By

Reverse Engineer

 

Trying to figure out exactly how Money achieves and holds its value is very difficult. In all but the simplest systems, which are little more than Barter, you quickly develop a level of complexity which is confounding mainly because it is always so self-referential. In this exercise I try to elucidate the process used over the centuries to not just create money, which is primary, but also to control money once created. I have some basic ideas here, but I have no idea how this post will come out in the end. It’s a very difficult problem.

Starting Point: You cannot have Money without a surplus in basic needs, but neither is surplus by itself sufficient. You also must have control over at least one basic conduit of wealth, which is in the beginning food. Why is this so?

First let us look at a pre-agricultural Hunter Gatherer (H-G) society. Said society can be in surplus, but they don’t need or use money because each member of the society can take from the surplus as much as he or she needs. You may barter things, but you do not need an intermediary of money to do that. It’s a very simple system, but it allows for virtually no savings and none are necessary so long as you always have and expect surplus. A small group of H-Gs in a large territory who are not competing with others are always in surplus. So no money develops in such a society.

However, as soon as it develops into an agricultural (Ag) society it requires money. First thing the Ag society develops is a surplus even beyond that of the H-G society. So much in fact the population begins to rapidly expand. The Ag system also works on a seasonal level, where large amounts of grain are collected at harvest time and must be stored in warehouses. Such initial efforts are communal, with a tribe working together on a patch of land to farm it. To do so though, they must claim ownership over that land. This requires the tribe to move to the next level, one with a military to protect and defend the land they have claimed and are now dependent upon.

It is at this point you have the three most necessary elements involved for the beginning of a monetary system. One is ownership of the land, at first communal by the tribe as a whole. Second is storage of large quantities of food in a warehouse. Third is developing a military group responsible for protecting both the land you grow on and the goods stored in the warehouse.

The military component quickly becomes the most dominant one; in the early stages it is led by the most powerful Warrior who all of the tribe respects and fears. This person becomes “King”. Call him Nimrod. The King then becomes the symbol of the State, and all the state ‘owns’ and ‘produces’ (really ‘controls’ and ‘extracts’) belongs to him. The monetary system develops as a means for the King to distribute surplus to his loyal subjects.

The money develops when the counting begins in the Warehouse of Grain. Whatever is in there is represented in the Count by Credits, which can then be symbolized in a token. Only as many tokens are produced as there is grain to cover their redemption and Precious Metal (PM) coinage works well for this in the beginning. All the precious metals the King has acquired by whatever means are coined up and appropriately valued so there are not more coins than grain to be redeemed. This is Hard Money in extremis and it has an absolute value measured in the food it represents.

The King can now hand out the tokens to his military protectors and also pay the overseers of slaves or serfs who work the land and grow the food. The serfs and slaves are not paid in coinage; they merely receive a small portion of the food they produce for a subsistence living and often barter for whatever else they need.

Problems arise as the society grows. In the beginning, the surplus of food being produced exceeds the amount of precious metals available for coinage, so food drops in price. A few things can happen here. The King can stop paying as much coinage to his military and overseer classes, raising the price of the food again thereby allowing the King to keep more precious metal in the treasury and more food in the warehouse. Everybody is still being fed at this point, the King has more precious metal in the Treasury and the surplus in the grain warehouse grows. The grain keeps a pretty long time, but eventually it will rot if not used or it simply become ridiculous to save any more. Like putting up more than a few years of Preps, it gets ridiculous after a while.

So you start to trade the surplus with others who don’t produce as much food and expansion begins in the system. Peripheral areas pay more Gold and Silver into the system and also begin to produce other things besides food, which money then becomes useful to pay for.

At this point the money system has become vastly more complex. The tokens no longer represent an absolute amount of grain in a warehouse, but rather the value of all goods and services being produced in this ever growing economic system. Bourses or Trading Markets develop, which set relative values for everything being produced in the society. As everything increases in size and velocity, the ‘economy’ needs a rapidly increasing money supply to handle it all.

The precious metal coinage does not increase at the same rate in most circumstances, so in order to have more ‘money’ available, base metals are used to produce some coins, which pretty much can be produced at will. Money is getting softer during this period, but so long as ‘the government’ doesn’t go wild coining up the base metals, it doesn’t devalue the money while the system is expanding.

The trading system begins to experience many stressors at this point. Regardless of whether there is a plague related famine or other issues, at times some folks in control of large swaths of land simply take it out of production, locally raising the cost of grain. This allows them to extract more precious metal ‘money’ from the buyers with this money disappearing into their basement safes. I’m sure you can see the analogue here with how oil prices are manipulated by creating periodic ‘shortages’, even if there is plenty of oil in the ground.

The ‘successful’ society utilizing money has now reached the point where there is a ton of surplus in the society, so much in fact there isn’t a whole lot of need for workers or for paying people very much coinage. And most of the PM’s are sequestered away in the basement safes of a few hoarders. At this point some folks can’t even get hold of a few base metal coins to buy any food, though there is plenty of food in the warehouse.

The society needs no more serfs, nor does it even need more artisans and toolmakers. Only a few of the most successful are necessary for the King and his Oligarchy, so these ‘new professions’ start to experience unemployment along with the serfs. The economy slows to a crawl, basically because it produced too much surplus too quickly and then developed an overburden of population with no remunerative work available.

Social discontent soon rises among the poor, at which point it becomes necessary to ‘give away’ the surplus to these folks or face revolution. But doing so causes money to lose further meaning. Why work as a soldier and put your life on the line for a few coins when bread and circuses are provided to the masses to keep them quiet and entertained? The Roman Empire’s period of bread & circuses has a direct analogue to the Great Society programs on through to the present day.

Eventually, regardless of actual production or the ability to grow food from the ground (or extract oil from under the ground) production of both begins to fall because there is no money flowing in the market with which to buy it. Now you really do get the beginnings of revolution, which then requires you to increase the size of the military and hand out money from the Treasury until the state is bankrupt of precious metals. At this point there are Gold coins in the hands of the soldiers, but there is little being produced to buy with those Gold coins. Soon you reach the end of the line for this iteration of a cycle, and not until the resultant wars and internal conflicts get resolved can you begin the rebuilding process……which then repeats the cycle over and over again.

The process has repeated countless times since Nimrod. And for so long as there is a real surplus in the economic environment, the only thing that causes a famine and scarcity problem is the collapse of the monetary system.

Our present day iteration is significantly different from those above. The repeated expansions and collapses culminated with the discovery and exploitation of the fossil fuel resource. This put the entire globe into such a great surplus that it rapidly expanded in population, thereby consuming this last great resource base. Upon its collapse, what is left of oil isn’t enough to expand once again after the typical wars knock down biblical numbers of around 25% of the population.

The monetary system doesn’t normally collapse from scarcity; it collapses from too much surplus and the hoarding of currency. However, due to overextension and resource depletion in specific locations, along with the vicissitudes of nature, periodically real scarcity does rear its head which causes a collapse from the opposite direction. In this case money may be circulating in the economic system, but it is a shortage of goods rather than a shortage of money which produces the disruption. The end result isn’t much different since you still end up with a situation where extant money won’t buy goods, but the causative factors are different.

The period we are now entering is a synergy of both problems, only on a global scale rather than local. On the one hand there is a consolidation of money happening, removing much of it from real circulation through the banking system. At the same time resources are depleting on a global level. So long as these two parameters move in tandem, you get shrinkage but not collapse. You only get a collapse when on the gross level both fail and that has yet to occur. When it does occur it is a lot worse than one or the other type of collapse.

In this last iteration of the cycle, rather than food in warehouses serving as the underlying basis of money, the thermodynamic energy of fossil fuels underpins the money. This, by extension through the industrial food apparatus, includes food. But food is only part of the total production of the society. Over time, food becomes arbitraged out of value since all it does is support ‘useless eaters’. Rather than produce more food, the monetary system serves to encourage the production of more fuel to perpetuate itself. Thus you get your corn ethanol production for cars rather than corn for people.

This is a Dynamic Shrinkage Model, basically serving to reduce population while at the same time conserving resources. This very well might be a planned methodology and could work, assuming the circulating money and available energy resource decline in near parallel terms. The problem it suffers from is one of instability along the way. Because the monetary system serves as a proxy for value for many other things besides fossil fuel energy, mal-investment throughout the system can collapse the monetary system too fast to maintain a stable equilibrium with the collapsing energy supplies.

An obvious example of this problem is the collapsing McMansion housing market. But it extends into cars, factories and many other financial ‘assets’. Unless those assets can be prevented from completely collapsing in value, the money supply can’t be shrunk at the steady rate necessary to equal the energy supply shrinkage. You then run into the old problem of plenty of resources available relative to the population, but insufficient working money to distribute said resources.

This of course is why we see the process where the central banks are pushing out credit to keep the energy market from locking up completely. They are trying to keep pace with the real shrinkage, but not issue so much credit as to render the currencies, which are dependent on the credit markets, to completely lose value as well. On a daily basis it is a system under great stress, and it is rapidly growing worse.

As long as linearity can be maintained between the energy markets and the money supply the system can continue to function, albeit ever more inefficiently and in increasingly smaller ‘boutique’ economies. The linearity gets disrupted either by a local implosion of a given credit market or by a local disruption of the oil supply of a threshold level magnitude. It is unclear how large that disruption has to be on an absolute value level to reach the threshold, but one suspects either a blockade of the Straits of Hormuz, which serves to reduce the energy level, or a credit collapse of a country such as the size of Italy, would be sufficient to disturb the equilibrium and send the relative economics into a tailspin.

Money and oil are EQUIVALENTS in the current society, mainly as defined by the dollar as the most popularly accepted proxy for oil. To keep the overall system running at any level, even a small boutique level, parity must be maintained between the currency and the available energy. To do this a vast portion of the population has to be cut off from credit to buy the oil……but not so fast the money loses its value or so fast the oil depletes in its availability at a reasonable Energy Returned on Energy Invested (EROEI). It is a tightrope which has to be walked very carefully.

So far, our Illuminati Masters have walked the wire very well. I do not discount the possibility they can walk the wire to the other side and maintain the equilibrium all the way through the spin down. This is possible, but in my opinion it is unlikely. Much like catching a raindrop on a knife edge and controlling how the water splits up, the magnitude of instability here is simply too great. One side or the other of the Energy-Money equation will exceed controllable parameters, and then you get a cascade failure. When that occurs, all bets are off. There is no maintaining a core in such a situation because there is no ‘core’.

I cannot say this one is “Coming Soon to a Theatre Near You.” I can only say to you that in my opinion it is, and will, inevitably come just as the largest mountains are inevitably washed into the sea. You must not despair here and think all is lost, with the outcomes inevitable and written in stone, for they are not. You just need to be patient and wait for the failure of the conduits, for when they do fail in earnest it will be a different ballgame altogether. Fail they will. I guarantee it.

RE

Original Source - Doomstead Diner

Changing the Script

 By

 Joe Withrow

Author of "The Individual is Rising"

 

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

 

The unsustainability of the current Pax Americana paradigm has been discussed here at length. We know sovereign U.S. debt is exploding exponentially. We know the true debt figure is actually north of $200 trillion – largely consisting of Social Security and Medicare unfunded liabilities. We know the Federal Reserve has pumped huge amounts of liquidity into the financial system in an effort to pump up asset prices and push down interest rates. We know even a slight up-tick in interest rates would dramatically impede the Treasury’s ability to service the US sovereign debt.

We know the official unemployment and inflation numbers are fudged and the economy has not magically fixed its underlying structural problems, thus there will be no ‘growing our way out’ of this mess. We know roughly fifty percent of the U.S. population is dependent upon government benefits in some capacity and we know 10,000 people will be turning 65 every single day for the next decade. And we know that which is unsustainable will one day cease to exist.

But we also know dying paradigms have an uncanny way of hanging around for a lot longer than we think possible.

Upon waking up to the demise of Pax Americana, the tendency is to react with anger. Throw the bums out! Route the globalists! Rebel against the New World Order! Let's collapse the system!

When the state of constant anger becomes unsustainable a feeling of hopelessness and depression kicks in. Everything is corrupt! The police state is omniscient – they monitor everything! There is nothing but injustice everywhere! Society is going to collapse any day now!

The tendency then is to switch back over to anger after the depression has run for a while and the cycle becomes self-perpetuating. The anger says “We need to change it now!” while the depression says “There’s nothing I can do!”

Our anger and depression are both stuck within the current paradigm; we perceive the wall to be higher than what it is thus we make no effort to peek over the top.

There are only two ways out of the anger-depression cycle: (1) re-assimilate back into the matrix or (2) change the script.

Re-assimilation becomes extremely difficult once one has peeked down into the rabbit-hole. Conversely, changing the script becomes surprisingly simple once one takes the time to rise up and peek over the wall.

There are plenty of articles out there discussing all the ills of the current System, and there are equally as many articles explaining why we should be afraid of collapse.

There are also all manner of articles and ideas floating around out there promoting one utopian macro solution after another. Can any of these solutions work? Maybe, but I rather doubt it.

The human race is rather amusing in that, generally speaking, much of it seems to desire conflict, struggle, and competition for its own sake. Some people seem to have a natural desire to play the ruler and boss others around. Some have a natural desire to play the victim and be bossed around. Some seem to wish constant illness upon themselves and they revel in sympathy. Some seem to be chronic gamblers who get a thrill out of risking it all and subsequently hitting rock bottom. Some seem to lack empathy altogether and they enjoy harming others. Some seem to feel the need to play the hero and seek to improve every nook and cranny of the world. Some just want to be free to live their life as they see fit.

It is that last segment of the population that seems to get the short stick throughout all of history. There's always some collective boondoggle demanding their support. Holy wars, witch hunts, manifest destinies, wars for democracy, wars to end all wars, new deals, great societies, wars against poverty, wars against drugs, wars against terror, you name it. There’s always something deemed more important than laissez faire.

Too often the frustrated response is to fight the entrenched System. We can see extreme examples of this by looking back at the many violent revolutions which have taken place throughout history where subjugated people rose up to overthrow their ruling class. Many of these revolutions were in the name of freedom or equality and, when successful, the revolutionaries went to work setting up their own governments supposedly based on their espoused principles.

In some cases the new government soon became more oppressive than the old government – just with new insiders doing the oppressing. In other cases the new government was more respectful of liberty in its infancy. But even these ‘better’ governments eventually became corrupt, bloated, and hostile to liberty over time. The historical record clearly shows that fighting the System is not a long-term solution because it is always grounded in the current paradigm; the fighting is motivated by an intense desire to force change and make the System better or more efficient or more equitable or what have you.

A big part of the problem is people think of government as a service organization. This is what we are taught in our history textbooks and civics classes in the ‘public’ educational system and it is reinforced by news media and popular opinion once we reach adulthood.

But government is not in the service business, it is in the government business. Sure government provides some services. It delivers the mail, maintains the roads, and provides some semblance of legal and defense services that most people would consider to be necessary societal functions. But government doesn’t exist to do these things - arguably every one of these services could be done better and at a lower cost by local communities and private organizations. Government maintains a monopoly on these services only because it must do so in order to keep the masses docile in order to stay in business.

Government, it turns out, is unbridled self-serving force and coercion. That is the government business and that is why all governments, even when originally harmless, are eventually co-opted by sociopaths seeking to use the force of government for their own gains. Mao was correct about one thing: political power does grow out of the barrel of a gun. Even the ‘good’ services provided by government in the current paradigm require coerced taxation with the implied threat of force. Just ask Wesley Snipes if you don’t believe taxation implies force.

Einstein advised “We cannot solve our problems with the same level of thinking that created them”. Yet that’s mostly what I see happening today on many levels.

On the national level, the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street movements personified anger fighting the System. One side raged against government and demanded more liberty. The other side raged against Wall Street and multi-nationals and demanded more equality. Both movements sought to collectively force change upon the System. While both of these movements have since been co-opted by established interests, the underlying sentiments still linger throughout the population.

On the local level, it looks like every community in the U.S. is spearheading an ‘economic development’ campaign. While the idea may be admirable, these campaigns all seem to be grounded within the current paradigm: they seek more. More tax revenue, more federal grants, more state grants, more population growth, more stimulus, more demand, more consumption, more everything. But more is backwards looking. More worked from roughly 1980 to 2008. It’s time has come and gone.

The solution is to change the script; to stop fighting the existing realty and begin creating the future.

Of course, the established order is not interested in change. Change is a threat. Change means more competition. Change means less power and wealth for the insiders. The establishment – governments/central banks/Wall Street/multi-nationals/Big-Agra/Big-Pharma/Big-Insurance/Big-Science/mega non-profits – will fight against change until their dying breath.

Thus the script must be changed at the individual level first. The individual must lead society, not the other way around.

The neat thing about this is there is no singular rigid model; no one cookie cutter solution. There is a basic regulatory framework rooted in common law (do not aggress upon others or their property) and contract law (do all you have agreed to do and nothing you have agreed not to do) but within this framework there is a blank canvas awaiting each individual artist.

My personal view is changing the script is simple. Not easy, but simple and intuitive. What follows are my experiences and thoughts on changing the script. What works for me may not work for others, so I share my perspective matter-of-factly with no implied suggestions, implications, or judgments. I am under no illusion of significance and I am well aware of the fact there are many others who have distanced themselves from the System much more so than I have. I offer my perspective only because I believe the sharing of ideas is what enables civilization to thrive.

My wife and I met in corporate America. We found ourselves working in the same department at the same mega-bank in the same metropolitan city. We were married at a downtown chapel in that same city a little over three years later. Our lifestyle was modeled after the mythical American Dream because that is what we had been conditioned to seek

It wasn’t long before we started to see through the deception and we made the decision to change the script. We ended our corporate careers, sold our home, liquidated our government-approved retirement accounts, and moved to a rural property with a little bit of land.

Knowing we will never be completely self-sufficient, our first order of business was to make our small homestead as resilient as possible. We stocked up on a reasonable amount of food, water, and provisions, bought a small solar-compatible battery and several propane tanks to store energy, stacked a cord of firewood, made a few minor repairs to the property, and most importantly stocked the wine cellar. After the initial outlay, maintaining this basic level of resiliency costs very little. We don’t think civilization is coming to an end, we simply think it is our responsibility to be prepared for what comes with the inevitable collapse of the funny money Ponzi as well as any other disaster or emergency that decides to come our way.

We have reduced our consumerism and our consumption of processed foods and we save 75% of our income like clockwork. We spread our savings across several asset classes according to our personal asset allocation model with most of our cash held within a high-cash value life insurance policy structured according to the “Infinite Banking Concept” to allow it to compound outside of the banking system and government-approved accounts. We are actively working to create diverse income streams for our family so we do not have to be slaves to a wage and we plan to plant our first garden this coming spring.

While we still carry health insurance policies in case of major emergency, we have divorced ourselves from every other aspect of the corrupt health care industry. Regular exercise and a healthy diet based mostly on paleo principles have virtually eliminated illness from our household. Natural supplements have told Big-Pharma to take a hike. We have no primary care physician nor do we fall in line to get our flu shot.

My wife gave birth to our first daughter in October... in our dining room. We completely shut out the Big Government/Big Insurance/Big Pharma health care cartel on that one.

We paid cash for midwifery services and received much more care, support, and education than we paid for when it was all said and done. Our daughter was born completely naturally without ever coming in contact with a hospital. There were no unnecessary prenatal tests or medications, no I.V.’s, no monitors, no labor-inducing drugs, no pain killers, and no invasive interventions. Upon her birth directly into her father’s hands, there were no meddlers waiting to rush our daughter off to be poked, prodded, weighed, measured, tested, vaccinated, or placed under a lamp. The only things awaiting her arrival were her mother’s loving embrace and her midwife’s gentle inspection.

The midwife made a 36-hour and then a five-day house visit to check on mother and baby and she answered numerous text messages and phone calls at weird hours during that stretch as well. As a result, mother and baby did not have to leave the comforts of their home for more than two weeks after birth. Three-week and six-week office visits that required no form-filling or waiting-room sitting completed our private contract with our midwife. Despite this, she offered to answer any questions at any time via phone or email going forward. Needless to say, there will not be any pediatricians in our daughter’s future. You just don’t go back to the cartel after such extraordinary health care service.

The wonderful homebirth experience was just the tip of the iceberg of our vision to provide our daughter with a mindful childhood free from the forceful expectations and coerced indoctrination that characterize so many American childhoods. Instead of viewing her as an ignorant child to be molded into society’s likeness, our daughter will be treated as a beautiful individual with innate untapped wisdom that very well may exceed our own.

When the time comes we will cater a home schooling program to her unique personality, skills, and interests. Her education will be as rigid and demanding or as free and creative as she needs it to be. As she grows in maturity, her home school program will become more self-guided and our role will move more towards encouraging her to pursue her own unique talents and passions.

Rather than ignoring financial education and hoping Social Security is still around in the year 2079, we will incorporate sound finance into the home school curriculum. Our daughter will learn the merits of saving, capital formation, and asset allocation at an early age. She will understand that fiat money is an illusion not to be cherished, but at the same time every individual has to make their own way.

We will also help her test her skills in the marketplace should she have such a desire. If she enjoys writing we can help her self-publish a book. If she is a skilled musician we can help her record an album for sale. If she likes baking we can take her to the farmer’s market to sell her goods. Any income derived from these enterprises would help her get real-world personal finance practice as well.

There will be no pressure to go to college upon completion of her home school program. We are capitalizing a small IBC insurance policy which will be given to her when she reaches adulthood to get her started on whatever path she chooses. If she chooses college she can go with no student loans necessary. If it is travel that calls to her she will have the means to begin her journey guilt-free. If her desire is entrepreneurial in nature she has the start-up capital already secured. Given the freedom to discover and pursue her passions at an early age, I suspect she will know what her next step will be well before ‘graduating’.

There is no doubt in my mind this script will enable our daughter to quickly mature into an intelligent, rational, logical, caring, passionate, and skilled adult. I contrast this with my own script that involved twelve consecutive years of public education followed by five consecutive years of higher education at a public university. It took me nearly a decade afterwards to shed the social conditioning and indoctrination and to mature into a free-thinking individual. By then my balance sheet was a wreck, my skills had atrophied, and my philosophical awareness was non-existent. Digging out of the hole of my own lost decade was exhausting.

I can’t help but imagine a world full of independent-minded individuals following the script of their own choice. What if individuals with infinite potential were not automatically plugged into the inner workings of the machine to perpetuate the System? What if more people were not exposed to all of the social conditioning throughout their childhood? What if more people did not get their news from the corporate media? What if more people recognized their true worth and settled for nothing less than following their own path? I can’t help but think such a world would be a much happier, healthier, and wealthier place.

But then I stop myself. For now I only need to concern myself with envisioning a world in which one family successfully writes their own script.

The rest is probably none of my business.

Joe Withrow

 

For more of Joe’s thoughts on the “Great Reset” and the Infinite Banking Concept please read “The Individual is Rising” which is available at....

"The Individual is Rising"

The book is also available on Amazon in both paperback and Kindle editions.

 

The Antidote

Convalescence : Building the Foundation

Essay Ten

By

On The Beach

 

 

This is Essay Ten in my series ‘The Antidote’. All previous Essays may be found here.

 

Over the course of the last nine essays I have attempted to show the current narratives, developed as stories to guide and manage social interactions, are mostly toxic lies. It is my contention these narratives, memes and institutions exist to create a humankind deadened and disconnected from its larger non-physical nature, and most certainly enslaved. Such an impaired humankind is easily pushed into continual conditions of fear because humankind does not have the internal knowledge to be able to exist as strong, individual sovereigns outside of the very social institutions which created this pathological mental and spiritual condition in the first place. My contention is modern humans living in these days of modern technological progress is basically insane.

I go on to contend this illness can be combated by an individual finding the strength and the way to connect themselves to their own greater non-physical consciousness. My personal choice for this connection is through a relationship with Nature. I believe this connection will allow an individual to not only connect to their larger non-physical consciousness, but ultimately to a much larger non-physical consciousness outside of themselves altogether.

My hope is this connection will allow each person who does this to realize more of their own true nature as an infinitely eternal entity of spiritual consciousness, well outside the control of the contrived, artificial and pathological narratives guiding and limiting humankind on earth at this time. My deep desire for each of us is our expanded awareness as spiritual beings will serve as an antidote to the lies of Modernity.

Additionally, I offer some further methods to use this new consciousness as a tool to help each day in dealing with the Lies that now prevail. I also sketch out my views on the individual in relation to the universe as I have grown to know it over my lifetime.

But one point I make consistently clear; at all times in this effort each individual is 100% responsible for their own actions and thoughts, their own emotions and outcomes. I do not mean this in any sort of judgmental way at all, colored by some sort of religious system of rewards and punishments, but rather as a statement of the absolute fact the individual alone must learn how to exist in the universe, by themselves, on their own terms, through their own actions.

Nothing is more important for each individual than to put away the ideas of Salvationism, Heaven, Hell, Ascended Masters, Gurus, or any other story which offers any easy, quick path to mastery of anything. I make it clear the only way to activate the ability to operate in the universe is for each of us to learn how to do what it is we want to do.

There are no limits at all. The universe is infinite in potential for each of us.

Having said all that, I think it is important for each of us to work on a series of steps which could be considered a new foundation for continued growth in this physical place. I use the term ‘growth’ with hesitation. It implies some sort of progression from a more primitive to a more advanced state. This is not exactly what I am talking about. I am talking about a growth away from Modernity towards a more balanced, more healthy and natural person.

There is nothing balanced or healthy at all about Modernity and the individual lives created under Modernity. To live under it is to live as the walking dead. I would like to see each human grow in our embrace of Life. We do not need Modernity for that at all. In fact, most of Modernity has been developed to strip the Life from each of us.

So this new foundation must be built to support a growing Life instead of the destruction of Modernity. Modernity will die within us anyway as we replace it with our own connections to Life and our own true nature.

 

Five Simple Steps to a New Life

Here are my suggestions for creating a new foundation for the experience of growing toward Life.

1. Focus your life so you consciously live in the Physical right now. This is the only physical life you know about, so do not waste a second of it. Live your life with passionate intensity and focused, thoughtful direction. Learn discernment in attention, intention and action.
2. Become independent of Modernity in as many ways as possible.
3. Deeply explore and express your own personal spiritual nature as a physical being.
4. Find others of a like spiritual and physical philosophy to yours and create an extended family community.
5. Truly enjoy your physical life right now in this moment.

These simple steps may seem almost childish, even trite; but if lived in the spirit of a new connection to an expanded spiritual non-physical Life, they take on a much larger, much more complex and enriching reality. Living inside our new connections to Nature and becoming aware of the responsibilities we actually have to ourselves and those close to us will enable each of us to start to regain our sovereignty as a living creature on this Earth.

Let me discuss this process in more detail.

 

Focus Your Life on the Physical

This might seem like a contradiction after I’ve just spent a few thousand words convincing you to realize your non-physical nature. So let me take a few paragraphs to explain what I mean.

At this moment you, my readers, are all physical beings. You have a life in the physical and are focused here, in this physical place within a body of your own creation. Here you are physical, first and foremost.

Use your new-found connection to the non-physical in general and to your non-physical self to understand your deep connection to all things, both physical and non-physical. You are not separate from these physical things; you are intimately connected to everything here in this physical place. This place will not become a better place until each of us, individually and collectively, focus our attention right here in terms of understanding our connections and responsibilities. We are not outside or separate from this place in any way. To focus on some reward in heaven or some time and place far away from the here and now is to deny our personal responsibilities to a life right here and right now.

This one thing - this focus away from the physical here and the physical now - is one of the great tragedies on Earth in these times of Modernity.

Many people, unhappy with their physical condition in one way or another, try to find happiness by focusing primarily on the non-physical in various spiritual studies of one type or another. While it is good to actually recognize we are more than just physical beings, it is not really appropriate to focus our main energies away from our physical experience. The point of being here in this physical place is to learn how to be here, within these earthly limitations and conditions.

To not do that, to try to escape to somewhere else or to some other time, might seem better or more interesting - but it doesn’t fix the issues that drove us to try to escape in the first place. It simply will not work. We are physical beings first and most importantly while we are here in this place. We need to learn how to do our physical work to the best of our abilities. We cannot escape that reality.

We can, however, learn how our own non-physical consciousness can interact here and help us here while we are physical. But the real focus and the main emphasis of our lives should be on our physical manifestation while we are here. We chose this place and this life - and to try to run away from it is not helpful at all. Putting the focus of our energies in some place or time other than our physical manifestation will not help us to deal with the issues of our physical experience. This will not help us to become stronger or more independent and capable. In fact it could keep us from becoming capable by distracting us from what we really should be doing to fix whatever it is in our physical life that needs fixing right now.

I have seen people explore all sorts of Eastern and New Age or Religious philosophies trying to find ‘the one’ they want to live their life by. In all of this searching they seem to be blind to the fact no matter what they look for, they still have to deal with the everyday realities of being a living being, with responsibilities, right here, right now. Their lives become shambling wrecks of chaos and disaster and they become even more unfocused and more miserable no matter how hard they search.

They have forgotten no matter what, each of us must look inside ourselves first and work in that personal physical space first to find comfort and peace. That space is in this physical place, not outside of it. All of these searches, whether via New Age, Eastern, Religious or Philosophical paths, are nothing more than disciplines each one of us must use as a tool only and learn how to use properly. None of them will save us unless we know how to properly use them. And none of them are actually proper tools at all if they cause us to focus on some place and time or object other than right here, right now, inside ourselves.

This means realizing our thoughts as physical beings are real things that create energy patterns of life force all around us. This means we need to learn how to create these thoughts with discernment of attention, intention and action. It does not mean everything is OK and there is no right or wrong or we can do anything we want to do since we have many lives to live. It means to take responsibility in every way you can in your own life, right now.

Focus inside your physical self and use these new connections to the non-physical as tools to live a better and more capable life in greater joy. Each of us is physical now and should focus on our solutions wholly inside of our physical selves.

 

Become Independent of Modernity

Modern Western civilization has been designed from top to bottom to enslave us. There is no cure for this situation by remaining inside of this monstrous creation of evil. The more dependent you are on society, the less independent you are and the less happy you will be unless your real goal in life is to be a slave living in apparent ease.

To one degree or another we are all enslaved to Modernity. As physical beings we can never truly regain our sovereignty or peace or joy while we live fully under the control of the Lies of Modernity.

I know it is impossible to become totally independent of Modernity, but each of us must begin to do what we can to disconnect from the greater Lies under which we now live. We can only do the very best we can given our individual situations and the conditions we live our lives within right now.

 

So - What is Important to You?

Do you as a physical being know and understand exactly what the minimally-required, but most vitally important, items are in your life right now? Exactly what are these things? And how many of these vitally important things are actually under your control?

If they are not under your direct control, then what do you do when these things you have determined as vital to your being are removed or restricted from you?

I will tell you what is vitally important for your survival as a physical being right now: air, clean water, food, clothing, shelter, fuel of some sort to use to keep warm if you are in a cold place, sensible health care and a well-conceived narrative of life for our social cohesiveness. Nothing more! These are the essential items vital for your survival. If these things are not under your control then you are dependent upon Modernity in some way. How dependent each of us is will be an individual issue, but do recognize an irrefutable fact. Having ‘plugged in’ to existing socially-driven systems of living day-to-day makes each of us incredibly vulnerable to having that plug pulled very suddenly, for whatever reason, by those who run Modernity.

Modernity controls us by controlling our dependence upon these issues. Modernity and its minions can easily create a shortage of one of these vital issues and enslave us. We are much more difficult to control, possibly almost impossible to enslave, if we control these vital issues of our lives ourselves. We are less dependent even if we control only one of these items.

Our dependence on Modernity for access to these essential items forces us to exchange our labor, energy and other valuable resources for something of indeterminate worth which has been designed to decrease in value over time. This item is money - and as long as we need money to live we are dependent and enslaved. There is no other way to say this thing. Money has been the main tool of our enslavement from its initial inception. Modernity and its institutional control over ‘money’ is the primary control of our daily lives, above and beyond all else.

We cannot be freely sovereign as long as we are dependent on money issued by some other entity, which in almost all cases are the Institutions of Modernity. These institutions can be clearly seen now as not having our own best interest at heart. In fact in most cases all the institutions of Modernity are nothing more than criminal enterprises designed and developed to enslave the common person. The more dependent on the Institutions of Modernity we are, the more enslaved we are.

But getting free of the enslavement to Modernity is very difficult. It will take huge personal bravery for an individual to walk away from as much of our dependence on Modernity as we can manage to do.

I want to ensure each reader understands a life lived under Modernity is actually a life lived in almost total dependence, a condition fueled by the illusion of independence. The concepts of freedom and natural rights, of democracy and rule of law are nothing more than a thin icing on a cake of enslavement.

Oh sure - some systems are marginally better than others; but in most people’s lives we now have memories long enough to have observed over time a slow, incremental and increasing enslavement - and a marked increase in the levels of our dependency. We are all more dependent and enslaved now than we were 50 years ago or even 30 years ago. This is not an accident. The system of Modernity is only designed to do one thing: to feed off of our dependence for as long as possible, with no interest in our well-being, viability or survival.

Dependent No More?

Are you now saying to yourself ‘There must be a way out of this place? But - what IS it?’ If so, I do have some ‘simple’ suggestions. While I know how hard this will be, here is what I would do.

1. Have environmental and social independence. After careful consideration, get out of any modern developed country and move to a developing country of your choice, hopefully a place with good air, but most especially a place with a greater sense of family and neighborliness and community than is now present in most developed countries.
2. Have shelter independence. Build a small house there for as little as possible so you have shelter that is simple and debt-free.
3. Have water independence. Make sure you have access to clean water 365 days a year regardless of access to electricity. This means your own system under your own power. Hand pumps work great.
4. Have food independence - or very limited food dependency. Grow the majority of your own food as organically as possible. How far you take this is up to you.
5. Have clothing independence. Making clothes is easy if you know how to sew. Acquire a foot-powered sewing machine and learn how to properly use and store clothing supplies. Learn to spin, weave and sew/repair/recycle simple garments - or cultivate the ability to barter for what you need. These are basic skills in most indigenous populations, even now.
6. Have energy independence. Install your own energy systems. Try to find ways to limit your use of transport energy. Study the Amish and learn how to live without electricity.
7. Learn as much as possible about how to treat and take care of your own health. Most illness starts with bad food and can be alleviated with a healthier, home-grown diet and treated with medicinal plants when there are problems. Learn about the older, time-tested systems of health long practiced by traditional healers in Asia and in other, older cultures. Such healing traditions have ‘legs’ and are long-established methods for both supporting good health and treating health anomalies.
8. Develop your own, well-thought-through narrative of social life. It is impossible to think you can live outside of the Lies if you continue to rely on these lies to guide your life. All such lies must be examined and replaced by sound, well-planned and time-tested principles for living well with others. This is one of the most important aspects of getting an intentional community developed that can maintain itself over an extended period of time.

These are all challenging things to do. Believe me; I know this fact on a very personal level. Doing these things takes skills and force of will that most people don’t have. It is so much easier to be dependent.

When I was 5 years old my mother, for some strange reason, decided that all processed foods were poison. She decided the only way she could keep her children from being poisoned was to remove 100% of our food dependency from the local grocery store. My mother, who grew up as a migrant farm worker, was no stranger to physical work. We moved from a comfortable suburban home in a suburb of LA out to a 4-acre rock of a place in a very dry part of Riverside County, CA.

After we repaired some barns and outbuildings, the first thing we did was buy animals: a milk cow, a couple of pigs and a flock of chickens. My little brother and I were in charge of moving all the animal waste and any other compostable material to pits we had dug for worm compost. It took one year of hard work, but after a year we had enough worm casting compost to start a huge garden.

After 18 months we were raising all our own food except for grain products. The garden was 100% organic. Fortunately there were Seventh-Day Adventists in our area who shared my mother’s attitude towards food processing, so we could at least buy some bread. Except for that bread there was almost nothing we bought at a grocery store. If it came in a can or box or package of any kind we did not eat it. We children were allowed 1 can of soda a year. I was over 16 years old before I drank store bought milk. I spit it out.

We left that little family ranch after 10 years because our well ran dry and there simply was no water. To this day I know I could manage a very large organic farm without too much effort. But it is hard work to get started and hard work to maintain. A person would have to believe in the eventual benefits gained versus the immediate effort expended. There was nothing easy about what we did, but we were barely dependent on anyone for our food.

The same sort of hard-nosed determination is required for anyone wanting to become independent of Modernity. There just is no way around this issue. But what is the cost of your enslavement? How much of you are you willing to give up for ease and apparent comfort? How many hours a day spent toiling or wasting time in a car trying to get to that toil do you spend so you can buy poisonous food and live without dignity in a box in a controlled community without any personality, real human connections or genuine passion at all?

But what about staying on top of all the pressing issues of Modernity: the endless amount of opinion and information and history, of ideas and philosophies that are now flying around the internet constantly? Doesn’t one need to stay constantly informed?

No. This is distraction at its most lethal.

Just say ‘No’ to most of that information at this time when you are trying to get a firm foundation under you for the rest of your life. Most of it does not impact your daily life or the really important things you must do to get free of dependency. Most of what passes for information is nothing more than pathways to more lies, or hooks back into the dependencies of Modernity.

There is no reason for you to have TV at this time at all, or access to most of the internet. Be very careful about what you use your time studying, watching or thinking about. Your whole focus now should be on nothing more than ending your dependency and connections to the Lies of Modernity as much as you possibly can. Later, when you are much stronger, more independent and more capable as a sovereign spiritual/physical being, you can drop back into a more leisurely and objective study of some of these areas of interest.

Get yourself well, first. Please!

 

Explore Your Spirituality

By now, any reader of these essays knows I am talking about each of us doing the hard work of exploring our own spiritual natures, but not by listening to anyone else, not even me, telling you what to do and how to do this task of yours.

I made it clear in my statements above, this exploration of one’s own non-physical being should be a tool for exploring one’s own very personal physical experience, right here, right now. The exploration of the spiritual should be subservient to, and under the direction of, physical needs and desires.

One issue I do want to make clear is this: even though I am constantly saying we are responsible for ourselves and what happens to us, I want to emphasize that great evil has been done to all of us in order to lock us into a state of great dependency upon the Lies of Modernity. We will have to work very hard to get out from under these lies as the conditioning we have been subjected to from all sources has been deep, persistent, corrosive and ultimately evil in its attempts to do us harm.

We have all suffered a tremendous amount of damage, damage not of our own doing or choosing. So anyone who really tries to escape from the Lies of Modernity needs to be very, very gentle with themselves and realize there is much more to this situation than blame or guilt or fault-finding. Doing so are dead-end actions that will not help us in any way.

 

Create a Community

Life in almost all forms in the universe is about sharing in some way. Cooperation is at the base of almost everything which has energy attached to it. Sharing and cooperation are essential, but need to be based on respecting the needs and desires of each individual involved and not imposed from some over-reaching social structure designed to crush and dominate individuals. There is a balance between the wants and needs of each individual and the overall welfare of the entire group that must be accepted and whole-heartedly agreed to by all participants before the idea of a community has a chance of success.

There are a number of reasons why this should be an important part of the foundation for our recovery. The most important issue will be that it is simply easier to do things together. Remember, you are now doing all you can to end your dependency upon Modernity. This means you will now need to do for yourself those things you used to pay for, or give up personal freedoms, to have done for you. Having other like-minded people you are close to who have different skills and resources which can be exchanged for equally valuable services and goods you produce will make life much easier for everyone.

This is a very difficult concept for most people of Modernity. We are not used to this connectedness between family and friends. We don’t know how to reach out in mutual support and simply be in community. This loss of community-mindfulness must be overcome by each individual, reaching out step by step. Where I live now, here in The Philippines, family and community are at the center of all life. Everyone is close in their family and community groups, helping and socializing all the time. It may take some getting used to for an outsider to make the transition to this type of life, but the rewards are great.

The single biggest reason, though, for the creation of community is so each participant, as an individual growing in their own sovereignty and personal power, can explore new, different and better community narratives for their social group. The Lies of Modernity must be replaced with truths - and it is up to each one of us who commit ourselves to growing as individuals to learn how to connect our growth to others and share it into our own communities. Humans are social animals who require social grouping. This natural tendency has been exploited by psychopaths to create the Lies that pass for our social narratives now. We seriously must re-write these narratives.

This dynamic between personal freedom and the growth of the group might seem like a contradiction - but this is only because we have nothing to contrast this type of social structure against except the pathological lies now pretending to be socially ‘normal’ in our personal worlds.

Personal growth is not inimical to the growth and power of the group. In fact, growth of both the individual and the group should go hand-in-hand. The fact that our modern-day group mentality is designed to limit the individual says a lot about current group-think and why these exist as hidden control mechanisms. Our current group structures are designed to create individual dependence, not to support individual sovereignty or genuine group cohesiveness.

There are many, many community structures to explore in this quest and it is not the purpose of this essay to explore all the possible forms of community that might abide. The fact there are community structures based on narratives that create individuals almost independent of Modernity should be enough to give hope to someone wanting to be part of such a community.

The only factor is the individual in almost all these cases is going to have to do the hard work of creating this group and the narrative that guides this group. This will not be an easy task - but it is one vitally needed and required by anyone really wanting to be independent of Modernity.

 

Enjoy Yourself Right Now

Now, you know you are not a slave to anyone. So make your liberation a joyous one. Do not delay joy or gratification until some future time. Make sure whatever you replace Modernity with is filled with personal joy for you and for all those around you and then do everything you can to enjoy this moment. If you cannot enjoy this moment, then do an honest self-examination as to exactly why you are not able to enjoy this moment.

You have done everything you can to rid yourself of your dependency on Modernity, so there is no reason to rob yourself of this justified reward for your sincere effort. Make joy a primary aspect of all the structures and actions you put in place for yourself and your group. This joy must exist inside the structures of sustainability you have built to sustain the group as well as the individual.

Remember, life is a verb. Make this verb as happy and fulfilling as you possibly can. Life will always have its sad and scary moments; but those can be offset by as much joy as possible.

Creating a personal life foundation based on these few starting steps will most likely be one of the most challenging tasks you could ever set for yourself, tasks almost impossible to achieve without a great deal of difficulty - but well worth the effort and the sweat-equity required. No one coming from a lifetime of conditioning under the institutional Lies of Modernity can expect to easily step into these ways of thinking and living. But each individual can work on these foundational positions, step by step, internally and externally, until a workable form of transition into this new way of being presents itself as both viable and workable.

The most important thing for each person to do, though, is to give one’s self the grace to move forward with this new life gently. It will be difficult enough to do, even with the added support of your new non-physical allies and assistants. Don’t add to the burden by pushing yourself beyond the limits that allow you to simply enjoy the process of great change you will be moving through.

The hard reality is a change in thinking and acting such as I am suggesting may well take generations to achieve. But if not now, when? And if not with us, with whom?

 

On the Beach

30 October 2014

9:00 AM

Iba, Zambales, Philippine