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What's New with My Site?
Research stemming from the U.S.Government's overt psychological warfare program has taught us a clear lesson. This lesson is best expressed in a book financed by the Carnegie Corporation, The Proper Study of Mankind by Stuart Chase (a self-confirmed American Marxist), who wrote [8],
"Theoretically a society could be completely made over in something
like 15 years, the time it takes to inculcate a new culture into a rising
crop of youngsters ... Prepare now for a surprising universe."
Change agents (i.e. 'facilitators) are trained in the Delphi Technique for use in small-group consensus-building. These 'sensitivity trainers' are, today, trained and credentialed by over 30 various tax-exempt foundations and/or nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) as well as at the Defense Equal Opportunity Management Institute (DEOMI) at Patrick Air Force Base in Florida for the U.S. military.
A change agent serves as a lightning rod in a small group to draw out the objections (and more important, the objectors) so that the target group can be manipulated toward the predetermined affirmative outcome. This is why the change agent must be an 'advocate-organizer-agitator.' His credo is 'Have the courage to change.'
Let us see how a 'change agent' crafts his art on an unsuspecting public. Eakman [9] explains that, as an advocate, the 'change agent' gets the target group to trust him, by making the group believe that he is on their side, a 'good guy,' someone who really cares what each individual in the group thinks. The 'change agent' goes through the motions, as an 'organizer,' of getting each person in the target group to voice concerns about the policy, project, or program in question. He listens attentively, breaks the larger group into smaller discussion groups, urges everyone to make lists, and so on. As he listens and watches, members of the group express their opinions and concerns, "The 'change agent' all the while is learning something about each member of the target group." He is evaluating each participant, learning who the 'leaders' are, who the loudmouths are, which persons seem weak or noncommittal, which ones frequently change sides in an argument. The weaker opponents of the plan or program in question become primary targets.
The facilitator's real 'change agent' self begins to emerge as he points out possible objections to an 'undesirable' position. He may warn that those who hold certain views might be perceived as too extreme by members of the larger group, or by the leaders in the community. Of course he claims his only 'concern' is that the group succeed. The 'change agent' is still everybody's buddy.
Suddenly, the 'change agent' becomes devil's advocate. He dons a professional agitator hat and pits one sub-group against the other. He knows exactly what he is doing, who to pit against whom. If the 'change agent' has done his homework, he has everybody's number, as the saying goes. The 'change agent' begins to question the position of opposition leaders, plays on the fears of individuals with weaker convictions, and finally drives a wedge between the 'pro' group and the 'con' forces by helping to make the latter seem ridiculous, or ignorant, or dogmatic, or inarticulate -- whatever works. The 'change agent' wants certain members of the group to get mad; and thus forces tensions 'to escalate,' as per the Havelock training text, always with the 'good of the group' in mind. The 'change agent' is well-trained in psychological techniques and can fairly well predict everyone's hot buttons. Dissension breaks out. Goals become muddled. Either the group will break up completely or, more likely, the individuals against the policy or program will be shut out. The desired outcome will be achieved.
A specialized application of this 'change agent' technique, applied specifically to teachers, is called the Alinsky Method. It is a staple of the National Education Association (NEA). Saul Alinsky penned Rules for Radicals in 1971, in which he asserted that "any revolutionary change must be preceded by a passive, affirmative, non-challenging attitude toward change among the masses of people." [10] The radical organizer, he said, must be 'dedicated to changing the life of a particular community.' To accomplish this, the organizer must:
"Fan the resentments of the people of a community; fan the latent
hostilities of many of the people to the point of overt expression
--he must search out controversy and issues ... An organizer must
stir up dissatisfaction and discontentment [sic] ... He knows
that values are relative ..truth to him is relative and changing."
Ronald G. and Mary C. Havelock (at the University of Michigan during the 1970s), in their Training for Change Agents: A Guide to the Design of Training Programs in Education and Other Fields, describe that social architects and political 'change agents' are charged with the task of 'finding out the values, beliefs ... of [group] members.' This reads like a page right out of ISR-Moscow's Social Psychology and Propaganda text. In fact, Eakman [11] informs us that the book credits for Havelock's text includes a mention that the ISR (a.k.a. Frankfurt School) affiliate at the University of Michigan provided financial support and contributed to the writing of the text. So it is hardly surprising that this training text sounds like its Moscow counterpart. Indeed, Training for Change Agents is the single most damning hard evidence that Marxist-Leninist, Soviet-style manipulative tactics have been part and parcel of America's educational 'restructuring' effort, just as it provides proof that educational restructuring is, at its root, an attempt to re-mold American society.
Make no mistake. The Tavistock-Delphi-Alinsky approach to 'consensus-building' works. Each is a further refinement upon the last. It works with adults, including teachers, and school children. It works with students in college classrooms, community leaders, and even church groups. It works in 'leadership and ethics' programs at our nation's premier military academies. 'Change agents' walk in with a smile, a pleasant demeanor and a handshake. The targets rarely, if ever, know they are being manipulated. This is now becoming a reality in the nation's military -- the last institution to come under the spell of the 'cultural Marxist' social engineers.
In particular, this approach is apparently becoming entrenched in the 'Leadership and Ethics' Department at the U.S. Naval Academy. The psychology professors who are in charge of this program are trained in the specific skills of the change agent, the provocateur, the 'sensitivity trainer.' They are professionals who are simply implementing at the U.S. Naval Academy, the same program that they have implemented in K-12 public school education over the past 30 years -- bit by bit, step by devious step, as they slowly 'march through the institutions' of the United States of America. While the Academy administrators and alumni sleep! While America sleeps!
What's New with My Subject?
"Nothing at last is sacred but the integrity of your mind."
--Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Self-Reliance"
PARTICIPATORY WISDOM: This is the era of USER AS CONTENT: No Audience; Just Actors. We are creating our own electronic content, digitally documenting and downloading our lives, We are experimenting musically, graphically, and in film with a wide variety of electronica for self-expression and creativity, or recording performances.
Rather than passively watching or consuming content, we are making our own. We are the subject of our own entertainment which has fused with our creativity. There is even electronica we can use to tweek ourselves for an upgrade of our own operating system.
More people are interested in and concerned about the shift from super-imposed myth, religious superstition, corporate imperialism, social conformity, and political propaganda to awareness of the character of the creative process itself.
SELF-CREATION: We can apply this creative dynamic to molding our own lives and character. We can shift personality deficits into strengths by learning focus, goal-setting, and empowering techniques. We can draw from the rich harvest of global spiritual and psychological techniques. They are all available in the post-postmodern medicine bag.
The clarity that comes from self-knowledge and self-determination helps us burrow underneath the cultural distortions of hollow myths from the consumeristic American Dream to the Gnostic Lie of elitist societies, to the multimedia Android Meme, to New Age Utopianism. Each of these well-meaning philosophies has its shadow side of control and manipulation.
Often what we believe is the cure, the panacea, turns out to be the same old poison in another form. Maybe we can't change the whole world to suit our personal vision, but we can change ourselves and that changes the world we live in. We can certainly overwrite the random programming we've gotten stuck in from childhood, traumas, and random cultural injunctions.
SELF-REGULATION: Control of the state of your mindbody is the single most important aspect of self-regulation and self-care. You can change how you feel by changing the state of your mindbody. You can take responsibility for your own states by focusing your mind and regulating your physiology. By increasing your own functionality, you become a stronger force in the world at large by expressing postive, even contagious, values.
Your state determines your quality of life, behavior and performance level. Self-regulation may be as simple as breathing in serenity and breathing out anxiety, diet, simple exercises or other regulatory interventions in your cycles of pleasure and pain. You can perform a self-intervention by interrupting at any part of the negative cycle or trance state with new input. You can break the cycle or trance.
The levels of intensity of pain and pleasure motivate most of our behaviors. We will go to greater lengths to avoid pain than even to seek pleasure. Your state of mind and the self-talk it generates are intimately linked to your values and beliefs. You can learn to modulate your pain-pleasure spectrum in a life-affirming, positive, rather than self-defeating way.
CONSCIOUSNESS and AWARENESS: For millions of years to evolve has meant to adapt to the environment. The rule of the dinosaurs lasted nearly 150 million years, while humans have only been here 200,000. In that relatively short time both the environment and ourselves have changed markedly and will continue to do so. For humans, survival has meant living by our wits. Even newer in evolutionary time is the electronic environment which leads us inevitably into an era where the human race is a mix of natural, transhuman (Homo Mutans) and posthumans (Homo Lumen), enhanced with exponentially changing technology. Using our wits to enhance our quality of life is natural for us, with both soft and hard technologies. Religions no longer hold a monopoly on mind-altering techniques. The generic aspects of self-regulation, healing, creativity have been synthesized and extracted from their superstitious, pre-scientific contexts. In the past religions imposed pre-baked mythic structures on the beliefs of their cultures. Before that, shamans held sway over the deeper layers of the human psyche. This was the original form of mind control, often enhanced with psychoactive drugs which alter and condition experiences and behavior by reinforcing cultural beliefs. The modern world has its own drugs, pharmaceutical and electronic which modulate the pain/pleasure spectrum, reinforcing their desirability. Now we are learning the nature and process of creativity for ourselves and applying it to ourselves. Throughout our history and prehistory, someone has manipulated the minds, emotions and physical health of others. This doesn't mean religion is obsolete, but it has a shadow side in which it competes ruthlessly as a cultural meme for your energy and attention. Like cults, religions aggresively seek to control all aspects of life through needs for belonging. Perhaps an even greater threat comes from militarily applied technology, and the seemingly more benign though pernicious influence of new media, which has become the fundamental electronic ground of our experience, mimicing a virtual voluntary ESP.
Adapting to the Environment
"Nothing at last is sacred but the integrity of your mind."
--Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Self-Reliance"
PARTICIPATORY WISDOM: This is the era of USER AS CONTENT: No Audience; Just Actors. We are creating our own electronic content, digitally documenting and downloading our lives, We are experimenting musically, graphically, and in film with a wide variety of electronica for self-expression and creativity, or recording performances.
Rather than passively watching or consuming content, we are making our own. We are the subject of our own entertainment which has fused with our creativity. There is even electronica we can use to tweek ourselves for an upgrade of our own operating system.
More people are interested in and concerned about the shift from super-imposed myth, religious superstition, corporate imperialism, social conformity, and political propaganda to awareness of the character of the creative process itself.
SELF-CREATION: We can apply this creative dynamic to molding our own lives and character. We can shift personality deficits into strengths by learning focus, goal-setting, and empowering techniques. We can draw from the rich harvest of global spiritual and psychological techniques. They are all available in the post-postmodern medicine bag.
The clarity that comes from self-knowledge and self-determination helps us burrow underneath the cultural distortions of hollow myths from the consumeristic American Dream to the Gnostic Lie of elitist societies, to the multimedia Android Meme, to New Age Utopianism. Each of these well-meaning philosophies has its shadow side of control and manipulation.
Often what we believe is the cure, the panacea, turns out to be the same old poison in another form. Maybe we can't change the whole world to suit our personal vision, but we can change ourselves and that changes the world we live in. We can certainly overwrite the random programming we've gotten stuck in from childhood, traumas, and random cultural injunctions.
SELF-REGULATION: Control of the state of your mindbody is the single most important aspect of self-regulation and self-care. You can change how you feel by changing the state of your mindbody. You can take responsibility for your own states by focusing your mind and regulating your physiology. By increasing your own functionality, you become a stronger force in the world at large by expressing postive, even contagious, values.
Your state determines your quality of life, behavior and performance level. Self-regulation may be as simple as breathing in serenity and breathing out anxiety, diet, simple exercises or other regulatory interventions in your cycles of pleasure and pain. You can perform a self-intervention by interrupting at any part of the negative cycle or trance state with new input. You can break the cycle or trance.
The levels of intensity of pain and pleasure motivate most of our behaviors. We will go to greater lengths to avoid pain than even to seek pleasure. Your state of mind and the self-talk it generates are intimately linked to your values and beliefs. You can learn to modulate your pain-pleasure spectrum in a life-affirming, positive, rather than self-defeating way.
CONSCIOUSNESS and AWARENESS:
Adapting to the Environment
For millions of years to evolve has meant to adapt to the environment. The rule of the dinosaurs lasted nearly 150 million years, while humans have only been here 200,000. In that relatively short time both the environment and ourselves have changed markedly and will continue to do so.
For humans, survival has meant living by our wits. Even newer in evolutionary time is the electronic environment which leads us inevitably into an era where the human race is a mix of natural, transhuman (Homo Mutans) and posthumans (Homo Lumen), enhanced with exponentially changing technology.
Using our wits to enhance our quality of life is natural for us, with both soft and hard technologies. Religions no longer hold a monopoly on mind-altering techniques. The generic aspects of self-regulation, healing, creativity have been synthesized and extracted from their superstitious, pre-scientific contexts.
In the past religions imposed pre-baked mythic structures on the beliefs of their cultures. Before that, shamans held sway over the deeper layers of the human psyche. This was the original form of mind control, often enhanced with psychoactive drugs which alter and condition experiences and behavior by reinforcing cultural beliefs. The modern world has its own drugs, pharmaceutical and electronic which modulate the pain/pleasure spectrum, reinforcing their desirability.
Now we are learning the nature and process of creativity for ourselves and applying it to ourselves. Throughout our history and prehistory, someone has manipulated the minds, emotions and physical health of others. This doesn't mean religion is obsolete, but it has a shadow side in which it competes ruthlessly as a cultural meme for your energy and attention. Like cults, religions aggresively seek to control all aspects of life through needs for belonging.
Perhaps an even greater threat comes from militarily applied technology, and the seemingly more benign though pernicious influence of new media, which has become the fundamental electronic ground of our experience, mimicing a virtual voluntary ESP.
EVOLUTION OF BELIEF PARADIGMS
The sophistication of our beliefs about the way ourselves and the world works has evolved over time. But not everyone lives in the Present, with a belief system that is consistent with our current rational knowledge. Beliefs are influenced by emotional and psychosocial pressures.
Many people are firmly invested in the spiritual practices of by-gone eras, for good or not so good. Regardless, time and technology march on, impacting our psychophysical organism with challenges never faced by humanity before. The future-oriented are already living there. As has been pointed out: "The future is already here; it just isn't evenly distributed." To truly live mindfully in the Now, which is all we ever actually have, is to live at your Cosmic Zero Point http://myzeropoint.50megs.com
For thousands of years, tribes were so well adapted to their environments, they had little need to evolve. Their worldviews and reality differed, but not so overwhelmingly as for repressed cognitive dissonance to drive them to higher-numbered stages
Belief systems are like reality wormholes into the past. Part of us can live in the 14th, 17th, or 19th century, depending on eclectic spiritual ideas we have embraced or gotten stuck in. The same individual, such as a religious scientist, can embrace conflicting beliefs from different centuries. Compartmentalization is the only way to deny this cognitive dissonance.
Self-regulatory techniques can be adopted without this psychological baggage, with or without maintaining the spiritual or religious context. Somewhere on the planet, humans are living in every niche of the evolutionary belief spectrum. Which existential experience you perceive depends on the filters of your options (environment), beliefs and values.
Each stage represents a limited understanding and repressions until its liabilities force us into the next stage. Alternating stages are self-expressive and social. First new traits and states are emergent; then they stabilize. Our archetypal experiences can be regressions or expressions of our present highest state of development or emergent, then stabilized intuitions of still higher states. Each stage is a worldview with its own needs, belief style and existential ground. Each is its own trance state, a lens through which the world is perceived with certain distortions. Each can be a trap of complacency as we enjoy its rewards.
Stage 1: Archaic: Survival, the Ground Zero of Existence. Self-preservation, isolation; antisocial. Paranoid or idiosyncratic beliefs.
Stage 2: Tribal: Truster/Trickster. Social; love, belonging. Self-sacrifice vs. selfishness. Transgression; taboo. Ethnocentric magical and superstitious beliefs.
Stage 3: Egocentric: Power; Esteem; Autonomy, heroic. Unscrupulous Competition/Hero. Shame vs. honor. Exploitation vs. Respect. Mythic beliefs.
Stage4: Moral/Patriotic. Rules; Initiative. Shame and guilt vs. conformity and conventionality; purpose, virtue. Systematized truths. Emotional, nostalgic beliefs.
Stage 5: Materialist. Reasoning; mental analysis. Rational beliefs, truth; goodness; consumerism, greed. Head vs. heart. Progressive if rewarded, compulsive, workaholic. Perspective. Rational beliefs.
Stage 6: Wise Empath. Service, rapport, intimacy, empathy. Politically correct.. Inner wisdom, meaning. Self-actualization. Intuitive, mystical beliefs.
Stage 7: Distancer/Self. Paradoxical; individuated, reclusive; universalist. Deconstruction and Synthesis, gestalt, the big picture. Integral, synergetic beliefs.
Stage 8: Global Village. Complex Dynamic Beliefs. Post-Metaphysical Integrative Spirituality. “Express Self Now, but not at the expense of Others or the World, so that Life May Continue.” (Graves) Sustainable beliefs.
As the most advanced mental structure, the Self resists ordinary articulation so completely that, according to Jung, it is the primary object of mysticism. Indeed, an experience of the Self also constitutes one of Reality, because the two reflect each other, providing (again, according to Jung) para-psychological knowledge of and influence over Reality. Jung considers the Self as a repository of all archetypes, which is, among other things, a way of saying that someone advanced in Stage Seven has experienced all the preceding ones, and, as part of a final dialectic between conscious and unconscious, is likely to refine mastery over the preceding ones. (Whitlark, 2006)
