Here some new materials for the SWPE.
The Bank Loan Scam
This is a revision and expansion of a draft I wrote for a leaflet to make available via a stall to hand to and/or just talk to people about outside local banks. I've tried to make it as simple and clear as possible. Let me know if you think I've succeeded - or have any suggestions or questions. Think the main thing should maybe be to first talk to people who stop and look - for example by asking them simple questions like 'Where do you think banks get their money from to give out loans?' The leaflet below could also maybe turned into a 4 page A5 leaflet.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1cV_7F0CM937nZ2yoPv0CFZfYSNiMFq6UNOYgd2Y1_PM/edit?usp=sharing
Could also write another complementary short leaflet/pamphlet type piece about what money is and where it comes from, i.e. how it's all created by the banks as debt - though only 10% of loans go to businesses - but could be created by governments and spent into existence for the people good rather than lent into existence for the bankers. Must admit that though the SWPE does want to get rid of usury I am not totally convinced that people (even diehard Marxists) understand what I mean by "the nationalisation of money creation" being central to 21st century socialism.
Further material:
Speech by Fran Boat
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1k9PBojQ5Mo3SlD3EUVonHZ56oqizNpyXl_zBwzmdNl4/edit?usp=sharing
Germany calling...
A piece on AfD party proposals for repatriation of Syrian refugees
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1teBMlyGtnu4H6mXy7uYx9q-MwXMaZraEFGwd5-qZcdc/edit?usp=sharing
Transforming the Eurozone through money creation for the peoplefrom www.positivemoney.org
http://positivemoney.org/2015/12/recovery-in-the-eurozone-using-money-creation-to-stimulate-the-real-economy-new-report/
International Monetary Reform
Speaks for itself - showing loads of countries that now have their own national movements to de-privatise money creation - you can open and right click on any flag to Google translate and read their own basic programs for monetary reform.
http://internationalmoneyreform.org/
Socialism is the past, Socialism is the future. It is an aberration that Socialism is not the present. We are here to correct this tragedy. We fight for a Free British Isles: a Socialist British Isles. Our vision is the British Isles of Social Justice: the British Isles of National Freedom. It is the British Isles freed from Capitalism, Liberalism & Trotskyism.
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29 November 2017
28 November 2017
Concerning Actions rather than just Demos
A few thoughts to add to the call for Meaningful Actions rather than just Demos
I would like to add that a good example is Donbass. They are actually Revolutionary Republics: The Steel Industry and Coal Mines have been taken off from Kiev-based oligarchs and are actually taken over by the Workers and the People's Republics of Lugansk and Donetsk.
Communists, Ultranationalists and National Bolsheviks are cooperating for the Common Good and defying the Left versus Right nonsense which came out with the Freemasonry-led Bourgeois French and American so-called 'revolutions'.
Another example I can think of is Golden Dawn in Greece. They are doing a good job in assisting the Greek Proletariat starved by the IMF, the EU and Globalisation. There are of course other examples, including Hezbollah in Lebanon.
Connecting to the two examples in Britain, I can see where it comes from (the need for action) over demos. Deep down, I think the National Front is still better than the Socialist Workers Party by a million miles. Apparently, the NF is having a revival in recent years, as lots of people defected from the BNP, as several regional branches defected. Kevin Bryan, the current NF leader, defected from the BNP a few years ago.
The SWP is just an open Trotz pro-immigration (aka White Genocide) bourgeois pro-EU, pro-globalisation party of upper class uni students [who play at rebellion] before going to the City of London. Electorally speaking they are an electoral spare wheel of the Labour Party, as at almost every General Election they say 'Vote Labour'.
The NF and SWP both have faults, but as far as I know, at least the National Front have some positive ideas, not like the SWP Trotzs!
Concerning Action in Practice
I have really smashing news. Unione Socialismo Nazionale emailed message of support for SWPE. Its a message of Solidarity. [It is a Message we reciprocate]
PIETRO
27 November 2017
Separatism as a Tool of Globalism. United We Stand
SWPE has long had a policy of seeking an independent England. The use of the name England in the party name is a key indication of the centrality of that policy. After much debate internally, this policy has now been revised. More than revised, this policy has now been reversed.
Great Britain is an island nation, comprised of several sub-nations, the main ones being
England,
Cymru/Wales
Alba/Scotland.
These main sub-nations can be broken down into the even smaller and more ancient nations which came before them, such as
Kernow/Cornwall,
Westseaxna/Wessex,
Cantaware/Kent,
Mierce/Mercia,
Norþhymbra/Northumbria,
Ēast Engla/East Anglia,
Dalriada,
Cait,
Fortriu,
Strathclyde,
Orkney,
Hebrides,
Shetland,
Deheubarth,
Gwynedd,
Powys,
Morgannwg,
But why stop there! Regional loyalty can be taken down to even smaller levels, to counties, to cities. The historic rivalty between Yorkshire and Lancashire dates back to a dispute between rivals for the crown of England. Even today, there are a small number people on each side of the Pennines who genuinely hate those on the other, failing to appreciate that the massacres of common people during the Wars of the Roses benefited nobody except the Ruling Class families to whom loyalty was mistakenly given. Interestingly, the modern truncated county of Lancashire (excluding Merseyside and Greater Manchester) was once (alongside Furness Cumberland and Westmorland aka Cumbria) a part of Strathclyde, which would make it reasonable to argue should exclude it from an independent England and place it inside Scotland.
To argue for separatism is to invite further spiralling into regionalism, with the end being the total disintegration of the nation, and the emergence of a vast number of little states, each with their own governments, each with their own leaders, each with their own despotisms and hidden allegiance to the same Global Ruling Class which would gain in power by virtue of the inability of any one state to have control over matters which have a Britain-wide impact.
As noted above with reference to the ancient kingdom of Strathclyde, the borders between England, Scotland and Wales have been fluid for a long time. Monmouthshire has only been in fixed in Wales by law since 1972. And what of the northeastern border of England? The former nation of Northumbia included not only the counties of Yorkshire, Durham and Northumberland, but also the southeast of modern Scotland, including Edinburgh, the very seat of the Scottish Parliament. Lowland Scots/Doric is a Germanic language which has no similarity at all with Scottish Gaelic.
Culturally, ethnically, linguistically, the peoples of Britain have so intermingled that to try to separate us is pointless, yet that is exactly what the separatists and regionalists are trying to do. The Westminster regime is the epicentre of regionalism, pushing the devolution hoax, with directly-elected City Mayors joining the rush for extra layers of government which of course have to be paid for with our taxes, and achieve nothing other than to provide centres of corruption outside of London in the manner of new hubs in a spider-like web of control. Of note again, Lancashire has been targeted by the London regime, with its largest cities (Liverpool, Manchester and Warrington) no longer even officially recognised as being parts of Lancashire (Warrington given to Cheshire by the stroke of a pen, Liverpool and Manchester being first carved off into unitary authorites and now saddled with the expensive and un-necessary directly elected mayors so beloved by the politicians who seek to divide us in every way possible).
We formally renounce our policy of English separatism, which we now accept was a mistake. We replace this with a commitment to unity.
The British Working Class suffer the same injustices regardless of location, we share the same hardships, we are treated by the Ruling Class with equal disdain. Over the centuries, our people have moved around the country and have intermingled. The historic divisions reflected divisions between rivals for power - and as such were of importance to the Ruling Class in terms of areas they controlled, but for us are interesting, but not reason for animosity towards our countrymen. The modern administrative demarcations have even less significance to us, being drawn up by servants of the State as lines on maps, with no care for cultural or any other ties.Who with family from these isles can seriously claim to be a 'pure' Angle, Saxon, Pict, Jute, Celt? We all have ancestry which roots us firmly with the original inhabitants of the Isles who came before any of the recognised modern tribes. We have become a single extended family not just from Lands End to John o'Groats but also onto the many islands which surround the British mainland.
Splitting us apart is to break the family, to make us weak, to give power to hostile elements. A free Socialist Britain would throw out NATO, the US military, multinational corporations, the 'monarchy', all institutions and individuals with loyalty to any organisation, country, company, or way of life which is not, of, from and for this land.
Unity Is Strength. We need to heal the wounds caused by those who create false divisions, and to deepen and strengthen our diverse cultures which when wound together become an unshakeable foundation for a better, happier and healthier future.
For Class and Nation
22 November 2017
The Illness is the Cure. (Wilberg on Wednesday)
The Illness is the Cure
An Introduction to Life Medicine and Life Doctoring - a new existential approach to illness
21 November 2017
Don't Play the Enemies' Game. We are Revolutionaries. Be Revolutionary!
For all the best will in the world, political activism can be something which is non-productive or worse, counter-productive. The phrase Acta Non Verba sums up the futility of words which are employed as a substitution for action.
In the current political climate, political action has become the stuff of pantomime. Across the spectrum, the 'revolutionary' activities tend to boil down to protest marches and demonstrations (which in every case have to be organised with the express permission of the police and state), and the usual stickering/leafleting campaigns which likewise have to be prepared with one eye on the possible legal ramifications for publishing material which does not conform to the liberal orthodoxy of the globalist Ruling Class.
Set piece activities do not work. They have become the norm because they are the sanitised and acceptable face of rebellion. They are conformity wrapped in the smug air of dissidence. To ensure that the people are kept in line, the liberal thugs who violently suppress any 'politically incorrect' expression of thought, have become a particularly insidious type of police by proxy. This makes activity more difficult. If only politically acceptable activity can be safely undertaken; if only non-threatening and easily ignored activity is sanctioned by the very state which is the problem, then what is the point in bothering?
A couple of poignant illustrations of pointless activity can be considered by looking at two organisations on opposite sides of the reactionary spectrum. These two organisations consider themselves revolutionary, but by obeying the rules of the game, they can be proven to be just side-shows and examples of how not to engage in politics:
- The National Front (NF). The NF claims to have been in existence for 50 years, and takes great pride in this. Their signature activity is the march. NF marches were at one point spectacular events attracting vast numbers. They have since dwindled to the shuffling of a few skinheads with media attention dwindling in direct correlation. They have learnt nothing in 50 years. They have failed to grasp that the massive protest marches in London which occur ever more frequently, achieve nothing.
- The Socialist Workers Party (SWP). The SWP set piece activity is the paper sale. This takes the form of a handful of students badgering passers-by to buy the SWP rag (Socialist Worker). An amusing example of such a sale was the SWP setting up stall outside a Bank(!) with the full permission of the Bankers inside to sell their rag. How very radical, how revolutionary! Of course it is with bitter irony that the SWP has fallen into the trap of becoming a neutered Trotskyite parody, full of Social Justice Warriors who are so obsessed with bizarre fetish identity politics that they are no threat whatsoever to the Capitalist system.
Demonstrations are not always pointless.
- Taking a stand alongside Striking Workers shows solidarity and emboldens the cause.
- Leafleting for specific purposes and specific times is a valid course. A flash demo outside a bank for the purpose of handing out literature to bank customers exposing the banking racket, is a worthy task (with the purpose of waking people up to the mendacity of the system being far more worthy than selling papers full of liberal drivel which wouldn't look out of place in the Guardian!)
- As long as the leaflets are concise and appropriate (not general and largely irrelevant), and as long as they are handed out personally and in broad daylight (not put through letter boxes / on car windscreens in the dead of night like a reverse burglar!), leaflets have their place. Stickers? Do they have any purpose at all? Probably not.
- The Education System is Toxic. Don't moan about it! Home school your own children. Where possible set up education cooperatives with like-minded people to teach sanity, and keep the minds of the youth safe from liberal lunacy
- Medicine is largely a cash cow for the Pharmaceuticals Industry. Research Natural Remedies, keep fit, break free as much as you can. Don't moan while continuing to feed the system - get out of the system and help others to do so.
- Stuck in a dead-end soul-destroying job? Quit! It isn't easy, but with planning, it is possible. As Socialists we espouse Workers' Cooperatives and the right of the individual to be his/her own boss. These are not theoretical possibilities for a post-revolutionary era; these are real and achievable building blocks of the Revolution right now.
- Live by example. Moaning about how awful life is, while remaining a cog in the machine, is defeatist. We want to build a better society. We can start by making our own lives better. If we live as Socialists, trade as Socialists, work as Socialists, support each other, help our communities, strive for our people as Socialists, we become living examples and we inspire others to do likewise.
In Wales, the fake patriots of Meibion Glyndwr tackled the problem of tourists depriving locals of homes through buying up property to holiday in, by the utterly stupid strategy of sneaking around at night and setting second homes on fire. This helped house no-one, and only further limited available housing. A better strategy would have been to break into empty properties and occupy them with people otherwise homeless (and not just Welsh people!) Meibion Glyndwr made the Welsh people appear to be an English-hating set of idiots, when they could have used a better set of tactics and become a beacon for the homeless across the UK. We have to be careful not to engage in activities which are counterproductive. The ends and means must work in unison.
Social Media is another minefield. Yes, it is useful in raising awareness. But if it is used without serious thought, it can lead people to the wrong idea about us. The message must be consistent, positive, constructive. If people want to naval-gaze and engage in self-pitying whinging, they can turn on the TV - they don't need to have the defeatist sickness pushed at them by us. We need to inspire people, and we won't do that by becoming an echo of the mainstream media!
To work Comrades! Be the Revolution. Take time to think about how we behave and how the general public see us. Actions, Not Words, will bring about the end of the Capitalist System, and it is up to us to do all we can, so that others do likewise. We are few, but we can inspire and motivate many.
15 November 2017
Beyond the Religion of ‘Objective Science’ - Wilberg on Wednesday
Humanity at the Threshold of the Subjective Universe
Language as such is ‘no-thing’ - for it is everywhere and nowhere. It is not reducible to a localisable textual object or spoken word but is the invisible non-local context of every word, text and act of speech. Subjective awareness - like language as such - or like activity or potentiality as such - is also ‘no-thing’. It is also everywhere and nowhere - a subjectivity irreducible to any localized object and not the property of any localised ‘subject’. All apparent ‘physical’ objects are but elements of subjective experience emerging (physein) within an infinite non-local field of subjective awareness. We dwell not in an objective but a subjective universe. ‘God’ is not some supreme ‘subject’ that ‘has’ awareness - ruling over a universe of objects. God is awareness or subjectivity as such – absolute and as all-pervasive as space and time, transcendent and immanent in all things. As pure awareness or absolute subjectivity ‘God’ is the most fundamental reality of all and no ‘delusion’. Modern science on the other hand is a delusive religion resting on the central dogma of an objective universe ruled by human subjects or ‘observers’. Hence its ever more aggressive assault - not only on all religions that treat ‘God’ rather than Man as supreme ruling subject - but on any attempt to undermine the dogmatic identification of reality as such with a universe of objects and of truth with objectivity. In today’s ‘postmodern’ world however, this dogma is belied by the linguistic or sign character of objects themselves. Go into any airport or shopping mall for example, and you will find barely a single object that does not stand before us as a sign of some sort – whether a directional sign, the sign of airline or shop, or a carefully de-signed product or logo. Objects lose their substantive character as totally independent ‘things’ and become mere signs - signs whose sole significance lies in their being ‘signifiers’ for a whole world of other signs. Thus a fashion item, brand name or logo stands as sign for the whole world of fashion signs in the form of branded commodities. Similarly, an electronic gadget stands as sign of the whole world of telecommunications and computer technology – itself but a medium for the transmission of signs in the form of words, images, photo images and advertising signs and video streams. Where once material substances and their sensory qualities were beheld as symbols of a world of subjectivity or soul, they now stand as mere signs. Where religious symbols once reigned, now rules the commercial sign - or the purely abstract mathematical symbols of science.
“Science is the new religion.” (Martin Heidegger). Yet what is the central, unquestioned, unprovable and, as I shall argue, wholly untenable dogma of this religion? This fundamental dogma of science and the sciences is the identification of reality with a world of ‘objects’ and truth with ‘objectivity’. The dogma begins by forgetting that the very terms ‘object’ and ‘objectivity’ are, first and foremost words – linguistic constructs. Yet no physicist or philosopher bothers to consider in what way language as such can be considered to be an ‘object’ or to have ‘objective’ reality. We can identify a word on the printed page but cannot say ‘where’ language as such exists – it has no locality in the same way that a physical ‘object’ seems to have. Nor can we even say what language as such is - for it is not reducible to a finite set of sounds, alphabets, syntactic rules - or even ways of speaking. Even the spoken or written ‘word’ is only a word by virtue of being more than a mere ‘object’ – for what makes a set of ink marks on a page or sound waves in space into writing or speech is that we read or hear within them a totally invisible or inaudible meaning whose material form is but the manifestation. Though scientists constantly use language to articulate their own theories of a world of objects there is no ‘objective’ way of even proving the objective existence of that invisible, inaudible and immeasurable world of meaning that lies behind their language and language as such.
Moreover any very way of thinking, speaking or writing about language assumes and makes use of language, which is not the private property of any thinker, speaker or writer and has a character innately transcending everyone who thinks about it and every thing that can be said about it. Thus though the terms ‘object’ and ‘objectivity’ are used as if they were self-evident, they themselves rest on a reality – language – which cannot itself be reduced to any object or set of objects. One of the main uses of language however, is precisely to objectify reality – for no sooner does a word or term become part of the common currency of language (including the word ‘language’ itself) then we assume that it to refer to some pre-given thing or ‘object’ that has existed for all time. We make this assumption despite the fact that the very word used to name this ‘objectively’ existing thing may be a neologism of the only the most recent historic coinage – emerging within a specific historic culture at a specific time, and belonging to the vocabulary of a specific science, religion, or academic discipline within that culture.
Thus the word ‘religion’ was coined only a few centuries ago in European culture and thought. Yet having become common currency we assume it refers to some ‘thing’ which has always existed in human culture and of which all specific ‘religions’ are but variations. Thus we speak casually of ‘Eastern religions’, we superimpose a European linguistic construct on Eastern cultures, completely ignoring the fact that in the language of these supposed ‘Eastern religions’ themselves, there is not a single word that corresponds to our recently coined and now globally superimposed term - ‘religion’. The word ‘religion’ then, far from being taken as a historically and culturally specific linguistic construct, is taken instead as some universal cultural thing - an ‘object’ which has existed universally and throughout history, and is differentiated only by its local, historical and culturally specific ‘varieties’. What can be said of the objectifying use of the word ‘religion’ can be said of the word ‘science’ too – and indeed of the terminologies of all the sciences. For their very terms are linguistic constructs – terms which linguistically construct the very ‘objects’ whose reality they assume as ‘given’. That the relation of scientific terminologies to their supposed objects of ‘exploration’ and ‘explanation’ is not even explored or examined as a question in science, shows how, in its own dogmatic self-understanding, modern science is an ideology that lags behind the most elementary of ‘post-modern’ understandings of the objectifying power of language, understandings which are not ‘pre-scientific’ but post-scientific - or rather post-scientistic – what we take as ‘science’ being a quasi-religious ideology or ‘-ism’.
Yet there is an even deeper fault and fissure in the foundational dogma of science – the dogma of a world of pre-given ‘objects’ and of truth as ‘objectivity’. That fissure is to be found in the narrow concept of ‘subjectivity’ that it presents or implies as its ‘unscientific’ counterpart. In everyday language use we take the word ‘subjective’ to refer to things experienced ‘in here’ – in our minds or imagination, as feelings in our emotional life and imagination, as moods or as bodily sensations such as pleasure and pain. All these dimensions of experience are counterpoised to an external world of ‘objects’ assumed to exist ‘out there’ - independently of our experience of them. Not a single modern physicist and but a single modern philosopher – Edmund Husserl – has come to the elementary insight that all experiencing – including every element of our experience of a world ‘out there’ – is by nature subjective. The fundamental but still unacknowledged starting point of ‘science’ is therefore not what it takes it to be - the dogmatically assumed pre-existence of a world of objects ‘out there’. Instead the true foundation of all knowledge and all true ‘science’ is subjective experiencing. This is true whether or not any given elements of experience are thought of and experienced as ‘in here’ or ‘out there’, as purely personal or wholly impersonal, as relative or absolute.
It was Husserl’s great insight that by excluding our experience of the entire ‘external’ or ‘physical’ world from our understanding of the ‘psychical’, we reduce the ‘psyche’ to a purely internal world of private experiences - thus creating a wholly false dualism between the ‘physical’ and the ‘psychical’, the ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’. The result is a wholly false separation of the so-called ‘sciences’ of ‘physics’ and ‘psychology’ - both of which ignore the inherently subjective nature of all experiencing, ‘outer’ or ‘inner’. That is why ‘phenomenological’ science is deeper than both physics and psychology, for understood properly, it is an understanding of science that transcends the unquestioned dualism of ‘subject’ and ‘object’, the ‘subjective’ and the ‘objective’. Phenomenological science runs counter to the dogmatic identification of reality with objects and objectivity. Indeed in its ultimate form ‘phenomenological science’ denies ultimate reality to any ‘objects’ whatsoever, which in essence are nothing more than linguistic objectifications of ‘phenomena’ ie. different elements or complexes of subjective experiencing.
The massive challenge posed by phenomenological science to our whole understanding of ‘science’ and the ‘sciences’, not least physics and psychology themselves, was understated even by Husserl, who failed to tackle the single most important fortress shared by both these sciences in defense of the dogma of objectivity. This is the highly Eurocentric but now ever more globalised dogma subjectivity is necessarily the private property of an individual ‘ego’ or ‘self’ – the so-called ‘subject’ - or that casually assumes that terms such ‘subjective’ or ‘subjectivity’ imply the existence of such a subject. As a result, the nature of subjectivity or consciousness as such is not even considered, but instead identified with the conscious experiencing of individual beings or ‘subjects’ - in particular human beings and subjects and individual human consciousness.
The identification of subjectivity, consciousness or awareness with a limited human ego or subject did not form any part of pre-modern Eastern ‘philosophical’, ‘religious’ and ‘scientific’ understandings of reality. Nor is it at all congruent with a new post-modern and post-scientific worldview. For the reduction of subjectivity as such to a property of an individual ‘subject’ is equivalent to reducing language as such to the private property of an individual speaker rather than the other way round – understanding speech as an individualised expression of language, one that shapes and reshapes the speaker’s very experience of themselves as an individual self or ‘subject’.
Philosophers in the West have no concept whatsoever of ‘subjectivity without a subject’ – the Eastern notion of a ‘universal consciousness’ that is the absolute source not only of all individualised consciousness, but of all that is – pervading all things, human and non-human. Instead, with only one or two exceptions they continue to wrestle with the meaning of ‘subjectivity’ whilst failing to even question the notion of ‘objectivity’. I have spoken of the everyday use of the term ‘subjective’. For Western philosophers subjectivity is understood only as the property of pre-supposed ‘subjects’. As a result, subjectivity is also identified with what is seen as the key attributes of such ‘subjects’, namely perspectival relativity, ‘ipseity’ or self-awareness, and autonomous agency.
‘Subjectivity’ is associated in Western philosophy with perspectival relativity because each ‘subject’, by virtue of having a unique location or ‘position’ (whether physical and perceptual, mental or emotional, ethical or cultural) sees ‘objective’ reality from a unique and therefore irredeemably ‘biased’ point of view. There is a paradox here. For having reduced subjectivity to a ‘subject’, this subject is then thought of in the same way as a localised object - being positioned at some ‘point’ in space. In contrast, in the most sophisticated of Indian yogic philosophies, subjectivity was understood as an all-pervasive or ‘non-local’ field comparable to space as such rather than any ‘objects’ in it. Space itself was not experienced by the yogi as anything ‘objective’ or ‘physical’ but as identical with the ‘universal’ or ‘divine’ consciousness’ – the latter being a limitless, non-local field of ‘pure awareness’ or ‘absolute subjectivity’ - and as such both transcendent and immanent, both embracing and pervading all things and beings within it. The practical yogic path to experiencing the limitless non-local nature of subjectivity was precisely through identifying with the seeming void or emptiness of the spaces within and around things – in reality the all-surrounding and all-pervading ‘space’ or ‘aether’ (Akash) of pure awareness.
I call my own further explication and refinement of yogic metaphysics ‘The Awareness Principle’. By this I mean the understanding that subjectivity or awareness as such (‘pure awareness’) cannot - in principle - be either the property of a pre-given subject or reduced to the function of any object. For in essence all ‘objects’ and ‘subjects’ are but differentiated elements of subjective experience - all emerging from and embraced by a spacious field of absolute subjectivity or ‘pure awareness’. From this point of view the association in Western philosophy of subjectivity with the ‘ipseity’ (self-recognition or self-awareness) of an individual subject is also undermined by The Awareness Principle. For awareness of any experienced ‘self’ or ‘subject’ cannot - in principle – be the property of any self or subject we are aware of. For like every element of our subjective experience, our experience of self necessarily belongs to an experiencing awareness or subjectivity transcending that particular, experienced self – or any self or subject.
The Awareness Principle is a philosophy of absolute subjectivity transcending any subject. Behind the ‘Objectivity Principle’ of modern science on the other hand is the religious absolutisation of an abstract subject standing apart from, over and above a world of objects. Whether this absolute subject be conceived of – objectified - as human or divine makes no difference, for belief in its existence constitutes the central dogma shared by both modern science and theistic religions.
The absolutisation of the subject - as opposed to a subjectivity prior to all subjects – came to its fullest expression in the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, where the subject as ‘observer’ is the principle agent responsible for determining what is observed. Whereas classical physics concealed the subject behind a world of objects in absolute space and time, Einstein’s General Relativity abolished the absolutivity of space and time, and Special Relativity made all motion relative to the observer – the subject. Quantum mechanics went yet further, ceasing to claim the existence of any objective world of particle-waves or wave-particles ‘behind’ instrumentally measurable data, and instead implicitly raising the scientist as such – the observing subject - to the status of a sole or absolute object. In place of God as a divine being or subject ruling over man and nature as its objects was placed the human being – but only in the form of the subject as posited by science - the observer. In this way we can see how theism, atheism, humanism and science all unite as one in sharing an identification of subjectivity with ‘the subject’ - whether it be conceived religiously, scientifically or humanistically.
Understanding itself as a mere set of operational practices with no claims to truth, science has, as Heidegger saw, become a mere handmaiden for technology - offering global capitalism an abundance of operational technologies to profit from by enframing exploiting the earth and converting it into a ‘standing reserve’ of human and natural resources. This exploitation is made possible, not in the first instance, through the machines and mechanics of industrial technologies, old and new - but rather through an unthinking mechanisation of thought itself. This is the transformation of thinking as such into a mere instrumental or operational tool for the enframing and objectification of every qualitative dimensions of earthly experiencing, into a specifically calculative mode of thinking which subjects them all to its own objectifying and purely quantitative or ‘quantised’ terms of reference. Such a mode of thinking is now being aggressively employed in an attempt to attack and wipe out any remaining experience or conceptions of a universal awareness or subjectivity – one that transcends both absolutised ‘subjects’, human or divine, and their worlds of operationally manufacturable and manipulable objects.
Heisenberg’s recognition of the intrinsic relation or ‘relativity’ of observer and observed in the observations possible in quantum physics could be seen as transcending the whole subject-object metaphysics of Western thought. Heidegger however, did not see Heisenberg’s ‘relativity’ as a return to a type of unifying ‘holism’ in physics - but rather as its very opposite - a theoretical mirror image of Hiroshima.
“The objectness of material nature shows in modern atomic physics fundamental characteristics completely different from those that is shows in classical physics … And yet – modern nuclear and field physics also still remains physics, i.e., science, i.e., theory, which entraps objects, in order to secure them in the unity of their objectness …
… the way in which in the most recent phase of atomic physics even the object vanishes also, and the way in which above all, the subject-object relation as pure relation takes precedence over the object … the subject-object relation thus reaches, for the first time, its pure ‘relational’, i.e., ordering character, in which both subject and object are sucked up … That does not mean that the subject-object relation vanishes, but rather now the opposite; it now attains its most extreme dominance …” Science and Reflection
No longer is it Newton’s God that is seen as supreme subject ruling over the earth but the human subject - a subject for whom, scientifically, objects, and even human beings themselves, no longer even exist except in so far as they ‘count’ as instrumental measurements or statistics. Such a delusive and deluded ‘subject’ is intrinsically destructive and self-destructive - for in submitting science to the service of commercial calculation and the technological-industrial depletion of the earth it quite literally removes the very ground from under its own feet. This is capitalist industry abolishing what Marx called its own ‘natural condition of production’ – whether in the form of forests and trees, soil, oil, water - or the exploited and polluted body of the human being.
The growth of a tree is not the activity of an agent or subject, human or divine. The tree is not grown at all, nor can the natural growth of trees be speeded up to keep pace with industrial demands for wood and paper. Trees are not grown. They emerge from the deeper soil and larger field of their environment, serving, like speech, as their living expression. Yet where can be found ‘physicists’ who remembers that the Greek physis – ‘emergence’ - is the true root and root truth of the term ‘physics’? Where are the philosophers who recall that the Greek logos - ‘speech’ - is the true root and root truth of ‘logic’? Where, above all, are the true thinkers who, as yogis, can once again experience space as the aether or ‘Akash’ of pure awareness, and who can once again experience the physical world as emergent word - as one experiential language or expression of pure awareness among others - not our language but that of a ‘God’ which does not ‘have’ but is awareness or subjectivity, universal and absolute?
Another attribute attached to the ‘subject’ and ‘subjectivity’ by Western philosophers is ‘titularity’ – its sense of owning its actions and experiences. As ‘subjects’ one aspect of our ‘subjectivity’ is defined - from this Western point of view - as the sense of an action or experience being ‘mine’. Eastern thought too has long recognized a close connection between what it understood as the limited self or ‘subject’ and this sense of ownership or ‘mine-ness’. Yet in contrast to Western thought yogic philosophy sees this ‘titular’ subject as the biggest obstacle in the way of realizing a higher and vastly expanded sense of self - a self identical with pure awareness or absolute subjectivity as such. That is why the basic principle of yogic philosophy and principal aim of yogic practice is to overcome ‘Anavamala’ - the basic ‘stain’ or ‘impurity’ of awareness that comes from ignorant identification of ourselves and of subjectivity as such with the finite ‘ego’ or ‘subject’ – the very ‘ego’ or ‘subject’ which Western thought takes, in its own ignorance, as something ‘possessing’ awareness or subjectivity as its ‘own’ titular private property.
The very terms ‘subject’ and ‘object’ are effectively separate, linguistically constructed ‘objects’ of Western philosophical discourse. It is because these linguistic constructs are then taken as ‘objectively’ real that the false assumption arises that consciousness and cognition are based on a sort of external relation between separable ‘subjects’ and ‘objects’ - in reality a relation of linguistically constructed objects. In an attempt to give some sort of ‘objective’ reality to this linguistically constructed relation, the commonly accepted neuro-scientific account of perception reduces the ‘subject’ itself to a single observable object - the brain. In doing so however, it also reduces the external ‘objects’ we think we perceive ‘out there’ into mere subjective hallucinations ‘projected’ outward by the brain in response to sensory data. The philosophical and logical nonsensicality of this ‘scientific’ model of cognition is revealed as soon as we ask what sort of external ‘objects’ the brain and sense organs are supposed to derive their initial sensory ‘data’ or ‘information’ from - given that what we perceive as such ‘objects’, are according to neuroscience itself, nothing but subjective images manufactured by the brain! According to this attempt to solve the riddle of the subject-object relation therefore, the brain – itself but one perceptible object among others - is supposed to give us a perception of other objects by interpreting sensory data coming from its own subjective hallucinations of such objects!
Another unresolvable riddle and paradox arising from the subject-object model of consciousness is its inability to explain so-called ‘qualia’ – our subjective experience of sensory qualities such as colour. Here physics and our everyday experience of the world set themselves on a collision course. That is because, for the physicist, colours are ultimately nothing but ‘objectively’ measurable quantities - wavelengths of light. How then however, does our everyday qualitative perception of colours arise? How are we to explain our experience of a quale such as ‘redness’? Is it something ‘purely’ subjective, is it the subjective figment of a biological object – the brain - or is there some truly objective sensory quality – and no mere quantity – corresponding to it?
The assumption here is that subjectivity has no innately sensual qualities of its own - an assumption questioned by both everyday language and everyday experience. We both experience and describe ‘moods’ for example, in terms of sensual qualities such as light (being in a ‘bright’ or ‘radiant’ mood or being in a ‘dark’ mood), colour (being in a ‘blue’ or ‘black mood’), gravity or weight (being in a ‘heavy’ or ‘grave’ mood or one of ‘levity’ and ‘lightness’), spatiality (feeling ‘high’ or ‘low’, ‘up’ or ‘down’, ‘exposed’ to or ‘closed off’, ‘distanced’ or ‘close’), heat (feeling ‘warm’ or ‘cool’, ‘hot’ or ‘cold’ towards something or someone), texture (feeling ‘solid’ or ‘empty’, ‘knotted up’ or ‘strung out’), time and motion (feeling ‘speedy’ or ‘slowed down’, ‘in a whirl’ or ‘going round in circles’) etc. etc. Is it any surprise that given the existence of such innately sensual qualities of feeling awareness or subjectivity, they should find expression in our dreams as experienced sensory qualities of dream objects - a dark cloud in our dreams for example expressing a felt darkness of mood, for example? Indeed the whole riddle of sensory perception and of the subjective vs objective nature of experienced qualities or qualia are resolved for us every night - through our experience of dreaming. For in contrast to scientists, with their dogma of a world of objects and their identification of truth with objectivity, our experience of dreaming is something we recognize as wholly subjective. We do not take dream objects as ‘objects’ in the way that the physical sciences and Western philosophy consider them – as entities existing independently of consciousness or subjectivity. Instead we experience them ‘physically’ in the root sense, as phenomena emerging (physein) from within the overall field of our subjective dreaming awareness, whilst at the same time giving expression to that field - constituting animate portions of that awareness. We would not think of attempting to find the ‘objective’ cause of a particular dream, let alone an explanation for the experience of dreaming as such - in one particular ‘object’ we happen to dream of.
Yet this is precisely what neuroscience seeks to do in explaining the nature of our waking experience of phenomena - by taking one single object of perception (the brain itself) – as the foundation for our waking experience of all other objects. Indeed neuroscience even attempts to explain dreaming experience as a function of our brains. This is a further oddity or paradox - given that neuroscience maintains, in effect, that our perceptions of waking world objects are themselves dreamt up by the brain. The only object excluded from this whole brain-based explanation of our perception of objects is the brain itself - our perception of which is treated, unlike all other objects, as immediate and ‘real’. Neuroscience cannot, in principle, explain this contradiction in its account of perception. For even to recognise this contradiction would be to admit the absurdity of its claims that consciousness and perception are functions of the brain. For the logical consequence or reductio ad absurdum of this claim is that the brain too cannot be considered as a scientific ‘object’ existing independently ‘out there’ - but is rather a figment of its own subjective imaginings, an object dreamt up by itself!
Our subjective experience of dreaming offers us vital clues to a wholly different understanding of the fundamental nature of waking consciousness and cognition to that which is proffered by the logically confused and self-contradictory constructs and explanations of modern science – all of which are rooted in the dogmatic identification of reality with objects, of truth with objectivity, and of cognition and consciousness with a relation of separable ‘objects’ and ‘subjects’. Indeed the experience of dreaming offers us a wholly new understanding of the fundamental nature of reality as such, allowing us to acknowledge the fundamentally subjective nature of all supposedly objective realities. In waking life, as in dreams, we inhabit a subjective universe. This is not a universe composed of separable subjects but of multi-dimensional fields of awareness - all rooted in a universal and absolute subjectivity of which we, and all things, are individualised portions and expressions. This absolute subjectivity is not the private property of a supreme subject or ‘being’. Quite simply it is subjectivity or awareness as such - without a prior or pre-given subject as its ‘owner’.
‘The Awareness Principle’ undermines not only the objectivity dogma of science but the philosophical and religious dogma that awareness or subjectivity is necessarily the property of a pre-given subject or ‘being’, human or divine. It understands ‘God’ neither as a supreme being or subject, nor even as Being - but as that absolute subjectivity or unbounded awareness of which all beings and all bodies in space-time are portions and expressions. Modern science itself, by virtue of its own untiring attempts to sustain the notion of an objective universe and an objective ‘explanation’ of subjectivity or awareness, has brought itself - through the contradictions inherent in both quantum mechanics and brain science - to the furthermost boundaries of its most religiously cherished assumptions and beliefs. In doing so it has also brought humanity to the threshold of a wholly new understanding of the universe and of ‘science’ itself. Crossing this threshold marks our entry – or rather return – into the subjective universe from which we and all things hail. This is a universe that can only be explored through subjective sciences based on directly subjective and experiential modes of scientific research. Yet no amount of research will allow this threshold to be experimentally or even experientially crossed unless it is first crossed in thought. This means questioning and letting go of the long-standing prejudice that still governs human thinking - the prejudice that grants more ‘reality’ to the objective than the subjective, that reduces subjectivity to subjects, subjects to objects, and that ultimately reduces both to nothing at all. That is the threshold - for subjectivity, like language, is indeed ‘no-thing’ and no ‘being’ – but the source of all things and all beings.
Crossing the threshold to the subjective universe is not a return to ‘religion’ as it is currently practiced and understood. Instead it is a return from the new religion that ‘science’ has become back to the eternal inner truth of religion as such, re-linking us with that ‘God’ which is not a being ‘with’ awareness but simply is awareness - absolute and unbounded. This is not some ‘New Age’ God but the oldest, most primordial God of all; one that has never ceased to re-gather and re-plant the knowledge-seeds of its scientist-priests, both during times of war and of peace.
The fact that the very term ‘subjective universe’ is taken today as connoting a type of private, solipsistic universe of the individual subject - comparable to a purely private and fantastic world of our dreams or imagination - shows how dramatically the meaning of the terms ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’ has altered over recent centuries. For as Owen Barfield has pointed out, the single most important attribute used or assumed by contemporary philosophers to define the basic concept of an ‘object’ – its nature as something independently real or self-subsistent in its own right – belonged originally to the word ‘subject’.
This is only one reason however for the difficulty faced by both physicists and philosophers in affirming the innate reality and validity of subjective experience and of subjectivity as such. The other reason is their own habitual defensive use of language as a way of intellectually distancing themselves from the realm of immediate subjective experience. In contrast, the yogis of the past took direct subjective experience as the starting point for the development of a refined subjective science and of philosophies that affirmed the absolute character of subjectivity or awareness. What is called ‘yoga’ did not suddenly come into being a fully-fledged philosophy or set of practices but arose from centuries of subjective-scientific experimentation with awareness, aimed at exploring and experiencing its many dimensions and qualities – the subjective universe. Out of such experimentation precise yogic practices were evolved and developed - not as mathematically calculated, operational acts performed on ‘objects’ – but rather as ways of letting presence and bringing forth new experiential aspects and dimension of that universe. Such practices made use of religious rather than mathematical symbols, and gave pride of place to the experienced body of the yogi - and not any technical instruments - as principal instrument of research. What passes as ‘yoga’ today however, is a pale and stale shadow of these practices, now adopted second-hand and without any memory of the original, experimental purposes they served - and through which they were evolved and refined, both in principle and in practice. These purposes were both scientific and spiritual - ‘spiritual-scientific’ – though the term itself is redundant so long as the original and essential meaning of the term ‘spirit’ itself remains unquestioned and clouded in holy smoke. What is ‘spirit’? In essence, it is nothing more or less than the immaterial yet foundational reality that is subjectivity or awareness as such - a reality that is the source of all in-spiration and indeed the ultimate foundation of breathing or ‘re-spiration’. Hence the yogic practice of using awareness of breathing to experiencing breathing itself as an in-spiration and ex-spiration of the life-breath or innate vitality (Greek psyche / Sanskrit prana) of awareness as such - that ‘higher air’ or Aether which permeates the spacious field of pure awareness that we perceive as empty space. Neither the subsumption and setting in stone of strict yogic practices within dogmatic religious sects, nor the secularisation or yoga as a mere means to physical well-being, do justice to its true significance as a primordial expression of subjective science - aimed at expanding the awareness of the practitioner to a degree that enables them to experience and explore ever-new and larger dimensions of the subjective universe of awareness.
In Europe and the West, the ‘subjective’ has long been relegated to the twin realms of religion and the arts - rather than seen as central to science and the sciences. In India and the East, the essentially arts of music, dance and sculpture never ceased to be understood essentially as religious-scientific disciplines or ‘yogas’. In the West, meanwhile, metaphysics and philosophy have long since given way to the new religion that is modern science, ruled by the high priests of quantum physics. Yet this is a ‘theory’ that no longer even understands itself as seeking fundamental truths but mere final mathematical solutions. Einstein himself said of it: "This theory reminds me of the system of delusions of an exceedingly intelligent paranoiac, concocted of incoherent elements of thought...If correct, it signifies the end of physics as a science." (letter to D. Liplein, July 5, 1952). It is indeed the end of physics as a purely objective science. Subjective science on the other hand, is aimed at not only at understanding but experiencing ultimate meta-physical and theosophical truths - not only understanding but experiencing the subjective universe.
Language as such is ‘no-thing’ - for it is everywhere and nowhere. It is not reducible to a localisable textual object or spoken word but is the invisible non-local context of every word, text and act of speech. Subjective awareness - like language as such - or like activity or potentiality as such - is also ‘no-thing’. It is also everywhere and nowhere - a subjectivity irreducible to any localized object and not the property of any localised ‘subject’. All apparent ‘physical’ objects are but elements of subjective experience emerging (physein) within an infinite non-local field of subjective awareness. We dwell not in an objective but a subjective universe. ‘God’ is not some supreme ‘subject’ that ‘has’ awareness - ruling over a universe of objects. God is awareness or subjectivity as such – absolute and as all-pervasive as space and time, transcendent and immanent in all things. As pure awareness or absolute subjectivity ‘God’ is the most fundamental reality of all and no ‘delusion’. Modern science on the other hand is a delusive religion resting on the central dogma of an objective universe ruled by human subjects or ‘observers’. Hence its ever more aggressive assault - not only on all religions that treat ‘God’ rather than Man as supreme ruling subject - but on any attempt to undermine the dogmatic identification of reality as such with a universe of objects and of truth with objectivity. In today’s ‘postmodern’ world however, this dogma is belied by the linguistic or sign character of objects themselves. Go into any airport or shopping mall for example, and you will find barely a single object that does not stand before us as a sign of some sort – whether a directional sign, the sign of airline or shop, or a carefully de-signed product or logo. Objects lose their substantive character as totally independent ‘things’ and become mere signs - signs whose sole significance lies in their being ‘signifiers’ for a whole world of other signs. Thus a fashion item, brand name or logo stands as sign for the whole world of fashion signs in the form of branded commodities. Similarly, an electronic gadget stands as sign of the whole world of telecommunications and computer technology – itself but a medium for the transmission of signs in the form of words, images, photo images and advertising signs and video streams. Where once material substances and their sensory qualities were beheld as symbols of a world of subjectivity or soul, they now stand as mere signs. Where religious symbols once reigned, now rules the commercial sign - or the purely abstract mathematical symbols of science.
“Science is the new religion.” (Martin Heidegger). Yet what is the central, unquestioned, unprovable and, as I shall argue, wholly untenable dogma of this religion? This fundamental dogma of science and the sciences is the identification of reality with a world of ‘objects’ and truth with ‘objectivity’. The dogma begins by forgetting that the very terms ‘object’ and ‘objectivity’ are, first and foremost words – linguistic constructs. Yet no physicist or philosopher bothers to consider in what way language as such can be considered to be an ‘object’ or to have ‘objective’ reality. We can identify a word on the printed page but cannot say ‘where’ language as such exists – it has no locality in the same way that a physical ‘object’ seems to have. Nor can we even say what language as such is - for it is not reducible to a finite set of sounds, alphabets, syntactic rules - or even ways of speaking. Even the spoken or written ‘word’ is only a word by virtue of being more than a mere ‘object’ – for what makes a set of ink marks on a page or sound waves in space into writing or speech is that we read or hear within them a totally invisible or inaudible meaning whose material form is but the manifestation. Though scientists constantly use language to articulate their own theories of a world of objects there is no ‘objective’ way of even proving the objective existence of that invisible, inaudible and immeasurable world of meaning that lies behind their language and language as such.
Moreover any very way of thinking, speaking or writing about language assumes and makes use of language, which is not the private property of any thinker, speaker or writer and has a character innately transcending everyone who thinks about it and every thing that can be said about it. Thus though the terms ‘object’ and ‘objectivity’ are used as if they were self-evident, they themselves rest on a reality – language – which cannot itself be reduced to any object or set of objects. One of the main uses of language however, is precisely to objectify reality – for no sooner does a word or term become part of the common currency of language (including the word ‘language’ itself) then we assume that it to refer to some pre-given thing or ‘object’ that has existed for all time. We make this assumption despite the fact that the very word used to name this ‘objectively’ existing thing may be a neologism of the only the most recent historic coinage – emerging within a specific historic culture at a specific time, and belonging to the vocabulary of a specific science, religion, or academic discipline within that culture.
Thus the word ‘religion’ was coined only a few centuries ago in European culture and thought. Yet having become common currency we assume it refers to some ‘thing’ which has always existed in human culture and of which all specific ‘religions’ are but variations. Thus we speak casually of ‘Eastern religions’, we superimpose a European linguistic construct on Eastern cultures, completely ignoring the fact that in the language of these supposed ‘Eastern religions’ themselves, there is not a single word that corresponds to our recently coined and now globally superimposed term - ‘religion’. The word ‘religion’ then, far from being taken as a historically and culturally specific linguistic construct, is taken instead as some universal cultural thing - an ‘object’ which has existed universally and throughout history, and is differentiated only by its local, historical and culturally specific ‘varieties’. What can be said of the objectifying use of the word ‘religion’ can be said of the word ‘science’ too – and indeed of the terminologies of all the sciences. For their very terms are linguistic constructs – terms which linguistically construct the very ‘objects’ whose reality they assume as ‘given’. That the relation of scientific terminologies to their supposed objects of ‘exploration’ and ‘explanation’ is not even explored or examined as a question in science, shows how, in its own dogmatic self-understanding, modern science is an ideology that lags behind the most elementary of ‘post-modern’ understandings of the objectifying power of language, understandings which are not ‘pre-scientific’ but post-scientific - or rather post-scientistic – what we take as ‘science’ being a quasi-religious ideology or ‘-ism’.
Yet there is an even deeper fault and fissure in the foundational dogma of science – the dogma of a world of pre-given ‘objects’ and of truth as ‘objectivity’. That fissure is to be found in the narrow concept of ‘subjectivity’ that it presents or implies as its ‘unscientific’ counterpart. In everyday language use we take the word ‘subjective’ to refer to things experienced ‘in here’ – in our minds or imagination, as feelings in our emotional life and imagination, as moods or as bodily sensations such as pleasure and pain. All these dimensions of experience are counterpoised to an external world of ‘objects’ assumed to exist ‘out there’ - independently of our experience of them. Not a single modern physicist and but a single modern philosopher – Edmund Husserl – has come to the elementary insight that all experiencing – including every element of our experience of a world ‘out there’ – is by nature subjective. The fundamental but still unacknowledged starting point of ‘science’ is therefore not what it takes it to be - the dogmatically assumed pre-existence of a world of objects ‘out there’. Instead the true foundation of all knowledge and all true ‘science’ is subjective experiencing. This is true whether or not any given elements of experience are thought of and experienced as ‘in here’ or ‘out there’, as purely personal or wholly impersonal, as relative or absolute.
It was Husserl’s great insight that by excluding our experience of the entire ‘external’ or ‘physical’ world from our understanding of the ‘psychical’, we reduce the ‘psyche’ to a purely internal world of private experiences - thus creating a wholly false dualism between the ‘physical’ and the ‘psychical’, the ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’. The result is a wholly false separation of the so-called ‘sciences’ of ‘physics’ and ‘psychology’ - both of which ignore the inherently subjective nature of all experiencing, ‘outer’ or ‘inner’. That is why ‘phenomenological’ science is deeper than both physics and psychology, for understood properly, it is an understanding of science that transcends the unquestioned dualism of ‘subject’ and ‘object’, the ‘subjective’ and the ‘objective’. Phenomenological science runs counter to the dogmatic identification of reality with objects and objectivity. Indeed in its ultimate form ‘phenomenological science’ denies ultimate reality to any ‘objects’ whatsoever, which in essence are nothing more than linguistic objectifications of ‘phenomena’ ie. different elements or complexes of subjective experiencing.
The massive challenge posed by phenomenological science to our whole understanding of ‘science’ and the ‘sciences’, not least physics and psychology themselves, was understated even by Husserl, who failed to tackle the single most important fortress shared by both these sciences in defense of the dogma of objectivity. This is the highly Eurocentric but now ever more globalised dogma subjectivity is necessarily the private property of an individual ‘ego’ or ‘self’ – the so-called ‘subject’ - or that casually assumes that terms such ‘subjective’ or ‘subjectivity’ imply the existence of such a subject. As a result, the nature of subjectivity or consciousness as such is not even considered, but instead identified with the conscious experiencing of individual beings or ‘subjects’ - in particular human beings and subjects and individual human consciousness.
The identification of subjectivity, consciousness or awareness with a limited human ego or subject did not form any part of pre-modern Eastern ‘philosophical’, ‘religious’ and ‘scientific’ understandings of reality. Nor is it at all congruent with a new post-modern and post-scientific worldview. For the reduction of subjectivity as such to a property of an individual ‘subject’ is equivalent to reducing language as such to the private property of an individual speaker rather than the other way round – understanding speech as an individualised expression of language, one that shapes and reshapes the speaker’s very experience of themselves as an individual self or ‘subject’.
Philosophers in the West have no concept whatsoever of ‘subjectivity without a subject’ – the Eastern notion of a ‘universal consciousness’ that is the absolute source not only of all individualised consciousness, but of all that is – pervading all things, human and non-human. Instead, with only one or two exceptions they continue to wrestle with the meaning of ‘subjectivity’ whilst failing to even question the notion of ‘objectivity’. I have spoken of the everyday use of the term ‘subjective’. For Western philosophers subjectivity is understood only as the property of pre-supposed ‘subjects’. As a result, subjectivity is also identified with what is seen as the key attributes of such ‘subjects’, namely perspectival relativity, ‘ipseity’ or self-awareness, and autonomous agency.
‘Subjectivity’ is associated in Western philosophy with perspectival relativity because each ‘subject’, by virtue of having a unique location or ‘position’ (whether physical and perceptual, mental or emotional, ethical or cultural) sees ‘objective’ reality from a unique and therefore irredeemably ‘biased’ point of view. There is a paradox here. For having reduced subjectivity to a ‘subject’, this subject is then thought of in the same way as a localised object - being positioned at some ‘point’ in space. In contrast, in the most sophisticated of Indian yogic philosophies, subjectivity was understood as an all-pervasive or ‘non-local’ field comparable to space as such rather than any ‘objects’ in it. Space itself was not experienced by the yogi as anything ‘objective’ or ‘physical’ but as identical with the ‘universal’ or ‘divine’ consciousness’ – the latter being a limitless, non-local field of ‘pure awareness’ or ‘absolute subjectivity’ - and as such both transcendent and immanent, both embracing and pervading all things and beings within it. The practical yogic path to experiencing the limitless non-local nature of subjectivity was precisely through identifying with the seeming void or emptiness of the spaces within and around things – in reality the all-surrounding and all-pervading ‘space’ or ‘aether’ (Akash) of pure awareness.
I call my own further explication and refinement of yogic metaphysics ‘The Awareness Principle’. By this I mean the understanding that subjectivity or awareness as such (‘pure awareness’) cannot - in principle - be either the property of a pre-given subject or reduced to the function of any object. For in essence all ‘objects’ and ‘subjects’ are but differentiated elements of subjective experience - all emerging from and embraced by a spacious field of absolute subjectivity or ‘pure awareness’. From this point of view the association in Western philosophy of subjectivity with the ‘ipseity’ (self-recognition or self-awareness) of an individual subject is also undermined by The Awareness Principle. For awareness of any experienced ‘self’ or ‘subject’ cannot - in principle – be the property of any self or subject we are aware of. For like every element of our subjective experience, our experience of self necessarily belongs to an experiencing awareness or subjectivity transcending that particular, experienced self – or any self or subject.
The Awareness Principle is a philosophy of absolute subjectivity transcending any subject. Behind the ‘Objectivity Principle’ of modern science on the other hand is the religious absolutisation of an abstract subject standing apart from, over and above a world of objects. Whether this absolute subject be conceived of – objectified - as human or divine makes no difference, for belief in its existence constitutes the central dogma shared by both modern science and theistic religions.
The absolutisation of the subject - as opposed to a subjectivity prior to all subjects – came to its fullest expression in the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, where the subject as ‘observer’ is the principle agent responsible for determining what is observed. Whereas classical physics concealed the subject behind a world of objects in absolute space and time, Einstein’s General Relativity abolished the absolutivity of space and time, and Special Relativity made all motion relative to the observer – the subject. Quantum mechanics went yet further, ceasing to claim the existence of any objective world of particle-waves or wave-particles ‘behind’ instrumentally measurable data, and instead implicitly raising the scientist as such – the observing subject - to the status of a sole or absolute object. In place of God as a divine being or subject ruling over man and nature as its objects was placed the human being – but only in the form of the subject as posited by science - the observer. In this way we can see how theism, atheism, humanism and science all unite as one in sharing an identification of subjectivity with ‘the subject’ - whether it be conceived religiously, scientifically or humanistically.
Understanding itself as a mere set of operational practices with no claims to truth, science has, as Heidegger saw, become a mere handmaiden for technology - offering global capitalism an abundance of operational technologies to profit from by enframing exploiting the earth and converting it into a ‘standing reserve’ of human and natural resources. This exploitation is made possible, not in the first instance, through the machines and mechanics of industrial technologies, old and new - but rather through an unthinking mechanisation of thought itself. This is the transformation of thinking as such into a mere instrumental or operational tool for the enframing and objectification of every qualitative dimensions of earthly experiencing, into a specifically calculative mode of thinking which subjects them all to its own objectifying and purely quantitative or ‘quantised’ terms of reference. Such a mode of thinking is now being aggressively employed in an attempt to attack and wipe out any remaining experience or conceptions of a universal awareness or subjectivity – one that transcends both absolutised ‘subjects’, human or divine, and their worlds of operationally manufacturable and manipulable objects.
Heisenberg’s recognition of the intrinsic relation or ‘relativity’ of observer and observed in the observations possible in quantum physics could be seen as transcending the whole subject-object metaphysics of Western thought. Heidegger however, did not see Heisenberg’s ‘relativity’ as a return to a type of unifying ‘holism’ in physics - but rather as its very opposite - a theoretical mirror image of Hiroshima.
“The objectness of material nature shows in modern atomic physics fundamental characteristics completely different from those that is shows in classical physics … And yet – modern nuclear and field physics also still remains physics, i.e., science, i.e., theory, which entraps objects, in order to secure them in the unity of their objectness …
… the way in which in the most recent phase of atomic physics even the object vanishes also, and the way in which above all, the subject-object relation as pure relation takes precedence over the object … the subject-object relation thus reaches, for the first time, its pure ‘relational’, i.e., ordering character, in which both subject and object are sucked up … That does not mean that the subject-object relation vanishes, but rather now the opposite; it now attains its most extreme dominance …” Science and Reflection
No longer is it Newton’s God that is seen as supreme subject ruling over the earth but the human subject - a subject for whom, scientifically, objects, and even human beings themselves, no longer even exist except in so far as they ‘count’ as instrumental measurements or statistics. Such a delusive and deluded ‘subject’ is intrinsically destructive and self-destructive - for in submitting science to the service of commercial calculation and the technological-industrial depletion of the earth it quite literally removes the very ground from under its own feet. This is capitalist industry abolishing what Marx called its own ‘natural condition of production’ – whether in the form of forests and trees, soil, oil, water - or the exploited and polluted body of the human being.
The growth of a tree is not the activity of an agent or subject, human or divine. The tree is not grown at all, nor can the natural growth of trees be speeded up to keep pace with industrial demands for wood and paper. Trees are not grown. They emerge from the deeper soil and larger field of their environment, serving, like speech, as their living expression. Yet where can be found ‘physicists’ who remembers that the Greek physis – ‘emergence’ - is the true root and root truth of the term ‘physics’? Where are the philosophers who recall that the Greek logos - ‘speech’ - is the true root and root truth of ‘logic’? Where, above all, are the true thinkers who, as yogis, can once again experience space as the aether or ‘Akash’ of pure awareness, and who can once again experience the physical world as emergent word - as one experiential language or expression of pure awareness among others - not our language but that of a ‘God’ which does not ‘have’ but is awareness or subjectivity, universal and absolute?
Another attribute attached to the ‘subject’ and ‘subjectivity’ by Western philosophers is ‘titularity’ – its sense of owning its actions and experiences. As ‘subjects’ one aspect of our ‘subjectivity’ is defined - from this Western point of view - as the sense of an action or experience being ‘mine’. Eastern thought too has long recognized a close connection between what it understood as the limited self or ‘subject’ and this sense of ownership or ‘mine-ness’. Yet in contrast to Western thought yogic philosophy sees this ‘titular’ subject as the biggest obstacle in the way of realizing a higher and vastly expanded sense of self - a self identical with pure awareness or absolute subjectivity as such. That is why the basic principle of yogic philosophy and principal aim of yogic practice is to overcome ‘Anavamala’ - the basic ‘stain’ or ‘impurity’ of awareness that comes from ignorant identification of ourselves and of subjectivity as such with the finite ‘ego’ or ‘subject’ – the very ‘ego’ or ‘subject’ which Western thought takes, in its own ignorance, as something ‘possessing’ awareness or subjectivity as its ‘own’ titular private property.
The very terms ‘subject’ and ‘object’ are effectively separate, linguistically constructed ‘objects’ of Western philosophical discourse. It is because these linguistic constructs are then taken as ‘objectively’ real that the false assumption arises that consciousness and cognition are based on a sort of external relation between separable ‘subjects’ and ‘objects’ - in reality a relation of linguistically constructed objects. In an attempt to give some sort of ‘objective’ reality to this linguistically constructed relation, the commonly accepted neuro-scientific account of perception reduces the ‘subject’ itself to a single observable object - the brain. In doing so however, it also reduces the external ‘objects’ we think we perceive ‘out there’ into mere subjective hallucinations ‘projected’ outward by the brain in response to sensory data. The philosophical and logical nonsensicality of this ‘scientific’ model of cognition is revealed as soon as we ask what sort of external ‘objects’ the brain and sense organs are supposed to derive their initial sensory ‘data’ or ‘information’ from - given that what we perceive as such ‘objects’, are according to neuroscience itself, nothing but subjective images manufactured by the brain! According to this attempt to solve the riddle of the subject-object relation therefore, the brain – itself but one perceptible object among others - is supposed to give us a perception of other objects by interpreting sensory data coming from its own subjective hallucinations of such objects!
Another unresolvable riddle and paradox arising from the subject-object model of consciousness is its inability to explain so-called ‘qualia’ – our subjective experience of sensory qualities such as colour. Here physics and our everyday experience of the world set themselves on a collision course. That is because, for the physicist, colours are ultimately nothing but ‘objectively’ measurable quantities - wavelengths of light. How then however, does our everyday qualitative perception of colours arise? How are we to explain our experience of a quale such as ‘redness’? Is it something ‘purely’ subjective, is it the subjective figment of a biological object – the brain - or is there some truly objective sensory quality – and no mere quantity – corresponding to it?
The assumption here is that subjectivity has no innately sensual qualities of its own - an assumption questioned by both everyday language and everyday experience. We both experience and describe ‘moods’ for example, in terms of sensual qualities such as light (being in a ‘bright’ or ‘radiant’ mood or being in a ‘dark’ mood), colour (being in a ‘blue’ or ‘black mood’), gravity or weight (being in a ‘heavy’ or ‘grave’ mood or one of ‘levity’ and ‘lightness’), spatiality (feeling ‘high’ or ‘low’, ‘up’ or ‘down’, ‘exposed’ to or ‘closed off’, ‘distanced’ or ‘close’), heat (feeling ‘warm’ or ‘cool’, ‘hot’ or ‘cold’ towards something or someone), texture (feeling ‘solid’ or ‘empty’, ‘knotted up’ or ‘strung out’), time and motion (feeling ‘speedy’ or ‘slowed down’, ‘in a whirl’ or ‘going round in circles’) etc. etc. Is it any surprise that given the existence of such innately sensual qualities of feeling awareness or subjectivity, they should find expression in our dreams as experienced sensory qualities of dream objects - a dark cloud in our dreams for example expressing a felt darkness of mood, for example? Indeed the whole riddle of sensory perception and of the subjective vs objective nature of experienced qualities or qualia are resolved for us every night - through our experience of dreaming. For in contrast to scientists, with their dogma of a world of objects and their identification of truth with objectivity, our experience of dreaming is something we recognize as wholly subjective. We do not take dream objects as ‘objects’ in the way that the physical sciences and Western philosophy consider them – as entities existing independently of consciousness or subjectivity. Instead we experience them ‘physically’ in the root sense, as phenomena emerging (physein) from within the overall field of our subjective dreaming awareness, whilst at the same time giving expression to that field - constituting animate portions of that awareness. We would not think of attempting to find the ‘objective’ cause of a particular dream, let alone an explanation for the experience of dreaming as such - in one particular ‘object’ we happen to dream of.
Yet this is precisely what neuroscience seeks to do in explaining the nature of our waking experience of phenomena - by taking one single object of perception (the brain itself) – as the foundation for our waking experience of all other objects. Indeed neuroscience even attempts to explain dreaming experience as a function of our brains. This is a further oddity or paradox - given that neuroscience maintains, in effect, that our perceptions of waking world objects are themselves dreamt up by the brain. The only object excluded from this whole brain-based explanation of our perception of objects is the brain itself - our perception of which is treated, unlike all other objects, as immediate and ‘real’. Neuroscience cannot, in principle, explain this contradiction in its account of perception. For even to recognise this contradiction would be to admit the absurdity of its claims that consciousness and perception are functions of the brain. For the logical consequence or reductio ad absurdum of this claim is that the brain too cannot be considered as a scientific ‘object’ existing independently ‘out there’ - but is rather a figment of its own subjective imaginings, an object dreamt up by itself!
Our subjective experience of dreaming offers us vital clues to a wholly different understanding of the fundamental nature of waking consciousness and cognition to that which is proffered by the logically confused and self-contradictory constructs and explanations of modern science – all of which are rooted in the dogmatic identification of reality with objects, of truth with objectivity, and of cognition and consciousness with a relation of separable ‘objects’ and ‘subjects’. Indeed the experience of dreaming offers us a wholly new understanding of the fundamental nature of reality as such, allowing us to acknowledge the fundamentally subjective nature of all supposedly objective realities. In waking life, as in dreams, we inhabit a subjective universe. This is not a universe composed of separable subjects but of multi-dimensional fields of awareness - all rooted in a universal and absolute subjectivity of which we, and all things, are individualised portions and expressions. This absolute subjectivity is not the private property of a supreme subject or ‘being’. Quite simply it is subjectivity or awareness as such - without a prior or pre-given subject as its ‘owner’.
‘The Awareness Principle’ undermines not only the objectivity dogma of science but the philosophical and religious dogma that awareness or subjectivity is necessarily the property of a pre-given subject or ‘being’, human or divine. It understands ‘God’ neither as a supreme being or subject, nor even as Being - but as that absolute subjectivity or unbounded awareness of which all beings and all bodies in space-time are portions and expressions. Modern science itself, by virtue of its own untiring attempts to sustain the notion of an objective universe and an objective ‘explanation’ of subjectivity or awareness, has brought itself - through the contradictions inherent in both quantum mechanics and brain science - to the furthermost boundaries of its most religiously cherished assumptions and beliefs. In doing so it has also brought humanity to the threshold of a wholly new understanding of the universe and of ‘science’ itself. Crossing this threshold marks our entry – or rather return – into the subjective universe from which we and all things hail. This is a universe that can only be explored through subjective sciences based on directly subjective and experiential modes of scientific research. Yet no amount of research will allow this threshold to be experimentally or even experientially crossed unless it is first crossed in thought. This means questioning and letting go of the long-standing prejudice that still governs human thinking - the prejudice that grants more ‘reality’ to the objective than the subjective, that reduces subjectivity to subjects, subjects to objects, and that ultimately reduces both to nothing at all. That is the threshold - for subjectivity, like language, is indeed ‘no-thing’ and no ‘being’ – but the source of all things and all beings.
Crossing the threshold to the subjective universe is not a return to ‘religion’ as it is currently practiced and understood. Instead it is a return from the new religion that ‘science’ has become back to the eternal inner truth of religion as such, re-linking us with that ‘God’ which is not a being ‘with’ awareness but simply is awareness - absolute and unbounded. This is not some ‘New Age’ God but the oldest, most primordial God of all; one that has never ceased to re-gather and re-plant the knowledge-seeds of its scientist-priests, both during times of war and of peace.
The fact that the very term ‘subjective universe’ is taken today as connoting a type of private, solipsistic universe of the individual subject - comparable to a purely private and fantastic world of our dreams or imagination - shows how dramatically the meaning of the terms ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’ has altered over recent centuries. For as Owen Barfield has pointed out, the single most important attribute used or assumed by contemporary philosophers to define the basic concept of an ‘object’ – its nature as something independently real or self-subsistent in its own right – belonged originally to the word ‘subject’.
This is only one reason however for the difficulty faced by both physicists and philosophers in affirming the innate reality and validity of subjective experience and of subjectivity as such. The other reason is their own habitual defensive use of language as a way of intellectually distancing themselves from the realm of immediate subjective experience. In contrast, the yogis of the past took direct subjective experience as the starting point for the development of a refined subjective science and of philosophies that affirmed the absolute character of subjectivity or awareness. What is called ‘yoga’ did not suddenly come into being a fully-fledged philosophy or set of practices but arose from centuries of subjective-scientific experimentation with awareness, aimed at exploring and experiencing its many dimensions and qualities – the subjective universe. Out of such experimentation precise yogic practices were evolved and developed - not as mathematically calculated, operational acts performed on ‘objects’ – but rather as ways of letting presence and bringing forth new experiential aspects and dimension of that universe. Such practices made use of religious rather than mathematical symbols, and gave pride of place to the experienced body of the yogi - and not any technical instruments - as principal instrument of research. What passes as ‘yoga’ today however, is a pale and stale shadow of these practices, now adopted second-hand and without any memory of the original, experimental purposes they served - and through which they were evolved and refined, both in principle and in practice. These purposes were both scientific and spiritual - ‘spiritual-scientific’ – though the term itself is redundant so long as the original and essential meaning of the term ‘spirit’ itself remains unquestioned and clouded in holy smoke. What is ‘spirit’? In essence, it is nothing more or less than the immaterial yet foundational reality that is subjectivity or awareness as such - a reality that is the source of all in-spiration and indeed the ultimate foundation of breathing or ‘re-spiration’. Hence the yogic practice of using awareness of breathing to experiencing breathing itself as an in-spiration and ex-spiration of the life-breath or innate vitality (Greek psyche / Sanskrit prana) of awareness as such - that ‘higher air’ or Aether which permeates the spacious field of pure awareness that we perceive as empty space. Neither the subsumption and setting in stone of strict yogic practices within dogmatic religious sects, nor the secularisation or yoga as a mere means to physical well-being, do justice to its true significance as a primordial expression of subjective science - aimed at expanding the awareness of the practitioner to a degree that enables them to experience and explore ever-new and larger dimensions of the subjective universe of awareness.
In Europe and the West, the ‘subjective’ has long been relegated to the twin realms of religion and the arts - rather than seen as central to science and the sciences. In India and the East, the essentially arts of music, dance and sculpture never ceased to be understood essentially as religious-scientific disciplines or ‘yogas’. In the West, meanwhile, metaphysics and philosophy have long since given way to the new religion that is modern science, ruled by the high priests of quantum physics. Yet this is a ‘theory’ that no longer even understands itself as seeking fundamental truths but mere final mathematical solutions. Einstein himself said of it: "This theory reminds me of the system of delusions of an exceedingly intelligent paranoiac, concocted of incoherent elements of thought...If correct, it signifies the end of physics as a science." (letter to D. Liplein, July 5, 1952). It is indeed the end of physics as a purely objective science. Subjective science on the other hand, is aimed at not only at understanding but experiencing ultimate meta-physical and theosophical truths - not only understanding but experiencing the subjective universe.
12 November 2017
Lest We Forget - The Ruling Class are Psychopathic Murderers, WE are their Cannon-Fodder
Today is Armistice Day. This is the day when people who have lost loved ones in wars remember our dead. It is also a day of propaganda in which the Ruling Class publicly parade in a pantomime act of compassion.
The Royals have excelled themselves this year with the head of the Windsor criminal syndicate (Elizabeth), even managing to stage a crocodile tear. Perhaps she has begun to feel guilt in her old age for the millions murdered while she had been in charge of the UK? This is highly doubtful. Maybe her tears were of sadness that the Working Class are now so impoverished that the days of worshipful devotion are well and truly over and that a new British Republican era must surely not be far away? Most likely she had a bit of dust in her eye and it is only twisting lies of the sycophantic media which have given her a pretence of humanity.
Website: https://crimesofbritain.com/
Twitter (best place to contact): @crimesofbrits
The British Army has been used since its creation as a tool of the Ruling Class for advancing imperialistic and economic gains. The soldiers themselves have been nothing but cannon-fodder. The Royal Family cynically lay a wreath every Poppy Day as if they gave a toss for the lives lost to make them rich. They don't care about those killed by the British Military. Nor do they care about those killed IN the British Military.
Rise Up! Overthrow the tyrants. Tugging the forelock and singing God Save The Queen; Marching to the Cenotaph to lay poppy wreaths - this is to bow down to the beasts who throw our lives away and get rich as we die or are made to kill others. Enough is Enough.
11 November 2017
Leaflets and Useful Information (Wilberg on Wednesday)
Here some new materials for the SWPE.
The Bank Loan Scam
This is a revision and expansion of a draft I wrote for a leaflet to make available via a stall to hand to and/or just talk to people about outside local banks. I've tried to make it as simple and clear as possible. Let me know if you think I've succeeded - or have any suggestions or questions. Think the main thing should maybe be to first talk to people who stop and look - for example by asking them simple questions like 'Where do you think banks get their money from to give out loans?' Have attached the leaflet below also as pdf. It could also maybe turned into a 4 page A5 leaflet.
Could also write another complementary short leaflet/pamphlet type piece about what money is and where it comes from, i.e. how it's all created by the banks as debt - though only 10% of loans go to businesses - but could be created by governments and spent into existence for the people good rather than lent into existence for the bankers. Must admit that though the SWPE does want to get rid of usury I am not totally convinced that people (even diehard Marxists) understand what I mean by "the nationalisation of money creation" being central to 21st century socialism.
Further material:
Speech by Fran Boat
Germany calling...
A piece on AfD party proposals for repatriation of Syrian refugees
Transforming the Eurozone through money creation for the people
International Monetary Reform
Speaks for itself - showing loads of countries that now have their own national movements to de-privatise money creation - you can open and right click on any flag to Google translate and read their own basic programs for monetary reform.
8 November 2017
Soul-Science and Social Change - Wilberg on Wednesday
Social-Revolutionary Aims of Soul-Science
The soul dimension of socialism has to do with the intrinsically social character of the individual soul as such. We have not one personal identity but many. Our soul identity is itself a group identity. The soul is itself a family group or community of selves. The personal self we know and identify with is but one part and one expression of this inner society of selves. As souls we are multi-persons.
In the social world, each person is the hub of a wheel of dyadic relationships with others. Part of the meaning of these relationships lies in the way in which each person we relate to in our social world symbolises and links us to another self of our own – to a specific part of that group or society of selves that makes up our whole self or soul. In the social world, we are taught to feel our personal identity as the private property of our ego. In the soul world on the other hand, personal identities can mix, merge, meld and overlap with those of others, without any loss of essential spiritual individuality, which has to do with the group nature of our whole self or soul.
If two individuals linked in a dyadic relationship can sense the specific aspects of their own souls linking them with the other, and feel the ways in which their own identity overlaps with that of the other, then that relationship becomes a link to their whole self or soul. It ceases to be a mere ‘interpersonal relationship’ - one in which each person treats their own identity as private property, and rigidifies the boundary of identity separating them from the other person. Instead they become conscious of their interpersonal relationship as a soul relationship, and become aware of its reality in the soul world.
A social group is a group of persons. A soul group is a group of souls. But since each individual, as a soul, is themselves a group or society of selves, a soul group has a ‘holarchical’ character. It is a group of groups in which each member is part of every other, and is linked to each other member through a particular aspect of their own soul. If each member of a social group is able to feel the specific inner soul-connection uniting them with each other member of the group, then the social group can come to consciousness of itself as a soul group, and become aware of its own living reality in the soul world. It is only through a highly specific sense of our inner soul connection with a specific other that both interpersonal and group relationships can be transformed into soul relationships - awakening a social consciousness of our own whole self or soul, of soul groups and communities, and of the soul world as such.
Most accounts of society and social history are based purely on studies of social practices and the social world as such. They entirely ignore the social influence and reality of soul relationships, soul groups and the soul world. The natural world is a world that surrounds us all the time. It is not ‘another world’ but one we are a part of, even though, as urban dwellers, we may only be conscious of it through changes in the weather. The same is true of the soul world. We are part of that world too and have never left it. It surrounds us all the time and in the same way that the natural world does, making its influence felt through constant changes in the psychical atmosphere, mood or climate that permeates social groups and the social world as a whole.
We know what it feels like when the atmosphere in an interpersonal relationship or social gathering cools or gets overheated. Soul relationships and soul group do not necessarily find expression in interpersonal relationships and social groups. Yet individuals who do form part of the same soul group can feel changes in the climate or atmosphere of that group even though they may rarely or never meet as a social group, or live thousands of miles from one another in totally different natural climates. Because of the hold exerted by the notion of personal identity as private property however, individuals tend to both personalise and privatise their experience of changes occurring in the psychical climate and atmosphere of their soul group and soul world – often to the extent that they treat them only as the result of their own unpredictable personal ‘mood swings’.
Natural weather patterns and climatic changes are only ‘unpredictable’ in a conventional scientific sense. From a soul-scientific perspective they are themselves a manifestations of local, regional and global changes in the psychic atmosphere of the mass psyche. Dangerous and life-threatening global climate changes are a result of humanity adopting a soul-less and purely practical relation to nature – turning the planet into a stock of exploitable mineral, vegetative and animal resources.
It is because social relationships, social groups and the social world are primarily formed on the basis of common practical relations and purposes rather than shared inner soul connections that the whole climate of the soul world can also be damaged, affecting every soul group within it and each of the individuals within those groups.
The foundation of religious groups and communities, religious cults and cultures, was driven by the ideal of giving social and communal reality to the soul world - to soul groups and communities. What unites religion and socialism however, is the ‘utopian’ spiritual ideal of creating ‘heaven on earth’, realising the innate soul-brotherhood and soul-sisterhood of all humanity in a way free of distortions and inequalities created by human practical relations. Unfortunately, like political groups and organisations, religious groups and communities too, have themselves built up solely on the basis of purely practical relations between their members. For whilst emphasizing the ethical importance of relational practices they have tended to reduce such practices to a body of moral commandments or a set of symbolic rites.
The spiritual and political essence of ‘socialism’ is not collectivism but individualism fulfilled through relational practices that free human relations from the alienation created by their practical social relations. Only such practices can create conditions for a communist society as Marx defined it – one in which “the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.” The ideal of a communist society will forever remain a utopian one however, unless soul is put back into ‘socialism’. Only by recognising the reality of the soul world (‘in heaven’), can soul communities attain reality in the social world (‘on earth’) as social communities. The sole means by which this can happen is through a relational revolution which shows each individual how to sense and realise their inner soul relationships with others through bodily relational practices – practices which break down the illusory bodily boundaries of personal identity itself.
We know that in reality all social groups, organisations and communities flounder or fragment through breakdowns in the interpersonal relationships among their members – the basic dyadic units of relation on which they are built. We know too, that the basic reason why individuals join or leave political and religious groups, organisations and communities has to do with the degree of inner soul connection they feel with them and the degree of relational fulfilment that they do or do not find within them.
This in turn has to do not only with the practical relations that govern those groups, organisations and communities but rather with the relational practices that do or do not flourish within them – practices necessary in order to not only nourish the interpersonal relations that are their very life, but to transform those relations into intimate soul relationships. It is through such relational practices that individuals can change their world, the world of others, and the social world as we know it. How? By overthrowing the foundations of capitalist social relations in their own souls. To do so means ceasing to experience their own personal identity as private property, recognising instead that their true spiritual individuality – their whole self or soul - is itself an inner society of selves. None of these selves is the private property of the ego. Rather each of them is a bridge of identity linking them with others in soul families, groups and communities.
Soul-sensing is a bodily relational practice that brings with it a bodily experience of soul-communion. Only through such bodily relational practices will it be possible to truly re-ensoul our social world – to form social groups and communities ‘on earth’ which know themselves as soul groups and communities, not just as aggregates of atomised and otherwise isolated individuals.
The essential reality of the human being is a complex of relationships. How they experience their reality is determined by the inner bearing they adopt to and within those relationships – their way of being in the ‘world’ that these relationships constitute. Any break in the normal pattern of relating, dominated as it is by everyday practical relations, brings about a break with normal consensual reality - but by no means with reality as such. For the ‘normal’ person their practical relations and purposes are all that constitute their world they take as real - however superficial or unreal the relationships that make up that world. Soul-science is a break with the entire non-relational concept of reality that underlies the world of normality, and the ‘normal’ modes of relating that maintain and reinforce it. Other realities – different planes and spheres of the soul words - do exist than the consensual reality reinforced by human social relations.
Soul-science is also a doorway into those realities, but one we can only open and enter through a revolutionary transformation of our own relation to the sensory world around us. That relation must cease to be one in which thinking turns all sensory phenomena of that world into intellectual abstractions. Instead it must become a relation in which we think with our bodies themselves, using them to sense the aware inwardness or ‘soul’ of all natural bodies – not least the human body itself, which is both a sense organ of the soul, and as Wittgenstein recognized, a sensory image of the soul – its “best picture”.
If the practice of medicine were understood as a relational practice, the physician would indeed take time to listen to the patient. If it were understood as a bodily relational practice, the physician would not simply rest content with observing or examining the body of the patient from the outside – they would listen not just with their medical mind but with their whole body - using it to sense the patient’s own inwardly felt body and inwardly felt dis-ease. The world of medicine and the physician-patient relation is but one example of the way in which what we call ‘the world’ is shaped by practical relations which leave no room for relational practices.
Just as the physician-patient relationship is approached only with the practical purpose of producing a diagnosis and recommending a treatment plan, so can the teacher-student relationship be dominated entirely by the project of setting and completing assignments and passing exams. Study itself ceases to be experienced as an activity by which the student deepens their inner relationship to a subject matter, but is reduced instead to the purely practical project of exam preparation or the production of passable essays.
We live in a world of practices – scientific and technical practices, professional and vocational practices, commercial and economic practices, medical and therapeutic practices, spiritual and meditational practices, political and religious practices. All these practices are also relational practices, yet how many understand themselves as such? Anyone can transform their ordinary practical relations with other human beings and with the entire sensory world into aware and bodily relational practices. In this way they ‘change the world’ in a revolutionary manner, subverting a consensual reality or world in which practical relations have hitherto squeezed the life out of human relations, and breathing fresh life into those relations through their relational practices.
The soul dimension of socialism has to do with the intrinsically social character of the individual soul as such. We have not one personal identity but many. Our soul identity is itself a group identity. The soul is itself a family group or community of selves. The personal self we know and identify with is but one part and one expression of this inner society of selves. As souls we are multi-persons.
In the social world, each person is the hub of a wheel of dyadic relationships with others. Part of the meaning of these relationships lies in the way in which each person we relate to in our social world symbolises and links us to another self of our own – to a specific part of that group or society of selves that makes up our whole self or soul. In the social world, we are taught to feel our personal identity as the private property of our ego. In the soul world on the other hand, personal identities can mix, merge, meld and overlap with those of others, without any loss of essential spiritual individuality, which has to do with the group nature of our whole self or soul.
If two individuals linked in a dyadic relationship can sense the specific aspects of their own souls linking them with the other, and feel the ways in which their own identity overlaps with that of the other, then that relationship becomes a link to their whole self or soul. It ceases to be a mere ‘interpersonal relationship’ - one in which each person treats their own identity as private property, and rigidifies the boundary of identity separating them from the other person. Instead they become conscious of their interpersonal relationship as a soul relationship, and become aware of its reality in the soul world.
A social group is a group of persons. A soul group is a group of souls. But since each individual, as a soul, is themselves a group or society of selves, a soul group has a ‘holarchical’ character. It is a group of groups in which each member is part of every other, and is linked to each other member through a particular aspect of their own soul. If each member of a social group is able to feel the specific inner soul-connection uniting them with each other member of the group, then the social group can come to consciousness of itself as a soul group, and become aware of its own living reality in the soul world. It is only through a highly specific sense of our inner soul connection with a specific other that both interpersonal and group relationships can be transformed into soul relationships - awakening a social consciousness of our own whole self or soul, of soul groups and communities, and of the soul world as such.
Most accounts of society and social history are based purely on studies of social practices and the social world as such. They entirely ignore the social influence and reality of soul relationships, soul groups and the soul world. The natural world is a world that surrounds us all the time. It is not ‘another world’ but one we are a part of, even though, as urban dwellers, we may only be conscious of it through changes in the weather. The same is true of the soul world. We are part of that world too and have never left it. It surrounds us all the time and in the same way that the natural world does, making its influence felt through constant changes in the psychical atmosphere, mood or climate that permeates social groups and the social world as a whole.
We know what it feels like when the atmosphere in an interpersonal relationship or social gathering cools or gets overheated. Soul relationships and soul group do not necessarily find expression in interpersonal relationships and social groups. Yet individuals who do form part of the same soul group can feel changes in the climate or atmosphere of that group even though they may rarely or never meet as a social group, or live thousands of miles from one another in totally different natural climates. Because of the hold exerted by the notion of personal identity as private property however, individuals tend to both personalise and privatise their experience of changes occurring in the psychical climate and atmosphere of their soul group and soul world – often to the extent that they treat them only as the result of their own unpredictable personal ‘mood swings’.
Natural weather patterns and climatic changes are only ‘unpredictable’ in a conventional scientific sense. From a soul-scientific perspective they are themselves a manifestations of local, regional and global changes in the psychic atmosphere of the mass psyche. Dangerous and life-threatening global climate changes are a result of humanity adopting a soul-less and purely practical relation to nature – turning the planet into a stock of exploitable mineral, vegetative and animal resources.
It is because social relationships, social groups and the social world are primarily formed on the basis of common practical relations and purposes rather than shared inner soul connections that the whole climate of the soul world can also be damaged, affecting every soul group within it and each of the individuals within those groups.
The foundation of religious groups and communities, religious cults and cultures, was driven by the ideal of giving social and communal reality to the soul world - to soul groups and communities. What unites religion and socialism however, is the ‘utopian’ spiritual ideal of creating ‘heaven on earth’, realising the innate soul-brotherhood and soul-sisterhood of all humanity in a way free of distortions and inequalities created by human practical relations. Unfortunately, like political groups and organisations, religious groups and communities too, have themselves built up solely on the basis of purely practical relations between their members. For whilst emphasizing the ethical importance of relational practices they have tended to reduce such practices to a body of moral commandments or a set of symbolic rites.
The spiritual and political essence of ‘socialism’ is not collectivism but individualism fulfilled through relational practices that free human relations from the alienation created by their practical social relations. Only such practices can create conditions for a communist society as Marx defined it – one in which “the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.” The ideal of a communist society will forever remain a utopian one however, unless soul is put back into ‘socialism’. Only by recognising the reality of the soul world (‘in heaven’), can soul communities attain reality in the social world (‘on earth’) as social communities. The sole means by which this can happen is through a relational revolution which shows each individual how to sense and realise their inner soul relationships with others through bodily relational practices – practices which break down the illusory bodily boundaries of personal identity itself.
We know that in reality all social groups, organisations and communities flounder or fragment through breakdowns in the interpersonal relationships among their members – the basic dyadic units of relation on which they are built. We know too, that the basic reason why individuals join or leave political and religious groups, organisations and communities has to do with the degree of inner soul connection they feel with them and the degree of relational fulfilment that they do or do not find within them.
This in turn has to do not only with the practical relations that govern those groups, organisations and communities but rather with the relational practices that do or do not flourish within them – practices necessary in order to not only nourish the interpersonal relations that are their very life, but to transform those relations into intimate soul relationships. It is through such relational practices that individuals can change their world, the world of others, and the social world as we know it. How? By overthrowing the foundations of capitalist social relations in their own souls. To do so means ceasing to experience their own personal identity as private property, recognising instead that their true spiritual individuality – their whole self or soul - is itself an inner society of selves. None of these selves is the private property of the ego. Rather each of them is a bridge of identity linking them with others in soul families, groups and communities.
Soul-sensing is a bodily relational practice that brings with it a bodily experience of soul-communion. Only through such bodily relational practices will it be possible to truly re-ensoul our social world – to form social groups and communities ‘on earth’ which know themselves as soul groups and communities, not just as aggregates of atomised and otherwise isolated individuals.
The essential reality of the human being is a complex of relationships. How they experience their reality is determined by the inner bearing they adopt to and within those relationships – their way of being in the ‘world’ that these relationships constitute. Any break in the normal pattern of relating, dominated as it is by everyday practical relations, brings about a break with normal consensual reality - but by no means with reality as such. For the ‘normal’ person their practical relations and purposes are all that constitute their world they take as real - however superficial or unreal the relationships that make up that world. Soul-science is a break with the entire non-relational concept of reality that underlies the world of normality, and the ‘normal’ modes of relating that maintain and reinforce it. Other realities – different planes and spheres of the soul words - do exist than the consensual reality reinforced by human social relations.
Soul-science is also a doorway into those realities, but one we can only open and enter through a revolutionary transformation of our own relation to the sensory world around us. That relation must cease to be one in which thinking turns all sensory phenomena of that world into intellectual abstractions. Instead it must become a relation in which we think with our bodies themselves, using them to sense the aware inwardness or ‘soul’ of all natural bodies – not least the human body itself, which is both a sense organ of the soul, and as Wittgenstein recognized, a sensory image of the soul – its “best picture”.
If the practice of medicine were understood as a relational practice, the physician would indeed take time to listen to the patient. If it were understood as a bodily relational practice, the physician would not simply rest content with observing or examining the body of the patient from the outside – they would listen not just with their medical mind but with their whole body - using it to sense the patient’s own inwardly felt body and inwardly felt dis-ease. The world of medicine and the physician-patient relation is but one example of the way in which what we call ‘the world’ is shaped by practical relations which leave no room for relational practices.
Just as the physician-patient relationship is approached only with the practical purpose of producing a diagnosis and recommending a treatment plan, so can the teacher-student relationship be dominated entirely by the project of setting and completing assignments and passing exams. Study itself ceases to be experienced as an activity by which the student deepens their inner relationship to a subject matter, but is reduced instead to the purely practical project of exam preparation or the production of passable essays.
We live in a world of practices – scientific and technical practices, professional and vocational practices, commercial and economic practices, medical and therapeutic practices, spiritual and meditational practices, political and religious practices. All these practices are also relational practices, yet how many understand themselves as such? Anyone can transform their ordinary practical relations with other human beings and with the entire sensory world into aware and bodily relational practices. In this way they ‘change the world’ in a revolutionary manner, subverting a consensual reality or world in which practical relations have hitherto squeezed the life out of human relations, and breathing fresh life into those relations through their relational practices.
5 November 2017
Remember Remember, the Heroic Revolutionary, Guy Fawkes
Bonfire Night / Guy Fawkes night is a ritual in the UK to commemorate the attempt in 1605 by Guy Fawkes to bomb the Houses of Parliament and destroy the parasites within - the Royals, Lords, Clergy and MPs. The State created the tradition as means of enforcing its rule upon the people; making the ordinary people of the country celebrate the capture of a band of Revolutionaries who would have liberated the country from the tyrants in charge, had it not been for their own excessive concern for innocents who would have been caught up in the carnage.
The Russian leader, VI Lenin, is associated with the traditional phrase that 'you cannot make an omelette without breaking eggs'. Sadly, Guy Fawkes and his Comrades, suffered from a typical English affliction, of compassion for our enemies, which led them to warn people in Parliament of the plan to burn that den of liars to the ground, with the Ruling Class rats sat inside. It is this reluctance to accept collateral damage as a price of uprising, which has kept our people in servitude.
There is even a degree of false class consciousness in the tragedy of the 5th of November: The Revolutionaries were under the illusion that there were decent people in Parliament who were worthy of saving, and who were kindred spirits who could help rebuild England after the despots had been put down. This error led to the capture of the Revolutionaries, as those they put trust in, used the tip offs about the 'plot' to have them captured and murdered. Even if a few decent people had been in Parliament, it would have been far better to have let them perish with the rest, than to prioritise saving them and thus putting the entire plan in jeopardy - which as we know from history, is what happened.
What would have happened if the great Yorkshireman and his Comrades had succeeded in ridding the world of the Ruling Class of King James? The King was the Monarch of England and Ireland (James I) as well as Scotland (James VI), so his demise may have halted the rush to the unification of those countries. Even if the process had continued, the obliteration of the Church of England would have removed the religious excuses for the injustices in Ireland under English rule, leaving the Ruling Class exposed as tyrants with no mumbo jumbo to hide behind. For those who ask whether there would there have still been injustices if the whole of the British Isles had been restored to Catholicism, the answer is of course yes. As long as a Ruling Class exists which rules over the Proletariat, there will always be tyranny.
The greatest benefit of the destruction of Westminster would have been to weaken the Protestants, and by so doing to slow the process of Capitalism. For all its ills (which are many), the Catholic variant of Christianity in its traditional form, was in many ways Socialist, with great emphasis on Charity and the need for the Poor and Needy to be looked after. Protestantism has always been associated with Greed, and for this reason is the backbone of Capitalism. A Catholic England as a part of a Catholic British Isles, would have been more in tune with nature. The loathsome Industrial Revolution and British Empire were products of Protestantism.
It is unlikely that the evils of the British Ruling Class would have ended with a victorious Revolution against King James and his Church of England criminals. What would have been achieved is the unity of the British peoples on both sides of the Irish Sea. With no religious division to keep us at each others throats, our people would have been able to see the class enemy. Who knows? Maybe without the distraction of 'religion', we would have risen up and thrown off our oppressors, and our country would have become a shining example of Freedom, rather than a dire and depressing source of exploitation and servitude.
Guy Fawkes lived in a time when the people who ruled the country could have been eliminated with the bombing of Parliament. Sadly that rotting institution is now nothing but a window display, with the real power residing in the City of London (an enemy country located inside our capital). SWPE celebrates Guy Fawkes, but only as a figure involved in a historical event. We do not advocate anyone trying to replicate his work! Destroying Parliament made sense in 1605, whereas now it would make no difference to the Ruling Class who control it from behind the scenes. It would be amusing to see the hypocrites blown to smithereens, but it would achieve nothing other than to justify even more draconian rule over us.
An England freed from Protestantism would be an England freed from Greed and Self as the motivating force. The post-Fawkes England we know is one in which liberal excess is everywhere, in which Trotskyite/liberal/SJW Identity Politics is rampant, in which the most insane selfishness is not only tolerated but encouraged (with those who refuse to bow down to the ethos that everything is subjective and that all behaviour is equally acceptable, punished by the thought police and the courts of decadence). Fawkes was motivated by a hatred of the religion/philosophy which gave birth to Capitalism, liberalism, Trotskyism, Identity Politics. His ideology was more Society-centred, and once cleansed of the trappings of priestcraft, would have fitted very well as a foundation for a coming Socialist Republic. It is a tragedy that he failed, and we salute his efforts, and those of his Comrades.
On this unseasonably warm 5th of November, we Remember the heroes of the Gunpowder Plot: Revolutionaries who could have made England a better place, had they only had the sense to keep their plans secret, and had been ready to sacrifice the few good men in Parliament (if any existed) in order to save the country as a whole.
1 November 2017
THE FICTIONS THAT KEEP US IN CHAINS (Wilberg on Wednesday)
1. ‘MONEY’ AS A FICTION. ALL MONEY IS DEBT.
All Bank of England notes have printed on them “I promise to pay the bearer on demand the sum of …”. With or without words like these, all bank notes in all capitalist currencies are ‘promissory notes’ or IOU’s (from the English ‘I Owe You’). A promissory note is essentially a promise. To pay what? To pay a debt. In other words all money is created as debt - borrowed into existence - and all monetary transactions are exchanges of debt. Yet since all debt carries interest the total of all debt cannot possibly be paid by all the money in circulation.
2. ‘NATIONAL DEBTS’ AS A FICTION. GOVERNMENTS COULD ISSUE MONEY DIRECTLY.
National Debts would not exist did not governments rely on taxation and on loans from private banks and financial markets to finance their expenditure, but instead affirmed their own sovereign right to issue their own interest-free money and inject it directly into the real economy. Forfeiting this sovereign right means that the entire money supply of nations exists in the form of debt to the private banking sector. Were all that debt to be repaid, there would be no ‘money’ in circulation in the economy at all, since - as explained above - money itself does not exist except as debt.
The Government should create, issue, and circulate all the currency and credits needed to satisfy the spending power of the Government and the buying power of consumers. By the adoption of these principles, the taxpayers will be saved immense sums of interest. Money will cease to be master and become the servant of humanity. – Abraham Lincoln
Greece and countless nations all over the world could solve their national debt problems at a stroke by following Lincoln’s advice. Yet no mention is ever made of this solution in ‘democratic’ parliaments or media, so dangerous is it to the international bankers. Outraged at the very idea of money not being created as debt to them with interest on it, they used all the power they could muster to bring an end to Lincoln’s vision and instead turned America into a United States Corporation ruled by banking creditors. The biggest ‘coup’ of these creditor was the establishment in 1913 of the so-called ‘Federal Reserve Bank’ - itself nothing but a cartel of the biggest private banks which made U.S. governments dependent on borrowing from those banks for every Dollar issued. When President J.F. Kennedy was just on the verge of revoking the powers of the Federal Reserve he was assassinated.
History records that the money changers have used every form of abuse, intrigue, deceit, and violent means possible to maintain their control over governments by controlling the money and its issuance. – James Madison
It is well enough that the people of this nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning. – Henry Ford
3. BANK ‘LOANS’ AS A FICTION. IN FACT THEY ARE FRAUDULENT AND UNLAWFUL.
Money is created as debt by private banks. But it is created in a way that breaks all the principles of Contract Law. A simple application for a loan is actually a ‘cheque’ for a certain amount of money granted to a bank by the borrower. Why? Because the signature on it allows the bank to create a fictional electronic ‘deposit’ of that sum of money in the borrower’s account - just by keying in the numbers on a computer. Yet besides being purely electronic money this money is fictitious also because it did not exist until the borrower applied for the loan. Putting your signature to a loan application without being told this, without full disclosure of the fact you yourself have signed the money you are borrowing into existence - is a breach of ‘Full Disclosure’ – one of the basic principles of Contract Law. It is also a breach of the principle of ‘Equal Consideration’ – since the banks themselves are offering no ‘consideration’ of their own – nothing of intrinsic value - to the loan contract (for example gold or capital reserves). Finally, since all credits issued by banks are signed into existence by the borrower, and since these loans or credits count as assets on the bank’s account (understandable – since just as ‘money is debt’ so also ‘debt is money’) the borrower has been defrauded by a four-step ‘scam’.
1. The borrower effectively gives an amount of money to a bank by applying to borrow it – effectively signing that money into existence.
2. The bank then demands that the borrower give the bank the same amount of money once again as ‘repayment’.
3. The bank asks for even more money from the borrower in the form of interest on the loan.
4. The bank makes huge amounts money by selling its loans to other banks and the financial markets. In fact people have a right to claim back this money made from loans to them.
Basically however, no one has any legal or ethical responsibility to pay back a bank loan - since the loan is a fraudulent contract. It is fraudulent not only for the reasons given above but also because in reality THERE IS NO CONTRACT. A joint contract requires the signature of two parties. But where is the signature from the bank that would make the loan a mutual ‘contract’? The bank can’t sign such a contract because it only exists as a fictitious legal ‘person’ – a corporation, and not a real person who can be held responsible for their side of the contract. It might be argued that a bank loan is a legal form of unilateral contract established by one party (the borrower) accepting a contractual offer from the other (the lender). This is highly questionable however given that the loan ‘offer’ is not for money that actually exists as ‘Consideration’ before the lender accepts that offer. All that is ‘offered’ then is a so-called ‘financial service’ but one lacking in the Full Disclosure necessary to regard it as a lawful contract. Finally, even the idea of payable ‘interest’ on a loan is essentially a fiction. Thus if an economy consisted of ten friends of yours to whom you loaned £100.00 each with 5% interest there would be a total of £1000.00 in circulation – not enough for all your friends to pay this back plus the interest. In other words, there is not – in principle – any possibility of paying of the Interest on the ‘sum of all ‘Principal’ loan amounts.
‘THE LAW’ AS A FICTION. MOST LAWS ARE UNLAWFUL.
Nobody is bound to follow the ‘legal’ statutes or ‘laws’ of any state. The only true ‘law’ is not Statutory Law but simple Common Law, otherwise known as ‘The Law-of-the-Land’. Common Law is simply ‘common sense’ law – meaning that you are free to do what you want unless it infringes on the life, liberty, property, freedom of movement or rights of another person. Common Law does not grant states and governments any lawful right to demand that you pay them any form of taxes, license fees, that you must have a license to drive or a passport to travel, that you must ‘register’ a business, car or property, birth or marriage etc.etc. In fact most Statutory laws are an unlawful infringement on your lawful rights under Common Law. Where they do so THE LAW IS UNLAWFUL. Indeed most Statutory ‘laws’, created in the form of so-called ‘legal’ statutes are infringements of LAWFUL rights under Common Law. Since they developed out of Common Law however, they stand UNDER Common Law and are not above it. If a judge asks you if you ‘understand’ however, he or she is asking you to place your Common Law rights in a position that stands under Statutory Law – and therefore to forego those Common Law rights. In order for the world’s first capitalist state – Britain - to make Statutory Law higher than Common Law – a language was based on’ The Law-of-Waters’ or ‘maritime’ law rather than The Law-of-the-LAND. That is why a bank is called a ‘bank’ – which means one side of a river or ‘waterway’. That why in English one speaks of monetary ‘currencies’ – a word deriving from ‘currents’ of water. It is also why in England someone accused in court of an offence under Statutory Law has to stand in an area still called ‘the dock’ - the place in a harbour where ships ‘dock’. That is also why so many English words still end with the very word ‘ship’ – for example ‘ownership’, ‘citizenship’, ‘worship’, ‘your Worship’ (‘Warship’), ‘Lordship’, ‘Ladyship’ etc. The Law-of-Waters is also the basis of all words ending in ‘port’ – for example ‘transport’, ‘passport’, ‘export’, ‘import’. Such words are all to do with commercial maritime trade and law, stemming from a time when it was still true that ‘Britannia rules the waves’ and Britain was the greatest maritime trading empire.
4. ‘SOCIETY’ AS A FICTION. WHAT EXISTS ARE ‘SOCIETIES’ OR ‘CORPORATIONS’.
There is another important reason why nobody is bound to follow the Statutes of any ‘state’, ‘nation’ or ‘parliament’. That is because they are all societies. Societies create statutes which are rules or ‘laws’ to be followed by members of that society. But societies need to be voluntarily joined. If you have NOT joined a particular society – or have resigned from that society – then you are no longer a member of that society – and no longer need to follow its rules or statutes. HER MAJESTY QUEEN ELIZABETH II is a corporation. What is called ‘the United Kingdom’ is not a country or nation. It is a corporate society or ‘corporation’. Its true name is THE UNITED KINGDOM CORPORATION – a commercial society in the form of a Limited Company with a listed set of directors. ‘MEMBERS of PARLIAMENT’ is also the registered name of a corporation. The Treasury, the Police Force – you name it – these institutions of the ‘nation’ or ‘state’ are not what their name suggests, simply national or state institutions. They are societies in the form of registered corporations. Yet again, none of the ‘laws’ created by a corporate society applies to you unless you have joined it – and will no longer apply to you if you have resigned your membership.
“The law can give rise to a FICTION, but a fiction cannot give rise to a law. Consequently a legal fiction called THE GOVERNMENT has no power to make LAW. It is, in point of fact, BOUND BY [COMMON] LAW - like everyone else, and including all other legal fictions. PARLIAMENT is another legal fiction entity. Statutes created by Parliament are not, therefore, the LAW. They are 'legislated rules for a society' and ONLY APPLICABLE TO MEMBERS OF THAT SOCIETY. Join a different society, and you would be bound by a different set of rules. (If this were not the case it would be impossible to become, for example, a Freemason and be bound by the rules of Freemasonry). Statutes are nothing more than the ‘Company Policy’ of THE UNITED KINGDOM CORPORATION, or THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA CORPORATION, etc. … A Society is, in essence, nothing more than a grouping of like-minded souls since it is defined as a number of people joined by mutual consent to deliberate, determine and act for a common goal. A society makes its own rules, and its members are duty-bound to follow them. Different societies can exist, having their own unique set of rules. One way of 'choking' the action of a court de facto is to claim membership of a society that only exists in Common Law jurisdiction.” Mary Elizabeth Croft
REGISTERED ‘NAMES’ AS A FICTION. THEY REPRESENT A FICTITIOUS LEGAL ‘PERSONS’.
Unfortunately for most of us however, our parents applied to join our national corporations by registering our birth. Registering a birth in the U.K. turns the NAME - as it is spelled partly or wholly in CAPITAL LETTERS - into a fictitious legal entity or ‘person’, and making this ‘person’ a member of THE UNITED KINGDOM CORPORATION. Registration transfers ownership of something. A Birth Certificate treats the baby as the cargo of a ship that has just ‘berthed’ – ownership of which is thereby transferred to THE UNITED KINGDOM CORPORATION. That is why if you go into a Courtroom, even as a mature adult, you are known as a ‘Ward of Court’ – a ‘ward’ meaning a helpless or imbecilic child that has to be represented (literally ‘re-presented’ in Court) by a legal ‘warden’ in the form of a solicitor, barrister or ‘attorney’. Since these are all members of The Law Society the only laws they need to respect are not Common or ‘common sense’ law but the laws of that society. Thankfully, when one of your parents signed your Birth Certificate they weren’t told this truth – another breach of the principle of Full Disclosure that is part of Contract Law. But be aware that when you receive any official document in which your name is CAPITALISED and begins with MR or MS it is not you as a real person that is being addressed, but the fictive legal ‘person’ created and represented by that NAME.
“Registration” comes from Latin “rex, regis” etc. meaning regal. So think about what occurs to whatever you ‘register’ – you hand legal title over to the Crown. When you register anything with the public, it releases legal title to the government corporation and leaves you with only equitable title – the right to use, not own, and for that use you will pay a ‘use’ tax which is every tax, be it income, sin, sales, property, etc. as opposed to lawful taxes – excise and impost. So that it doesn’t appear that the government now owns the property which you have registered they put it in a name which so much resembles your own that you won’t suspect it, however, the NAME is owned by the government. If you choose rather to record your legal title to your property with the public, you maintain your status as Title Owner. This is one of the most important things you can ever learn for the sake of your commercial affairs. The best example of the effects of registration is the birth certificate. A bankrupt entity – city, state/province, country – cannot operate in commerce. So how do they manage? Since USA/CA have been bankrupt for decades, having no substance such as gold and silver to back it, the only asset it has are men and women and our labour. We are the collateral for the interest on the loan of the World Bank. Each of us is registered, via the application for a birth certificate. The Treasury issues a bond on the birth certificate and the bond is sold at a securities exchange and bought by the FRB/BoC, which then uses it as collateral to issue bank notes. The bond is held in trust for the Feds at the Depository Trust Corporation. We are the surety on said bonds .. The USG/CAG, in order to provide necessary goods and services, created a commercial bond (promissory note), by pledging the property, labour, life and body of its citizens, as payment for the debt (bankruptcy). This commercial bond made chattel (property) out of us all. We became nothing more than ‘human resources’ and collateral for the debt. This was without our knowledge and/or our consent, via the filing (‘registration’) of our birth certificates.” Mary Elizabeth Croft
The process of appropriating the common wealth of the people began in England during the Fire of London, when an Act of Parliament (still in force) was passed declaring all the people dead and transferring their property to the Crown – unless they showed up in the flesh and claimed this property back. Thus it came to be that capital letters are used on birth certificates – as they are on gravestones – thus effectively turning the registration of a birth into a certificate of legal ‘death’ which makes the child into property of the Crown (regis)
5. LEGAL ‘ORDERS’ AS A FICTION. NO ONE CAN ORDER YOU TO DO ANYTHING!
Statutory Law is based on Commerce and Commercial Law (now called the UCC or Uniform Commercial Code). This is important, because it means that when any state bureaucrat ‘orders’ you to do something what they are really doing is presenting you with a commercial order for a service or item. There is no difference in Law between ‘ordering’ someone to show a license and ‘ordering’ an item from a menu or sales catalogue. Like a seller therefore, you yourself can therefore decline to accept the order or else place a charge on any Court or policeman for the order they give you. You can also argue that all Statutory laws under which they assume they can arrest and order you to do something require your assent to be valid, and ask for proof of this assent. Last but not least, you can ask a policeman to recall their oath – which is an oath to uphold Common Law. Therefore if they or anyone else such as a bailiff take any property of yours without your permission, use any form of force on your body or infringe your liberty in any way (for example by seizing you bodily, restricting your freedom of movement or holding you in custody) they are themselves in breach of the very Law they have sworn on oath to uphold – The Law-of-the-Land. Any seizure of property, imprisonment or enforced compensation can only be enforced through a breach of this law - Common Law – a breach which must first be established by any real person with a Common Law grievance against you taking evidence that is more than hearsay or suspicion to a Common Law jury. A Corporation of any sort, being a fictional legal entity or ‘person’ rather than a real flesh and blood person, cannot however make any claims or pursue any ‘orders’ against you under Common Law, just as it cannot enter into lawful contracts with you - which require the signature of real persons as joint parties to the contract.
6. ‘EMPLOYMENT’ AS A FICTION. EMPLOYMENT IS WAGE-SLAVERY
“A society in which people exist for the sake of companies is a society enslaved.”
“The hurdy gurdy grinder's monkey exists for the sake of the organ grinder… Workers are [there] to fulfill companies' needs rather than vice versa.”
John Kozy
Why is employment a fiction? First of all, the very word ‘employment’ is a misnomer. Billions of workers, all over the globe are paid to do work which does not ‘employ’ their unique individual capacities or creative potentials as human beings. Secondly, ‘employment’ is not the same as work – understood as free, creative and productive activity. It is the extraction of corporate profit from workers - workers who are forced to sell their labour time and labour to corporations (perhaps prostitute would be a better word) simply because they do not themselves own the land, building, technical and industrial equipment and other forms of ‘capital’ that make up the ‘means of production’ – for that is the property of the few, the capitalist class – obtained by exploiting other workers. Besides not owning the means of production however, the employed worker does not even own the products of their very own labour - physical or intellectual - which automatically become the property of their employers - the capitalist class. Then again workers must actually pay to become indentured slaves to those corporations – not just through taxes, but even through having to directly pay back the cost of their education or training (not to mention having to allow corporations or pension funds to speculate with their contributions on the financial markets). “Students are being asked to pay for the privilege of becoming serfs.” John Kozy. Finally, since a large proportion of jobs are now temporary or part-time, employment no longer means having a guaranteed or ‘safe’ income, or even one that pays a living wage – and given the fact that even the best and most experienced or capable workers can at any time lose their jobs if their companies cannot meet their debts - we already live in a ‘post-employment’ economy, one in which individuals must compete with hundreds or even thousands of others just to become exploitable and expendable serfs. The absurd irony of so-called ‘employment’ in capitalist economies was sarcastically laid bare by Eimar O’Duffy in his book Asses in Clover:
“Suppose a party of people were wrecked on a desert island, what do you think would be the first thing they’d do? Obviously they would look around for a man with money to employ them in gathering fruit. If there were no capitalist among them, or if he didn’t see his way to make a profit out of the business, they would all remain unemployed and starve to death, no matter how fertile the island might be … If therefore we want to have plenty of employment, we must give every possible incentive to entrepreneurs – encouraging them to get as much of our money from us as they can, so that they can spend it on employing us to make more for them.”
What is all this employment really needed for? To sustain what is called economic ‘growth’ – a necessity for ever-increasing interest on corporate and national debt to be paid off – ‘growth’ attained at the expense of diminishing natural resources and their capacity for re-growing themselves.
7. ‘DEMOCRACY’ AS A FICTION. THERE IS ONLY ‘DEBTOCRACY’.
The Wikipedia entry for ‘democracy’ states correctly that the word ‘democracy’ “comes from the Greek word δημοκρατία (dēmokratía) ‘rule of the people’, which was coined from δῆμος (dēmos) "people" and κράτος (kratos) "power", in the middle of the 5th-4th century BC to denote the political systems then existing in some Greek city-states, notably Athens.” What is often forgotten however is that the only ‘citizens’ eligible to speak and vote in the assembly, which set the laws of the city state “were all-male, born from parents who were born in Athens, and excluded women, slaves, foreigners (μέτοικοι /metoikoi) and males under 20 years old.” As a result, of the estimated 200,000 to 400,000 inhabitants of Athens there were only between 30,000 to 60,000 ‘citizens’. So even though Greek ‘democracy’ did indeed offer a model for modern liberal parliamentary ‘democracy’, it did so also in a highly questionable way – being, like Roman ‘democracy’, a form of purely political democracy based on economic slavery and ultimately influenced most by those with wealth. We see the ‘great’ heritage of ‘democracy’ still today – in which, no matter how many more people are counted as ‘citizens’, ‘democracies’ are still countries ruled by the few and by the wealthiest.
So whilst the root meaning of the Greek word ‘democracy’ is indeed ‘people power’, what sort of ‘democracy’ is it in which millions of dollars of campaign funding from bankers and big corporations are required simply to seek to stand for election as a U.S. President, State Governor or even as Mayor? It is electoral ‘Democracy’ for the ‘elect’ few – as in Athens and Rome. Similarly what sort of ‘democracy’ is it in which the organisations that wield most power on governments and that also effect most people’s lives most immediately and directly – namely the corporations that employ them – are entirely undemocratic if not totally autocratic in nature? Only a tiny number of corporate board members have the power to elect a CEO or managing director. Today’s wage-slaves – workers and middle management – certainly have no say and no vote whatsoever. Modern political democracy is therefore true to its roots - being based on a total lack of economic democracy. Along with this lack of economic democracy goes almost total corporate control of all sources of information in the form of press and broadcast media. Thus even to speak of a ‘free press’ or ‘neutral’ TV channels in today’s ‘liberal democracies’ is nothing but a bad joke. ‘Freedom’ means not offending your corporate owner, advertisers or sponsors. ‘Neutrality’ means reducing political reporting and debate to the most superficial and banal level possible – and shaped by a constant flow of disinformation pumped out by the media. What counts as reporting, news and debate is determined as much by what is not reported, does not make the news - and is not questioned or debated - as by what is. And if what could be but is not reported as ‘news’ or supplied as information vastly exceeds what is reported – thus potentially offering a no less vast choice of news items to air or print - why is it that almost all news channels and newspapers nevertheless offer the same if not near identical fare of lead ‘stories’?
Power over media, political parties and ‘elected’ politicians alike by wholly undemocratic corporations and their lobbyists make ‘democracy’ a total fiction. When for example, was the last time the people were ever given the right to vote whether or not to go to war for example – and that without being ‘primed’ to vote ‘yes’ by corporate, political and military disinformation? And in what ‘democratic’ country can employees elect, select, hire or fire those who (mis-)manage the enterprises and corporations that employ them – let alone or exert a majority vote over boardroom decisions that may ruin their lives? For political democracy to be possible at all it must be based on economic democracy and on direct democracy – not on voting for political ‘representatives’ whose principal loyalty is not to the people who voted for them but to their corporate backers, to monarchs or to the fictions of ‘democratic’ constitutions and ‘representative’ parliaments or assemblies – all of which are in turn ultimately ruled by powerful groups of creditors, ‘the 1%’ who hold the purse strings. Democracy is ‘Debtocracy’.
8. ‘EDUCATION’ AS A FICTION. THE MANUFACTURE OF IGNORANCE.
“The integrated core [of education] concerns itself with the universal experiences that are
common to all people, with those shared activities without which human relationships are diminished and the quality of life reduced.” – Ernest L. Boyer
‘Education’ today, whether in the form of public or private schools, colleges and universities, has gradually become nothing more than a set of graded institutions competing in a national and international marketplace to ‘produce’ the best corporate servants - whether in the form of low, middle or upper level wage-slaves or an elite class of politicians. At the same time they provide a necessary day-time depository or parking place for the children of working families i.e. existing wage-slaves and corporate servants. In this process the distinction between teaching what the Greeks called techne (technical skills) and episteme (knowledge) has dissolved. The result is what Ivan Illich called institutional counter-productivity – with many schools no longer able to guarantee even the most elementary skills (spelling or mental arithmetic for example) necessary for ‘further education’ and eventual ‘employment’ as a corporate servant. For such necessary skills include not only accurate literacy and numeracy (something which not even many teachers possess) but also the capacity for independent questioning, critical thinking and articulate communication in speech and writing.
The situation has reached such a point of absurdity that one single technical skill supersedes all other forms of knowledge and learning – the skill of answering anticipated examination questions without needing to possess any true understanding of either the question or the answer. Thus in the realm of English literature, students are mechanically prepared to answer anticipated questions on one single scene of one single play of Shakespeare – yet without any requirement to have either fully read that play – yet alone deeply understood its meaning in a feeling way. The result is that in America more than two thirds of the human products of the educational production line can only read prose writing (even in the form of a newspaper article) at a low or sub-average level. And just as 50% of Americans live below the poverty line, so have 50% of the population never read a single book. Indeed in American colleges, students can obtain ‘credits’ for their degrees from a vast menu of courses on such subjects as ‘The History of American Football’ - yet without knowing anything of the history of their own country, let alone that of the world and other cultures.
“In philosophy, a single naïve question oftentimes suffices for the whole system to collapse.”
Nicolas Gomez-Davila
Science teaching – now promoted more than ever before - has become a form of pure indoctrination which by-passes all critical thinking through a vast web of circular definitions which rule out what appear as ‘naïve’ and yet basic philosophical questions. Thus ‘electricity’ is defined in terms of its relation to ‘magnetism’ and ‘energy’ in terms of its relation to ‘matter’ – and vice versa. No one even thinks of asking questions such as ‘What is ‘matter’ or ‘energy’?’ or ‘What is an ‘electron’ or ‘photon’? – for the answers to such basic questions are all already foreclosed by circular definition, i.e. by defining such unquestioned scientific terms only in terms of other such terms and only within the framework of the unquestioned terminological jargons they constitute.
It used to be thought that students in ex-Communist countries such as Russia were ‘indoctrinated’ by their educational institutions. In fact it was only in these countries that all students (and not just those in elite schools) achieved a real education i.e. one including not only technical skills but broad areas of knowledge – including world history, philosophy and logic, not to mention foreign cultures and languages – all of which were compulsory ‘subjects’ and not mere ‘options’ for the marginal few.
Today, the ever-increasing competitive pressures arising from the drive towards the commercialisation and privatisation of education has resulted in ‘curricula’ which turn ‘education’ as such into a fiction – and its institutions into veritable factories of ignorance. For nothing that is taught needs any longer to have any innate interest or value to the student, any innate cultural or spiritual value, any relation to the actual life world and life experience of the student – let alone educate them in the history and nature of the larger world and culture they will enter as adults.
Education removes student from the real world around them in order indoctrinate them in the fictitious knowledge and fictitious values that rule that world – only in order to then re-insert them in that world as corporate slaves. It is indoctrination because it teaches no-one to think, question or ‘examine’. The Greeks understood that an ‘unexamined life’ is life not worth living. Today ‘education’ replaces the questioning examination of life with ‘exam’ questions and the fictitious certificates or qualifications of ‘learning’ obtained through them. Educational ‘credits’ are just that – loan certificates which trap their owners not just in monetary debt in the form of loans taken to attend universities or private schools - but also and more perversely trap them in a lifelong indebtedness to their own resulting lack of true, deep and broad ‘education’.
“In an age in which the media broadcast countless pieces of foolishness, the educated man is defined not by what he knows, but by what he doesn't know.” Nicolas Gomez-Davila
9. MEDICINE AS A FICTION. MEDICINE KILLS.
“People who are angered, sickened and impaired by their industrial labour and leisure can escape only into a life under medical supervision and are thereby seduced or disqualified from political struggle for a healthier world.”
“A professional and physician-based health-care system that has grown beyond critical bounds is sickening for three reasons: it must produce clinical damage that outweighs its potential benefits; it cannot but enhance even as it obscures the political conditions that render society unhealthy; and it tends to expropriate the power of the individual to heal himself and shape his or her environment.”
“Before sickness came to be perceived primarily as an organic or behavioral abnormality, he who got sick could still find in the eyes of the doctor a reflection of his own anguish and some recognition of the uniqueness of his suffering. Now, what he meets is the gaze of a biological accountant engaged in input/output calculations. His sickness is taken from him and turned into the raw material for an institutional enterprise ….”
- Ivan Illich
Medicine today is essentially money-driven, a huge source of profit for the pharmaceutical and hi-tech health industry - which rake in more profits than all the Fortune 500 corporations combined. What is conventionally regarded as ‘science-based’ or ‘evidence-based’ medicine is actually nothing of the sort - given the corners cut by Big Pharma in testing new drugs, in informing the public on their true and often minimal efficacy, in warning them of their side-effects and often serious dangers - not to mention the massive sums of money spent not on costly ’R&D’ but purely on marketing the latest drugs and treatments to doctors and surgeons.
The ‘science’ on which today’s medicine is based is one that completely separates the life of the human body and brain from the life of the individual as a whole – from current or recent life experiences, from their life history and from their larger social and economic life world. It researches the ‘causes’ and ‘cures’ of ‘illness’ as if they had absolutely no meaning in the larger context of this life world – not least the stresses of economic life and of living in what can only be regarded as a fundamentally sick and innately sickness-generating society. The fact that individuals may have good reasons for feeling deeply ill-at-ease in such a society is ignored – until and unless this felt dis-ease expresses itself in symptoms of some medically classified and diagnosable ‘disease’. Even then, however, the aim of medicine is to identify the cause of disease solely in biological terms – ignoring the fact that the root meaning of the term biology’ is the ‘speech’ (logos) of the ‘life’ (bios).
Yet instead of seeing the human body as a living language of the human being – and illness as a form of mute but meaningful bodily speech - or even protest – the body is reduced to a biological machine and illness to mere defects in a biological machine and its genetic components. ‘Health’ as such is effectively reduced by the institutions of state to the individual’s capacity for economic functioning and ‘employment’ in a system of wage-slavery – rather than the capacity for creative fulfilment of their own non-monetary values and potentials. Yet loss of income, housing or life opportunities of the sort that lead to disheartenment or loss of heart on the part of individuals count for nothing in medical science – until and unless this loss of heart manifests as diagnosable symptoms of ‘heart disease’. These are then, like all other forms of disease, cold-heartedly treated as if they had nothing to do with the patient’s actual life whatsoever. Last but not least, ‘scientific’ medicine fails - even in its own narrow terms. Thus there is hardly a drug on the market that does not carry the danger of worsening the very symptoms it was prescribed for. Nor can medical ‘science’ provide any evidence that expensive cancer research and treatments carried on over decades have in any way extended the life-expectancy of patients - whereas such treatments invariably damage their quality of life. In fact medical treatment itself has been long acknowledged by the medical profession as being one the top three causes of death – if not the leading cause, ahead of cancer and heart disease. That this fact is ignored is because Illness is Big Business - a profitable commodity produced by patients and exploited for profit whether they live or die.
At the heart of medicine and its ‘science’ then, are countless fundamental fictions - of which I will list only seven (1) that health is innately ‘good’ and ‘illness’ is innately bad (2) that health is merely the proper ‘functioning’ of the body rather than the capacity to lead a fulfilled life (3) that illness is an abnormality rather than a natural part of life - not least in a sick society (4) that ‘death’ itself must be fought to the end - being seen as the end of life (5) that medicine saves or prolongs life, whereas it often kills or reduces quality of life (6) that the human body is a gene-reproducing machine rather than the living speech (bio-logos) of the human being (7) that ‘illnesses’ have ‘causes’ but no life meaning - and are therefore to be ‘fought’ and ‘conquered’ through science and technology rather than understood as an expression of the patient’s life as whole.
“The idea of one basis for Science and another for Life is from the very outset a lie.”- Karl Marx
“That illnesses have meaning, can lead those affected to the meaning of their lives – this is the insight that natural-scientific medicine has fundamentally impeded.”
Viktor von Weizsäcker
10. ‘SCIENCE’ AS FICTION. A NEW RELIGION WITH ITS OWN ‘GODS’.
“One of the worst intellectual catastrophes is found in the appropriation of scientific concepts and vocabulary by mediocre intellects.”
“More irritating than someone's actual stupidity is their mouthing a scientific vocabulary.”
“Stupidity appropriates with a diabolical ease whatever science invents.”
“Replacing the concrete sensory perception of an object with its abstract intellectual construction gains the world for man, but loses his soul.”
Nicolas Gomez-Davila
What we call ‘science’ today is nothing but a new religion with its own pantheon of fictional entities such as ‘quanta’ of energy. It even searches for what it calls the ‘God particle’. What makes science nothing but pure fiction is the way it takes its own purely mental constructs and mathematical equations as more real than the very phenomena they are supposed to ‘explain’. Mental and mathematical fictions are used to explain actual facts. Science denies the simple truth that all the phenomena we actually experience as reality are not abstract mathematical quantities such as ‘frequencies’ or abstract mental constructs such as ‘quanta’ of energy. Instead they are sensuous qualities or ‘qualia’ such as our conscious experience of light and darkness, colour and sound, lightness and heaviness, hardness and softness etc. Science in other words, seeks and yet wholly fails to explain Common Sense – our immediate sensory experience of the world. Yet Common Sense tells us that common human experiences do not need ‘explanations’. We do not need scientists or scientific ‘knowledge’ to ‘prove’ what we directly experience and know as ‘love’, pleasure, pain, mental activity etc. Nor can they ‘explain’ any of our feelings or subjective experiences by showing through brain imaging how they appear to activate different parts of the brain.
The new religion of science has also created a new mythological creation story in which a so-called ‘Big Bang’ replaces the ‘Big Being’ known as God. This new myth is riddled with contradictions and yet preached as ‘God’s Truth’ by a new breed of ‘celebrity physicists’ sermonising with the aid of mesmerising images of the cosmic galaxies on TV ‘info-tainment’ documentaries. Is there not an obvious logical contradiction in claiming, as Big Bang preachers do, that time itself began at a specific and dateable point in time?! Yet perhaps the greatest fiction of science is the way it conceals a fundamental truth – namely that to ‘explain’ any phenomenon at all requires that we first of all be conscious of it. Even the very ideas and concepts that scientist come up with - along with all the measurements they take and the images they create with their hi-tech instruments - would not be possible without consciousness of those concepts, images, instruments and measurements. The problem is that it is impossible to explain consciousness as such by anything that already assumes a consciousness of it – including conscious observations of the structure and activity of the human brain.
Just as Judaeo-Christian religions sees consciousness merely as the private property of beings – including a supreme ‘God-being’ – so does science sees it as the mere property of insentient things or processes. The truth is however that consciousness cannot - in principle - be reduced to the product or property of any thing or being – even a supreme being. For again, whatever we use to explain consciousness already assumes a consciousness or awareness of it. Put simply, there is and can be nothing beyond, before or outside ‘consciousness’, just as there can be nothing ‘before’ time or ‘outside’ space. All individual things, beings and all bodies in space and time can be nothing but ‘souls’ i.e. individualised portions, expressions and embodiments of a universal consciousness. That universal, all-embracing consciousness can be called ‘the Divine’ or ‘God’. The notion of God that science rejects is a totally simplistic notion of some supreme being that has or possesses consciousness and creates the world like a potter creates a pot. In reality the only conceivable God is a God that does not ‘have’ but IS consciousness - not a consciousness that is yours or mine, the product of our brains or our private property as beings, but a consciousness that is universal and ‘divine’ – being the all-embracing and all-pervading source and essence of all things and all beings.
The truth is that consciousness is everything – all pervasive and all-embracing, and that everything in turn, whether an atom, molecule, rock, cell or body of any sort is a consciousness or ‘soul’ in its own right - being one sensuous shape and portion of that universal consciousness which IS ‘God’.
11. ‘DEATH’ AS A FICTION. CONSCIOUSNESS CANNOT ‘DIE’.
If, as Shakespeare suggested: ‘We are such stuff as dream are made on” i.e. consciousness - and if, in other words, consciousness is the very medium in which we dwell and of which we and all things are formed - then it follows that no matter in what ways a portion of consciousness - a ‘soul’ – may shift its shape or form or alter its patterns or qualities, and no matter in what way it may fragment into parts and/or mix and merge with other consciousnesses - it cannot ‘die’ in the sense of ceasing to be.
Instead the life of the individual as a soul - as a unique, ever-changing and living consciousness - survives eternally - just as it also remains forever both distinct and inseparable from that universal consciousness of which it is an individualised portion and from which it is formed. Each soul or consciousness therefore also remains united with every other soul or ‘living consciousness’ through the very medium of that universal consciousness from which they all arise. Each soul also continues to dwell and grow within the infinite dimensions of that universal consciousness - even if it ceases to manifest and dwell in its limited physical dimensions and limited physical and human form - or in a way that is physically manifest to those whose consciousness is still attached to that physical form.
The fiction of death is closely connected with the fiction of the body and the fiction of matter – the belief that bodies are made up of so-called ‘material’ atoms and molecules - rather than of patterns of atomic and molecular consciousness, of inorganic and organic consciousness, of mineral, vegetable and animal consciousness - and of not only human but also pre- and trans-human consciousness. Consciousnesses or ‘souls’ do not ‘have’ bodies and nor are they a by-product of them. Instead consciousness or souls are what body – whether they do so in human and physical form and or in trans-human and trans-physical forms and dimensions. We are indeed eternal spiritual beings (souls) on a temporary human journey or ‘sojourn’ - and not just human beings on a finite spiritual journey, one destined to end either in death or in some a fixed and final state of ‘enlightenment’. Death is a birth into infinite dimensions and infinite worlds of consciousness or ‘soul worlds’, from which the soul may or may not return and re-body itself in physical form - and in those physical planes of consciousness we perceive as ‘planets’.
12. YOU ARE NOT A FICTION. YOU ARE A FREE, LIVING AND ETERNAL SOUL.
This is the fundamental truth that all the fictions described and explained above are designed to stop you from recognising. Once we recognise that we live in a world entirely shaped by these fictions we can stop believing in them (which we are constantly indoctrinated to do) and instead come to recognise this truth. Then we will no longer have to submit to and worship the Gods of Money, Law, Science, Religion and many others – including fictional ‘Employment’, fictional ‘Costs’ and the fictional Media – the media which promote all these fictions. Instead freedom from these fictions will bring us knowledge of truth, and truth in turn will empower us to exercise our innate freedom as beings - as embodied souls or ‘consciousnesses’. There is freedom ‘from’ and freedom ‘to’. Freedom from fiction releases our freedom to do what as individual souls we are most inclined to do, have the best capacity to do and therefore derive the most fulfilment and satisfaction from doing. Instead of ‘working for a living’ our lives themselves can become creative works - giving expression to the unique qualities and capacities of the soul or consciousness that we each are. We will then free ourselves from perhaps the most insidious fiction of all. This is the fiction, already mentioned, that freely chosen and fulfilling human activity or ‘work’ is the same thing as ‘employment’. It is the fiction that if our time and power to do and create (our labour time and labour power) is not sold to a corporation and put to use in the way it orders us to then we are not ‘doing anything’ at all or are not ‘working’. In reality the very opposite is the case – most people ‘employed’ by corporations are essentially unemployed – since what they do is not the free employment of what they are best capable of doing - not an expression of their true potentials or power to. For as well as ‘power to’ there is also power ‘over’. ‘Employment’ is for the most part the exercise by corporations of power over our power to. Its purpose is not the free fulfilment of the individual’s innate potentials - their ‘power to’ - but simply profit for the corporations and banks. Such ‘employment’ – in reality nothing but ‘wage-slavery’ - is legally enforced through unlawful statutes by fraudulent ‘debt-slavery’ i.e. slavery to the need for ‘money’ to buy what we need.
We work for a living to pay for the ‘cost of living’. Even the houses or flats we are forced to buy or rent to live in have long since been paid for by the labour that first went into building them. And since when did life and living have a cost? Energy and life itself is a gift from the Sun and the Earth. Food is a gift of the land – which by nature is Common Land and not the property of emperors, monarchs, feudal lords or modern farming corporations. So since when did the raw materials of all we produce – the sun, the earth, the land and sea, human labour power – and even the very ideas that arose spontaneously in the mind of those inventors who revolutionised technologies of production – have a price on them? Do we have to ‘pay back’ the sun for energy, our bodies for being able to engage in activity - or pay back the creative power of consciousness for ideas? In reality all that we purchase with our money was granted to us free of charge. Its ‘cost’ only arises from the fact that freely granted energy and fuel, land natural resources, technologies and means of production became the ‘private property’ of a few. Why then, do we have to ‘pay’ those who have appropriated for themselves what is freely given to us all to make use of – as if we were still agricultural serfs obliged to pay their feudal ‘lords’ with a portion of our labour or harvest?
Today it is corporate debt and interest which constitute up to 50% of the price of all products. So why, apart from paying off this debt and interest to the banks, do any products need to be paid for at all - instead of just being distributed to others according to their needs?
A MANIFESTO OF SPIRITUAL COMMUNISM
Workers of the world unite. You have nothing to lose but the fictions that keep you in chains!
What is common to all the commonly held fictions we need to free ourselves from - and at the same time holds the very key to freeing ourselves from them can be called ‘The Common’ - for the word ‘common’ is also the root of the word ‘communism’. And yet as Marx himself pointed out:
“Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence.”
As individuals and nations find it ever more impossible to keep up with their growing debt, the global banking debtocracy, oligarchy and kleptocracy can only preserve its own fictional wealth by creating yet more money as debt, by increasing interest on it, or by hoarding it and withholding it from the economy. Yet for money as interest-bearing debt to be paid off – or to simply retain its value for the banksters - requires further exploitation and impoverishment of the people - which in turn reduces consumer demand for products and stalls the constant economic ‘growth’ on which capitalism depends – just in order to pay off the compounding interest to the banks on domestic, corporate and national debt. The only alternative is for new wars to be started - just to boost growth through demand for ever more costly and sophisticated hi-tech weaponry.
What Marx called “the premises now in existence” for a “real movement” - ‘Communisation’ - are the ever more extreme measures now being used to pay off fictional debts to the banks. These include job, wage, pension and benefit cuts of such severity, that (even in supposedly ‘developed’ European countries and American States) threaten not just the livelihoods of the people but their very ability to obtain by means of money what they need to live and survive - whether it be food and other provisions, energy supplies, housing or even that most basic life necessity – water. Thus it is that one million children in America are now homeless, and like countless families live off food handouts.
Ultimately then, it is not ‘Communism’ as an idealised and therefore fictional ‘state of affairs’ but only a “real movement” of ‘Communisation’ that can allow people to survive. Communisation is the re-assertion of ‘The Common’ - of common law against state laws and taxes, the re-assertion of Common Sense of the common human bonds and spiritual values that make up families and communities against soul-less corporate and political structures. Communisation also means the direct re-appropriation of all ‘common wealth’ - whether land, water, energy supplies, food supplies, housing and means of production – by and for the people. Since this cannot be done with debt-money it can only be done directly, through the creation of communal trusts which hold all property in common, and allow local, municipal, regional and national communities to issue their own interest-free money in the form of new ‘scrip’ currencies which by-pass the private banks . This debt and interest-free money would take the form of ‘tokens’ or ‘vouchers’ – material or electronic. These were once issued by English monarchs in the form of ‘tally sticks’ when they could no longer repay their debts to the bankers. So it is no surprise that the bankers symbolically buried these sticks under the building that houses the Bank of England. Communisation is a real process that has already begun by the common people in the heartland of capitalism – the U.K. Its aim is a community of free communities – each based on respect for both the divine rights and absolute sovereignty of all individuals who associate within them – in other words the total sovereignty of the people and not of monarchs, popes or modern states and parliaments. (see www.freetheplanet.net ).
The idea of the so-called ‘Freeman’ movement - namely that societies are ‘in essence, nothing more than a grouping of like-minded individual and sovereign souls…’ and that ‘revolution’ is about nothing more than reminding ourselves of this truth – is both ‘socialist’ and ‘revolutionary’ in a profoundly spiritual sense. For rather than fixating on the political it is simply about re-cognising and coming back to who we really are as individuals, recognising our innate freedom as souls, and creating a society built on ‘societies’ that are indeed nothing more than a ‘free association’ of ‘like-minded souls’. We are speaking of what I have previously termed ‘Socialism with Soul’ (see www.thenewsocialism.org ). What is important however, is that the possibility of understanding and realising ‘socialism’ in this new sense does not arise from an attempt to unite the realms of the spiritual and political - but rather from recognising, opening up and widening even further a decisive cleft between them – a space of true freedom from the fiction of ‘society’ that capitalism has created – a fictitious society that individuals continue to believe in, buy into and in this way also sustain and recreate – yet at the expense of their own spiritual, social, economic and political freedom as individual souls. This fictitious society is built not just on fictitious entities such as legal persons and corporations, not just on fictitious laws and on fictitious money, but also on fictitious freedoms, fictitious education, fictitious medicine, fictitious sciences, fictitious media, fictitious information and fictitious political debates and ‘democracies’. All these fictions in turn however, rest on fictitious languages, fictitious concepts and fictitious beliefs – beliefs however, that have become so deeply embedded in human consciousness that the most fundamental dimension of our nature as human beings – our spiritual essence as free and eternal individual souls - has almost completely fallen into oblivion. This spiritual ‘essence’ of the human being cannot be united with the fictitious society and fictitious ‘politics’ of today but must be ever more firmly distinguished and separated from it.
To simply oppose the fictive politics of today’s fictitious capitalist ‘society’ with a multitude of alternative social and political ‘-isms’ is to attempt to play capitalism at its own game. It not only gives more credibility to its fictions than they deserve. It also reinforces the utterly soul-less and inhumane social and global reality that has and continues to be built on those very fictions. This is a reality in which human beings can be compared to animals in a zoo - animals who have lost the freedom - or even forgotten what it was like - to live in an environment natural to them and in accord with their essential nature. Worse still, the monstrous suffering and distortions of human consciousness and behaviour that result from this zoo-like imprisonment and consequent loss of their essential nature have become taken as ‘normal’ – indeed are even seen ‘scientifically’ as defining ‘human nature’.
Bringing this fiction and all the fictions associated with it to an end is indeed a spiritual aim with a profoundly political dimension. Yet it is also an aim that cannot – in principle - be achieved by socialist political revolution and ideologies alone. No political ideology can anymore undermine ‘the fictitious society’ and its fictions. Only individuals who re-cognise themselves as essentially free and eternal souls - and relate together freely as such – can re-create what we call ‘society’. Only such individuals can replace the fictitious society of today with a new and true socialism - a ‘socialism with soul’. Such a socialism is no mere political ideology or ‘-ism’. For it can only arise from and within the soul itself – and through a fully embodied and fiction-free relation and association of ‘like-minded’ souls with one another. For what defines fictitious ‘corporate’ entities such as parliaments and legal ‘persons’ - like the pure abstraction that is money or ‘exchange value’ - is precisely its wholly disembodied nature. The fictitious society works by dissociating individuals from their own bodies – which are turned into mere instruments or objects. In doing so, it dissociates them also from their own intuitive bodily knowing and from their own embodied souls – replacing them with fictitious bodies of knowledge in which the soul no longer has any place or home. The universal homelessness which Heidegger constantly spoke of is a homelessness of the soul that knows no geo-political or national boundaries. Nor can it be overcome by seeking to once again house the soul in traditional communities or in the traditional architecture – physical and doctrinal - of churches, synagogues, mosques and temples. Instead the soul must learn to feel and find itself at home again in the human body and in learning to feel another human being as ‘some body’ – that is to say, as an embodied soul and not just a ‘talking head’ or labouring body.
Thus for Communisation to proceed, prostitution and slavery must be forbidden under Common Law. This does not mean only banning the sale of bodies for soul-less sex, but also banning wage-slavery and wage-prostitution - the sale of the individual’s soul in the form of their bodily and mental labour power and labour time, thus finally freeing individuals to choose the creative and productive activities they engage in, both alone and in common. Revolution through Communisation also requires leadership however – thought leadership based on a thought revolution.
THE THOUGHT REVOLUTION
A work such as this that seeks to expose lies and fictions is a ‘manifesto’ in the literal sense – seeking to ‘manifest’ or make evident the truth concealed by these fictions. Such a work also lays claim to ‘truth’ or ‘knowledge’. As a result however, it also immediately faces several problems. One problem is: who really wants to know? For it is not simply the case that there are those who know truth on the one hand, and those who don’t know on the other. There are also those who truly want to know – who ‘seek’ truth and knowledge – and those who simply don’t want to know. Yet as Jesus is quoted as saying in the Gospel of Thomas – ‘Seek and ye shall find. Find and ye shall be disturbed’.
Those who don’t want to know therefore prefer rather to stay in their ‘comfort zone’ and simply accept and adapt to fictions. In doing so however, they also let these fictions rule their lives. True knowledge on the other hand, though it may be disturbing, is also a source of empowerment – of true freedom.
Yet if people have adapted their lives to lies, recognising those lies challenges the way they have led their lives and the identity they have built around them.
“If you want to make someone angry, tell him a lie. If you want to make someone furious, tell him the truth.”
“All truth passes through three stages. First it is ridiculed, second it is violently opposed, and thirdly it is accepted as self-evident.”
Arthur Schopenhauer
“A truth’s initial commotion is directly proportional to how deeply the lie was believed. It wasn’t the world being round that agitated people but that the world wasn’t flat. When a well-packaged web of lies has been sold gradually to the masses over generations, the truth will seem utterly preposterous and its speaker a raving lunatic” – Dresden James.
“If the truth is that ugly – which it is – then we do have to be careful about the way we tell that truth. But to say somehow that telling the truth should be avoided because people may respond badly to the truth seems bizarre to me.” Chuck Skoro, Deacon, St. Paul’s Catholic Church
“In a time of deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.” – George Orwell
Simply thinking and telling the truth is a revolutionary act, because it cannot but bring about a revolution - not just in people’s thinking but in their lives. It is a ‘revolution’ because it literally turns over and upside down (‘revolving’) the fictions they have been taught and taken as truth hitherto.
A second problem however, is that of ‘arguing’ or ‘validating’ the claims to truth and knowledge of those who make it their task to expose what they say are lies and fictions. One obstacle in the face of this is peer pressure and the desire to conform – or at least to stray only within the confines of larger lies and deeper fictions. For in the face of this pressure “… the logic behind an argument doesn’t count as much as the power and popularity behind an opinion.” – Livergood
A third problem is language – words as such. Thus no sooner is a loaded word such as ‘communism’ used than people react to it according to whether they believe it to be something good or bad. Before they do this however, they do something even more important – they assume we all already ‘know’ what the word itself means or denotes.
In the case of the word ‘communism’ for example, they take it as given that the word refers to some old-fashioned ‘Marxist’ ideology. This is associated in turn with totalitarian states controlled by ruthless communist ‘parties’ – for example those parties which ruled the erstwhile ‘communist’ states in Russia and the USSR - and still rule states such as Cuba, North Korea and China. Yet does the fact that China is still ruled by a party that calls itself ‘Communist’ tell us anything about the meaning of the word ‘communism’ – not least given that the Chinese economy has essentially become a form of highly authoritarian state capitalism?
The question of how we understand words is not limited to loaded words such as ‘communism’ however. The question goes much deeper. What is at stake is the assumption that we already know what any words or terms we use mean i.e. the assumption that what they refer to or denote is some well-established and already known ‘thing’ or ‘things’.
This assumption has huge implications for the very way we understand such basic words as ‘truth’ and ‘knowledge’ themselves. For it is the basis of a second basic but unquestioned assumption. This is the assumption that knowledge and truth are a property of verbal ‘assertions’, ‘statements’ or ‘propositions’ about reality - for example the assertion that ‘God exists’ or that ‘God does not exist’. The assumption is that ‘truth’ is then simply a matter of deciding which of these assertions is ‘true’ – which of them does or does not ‘represent’ what we call ‘reality’, and which of them can therefore count as true representations or ‘knowledge’.
The reader may have noticed by now that I have begun to ‘bracket’ a lot of words I use in my assertions in inverted commas. There is a good reason for this. For assertions make use of individual words or terms whose meaning is most often unquestioned. Thus endless debates might take place around the question of whether or not ‘God exists’ - yet without any of the participants ever even thinking of questioning the way in which the very word ‘God’ is, has been or could be understood –instead simply assuming that the word refers to some singular and supreme being of some sort.
This typically Judaeo-Christian understanding of the word ‘God’ implies however that ‘God’ is one being among others which in turn would imply that the ‘God’ referred to is a finite entity, and one whose existence would not exclude the existence of other ‘gods’ – both of which are conclusions that would unsettle true ‘believers’ in the existence or ‘being’ of one single omnipotent and omnipresent ‘God’. I refer to this issue in the section of this work entitled ‘SCIENCE AS FICTION’. For scientists, too, whether atheist or not, use words whose meaning is simply taken as given – as referring to some ‘thing’ that has always existed – and that even if the word itself was first created as a concept by scientists themselves. The result is a situation in which most taken-for-granted scientific terms such as ‘energy’, ‘matter’, ‘time’, ‘space’, ‘light’, ‘electricity’, ‘magnetism’ etc. end up effectively being defined in terms of each other. So just as religious assertions about ‘God’ do not begin with the more fundamental question of all – “What is ‘God’?” – so do countless scientific assertions fail to the question the meaning of their most basic terms. No one asks what ‘light’ essentially is – whether an ‘objectively’ measurable and purely quantitative frequency of ‘electro-magnetic energy’ - or a sensuous and essentially qualitative dimension of subjective experience – one we even experience in our dreams.
The revolutionary nature of this work therefore lies first and foremost in the way it seeks to explain and demonstrate a revolution in the way we think and a revolutionary understanding of ‘thinking’ itself – a revolution first initiated by the 20th century philosopher Martin Heidegger. The revolution consists in no longer regarding ‘truth’ as something belonging to or represented in the form of assertions or beliefs, no longer using thought merely to question the truth of particular assertion or beliefs – but instead questioning the very words and terms used in formulating those assertions or beliefs. That is why I first of all bracket in inverted commas such words as ‘money’, ‘debt’, ‘democracy’, ‘science’, ‘education’, ‘employment’ etc. - in this way reminding us that the meaning and use of so many of the common words whose meaning we take for granted is something questionable in itself - and not just statements that make use of that word or beliefs about it. That is also why, although I offer ‘A Manifesto of Spiritual Communism’, I also apply this new method of thinking to each of the three main words used in this phrase – which also need ‘bracketing’ – not just in writing but in thought. For only in this way can we distinguish them from any ‘thing’ we might simply assume they refer too, and instead let the words speak for themselves through their root meanings:
- ‘Manifesto’ - something that is made evident or ‘manifest’, as opposed to being concealed, for example by cover-ups, lies, ignorance or fictions.
- ‘Spirit’ – from the Latin spirare – to breathe. This is also the root of the words inspiration, expiration, and transpiration - that which inspires us and also enables us to breathe and therefore live and communicate freely.
- ‘Communism’ – not an ideology but that which has to do with the ‘common’ or ‘communal’ – as in the terms commoner, common law, common sense, common land, and ‘commonwealth’ – the common ‘weal’, ‘will’ or wish of a ‘community’ as determined though the ‘communication’ of its individual members, and their mutual ‘company’, ‘companionship’ and ‘communion’ – and not by the fiction of parliamentary ‘democracy’ known in the U.K. as ‘The House of Commons’.
What might in general be called ‘The Common’ includes of course all commonly held beliefs - many of which are fictions. The Common’ therefore, also embraces all those commonly practiced modes of ‘communication’ in which all parties tacitly agree to unquestioningly assume what is meant by the very words used in that communication. It is this assumption, the assumption that we already ‘know’ what is meant by a commonly used word - or even a highly specialist ‘term’ – that is itself the biggest and most important fiction of all and the biggest obstacle to the pursuit of truth – leading instead to a parroting of assumed ‘knowledge’. Such fictitious knowledge can only be overcome through a new and revolutionary mode of ‘thinking’. This is a thinking which does not even assume that we already ‘know’ what ‘thinking’ itself is, that does not assume that we are all naturally endowed with the capacity to ‘think’ – and that above all does not assume either that commonly used words and language are a mere ‘tool’ enabling us to ‘express’ or ‘represent’ our thoughts or beliefs – and are therefore not themselves in need of any deeper questioning.
Martin Heidegger was the first thinker to recognise that in order to overcome all these assumptions and to engage in a new and revolutionary way of thinking means first and foremost establishing a more aware and questioning relationship to words and language as such – one which frees us from the fiction that ‘truth’ is a mere ‘property’ of verbal assertions or beliefs and the fictitious ‘knowledge’ arising from this fiction. For “there is a wordless knowledge within the word” (Seth) and there are also many things we ‘know’ to be real and true in more basic and deeper ways – through that wordless awareness, through direct sensuous experiencing and through inner bodily knowing or ‘gut feeling’ – all of which constitute the true foundations of ‘common sense’. Such inner knowing went under the name of the Greek word gnosis – referring as it did to a type of knowing based on an intimate inner relation to the known of the sort implied when we speak of ‘knowing someone’ intimately - through an intimate relation to them. This is also why new and deeper forms of knowing go together with new modes of relating to others and why all revolutions are essentially ‘relational revolutions’.‘Spiritual Communism’ then, is also the recognition that the true locus of revolutionary change lies neither in the individual nor in groups or communities, but, as Martin Buber recognised, in a third realm – that of the immediate relations of individuals to one another within any given community.
All Bank of England notes have printed on them “I promise to pay the bearer on demand the sum of …”. With or without words like these, all bank notes in all capitalist currencies are ‘promissory notes’ or IOU’s (from the English ‘I Owe You’). A promissory note is essentially a promise. To pay what? To pay a debt. In other words all money is created as debt - borrowed into existence - and all monetary transactions are exchanges of debt. Yet since all debt carries interest the total of all debt cannot possibly be paid by all the money in circulation.
2. ‘NATIONAL DEBTS’ AS A FICTION. GOVERNMENTS COULD ISSUE MONEY DIRECTLY.
National Debts would not exist did not governments rely on taxation and on loans from private banks and financial markets to finance their expenditure, but instead affirmed their own sovereign right to issue their own interest-free money and inject it directly into the real economy. Forfeiting this sovereign right means that the entire money supply of nations exists in the form of debt to the private banking sector. Were all that debt to be repaid, there would be no ‘money’ in circulation in the economy at all, since - as explained above - money itself does not exist except as debt.
The Government should create, issue, and circulate all the currency and credits needed to satisfy the spending power of the Government and the buying power of consumers. By the adoption of these principles, the taxpayers will be saved immense sums of interest. Money will cease to be master and become the servant of humanity. – Abraham Lincoln
Greece and countless nations all over the world could solve their national debt problems at a stroke by following Lincoln’s advice. Yet no mention is ever made of this solution in ‘democratic’ parliaments or media, so dangerous is it to the international bankers. Outraged at the very idea of money not being created as debt to them with interest on it, they used all the power they could muster to bring an end to Lincoln’s vision and instead turned America into a United States Corporation ruled by banking creditors. The biggest ‘coup’ of these creditor was the establishment in 1913 of the so-called ‘Federal Reserve Bank’ - itself nothing but a cartel of the biggest private banks which made U.S. governments dependent on borrowing from those banks for every Dollar issued. When President J.F. Kennedy was just on the verge of revoking the powers of the Federal Reserve he was assassinated.
History records that the money changers have used every form of abuse, intrigue, deceit, and violent means possible to maintain their control over governments by controlling the money and its issuance. – James Madison
It is well enough that the people of this nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning. – Henry Ford
3. BANK ‘LOANS’ AS A FICTION. IN FACT THEY ARE FRAUDULENT AND UNLAWFUL.
Money is created as debt by private banks. But it is created in a way that breaks all the principles of Contract Law. A simple application for a loan is actually a ‘cheque’ for a certain amount of money granted to a bank by the borrower. Why? Because the signature on it allows the bank to create a fictional electronic ‘deposit’ of that sum of money in the borrower’s account - just by keying in the numbers on a computer. Yet besides being purely electronic money this money is fictitious also because it did not exist until the borrower applied for the loan. Putting your signature to a loan application without being told this, without full disclosure of the fact you yourself have signed the money you are borrowing into existence - is a breach of ‘Full Disclosure’ – one of the basic principles of Contract Law. It is also a breach of the principle of ‘Equal Consideration’ – since the banks themselves are offering no ‘consideration’ of their own – nothing of intrinsic value - to the loan contract (for example gold or capital reserves). Finally, since all credits issued by banks are signed into existence by the borrower, and since these loans or credits count as assets on the bank’s account (understandable – since just as ‘money is debt’ so also ‘debt is money’) the borrower has been defrauded by a four-step ‘scam’.
1. The borrower effectively gives an amount of money to a bank by applying to borrow it – effectively signing that money into existence.
2. The bank then demands that the borrower give the bank the same amount of money once again as ‘repayment’.
3. The bank asks for even more money from the borrower in the form of interest on the loan.
4. The bank makes huge amounts money by selling its loans to other banks and the financial markets. In fact people have a right to claim back this money made from loans to them.
Basically however, no one has any legal or ethical responsibility to pay back a bank loan - since the loan is a fraudulent contract. It is fraudulent not only for the reasons given above but also because in reality THERE IS NO CONTRACT. A joint contract requires the signature of two parties. But where is the signature from the bank that would make the loan a mutual ‘contract’? The bank can’t sign such a contract because it only exists as a fictitious legal ‘person’ – a corporation, and not a real person who can be held responsible for their side of the contract. It might be argued that a bank loan is a legal form of unilateral contract established by one party (the borrower) accepting a contractual offer from the other (the lender). This is highly questionable however given that the loan ‘offer’ is not for money that actually exists as ‘Consideration’ before the lender accepts that offer. All that is ‘offered’ then is a so-called ‘financial service’ but one lacking in the Full Disclosure necessary to regard it as a lawful contract. Finally, even the idea of payable ‘interest’ on a loan is essentially a fiction. Thus if an economy consisted of ten friends of yours to whom you loaned £100.00 each with 5% interest there would be a total of £1000.00 in circulation – not enough for all your friends to pay this back plus the interest. In other words, there is not – in principle – any possibility of paying of the Interest on the ‘sum of all ‘Principal’ loan amounts.
‘THE LAW’ AS A FICTION. MOST LAWS ARE UNLAWFUL.
Nobody is bound to follow the ‘legal’ statutes or ‘laws’ of any state. The only true ‘law’ is not Statutory Law but simple Common Law, otherwise known as ‘The Law-of-the-Land’. Common Law is simply ‘common sense’ law – meaning that you are free to do what you want unless it infringes on the life, liberty, property, freedom of movement or rights of another person. Common Law does not grant states and governments any lawful right to demand that you pay them any form of taxes, license fees, that you must have a license to drive or a passport to travel, that you must ‘register’ a business, car or property, birth or marriage etc.etc. In fact most Statutory laws are an unlawful infringement on your lawful rights under Common Law. Where they do so THE LAW IS UNLAWFUL. Indeed most Statutory ‘laws’, created in the form of so-called ‘legal’ statutes are infringements of LAWFUL rights under Common Law. Since they developed out of Common Law however, they stand UNDER Common Law and are not above it. If a judge asks you if you ‘understand’ however, he or she is asking you to place your Common Law rights in a position that stands under Statutory Law – and therefore to forego those Common Law rights. In order for the world’s first capitalist state – Britain - to make Statutory Law higher than Common Law – a language was based on’ The Law-of-Waters’ or ‘maritime’ law rather than The Law-of-the-LAND. That is why a bank is called a ‘bank’ – which means one side of a river or ‘waterway’. That why in English one speaks of monetary ‘currencies’ – a word deriving from ‘currents’ of water. It is also why in England someone accused in court of an offence under Statutory Law has to stand in an area still called ‘the dock’ - the place in a harbour where ships ‘dock’. That is also why so many English words still end with the very word ‘ship’ – for example ‘ownership’, ‘citizenship’, ‘worship’, ‘your Worship’ (‘Warship’), ‘Lordship’, ‘Ladyship’ etc. The Law-of-Waters is also the basis of all words ending in ‘port’ – for example ‘transport’, ‘passport’, ‘export’, ‘import’. Such words are all to do with commercial maritime trade and law, stemming from a time when it was still true that ‘Britannia rules the waves’ and Britain was the greatest maritime trading empire.
4. ‘SOCIETY’ AS A FICTION. WHAT EXISTS ARE ‘SOCIETIES’ OR ‘CORPORATIONS’.
There is another important reason why nobody is bound to follow the Statutes of any ‘state’, ‘nation’ or ‘parliament’. That is because they are all societies. Societies create statutes which are rules or ‘laws’ to be followed by members of that society. But societies need to be voluntarily joined. If you have NOT joined a particular society – or have resigned from that society – then you are no longer a member of that society – and no longer need to follow its rules or statutes. HER MAJESTY QUEEN ELIZABETH II is a corporation. What is called ‘the United Kingdom’ is not a country or nation. It is a corporate society or ‘corporation’. Its true name is THE UNITED KINGDOM CORPORATION – a commercial society in the form of a Limited Company with a listed set of directors. ‘MEMBERS of PARLIAMENT’ is also the registered name of a corporation. The Treasury, the Police Force – you name it – these institutions of the ‘nation’ or ‘state’ are not what their name suggests, simply national or state institutions. They are societies in the form of registered corporations. Yet again, none of the ‘laws’ created by a corporate society applies to you unless you have joined it – and will no longer apply to you if you have resigned your membership.
“The law can give rise to a FICTION, but a fiction cannot give rise to a law. Consequently a legal fiction called THE GOVERNMENT has no power to make LAW. It is, in point of fact, BOUND BY [COMMON] LAW - like everyone else, and including all other legal fictions. PARLIAMENT is another legal fiction entity. Statutes created by Parliament are not, therefore, the LAW. They are 'legislated rules for a society' and ONLY APPLICABLE TO MEMBERS OF THAT SOCIETY. Join a different society, and you would be bound by a different set of rules. (If this were not the case it would be impossible to become, for example, a Freemason and be bound by the rules of Freemasonry). Statutes are nothing more than the ‘Company Policy’ of THE UNITED KINGDOM CORPORATION, or THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA CORPORATION, etc. … A Society is, in essence, nothing more than a grouping of like-minded souls since it is defined as a number of people joined by mutual consent to deliberate, determine and act for a common goal. A society makes its own rules, and its members are duty-bound to follow them. Different societies can exist, having their own unique set of rules. One way of 'choking' the action of a court de facto is to claim membership of a society that only exists in Common Law jurisdiction.” Mary Elizabeth Croft
REGISTERED ‘NAMES’ AS A FICTION. THEY REPRESENT A FICTITIOUS LEGAL ‘PERSONS’.
Unfortunately for most of us however, our parents applied to join our national corporations by registering our birth. Registering a birth in the U.K. turns the NAME - as it is spelled partly or wholly in CAPITAL LETTERS - into a fictitious legal entity or ‘person’, and making this ‘person’ a member of THE UNITED KINGDOM CORPORATION. Registration transfers ownership of something. A Birth Certificate treats the baby as the cargo of a ship that has just ‘berthed’ – ownership of which is thereby transferred to THE UNITED KINGDOM CORPORATION. That is why if you go into a Courtroom, even as a mature adult, you are known as a ‘Ward of Court’ – a ‘ward’ meaning a helpless or imbecilic child that has to be represented (literally ‘re-presented’ in Court) by a legal ‘warden’ in the form of a solicitor, barrister or ‘attorney’. Since these are all members of The Law Society the only laws they need to respect are not Common or ‘common sense’ law but the laws of that society. Thankfully, when one of your parents signed your Birth Certificate they weren’t told this truth – another breach of the principle of Full Disclosure that is part of Contract Law. But be aware that when you receive any official document in which your name is CAPITALISED and begins with MR or MS it is not you as a real person that is being addressed, but the fictive legal ‘person’ created and represented by that NAME.
“Registration” comes from Latin “rex, regis” etc. meaning regal. So think about what occurs to whatever you ‘register’ – you hand legal title over to the Crown. When you register anything with the public, it releases legal title to the government corporation and leaves you with only equitable title – the right to use, not own, and for that use you will pay a ‘use’ tax which is every tax, be it income, sin, sales, property, etc. as opposed to lawful taxes – excise and impost. So that it doesn’t appear that the government now owns the property which you have registered they put it in a name which so much resembles your own that you won’t suspect it, however, the NAME is owned by the government. If you choose rather to record your legal title to your property with the public, you maintain your status as Title Owner. This is one of the most important things you can ever learn for the sake of your commercial affairs. The best example of the effects of registration is the birth certificate. A bankrupt entity – city, state/province, country – cannot operate in commerce. So how do they manage? Since USA/CA have been bankrupt for decades, having no substance such as gold and silver to back it, the only asset it has are men and women and our labour. We are the collateral for the interest on the loan of the World Bank. Each of us is registered, via the application for a birth certificate. The Treasury issues a bond on the birth certificate and the bond is sold at a securities exchange and bought by the FRB/BoC, which then uses it as collateral to issue bank notes. The bond is held in trust for the Feds at the Depository Trust Corporation. We are the surety on said bonds .. The USG/CAG, in order to provide necessary goods and services, created a commercial bond (promissory note), by pledging the property, labour, life and body of its citizens, as payment for the debt (bankruptcy). This commercial bond made chattel (property) out of us all. We became nothing more than ‘human resources’ and collateral for the debt. This was without our knowledge and/or our consent, via the filing (‘registration’) of our birth certificates.” Mary Elizabeth Croft
The process of appropriating the common wealth of the people began in England during the Fire of London, when an Act of Parliament (still in force) was passed declaring all the people dead and transferring their property to the Crown – unless they showed up in the flesh and claimed this property back. Thus it came to be that capital letters are used on birth certificates – as they are on gravestones – thus effectively turning the registration of a birth into a certificate of legal ‘death’ which makes the child into property of the Crown (regis)
5. LEGAL ‘ORDERS’ AS A FICTION. NO ONE CAN ORDER YOU TO DO ANYTHING!
Statutory Law is based on Commerce and Commercial Law (now called the UCC or Uniform Commercial Code). This is important, because it means that when any state bureaucrat ‘orders’ you to do something what they are really doing is presenting you with a commercial order for a service or item. There is no difference in Law between ‘ordering’ someone to show a license and ‘ordering’ an item from a menu or sales catalogue. Like a seller therefore, you yourself can therefore decline to accept the order or else place a charge on any Court or policeman for the order they give you. You can also argue that all Statutory laws under which they assume they can arrest and order you to do something require your assent to be valid, and ask for proof of this assent. Last but not least, you can ask a policeman to recall their oath – which is an oath to uphold Common Law. Therefore if they or anyone else such as a bailiff take any property of yours without your permission, use any form of force on your body or infringe your liberty in any way (for example by seizing you bodily, restricting your freedom of movement or holding you in custody) they are themselves in breach of the very Law they have sworn on oath to uphold – The Law-of-the-Land. Any seizure of property, imprisonment or enforced compensation can only be enforced through a breach of this law - Common Law – a breach which must first be established by any real person with a Common Law grievance against you taking evidence that is more than hearsay or suspicion to a Common Law jury. A Corporation of any sort, being a fictional legal entity or ‘person’ rather than a real flesh and blood person, cannot however make any claims or pursue any ‘orders’ against you under Common Law, just as it cannot enter into lawful contracts with you - which require the signature of real persons as joint parties to the contract.
6. ‘EMPLOYMENT’ AS A FICTION. EMPLOYMENT IS WAGE-SLAVERY
“A society in which people exist for the sake of companies is a society enslaved.”
“The hurdy gurdy grinder's monkey exists for the sake of the organ grinder… Workers are [there] to fulfill companies' needs rather than vice versa.”
John Kozy
Why is employment a fiction? First of all, the very word ‘employment’ is a misnomer. Billions of workers, all over the globe are paid to do work which does not ‘employ’ their unique individual capacities or creative potentials as human beings. Secondly, ‘employment’ is not the same as work – understood as free, creative and productive activity. It is the extraction of corporate profit from workers - workers who are forced to sell their labour time and labour to corporations (perhaps prostitute would be a better word) simply because they do not themselves own the land, building, technical and industrial equipment and other forms of ‘capital’ that make up the ‘means of production’ – for that is the property of the few, the capitalist class – obtained by exploiting other workers. Besides not owning the means of production however, the employed worker does not even own the products of their very own labour - physical or intellectual - which automatically become the property of their employers - the capitalist class. Then again workers must actually pay to become indentured slaves to those corporations – not just through taxes, but even through having to directly pay back the cost of their education or training (not to mention having to allow corporations or pension funds to speculate with their contributions on the financial markets). “Students are being asked to pay for the privilege of becoming serfs.” John Kozy. Finally, since a large proportion of jobs are now temporary or part-time, employment no longer means having a guaranteed or ‘safe’ income, or even one that pays a living wage – and given the fact that even the best and most experienced or capable workers can at any time lose their jobs if their companies cannot meet their debts - we already live in a ‘post-employment’ economy, one in which individuals must compete with hundreds or even thousands of others just to become exploitable and expendable serfs. The absurd irony of so-called ‘employment’ in capitalist economies was sarcastically laid bare by Eimar O’Duffy in his book Asses in Clover:
“Suppose a party of people were wrecked on a desert island, what do you think would be the first thing they’d do? Obviously they would look around for a man with money to employ them in gathering fruit. If there were no capitalist among them, or if he didn’t see his way to make a profit out of the business, they would all remain unemployed and starve to death, no matter how fertile the island might be … If therefore we want to have plenty of employment, we must give every possible incentive to entrepreneurs – encouraging them to get as much of our money from us as they can, so that they can spend it on employing us to make more for them.”
What is all this employment really needed for? To sustain what is called economic ‘growth’ – a necessity for ever-increasing interest on corporate and national debt to be paid off – ‘growth’ attained at the expense of diminishing natural resources and their capacity for re-growing themselves.
7. ‘DEMOCRACY’ AS A FICTION. THERE IS ONLY ‘DEBTOCRACY’.
The Wikipedia entry for ‘democracy’ states correctly that the word ‘democracy’ “comes from the Greek word δημοκρατία (dēmokratía) ‘rule of the people’, which was coined from δῆμος (dēmos) "people" and κράτος (kratos) "power", in the middle of the 5th-4th century BC to denote the political systems then existing in some Greek city-states, notably Athens.” What is often forgotten however is that the only ‘citizens’ eligible to speak and vote in the assembly, which set the laws of the city state “were all-male, born from parents who were born in Athens, and excluded women, slaves, foreigners (μέτοικοι /metoikoi) and males under 20 years old.” As a result, of the estimated 200,000 to 400,000 inhabitants of Athens there were only between 30,000 to 60,000 ‘citizens’. So even though Greek ‘democracy’ did indeed offer a model for modern liberal parliamentary ‘democracy’, it did so also in a highly questionable way – being, like Roman ‘democracy’, a form of purely political democracy based on economic slavery and ultimately influenced most by those with wealth. We see the ‘great’ heritage of ‘democracy’ still today – in which, no matter how many more people are counted as ‘citizens’, ‘democracies’ are still countries ruled by the few and by the wealthiest.
So whilst the root meaning of the Greek word ‘democracy’ is indeed ‘people power’, what sort of ‘democracy’ is it in which millions of dollars of campaign funding from bankers and big corporations are required simply to seek to stand for election as a U.S. President, State Governor or even as Mayor? It is electoral ‘Democracy’ for the ‘elect’ few – as in Athens and Rome. Similarly what sort of ‘democracy’ is it in which the organisations that wield most power on governments and that also effect most people’s lives most immediately and directly – namely the corporations that employ them – are entirely undemocratic if not totally autocratic in nature? Only a tiny number of corporate board members have the power to elect a CEO or managing director. Today’s wage-slaves – workers and middle management – certainly have no say and no vote whatsoever. Modern political democracy is therefore true to its roots - being based on a total lack of economic democracy. Along with this lack of economic democracy goes almost total corporate control of all sources of information in the form of press and broadcast media. Thus even to speak of a ‘free press’ or ‘neutral’ TV channels in today’s ‘liberal democracies’ is nothing but a bad joke. ‘Freedom’ means not offending your corporate owner, advertisers or sponsors. ‘Neutrality’ means reducing political reporting and debate to the most superficial and banal level possible – and shaped by a constant flow of disinformation pumped out by the media. What counts as reporting, news and debate is determined as much by what is not reported, does not make the news - and is not questioned or debated - as by what is. And if what could be but is not reported as ‘news’ or supplied as information vastly exceeds what is reported – thus potentially offering a no less vast choice of news items to air or print - why is it that almost all news channels and newspapers nevertheless offer the same if not near identical fare of lead ‘stories’?
Power over media, political parties and ‘elected’ politicians alike by wholly undemocratic corporations and their lobbyists make ‘democracy’ a total fiction. When for example, was the last time the people were ever given the right to vote whether or not to go to war for example – and that without being ‘primed’ to vote ‘yes’ by corporate, political and military disinformation? And in what ‘democratic’ country can employees elect, select, hire or fire those who (mis-)manage the enterprises and corporations that employ them – let alone or exert a majority vote over boardroom decisions that may ruin their lives? For political democracy to be possible at all it must be based on economic democracy and on direct democracy – not on voting for political ‘representatives’ whose principal loyalty is not to the people who voted for them but to their corporate backers, to monarchs or to the fictions of ‘democratic’ constitutions and ‘representative’ parliaments or assemblies – all of which are in turn ultimately ruled by powerful groups of creditors, ‘the 1%’ who hold the purse strings. Democracy is ‘Debtocracy’.
8. ‘EDUCATION’ AS A FICTION. THE MANUFACTURE OF IGNORANCE.
“The integrated core [of education] concerns itself with the universal experiences that are
common to all people, with those shared activities without which human relationships are diminished and the quality of life reduced.” – Ernest L. Boyer
‘Education’ today, whether in the form of public or private schools, colleges and universities, has gradually become nothing more than a set of graded institutions competing in a national and international marketplace to ‘produce’ the best corporate servants - whether in the form of low, middle or upper level wage-slaves or an elite class of politicians. At the same time they provide a necessary day-time depository or parking place for the children of working families i.e. existing wage-slaves and corporate servants. In this process the distinction between teaching what the Greeks called techne (technical skills) and episteme (knowledge) has dissolved. The result is what Ivan Illich called institutional counter-productivity – with many schools no longer able to guarantee even the most elementary skills (spelling or mental arithmetic for example) necessary for ‘further education’ and eventual ‘employment’ as a corporate servant. For such necessary skills include not only accurate literacy and numeracy (something which not even many teachers possess) but also the capacity for independent questioning, critical thinking and articulate communication in speech and writing.
The situation has reached such a point of absurdity that one single technical skill supersedes all other forms of knowledge and learning – the skill of answering anticipated examination questions without needing to possess any true understanding of either the question or the answer. Thus in the realm of English literature, students are mechanically prepared to answer anticipated questions on one single scene of one single play of Shakespeare – yet without any requirement to have either fully read that play – yet alone deeply understood its meaning in a feeling way. The result is that in America more than two thirds of the human products of the educational production line can only read prose writing (even in the form of a newspaper article) at a low or sub-average level. And just as 50% of Americans live below the poverty line, so have 50% of the population never read a single book. Indeed in American colleges, students can obtain ‘credits’ for their degrees from a vast menu of courses on such subjects as ‘The History of American Football’ - yet without knowing anything of the history of their own country, let alone that of the world and other cultures.
“In philosophy, a single naïve question oftentimes suffices for the whole system to collapse.”
Nicolas Gomez-Davila
Science teaching – now promoted more than ever before - has become a form of pure indoctrination which by-passes all critical thinking through a vast web of circular definitions which rule out what appear as ‘naïve’ and yet basic philosophical questions. Thus ‘electricity’ is defined in terms of its relation to ‘magnetism’ and ‘energy’ in terms of its relation to ‘matter’ – and vice versa. No one even thinks of asking questions such as ‘What is ‘matter’ or ‘energy’?’ or ‘What is an ‘electron’ or ‘photon’? – for the answers to such basic questions are all already foreclosed by circular definition, i.e. by defining such unquestioned scientific terms only in terms of other such terms and only within the framework of the unquestioned terminological jargons they constitute.
It used to be thought that students in ex-Communist countries such as Russia were ‘indoctrinated’ by their educational institutions. In fact it was only in these countries that all students (and not just those in elite schools) achieved a real education i.e. one including not only technical skills but broad areas of knowledge – including world history, philosophy and logic, not to mention foreign cultures and languages – all of which were compulsory ‘subjects’ and not mere ‘options’ for the marginal few.
Today, the ever-increasing competitive pressures arising from the drive towards the commercialisation and privatisation of education has resulted in ‘curricula’ which turn ‘education’ as such into a fiction – and its institutions into veritable factories of ignorance. For nothing that is taught needs any longer to have any innate interest or value to the student, any innate cultural or spiritual value, any relation to the actual life world and life experience of the student – let alone educate them in the history and nature of the larger world and culture they will enter as adults.
Education removes student from the real world around them in order indoctrinate them in the fictitious knowledge and fictitious values that rule that world – only in order to then re-insert them in that world as corporate slaves. It is indoctrination because it teaches no-one to think, question or ‘examine’. The Greeks understood that an ‘unexamined life’ is life not worth living. Today ‘education’ replaces the questioning examination of life with ‘exam’ questions and the fictitious certificates or qualifications of ‘learning’ obtained through them. Educational ‘credits’ are just that – loan certificates which trap their owners not just in monetary debt in the form of loans taken to attend universities or private schools - but also and more perversely trap them in a lifelong indebtedness to their own resulting lack of true, deep and broad ‘education’.
“In an age in which the media broadcast countless pieces of foolishness, the educated man is defined not by what he knows, but by what he doesn't know.” Nicolas Gomez-Davila
9. MEDICINE AS A FICTION. MEDICINE KILLS.
“People who are angered, sickened and impaired by their industrial labour and leisure can escape only into a life under medical supervision and are thereby seduced or disqualified from political struggle for a healthier world.”
“A professional and physician-based health-care system that has grown beyond critical bounds is sickening for three reasons: it must produce clinical damage that outweighs its potential benefits; it cannot but enhance even as it obscures the political conditions that render society unhealthy; and it tends to expropriate the power of the individual to heal himself and shape his or her environment.”
“Before sickness came to be perceived primarily as an organic or behavioral abnormality, he who got sick could still find in the eyes of the doctor a reflection of his own anguish and some recognition of the uniqueness of his suffering. Now, what he meets is the gaze of a biological accountant engaged in input/output calculations. His sickness is taken from him and turned into the raw material for an institutional enterprise ….”
- Ivan Illich
Medicine today is essentially money-driven, a huge source of profit for the pharmaceutical and hi-tech health industry - which rake in more profits than all the Fortune 500 corporations combined. What is conventionally regarded as ‘science-based’ or ‘evidence-based’ medicine is actually nothing of the sort - given the corners cut by Big Pharma in testing new drugs, in informing the public on their true and often minimal efficacy, in warning them of their side-effects and often serious dangers - not to mention the massive sums of money spent not on costly ’R&D’ but purely on marketing the latest drugs and treatments to doctors and surgeons.
The ‘science’ on which today’s medicine is based is one that completely separates the life of the human body and brain from the life of the individual as a whole – from current or recent life experiences, from their life history and from their larger social and economic life world. It researches the ‘causes’ and ‘cures’ of ‘illness’ as if they had absolutely no meaning in the larger context of this life world – not least the stresses of economic life and of living in what can only be regarded as a fundamentally sick and innately sickness-generating society. The fact that individuals may have good reasons for feeling deeply ill-at-ease in such a society is ignored – until and unless this felt dis-ease expresses itself in symptoms of some medically classified and diagnosable ‘disease’. Even then, however, the aim of medicine is to identify the cause of disease solely in biological terms – ignoring the fact that the root meaning of the term biology’ is the ‘speech’ (logos) of the ‘life’ (bios).
Yet instead of seeing the human body as a living language of the human being – and illness as a form of mute but meaningful bodily speech - or even protest – the body is reduced to a biological machine and illness to mere defects in a biological machine and its genetic components. ‘Health’ as such is effectively reduced by the institutions of state to the individual’s capacity for economic functioning and ‘employment’ in a system of wage-slavery – rather than the capacity for creative fulfilment of their own non-monetary values and potentials. Yet loss of income, housing or life opportunities of the sort that lead to disheartenment or loss of heart on the part of individuals count for nothing in medical science – until and unless this loss of heart manifests as diagnosable symptoms of ‘heart disease’. These are then, like all other forms of disease, cold-heartedly treated as if they had nothing to do with the patient’s actual life whatsoever. Last but not least, ‘scientific’ medicine fails - even in its own narrow terms. Thus there is hardly a drug on the market that does not carry the danger of worsening the very symptoms it was prescribed for. Nor can medical ‘science’ provide any evidence that expensive cancer research and treatments carried on over decades have in any way extended the life-expectancy of patients - whereas such treatments invariably damage their quality of life. In fact medical treatment itself has been long acknowledged by the medical profession as being one the top three causes of death – if not the leading cause, ahead of cancer and heart disease. That this fact is ignored is because Illness is Big Business - a profitable commodity produced by patients and exploited for profit whether they live or die.
At the heart of medicine and its ‘science’ then, are countless fundamental fictions - of which I will list only seven (1) that health is innately ‘good’ and ‘illness’ is innately bad (2) that health is merely the proper ‘functioning’ of the body rather than the capacity to lead a fulfilled life (3) that illness is an abnormality rather than a natural part of life - not least in a sick society (4) that ‘death’ itself must be fought to the end - being seen as the end of life (5) that medicine saves or prolongs life, whereas it often kills or reduces quality of life (6) that the human body is a gene-reproducing machine rather than the living speech (bio-logos) of the human being (7) that ‘illnesses’ have ‘causes’ but no life meaning - and are therefore to be ‘fought’ and ‘conquered’ through science and technology rather than understood as an expression of the patient’s life as whole.
“The idea of one basis for Science and another for Life is from the very outset a lie.”- Karl Marx
“That illnesses have meaning, can lead those affected to the meaning of their lives – this is the insight that natural-scientific medicine has fundamentally impeded.”
Viktor von Weizsäcker
10. ‘SCIENCE’ AS FICTION. A NEW RELIGION WITH ITS OWN ‘GODS’.
“One of the worst intellectual catastrophes is found in the appropriation of scientific concepts and vocabulary by mediocre intellects.”
“More irritating than someone's actual stupidity is their mouthing a scientific vocabulary.”
“Stupidity appropriates with a diabolical ease whatever science invents.”
“Replacing the concrete sensory perception of an object with its abstract intellectual construction gains the world for man, but loses his soul.”
Nicolas Gomez-Davila
What we call ‘science’ today is nothing but a new religion with its own pantheon of fictional entities such as ‘quanta’ of energy. It even searches for what it calls the ‘God particle’. What makes science nothing but pure fiction is the way it takes its own purely mental constructs and mathematical equations as more real than the very phenomena they are supposed to ‘explain’. Mental and mathematical fictions are used to explain actual facts. Science denies the simple truth that all the phenomena we actually experience as reality are not abstract mathematical quantities such as ‘frequencies’ or abstract mental constructs such as ‘quanta’ of energy. Instead they are sensuous qualities or ‘qualia’ such as our conscious experience of light and darkness, colour and sound, lightness and heaviness, hardness and softness etc. Science in other words, seeks and yet wholly fails to explain Common Sense – our immediate sensory experience of the world. Yet Common Sense tells us that common human experiences do not need ‘explanations’. We do not need scientists or scientific ‘knowledge’ to ‘prove’ what we directly experience and know as ‘love’, pleasure, pain, mental activity etc. Nor can they ‘explain’ any of our feelings or subjective experiences by showing through brain imaging how they appear to activate different parts of the brain.
The new religion of science has also created a new mythological creation story in which a so-called ‘Big Bang’ replaces the ‘Big Being’ known as God. This new myth is riddled with contradictions and yet preached as ‘God’s Truth’ by a new breed of ‘celebrity physicists’ sermonising with the aid of mesmerising images of the cosmic galaxies on TV ‘info-tainment’ documentaries. Is there not an obvious logical contradiction in claiming, as Big Bang preachers do, that time itself began at a specific and dateable point in time?! Yet perhaps the greatest fiction of science is the way it conceals a fundamental truth – namely that to ‘explain’ any phenomenon at all requires that we first of all be conscious of it. Even the very ideas and concepts that scientist come up with - along with all the measurements they take and the images they create with their hi-tech instruments - would not be possible without consciousness of those concepts, images, instruments and measurements. The problem is that it is impossible to explain consciousness as such by anything that already assumes a consciousness of it – including conscious observations of the structure and activity of the human brain.
Just as Judaeo-Christian religions sees consciousness merely as the private property of beings – including a supreme ‘God-being’ – so does science sees it as the mere property of insentient things or processes. The truth is however that consciousness cannot - in principle - be reduced to the product or property of any thing or being – even a supreme being. For again, whatever we use to explain consciousness already assumes a consciousness or awareness of it. Put simply, there is and can be nothing beyond, before or outside ‘consciousness’, just as there can be nothing ‘before’ time or ‘outside’ space. All individual things, beings and all bodies in space and time can be nothing but ‘souls’ i.e. individualised portions, expressions and embodiments of a universal consciousness. That universal, all-embracing consciousness can be called ‘the Divine’ or ‘God’. The notion of God that science rejects is a totally simplistic notion of some supreme being that has or possesses consciousness and creates the world like a potter creates a pot. In reality the only conceivable God is a God that does not ‘have’ but IS consciousness - not a consciousness that is yours or mine, the product of our brains or our private property as beings, but a consciousness that is universal and ‘divine’ – being the all-embracing and all-pervading source and essence of all things and all beings.
The truth is that consciousness is everything – all pervasive and all-embracing, and that everything in turn, whether an atom, molecule, rock, cell or body of any sort is a consciousness or ‘soul’ in its own right - being one sensuous shape and portion of that universal consciousness which IS ‘God’.
11. ‘DEATH’ AS A FICTION. CONSCIOUSNESS CANNOT ‘DIE’.
If, as Shakespeare suggested: ‘We are such stuff as dream are made on” i.e. consciousness - and if, in other words, consciousness is the very medium in which we dwell and of which we and all things are formed - then it follows that no matter in what ways a portion of consciousness - a ‘soul’ – may shift its shape or form or alter its patterns or qualities, and no matter in what way it may fragment into parts and/or mix and merge with other consciousnesses - it cannot ‘die’ in the sense of ceasing to be.
Instead the life of the individual as a soul - as a unique, ever-changing and living consciousness - survives eternally - just as it also remains forever both distinct and inseparable from that universal consciousness of which it is an individualised portion and from which it is formed. Each soul or consciousness therefore also remains united with every other soul or ‘living consciousness’ through the very medium of that universal consciousness from which they all arise. Each soul also continues to dwell and grow within the infinite dimensions of that universal consciousness - even if it ceases to manifest and dwell in its limited physical dimensions and limited physical and human form - or in a way that is physically manifest to those whose consciousness is still attached to that physical form.
The fiction of death is closely connected with the fiction of the body and the fiction of matter – the belief that bodies are made up of so-called ‘material’ atoms and molecules - rather than of patterns of atomic and molecular consciousness, of inorganic and organic consciousness, of mineral, vegetable and animal consciousness - and of not only human but also pre- and trans-human consciousness. Consciousnesses or ‘souls’ do not ‘have’ bodies and nor are they a by-product of them. Instead consciousness or souls are what body – whether they do so in human and physical form and or in trans-human and trans-physical forms and dimensions. We are indeed eternal spiritual beings (souls) on a temporary human journey or ‘sojourn’ - and not just human beings on a finite spiritual journey, one destined to end either in death or in some a fixed and final state of ‘enlightenment’. Death is a birth into infinite dimensions and infinite worlds of consciousness or ‘soul worlds’, from which the soul may or may not return and re-body itself in physical form - and in those physical planes of consciousness we perceive as ‘planets’.
12. YOU ARE NOT A FICTION. YOU ARE A FREE, LIVING AND ETERNAL SOUL.
This is the fundamental truth that all the fictions described and explained above are designed to stop you from recognising. Once we recognise that we live in a world entirely shaped by these fictions we can stop believing in them (which we are constantly indoctrinated to do) and instead come to recognise this truth. Then we will no longer have to submit to and worship the Gods of Money, Law, Science, Religion and many others – including fictional ‘Employment’, fictional ‘Costs’ and the fictional Media – the media which promote all these fictions. Instead freedom from these fictions will bring us knowledge of truth, and truth in turn will empower us to exercise our innate freedom as beings - as embodied souls or ‘consciousnesses’. There is freedom ‘from’ and freedom ‘to’. Freedom from fiction releases our freedom to do what as individual souls we are most inclined to do, have the best capacity to do and therefore derive the most fulfilment and satisfaction from doing. Instead of ‘working for a living’ our lives themselves can become creative works - giving expression to the unique qualities and capacities of the soul or consciousness that we each are. We will then free ourselves from perhaps the most insidious fiction of all. This is the fiction, already mentioned, that freely chosen and fulfilling human activity or ‘work’ is the same thing as ‘employment’. It is the fiction that if our time and power to do and create (our labour time and labour power) is not sold to a corporation and put to use in the way it orders us to then we are not ‘doing anything’ at all or are not ‘working’. In reality the very opposite is the case – most people ‘employed’ by corporations are essentially unemployed – since what they do is not the free employment of what they are best capable of doing - not an expression of their true potentials or power to. For as well as ‘power to’ there is also power ‘over’. ‘Employment’ is for the most part the exercise by corporations of power over our power to. Its purpose is not the free fulfilment of the individual’s innate potentials - their ‘power to’ - but simply profit for the corporations and banks. Such ‘employment’ – in reality nothing but ‘wage-slavery’ - is legally enforced through unlawful statutes by fraudulent ‘debt-slavery’ i.e. slavery to the need for ‘money’ to buy what we need.
We work for a living to pay for the ‘cost of living’. Even the houses or flats we are forced to buy or rent to live in have long since been paid for by the labour that first went into building them. And since when did life and living have a cost? Energy and life itself is a gift from the Sun and the Earth. Food is a gift of the land – which by nature is Common Land and not the property of emperors, monarchs, feudal lords or modern farming corporations. So since when did the raw materials of all we produce – the sun, the earth, the land and sea, human labour power – and even the very ideas that arose spontaneously in the mind of those inventors who revolutionised technologies of production – have a price on them? Do we have to ‘pay back’ the sun for energy, our bodies for being able to engage in activity - or pay back the creative power of consciousness for ideas? In reality all that we purchase with our money was granted to us free of charge. Its ‘cost’ only arises from the fact that freely granted energy and fuel, land natural resources, technologies and means of production became the ‘private property’ of a few. Why then, do we have to ‘pay’ those who have appropriated for themselves what is freely given to us all to make use of – as if we were still agricultural serfs obliged to pay their feudal ‘lords’ with a portion of our labour or harvest?
Today it is corporate debt and interest which constitute up to 50% of the price of all products. So why, apart from paying off this debt and interest to the banks, do any products need to be paid for at all - instead of just being distributed to others according to their needs?
A MANIFESTO OF SPIRITUAL COMMUNISM
Workers of the world unite. You have nothing to lose but the fictions that keep you in chains!
What is common to all the commonly held fictions we need to free ourselves from - and at the same time holds the very key to freeing ourselves from them can be called ‘The Common’ - for the word ‘common’ is also the root of the word ‘communism’. And yet as Marx himself pointed out:
“Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence.”
As individuals and nations find it ever more impossible to keep up with their growing debt, the global banking debtocracy, oligarchy and kleptocracy can only preserve its own fictional wealth by creating yet more money as debt, by increasing interest on it, or by hoarding it and withholding it from the economy. Yet for money as interest-bearing debt to be paid off – or to simply retain its value for the banksters - requires further exploitation and impoverishment of the people - which in turn reduces consumer demand for products and stalls the constant economic ‘growth’ on which capitalism depends – just in order to pay off the compounding interest to the banks on domestic, corporate and national debt. The only alternative is for new wars to be started - just to boost growth through demand for ever more costly and sophisticated hi-tech weaponry.
What Marx called “the premises now in existence” for a “real movement” - ‘Communisation’ - are the ever more extreme measures now being used to pay off fictional debts to the banks. These include job, wage, pension and benefit cuts of such severity, that (even in supposedly ‘developed’ European countries and American States) threaten not just the livelihoods of the people but their very ability to obtain by means of money what they need to live and survive - whether it be food and other provisions, energy supplies, housing or even that most basic life necessity – water. Thus it is that one million children in America are now homeless, and like countless families live off food handouts.
Ultimately then, it is not ‘Communism’ as an idealised and therefore fictional ‘state of affairs’ but only a “real movement” of ‘Communisation’ that can allow people to survive. Communisation is the re-assertion of ‘The Common’ - of common law against state laws and taxes, the re-assertion of Common Sense of the common human bonds and spiritual values that make up families and communities against soul-less corporate and political structures. Communisation also means the direct re-appropriation of all ‘common wealth’ - whether land, water, energy supplies, food supplies, housing and means of production – by and for the people. Since this cannot be done with debt-money it can only be done directly, through the creation of communal trusts which hold all property in common, and allow local, municipal, regional and national communities to issue their own interest-free money in the form of new ‘scrip’ currencies which by-pass the private banks . This debt and interest-free money would take the form of ‘tokens’ or ‘vouchers’ – material or electronic. These were once issued by English monarchs in the form of ‘tally sticks’ when they could no longer repay their debts to the bankers. So it is no surprise that the bankers symbolically buried these sticks under the building that houses the Bank of England. Communisation is a real process that has already begun by the common people in the heartland of capitalism – the U.K. Its aim is a community of free communities – each based on respect for both the divine rights and absolute sovereignty of all individuals who associate within them – in other words the total sovereignty of the people and not of monarchs, popes or modern states and parliaments. (see www.freetheplanet.net ).
The idea of the so-called ‘Freeman’ movement - namely that societies are ‘in essence, nothing more than a grouping of like-minded individual and sovereign souls…’ and that ‘revolution’ is about nothing more than reminding ourselves of this truth – is both ‘socialist’ and ‘revolutionary’ in a profoundly spiritual sense. For rather than fixating on the political it is simply about re-cognising and coming back to who we really are as individuals, recognising our innate freedom as souls, and creating a society built on ‘societies’ that are indeed nothing more than a ‘free association’ of ‘like-minded souls’. We are speaking of what I have previously termed ‘Socialism with Soul’ (see www.thenewsocialism.org ). What is important however, is that the possibility of understanding and realising ‘socialism’ in this new sense does not arise from an attempt to unite the realms of the spiritual and political - but rather from recognising, opening up and widening even further a decisive cleft between them – a space of true freedom from the fiction of ‘society’ that capitalism has created – a fictitious society that individuals continue to believe in, buy into and in this way also sustain and recreate – yet at the expense of their own spiritual, social, economic and political freedom as individual souls. This fictitious society is built not just on fictitious entities such as legal persons and corporations, not just on fictitious laws and on fictitious money, but also on fictitious freedoms, fictitious education, fictitious medicine, fictitious sciences, fictitious media, fictitious information and fictitious political debates and ‘democracies’. All these fictions in turn however, rest on fictitious languages, fictitious concepts and fictitious beliefs – beliefs however, that have become so deeply embedded in human consciousness that the most fundamental dimension of our nature as human beings – our spiritual essence as free and eternal individual souls - has almost completely fallen into oblivion. This spiritual ‘essence’ of the human being cannot be united with the fictitious society and fictitious ‘politics’ of today but must be ever more firmly distinguished and separated from it.
To simply oppose the fictive politics of today’s fictitious capitalist ‘society’ with a multitude of alternative social and political ‘-isms’ is to attempt to play capitalism at its own game. It not only gives more credibility to its fictions than they deserve. It also reinforces the utterly soul-less and inhumane social and global reality that has and continues to be built on those very fictions. This is a reality in which human beings can be compared to animals in a zoo - animals who have lost the freedom - or even forgotten what it was like - to live in an environment natural to them and in accord with their essential nature. Worse still, the monstrous suffering and distortions of human consciousness and behaviour that result from this zoo-like imprisonment and consequent loss of their essential nature have become taken as ‘normal’ – indeed are even seen ‘scientifically’ as defining ‘human nature’.
Bringing this fiction and all the fictions associated with it to an end is indeed a spiritual aim with a profoundly political dimension. Yet it is also an aim that cannot – in principle - be achieved by socialist political revolution and ideologies alone. No political ideology can anymore undermine ‘the fictitious society’ and its fictions. Only individuals who re-cognise themselves as essentially free and eternal souls - and relate together freely as such – can re-create what we call ‘society’. Only such individuals can replace the fictitious society of today with a new and true socialism - a ‘socialism with soul’. Such a socialism is no mere political ideology or ‘-ism’. For it can only arise from and within the soul itself – and through a fully embodied and fiction-free relation and association of ‘like-minded’ souls with one another. For what defines fictitious ‘corporate’ entities such as parliaments and legal ‘persons’ - like the pure abstraction that is money or ‘exchange value’ - is precisely its wholly disembodied nature. The fictitious society works by dissociating individuals from their own bodies – which are turned into mere instruments or objects. In doing so, it dissociates them also from their own intuitive bodily knowing and from their own embodied souls – replacing them with fictitious bodies of knowledge in which the soul no longer has any place or home. The universal homelessness which Heidegger constantly spoke of is a homelessness of the soul that knows no geo-political or national boundaries. Nor can it be overcome by seeking to once again house the soul in traditional communities or in the traditional architecture – physical and doctrinal - of churches, synagogues, mosques and temples. Instead the soul must learn to feel and find itself at home again in the human body and in learning to feel another human being as ‘some body’ – that is to say, as an embodied soul and not just a ‘talking head’ or labouring body.
Thus for Communisation to proceed, prostitution and slavery must be forbidden under Common Law. This does not mean only banning the sale of bodies for soul-less sex, but also banning wage-slavery and wage-prostitution - the sale of the individual’s soul in the form of their bodily and mental labour power and labour time, thus finally freeing individuals to choose the creative and productive activities they engage in, both alone and in common. Revolution through Communisation also requires leadership however – thought leadership based on a thought revolution.
THE THOUGHT REVOLUTION
A work such as this that seeks to expose lies and fictions is a ‘manifesto’ in the literal sense – seeking to ‘manifest’ or make evident the truth concealed by these fictions. Such a work also lays claim to ‘truth’ or ‘knowledge’. As a result however, it also immediately faces several problems. One problem is: who really wants to know? For it is not simply the case that there are those who know truth on the one hand, and those who don’t know on the other. There are also those who truly want to know – who ‘seek’ truth and knowledge – and those who simply don’t want to know. Yet as Jesus is quoted as saying in the Gospel of Thomas – ‘Seek and ye shall find. Find and ye shall be disturbed’.
Those who don’t want to know therefore prefer rather to stay in their ‘comfort zone’ and simply accept and adapt to fictions. In doing so however, they also let these fictions rule their lives. True knowledge on the other hand, though it may be disturbing, is also a source of empowerment – of true freedom.
Yet if people have adapted their lives to lies, recognising those lies challenges the way they have led their lives and the identity they have built around them.
“If you want to make someone angry, tell him a lie. If you want to make someone furious, tell him the truth.”
“All truth passes through three stages. First it is ridiculed, second it is violently opposed, and thirdly it is accepted as self-evident.”
Arthur Schopenhauer
“A truth’s initial commotion is directly proportional to how deeply the lie was believed. It wasn’t the world being round that agitated people but that the world wasn’t flat. When a well-packaged web of lies has been sold gradually to the masses over generations, the truth will seem utterly preposterous and its speaker a raving lunatic” – Dresden James.
“If the truth is that ugly – which it is – then we do have to be careful about the way we tell that truth. But to say somehow that telling the truth should be avoided because people may respond badly to the truth seems bizarre to me.” Chuck Skoro, Deacon, St. Paul’s Catholic Church
“In a time of deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.” – George Orwell
Simply thinking and telling the truth is a revolutionary act, because it cannot but bring about a revolution - not just in people’s thinking but in their lives. It is a ‘revolution’ because it literally turns over and upside down (‘revolving’) the fictions they have been taught and taken as truth hitherto.
A second problem however, is that of ‘arguing’ or ‘validating’ the claims to truth and knowledge of those who make it their task to expose what they say are lies and fictions. One obstacle in the face of this is peer pressure and the desire to conform – or at least to stray only within the confines of larger lies and deeper fictions. For in the face of this pressure “… the logic behind an argument doesn’t count as much as the power and popularity behind an opinion.” – Livergood
A third problem is language – words as such. Thus no sooner is a loaded word such as ‘communism’ used than people react to it according to whether they believe it to be something good or bad. Before they do this however, they do something even more important – they assume we all already ‘know’ what the word itself means or denotes.
In the case of the word ‘communism’ for example, they take it as given that the word refers to some old-fashioned ‘Marxist’ ideology. This is associated in turn with totalitarian states controlled by ruthless communist ‘parties’ – for example those parties which ruled the erstwhile ‘communist’ states in Russia and the USSR - and still rule states such as Cuba, North Korea and China. Yet does the fact that China is still ruled by a party that calls itself ‘Communist’ tell us anything about the meaning of the word ‘communism’ – not least given that the Chinese economy has essentially become a form of highly authoritarian state capitalism?
The question of how we understand words is not limited to loaded words such as ‘communism’ however. The question goes much deeper. What is at stake is the assumption that we already know what any words or terms we use mean i.e. the assumption that what they refer to or denote is some well-established and already known ‘thing’ or ‘things’.
This assumption has huge implications for the very way we understand such basic words as ‘truth’ and ‘knowledge’ themselves. For it is the basis of a second basic but unquestioned assumption. This is the assumption that knowledge and truth are a property of verbal ‘assertions’, ‘statements’ or ‘propositions’ about reality - for example the assertion that ‘God exists’ or that ‘God does not exist’. The assumption is that ‘truth’ is then simply a matter of deciding which of these assertions is ‘true’ – which of them does or does not ‘represent’ what we call ‘reality’, and which of them can therefore count as true representations or ‘knowledge’.
The reader may have noticed by now that I have begun to ‘bracket’ a lot of words I use in my assertions in inverted commas. There is a good reason for this. For assertions make use of individual words or terms whose meaning is most often unquestioned. Thus endless debates might take place around the question of whether or not ‘God exists’ - yet without any of the participants ever even thinking of questioning the way in which the very word ‘God’ is, has been or could be understood –instead simply assuming that the word refers to some singular and supreme being of some sort.
This typically Judaeo-Christian understanding of the word ‘God’ implies however that ‘God’ is one being among others which in turn would imply that the ‘God’ referred to is a finite entity, and one whose existence would not exclude the existence of other ‘gods’ – both of which are conclusions that would unsettle true ‘believers’ in the existence or ‘being’ of one single omnipotent and omnipresent ‘God’. I refer to this issue in the section of this work entitled ‘SCIENCE AS FICTION’. For scientists, too, whether atheist or not, use words whose meaning is simply taken as given – as referring to some ‘thing’ that has always existed – and that even if the word itself was first created as a concept by scientists themselves. The result is a situation in which most taken-for-granted scientific terms such as ‘energy’, ‘matter’, ‘time’, ‘space’, ‘light’, ‘electricity’, ‘magnetism’ etc. end up effectively being defined in terms of each other. So just as religious assertions about ‘God’ do not begin with the more fundamental question of all – “What is ‘God’?” – so do countless scientific assertions fail to the question the meaning of their most basic terms. No one asks what ‘light’ essentially is – whether an ‘objectively’ measurable and purely quantitative frequency of ‘electro-magnetic energy’ - or a sensuous and essentially qualitative dimension of subjective experience – one we even experience in our dreams.
The revolutionary nature of this work therefore lies first and foremost in the way it seeks to explain and demonstrate a revolution in the way we think and a revolutionary understanding of ‘thinking’ itself – a revolution first initiated by the 20th century philosopher Martin Heidegger. The revolution consists in no longer regarding ‘truth’ as something belonging to or represented in the form of assertions or beliefs, no longer using thought merely to question the truth of particular assertion or beliefs – but instead questioning the very words and terms used in formulating those assertions or beliefs. That is why I first of all bracket in inverted commas such words as ‘money’, ‘debt’, ‘democracy’, ‘science’, ‘education’, ‘employment’ etc. - in this way reminding us that the meaning and use of so many of the common words whose meaning we take for granted is something questionable in itself - and not just statements that make use of that word or beliefs about it. That is also why, although I offer ‘A Manifesto of Spiritual Communism’, I also apply this new method of thinking to each of the three main words used in this phrase – which also need ‘bracketing’ – not just in writing but in thought. For only in this way can we distinguish them from any ‘thing’ we might simply assume they refer too, and instead let the words speak for themselves through their root meanings:
- ‘Manifesto’ - something that is made evident or ‘manifest’, as opposed to being concealed, for example by cover-ups, lies, ignorance or fictions.
- ‘Spirit’ – from the Latin spirare – to breathe. This is also the root of the words inspiration, expiration, and transpiration - that which inspires us and also enables us to breathe and therefore live and communicate freely.
- ‘Communism’ – not an ideology but that which has to do with the ‘common’ or ‘communal’ – as in the terms commoner, common law, common sense, common land, and ‘commonwealth’ – the common ‘weal’, ‘will’ or wish of a ‘community’ as determined though the ‘communication’ of its individual members, and their mutual ‘company’, ‘companionship’ and ‘communion’ – and not by the fiction of parliamentary ‘democracy’ known in the U.K. as ‘The House of Commons’.
What might in general be called ‘The Common’ includes of course all commonly held beliefs - many of which are fictions. The Common’ therefore, also embraces all those commonly practiced modes of ‘communication’ in which all parties tacitly agree to unquestioningly assume what is meant by the very words used in that communication. It is this assumption, the assumption that we already ‘know’ what is meant by a commonly used word - or even a highly specialist ‘term’ – that is itself the biggest and most important fiction of all and the biggest obstacle to the pursuit of truth – leading instead to a parroting of assumed ‘knowledge’. Such fictitious knowledge can only be overcome through a new and revolutionary mode of ‘thinking’. This is a thinking which does not even assume that we already ‘know’ what ‘thinking’ itself is, that does not assume that we are all naturally endowed with the capacity to ‘think’ – and that above all does not assume either that commonly used words and language are a mere ‘tool’ enabling us to ‘express’ or ‘represent’ our thoughts or beliefs – and are therefore not themselves in need of any deeper questioning.
Martin Heidegger was the first thinker to recognise that in order to overcome all these assumptions and to engage in a new and revolutionary way of thinking means first and foremost establishing a more aware and questioning relationship to words and language as such – one which frees us from the fiction that ‘truth’ is a mere ‘property’ of verbal assertions or beliefs and the fictitious ‘knowledge’ arising from this fiction. For “there is a wordless knowledge within the word” (Seth) and there are also many things we ‘know’ to be real and true in more basic and deeper ways – through that wordless awareness, through direct sensuous experiencing and through inner bodily knowing or ‘gut feeling’ – all of which constitute the true foundations of ‘common sense’. Such inner knowing went under the name of the Greek word gnosis – referring as it did to a type of knowing based on an intimate inner relation to the known of the sort implied when we speak of ‘knowing someone’ intimately - through an intimate relation to them. This is also why new and deeper forms of knowing go together with new modes of relating to others and why all revolutions are essentially ‘relational revolutions’.‘Spiritual Communism’ then, is also the recognition that the true locus of revolutionary change lies neither in the individual nor in groups or communities, but, as Martin Buber recognised, in a third realm – that of the immediate relations of individuals to one another within any given community.