Anarchistbanjo's World

There comes a time for some of us when we self identify more strongly with our soul or Observer self or individual awareness then we do with our physical body. This was the goal of the great religions, for the individual self awareness or ego to identify itself as soul or nonphysical and immortal. This is what was meant by the phrase “to be born again”. This stage of ego development had clearly defined characteristics that were unmistakable. For the person who had achieved this state of development they no longer felt the burden of an earthly existence. They no longer fought against earthly things, because those earthly things no longer had power over them. They were not disturbed by the inconveniences of life, because they only lived in the spirit world feasting on spiritual food. They were preoccupied with thought and spiritual things. They gulped down food like animals hardly knowing or caring what they ate or drank. They were always living in their heads.

Compare this view of life to that of the rational atheists. The rational atheists struggled mightily against the forces of nature and the hardships of the physical world. Their entire life centered around surviving and living as comfortably as possible. They made great strides in the evolution of humanity and its ability to adapt to changing physical circumstances. It was only at the last minute that they recognized the power of the mind and turned their backs on the physical world as well. But life that is turned away from the physical world no longer draws any nourishment from nature and is therefore no longer life, but thinking!

But try as they might, the thinking of the rational atheists was not the same as the lofty spiritual and imaginative thinking of the social enforcers. What the rational atheists sought was the true life and the true enjoyment of life! What they thought of was the importance of good health, beauty, wealth and social pleasures.

But what the rational atheists sought for the most, now called the Stoics, was wisdom and life with a practical philosophy. They wanted a calm and placid unmoving life, one that ran smoothly without fear and without excitement. That was the best that the Stoic could come up with, since they could not get rid of the world even though they spent their entire lives rebelling against it. The furthest they got was to deaden their senses and become numb to life. Yet this doctrine of repelling the world and asserting oneself against the world was not a doctrine of spirit. They could not attain the level of separation from the earth that the social enforcers enjoyed.

It was the social enforcers, now called the skeptics, that truly made the break away from the physical world. They felt that any connection to worldly things was worthless and that earthly emotions and thoughts held no truth. The world was neither bad nor good, neither beautiful nor ugly, but only what man makes of it. There was no longer any truth to be recognized. It was all contradictory. What one person called good another called bad and the only way out of the paradox was to leave the deceptive world behind and pay no attention to it.

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Humanity evolves in stages and if we try we can recognize those stages. Humanity is currently on the cusp of a brand-new stage of existence, but how did we get here? What did our ancestors do to bring humanity to this point? The first group of ancestors that I’m going to be talking about invented reading and writing as well as logic and reason. For simplicity I’m going to call this group of people rational atheists. They still enjoy a prominent place in today’s world. But they have become antiquated and are in the process of being replaced. In a few minutes we will see how they have been replaced and by who. Then later we will see how that group of people is also now being replaced by a new humanity that is just now being born.

I will call the second group of people, the ones that have replaced the rational atheists, social enforcers because their greatest desire has been to enforce their own social and spiritual values upon the entire world whether the world wanted it or not!

For the rational atheists our physical world is truth. The physical life that we live and the families that we belong to are the things in life that matter the most. The social enforcers believe in the truth of the spirit! They believe in the vanity and transitory nature of the world. They believe in the eternal and unshakable truth of spirit and the immortal life of the soul.

So the very thing which the rational atheists consider the most sacred, the physical world and family relationships, is spurned by the social enforcers and considered valueless. The social enforcer does not live in this world, but above it!

From this we can see that each side perceives a truth that is opposite to that held by the other. One side holds the natural physical world to be true, while the other holds the imaginative spiritual and heavenly worlds to be true.

It was the rational atheists themselves that turned their own truth into a lie through the creation of reading and writing and sophistry or intellectual debate. In Greece a new generation of philosophers called the Sophists began to use debate with logic and reason to diffuse the rationalistic doctrine. They used mind as a weapon, as a means of trickery and defiance to overpower the rational atheists and the power of physical reality.

Socrates fought back! He said that you needed to listen to your heart as well as your mind. It was not enough to follow the path of the mind. One had to follow the path of the heart as well. He made it clear that logic and reason could be used through sophistry to rationalize and justify anything. This began a second era of Greek philosophy, a period of liberation of the heart. But the heart remained worldly minded and crude. The mind was much more powerful!

A new war began, to become master of the heart. Socrates began the examination the heart, but the skeptics finished it. The sophistic culture made the mind so powerful that nothing could stand against it and the heart of the skeptic was no longer moved by anything. As long as man was entangled in physical reality, as long as his heart had to struggle to be free from worldly passions, his spirit was not free. Because spirit does not have a body and is not of this world. This world does not exist for the spirit and no bonds or temptations exist for it either, except for the spiritual world and spiritual bonds.

And this is what the invention of reading and writing led to, that human awareness could know itself as an immortal nonphysical soul. As an awareness without a body, with no ties to the physical world. And the only thing it cared about was spiritual things, the spiritual worlds and the soul. The worldly and natural no longer had any control or domination over it.

And the rational atheists came close to the spiritual and tried to become spiritual but they couldn’t. They remained trapped in the mind, trapped within logic and reason and trapped within the spirit of the physical world, the only world that they could know!

But a new generation of humanity became spirit, and sought the spirit, and recognized only spiritual things. So the non-spirituality of the rational atheists set them apart from the social enforcers forever. Because the wisdom and insight of the rational atheists lies as far from the soul and the spirit world as the distance between heaven and earth. And so it remains today.

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As a man I was determined to bring my dreams into physical reality and everywhere I turned I met with opposition. I was forced to confront the world as it really was and deal with things that I really didn’t want to deal with, things that I felt were not really important. I wanted to take shortcuts and didn’t want to be bothered by the small details. I didn’t realize at the time that the small details made the difference between success and failure.

Another way of saying this is that I needed to become competent at life before life would recognize me and grant me my desires. There is such a wide chasm between having a dream and manifesting it in physical reality! That requires attention to the small details!

It is so easy to be distracted by other concerns, by other people, and by other dreams as well. I was a dreamer and it was not easy for me to be practical! In a way I had to constantly think about my dream until it became so strong that I grew emotional about it. When I became emotional enough about it I was driven to act upon my dream. After several failed tries and repeated efforts I often managed to achieve my dream but the results were not anything like what I had expected. I never seemed to get it on the first try!

But each success made me stronger and helped me to believe in my own capabilities, to believe in my own ability to succeed! Each success allowed my sense of self and my self-esteem to grow stronger. Success can become just as much of a habit as failure can! We need successes to be successful in life, it’s just that simple. If I wrote a list of the top 20 things that I wanted to do in my life I have already done the top eighteen. The fact that none of them turned out the way I had expected does not change the fact that I have achieved them. And in the process of achieving each one of those goals I became more competent at determining what my true goal should have been all along.

And now I’m left with this one final thought. To make your dream come true you need to pursue that dream, give it all you have, and not allow yourself to be distracted by less important things. Unfortunately, the world calls that being selfish and egotistical. It will try everything in its power to turn you away from the realization of your dream! It will try to force you to serve some other dream! Most people never even get the chance to go after their dream in life because the obstacles are too strong for them to overcome.

Do you recognize the stages? The child is realistic, but emotionally caught up in the flow of physical events without the ability to understand or recognize why they were happening. The youth has gained understanding, but at the cost of stepping outside the flow of physical events as they happen. The youth has become an impractical dreamer and observer of life. It is the adult that struggles to make the dream become physical reality and the only way to do this is by dedicating one’s entire self to that life purpose or goal. Otherwise they will be sacrificed to some higher goal that is not their own.

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Once I outgrew the stick I was no longer a child and I became a youth. For the first time I became aware of myself, I became aware of thoughts and ideas. As a child I only participated in the world without thought, but as a youth I became more aware of the world, how big it was, and how much I didn’t know.

In the beginning I deferred to external powers. I deferred to my parents, authorities, and rules. Later I ignored them because I felt I didn’t need them anymore. I had outgrown them. I had discovered the invincibility of youth that answered to nothing or no one other than itself. I chose to act for myself and the world resisted!

Bright ideas and dreams are the idealism of youth. Ideas are pure thought, and they bring delight. I was fascinated with them. From this idealistic viewpoint earthly things faded away and became less important. Instead of being an unthinking participant I became an observer, a watcher. I tried to understand things by observing them and to confuse things even more, I discovered my conscience. I successfully defied external authority, but I couldn’t hide from myself! As a youth, I found that I couldn’t hide from my thoughts, from what I believed in my heart.

But thoughts are not the real thing and as a youth it was very easy to confuse my dream girl friend with who she really was as a person. I idealized her, put her onto a pedestal and made her something that she wasn’t.

I did the same thing with glorious ideas like truth, freedom, justice and equality. And once more I found myself kneeling before these external powers offering myself as a sacrifice. I felt empty inside and not worthy of them. And once more I had to learn the hard way that these lofty thoughts and ideals were abstract things that didn’t really belong to me. They were just ideals. They were just thoughts. They were not the real thing!

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When I was a child the world was an exciting place full of mystery and adventure. I loved learning new things. I loved discovering hidden secrets and pretending that I was a grownup. I loved playing make-believe and most important – I was not afraid! Sure, I was always getting into things that I wasn’t supposed to. There were many times when I was punished and just as many times when I got away with something that I shouldn’t have. Sometimes I think that the job of children is to find out what they can get away with.

But I did fear getting caught and I did fear being punished! I couldn’t help it, my parents were bigger and stronger than I was and getting punished hurt! But most of the time they didn’t even know what I was getting into. But I still remember the time when my will was so strong and I was so determined that I didn’t care if I was punished, I was going to do it anyway! That was the day that I became bigger than the stick! Before that the stick was always bigger than I was. I think all of us can relate to this story, the day when we became bigger than the threat of punishment against us. From that moment onward we became free, at least until we became adults and became like children again afraid of the stick.

But back then, as children, we understood that our will was stronger than our fear and that we had outgrown the stick. We didn’t really think about it. It was an emotional thing that we felt. But it was powerful! For the first time the threat of punishment held no power over us. What was it that changed inside of us? It was our mind! For the first time we became aware! We no longer reacted out of emotions, but out of rational thought. We woke up!

But then we became adults and now we live in a world in which we fear punishment. Fear has become part of daily life and we fear the stick! So we no longer do our own will. We do what others demand of us, work at jobs that are not fulfilling, live in social situations that are degrading. We don’t stand up for ourselves anymore.

This past year has been a difficult one for me personally. I have had medical health issues and my wife, even though we are separated, has had multiple strokes and been forced to live in assisted living. My finances have been devastated and the bill collectors have come after me. Nothing I share here is new, the same thing is happening to people all over the world. I finally told the bill collectors that I would try to pay each one of them $50 a month till I could get back on my feet again. Now I work general labor and my weekly paycheck is about $360. That’s not very much, hardly a living wage. But one bill collector didn’t care and demanded that I pay $175 a month until what I owed was paid off. For the past three months I have made those payments but this past month I couldn’t. Something snapped inside me and I sent them $50 just like the others. I no longer feared the stick! And now my life has become a wonderful adventure, doing new things and getting to know new people. The stick no longer has power over me!

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