”Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blind-folded fear.” –

Thomas Jefferson

How Long Will They Kill Our Prophets?

If your are even slightly familiar with Plato, you may know that some of his most fervent writing came after his teacher Socrates was sentenced to death for the crime of “impiety”. It was a charge levied against him by the tyrannical Athenian government who believed that “might is right” and who Socrates repeatedly opposed for their “style over substance” governing that he felt led to the decline of virtue in his region. His sentence is not much different than that of Jesus centuries later accused of “blasphemy” and given over to the torture device that you can recognize on the façade of most churches nowadays, only after he lived antithesis to the oppressions of the Roman administration. If it behooves you to know, Socrates, like Jesus, did not accept his badge as a wise man, but instead believed what was later found in biblical writings “that those who think they are wise are not wise.” It was his belief that man must first admit his own ignorance before the portals of higher truth and consciousness can be opened to him. Another great statesmen against acts of injustice, Martin Luther King, found himself burdened by the truth and troubled by the atrocities in Vietnam and spoke out on April 4, 1967: “Even when pressed by the demands of inner truth, men do not easily assume the task of opposing their government’s policy, especially in time of war…but a time comes when silence is betrayal.”

These were great philosophers who came about as byproducts of the spirit of tyranny that was allowed to assume leadership in the highest levels of government. The philosophical revolutionary seems to always rise to prominence in times of nefarious tyranny, in environments where society has been hi-jacked by those who use neither reason, wisdom, nor ethos as guiding principles. Rather there can be found the most practiced forms of cunning, trickery, and deception on a mass scale to keep the citizenry sedated with nonsense. This massive seduction of the population, an attempt to minimize revolution, riot or revolt, undermines its own cause, as there is always produced some individual or individuals privy to the game who work to enlighten their fellow man. It is not some emotional drill that brings about this radical reconstitution in an individual. It just so happens, that after numerous encounters with the truth, in which an individual all too often walks away unnerved and content in his ignorance, that truth one day causes a fissure in that deceptive force that surrounds him and seeps into the crack. That one small truth stands as a behemoth to the many kingdoms of misery and delusion that have been established within. If that individual in that window of inner revolutions braces the sword of ultimate reality, he sets about destroying those kingdoms.

Icons such as the philosophers of the past admitted their own ignorance, and through serious contemplation, recognized that the fantasies being presented to them, the contradictive forms of democracy were not rooted in virtue, justice or truth. It alarmed them to look out upon the world only to witness a decaying culture. That inner “calling” as some classify it began them on journeys that lifted them into higher realms of thinking and put them at odds with the popular sentiments of the day. Our problem lies in the belief that these philosophers are on a pedestal beyond our reach. We commend them for their “supernormal” ability to communicate ideas above our sphere of existence, but continue, through neglect and indifference, to protect the very machinations in our lives and world that could lift us to higher states of truth if we could only rid ourselves of them.

When Plato wrote, “death is not the worst that can happen to man” there was a time, not too long ago, that I would disagree. I was reared in a fire and brimstone environment so that I viewed death as something I had to approach with tremulous apprehension. It was a fear that rooted itself in my daily routine and the only reward for me was unnecessary stress. Why do we hold such unhealthy fears of death? Part of it surely lies in that what awaits us is a passage into a territory of the unknown. For all the spiritual missives that have been penned throughout history, the aftermath of our material existence and the uncertainty of the destination have not been answered.

That surely affects the ideas we have of a spiritual death, which is not a death as much as it is an awakening. I no longer view spiritual death in the vein of the sinful and debilitating religious structure I grew up in, but instead I see it as a shedding of the layers and masks that have covered us from our true selves, a rinsing out of the plagues and poisons that have created vacuums within many people; a vacuum, that if most could be honest within themselves, would admit have weakened us a civilization and lessened us in quality.

We have no idea that transformation is possible. Most of accept the anecdotes of our day, what has unfortunately become conventional wisdom. There is a belief in the reigning part of our society, whether they are conscious of it or not, that humanity has reached a plateau. We have increased capital and technological innovations have advanced at such a rapid pace in the last century that it could only be attributed to the ascending intelligence in man. I have no qualms in calling this belief the lie that it is. There is no doubt that the subversive media control over the content we see and hear, the strict secrecy of our government and the censorship of alternative views, the state seizure of public education that has moved schools away from “academics” to more “socialized” learning has devastated our society, and created a “commercialized” class of people with similar wants and desires.

Many of us are so self-deluded that we believe our decisions stem from our own desires and wants. Plato called it “the ignorance of ignorance.” We don’t recognize how deeply we’ve been indoctrinated, and so walk about in the arrogance that we are certain of who we are, when the good majority have yet to meet themselves. Airplane engineers conduct shock testing on aircraft to determine their safety. The recoil impulse of firing a gun mounted on the airframe causes shock waves in the structure that tell aviation engineers the conditions under which some parts of the airplane or the whole airplane or its wings will start to vibrate or flutter like a guitar string, a flute reed, or a tuning fork, and disintegrate or fall apart in flight. This is not unlike what the masters of our present society do. Our very desires have been created by repeated experiments and tests that are used on the public to gage what our actions would be under certain circumstances. It is was what the Nazi Party did in the burning of the Reichstag in 1933 to turn the country against communism, and what our very own government did in 1915 with the full knowledge that the Lusitania would be attacked by the Germans propelling us into World War I. Many times the manipulation of our opinions has been accomplished through the media circus, staged crisis’s, political propaganda, and contrived economic meltdowns. We go right along with the shill game because we have been indoctrinated for days and days gone by with the precepts of fear.

I don’t believe that this culture of fear is a natural part of our evolution, but rather it has been systemically cultivated by the “powers that be” as a means to control, confuse and/or divide. I don’t believe that our natural predisposition is one based in fear, tepidity, and nervousness. I think the better part of us, the higher echelon of our inner self, believes in the reality of our true nature and not the “straw man” that we’ve been led to believe is our actual self. The “straw man” that has been systemically crafted by our society’s social engineers, an artificial image that most of us would probably argue to death is who we really are. There is a huge wall of resistance, as we will fight tooth and nail to protect this false self of ours. And don’t think that I am being highbrow and pious because I am none the differ; Likewise, I use everything at my disposal to protect my “straw man” from destruction.

But let me return to the point. The point is that we don’t know who we are anymore. We walk about doing things deep down we are not happy with, making decisions we don’t agree with, confused by our impulses, doubtful of who we truly are, afraid to share, to learn, to really “educate” ourselves, and to feed our minds and spirits with things of substance. We are driven in every way by irrationality and emotion, succumbing to every lie and responding to every big “event” or national crisis without reasoning anything out. We just accept the fantasy that is given to us and never wonder about the countless discrepancies and don’t even believe that it is our right anymore to question or to be curious about such things. We trust the status quo and look at eccentricity with consternation if it doesn’t match the gloss of what our leaders are telling us. And we do this even when there is an unction within us that is trying to lead us away from the counterfeit and into the truth. We don’t want to go. To go could only invite isolation or lost benefits, or to be considered unpatriotic, anarchist, or nutty. Most of the accusations have no foundation but being part of the “hive”, we don’t realize the stupidity of it, and that maybe, just maybe we could have an independent, unique thought.

The idea that we must look out into our world with fear and to our fellow man with suspicion is the biggest con game played on us. The very mentality is a breeding ground for indifference, intolerance and prejudice and the perfect combination for tricking a non-thinking public into becoming complicit in acts of political criminality. How quickly we became anti-middle eastern after 9/11? How vindictive did we become, crying out, not for justice, but for blood? Can we not see that the violence has solved nothing, has made our country less safe, and many innocent people have died? Some of us are still falling into a cesspool of hatred with the current administration’s continued vilification of the Middle East. Sure, many of us enlightened ones recognized the lunacy of the village idiot and his henchmen, but not many of us are thinking. The old adage is that if you tell a lie enough it becomes truth. How many have been told the most far-fetched lies over and over and have been led to believe they are true? I don’t exempt myself from this program. If we search deep within, honestly and objectively, we will continue to be surprised at how easily we have been duped. We accept these lies over and over, that things must be this way, that we don’t have the capacity to understand these things, “there’s nothing to see here, folks,” that we should go back to our long work weeks, concerts, sporting events and soap operas. We trust that things will get better, even when things are getting no better. For a few, yes, but for the many, no.

We have to overcome this fear because many more are suffering than we realize and we are heading into a period when conditions will only get worse. It’s not easy “having done all to stand, to stand therefore in truth” because we are still concerned about our “straw man” being persecuted, when what we really should be doing is whatever it takes to destroy this counterfeit image of who we are. Who we truly are is a person grounded in courage, love, and a strong, fortified mind. We are a nation of 300 million people but we are 300 million unique souls. We must get over this idea that we all fit one classification and must be branded and degraded below our true nature. We have the ability to think and to reason. It is true that these faculties become inefficient with disuse and neglect, but they can be resurrected to life if we are willing to work. Enlightenment comes, not by reading a few books, or learning about a few social ills, but enlightenment is an ever-developing process. If we are willing to die to all the lies and peel back the layers of deception that cover us, we can find who we truly are. We won’t have to look out into the world with fear any longer, because God has not given us a spirit of fear, and neither do we walk in the delusional idea that who we are can be denied because our true self, crafted in the inner parts of us, cannot be defrauded or deceived.

But the adoption of the path of truth and the search for ultimate reality is a heavy-handed one. It puts us at variance with the common man who doesn’t conceive that there is a faction of evil that has overtaken our society at the highest levels. Most of us who have taken steps in truth are regarded with suspicion and refused if we suggest that there is such a thing as an evil cabal that could misrepresent freedom, kill innocents, torture, and rob and pilfer as many of our esteemed leaders have done. The mainstream media treats the “small truths” about the evil as anomalies to the ministry of “democracy”, when the reality is that they are not the exceptions, they are the standard. But many have not the gall, nor the need to pursue curiosities within, the resonating impulse to think, question, and investigate that I believe are in all people. King states it beautifully in the same Vietnam speech I mentioned earlier, “When the issues at hand seem as perplexed as they often do in the case of this dreadful conflict, we are always on the verge of being mesmerized by uncertainty; but we must move on.”