By Judith Gayle | Political Waves
“There is only one perpetrator of evil on the planet: human unconsciousness.”
–Eckhart Tolle
Sandwiched between eclipses, the energy this week has been as jumpy as an irregular heartbeat. What is striking about the week’s news is that much of it came bubbling up from under the radar, catching us off guard. Dismaying accounts from Yemen and Tikrit, from the halls of Liberty University to the inner sanctum of Congress, topped off with jarring news from the French Alps, gave us all pause.
This week a plane full of unsuspecting souls lost their lives in collateral damage to ‘suicide by mentally disturbed co-pilot.’ Information discovered at the gentleman’s home revealed that he had been considered by medical staff unfit to work, but withheld evidence of his psychological issues from his employers and colleagues. Nobody second-guessed this tragedy or saw it coming. May all who are not here to answer the questions that will linger rest in peace.
Not to be flip, perhaps someone should search the files of the first presidential candidate, Ted Cruz, for similar evidence before anyone gets in the clown car with him. Ted announced his candidacy to an obligatory audience at Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University on Sunday, revealing his delusion to the nation, although there is method in Ted’s madness. Very little method, however, in Donald Trump’s, who has gone on birther-attack against Canadian-born Ted, grumpily accusing him of stealing his political slogan (the same one that he himself stole from prior generations).
Trump is so clueless to cultural issues it’s a wonder he’s managed to hold on to his daddy’s money all these years, or maybe that very insensitivity to all but his own interests is why he has. Most everyone knows these two characters are “absolutely unfit to run for office,” especially Cruz (as California Governor Jerry “Moonbeam” Brown asserted so definitively in response to questions about his candidacy on “Meet the Press” last Sunday).
It appears that, as Will Pitt tells us, “The 2016 Republican presidential race is officially underway.” Unofficially, of course, it’s been underway since the black guy took office. I’m going to quote Pitt here, because it’s too snarky to miss. Snark, I find, cuts right to the chase. It’s the kind of shorthand that captures so much more than just the facts:
Not to put too fine a point on it, but Ted Cruz is – to all intents and purposes – the true demon spawn of Joe McCarthy, Phyllis Schlafly, several small rocks and an under-watered cactus that nobody ever really loved… and now he is going to be in my kitchen for at least a year. Life is not fair, and this is not a just and decent world, and if I ever needed affirmative, irrefutable proof of this, now I have it.
I know just how he feels. I must admit to having the same response to a glimpse of Ted’s faintly sad choir-boy visage as I had to Stephen King’s evil clown, Pennywise, in his novel It, the only King book I ever had to put down for several weeks in order to collect myself for a marathon run at the ending. Perhaps it’s from early scarring of the religious kind.
Raised in a fairly liberal church, I remember a visit to a relative’s small, backwoods Southern Baptist meeting house that not only confused but distressed me. What had at first seemed kindly, was not. I was alarmed by the pulpit pounding and the sobbing tone in the preacher’s voice, the hell-fire and brimstone business that was calculated to make us all sit up straight and pay attention, the blanket energy of joylessness in the room. These people were, my mother explained later with a sniff, “holy rollers,” although I now know they were only a pimple on the posterior of the fledgling evangelical movement. Even at the age of five or six, I knew this was not a place for me.
An article at the Daily Beast contained this line, which rings like a gong to those who have developed an ear for this level of rhetoric: “It’s a tic in the vernacular of the evangelical subculture Cruz hails from to think of extravagantly passionate sincerity as evidence of honesty and probity.” I find that even here in the Pea Patch, people are wary of Ted. His kind of American dream feels very unAmerican.
Cruz is a Dominionist, anointed by his preacher father as the Messiah who has come to raise up the church, save America, and divvy up the spoils of war to the righteous. I wouldn’t kid you. You may recognize this schism as Sarah Palin’s preference, allowing no separation of church and state. Dominionism is theocracy, the same rigid and tyrannical system we abhor in Iran, only wearing a Jesus happy-face and dressed in capitalism.
The fact that we can’t actually discuss this out loud remains the most ridiculous part of our human family delusion, here in the United States. CNN recently did a piece on atheism that revealed an enormous chasm between what is factual and what is emotional about this topic. We have a long way to go before we can have that conversation without hard feelings and hate-speak. To illustrate, retired legislator Barney Frank has only now revealed his atheism. It was safer, he decided, to let his much-demonized sexuality out of the closet than his religious preference.
I linger on this topic because it will not go away soon, and because, as cartoonist Mark Fiori warns, “As a cartoonist, I really hope Senator Cruz stays in the race as long as possible. As a citizen, I hope he flames out instantly. Even though Cruz is good fun and has such crazed views he’s a made-for-satire candidate, the real story is the dark (and not-so-dark) money that will be poured into this campaign.” Strap in, kids, bumpy road ahead as we face off against a form of consciousness that celebrates fear as godly, and God as fearful.
Moving along, with Netanyahu’s big win behind him, Israel’s shift to the right has put the tiny nation’s vulnerability in the spotlight as nothing has for the last forty years. Revealing eroding approval for Palestinian apartheid and illegal building in the territories, the liberal Jewish lobby, J Street, has made it clear that they do not approve Bibi’s administration and do not consider him their spokesman. This is akin to the Red Sea parting, representing both sea change and generational shift.
John Boehner, planning his trip to visit his new BFF Bibi later this month, gave a news conference in which he asserted that he was “shocked and baffled” by the Wall Street Journal account that Israel had spied on U.S. negotiations with Iran. I believe that might be the very definition of ‘ingenuous.’ Every kid that ever watched an “NCIS” re-run on Turner Broadcasting knows that Mossad spies on everybody.
With the Saudis strafing in Yemen and the Iranians fighting in Tikrit — the Americans supporting both in a kind of schizophrenic frenzy against radicalized brutality — things have become very confusing indeed, a drama likely to ratchet higher. You can’t really tell the players without a scorecard now, and our predictable and annoying dynamic duo, John McCain and Lindsey Graham, jumped on the collapse of Yemen like a duck on a bug, pointing back at Obama’s ‘failed foreign policy.’ Each opportunity for boots on the ground excites this pair like porn, and as consequence, its been a stimulating decade for them. Imagine where we’d be today if we’d rushed to the aid of every country that has succumbed to the (r)evolutionary cadence of the Pluto/Uranus factor in recent years.
While I think it’s true that America must lead — mostly because it has accustomed other nations to suppose it must, weakening their own natural defenses and authority — we simply don’t have the resources or the stomach to police the world any longer. And while few on the left are entirely happy with Obama’s foreign policy, given his hesitation to remove our footprint from the Middle East, his dependence on drones, his national security issues, yadda, those on the right of the political spectrum seem to display so little understanding of the actual issues, the thought of handing them the reins of government chills to the bone.
We can witness that kind of “love it or leave it” mindset in the howl of outrage that met news that Bowie Bergdhal, the soldier traded for Taliban captives, has finally been charged with military crime. That Obama traded for him at all, given his transgressions, enraged the conservative warrior-class, who would likely have let him remain caged forever had they had their druthers, and even now blame him for deaths not entirely his fault.
Bergdahl — who, like so many others, entered the Army on a waiver — will face one count of desertion, and another of misbehavior before the enemy. If viewed through the compassionate lens, he could end up with only time already served (five years in captivity) followed by dishonorable discharge. If the amped-up military mind of the right-wing has its way, of course, he could serve a life sentence for his ‘cowardice’ and be damned lucky not to face a firing squad. This is, after all, the American way: the duty-before-dishonor way General George Patton would demand of a warrior nation. With so much casually overlooked in the fog of war, I doubt Bergdahl’s betrayal of the ‘band of brothers code’ celebrated by the military will be.
While we prefer to sweeten our mythology with talk of heroes and patriots, the push to recruit “dumb, stupid animals to be used as pawns in foreign policy,” as infamously pronounced by Henry Kissinger decades ago, became something of a problem during the early years of the longest war in U.S. history. As the Afghan occupation wore on, the quota for warm bodies was accomplished with a pared-down selection process that issued waivers for earlier transgressions; in Bergdahl’s case, an ignored release from the Coast Guard.
Within short order, it seemed evident that if this man was not entirely a conscientious objector, he was at minimum a deeply disenchanted soldier, desperate for an opportunity, according to lawyers, to blow the whistle against what he’d witnessed at his outpost. It’s a conundrum what happened after he wandered away, but I doubt that those of us who eschew war misunderstand the heartfelt rejection of the circumstance that drove him to leave.
A soldier who applied for and received status as a CO explained the process on Democracy Now, and I was startled that the superiors to whom he applied had no idea such a thing was even possible. During the Vietnam war, a close friend became a CO and spent his service obligation emptying bed pans and such. He had genius-range mentality and might have served his country in any number of other more effective ways had American military machinery not been intent on punishing him with ‘demeaning’ activity.
We punish. It’s who we choose to be. But are we so co-opted by the workings of the military-industrial complex and asleep to the corporate aggression that keeps the cogs of commerce turning war to profit that we no longer even TRY to mend this addiction to warfare? Bergdahl’s father, advocating for his son, wonders as well:
“I’m sorry, how can we teach two generations, at least, of children in this country that we have zero tolerance for violence, but we can occupy two countries in Asia for almost a decade? It’s schizophrenic. And no wonder this younger generation is struggling psychologically with the duplicity of this, the use of violence. The purpose of war is to destroy things. You can’t use it to govern.”
Humans have an ability that other species appear not to have. No, I’m not talking about man’s dominion over the natural world, I’m talking about humankind’s confusion over which path is appropriate, which plan is reliable, which direction is preferable. Everybody has a different opinion. If we were ants, all receiving the same essential signals, we would all be working productively toward some similar goal, but instead we’re all — as Eckhart Tolle tells us –“victims of the collective manifestations of insanity that lies at the heart of the human condition.”
We are subject to the distorted perceptions of our earthly senses and we’ve made quite a mess of it. But Tolle tells us that the ego — fixated on ‘fear, greed and the desire for power’ — is destined to dissolve:
” … and all its ossified structures, whether they be religious or other institutions, corporations or governments, will disintegrate from within, no matter how deeply entrenched they appear to be. The most rigid structures, the most impervious to change, will collapse first.”
In his book, A New Earth, Tolle goes on to explain the pain-body which aligns with our victim consciousness, often responsible for our unconscious response to stimulus. We can translate that into a vibrational resonance that pulls things into our experience, like a Karmic magnet. When recognized, the realization that something other than our higher self is creating our reality becomes a deal-breaker, loosening illusion’s grip. When we become aware, then, we can begin to carve away what is not real, not authentic, changing our pattern. Unless we change our pattern, we cannot evolve into the new thing we so desire.
All these people we’ve discussed today — the Saudis and the Yemenis and the Dominionists; Ted Cruz and Donald Trump and Joe McCarthy; the gung-ho soldiers and Henry Kissinger? All family. All cousins, as Eric would say. Not just members of the human family, but part of Maya, the delusional consciousness of form that so often blindsides us. A Course In Miracles would tell us there is only One Son — us. Tolle says there is only One Consciousness — us. That will become our truth only when we realize and inhabit it.
Beginning with the witness of our own little slice of consciousness, then, we can begin to free ourselves from pattern, and hold a similar vision of freedom for our brothers and sisters. The more we observe our selves, the more we are able to observe and discharge (lose the charge toward.) When things are as confused and confusing as we find them today, stepping up into freer form and larger view can eliminate pain, if we will allow it.
As members of one consciousness then, what we bring to understanding today not only changes how we see things, but how things will be seen. That can look very dire, as it appears right now, but Tolle tells us we’re destined to evolve in these extraordinary times, and quickly. Here is the rest of the quote begun at the top of the page, giving us a — simple, Tolle says, but not easy — template for a healed world, a way to view the news of the day and the drama of the moment, a prayer for the whole of our human family:
“There is only one perpetrator of evil on the planet: human unconsciousness. That realization is true forgiveness. With forgiveness, your victim identity dissolves, and your true power emerges — the power of Presence. Instead of blaming the darkness, you bring in the light.”
