Our ails are directly due to the fact that we are being sucked into the ‘humanivoros’ black hole of the current monetary system, struggling and mostly failing to ‘keep our heads above water’

Greed and Scarcity – Money by-products

Even if we have money we are often terrified that someday we won’t.   We envy those that have it. We feel sad if we do not.  We lust after it and betray our deep human values for it. We centre our lives on squirreling away resources so that if anything happens we’ll be OK, Jack.   

We keep more than we can ever need as we put up signs saying keep out, private, mine, mine, mine.    We separate ourselves into them and us and we bow to the credo of ‘the survival of those most able to pull in the money and let those who can’t perish’.  

Those of us that have want more and more laws to protect ourselves from those that don’t have whilst finding more and more loopholes so that those that do have don’t have to share it.

Fact is we have become a world of greedy self centred f**kerswho don’t care if they destroy the very world that sustains them as long as they are OK.   We are turning into a pack of Gollums, lusting after our ‘precious’, willing to destroy whatever keeps us from her.

What on Earth went wrong?

 How is it that such awesomely creative, high minded and sophisticated creatures have sunk so low.

We have evolved super potent technological capabilities and nurtured highly developed scientific minds that are capable of researching and generating facilities that can free humans from scarcity, drudge, envy and greed whilst still sustaining and nurturing all life on earth.

Yet the manner in which we use this potency suggests we have devolved to primitive, survival of the fittest, kill or be killed savages.  

 We have devoted most of our creative and innovative energy to finding ways to acquire and protect land, oil reserves and our precious Prada pants.   We go to war with other humans over stuff, resources and money.   We rape and pillage the Earth to provide more stuff, resources and money not caring that we are leaving Gaia half dead and bleeding profusely on the sidewalk of our existence.     

 We have become hardened to anything other than our own selfish needs.

 And in a way we’re not to blame.  For most of our lives, we have been mezmerized by masters of the hypnotic arts.

Deep Hypnosis  

As a hypnotherapist, I, Sunny, understand this process well.   We’ve been asleep in a world of illusion. We’ve  been fed stories of how life is meant to be for so long, so often and so seductively that we utterly believe in them with as much fervor as a muslim believes in the will of allah or fundamental christians believe that jesus is our only savior.   

Hypnosis is very powerful and unbeknown to most of us we have been trapped in  deep and seemingly tender hypnotic trance.  

But the times they are, once again, a changin’ with one big difference since Bob Dylan wrote that song.  Today change is happening exponentially much faster than it was.   

Even as we sleep in arms of the the matrix that feeds on us, we cannot completey switch off from the extensive waves of information and calls to new ways of living that are spreading across the planet.    Everywhere people are coming out of their trance.   In what seems to be a dark world, more and more tiny sparks of illumination are waking us up.    

We are slowly opening our eyes to the illusion and realizing that the way we are living our lives is both crazy, destructive, and utterly illogical.

The Tender Trap

Life is a paradox.   We spend our lives working to make money so we can have a ‘good life’ but we work so hard that we get stressed and are then compelled to spend spend spend to alleviate the stress thereby requiring us to work even harder and … so on.  

We are bombarded daily by mainly poisonous hypnotic thought memes that stealthily penetrate our consciousness on the news and in the raised volume adverts that appear between the syrupy content we are so spellbound by.    

They whisper sweet nothings telling us we will only be happy if we have the latest phone, car or home appliance.  They transport us to a wonder world  where life is oh so perfect as you stroll through life living the illusion that you one of the elite because of what you have.     

They lead you to believe that a $500 pair of shoes will make people sit up, respect and admire you.  And the more you indulge the more dependent your self esteem becomes on having stuff to the point that  you will radically defend your reasons for buying them even if you already have more than enough.  You say ‘it gives me pleasure, they’re better quality, I need retail therapy’… until you are so entranced that you believe it’s OK to spend like that when a billion people live on less than $1 dollar a day.   

They know we are stressed, economically challenged, overworked and depressed and they seduce us in syrupy, gelatinous voices like an over-doting mother ‘Oh sweetie, I know it hurts.  Let mommy make it better’  with Killudan, Diesoonillin, Zombitol and all those other high falutin’ sounding pharma names or credit scheme or dependencies they’re peddling.

And we nod our heads, falling into what sales people call the ‘yes’ set (That’s where the salesperson elicits your needs, getting  you to say ‘yes’ to something enough times so that when they make their move, it appers logical to say ‘yes’ to whatever’s on offer)

We say to ourselves ‘Yes, I am sick’! ‘Yes, I am depressed!’ ‘Yes I’ve got kids to put through college’ and ‘YES! I need help!   And you willingly enter their trance, forgetting that it is not their business to help you but to keep you sick or in debt so that you’ll continue to need their snakeoil.

We  sit in front of the TV feeding on rotten news whilst eating  junk, processed and microwaved food pretending that ‘all natural’ is goo.   We are literally poisoning ourselves in exchange for a moment or few of relief from world realities, the daily grind and our obsessive mind chatter.    

And every day the food industry feeds on our weakness, bombarding us with new offerings of food made tastier, prettier and easier with the help of  MSG, E-numbers, sugars, GMO’s and microwaves.   

Whoopee! Thanks to the deforestation of the Amazon there’s land to raise soy to feed the beef to make a burger that is cheaper than a head of broccoli.  DOH! But as we’re delighting in the burger, we need to wake up to the fact that without that forest, the earth will soon be unfit to sustain man, beef cattle and even that head of broccoli.

In school our children are being peddled lies about the past and how life works as part of the process of training them to conform, compete and function in the current system.    And, like good little soldiers they will emerge with a prolific desire for more money, stuff and power and a readiness to do anything to get it.

And day by day, year by year relentlessly the messages continue to insinuate into our sleepdaze…until a bell goes off..

System Failure Alert – Activate Escape

The good news is that they can’t keep us under for ever.   There are too many alarms going off all over the planet as the system begins to break down.   They are warning signs.  We can wait until it happens or we can wake up now and take action.   

Look at the patterns of the past.   People have been sounding warning signals about all sorts of things. People you know, the alternative researchers, even the traditional news agencies are amongst the few that get it.    Mark these words, in ten years, if we haven’t let go of our rapacious life style, we will not have a  life on earth, let alone a lifestyle.

It’s time to wake up and to the truth

The food, pharma, oil industries and the media are NOT here to help us.  Their disguised strategy is to hypnotise us, damp us down and keep us sick [most produced and processed food makes us sick therefore we need pharma].  Thus the circle turns. 

They addict us to their products thereby supporting a system that makes them very rich leaving us stressed, sick, depressed, angry, fearful and weak.

SO, what has to happen for us to begin to escape the trance, break the evil spell and step into a new way of living?

The Great Escape

• We will begin to escape when we make wellness our goal versus expensive pharmaceutically based health ‘care’. 
• We will begin to escape when we make the generation and delivery of free, sustainable energy a priority versus oil dependency.  
• We will begin to escape when we harness technology, science and nature to generate enough sustainable resources for all versus earth raping war mongering activities.  
• We will begin to escape when we take charge of the education of our children versus subjecting them to someone else’s propaganda
• We will begin to escape when we start making our own investigations versus taking news as reality
• We will begin to escape when we adopt a new attitude to nutrition, home or community grown seasonal food versus processed, junk and microwaveable gunk.  
• We will begin  to escape when we learn to repurpose existing goods versus always acquiring new
• We will begin to escape when we create open sharing community versus gated urban gaols. 
• We will begin to escape when we adopt natural building techniques versus building high rise steel and glass monsters.
• We will begin to escape when we realize that one human or nation is no more important than another versus the us and them sensibility of nationalism
• We will begin to escape when we allow people to share and build on our land versus fencing ourselves in
• We will begin to escape when we make wellness a focus, changing our diets and using natural remedies where possible
• We will begin to escape when we spend more time in close connection to the earth, camping in the forest, learning simple earth-living techniques
• We will begin to escape when we turn off the TV and selectively watch more meaningful movies or go for a walk in the forest
• We will escape as we move from ‘green’ activities to ‘brown living’ Natural, earth based lifestyles, simple and self-sustaining

And above all we will be well on the path to escape when we turn our consciousness outwards sensing ourselves not as an organism struggling for personal survival but as an integral part of the entire universe working symbiotically for the greater good.

Like that we are continually asking ourselves..

 ‘Is this the right thing to do for the greater good versus how it meets my personal needs.

Start Planning Your Escape NOW!

Time is running out.   We have maybe 3 years to begin the exodus and embrace a new way of living before the entire planet is wiped out by us.   Are you ready to move towards the Great Escape?

Help is at Hand

There are internet groups of activists and people all over the planet who have already gone far down the Great Escape Route and they are rallying for all of us. They are there to inform us, help us see another way, teach us how to move from green to brown and lead by example.   

Find out more in this directory of alternative activities and solutions for  creating free and sustainable energy , natural building techniques, land sharing, food production and nutrition, wellness, new forms of community  and viable systems of economy.

Coming Soon –  Life on Earth Part 2 – The Great Escape

Take a peek into our world     www.planetearthship.org

© 2009, Pierre Soleil. All rights reserved but relaxed Pierre Soleil We like to pass on the word so YOU are welcome to use this document in accordance with the Creative Commons license. That is, you can tweet, facebook, repost, excerpt and even adapt it so long as you don’t pretend it’s yours for commercial purposes

If you think you’re enlightened you’re likely living an illusion!

What happens when you consider enlightenment not as a noun or something static, but as a movement, a verb, an ongoing process of waking up to reality and shedding the illusory defenses and pretences of our personalities?

The Rocky Road to Enlightenment is our path from life to death. Some of us live our entire lives in an illusion, unaware of anything other than the goals and desires of the materialistic illusory world.

Waking up – there’s no going back

And then something happens, a small spark, an awareness, an illumination. This is usually generated by a tiny nagging thought that occurs from time to time saying ‘there must be more’ or asking ‘this can’t be all there is’.

It can be sparked by something someone says, a line we read in a book or a blog like this or by an unexpected kindness or action on the part of someone else. The only real given is that once woken we cannot go back to sleep again.

And believe us, you will want to go back or you will know what we are talking about!

Waking up to reality is similar to the process of Neo taking the Red Pill and getting that life outside the Matrix is not so shiny shiny. We are so programmed to seek the illusion, and to draw comfort from it yet the illusion keeps us in a zombie like dream.

On the other hand living in reality allows us to be FULLY ALIVE.

How does the journey work?

Once started along the road, we will experience a series of small illuminations, often triggered by a ‘dark’ experience. And if we are waking up and aware then we recognize that frequently the darker and more traumatic the experience, the greater the illumination available to us. These illuminations become pathfinders, points of light that show us the next steps in our journey.

This journey is not about thinking spiritually or having a vast knowledge of spiritual texts or knowing the ‘how tos’. It is about having real experiences that face us with our egoic defenses and pretences and wake us up and engender a resolve to be and do differently. It’s about recognizing that these experiences, however uncomfortable we translate them to be, are showing us what needs to be addressed.

It is about seeing how we stop ourselves from more fully participating in honest and open relationship with our own thoughts, personality and subsequently with other people. It is about catching ourselves if we can and congratulating ourselves each time we do. It is about being humble, admitting our part in the game and respecting the other for facilitating in us this illumination, no matter how harshly it appears to cut you to the quick.

The steps are small, the path is uniquely yours and the road is eternal. Knowing how it works enables us to keep on track in the darkest of times.

Ram Dass’s Realizations

Ram Dass [Professor Richard Alpert] in ‘Be Here Now’ his classic book, gives some useful pointers to the process of spiritual waking up.

Ram Dass was a big spiritual guru in the 60’s and subsequently suffered a stroke in his sixties, prompting him to rewrite his latest book ‘Still Here’. The book offers profound hindsight into his own process and is endearing in the way Dass observes himself and his egoic moves with humor. What’s really cool and a lesson to all of us is that after the stroke, Dass realized his journey of spiritual growth was far from done.

The topography of the road to enlightenment [adapted from Ram Dass]

YOU ARE NOT ENLIGHTENED
Each stage one can label must pass away. If you think you’re enlightened, you’re probably not.

IT GETS WORSE BEFORE IT GETS BETTER
The initial euphoria at waking up will often be followed by and leave a sense of loss or even a despair that may seem like the Dark Night of the Soul.

THE ROAD IS ROCKY
This process is NOT smooth. Each new height is followed by a new low and understanding this makes it much easier to ride the aves.

GLARING IMPERFECTIONS
As you get illuminations so your imperfections seem more glaring. Relax. You’re not getting more stuck in the illusion, you’re just more aware of it. But also take heart in the fact that, as the demons get fiercer the illumination get Sbrighter. Think of if as the sweet that comes after the medicine.

FAKE IT UNTIL YOU MAKE IT
In the beginning you may see spiritual practice as something you do, like meditating for 40 minutes or giving to the poor or thinking abundantly. In time you realize mindfulness, being present and experiencing the moment IS spiritual practice. You can experience illumination as you pour a cup of coffee, wash the dishes or fire an employee. There is a Zen saying, “Before Enlightenment chop wood carry water, after Enlightenment, chop wood carry water.

THE ‘I’M SO SPIRITUAL’ TRAP
At some stage when you think you are being all good and spiritual you will get caught up in how ‘spiritual’ you are. In India this is called the Chain of Gold. The chain traps you in an inflated illusion of ‘oh I’m so spiritual’ that only exists up your own backside. We have to give up the illusion of total purity and holier than thou if we are ever to make progress.

AM I THERE YET?
Early in the journey you will I be probably wondering on a regular basis how long it will take or whether you have got it yet. and be saying to yourself ‘Oh if I do this course or read this book or meditate for x hours a day, I’ll get spiritual in two, three or four years’ As you progress you realize that where you are going is ‘here’ and you will arrive ‘now’.

LAUGH AT YOURSELF
You will also start to get really serious about it all. Give it up. A cosmic sense of humor about your predicament, your resistance and your journey is an absolute requirement

NOTHING’S HAPPENING – IS THIS SPIRITUALITY?
At some phase you will experience a plateau, a sense that nothing is happening, in which case just continue chopping wood and carrying water or whatever equivalent you have in your life. Sweep floor, make beds. Fix car, drive to work. Write blog! Just keep on doing whatever YOUR Zen is!

INSTANT ENLIGHTENMENT – NOT!
You may have been led to believe that enlightenment will come upon you like the flash that hit St Paul on the road to Damascus that your halo will sprout and everyone will notice your spiritual energy. Bullshit. This is very very rare. Most frequently it is just a slow peeling of layers, like an onion, only slower!

IN AND OUT
At times you will experience not just the up and down process but the ‘in and out’. You will feel the need to go inside and spend time examining and experiencing your own inner processes and sometimes getting just how yukky it really is in there [and how nice it could be]. And you will also feel the need to be out in the world, connecting with and experiencing yourself in relation to others. Both the in and the out are part of a total process and feed each other.

The rocky, stony road to enlightenment is full of challenges, obstacles and barriers that bring spiritual illuminations because it is in the facing of these and moving beyond them that we develop spiritual fortitude.

Enlightened people don’t have to sit on a velvet cushion, holding their fingers in om-cars, chanting mantras and getting into yoga asanas. They’re all great, but remember, enlightenment comes from being present in whatever life you life, no matter how ordinary.

And next time you scream at the guy who takes the parking space you were angling for or you think angry thoughts about your spouse, or you trip over something cos you’re not ‘here’… remember you’re human. We all are. Simply tell yourself ‘life happens… what’s next?’

WE INVITE YOU TO SHARE YOUR EXPERIENCES IN THE COMMENTS

What illuminations have you experienced along the road?

How did they come about and what changed for you as a result?

Sunny and Pierre Soleil

Harmonic Emergence – Return to Earth
H.E.R.E.

World Human Orientation
W.H.O.

© 2009, Pierre Soleil. All rights reserved but relaxed Pierre Soleil We like to pass on the word so YOU are welcome to use this document in accordance with the Creative Commons license. That is, you can tweet, facebook, repost, excerpt and even adapt it so long as you don’t pretend it’s yours for commercial purposes