Here's a contribution that I think is more in line with the group effort than the one I linked previously.
This post was originally formatted as a "Dialog with Garret" based on the video narrative which starts below. But I decided it was a bit too "wild", so I toned it down and re-wrote it a bit. The video narrative is the bolded part.
ATTENTION: All you rule-breakers, you misfits and troublemakers, all you free spirits and pioneers, all you visionaries and non-conformists:
That description could apply to ADDers, non-ADDers, sociopaths, Narcissists and possibly psychopaths. I’m not sure about psychopaths, since without empathy and with shallow emotions, could they be ‘motivated’ by this presentation? Seems more likely they would be behind the scenes, orchestrating the show.
So, who is being addressed, exactly?
Everything that the establishment has told you is wrong with you is actually what's right with you.
In light of all the possible addressees, how about some clarification here?
You see things others don’t.
How about an example so we can narrow down the field a bit?
You are hardwired to change the world.
And this statement is based on what?
Unlike nine out of ten people, your mind is irrepressible, and this threatens authority.
As a generality, I suppose that could be a contextually accurate statement for many, many people. Even some who are still inured in the system in different ways.
You were born to be a revolutionary.
“A revolutionary” in what way? Science, industry, academia, politics, something else?
You can’t stand rules because in your heart you know there’s a better way.
Which rules? There are all kinds of rules for just about everything imaginable – including grammar. And there is a BIG difference between some rules that are stupid, boring, pathological and counter-intuitive to creating and living a rational beneficial life - and those rules that are the only thing standing between some pathological people and the wholesale expression of their pathological urges to rape, rob, pillage, destroy, hurt, maim, kill, etc., etc., etc.
You have strengths dangerous to the establishment, and it wants them eliminated.
Well, I have certain strengths and “I” know what they are, but am I to assume the ones that are meant? And why must the referents be so vague? To keep the statements from being challenged? Which ‘strengths’ are targeted for elimination by this ‘establishment’?
So your whole life you’ve been told your strengths were weaknesses - Now I’m telling you otherwise.
Umm, if you are referring to the strengths that I think you might mean, and you know me the way you think you do, then you already know that I know that. So, naturally I wouldn’t need to be told that. Reality provides evidence via feedback and cognitive loops provide the means for perceiving it. So, it seems you might be addressing ‘wounded’ people who are deep in their ‘disorder’ perspective and your statement could be wrong or right, depending on their particular issue and situation.
Your impulsivity is a gift. Impulses are your key to the miraculous. Your distractibility is an artifact of your inspired creativity.
You’ve just used the three keywords of “AD/HD” as understood from the ‘disorder’ perspective and advanced by Russell Barkley. Am I to assume you’re not interested in ‘AD/HD’ folks with a healthier perspective? For instance, I’m not ‘impulsive’; I'm just ready and able to throw myself into 'the chase' on a moment's notice. And I'm not distractible; I'm constantly monitoring my environment; which is how I understood that you were coming while half a mile away and didn’t need to stay focused on you to maintain this awareness. Can we move this along?
Your mood swings reflect the natural pulse of life.
Well, maybe sometimes, but my sensitivity to stimuli also prompts my mood swings, mediated by my self-discipline of the moment. Since my inner and outer environment includes all kinds of toxins, including emotionally toxic people, the natural pulse of my life is not necessarily the healthiest at all times.
They give you unstoppable energy when you're high, deep soulful insight when you're low.
No, the mood swings don’t give me anything – they are effects rather than causes. The high energy levels are natural and exist in the absence of suppression/repression.
Been diagnosed with a "disorder"? That’s society’s latest way to deny its own illness by pointing the finger at you.
Well, to what ‘disorder’ do you refer? If you mean ‘AD/HD’, I agree that this diagnosis is done by using ‘normal’ as the yardstick and as ‘normal’ relates to the (so-called) Executive Functions Model which is a theory of human variability rather than proof of biological basis. Last time I checked, anyway.
Your addictive personality is just a symptom of your vast underused capacity for heroic, creative expression and spiritual connection.
I dunno. ‘Addictive personality’ in my case simply means that any ‘high’ I chase has to be done manually, time after time, because my brain is not wired for the easy, low-effort establishing of automatically maintained addictions. Not that it can't be done, of course. It just takes a lot more. Seems it’s more a symptom of not being able to easily turn off the perception of what’s really wrong in the world – for long, anyway.
Your utter lack of repression,
Who has ‘utter lack of repression’? According to Hervey Cleckley, Robert Hare and others, it’s the psychopath that has the property of ‘utter lack of repression’. The ‘AD/HD’ folks who see themselves from the ‘disorder’ perspective, are already repressed, obviously. Read that sentence again.
…your wide eyed idealism, your unmitigated open mind - didn’t anyone ever tell you? These are the traits shared by the greatest pioneers and visionaries, innovators, revolutionaries, procrastinators and drama queens, activists on the social scene, space cadets, mavericks, philosophers, derelicts, business suits flying fighter jets, football stars and sex addicts, celebrities with ADD, alcoholics who seek novelty, first responders, prophets and saints, mystics and change agents.
Well, you’ve just blended ADDers, psychopaths, sociopaths and other disturbed people into a single group, mixed desirable and undesirable traits together and came up with “a single personality type”. That’s bad alchemy. And potentially dangerous to some very good people in your “group” who have been hoodwinked, manipulated and abused enough in their lives.
CHORUS
We are all the same, you know
'cause we're all affected, by The Way
We are all the same, you know
'cause we're all attracted to the flame.
You know in your heart that there's a natural order, something more sovereign than any man-made rules or laws could ever express.
No. As I just pointed out, we’re all obviously not the same. Bad choice of metaphors: ‘attracted to the flame’. That’s about a moth’s spiraling path to death.
This natural order is called "The Way."
By whom? And which "The Way"?
According to a friend of mine (whose name I don't yet have permission to mention), back in the day, "The Way" referred to the inner secrets of the old Mystery religions, forerunners of Gnosticism and some forms of early Christianity. These groups of individuals worked to know themselves, to master their emotions, aspire to higher thought and Truth as the ultimate ideals; then came psychopath co-opting.
The Way is the eternal substrate of the cosmos. It guides the very current of time and space.
The ‘eternal substrate of the cosmos’ may guide the ‘current of time and space’. If that is the case, then that is what is real. “The Way” is a mere man-made effort to re-conceptualize the actual reality as if it were some prop in a scripted show. A redundant semantic identification. An esoteric sounding bridge to what follows…
The Way is known by some as The Will of God, Divine Providence, The Holy Spirit, the Implicate Order, the Tao, reverse entropy, life force, but for now we’ll simply call it 'The Way.'
Who is the ‘some’ who ‘knows’ this? None of those words are necessarily equivalent to your definition of ‘the way’ as eternal substrate of the cosmos. More unnecessary semantic identification to mix up all kinds of different referents as if one was making a pot of ‘refrigerator soup’.
The Way is reflected in you as the source of your inspiration, the source of your passions, your wisdom, your enthusiasm, your intuition, your spiritual fire...love. The Way takes the chaos out of the Universe and breathes life into it, giving it divine order. The Way, when expressed by the mind, is genius; perceived through the eyes, is beauty; felt through the senses, is grace. When allowed into the heart...is love.
Word salad blended together to feel good to the brain, taste good to the tongue, and leave the belly starved for solid nutrition.
Most people cannot sense The Way directly...
Most people cannot sense the ‘eternal substrate of the cosmos’ directly? So…?
…but then there are the Wayseers, the keepers of the flame.
Finally, a “noun” for that mixed group of people you defined above which likely includes psychological pathology. And what flame? The one I already mentioned that attracts the moth to its death, or did I miss something?
Wayseers have an unexplainable knack for just knowing The Way. They sense it in their very being. They can’t tell you why or how they arrived at the right answer. They just know it in their core.
You seem to be mixing 'just knowing the way' with situations of valid intuition or insight that come from a deep understanding of a particular something at a particular time after the preparatory work has been done.
They can’t show their work, so don’t ask.
Yes they can show it, by deductively expressing what they have intuitively sensed, in context with their observations and knowledge of how the world/universe works. They may often struggle for the right words to string together in the right manner to achieve the acceptable grammar of linear understanding; their logic may even seem fuzzy at times, but it just takes effort, and enough interest to maintain the necessary focus.
Their minds simply resonate with The Way. When The Way is present, so are they.
“When” the way is present? If the way is the eternal substrate of the cosmos, when would it not be present? Is that a faux paux?
While others are blind to it, and society begs you to ignore it, The Way stirs you inside.
If the others who are blind to ‘it’ are part of society, how is it these others beg me to ignore something that they, themselves, are blind to?
Neurological repression blocks most people’s awareness of The Way.
Neurological repression of one sort or other blocks most people’s awareness of many aspects and facts of reality. There is nothing new here.
Censoring all thoughts and impulses from the unconscious is their prefrontal cortex, the Gestapo of the brain. Nothing which violates its socialized programming even gets through.
Wait, which is it? The prefrontal cortex or the socialized programming that does the censoring? This idea of the PFC as the Gestapo of the brain is silly. The PFC is the latest addition to the brain, evolutionarily speaking, and is necessary for deductive work and contextualizing the irrational emotion originating in the more primitive limbic system, at the least.
You already know the limbic system because it’s represented by the reptile image in your own video. Without the PFC, one would not even be able to do the mathematics of engineering or to program computers, among other things.
The PFC was even instrumental in this video production due to the need for gathering the pictures, video, planning the script - which includes careful thought to what is and is not said, what power words to use, choosing the narrator, choosing the music and it's tone (whether major or minor keys to create and hook the desired mood), blending the music in, editing for a logical flow, etc. In short, making this entire video.
But your mind is different. Your mind has been cracked wide open to The Way; by some miraculous genetic trait, some psychotropic chemical or maybe even by the will of your own soul.
Cracked wide open? Like an egg or the earth during a massive earthquake, or by crack cocaine? So, the inference here is that no matter how it happens, it’s all good and beneficial and oh, so right?
Your brain’s reward pathways have been hijacked; dopamine employed to overthrow the fascist dictatorship of your prefrontal cortex.
Hmmm. From my own studies, it seems to me that dopamine is employed to stay calm in the face of predators, killers, incessant, unrelenting stress and the awareness of the fascist dictatorship of psychopaths and their worker bees. Where'd I go wrong, assuming it is me?
Now your brain is free of repression, your mind free of censorship, your awareness exposed to the turbulent seas of the unconscious - through this open doorway divine light shines into your consciousness, showing you The Way. This is what makes you a Wayseer.
Well, a person could theoretically be free of all addictions involving excessive dopamine, but they can still be ‘infected’ by narcissistic deep denial implanted by less-than-optimal childhood experiences that can also involve the compulsive re-enactment of trauma.
Following your logic, a person can be this wonderful ‘Wayseer’ and still unconsciously seek to visit their traumas onto others. Lloyd deMause and more mainstream psychologists have reams of research material to prove that.
Ninety percent of human civilization is populated with those whose brains are blocked to The Way.
Where does that percentage come from? I have read that 10 to 15% of the world’s population and 3 to 6% of school-age children are supposed to be on the “AD/HD” continuum. Are you referencing 90% of non-ADD people? If not, then where does this figure come from, exactly?
Their brains are hardwired to enforce the social programming indoctrinated since birth.
No, they’re not hardwired this way. This just becomes the default neurological set once the brain chemistry has balanced in ‘a state of siege’ that never ends.
Unlike you they cannot break out of this programming, because they have not yet experienced the necessary revolution of mind.
Anyone can experience a revolution of mind by questioning everything, breaking their robotic, mechanical addictions, following an esoteric path, or by more direct means that slowly and steadily lower the amount of stress and certain levels of certain neuro-chemicals the brain/body has become addicted to. That last is theoretical for most people at this time.
These programmed people take social institutions and rules very seriously. Society is full of games programmed to keep peoples’ minds occupied so they will not revolt. These games often cause sick fixations on peculiar protocols, power structures, taboos and domination - all subtle forms of human bondage. This distinct form of madness is not only tolerated by the masses but insisted upon. The programmed ones believe in rules so forcefully they become willing to destroy anyone who violates them.
When people cannot think for themselves because they have been taught and programmed with all the instructions they will ever need from their authorities, then yes, they will fight to preserve this status quo because unconsciously, the alternative is literally unthinkable - possibly resembling death.
Wayseers are the ones who call their bluff.
Neither Wayseers nor anyone else should take something out of a baby’s hand without replacing it with something else at the same time. I think a true Wayseer would recognize that efficiency which reduces stress and eases one’s work is a value.
Since Wayseer minds are free to reject social programming, Wayseers readily see social institutions for what they are - imaginary games.
So would anyone with an understanding of General Semantics and conscious projection.
Wayseers comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable. Helping those who are lost in these games and refuse to help themselves is a calling of many Wayseers.
That applies to anyone who displays genuine empathy and caring for others.
Since Wayseers are the ones who keep contact with the original source of reality, they are able to disrupt societal conventions and even governments to realign humanity with The Way.
How about an example from a historical perspective?
Wayseers are an ancient lineage - a kind of priesthood, carriers of the flame, ones "in the know." There must always be Wayseers to reform the dizzying psychotic spinning wheels of society, giant mindless hamster wheels obscuring the pure blue sky, keeping humanity shackled in a darkened cage. So Wayseers are called - to shed light on the madness of society, to continually resurrect the timeless transcendent Spirit of Truth.
“Wayseers” is something you made up. There have been mystics, prophets and others who have influenced the evolutionary course of history, but of those people whose collective traits fit your ‘Wayseer’ description there has also originated much destruction, pain and suffering; same as today.
As mentioned earlier, historically, there was a useful "Way" and there was the co-opted "Way". If, instead of lecturing, you are revealing some kind of secret or something, why would you want to shine a spotlight on it? Just how naïve do you think your audience is?
Wayseers reveal this divine truth by devoting themselves to the birth of some creative or disruptive act expressed through art or philosophy, innovations to shake up industry, revolutions for democracy, coups that topple hypocrisy, movements of solidarity, changes that leave a legacy, rebellions against policy, spirit infused technology, moments of clarity, things that challenge barbarity, watersheds of sincerity, momentous drives for charity.
So, here you ‘rap and rhyme’ to reveal that this imaginary group of people you call Wayseers are those people who are deliberately disruptive, overtly rebellious and destructive and those people who are also actually creative?
I disagree completely. It appears to me you are blending together highly entropic individuals with highly creative people and ‘nouning’ them as “Wayseers”. Righteously enough, a “Real Wayseer”, if such exists, would see this nonsense from a mile away and avoid it like a plague. But the gifted, yet self-effacing ‘disordered’ people will probably get suckered into another con again.
As a Wayseer by your definition, I reject the Way you describe in favor of a different Way. A Way that makes use of the prefrontal cortex to outflank and rewire the pathological influences of socialized programming and to help others do the same by understanding what has gone wrong, as well.
CHORUS
We are all the same, you know
'cause we're all affected, by The Way
We are all the same, you know
'cause we're all attracted to the flame.
This is your calling, Wayseer.
You’ve found your tribe.
Welcome home.
That sounds warm, fuzzy, and nice and cozy, but no thanks. This feels like it is knowingly addressed to those people who have suffered infant and childhood emotional abandonment. That situation leaves a hunger inside, for the caring, support and love never received when it was necessary to meet nature’s requirement for the formation of healthy brain circuitry in humans, ala Gabor Mate.
The only way your Wayseer conceptualization makes any sense to me, considering the disparity and inconsistency of the traits you describe, is as a "granfalloon". That’s your WaySeer!
Closing note:
As the founder of The Fourth Way, Gurdjieff believed everyone was a "dog" until they proved otherwise. Considering what is available and known and revealed in contemporary psychology and psychopathology, I think that's sound policy for life.
