Good-Bye Woke:
It Was Fun While It Lasted
Am I Dreaming Still, or Really Waking Up to Woke — Again?
While sharing a delicious meal with a friend and his twenty-one year old son, whom I met the week earlier, I made a comment critical of woke.
We had met during a lovely walk up a gentle mountain trail north of the cabaña I’m living in. And we went off trail and wound up bushwhacking a long way round back to the official trail and then walking back up the trail to recover a small backpack. It was a wonderful way to explore our meeting and for me to learn that he has recently become interested in spirituality and the possible immaterial/irrational aspects of being alive that impact the quality of being a human creature on earth. The start of his exploration of the spiritual questions of his existence was prompted, in part, by his girlfriend. His introduction to this is with the gentle Ekhart Tolle and Ram Dass.
This night we were enjoying good Mexican food and an engaging discussion about various aspects of being alive. During a turn of the conversation the how/why of my being in Oaxaca became part of the discourse. I briefly described the various choices I made to reject the injection at the cost of my employment and that that choice eventually resulted in my decision to leave Canada as a covid refugee. See
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And I described some of the tyrannical illogic and craziness I encountered especially when leaving Canada. I elaborated, paraphrased, that I became aware that my journey from Canada wasn’t really about becoming a refugee from convidiana. It is a spiritual journey towards something ineffable, although the ineffable might be suggested by freedom from internal tyranny and loosening the power of my own appropriate eccentric expression in each moment-action-opportunity. I now see that my rejection of medical tyranny was actually a giant leap into freedom to express eccentric me.
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I did not expand the discussion to include the dangers of the injection, the pretty obvious long term planned nature of it as a military operation guided by the DoD in the USA (and likely Canada too), with connections to the WEF and the WHO, etc. And when he said ‘I’ve not read anything that makes me believe that the injection is dangerous’ I successfully remained quiet and did not reply ‘You’re not reading in the right places.’ And thus, I acquiesced to the tyrannical nature of the times while going against all current advice to wake people up lest they become at some point down the road of time the jailers or executioners of we the uninjected undeserving non-people. I chose to allow that spiked elephant to remain comfortably alone to tipple mRNA shots in the corner as the rate of increase in the number of all cause excess mortalities continues to grow that elephant and to rise in the highly injected countries.
He did respond more fully when, paraphrased, I casually commented on the woke as an ideological group. It was in reference to what I thought was the pretty obvious tyrannical nature of ‘woke’ actions in schools about language, gender, sexuality, race, etc. He expressed his displeasure at that term because it creates an unhelpful categorisation that negates conversation. And he cited himself as an example because as a ‘liberal’ who believes in universal health care he gets lumped into the black abyss of the woke holiness.
And, of course, he is correct. And I said to him that he is correct. My glibly defining people as being within a group of anything, in this case woke, is a kind of arrogant simplification with an authoritarian structure. That simplification has the potential, if not the actuality, of contributing to the destructive energy of tribalism that generates that deserving/ underserving split we humans seem attracted to and that can quickly be turned by manipulative authoritarian leaders into concentration camps like what happened in some places during convid. (Trudeau in Canada had begun the process of contracting out their formation before the truckers surprised him. New York still has some kind of legal okay to create them and forcibly fill them.) And before the concentration camps got created in Canada or NY State we saw the craziness of mob attacks against free speech, especially at universities and hospitals. And we saw the removal of once respected people from their employment for wrong-speak that had put them into the woke world of an undeserving non-human. And with convid anyone who didn’t publicly toe the line with the presented scientism faced public shunning that often included loss of employment, loss of accreditation and professional respect, and loss of community including loss of family.
At the time I agreed with my young companion that my unthinking categorisation wasn’t necessarily helpful to allow conversations to continue and that it contributes to divisiveness. I added that that has the same effect as the left’s attacks on Trump and the so-called right — and snap, I’d named three more categories, ‘left’, ‘right,’ and ’Trump’.
And yet… that leaves us lowly language users in a peculiar catch-22 because, as discussed by me elsewhere in this substack and by most philosophers worth their weight in salt, how are we to use words in a way that doesn’t inherently create categories and groups? Until we are willing to see the elephants, we won’t talk about them. And when we do have the double courage both to see and then talk about that elephant our language by structure has created some kind of categorisation that by necessity distinguishes between those who see the elephant and those who do not. Even Gautama had categories to distinguish groups, not to separate them because the sleeper-awakened separation happens as naturally as oil distinguishing itself from water. Even Gautama used adjectives to distinguish between the awake, āryapudgala, and the unawake: puthujjana or pṛthagjana. That is language and, of course, that makes perfect sense because without being able to perceive distinction then language itself could not exist. (And unsurprisingly this hints at the spirituality that is well described by Patañjali in his last four limbs of yoga that discuss the distinguishable nuance of differing states of mindfulness in meditation practices. The Yoga Sutras.)
It is very tempting in this age of the very overt use of divisive psyop techniques to blame woke on something left that distinguishes it from the so-called right. That was how I used woke that night, for example. And how it has been used in research I’ve read with the rise of woke as a leftist activity that would have made Marx and Lenin very happy. And that Jordon Peterson frequently refers to as a leftist behaviour.
My dinner companion’s quiet and firm rebuttal got me thinking in two ways. Initially his claim that he is a ‘good’ liberal who supports things like ‘universal health care’ jiggled something that gave space for an intuitive awareness to become conscious. At its heart, at its base, universal health plans rests on an authoritarian platform to work and that within that platform the needs of the few are, rationally, sacrificed to meet the needs of the many. And that is woke, by the largely accepted definition — which I’ll show a bit later, is divisively being used by failure to properly attribute it to the right as well. This principle was, clearly, one of the cornerstones of the largely successful convidiana ‘slap stick slick schtick fear attack’, perhaps the key one. “We will nobly sacrifice the rights of, and even lives of, the few to save the lives of the many.” That was, of course, actually a lie. It was, though, the active hard sell that was the root of those discussions I had with co-workers or others about my state of being selfishly killing grandmothers because I was uninjected.
And the so-called humanitarian liberals have sucked up this ‘woke’ ideology with zealous self-proclaimed humanistic ideology within which they see themselves striving to create a society of rigidly defined categories in order to manage them with a disconnected ideological humanity — their version of free people under a maternalistic protective thumb — of course, because they know best and their control-freakism is maternalistically a too obvious social good to require either explanation or truth. No questioning please with threat of shunning or pillory.
In this constructed ideology there is no room for the individual who, as rationalised collateral damage, gets to be pilloried in various ways. Mine was with job loss leading to becoming for six months homeless and settling in another country as a refugee. (I supply the more powerful example of Wilhelm Reich below.) And that is exactly what was happening pre-convid since 9/11 and went off the charts with-convid. For example, my woke sister number three took time to completely re-write the letter that I’d sent to her. She explained that she had expected me to write my story to support her narrative — my paraphrase — of my leaving Canada in order that my story, I infer, would keep her feeling safe as if my expression of my experience of having become an undeserving refugee in the time of covid was hurting her. She explained herself in a manner as if I were a child needing to be spanked by some kind of benevolent maternalistic authoritarian grandmother who is wise in the ways of language correctness. I literally laughed at the insanity it represented as she completely redefined my experience to fit her narrative of the truth of life. She had tricked herself to living the lie as if that would make her happy. And she has no idea that that is a form of authoritarianism and a kind of self-generated group-think tyranny that keeps her from seeing what is happening in life.
And the ideology ‘for their own good’ is what Jasun Horsley astutely calls the soft-gloved tyranny of a gynocracy because it is without the obvious boot to the head of Orwell’s tyranny. This idea forms part of his thesis in his book Big Mother: The Technological Body of Evil. This tyranny has manifested itself as an act of love and the sleepers, left and right, do not see that that is in fact the tyranny of the devouring mother. Jordan Peterson warned the world in 2016 that the woke language police who had come after him as both a Nazi and a Stalinist were a kind of elephant-sized canary in the undeserving mine of tyrannical minds creeping into the society as minders of right group think. He failed to appreciate that the rationale of being nice was to be the edge of the convid con of keeping your grandmother alive by injecting yourself with a trust-me smile and a club.
The Second Woke Awareness That Arose
While I was mentally playing with the above ideas I realised at the time I didn’t actually know what I meant by ‘woke’ and the knee-jerk assignment of putting it on the left side of things. Beyond the obvious idea that we still have the delusion that left means for the good of the people. Wow, the psychological effects of that psyop is so deeply entrenched that the left Obama is a peacenik with starting more than one war during his term and gutting the government coffers to feed the banks. And on the other hand, Trump is death and social destruction when he was the first US president since the Second World War who didn’t initiate a war and expanded peace in several parts of the world and really attended to the working class in the USA.
Synchronicity on Target of Woke and Authoritarian Structures
Yesterday I talked with my friend who is working with his own expansive waking up from being a trusting American. That’s my paraphrase of what I see and hear from his description of his perception of the increased destructiveness to America and Americans in recent years by the so-called left governments. What he saw saddened him so much that he decided to leave the USA and look to find renewed (renewable?) life in Mexico. He was kind of reminiscing about how ‘nice’ the USA was before … some time before the 2000s, maybe, either before the orchestrated banking collapse to transfer wealth out from the middle class, or perhaps the manufactured [demolition] collapse of the three World Trade Centre towers. He wasn’t clear about when the change occurred, although it was after the illegal Vietnam invasion by America.
When I suggested that my reading of Chomsky points out that his sense of the relative ‘niceness’ of pre-sometime America is actually not true he politely deflected away my comment because, he said, it was still pretty good for the average American in the 90s and early 00s. Life was rich and comfortable. Now the synchronicity. Last week by ‘chance’ I was directed to read a book via someone on substack. I was directed to especially read the introduction to it. I read it yesterday night and it has become part of this essay and linked to my friend’s false perception of the niceness of the America of his younger days. The book is Wilhelm Reich In Hell By Robert Anton Wilson. I’ve included a substantial citation because the book, published in the 1980s, describes the oppressive tyrannical nature of the American scient(ism) world going back to the 1950s with the burning of Reich’s books and research and then putting him in jail because he refused to bend his head to the medical tyranny he and others like him experienced. He died in jail.
Woke! I Wake Up To Woke With A Proposed Definition — And a Categorical Reduction!
Woke is the practice of denying the validity of individual human experience as a sovereign, self regulating individual born with that as a much more than an inalienable right. It is the absolute inherent truth of physical existence that occurs with birth and that likely began at conception. Woke is the efforts to stamp that individuality out using narcissistic tools of trauma disguised as ‘good for you’ rules and unconscious behaviours that separate the body from the mind-spirit. And that those efforts often begin almost immediately after birth in some (many) cases using various techniques of creating trauma augmented by the organised schooling system of indoctrination and perpetuating fear-based social constructs.
With this definition ‘woke’ is neither left nor right. It is about oppression and suppression of the individual to the benefit of the oppressors. One of the great apocalypses of the convid attempt was that the organising oppressive bodies have carelessly or accidentally displayed themselves in way they’ve not done before so that we now see that they have been manipulating we the oppressed in various ways for years. One of their tools of oppression is extending the delusion that there is a left and a right and that left-right labels are real and not tools of oppression. ‘Woke’ and like words now can be seen as a tool to perpetuate delusion and deflect away from our personal traumas.
With this realisation I’ve dropped ‘woke’ out my language because it is energising tyranny in the form of oppression and suppression in the same way I’ve dropped ‘have to’ and ‘should’ out of my vocabulary. I’ll see how I can drop political labels of ‘left’ and ‘right’ from my language as well. See
Unseen Stockholm Syndrome And Other Oddities of Being Alive in a MisSpelled See of Words
Boldly Going Where No Other Synchronicity has Gone Before: Predictive Programming
A spiritual client who has been waking up more and more deeply sees now that her once favourite show, ‘Star Trek’, is filled with predictive programming.
She explained this to me yesterday and today Jeff Childers linked to ‘Star Trek’: ‘Spock’s Illogic: “The Needs of the Many Outweigh the Needs of the Few”’ by Ari Armstrong September 12, 2013.
Childers commented that a pro-spiker he engaged with in an actual, and unique for now, conversation openly ‘.. admitted [that the real] risk of injury [by injection] is outweighed by a broad, intangible communal benefit: a utilitarian ethic that prioritises the needs of the many over the needs of the few, or the one, as Spock so coldly put it in a series of 1980’s Star Trek movies.’ I read the article to which Childers linked and Armstrong has a more nuanced approach than that broad sweep of group priority Childers highlighted. Although Armstrong’s argument fails, in my opinion, in an amusing and another, for me, synchronistic way.
Armstrong makes a logical argument that supposedly reconciles Spock’s logic with the human reality of emotions. He denigrates the emotions without reason by describing them as incapable of providing knowledge. For Armstrong ‘our means of knowledge is reason’ and that reason has the power to either take or leave our emotions as part of the logical weighting of objects. In other words, he has assigned emotions as objects that reason can manage, which completely defies the reality of the well documented power of emotions frequently to obliterate reason! However, Armstrong has with this ‘trick’ of the mind given to the mind its manna, dualistic pro-con arguments that disallow the tertium quid, or in Tereza Coraggio’s phrase, ‘the third paradigm.’
And that was the segue in perfect synchronistic timing to my having listened to, on the same day, Coraggio’s recent fun critique, using well expressed arguments of ideas, with a man imprisoned by an emotional belief that atheism has logically removed emotion from him so that he is free of them. He totally doesn’t see that he became simply totally free to project his emotions onto Tereza, which he did, as a way of by-passing the logical arguments Coraggio elegantly supplied him with. See
for a fun look at an avowed atheist blindly projecting the denied emotions and ‘god-energy’ we seem to be illogically born with.
Outliers as Appropriate Eccentric Action: Play the Trump Card
Before I had refined my definition above I had continued to wrestle with the challenge of what is ‘woke,’ and its populist association with leftist tyranny. And it came to me that amongst the left’s greatest oppressive behaviours might be the hate-Trump-as-inhuman practices we have seen for (OMG!) ten years. Why this off-the-charts pillorying of this man? My sense is that he is a real threat to the people who have most significantly abandoned the value of the individual for the group because he is far closer to being an eccentric individual creating appropriate eccentric actions than he is a walking puppet that most everyone attacking him seems to have become. Anti-individual practitioners cannot survive individuals and individualistic behaviours. I suspect that they sense that in Trump there is actually an individualistic human energy that resonates with and perhaps touches a core truth of human existence that the group identifiers deny and are frightened of: that we were born individuals and free and this is the core of his popularity with the citizenry.
So ‘Woke’ is Neither Left Nor Right: It is Part of the Psyop Game. Evidence? Wilhelm Reich in Hell
Going forward I’m dropping my voice out and allowing others to speak on my behalf. I’m not deferring to their authority. It is simply that the sources have well expressed these issues, on my behalf, without knowing I would be tapping them on the shoulders some 30 or more years since they were written.
…
Then came the news in the fall of 1957. Wilhelm Reich had died in jail. This was indeed a great shock. I think we are the losers here. Reich was a great innovator as well as a creative and experimental clinician. It is a blot against the intellectual climate of society that he has been denied the freedom of expressing and disseminating his ideas, whatever they were. It is an even greater crime against freedom of scientific thought that he was imprisoned — regardiess of the fact that he had violated a legal injunction and then refused adequately to defend himself. He felt no court of law was fit to adjudge scientific discovery and progress.
I am deeply concerned with this infringement of the basic freedom of expression of scientific thought and creativity. We run the risk, if it is continued as it was in his case, of becoming imprisoned in a police state where not only our ordinary activities and secular movements are controlled and regulated, but our thinking as well. This is a condition which violates the basic mental climate and attitudes of the fathers of the American revolution. Perhaps Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson today might have been considered subversive individuals and have been investigated by a government agency (p. v. Christopher S. Hyatt, Ph.D. from Foreward 1987).
…
It was with some horror and considerable indignation, then, that I reacted to the news, in 1957, that the U.S. government had seized all the scientific books and papers of Dr. Wilhelm Reich and burned them in an incinerator in New York City. This was only twelve years after the U.S. had fought a prolonged and bitter war against Nazi Germany and I had been raised on anti-Nazi propaganda in which the Nazi "crime against freedom" in burning books had been stressed as much as their crimes against humanity in killing people. I was astounded and flabbergasted that the U.S. government was imitating its former enemy to the extent of actually burning scientific papers it found heretical.
…
Thirty years have passed since Reich's books were burned, and I have never stopped wondering about the broad political and philosophical implications of the Reich case. William Butler Yeats once said that we make rhetoric out of our dispute with others and art out of our dispute with ourselves, and Wilhelm Reich in Hell, a Punk Rock Opera, is my attempt to make dramatic art out of my dispute with myself about the ambiguities and unsolved enigmas of the life and persecution of Dr. Reich. This introduction, I suppose, only makes political rhetoric out of my dispute with others--specifically, my dispute with those New Inquisitors who burned Reich's books and have continued, ever since, to follow in the arrogant and authoritarian footsteps of the Papacy while inconsistently proclaiming their allegiance to Science.
My suspicion that we are not living in a totally free and rational society, while reading The Mass Psychology of Fascism [by Wilhelm Reich], shortly after the burning of the publisher's stock of that book, has not left me. As three decades have passed, I have seen increasing evidence to support Reich's argument that beneath the "liberal" surface of respectable intellectual people there is a dark underside that can very easily flame up into a fascist fury in times of stress and anxiety.
The Coming Of The New Inquisition
Few can doubt that there si something akin to an Inquisitorial spirit abroad in the scientific community these days. Dr. Reich was neither the first nor the last victim of those "Popish" mentalities who want to turn Science into a new Theology and punish al heretics who sin against Dogma.
…
In the early 1980s, Nature, one of the most prestigious scientific journals in England, proposed that a book by the biologist, Dr. Rupert Sheldrake should be burned, as Reich's books were 30 years earlier.¶
¶NB: I looked for that on-line at Nature and found ‘A Book For Burning’ when I searched for Sheldrake published in 1981. Unfortunately it is behind a paywall. I did find a publication in Nature published in 1990 by James E. Lovelock that was open. In the article Lovelock makes reference to ‘science’ wanting to burn Sheldrake’s ideas/books and his own concern that he would run afoul of the scientism inquisitors. Lovelock’s review of The Rebirth of Nature: The Greening of Science and God.
I felt uneasy when writing this review. This new inquisition [of scientism] will surely use anything favourable I say about someone they regard as a real heretic as evidence of my own delinquency.
Perhaps Lewis Wolpert was right to say "Sheldrake's ideas are just nonsense", but for others to call them dangerous , or a threat to science, goes too far. The theory of formative causation makes testable predictions, although nothing has yet been reported that would divert the mainstream of science. Even if it is nonsense, errors, in the golden days of science, were well regarded. As Vilfredo Pareto said of Kepler, we should "prize the fruitful error, full of seeds bursting with their own corrections." Recognising this need for fruitful errors, I do not regard the book as dangerous. Ideas like morphogenetic fields or morphic resonance may not even be good guesses, but burning might give them that piquant smoked flavour of martyrdom. Entertaining and informative though it is, I do not think this book yet merits such an accolade. The question is, are the errors fruitful?
I think so, if only because they identify the real danger to science: the acceptance of a censorship of ideas and the isolation of science in a naive mechanical reductionism. In certain ways the scientific establishment has grown to resemble Eastern Europe of a few years ago. Deviations from the materialistic creed are pilloried as threats to science, whereas patent nonsense, like cold fusion, is swallowed whole. Science is not threatened by the imaginative ideas of the Sheldrakes of the world, but by those who would censor them. Sheldrake is a threat, but only to the established positions of those who teach and practice an authoritarian science. A healthy scientific community would accept or reject formative causation as the evidence appeared (‘A Danger To Science?’ by James E. Lovelock, 1990; my emphasis).
And this has an odd ‘morphic’ resonant synchronicity with a recent post from El Gato Malo.
“sacrificing the sacred ideas upon the altar of discourse: only that which is dead may cease to struggle” 27 Dec 2023
Resume Wilson’s introduction to Wilhelm Reich in Hell:
I pass no judgment on the validity of the ideas of[Dr. William] Ivy, [not found on-line] [Immanuel] Velikovsky, [Timothy] Leary or [Rupert] Sheldrake. I merely point out that none of them were refuted by scientific evidence in a systematic way; they were just declared Heretical and Damned, and only a few individualists have ever tried to re-open any of these cases and investigate impartially if the hysteria against these researchers was entirely justified. Meanwhile, somebody who knew only recent history and was unaware of the past might come to the conclusion that Science, not Theology, is the main enemy of free thought and free enquiry.
Most of this Papal Authoritarianism in the scientific community emanates from a group called the American Humanist Association and its off shoot, the Committee for Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP) [now called ‘Committee for Skeptical Enquiry (CSI)]. The British author, Guy Lyon Playfair, has described Martin Gardner and the other ring-leaders of this movement as [scientism’s] "witch-hunters." We will shortly see that the label is hardly excessive (4-6).
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My case for thinking the breakdown of our civilisation may be the breakthrough to a higher level of civilisation is in my book, Prometheus Rising. Here I am willing to leave the question open. Whether the zombi-like impassivity of the majority, as a Holocaust worse than Hitler's is being prepared before our eyes, represents a temporary shock, which will lead to a higher level of evolution, or whether it represents the Emotional Plague diagnosed by Reich, is something only the future will reveal.
Are people capable of waking up and taking responsibility, as I hope, or are they so trapped by Character Armour that they will follow their leaders, like the robots at Jonestown, right up to the final mass suicide? Reich's writings force us to examine that question with the urgency it deserves, and I suspect that that is why his books got burned (pp 45-46 Anton Wilson Foreward; my emphasis).
Wilhelm Reich In Hell By Robert Anton Wilson.
Reich Who? A Bit More Information
Here is an citation from a detailed review, that includes Reich’s association with Freud and communism and then rejection of both. For example:
Around the same time, [Reich] began to question and ultimately reject Freud’s death instinct hypothesis. He became increasingly disillusioned with psychoanalysis as its proponents concentrated more on the development of theory rather than clinical practice and treatment of disorders. The pursuit of human freedom, for Reich, lies in what he termed “Work-Democracy.” It included a rejection of politics and the totalitarian state and rested on assuming direct social responsibility for the practical functions of life. “This democracy is borne by the functions of love, work, and knowledge and is developed organically” (‘Wilhelm Reich’s The Mass Psychology of Fascism by William Stroud, my emphasis).
Control: The Lot of Gnostic Egalitarian Social Structure is Authoritatively Quashed
We have noted before how the author of the Apocalypse of Peter ridicules the claims of church officials:
Others . . . outside our number ... call themselves bishops and also deacons, as if they had received their authority from God. • • . Those people are waterless canals.
The Tripartite Tractate, written by a follower of Valentinus, contrasts those who are gnostics, "children of the Father," with those who are uninitiates, offspring of the demiurge. The Father's children, he says, join together as equals, enjoying mutual love, spontaneously helping one another. But the demiurge's offspring — the ordinary Christians — “wanted to command one another, out-rivalling one another in their empty ambition"; they are inflated with "lust for power," "each one imagining that he is superior to the others.”
If gnostic Christians criticised the development of church hierarchy, how could they themselves form a social organisation? If they rejected the principle of rank, insisting that all are equal, how could they even hold a meeting? Irenaeus tells us about the practice of one group that he knows from his own congregation in Lyons the group led by Marcus, a disciple of Valentinus’. Every member of the group had been initiated: this meant that every one had been "released" from the demiurge's power. For this reason, they dared to meet without the authority of the bishop, whom they regarded as the demiurge's spokesman — Irenaeus himself! Second, every initiate was assumed to have received, through the initiation ritual, the charismatic gift of direct inspiration through the Holy Spirit.
How did members of this circle of "pneumatics" (literally, "those who are spiritual") conduct their meetings? Irenaeus tells us that when they met, all the members first participated in drawing lots. Whoever received a certain lot apparently was designated to take the role of priest; another was to offer the sacrament, as bishop; another would read the Scriptures for worship, and others would address the group as a prophet, offering extemporaneous spiritual instruction. The next time the group met, they would throw lots again so that the persons taking each role changed continually.
This practice effectively created a very different structure of authority. At a time when the orthodox Christians increasingly discriminated between clergy and laity, this group of gnostic Christians demonstrated that, among themselves, they refused to acknowledge such distinctions. Instead of ranking their members into superior and inferior "orders" within a hierarchy, they followed the principle of strict equality. All initiates, men and women alike, participated equally in the drawing; anyone might be selected to serve as priest, bishop, or prophet. Furthermore, because they cast lots at each meeting, even the distinctions established by lot could never become permanent "ranks." Finally — most important — they intended, through this practice, to remove the element of human choice. A twentieth-century observer might assume that the gnostics left these matters to random chance, but the gnostics saw it differently. They believed that since God directs everything in the universe, the way the lots fell expressed his choice.
Such practices prompted Tertullian to attack "the behavior of the heretics":
How frivolous, how worldly, how merely human it is, without seriousness, without authority, without discipline, as fits their faith! To begin with, it is uncertain who is a catechumen, and who a believer: they all have access equally, they listen equally, they pray equally — even pagans, if any happen to come. ... They also share the kiss of peace with all who come, for they do not care how differently they treat topics, if they meet together to storm the citadel of the one only truth.... All of them are arrogant... all offer you gnosis!
The principle of equal access, equal participation, and equal claims to knowledge certainly impressed Tertullian. But he took this as evidence that the heretics "overthrow discipline": proper discipline, in his view, required certain degrees of distinction between community members. Tertullian protests especially the participation of "those women among the heretics" who shared with men positions of authority: "They teach, they engage in discussion; they exorcise; they cure — he suspects that they might even baptise, which meant that they also acted as bishops! (Pp40-2 The Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagels; my emphasis.)
More on the Lot of Drawing By Lot to Remove Oppressive Government Practices
In 2004 I presented a paper on the self corrupting nature of the electoral process and proposed instead to create a governing body by lot. See: “STV vs FPP vs Governance by Lot: On the Self-Corrupting Nature of Electioneering — And an Alternative”.
A few years later I discovered that this is an old idea. Aristotle talked about it. I wrote about that here: “MP Election by Lot — Secondary Rumination Pt 2.”
And now in recent weeks I read that the Gnostics had effectively done just that thing. Fascinating. And few know of this, in the age of controlled narratives and careful indoctrination practices.
Thank you for reading.
Addendum 2024.11.22
Today I came upon a great and interesting discourse from James Lindsay and his discourse Is the “Woke Right” Really Woke?. A great addendum to my essay, imo. Very detailed look at the similarities in function and, loosely, intention: authoritative rule.
Or you can find him here:
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Request for Help
In July of 2024 I had unexpected pacemaker surgery that cleaned out my savings.
I requested donations to help me through the pinch. I anticipate that my immediate threat of insolvency will be cleared before the end of the year.
If you have come to this essay before January 1, 2025, and you are in position to help and would like to, you can check out the details of that in the link in the post. Once my yoga based trauma recovery centre is given the green light with confirmation of my residency, I anticipate the need for immediate financial help will disappear. As the situation changes I will update my requirements. At this time, I’m about 1/3 of what I anticipate is required. So if you are curious and would like to help me, please consider my request for donations and give an amount, if you are called to do so, that gives you joy. I appreciate and am grateful for you giving me your consideration.
Closing Song Of The Essay
Lyrics
[Verse 1]
I lost my heart
Under the bridge
To that little girl
So much to me
And now I moan
And now I holler
She'll never know
Just what I found
[Verse 2]
That blue-eyed girl (That blue-eyed girl)
She said, "No more" (She said, "No more")
And that blue-eyed girl (That blue-eyed girl)
Became blue-eyed whore ('Came blue-eyed whore)
Down by the water (Down by the water)
I took her hand (I took her hand)
Just like my daughter (Just like my daughter)
Won't see her again (See her again)
[Verse 3]
Oh help me, Jesus
Come through this storm
I had to lose her
To do her harm
I heard her holler (I heard her holler)
I heard her moan (I heard her moan)
My lovely daughter (My lovely daughter)
I took her home (I took her home)
[Outro]
Little fish, big fish, swimming in the water
Come back here, man, gimme my daughter
Little fish, big fish, swimming in the water
Come back here, man, gimme my daughter
Little fish, big fish, swimming in the water
Come back here, man, gimme my daughter
Little fish, big fish, swimming in the water
Come back here, man, gimme my daughter
Little fish, big fish, swimming in the water
Come back here, man, gimme my daughter
Little fish, big fish, swimming in the water
Come back here, man, gimme my daughter
Little fish, big fish, swimming in the water
Come back here, man, gimme my daughter
Little fish, big fish, swimming in the water
Come back here, man, gimme my daughter
If you think that woke was awful in my opinion it will seem like a playful saturday afternoon picnic
compared to what will most probably happen if Donald Trump (Orange Jesus) is elected and gains the political power to deal with all of those who he as defined as the enemies of the "real" American people.
I was thinking how many of us seem to be writing about arguments lately, and then saw my link. What a lovely surprise! You've probably noted that I've continued the theme with How to Have a Better Argument. Your point about woke is salient. It's probably time to retire it but it was fun while it lasted!
Your playlist is a delight. I listened to the last first because I'd be looking for that song. The spooky whispered refrain of 'little fish, big fish, swimming in the water. Come back here and give me my daughter" has haunted me so much I thought I might have written it. But there it was!
And the first Arcade Fire was one I used in my long-ago radio show. My 'producer' Skidmark Bob came up with it I'm sure. He introduced me to so much music that fit into my themes, as do you.
I never knew about Wilhelm Reich, who died when I was six months old. Or what Rupert Sheldrake went through. Or that Gregory Bateson was married to Margaret Meade!
And now I really need to dust off Pagels and read it. This is fascinating! I'll certainly be referencing it. A friend of mine, John Mabry, did a series of sermons on Heretics, Mystics and Misfits. It had so much that shook the foundations of the basilica! You would like him, I think. He also has a reading of the Tao called God as Nature Sees God.
Okay, I finished folding the laundry listening to your playlist. Time to debone some duck so I can listen more.