https://www.brighteon.com/720894bd-8257-4898-a3f1-09c0574107ea
DELUSIONS
Mainstream Americans are living in an artificial world
(mini-documentary by Dr.Mike Adams)
Neelesh Marik returns to the Cosmic Matrix podcast to talk with Bernhard Guenther about the ultimate riddle of the world: the problem of evil, the Divine, and the Undivine from the perspective of Sri Aurobindo’s Integral Yoga. They discuss the exoteric (outer) events in the world in light of the esoteric (inner) work, the occult domains of evil and how they manifest in the world and within us, and what needs to be done during this critical time of human history to avoid extinction. They talk about the origin of Evil, the trap of unconscious activism, the subtle distortions of Truth, the different levels of the splitting of humanity, what it takes to be a spiritual warrior, and much more.
I’ve always had a propensity to look too deeply into the darkness of the world. It draws me in, and in a sense I love it. Most of us do.
I recall when I was young seeing a bootleg VHS of Faces of Death with my middle school friends. Back then we didn’t have the internet where you can now click a few buttons and see the most disturbing images possible. Simpler times.
Someone recently sent me an email that I can only describe as a proper psychic attack. When I opened it up there was a large image looking right at me. Definitely the most disturbing thing I’ve ever seen, and to be honest it fucked me up for a few days.
It wasn’t until I had a conversation about it with a friend that the psychic energy of it began to dissipate, but the experience reminded me of my own lust for darkness, which I believe many of us have. It’s really the only thing that can explain to me why people can be so demented and cruel.
I never thought that taking in images of death and destruction were anything to worry about until in 2013 during one of my first journeys with the shamanic plant medicine Iboga.
Iboga is a fascinating experience, and I’ve described it as a lifting of the veil between the conscious and subconscious mind. You get a chance to see into the abyss within your heart and soul and ferret out the crud swimming around in there. And there is a LOT of crud in there.
During that journey I learned that every image, every negative thought, and every psychic impression you’ve ever consumed sits deep within the soul rotting and festering, coloring you darkly in subtle and not so subtle ways.
So many talk about trauma and the need to resolve the traumatic experiences of your past, but I’ve heard few discuss the traumatic effects of consuming decades worth of violence and death, both the theatrical crap we call entertainment and raw footage of real human brutality.
I’m thinking about this today because I received an email this morning from someone who recently took a job at Google reviewing disturbing content to determine what needs to be censored from the search engine. Her work has her routinely looking at the most disturbing stuff imaginable, and she’s having what I see as a spiritual crisis, and is stuck between the need to have a job and income and knowing that the work is disruptive to her well-being.
Jung talked about the shadow side of man, and how important it is to integrate this part of you in a healthy way in order to live a mentally healthy and stable life. We are shadow beings. We are drawn to darkness, because we are in part darkness. When you’ve learned how to appropriately integrate this energy in a healthy way, the deeper into the abyss you are willing to look proportionately expands your ability to see into the light. It’s a double-edged sword that requires intention and discernment to handle.
In other words, shadow exploration can be a path to personal growth and expansion, but when there is no consciousness to how one approaches the darkness in our world and in their life, it pushes the psyche out of balance, and, as I believe, creates conditions ripe for mental illnesses like anxiety, depression and other neuroticisms.
As a self-sabotage coach, I speak in depth about how the contents and programs in the subconscious mind are the source of your self-sabotaging behavior. The subconscious does not know the difference between reality, what’s on the TV screen, or even what you visualize within your own mind. When you’re consuming darkness intentionally or inadvertently, the subconscious sees it all as real, and you’re adding crud to your programs that will effect the way you feel, think and behave.
Nietzsche figured this out a long time ago…
“Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster… for when you gaze long into the abyss. The abyss gazes also into you.” –Friedrich W. Nietzsche
Protect your subconscious minds, people. It’s far important to your health, wealth and happiness than you may realize.
Dylan Charles is a self-mastery and self-sabotage coach, the editor of Waking Times, and host of the Battered Souls podcast. His personal journey is deeply inspired by shamanic plant medicines and the arts of Kung Fu, Qi Gong and Yoga. After seven years of living in Costa Rica, he now lives in the Blue Ridge Mountains, where he enjoys serving, training, and spending time with family. He has written hundreds of articles, reaching and inspiring millions of people around the world. Follow Dylan on telegram here, and sign up for his weekly newsletter here. On Facebook.
Dylan is available for interviews and podcasts. Contact him at [email protected].
This article (Staring Into the Abyss) was originally created and published by Waking Times and is published here under a Creative Commons license with attribution to Dylan Charles and WakingTimes.com. It may be re-posted freely with proper attribution, author bio, and this copyright statement.
Let’s get one thing straight. I’m not writing for your mother-in-law. I’m writing for you.
Your mother-in-law is still deciding whether to vote for Jimmy Carter or Ronald Reagan. She thinks J Edgar Hoover is Herbert Hoover.
A few readers have suggested I should make several adjustments, so my work is more “accessible” to the general public.
The general public is a collectivist cheeseball which has been sitting in a frying pan, with the flame set on low, for a very long time.
I published my first article in 1982. I’ve never made any adjustments.
Since then, I’ve only worked one change. I stopped taking assignments from editors. I don’t like them. I’ve always had the crazy notion that if editors want writers to carve away THIS and add THAT, they should write the pieces themselves. There are three reasons they don’t: they can’t write; they’re filled with self-importance; they’re lazy bureaucrats.
For me, writing has ebbs and flows. They depend on me finding a tag-end I like, which I then pull on. The article then takes shape. The tag-end might be a headline I read. It might be some absurd insane sentence uttered by a news anchor. It might be a scene in a dream. It might be an answer to the question, “What would be crazier than the last tag-end I found?”
If I can’t think of a tag, I sit here and stare at the wall and keep thinking. Or I watch a cooking show. Or I go over the five or six pretentious scuzzy reasons doctors deploy when they assure readers the virus exists. Or I fly my Gulfstream to London, where I dine with the Queen, and discuss how non-existent climate change will force us to eat insects for protein. Or I find a medical review admitting that, in 2001, only 18 flu deaths in the US could be traced to a flu virus. Actually, the number is zero. Or I reread the NY Times opinion piece which revealed the three major clinical trials of the COVID vaccines were designed to show the injection could prevent nothing more serious than cough, chills, and fever—after which the Times never mentioned the subject again. Or I consider how fear of the virus and love of the virus and the conviction the virus exists merge like a subconscious nursery rhyme. Or I imagine a time when men and women would have laughed off orders to lock down and would have gone about their lives without a second thought. And THAT’S a tag-end:
JULY 20, 2020. Look at what happened to a great city, to the people of that city, who over several decades were subjected to forms of cultural mind control…and who then became DIFFERENT.
…People turning into caricatures of themselves. In the process, they were ripened for takeover—which is what happened when the fake pandemic was declared.
New York. Once upon a time, I was married to it. No more. But it’s still my city.
I was born there. One of my early memories was looking across 2nd Avenue at a candy store. This was 1943. The candy store no longer sold Fleer’s bubble gum—the best bubble gum—because the latex was needed for the War effort. But the rumor was, they peddled it under the counter for an exorbitant two cents a chunk, with the cartoon inside the wrapper.
When I was 22, after growing up in the suburbs, I moved back to NY and for several years lived among some of the smartest asymmetric people in the world. You could have an argument with the dumbest person in the city and it would be a smart argument. Everyone had opinions, and they could back them up. There was no such thing as political correctness, believe me. If you had uttered the phrase, no one would have known what you were talking about.
New York was a great city. The thing was, no one was proud to BE a New Yorker. That false synthetic layer of goo came much later. In the old days, there was no pose, no artificial front. People had ideas, they had talent, they had survival instincts.
The best jazz musicians in the world lived and played in New York. When a giant like Bud Powell was playing at Birdland, you could get in for a dollar and sit in a hard wooden chair and listen to him until two in the morning. A buck for the greatest pianist in the world.
And now, the city is wrecked and boarded up, and the people are locked in.
Out on the street, the few aimless glazed pedestrians wear masks. They’re not the same people. They’re replacements. Pods.
OVERNIGHT, the people of New York could throw off the whole phony pandemic, not only for themselves, but the world. They could come out of their apartments and go back to work, defying the petty little lunatics like Cuomo and De Blasio. They could open up their restaurants and bars and stack in the customers. They could start building again. They could open wide the libraries and museums and fill the concert halls. They could open up the little groceries to all comers. They could laugh in the face of the public health authorities.
And it would be OVER.
In 1960, that’s exactly what would have happened. And not for some cause. Not for the chance to do a little virtue signaling. Not for the sake of “being a New Yorker.” For survival. For continuing to live their lives, people would have shaken off that slimy fraud Fauci like a five-minute bad dream. A joke played by an idiot.
They would have looked at the screaming lockdown headlines in the newspapers on the corner stand and shrugged and gone on their way. “You’re telling me I can’t walk down the street and listen to John Coltrane at the Jazz Gallery on a summer night? You’re out of your mind.” And the Termini brothers, who owned the club, would have packed the place even tighter than usual, just to thumb their noses at the mayor and his con artists. They would have put in a call to their contact at Democratic Machine headquarters. And it would have been OVER.
No one would have obeyed. Independent scholars would have walked into the 42nd St. library, as they did every day, and gone to the reference desk and asked for manuscripts on ancient Roman law and the Walt Whitman papers and the early maps of the city. The quiet upstairs macrobiotic restaurant on 2nd Avenue would have served supper as usual. The Cedar Bar on University Place would have turned in another raucous night. The Irish bars would have been jammed. A chamber orchestra in Washington Square Park would have performed Vivaldi, with the sounds of traffic from 6th Avenue in the background. Miles Davis would have played two sets at the Apollo. If Ravi Shankar was in town, he would have laid out a few stunning hours of ragas at the Asia Society and adjourned to an East Side apartment to continue on until dawn. No one and nothing would have obeyed a lockdown.
Pandemic? Virus? Get serious.
That New York…where is it? Who are all these flat minds swearing allegiance to medical fakery? Are they passively waiting for gold stars on the blackboard from the teacher?
In the old days, New York had DISDAIN. You didn’t get by with platitudes. You didn’t blithely mouth Left or Right and get away with it. The city was plugged into its own non-stop bullshit detector. What did you have to OFFER? Aimless blabbermouths were consigned to a special circle of Hell.
There was no political PROGRAM. Today’s “New Yorkers” would apparently be afraid to live in a landscape like that. They wouldn’t know which way to turn. They have a desperate need to become slaves to an IDEA. In this case, an idea about a virus.
In the 1960s, concealed by the Vietnam War, the city was undergoing a transformation into a cartoon of itself. That’s when the synthetic notion of “being a New Yorker”—based on nothing—started to take hold.
There were many reasons. The shrinking value of the dollar. Crippling street drugs. Mind numbing leveling television. The raising of children to be targets of advertising and fetish objects in a consumer society. The new New Yorkers were taught that liberal politics were a necessary adjunct of their status. Liberal equaled big government. Messaging from every possible quarter was aimed at turning the people of the city into servants of share and care as defined by government…
Going to doctors and acquiring serial diagnoses of physical and mental conditions was starting to take off as a social trend. The medicines and the vaccines were, of course, toxic. The city was taking in more immigrants than it could handle. There weren’t enough jobs. Desultory schools were steamrollered. Literacy was being destroyed. Even skyscraper architecture was moving away from unique structures like the Chrysler and the Empire State, into functional steel and glass boxes. Signs of the minds.
With people dumbed down enough, they would fall for any con. Any piece of shiny gloss. And it was eventually provided:
New York media covered the rise of New Money in the city as if it were a perfumed cultural signal of a dawning utopia. By the 1970s, envious intellectuals in the city were reading and admiring hyped chronicles of the emerging $$ stars of Manhattan: painters, fashioneers, stock speculators. And yes, Trump. The content of these celebs’ characters was entirely irrelevant. All that mattered was that their hustles were ringing up extraordinary sales in inflated dollars.
And finally, to view how thin and vulnerable new New York had become, and how brainless—when, in 2020, the fake pandemic hit, and lockdowns were announced, the population promptly folded, stayed indoors, went into mask and social distance mode without a whisper of protest.
In short order, the city was made over into abject wreckage, shuttered, obedient, loyal to a psychotic delusion.
In a silly song he recorded long after its internal demise, Frank Sinatra said New York was the city that never sleeps.
Now that’s all it does.
CODA: If the September 11th attacks had happened in 1960, there would have been no need for Billy Joel or the Yankees to rally “all New Yorkers.” The people of the city would have looked at the firemen and cops as human heroes risking everything for other humans. Period. That would have been enough. More than enough. That would have gone deep into souls and minds. Where it counts.
—Entraining minds. The job of the Super-State. Reworking independence into devotion to a synthetic pose of altruism.
But in this phony pandemic, it’s good to be BAD…
I’m not talking about looting and burning. I’m talking about a different type of BAD. Think it through. Figure it out. It’s always there, like a tag-end. You just have to pull on it…
Feb 9, 2022
Is it good or bad to have sex? Is sex love or physical activity? What is sexual energy? Flirting, sex, power: is it the dictatorship of images? What is chastity? What is celibacy? How does the system impose false feelings on a person? Is sex a hindrance on the spiritual path?
Mysterious female nature. A woman as a source of power that begets life. Why was a woman forced to forget that she is a mother? Why was it said in ancient times that a woman is forty steps closer to heaven than a man? The internal fire of Love: how are the powers of Allat generated?
What does a man not know about his own nature and the nature of a woman? Why do men strive for immeasurable wealth and power? What is the basis of sudden changes in mood, desires and passions? Why do men need power over women?
FEMALE GROUPS IN THE HISTORY OF HUMANITY.
ALLAT SISTERS: the heavenly birds, the spiritual heritage, and the true wealth of humanity. Why were the Allat Sisters called “heavenly birds” and deeply worshipped in ancient times? Why were there no wars and violence during a certain period of humanity’s history? Allat’hiara as assistants to the Allat Sisters. What was the cause of a decline in humanity’s spiritual development?
Sophia’s group of the Knights Templar. What did the invincible might and secret force of the Knights Templar consist of? What was the Templars’ historical mistake?
A sensational letter by a famous God-fighter. What happens to those who oppose spiritual forces, and what is this fraught with for society? What is hidden behind sodomy?
Why can we recently observe a worldwide trend of decreasing sexual activity among people? Why are children with a development delay born? Why is the “celibacy syndrome” observed? The end times. Warnings of the ancients regarding the advent of the Angel of Apocalypse. The time of choice and decision-making. Whom do you serve?
Videos with Igor Mikhailovich Danilov: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list...
"THE SERVICE" https://allatra.tv/en/video/the-service
"CLIMATE. THE FUTURE IS NOW" https://allatra.tv/en/video/climate-t...
Anastasia Novykh. Book AllatRa https://allatra.tv/en/book/anastasia-...
Aug 17, 2021
As we know, there are many people who believe in the existence of viruses with all the certainty and passion they can muster.
After exhaustive research over a period of 14 years, in the lab, I’ve isolated, purified, and identified 16,768 distinct types of these virus lovers.
I’m now negotiating with Pfizer to develop a vaccine against each type. (Pfizer doesn’t care what a vaccine does; it only cares about marketing and money.)
From my vault, here is a profile of Type 6,659. See if he seems familiar.
Of course, he thinks of himself as “science-minded.” He likes models. He LIKES the notion of vast interconnected systems. Studying these systems feels stabilizing. Also feels like a warm bath with soft music in the background.
Closed systems—with the emphasis on CLOSED—appeal to him. Like crosswords puzzles.
Games are good. Chess, for example. If only the world were like chess. All the pieces on one board. Rules for their movements.
You can’t let someone move a piece off the board. That would be absurd. And you can’t let a person bring a piece on to the board from God knows where. We must have order.
Tight control.
Look at giant armies on parade, in the US, in the old Soviet Union, in China. Especially China. Perfect lines and rows. They’re heartening to him.
Look at a flower. It, too, is perfect. As you look deeper, into its structure, every tiny piece has its place.
What about its VITALITY?
Hmm. The microscope doesn’t show that. So this virus lover can discount it.
What about the vitality of a person? Must be a myth. Analysis only reveals interlocking structures. As in a machine.
Look at two people. The first one is sitting in a chair. His skin seems to be a shade of gray. He’s obviously fatigued. Not much going on. The second person is running through a field at top speed. But not just running. His stride seems to be elastic. He’s…what? Free? Alive?
This virus lover says: Nonsense. The only differences between these two people would be found and explained, inside their bodies, in the operating levels of systems.
One machine runs well; the other doesn’t. What else could be going on? Nothing. The first person needs to go to the shop for repair. That’s all.
Because closed structures are the totality of reality.
Of course they are.
Sure.
You bet.
No doubt.
Uh-huh.
And when you take away a closed system from this virus lover, this addict who must have it, he shudders.
When he was a child, he played with a train set his parents bought him for Christmas. The train ran through a little village. It was breathtaking.
The world must be made into the train set.
The idea that systems and structures rest on something else—something ASTONISHING that can’t be plugged into equations—is alien to him. It doesn’t register.
Maybe someday, when he’s 90, and he’s sitting on the back porch dozing away, it’ll suddenly come to him. But for now, he has to have Closed Order.
Nothing can be disposed of. Certainly not the existence of the virus.
If you could send a vast parade by him; the works of thousands of artists who painted, for hundreds of years, beyond any system; he wouldn’t have a clue what he was looking at.
If you told him, LIFE SUPERSEDES THE GERM, he wouldn’t know what you were talking about.
When he enters his local Whole Foods, he looks for the hand sanitizer. He needs to have that goo on his hands.
In person, he seems friendly enough. But, for instance, if he owns a business, and you could walk in and stand in the corner and watch, you’d see he treats his employees like lowly peasants.
He’s in a rage. He really doesn’t know why. But he’s madly pursuing some sort of fictional perfection which should be met but somehow can never be met. Because it’s all in his mind.
He’s huffing and puffing because he must maintain his own mind as if it’s columns and rows of figures.
Take one number away and the whole structure could collapse.
It turns out he’s wrong. Dead wrong. His mind isn’t rows of figures, and nothing collapses when he stops obsessing, except obsession itself.
But he wouldn’t know that.
And he would say he’s defending the existence of the virus as just a matter of science. Good science. The best science.
Rounding out this portrait of what I would call a high-IQ-idiot, let’s say he owns a Rolex. He wears it every day. Prized possession. He looks at it the way an adoring child looks at his father.
As a lark, a joke, a little test, you tell him you want to remove a tiny piece of the internal works of this watch. Just one tiny piece.
You’d better step back.
If he’s packing heat, he’ll draw on you.
If he has the wherewithal and the clout, he’ll call in a drone strike.
This is a man who, standing in front of the mirror in the morning, takes ten minutes to trim his moustache.
And that’s just a segment of hair on his face.
You’re talking about his ROLEX.
Virus, virus, virus. His world MUST contain the virus.
To hold off the nameless Doom.
Let him go, walk away.
Part Two
As I mentioned the other day, in Part 1, after 14 years of laboring in the lab, I’ve isolated, purified, and identified 16,768 distinct types of virus lovers.
These are people who must say the virus exists. They’re compelled, obsessed.
And in Part 1, I profiled Type 6,659.
Today, I’m going to describe Type 846.
He’s definitely “alternative.” And he thinks of himself as a card-carrying “member of the alternative community.”
But he has a problem. He observes that within his own community—which is battling against the official powers-that-be—there are RUFFIANS.
Ugh.
And these ruffians are claiming the virus doesn’t exist. A few are even saying no viruses exist.
He believes the ruffians are giving his community a bad name. The public will now see the community as generally ruffian-istic.
And to head this off at the pass, guess what he does?
He names the ruffians. He advertises them. He puts up posters on walls.
The public—which was unaware of the ruffians—and the official press and government—which already have 9,453 talking points aimed at burying the “alternative community”—NOW see the virus lover’s advertisements, and say, “Well, these alternative people are even worse than we thought they were.”
When this virus lover was a boy, he headed up a “community” in high school called Students for Academic Excellence. The main thrust of the group was: Football is overemphasized; we need to highlight young scholars; teachers shouldn’t give football players passing grades they don’t deserve.
Well, one night the virus lover and a few of his alternative pals were walking around on the football field, and just outside the end zone they saw a small pile of leaves.
One of the boys said, “Watch this,” and he lit the pile on fire, and he produced a few long sticks and a box of marshmallows, and all the boys sat down and roasted the marshmallows and ate them.
A neighbor peering through his window saw this, and the next day he called the principal of the school.
The principal checked one of the video cameras posted on a tree near the end zone, saw who the boys were, and called them into his office. He said, “What you did was terribly dangerous and outrageous. I’m going to pretend this never happened. If I catch any of you committing an infraction of any kind this year, I’ll call your parents and suspend you. Now get out of here and behave yourselves.”
So the next day, the young virus lover writes a letter, prints copies, and posts them everywhere on campus. The letter describes the horrific marshmallow incident, and concludes: “I swear I had no knowledge that Harry, Fred, and Mason were going to burn the leaves. I was there, but I didn’t participate. I didn’t eat a single marshmallow. Our group, Students for Academic Excellence, is dedicated to achieving higher test scores and overcoming the football hysteria which engulfs our campus. We do not support the marshmallow actions of a few outlaws who carry membership in our group. Pay no attention to them. They’re distracting from our goal.”
Suddenly, a number of students are talking to Harry, Fred, and Mason. “Do the leaves burn fast? Does the fire go out by itself or do you have to pour water on it? How long are the sticks for the marshmallows? Which brands of marshmallow do you buy? Do you roast them until they turn brown or black?”
A week later, having disconnected several video cameras, another nameless group of students burns a pile of leaves on the 50-yard line and roasts marshmallows and sings the Stones’ I Can’t Get No Satisfaction. Possibly, beer is involved.
Meanwhile, the parents of ruffians Harry, Fred, and Mason are having marshmallow roasts with their sons. Harry’s father, who owns a café in town, puts up a big sign above his door: FREE ROASTED MARSHMALLOWS WITH EVERY PURCHASE OF FISH AND CHIPS. His business booms.
A local band, who has a standing gig at a bar on Main Street, unveils their new song, STEAL THIS FRIGGIN’ MARSHMALLOW.
The young virus lover sends a letter to the editor of the town paper: “This is exactly what I feared. One marshmallow roast in the end zone, perpetrated by a few scofflaws, has resulted in a contagion of demeaning incidents. The national press will undoubtedly cover this and make a mockery of our county…”
Flash forward to the present day.
This is what is happening. The virus lover, who now writes for an online publication called REBELLION WITH SANITY, NO RUFFIANS ALLOWED, is penning articles which express support for the existence of SARS-CoV-2. He is receiving a number of emails from, yes, ruffians, some of whom are offering detailed arguments against the existence of the virus. This is annoying and troubling.
It occurs to the virus lover that he can, through the exercise of massive self-control, ignore these emails, forget about them, and write about other vital issues of the day.
But alas, his skin has been gotten under. He can’t walk away.
He has to advertise the ruffians.
He feels the need to distance himself from them while naming them and alerting readers to their existence.
He declares them irresponsible, disreputable, and craven.
He may be suffering from a syndrome called SELF-UNDERMINING WITH DEVELOPMENTAL DELAY OF RECOGNITION OF IMPLICATIONS ACCOMPANIED BY EXCESSIVE AND IRRELEVANT HYPER-VIGILANCE.
Finally, after he attempts to dismiss the ruffians by naming them and advertising them, he argues his own case: the virus exists because it exists. Those medical professionals who can be trusted say it exists.
Although these professionals say the vaccine is safe and effective—which claim is absolutely false—when they say the virus exists, they are absolutely correct.
It’s magic. By chance, they are horribly and dangerously wrong over THERE, but they are true-blue and majestically honest over HERE.
I admire this form of logic. It has a surreal quality which matches the surrealism of the entire fake pandemic story.
by Jon Rappoport (January 19, 2022)
January 9, 2022
AGE OF TRUTH TV Highlights [Age Of Truth TV]
From the MIB protest.
SIGHTS & SOUNDS & HIGHLIGHTS from a fantastic day......
AOT TV on Bitchute: https://www.bitchute.com/channel/uTyi...
AOT TV on Brighteon: https://www.brighteon.com/channels/ag...
“Here the ways of men divide. If you wish to strive for peace of soul and happiness, then believe; if you wish to be a disciple of truth, then search.” ~Nietzsche
In German Überwindung means self-mastery, or self-overcoming. Überwinden means to overcome. Mensch means man, or human. So ‘Self-overcoming Human’ seems to be the most accurate translation of Übermensch.
Nietzsche used the Overman as a personification of potential genius, demonstrating that Truth moves, and moving, demolishes thrones and altars. If it’s not moving, then it becomes stale. Thrones become entrenched. Alters become golden idols. Truth that doesn’t move, and keep moving, soon becomes fallacy. It dissolves into delusion. It grows uncouth.
Thus, self-overcoming is the life-task of man. If we never discover this life-task, we limit ourselves to merely existing. We become stuck. We comfortably and contentedly believe rather than adaptively and proactively seek. We would rather comfortably bow to thrones and revere altars than uncomfortably discover new ways of being human in the world. We would rather have faith than have fortitude, and often we confuse the two.
The most powerful way to prevent this merely existing—this stuck-ness, this comfortable annihilation, this confusion of faith and fortitude—is to practice the art of self-overcoming. When we self-overcome, we are forcing Truth to move. We don’t allow it to grind to a halt and become a millstone. We don’t allow it to rule over us. Instead, we use it as merely a steppingstone into higher and higher truth. We transform it into a Philosopher’s Stone.
As Nietzsche said, “And Life confided the secret to me: behold, it said, I am that which must always overcome itself.”
And so, foremost, the art of self-overcoming is the ability to continue the search despite the urge to give it up to a particular belief. It’s the ability to cease merely arriving and to focus instead on courageously thriving. It’s the ability to overcome. Let’s break it down…
‘Belief’ is an existential hang-up:
“Faith: not wanting to know what is true.” ~Nietzsche
Belief in any ideology is a spiritual camouflage pattern based upon fear. Belief is almost always fear conditioning. The statist ‘believes’ in nationalism out of fear of being ostracized. The religious zealot ‘believes’ in their particular religion out of fear of the afterlife. As Krishnamurti said, “Any activity or education that conditions the mind through nationalism, through identification with a group, an ideology, a dogma, is an impediment to truth.”
The same applies to almost every level of belief, and the more blind the belief the more fear tends to be the driving force. But fear-based reasoning can be extremely unhealthy, and even dangerous. As Nietzsche said, “Convictions are more dangerous foes of truth than lies.”
When it comes to self-development, belief tends to be the fear of growth, the fear of being wrong, the fear of stretching one’s comfort zone, the fear of the unknown. The list goes on. Perhaps the greatest fear is the fear that one’s worldview could be wrong. This fear is so powerful that it creates a kind of blind spot in our reasoning. It’s called cognitive dissonance, and we all suffer from it.
When it comes to navigating through cultural, political, and spiritual change—and all change, really—there is a level of cognitive dissonance that comes into play that amps the difficulty to near impossible proportions. The cart of cultural pressure is set so firmly in front of the horse of our reasoning powers that it seems unpassable. Our ability to progressively evolve becomes blocked by the comfort and security infrastructures we have erected. So what can we do?
We can choose self-interrogation over belief. We can choose discomfort despite security. We can choose the question mark over the period. We can choose having a flexible notion rather than a rigid opinion. We can choose to be adaptive and transformative rather than stuck in our ways. We can become gamechangers. We change the way the game is played by taking responsibility for change itself, by getting comfortable with the uncomfortable truth, by moderating our comfort and security with courage and flexibility. Most of all, we become gamechangers by admitting that we could be wrong.
If it’s true that, as Daniel Dennett said, “There’s no polite way to suggest to someone that they have devoted their life to a folly,” then it stands to reason that we simply get out of our own way in the first place so that we are not so devastated when we discover our folly.
If we rigidly and dogmatically cling to a particular “basket,” (rigid belief) then we would probably be crushed under the heavy blow that our worldview has suddenly become invalid (or maybe our cognitive dissonance will have been so strong that it keeps us mired in ignorance).
But if we cultivate an open-minded, flexible, and humorous disposition regarding our “answers” then there would never have been any basket worthy enough to hold all our “eggs” in the first place, and so we would not be so devastated. We would be more likely to simply shrug our shoulders, have a good laugh at ourselves (self-deprecating humor is a staple for self-overcoming), and then move on with our new knowledge in tow. Indeed. We would be more likely to embrace the wise words of Aristotle, “It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.”
‘The search’ is an existential jumpstart:
“What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal. What can be loved in man is that he is an overture.” ~Nietzsche
The key to keeping the search alive, then, is to keep belief at bay. All belief. Whether it’s the abstract belief in God or the concrete belief that we exist. All belief must be taken into consideration rather than believed so as to prevent falling victim to the blind spot and tripping into dogmatic thinking, which is the opposite of thinking clearly.
So, the secret to keeping the search alive is discovering the joy and transcendence of uncertainty. Where certainty bottles us up, constricts our perception, and puts up walls around our comfort zone; uncertainty shatters the bottle, unknots our thoughts, and demolishes all the walls preventing us from further expansion into Truth. Indeed. There is a virtue in uncertainty that the certain will never know.
It’s a matter of attitude. A bad attitude falls into the trap of right and wrong, of good and evil, whereas a good attitude goes beyond. It transcends. A bad attitude plays the victim; a good attitude plays with victimhood. A good attitude transforms tragedy into teacher, pain into professor, labor into laboratory.
This, the self-overcoming philosopher knows: The lodestone must become a whetstone before it can become a Philosopher’s Stone.
Transforming life into a whetstone gives us something to sharpen the sword of our self. This is the essence of self-overcoming. Where yesterday our sword was dull, having not experienced honing, today, after the honing, it is sharper. Self-overcoming is allowing the possibility of our own personal sharpening. Without honing there can be no sharpness. Self-overcoming is taking the sword of our self and honing it against the whetstone of hardship. It’s the ability to use the hardships of life, the setbacks, the slings and arrows, the ups and downs, to make ourselves stronger, resilient, more robust, and even antifragile despite the fragile culture.
Self-overcoming is honoring the grit, the coal, and the dullness within us, and, through such honoring, recognizing the vital importance that polishing, pressure, and honing have in transforming us into pearls, diamonds, and sharpness. It’s the deep understanding that in order to experience growth there must be a rub, a friction, a testing. There must be a crucible. Self-overcoming is allowing life to be a crucible for transformation, rather than a comfort zone of stagnation.
When we are in the throes of self-overcoming, the search is always on. We are continuously searching for truth. We may discover “answers” here and there—ideas, knowledge, wisdom, love—but these “answers” do not hinder our overall truth quest, they only strengthen it, they only compel it, propel it, launch it above and beyond the need for an answer. For we understand that the truth quest—allowing the journey to be the thing, forever questioning, never settling on a belief—is the answer.
Nietzsche was able to tap the depths of the human condition like no other philosopher before or after. He was able to do this because he practiced self-overcoming. His philosophy was a hammer that shattered the very concept of belief itself. It crashed through all values. It even launched us into a revaluation of all values. It taught us how it is possible to recondition our cultural conditioning. It taught us how the self can also be a hammer, and how, through the hammer of the self, new, healthier values can be created despite the rigid, inflexible, and entrenched dogmas that trip us up as a species and prevent us from evolving in a healthier way.
About the Author
Gary ‘Z’ McGee, a former Navy Intelligence Specialist turned philosopher, is the author of Birthday Suit of God and The Looking Glass Man. His works are inspired by the great philosophers of the ages and his wide awake view of the modern world.
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