In 1989 after the Berlin Wall came down, Boris Yeltsin, then Russia’s President, immediately handed over his countries largest industries to a handful of oligarchs. We all know what happened after that. One part of the Russian economy blossomed and was a raging bull market in the late 90s. Anybody who owned a Russian or Eastern European ETF, remembers those days fondly as their portfolios boomed, and there was the definite sense of a World changing paradigm shift underway. Simultaneously, in America the great internet, communications revolution was exploding, unleashing an unprecedented wave of legitimate wealth, creativity, and freedom to the people. No wonder, as the year 2000 approached, there was a palpable feeling in the air that the new millenium was about to usher in, not an Armageddon of religious prophesy, but a dawning of an age of Aquarius where a sense of wealth and freedom would manifest, a true Golden Age like no other. There was indeed “exuberance,” but it was not as Mr. Greenspan said, “irrational.”
The most important point to remember why this isn’t working is that crony capitalism is not free market capitalism. It’s national socialism. It’s like what Warren Buffet said, ‘The next best thing to a monopoly is a duopoly.’ He was referring, at the time, to the national socialist organizations Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. We know what those two organizations were and what they did: Created the national housing crisis while stuffing the pockets of power with unearned millions.
What knocked the wheels off this apple cart bringing the “forbidden” fruit from the Garden of Eden? It was not the desire of the people, the “unwashed masses” to be rich and free or the greed of entrepreneurs, as the Establishment and its mouthpiece the corporate “mass” media would have us believe. On the one hand in Russia, the abuse of the Oligarchs, which is not a free market system (analagous to our Financial, Energy, Insurance, and Telecommunications industries in America), created a wave of crime and instability that was too powerful a force for the freed “cottage” industry system, a true free market, freed by eliminations of regulation and a 13% flat tax, to bare. The Russian Oligarch abuses and criminality is well documented, and what it did was open the door for an authoritarian style regime, led by Vladimir Putin, to fill the vacuum. In America a watered down, but no less effective, version of this took place with its epicenter being the Telecommunications Act of 1996 which caused the internet crash of 2000. On the surface it seemed as if the act was designed to protect the little guys and restrict the Oligarchs of Telecom. But this was a “false flag” destruction, creating a false vacuum of national socialism, or Oligarchy. The bill was designed, not to help small telecoms, but to put a knife in the side of free market creativity by retarding the natural flow of capital into this industry. The result is what we have today, an Oligarchical system in the Telecommunications industry, controlled by a few small players. These are false monopolies, false vacuums if you will, created and protected by Governmental regulation. This is national socialism which has nothing to do with free market capitalism.
The same system holds sway in America’s Health, Energy, and Financial industry. Who writes the policies for these industries? The Oligarchs and their paid for representatives in the Government. Witness Dick Cheney and friends writing energy policy in the early part of this decade. But this same playbook has happened in Insurance, Financial (need I remind you of what came to fruition last year there?) and Telecommunications.
The Health Insurance industry is an Oligarchichal, Government Regulated, Protected system that gives us higher prices and lower quality at we the people’s expense, for the benefit unearned gains of a few powerful elite class of Oligarchs.
But the solution to this national socialism is not “socialism socialism”, whereby the quality degrades even further, and the prices do not go down but are simply transferred from bloated premiums to bloated taxes, and the power and money is pocketed in an unearned fashion by the same people, simply wearing different hats. What’s even worse about this scenario is that, since the majority of tax money is pocketed by governmental Oligarchs and their various pals and interests, the debt will crack the U.S. Government, like it did the Soviet Union, and which Medicare itself threatens to do all by itself in the next two decades.
The solution to the Healthcare problem is simple. It’s almost too simple for people to accept. “De-regulation” has an ugly connotation. People have the subconscious sense that regulation is always beneficial to the people. And indeed a lot of it is. Real justice as regulation, the rule of law as applied to justice is a benefit, indeed a necessity to the public. But regulation in the name of protecting a false vacuum, a false monopoly, Oligarchical system such as what exists in the Health Insurance Industry today, works against the people and works against prosperity and creativity.
All that needs to happen to bring down prices and increase quality in Healthcare is to outlaw governmental lobbying, to outlaw the Health Insurance Oligarchs from writing Healthcare Insurance regulation and policy. The effect of this so far has been eliminating free market forces from bringing efficiency to the industry. The Healthcare Reform Act could be written on one sheet of paper. One of the most important revisions would be to allow all citizens to buy health insurance in a free open market from anywhere in the country, anywhere in the world for that matter. In other words, regulate against fraud and misconduct but don’t regulate against free choice (for the benefit of a few large corporations to ride an unearned money train). If such an Act were passed a flood of capital would come flowing into this market and a rich ecosystem of diverse, energized, competition would blossom, fulfilling every niche in American society with a cornucopia of products and choices. Not only would needs be met, but opportunities would also manifest. Innovation, like it always does, would spur quality and efficient prices to the consumer and wealth and abundance to a whole new generation of entrepreneurs who would simultaneously create great paying, fulfilling jobs to the society itself.
The premise of free market capitalism is this: Whenever wealth is created in an open, free market, in an ethical, non criminal, non false vacuum way (meaning propped up by Government protection disguised as “regulation”), the benefit to society as a whole and the individual is inversely proportional to the wealth that is generated for the capital, businesses, and individuals invested.
All of us, even the best, have what is known as a “shadow” part of our personality. The Shadow is our “dark” side, the one that wants to cuss and do what society deems as “bad things” and which in some manifestations really are bad things. Normally we are not even conscious of it, our Ego isn’t conscious of it, and when those times the shadow asserts itself to the point that it breaks through the Ego guardian, perhaps even the Super Ego guardian, i.e. “Society,” we become unconscious and don’t even acknowledge it.
But the trick to making your life happier is to acknowledge it.
If one can learn to acknowledge, release, pay homage to the shadow in a ceremonial, private way, it won’t come out in a public embarrassing way.
In fact respecting the shadow in private ceremonially is the key to releasing the enormous amount of positive, creative energy that’s stored inside all of us in public. In other words to be successful and happy. Manners are the oil on which societal interactions run. Forced manners are painful and take up a lot of energy. In a person who has released his shadow energy, manners flow naturally and exuberantly.
How can one deal with their shadow personality privately? Well, since the shadow is a part of the subconscious, it responds very well the ceremony and ritual. Subconscious energies believe, for example, that something said or written in private is the same as saying, writing, or doing it in public. If you are angry at someone who is close to you, for example, you may write your shadow feelings in a diary or scream and cuss at them when you are alone and no one can hear you.
This may seem absurd to some people or even “weird,” but what it does is prevent you from sending a nasty note or getting into a real argument that could have lasting scaring effects.
It’s important to understand that dealing with your shadow in private doesn’t mean that you won’t deal with conflicts that really do need to be dealt with in public or at least between two people. It’s just the opposite. Releasing your shadow in private, enables you to deal and resolve conflict more effectively and in a socially acceptable way. This is because the shadow, your dark side is also about shame and fear. You know what causes avoidance behavior? It’s not for lack of “thrashing out.” It’s from repressing your shadow, so that your shame and guilt control your consciousness, blocking out your objectivity.
This is why privacy is so important. One must have the private space to express every ounce of shadow energy, privately. Bad or “dirty” thoughts and feelings are not something to feel guilty about. But acting these “bad” or “dirty” thoughts in public is something that will cause society and yourself much harm. Still they’re going to get out one way or another, so the best way of dealing with them effectively is to pay them respect, privately, ceremonially, in a socially acceptable way.
The best book I have ever read on this subject is one called Owning Your Own Shadow: Understanding the Dark Side of the Psyche
Dealing with your shadow is actually a lot of fun and will enable you to release hidden, positive parts of your personality that you never knew you had before.
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But an important step in the “Marriage of Heaven and Hell” developed at the turn of the 20th century with the discovery of Relativity, Hubble’s observations of an expanding Universe, and Quantum Mechanics. Overthrowing “determinism,” the prevailing theory at the turn of the century, these discoveries and their validation gave birth to most of the “magical” things in our lives today: radio, TV, computers, the internet, and on and on, all wonders of the mysterious Planck Length world making themselves known, felt, and realized in our “macro” conscious world of everyday living. This is one way that the horizontal cross and its barrier starts to be dissolved.
But also, ironically, the sense of Science being the great Antithesis of Religion, also was cut through like a lightening bolt from Zeus or Indra. In fact, beginning with Special Relativity and up to this day, the more Science digs and discovers, the more Mystery it finds. We find that Science is actually coming to the aide of Religion, at least religion in the since of Metaphysics and Mysticism, although even to this day this sense doesn’t not have much mindshare. Mostly because of the institutionalizing of the arts and sciences and their systems which produce “walled gardens” that can’t nourish each other. I talked about this a little bit in another article, “No Possum, No Sop, No Taters.”
It’s important to realize that without a wave function you couldn’t be reading this message, PC’s couldn’t exist, the internet couldn’t exist, because its all based on the ability of the electron to exist simultaneaously at every point in space. Fortunately we can’t “observe” an electron, so its wave function doesn’t collapse, and our Micro Processors still compute, and our emails go through. Even more fortunate still for our bodies’ sake, or it would collapse. The electron cloud keeps all of our bodies’ trillions of molecules that are constantly colliding, stable. The electron cloud is based on the electron’s ablity to be in an infinite number of points around the nucleus, simultaneously. Fortunately, someone wishing to do us harm has not the sensory organs to observe our electrons and collapse their wave function!
and coming across a passage about Quantum Mechanics:
"To resolve the discrepency between waves of probability and our commonsense notion of existence, Bohr and Heisenberg assumed that after a measurement is made by an outside observer, the wave function magically "collapses," and the electron falls into a definite state-that is, after looking at the tree, we see that it is truly standing. In other words, the process of observation determines the final state of the electron. Observation is vital to existence. After we look at the electron, its wave function collapses, so the electron is now in a definite state and there is no more need for wave functions." - page 152 "Before an observation is made, an object exists in all possible states simultaneously. To determine which state the object is in, we have to make an observation, which "collapses" the wave function, and the object goes into a definite state. The act of observation destroys the wave function, and the object now assumes a definite reality. The wave function has served its purpose: it has given us the precise probability of finding the object in that particular state." - page 153If I'm thinking of Eastern philosophy, the "Third Eye" represented as the red dot on the forehead of many Indians, is a symbol of observing without collapsing the wave function. "Seeing the infinite" as Blake would say. So before I walked into my bathroom and see my cat reclining on the chair, was he really on Mars and every other place in the Universe for that matter? Yes, according to Quantum Mechanics, which though is still just a theory, is the most successful scientific theory of all time and is responsible for the microchip and this Mac I'm writing on. So one must take pause. So if you want to travel through space and time, don't collapse your wave function! And one of the ironies is in order not to collapse it, you have to stop wanting not to collapse it! How else do you do it? I don't exactly know. My path might be different from yours and everyone else's. The Authurian Romances tell us "Each adventurer entered the forest in a different place and made his own path which had never been made before. To follow another's would have been a disgrace." So no one knows exactly, but mythologies give us hidden clues. The rest we have to find for ourself, and in our own way. What are your thoughts on this topic? Am I on to something, am I completely wrong, or somewhere in between? Love to have a conversation with you about it. Related Posts:
Above are the figures of Angyou and Ungyou, which stand as gate guardians outside Japanese Buddhist temples. They look pretty scary don’t they? What they are, are symbols of one’s own fear, which if held onto keeps one’s psychologically out of the “Temple” which is the symbol of peace, joy, exuberance, beauty where the Buddha (your authentic self) sits under the tree of Immortal Life. One can choose to live life on “This Side of Paradise” or that. Fear is exactly attachment to your ego. In order to break this lock, one must dissolve the attachment. There are many practices to do this. I’ll talk about this more in future posts.
“That is a symbol of your own fear and holding to your ego which is what’s keeping you out of the Garden where the Buddha sits under the Tree (of Immortal Life) and his right hand says, “Don’t be afraid of those guys, come through”
“A transcendent energy consciousness informs the whole world and informs you.”
“The Hero is the one who responds to the call to adventure.”
“There’s something about the integrity of a life, and the world moves in and helps.” – Joseph Campbell
By the way, I think a good definition of Ego is the feeling, the sense of yourself being separate from others, from the world around you, from which you were born.
The trouble with authentic artists is that they’re in a silo both psychologically and culturally, so its not feeding the culture, and we have a Wasteland situation. Science, Art, Philosophy, Psychology, Media, Business, Politics, Technology, Religion are all walled off into separate silos. There’s no integration because they are controlled by protocols and systems, institutions. They are not feeding or being nourished by each other. The instutition becomes a complex both physically and psychologically that snuffs out the exuberance and spontaneity that gave birth to an organizing factor to begin with. This is what Nietszche calls “Groveling before sheer fact.” Nature, which unites and integrates, gives birth to all consciousness, becomes repressed by systems and institutions, which ironically enough were initially created to make life happy and instead have had the opposite effect.
Whenever a spring pops up out of the ground, people figure out they can make money from it, and build a wall around it and charge for admission. Then the spring gets angry, dissappears and pops up in a new, unexpected place.
“Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them. Are ye not much better than they? And which of you by being anxious can add one cubit unto the measure of his life? And why take ye thought for raiment? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin: And yet I say unto you, That even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. Wherefore, if God so clothe the grass of the field, which to day is, and to morrow is cast into the oven, shall he not much more clothe you, O ye of little faith?”
He is not here, the old sun,
As absent as if we were asleep.
The field is frozen. The leaves are dry.
Bad is final in this light.
In this bleak air the broken stalks
Have arms without hands. They have trunks
Without legs or, for that, without heads.
They have heads in which a captive cry
Is merely the moving of a tongue.
Snow sparkles like eyesight falling to earth,
Like seeing fallen brightly away.
The leaves hop, scraping on the ground.
It is deep January. The sky is hard.
The stalks are firmly rooted in ice.
It is in this solitude, a syllable,
Out of these gawky flitterings,
Intones its single emptiness,
The savagest hollow of winter-sound.
It is here, in this bad, that we reach
The last purity of the knowledge of good.
The crow looks rusty as he rises up.
Bright is the malice in his eye…
One joins him there for company,
But at a distance, in another tree.
