Men and Lynn’s Mammoth Book of UFOs (2001). It does seem the whole UFO thing has been exploited – maybe even invented – to provide a convenient cover for all sorts of black ops, from testing secret aircraft to psychological warfare experiments. Even this, however, barely scrapes the surface of the sinister goings-on associated with over six decades of UFO research.

    Enter the Nine

    In the late 1990s we researched a story packed with all the paradoxes and questions just discussed, as detailed in our The Stargate Conspiracy (1999, updated 2000). These events represent either the biggest and most concerted attempt yet at extraterrestrial intervention – or a criminal manipulation of the belief in it. Either way, it’s sensational and terrifying.

    The central character is the American Army physician and parapsychologist Andrija Puharich (1918-1995) who experimented with stimulating psychic abilities using hypnosis, psychoactive drugs and electrical devices. He was also obsessed with the possibility of psychic communication with non-human intelligences.

    In 1948 – after being discharged from the army on medical grounds – Puharich created the Round Table Foundation in Maine, to carry out ostensibly private experiments with psychics such as Eileen Garrett and Peter Hurkos. The Foundation soon attracted wealthy backers, even including Henry A. Wallace, Vice President of the USA under Franklin D. Roosevelt, who funded Puharich through his Wallace Foundation. Another supporter was Ruth Forbes Young, from the stupendously rich Forbes family, and her husband, the ubiquitous inventor Arthur M. Young, besides Alice Bouverie, heiress to the Astor dynasty.

    From research in the 1990s we now know Puharich’s Round Table Foundation was also covertly funded by the US Army. He himself recorded several visits from military top brass, including the head of psychological warfare research. So was it a front for military psi experiments on civilian psychics, with his discharge merely a cover?

    Puharich was a passionate advocate of the military use of psi, presenting the paper: ‘An Evaluation of the Possible Usefulness of Extrasensory Perception in Psychological Warfare’ to the Pentagon in November 1952. He was redrafted the very next day…

    But before taking up his duties, a seminal event occurred at the Round Table Foundation. Puharich’s team were working with the Indian channeller Dr. D.G. Vinod, who on New Year’s Eve 1952 declared, in trance, “We are Nine Principles and Forces,” going on to channel them. The Nine described themselves as separate entities that function as one – claiming (with typical lack of modesty and lofty disdain for mere mortal grammar): “God is nobody else than we together, the Nine Principles of God. There is no God other than what we are together.” The communications continued for six months until Vinod’s return to India.

    Deeper and Darker

    In parallel with the Vinod communications, from February 1953 until April 1955, Puharich was stationed at the Army’s Chemical Centre at Edgewood, Maryland – although he often returned to the Round Table Foundation. The exact nature of his duties remains unknown, but Edgewood was the Army’s research facility into both chemical and psychological warfare – and at that time it was involved with a joint project with the CIA’s notorious MK-ULTRA.1 Puharich’s Army career certainly puts a different spin on the debut of the Nine.

    In 1956 the extraterrestrial element was spliced to the story. In Mexico, Puharich and Arthur Young encountered Charles and Lillian Laughead, who were working with a young man who claimed to be in psychic contact with aliens. The Laugheads sent Puharich messages from these ETs, containing cross-references to the earlier Vinod communications, apparently revealing that the same cosmic intelligences were contacting different people.

    In the 1960s Puharich devoted himself to parapsychological research and the development of patented medical devices. Then, in 1970, Puharich met Uri Geller in Israel, becoming convinced that his spoonbending and other talents were genuine. When he experimentally hypnotised Geller, the young Israeli channelled the entity ‘Spectra’, allegedly a conscious computer aboard a far-distant spaceship. Spectra said ETs had programmed Geller with his powers as a toddler, and effectively anointed him as a new Messiah for coming world changes, stating, “He is the only one for the next fifty years to come.”

    When Puharich then asked the somewhat leading question, “Are you of the Nine Principles that once spoke through Dr Vinod?” Spectra unsurprisingly replied, “Yes.” It then confirmed that the Nine were behind UFOs, right from Kenneth Arnold’s seminal 1947 sighting.

    ‘Oddly Monotonous Miracles’

    The hypnosis sessions and Spectra channellings continued, while strange phenomena dogged Puharich and Geller. In what Colin Wilson calls “a confusion of oddly monotonous miracles”2 machine-like voices spoke out of thin air, objects dematerialised and teleported (including Puharich’s dog – and once Geller himself). And several UFOs appeared over Tel Aviv and the Sinai desert.

    However, although Geller confirms the paranormality, he distances himself from the channelling. And although Puharich seemed convinced that Spectra and the Nine were real, Geller calls them “a civilisation of clowns”3 – a perfect description of the Ultraterrestrial/Cosmic Joker scenario.

    Puharich arranged for Geller to be tested at SRI International, the Californian institute where CIA-backed ‘psychic spying’ research – most famously remote viewing – was being conducted. In fact, during our research for The Stargate Conspiracy Geller told us Puharich was working for the CIA when he visited Israel to evaluate him. Another associate of Puharich’s, the physicist Jack Sarfatti, also confirmed it. Given his background, Puharich would of course have been their ideal head-hunter.

    Just as in the first contact with the Nine twenty years before we discover paranormal research secretly backed by military intelligence – which again centres on channelling the Nine… Perfect symmetry – but what does it mean?

    Exit the Messiahs

    Despite Puharich’s efforts to promote Geller as the Messiah of a new phase in human evolution, he bowed out in 1973, having risen to international superstardom. But the Nine continued to reach Puharich through new channellers. They seemed to forget they once declared Geller “the only one to come for the next fifty years.” First there was a young chef known only as ‘Bobby Horne’ who, hypnotised by Puharich, channelled the extraterrestrial ‘Corean’ – who agreed with Puharich’s suggestion that he/she/it was an emissary of the Nine. Horne was driven to the brink of suicide by the experience.

    He was replaced by medium Phyllis Schlemmer who was appointed the Nine’s official ‘transceiver’, a position she maintained for the next twenty years. Her guide ‘Tom’, who she had assumed was the spirit of her grandfather, suddenly announced he was an extraterrestrial and one of the Nine – now the ‘Council of Nine’.

    After Geller’s departure, Puharich established a new research facility in New Jersey, ‘Lab Nine’. This became the focus for two related series of events.

    First there was the mission of alerting the world to the Council of Nine’s existence and imminent return through mass landings of spaceships in the late 1970s. An important new player was the wealthy English baronet and spiritual seeker, Sir John Whitmore, a former racing driver.

    There was a concerted effort to get the Nine’s message to a wider audience, besides enticing influential individuals to hear Schlemmer dispense their cosmic wisdom. They included scientists interested in the interface between quantum physics and consciousness besides members of super-rich families, politicians and writers.

    But the biggest name was undoubtedly Gene Roddenberry, creator of Star Trek, who was involved with the Nine in 1974 to ‘75. Clearly hoping to exploit his cult status, Puharich urged him to write a movie screenplay about the Nine, although it was never finished. How far Roddenberry believed in or trusted them is unclear.

    Although it’s claimed that Roddenberry’s Lab Nine experiences had some influence over the first Star Trek movie and the Next Generation series a decade later (with its nine central characters), besides the Deep Space Nine spin-off, the series that undoubtedly reveals most about Roddenberry’s attitude to the Nine is his last, Earth: Final Conflict (1997-2002), produced after his death. This is set in the near future where an advanced alien race, the Taelon, arrive on Earth claiming to help mankind, but some humans are suspicious that they’re really bent on conquest…

    Roddenberry had turned the discarnate Nine into flesh-and-blood aliens – and the Taelon are ruled by a Synod or Council. Although the plot seemingly reflects his uncertainty about the Nine, since his death in 1991 Phyllis Schlemmer still claims he was unknowingly influenced by the Nine when creating the original Star Trek series.

    However, it was in response to a question by Roddenberry that ‘Tom’ finally revealed his – and the Nine’s – real identity. He was none other than Atum, chief god of the ancient Egyptian ‘Great Ennead’, the nine gods and goddesses beloved of the pyramid builders. However, perhaps it should be pointed out that after Vinod’s first contact, Puharich had begun to study the Ennead.

    The other project at Lab Nine was more disturbing. Using various techniques including hypnosis, he also got a group of children – the ‘Space Kids’ – to remote view political and military targets such as the Kremlin, and tried to make them channel alien intelligences.

    Virtually nothing is known about this project. The only record consists of visitors’ comments, disturbingly noting that some of the kids were clearly traumatised by the experience. As this happened in parallel with the CIA-backed remote viewing programme, it seems a way of involving children without arousing suspicions. After all, which would you be most ok with: sending your kids to a cool camp to become the new Uri Geller – or waving them off into the care of the CIA and military somewhere secret?

    In 1978 it all fell apart: Lab Nine mysteriously burned down, and Puharich fled to Mexico, claiming he was being targeted… by the CIA! Perhaps they feared revelations about the Space Kids through a scandal involving his associate Ira Einhorn, who was being investigated for the murder of his former girlfriend Holly Maddux (for which he was subsequently convicted). At the time of her disappearance, Maddux possessed papers relating to the Space Kids research. (Puharich returned to the USA three years later – odd for someone who feared assassination by the CIA – and continued his paranormal research, although apparently playing no further part in the Nine story. He died in 1995.)

    Onwards and Downwards

    The Council of Nine continues its mission. Schlemmer/Tom’s 1992 book, The Only Planet of Choice, remains a New Age bestseller, and although no longer actively channelling the Nine, she still promotes their message. Given she had been in touch with these ‘ancient gods’ almost daily since 1975, her book of just under 400 pages is clearly somewhat selective.

    Then the Nine entered the big time. In 1978 Whitmore introduced Englishwoman Jenny O’Connor to the Esalen Institute, the Californian centre for the alternative scene that attracted famous names from the worlds of art, entertainment, science and even politics. Incredibly, not only did the Nine give seminars at Esalen through her, but from 1979 until at least 1982 they effectively took over the Institute. In Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion (2007), Jeffrey J. Kripal describes the founder Richard Price’s reliance on O’Connor: “Dick decided to ask Jenny and the Nine to help him make tough administrative decisions, which included firing and hiring individuals.” Esalen staff member and Price’s biographer Eric Erickson describes the Nine as “extraterrestrial hatchet men.”4 

    This period was particularly significant for Esalen. Many of those who attended O’Connor’s seminars became prominent in political circles both in America and the USSR (through the Institute’s Soviet Exchange Program), as Jack Sarfatti wrote (his emphasis):

    The fact remains… that a bunch of apparently California New Age flakes into UFOs and psychic phenomena, including myself, had made their way into the highest levels of the American ruling class and the Soviet Union and today run the Gorbachev Foundation.5

    It was through O’Connor that the Nine reached Washington, including the circles from which Al Gore – an unashamed fan of the paranormal – was to emerge. It isn’t known how much he was influenced by the Nine, but some of his associates – including his political mentor Senator Claiborne Pell – were certainly interested in their pronouncements. It’s a chilling thought that if Gore had become President, who – or what – would have influenced him?

    Joking Apart

    The Nine represent the most concerted effort ever to manufacture and sell a system of belief based on extraterrestrial contact. Built up over five decades, it involved persuading prominent politicians and cultural leaders of their reality and impending return, besides attempting to make them known globally through books and movies. This campaign was most successful in the New Age subculture, which is still largely – and unquestioningly – in thrall to the Nine.

    The Nine’s communications exhibit all the classic ambiguities and difficulties of alleged alien contact. At the very least they’re ‘anomalous’ – ostensibly extraterrestrial but laced with more traditional paranormality. And behind it all is the shadowy presence of government agencies.

    The facts outlined above fit two different scenarios. The first – preferred by the Nine devotees – is that the Nine are genuinely advanced ETs who created the human species and guided its development, and who were worshipped as gods in ancient Egypt. And now humankind has reached a crisis point through its own folly, they are about to return to get us out of the mess and (somewhat contradictorily) to launch humanity into the next evolutionary level.

    There are good reasons to doubt this explanation. Analysis of the Nine’s pronouncements reveals too many internal inconsistencies, besides often ridiculous historical and scientific errors. So what about the second scenario? Given Puharich’s sinister background, could the whole thing have been an experiment into the creation and manipulation of channelled contact? It is clear even from his own account that he directed the channelling, often asking leading questions of hypnotised channellers. And there is evidence suggesting that he also used chemical and electronic techniques.

    Was it all just an experiment to see how apparent contact with non-human intelligences could be induced, manipulated and exploited? If so, what do we make of the evidence from the late 1970s of the concerted effort to construct a new religion centred on the Nine? Like every cult, however, true power would lie with the ‘priesthood’ led by Puharich and his cohorts.

    But even that scenario, it seems to us, fails to cover the facts. There seems little doubt that something genuinely paranormal was happening. The British writer Stuart Holroyd, for example, was persuaded to write a book about the Nine – Prelude to the Landing on Planet Earth (1977) – after experiencing poltergeist-type activity in his house. This is harder to ascribe to CIA manipulation – unless we assume the CIA can induce paranormal events. And, of course, the Nine communications continued even after Puharich’s involvement, through several individuals. They include James J. Hurtak, Puharich’s second-in-command at Lab Nine and Carla Rueckert, a paranormal researcher who collaborated with him. Both produced books of channelled material from the same source – whatever that might have been. Hurtak’s The Keys of Enoch (1977) and Reuckert’s The Ra Material (1984) have both been New Age best sellers.

    Puharich wrote, “I do not doubt that discarnate intelligences exist, any more than I doubt that finite carnate intelligences exist.”6 But as someone who made a specific study of the subject, even becoming a kahuna, an initiate of Hawaiian shamanism, he must have known always to be on guard against trickster spirits – what Colin Wilson memorably called (in his introduction to Prelude to the Landing on Planet Earth) the “crooks and conmen of the spirit world.”7  

    Perhaps Puharich was indeed directing events, but was experimenting as much on the Nine as he was on their human channels – trying to discover how to sort the wheat from the chaff among discarnate entities. Or maybe even (terrifying thought) to find out if the entities themselves can be manipulated and controlled. But if true, what would it mean for the involvement of the military and intelligence agencies? Are they trying to establish a relationship with such beings?

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    ‘An Awful Lot of Trouble’

    If, as the evidence increasingly suggests, the CIA and military are not trying to suppress belief in alien contact but to encourage it, why would they? The assumption of most advocates of the Federal Hypothesis is that those agencies want to use the phenomenon and people’s belief in it as a smokescreen for their own covert purposes. In other words, if the CIA want us to think UFOs exist then the truth is that they don’t. But in our view, there is another even more unsettling reason: they want us to think UFOs are extraterrestrial nuts-and-bolts machines and the aliens are flesh-and-blood in order to divert attention from the reality that the real ‘aliens’ co-exist invisibly with us on the Earth – and are the source of all cases of high strangeness.

    Jacques Vallée, one of the first to research the covert manipulation of the UFO scenario by official agencies, concluded: “someone is going to an awful lot of trouble to convince the world that we are threatened by beings from outer space.”8 But how does this fit in with his Magonian hypothesis? Vallée presented his most explicit statement of the big picture in the storyline of his 1996 novel Fastwalker (written with Tracy Tormé): a powerful group of human conspirators know that the UFO phenomenon is created by entities from a parallel world, but they aim to convince world leaders and the global population of the existence of ‘aliens’ – and then position themselves as the world’s go-betweens.

    Which is basically our own view of the case of the Council of Nine: they have the stamp of the Ultraterrestrial all over them – clowns, conmen and cosmic jokers – but there is also the pernicious presence of very human agencies lurking in the background. The joke is on all those who follow the Ultraterrestrials, however they choose to manifest themselves or however their human allies choose to present them to us. But, as history has shown, it may be no laughing matter.

    [alert type=”general” dismiss=”no”]This article was published in New Dawn Special Issue 17.[/alert]

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    Footnotes

    1. John Marks, The Search for the ‘Manchurian Candidate’: The CIA and Mind Control, W.W. Norton & Co., 1979, Chapter 5.

    2. Colin Wilson, Alien Dawn: An Investigation into the Contact Experience, Virgin, 1998, 18.

    3. Andrija Puharich, Uri: The Original and Authorized Biography of Uri Geller, Futura, 1974, 173.

    4. Jeffrey J. Kripal, Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion, University of Chicago Press, 2007, 366.

    5. Jack Sarfatti’s 1996 autobiographical online essay ‘Sarfatti’s Illuminati: In the Thick of It!’, widely distributed on the Internet, e.g. www.whale.to/b/sarfatti.html.

    6. Andrija Puharich, The Sacred Mushroom: Key to the Door of Eternity, Doubleday, 1974, 170.

    7. Stuart Holroyd, Prelude to the Landing on Planet Earth, W.H. Allen, 1977, 14

    8. Jacques Vallée, Revelations: Alien Contact and Human Deception, Souvenir Press, 1992, 247

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  • The Illuminati: Renegades of the Mystery Schools

    The Illuminati: Renegades of the Mystery Schools

    From New Dawn Special Issue 18 (Dec 2011)

    The word “Illuminati” has become a catch-all term for the defacto Rulers of Planet Earth. Definition is crucial because the words “Conspiracy” and “Illuminati” have themselves become code-words for the occult (hidden) machinations of the Powers That Be. With the advent of the internet and its rough cut of “news” and disinformation, what was once considered esoteric knowledge has been revealed for all to see. Even the cowans – a derogatory Masonic term for non-Masons – and the goys – a derogatory Yiddish term for non-Jews – are learning about the Illuminati black magic hoodoo that permeates the planetary matrix.

    Illuminati originally meant “the enlightened ones” in Latin, and it refers to those who control the political, economic and social infrastructures of the planet. By their reasoning, they believe they are the (self) designated rulers of Planet Earth.

    Also called “Olympians” and “Moriah Conquering Wind,” the Illuminati are a “network” of interconnected “bloodlines” who call themselves “The Family” or “The Circle.” Intergenerational satanism, or more accurately Luciferianism, is their primary Belief Structure (That’s BS to you, pardner).

    Also don’t forget their fatal flaw… The Illuminati consider themselves a tribe apart – Bande à part – a proud super-race who trace their genealogical origin back to the biblical Nimrod.

    To add to the confusion, people sometimes refer to the Illuminati as the Bavarian secret society which infiltrated Freemasonry – even as the term “Illuminatus” is an actual title in Freemasonry.

    Current understanding of the Illuminati comes from first-hand knowledge of mind control survivors like Arizona Wilder, Cathy O’Brien, author of Trance Formation of America, Brice Taylor, author of Thanks for the Memories, Kathleen Sullivan, author of MK, and Annie McKenna, author of Paperclip Dolls.

    Their accounts describe a parallel Illuminati “culture” whose primary goal is to keep the populace “productive” and under control, as their corporate motto promises to deliver, “Ordo ab Chao” (Order Out of Chaos).

    This parasitic Illuminati culture also uses mind control programming to keep its own members of the Family, as well as the rest of society, locked in a grid of compliance.

    Various authors have further introduced errors in their “exposés” of the Illuminati by interpreting history with a bias that reflects their own political and religious indoctrination.

    For example, the works of Fritz Springmeier and Cisco Wheeler, while informative about the Illuminati’s sociopathic “traditions” (no es mi costumbre) and psychopathic behaviour, which includes torture, human sacrifice and mind control, nevertheless belie a Christian programming which adds to the chaos and confusion of trying to untangle history from disinformation.

    Likewise even as the writings of John Coleman, author of The Committee of 300 and Eustace Mullins, author of The World Order, describe various Illuminati organisations which exercise political and religious control in pursuit of their oft-stated goal of establishing a New World Order (One World Government), their asides reveal a rigid Christian fundamentalist mindset which undermines their credibility.

    The greatest confusion, however, seems to lie in the connection between the Illuminati and the Gnostics. For example, authors like Nesta Webster in her book on Secret Societies claims the Illuminati can be traced back to the Gnostics. In other words, she frames her argument that Illuminati and the Gnostics are “bad” because they appear to be antithetical to Christianity.

    This conflict then refers to the perennial battle between the Gnostics, representing the Mystery Schools, and the Roman Catholic Church which fought fiercely against self-knowledge, mysticism and other metaphysical concepts, inimical to the mind control confabulations of the Vatican.

    Today this animosity is evident in the Belief Systems (BS) of Christian evangelicals, among others, who see all secret societies, Gnostics, New Agers, and the like as devil worshippers and ignorant (or conscious) agents of the Illuminati.

    Not so… The Mystery Schools were pre-Christian mystical communities that were in effect educational centres with libraries and workshops amid a vibrant cultural life.

    This just may be the scene of the crime, so to speak, and the origin of the current metaphysical confusion.

    Was this where the great ideological schism, or the Dividing of the Way, began?

    Gnostics vs. Illuminati

    Comparative mythologist John Lamb Lash, the world’s foremost authority on Gnosticism and esoteric traditions, is the author of the indispensable groundbreaking book Not In His Image: Gnostic Vision, Sacred Ecology and the Future of Belief.

    According to Lash, Mystery School adepts (so-called Gnostics) were originally members of the Magian order of shaman-initiates whose purpose was to guide humanity as teacher-mystics in pursuit of spiritual/ human evolution.

    The controversy began when certain initiates of the Mystery Schools began to abuse their mystical knowledge and redirect it into behavioural manipulation, psychological programming and mind control technology. In essence, the Illuminati gave up their role as teachers to become social engineers and advisors to the Ruling Class. This coincided with the rise of the patriarchal Abrahamic religions of Judaism, Islam and Christianity, which also required techniques of mind control to keep their followers (“believers”) in line.

    “Around 4000 BCE with the rise of urban civilisation in the Near East, some members of the Magian order chose to apply certain secrets of initiation to statecraft and social engineering,” writes Lash, describing the spiritual devolution of the Kali Yuga. “They became the advisors to the first theocrats of the patriarchal nation-states, but in fact the advisors were running the show.”

    “Their subjects were systematically programmed to believe they were descended from the gods,” continues Lash. “The Illuminati inaugurated elaborate rites of empowerment, or kingship rituals. These rituals were in fact methods of mind control exercised on the general populace through the collective symbology and mystique of royal authority.”

    Civilisation – the Civil Lie in Action – needed an iron fist in a velvet glove from the beginning, and the Illuminati were there to ensure compliance. “Kingship rituals were distinct from the rites of initiation that led to instruction by the Light and consecration to the Great Goddess,” writes Lash. “Their purpose was not education and enlightenment but social management.”

    The control freak tendencies of the Illuminati are evident everywhere now, as their failure in managing the world financial system is rushing the planet headlong into economic collapse.

    “Gnostics refrained from assuming any role in politics because their intention was not to change society, but to produce skilled, well-balanced, enlightened individuals who would create a society good enough that it did not need to be run by external management,” Lash continues. “The intention of the dissident Magians to run society by covert controls was based on their assumption that human beings are not innately good enough, or gifted enough, to create a humane world.”

    Of course Lash is being too “liberal” in labelling the Illuminati as “dissident” since their spiritual betrayal in the Mystery School was more of a bitch slap to Gaia, than the red flag of a covert rebellion.

    “The difference in views of human potential was the main force that precipitated the division of the Magians,” writes Lash, meaning that the judgmental arrogance of the Illuminati who believed they were indispensable, even as they think they’re nothing less than “God’s gift to mankind.”

    “It’s simple enough to see that this mind set would develop the hierarchal structures in society today,” Lash continues.

    True enough. The so-called Global Elite keep the planet under control utilising Illuminati Gofers known as politicians, military personnel, police officers, and religious leaders, whose function is to be the shepherds of society – guarding the sheep… until they’re ready for slaughter in their endless wars and intertribal rivalries.

    People who behave as sheep, or so-called “sheople,” are always the ones who suffer the most because of their programming. Meanwhile the Illuminati Gofers pretend that this is the way it’s supposed to be. This long-standing ideological disagreement in the Mystery Schools has, it appears, resulted in the gross inequities of life on Planet Earth.

    “The Illuminati program was (and still is) essential to patriarchy and its cover, perpetrator religion,” writes Lash, describing the global conspiracy which has conquered the world.

    “While it cannot be exactly said that the deviant adepts known as Illuminati created patriarchy, they certainly controlled it,” continues Lash. “And still do. The abuse of initiatory knowledge to induce schizophrenic states (‘entrainment’), manipulate multiple personalities in the same person (‘platforming’), and command behaviour through posthypnotic suggestion (The Manchurian Candidate technique) continues to this day, with truly evil consequences for the entire world.”

    Attempting to disentangle the erroneous idea that Gnostics and Illuminati refer to the same characters, Lash writes: “If we accept that the Mysteries were schools for Gaian co-evolution dedicated to the Goddess Sophia, they could not have been run by the Illuminati, as some contemporary writers (who believe they are exposing the Illuminati) have supposed. Everything the Gnostics did in the schools was intended to counterbalance and correct the machinations of the deviant adepts.”

    Right intent once again becomes critical and the radical difference in ideology between the Gnostics and the Illuminati become self-evident.

    “Initiation involved melting ego boundaries in preparation for deep rapport with nature, not lowering the ego consciousness, so that the subject could be behaviourally programmed using the power of suggestion, imprinting and other psychodramatic methods. These behavioural modification tools of the Illuminati were strictly forbidden in the Mysteries overseen by the Gnostics.”

    The metaphysical perverts known as the Illuminati have structured today’s society to reflect the manipulation of humankind through religious belief systems, political affiliations as well as the non-stop onslaught of media programming known as “news” and “entertainment.”

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    The Defeat of the Illuminati

    As renegades from the Mystery Schools who betrayed the Mysteries and subverted Gnosis (“Knowledge”), the Illuminati plan to divide, conquer and rule the world has worked quite well because people are easily programmed into belief systems contrary to their own welfare.

    As Lash notes, “Skilled in theology and dialectical argument, the Gnostics were able to refute fanatical beliefs, but unable to protect themselves against the violence driven by those beliefs.”

    In other words Judeo-Christian Annihilation & Apocalyptic Theology sponsored by the Illuminati was responsible for the destruction of the Mystery Schools and the murder of the Gnostics, who were no match for those who perceived them as a threat to their planetary dominion.

    “Not only were the gnostokoi like [the female philosophy teacher] Hypatia [who was murdered by the Church] apolitical, they deliberately refrained from involvement in politics in order to dissociate themselves from the other type of initiates, the Illuminati who had been enmeshed in patriarchal and theocratic power games from their outset,” Lash concludes.

    The Illuminati may be considered to be apostate Gnostics who abandoned their role of enlightening humankind in order to reap the benefits and entitlements of the Ruling Class.

    Now as before the Illuminati continue to move towards their goal – a feverish dream of world domination culminating in the so-called New World Order (One World Government), which simply means Global Techno-Feudalism.

    This has always been Metaphysical Warfare. And humankind’s choice is once again – Freedom or Slavery.

    Maybe the “Know-It-Alls” – a derogatory term used by the Church against the Gnostics – might be able to help them out…

    [alert type=”general” dismiss=”no”]This article was published in New Dawn Special Issue 18.[/alert]

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  • Awakening Our True Potential

    Awakening Our True Potential

    From New Dawn 129 (Nov-Dec 2011)

    Man is born an unfinished creature. He cannot walk or talk or feed himself. Long years of care are required to bring him to even the most minimal levels of self-sufficiency.

    And yet even after the typical person has reached the stage of functioning that we call adulthood, something still seems to be missing. In a sense, of course, something will always be missing; there are always new horizons to discover and new skills to attain. But the lack may go further. There is a sense in which even the mature human being is incomplete. The Freemasons allude to this when they speak of the candidate for initiation as a “rough ashlar.” An ashlar is a block of stone; in its rough state it fits only approximately into its intended setting. Some kind of process is needed to adjust and polish it so that it is perfectly suited to its function.

    Some may balk at this description – are we, after all, nothing more than raw materials to be sent down some assembly line to be made into identical pieces of manufactured goods? That is the kind of transformation society as a whole seems to envisage. And we would do well to mistrust it. The process to which the Masonic initiations allude has something more than mere conformity as its goal; it is not a matter of circus horses trying to break themselves in. It is the opposite: it is a matter of having access to our own potential, developing it, and offering to the service of higher aims.

    This process has been discussed often, sometimes (as in Masonry) allegorically, sometimes in more straightforward terms. But even so it has rarely been presented in a reasonably honest and lucid way. Most of the time, developing human potential is portrayed as a kind of hypertrophy – the exaggerated development of certain functions at the expense of others.

    Recently I read a magazine profile of a prominent Oxford philosopher. He had written a fourteen-hundred-page treatise on moral philosophy, in which he had examined and refuted all possible criticisms and objections to his thesis. Yet the article said he wore the same clothes each day (white shirt, black trousers) and did not like to look at any building that was not adorned with columns. His capacity for human interaction sounded rather primitive. In the end I was left with the impression of a gigantic cerebrum attached to a vestigial body.

    Is this what is meant by developing our human potential? For many people it is. The abstracted philosopher is only one specimen. Others are the athlete who is nothing more than his sport, the painter who can do nothing more than paint. Some of the greatest achievements of the human race have been attained by such people. But the overdevelopment of talents can and does turn into a Faustian bargain. Breakdowns, crises, and collapses seem to dog these individuals. We may envy their achievements, but their fragility warns us against imitating them.

    The same holds true for abilities that are considered paranormal. Although science does not care to admit it, it is possible to develop psychic powers such as telepathy, clairvoyance, and telekinesis. Indeed, in his forthcoming book The Reality of ESP: A Physicist’s Proof of Psychic Abilities, Russell Targ, one of the leading parapsychologists in the US, argues that anyone with a certain amount of (not very difficult) training can develop these skills. Nevertheless, overemphasis on these abilities, no matter how miraculous they may seem, creates problems as well. Psychics, clairvoyants, visionaries, and healers frequently seem imbalanced, having developed one skill or power at the expense of the whole.

    That is why I would like to suggest a slightly different model of developing human potential, one that is not designed to serve the interests of society (or business or political powers) at the individual’s own expense, but also one that avoids the trap of hypertrophy of a single area. Hence it begins with the crucial need for balance.

    There are many models of the human mind, all of them insightful to a certain degree and all of them to a certain degree incomplete. One of the oldest and simplest sees the human makeup in terms of the body, the emotions, and the mind. We have already seen how some people are underdeveloped in one way or another. Even if we set aside extreme cases, esoteric teachings suggest that this is basically true of everyone. While it’s often easy enough to see someone else’s imbalances, it may not be so easy to see one’s own.

    Gurdjieff’s Three Types of Humanity

    The great twentieth-century spiritual teacher G.I. Gurdjieff (pictured below) divided the ordinary run of humanity into three types: man number 1, who is orientated toward the body; man number 2, who is centred in his emotions; and man number 3, who sees the world through the intellect. Moreover, Gurdjieff contended, human beings pass their lives in a kind of waking sleep – a low-grade trance populated by illusions and daydreams. These facts are all connected. Our sleep in ordinary life is characterised by the fact that we are overbalanced in one or another of these directions and fail to use the intelligence of the other parts of the mind.

    This, then, is the first step toward awakening human potential: to see what type of individual you are, because this shapes how you conceive of the world. Man number 1 is often of a highly practical turn; he can fix anything but may not have the dimmest idea of how to express his emotions, and may not even know what emotions he is having. Man number 2, by contrast, sees everything through his feelings. Artistic types (whether or not they have any real artistic talent) are a prime example; everything is emotion, everything is drama. Man number 3 sees life as a series of intellectual problems. He may be able to discuss philosophical issues brilliantly or add up long rows of figures in his head, but may, as James Joyce remarked of one of his characters, live a short distance from his body. (The Oxford philosopher I have mentioned would be an example of man number 3.)

    In all probability you are one of these three types. The first task in awakening human potential is, as the ancient motto said, to “know thyself,” and in a very fundamental sense this means knowing what type you are. One way of exploring this question is by looking at your leisure activities: what do you do with your free time? Are you compulsively active, running from sport to sport or task to task? Do you enjoy spending your time in pleasant fantasies of happier times past or present? Or would you rather curl up with a good book? Leisure activities are important cues because they are not compulsory; you are doing these things because you like them. Of course, work life offers its own share of data. Your profession is often based on type, even in cases where you are not doing the kind of work you want to do. You may think you are really an artist or writer but somehow you have found work as a plumber, and the work comes as second nature to you. You keep at it not because you like it but because it comes easily to you. Despite what he may think about himself, a person like this is probably man number 1.

    Very few people are pure examples of any given type; we tend to be admixtures, with bundles of strengths and weaknesses, with skills and affinities that harmonise or conflict in any number of ways. Consequently it is not a matter of simply typing yourself as you might do when taking a test out of a magazine. Knowing yourself is a lifelong course of study.

    Furthermore, self-knowledge is not a static process. There is a type of individual who is self-conscious to an extreme degree and can see her strengths and faults with remarkable clarity but is utterly unable to do anything about them. Consequently the next step in developing human potential is trying to consciously balance ourselves, strengthening the weaker aspects of our natures and making sure the stronger ones do not overpower the others. This is one meaning of Christ’s parable of the “evil servant,” who, when his master is away, “shall begin to smite his fellowservants, and to eat and drink with the drunken” (Matt. 24:45-49).

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    Balancing the Different Aspects of Yourself

    Strengthening your weaker functions is never a pleasant task. Inevitably it involves giving time and energy to things you do not like. The intellectual must take up Tai Chi or learn carpentry; the artist must manage financial accounts; the athlete needs to paint pictures or write poetry. Because these are the things we do not like to do, we often find them unpleasant and humiliating, and it is a rare person who has the discipline to persist on his own.

    Speaking personally, when I was a high-school student, I realised that my connection to my body was not all that it could be, so I took the somewhat extreme step of attempting ballet. But the rigorous discipline ballet demands of the body was too much for me; I lost interest in it and dropped it after two or three classes. Only years later, as a result of involvement with esoteric disciplines, was I able to work on a more conscious connection with the body through various movements and exercises. But I never took up ballet again.

    Another one of my experiences, at an esoteric school in the north of England, casts further light on the sort of work required. The school was moving into a new centre, and a great deal of remodelling was needed. I was there for a residential course, and I was given the job of cutting wall-to-wall carpeting for one of the rooms. I was utterly hopeless at this task. I could not cut the carpet straight; I kept hacking at it and making a mess of it until I was relieved and someone was given the job who was able to carry it out in short order.

    Why was the job given to me first? Not because anyone was under any illusions about my skills at laying carpet. Rather it was to show me something about myself, so that, by struggling with an unfamiliar task, I could see where some of my limitations lay. And in fact to this day as a homeowner, I find it a challenge to do the types of household repairs that other men do without trouble and sometimes with pleasure.

    As this story suggests, it’s comparatively rare to even out one’s own imbalances completely. If you were really to do so, it would probably take a life’s work, and a life’s work cannot consist entirely of remedying imbalances. Nor is that the ultimate goal. Becoming a well-rounded person is a worthwhile aim, but from a spiritual point of view it still falls short of fulfilling the true potential that every human being possesses. What is this potential?

    The student becomes aware of it little by little in the course of struggling with his imbalances. In the first place, he learns to become free from the roles he has identified with in the past. A man thinks, “I’m not a handyman,” but if he has to carry out some task of repair he learns that this is a limitation. His identification with whatever roles he has traditionally clung to – thinker or artist – impedes him in other areas of life. In this way he learns to become free of roles – or at any rate he is a little bit more suspicious of his own tendency to identify with them. This seemingly small step actually marks a crucial point of transition, because it frees up an initially tiny amount of will and attention that had been completely fixed in identification. In short, the student learns that there is an “I” that is separate from, and free from, all the things he has identified with up to this point.

    I have spoken of this development taking place in the context of an esoteric school, and while there are not a huge number of these in the world, there are still a fair number. The ones I have encountered range across traditions: Gurdjieffian, Buddhist, Sufi, Qabalistic. Each has its own peculiar orientation, but the general type of training is the same – and in the beginning consists of the kind of work I have been talking about here. The question then arises, is a school necessary? Can you do this work all on your own?

    Generally speaking, no. You did not learn how to speak English alone; you did not learn math or cooking or carpentry or whatever life skills you have on your own. Almost always there was some instruction, and usually some instructor, behind your training. You can teach yourself how to do some things, but these are the exceptions in life. Human beings need each other for many reasons, and one of them is learning. While it’s true that people can and do undergo spontaneous moments of awakening that illuminate their being past all previous limitations and preconceptions, these are rare cases, and you can’t count on being one of them. If it has happened to you, you are fortunate. Even so, such moments of awakening are, for many people, mere glimpses intended to motivate them to undertake the hard, slogging work that I have been talking about here.

    In any event, at some point in one’s development, something starts to crystallise. And this something consists precisely of the small amount of will and attention that I spoke about earlier. An aspect of the mind begins to awaken and can see that it is not its roles, its tasks, or even its thoughts and feelings and emotions, but can step back and look at them almost as if they belonged to someone else. This is the true “I,” or at any rate the seed of the true “I.”

    Ultimate Key to Human Potential: The True “I”

    Remember that Christ in the Gospels often speaks of the kingdom of heaven as a seed. The metaphor is apt on more than one level. As the parable says, the sower sows seeds on all kinds of ground. That is, everyone has this seed of the true “I” – somewhere inside of you there is a Self that stands back and can witness, impartially but compassionately, all the doings of your life like a film. But most people take this for granted. They do not see it as important and they do not bother to develop it. To use the language of the parable again, the seeds fall on stony ground or the birds of the air eat them up.

    But this Self, this true “I,” is the ultimate key to human potential. Almost all of the parables in the Gospels speak of it in one way or another. It is the pearl of great price; it is the treasure buried in a field that a man sells all he has to buy; it is the light “that lighteth every man that cometh into the world.” Everyone has this and can never lose it; it is immortal and indestructible; indeed it is the only thing about us that is genuinely immortal – everything else will pass away. But you can make contact with it and make it develop and grow or you can neglect it, as the majority of people do and have done throughout the course of history.

    The choice is yours – now. Up to this point in your life you may not have been aware that you had this “I” within you or had the chance to develop it. You may have had the dim sense of something missing, or you may have had a vague longing of a journey that you have wanted to take without knowing where or why. This is the journey that you have wanted to take. If you were not aware of it before you read this article, you are aware of it now. And like the man in Christ’s parable of the treasure hidden in the field, you will either go out and sell all you have to buy it (figuratively speaking), or you will ignore it and return to the sleep of ordinary life.

    “Seek ye first the kingdom of heaven, and all else will be added unto you.” This true “I” is what the Gospels call the “kingdom of heaven.” If you have it – that is, if you are aware that you have it – the rest of life begins to fall into place, naturally and as it were spontaneously. This does not, of course, mean that life automatically becomes easy. It does mean that you become increasingly able to value things rightly. Money, possessions, status become progressively less important. You don’t need to become an ascetic and cast all these things away. You do need to put them in perspective and see that while they have instrumental value, they do not have ultimate value.

    This teaching of the true “I” extends far beyond even esoteric Christianity. The sacred Hindu texts known as the Upanishads speak of it frequently. Here is one example: “Verily… that Imperishable is the unseen Seer, the unheard Hearer, the unthought Thinker, the ununderstood Understander. Other than It there is naught that sees. Other than It there is naught that hears. Other than It there is naught that thinks. Other than It there is naught that understands. Across this Imperishable… is space woven, warp and woof” (Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, 3.8.10).

    The Gospels speak of this “unseen Seer,” also known as “the kingdom of heaven,” as a seed. A seed is not a fully developed plant. Similarly, this sense of “I” above and apart from our ordinary thoughts and feelings is also undeveloped when we first come across it. It is developed by further work, and even at a fairly early stage it becomes obvious what this work is. I’m tempted to use words here such as love and compassion, but what I am getting at goes far beyond even these characteristics. To put it as simply as possible, it involves a further insight: that this “I” that exists at the core of my being also exists at the core of all other beings, human and nonhuman, animate and inanimate. It is very hard in ordinary language to express the idea that what is most essentially myself is precisely that which I have in common with all others, but this is exactly the case.

    Most spiritual traditions speak of a dual path that they characterise as wisdom and compassion or of knowledge and love. While these two potencies may appear at first to be separate, in fact as a student progresses they seem more and more to converge. There is a first level of awakening – to become conscious of the true “I.” The second level is to understand how vast and all-pervasive it is and that so far from cutting us off from others, it is precisely what unites us with them. In this way individual consciousness becomes universal consciousness.

    Earlier in this article I mentioned that psychic powers are comparatively easy to develop. So they are. But if they are developed independently of the greater growth that I am speaking of here, they risk becoming a trap. (Practically all the great spiritual traditions warn of this.) By contrast, if we work to grow the seed of the individual consciousness into the greater consciousness that embraces all of us, paranormal powers come more or less naturally. You will not necessarily find that you can read minds or predict the future at will, but you probably will find that you know what you need to know when you need to know it – sometimes in ordinary ways, sometimes in ways that are quite startling.

    I have tried, in an extremely brief way, to sketch out some of the key aspects of developing human potential. Of necessity this description will seem somewhat linear. You start as a novice; you experience certain types of insight or awakening; and gradually these insights become more stable and present in your day-to-day life. In a sense this is all true. But the path – if it is right to call it a path – is more circuitous than this. Doubts come after awakening; fear closes in again after times of great opening. More than once it will seem as if all the gains of years of effort have suddenly evaporated. I do not know how to avoid this problem – if it can be avoided. I do know that when one picks up again, after however long a time, the knowledge and faith that one had before reasserts itself, and the long, laborious work of transformation can recommence. As one of Gurdjieff’s pupils once observed, “No conscious effort is ever lost.”

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  • War for Total Control: Planning the Ultimate ‘Big Brother’ Surveillance Society

    War for Total Control: Planning the Ultimate ‘Big Brother’ Surveillance Society

    From New Dawn 129 (Nov-Dec 2011)

    It’s an old cliché to say that technology in itself is neither good nor bad, but that all depends on how you use it. In the case of Information and Communications Technologies, and their out-of-control problem child the Internet that has so revolutionised the world, today we seem to be at a key crossroads where all seems to hang on which path Mankind finally treads.

    Like a sharp two-edged sword, the Internet and the very rapidly evolving technologies surrounding it, are poised to either usher in a new era of intellectual, cultural and spiritual enlightenment, material well-being and true cooperation amongst nations bent on resolving common global problems; or we may be about to fall into a black abyss of absolute totalitarian control; intellectual, physical and spiritual violence; and mass slavery on an unprecedented scale.

    How to resolve this dilemma? We should certainly start by understanding three key issues: who really controls these technologies, what are their medium and long term objectives, why are they being used the way they are…

    The Invisible Man

    One of the greatest perils we face today is the difficulty in properly identifying and distinguishing friend from foe; it is increasingly difficult to understand who – even what – the enemy or adversary is which means that society’s key vulnerability stems from its incapacity to properly identify risk, peril and danger. If you cannot see a danger approaching, it will hit you by surprise as the look-out on the Titanic so painfully learned on that fateful night in April 1912.

    A vital factor for the survival and prosperity of individuals, families, communities, organisations – even entire nations – lies in properly identifying friends and enemies (or at least adversaries). There is always an “enemy” out there who either wants to have what we own, or wants to place us in his or her service, or may have a myriad of reasons for wanting to somehow weaken or get rid of us, mostly because they want to take for free something that is ours. Some will say this is basic human nature; others that it’s the Darwinian imperative of the survival of the fittest; still others will complain that it’s man’s criminal egotism. Whatever your view, the truth is that in one way or another we all live immersed in “self-protection or defense mode” which begins every morning when we close and lock our front door.

    What I mean to say is that self-protection or defense is easy when you can clearly identify and understand your enemy: whether thieves at large on our streets, or foreign powers bent on subduing or colonising us. Here is where modern European languages play us a bad trick, because we use the word “enemy” with far too wide a scope. In fact, we would do well to heed the recommendations of German Jurist Carl Schmitt (1888-1985) who, like the Romans, differentiated between Inimicus (i.e., your own personal enemy whom you might hate for having done you some wrong but who is your own private affair and problem) and Hostis (i.e., a public enemy of the community and State, whom we might not necessarily dislike but who poses a threat to all and must thus be combated).

    For example, two hundred years ago, it was easy for the thirteen original colonies of North America to identify as its Hostis the British Crown in London, or for the South American Viceroyalties to identify as their Hostis the Spanish Court in Madrid. A common, visible, credible enemy makes strategic planning that much simpler, for we know who he is, where he is, what he wants, and how he achieves his objectives.

    Today’s challenge, however, is far greater because Hostis – the common enemy – is no longer easy to identify. We can no longer simply say “it’s the Brit’s over in London” or “it’s the Reds” or “the Nazis” or “the Japs.” Today, Mankind’s Hostis has become all too complex, often subtle and defying simple identification whether by nation, creed, race, geography, language, or any other easy-to-perceive characteristics. Today’s Hostis is everywhere and nowhere; which requires we refine our search, identifying him more by his tell-tale signs, fingerprints, “DNA” so-to-speak, than by directly perceiving him (or her).

    No longer can national leaders rally mass popular support to “fight the Soviets or the Germans, or the Japanese.” A decade ago, they had to resort to weaker abstractions like the Bushian “war on terrorism,” which is meaningless until you actually define what “terrorism” is.1

    What we have today is basically a public invisible enemy that is very difficult to specifically pinpoint, but the effects of whose actions we all increasingly suffer everywhere. Perhaps “Global Power Elite” is the closest we can come to describing this veritable global enemy whose planetary interests and objectives for the most part run counter to the common interests of “We the People” everywhere, and yet that too is still quite abstract and faceless.

    Nevertheless, and like all “invisible men,” whilst we cannot “see” the enemy we can certainly feel the effects of his actions and can thus certainly learn to trace his tracks, infer where he is now, where he’s going and what he plans to do.

    In this world war, all aware citizens need to become hunters of sorts: fighting the Global Power Elite is much like tracking down a dangerous wild tiger in the forest… An experienced, shrewd and watchful hunter does not need to actually see the tiger to know that he’s close by, if he knows how to identify and understand specific tell-tale ‘tiger marks’: here, some broken twigs on a forest path; there, a dead rodent; perhaps tiger droppings by a tree or paw marks on damp soil; a specific scent, or hushed growling echoing in the distance…

    A similar task faces us if we are to become free and independent: we must learn and understand who, where and what is the enemy and its weapons of war. We can certainly say that technological research, development and control are among its array of armaments. If we understand the enemy, it should not be all that hard to understand what he will do with the technology so “generously” given to Mankind.

    Putting on the Chains of Slavery

    A century ago, Soviet revolutionary Vladimir Lenin said capitalists would one day sell to the communists the very ropes with which communism would hang them. Well, not quite actually as it ended up being the other way around with communists hanging themselves with the invisible “ropes of capitalism,” enthralled as they became at the end of the Bi-Polar world with the West’s mass consumerism. An eloquent snapshot of which right after the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 was a little ticky-tacky East German “Trabant” next to a powerful West German Mercedes-Benz. Indeed, a picture that was worth 1,000 words!

    22 years later, something similar seems to be happening; only this time it’s the Global Power Elite enthralling us with invisible technological ropes with which millions of people are about to hang themselves, in a figurative sense, of course. Not that all of us are doing that yet, but when you look around at the growing mass population control, the noose is certainly being fitted snugly around our necks.

    Humans needs time to adapt and cope with major changes. Through tens of thousands of years of history, change took place very slowly, spanning entire generations so that with each new change, social structures slowly adapted. Today, however, with the explosive advent of information technologies, telecommunications and genetics to name but a few, we’re all mesmerised and desirous to become part of the Info Cybersphere. We’ve been persuaded that we really do need to have the latest cell phones, iPod, iPad, the Internet and cable/satellite TV, iPhone and Blackberry, which potentially is a good thing, but they must be approached with discriminating caution. For they represent a two-edged sword that can either help expand our consciousness and awareness of the world around us in every sense of the word, or they can chain us unwittingly into a macro-system that has grown into a Leviathan with huge capacity to control every detail of our lives.

    I am a layman so I won’t delve into the technicalities of today’s information technologies because others are far more qualified to do that, but I can tell you this: all these technologies are not as innocent as they would have us believe: i.e., so “innocent” that 5, 6 or 7 year olds can be set loose to play with video games and the Internet as if they were mere toys. Not so! These technologies must be approached with at least as much caution, prevention and awe as we do when we drive our car, knowing that just as it can safely take as wherever we want to go, if we thoughtlessly rev the engine up to 250 kmph, it can also get us and others killed.

    Similarly, this two-edged sword can serve to vanquish the Global Power Elite by making us aware of their intentions and their terrible medium and long-term consequences, or it can serve them to cut our throats. In fact, this Janus-headed monster lies equidistant between them and us. Objectively, either they win and we lose, which means the world will be run by machines that they control or, we use these technologies to rally the overwhelming power of We the People, to annihilate the Global Power Elite. Where does the difference lie? In our awareness. 

    The Global Power Elite know full well what they are doing whilst most people don’t, and they will do everything in their power to keep it that way. Here, then, are two global armies pitted against each other. “In this corner…” a tiny but extremely powerful elite controlling a huge machine to their benefit and our enslavement. “In that corner…”, gigantic masses of mostly unaware people using that same machine but without understanding it, nor realising what it’s really being used for.

    It is today so embedded into society that, increasingly, every aspect of our lives are controlled by it: whether it be work done on the Internet, Intranets, E-Trade, managing your bank account, reserving your next flight and printing your boarding pass, doing research and fact-finding, or just plain entertainment and whiling the time away. It’s a coin of which we are systematically shown only the “heads” side, i.e., all the benefits, magic, comfort and advantages of being hooked-in and on-line. “Life is so much easier now…” However, we’re not shown the “tail” side that poses a dark and lurking danger: Total Control. The Info Cybersphere represents a super-structure for total control against which individuals can do little to escape from, unless awareness dawns on them.

    The key weapon wielded against all peoples in every country is PsyWar – Psychological Warfare – that has successfully: (a) incorporated two, maybe three billion people into the IT Cybersphere allowing growing partial/total control over them, and (b) persuaded billions of people to willingly accept this. The rest of Mankind – the other 3 or 4 billion are “useless eaters” as David Rockefeller once called them – just don’t count because they’re too abjectly poor and are not part of any “market”; there’s literally nothing the Corporate Overworld can sell to them. Thus, they are implicitly earmarked for controlled extermination over the next generation through war, disease, starvation, urban violence, environmental contamination, artificially induced “natural” disasters, or by just plain letting them waste away.

    A quick look at some of the technological wonders they have in store for us might better illustrate this:

    Watch What You Say… and Do… (and Think..!)

    “Romas/COIN” is a super hi-tech military civilian mass surveillance and data gathering project supported by US private defense contractors (Northrop Gruman, notably), think tanks, and the US military and civilian intelligence community, with electronic capabilities to monitor and analyse millions and millions of conversations, sort key data and then re-build it to reflect specific behaviour patterns amongst individuals and groups of people, which enables projecting their future plans, whereabouts, goals and actions. This will make “preventive war” and “preventive arrests” that much easier. For now, much of this mass surveillance and data mining targets Arab speaking peoples, not just in the Middle East/North Africa but the world over, which ties in nicely with the endless “global war on terrorism.”

    This represents a quantum leap by the Global Power Elite in that until recently such global hi-tech spying was only done by the National Security Agency, CIA, FBI, MI6 or Mossad (which can always be demonised as modern Gestapo-like entities); now however, we have “friendly” household names like Apple, Google, Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft, Pixar/Disney, PointAbout, doing all the spying for the Elite. This private corporate network is part of the invisible noose we are putting around our necks.

    Big Brother is Watching You…

    Countries one normally believes are bastions of liberty and freedom – the UK, Canada, Australia or New Zealand – are prime examples of mass surveillance. Take a stroll through London and a vast and ubiquitous network of several million CCTV cameras will be watching your every move 24/7 in airports, underground and railway stations, street crossings, stores, bus stops, shopping malls, motorways, parks, bridges, condos, public buildings, private offices, utilities, public toilets, toll booths… Wherever you are in London, someone is watching you… very closely. Naturally, all this is done in the name of “national security” which has become a smokescreen for the political and corporate elites’ perception that growing public awareness does pose a real threat to their interests.

    In Australia Big Brother is hard at work, not surprising since Australia responded to September 11 with extraordinary law-making. In the ensuing decade, Australia’s Federal Parliament enacted 54 pieces of anti-terrorism legislation; 48 of which were passed under the Howard government, an average of one new anti-terrorism law every seven weeks.

    The numbers are striking: Canadian Professor Kent Roach found that “Australia has exceeded the United Kingdom, the United States, and Canada in the sheer number of new anti-terrorism laws it has enacted since September 11, 2001. Australia’s hyper-legislation strained the ability of the parliamentary opposition and civil society to keep up, let alone provide effective opposition to, the relentless legislative output.” All brought to you by the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO).

    Australia’s legislation includes the Telecommunications Interception and Intelligence Services Legislation Amendment Act, and the Intelligence Services Legislation Amendment Bill 2011 that strengthens and increases ASIO’s powers to conduct offshore surveillance and reach such organisations as WikiLeaks, targeting anyone campaigning on political and social issues.

    “We know who you are…”

    New technologies may also soon make fingerprints a thing of the past. Vein recognition represents a far more precise method to identify you than traditional fingerprint scanners because of its low .001% false acceptance rate. Using light to penetrate a users’ finger to read vein patterns which are unique and thought to be impossible to replicate, this method is fully fool proof as vein structures change after death, which means severed fingers cannot be used to fool the readers.

    Then there’s face recognition where Toshiba recently unveiled a new range of LED-backlit televisions for 2011 including the model WL800A that uses facial recognition. Next time you’re surfing the Internet or speaking on Skype, hmmm… “we know who you are, where you are and what you’re doing…”

    Lost & Found: “M’am: We found your missing husband’s black box…”

    Microchip Implants for personal tracking and ID are getting smaller and smaller, and ever more injectable without you ever even realising it. Next time an Avian or Swine Flu “crisis” breaks, don’t let yourself be coaxed into mass vaccinating your family. Michael G Michael (University of Wollongong’s School of Information Systems and Technology, Australia), has coined the term “uberveillance” to describe the emerging trend of all-encompassing surveillance, explaining that “Uberveillance is not on the outside looking down, but on the inside looking out through a microchip that is embedded in our bodies.”

    The US’s private hi-tech company VeriChip (www.positiveidcorp.com) widely markets implantable nano-chips which store a 16-digit unique ID number on humans “for medical and security purposes, focusing on high-risk patients and the need to identify them and their medical records in an emergency.” To allay any fears they also explain they do not know when or if someone will develop an implantable microchip with GPS technology, but that “it is not an application we are pursuing.” Michael explains that such implantable chips will become like a “black box that will then be a witness to our actual movements, words – perhaps even our thoughts – and play a similar role to the black box placed in an aircraft.” He also predicts microchip implants and their infrastructure could eliminate the need for e-passports, e-tags, and secure ID cards, adding that “microchipping… will eventually become compulsory in the context of identification within the frame of national security.” For now, your mobile phone acts as a passive transponder for radio frequency identification (RFID) readers.

    Watch the Birdie…

    Not surprisingly, military applications are where trillions of ultra hi-tech dollars are going. We now have drones as tiny as bugs. In a recent piece published in The New York Times2 we learn that the US military’s Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio runs a flight lab dubbed a “microaviary” where drones designed to replicate flight mechanics of moths, hawks and other creatures are being developed. “‘We’re looking at how you can hide in plain sight’ said Greg Parker, an Aerospace engineer, as he held up a mechanical hawk that in the future might carry out espionage.” Today, the Pentagon has some 7,000 aerial drones explained Ashton B Carter, the Pentagon’s chief weapons buyer and a member of the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations (CFR).

    “In February 2011, researchers unveiled a hummingbird drone built by the firm AeroVironment for the secretive Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) which can fly at 11 mph and perch on a windowsill… one of the smallest drones in use on the battlefield is the three foot long Raven which troops in Afghanistan toss by hand like a model airplane to peer over the next hill.”

    Then we have new “Gorgon Stare” technology that can capture live videos of an entire city, but requires 2,000 analysts to process the data feeds from a single drone compared with 19 analysts per drone today. We can also expect massive growth of armies of military surveillance analysts representing “wonderful new job careers in national defense.”

    A Nation of Cowards

    That same New York Times piece goes on to say, “within the military, no one disputes that drones save American lives. Many see them as advanced versions of ‘stand-off weapons systems’, like tanks or bombs dropped from aircraft, that the US has used for decades. ‘There’s a kind of nostalgia for the way wars used to be,’ said Deane-Peter Baker, an ethics professor at the US Naval Academy, referring to noble notions of knight-on-knight conflict. Drones are part of a post-heroic age, he said, and in his view, it is not always a problem if they lower the threshold for war… Military ethicists concede that drones can turn war into a video game, inflict civilian casualties and with no Americans directly at risk, and thus more easily draw the US into conflicts.”

    This ties in with the Powell Doctrine, drafted by Gen. Colin Powell (CFR) after the First Gulf War which states, amongst other concepts, that the US should only engage in military conflict where its overwhelming military clout guarantees complete victory over carefully chosen weaker enemies. That explains why the US (and its staunch ally Britain) will unilaterally attack Afghanistan and Iraq, but not China or Russia; or why the US (and NATO) imposed “regime change” on Libya but not on North Korea (so intimate with China) or Iran (so close to Russia). This explains why America’s “heroic exploits” included invading tiny Grenada under the Reagan Administration in 1984, and unarmed Panama under Bush Senior in 1991, as well as its unflinching support of nuclear-armed-to-the-teeth Israel against rock-throwing Palestinians.

    Clearly, a more overt “doctrine” of abject and shameless cowardice has yet to be advanced by any nation. There, no doubt, lie the seeds of America’s coming demise and that of its key allies: they have become greedy and corrupt nations governed by cowardly rulers. 

    What are You Going to Do?

    Whatever happens from now on, Planet Earth depends on how large a portion of the two or three billion “lucky ones” who have voluntarily integrated themselves into the Cybersphere through PC’s, laptops, blackberries, websites, cell phones, etc., become aware of the grave dangers facing us all. How fast they begin taking defensive measures from inside the Cybersphere, especially by identifying and taking advantage of its myriad weak points.

    As a friend once said, “if globalisation can be compared to a balloon, then you only need the microscopic point of a sharp pin to blow it up…” Each of us must become such a “microscopic pin.”

    As I write, the surveillance and control infrastructure can read this article, plot my location from their satellites using the cell phone in my pocket as a GPS transponder, spy on what I read, write and navigate on my laptop, and God knows what more.

    Since 20 years or so, the National Security Agency’s Echelon Project can spy on our phones and emails, targeting specific words used in billions upon billions of messages and texts – “bomb,” “attack,” “Islam,” “Muslim,” “nuclear,” “chemical,” and “biological” are just some of the words and sequences Echelon can snoop into (they’re probably doing this right now as I write and as you read!). Whatever it is they can do today surely exceeds our wildest imagination.

    This is no longer just the “national intelligence infrastructure” spanning the CIA, FBI, FEMA, Homeland Security, DARPA, Army, Navy and Air Force Intelligence, and their counterparts in other countries. This now spans private corporations that gather data, organise it, seek and find specific patterns (behaviours, contacts, interests, intents, geographies and infinite others) through which they hope to eventually exert their long-sought dream of total control over populations forming part of their Global System (the rest are as good as dead).

    Microsoft, Facebook, Google, and a vast array of intelligence, security, IT, data gathering companies are all linking into increasingly large networks that pool data, findings and capabilities into complex arrays of self-sustaining and evolving structures, that lie outside the visual scope even of governments, for the simple reason that governments cannot even begin to fathom those capabilities, powers and future projections.

    Does anybody really believe that Barack Obama, David Cameron, the senators, representatives and MP’s of the US or UK governments have a real clue as to what the NSA, together with Google, together with Boeing, together with Northrop, together with Halliburton, together with Apple, together with Mossad, MI6 and CIA front companies, together with key universities and think tanks, together with…. are really developing?

    Can Congress or Parliament enact more laws to “control” something they themselves cannot understand and, even if they were to enact limiting legislation, by then technology will have evolved even further, easily wiggling its way out of any such laws.

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    Who’s in Charge?

    That brings us to the key question: who’s in charge? Who really runs Australia, Britain, France and Germany? Japan, India and Brazil? The US and Canada? Argentina and South Africa? Even Israel??

    We see “elected leaders” accessing top government posts using 19th century “democratic” voting mechanisms, that are all controlled by a highly complex 21st century technocratic Over-world, embedded inside the US, UK, EU and most every other country. It operates from inside these countries – even using the military might of the US and NATO countries – but in no way does it heed, support or respond to the interests of these peoples. Was it really the US, Britain and France that invaded and destroyed Iraq, Afghanistan and now Libya? Or is it something far more elusive and powerful embedded inside them but controlled from way above today’s completely outdated, eroded, fatally weakened and – at this rate – soon to disappear “sovereign Nation-State”?

    It’s high time we make the necessary quantum leaps that will allow us to start joining the dots. We need to move away from silo mentality paradigms, and towards a much more holistic Weltanschauung. We have become too “specialised,” which leads to narrow-mindedness. We talk about finance but never join the dots on its geopolitical overtones. We talk about politics but are blind to underlying social forces. We think Hollywood is only about “entertainment,” not realising how they implant ideas and behaviour patterns into our collective psyche.

    Information and data overdrive generate confusion, as we become overwhelmed by trillions of bits of data that swamp our brains every day, hour, minute and second. A healthy tip: take your proper distance and perspective so that we all start to see the big picture. Only then can we move down to the finer detail, because the forest is far, far more important than the tree… at least in this stage where we all need to come to grips with a question that should be growing louder and louder in your mind no matter where you live or who you are: what on Earth is going on!?

    We had better find the answers quickly because we are fast coming to a fork of world historic proportions on the road of human destiny. We either climb up the high road leading to human evolution which will necessarily entail the painful but necessary destruction of the Global Power Elite and all who support, consolidate, empower and fuel its growth, or… we slip down the low road into a dark abyss of death, destruction, mass hypnosis and the end of the human spirit; a vision pretty close to what men throughout the ages have described as Hell…

    What road will you take? We can still make the right decision. There is not, however, much time left.

    [alert type=”general” dismiss=”no”]This article was published in New Dawn 129.[/alert]

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    Footnotes

    1. Arab countries fighting back against US-UK-EU intervention in the Middle East and North Africa are branded “terrorists” or “rogue states,” whilst the very cause of the problem – i.e., long decades of violent US-UK-EU and Israeli terror interference in Arab countries is never branded “terrorism” (in fact, they call it “promoting democracy” or some such Newspeak). Militarised groups are thus branded either “terrorist” or “freedom fighters” depending on which side they stand vis-à-vis the Global Power Elite.

    2. See The New York Times, 19 June 2011, “War Evolves with Drones, some Tiny as Bugs”, by Elisabeth Bumiller and Tom Shankar.

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