'Cognitive Boddhisatvic Bypass Syndrome'

by ChaosNavigator

"It was basic to his [Robert Lindner's] thinking that all Western society is "neurotic" since Western man lives only according to taboos, myths, legends -- beliefs without foundation in fact. Yet the average psychiatrist, Lindner complained, tries to "adjust" his patients to placid acceptance of a maladjusted society. This procedure has caused many to condemn psychological practice as a "quack religion." And so it is, according to Lindner, whenever it offers the individual no more than resubmergence in mass man. If psychological science is sound, then in order to save Western man, our fundamental behavior and basic beliefs must be made to yield to the efforts of informed rebels. It has taken several years for the "informed rebels" to surface and make their influence felt."
- Israel Regardie

"There will be, in the next generation or so, a method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing...And this seems to be the final revolution [for the elites]"
- Aldous Huxley, Tavistock Group, California, 1961

"The ultimate tyranny in a society is not control by martial law. It is control by the psychological manipulation of consciousness, through which reality is defined so that those who exist within it do not even realize that they are in prison."
- Barbara Marciniak

"I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror, and were suddenly silenced. I fear something terrible has happened."
- Alec Guiness, as Obi-Wan Kenobi, Star Wars, 1977

"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free."
- Goethe

During the last decade I have increasingly noticed another bypass besides the spiritual bypass [1] , [2]. I have tentatively named this 'new' type of bypass 'Cognitive Boddhisatvic Bypass Syndrome'.


[1] 'A third obstacle is the “spiritual bypass” school, which imagines that if you find Spirit or Goddess or your Higher Self, everything else will magically take care ofitself. Job, work, relationships, family, community, money, food, and sex will all cease their annoying habits. The despairingly sad thing is, it usually takes ten or twenty years to discover that this is definitely not the case, ..This spiritual bypass approach can be very tricky, especially—and ironically—if you are dealing with the very highest Nondual schools."
- Ken Wilber, One Taste
- http://files.meetup.com/885675/On%20Integral%20Practice%20by%20Ken%20Wilber.pdf
(I have a mixed view of Wilber and have somewhat put some of Wilber's theories behind me, i.e. only giving some of it relative value, but I try to give credit where I interpret credit is due).

[2] 'Spiritual bypassing is a very persistent shadow of spirituality, manifesting in many forms, often without being acknowledged as such. Aspects of spiritual bypassing include exaggerated detachment, emotional numbing and repression, overemphasis on the positive, anger-phobia, blind or overly tolerant compassion, weak or too porous boundaries, lopsided development (cognitive intelligence often being far ahead of emotional and moral intelligence), debilitating judgment about one's negativity or shadow side, devaluation of the personal relative to the spiritual, and delusions of having arrived at a higher level of being.'
- 'Spirtual Bypassing', Robert Augustus Masters, http://www.realitysandwich.com/spiritual_bypassing

See also bottom footnote [3]

The reason for this rather provocative term is that the Boddhisatvic intention/ideal is explicitly about helping sentient beings to an extent that is perhaps the most excessive ideal of compassion one can imagine. Failing to recognize harmful things to oneself and others is therefore addressing the Boddhisatva (or the 'Boddhisatvic' type) more than anyone else (not that anyone else is exempted but it's easy to explain the indifference of cynics, the gullible, and the oblivious). Humanitarians, well-intentioned ethical people, or goodhearted people in general belong as such to the same category.

                        

2 simple examples:

* If you live under high power voltage lines (carcinogenic) the solution is not mindfulness, but either to move away from the high power voltage lines or removing them. Although mindfulness will ease the symptoms (symptomatic treatment) it will not remove the external cause, namely the carcinogenic high power voltage lines

* Mindfulness will not protect the body and brain against fluoride in toothpaste or water supply - but concrete knowledge that fluoride is harmful will! Fluoride has increasingly been proven to be a neurotoxin, making people docile, and perhaps even inhibiting spiritual growth. even though sodium fluoride is state-sanctioned!

Whereas living under high power voltage lines are seen as dangerous by society at large today, fluoride is not, likewise with Gardasil vaccines and other types of vaccines, aspartame, state-sponsored terrorism, etc. - which are other examples of destructive state sanctioned practices at the expense of the naive, the ignorant, the goodhearted and gullible majority, who often more than not, believe in government-approved institutionalized practices.

The point is that mindfulness and therapy are often misapplied, and as such can make things worse because mindfulness is about being with 'what is', not about discernment about harmful causations, often hidden causations, often state approved practices not seen as harmful by society at large – causations which should be removed instead of endured.

If we don't have discernment we will be unaware of negative circumstances which can be changed and vice versa; try to change things which per definition cannot be changed.

Mindfulness and therapy should not be misapplied as an adjustment to a sick society ('It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society' – Krishnamurti). The use of mindfulness and therapy can therefore be used as mindlessness– and is being used - as a sedative, a kind of soma (soma is a sedative/happiness drug in Huxley's novel Brave New World given whenever there is dissatisfaction among the population).

Mindfulness should not be misapplied as acquiecence to the prison if there is an exit in the prison cell.  But such prisons ('democracy', state sanctioned 'normal' practices, etc) are often not cognitively seen as prisons at all which is the quintessential point.

"As we've seen, cultivating presence through meditation or yoga is not by itself an adequate way to address the complex global challenges we face. The "raising of consciousness," as it's popularly phrased in today's yoga and meditation communities, doesn't raise political consciousness. It doesn't make people more aware of what is violent and what is not, nor does it make them resist violence. An increase in presence in the world does not increase justice.....How would meditation or the experience of awakening change the politics of these various groups? The Black Panther Party, radical feminists, the tea party, the KKK, Goldman Sachs bankers or anti-abortion activists. Would it somehow make them all the same?"
- Why the Dalai Lama is wrong to think meditation will eliminate violence

"Many corporate advocates argue that transformational change starts with oneself: if one's mind can become more focused and peaceful, then social and organizational transformation will naturally follow. The problem with this formulation is that today the three unwholesome motivations that Buddhism highlights -- greed, ill will, and delusion -- are no longer confined to individual minds, but have become institutionalized into forces beyond personal control. Up to now, the mindfulness movement has avoided any serious consideration of why stress is so pervasive in modern business institutions. Instead, corporations have jumped on the mindfulness bandwagon because it conveniently shifts the burden onto the individual employee: stress is framed as a personal problem, and mindfulness is offered as just the right medicine to help employees work more efficiently and calmly within toxic environments. Cloaked in an aura of care and humanity, mindfulness is refashioned into a safety valve, as a way to let off steam -- a technique for coping with and adapting to the stresses and strains of corporate life."
- Beyond McMindfulness, Ron Purser, Professor of management at San Francisco State University and Zen teacher David Loy

The corporate world is especially using mindfulness irrespectively of ethics otherwise. Likewise is the US military to train snipers and killers:

'U.S. Marine Corps members learn mindfulness meditation and yoga in pilot program to help reduce stress. The U.S. Marine Corps, known for turning out some of the military's toughest warriors, is studying how to make its troops even tougher through meditative practices'

- THE ASSOCIATED PRESS, January 23, 2013

Ron Purser, a Professor of management at San Francisco State University and Zen teacher David Loy - See more at: http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/cynical-and-amoral-the-dark-side-of-the-mindfulness-fad#sthash.WHaV4rF8.xsQ3u0IO.dpuf

'In this context, mindfulness is an ideal tool to induce compliance, with its focus on the individual management of our responses to forces we’re being told are well beyond our control.'
-How corporates co-opted the art of mindfulness to make us bear the unbearable

See also:

Who gets Mindfulness 'Right'? An Engaged Buddhist Perspective

NYT: Can We End the Meditation Madness?

The McMindfulness Craze: The Shadow Side of the Mindfulness Revolution

The New Bodhisattva and a New Kind of Political Activism

2 historical insights might share light on the modern disconnect also:

"The features that made Burmese mindfulness practice..so attractive to a Western audience are precisely those features that rendered it controversial in the Buddhist world."
Mindfulness or Mindlessness: Traditional and Modern Buddhist Critiques of “Bare Awareness

 "Taoism opened itself to misuse... proper "peace of mind" can actually accompany wrongful, even cruel and atrocious, actions. But this is the case. It is not to say, on the other hand, that Taoism and Ch'an are without value. They are of great interest and value .... Zen really may help both with archery and with motorcycle maintenance - just not as morality. Even real holiness in religion may be accompanied by moral error. Morality is a matter for reason, and both religion and aesthetics can be morally judged, regardless of their own claims, intuitions, or logic. ... morality, aesthetics, and religion are about different things, logically independent systems of value, but that human existence combines them all. In Buddhist terms, the dharma as a moral teaching cannot be replaced with an incomprehensible transmission separate from the texts; and the blind obedience of the samurai, whether practicing Zen or Jôdo, was neither righteous action nor right livelihood."
- The Dark Side of Tao

Thus the modern Boddhisatva, neither the modern man, should apply a false solution through mindfulness as a sedative(mindlessness), but to help the prisoner free himself internally AND externally; to make people aware of the prison and point out an exit in the prison cell whenever possible. The obligation from the heart of the boddhisatvic aspirations is to be aware of these dangers in the relative world as well in order to make others aware of this. Otherwise we use mindfulness as many people do to retain equanimity to endure external suppressive circumstances, many of which are not even perceived as suppressive: A type of 1984 (obvious brutal suppression) masked as a Brave New World (masked tyranny or inverted totalitarianism). 

 

We should ideally practice mindfulness during all circumstances anyway but that does not nullify this critique at all because it's a point of irrelevance here (logical fallacy).

'It is to be expected that advances in physiology and psychology will give governments much more control over individual mentality than they now have even in totalitarian countries. Fichte laid it down that education should aim at destroying free will, so that, after pupils have left school, they shall be incapable, throughout the rest of their lives, of thinking or acting otherwise than as their schoolmasters would have wished… Diet, injections, and injunctions will combine, from a very early age, to produce the sort of character and the sort of beliefs that the authorities consider desirable, and any serious criticism of the powers that be will become psychologically impossible. Even if all are miserable, all will believe themselves happy, because the government will tell them that they are so'

- Bertrand Russell, from this noteworthy article

“The real hopeless victims of mental illness are to be found among those who appear to be most normal. Many of them are normal because they are so well adjusted to our mode of existence, because their human voice has been silenced so early in their lives, that they do not even struggle or suffer or develop symptoms as the neurotic does. They are normal not in what may be called the absolute sense of the word; they are normal only in relation to a profoundly abnormal society. Their perfect adjustment to that abnormal society is a measure of their mental sickness. These millions of abnormally normal people, living without fuss in a society to which, if they were fully human beings, they ought not to be adjusted.” [my emphasis]
– AldousHuxley – Brave New World Revisited

'Cognitive Boddhisatvic Bypass Syndrome' is – as the name implies – a cognitive blindspot, not only an ethical issue.

There seems to be a clear misapplied mindfulness instead of skillful means in action; fx. quitting/warning about/being aware of/changing the potential external but hidden state-sanctioned causes to suffering. If we don't warn people also about external dangers which are invisible (due to lack of media coverage fx.) or seen as 'normal', it seems to constitute an omission on the part of the boddhisatvic aspirations, which means that we are not able to point out solutions.

We must have both mindfulness and discernment and knowledge and wisdom and compassion,  and if we do not have knowledge about harmful things which are seen by many as harmless or insignificant, then we cannot help people with seemingly abstract dangers, which are nonetheless very concrete but in many instances under the radar, partly because many of them are state sanctioned - and goodhearted, gullible people who believe in the authority of government approved harmful practices are ultimately thus a danger to themselves and others, albeit well-intentioned 'useful idiots'.

 'But if...the situation is such that the welfare of others is at stake, we have to work very hard and fight for the rights of others, and not accept the loss at all. One of the forty-six secondary vows of a bodhisattva refers to a situation in which somebody is doing something very harmful and you have to use forceful methods or whatever else is necessary to stop that person’s actions immediately—if you don’t, you have transgressed that commitment....The bodhisattva precept deals with a situation in which one’s prime concern is the welfare of others: if somebody is doing something extremely harmful and dangerous it is wrong not to take strong measures to stop it if necessary. Nowadays, in very competitive societies, strong defensive or similar actions are often required. The motivation for these should not be selfish concern but extensive feelings of kindness and compassion towards others. If we act out of such feelings to save others from creating negative karma this is entirely correct. ' [my emphasis]
- Commentary on the Eight Verses of Thought Transformation By His Holiness the Dalai Lama Dharamsala, India 1981

Even though the capacity to master pain is grounded in non-judgmental spaciousness, there is a danger that mindfulness plays a dissociative role, severing the cognitive discernment in regard to external causes one should not tolerate but change.

Given how such techniques as mindfulness can be Soma, SSRI-pills or any other misapplied sedative - it somewhat constitutes a parallel to the Faustian techno-biological promise of removing psychological suffering:


Eternal sunshine? Scientists create technique to delete traumatic memories




Science-fiction could soon be reality after researchers found a way to
delete painful memories. The concept was explored in the film Eternal
Sunshine Of A Spotless Mind where Jim Carrey (pictured) and Kate
Winslet decide to erase each other from their memories after a difficult
break-up

The Forgetting Pill Erases Painful Memories Forever | Wired




Deep Politics, Inverted Totalitarianism, Apathy, Ignorance
I know that many buddhists are aware of the fact that mindfulness can be misused – as spiritual bypass, and also as personal and corporate instrumental efficiency decoupled from ethics, etc. - but only if we recognize that many normalized practices (as well as hidden causations; deep politics, directed history, false flags, ethics and discernment, inverted totalitarianism, perception management and governmentality) in society are pathological, suppressive, harmful, can we protect ourselves and others (fluoride for example, just to mention one ubiquitous practice out of many which is not recognized as destructive – on the contrary).

"Just as there is a set of metaphysical commitments that undergird the modern mindfulness movement, there are also ethical and political commitments. The problem is that, in America at least, these commitments so resemble those of mainstream consumer culture that they go largely unnoticed. Rather than enjoining practitioners to renounce mainstream American culture, mindfulness is seen as a way to better cope with it."

http://buddhiststudies.berkeley.edu/people/faculty/sharf/documents/Sharf%20Is%20Mindfulness%20Buddhist.pdf

What differs from all the previously linked and following articles about mindfulness is that this is the only article taking deep politics perspectives into consideration and not mentioned in the more 'traditional' critiques of Mindfulness. As such, this critique goes further: the problem goes much deeper - thus I would reformulate the sentence (my emphasis):

'"Just as there is a set of metaphysical commitments that undergird the modern mindfulness movement, there are also ethical and political commitments. The problem is that, in Western countries, these commitments so resemble those of mainstream consumer culture that the prison; Deep Politics, false flags, inverted totalitarianism , Ignorant Unfreedom, and Governmentality, go largely unnoticed. Rather than enjoining practitioners to detect and renounce the prison, mindfulness is seen as a way to better cope with it.'

We now seem to be in a situation where many people are unaware that we are already living in a tyranny (especially in UK and USA in terms of civil rights), much of the suppression is immanent and internalized – the suppression is not recognized as suppression. Many other internalizations have taken place under the radar, wage labor fx:

“Most oppression succeeds because its legitimacy is internalized. That’s true of the most extreme cases. Take, say, slavery. It wasn’t easy to revolt if you were a slave, by any means. But if you look over the history of slavery, it was in some sense recognized as just the way things are.......Another example, also contemporary (it’s estimated that there are some 26 million slaves in the world* ...At one time in the U.S., in the mid-19th century, working for wage labor was considered not very different from chattel slavery. That was the slogan of the Republican Party, the banner under which northern workers went to fight in the Civil War. ‘We’re against chattel slavery and wage slavery’. Free people do not rent themselves to others. Maybe you’re forced to do it temporarily, but that’s only on the way to becoming a free person, a free man, toput it in the rhetoric of the day. You become a free man when you’re not compelled to take orders from others......You could even read editorials in the New York Times saying this around that time. It took a long time to drive into people’s heads the idea that it is legitimate to rent yourself. Now that’s unfortunately pretty much accepted. So that’s internalizing oppression. Anyone who thinks it’s legitimate to be a wage laborer is internalizing oppression in a way which would have seemed intolerable to people in the mills 150 years ago’.  

- Noam Chomsky

Chris Hedges, a very sharp observer in addressing the issue of inverted totalitarianism or masked slavery:

”The political philosopher Sheldon Wolin uses the term 'inverted totalitarianism' in his book 'Democracy Incorporated' to describe our political system. It is a term that would make sense to Huxley. In inverted totalitarianism, the sophisticated technologies of corporate control, intimidation and mass manipulation, which far surpass those employed by previous totalitarian states, are effectively masked by the glitter, noise and abundance of a consumer society. Political participation and civil liberties are gradually surrendered.

The corporation state, hiding behind the smokescreen of the public relations industry, the entertainment industry and the tawdry materialism of a consumer society, devours us from the inside out. It owes no allegiance to us or the nation. It feasts upon our carcass.  The corporate state does not find its expression in a demagogue or charismatic leader. It is defined by the anonymity and facelessness of the corporation. Corporations, who hire attractive spokespeople like Barack Obama, control the uses of science, technology, education and mass communication. They control the messages in movies and television....…The result is a monochromatic system of information. Celebrity courtiers, masquerading as journalists, experts and specialists, identify our problems and patiently explain the parameters. All those who argue outside the imposed parameters are dismissed as irrelevant cranks, extremists or members of a radical left. Prescient social critics, from Ralph Nader to Noam Chomsky, are banished. Acceptable opinions have a range of A to B. The culture, under the tutelage of these corporate courtiers, becomes, as Huxley noted, a world of cheerful conformity, as well as an endless and finally fatal optimism. We busy ourselves buying products that promise to change our lives, make us more beautiful, confident or successful as we are steadily stripped of rights, money and influence. All messages we receive through these systems of communication, whether on the nightly news or talk shows like “Oprah,” promise a brighter, happier tomorrow.

And this, as Wolin points out, is “the same ideology that invites corporate executives to exaggerate profits and conceal losses, but always with a sunny face.” We have been entranced, as Wolin writes, by “continuous technological advances” that “encourage elaborate fantasies of individual prowess, eternal youthfulness, beauty through surgery, actions measured in nanoseconds: a dream-laden culture of ever-expanding control and possibility, whose denizens are prone to fantasies because the vast majority have imagination but little scientific knowledge....

…..Our manufacturing base has been dismantled. Speculators and swindlers have looted the U.S. Treasury and stolen billions from small shareholders who had set aside money for retirement or college. Civil liberties, including habeas corpus and protection from warrantless wiretapping, have been taken away. Basic services, including public education and health care, have been handed over to the corporations to exploit for profit. The few who raise voices of dissent, who refuse to engage in the corporate happy talk, are derided by the corporate establishment as freaks.

Attitudes and temperament have been cleverly engineered by the corporate state, as with Huxley’s pliant characters in “Brave New World.” The book’s protagonist, Bernard Marx, turns in frustration to his girlfriend Lenina:

“Don’t you wish you were free, Lenina?” he asks.

“I don’t know that you mean. I am free, free to have the most wonderful time. Everybody’s happy nowadays.”

He laughed, “Yes, ‘Everybody’s happy nowadays.’ We have been giving the children that at five [Soma]. But wouldn’t you like to be free to be happy in some other way, Lenina? In your own way, for example; not in everybody else’s way.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” she repeated.

The façade is crumbling. And as more and more people realize that they have been used and robbed, we will move swiftly from Huxley’s “Brave New World” to Orwell’s “1984.”
- A Brave New Dystopia

This is a very clear point by Chris Hedges, and is supported by many erudite, vigilant, and qualified people, and it should not be underestimated, it is not an armchair academic exercise in speculation.

The heroic task of coming to understanding of the mechanisms of control and suppression demands a kind of emotional non-attachment, at best fearlessness, in order to avoid becoming burned out, if not horrified - which is tremendously difficult. HERE we really need mindfulness! And yet to ignore this task, a much greater evil would result if most do nothing ( 'For evil to prevail all that is required of good men is to do nothing' - Edmund Burke. The same with Einstein: 'The world is too dangerous to live in—not because of the people who do evil, but because of the people who sit and let it happen.')

And one can be sure of that these people, organisations, etc.  - that most don't even know or want to know about or ignore (Neocons, DARPA, Monsanto, the military-industrial complex, etc) - will nonetheless have an impact on their lives - globally. They have already (post-9/11 legislation globally, wars, internet laws, etc.)

'But the fact that good, obedient citizens do not themselves perceive oppression does not mean that oppression does not exist. Whether a society is free is determined not by the treatment of its complacent, acquiescent citizens – such people are always unmolested by authority – but rather by the treatment of its dissidents and its marginalized minorities.

In the US, those are the people who are detained at airports and have their laptops and notebooks seized with no warrants because of the films they make or the political activism they engage in; or who are subjected to mass, invasive state surveillance despite no evidence of wrongdoing; or who are prosecuted and imprisoned for decades – or even executed without due process – for expressing political and religious views deemed dangerous by the government.

People who resist the natural human tendency to follow, venerate and obey prevailing authority typically have a much different view about how oppressive a society is than those who submit to those impulses.

The temptation to submit to authority ... bolsters an authoritarian culture by transforming its leading institutions into servants of power rather than checks on it. But worse, it conceals the presence of oppression by ensuring that most citizens, choosing to follow, trust and obey authority, do not personally experience oppression and thus do not believe – refuse to believe – that it really exists.'

 -  Glenn Greenwald, Guardian, Sunday 26 August 2012 'Film highlights the temptations and perils of blind obedience to authority'

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/aug/26/compliance-authority-failure

Skynet and Global Insanity - what we must be mindful about

The American people (and Europeans to a lesser extent) have been participants in their very own Milgram experiment being conducted by their government since 9/11. Since the passage of the Patriot Act, the government continues to demand that its citizens increase the voltage in the name of security. The following list has been verified many times and puts mindfulness and therapy in macroperspective: The Darth Vader Empire & Skynet

The list would fill many many pages, this one is short, not extensive, is NOT 'pessimism', is not fiction (I really hoped it was, but isn't - do your homework!), is not 'doom porn', but reality asssessment. The situation is much worse now, particularly in USA! If we don't point out the tyranny, the dangers, the suppression and harm, the unawareness and even internalization of many people mistaking bondage for freedom, then for sure it constitutes a boddhisatvic blindside.
C.G. Jung notes in his observations of Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia that most citizens of those nations did not necessarily want the formation of a tyranny, but, they went along with it anyway because they feared for their own comfort and livelihoods.

"One day I passed memorial epitaph for Sophie Scholl in Franz Josef Strasse, and when I saw that she was of the same year of birth as I, and she was executed the same year that I started with Hitler. At that moment I understood that it is no excuse that you are young, but that one probably also could have been able to find out certain things. "
- Traudl Junge

Traudl Junge is the very emblem of the majority of the German people during the Second World War, which probably had some degree of presumption, but did not have complete certainty and at least failed to seek out knowledge, which could have led to consideration of facts and thus distancing. Instead, the then 22-year-old Traudl - despite warnings from family and friends – chose to apply for the job as Hitler's secretary, chose to be young, girly, adorable, ignorant.
 
In our days, "young, girly, adorable, ignorant" would be equal to = I-pod, I-pad, pop, Playstation, Paris Hilton, porn, American Idol, Dancing with The Stars, etc. In other words; egocentrism, narcissism, mindless hedonism, ignorance, apathy, brutalisation and callousness, etc.

"At last year’s Wisdom 2.0 conference in San Francisco, Google
representatives’ "3 Steps to Build Corporate Mindfulness the Google Way," presentation was interrupted by a Buddhist protest: The activists jumped onto the stage to chant, "Wisdom means stop displacement! Wisdom means stop surveillance!" They claimed that "Google should not be speaking as experts on mindfulness, when they're playing a role in displacement, privatization of public assets, for-profit surveillance, profiling, policing, and targeting of activist communities." After the activists were removed from the stage, without acknowledging or refuting their allegations, the Google spokesperson directed the audience to "check in with your body" to "feel what it's like to be in conflict with people with heartfelt ideas."

- Cynical and amoral: the dark side of the mindfulness

Angry wisdom in action: Buddhist activists adressing mindfulness as mindlessness as practised by Google without wisdom and compassion (cause Google is thoroughly evil in its actions and history anyway) - Google's absurd response? Mindlessness! Watch the video                                  

“And therefore, all of those for whom authentic transformation has deeply unseated their souls must, I believe, wrestle with the profound moral obligation to shout form the heart—perhaps quietly and gently, with tears of reluctance; perhaps with fierce fire and angry wisdom; perhaps with slow and careful analysis; perhaps by unshakable public example—but authentically always and absolutely carries a a demand and duty: you must speak out, to the best of your ability, and shake the spiritual tree, and shine your headlights into the eyes of the complacent. ..Alas, if you fail to do so, you are betraying your own authenticity. You are hiding your true estate. You don’t want to upset others because you don’t want to upset your self. .. You were allowed to see the truth under the agreement that you would communicate it to others - that is the ultimate meaning of the bodhisattva vow. And therefore, if you have seen, you simply must speak out. Speak out with compassion, or speak out with angry wisdom, or speak out with skillful means, but speak out you must. And this is truly a terrible burden, a horrible burden, because in any case there is no room for timidity.
- Ken Wilber, One Taste

A bit about Google:

How the CIA made Google
Inside the secret network behind mass surveillance, endless war, and Skynet—part 1 https://medium.com/@NafeezAhmed/how-the-cia-made-google-e836451a959e

  “A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude.” 
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

Why Google made the NSA
Inside the secret network behind mass surveillance, endless war, and Skynet—part 2
https://medium.com/@NafeezAhmed/why-google-made-the-nsa-2a80584c9c1

Do No Evil Google – Censor & Snitch For The StateGoogle Gives New Meaning to “Orwellian” – Becomes Ministry of Truth

Just Be Evil: The unauthorized history of Google

10 shocking facts you never knew about Wikipedia and see this and this

“The supreme mystery of despotism, its prop and stay, is to keep men in a state of deception, and cloak the fear by which they must be held in check, so that they will fight for their servitude as if for salvation.” – Baruch Spinoza

At the expense of truth, the people must of course feel 'good' in blissful ignorance. One would do well to think about who is benefitting from this ignorance and who is harmed. Any 'prisoner in The Matrix' is shocked in the moment of awakening, therefore mindfulness should be used as calmness in the midst of chaos and skillful action, not mindfulness as sedating adjustment to a pathological system of slavery , but mindfulness as reaction to the grim truth, the realization that there is a very destructive stealth-pathological systen, a storm,which is an unpleasant awakening, which is why equilibrium of the mind is especially necessary.

Two very different applications of mindfulness meditation: The first applies mindfulness as mindlessness, a placid adjustment to a prison mistaken for freedom. The second is the shocking realization that we aren't free and do live in a prison, a Truman Show -  it searches for the exit while applying true mindfulness as a necessary tool for awakened calmness in the midst of chaos, not mindfulness as misapplied lullaby in an imprisoned Truman Show, thus discouraging the prisoners from seeking an exit in the first place through the misapplication of misguided mindfulness.

'All day long beating you over the head with their media telling you what to believe, what to think and what to buy. The table has tilted folks. The game is rigged and nobody seems to notice. Nobody seems to care! Good honest hard-working people; white collar, blue collar it doesn’t matter what color shirt you have on. Good honest hard-working people continue, these are people of modest means, continue to elect these rich cock suckers who don’t give a fuck about you….they don’t give a fuck about you… they don’t give a FUCK about you.
They don’t care about you at all… at all… AT ALL. And nobody seems to notice. Nobody seems to care. Thats what the owners count on.'     - George Carlin
http://shoqvalue.com/george-carlin-on-the-american-dream-with-transcript/

Resignation , denial, escapism, fear, and refusal to deal with what is and what has been created by a dark elite, on the mistaken grounds that it is 'negative', 'untrue', etc., is actually negative and such resignation, refusal, and lack of comprehension will be aiding evil by our unwitting or advertent passive bystanding. In such a way the greatest ally of evil is the disbelief and apathy of the people.

Peter Dale Scott, a highly esteemed, noble and respected ex-UN diplomat, nails the same point here also:

”My notion of deep politics… posits that in every culture and society there are facts which tend to be suppressed collectively, because of the social and psychological costs of not doing so. Like all other observers, I too have involuntarily suppressed facts and even memories about the drug traffic that were too provocative to be retained with equanimity.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_politics

We can only remove these entities if sufficient numbers of people are becoming aware of their destructive influence in the first place, apply thought and analysis, and then action. Non-duality, a vertical spiritual awakening (transformation, and transcendence of negative emotions and exclusive identification with thought) in the individual is necessary but it cannot remove the institutionalized destructive pathological stealth-system - the domain of thought and analysis and subsequent skillful action is needed here. Moreover, the point is not self-aggrandizing self-righteousness, but a a matter-of-factly ascertaining perspective; if Google is evil (which it is in so many ways), if fluoride, vaccines, controlled mainstream media, etc. are destructive, hostile to life, deception and whitewash, while simultaneously perceived by the majority as true, good, healthy, then it is – from a perspective of purely mental discernment – a result of indoctrination.
We could even establish perfect decentralized spiritual communities with highly individuated people, high interpersonal social intelligence, integrated shadows (in the Jungian sense), etc. and still be unaware of Monsanto's terminator GMO technologies polluting the beatiful crops and gardens of such eco-villages, just another example.

Monsanto's destructive technologies will then still be operational whether we meditate or not. Being aware of their agenda is the prerequisite for overthrowing/stopping them. This has nothing to do with 'Us' versus 'Them' in terms of emotional judgment (albeit understandable, given their disregard for farmers, life, etc.) or lack of own responsibility but with mental discernment (minus the emotional aversive component) and concrete knowledge in order to change the situation. Otherwise we risk being in denial, ignorant and/or useful idiots in regard to many things. We have to work internally and externally with the right action and discernment hand in hand.

'Ahriman guides certain forces in evolution in such a way that they may be of the greatest possible advantage to him. And evil would result were people to live on in a state of drowsy unawareness'
- Rudolf Steiner

Cognitive Boddhistavic Bypass means that everything destructive which is internalized as 'normal' is not on the radar of the collective consciousness as destructive, and is therefore not disposed for indignation on the part of the greater public (or the spiritual avantgarde), no cognition and no action, let alone the fact that much of it is invisible because of secrecy, i.e. Deep Politics.



Everything is backwards.
https://sitdol.blogspot.dk/2016/07/everything-you-know-is-wrong-reedited.html


Many are aware now; both socialists, anarchists, libertarians, liberals, conservatives, new age people, etc. across the board agree that there is a horrid neofascist agenda at foot. The stumbling block is unfortunately the ignorance, cognitive dissonance, and disbelief of many well-intentioned goodhearted (but ignorant) people. As such, disbelief becomes the inadvertent ally of evil (for a lack of a better word).

 Adolf Hitler understood the power of the big lie over the ignorant masses who want to believe: 

“All this was inspired by the principle–which is quite true within itself–that in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation. For the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world and to all who conspire together in the art of lying.”
– Adolf Hitler – Mein Kampf

"If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State."
-Josph Goebbels, Nazi propaganda minister

This shielding is disappearing increasingly fast, mainly because of the internet reformation, which is the reason why the elites want to restructure internet under various 'legitimate' pretexts. Soon many changes will become too obvious for people to remain shielded.

One of the only premises preventing people from waking up is the erronuous belief that governments and mainstream media wouldn't lie and deceive to such a murderous extent as they have.

The epic result and irony of this:The deniers are attacking the 'protectors', thereby defending the elites through ignorance even though the deniers, unwittingly, are attacked by the very same elites supposed to be non-existent. Worse than Stockholm-syndrome.

 BitingOur Tongues Doesn’t Keep Us Safe … It Only INCREASES Danger Inthe Long Run

"The first is to open our minds, start taking responsibility back, and remove this edifice of control and suppression of information which will allow the full flow of knowledge of who we are to flood into the public arena. Once people start to realize who they really are and the nature of life, then we can go into stage two which is the incredible consciousness shift that is going to happen, and is happening for many people already, but can happen for everybody if we open up to the knowledge of what’s going on and to do that the edifice of suppression has to go. And what I see so often in … what we call New Age movement is that they’re focusing on the second bit and they’re in denial about about the first. And the second is not going to happen for many people unless we remove the edifice of suppression cause most people are going to think what the heck’s going on and they’re going to go through this great change in a complete fog of what’s happening. Two things to do here. One is to start focusing on how the world’s controlled, identify it and remove it. Secondly, then we can concentrate unhindered on the transformation spiritually."
- David Icke

  On a more lofty metaphysical note; Rudolf Steiner prophezised that leaders of the spiritually aware will come together to form the most widespread and determined underground movement against the distortion of spiritual values, represented by the New World Order. The members of the underground will be those people from all walks of life who have entered upon a path of spiritual self-discovery in which they have united the rational mind and the new spiritual faculties to reveal the presence of the spiritual world; people who have begun to unveil the meaning of their personal destiny and accept with love the dictates of the the individual human spirit in the service of the true aims of mankind.


'Again and again, when confronted by the many serious problems with which humanity has been struggling since the First World War and is still facing, the almost despairing question is often asked, even in anthroposophical circles: 'What can I do? What can the individual do about the machinations of these secret groups, if indeed they exist? It's all too much for individuals.' Rudolf Steiner's answer in these lectures is bold and clear:

The only defence against these things is knowing about them. If you know about them, you are protected ... But you must not be idle about acquiring real knowledge of these things.
- Secret Brotherhoods and the Mystery of the Human Double

There is good reason to believe that our times is a karmic collective rendez voux for humanity with the occult energies at the time of Hitler (Rudolf Steiner, Martinus, have talked about this) - however dramatic, sensational, surreal, high-strung, crazy or speculative this may sound to the uinitiated.

We must relish in these relatively good times (compared to the next period) by living life to the fullest, meditate, cultivate compassion, positivity of mind and discernment while being aware of the dangers simultaneously - and prepare and ACT for the future, and fortify and brace ourselves with fearlessness, and if we can't do that, then with fortitude, courage and bravery.

Many others have picked up on this deficiency of misapplied mindfulness as aquiscence. Robert Lindner most presciently anticipated the state of affairs the U.S. is in today, with police misconduct the norm, not the exception, largely because “The sciences have sold themselves to the status quo,” he writes:

“For psychiatry, psychology, and the medical or social arts that depend from them have become devil’s advocates, and sorcerers’ apprentices of conformity. Joined in the criminal conspiracy against human nature, they have poisoned the last oasis for the relief of man. Of all the betrayals, their treachery has been the greatest…equating protest with madness, and non-conformity with neurosis…they labor with art and skill to gut the flame that burns eternally at the core of being.”

See also:  Ignorant Unfreedom - Contented Slaves


_______________________

[3]  A third well-known important point also:

'Like therapy, vipassana meditation is an uncovering technique, characterized by neutrality, removal of censorship; observation and abstinence from gratification of wishes, impulses, or desires, and discouragement of abreaction, catharsis, or acting out; and a therapeutic split in the ego, in which one becomes a witness to one's experience. All of these elements presuppose a normal, neurotic level of functioning. In Engler's view, those with poorly defined and weakly integrated representations of self and others cannot tolerate uncovering techniques or the painful affects which emerge (p.36). Thus insight techniques like vipassana run the risk of further fragmenting an already vulnerable sense of self.

The vipassana guidelines of attention to all thoughts, feelings, and sensations without selection or discrimination create an unstructured situation intrapsychically. However, the goal of treatment of borderline conditions is to build structure (not to uncover repression), and thus to facilitate integration of contradictory self-images, object images, and affects into a stable sense of self able to maintain constant relationships with objects even in the face of disappointment, frustration, and loss. Such treatment addresses the developmental deficits deriving from early relationships-through a dyadic relationship, not through introspective activities like meditation (p.38). Engler emphasizes that mere self-observation of contradictory ego states is not enough to integrate dissociated aspects of the self, objects, and affects. What is required is confrontation and interpersonal exposure of split object- relations units as they occur within the transference. Thus, Engler writes, "Meditation is designed for a different type of problem and a different level of ego structure" (p.39).

Because a cohesive and integrated self is necessary to practice uncovering techniques like vipassana, meditation is not a viable or possible remedy for autistic, psychopathic, schizophrenic, borderline or narcissistic conditions.'

- source

See also: http://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/zoebrigley/entry/being_somebody_and/
'To observe the mind without interfering sounds simple. Any one can do it in short stretches from time to time.The difficulty is sometimes that one discovers the fact that what at first glance looks like mindfulness neutrality, is often a gentle repellent push, a subtle numbing of one's emotional troubles. a subtle saying 'no', or a subconscious steering towards the easy, the positive. Suppression consists in selection; when pushing away and saying no, the training in neutral observation will nullify one's suppression, in which case all the suppressed stuff (shadow sides, traumas, shocks, etc.) will creep up and appear from the cellars of the mind.

In other words; if there isn't a sufficient therapeutic processing of one's personality, it will be difficult to be authentically neutral in observation of one's inner content, in which case one can become emotionally unwinded. An unprocessed personality will not allow the neutral observation to undermine the barriers of suppression. Mindfulness neutrality in such case will accordingly not be truly neutral but underhandedly selective by maintaining the barriers of suppression.'
- an elaborated translation from:
- BEVIDSTHED OG KÆRLIGHED – bearbejdet fra Jes Bertelsen