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Humanity Must Awaken from the Dream of Separation

12/27/2024

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Caitlin Johnstone
December 27, 2024

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We suffer because we erroneously believe we are separate. It’s why humans suffer as individuals, and it’s why humanity creates so much suffering as a collective.

As individuals we suffer because we create a psychological self-construct at a young age comprised of memories and mental stories, and we imbue that psychological self with the power of belief by identifying with it. There is nothing in the raw data of our immediate sensory experience which tells us that we’re a separate “me” character standing apart from the rest of the world who must secure its own interests against those of others, but because we identify with the psychological self-construct, we believe its stories telling us that this is the case.

The believed experience of being a tiny “me” character moving through linear time in an ever-changing world is one of constant fear, insecurity, lack, deficiency, and discontentment. It’s a completely false dilemma because we’ve never actually experienced separateness except in our own imaginations, but it feels real because we believe our mental stories about it.

We generate suffering in much the same way as a collective. We imagine ourselves to be separate from other humans, so we compete against them, and can even be convinced to fight wars against other groups of them. We imagine ourselves to be separate from nature, so we work to dominate and enslave it even when doing so destroys the biosphere we ourselves depend on for survival.

All our systems for driving human behavior at mass scale are built around the premise of competition. Competing against each other for jobs and wealth. Competing against rival businesses and corporations for money. Competing against other nations for planetary dominance. Competing against the non-human organisms of this planet for profit and security.

These systems of competition give rise to inequality, exploitation, poverty, injustice, oligarchy, violence, war, tyranny, and ecocide. And it’s all based on fictional stories with no real existence outside our own skulls.

Humanity has the ability to awaken from the dream of separation. Humans have been writing about this for thousands of years — that’s all Buddha was ever talking about. This potential has been sleeping within us this entire time, just waiting for the right moment to become activated.

The fact that enlightenment is a real thing that humans are very capable of attaining has massive implications for our species and the existential hurdles it faces at this point in history. It’s like a Chekhov’s gun that’s been sitting there since the opening scene of this play we’ve been acting out for millennia, and it is not unreasonable to suspect that the mounting pressures of our time may cause it to go off before the final curtain.

If humanity can unlock this latent potential, every single one of the problems we now face can be very easily resolved. As soon as we are no longer transfixed by hallucinations of separation, we’ll have the ability to move from a competition-driven species to a collaboration-driven one, because we’ll no longer be ruled by fear and insecurity. The propaganda which tells us to compete and hate and toil and hoard will no longer find any egoic purchase within us, and we can shrug off the old systems of control like a heavy coat on a warm day.

I see a great many reasons to have hope for the future, but one of the biggest is the fact that there’s this potential sitting right there within each of us just waiting to be unlocked. As our very survival on this planet is becoming increasingly threatened by the illusion of separation, we may find ourselves at the point where, to quote Anais Nin, “the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.”
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Jeffrey Sachs: The Inevitable War With Iran, and Biden’s Attempts to Sabotage Trump

12/17/2024

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Jeffrey Sachs on how Joe Biden has been the most destructive president in American history.

View on YouTube or Rumble.

December 16, 2024

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Shame Game Heats Up for Tulsi

12/12/2024

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Tulsi Gabbard still confronting "forever" smears en route to DNI confirmation

Gene Marx

December 12, 2024

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With evidence-based claims at a premium, especially during a presidential transition, this Navy veteran and 2024 Green Party voter just had to make the time to rebut NW Citizen’s atypical hit piece, Gabbard and Hegseth: Why are they not Profoundly Ashamed?
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Gabbard and Hegseth - It is not too late to put your country above your non-existent fitness for high office nwcitizen.com
And frankly, it would come as no surprise to my Lib friends that I would support Tulsi Gabbard’s DNI nomination. Not only do I find her more than qualified, but she might even shake up our hegemonic, interventionist foreign policy should she be confirmed. Of course I “wasted” my vote on Jill Stein, so what does this “Putin apologist” know…or is it “Assad apologist” now?

Gabbard first caught my attention in 2016 when she resigned as DNC Vice Chair to endorse Bernie Sanders, so I knew then she had spine. But when she remarked in 2019 that she kept her distinctive streak of white hair, after leaving Iraq and it had returned to its natural color, as a reminder of the price we all pay for the US’s endless wars, I was totally on board.

"It's a reminder, every single day of the cost of war of those we lost and my mission in life to seek peace and to fight for peace."
While I am not able to weigh in on Pete Hegseth’s qualifications to be sworn in even as a member of a school board, much less the DoD Secretary, I do consider myself uniquely qualified to write in support of Tulsi Gabbard’s nomination for Director of National Intelligence. After my more than 35 years in federal service, including a combat tour of Vietnam as an Airborne Electronic Warfare Officer and several years as a SCIF-bound TS/SCI FAA Emergency Services Watch Supervisor, I am hardly a layperson on the national security system and vetting process. If nearly 100 former national security officials are ‘alarmed’ at the prospect of Gabbard providing oversight for the intel community – ‘apoplectic’ might be more apt - she just might be the perfect outsider for the job, If recent bailouts are any indication of the potential impact of this new Trump DNI cleaning house.

In order to unravel another biased appraisal of Tulsi Gabbard, let’s briefly step outside the corporate media smear bubble, now obviously engulfing this local online news magazine.


Continue reading on Substack.

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Islamist Takeover of Syria Proves Tulsi Gabbard Was Right

12/9/2024

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James Carden
December 9, 2024

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yahoonews.com
The tragic events in Syria over the weekend should, but will likely not, prompt reflection and rethinking on the part of many within the Washington establishment who were at the forefront of calling for the overthrow of the secular leader of multi-confessional Syria, Bashar al-Assad, beginning in 2011 when his government was the object of a coup attempt by Islamist jihadists. What was unfolding there thirteen years ago was no secret – at the time Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s adviser Jake Sullivan noted in an email that “AQ is on our side in Syria” – AQ being Al Qaeda. Yet this did not dissuade an alliance of crusading “progressive” foreign policy thinkers and neoconservatives from wholehearted embracing Hillary Clinton’s war cry that “Assad must go.” The question they never had a satisfactory answer for was “and then what?”

We arrived over the weekend at the “and then what?” part of the story. It appears by all accounts that the Islamist group, Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, which has roots in the al Nusra front, the Syrian branch of al Qaeda, has now, and with fearful alacrity, taken control of Syria. And so what has happened is exactly what a number of us, perhaps most prominently Donald Trump’s nominee to serve as Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, have spent years warning about: an Islamist caliphate on the Mediterranean.

What to expect now? The Christian population of Syria which was heretofore free to worship should expect to be fed to a slaughter, as advertised.
What do I mean ‘as advertised’?

Eyewitnesses to the earliest protests knew that this was no peaceful pro-democracy movement. Recall the observations of  Father Frans van der Lugt, a Dutch missionary to Syria who was murdered by so-called “rebel” forces in 2014:

…From the start, the protest movements were not purely peaceful. From the start I saw armed demonstrators marching along in the protests, who began to shoot at the police first. Very often the violence of the security forces has been a reaction to the brutal violence of the armed rebels.”

The murdered Dutch priest also observed, “The opposition of the street is much stronger than any other opposition. And this opposition is armed and frequently employs brutality and violence, only in order to then blame the government.”

The promise made by Saudi- and Turkish- backed terrorists in the early days of the anti-Assad uprising, that they would drive “Christians to Beirut, Alawites to the grave” is now likely to come to fruition.

Given this, opponents of Gabbard’s nomination to serve as DNI might take a deep breath and consider what is happening in Syria at this very moment before they unleash another round of unfounded, uninformed – and in the cases of Senator Elizabeth Warren and Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz – hysterical attacks on her character.

Part of the reason for the attacks has of course to do with her heterodox view of US-Russia policy (a view I share), which in some ways tracks with Trump’s. The other reason for the opprobrium aimed in her direction has been her steadfast opposition to an Islamist takeover of Syria.

As has been widely reported, Gabbard met Assad in January 2017. Gabbard was hardly the first American politician to meet with the Syrian leader. Then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi met with him against the objections of the Bush White House in 2007.
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nationalreview.com
Why did Gabbard meet with Assad? Likely because our policy toward the region was deeply immoral and strategically counterproductive. And we know this because the man serving as Washington’s chief diplomat at the time of Gabbard’s meeting was caught on tape admitting as much.

Continue reading on antiwar.com.
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Blinken is Pushing for Ukrainian Teens to Die for US Hegemony

12/5/2024

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Caitlin Johnstone
Dec 05, 2024
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US Secretary of State Antony Blinken repeated the US government’s new position that Ukraine needs to start sending 18 to 25 year-olds to fight in its war with Russia, telling Reuters on Monday that “getting younger people into the fight, we think, many of us think, is necessary.” This comes even as polls have begun showing that Ukrainians favor making a deal with Russia to end this war as quickly as possible.

This is one of those things that looks more evil the longer you stare at it. They’re pushing for teenagers to be thrown into the fires of an unwinnable war like it’s nothing — like a corporation saying they need to hire more staff to accommodate their growing business. And why? To tie up Russia so that Syria can be turned into a smoking crater and allow the US war machine to focus its crosshairs on Iran and China, with the end goal of total planetary domination. All because some swamp monsters
decided after the fall of the Soviet Union that the US must maintain unipolar global hegemony no matter the cost.

Ukraine
barely even has anyone in the country from ages 18 to 25 for various reasons (many of which predate this war), but the managers of the US-centralized empire are pushing to scrape out the few they do have and toss them into the landmines and artillery fire just to keep this unwinnable war going for a few more months. Whether they succeed or not, the fact that they even tried is so profoundly psychopathic it’s actually hard to wrap your mind around.

You won’t see anyone in Tony Blinken’s family headed to the frontlines in Ukraine. These freaks see the population of this planet as nothing more than pawns on their grand chessboard, and they will sacrifice them just as casually.


Continue reading Caitlin Johnstone on Substack.


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