Breaking the Spell

by Nowick Gray

Breaking the Spell

by Nowick Gray

The mess we’re in from the mass delusion of 2020 is far from over. While clear problems remain, and the war on humanity escalates on many fronts, there is also a groundswell of consciousness rising, a “great awakening” beyond the swamp of status quo politics. Of first importance is to recognize the nature of the trap, its origin and agenda for control of our future. Then we can call on the appropriate skills and wisdom to break the spell, invoking our own powerful magic of transformation.

Dominion over the earth

In this brief survey I review some current media lenses through which to assess the spell-binding, and seek to harvest a ray of light with which to begin to open the trap.

Garrett Ziegler

Former White House staffer Garrett Ziegler gives an inside view of the last days of the Trump administration. As the days in office counted down, the president found himself increasingly isolated, abandoned in the face of inertia and self-serving betrayal of the establishment political class, careerists who sided instead with maintaining the status quo. As for the military option for saving the Republic from the Biden coup, this hail-Mary too was out of the question, as the brass maintained allegiance instead in that old-school leftist ethos, “Invade the world; invite the world.”

Catherine Austin Fitts

Former Assistant Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Catherine Austin Fitts is wise to all facets of the current war on humanity, waged against “those who earn money by those who print it.” Thus, it’s no surprise that Bill (where have I heard that name before) Gates has recently become the largest owner of US farmland. The rest of the economy—particularly the vanishing middle class, thanks to lockdowns—is also at the mercy of the uber-rich, who are hell-bent on buying up the lion’s share of real assets with all of their pumped-up volumes of fake money.

Clash of the Empires

In this lowest of the low-budget action thrillers, a dwarf cousin of Homo sapiens, Homo floresiensis (AKA Flores Man) faces brutal oppression from the bestial tribe of Java Men, and turns to a tribe of early humans for help. At first feeling the depression of yet more bad news about the perils of human nature, I stuck it through to the end, when the film almost redeemed itself with a hopeful outcome: the humans were the good guys, vanquishing the Java Men and letting the Flores Men go back to the forest to live in peace.

Too bad actual history tells a different tale, of Homo floresiensis leaving only traces in that contested habitat (Flores Island, Indonesia), once modern man arrived on the scene. Typical H. sapiens: project our own genocidal tendencies on another evil force (the subhuman Javanese), and hold ourselves up as the reigning “master race” with God-sanctioned “dominion” over the earth.

From prehistory to hyperhistory

Power politics, as described above, is as old as human memory. Today, however, we are on the verge of a leap beyond history, beyond humanity altogether. Edward Curtin warns of a “digital dementia”: “Flesh and blood life is being sucked into a whirlpool… ‘a universe of disembodied data.’ Mediated reality is replacing physical reality as the world’s elites attempt to sell their packaged and commodified stories to publics ensnared and enamored by the technology that is entrapping them.”

Dennis Kingsley outlines the choice before us, where passive adaptation—once a positive hallmark of evolution—now means surrender of our very humanity: “Connecting into the power-machine will become the new cartography of the ‘human reality.’ Living ‘manually’ will become one of the last few remaining sites of resistance as human life becomes regulated-by-automation…. By doing nothing, we are allowing our behavior to be modified and our self-identities to be splintered. In these post-pandemic landscapes, the choices we make will be choices that, like never before, determine our future as a human species.”

Resistance or slavery

Our mortal enemy is our own individual apathy. If we simply allow a new abnormal global society to be constructed by a minuscule gaggle of immensely wealthy power brokers, that society will serve them and enslave all of us and our children for generations to come… The new biosecurity State the authorities are building is for everyone. Resistance or slavery are your only options.
—The Disillusioned Blogger, https://newagora.ca/for-those-about-to-question-authority-i-salute-you/

If adaptation to a single imposed future implies unthinkable surrender, it’s clear we must widen the scope of our adaptive strategies to reach outside that black box of digital slavery. That means going also beyond traditional responses to oppression, and diving deeper into our creative imagination.

The courage to resist

Why live if you have to spend all of your time and energy focusing on negative stuff or living in fear? Why have so many people stopped living? Stopped laughing? Stopped exploring? If we stop living, evil wins. Guidance and solutions will evolve from THIS PLACE. Banging our heads against the wall to resist, run, or fight back isn’t bringing resolution, it’s bringing a lot of frustration and depression for a lot of people, while keeping everyone on the negative energy hamster wheel, which is exactly where they want you. Rise above.

In this space is where creation evolves, light shines through, and the universe works with us. Remaining in this state of mind will manifest the best possible future. Whereas logic, common sense, practicality, and analysis are all incredibly important tools in the toolbox, without imagination and creation, the toolbox doesn’t exist. Instead of battling and tearing down, we need to build up and CREATE, together.

—Corey Lynn, The Calm Through the Storm [my emphasis]

Given that we start from where we are, and grassroots resistance can have limited success, let’s review the familiar strategies Corey Lynn mentions: resist, run, and fight back.

1. Resist: Noncooperation

Noncooperation means not confronting authority directly, but finding workarounds, loopholes, exemptions. Keeping your mask off on the ferry by nursing a hot drink. Having group meetings in a restaurant. Entering stores and claiming legal exemptions.

Here are two such useful exemptions in recent BC health orders:

• Gathering in residences allowed for a “purpose that is not social in nature.”
• Masks exempt if you have “(i) a psychological, behavioural or health condition, or (ii) a physical, cognitive or mental impairment.”

Noncooperation and noncompliance hinge on the very dynamic of power, which is its Achilles heel: “We are sovereign spiritual beings… If we don’t obey, there are no rulers” (Iain Davis).

2. Run: Avoidance

Like Flores Man, we are on the run from those who would enslave us and exterminate our sovereign, creative essence. If there is somewhere to run and hide, a forest deep and dark and remote enough, then that escape route can provide some respite from the war, at least in the short term. Off-grid living also presents the benefits of creating a more sustainable future in harmony with our natural past and the living earth. Which is not to say it’s an easy path to avoid the tentacles of the beast.

Jim Quinn outlines a wide array of options which he calls “passive noncooperation,” but which might better be described as ways to extricate oneself from an oppressive matrix of control (i.e., avoidance). Such tactics include: Reduce taxes, buy local and pay in cash, cancel Big Tech, boycott social re-engineering, learn practical skills, grow food, barter, bank locally, avoid debt, own alternative currency, use encrypted messaging, reject masks and fake vaccines, ridicule sheep, move out of the city, and prepare to defend your home.

As a pacifist I might take issue with the last advice (armed defense), but in doing so I would reiterate the approach of avoiding confrontation (and violence) as much as possible. The same debate (violence vs. nonviolence) would carry into the next strategy.

3. Fight Back: Confrontation

Obviously fighting fire with fire will prove the disadvantage of the side that is outgunned. Not to mention the drawback of historical revolutions: even if they are successful, they usually serve to bring a new regime of violence and oppression into power; or they must defend themselves, thereafter, from the revenge of the ousted ruling powers (see Cuba, Venezuela, Iran).

The irony of nonviolent direct action today is that, while it has a notable history (from Jesus to Gandhi to King), the covert forces of empire have co-opted the strategy to promote selective regime change through mostly “nonviolent,” but infiltrated and orchestrated popular uprisings, now branded as “color revolutions.” Which only reinforces the legitimate potency of such tactics for a genuinely popular cause.

Confrontation thankfully can take place also in the narrative space… at least until censorship is total. Speaking truth to power, even with righteous anger, is a vital arena of fighting back against lies and injustice.

Once again Corey Lynn expresses this imperative well: “Everyone needs to feel the sense of betrayal and being a victim to find the rage within. This is righteous anger and it needs to be acted upon, not through violence, but most definitely not through silence. If people do not take a stand now, the middle class will be entirely wiped out, the ‘elites’ will continue to syphon all the wealth, and the poor will remain poor.”

A more conventional form of confrontation can take place even within the democratic political arena. Surprising to some, Trump’s champion General Michael Flynn, far from promising a military salvation for the legion of patriots in the wake of Trump’s ouster, advises a rather tame program of localized change:

• Organize & get involved in your city/town and in your state.
• Run for a local position in your city.
• Demand local and state officials take measures for election integrity.

Regardless of the level of resistance once feels called to engage in—whether it means to resist, to run, or to fight back—the necessary fuel is provided by courage. “America’s general” would well understand that requirement, in extoling a Plan compatible with the level of courage most people can access.

Whatever you do, you need courage. Whatever course you decide upon, there is always someone to tell you that you are wrong. There are always difficulties arising that tempt you to believe your critics are right. To map out a course of action and follow it to an end requires some of the same courage that a soldier needs. Peace has its victories, but it takes brave men and women to win them. ― Ralph Waldo Emerson

Returning to Corey Lynn’s opening plea, all the energy we spend on changing the world, coping, adapting, or surrendering to it, risks spinning the hamster wheel, if we don’t also open space to create. This takes another kind of courage, a loyalty to life itself, to imagine miracles worthy of wise Nature.

The power to create

This is the realm of the metapolitical, beyond government. It is the playground of the artist, the prayer rug of the mystic, the knowing soul in each live denizen of earth. Both paths, of art and spirit, can apply the same strategies as we use to resist on the political plane, but from a higher, deeper place, in service of common harmony and not divisive ego.

Art

Art, besides casting its vote for intrinsic beauty, can approach political issues of the day in creative ways—whether destructive or constructive, as needed.

Confrontation: mockery, memes, caricatures, satire, eloquence

Workarounds: more subtle memes and satire, exposing by analogy and inference

Avoidance: art for art’s sake; celebrating the essence of life’s beauty and our compassionate humanity

Spirituality

As with art, a spectrum of approaches is available, according to one’s inclination and talents:

Confrontation: speaking truth to power, nonviolent action witness, civil disobedience, hunger striking

Workarounds: demonstrating, to “enemy” and “sheep” alike, our life-honoring humor, empathy, shared humanity, natural truths

Avoidance: donning the cloak of invisibility; developing “spiritual immunity”; feeding the flame of purest truth and spirit; cultivating acceptance; embracing wholeness

In all of these “metapolitical” ways, the strategies of resistance can play out relatively indirectly, but infused with a lightness and brightness of being. That kind of courage to create can inspire a new world worth imagining, beyond more rhetoric about one’s party or race, nation or creed. Its power and responsibility are exercised in the personal sphere, where it is up to the individual to open up space, to stop the march of time, to dissolve the stress and pressure of the linear push to a forced reset.

And how do we do this magic trick? By flipping the hourglass.

The Hourglass Effect

History is unfolding in real time. Events are pressing in upon us—welcome to the unbearable intimacy of planetary catastrophe. I have never been through a civilization-wide transformation before, and neither have you; we are in uncharted waters together. There is a war taking place in heaven concerning the soul of humanity, and it will be fought in each person’s heart, every day, without rest, and into the foreseeable future. —Zachary Stein, Covid-19: A War Broke Out In Heaven

The war on humanity is fought now as a war on our consciousness, and on our relationship to time. To fight this war it is necessary to defuse this weaponization of time, and of our psychic integrity. Carlos Castaneda emphasizes the duty of the spiritual warrior, before all else, “to rest.” To recharge through quiet reflection and openness to the creative force of the universe, always in gestation, always birthing.

Yes, this is a revolutionary time—just as there are such moments in geological history, from cometary catastrophes to pole shifts, ice ages, continental drift. Yet in our human realm we can contain and plumb the depth of it all, we can become the scope and the largeness of it all, and in that transcendence, which is greater inclusion, we can be part of the healing. The growth of identification to the whole, from the singular log being pushed down the river, to the river itself, the sea, or the whole hydrological cycle, is a relief from disaster, from death. It’s a sacrifice of self, a gift back to the natural force of Life to heal, to express the divinity of the whole through all its parts.

Fear, stress, “deadlines” … picture these as sand squeezing through the narrow neck of an hourglass. Time is running out. Time is money. Attachment, achievement, identity… not enough. Never enough… to redeem or perfect yourself, your life, or the world.

But consider

Time instead as an opening, a railroad track disappearing to a distant point on a field of timelessness. The sand in the hourglass slips through… into freefall…

… space, possibility, freedom

… release from time

… it settles to stillness

… being, non-doing, innate perfection

… then: flip!

The hourglass turned upside down recycles the static, the inert… to rebirth, reincarnation.

The operating system is rebooted, to a greater level of freedom (movement) and perfection (stasis), and a synthesis of the two, a dynamic and unitary vision of the whole living cycle.

In this larger vision we take the quantum human leap from apprehension of our own mortality, to the scope of the current threat to our species, and the earth we share with others. Zachary Stein calls this awakening a “second dawn” in human awareness—though it doesn’t come without birth pangs: “It is an age in which heaven competes with hell for a chance to be born.”

With the hourglass turned upside down, Stein says,

The passing of time feels different and days matter more as they start becoming too full of experience and dense with meaning. It feels like a sprint—and sprinting right now makes sense for some—but the full arc of this journey cannot be sustained at this pace. What is happening is more of a pilgrimage or exiled wandering, beyond roads and maps. No one can go it alone in this wilderness between worlds.
…
This is it: we have arrived at the end of the world. Finally. Now we can start to build a new one. (Covid-19: A War Broke Out In Heaven)

New to the world, the creative vision of our positive future, by its very nature, is open-ended. From where we stand we can give it any number of names:

• The Age of Aquarius
• The Great Awakening
• The Greater Reset
• The New Earth positive timeline
• The Hundredth Monkey
• Goddess Alive, Magic Afoot

Guided by our heart, art and spirit, we traverse our way between the worlds, to the land that time forgot. We find sanctuary in the forest of our birthright. There we make alliance with humans of good intention. We dare to thrive.

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image credits:

(feature) Moses: Charlton Heston: The Ten Commandments (1956) Moses: Maverickmemez
dummies: MerkAvot Media
posthuman: metaphysicalmusing.com
No thanks: RealStewPeters, Telegram
sheep/dog: Charlie Ward, Telegram
BS first aid: Bernie Sanders, Twitter
hourglass: Charlie Ward, Telegram
Humanity: Paul Levy

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Nowick Gray writes from Salt Spring Island, BC. His books of genre-bending fiction and creative nonfiction explore the borders of nature and civilization, imagination and reality, choice and manifestation. Connect at NowickGray.com to read more. A regular contributor to The New Agora, Nowick also offers perspectives and resources on alternative culture and African drumming, and helps other writers as a freelance copyeditor at HyperEdits.com. Sign up for the “Wild Writings” email newsletter for updates and free offers.

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