It’s Christmas morning in the year of the Christian dispensation, 2010 and I’m finding that I’m hard-pressed to be Merry about much of anything. If you want to read something cheerful and uplifting about Christmas, stop now and go elsewhere.
Yes, I am more than thankful for my wonderful family and friends and the extraordinary good times we have together, and I know that I am blessed beyond all expectations I ever had for my life. But in a sense, that’s part of why I am unable to feel “Merry” about Christmas.
You see, within the circle of my family and friends, we share common values and aims that are based on love and caring and sharing, and all around us we see a world where those values have been degraded and corrupted to the point that they are either no longer recognizable, or they have disappeared altogether. This is incredibly painful and even moreso because we know that the way the world could be is so different from what is, and that this “what is” will, inevitably, affect us personally.
When, as a result of being part of a loving, cohesive group of creative and intelligent beings, one realizes that such a group is surrounded on all sides by creatures in whom the rule of the jungle prevails – the strong dominate the weak, conflict and rule by thugs is the order of the day – it is really hard to feel very Merry.
The situation is so bad that I see no hope for humanity at large at all. Extinction of our race is the inevitable outcome and I am no longer the only person who thinks so; even some mainstream scientists and pundits have written as much. They don’t seem to be able to put their finger on the root of the problem, tending to blame it on effects, not causes, but they feel the prickle of the hairs rising on the back of their neck, and they sense the wolf circling in the darkness.
The problem is personal evil. And in our world, personal evil manifests always and ever through pathology whether it is a sickness of the individual body or mind, the body social or politic, or the body of our mother: Planet Earth. As above, so below.
Just as germs are not aware that they will be burned alive or buried deep in the ground along with the human body whose death they are causing, so the psychopaths presently ruling humanity do not realize – because they cannot – that the only end for all under their rule – including themselves – is death.
That is not, of course, what the psychopaths running the show believe is going to happen. The fox chasing down and eating the last, living, rabbit has no idea that she and her kits will soon starve because there is nothing left to eat; she feels only her hunger of the moment and her determination to eat now, her “fear” (if you can call it that), of being hungry.
But we are not talking about foxes and rabbits here, we are talking about human beings and human-looking beings – an intraspecies predator of extraordinary cunning – that has evolved in the crucible of human intelligence to be able to deal effectively with that defense mechanism that is distinctly human: productive and intelligent creativity.
We have seen extraordinary examples of this evolution in the cunning of the human predator in the past year or so and I am reminded of bits of that remarkable passage in Matthew 24:
Take heed that no man deceive you. For many shall come in my name, saying, I am Christ; and shall deceive many. And ye shall hear of wars and rumours of wars: see that ye be not troubled: for all these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet. For nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom: and there shall be famines, and pestilences, and earthquakes, in diverse places. All these are the beginning of sorrows. Then shall they deliver you up to be afflicted, and shall kill you: and ye shall be hated of all nations for my name’s sake. And then shall many be offended, and shall betray one another, and shall hate one another. And many false prophets shall rise, and shall deceive many. And because iniquity shall abound, the love of many shall wax cold. But he that shall endure unto the end, the same shall be saved.
For then shall be great tribulation, such as was not since the beginning of the world to this time, no, nor ever shall be. And except those days should be shortened, there should no flesh be saved: but for the elect’s sake those days shall be shortened. Then if any man shall say unto you, Lo, here is Christ, or there; believe it not. For there shall arise false Christs, and false prophets, andshall shew great signs and wonders; insomuch that, if it were possible, they shall deceive the very elect. (verses 4-25 excerpts)
Now, I’m not going Bible thumper on you, but as I have explained to many, as a work of literature, the Bible deserves close and careful scrutiny for the many things between the lines and layered on in the glosses, not to mention what can be extracted from the discernment of earlier layers before the glosses were applied. This passage is a case in point. Whoever wrote it (and Anotoly Fomenko believes it was written during the Middle Ages and makes a very good case for that) had certain knowledge and experiences in his reality and that reality may very well have been the one that Mike Baillie describes in “New Light on the Black Death,” or the near complete destruction of Europe and the decimation of its population during the Dark and Middle Ages. I’ve written about this in my series of articles on Cometary disasters as well as the more recent“Witches, Comets and Planetary Cataclysms.”
The point I wish to highlight from the Matthew passage is the level and extent of deception that is such that “if it were possible, they shall deceive the very elect.”
A couple of days ago I called an old friend to wish her a pleasant holiday season and catch up on what she had been doing. During the course of the conversation, she made the remark that it was hard to feel Merry about things because of the “Muslim terrorists.” Oh boy! Don’t get me started! I wrote to her after hanging up the phone: “I was a tiny bit alarmed with your comment about Muslim terrorists yesterday…” I then went on to explain that the Muslim Terror threat was simply propaganda. Then, I got to my point which was that believing lies can actually damage the brain in such a way that believing lies becomes habitual and begins to extend into all areas of one’s life. Clearly, when that happens, the individual is in a precarious position because – due to habit of mind – they will undoubtedly believe a lie one day that is fatal to them or someone they love. I included a “note” that I posted on my Facebook page a week or so ago entitled “Does Lying and Believing Lies Damage the Brain?” wherein I wrote, in part:
Among the many interesting things said by psychologist, Andrew Lobaczewski in his seminal work, Political Ponerology, one that interested me the most was his remark about “the first criterion for ponerogenesis” being the atrophy of critical faculties.
One phenomenon all ponerogenic groups and associations have in common is the fact that their members lose (or have already lost) the capacity to perceive pathological individuals as such, interpreting their behavior in a fascinated, heroic, or melodramatic ways. The opinions, ideas, and judgments of people carrying various psychological deficits are endowed with an importance at least equal to that of outstanding individuals among normal people.
The atrophy of natural critical faculties with respect to pathological individuals becomes an opening to their activities, and, at the same time, a criterion for recognizing the association in concern as ponerogenic. Let us call this the first criterion of ponerogenesis. […]
Thus, whenever we observe some group member being treated with no critical distance, although he betrays one of the psychological anomalies familiar to us, and his opinions being treated as at least equal to those of normal people, although they are based on a characteristically different view of human matters, we must derive the conclusion that this human group is affected by a ponerogenic process and if measures are not taken the process shall continue to its logical conclusion. We shall treat this in accordance with the above described first criterion of ponerology, which retains its validity regardless of the qualitative and quantitative features of such a union: the atrophy of natural critical faculties with respect to pathological individuals becomes an opening to their activities, and, at the same time, a criterion for recognizing the association in concern as ponerogenic. […]
Any human group affected by the process described herein is characterized by its increasing regression from natural common sense and the ability to perceive psychological reality. Someone considering this in terms of traditional categories might consider it an instance of “turning into half-wits” or the development of intellectual deficiencies and moral failings.
The sad thing about Lobaczewski was that, despite the fact that he completed the task of assembling the work of many experts from that place and time that was, in many ways, rather similar to the place and time that must have given rise to the passage from Matthew quoted above, he, himself, with all his intellect and experience, was also taken in by lies, in specific, the belief that the U.S. was truly democratic and the “last, best hope of the world,” along with the lie that Christianity was a religion based on a man named Jesus who was crucified and rose from the dead 2000 years ago. These two lies led to his inability to see certain things about either the U.S. or Christianity that are as obvious as the nose on an elephant to so many others. On those topics, he certainly discoursed like a “half-wit.” This then led, so I believe, to his failure to perceive danger in crucial areas that resulted in his death.
I, and my fellow researchers and editors of SOTT.net, have observed this “turning into half-wits” over and over again. It’s the damnedest thing! The instant an individual makes a decision to believe a lie, it’s as though their ability to use accurate reasoning about anything else – not just a contentious item – grinds to a halt.
Most often, this sort of dynamic occurs in very emotional situations where the individual is heavily invested in not seeing the truth about a person or a situation for any number of reasons. They may be involved in a close relationship with the person, they may be brought up to ‘believe’ a certain way and, in spite of evidence that their faith is misplaced, refuse to accept the facts.
In addition to the quote from Lobaczewski and similar comments to those written above, I also included the following from my ‘note’ on Facebook:
Focuses on the use of functional magnetic resonance imaging in lie detection in forensic psychology. Impact of lying on the brain’s activity.
By: Kaja Perina
Lying generates unique brain activity that can be measured by functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRIs), brain scans that could someday morph into a forensic tool far more potent than the flawed polygraph test.
Researchers gave 18 subjects a playing card, then offered them money to lie to a computer about the card while undergoing an fMRI. When subjects lied, the scans revealed increased activity in several regions of the brain, including the anterior cingulate gyrus, which is implicated in conflict monitoring, attention and response inhibition. Head researcher Daniel Langleben, M.D., a professor of psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania, says this confirms that the brain’s “default” response is to tell the truth. “No area of the brain works harder to tell the truth than to lie” says Langleben. …
For my facebook note, I had done more research and included the following link with a few clues:
In this study, the authors investigated the function of the anterior cingulate gyrus mentioned above in the article about lying, and discovered that patients with schizophrenia showed significantly less anterior cingulate gyrus activation when lying. That is to say, lying without the ACC lighting up means that you’ve descended into madness.
The wikipedia article on the topic adds interesting clues about the possibility that lying and believing lies damages the brain:
[…] The ACC is connected with the prefrontal cortex and parietal cortex as well as the motor system and the frontal eye fields making it a central station for processing top-down and bottom-up stimuli and assigning appropriate control to other areas in the brain. The ACC seems to be especially involved when effort is needed to carry out a task such as in early learning and problem solving. Many studies attribute functions such as error detection, anticipation of tasks, motivation, and modulation of emotional responses to the ACC.
ACC response in Stroop task experiments (designed to measure adherence to sequential decision-making paths) remains relatively elevated in typical human subjects, as the alternative – spontaneity – is sacrificed. Rehearsing a task that originally produced spontaneous, novel responses to the point of producing rigid, stereotypic responses results in a diminished ACC response.
Whereas most funded research is concentrated on reduced task focus – often diagnosed subjectively as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) – recent research using monkeys has revealed that heightened ACC activity (generally associated with reduced dopamine utilization) reduces capacity to learn how to use visual cues for anticipating rewards. […]
Evidence for the role of the ACC as having an error detection function comes from consistent observations of error related negativity (ERN) uniquely generated within the ACC upon error occurrences. […]
Studying the effects of damage to the ACC provides insights into the type of functions it serves in the intact brain. Behavior that is associated with lesions in the ACC includes: inability to detect errors, severe difficulty with resolving stimulus conflict …. emotional instability, inattention, and akinetic mutism.
There is evidence that damage to ACC is present in patients with schizophrenia, where studies have shown patients have difficulty in dealing with conflicting spatial locations in a Stroop-like task and having abnormal ERNs. Participants with ADHD were found to have reduced activation in the dorsal area of the ACC when performing the Stroop task.] Together these findings corroborate results from imaging and electrical studies about the variety of functions attributed to the ACC.
Helen S. Mayberg … identified area 25 as a key conduit of neural traffic between the “thinking” frontal cortex and the phylogenetically older central limbic region that gives rise to emotion. She subsequently found that area 25 appeared overactive in these depressed people – “like a gate left open,” as she puts it – allowing negative emotions to overwhelm thinking and mood. …
The ACC area in the brain is associated with many functions that require conscious experience by the viewer. Higher ACC activation levels were found for more emotionally aware female participants when shown short ’emotional’ video clips. Betteremotional awareness is associated with improved recognition of emotional cues or targets which is reflected by ACC activation.
The idea of awareness being associated with the ACC has some evidence with it, in that it seems to be the case that when subject’s responses are not congruent with actual responses, a larger ERN is produced.
One study found an ERN even when subjects were not aware of their error. Awareness may not be necessary to elicit an ERN, but it could influence the effect of the amplitude of the feedback ERN. Relating back to the reward based learning theory, awareness could modulate expectancy violations. Increased awareness could result in decreased violations of expectancies and decreased awareness could achieve the opposite effect. …
The clues all seem to point to the idea that lying, holding onto a lie, even if one is only lying to the self, and believing lies, causes some kind of damage to this area of the brain. It is said that any brain tissue lesion causes a certain degree of loosening of accurate thinking and, as a consequence, this can affect the personality. Lobaczewski points out that people who don’t like to think about, focus on, or talk about disturbing topics when those disturbing elements are present all around, have to resort to a sort of wearing of blinders to truth. They do this mainly because, if they face the truth without flinching, assuming there is any sort of strong sense of principle within, they have to make changes to their lives that are often uncomfortable and unwelcome. For example, a woman who denies to herself that her philandering spouse is cheating on her does so because, if she faces the truth, she must make a choice about what to do: divorce him and change her whole life (which she is used to – ‘the devil you know is better than the devil you don’t know’) or accept the situation, in which case she might fall under censure – either her own, or that of her friends and family. Of course, some women deal with this by projecting the attitude that they don’t care, that they have an ‘open relationship’. In some cases it might be true, but in most cases, it is simply a matter of lying to the self at another level. And isn’t that what I’m talking about? The line in the sand keeps getting closer and closer, and people keep backing up into more and more clever self-deceptions in order to avoid facing the cold, hard truth.
In any event, this process amounts to consciously or unconsciously eliminating data from one’s field of view. Doing this can become a habit of mind. But there is a price to be paid for doing this. Any thought processes that are based on incomplete data where, at some level, the self knows that some data has been avoided or eliminated, and the objective is that the person wants – maybe desperately needs – to come to a nicer, more socially approved conclusion, amounts to thinking like a psychopath. And what is the consequence of habitually thinking like a psychopath even if one is not genetically psychopathic? It leads the brain into the realm of psychopathology and once that threshold is crossed, it is very, very hard to return.
So, anyway, I shared much of the above with my friend and what she wrote back was even more alarming:
Thanks for all the stuff. Yes I think I have learned to think for myself (:-0). In fact I agree that most Americans are totally confused. Trying to sort through the morass and layers of intrigue, personal greed and arrogance of those with power (and power is the great corrupter) is beyond the abilities of most people; for one because of the complicity of the news networks etc. etc. I tend to look for hard evidence. The pictures of muslims praying in the streets of New York and blocking traffic, the women who want driver’s license pictures taken with their veils, and the pictures of throngs of angry people holding up signs in London are a heads up, what’s going on, to me. Especially since these people are also the vicitms of lemming like reactions to their religious leaders’ fundamentalism. Then there is the secondary place of women in their society. Those who emigrate don’t apppear to be going to other countries so that the women can escape their restrictions (at least some of them). Isn’t this migration possibly a way of collapsing within? Maybe yes, maybe no. Of course there are always exceptions, but one can’t just focus on exceptions and make that the conclusion. And that can go in both directions of course.
We see here a typical example of defending the lie via subconscious selection and substitution – turning into a half-wit. First of all, she has missed the point that power is not the great corrupter, but rather that power attracts corrupt individuals – corrupt right down to their genes. It is a cliche response. Then she says she looks for “hard evidence” and says that pictures are that evidence!! She then rambled on about what was wrong with the world being the lack of a good classical education and so on – rather typical rants for middle class people who have lived a more or less mainstream life and are having great difficulty sorting out what is wrong; because, they do, indeed, feel that something is terribly wrong. There just happens to be a whole line of propaganda designed for this class of people and their higher intellectual level.
What is more disturbing is the fact that I have been communicating with this individual for a long time and conveying to her many bits of information that should have given her some clues to ‘think with’ (she says she thinks for herself but we see her regurgitating the propaganda line that is designed to snare the liberals and progressives), I was – to put it mildly – dismayed by this apparent half-wittedness. This is a woman of excellent qualities, superior thinking abilities, good education, and who generally reads widely and has done for years.
But still, she’s been had.
I thought I would give it a shot even though, with this sign – the first criterion of ponerization – I know there isn’t much hope. I wrote back in response to her remarks about how she looks for “hard evidence” and found it in “pictures of muslims praying in the streets of New York and blocking traffic, the women who want driver’s license pictures taken with their veils, and the pictures of throngs of angry people holding up signs in London are a heads up, what’s going on, to me…” I told her:
The problem is, if you get even those images via the media, they can be totally misrepresented and the mainstream media has been caught photoshopping images. You can’t trust anything they publish without total context. That’s why we have all the members of our group around the world constantly checking stuff out to try to find out what is really going on and the layers of that onion of lies are endless! For example, the staging of the toppling of the statue of Saddam Hussein is a good model to remember whenever a photo seems convincing.
But I don’t want to get off into the anti-Muslim propaganda and how it is done here, I want to come back to the levels of deception that are so cunning as to “deceive even the very elect.” Barbara Oakley wrote a book entitled Evil Genes wherein she reported the following:
A recent imaging study by psychologist Drew Westen and his colleagues at Emory University provides firm support for the existence of emotional reasoning. Just prior to the 2004 Bush-Kerry presidential elections, two groups of subjects were recruited – fifteen ardent Democrats and fifteen ardent Republicans. Each was presented with conflicting and seemingly damaging statements about their candidate, as well as about more neutral targets such as actor Tom Hanks (who, it appears, is a likable guy for people of all political persuasions). Unsurprisingly, when the participants were asked to draw a logical conclusion about a candidate from the other – “wrong” – political party, the participants found a way to arrive at a conclusion that made the candidate look bad, even though logic should have mitigated the particular circumstances and allowed them to reach a different conclusion. Here’s where it gets interesting.
When this “emote control” began to occur, parts of the brain normally involved in reasoning were not activated. Instead, a constellation of activations occurred in the same areas of the brain where punishment, pain, and negative emotions are experienced (that is, in the left insula, lateral frontal cortex, and ventromedial prefrontal cortex). Once a way was found to ignore information that could not be rationally discounted, the neural punishment areas turned off, and the participant received a blast of activation in the circuits involving rewards – akin to the high an addict receives when getting his fix.
In essence, the participants were not about to let facts get in the way of their hot-button decision making and quick buzz of reward. “None of the circuits involved in conscious reasoning were particularly engaged,” says Westen. “Essentially, it appears as ifpartisans twirl the cognitive kaleidoscope until they get the conclusions they want, and then they get massively reinforced for it, with the elimination of negative emotional states and activation of positive ones.” {…}
Ultimately, Westen and his colleagues believe that “emotionally biased reasoning leads to the ‘stamping in’ or reinforcement of a defensive belief, associating the participant’s ‘revisionist’ account of the data with positive emotion or relief and elimination of distress. ‘The result is that partisan beliefs are calcified, and the person can learn very little from new data,’” Westen says. Westen’s remarkable study showed that neural information processing related to what he terms “motivated reasoning” … appears to be qualitatively different from reasoning when a person has no strong emotional stake in the conclusions to be reached.
The study is thus the first to describe the neural processes that underlie political judgment and decision making, as well as to describe processes involving emote control, psychological defense, confirmatory bias, and some forms of cognitive dissonance. The significance of these findings ranges beyond the study of politics: “Everyone from executives and judges to scientists and politicians may reason to emotionally biased judgments when they have a vested interest in how to interpret ‘the facts,’” according to Westen.
This information is crucial to our topic here, and I would like to point out that Ms. Oakley herself suffered from the very thing she was describing just as Lobaczewski could describe the first criterion of Ponerogenesis and suffered from it himself and my friend can be so liberal and progressive and still fall for the propaganda. Oakley lionizes Donald Rumsfeld! In short, she, too, was captured by a particular line of propaganda designed just for her type. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: There is a program for everyone!
This brings me to the core issue of my topic: the subtlety of the confusion being spread around the globe and how even the very “elect” can be deceived. This is because it is evolving and changing. It’s like a dance: those seeking truth make a move, those seeking to conceal counter that move, and the stakes keep getting higher, and the moves keep getting more and more subtle. We have seen recently one very dramatic example in the case of Wikileaks and Julian Assange where a truth is entangled and wrapped up in so many lies that even very perspicacious people can be deceived. It’s all being done in the name of ‘resistance to the constituted authorities’ so it has to be good, right? Wrong.
Then, there is Jim Humble – the Julian Assange of the alternative health industry. Because we all know that the FDA is not to be trusted, he must be a good guy and his product a real boon to mankind, right? Wrong. MMS is deadly poison and Jim Humble is a snake-oil salesman and so is Julian Assange.
I finally wrote and told my friend:
If you haven’t read Fletcher Prouty’s book The Secret Team, do so asap. People need to know what they do, what their methods are, and how totally our impressions are managed. If you aren’t out there yourself, or hooked up to a real, live network of people who are on hand about everywhere and can bear honest witness, you have no way of knowing what is really going on!
Read SOTT daily, please. We work very hard to find out what is really going on, to ‘see the unseen’ and keep people informed. I doubt that we will be able to do it much longer…
Here I’m going to bring up a topic that I don’t often discuss on SOTT.net – my foray into superluminal communication – the Cassiopaean Experiment. I think I need to mention that we here at SOTT do get a lot of guidance from the Cs on the topic of world affairs even if that guidance is mainly suggesting that we research deeper – and hint at the direction or give some clue words… and they are right more often than not. After all, the Cs have said:
Life is religion. Life experiences reflect how one interacts with God. Those who are asleep are those of little faith in terms of their interaction with the creation. Some people think that the world exists for them to overcome or ignore or shut out. For those individuals, the worlds will cease. They will become exactly what they give to life. They will become merely a dream in the ‘past.’ People who pay strict attention to objective reality right and left, become the reality of the ‘Future.’
Everything that is happening right now on the planet is exactly what they predicted back in 1997 – 2000… I don’t think we would have navigated through it as far as we had if we had not been getting this guidance. I don’t know if you – the reader – have read The Wave” and “Adventures With Cassiopaea” or not, but I laid it all out online back in 1998 and ’99 and so far, they’ve batted them out of the park repeatedly. So I’m inclined to give them a pretty high probability of being right much of the time.
As I said, I don’t usually bring them into the discussion on the SOTT.net page because it’s just not appropriate and I don’t want to turn off the people who aren’t into metaphysical stuff, but if there is something that is really difficult, we do ask. And very often the guiding hand of the Cs is behind the approach we take as well as the “side” we take on SOTT.
Coming back to Christmas, now. Because of our research, our network, because of guidance from the Cs, I see the lies, the confusion, the twists, the turns, the myriad deceptions that take in even the brightest and best. But without that network, that research, that guidance, I would be helpless just as so many of the brightest and best are. Our network is spread all over the planet, connected via the internet, and now – thanks in part to Julian Assange – even that possibility is under serious threat. In the same way, thanks to people like Jim Humble, our ability to be in charge of our own health may soon be threatened (keep your eye on the ball here, it’s coming!)
However, I think that most of the members of that network have practiced ‘seeing’ long enough that, even without the physical or virtual connection, the principles of finding truth will have been well enough established to see them safely through the lies and deceptions designed to deceive even the very elect. But, without a network – and guidance – to provide robust feedback for training the eyes of the soul, there is no possibility of being able to escape what is coming upon the human race.
And that, in the end, is what my friend and so many others lack: a true network to which they have committed themselves in sincerity in a search for the truth.
I am thankful for that on this Christmas Day, year of the Christian dispensation, 2010. I am thankful for my family, my extended family, my friends, my network, and the gift of the Magi – the Cassiopaean communication.
And except those days should be shortened, there should no flesh be saved: but for the elect’s sake those days shall be shortened.
And despite the fact that I see what is coming, I still cling to the hope that, “for the elect’s sake, will those days be shortened.”
May we be blessed with the Love of Truth – the true Christ within – and the determination to seek it – to be Christed – this Christmas Day.
Ye shall know the Truth, and the Truth will set you free.
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