Great insights from great thinkers – and the odd little thought from Marcus T Anthony
What if you are living someone else’s life, someone else’s story? Someone else’s WAR. Only you just didn’t realise it? And what has all this got to do with the connection between singer Elvis Costello and English Civil war figure, Oliver Cromwell? I answer these questions in my latest video on YouTube.
So, here we are at the beginning of what I call the A.I. Explosion. We are at a moment in history where change is happening at a rate that may never have previously occurred. I can’t say that definitively, because it is difficult to fully quantify the extent and impact of what’s occurring. But I…
To learn how to feel deeply is not easy. Many of the more popular or academic practices of presence do not understand this secondary level of healing. This is, of course, due to the limited aims of most of these practices. The purpose of many current mindfulness modalities is to permit calmness, and they are not usually healing practices. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why some mindfulness studies indicate that mindfulness practice results in a small percentage of practitioners becoming more depressed, anxious or even suicidal.[ii] Mindfulness may allow us to relax just enough to leave us poised at the gateway of ancient caverns of the psyche; but ignorant of the cruel goddess. Those practices may not provide us with the proper tools to navigate our way out of that murky domain.
– Higher levels of cognitive responsibility are positively correlated with expanded stages of consciousness evolution.
– The degree of our victim consciousness is inversely proportional to our level of cognitive responsibility.
– Our need for drama is directly related to our unwillingness to assume responsibility for our lives and especially our emotional experience.
– Our sense of personal empowerment (agency) is positively related to cognitive responsibility, and inversely related to our need for drama and identification as a victim.
– A key barrier to assuming higher levels of cognitive responsibility is the often unconscious fear of the emotional pain that we will (possibly) need to feel if we do so.
Yet the spirits of the ancestors move within us still; nervous, foraging ghosts with hungry bellies, scanning incessantly for sustenance, water and predators upon the African savannah. Despite our increasingly protected, controlled lives, we humans of the 21st century remain prone to the whims of our biology. And perhaps to mind fields that connect us beyond space and time to the trauma of past lives lived and ultimately lost by our desperate forebears, now long returned to the dust from which their physicality arose.
“Is the person I am online today the person that my 12-year old self would be proud to have seen me become?”
The key focus of this special symposium is to reevaluate the futures of mainland China, Hong Kong and the globe in light of the current crisis in Hong Kong. This includes all or any of political, economic, social, educational and psycho-spiritual futures.
Power and Presence begins with the disturbing proposition that the ITopian nightmare has descended and possessed us. The weaponization of the internet, politics and society is all but complete, and our souls – our authentic selves – have been defeated. Our awareness has shifted from the inner wisdom of the psyche to become ensnared in a virtual MemeWorld, which we now confuse for reality. Power and Presence is a confronting but (I hope) ultimately uplifting volume designed to shake readers from the illusion and empower them to rediscover their authentic selves, and from there to build a truly meaningful and empowered life.
Perhaps it is that in the internet age of memetic reality, we have not so much created our monsters, but distorted and expanded them to the point that they have become virtual caricatures; dehumanized leviathans towering menacingly over us, and who can only be met with brute force, and never engaged personally or in presence. Perhaps we have helped create our own Wizards of Oz, given our power away to them, then recklessly, and sometimes violently rebelled against the images that we have helped erect. Could it be that we are fighting the shadows within our own psyches, as much as fighting genuine demons, genuine oppression? Are we fighting ourselves?
When we do not forgive, we hang on to old wounds, hurts, and upsets. We keep the unhappy parts of the past alive and feed our resentments. When we don’t forgive, we become slaves to ourselves. Elisabeth Kubler Ross and David Kesler