Obedience to Authority: An Exploration, Part VII Fini

On 'Mass Formation', Woke and Corporatist News: OMG! Are Yogic, Buddhist, Christian, or Other Spiritual Practices the Parasite Killer?

Continued from Obedience to Authority: An Exploration, Part VI

OMG! Are Yogic, Buddhist, Christian, or Other Spiritual Practices the Parasite Killer?

OMG! Not Yoga! Surely we’ve had enough of that millennia old panacea bullshit?

What to do about this obedience to authority parasite? Interestingly enough, these conflicting psycho-neuro-somatic energies are exactly what the roots of most spiritual practices are designed to ameliorate. In the recent language of neuroscience the effort is to move from dominance of the sympathetic system to that of the parasympathetic system, to move from a dominance of fear-flight-fight reactivity to that of calm and peaceful response. The amygdala, the core of the sympathetic system, is the reptilian brain and, who would have thought, that a significant part of that comes from the same genetic lineage as the lobster!? This brings to mind the question: is hierarchical awareness and signalling a sympathetic response given that it predates reptilian evolution?

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I would answer ‘Yes’ for two reasons. The first is because hierarchical signalling and response happens at mostly an unconscious, reactivity level and is very difficult to overcome. And the second reason is because that natural hierarchical proclivity is also assuaged with the ‘proper’ spiritual practices that move us into the prefrontal cortex from the fright-flight-fight reactivity that originates in the amygdala. Together these two reasons explain, if not wholly then significantly, one of the key concepts arising from Christ’s and the Buddha’s teachings, which is that ‘all people are created equal’. 

Voluntary Reciprocity Between Differentiated Equals

As noted, the conflicting energies of voluntary reciprocity between equals and the biological roots that have us looking for and building hierarchies will automatically and naturally create disequilibrium and flux as we negotiate, mostly unconsciously, between those energies. At their best they are the internal discomfort that allows for personal growth and self awareness. Without that irritation there doesn’t exist the incentive to improve ourselves, to find our place in the hierarchies of Self, relationships, communities and meaning. Jung and others have commented that perhaps the overriding characteristic of human behaviour is laziness and torpor. At its worst that discomfort is the shadow that gets projected outwards and becomes the social instability that, with circumstances and pressures similar to what we see now in the time of covid, become the chaos and mayhem we can see throughout history: the records of rise, decay, blood and re-birth in seemingly obvious obliviousness to a cause or reasonable rationale: we don’t learn from history. The Nuremberg Code did not stop injection experimentation without proper consent.

The true contemplative nature of most religious, spiritual and/or yogic practices are all designed to calm anxiety, to move our selves into a state of parasympathetic dominance and calmness by slowing or eliminating the reactive behaviours that are filled with blame and a lack of personal responsibility, compassion or wisdom. In a real sense, these practices are designed to move us, evolve us, out of the reptilian-lobster brain. They are truly evolutionary practices of mind-body function. And it is these practices that, when done properly, mitigate as prophylactic and treatment against the authoritarian cries for panic and fear that allow for the virus or parasite of obedience to authority to become aggressively active.

I am reminded of an interesting history about the suppression of kundalini yoga in the time of the Indian mogul expansion.

The moguls discovered that the people who seriously practiced kundalini yoga wouldn’t do what they were told to do: they simply disobeyed authority, even with the threat of death. And this increased the anxiety of the mogul conquerors: what if others practiced kundalini yoga? If that happened, the moguls feared that they would lose their power. In their effort to stop that the moguls made the public practice and teaching of kundalini yoga punishable by death. Hence it became a ‘secret’ practice for a millennium.

And with these thoughts, it really struck me how lost are the great resetters. They have projected evolution as an outward act to be imposed onto the planet and all its creatures, with GMO, creative agricultural and medicinal poisons, artificially created life simulacrums, fake food and human ‘evolution’ as some kind of mechanical hybrid android. Other people have pointed out that these puppet masters of the reset narrative are no different than past utopians who killed the other to elevate themselves in the name of some kind of perceived sociopathic heaven. Like them, today’s cabal are stuck as resentful teenagers who believe that their power to change the world is limited to blaming and destroying the faceless other, the undeserving. I see those of them that aren’t true sociopaths, and I’m sure some of them are truly sociopathic, as suffering from mass formation: they are in a state of anxiety and disconnection, with a life purpose meaning that is disconnected from life and with these discomforts express an insatiable aggression against their designated underserving. 

To blame, complain and destroy is the creative actions of the powerless. Our transhumanist cabal haven’t grown up and faced the truth of their own mortality. Nor have they realised that their need to control everyone, with smart cash, smart phones, smart algorithms, smart implants, smart human hacking is confirmation of their unacknowledged powerlessness over the ubiquity of impermanence and death. The ultimate evolutionary goal of the transhumanists is to meld into the machine and so avoid their inflated egoic demise.

‘She’ ain’t pretty, she just looks that way.

And who will be there to repair the mechanics of that immortality, I wonder? In their minds, if they have even thought about that, I imagine it is AI robots who they hope do not develop a bug that creates imagination enough to enable disobedience to authority.

Our mission, if we choose to accept it,

Self Destruct or Self Construct: The Choice is Ours To Make.

is to have the courage to be curious and open enough to see what is true in the world around us and what is true inside of us, both the ‘light’ and the ’shadow’. To ask me, my Self and I what are the myriad ways, big and small, that I have contributed to my society as it is now, an embodiment of medical, economic and other tyrannies built on corrupt hierarchies of power and perceived deservedness? And what are the ways I can live my life that remove those tyrannies from my own state of being and with that from the various communities within which I’m an integral and participating member?

Those questions are the ones that for millennia have been answered by deep inward journeys done through various means: shamanic journey states or spiritual prayer and yogic meditation practices. These are the practices that remove the anxiety-rooted energies of blame and aggressive destruction as agents of change and replaces them with personal responsibility and the power to embody and make manifest expansive creative change.

A fascinating example of taking personal responsibility for every and all aspects of our life as the agent of change and societal healing comes from the ancient Hawaiian healing spiritual art of Ho’oponopo.    

This is exquisitely expressed by the Hawaiian Ho’oponopo therapist, Dr. Ihaleakala Hew Len, who “cured an entire ward of criminally insane patients, without ever meeting any of them or spending a moment in the same room. When he arrived at the residential treatment centre, the cure rates were abysmal, morale very low, employee turnover very high. Dr. Len locked himself in his office day after day to the consternation of the staff… But after some weeks, things began to change, patients were getting better, morale was improving. How had he done this? He reviewed each of the patients’ files, and then he healed them by healing himself with [the mantra of personal responsibility for the disorder that existed within each inmate and with the institution as well]. It seems miracles do happen when you use this method, which Dr. Len calls Self I-Dentity Through Ho’oponopono (SITH).” This is, perhaps, an example of the epitome of having evolved from the amygdala and lobster into the prefrontal cortex with a total lack of deservedness hierarchy and the fright-flight-fight sympathetic system. 

Addendum: How Did Western Civilisation Build Itself Up While Hypocritically Honouring All People as Equal?

With a lot of discomfort and frequently chaotic confrontation of all kinds. For example, the USA built itself up with the explicit ideology that all people are created equal. Unless you were without land, indigenous, black, or female, who were not classified as people because they were underserving. Peterson talks about the role that the Bible, in particular, has had in the development of democracy and capitalism as the apex of human achievement because they are built on the fundamental belief in the equality of all. Max Weber, author of the interesting book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, suggests that the way that Christianity supported capitalism was in its implicit development of trust between strangers. Francis Fukuyama makes a similar with his book Trust: The Social Virtue and the Creation of Prosperity.

Francis Fukuyama: ‘Economists joke that their discipline advances one funeral at a time, but many fields must wait for wholesale generational turnover before new approaches take hold.”

Peterson also cogently argues that the ideal of equality between humans has been slow to be made fully manifest and points to it as goal towards which humanity, especially the western culture with fundamental Christian roots, has been striving towards with increasing expansiveness and success. I would add that Buddhism at its core is also striving towards that same goal of equality for all. Both Christianity and Buddhism have been encrusted with religious dogmas that obscure that fundamental foundation. It will be an interesting investigation to see how the eastern and western ideas of equality for all evolved in the ways they did. The one developed an ethic that frequently manifests itself in a violent need to dominate and control while building a capitalist economic system based on trust while the other became the practice of a pacifism that generally removed them from direct confrontation with the other and didn’t expand into an ethic of interpersonal trust with people outside the family. Fukuyama argues that that is the key reason eastern culture didn’t develop a capitalist infrastructure: large scale capitalism requires trust between strangers.

How to reconcile this disjointed conflict? Earlier I pointed out that the woke, at the extreme, hold beliefs on the arbitrariness of sexual identity so contradictory that I am surprised their brains don’t explode. And Chomsky has pointed out that journalists are able to blatantly lie while believing that they tell the truth. The obedient test subjects of Milgram thought themselves incapable of killing anyone, except maybe in self defence, and yet were actually willing to kill innocent people if told to do so in the right way. And so it is that humans have the capacity to hold conflicting ideology and beliefs in complete ignorance and/or denial.

Peterson points out that everyone thinks that they would be the people hiding Anne Frank, and yet it is the few who would when push came to obedience.

This is a lack of integration and that lack creates, in the language cited by Desmet, ‘floating anxiety.’ That floating anxiety, in the circles of therapy and recovery from addiction, is at the core of maladaptive and addictive behaviours. The successful long-lived treatment of these behaviours, the ones that aren’t unstably built on a straight force of will or on the long term ineffectiveness and danger of psychotropics, are those that remove anxiety. The most effective medicines that remove anxiety are the so-called spiritual practices around that too popular word/concept called ‘mindfulness.’ Mindfulness means, fundamentally, to bring the focus of attention and origin of action out of the amygdala’s memory, anticipatory and hierarchical functions and into the pre-frontal cortex of the present moment, the place where personal responsibility is recognised and from that awareness peace and wisdom express and transform ourselves and our communities.

The beginning of awareness in the Buddhist and Yogic traditions is ‘right seeing’,

Sanskrit ‘avidya’. And that is the challenge! Delusion knows no bounds and is always the other person’s issue.

The opposite of right seeing is propaganda. How to wake up to propaganda? To question anything that squelches curiosity and posits absolute truth on things that are truly transitory. Question the truths you have that you know don’t require questioning, the truths so true that they are invisible. Lol! So, that seems to infer that waking up means looking for the invisible truths we hold. Wow! That is a challenge.

Caution: Beware of Yoga and Yogi - Modoki

Doing yoga poses and meditation everyday does not guarantee we will evolve from the amygdala into the pre-frontal cortex. Yoga and meditation are often, perhaps most commonly, used as an addictive practice that allows for a spiritual by-pass, an effective tool to mask deep rooted, base-level anxiety. The age of covid has made that very clear, with the behaviour of so-called yogis, the yoga-modoki, who freaked out in thte time of covid instead of remaining calm. For more on that, see my discussion at:

Yoga as drug.

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End of Part VII Fini

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