How to Change the World - Free E-Book

[United Gnosis]

This morning, there was a thread created to discuss an e-book that was featured on Zen Gardner. Laura asked for a review of the book, so I went to read it and write a short review; the original thread has since been deleted. Nevertheless, I'll put the short review here, in case anybody is curious.
The e-book was presented here:
_http://www.zengardner.com/free-e-book-everything-anyone-needs-know-wake/

This ebook is not too bad - as an eye-opener for external man. It is a quick read (1 hour at a fast pace, probably 2-3 hours for somebody not familiar with the material) that leads the reader to question their conditioning and envision a greater spectrum of possibilities of being. The discussion is light, simple and moves quickly, as one would discuss it to give an overview of exoteric spirituality to a friend. The main strength of the book appeared to be its very down-to-earth, non-preachy/non-pretentious attitude; I feel like this would avoid polarizing new readers away from the material.

However, the title "How to Change the World" ends up being hyperbolic. No actual techniques for the Work are discussed, and the book steers clear from serious examination of esoteric teachings. As such, it would barely qualify as an introductory type B influence. To be fair, there is also a good selection of quotes that are constantly brought to the forefront to illustrate the topics discussed. Comically, out of the hundred or so quotes in the book, there is only one from Gurdjieff, but it does stand out as the final word.

I'll repeat a few of the quotes used in the book to illustrate how the book progresses:

Introduction:

You go to school, and try really hard so that you can get into a good college, and then you try really hard at college to get a good job, and then you try really hard at your job so you can make money. And then your kids do the same thing. And everyone just keeps on doing this and no one even stops to think WHY they’re doing it anymore...
- Dylan, 12 year old

1: That’s Just The Way It Is ?

It is among the commonplaces of education that we often first cut off the living root and then try to replace its natural functions byartificial means. Thus we suppress the child's curiosity and then when
he lacks a natural interest in learning he is offered special coaching for his scholastic difficulties.
- Alice Duer Miller

‘Normal’ is getting dressed in clothes that you buy for work and driving through traffic in a car that you are still paying for – in order to get to the job you need to pay for the clothes and the car, and the house you leave vacant all day so you can afford to live in it.
- Ellen Goodman

Basically, economic growth means that you have to find something that people once got for free, or did for themselves or for each other, and then take it away and sell it back to them somehow.
– Charles Eisenstein

The few who understand the system will either be so interested in its profits or be so dependent upon its favours that there will be no opposition from that class, while on the other hand, the great body of people, mentally incapable of comprehending the tremendous advantage that capital derives from the system, will bear its burdens without complaint, and perhaps without even suspecting that the system is inimical to their interests.
- The Rothschild brothers of London writing to associates in New York, 1863

2: Beyond Conditioning

Earth provides enough to satisfy every man’s need, but not every man’s greed.
– Gandhi

A human being is a part of the whole called by us “the universe,” a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separate from the rest – a kind of optical illusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening the circle of understanding and compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.
- Albert Einstein

We're in a situation where we don't have enough jobs for people. But what are the jobs for? Are they because we need more production? Actually no. We have more than enough food for the whole world. We burn food in America to keep market value high. We have more than enough places to live so much that we're demolishing homes. In America we're ripping down homes because if we just let people live in them, then the market value would go down. And we're looking for ways to create jobs for people so they can compete for stuff that's already in abundance that we're burning down. That's when I look at it and say something is ass backwards here.
– Douglas Rushkoff

We make you pay for the water you drink, the food you eat, for the wars we need, for the crimes we commit; we make you dedicate the most important part of your life to us, but we give you wages and tell you they allow you to buy stuff and pay for your needs to make us even richer. We call this freedom.

I believe that the human race has developed a form of collective schizophrenia in which we are not only the slaves to this imposed thought behaviour, but we are also the police force of it.
- David Icke

Given the challenges we face, education doesn't need to be reformed – it needs to be transformed. The key to this transformation is not to standardize education, but to personalize it, to build achievement on discovering the individual talents of each child, to put students in an environment where they want to learn and where they can naturally discover their true passions.
- Sir Ken Robinson

3: An Answer to Existential Questions

How is it that something as unconscious as the matter of the brain ever gives rise to something as immaterial as an experience? (…) Scientists find themselves in the strange position of being confronted daily by the indisputable fact of their own consciousness, yet with no means to account for it.
- Peter Russell

The tighter physics have tried to grasp on to physical reality, to understand what it’s really made of, what are the core building blocks of life at the basis of it all – life, the universe, slips through your fingers. And you come up with something that’s increasingly abstract. And that’s what the unified field is; pure abstract potential. Pure abstract being. Pure abstract self-aware consciousness, which rises in waves of vibration to give rise to the particles, the people, everything we see in the vast universe.
- John Hagelin, Particle Physicist, Ph. D.

The world we are experiencing today is the result of our collective consciousness, and if we want a new world, each of us must start taking responsibility for helping create it.
- Rosemary Fillmore Rhea

4: The Purpose of Life

Knowing that I am different from the body, I need not neglect the body. It is a vehicle that I use to transact with the world. It is the temple which houses the Pure Self within.
- Adi Sankaracharya

Enlightenment means waking up to what you truly are and then being that.
- Adyashanti

The word enlightenment conjures up the idea of some superhuman accomplishment, and the ego likes to keep it that way, but it is simply your natural state of felt oneness with Being. It is a state of connectedness with something immeasurable and indestructible, something that, almost paradoxically, is essentially you and yet is much greater than you. It is finding your true nature beyond name and form.
- Eckhart Tolle

5: Lessons for Humanity

No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.
- Albert Einstein

You never change things by fighting the existing reality.To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.
- Buckminster Fuller

In observing himself, a man notices that self-observation itself brings about certain changes in his inner processes. He begins to understand that self-observation is an instrument of self-change, a means of awakening.
- G.I. Gurfjieff

 

[Palinurus]

Hi United Gnosis,

When I encountered the post in the deleted thread you mentioned, my curiosity got peaked; so I went for the download and had a quick glance through from cover to cover. No table of contents, no register, no list of references. Based on that brief encounter, I think your assessment of it is spot on. Thank you for posting it.

Looking through the website of Zen Gardner, I found the title of a piece that seemed familiar. After a search it turned out I had seen that piece on SotT recently.
Namely this one: http://www.sott.net/article/283123-Tora-Bora-tunnels-and-other-insane-Zionist-psyops

A searching of the SotT site as a whole for Zen Gardner's name (with the Google button enabled) revealed about twenty other pieces, most of them written by this author except the first one, from as early as January 27 2011 [Original graphics layout by Zen Gardner]: http://www.sott.net/article/222300-9-11-Mission-Accomplished

That one was written by Nila Sagadevan and originally published on the Before It's News website, for which Gardner has worked apparently -- both on lay out and on writing as well.

 

[Buddy]

This morning, there was a thread created to discuss an e-book that was featured on Zen Gardner. Laura asked for a review of the book, so I went to read it and write a short review; the original thread has since been deleted. Nevertheless, I'll put the short review here, in case anybody is curious.

Same here. I was also in process of answering the request. Here are my results:

106 pages with an Introduction, five chapters and an Endnote. No table of contents. Chapter five introduces "Five lessons for humanity".

Provides overviews of how various systems are designed to work and who they work for, e.g., education, financial systems, the vicious circles of work and debt, ownership and hierarchy, the "elite class", poverty as manufactured scarcity, dependency on the system. In general terms it then asks the reader to imagine possibilities beyond each of these systems.

Quotes in each section are provided that encapsulate the author's points and there are external links like, to you-tube and statistics papers that offer additional support.

At page 62 there's a recap:

QUICK RECAP

ENSLAVED STATE: We need to earn our way through life. We need to earn good grades so that we can earn a diploma so that we can earn a better chance at getting a job that will earn us the money that earns us the right to survive. Who says? “Authority” says so. “Owners” say so.

NATURAL STATE: From the moment we are born, we have access to everything on the planet. As a result, we are full of potential. Instead of learning how to conform, we learn what will expand our individual skills and talents. Instead of running in circles shuffling paper to earn some more pieces of paper, we get to share our gifts to the world and live the life we truly want to live. There are no owners and no authority. There is co-existence, collaboration and co-­creation.

The presentation up to this recap seems to make an overall picture of everyday life that's simple and easy enough for just about anybody to understand and I agree with United Gnosis' assessment:

The main strength of the book appeared to be its very down-to-earth, non-preachy/non-pretentious attitude; I feel like this would avoid polarizing new readers away from the material.

From this point on, the author introduces existential questions, like 'who are we', 'why are we here', 'what is consciousness?'

An attempt is made to unite science and spirituality:

Quotes from various scientists, physicists, authors and concepts from quantum theory are presented to draw a picture of reality which supports the idea that, fundamentally, all is light and light is also consciousness and all of that is an unbroken 'one'.

One particular supporting quote I've never run across before:

Simple people imagine that they should see God as if he stood there and they here. This is not so. (...) The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me. My eye and God's eye is one eye, and one sight, and one knowledge, and one love. ~Meister Eckhart (1260-1328)

Chapter four is entitled "The purpose of Life." Basically, it asks the question "why would Source manifest itself as all this stuff we see, including as humanity?" We are invited to put ourselves “in the shoes” of Source and basically wonder what else would we do? A hint is made of a great cosmic game of sorts, as Source seeks to explore itself through its creation. A section is devoted to 'enlightenment' and is explained as a process of removing illusions like peeling off layers of an onion.

The above takes us up to page 90, where the author then describes the illusion of separation, or "the separated state we are in" and how our ways of thinking and our beliefs create and maintain this condition.

Chapter 5 begins with an analogy:

In a Simple Analogy…

Imagine children playing in a sandbox full of toys. A few of them
decided that the toys are theirs, and tell all the other kids that they
must earn these little pieces of paper that will grant them access to
the toys. The parents observing the situation would most likely
intervene and remind the children that the toys are to be shared.

Now imagine children on a big blue playground featuring an abundance of vegetation, animal life, oceans, lakes and rivers. Although the playground is set up for everyone to play, explore, create and share as equals, some of them decided that they should have more rights and authority than others. This belief led them to take possession of whatever land or resource they came across. They then created a hierarchical system in which they are the supreme authority while others have to abide by their rules. Resources became accessible only under the condition of money, which is earned only under the condition of work.

As this hierarchy became pervasive across the entire playground, that which was once sharing, creativity and play became conformity, fear and survival. The children of the playground no longer recognized each other as playmates and co-creators of the same human family, but as strangers, competitors and even enemies. There may be no parents watching over the playground reminding all children of the earth to simply share and be kind to one another, but there is a growing call for change felt within the heart of mankind.

...and then goes into the lessons:

LESSON # 1
NOTHING HAS POWER OVER US UNLESS WE GIVE IT
Main idea: We are more powerful than all of this because we created all of this.


LESSON # 2
“NO PROBLEM CAN BE SOLVED FROM THE SAME LEVEL OF CONSCIOUSNESS THAT CREATED IT”
- ALBERT EINSTEIN

Main idea: first you gotta become a neutral observer. Then, you realize that we don't change things by fighting the existing reality, but rather build a new model that obsoletes the old one. Paraphrased from a Buckminster Fuller quote.

LESSON # 3
STOP REACTING, START CREATING !

Main idea: stop doing the same ol' thing the same ol' way. Get creative.

LESSON # 4
BEYOND BLAME : UNDERSTANDING ROLES

Main idea: the "evil ones" play the perfect role for us to grow up and realize our power.

LESSON # 5
ONE SINGLE CANDLE CAN BRIGHTEN A DARK ROOM

Main idea: since we're all connected, positive change in one person is positive change in all.

End Note:

Main idea: find out what it is we fear and avoid, try to understand why, and let's get busy making global change now.