4. Which Came First: Personae or the Mask? Into Joyful Quarantine

Exiting Quarantine to the Thinly Disguised Rat Cage as Disposable Mind Barriers

Continued from 3. Yoga off the Sumo Mat: The Big Dump II

“The writing of a text presupposes the existence of a fine net of relationships binding the different threads that weave within it. Everything converges: outside events, personal experiences, moods, journeys, chance occurrences––all randomly mix with reading, fantasies, images, thanks to an ars combinatoria of encounters, correspondences, memory associations, sudden illuminations, alternative currents (p11, Quarantine by Juan Goytisolo translated by Peter Bush).

Who is King? Opportunity and Self Awareness in the Artificial Rat Cage

Two days before the official quarantine could truly begin my new boss met us at our AirBnB to give us, from afar, the keys to the company’s condo. The condo was a hiring perk where we would stay for a month to allow us time to find a permanent home in a tight housing market. We joined him outside, -24C, where he apologised for the cool ‘covid-nature’ of our introduction. He kept more than two meters from us at the other end of the full length of a parked car. He set the keys on it before leaving and wishing us well.

The next day we moved a few items into the condo. The condo was very comfortable and provided us with the perfect opportunity to joyfully uphold the government’s directive to self-quarantine for two weeks. Our initial concerns about how to get food were quickly worked out, even with our odd vegetation diet, with the assistance of friends we knew who lived in Whitehorse. The world is truly a small place!

With the issue of food settled and the move and storage and rental return logistics completed outside the quarantine, we turned to embrace the opportunity we had been given to expand our practice of yoga and pranayama free of distraction or interruption. And we decided to enrich our health with the ten day Master Cleanse (lemonade diet) protocol and take it easy in our two week ‘quarantine vacation’ before my first day with my new employer.

Kundalini Yoga somehow entangled with astrology

With Yoshiko’s direction we joined Tommy Rosen’s R20 daily on-line yoga at at nearly the same that he started on-line classes because of the lockdowns. Wow! With him those two kundalini quarantine weeks marked an unexpected quantum leap in the expansion of our feeling of integrity in mind, body and spirit. And in those two weeks kundalini yoga became, to my surprise, the bedrock of our living joyfully present in the time of covid, quarantined or not, masked or not, plastic barriers or not. And I didn’t know that we were practicing kundalini yoga until many months later, as Tommy didn’t use the word ‘kundalini’ in his instruction.

As we developed and expanded our connection to and integration with mind, body and spirit we  expanded also our sense of community into the ‘big’ world via the internet. I didn’t think of it at the time, how odd that that was, that we began a process of non-physical connection instead of connecting with the people of our new city. The act of creating social physical isolation was also the means by which the tools of non-physical social connection exploded. People want to connect with people, and will leap over hurdles to do just that. It is interesting to me that this ‘media’ tool, that can create ‘personal’ presence with distant people, concomitantly created separation with the people present in our lives. The act of two people in a restaurant interacting with some distant other by smartphone rather than the person sitting adjacent to the other. And as I write this sentence in a lovely café, Yoshiko is beside me messaging someone while I’m writing. So interesting.

Our lives, and the feeling of being more alive, changed as we felt connection with the inner peace of who we are. And because we weren’t watching, reading or listening to any news, our anxious and fear-seeking egos weren’t being brainwashed into needing to grasp at or cling to a fear-centric state of being anxious all the time about everything. We didn’t need to buy or need to believe whatever the latest promotion of fear and inadequacy was being peddled. We were free, totally free and alive, in our quarantine, learning the power of breath and a new joy with being alive and aware inside and with our wonderfully responsive and increasingly resilient bodies.

You Dirty Rat! A Digression into the Future and a Question

I was surprised, eighteen months later when a work injection mandate directed me to look at the world of news and infotainment again, to read about the many studies and statistics around quarantines that were filled with depression, increased addictive behaviours, sickness and suicides. What was that about?

The answer may rest significantly in a low-down dirty rat addiction story that seems sadly horribly humanly apt. And since its unwanted moral has a scientific foundation it is unappetising to the consumerist idealisms alive and well in both the left and right. Being without ideology and, worse, antithetical to left and right ideology, it remains a fringe ‘conspiracy’ to be ignored and shunned.

“Put a rat in a cage and give it two water bottles. One is just water and one is water laced with heroin or cocaine. The rat will almost always prefer the drugged water and almost always kills itself in a couple of weeks. That is our theory of addiction.

“Bruce comes along in the ’70s and said, 'Well, hang on. We’re putting the rat in an empty cage. It has nothing to do. Let’s try this a bit differently.' So he built Rat Park, and Rat Park is like heaven for rats. Everything a rat could want is in Rat Park. Lovely food. Lots of sex. Other rats to befriend. Coloured balls. Plus both water bottles, one with water and one with drugged water. But here’s what's fascinating: In Rat Park, they don’t like the drugged water. They hardly use it. None of them overdose. None of them use in a way that looks like compulsion or addiction. What Bruce did shows that both the right-wing and left-wing theories of addiction are wrong. The right-wing theory is that it’s a moral failing, you’re a hedonist, you party too hard. The left-wing theory is that it takes you over, your brain is hijacked. Bruce says it’s not your morality, it’s not your brain; it’s your cage. Addiction is largely an adaptation [or attempted adaptation] to your environment.

Now, we created a society where significant numbers of us can't bear to be present in our lives without being on something, drink, drugs, sex, shopping... We’ve created a hyper-consumerist, hyper-individualist, isolated world that is, for many of us, more like the first cage than the bonded, connected cages we need.

The opposite of addiction is not sobriety. The opposite of addiction is connection. And our whole society, the engine of it, is geared toward making us connect with things not people. You are not a good consumer citizen if you spend your time bonding with the people around you and not stuff [and false truths of weakness and dependency]. In fact, we are trained from a young age to focus our hopes, dreams, and ambitions on things to buy and consume [in order to compensate for our media induced feelings of inadequacy, worthlessness and isolation from interpersonal connection]. Drug addiction is a subset of that."

Credit: Johann Hari, based on a TED Talk by Johann Hari (my emphasis and amendments). Note: A similar study done with meth addicted rats can be found here. And Jordan Peterson has, in passing, referred to studies that show that wild rats, when presented with these highly addictive substances, refuse them and remain free and alive in the present moment of living life in the wild.

When I shared this essay with Daniel for feedback before publishing it, he prompted me to address head-on the ‘epidemic’ of psychotropics now being prescribed and ingested, particularly in the USA. With his prompt I re-arranged my essay and chose to address this societal phenomena with the following questions: to what extent is the use of legally prescribed and the legal and illegally self-administered psychotropic drugs the equivalent of the rat caged drugged bottled water? Are the drugs people use to ease their baseline anxiety their escape from the empty cage that has come to embody the lives of many who have chosen pursue happiness instead of simply choosing to be happy? (American psychotropic drug usage 2021.)

No Drugs! Hidden Behind Plastic Masks and Barriers Our “Rat Cage” Yoga Bliss Expands 

In the quarantine of April 2020 Yoshiko and I were mostly joyful with the expansion of our yogic practice. Mostly because the path of yoga is, ultimately, to release the old habits of mind and body that keep us stuck in discomfort and stress and letting them go is oftentimes fractious.

When the quarantine ended we moved into the coveted covid-ed world of outdoor lives with renewed energy and at a higher frequency of joy and awareness. We mostly shook our heads with an odd combination of amusement and sadness that so many people acted as if masks and barricades could possibly work. Why wouldn’t the virus go around the barricades?

Maybe craziest barrier: between passengers in a Mexican bus

And yet, despite the mind-barriers that most others put themselves behind, frequently we connected to people under every circumstance. The so-called virus guards are barriers of the mind only, an intangible or invisible form of the rat cage created with the overconsumption of anxiety enriched junk news, junk food, junk ideology that fills our media. This reminds me of a tiny one act play I saw in a high school acting class in which prisoners were kept ‘locked’ down with toilet paper barricades. And, of course, this was enacted in the great scene in ‘Support Your Local Sheriff,’ in which the Danby son was ‘kept’ in a jail that had no bars in the window or at the door.

However, and perhaps naïvely or even foolishly, Yoshiko and I weren’t paying attention to what was happening in the minds of those hidden behind the blatantly ineffectual barriers: the barriers were a wedge into, or even the cornerstone of the foundation on which, the creation of covid police forces as the means to create social acceptance of a Canadian police state.

Not the Best Approach to Normalise the Police State at the Beginning

We were unaware that by our silence we had abetted the constellation of mass formation. And Life does have a wicked, often peculiar irony, because we were using yoga to see our life more clearly and to ground ourselves more fully at the same time that we were oblivious to having embraced avidya, or not seeing what is true or being ignorant of what is actually happening. Avidya is one of the cornerstones of suffering as described in The Yoga Sutras by Patañjali. While we had been deeply studying yoga beyond the ‘mere’ postures (asana), we had closed our eyes to what was happening around us and in that way were not practicing ‘true’ yoga.

‘Real’ Masks as Personae Personified: A Porous Rumination with Unfiltered Questions

Why did Yoshiko and I knowingly wear masks that we perceived as both futile and unhealthy? We wore them because we didn’t want to be outsiders. Without actually looking into their effectiveness in 2020 we were certain that they couldn’t possibly work because they don’t seal around the nose and everyone was constantly adjusting them. So when we went into shops or service spaces we lived a lie and violated one of the ethical suggestions of yoga: satya, to be honest and truthful. In those spaces we moved uncomfortably sheeplike behind the masks. Everywhere else our masks were stuffed into bags, ready on hand to avoid conflict.

LoL! How symbolic of our culture is that? We wore an actual mask to symbolise the personae usually hidden behind empty smiles of an inauthentic life. We used our actual masks to hide our yogic path towards living an authentic life of increased insight and freedom in order to conform. ROTFL. Such hypocrisy.

We weren’t perfect sheep though. In those relatively rare times we wore masks we deliberately mis-wore them, keeping our noses in the air and free. Through yoga our knowledge of breath includes the fact that 95% of our body’s waste by weight leaves via our breath. We chose not to actually inhale our bodily waste and so left our noses uncovered unless directly confronted by the usually polite enforcers. After such an encounter we thumbed our noses out as soon as socially possible.

Our pseudo-acquiescence to masking turns out to have been a poor long-term action because the lack of confrontation helped to suppress the questioning of all crazy things covid. As noted above, that silence contributed to the societal acceptance of the expansion of censorship, open denigration, castigation, scapegoating and the near total loss of freedom of expressed thought. In effect, masks represented a mind-muzzle embraced by the majority that had been inculcated by pseudo-science promoted by governments acting as pharmaceutical salespeople using legacy media as megaphones. Wrong doing and error expands into evil when it is not confronted. We didn’t confront it. Mass formation formed. Evil was afoot.

Much later I read many seasoned and accredited virologists and epidemiologists state that quarantines and masks were a process that would not could not stop covid, nor any virus. Neither process works nor have they worked in the past. Which is why they haven’t been used for flus in scores of years. And, as it turned out, these scientists were right: masks and quarantines didn’t work and the injected are looking at their 4th or 5th injection and often repeat episodes of covid infection. The government and media lied on behalf of big pharma who raked in the dough. In late August 2022 the CDC and NIH quietly admitted that they lied, without a fusillade of anti-fear mongering press, by burying their admission in unannounced covid protocol changes within their webpages.

Virus 1000x Smaller than Mask Pores, so Why Did we Wear Them?

Much later I confirmed our common sense and learned that viruses are about 1000 times smaller than the pores of the “standard” surgical-type and N95 masks being sold to us. Viruses are unlikely to be even aware that masks exist. On top of that viruses don’t even care about those types of masks because viral infections usually enter the body through the eyes. Beyond that some scientists state that wearing them is unhealthy because they give viruses a warm and moist place to grow. And now they have been clearly shown to have caused development retardation with young children who learn speech in part through facial cues.

So why are we wearing them? Because the corporate legacy media told us to do it with the threat of immanent death. That turns out to have been an about face-mask: at the very beginning of the ‘pandemic’ just about every health official around the world, including the FDA’s Anthony Fauci, announced publicly that masks were useless and possibly unhealthy. Some even added the caution against wearing them because they will give a false sense of security. With alternative media and the ubiquity of communication tools it really is awesome to catch Orwellian double-speak almost as fast as it happens. For an amusing collage of public health announcements from around the world denouncing masks as useless and their subsequent about-face-mask see Face Masks: A 2020 Timeline, Who’s U-Turn & Still No High Quality Evidence.

WTF: Going Maskless got People Killed! By People, not the Virus

And beyond ‘just’ mandates, governments and their media megaphones irresponsibly incited intolerance and even violence against the anti-maskers who were often openly vilified, tracked by covid police, fined and, in some cases, physically attacked in public by their fellow citizens or police. I’ve read of two umasked people having being killed because they dared show their faces.

What is going on? Why did ‘our’ officials of health, who have the scientific studies and histories that these measures don’t work, lie to our governments and the public? I repeat: as of late August 2022, the CDC and NIH tacitly admitted to having lied when they relaxed the mandates and changed the covid protocols as having failed.

Why have our societies embraced and/or accepted self-directed intolerance and violence, censorship and loss of personal freedom? Mattias Desmet points out that we are in a state of “mass formation”, meaning we have become a society that is so anxious that we look to blame a group within our community to assuage the anxiety. This is not unique to covid: it is what happened in Germany in the 1930s, to witches, blacks, heretics, the mentally handicapped, the indigenous, etc. etc. See a great discussion of this at ‘Mattias Desmet - Psychology of Mass Formation | Real Talk with Zuby Ep. 213’ at 8:50min and Desmet’s book The Psychology of Totalitarianism.

How Now Mass Formation?

My next question is “How were the conditions generated that allowed mass formation to form?” Desmet delineates them and associates their growth with the increase of industrialisation and technology. I’ll expand on that to include what the rat cage experiments suggest is a key component to the answer. And the rates of prescribed and unprescribed drug addictions including sugar point to the same answer. And the rates of suicide, either quick or slow with poor life-habits using food, lack of exercise and/or poor relaxation, point to the same answer. Answer: most people do not feel free because they are living within the intangible psychological and emotional cage of mostly unacknowledged fear, anxiety, and the feelings of isolation and spiritual meaninglessness. In other words, the human form of the empty rat cage. (I recently published an essay looking at ‘Obedience to Authority, Mass Formation, Woke, and the Corporate News’ that examines this in more detail.)

If this is true, then why don’t we kill ourselves in a few weeks like the rats do? Fear of death is likely a big part of it. Patañjali in The Yoga Sutras includes that fear, abhinivesa in Sanskrit, as the last of the five mind-states (in Sanskrit ‘kleshas’) that create all human suffering. Buddhism similarly lists these, with slightly different language.

Fear of Death?

Yogi-Buddhist Michael Stone has an expanded definition of abhinivesa to mean the fear of letting go of the stories of “I”, “me”, “mine”. This definition includes fear of death as the ultimate end of our story. This perfectly captures why humans remain content in the misery of their intangible cages when death is not ostensibly immanent: the fear of change inside and outside of ourselves and our lives. We would rather be addicted to drugs or other things than risk changing the story of “I”, “me”, “mine”. Living with no-change in order to feel safe in the familiar while pretending that that isn’t a mind-cage form of a protracted death.

This answer seem reasonable at first. It certainly goes a long way to explain why the death-fear mongering that bombarded the world was able to successfully constellate mass formation. And yet I think that it is not quite the whole answer because it doesn’t address why those structures that create anxiety and isolation exist. For now I’ll leave that question unaddressed and loosely suggest that it has been the result of the religion of the economics of greed without addressing why that is. And Jordan Peterson often speaks of it through the adoption of nihilistic philosophies that put the human ego as the sine qua non of existence.

Desmet also says that the mass formation leads to intra-societal genocides. It seems that once the mass anxiety begins to constellate it creates a kind of feed-back loop that amplifies the anxiety and that the release of the anxiety is to kill the perceived source of that anxiety: the scapegoat. And so, unlike the rats, the mentally and emotionally caged humans in mass formation often kill the evil other instead of killing themselves. History, as mentioned above, is full of that. While Desmet points out that industrialisation is a source of the anxiety and isolation that leads to mass formation, he also gives examples of that from long before industrialisation.  I suspect that what gives the impetus towards mass formation is the social structure of mass exploitation of the many by the few. I did that before finishing this essay in my essay ‘Obedience to Authority, Mass Formation, Woke and the Corporate News’.

The Repetition of History Ad Infinitum or... What?

What to do about stopping the repetition of the history of mass formation? I suggest we go back to the rat experiment that few want to look at. Let us make human heaven on earth, with a life filled with human inter-connection, or inter-being, as Buddhist Thich Nhat Hanh calls it, which includes connection with nature.

Thich Nhat Hanh

Stop extolling the virtues of exploitation as good for the economy as if the economy and people were the same thing. And that comes down to each individual taking personal responsibility for living without valuing exploitation. Interesting how that aligns with the roots of all the great religions of the world: to stop the roots of mass formation from taking root, ground our values in something akin to spiritual verities instead of the accumulation of prestige, wealth, or power. And yet, our great religious edifices have been frequent creators of mass formation, and so the solution, if there is a “the solution”, will be to look at the roots of religious structures and canons, and to turn inward in the ways Christ and Buddha both averred.

We Continue our Inward Looking Practice, in Isolated Bliss and Full of Sincere Ignorance 

And so I continued to work full days of engineering. We continued to attend to a very healthy diet, and the practice of our inward looking yoga, breath, while remaining in total ignorance of the psychological manipulation that was being enacted by our political leaders, so-called scientists, the pharmaceuticals, and the corporate media to create obedience and with it the energy of a strong enough fear to justify the forced removal of basic human rights, even with threats of job loss, fines, and even imprisonment.

With my deepest apology, Martin Luther King, for embodying ‘sincere ignorance’.

We were silent as an evil was beginning to fill the community around us, our country and the world. I am sorry.

To be continued.