While each of us in our respective locations are coming to think about where we are, what we have, what we'll need, what we're doing, who we can network with, and what inner resources we have and will want to build on, and draw upon - I think, also, that there is a lot of knowledge we can look to, and assimilate, to help strengthen ourselves for the coming times.
Rome wasn't built in a day, and neither will all the answers as to how move ahead and shore up all our potential resources. But that's ok. We start or continue on this journey from exactly where we are. And if that means that we have to face up to weaknesses in our strategic enclosures - or our personal weaknesses - then we do that too. It takes strength to be more or less objective about these matters, and every time we face up to what
is, and deal with things practically, we have the opportunity to become
stronger. Not just for ourselves, but most especially for
everyone here and - for those who have yet to see the full battle ahead from the incredibly well informed perspective that we all share.
That said, the following passage from Carlos Castaneda may provide some good rules of thumb as we metabolize all this information. I'm sure there'll be much more to come here, and even from places where we least expect it. We can be open to that too. I've added some comments (in blue) to the familiar section below from
The Fire From Within, to qualify his great insights.
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"Seers are divided into two categories. Those who are willing to exercise self-restraint and can
channel their activities toward pragmatic goals, which would benefit other seers and man in general, and those who don't care about self-restraint or about any pragmatic goals. The latter have failed to resolve the problem of self-importance.
Self-importance is not something simple and naive. On the one hand, it is the core of everything that is good in us, and on the other hand, the core of everything that is rotten. To get rid of the self-importance that is rotten requires a masterpiece of strategy.
In order to follow the path of knowledge one has to be very imaginative.
In the path of knowledge nothing is as clear as we'd like it to be. Warriors fight self-importance as a matter of strategy, not principle.
Impeccability is nothing else but the proper use of energy. My statements have no inkling of morality.
I've saved energy and that makes me impeccable. To understand this, you have to save enough energy yourself.
Warriors take strategic inventories. They list everything they do. Then they decide which of those things can be changed in order to allow themselves a respite, in terms of expending their energy.
The strategic inventory covers only behavioral patterns that are not essential to our survival and well-being.
But certainly taking a material/resource inventory would seem to be part the equation as well.
In the strategic inventories of warriors, self-importance figures as the activity that consumes the greatest amount of energy, hence, their effort to eradicate it.
One of the first concerns of warriors is to free that energy in order to face the unknown with it.
The action of rechanneling that energy is impeccability.
The most effective strategy for rechanneling that energy consists of six elements that interplay with one another. Five of them are called the attributes of warriorship:
control, discipline, forbearance, timing, and will. They pertain to the world of the warrior who is fighting to lose self-importance. The sixth element, which is perhaps the most important of all, pertains to the outside world and is called the petty tyrant.
And we will certainly have an abundance of those! From government to all the unhinged individuals who will basically be all around us.
A petty tyrant is a tormentor. Someone who either holds the power of life and death over warriors or simply annoys them to distraction.
Petty tyrants teach us detachment. The ingredients of the new seers' strategy shows how efficient and clever is the device of using a petty tyrant. The strategy not only gets rid of self-importance; it also prepares warriors for the final realization that impeccability is the only thing that counts in the path of knowledge.
Usually, only four attributes are played. The fifth, will, is always saved for an ultimate confrontation, when warriors are facing the firing squad, so to speak.
But we needn't think much about the firing squad to realize how much of a factor will plays in all of this. Its ok to have some fear, experience the chills, not know everything around every corner - if we continue to push forward bit, by bit, by bit.
Will belongs to another sphere, the unknown. The other four belong to the known, exactly where the petty tyrants are lodged. In fact, what turns human beings into petty tyrants is precisely the obsessive manipulation of the known.
The interplay of all the five attributes of warriorship is done only by seers who are also impeccable warriors and have mastery over will. Such an interplay is a supreme maneuver that cannot be performed on the daily human stage.
Four attributes are all that is needed to deal with the worst of petty tyrants, provided, of course, that a petty tyrant has been found. The petty tyrant is the outside element, the one we cannot control and the element that is perhaps the most important of them all. The warrior who stumbles on a petty tyrant is a lucky one. You're fortunate if you come upon one in your path, because if you don't you have to go out and look for one.
T
his is where we can take up the attitude that our experience here at this time really is something of an adventure. And perhaps channel our inner Putin, Luke Skywalker, Neo, Trinity, Batman, whoever. Yes, interactions with petty tyrants (of all stripes) can and will be, to some degree, unpleasant. But its mostly the attitude we take in dealing with them that will help form our successes. And we can learn from each experience.
If seers can hold their own in facing petty tyrants, they can certainly face the unknown with impunity, and
then they can even stand the presence of the unknowable.
I think that its one thing to be reading about so many of the changes in the offing - and yet another to see those changes staring us straight in the face. Make no mistake: Things will be getting even more bizarre and the changes ever larger in scope and "drama". So facing all we are, as we're now doing, can help fortify us for those things that, as of yet, are unknowable I think.
Nothing can temper the spirit of a warrior as much as
the challenge of dealing with impossible people in positions of power. Only under those conditions can warriors acquire the sobriety and serenity to stand the pressure of the unknowable.
Imagine every half-wit and authoritarian follower out there succumbing to their own worst instincts because of their own pathologies, ponerized thinking, beaming, downloads, etc. and, again, we can see how the probability of having to deal with some of these types can actually help us to "stand the pressure of the unknowable". Not that we should go out looking for it of course.
The perfect ingredient for the making of a superb seer is a petty tyrant with unlimited prerogatives. Seers have to go to extremes to find a worthy one. Most of the time they have to be satisfied with very small fry. Then warriors develop a strategy using the four attributes of warriorship: control, discipline, forbearance, and timing.
On the path of knowledge there are four steps. The first step is the decision to become apprentices. After the apprentices change their views about themselves and the world they take the second step and become warriors, which is to say, beings capable of the utmost discipline and control over themselves. The third step, after acquiring forbearance and timing, is to become men of knowledge. When men of knowledge learn to see they have taken the fourth step and have become seers.
We're all learning and on various steps along this series of steps. Its our job to help one another where we see that another can use some help in seeing.
Control and discipline refer to an inner state.
A warrior is self-oriented, not in a selfish way but in the sense of a total examination of the self.
Forbearance and timing are not quite an inner state. They are in the domain of the man of knowledge.
This means that there will be times when patience is needed, and that the time to act has not yet come. Timing can be everything in some in some situations and jumping the gun out of a frenetic need to act can become disadvantageous or even disastrous.
The idea of using a petty tyrant is not only for perfecting the warrior's spirit, but also for enjoyment and happiness. Even the worst tyrants can bring delight, provided, of course, that one is a warrior.
The mistake average men make in confronting petty tyrants is not to have a strategy to fall back on; the fatal flaw is that average men take themselves too seriously; their actions and feelings, as well as those of the petty tyrants, are all-important. Warriors, on the other hand, not only have a well-thought-out strategy, but are free from self-importance. What restrains their self-importance is that they have understood that reality is an interpretation we make.
One of the great advantages we have are the wider and greater informed perspectives that are shared here. Sometimes we just need to get of our own heads, cognitive biases, egocentricities, prejudices, etc. - to make room for better, more constructive, interpretations.
Petty tyrants take themselves with deadly seriousness while warriors do not. What usually exhausts us is the wear and tear on our self-importance.
Any man who has an iota of pride is ripped apart by being made to feel worthless.
To tune the spirit when someone is trampling on you is called control. Instead of feeling sorry for himself a warrior immediately goes to work mapping the petty tyrant's strong points, his weaknesses, his quirks of behavior.
To gather all this information while they are beating you up is called discipline. A perfect petty tyrant has no redeeming feature.
This is what we are doing collectively and individually; gathering information while they're planning on beating us up.
Forbearance is to wait patiently--no rush, no anxiety--a simple, joyful holding back of what is due.
A warrior knows that he is waiting and what he is waiting for. Right there is the great joy of warriorship.
Timing is the quality that governs the release of all that is held back. Control, discipline, and forbearance are like a dam behind which everything is pooled. Timing is the gate in the dam.
Forbearance means holding back with the spirit something that the warrior knows is rightfully due. It doesn't mean that a warrior goes around plotting to do anybody mischief, or planning to settle past scores. Forbearance is something independent. As long as the warrior has control, discipline, and timing, forbearance assures giving whatever is due to whoever deserves it.
Given the "triple bad day" that the Rockefellers, and others, are likely to receive at the hands of the universe itself, we needn't waste energy thinking about them getting their comeuppance. It will just simply happen as a consequence of natural processes. In the meantime though we keep putting love, energy and knowledge into the system where we can.
To be defeated by a small-fry petty tyrant is not deadly, but devastating. Warriors who succumb to a small-fry petty tyrant are obliterated by their own sense of failure and unworthiness.
Anyone who joins the petty tyrant is defeated.
To act in anger, without control and discipline, to have no forbearance, is to be defeated.
It is not necessary to over-react or to throw a fit in response to something that some petty tyrant does. In fact, it can put one in even greater danger. This is where self awareness and self observation has such a big part to play. "What are my buttons and my triggers? What types of situations get me riled up and what are some likely situations that I may be faced with going forward?".
We can rant, or cry, or be enraged, or shocked; all of these are normal human responses. But we just don't want to make ourselves more vulnerable by showing our inner state and vulnerabilities to those who would only seek to take advantage of them, and of us.
After warriors are defeated they either regroup themselves or they abandon the quest for knowledge and join the ranks of the petty tyrants for life.
There are a series of truths about awareness that have been arranged in a specific sequence for purposes of comprehension. The mastery of awareness consists in internalizing the total sequence of such truths.
The first truth is that our familiarity with the world we perceive compels us to believe that we are surrounded by objects, existing by themselves and as themselves, just as we perceive them, whereas, in fact, there is no world of objects, but a universe of the Indescribable Force's emanations.
Before I can explain the Indescribable Force's emanations, I have to talk about the known, the unknown, and the unknowable.
The unknown is something that is veiled from man, shrouded perhaps by a terrifying context, but which, nonetheless, is within man's reach.
I think that we have come a long way in understanding the normally "unknown" in its "terrifying context" is. And we will continue to do so with a certain amount of faith and hard work that will make the answers available to us.
The unknown becomes the known at a given time. The unknowable, on the other hand, is the indescribable, the unthinkable, the unrealizable. It is something that will never be known to us, and yet it is there, dazzling and at the same time horrifying in its vastness.
We're taking things one step at a time here! 
There is a simple rule of thumb: in the face of the unknown, man is adventurous. It is a quality of the unknown to give us a sense of hope and happiness. Man feels robust, exhilarated. Even the apprehension that it arouses is very fulfilling. The new seers saw that man is at his best in the face of the unknown.
Though this new information we're looking at may arouse some fear and chills and sadness, we can take the perspective of us being more or less active participants in a grand cosmic epic story. I mean, what compares to this story that we're a part of? I for one can't think of anything!
The unknown and the known are really on the same footing, because both are within the reach of human perception. Seers, can leave the known at a given moment and enter into the unknown.
Whatever is beyond our capacity to perceive is the unknowable. And the distinction between it and the knowable is crucial. Confusing the two would put seers in a most precarious position whenever they are confronted with the unknowable. Most of what's out there is beyond our comprehension."
In the meantime though, we can use our imaginations a little to extrapolate from what is knowable, while continuing to do what is right in front of us to do.
