So your nation mass murders poor people....

So your nation mass murders poor people in other nations for decades. You find yourself feeling guilty about it. Everyone around you ignores this reality that the nation mass murders poor people. What do you do?

Being a conscious being today is not an easy job. Most of us exist around a large majority of people who care more about their favorite football team than they do about the Chinese workers committing suicide because of the horrible working conditions at manufacturing companies for Apple iPhones.

There are many ways to approach this problem. But one thing that should be pointed out right away is that this is not a new problem.

We all remember the allegory of Plato's Cave. In this philosophical inquiry, Plato proposes we think about a cave within which hundreds of people have been facing a wall of shadows, chained and bound so that they could not turn their heads. All they see are the shadows on the walls in front of them, unaware of the light source behind them at the opening of the cave.

Nobody has ever left the cave or seen what's behind them. Until one day someone breaks free, and ventures outside of the cave to discover a completely unrealized existence, an entire world of color, light, wind, water, and life. An entire cosmos awaiting anybody willing to break free from their chains.

Plato wonders what it would be like for the conscious person to wander back into the cave and to try and describe the wonders of the world beyond the shadows on the wall. But nobody will listen. Everyone's content with the shadow world. Not a single person is moved to break free from their chains to at least try and see what the person is describing.

The Plato's Cave allegory is synonymous with today's conscious being. Whether we're talking about a person who has traveled outside of the shadow cave of fear and guilt and shame of the Catholic church and its doctrine in order to experience the real spiritual world beyond the confines of these archaic story religions, or whether we're referring to someone who has escaped the confines of the instilled ignorance of the 'patriot' who was taught to pledge allegiance to a flag and believe the nation could do no wrong, finally casting aside the lies to come to terms with the fact that millions of people have been sacrificed to needless wars so that rich, mostly white, people could become even richer and more powerful.


You go to the Zen master and say, "I have a problem. I can't seem to forget that there is needless suffering in the world. I am guilty for the mass murdering my government has been doing." And the Zen master says, "Show me this problem. Bring it to me. Hand it to me." And you say, "Well, I can't hand it to you." And the Zen master says, "Problem solved."

But just because we can forget about a problem, does not mean that it does not exist. The Zen story does not adequately handle the issue at hand. Sure, the Zen doctrine would have us clean the Zendo when there is dirt to be cleaned away. But our complex world is far beyond the simple fixes offered up by the Zen masters. The Zen masters were not dealing with a world where thousands of species were going extinct because of human activity and greed.

We can think entirely selfishly and plan our escape into new lands where the corruption and vast powers of the U.S. government do not reach. Or we can stay and fight and work for change.

Are any of those things wrong? I cannot say. Don't we all feel responsible for what happens? Aren't we all partially responsible for the direction this nation goes?

What are your thoughts on these matters?

Everyone Is Going Conscious: Thank You Snowden

Moksha, by Aldous Huxley

Everyone Is Going Conscious

"It is without any question the most extraor- 
dinary and significant experience available 
to human beings this side of the Beatific 
Vision."— Aldous Huxley 

The publication of MOKSHA pre- 
sents for the first time an authorita- 
tive collection of the prophetic and 
visionary papers of Aldous Huxley— 
his writings on mind-altering drugs, 
psychology, education, politics, the 
collective imconscious and the future 
of humankind. 

In May 1953 Aldous Huxley, while 
in the company of his wife and a 
physician-friend, was administered 
four-tenths of a gram of mescalin. 
The mystical and transcendent ex- 
perience which followed became the 
basis for one of his most fascinating 
and controversial books. The Doors 
of Perception, and set him off on an 
exploratory course which was to 
produce a profound and revolution- 
ary body of work. 

MOKSHA is an engrossing narrative 
of Huxley's preoccupation with the 
mysterious inner reaches of the 
human mind, the "visionary expe- 
rience and its relation to art and the 
traditional conceptions of the other 
world." Taking its name from an 
ancient Sanskrit text, moksha spans 

Everyone Is Going Conscious

The Wonderful Paintings of Leonid Afremov

Click here for more of Leonid Afremov's artwork<-----

Quanzhen Daoism: free pdf ebooks:

Cultivating Pefection: Mysticism and Self-Transfmormation in Early Quanzhen Daoism

The Teachings and Practices of the Early Quanzhen Taoism Masters

Nobody Knows Anything

Ladies and gentlemen: Nobody knows sh%t. That's right, folks. Anyone who has ever said they know something is full of it.

You cannot know anything at all. The idea of knowing something is a linguistic illusion. It requires two things: a knower and the known.

The only true knowledge is that of simply being. What is, simply is.

There is nothing else you can say about it. You can try. But it doesn't make what is anymore than what it already is.

When people talk to me about karma, I say to them, "Well, I suppose you think the millions of people slaughtered by the Nazis had it coming then."

Karma is the way people explain away the terrifying reality of all things being a mystery.

And so is religious mythology, for that matter.

Beyond all of this is the fact that the body is going to die. Get with that truth. Stay with it. Put mind on it. Dwell there and watch what magically happens: you become nicer.