What I expected to see when I came back to the Fairfield scene after 20 years away from Transcendental Meditation was a group of mainstay meditators true-blue to Maharishi and a group of robust dissenters, whose minds questioned everything they learned from their guru days. Instead, I found the true-blue meditators, but not the kind of dissenters I anticipated. I encountered people who had left the TM movement but hadn’t substantially changed their belief system. This latter group had changed in the way that people change hats, or redecorate their homes, leaving unaltered the structure underneath.

The dissenters had splintered into a myriad of Eastern or Eastern-related philosophies: Eckhart Tolle, Byron Katie and Andrew Cohen were popular, and Neo-Advaitin gurus had rallied many behind their minimalist philosophy. “Saints” like Ammachi visit Fairfield regularly, dispensing dharshan and picking up new recruits. Across town, small groups meet in “satsangs” to discuss their growing enlightenment or to chant songs to the gods. Heated debate is common between adherents of competing gurus, and people grow vitriolic over whether Maharishi has slept with young women or not. There is a smattering of hedonists and atheists, but ex-TMers in the Fairfield circuit mostly show up with an intact Vedic worldview. That worldview is a lens through which they perceive and measure all gurus and reality itself.

I find this disturbing. It’s rather like people who’ve been swindled by a con man, despising him for how they were treated while they continue to invest money in the enterprise he sold them on. Why doesn’t the skepticism extend beyond the procurer, to that which he procured for?

And what did Maharishi procure for? The Vedic gods. He sold us a meaningless word that was supposed to guide our minds to transcend superficial consciousness. Later we learned those meaningless words, our mantras, were names of deities. He taught us advanced techniques with the Sanskrit word “namah” at their core: “I bow down.” Mantra meditation is a form of paying worship to those who call themselves gods. When you scrape away all the fancy and misleading explanations – like “meaningless sounds” and “impulses of creative intelligence,” what you get very simply is people with their eyes closed bowing down in their minds to an assigned Hindu deity.

Of course we can explain this away using TM explanations, much like the townsfolk explained away the emperor’s nakedness using the reasoning they were fed by the tricksters who paraded him through the town. But the emperor has no clothes. Mantras worship the gods. “Namah” means “bow down.” It’s right there on the surface for anyone to see if we toss out the excuses we were handed and look at the situation with even a shred of unbiased observation.

Who are these gods, that we’re so willing to explain away as “impulses of our own consciousness”? The same gods have appeared in other religions and cultures, even in societies that had no contact with each other. They go by different names, but the entities are the same. In Hinduism, you have Indra, god of thunder, ruler of the gods, married to Indrani, queen of the gods, known for her jealousy. In Greek mythology, you have Zeus, god of thunder, ruler of the gods, married to Hera, queen of the gods, known for her jealousy. One-to-one correspondence like this is common. The gods are a global phenomenon, with their imprints on every society.

Historically, the gods exacted worship and sacrifice – blood sacrifice commonly, including the murder of humans. While Hinduism has a history of human sacrifice, it has been reduced today to worship of Kali, the goddess with her bloody tongue hanging out, whose body is adorned with a necklace of bleeding, decapitated human heads. Or Shiva, adorned with serpents, who dances on graves. Or Vishnu, whom Arjuna perceived in His cosmic form with pieces of devoured victims’ flesh sticking between his teeth. Gods feed on the energy of suffering, the fearful energy of the victim. In one South American sacrificial ritual, a bull has his throat slit, as slowly as possible. The reasoning given is that the gods cherish “live blood” as the blood with the greatest energy, so the animal must be kept alive while the blood drips from its body. In other words, the greater the fear and suffering of the sacrificial beast, the greater is the pleasure of the gods.

The Shrimad-Bhagavatum, among other scriptures, explains the antipathy of the gods for human enlightenment. According to the Vedas and the mythology of other cultures, the gods feel threatened by the human race, afraid mankind might grow as powerful as they. The gods want humans to remain ignorant and “inferior” because if man realized his intrinsic nature as consciousness, he would no longer be subject to deva control. The devas wish us to believe, and have told us throughout scripture, that their divine hands manipulate and guide the laws of nature – creation itself. For this reason we should worship them, chant to them, send them our soma (subtle energy generated in meditation). Because our energy feeds the gods and is needed by them to stay strong and in control of this material dimension. And they wish us to believe that their control is in our best interest.

Who would make the rains come or the sun shine if the gods are rightful stewards of those things and we humans didn’t support them? All creation would crumble without the blessing of the gods. That, scriptures tell us, is why we should worship, which is equivalent to paying an energy-tithe. It’s the same reasoning human warlords use against the people they dominate: pay your tax, because you need us; we will protect you. Don’t pay the tax, and we will punish you. The gods threaten to punish, even destroy mankind if he doesn’t bend before their yoke and serve them. They fulfilled that threat in the Great Flood (a story which appears in disparate cultures) and in other visitations of divine vengeance recorded in countless tales throughout cultural history.

But really, who are these characters? And do they really exist? The modern mind relegates “gods” to the overactive imaginations of pre-civilized peoples, and in so doing, dismisses the concept. But actually, deities appear in highly civilized early societies, including Sumeria, Babylon, Greece and Egypt. Isn’t it ethnocentric of us to suggest that civilizations capable of constructing the pyramids or accurately charting the course of the stars for centuries into the future, should be dismissed as childlike and ignorant when they write of their experiences with other-worldly beings? Archeologist Zechariah Sitchen, in his voluminous tomes, details the countless references in ancient writings and artifacts to beings who visited this world in fiery flying ships, who taught mankind, interbred with humans, and set up a government of divine-right kingship. Visiting beings who called themselves gods.

Kings were considered “sons of the gods,” connected to the deities by bloodline, hence their right to rule. In the Mahabharata, Arjuna’s mother was said to conceive her numerous sons by intercourse with several different deities. The first chapter of Genesis speaks of the Nefelim, a giant race that interbred with early humans. In Egypt, the pharaohs were literally “sons of the gods.” We find stories of gods interbreeding with humans to create a kingly line in Zulu shamanism and in South American Indian lore.

Time and again, in culture after culture, the gods appear doing the same things, demanding the same things. Even Christianity springs from a pantheistic tradition: Jehovah was one god among many for the Hebrews. A self-righteous fellow fond of war and genocide, he had to compete with the other local gods for the Hebrews’allegiance. Today, having beat out the competition, revered as “God” by his followers, Jehovah garners the worship not just of Jews but Protestants and Catholics as well.

How foolish and arrogant is it to laugh off the existence of a race of beings who appear in the annals of every civilization? I was amazed to see ex-TMers, who spent years feeding soma to devas through chants and mantras, whose walls are still plastered with pictures of Lakshmi, Kali and Shiva, dismiss with a toss of their head the idea that gods might exist as real persons.

Who, in truth, are the gods, and what do they want from us? Do “deities” sit at the controls of the universe, managing the laws of nature? Beings with such awesome power that our lives are in their hands? Entities we must never challenge at the risk of losing all we hold dear? I suggest, if the gods are innately as powerful as they purport to be, they would not need human worship to survive. They would be self-sufficient, drawing on the Infinite within them for every need. Instead, they tell mankind to bow down and pay tithe, and threaten in the scriptures to destroy us if we don’t. What kind of power is it, that can’t exist without feeding?

It sounds more like psychic enslavement to me. Convince the people whose world you contrive to control that they are powerless without you, that the rains won’t come and the sun will go dark if they don’t please you. Drink their soma, the positive energy of worship, and drink their negative energy, too, when you can incite it and siphon it off. Feed yourself on human astral energy, whatever the quality, and you and your race can control human life as long as the system remains intact. Planetary farming. If anyone starts to wake up a little, divert their efforts at spiritual independence by luring them into mantra meditation.

Consider this quote by the currently popular guru, Ramana Maharshi: “Repetition aloud of His name is better than praise. Better still is its faint murmur. But the best is repetition within the mind — and that is meditation. Better than such broken thought is its steady and continuous flow like the flow of oil or of a perennial stream.”

Ramana Maharshi’s statement represents mantra meditation’s goal: a state where the mind is timelessly identified with surrender to the name of one’s god – identical with the god himself. The mind itself has become self-negation at the feet of the deity. Empty of original thought and dynamic desire, the “liberated” person’s ego is dissolved: the very thing that made him or her human. All that is left is a mind-body shell, a meat-robot, that moves through life as a surrendered instrument of some greater will. I suggest the greater will is not that of the Infinite. It is the will of the god who has taken the place of one’s mind.

Does this sound like possession? It surely appears to be. Think of all the gurus you’ve met with their palpable shakti. An energy so real no one who experiences it can deny it. What is that light in their eye, a light beyond this world? Whose is that power they touch you with, embrace you with? Is it the shakti of Brahman, the light of pure consciousness? Or is it the power of Kali or one of her friends? Gurus often say they are the embodiment of Shiva, Kali, or some other god. Why do we not take them at their word?

I would like to suggest that mantra meditation turns humans into zombies who serve the agenda of the gods. That agenda is procurement of more humans and more human energy. This explains the common phenomenon of proselytizing by the religious, including fundamentalist Christians, TMers, and disciples of other varieties. Servants of “God” or the gods feel a driving need to bring in more recruits. The god that moves through them fills them with this zeal, as a hungry stomach fills the mind with an overwhelming need to procure dinner.

There are no gods, in the sense the gods would have us think of them. No one has been designated by the Infinite to control creation and administer the laws of nature. The sun shines by itself as an entity with its own consciousness. The rain and wind don’t need a god to direct them; they move where they will in harmony with their fellow elements. All things are children of the Infinite, spirits or egos in their own unique right, expressing in physical form and also in astral dimensions.

The gods are spirits/egos like everybody else. Most of the time they dwell on astral planes, which is why human senses normally don’t perceive them. According to ancient records, they have visited the earth in ages past in physical forms of their own, as entities from the stars.

They are no more divine than a ghost, no more cosmic than you or I, and no more entitled or intended to run the universe than any other gang of warlords might be. Somehow they’ve gained control of this planet, and have held that control at least since the beginning of recorded human history. But that is no reason to think the Infinite wants it that way, or that life needs to continue that way.

True empowerment is not the Indian concept of enlightenment. It is knowing what we are and living from there. We are spirit: individual and eternal, moving within the consciousness of That which created, sustains and pervades all life. Knowing this is not difficult. It only requires putting attention on that which is beneath the content of thought. Acting from this place of empowerment is natural: we can ordain reality from that quantum level. Everyone can do it. Everyone is equally powerful moving and creating in the depths of their own consciousness.

Unfortunately, people rarely do that, though, as the mass hypnosis that governs human life convinces us that karma, fate or the will of God runs the world, that we as individuals have little direct control over what happens to us. The gods are the purveyors of this global hypnosis. It serves their agenda of control. True liberation does not mean rising above the illusion of ourselves as egos. It means rising above the illusion that as egos we are cut off from the powerhouse of creation. That as individuals we are something less than pure, eternal, powerful spirits – in our own right, very much gods. Gods with a global case of amnesia.

The “enlightened” have surrendered their personhood to the deities who control their meditations. Their bliss is the euphoric stupor which their appeased deities grant them as reward. The words, the thoughts, the desires of the enlightened are not their own any longer, but those of their controlling god. The word “zombie” is appropriate because of its meaning as the walking dead.

But all is not lost for such people. No one can keep the human soul enslaved against its will. An act of personal empowerment, of willfully recalling one’s ego, must surely destroy enslavement by any possessing entity. One can recall surrendered pieces of one’s being as a magnet can recall iron filings. Native American traditions speak of our ability to do just this, calling back the parts of our lost personhood.

When people cease to surrender their energy and spirit to those who call themselves gods, the deceivers will lose their power over this dimension. They will shrink back to “normal size,” entities responsible for themselves like everybody else. Our world will know a freedom, creativity, harmony and joy it has never demonstrated in its history, because interdimensional manipulation will cease. The suffering on this planet, god-inspired and god-feeding, will dwindle and disappear. The need to kill to eat will no longer exist. Sickness, aging and death will have no substructure. Each wonderful created being – animal, human or astral – will thrive on the power of the Infinite source within itself, and victim/tyrant relationships, which ran the planet for eons, will fade into thin air. Living will become what surely the Infinite intended in Its original vision for the universe: a symphony of minds, not a competition; a tapestry of spirits, not a hierarchy; a garden of consciousness, not a painful struggle.

When I hear “the enlightened” excuse all the atrocities of this world by saying that in their exalted perception, everything is “perfect” just as it is, I hear “fraud.” The God I perceive in the depths of my being is not a God who is content with fathers raping infants, animals being ripped apart alive, or human sorrow so great only suicide can quell it. This kind of world is not perfect, and anyone who sees it as such has something seriously wrong with them. If the gods were really beneficent and powerful, they would not operate a world that runs like this. When their mouthpieces and procurers tell us this world is just as it should be – that shows you the true nature of the gods.

These beings are not our friends, though surely, if there are scoundrels in astral dimensions, there must be virtuous entities there as well. Perhaps the ones who don’t seek lordship over this planet are watching to see if humans take back control of our world or continue to surrender it, piece by piece, to the cosmic band of thugs who want to own it. Will we continue surrendering our governments, media, schools, workplaces, taxes and spirituality to those who would lead us farther away from personal freedom and self-actualization, closer to a world without responsibility, originality or joy? Such a world is the goal of the gods, because it’s more controllable.

Their lackeys in the political arena (many – George Bush, for instance – are genetically linked to European royal families and the god-engendered lines of divine-right kings) call this future society the New World Order. Centralized control, humans functioning on autopilot. The death of free will, passion, desire and originality – sounds a lot like enlightenment, doesn’t it. The surrender of the individual to the collective. Control of the collective by divine-right rulers, and control of those rulers by the cosmic band of thugs themselves. The rise of the great Fourth Reich.

Who were the mystical entities Hitler conversed with and took guidance from? Why was group meditation a part of Nazi protocol? Why were many TM/ New Age slogans (“established in Being, perform action,” for instance) also slogans of the Third Reich?

Total control and spiritual domination. The destruction of everything that makes life worth living. Creation imploding on itself, like a snake swallowing its tail. That actually is a symbol found in mystery schools, which were controlled by the gods.

It’s time to give up beads and mantras, chanting and bowing down to dirty feet. It’s time to fire the gurus, stand up and be the powerful, sublime individuals we are. It’s time to question the dogmas we swallowed whole from Vedic tradition and take a closer look at what is happening when we meditate.

It’s time to reclaim our birthright, our divinity and this Earth. Only we can do it, as the conscious beings we are. As Alice in Wonderland said, turning and facing the Red Queen’s army that was hot on her heels, “Pooh! You’re nothing but a pack of old cards.” That army toppled, turning into a heap of playing cards the moment the girl broke through her bad dream. Our controllers too will topple, and dragons will turn into geckos. It’s time to give up the cosmic illusion and de-hypnotize.

Bronte Baxter

© Bronte Baxter 2008

Anyone may copy or republish this article on another site as long as they include the copyright and a back link to the “Splinter in the Mind” website at www.brontebaxter.wordpress.com

Link to the original article

Arlo Guthrie

The climate of the 60s: America’s youth uprising. Questioning everything, challenging “the system” and the established worldview. Refusing to serve in a war, bringing about the end of it. Experimenting with sex and drugs, toying with every new or forbidden philosophy. A better world was around the corner – we were sure of it. Soon we’d be, as Arlo sang, “walking hand in hand with every man, sleeping in the sun with everyone.” The times, they were a’changin’.

Fifty years later, the world is no utopia. We’ve had two more wars. The only sleeping in the sun we do is on vacations. There’s less freedom, more surveillance. Independent journalism has virtually disappeared, original voices in the press replaced by dumbed-down TV nightly news. Our schoolteachers teach to standardized tests instead of teaching to kids.

What happened? Where have all the flowers gone, and all the flower children? How did something as radical, colorful and vital as the hippy movement simply vanish one day when no one was looking? Perhaps the answer lies with the Maharishi.

Maharishi Mahesh Yogi (2007)

Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, 1970s version. Founder of Transcendental Meditation and the Students International Meditation Society. SIMS was an organization that descended on US campuses, grabbed pothead kids by the scruff of their raggedy necks, cleaned them up and turned them into upstanding members of society.

Just by giving them a mantra and teaching them to meditate. It soon became the rage – hippies converting to TM, trading in swear words for mantras, tie-dyed shirts for three-piece suits. Most kids were recruited to become teachers, pulling in still more people.

In 1975, Merv Griffin featured Maharishi on his prime-time TV show then started TM himself. First promoted by the Beatles, the giggling guru’s meditation program grew mainstream, with courses taught in corporations and schools so executives could relax and students could focus.

A virtual army of TM teachers covered the globe, with centers in every major city, talks in every suburb. Maharishi said that world peace would happen – better yet, an ideal world – when enough people globally found inner peace by practicing TM.

I was among that army, personally instructing 350 people in the course of six years. I fell in love with a starry-eyed boy, and we were going to create utopia together. We preached the message of transcendence: taking the mind inward to bask in its Source, the state of pure awareness, from which all good things spring. We drank of those waters daily. Refreshed from contact with the supreme, we’d return to the world energized for more lectures and teaching.

It was a glorious time. Hope was everywhere. Gone was the contentiousness of our generation. We were avant-garde leaders now, shouting a new message, a new answer, to the world. Challenging authority became a thing of the past. (Maharishi taught that people should respect it.) Working within the system, we were told we would bring about change, and change would happen by raising people’s consciousness. Get them all to meditate, and problems would vanish from this earth.

We truly believed it. The idea was radical, new, and to our young minds it made sense. TM opened a brand-new vista on the future, where troubles, all born of man’s separation from his pure infinite nature, would spontaneously disappear. The ex-hippie army was passionate: our full love and energy went into achieving Maharishi’s dream for the world.

Hippie recruits who didn’t feel called to become teachers found their way in businesses and vocations, becoming productive members of society. Those from wealthy families supported the movement with gargantuan donations, and received places of influence directly under Maharishi. It was only a matter of time until the world would be transformed and mankind would enter a New Age. Maharishi called it The Age of Enlightenment.

But something happened on the way to paradise. Slowly and subtly, the tone of the guru’s teachings changed. What used to be 20 minutes twice a day became hour-long, then 90-minute, meditations. The mantras were reshaped into “advanced techniques,” and chanting and Vedic readings (hymns to the gods) began. In a bold move, Maharishi began teaching courses in TM-Siddhis, a slew of paranormal abilities which he said humans could develop. Turning invisible was one of the siddhis; levitation was another.

Maharishi Effect

Butt-Bouncing

People took the siddhi training, told that it would elevate their consciousness. But instead of flying, people were bouncing around cross-legged on foam rubber mats on their posteriors. Flying is coming, Maharishi promised – keep practicing: frog-hopping is only the beginning stage. No one turned invisible, and no one demonstrated the other special abilities the several-thousand-dollar siddhi course was supposed to teach. At the time of this writing, 30 years after the inception of the TM-siddhis, no one in Maharishi’s organization has yet demonstrated any levitation beyond frog-hopping.

Meanwhile the movement snapped photos of smiling butt-bouncers caught in mid-air and plastered the pictures on posters and fliers as advertisements: “Come learn yogic flying.” TM teachers who completed siddhi training were called “Governors of the Age of Enlightenment,” because Maharishi said our elevated consciousness would regulate negative tendencies in the world. Governors were told not to reveal to TM teachers or meditators that butt-bouncing was all that was being achieved on the siddhi courses to date. That would spoil the innocence of the new initiates, interfering with their ability to learn.

For the first time, more than a few disciples started questioning. Why was TM deceitful in its advertising, pretending that people were flying? Why were we asked to pay thousands of dollars for something that didn’t work? And how had a simple meditation technique, that was supposed to be all we needed for cosmic consciousness, gotten so complicated?

Originally, we signed on for a nonreligious “relaxation technique” practiced a few minutes twice daily as an adjunct to dynamic activity. TM had its roots in Hinduism, but we had ignored that. As teachers or “initiators,” we had to perform a “puja,” a ritual of offerings performed on an altar before a picture of Guru Dev, Maharishi’s master. We were ordered to do this in the presence of every new initiate before dispensing their mantra. We were to kneel down and bow before the picture, making a hand gesture to indicate that the student was expected to kneel down, too.

At the time we teachers convinced ourselves that we weren’t being deceptive. Maharishi said the initiates would understand in time, after their consciousness was raised through meditation. He repeatedly told us that TM was not a religion. As if saying it enough would make it so!

But when the TM-Siddhis started, things got even more religious. We were instructed to read prayers to the gods after every meditation and to listen to audiotapes of chants to Hindu deities as we fell asleep at night. Maharishi reassured us: the gods are not actual personal entities but “impulses of creative intelligence” that exist within ourselves. The fact that Hinduism anthropomorphizes deities just signals immature consciousness, he said, and that, of course, was something the movement was far too sophisticated to be guilty of.

The changes in the movement were so gradual that I hardly blinked an eye the day I got my own advanced technique, which consisted of adding the Sanskrit word “namah” to my original mantra. I didn’t quite understand, as I was told the mantras were meaningless sounds that have a beneficial effect on the nervous system. I didn’t know any translation for my mantra “Eima,” but I did know, from the puja, what “namah” meant in English. It means, “I bow down.” Who was I bowing down to, I wondered? Well, it must be a god. “Eima” must be a name for her, and she must be my escort on the path to higher consciousness. Another hidden teaching, obvious only to an advanced spiritual aspirant. I felt privileged and superior to be let in on the secret.

Around this time in the movement, many people started to complain of physical problems, as well as irritability and/or depression. Once I was assigned to spend the night guarding one meditator who was being sent home from a siddhi course because she was “unstable.” She was being shipped out the following day, and course leaders were concerned that she might harm herself or create an embarrassing scene in the meantime, hence her need for a “guard.”

In 1978, an article appeared in Psychology Today reporting that “a substantial number” of individuals develop “anxiety, depression, physical and mental tension and other adverse effects” from meditating. (San Francisco Examiner, September 10, 1989) The scientific criticism was just starting. While over a hundred studies had been done by TM scientists showing outstanding benefits from TM for mind and body, new studies by independent researchers failed to corroborate such claims. Some new studies even suggested adverse mental and physical effects resulting from meditation (depersonalization, the onset of mental difficulties, psychological disorders). TM was accused of failing to conduct double-blind experiments, and of influencing test results with the prejudice of the tester.

One insider, a friend of mine who was exceptionally devoted to Maharishi and who worked with TM psychologists as their research assistant, became shaken and left the movement when she found the scientists she worked with doctoring test results to make them better conform to Maharishi’s desired outcomes. (See the following site for more about independent studies done on meditators: http://minet.org/TM-EX/Winter-94)

Maharishi International University

Around this time, people started leaving the movement, but most of us held strong. A meditating community had sprung up in Fairfield, Iowa within and on the borders of Maharishi International University. The town became home to a thousand meditators, teachers and TM “governors,” many of whom had a hard time fitting into normal jobs and living situations in the world. We were told to meditate and “fly” together daily. That was the new strategy to create world peace as well as success in our lives.

Maharishi began mens’ and women’s monastic groups (the Purusha and Mother Divine programs) and encouraged people to join them as “the most rapid lifestyle for unfolding enlightenment.” People gave up dreams of love and a family to follow their guru’s advice, believing they were serving their enlightenment and the highest social good. My best friend, intensely in love with her husband, was divorced by him when the monastic programs started. He became a celibate, while my friend tried to live as a nun with her broken heart. Within months she developed cancer, dying a couple years later. She forewent Western treatment to pursue an alternative healing system: Ayurveda, India’s ancient “world medicine” which then was being revived by Maharishi. Her physician was Deepak Chopra, at the time TM’s poster boy and its leading Ayurvedic physician. My friend Sharon withered away and died, but Ayurveda grew in popularity.

What troubled me most about the movement in the 80s was a growing sense of subterfuge and surveillance amidst an atmosphere of increasingly artificial “positivity.” Movement leaders instructed the rank and file to “never entertain negativity,” which meant never criticize and always wear a happy face.There was a sense that we were being watched, that unknown people within the organization had been assigned as spies for the rest of us. Any person suspected of entertaining doubts about Maharishi and the movement or visiting other spiritual teachers would find themselves refused admittance to new courses or group meditations in the central “flying” hall. The outcasts were never told what they had done to merit excommunication. “You know,” was the cryptic reply, or “Reapply in a few months” whenever the rejects asked, “But what did I do?”

The significance of being tossed out by the TM movement was devastating to those it happened to. The depth of their turmoil can only be fathomed by understanding that Maharishi was teaching then that two twenty-minute meditations a day no longer would cut it. Regular expensive advanced courses and meditating with the group in the flying hall had become pre-requisites not just for world peace but also for personal salvation. Unless you wanted condemned to many future lifetimes of ignorance and suffering, it was vital to keep up with the program. Our goal was liberation, enlightenment: an egoless state where blissful “pure consciousness” suffuses the awareness at all times, trivializing everything that used to seem important. In enlightenment, nothing touches you, success and loss don’t affect you.

Because liberation in this lifetime required staying on the good side of the TM “gestapo,” people became artificial and prone to quoting movement slogans in front of each other. Everyone wanted to appear kosher so they could stay on the campus and evolve.

Man on the Moon

The movie Man on the Moon depicts what happened to Andy Kaufman, a Hollywood comedian and TM governor who after years of movement involvement was found to be mysteriously wanting. There is a scene where a smiling TM-Siddhi administrator informs him he is not welcome on Maharishi’s campus anymore, no reason given. For an earnest meditator, that was like telling a cancer patient the drug he needs to live is being withdrawn.

In 1987, when I left TM and Fairfield, I had lived 17 years within the movement’s perimeters. I’d seen the world go from flower power to mantra power. My friends had changed from buoyant folks delighting in free expression to paranoid people with phony smiles and legislated attitudes. It took me two years to break free of the thinking that kept me in Maharishi’s orbit. It felt traumatic, like a failed marriage. I didn’t know what was happening, but I knew I could no longer be part of it.

In the 20 years since I left the Transcendental Meditation movement, Maharishi raised the price for learning to meditate into the thousands. Disciples able and willing to kick in a million dollars (apiece) were offered (in the last years of the guru’s life) proximity to him, a golden crown to wear, and the title of “raja” or “king”. Maharishi had created a “world government” he called “The Global Country of World Peace,” and his rajas are the rulers.

News of the World

I’ve come to personally know two women who confide they were sexually propositioned by the “lifelong monk.” One of Maharishi’s closest disciples from the 70s, a Swedish man named Conny Larson, published an autobiography in which he says he left the TM movement when he realized the girls who came into Maharishi’s room in the wee hours, leaving disheveled, weren’t really in there “reading him his mail.” Since Maharishi’s death last February, one of his former girlfriends, Linda Pearce, is expected to come forward with her full story (first covered in a newspaper article in 1981, some years after John Lennon announced in a Rolling Stone interview that the Beatles believed Maharishi had tried to rape Mia Farrow).

In the years since I left the movement, the truth about the mantras has also come out. The mantras (which Maharishi gave to the teachers to give in turn to the lower initiates) turn out not to be “meaningless sounds with life-supporting qualities” as he said. They are, rather, names of Hindu gods, a fact made public with the advent of the Internet. Wikipedia, in its section on mantras, lists three of the mantras Maharishi gave me and other teachers to dispense: Eim, Hrim, and Shreem. Eim, says Wikipedia, is the Hindu goddess Saraswati, Hrim is the goddess Durga, and Shreem is the goddess Kali. (Wikipedia quotes these facts from “The Shakti Mantras,” by Thomas Ashley Farrand, Ballantine Books, 2003, pages 43, 124 and 138, but you can find the same information appearing dozens of places in a simple Google search.)

This intentional deception by Maharishi, perpetrated on his teachers and through them on the public, is to me the worst thing this “man of God” did to society. Through this lie, telling us that the mantras were “meaningless sounds,” Maharishi got unsuspecting Westerners to worship his gods under the guise of teaching them a “simple relaxation technique.” This is even more reprehensible than sex seduction of young disciples. He seduced the minds of 6 million people, or should we call it rape?

I’ve written elsewhere about the hidden agenda of mantra meditation, how it connects with psychic realms and why it was important to Maharishi to pass this lie off to the world. The power of recitation of the name of a god in meditation is very real power indeed. It connects a person to trans-physical dimensions, where vital energy is siphoned off, eventually crippling and destroying the personality. As individual identity disintegrates, the meditator continues his practice, because, he’s told, this implosion is a good thing. Oneness consciousness is taking the place of his formerly “limited” self. He is nearing his goal: universal awareness, the death of ego, annihilation of “the illusion of I.”

This is why the flower children disappeared. Maharishi transformed a generation of dissenters, the hippie generation, into pimps for the gods. He turned their spiritual yearnings into spiritual servitude. The ambition of 60s/70s youth to make a better world was undermined first by drugs and then by mantras that freed from drugs but turned the saved into thralls of invisible forces. Grateful thralls to boot, who would always remember that they were rescued and how much they owed to their guru.

Maharishi Mahesh Yogi: diverter of seekers, seducer of minds, stealer of souls. Any of those would be an appropriate epitaph. The mainstreaming of meditation in Western culture is this man’s questionable legacy.

Bronte Baxter

© Bronte Baxter 2008

Anyone may copy or republish this article on another site as long as they include the copyright and a back link to the “Splinter in the Mind” website at www.brontebaxter.wordpress.com

Link to the original article

The hippies were an aware generation, on the edge of discovering and achieving remarkable things. Spiritual growth divorced from restrictive religion. A government accountable to the people. Wars that couldn’t happen because kids wouldn’t serve in them. The questioning of authority. Noncompliance with idiocy. Community empowerment through back-to-the-land living and support of local trades and local commerce, breaking the growing stranglehold of Big Business.

The flower children challenged all the assumptions: spiritual, political, social, economic. They asked the big questions and were willing to go to jail for their principles. The hippies knew something was wrong with the world, and even tried to name it: the Establishment, the System. They were so close to the truth that they had to be stopped. Since they couldn’t be stopped, they had to be diverted.

The hippie movement was poisoned from within. Drugs, thrills and depersonalized sex ate away at flower-power vision and resolve. Heads were clouded by pot and heavy metal. Icons announced that getting the latest kick was the way to personal freedom. Drugs weren’t bad – the Establishment only said that to stop our having fun. Drugs would set our mind free. Multi-partnered sex would set our soul free.

The focus turned from activism to pleasure, thrills that never satisfied. We grew bloated with decadence, and longed for a way out. We wanted to be spiritual, but didn’t believe in Jesus. We lost our self-confidence, mourned our lost innocence. If only someone would show us the way back to feeling wonderful again.

That’s where Maharishi found us in the 1960s and 70s when he made his trips to America. He tossed life vests into our turbulent sea. We followed his voice and made it to the shore. We’d be forever grateful.

The hippies could not be allowed to grow into adults and assume responsible places in society. Not without being purged. Our enemies corrupted us, and then we begged for purging. One of their own, Maharishi obliged us. He taught TM to take our “stress” away. We gladly gave it to him. But “stress,” our cares, were attached to our souls. When TM took them away, it took part of us with it. Instead of working our problems through and becoming integrated, we gave them to a mantra, the hypnotic song that transported them, with pieces of our personality, into another dimension.

Is it a stretch to allege that the death of the hippie movement was intentional? A form of cultural genocide? The Establishment lost its critics once the hippies were assimilated. Gone were the voices crying “foul!” and “fraud!” The Establishment and the agenda that drives it wanted the hippie movement killed. Maharishi Mahesh Yogi was their henchman.

Transcendental Meditation diverted the hippies to “changing the system from within.” We were taught to respect authority, and teacher/initiators were ordered to wear the Establishment’s suit-and-tie uniform. Maharishi said we’d been wrong in our rebellion, and because he had saved us, we believed it. How could a man who lifted us from our lost lives of drugs and hedonism not be telling the truth? We never questioned the man for a minute.

Was it coincidental, the sheepifying of the flower children? Look what the gods got out of it, those psychic off-world entities the mantras carried our worship to. The hippies were too conscious to fall for the Christian religion. It seemed juvenile to us, the idea that God needed blood sacrifice, the blood of his son no less, to be satisfied with “sinful” mankind. We didn’t see ourselves as sinners, and even if we were, why would a loving God’s solution to sin be stringing someone up on a cross? Nope, it didn’t compute.

And so a whole generation was moving into adulthood refusing to pay toll to the divine. No prayer would come from the hippies. No aroma of worship would waft up to the heavens, full of human emotion and energy. No helpless cries for forgiveness from the flower kids. The psychic vampires were hungry, and they knew things were going to get worse. Someone had to convert our generation into dinner-producing devotees, energy batteries for the “divine plan.” The only way to pull that off was to give religion in the West a major face-lift.

So Maharishi took Eastern religion and brought it to the West disguised as a relaxation technique. He taught it to the hippies, saying the mantras (which are names of gods) were “meaningless life-supporting sounds.” (See Where Have All the Flower Children Gone? – Part One for a discussion of this deception.)

His strategy worked. We fell for it. By the time we learned we were worshipping gods and had taught six-million people to do the same, we were so deeply mired in “the teachings” we barely batted a blink. It was easy to just go along: so much of our will had already been surrendered to our guru and what he stood for.

I find it ironic that we who smirked at the silly idea of a decent God wanting blood sacrifice wound up sacrificing something every bit as precious as blood on the altar of gods no more decent than Jehovah. That something was our life force, contained in our consciousness. We gave ourselves away piece by piece, breath by breath, meditation by meditation, our minds lulled and soothed by a mantra, while Indra, king of the gods, drank and distributed our Soma to his clan. But I’ll get to that in a minute.

The final goal of meditation is to become a vessel for the divine, a conduit of the Infinite. Your consciousness merges with the mantra, and you become one with the word. Your body, mind, will, desires all get surrendered to the That. You become a pure vessel of divine will. The detachment you experience is called “witnessing.” You no longer recognize yourself as “the doer.” You observe your thoughts and actions as separate – they happen independently, disconnected from your conscious will or control. Someone else, “God,” is doing them.

Does that sound terrifying? Not to TMers. They’re taught dogmas that make this scenario equate with achieving the ultimate purpose of life. It’s called liberation, enlightenment. Of course, from the gods’ perspective, that’s exactly what enlightenment is: complete possession of the human personality: purpose of life achieved.

If Transcendental Meditation is as debilitating as I’ve made it out to be (see Part One of this two-part article for a discussion of the effects of TM), why is anyone still doing it?

I think there are two answers, as there are two types of meditators who could answer this question. The first group is people who only went as far as learning the initial technique, the 20-minutes-twice-a-day routine. Many of them still happily meditate several times a week, and still claim benefits. I have a friend like this who has practiced beginner TM for years. She changed her mantra to a word she made up when she learned that mantras are names of Hindu gods. She reports she continues to get the same good results, a calm centeredness when she meditates and a rejuvenated feeling as she goes about her day. On days she doesn’t meditate, she misses this.

The second group that continues to meditate are people who went deeply into “the teachings,” learned advanced techniques and the TM-Siddhi Program, and typically became teachers. While it’s hard to tell how many have left this group, it’s clear that at least several thousand still belong, judging by the TM community in Fairfield, Iowa where dyed-in-the-wool meditators came together to live, at Maharishi’s behest, in the 1980s and continue meditating together to this day.

From my experience, observing many old friends and acquaintances, veteran advanced TMers (and those who have switched to other gurus but continue to meditate) are, as a group, troubled in a host of ways. Some developed health problems at an early age. Some exhibit bizarre emotional reactions and personality or psychological disorders. Others, who claim they’re now enlightened, see themselves as superior to their fellows. One woman reports it’s a drag for her to shop these days because her dharshan (aura) is so compelling that other people helplessly follow her about, seeking her advice and attention. This person compared the rank-and-file meditators of Fairfield to “beggars” whom she must limit contact with in order to protect her high-grade spiritual experiences.

Why do the veterans hang on? Not counting those on an ego trip, the reason seems to be because “things in the beginning were so good.” People talk about how great it felt in the early days, before they learned advanced techniques or the TM-Siddhis. Many cite how TM got them off drugs. One man who lived on the outer edge of Maharishi’s inner circle for years recounts how his mother was cured of suicidal and schizophrenic tendencies when he (the son) asked Maharishi for help.

How do we explain this, cures and reprieves from drugs, if TM is bad for you? The answer lies in some subtle understandings.

First, Maharishi was a powerful man, as alleged in Part One of this article, a procurer for the gods. The powerful typically reward faithful servants, so it’s reasonable Maharishi would be rewarded by the gods with some special abilities. In the same vein, it’s no surprise that Maharishi would reward his own higher-ranking disciples. Does the fact that he healed the mother of one of his staff prove Maharishi’s work was intended to bless mankind? No more than a hunter giving a bone to his dog proves that the hunter is too kind to kill animals.

Second, let’s look at the contention of many ex-hippies that TM got them off drugs. This is undeniably the case. Maharishi’s movement required that new initiates had to “be clean” for 14 days before they could be initiated. We were told that if we cheated and took drugs in the meantime, the chemicals in our system would keep the meditation from working. Once we started the practice, we were told that if we returned to drugs, all would be spoiled. We liked the high from TM better than drugs, so we gave up drugs in its favor. That’s how Maharishi “saved” us from drugs. Not really a very big miracle.

I don’t deny that the beginner’s TM technique, as taught to new meditators, produces some positive results. It settles down the mental chatter, bringing the mind to stillness. I believe experiencing that stillness is very beneficial.I also believe consciousness is the stuff of creation, that dipping in its waters refreshes, heals, clarifies and energizes. This is why TM feels great in the beginning and produces a sense of peace plus tangible life improvements.

It’s later that the problems begin, with advanced techniques and the siddhi course. Why? Because as the initiate progresses, the toll he must pay to the gods for the privilege of spiritual experience increases. In the beginning, he was reciting the name of a god for 40 minutes a day. After advanced techniques and the siddhis, he’s reciting the name of the god along with the words “I bow down,” and the 40 minutes has grown to 3 hours. Besides that, he’s reading hymns to the gods for 20 minutes daily and listening to chanted hymns on audiotape at night as he falls asleep. How do all these god-focused extras change the meditation experience?

The mind is now deflected from experiencing pure consciousness in meditation. Advanced techniques inhibit that because the mind is too busy putting out for its deity, the god of the mantra, too busy “bowing down” to That. The gods harvest human consciousness, a source and storehouse of energy. Our life force becomes their food, and they receive it through the worship of advanced meditation.

Maharishi himself taught this, although he put a spin on it to make this seem like a good thing. He told us that the hymns we read generate Soma in the body, which the gods rightfully take from us during the hymn reading. “Soma” he defined as a substance, part physical/ part ethereal, that is produced in the body during meditation. He said this is what the Greeks meant by “ambrosia” and “nectar of the gods.” It is the duty of mankind to provide the gods with Soma, in return for which we’ll be blessed with enlightenment and good fortune. Rig Veda’s Ninth Mandala is called “Soma Mandala” in India. One oft-repeated line is, “Flow Soma, for Indra to drink.” Indra is king of the gods, and we recited such lines to him many times a day.

It’s when you reach this stage of meditation that the good effects wane and the problems usually begin, things like chronic health issues, depression, irritability, arrogance, difficulty focusing, difficulty working. Meditators are told they’re “just unstressing,” ridding themselves of the impurities in their consciousness, that in time the good feelings will be back again.

In the “flying hall” during group meditation when I was a meditator, over half the people would typically fall asleep. Yet our routine provided plenty of time for sleep. Rest was built into our schedules. I suggest that advanced meditators sleep so much because of all the life force being depleted through the Soma mandala and through the increasingly worshipful nature of the mantras.

In case any meditators were squeamish about the god thing, Maharishi reassured us that gods are not real entities in the sense we humans think of them. Rather, they are “impulses of creative intelligence,” “laws of nature” that exists within ourselves and that we’re merely activating. There was never talk of energy depletion. Always it was represented that giving the gift of Soma to the gods was an honor and duty for humans and something of great benefit to us personally. Our lives were so entwined with the TM movement by then that most people didn’t question this, in spite of all the problems we were having. We wanted so badly to believe Maharishi.

The bottom line is, TM changes as you do it. In time the initial good results turn into a curse. An allegory helps explain how this happens, and why it is so hard to break free. (A copy of the allegory appears at the bottom of this article).

There are thousands still asleep on the cosmic beach, the victims of Maharishi and other “masters” who teach that the ocean of pure consciousness cannot be accessed without a guru or mantra, without their sacred teachings. Disciples pay a high price, less in dollars than in the loss of personal autonomy. The authoritarianism of the master/disciple relationship, coupled with the stripping of the ego, work to create the surrender to “the One” that Eastern religions taut as the great goal.

Gone is self-trust and independence. People become mouth-pieces of the masters they serve. Like the nuns and monks on Maharishi’s “Thousand-Headed-Mother-Divine” and “Thousand-Headed-Purusha” programs, meditators who’ve gotten in deep turn into another head of the cosmic beast, the monster that calls itself “deity” and devours within its maw all that will bow down.

Mantra meditation not only turns people into batteries for the gods. It makes us an extension of the gods and their will. Under the guise of getting disciples to surrender to higher consciousness, gurus get their flock to surrender to the deities their mantras name and serve. Rather than becoming an embodiment of the Infinite, the advanced meditator comes to embody the entity whose name he surrenders his mind to several hours a day. His eyes become cosmic, his charisma irresistible. He is a vessel of that to which he has given himself. Like a tuning fork that hums the pitch of the ringing fork beside it, “the enlightened” entrain to the will of the beings they serve. Through them, “divine will” flows into the world, unimpeded by the thoughts, will or desires of the meditator, which have long since been sacrificed.

In time TM declined in popularity, as many disciples woke up and exited the movement. In Maharishi’s wake, other procurers for the god realm arrived on the Western enlightenment scene, writing books and riding the cosmic circuit. They converted the disillusioned and reinitiated them back into the racket, which they represented as (through them) reformed. Fairfield is awash with thousands of people who extracted themselves from the clutches of Maharishi only to march into the embrace of gurus who are even more blatant and aggressive in extracting their personhood.

The new gurus achieve this miracle by explaining that there are good gurus and bad ones, true masters and false. If you had a bad experience, it means you just had a false guru, an unfortunate experience from which you can only recover by finding a true guru. The breed of gurus who flowed into the West as TM’s heyday waned serve up new promises, attractive new personalities, and teachings tweaked to “correct” the Indian dogmas that had started bothering people. Just as TM renovated religion so those who could see through Christianity would accept its more palatable teachings, the new schools of Indianism make over the obvious inconsistencies and scandals of TM, while operating from the same fundamental lies.

The lie that you need a master to find yourself. That your guru is divine and you are ignorant. That obedience to the teacher is the door to Truth. That you’re not pure until you surrender your personhood to the One. That attachment to people, desires, or things is a mark of ignorance, but attachment to the guru bestows eternal life.

The good news is, while many continue going around in circles, increasingly more are kicking the habit. Old hippies are dusting off their old ideals and ideas. We’re evaluating the detour we took and learning from it, ready to go forward rather than ride forever on the god-and-guru merry-go-round, losing more of ourselves over time.

“Conspiracy” is not a far-fetched concept to reviving hippies. It’s what we sensed but didn’t have a word for back in the 60s and 70s. The lid is off the truth again, and people are whispering. We’re talking about it, old hippies and younger men and women of independent thought and quickening awareness. People are spinning words into a freedom-web, an anarchical Internet, spanning the globe. Through posts and blogs, forums and emails, we’re sharing truth as we find it: fact by fact, experience by experience, thought by thought, website by website.

The freedom-web is spinning not only on the Internet but in kitchens and coffee shops, on sidewalks and hiking trails, in bars and lunchrooms, across the world. As it grows, this buzz we spin will catch every liar it touches. Those who feed off human consciousness and all who serve them surely will be brought down. Not in blood and hatred, but in a new consciousness, an empowered human freedom, that does not tolerate consigning one’s individuality to others or being told by self-serving tyrants what to think and do.

Oz is not really the fierce head spouting thunder and smoke. He’s the pudgy man hiding behind the screen, frantically working silly buttons and levers. Once we pull back the curtain and reveal him, the game is up. Until then, expect him to thunder like never before. He’s desperate now and shaking in his boots. He knows we are so close to the unveiling.

© Bronte Baxter 2008

Suppose you want to go visit the ocean, only you know of no road that goes there. One day you find one. It’s owned by a man who tells you you’re free to use his road anytime you like. He seems like a real nice fellow. After you use his road a few times, though, you learn he’s been stealing a dollar from your pocket every time you pass by. You don’t mention this, as it seems a small price to pay for the use of the road. Or maybe you do mention it, and he tells you that’s his toll-road charge. He took it without saying for your own good, because if you knew you had to pay you might have backed out of your first excursion and never would have had that wonderful experience. Now that you’ve been there, he’s sure you won’t mind paying the dollar. This explanation seems a little off, but you buy it. After all, what really matters is the great time you’re having at the beach.

After a while, the man announces he’s raising the toll. Now it will cost you five dollars every time you pass. You go to the beach every weekend, and it’s great, but the price for using the toll-road keeps getting higher. It’s very expensive now, hundreds of dollars a week. You inquire again if there are other roads that will take you to the sea, free ones maybe, but the man and your friends who use the road tell you this route is the only one .

So you keep going there and paying. But after a while, the beach isn’t such fun anymore. You’ve taken a second job to support the toll-road, and by the time you get to the sea you have no energy left for anything but a nap. You only go into the water on rare occasions. While you’re sleeping on the beach, goons who work for the toll-guy patrol the premises, picking the pockets of the sleeping sunbathers. You hear rumors among the crowd that someone is robbing people, but you don’t believe it. True, you’re missing some money, but you’re sure you left it at home and only thought you had it with you.

The fact that this starts happening every weekend doesn’t disturb you. You’ve been so spacey and foggy-headed lately – you can’t expect yourself to remember if you had your money when you got to the beach or not. All that matters is the sun and the sand feel so good. You’re so tired, and they are so soothing. You’ve forgotten about boating and swimming, picnicking and flying kites in the wind, all the things you used to enjoy in the early days when you would come to the oceanside, back when it was practically free. All that matters now is how good it feels to get to the beach and fall asleep. Yours cares dissolve away. You don’t think you could live without it.

One day you wake up from a beach nap to see a couple of people flying kites on the sand, in between all the snoring bodies. A couple more people are playing in the surf. It looks fun, and you call out and ask them, where do they get so much energy? They yell back that they’ve found a free road that takes them to the ocean and they don’t have to work to pay the toll-guy anymore. In fact, coming to the ocean energizes them now, the way it used to do back when the toll-road only cost a dollar or two.

You say, that’s impossible. Everyone knows this toll-road is the only route to the beach. No, say the others, the toll-guy lied to us. This free road has been there all along. It’s even older than the toll-road. In fact, it’s not even the only free road that will take you here. There are plenty of them. They just take a little work to find, and then you’re on your way.

You hear this, and you start to get mad. Who are these guys, coming in here telling you nonsense like that, and saying bad things about the toll-guy? If it weren’t for him and his generosity, letting you use the toll-road, your life would be empty. You never would have found the beach. You are eternally indebted to the toll-road guy for that.

You wonder why these kite-flyers and swimmers are lying, telling you all the money you’ve spent on the toll-road all these years was a waste. You simply can’t accept that. It would mean you’ve been a fool, and you won’t let anyone make you look like one. No, they must be lying. They’re just here to make trouble. You lay back down in the sand, tune out everything you just heard, and fall back into the welcome numbness of sleep.

© Bronte Baxter 2008

Anyone may copy or republish this article on another site as long as they include the copyright and a back link to the “Splinter in the Mind” website at www.brontebaxter.wordpress.com

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A person determined to examine their programming and figure out the truth about the world is an adventurer. Like explorations in the physical world, those in mind or spirit can be laced with surprises and challenges, even dangers. But the person intent on truth is willing to face them, trusting in something within to show them the way.

I want to write today about that something. When cherished beliefs are assaulted by new knowledge, the foundations of our world take the hit. That means the foundations of our psyche itself, because that is where our deepest beliefs are structured, deep in subconscious mind. I don’t think a person can question and explore reality without feeling shaken, even shattered, from time to time, and I want to talk about how I personally deal with that. Because the ability to deal with that determines whether we move forward in our quest or turn tail and beat it back to base camp, trying to block out what we heard and saw in the forest.

How deep does the rabbit hole go? We still don’t know. Those of us who research the secrets of the elitist global agenda have not yet reached the end of it. I still get shaken from things I sometimes find. Here is how I deal with that experience.

I know I have a choice, whether to accept fear or whether to trust myself and the essential goodness in the universe. No one can harm me without my tacit permission, and I give that permission when I get into fear. Fear is a decision we make that we can’t take care of ourselves. Once we’ve decided that, it opens the door for harm to enter our lives. Subconscious permission counts as permission, and that’s why the manipulators of this dimension go to such lengths to secure ours.

Through religion, schooling, news and entertainment, we are programmed to accept ideas that take away our natural autonomy and empowerment. We’re taught that we are born into sin, or that we’re born into ignorance. We’re told we’re selfish and greedy, and that ego identification (cherishing our individuality) is the root of all suffering. We’re told we must forfeit freedoms so we can have safety and justice. We’re told the world is a dangerous place and only governments, rules and restrictions can protect us: the bigger they are, the better the protection.

The more we accept these ideas, the more fear takes over our subconscious minds in the form of deep-seated attitudes that tell us we can’t trust ourselves, and that we are little and powerless. By the time we are adults, our subconscious is in a pretty saturated state of self-doubt, which is why our conscious mind builds so many cathedrals to things outside ourselves that we trust to take care of us and explain the world to us. Spiritual teachers, religious leaders, charismatic politicians, celebrities – we let what they say determine what is real and what is right. Because we have no faith in our ability to know what is real and right for ourselves.

That’s unconscious fear, and that attitude is what our manipulators manipulate us through. If it weren’t there, they couldn’t touch us. It’s that subconscious acceptance of ourselves as lacking that keeps the door open to entities outside ourselves messing with us.

What’s the solution? I think, to really examine who we are. To really look at what we’re made of. At bottom, I find I’m a consciousness, a unique spiritual identity empowered with perception and creativity. I am unique and at the same time totally one with the wholeness of consciousness, the First Consciousness, in which all individual consciousness is structured and of which it is made.

Where is the lack? Where is the ignorance, selfishness, and greed that we have been told we are? Those lame concepts are only attitudes we have picked up about ourselves, not our inner reality. Before consciousness doubted itself, it was complete and perfect. That little thought, “but what if maybe I’m not?” was the seed thought that started all the chaos and suffering in the universe. It’s nothing but a wisp of fear, and it is unfounded. How can we be rightfully afraid when we are infinite, when our very consciousness is the stuff of creation, and a manager of creation?

The belief that fear is founded is the ultimate illusion. When we unseat that attitude from our subconscious, through thoughtful examination of who we really are, followed by emotional acceptance of that wonderful reality, there’s nothing to be afraid of anymore. We have found a storehouse of power and goodness within ourselves, and that is our new home base. The place we go back to when life starts to overwhelm us again.

Life cannot be scary when you know what you are made of. You can relinquish your worship of middle-men who claim they will take you to God, or that they are God, once you know you are God as much as anybody else could ever be. You have direct access to the Source, because you’re a child of the Source and part of the Source. Dogmas and beliefs you previously fell for, you can let go of now. You’re equipped for the adventure of living, and nothing can deflect you from your consistent talent for self-referral. Your personhood, established in your Source, is the authority you run things by. Nothing outside can program you again.

When I start to feel shaken by what’s going on the world, or what I’m finding in my research, this is what I go back to that always sustains me. Manipulating entities can’t mess with me, because I don’t give them permission. If I fall into temporary self-doubt and fear, thereby opening the door to their return in the realm of my thoughts, I have only to remember what I am, and they are ousted. It’s easy, once I self-examine and remember. Then the power of the Source, its creativity and joy, flow into me again. While the thought demons sit on the sidelines wondering, “How the heck does she do that?”

When I encounter new information that shakes my current paradigm and whispers I may need to let go of another belief, I take a deep breath and say, “I can survive that.” My beliefs are not who I am, they’re something I own. And I want to clear out any that don’t correctly match the nature of the universe. This puzzle-piecing business requires lots of paradigm revision. When that starts to feel scary, I focus again on who I am and re-experience that inner reality. Then I can handle anything.

Bronte Baxter

© Bronte Baxter 2008

Anyone may copy or republish this article on another site as long as they include the copyright and a back link to the “Splinter in the Mind” website at www.brontebaxter.wordpress.com

Link to the original article

Did you ever wonder why a good God would build a world where the only way to survive is by taking life? How long would you stay alive if you refused to eat? You may love animals and grow plants inside your home and flowers in your garden, but every time you eat, you destroy the life of something. A something with a consciousness, that feels and desires to live, as we do.

The other day I grabbed an onion from a basket to chop up, and I saw it had sprouted a beautiful, tender, light-green shoot. It had a life inside it, a consciousness that wanted to take root, breathe air and thrive. Any tears in chopping that onion did not come from the fumes.

I’m not a sentimentalist. I’m a person questioning, increasingly aware of an insidious thread woven through biological life. We are born, we feed, and we die. Life is a process of consuming other living things in order to stay alive as long as possible until death in turn consumes us. We tell ourselves life is a whole lot more, but it’s reduced to that as long as we must feed to survive. If we can’t stay alive more than a few months without food, how can eating not be fundamental to how we define our existence?

Eating is a requirement for biological life as we know it. It’s the thread that holds together material existence. More than a thread, it’s a chain, binding us to the law that we must consume each other. Rebelling is punishable by death.

What kind of God or gods would create a world predicated on killing? We don’t like to ask that, and we find every excuse to avoid looking at this question. But every time a dear one dies, or you find a nibbled bird in the yard destroyed by an idle cat, or you read about an animal that has suffered mercilessly, or another molested child, or a nation ravaged by a quake that’s buried thousands of living people, your mind goes back to that nagging question. Who would make a world like this? Was it truly a God of love?

According to much evidence, it wasn’t. The world was created by something else. Or if it was created by the loving God our hearts insist exists, then creation has been tampered with by someone else so merciless that it barely resembles the original divine vision. The biological universe is controlled by the law that to live we must take life or die. That is sinister. Something there is that makes us have to eat, that makes us age and disintegrate. This is the “something wrong with the world,” the crack in the universe. Knowledge of it works “like a splinter in the mind, driving you mad,” quoting “The Matrix.” Yet awakening to the truth of our predicament is the first step toward radical change. Only radical change can possibly right the fundamental flaw woven into physical creation.

And how well-woven it is. Not only does violence wind through the lives of all Earth life like the fibers of a time-bomb attached to a victim. It reaches out into space, where supernovas implode, collapsing millions of stars along with all living beings on all their attendant planets. Death and devouring are so pervasive most people can’t conceive of a world without them, or if they can conceive it, they label the concept preposterous. Yet quantum physics shows that matter is nothing but atoms: emptiness vibrating. Emptiness does not die and neither does the energy it oscillates. So why must bodies die that are made of up of these things?

Robert Monroe, in his book “Far Journeys,” writes of contact he had with a light being in an out-of-body experience. (Monroe is arguably the world’s foremost researcher on OBEs; he started an institute with trainee/researchers to scientifically investigate the phenomenon.) Reportedly the light being told Monroe that when humans die, their energy is released and harvested by trans-dimensional beings, who use it to extend their own life spans. The claim is that the universe is a garden created by these beings as their food source.

According to Monroe’s story, animals are intentionally positioned on this planet to feed on plants and on each other, thereby releasing the life force of their victims so it can be harvested. In a predator-prey struggle, exceptional energy is produced in the combatants. The spilling of blood in a fight-to-the-death conflict releases this intense energy, which the light beings call “loosh.” Loosh is also harvested from the loneliness of animals and humans, as well as from the emotions engendered when a parent is forced to defend the life of its young. Another source of loosh is humans’ worship.

According to Monroe’s informant, our creators, the cosmic “energy farmers,” intentionally equipped animals with devices like fangs, claws and super-speed in order to prolong predator-prey combat and thereby produce more loosh. In other words, the greater the suffering, the more life force is spewed from our bodies, and the tastier the energy meal for our creators.

This story told to Monroe (which threw him into a two-week depression) corresponds to reports in some of the world’s oldest scriptures, the Vedas, Upanishads, and Puranas of India. There we read that “the universe is upheld by sacrifice” (Atharva Veda) and that “all who are living (in this world) are the sacrificers. There is none living who does not perform yagya (sacrifice). This body is (created) for sacrifice, and arises out of sacrifice and changes according to sacrifice.” (Garbha Upanishad)

Again:

“(Death as the Creator) resolved to devour all that he had created; for he eats all. … He is the eater of the whole universe; this whole universe is his food.” (Mahabharata)

In the writings of Carlos Castaneda, who chronicles the life and teachings of a Yaquii sorcerer called Don Juan, we find another story of the Divine devouring humans, in this case human consciousness. Reports Castaneda:

“The Eagle is devouring the awareness of all the creatures that, alive on earth a moment before and now dead, have floated to the Eagle’s beak, like a ceaseless swarm of fireflies, to meet their owner, their reason for having had life. The Eagle disentangles these tiny flames, lays them flat, as a tanner stretches out a hide, and then consumes them; for awareness is the Eagle’s food. The Eagle, that power that governs the destinies of all living things, reflects equally and at once all those living things.” (“The Eagle’s Gift,” by Carlos Castaneda)

The idea that man must sacrifice (must kill something or be killed in order to appease the gods) is apparently intrinsic to all the world’s root religions. We find blood ritual, including human sacrifice, in the Druidic tradition, Tibetan Buddhism, among the Indians of the Americas, in Greece and Rome, Africa, China, Arabia, Germany, Phoenicia and Egypt. Even the Old Testament (Judges 11:31-40) has a little-advertised story of human sacrifice, with the Israelite judge Jephthah ritually slaughtering his own daughter to fulfill a vow he made to Jehovah.

While we may not think of Judaism as typically promoting human sacrifice, it more than promoted it if we count the genocide Jehovah demanded of the Hebrews. In one day alone, they murdered 12,000 Canaanites “and utterly destroyed everything in the city, both man and woman, young and old, and ox and sheep and donkey with the edge of the sword.” (Joshua: 6:21)

In Islam, the situation is similar. Allah, while paying lip service to the immorality of human sacrifice, orders his servants in the Koran to practice jihad against all unbelievers. “When the forbidden months are past, then fight and slay the Pagans wherever ye find them, and seize them, beleaguer them, and lie in wait for them in every stratagem of war.” (Koran: 9:5)

Peace-loving Moslems interpret such passages as “symbolic” in their desire to justify their faith, much as Christians try to justify Jehovah’s sociopathic behavior with excuses. In many ways, the god of Islam reasons and rants like the god of the Israelites. Could it be the same entity? It isn’t contradictory that he would support two separate peoples, then lead them to fight each other. Not if his agenda is to stimulate and harvest plenty of loosh.

Christianity, the religion of brotherly love, is implicated in blood sacrifice by being rooted in the Jewish tradition. The Bible declares Jesus is the son of God (Jehovah), and Jehovah announces at Jesus’ baptism, “This is My beloved Son in whom I am well-pleased.” (Matthew: 17:5) Where was Jesus when his father was slaughtering the Canaanites? Jesus himself becomes a blood sacrifice, a fact that Catholics reenact in the mass and that Protestants bathe themselves in to be “saved.” Christians are no strangers to sacrifice.

If suffering and death were part of creation that no one, including the gods, could help, there’d be some reason to be more forgiving. I might even buy the story that they need us to support them with our homage and we need them to keep the universe running. But when you add blood sacrifice into the equation, I abandon ship. It’s one thing if the gods can’t prevent earthly suffering and death – quite another if they seek it out and thrive from it – or worse yet, created it. And that’s what blood sacrifice, and the scriptures around it, indicate.

When the oldest scriptures of the world tell us we were created as food for the gods, I have to ask myself if I want to live in a universe where that might be true. The fact is, I don’t. I can no longer give my approval to that kind of reality. So if I won’t live with it, I have to come up with something better. I have to find something more fundamental than the physical universe to locate my identity in, and my power in. I sense, as many do these days, that there’s something beyond the universe as it has been presented to us, something outside this box, outside this system. That’s what I seek to know, connect with, and draw from.

Robert Morning Sky, a truth seeker of the Hopi and Apache traditions, tells a story he learned from his people about a race of beings who knew no limitations, who existed far outside this physical universe. One day one of them declared his intention to visit Earth and take on a body just for the adventure of it, for the experience. His friends cautioned him, as this universe had a reputation as amnesia-producing, a place of no return. But the entity laughed that off and promised to come back after one lifetime.

Centuries passed, and the entity never came home. One of his comrades decided to enter the physical world to go look for his friend. He promised not to get lost in matter and to return with the other individual. More centuries passed, and neither being returned. So another immortal entered physical mass, and he also never came back. In time many members of these unlimited beings incarnated in human form, and the story goes, none of them yet has gone home.

Maybe we are those people, starting to remember who we are. Maybe it’s time to break out of the hypnosis we’ve lived under for eons, the unquestioned assumptions that we must kill and eat, suffer and die, live in lack and sadness, and undergo all the human drama as it has been defined for us.

Is it insane to think that humans can beat the system? That we could make a choice to stop the activities that supply our up-line with fuel? That we could minimize – even stop – our own refueling from the life force of creatures lower than us on the food chain? Is it madness to think that our bodies, made of undying energy, could themselves not have to die, that we might learn to live on the power of infinite consciousness, which we can access within ourselves, being part of it?

While some may call that madness, I prefer it to the world I see around me. I certainly prefer it to death. I prefer it to loss of my dear ones, and to sickness and poverty. The greatest experiment mankind can engage in is mastery of the principles of freedom, creation, abundance, and immortality. We’re wearing body suits that in 70-some years of use are programmed to self-destruct. What could be more important than changing that programming?

In the Bhagavad Gita, Lord Krishna warns: “He who does not follow the wheel thus set revolving lives in vain.” The wheel is the cycle of birth and death, karma and retribution, human sacrifice and divine blessing. To rebel against this system is to fail in our life purpose as defined by those who say they are our creators and gods. But surely life was meant to be more than dinner for the next rung up on the food chain. If “living in vain” means breaking out of that, I’m all for that kind of failure.

Bronte Baxter

© Bronte Baxter 2008

Anyone may copy or republish this article on another site as long as they include the copyright and a back link to the “Splinter in the Mind” website at www.brontebaxter.wordpress.com

Link to the original article

Let’s talk more about loosh. If you haven’t read “Loosh 101: Tracking the Crack in the Universe,” that’s the foundation for what we’ll talk about here, so check that out before you continue. This is “Loosh 102.”

The concept of loosh, in my opinion, holds a major clue to human freedom. What is loosh, as it was described to Robert Monroe? It is a kind of energy that animals and humans generate in situations that involve two things: an intense desire plus a negative emotion. In the last article I equated loosh with “life force,” but when loosh arises in the harvestable form, it is laced with some form of negativity: fear (in the example of a mother defending her young), sadness or hopelessness (in the example of a lonely person), fear again (in the example of prey/predator combat). So how do we explain this? Life energy isn’t negative, so what really is loosh?

It seems to me loosh is a strong inrush of vital energy caused by a strong desire in the individual experiencing it. It’s that adrenaline surge you feel in a fight-or-flight situation. But it’s more than a chemical, because we are told loosh is also generated in a situation like a lonely person pining, where no adrenaline is involved. In both cases, there is a common element: a strong emotional desire. Negativity seems to be what makes the harvesting possible, but it is not the loosh. It’s something that sometimes laces loosh, and its presence is necessary for access to the substance by interdimensional energy-eaters. Negativity is not the essential emotion but an overlay emotion, and when it is present, it creates a drain on the inrush of vital energy.

Let me explain more concretely. Whenever we have a strong desire without tangential feelings of fear, sadness, remorse, etc., what do we experience? A surge of life, a re-charge. We say “I’m pumped” or “I’m psyched.” We feel power. But when we have a strong desire accompanied by the negative emotions, that’s another story. Then our strong desire seems to churn inside us, causing anguish. In the first case, our life energy is infused into us from somewhere. In the second case, it’s being infused and at the same time being drained away. Hence no re-charge.

Negative emotions come from an attitude, a decision that has been struck by a very deep part of us, the subconscious mind. The subconscious decision behind a negative emotion like fear or sadness is something like “This won’t work,” “I can never have it,” “I’m sure to fail.” Self-messages from the deep influence what happens to us in outer, material reality. If we’re engaged in combat, a self-defeating attitude determines that we lose. If we’re trying to create something nice, this attitude jinxes us. If we have a fabulous dream, a negative subconscious decision ordains that the dream remains a wish and never becomes reality.

Negative self-talk, which results from self-doubt on the subconscious level, also opens the door to being harvested. When the subconscious has decided that we can’t get what we want, that we will fail, that fundamental ruling relinquishes the reins that control our destiny, in spite of the positive thoughts we may be consciously thinking. Self-doubt puts the outcome of any endeavor on the cosmic “freebie shelf,” where anyone who wants can come and take it over. That’s the reason behind the expression, “Victory belongs to the most committed.” The individual with the least negative self-talk about a competitive outcome wins, because that is the person with the fewest internal obstructions to manifesting their desire.

Negative self-talk makes it possible to be defeated by an opponent with a more user-friendly subconscious. It also opens the door for trawling psychic entities, like “the gods” or Monroe’s “light being,” to lap up the influx of energy that our strong desire has instigated. No such in-road exists when a strong desire is accompanied by a determined intention. The energy drain only happens when negative self-talk contaminates the process of strongly desiring something. Then the tears come, or the sadness, or the fear or the outrage, and that self-undermining mindset that shouts “I can’t do this!” shoots a hole in our manifestation, letting the wonderful energy drain away to benefit those who know how to cart it away and make use of it. Did they steal it, these loosh harvesters? Actually, they didn’t. We gave them permission subconsciously. We said “I can’t handle this,” so somebody else decided. That’s what happens when you put your life or desires on the freebie shelf of the universe.

To put this in a nutshell:

• Strong desire + authoritative intent = influx of life energy stored (spiritual empowerment)
• Strong desire + self-defeating attitude = influx of life energy siphoned (spiritual harvesting)

What’s emerging from this picture is that intent is everything. Intent is the reverse side of permission. Holding a determined intention is the key to both success in a given situation and to personal empowerment from that situation, while having a weak intent (a desire polluted by self-doubt) is tantamount to permission for someone else to step in.This spills the life energy and places the key to a situation’s outcome into the hands of something outside ourselves.

Let’s look at this from another angle. What is that inrush of energy you feel when you have a powerful desire, the kind that’s uncorrupted with negative mind chatter? When you get that flush of inspiration, that idea of something wonderful you could be or do or create or experience, how do you feel? You are flooded with energy and joy. If it happens in the middle of the night, you are up for hours. There’s power in a dream, in a desire. Because dreaming and desiring are – what? – they’re attached to something. They’re like a pipeline, bringing in an unbounded rush of energy. Where does that come from? What is it that such great thoughts tap into? Whatever it is, it seems to be the font of the life force itself. The energy that rushes in from that place is strong enough to empower people to lift cars that have fallen on the body of a loved one. It’s strong enough to give the victory in battle to the physically weaker party.

Quantum physics has revealed that matter is not solid. It’s made up of atoms, which are not particles and waves as we once believed, but waves only. Matter is nothing but vibration: waves in some unseen medium. We could call that unseen “nothingness,” or we could call it “consciousness,” or “energy.” I suggest that consciousness and energy are better names for the material emptiness at the core of physical life, because how can “nothing” manifest as matter and all the varied activity of this world? Surely it’s more reasonable to assume that the energy we see around us comes from a source of energy, rather than from zip. Our experience suggests that we ourselves are linked to a source that is a font of energy, something outside physical matter, something on which matter is predicated.

When we desire something, or dream of something that instills a desire, that need reaches into the deepest part of ourselves, a realm that is a powerhouse of energy and consciousness. Unless we obstruct the natural process by throwing up self-doubt, the Infinite, this powerhouse, responds to our desire like a reservoir responds to an opening pipeline: it rushes in to fill it. That’s why energy suffuses us in our inspired moments and in our crisis moments. We are becoming more powerful, more filled with life, at those times. We are garnering spiritual power. In those moments we are fulfilling the intention of the life force to create and to manifest, and to become a unique embodiment of itself: an empowered creator, making manifest more creation, more expressions of life.

Powerful, authoritative desire is the key to personal empowerment, spiritual empowerment. That’s why those who feed off human life created religious teachings that tell us desire is bad. If we believe it’s bad to want things, our desires will never be powerful, never full of confident intent. They will be wimpy and ridden with self-doubt: just the thing the psychic trawlers like, because then our pipeline to the Infinite has holes in it, making any incoming energy harvestable.

So passion, or what I’ve been calling “authoritative intent,” brings in spiritual power. Self-doubt brings in the harvesters. Loosh is the power of the Source, the power of life. When we access it through desire, it infuses us, unless we let it be drained off by doubting ourselves, by shooting holes in our pipeline.

Intent and permission are reverse sides of will, and will is one of the faculties of personhood. We can give it away through permission, letting our energy be siphoned and our souls assimilated into oneness with the harvesters. Or we can build our will and grow in personal empowerment. We are told that being spiritual means surrendering our ego (our desires and our self-hood). But true spiritual empowerment will never be achieved by bending before the gods in self-abnegation. Spiritual empowerment means living the power of the Infinite as unique expressions of the Infinite, which is what our spirits were long before the gods got hold of us. Long before the creation of this physical universe took place.

Freedom means taking back control of ourselves through will, taking back control of our spirits. It means exercising will to think the thoughts we desire, not the thoughts the trawlers want us to think.

And freedom means much more. It means, through intent, hooking up our bodies to run on the intelligence, love and energy of the Infinite, rather than on the limited grid of DNA. DNA was created by (or at least is currently controlled by) the gods, our harvesters. It is programmed with our decay and death. We can overcome the program by establishing ourselves in our nature as one with our spiritual Source. When we ordain, from our authority as sons and daughters of the Infinite, then the power behind our wishes brings them to fruit, whatever our declaration might be. We can ordain a parking place, or we can ordain a healing, or immortality. We can ordain personal freedom from harassment by purveyors of the global agenda. We can also work together with other awakening creators, and ordain freedom for mankind. Working on behalf of all material creation, we can ordain freedom and happiness for all beings in the physical universe. We can establish material life on a new level, where death, lack and suffering are never part of the picture again. We can claim our own divinity, and oust the regime that controls this dimension. And if we choose to ordain that, we must do it in love and compassion for the trawlers, not in revenge and hate, because a made-new world is no place for negative things.

The harvesters are hungry, like everybody else. The gods are no worse than we are when we eat chicken or beef, or when we set up pens on a farm. They eat our energy because they know no other way to live. Our life force sustains them, while they make us their minions. But just as we don’t need meat to live, just as we can rewire ourselves to live off the power of the Infinite within us, so, too, can these gods. What better way to help them learn to tap their internal spiritual resources than by removing their external food source, rendering ourselves unavailable? When humankind takes back its power and its home in the universe, the psychic vampires will have empty nets from their trawling and will have to look to the same Source we’re being forced to look to for ongoing life.

This learning process, for both mankind and gods, won’t be easy and may not always be pretty. But it’s the door to everyone’s freedom, the door to a new life. We can no longer afford to let paradise remain a metaphysical concept. We have to make it reality. Because it’s the only alternative, at this time in history, to assimilation. Our enemies wish not only to harvest our energy but to assimilate our consciousness, our individual souls. That is their plan with their New World Order, where all will be microchipped servants of global government. That is their plan with a universal religion, where all will surrender their egos and amalgamate into Oneness consciousness: the impersonal consciousness of “enlightenment” – stripped of desires, originality, joy, passion, and the power to choose.

We either let them accomplish this by doing nothing, or we take action now. We pick up the forgotten key to freedom, call it whatever you will: choice, personal will, authoritative intent, impassioned and confident desire. We elect to become the children of the Infinite that we forgot how to be. We take back our birthright as sons and daughters of the original, loving, joyous divine intention.

How will that happen? The Infinite will show the way. Once we hook up our pipeline of desire and shore up the holes of self-doubt – in other words, once we take back our power – Original Consciousness can pump its life into our flagging bodies and spirits once more. With that will come inspiration and ideas. Connections will get made. When that starts happening to enough of us, how can the New World Order do anything but fail?

Bronte Baxter

© Bronte Baxter 2008

Anyone may copy or republish this article on another site as long as they include the copyright and a back link to the “Splinter in the Mind” website at www.brontebaxter.wordpress.com

Link to the original article

The world’s religions have changed from their ancient demands for blood sacrifice to their modern insistence on a more personal commitment to the divine. Blood provided life-force renewal to the interdimensional predators who call themselves the gods. But blood-on-demand is nothing in “loosh quality” compared to willing, devoted worship. Robert Monroe was told as much in his encounter with the light being (see my two last articles).

Yet there is another, more insidious reason why the ancient religions, which taught fear of God, have morphed into modern religions and spiritual practices that teach surrender or love of God. The reason concerns free will. If that deeply human element can be won over, if the heart and ability to choose can be wholly offered to “the divine,” those on the receiving end no longer have to siphon humans for their energy, they can simply assimilate us. We become one with their system, with their collective consciousness. Our personal energy signature – the soul or ego, individual self– that which makes us creative, original, reasoned, deliberate beings of action – that is taken from us. Or more precisely, we give it away.

We give ourselves to “the divine,” and in so doing, align our personal frequency with those who have fed on humans since the dawn of history. We become entrained with them, like a tuning fork that hums the pitch of the humming forks around it or a soldier that marches in step with his army. As in the military, the surrender of personal choice results in a strengthening of the collective. Soldiers fall out of step when they cross a bridge, because the power of marching in unison is great enough that it could break the structure. Assimilation strengthens the collective that is the gods.

If the “Star Trek” image of The Borg comes to mind, the parallel is not inappropriate. The Borg in the sci-fi TV series were a civilization of beings half biological and half cyber. Like a hive, they were ruled by a central queen, whose will ran the collective. They thrived by discovering new planets and assimilating their inhabitants. Assimilation was accomplished by mind-controlling a person and then inserting, in place of the individual’s mind, the mind of The Borg. The victim’s will became the will of The Borg, his actions entrained, like an ant’s, to work for the collective’s purpose.

Cosmic consciousness is not what we are told: a state where the individual mind merges with its own interior pure consciousness. Cosmic consciousness (“enlightenment” or “Brahman”) is a fusing of one’s personal self with the force that has hijacked the universe.

We can reason that the Infinite Source of all the egos in the universe must be an unlimited consciousness of love, life, joy, creativity and immortality. It knows no destruction or death, either for Itself or its children. Why would a self-fulfilled, joyous being want to make individuals that don’t share in and express Its own qualities?

Brahman is quite different than this original entity. Brahman is the consciousness that enfolds the physical universe, spitting out supernovas and destroying them with all their attendant life forms. We are told Brahman is the creator, the maintainer, and the destroyer. Brahman is that consciousness that feeds and depends on physical matter, creating and devouring it at will, as humans breed then slaughter animals on a farm for food. When meditators have cosmic visions of themselves as all the universe, this is the consciousness they identify with. By uniting with and surrendering to it as their Higher Self, they become possessed by the entities who have taken charge of (and perhaps created) the physical universe.

I remember a chilling moment in a videotape of the popular spiritual teacher, Eckhart Tolle, where he describes the movement of the ”Presence” in the world. He reaches out a long arm and makes a swooshing sound with his mouth, drawing the arm back in. Then he makes a swipe in the air with his other arm, then the first one again. That’s Consciousness, he tells us, creating then sucking back in life form after life form. That is what Tolle has aligned himself with, the Presence that creates and destroys individual life.

A loving and unlimited creator of individual awareness would not create life forms only to destroy them. That is the act of a farmer, not of an artist or innovator. Creative people don’t make things in order to feed off their creations. They make things to express what’s inside them: the joy or beauty or humor or wisdom. We know this from our own life experience.

Happy people create good things around them, and cherish and take care of those things. They don’t decide to blow them up or devour them. If we as humans naturally behave like that, how could the Infinite Being from whose cloth we were cut think and behave like a savage? How could It be unfeeling or uncaring, when we by nature are feeling and caring? How could the children be greater in character than their own Creator? It’s not a very reasonable premise.

It cannot be God, in the sense of a supreme consciousness, that requires sacrifice, worship, surrender of ego and ultimate physical death. That can only be the agenda of limited spiritual beings, who see the manifest universe as their playground. They are the playground bullies. They’ve convinced everyone that they by rights run the show and that they even created it.

I remember Tolle’s story of his “awakening.” After suffering for years from severe depression, he decided he would commit suicide, at which point he felt an energy vortex sucking him in and heard the words “Resist nothing.” He blacked out and when he awoke, the world was fresh and new. He was a man without depression, without desires, without thoughts. He was a clean machine, devoid of his former sense of personal self. From that day on, he has moved through physical reality without an ego. “Life” moves through him, he says, and he identities that “wholeness” as his Self.

But Tolle’s wholeness is a small particle in the vastness of the Infinite. It is not the Infinite, however much he believes it must be. Brahman is not Infinite, it is the collective consciousness of the material universe, which embraces good and evil, birth and death, as equal in value. The consciousness of the Infinite surely never intended suffering or death for its children.

Tolle, like the enlightened guru-followers, has accepted all that happens in this world, horrendousness included, as the wonderful will of the divine. He regards what happened to him the night of his transformation as an awakening to the highest truth. I suggest what he awoke to was assimilation of his will, his personhood, all that made him uniquely human. He became a vessel for the voice that told him, “Resist nothing” – words that eerily echo the voice of The Borg, telling its victims the moment before assimilation: “Resistance is futile.”

Brahman, what Tolle calls “Presence,” does bring euphoric peace to the experiencer. The grave is peaceful, too, but I wouldn’t want to spend time in one. There is peace when an individual surrenders their personal self. Gone is the responsibility of making choices, of finding motivation, of coming up with creative solutions. Gone is the need to think and the sting of emotional repercussions from former bad decisions. The enlightened need to do nothing, say nothing, become nothing. But to achieve that iced-over state of detachment, that cosmic disassociation, they must sacrifice the most precious thing they have ever been given: their personal divine spark. The enlightened willfully self-implode. And God’s very purpose for making them, as a unique, personal expression of Itself, gets subverted.

Surely we were meant to be more than automatons, possessed zombies, walking around the earth while something else moves through us. Surely God’s plan was not for Its creatures to become mindless robots, with glassy grins and empty hearts, who regard suffering and happiness, death and life, as all the same in value. Surely there is something beyond what the gurus’ teach as the ultimate, Something that celebrates, supports and cherishes each being It ever created, that desires them to live forever and in harmony and joy, as Itself.

The gods have not stopped living off human sacrifice. The rules of the game have only changed a little. Blood-on-demand is not as delicious as the willing offering of a human soul. Siphoning is evolving into assimilation. This is the tyranny of One, the reason the New Age teaches that awakened consciousness means seeing “small self” as illusion and “Cosmic Self” or “the One,” as the true reality. The intent is to fuse all egos into the will of the One, the will of the Overmind.

The gods are masquerading as Cosmic Self. We either open our minds and recognize our programming, and reason our way out of this snare, or we grin like foolish children and follow the Pied Piper right into the maw of the mountain. Will we choose to amalgamate or to shoulder the burden and joy of becoming conscious, empowered individuals? The fate of the universe rests on our decision.

Bronte Baxter

© Bronte Baxter 2008

Anyone may copy or republish this article on another site as long as they include the copyright and a back link to the “Splinter in the Mind” website at www.brontebaxter.wordpress.com

Link to the original article

“Love one another.” “We are all one.”

Such beautiful sentiments. Love is the balm that heals the heart, and oneness the reality that joins us. But spiritual teachers with an agenda use “love” and “oneness” teachings to keep the lid down on their disciples’ spiritual development.

Let’s look at these teachings one at a time and see how they are used to manipulate. When a teacher or religion preaches love, at first glance that seems to be a good thing. It encourages people to be selfless and to help their fellows. Because of “love” teachings, religious people give to the poor, volunteer their time, and bite their tongue a lot. They say “the right thing” and don’t do things that other people won’t like. They put their desires on the backburner and focus instead on doing what they think will make others happy. Whenever sentiments of discontent or rebellion arise, they quash them with the stern heel of conscience. They know such feelings are from the dark side, and that they must be vigilant against them.

Years go by, and these well-meaning people become frustrated and repressed. The rebellion in them grows, because they are not listening to themselves. Their soul cries out for experiences, for learning through experience, but they have been taught that personal desires are selfish, so the cries of their soul go unheeded. They grow depressed or angry, because their purpose of embodiment in human form has been thwarted. The frustration comes out in many negative ways: short-temperedness, jealousy, vindictiveness, gossip, judgmentalness.

The sincere people who faithfully follow “love” teachings typically live in a box with the lid down, able to express but little of themselves because instinctual wants are considered suspect or evil. Repressed, their souls turn miserable or spiteful, like a dog chained for years to a stake. “See, it’s a bad dog,” people say when the animal snarls and nips, convinced by such nasty behavior that they were right in chaining that animal all along.

Telling people to be unselfish creates a shadow personality inside them, the very “ego” that religions decry and that wouldn’t exist without religion. It’s ego, teachers preach, that makes the spirit discontent and rebellious. The vices their followers find in their private hearts are proof that the soul is a tainted thing, needing to be risen above or controlled.

So people redouble their efforts to be kind and loving. They volunteer more time, give more money to their church or their guru, and bite their tongue so hard that it hurts. But their “wicked” spirit only becomes sulkier, their negative thoughts stronger, their suppressed rage greater.

The spiritual teacher has, of course, the solution to all this. The Christian struggling with wicked thoughts is told to surrender his soul to Jesus. The disciple plagued by negativity is told to surrender her ego to Oneness Consciousness. It amounts to the same thing. Spiritual aspirants must make an oblation of the will (the soul’s chief attribute and mode of expression) to something perceived as greater and purer than themselves. If they do this, God, they are promised, will destroy the evil in their hearts. Oneness, or Brahman Consciousness, will dissolve their selfish cravings and negative mental chatter. The soul will melt away into the wholeness that is their true cosmic nature, or into the love that is Jesus. The troublesome entity they have fought with for years, their inner self, will be gone. In its place will come a peace that surpasseth understanding, the presence of the Divine alive in their heart.

People who succeed in going the final steps to such surrender do indeed experience peace, but it is the peace of spiritual death. Gone is the cry of their spirit for expression, for freedom to live and do things in the world. Gone is the frustration of the heart that lived in a box all its life. All noise is silenced. The soul has been snuffed out. All that exists in the shell called the body is the presence of something else: a new, “holy” or “cosmic” consciousness.

The consciousness that takes over when we surrender our souls only claims to be divine or of the Source. It is a consciousness that hates life, that abhors uniqueness and diversity. It wants to wipe out the creative spark whose expression was the purpose of creation. That spark, individual consciousness, burst forth from the Source Consciousness in a brilliant firework display at the beginning of time. We are those sparks, children of the Infinite, and our play and display is the reason for the world.

The play has been thwarted for millenniums. The display has been forbidden. Any original impulses that don’t align with institutionalized spiritual programming, in religions of East or West, are judged egoistic or evil. While a few people in society break free from these fetters (becoming our artists, our inventors, our thinkers), most of mankind lives under the yoke of spiritual repression, judging their deepest instincts as suspect, selfish, and wrong.

So we live in miserable marriages, work at miserable jobs, go places we don’t want to go for the “happiness” of our families, and do things we don’t want to do to help the less fortunate. Religious people work so hard to make sure everyone else is happy, but no one does anything that makes anyone happy, because happiness is a luxury they’re told they have no right to expect or experience.

I remember as a girl, how Sundays my family would sit around asking one another how they’d like to spend the day. “Would you like to go to the park?” one person would ask. “I don’t know, would you like to go to the park?” would come the reply. Everyone was so busy being unselfish, trying to do what the others supposedly wanted, that no one ever answered honestly about what they thought would be fun. So we went to the park or museum, never knowing if even one family member really wanted to go there. We were that intent on being good Christians, on sacrificing our personal desires for the sake of everyone else. We thought that made us moral and pleasing to God.

I often think of this sad and ridiculous scenario that was acted out so many times when I was growing up, and what a metaphor it is for all decisions that are based on repressing our inner spark for the supposed higher good. What if instead we all listened to the promptings in our hearts, without judgment? What if we stopped calling those promptings “ego” and considered them messages from the divine within us, messages there to guide us through life?

Those who have succumbed to the teaching that the ego is a self-serving, antisocial, anti-spiritual entity that lives inside waiting to undermine, can never free the creative spark and do the things that truly bring happiness to themselves and to others. When we trust our desires and stop judging them as selfish, the nastiness that once accrued to our inner spirit strangely disappears. The soul isn’t repressed anymore. It is free and expressing, fulfilling its divine promptings. Gone is its envy toward others, its anger and resentment. The soul fills with its own innate joy, and wishes no less for everybody else.

Egoism and evil are not born of this entity; they are born of repressing this entity. Left to itself, unjudged and uncensored, the soul desires good things for itself and for all creation. So where is the selfishness?

Spiritual teachers tell us to love, but true love is never born of an edict. Love is not biting your tongue, doing what someone else wants, repressing your desires, giving money to charity or doing prescribed service. All those things come from an effort at love, not from having love. When you have love, you need no mandates. Love is a tenderness of feeling, an empathy to what another is going through, a perception of the beauty in another.

Not only is a mandate not needed for real love – a mandate is useless in bringing love about. How can a spiritual rule make you feel tenderness or empathy, or appreciation of beauty? Only an open soul can experience those things. A soul shrouded in judgment of itself as egoistic and selfish cannot feel tenderness, empathy or appreciation. It is way too hurt and closed for such delicate feelings. Expecting a judged soul to bloom forth in genuine love is like expecting a seedling you poured drain cleaner on, to sprout forth in beautiful, new, green shoots.

Any spiritual leader who makes love the core of their teaching or who talks of dissolving the “small self” or “ego” leads mankind further into the dark. A truly awake person knows that love cannot be achieved through effort and that egoism is the product of self-flagellation. The truly awake don’t tell people to be loving, they suggest people be true to themselves. They advise self-trust. They are also aware of the nature of religion and its destructive role in the world. They speak out against it in all its forms.

Truly spiritual people recognize that religions use teachings of love and oneness to manipulate humanity into first judging and then surrendering their precious, unique souls (in the form of their will). They perceive that someone stands to gain from this, those who stand at the top of religions, those who call themselves God, gods, or gurus. They know that the true God, the Source Consciousness, has no need for worship and never mandated such. They know that anyone asking for adulation is less than Infinite, less than divine – an imposter pretending to be those things.

The truly aware know that Source Consciousness wants only that its purpose in creation be fulfilled: the play and display of happiness, in a myriad expression of souls, unique in their wonderful forms. They know that religion’s teachings of mandated love and dissolving ego thwart the Infinite’s purpose by destroying those souls.

People who know the truth encourage free expression, independence, individuality. They cheer for things like questioning, dissent, and nonconformity. They never codify “truth” and they never set themselves up as “teachers.” They don’t allow others to put them on a pedestal. They don’t appear on the rolls of “the holy” or “the Self-realized.” They are simple, confident people going about their lives with the light on inside.

No one turns to them as gurus or quotes them as spiritual authorities. They bring light to the world by being who they are and living freely and differently. Their joy and originality inspire those around them to re-evaluate the shrunken, judged personhood inside themselves, to consider whether it, too, might be capable of such luminosity. The truly awake inspire envy and anger in many, whose first reaction to the possibility of freedom is outrage, because it means they may have been traveling in the wrong direction all their lives.

Love is the sweetest expression of life, the flower of God’s creation. Oneness is our deepest nature, the place we all join with God (to quote the poet, Matthew Arnold) like islands “linking (our) coral arms beneath the sea.” Love and Oneness – what could be better?

But teachings that tell us to practice love and to surrender to Oneness are quite another thing. There are those who would twist mankind’s natural spiritual instincts to serve their sinister purposes. Love and Oneness are their calling cards.

(For more about those sinister purposes, see my other articles in the “Blowing the Whistle on Enlightenment” series.)

Bronte Baxter

© Bronte Baxter 2008

Anyone may copy or republish this article on another site as long as they include the copyright and a back link to the “Splinter in the Mind” website at www.brontebaxter.wordpress.com

Link to the original article

Since I wrote the article below about “the other side” of Amma, a book has come out that describes one person’s life as a close disciple of the woman known as “the hugging saint.”

The book is called Holy Hell: A Memoir of Faith, Devotion, and Pure Madness and was written by Gail Tredwell (formerly called Gayatri), who for 20 years served as Amma’s closest personal attendant and chief female disciple.

In the book, Tredwell recounts her personal experience in the ashram, where she admits she was complicit in covering up all sorts of ashram secrets, in a misguided attempt to protect the guru’s misdeeds from public view (believing, as all guru cultists do, that the guru is God in human form and therefore exempt from human standards of right and wrong).

Tredwell’s riveting book recounts stories of donations intended for charity being converted into gold jewelry and hidden under the garments of Amma’s sanyasis (monks) as they passed through customs – then the gold being passed to Amma’s family to make them fabulously rich. Tredwell tells of being beaten, clawed, and bitten by Amma, who would succumb to fits of rage over small mistakes made by her attendants. Tredwell speaks of her discovery that, while claiming to be a lifelong celibate, Amma secretly had ongoing sexual affairs with several of her closest swamis (monks who have taken lifelong vows of celibacy).

Tredwell was extensively quoted in an August 2012 Rolling Stone article on Amma regarding some of these allegations. Rolling Stone was able to corroborate the claim of physical abuse by Amma through the testimony of another one of Amma’s female attendants, who would not reveal her name except to the magazine.

Holy Hell can be purchased through Amazon via this link. What follows below is the original article I wrote about Amma for this website, in 2008.

Amma

Kali

What do stuffed dolls have to do with enlightenment? Lots, if you’re into the cult of Amma, known also as Ammachi, Mata Amritanandamayi, and “the hugging saint.”

Amma’s devotees talk to dolls made in her image that are sold on Amma retreats. They tell the doll their problems, seek its comfort, and listen in their minds for its advice. Amma calls the devotees her children, and clucks syllables like baby talk into their ear in her trademark ritual of lining people up, watching them kneel before her, then embracing them.

She tells them she is their mother and that she hears their prayers. She says she’d no more charge them for her darshan (i.e., being in her presence) than a mother would charge an infant for breast milk. Yet insiders have estimated Amma rakes in upwards of 3 million dollars in a 7-week tour, through donations and sales of items like her toothbrush, fragments of a garment she has sat on, Amma dolls, Amma posters, and books by devotees extolling her divinity.

Devotees believe Amma is a living incarnation of the being they consider the supreme God: Kali in Hindu religion, who is depicted in Indian art wearing a necklace of bloody human skulls and a girdle of severed arms but who somehow translates to devotees as a loving maternal figure. Amma events consist of childlike lectures on Hindu doctrines, Amma blessing water which devotees then drink, hymn singing, worship ceremonies, and the hugs. At some events, Amma wears a one-foot-high sparkling crown.

Amma marries people on stage, gives babies their first taste of solid food, tells couples to break up or to stay together, and ordains some of the faithful to abandon their family and live as monks in her ashram. Amma teaches that love is all we need, and it is her divine love that will save us.

In Seattle a couple of months ago, she predicted nuclear war and that no child younger than 5 will live to adulthood after the year 2012. After spreading fear and despair through such prophecies, she announced that only meditation and self-effacing acts of charity can possibly mitigate the sentence for humanity. “Meditation” means mantra/obeisance meditation to the divine mother. Self-effacing charity means donations to her organization and service to her cause.

At public sessions, devotees chant hymns to Amma that grow in volume and frenetic intensity, gesticulating in unison with their arms in the shape of an arc, from their midsection up and out towards Amma, who sits on a dais in front of them. The words of the chant are “Aum Parashaktyai Namah.” That translates to “I bow down/ pay homage to the Supreme Mother of the Universe.” The arm gesture is body language for surrendering one’s soul to Kali in the form Amma, her living embodiment.

I am one of the moderators of the Ex-Amma Forum, a place where people who’ve left the Amma cult come together to help each other heal from their ordeal. The group is open to ex-followers, questioning devotees, concerned family and friends of devotees, and people seeking more information. I became involved with the forum when I watched a close friend of mine grow farther and farther away from the person he once was, the deeper he sank into Amma’s hypnotic embrace. On the forum, I’ve read hundreds of first-person accounts of what people experience with Amma, the side of her no one wants to talk about.

I’ve seen an email from her former joint-secretary alleging she cooks the books, that the money she gathers for charity doesn’t go to the charities she claims. I’ve read accounts by her former monks of the unexplained wealth of Amma’s family, how her charity hospitals won’t take the very poor because the poor don’t have money enough for treatment. I’ve read about “suicides” and unexplained deaths of ashram devotees. So many dead bodies have appeared in the waters outside the ashram that The Indian Express, New Delhi’s daily newspaper, printed an account of local citizens demanding a police investigation into the matter.

I’ve read of alleged organ selling and newspaper reports of beatings. I saw a video of Amma performing a puja (worship ceremony) to a portrait of Sai Baba, the guru who gives penis massages to his favorite boy disciples. I read a letter from a former Amma monk alleging he was told by an Indian holy man not to share what he knows about Amma if he values his safety.

Amma’s website sells pujas performed on behalf of the paying devotee for prices ranging from $30 to $250. We read there an explanation of what happens in Kali puja, which is performed “on Amma’s birthstar”:

“The puja is offered to a lamp representing the Goddess… The puja starts with a worship of the Guru… The central aspect of the puja is the symbolic offering of the five elements of creation to God. Our body is composed from these five elements… The puja symbolizes the surrender of the devotee to God… Each element is represented by a material symbol, such as flowers, or fire… These are offered at the foot of the lighted lamp. The desire of the devotee to offer his or her surrender is effected by these symbolic offerings. During the entire puja the temple resonates with the continuous chanting of the holy names of Kali.” (emphasis mine)

Amma’s PR is impeccable. She presents as “the hugging saint,” a portrait of sweetness and universal love, and the media promotes her unquestioningly as such. There has never been an investigation into her movement, the dead bodies, where the money goes, or what is really happening in her hospitals and orphanages in India.

In July, 2005, the United Nations awarded Amma with “Special U.N. Consultative Status,” according to her website. She is one of 25 core leaders in the United Nations Parliament of World Religions. Her website contains over a dozen pages extolling the humanitarian work of the U.N. One page compares the U.N.’s “Millenium Goals” with Amma’s goals, which are word-for-word identical. (Click here to view both documents.)

The ashram is among 30 Indian NGO’s to receive formal U.N. affiliation, according to Amma’s website. “This will provide opportunities for joint collaboration” between the U.N. and her organization, it goes on to state. Amma’s website openly extols the U.N. for its advances toward global government:

“The United Nations has been in the forefront of tackling problems as they take on an international dimension, providing the legal framework for regulating the use of the oceans, protecting the environment, regulating migrant labor, curbing drug trafficking and combating terrorism, to mention a few. This work continues today, with the United Nations providing input into the trend towards a greater centrality of international law ingoverning interaction across a wide spectrum of issues.” (emphasis mine)

Pulling all this together, what are we seeing here? Amma is a globalist, working intimately with the U.N. to bring about its agenda. That agenda is world regulation and control – a wolf that hides in the sheep’s clothing of humanitarian ideals. The U.N.’s aim is a global Orweillian state held in place by a world bank, a centrally controlled media, a world “peace-keeping unit” (world army), technological surveillance, and control of the world’s water, food, and other life-essential resources.

As one of the 25 core leaders in the U.N.’s religion parliament, Amma supports and promotes these “Big Brother” goals. For anyone wondering if the efforts by the global elite to create a New World Order have a spiritual component, Amma provides ample evidence.

My earlier articles in the “Blowing the Whistle on Enlightenment” series explain the real meaning of the kind of surrender that Amma and other Indian gurus promote among their followers. It is surrender of the personal self to the gods, whom Amma calls “the Lord.” Amma’s hugs, her relics, her blessed water and food, are ways of infusing her energy signature into the minds and bodies of those who visit her, be they devotees or unsuspecting guests. Not only her energy signature but, I submit, the energy signature of the astral entities who work through her, who call themselves gods, and who feed on the psyches of mankind.

Amma’s energy transfer helps devotees entrain with her vibration and meld their minds and souls with “the godhead.” In other words, it helps them become assimilated, or possessed by the same “cosmic” forces that possess and work through Amma. Gurus call such a change in consciousness “attaining enlightenment” or “liberation.” It’s a state of “ego death,” where one no longer functions as an independent individual but as a receptacle of “the Supreme Consciousness.” Translation: as a tentacle of the astral entities who live off human worship and suffering.

What makes Amma both so successful and so sinister is the loving image she hides behind. The media uses it to promote her far and wide. If it seems remarkable that no investigative reporting has been done, that no one from the mainstream media has questioned Amma’s PR, the mystery evaporates when we recall who the mainstream media is run by these days.

Large corporations have bought and own our press and television, and dictate the “news” that journalists are permitted to report. Behind those corporations, as behind our governments, lurk the privileged aristocracy, who control both news and world events by means of puppets who do their bidding. Our world leaders, the mainstream media, and “the saint” Amma work in tandem. That’s why the media and world leaders sing her praises.

Why do I single out Amma among the dozens of gurus I could write about? Because she is so popular, and so unquestioned. Even that guru-busting website, Guruphiliac, seems to miss the shadiness of Amma, voting her the “least bad” of the gurus. But Amma is one of the worst. Powerful and successful, she ropes in new recruits by the thousands on her yearly worldwide tours. Amma’s movement claims that the “saint” has hugged over 26-million people – people who often return as devotees, worshipping her godhood and donating to her coffers.

Amma’s brand of religion is a return to the infantile. She makes babies of grown men and women, giving them dolls to babble to and telling them she’s their mother. While speaking fine words about “the God within each of us,” her actions teach something different. Allowing people to pray to you, kneel to you, and worship you as God Incarnate is not the behavior of someone who wants people to recognize themselves as magnificent, powerful expressions of God.

Amma’s disciples get their power from hugs, dolls, mantra obeisance, and the group euphoria of retreats, not from the core of their own being. They’re conditioned to believe that their inner self is less than the glorious entity before them. They’re told, in fact, that their unique, individual personhood is nothing but a self-serving “ego” – flawed, proud, and devious, something to be destroyed before they can be happy. Every time they bow down to Amma and “the gods” who work through her, Amma’s devotees shut the door more tightly on the divinity within themselves.

It’s a tragedy, but we can stop it: by spreading this information far and wide. When enough people know the other side of Amma, her crown and power will topple. Just as the global government she promotes will crash down about itself when the public sees through the fairy tales.

“The emperor has no clothes.” Pass it on. Once the message ripples through the crowd, the game will be up, and the illusion will be over.

Bronte Baxter

© Bronte Baxter 2008

Anyone may copy or republish this article on another site as long as they include the copyright and a back link to the “Splinter in the Mind” website at www.brontebaxter.wordpress.com

Link to the original article

Lots of questions surround any discussion about creating reality (or manifesting desires) by using what is popularly called The Law of Attraction. What is this philosophy – something of genuine value or another New Age spiritual detour? Is it selfish and superficial or actually healing and useful? Can it help the state of the world? Doesn’t it contradict the Law of Karma? If the Law of Attraction is real, why do affirmations seldom work? Is there a more effective way to create reality through thought than the simple advice given in “The Secret” DVD?

Let’s look at all these questions and start with a definition. The Law of Attraction is a law of nature that says whatever you think, you get: our thoughts determine what happens to us in the physical outer world called “reality.” Is this valid theory or New Age nonsense?

The theory is a sound one. The Law of Attraction operates at the heart of personal self-empowerment. It’s also the key to unlocking new possibilities in the universe. As such, it’s a powerful tool for defeating the New World Order and creating a magnificent world.

To understand why consciously utilizing this law offers so much, we must first understand the relationship of thoughts to matter, because the Law of Attraction is a “mind-over-matter” philosophy. So let’s get philosophical for a moment.

Thought creates outer reality for one reason: because thought is consciousness vibrating, and that’s all physical matter is, too. The difference between thought and matter is only the level of density. They’re two layers of the same cake. Matter is just a slightly slower vibration of consciousness.

The analogy of a fan demonstrates the difference in frequency between thought and the physical world. When a fan moves slowly, you clearly see its distinct blades. They are unquestionably solid. They block out your view of anything positioned behind them. But when you turn the fan on high, suddenly the blades become blurry. Earlier perceived as solid, they seem to grow translucent, almost invisible. You can see objects through and behind the fan, things that before were hidden by the solidity.

Physical reality is like a fan on low-speed. It operates on a slow vibration, which makes it appear defined and dense. Thought is like a fan on high-speed. The higher frequency makes this level of reality fluid and invisible to the senses, but it is actually the same reality as matter, only vibrating faster.

Another analogy is H2O. Ice, water and vapor are the same substance expressing differently. One expression is solid and dense, another is fluid and without boundaries, while a third is gaseous and practically invisible. Consciousness, too, has layers or levels: gross, subtler and subtlest. Thought is a manifestation at a subtle level. Matter is a gross manifestation of the same thing.

Quantum physics has discovered that matter is not solid, in spite of its appearance being so. Matter consists of atoms, which are not combinations of particles and wave vibrations as scientists once believed. It turns out, atoms are pure vibration. So the physical world is pure vibration, appearing as solid the way fan blades appear solid when they slow down.

If matter is vibration, what is it that’s vibrating? Apparently, emptiness. But because it’s vibrating, that emptiness must be energy. And because it vibrates in the shape of organized forms, that emptiness must be intelligent. So intelligent energy is the stuff of creation, the power that underlies all things that exist. Consciousness is one name for that intelligent energy, and a subtle movement in consciousness is a thought. Thought results in changes in matter.

Here is an example, on a gross level, of how thought moves the material world. If I want a glass of water, I first have the thought to get a drink, then I walk to the sink, fill up a glass, and sip. The water, the glass, and my body – physical objects made up of atoms – all three shift and change a bit in response to the thought that I’m thirsty. Every minute of the day, thoughts shape physical reality. The world is a collection of atoms in various combinations, all of them pulsing in an intelligent energy field.

Besides moving reality around, thoughts can create reality “from scratch.” An example of this is inventing something that never has been thought or felt before: a symphony, a theory, a relationship …

If you consider any object or situation in creation, and think back in reverse to its origins, everything came together from a series of thoughts. Thoughts are pulsing consciousness, and matter is a denser, responsive expression of the same thing. Since thoughts and matter are two levels of one essence, they’re linked. Thought is the creative aspect, and matter the receptive aspect, of consciousness.

While it’s easy to see how thought moves matter in the case of a thirsty person reaching for a drink, the way thought moves the world is not always perceivable by the senses. If you desire a better job, and focus on having that with confident expectation, a better job will manifest in your life. You won’t see all the mechanics of how this transpires because so much takes place behind the scenes, like stage hands scurrying about behind the curtains of an ongoing play.

It isn’t magic when a scene changes in a dramatic production, nor is it accidental. When the scene we call reality changes, that isn’t magical or accidental either. It happens in response to the needs and desires of the actors on the stage of life, who directly influence what the “stage crew” (the dynamic substructure of the universe) is doing.

When you have a desire, that thought sends a pulse through the fabric of creation. Your desire vibrates the ether, the energetic consciousness, of which everything is made. That desire draws to you whatever is needed to materialize your thought, because thought is dynamic and magnetic. Then presto, the wish becomes an experienced reality. This power of consciousness, to desire and manifest thought into form, is what makes us co-creators with the Infinite.

Manifestation of thoughts into reality happens automatically, whether we intend it or not. Contemplate the people you know and how their outer lives reflect their attitudes (which are the sum of their thoughts). We can either create reality on autopilot, by thinking random thoughts indiscriminately, or we can elect to be conscious of how we think and make thought work for us to fulfill our most cherished desires.

But if thought moves and manifests physical reality, why do so many people have poor results when they try to consciously utilize the Law of Attraction? Why don’t more people get what they want from affirmations or from telling the universe their desires?

To understand the answer to that, we need to understand the nature of subconscious mind, because that is what fulfills or fails to fulfill our wishes. Subconscious mind is that deep level of ourselves where our individual self begins to link up with everything else. It is like the place beneath the ocean where all the islands touch the ocean floor – as Matthew Arnold poetically put it, “linking their coral arms beneath the sea.”

One person’s subconscious mind is connected to all other minds in that subterranean place, and when mind is stirred at that level, it sends a ping through the universe. It influences creation, because mind is the base or ground state of creation. That’s why connecting with subconscious mind, and persuading it to accept our desire, is essential to our wish becoming manifest as reality in the world.

When we have a strong or repetitive thought – especially a thought that’s emotionally charged – it is always recorded in the subconscious. We are constantly imprinting this powerful level of mind with every belief and attitude we pick up. Our past thoughts have programmed our subconscious. Every old impression is written and retained there.

When we have a desire that’s in harmony with our programming, deep mind accepts the desire without question because it is congruent with the program. The subconscious accepts this sort of desire without resistance, and spontaneously manifests the inner thought into exterior reality.

An example would be a successful business person starting a new product line about which he’s very excited. Because he trusts ability to succeed (i.e., he has a winning attitude engrained in his subconscious), the new product line will probably be a success. The thinker’s conscious desire, being in alignment with his subconscious belief, brings his idea into form on the material level.

Consider, by contrast, a person who has no confidence in himself . His talents may actually exceed those of the person in the first example, and he might have an idea for the identical product line. But in this person’s hands, the project will almost surely fail. Why? Because his subconscious mind holds the belief that he is a loser. It therefore sabotages his good intentions and efforts with quiet negative self-talk that creates fear or doubt. His conscious desire is not aligned with his subconscious beliefs about who he is, what he’s capable of, and how the universe works.

So the circumstances and opportunities never come together for this person that are requisite for success, in spite of affirmations he repeats, prayers he makes, time he puts in, or anything else. The ensuing failure of the project reinforces his original belief that he is hopeless. The next time he tries to accomplish something, his chances of success are even slimmer than last time he made an attempt.

This kind of mental self-sabotage keeps us all, to some degree or other, from having what we long for. We may be successful at manifesting certain desires, around which we carry no subconscious baggage, but most of us house programming that tells us we are limited, at least in certain areas of life.

We may be materially successful and affluent but always bat zero in personal relationships. Perhaps we have loving family and abundance, but can’t get rid of our asthma or some nagging extra pounds. Maybe we’re doing fine personally, but feel we’re helpless to solve the serious problems of the world. And almost everybody accepts that aging and death are necessary – few people even consider using thought to create eternal youth or physical immortality, because the collective programming is so deeply entrenched against this.

How do we get around this problem of a self-sabotaging, negatively programmed subconscious mind? The first thing is to realize that what looks like lack of personal power is really tremendous power hiding behind the mask of self-doubt. The person who can’t get what she consciously longs for is very powerful in creating what she subconsciously thinks she deserves: failure and unhappiness. Once she can see how her beliefs about herself are what undercut her, once she becomes conscious of the negative self-talk, she comes to an understanding that allows her to change the situation.

The trick is to persuade the deeper levels of mind to accept the new consciously held opinion that I should have, experience, or be able to do the thing I wish. How does a person persuade subconscious mind to give up its long-held attitudes and biases that subvert that?

We come to realize that if our subconscious harbors self-defeating attitudes, it is our own conscious thoughts that created the situation. Telling ourselves again and again for years, “I can’t,” “It’s dangerous,” “It’s impossible,” or “I’ll look stupid” has colored the subconscious mind with matching beliefs. But what conscious mind created, it can uncreate. The computer programmer can always overwrite the program he has written for himself.

We are each the author of our personal story, and we can revise it at any time. We can only do this if we can perceive how our thoughts have created and/or allowed all of our experience.

Looking back on our childhood, or on incidents of victimization in our lives, we may find it hard to believe our thoughts either created or allowed the whole scenario. But if we’re willing to let go of the karma doctrine long enough to consider an alternative idea, what if we planned our own incarnation? Freely made plans in the between-life place would then have determined the circumstances of our birth. (For more on this fascinating concept, read psychologist Dr. Michael Newton’s “Journey of Souls,” a book of transcripts of conversations with hypnotically regressed subjects who revisit their pre-incarnation plans for their various lifetimes.)

Once we consciously accept that we are indeed the authors of our reality and should, in theory, be able to change and direct it, we are ready for the next phase of empowerment, which is to start to rewrite the programming we no longer want in our subconscious mind. How do we do that?

There are several parts to this, and more than one right way to go about it. One excellent strategy, outlined beautifully in Neville’s books, “The Law and the Promise” and “The Power of Awareness,” is to imagine, before falling asleep, precisely what you desire to experience, in all its color and glory. As your drowsy mind fantasizes, your subconscious mind becomes more alert and receptive (because deeper mind is most lively and open in a drowsy or trancelike state). Using this technique, the image of what is desired is recorded by the subconscious mind clearly and powerfully. Resistance to the desire is less than in normal waking consciousness, because the mental chatter is absent in a drowsy, alpha state.

You know you’re making progress when you find yourself “getting into” the fantasy, experiencing it as you would a movie in which you’re emotionally involved. When you find your emotions and/or your senses responding to your imaging, it means your subconscious mind is accepting your desire without blocking it. Deep mind is seeing your wish as a doable thing. The program is being rewritten!

When you practice this technique (which I like to call “imaginating”), it’s important to visualize the scene from the perspective of being in it, not from the perspective of a watcher. Imaginating is different in that sense from watching a movie. You become an actor in the scene, as opposed to an outside observer. Rather than seeing an image of yourself thin, let yourself experience the feeling of being thin, and imagine doing the things you would do or feel as a thin person. If you want a visual image of yourself, you can imaginate looking in a mirror. The point is to imaginate from the perspective of being in the movie.

If you find that visual images don’t spontaneously come to you, it doesn’t matter. You can imaginate through any of the senses: sound, touch, taste, smell – you don’t have to get visuals. You can even imaginate without sense involvement, by imagining the feeling of an experience. For most of us, though, starting out using some sense image helps generate the feeling we’re looking for. Having the feeling of the wish fulfilled is the culmination of properly practiced imaginating.

When you imaginate, picture the scene as if the desire has already been accomplished. Don’t imagine looking at the title of your home – imagine holding it in your hand. Don’t think of a piece of land in the country – imagine sitting on the grass in the front yard, or working in the garden. Imagine however your heart directs you, but always from the perspective of the wish fulfilled. If you imaginate a bike in a store window, the bike will always stay in the store window. Instead, feel yourself riding the bike, with your personal paraphernalia attached.

By practicing this technique right before sleep and sometimes falling asleep in the midst of the fantasy, a person will often find their desire realized in the outer world in a very short time. Circumstances come together, sometimes in remarkable ways, to bring the wished-for results.

While subconscious mind may seem dumb in that it blindly accepts whatever we tell it, there’s nothing dumb about an intelligence that can move the universe to bring us what we want. The subconscious mind deserves to be respected, but we need to understand that it is we, as conscious mind, that gives the orders.

We also need to understand that what we consciously desire may not always be good for us. It’s advisable to contemplate all desires at the deepest level of mind, the level of Infinite Source Consciousness, before deciding whether to imaginate on them. If upon Self-referral a desire seems in alignment with Infinite Source, then it has the support of God behind it. That will help overwrite any resistant attitudes to the desire that the subconscious may hold. We can directly solicit Infinite Source to overwrite our self-defeating attitudes, and God will work with us to accomplish that.

Affirmations, while pretty useless by themselves, are powerful when practiced in concert with imaginating. They’re especially potent uttered a few times after getting into bed, before starting the technique. They’re also potent when thought or uttered on waking, since waking up and falling asleep are both twilight junctures when the mind is in alpha state just on the borders of sleep. (For this reason, waking-but-still-drowsy is another very effective time to imaginate). Keep written affirmations under your pillow or on your nightstand. Pronounce them with attention and feeling when you think or say them, or they are only empty words.

Now we get to the number-one difficulty so many people experience in manifesting desires: negative self-talk. This can happen anytime your desire is not in alignment with your subconscious long-held attitudes and beliefs. Imaginating goes a long way toward overwriting ancient negative attitudes, because once the subconscious accepts the new image, through an emotional response to the imaging, the old program is already being revised. But if your desire dramatically contrasts with the “old you” or your old worldview, the subconscious mind may (not necessarily) give you some backtalk before it fully accepts what you are selling it.

An analogy to this is falling in love. The boy and girl are having wonderful feelings for each other. Something powerful is happening. But sometimes, when they’re apart, they have doubtful thoughts about themselves, the beloved, and what they’re experiencing. That’s the subconscious mind questioning the new direction, asking for an explanation that reconciles the old view of reality with the new emerging view. Lovers who give in to the doubts lose each other. Those who talk themselves through it, and reassure their subconscious mind that these new feelings are safe and good, are rewarded with the blissful experience of deep intimacy.

In the same way, as conscious creators, we have to talk down the doubts our subconscious minds might kick up, in the way of negative self-talk, about why we can’t or shouldn’t have what we wish for. One popular argument we hear from the Big Sub is that the world doesn’t work that way. It tells us we’re chasing a pipedream. It says we’ve gone around the bend. Just the same argument the Sub gives to the lover for why what he is feeling isn’t real.

This back talk usually comes in quiet ways, as little nagging feelings throughout the day. It whispers on a barely conscious level, poisoning our good mood and self-confidence. After a perfectly blissful morning imaginating session, where we joyfully knew our dream was in the process of coming true, we can, by 11 o’clock, be irritable and depressed, asking ourselves, “What on earth was I thinking?”

How to handle this? I’ve found head-on confrontation to be most effective. When I notice negative self-talk, I try to take a break from whatever I’m doing and give a little feedback to the Sub. I close my eyes, get quiet, and look at the nagging thought my subconscious mind has presented. Then I genuinely consider the possible truth of the negative thought, in light of my desired ideal. I listen to the argument of my sadly programmed subconscious as I would to an opposing parent or spouse: with patience and attention. Then I’m able to see the fallacies in its point of view, which is easy, because I now know more about life than I did when I taught those attitudes to my subconscious.

So I explain to the Sub where its thinking is wrong, why life does not work quite that way, or why it doesn’t have to. I do this little internal conversation using reason, logic, emotion, love, whatever my instinct tells me is necessary to heal the old attitude. It’s like telling a little child, afraid to jump in the water for the first time, why it’s all right and doable. You listen to the fears, and then you address them. You reassure and explain, in light of your greater knowledge. And the child, or in this case, subconscious mind, adjusts its thinking to reflect your reassuring understanding.

This idea, about talking things through with your subconscious, comes from Dr. Joseph Murphy’s “The Power of Your Subconscious Mind.” That wonderful book illustrates several different ways of programming deeper mind to reflect what you consciously choose and desire for your life. Combined with Neville’s books, it serves as an excellent primer in how to consciously work the Law of Attraction.

But back to negative self-talk. Sitting down and having a little chat with your subconscious is the most useful technique I’ve discovered for rewriting old self-defeating programs. You may have to do it a number of times. In the first session, you’ll answer and erase the first “Yes, but.” Later that same day or the next, your subconscious will raise another, different objection, one that underlies the doubt you just resolved. So you sit down and address that issue, too. Then a still deeper layer of programming will expose itself in the form of another nagging fear or doubt. Again, you consciously and compassionately address it. You keep on doing this, peeling the onion, until all the objections have been aired and answered. After this happens, the self-talk will be far less powerful. That’s because the overwrite is well underway.

But sabotaging self-talk may still occur. At this stage, negativity is mostly a matter of old habit. The subconscious mind has understood the new explanations you’ve sold it, but it hasn’t completely bought the package. It’s used to the old habitual way of seeing and doing. That is more familiar, more comfortable. At this point, a little self-discussion about comfort zones may be in order. When you’ve talked that through and have the feeling your subconscious mind is basically in league with you, but hesitant to commit, that may be the time to simply tell it: “Enough – we’re going to do this thing.”

This is a form of ordaining that works when subconscious mind is 99 percent with you and just needs a little nudge over the edge. But don’t order your deeper mind around unless you’ve fully listened to it first. If you start out your work on a manifesting a desire by telling self-talk to stop, your deep mind will obey you. The doubts and fears will go underground and become repressed. Then your desire won’t materialize, and you’ll be stymied as to why. Your subconscious won’t tell you, of course, because you told it to shut up.

Never regard your subconscious mind as stupid or a nuisance, something to be sneered at or bossed. Its doubts and fears are trying to protect you, based on what you taught it is safe from before. Treat it like a concerned friend. But after you’ve explained everything to the friend, if they have no objection left other than being nervous at the newness of it all, it’s time to nudge them encouragingly and say, “Come on, buddy, let’s go for it.”

I’ve found my negative self-talk to be dramatically affected by these strategies. On most of the former “issues” in my life, self-sabotage has stopped completely. I feel in once piece, in an optimistic, happy frame of mind most of the time. I’ve manifested dramatic things, mostly using imaginating and conversations (when needed) with my doubting mind. Now that my subconscious operates from a program more in alignment with my conscious values, I find myself spontaneously moving to a new level of manifesting.

I call this level “ordaining” – simply willing, or giving the order, that something is so. This works if you do it from a state of consciousness that is a unity of conscious mind, subconscious mind, and Infinite Source. Ordaining has resulted in instantaneous healings and some other remarkable results. But this is a new area for me that I am only starting to learn to move around in, so I can’t write much about it at this point.

Remember to use the “conversations with the Sub” strategy alongside your imaginating. The two work together, because it’s the imaginating that stirs up and challenges the old programming blocking your manifestation. If you just sit around waiting for the subconscious to kick up and reveal its buried attitudes, without any imaginating to stimulate that, the mind will oblige you in the form of its typical daily background mental chatter, and indeed it’s always worthwhile to address that. But if you combine this with imaginating, you’re actively stirring up the buried mud, which starts flying to the surface. Then you can clean out old attitudes much more quickly.

Cognitive psychology teaches people to reframe negative self-talk by becoming aware of it, then considering in what way the negative thought isn’t true, then replacing it with a conscious thought that better reflects the truth (this could be an affirmation). Studies have shown that this strategy changes brain chemistry in people suffering from chronic depression to the same degree that brain chemistry is altered through anti-depressive medications. Cognitive psychology is clearly onto something, and it doesn’t hurt to borrow the strategy. Basically, you overwrite negative self-talk, when noticed, with an affirming statement that supports the new attitude or desire you’re working on. This complements the other techniques we’re talking about here.

“The Law and the Promise” contains many first-hand accounts from Neville’s students about what happened when they practiced his method. I could add stories of my own. The miraculous events that have already happened in my life have generated a confidence that drives me to work on still greater manifestations. My experience has completely convinced me that thought can create anything we want to experience! There are no limits, because consciousness is unlimited.

What about when you want something and someone else desires the opposite? Since both people have the power of creation, their desires can cancel each other out, or weaken the power of each other. If you desire something that conflicts with someone else, the best solution is often to move to a higher level of desiring, to envision a solution where both of you will be satisfied.

For instance, if you apply for a job and 15 other people are competing, you can imaginate yourself being thrilled with your work, creative and happy as you go about your day, doing the kind of work you love and having a great income — this, rather than imaginating snagging that particular job, which places you in conflict with the creating energies of 15 other people. You can word an affirmation in a way that promotes all 15 people finding jobs they love, right along with you.

If your ideal job matches the job you’ve applied for, the position will then be yours, without any conflict from the desires of the other applicants. If the job in question is perfect for someone else, they will get the job while you find something better, a position better aligned with your desire.

Everyone winds up happy because you imaginated in a harmonious way that brought fulfillment to everyone, not just to yourself. The universe can easily fulfill a desire like that, as there is no resistance.

The Law of Attraction is the key to creating in this world, and also to protecting ourselves from other people’s creations that we don’t wish to be involved in. Whatever the world is doing around us, we can carve our own path through the woods and go wherever we wish. We can use affirmation to disconnect from any negative influences, entities or programs that have previously controlled or manipulated us. We need to consciously withdraw ourselves from thoughts, activities and alliances that have allowed others to dominate our lives.

Conscious choice, or alternatively, unconscious acceptance, determines what we get to experience in this world. We have the choice of being conscious creators or victims. That is The Secret, the key to everything wonderful in life, including realities most people don’t even dream are possible.

Some people use the Law of Attraction to manifest selfish or superficial things. That’s rather like Frodo, finding the ring of power and mistaking it for a piece of trinket jewelry. We can use the Law of Attraction to fundamentally change our experience. We can use it to create good for others. We can use it to make a better world.

Perhaps it’s foolish to use the genie that can grant any wish by asking for something trifling. On the other hand, if some people need to do that for a while to establish their confidence in the genie, then materializing toys probably serves a good purpose. Each successful manifestation leads to more trust in the process. In time, our confidence rises to the point where we can ordain reality like a master.

If consciousness creates the outer reality, then consciousness is king. Thought is king. We can think and create unconsciously and get more of the same old thing. Or, we can think fresh thoughts, dream bold dreams, and talk ourselves into a finer state of existence. Whether we live on purpose or on autopilot, we are creating and/or allowing everything that appears in our path. Once we know this – our power to choose, our power of permission – we move from passive victims to masters of living.

Karma is a lie that keeps us enslaved to the past. Our future is not determined by what we did but by what we presently choose to think and experience. Karma only exists in the mind, in the ancient attitudes that keep us enslaved to tired-out negative patterns. Karma dissolves when we change our thinking, first consciously, then subconsciously.

When conscious and subconscious agree, and take their direction from the harmonious Infinite within, life opens out into beauty and miracles. This is the new consciousness humanity is moving into. When we arrive there, we’ll transform the world into paradise.

Bronte Baxter

© Bronte Baxter 2008

Anyone may copy or republish this article on another site as long as they include the copyright and a back link to the “Splinter in the Mind” website at www.brontebaxter.wordpress.com

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Individuality in league with Oneness (not Oneness alone) will win the day and restore human freedom. The gospel of Oneness, all by itself, supports the New World Order. Proponents say it doesn’t matter if the world goes to hell in a hand basket, because after all, this world is an illusion and only Oneness Consciousness is real. If we know that, they argue, it doesn’t matter what happens, because there’s really no happiness or suffering, right or wrong, life or death, good or no bad — only the Oneness. So who cares?

I understand how people caught in the web of Eastern religion and New Age mumbo jumbo come to those conclusions. Their teachers’ purpose is to make them passive, “surrendered to the One,” their ego (personal selfhood) made into the enemy that must be killed. The teachers state it outright: “ego death” is the goal.

But that conspiracy-conscious people can fall into the same plight, instead of raising a cry for freedom and life in this world, came as a shock to me. I realize now it’s because Truth Movement leaders themselves sometimes combine the Oneness Doctrine with their research and information on the conspiracy. These people may have mystical experiences of their own that they trust in the way the religious trust their gurus, never questioning where they came from or why they were given to them.

The assumption seems to be that if it happened in my head and was accompanied by euphoria and fireworks, it must be true, and proof of the nature of the universe. But if the Illuminati extend to realms between visual perception (and evidence indicates they do – see my article series, Blowing the Whistle on Enlightenment), the Illuminati could be the source of much of mankind’s mystical experience. It’s easy for beings in the Unseen, adept at thought transference, to implant ideas in the minds of willing seekers, generating chemical changes in their brains and bodies and making them feel like they’ve been kissed by God. This would be particularly easy if the seekers have imbibed hallucinogenic substances.

I believe that well-intentioned, semi-depressed people are being implanted with messages that God has sent them to save the world. The urgency this produces gives their lives a particular sense of meaning. The message they receive is either that there is a war on among the Powers of Light and Darkness, which they must help fight, or that seeing through the illusion called reality and uniting with Infinite Oneness is the end-all and be-all of human existence. Both messages hold enough truth that they appeal to those who receive them as genuine. Both are so flawed as to point the receiver in the wrong direction, toward beliefs that favor humanity handing the universe into the Illuminati’s conniving hands.

The Light and Dark War of Principalities is nothing more than the Good Cop – Bad Cop Game taken to celestial levels. Like the eternal war between the Democrats and Republicans, it is unreal – a smokescreen designed to hide where the real action happens. Lucifer and Jehovah are on the same side: control of humanity. The “gods” and “demons” of Indianism are on the same side. As long as mankind provides the loosh (life energy) to the nether worlds through worship or suffering, all in the Fourth Dimension are happy.

It doesn’t matter if you call for help from Satan or Jesus, Krishna or Kali, you’re aligning your soul with the gang of brigands who have hijacked our lives by controlling us at our most intimate level. This control is not a takeover, but rather, freely given. Worshipers of their own accord give their lives to management by these beings, whom they regard as divine. They think in so doing they fight on the right side in the battle of good against evil. But all they do in fact is supply the life force, the loosh, needed for humanity’s hijackers to continue feeding off our hearts and souls.

Those who surrender their flawed human egos to the Oneness are no different. They, too, give their souls to management by the Fourth Dimension’s united company of tricksters. This is the point so many in the Truth Movement miss. We think that by making Oneness consciousness our supreme goal we are becoming pure. We think by embracing The Doctrine of Oneness we acquire supreme wisdom.

But the doctrine as it is taught today, even as the greatest Indian masters once taught it, is corrupt. The truth has been contaminated by the Fourth Dimension. Because the doctrine teaches that individual ego is a perversion of the Infinite, something that must be dissolved back into the universal consciousness for us to become wholesome and free. As such, that doctrine erodes the integrity of humanity.

It does so because it puts our world’s future up for grabs when it tells us to abdicate personal desire and intention as constructs of the ego. If we regard our individual nature as a corruption of Oneness, we conclude we must negate our ego to know Truth. We abdicate everything about us that makes us aware, decisive, will-exerting doers in this world – in favor of melting into the One, whose cosmic workings are thought to be automatic and perfect once humans remove their will and personality from the equation.

Whether or not the Doctrine of Oneness entails mantras and worship of gods, it is destructive. Because the doctrine is taught at the expense of the personality, the part of us that makes choices, that makes a difference in the world. When ego is taught as something essentially corrupt, or essentially unreal, it ceases to have value for us, and we naturally want to abandon it. This is exactly what the Illuminati desire from us, more than anything else we can give.

When we turn our backs on our ego, on the individual will and personality that is the very spark of the Infinite within us, we set our souls on the freebie shelf of the universe, to be absorbed or manipulated by Fourth Dimension entities. Our acts no longer appear to be our own – they feel like the work of forces moving through us. That perception is correct. But those forces are not the winds of Infinity, as the possessed assume: those forces are the egos of the possessors, who cherish this surrender of human selfhood.

By making the choice to regard all except the Oneness as flawed, unreal or insignificant, we turn over control of this universe to anyone who hasn’t abdicated their authority as a doer. Those are the only players still left on the field. This non-surrendered-ego group includes the Fourth Dimension band of brigands as well as those humans who accept neither the Oneness Doctrine nor the Doctrine of the War of Principalities – in other words, those who respect and retain their personhood and all its attendant faculties of will and desire.

I am not saying that Oneness, the Infinite Oneness that is the source from which we came, that place deep within us where we are all united, does not exist or is not important. It’s of supreme importance. The Infinite is the font of all life, all joy, all inspiration, all creativity. It is that which inspires us. It is pure genius. That Infinite, and our conscious connection with It, holds all the hope for our breaking out of the slavery we have let be visited on us materially and spiritually.

But to say It is the only reality, that everything except for It is a corruption of the Oneness – which is how the Doctrine of Oneness is perpetually preached – that is a perversion of the truth, designed to control us. If the Illuminati, functioning in the field of spiritual teachings, can get us to believe that we as individuals are illusory, that all we really are is the One, we will give up treasuring our will and desires as gifts of the divine, expressions of the Infinite, and throw them onto the waste pile as impure.

From that waste pile, they will be collected by the brigands who are able to use our abandoned will and desiring mechanism to achieve their own desires. When you abandon responsibility for your ego, which never can be destroyed since it is the stuff of consciousness, it is not the Oneness that takes over your personhood and absorbs it, it is other egos. The vulture-like, thieving egos who want to control all beings and bring them into alignment with their will.

When you surrender your ego, it does not dissolve as you have been promised, because the spark that you are can never dissolve. Your ego is either absorbed by the “god” you worship, increasing that entity’s personal power, or, if you do not worship a god, it is absorbed by any passing brigand who happens to notice that it has been abandoned. Ego = personhood = individual soul. This is soul-stealing, by permission.

Why can’t we all just dissolve into the Oneness? Because the Oneness didn’t make us individuals by accident, as some big cosmic mistake. We were created on purpose, as expressions of the joy of the Infinite. Just as a serene artist takes the joy in her heart and turns it into a fountain of expressions, each art piece revealing a unique aspect of her thoughts and nature, so the Infinite made us all unique expressions of aspects of its limitless self. It WANTS to see its oneness made into myriad shapes. It created the universe to be a delight, a mirror story of its own joy and greatness. Instead creation has slid into a nightmare, delight overshadowed by the misery and cruelty that comes of forgetting the nature of our inner being.

The flaws in creation are not because the Infinite individuated, but because its unique expressions – you and me – forgot our deeper nature, forgot the infinite power, bliss, and goodness that only can be located and tapped deep within ourselves in the place where we’re one with the Infinite.

The solution to our suffering is not to surrender our egos to the cosmic freebie shelf/ dump heap under the guise of awakening to Oneness. Rather, it is to bathe our personhood in the purity of the Infinite, to drink deeply of its waters, to melt our cares in its bliss and consciously become again what we are at core: pure molecules within that infinite ocean. From the bath, we return to the world and make it better, more joyful, more free, more inspired. We spontaneously grasp solutions to problems that eluded us before.

After enough bathing in the Infinite, it’s possible to move through this world and act here without ever leaving the consciousness that holds us in that embrace. The world becomes God’s ocean where we splash and cavort. That is God’s dream for the world – not amorphous, static Oneness. The amorphous is where God started from, and God found it boring. That’s why It created diversity, to play in. Because sitting being amorphous – simple Oneness – got dull.

Why would we make being “amorphous” our end-all and be-all, when it was the Infinite’s starting point, the very place it was endeavoring to emerge from in hopes of creating something interesting? Oneness isn’t interesting, it’s blissful. Just being blissful by itself gets old. Bliss needs to express in myriad creations to be fun and dynamic. It needs to desire, intend, make, choose, and act – all functions of ego. To say getting back to the Oneness is the whole point of life is like saying getting back to the first scene of the play is the whole point of the play, or getting back to the starting line is the whole point of the race.

The point is to run the race, play the play, dance the dance – and to do it in a way that retains contact with the consciousness that inspired the endeavor: the Infinite joy and oneness. When we learn to connect with the Oneness without abdicating the beauty and importance of multiplicity (variety), then will the purpose of creation be accomplished.

Then we will know how to dissolve the malignity that afflicts us. We will see that those who wish to control the rest are confused parts of our Greater Self. We won’t wish to destroy them but to help them. Our love, our inmost nature, will forgive and heal them. Then all God’s children will sport on the cosmic playground in laughter together – no more bullies and victims. No more battles and taking sides. No more stopping playing and being amorphous/ withdrawn in some corner. Life will be joy as we have not known it, for from the perspective of Infinity we will learn to dissolve everything that causes suffering here.

That is the divine vision, not destruction of one team on the battlefield, and certainly not the destruction of creation through abdication of personhood. But unless we awaken to the lies in the Doctrine of Oneness, the end of creation is what we promote. When the brand of brigands has consumed every ego in the universe through clever spiritual lies, it will be the proverbial snake that has swallowed its own tail. Creation will implode if that is allowed to happen.

We contribute to cosmic implosion when we accept the Doctrine of Oneness, striving for dissolution of ego into Oneness as our highest goal. The truly highest goal is Oneness expressing in joy in the forms of its myriad children, who make up the infinite garden of the world.

Bronte Baxter

© Bronte Baxter 2008

Anyone may copy or republish this article on another site as long as they include the copyright and a back link to the “Splinter in the Mind” website at www.brontebaxter.wordpress.com

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Modern spiritual teachings, both Christian and New Age, tell us love is the answer to all the problems humanity is facing. But love without will is powerless. That’s why love is touted as the singular solution, because such teachings lead mankind away from the path to freedom. That fulfills the purpose of religion, which is to keep mankind enslaved through the powers of erroneous thought.

When is the last time you heard anyone talk about the importance of that forgotten human faculty, the will? When did you read anything about it? The last time I heard it discussed, I was a child, back in the 1950s. Adults then spoke of “willpower.” But even though will was talked about, mostly it was a topic of humor. People were fond of saying how they didn’t have any willpower, giggling about it as they dove into their cigarette pack or their second helping of dessert. The assumption was that will was the gift of the superhuman, that ordinary flawed humanity could not be expected to find it in themselves.

The human will has been ignored as a serious subject for a very long time. We talk about our other faculties constantly: our brains, our sexuality, our athletic prowess, our emotional sensitivity, our empathy, even our intuition and psychic abilities. But the human will – the ability we have to decide and to choose, and to do so in a way that carries power – that part of our humanness is buried. Not because it’s weak or incapable of doing, but because our social programming has conspired to make us forget it exists.

There’s an old story called Acres of Diamonds about a man who traveled the world as a pauper looking for riches, only to discover as an old man that the land his home had always been on contained acres of undiscovered diamond mines. The diamonds represent the will, the faculty we possess that’s capable of choosing and molding our future. Right now when we’re threatened with tyrants at every turn, with the very loss of all that makes life worth living, we need to connect with this forgotten part of our humanity and call on it for answers and solutions.

I believe this is the lesson we were born for. Have we not been born into a world of bullies and the bullied? Of hunters and the hunted? People aware of the global conspiracy have woken up to this. But there’s more to the story, if we want to be free. We have to dig deeper.

Why is the world an interplay of tyrants and victims? Why is that the biggest game in town? Why does genuine love get short billing, in spite of our good intentions to be loving and “evolved”? The reason is that will controls the playing field, and the ones exerting the will are the tyrants. The rest of us, unaware of the power of will, fall prey to the schemes of those who know how to use it.

Adopting a loving attitude when we haven’t yet broken out of being victims will not save us personally nor will it save the world. Our fear will constantly drive us to abdicate our lovingness. Even if we manage to stay loving in the face of injustice and enslavement, love does little to help if it isn’t upheld by will. I cry, you cry, we embrace – and hug all the way to the FEMA camp.

As a frequent visitor at the Alex Jones website, I value all the information available there. I sometimes read the comments at the end of the articles and am troubled by the hopelessness so many posters feel about our future. I found the same attitude in many emails and comments I received when I was very active writing this blog.

The truth movement has awoken to the realities preying upon mankind, but has yet to take the step to become a genuine liberty movement. Truth movement, liberty movement – one focuses on knowledge, the other on empowerment. Only when we make that shift can we take back the control of our lives and our world that the tyrants are sucking from us.

People are hopeless because they don’t believe they have any power over the threatening situation. They think the tyrants hold all the cards. Indeed, the tyrants are brilliant, and have posted guards at every exit. They’ve planned their chess moves well in advance, while we, the novice players, are just waking up to how to play the game.

But human intelligence, buttressed by will, does have the ability to throw a wrench in their strategy, just as a savvy chess opponent can defeat any strategy if he’s determined and clever enough. No set of moves, however brilliantly orchestrated, is guaranteed to win every game. It only succeeds if the opponent is less clever than the other player. With enough will and deep thought, any brilliant chess play can be defeated. In the same way, determination and cleverness can defeat the strategists planning the New World Order.

Think of “determination” as will in action. Will decides what we allow (the passive aspect of willing) and what we initiate (the active aspect). Then determination implements the decision. For all practical purposes, “will,” “choice,” and “determination” refer to the same thing. From this point on, I’ll use the terms interchangeably.

I am increasingly certain that reclaiming our will is the door to our freedom – the only door to our freedom. Ignorance of the power of will is what keeps us afraid and enslaved.

I’ve written elsewhere in this blog about the power of thought to create real things in the outer world. Some call it the Law of Attraction. Some call it Creating Reality. Thought is powerful and creative because it rides on will. A thought without a strong intention, without passion behind it, is nothing but a pipe dream. A thought infused with will is a force to be reckoned with.

Determined thought or intention moves the machinery of the universe, not only on the gross level but at the subtlest level of life. Quantum physics talks about the intention of scientists in experiments determining the path taken by quantum particles. This isn’t just a theory, or feel-good pretending: it’s scientific fact.

In your own life, think about the times you’ve accomplished something, or someone you know accomplished something. Compare that to the times you didn’t accomplish. Was not will the differentiating factor? When you succeeded, was it not because you refused to have it any other way?

Some time ago I was an activist on a neighborhood project attempting to save our town from encroachment by a powerful government agency with destructive designs. There were several people at the helm, organizing the fight. I’ll never forget one day when one of them told me, with the utmost determination and confidence, that the agency would without a doubt be defeated. This was at a time in the campaign when everything looked like the agency would win.

Lynn is a spiritual woman with a high degree of personal will and empowerment. She had made up her mind that the plan would be defeated, and that was the end of it. It was simply a done deal. Not just a done deal in her mind, but a done deal in the real world. She had decided it so, with all the passion and confidence she possessed. This beautiful person understood the power of her own determination. She fully got that if she made up her mind that the agency could not have her home, then it could not take it. She knew she had the right and power to decide whether to concede it to them.

I knew in that moment, from the way she said it, that she had created the defeat of the agency. All the motions we all went through from that point onward were merely the denouement, the winding up of the story. The outcome had already been decided. This master of reality had made up her mind that the bullying stopped at her front door, and it did.

We’re so much more powerful than we realize. Mothers with will in gear have lifted automobiles off their trapped children. Prisoners with will have broken out of impossible-to-escape prison camps (see the movie Rescue Dawn for one such remarkable true story). We all know someone who with the confident innocence of determined desire succeeded in something the world considered impossible. We think of them as exceptional, but the only difference between them and the rest of us is that they access a faculty that most of humanity doesn’t remember it possesses.

I’m working on building my will. When I find something in my life I don’t like – a situation, a negative habit – I now say to myself, “I don’t accept this.” I say it with confidence and a sense of being finished. I may not know at the time how I’m going to get out of the thing that has bound me, but the ropes begin to loosen the moment I make the decision that I’m done. Circumstances develop from that point onward that bring about the end of the thing I want rid of. It’s quite dramatic sometimes, even miraculous. Other times, it’s gradual and subtle. Always it works.

I build my will in little things and in so doing develop my confidence in taking on matters of substance. I fully believe if the time comes when I face someone demanding I get vaccinated or microchipped, I will spontaneously access the power to make them leave me in peace.

I remember the moment in the first Star Wars where Obiwon waves his hand in front of an Empire cop, and the dazed guy lets him pass. And the moment in the book/movie, The Education of Little Tree, where officials come to drag the boy to a reservation school, but the granddad sees them coming from the hilltop; he and the boy are safe in the woods every time the would-be enslavers come to their door (another great true story).

Those who are afraid (and do not master their fear) that they will be sent to FEMA camps or killed, are creating being sent to FEMA camps or killed. Those who believe global tyranny is a done deal are creating experiencing global tyranny. By passively accepting the horrendous as inevitable, the passive aspect of our own will kicks in to allow it, stamping the plans of the tyrants with our own personal seal of permission.

We live on the Earth at this time because we chose to be here. We allowed it, we willed it. Perhaps we did that so we might experience the drama of bullies and bullied being played out in the extreme, as it is being played out today. Perhaps we wanted the stakes to be this high in order to jog our will awake, so we might become at last fully human, fully empowered, reality creators, masters of living.

We are only victims if that’s how we perceive it. We can take the bull by the horns, take charge of any situation. No one ever does anything to us that we don’t on some level allow. Allowing can be as simple as believing there’s no way out. It can be as simple as fear, or any other form of helpless acceptance.

What happens in our future is up to no one but us. The rest of the world can do what it likes, experience what it wants to, for its own ultimate freedom and wisdom. But no one can force anyone to be a slave who does not accept it. Whatever your fellows choose to do, you are safe and free if you determine to be.

But can your choice for personal freedom help save the world from the New World Order? I think it’s the only thing that can save it. But that’s the subject for another article.

Bronte Baxter

© Bronte Baxter 2008

Anyone may copy or republish this article on another site as long as they include the copyright and a back link to the “Splinter in the Mind” website at www.brontebaxter.wordpress.com

Link to the original article

The last chapter talked about that least-remembered talent we human beings possess: the power of will. I equated it with “choice” and “determination,” but will deserves some closer examination. After all, how can we draw on its power if it’s only a shadowy concept, something we’ve mentally assigned to the realm of boring philosophers and 19th Century preachers?

Yet will is the force that moves everything in the universe. It is the magnetic energy behind thought, that draws to itself whatever it dreams of. Will stirs the pot of creation, and adds new colors to the mix. It is the creative power behind thought, behind everything. By learning to use it, we can deflect any aggression, defeat any predator, and create whatever in life we wish to experience.

We need to really get this, intuitively, or it’s only an empty theory. It needs to become a deep understanding that we live from. Only then can will empower us.

So let’s think deeply for a few moments, reason things out, and consider our own experience. What evidence is there that will exists and that it is the power that moves the universe?

Well, what does the universe consist of? Stuff. Matter. Things. Where did it all come from? Unless it existed eternally, matter had a beginning: there was a time before it appeared on the scene.

Is it reasonable to think matter has always been there? That would mean matter is God, the end-all and be-all. Does that make sense? That rocks, fish, air, planets, stars have existed forever, without any beginning? It’s more reasonable to think that they came from something, something more basic than themselves. Scientists speak of a Big Bang, from which all matter appeared. What did the Big Bang come from? What was it that was exploding?

If nothing existed yet, then what exploded in the Big Bang was something immaterial, something that pre-dated matter. What could that possibly be except energy or thought? In fact, it had to be both: energetic thought, because thought is naturally energetic and energy is naturally intelligent.

Think about it. Think how energy moves in an intelligent direction. In its solid form as matter (people, animals, objects), energy moves in response to desires and intentions: a dog gets thirsty, it moves toward the water; you miss your mom, you call her on the phone. Energy moves with purpose directing it, not randomly and meaninglessly. That’s why we know energy is by nature intelligent. We see this even on the finest levels of creation, where subatomic particles display attraction and move in response to the attention of the observer.

So energy is intelligent. Is the reverse true: is intelligence energetic? If so, then energy and intelligence are one and the same thing. Energy and thought are one and the same thing. I’m using “intelligence” to mean “thought,” because thought is the active expression of intelligence.

Stay with me here. This is what I mean by thinking long thoughts. This is the kind of deep thinking we need to do to understand what we are and what we’re made of and how the universe works. Once we deeply grasp that, we grow in power. Perceiving our deeper nature, we start to operate from there. And that means finding our way out of the fix we and the rest of mankind are in.

So let’s get back to the drawing board … Is thought energetic? Obviously it is. Thoughts are what drive us to do things (to expend energy). A powerful thought (one with great energy) attracts other minds to it (examples: reading a book, buying a popular item, joining a cause). Even the random mental chatter that flows through our minds when we’re idle has a level of energy (enough to keep us awake at night if too much of it is going on).

We’ve seen for ourselves that energy is intelligent and that intelligence (thought) is energetic. So thought and energy are essentially one and the same. We also saw that energy/thought, being immaterial, must have preceded the creation of the universe. In fact, it is what the universe had to be born of, because there was nothing else.

Since energetic thought is the parent of the universe, it is also what the universe is made of. Matter (the universe) is simply congealed thought, congealed intelligent energy. And matter (creation) moves in response to our energetic thought.

This is the principle behind the Law of Attraction, the reason thoughts are magnetic. There’s very little difference between a thought of something and that thought congealed in the form of a thing. Our thoughts are creative and destructive, depending on the direction of their energy. Thinking bad things will happen, attracts energy to the thought that encourages the bad thing to occur. Intending and expecting good things to happen has the opposite effect.

So where does will come in? Will is all of it. Will is the force behind the thought (it’s the energy). Will is the intention directing the energy (it’s the intelligence). Will is the energetic thought, the directed energy, that is the source of the universe. It is the oven from which the Big Bang exploded. It is the force that moves everything in the universe. In fact, it is the only thing that ever makes anything happen. Without will, without energetic thought, everything would be static. There would be no life.

Whenever something happens, someone’s will has caused that event. Someone had an intention, a desire, strong enough (energetic enough) to move the soup of creation around in some way, or to add something new to the soup. People who live mostly on random thoughts, on their own repetitive mind chatter, have very little influence on the direction of creation, let alone the direction of their own life. Because they think from a level of low energy, not from focused intention.

The people we call the movers and shakers of the world live mostly on focused thoughts. They control what they allow in their minds, and think thoughts purposefully. Their minds are filled with plans, with intentions. The energy behind their focused thought is powerful, because focus gathers energy. Such people are the architects of the world, of “reality.” The reality that the rest of us mostly just react to and experience, because we, floating in the soup of our own random thoughts, allow others to determine our direction.

The movers and shakers are swimmers. The rest of us are floaters. And the swimmers of the world, having the game down as they do, right now are having fun pushing the floaters around the pond. Their scheme is to shove all the floaters into one little corner of the pool and keep us there, while they splash and play and enjoy all the rest of the place by themselves. It’s called the Great Conspiracy. And they’re pulling it off because we cry and moan about how mean they are, how clever they are, and how powerful they are, when in fact, the only difference between us and them is that they know how to think!

They know how to think with purpose, with will. They think with intention. They think with bad intention, but this is partly our own fault. We earn and deserve their scorn for being floaters, always reacting to life, never grabbing life with our hands and shaping it to our purpose. Our passiveness, our lack of will, has let the willful assume control of the playing field. They despise us for our weakness and stupidity and would like to see most of us exterminated (although they’ll keep a few around to do their bidding).

We have been weak and stupid, but not because the bullies are by nature stronger or smarter than we. Everyone came from the same Big Bang, the same intelligent energy. Some of us just learned the power of will while others forget that faculty existed. Those who did learn the secret conspired to keep the rest of us in forgetfulness. But the power is there within our own thoughts to take back control of our destiny. To take back our lives, personally and collectively.

It is only a matter of changing our minds, of thinking with new purpose, of determining not to self-destruct over the machinations of the bullies who are having a great laugh at our expense, as we float every which way they think to push us. It’s a matter of learning to swim.

It doesn’t matter how advanced they are in implementing their plans. When the floaters wake up and start swimming, they will create a force in the water that pushes back those trying to herd them. The bullies know that, and it is why they want to get rid of us, to destroy most of the world’s population before we get wise to the game. A cornered animal is likely to get wild, to discover its will, to assert its power. The bullies want to eliminate most of mankind before we reach that point.

The trick is for us to wake up soon enough. Not wake up in the sense the Truthers have already awakened: to knowledge of the conspiracy. We must wake up much more profoundly, to our power of will. We must decide NEVER to allow what they are orchestrating, that it will NOT happen, that we draw the line right here.

We mustn’t say “I’ll let them shoot me before I’ll go to a FEMA camp,” because then we create being shot. Then we enter the next world as a victim, still vulnerable to bullying, still pursued, still the plaything of the strong and malicious. When will it stop? When will we have enough and DECIDE it ends here? How much must we get pushed around before we catch on that when it ends depends entirely on us?

It’s our lack of will that allows their will to determine everything. It’s our lack of assertion. By remaining passive, mentally and physically, we allow them to do to us whatever they will. We are victims by choice. By default. Our will, operating in passive mode, has allowed it.

All we have to do to reverse the situation is to summon that will, to summon our passion, to understand the difference between us and them is only in the level of determination. “Victory belongs to the most committed,” goes the saying. They are more committed. They scheme, plan, and act. We bitch, moan, and hide under the bed. Not all of us, but so many of us aware of the conspiracy. So many of us feel hopeless. And it is that very hopeless attitude that will be our downfall, unless we take the bull by the horns and correct that.

It’s time to grab hold of our attitude and will ourselves to grow powerful. First by addressing everything in our personal lives that we let hold us back, every lame excuse for why we haven’t succeeded, for why we suffer, for why we cannot have what we desire. Then by addressing the Great Conspiracy itself.

All there is in the world is one essential element: thoughtful energy, energetic thought. That’s all there is. Everything material is a distillation of that, a result of that. Each of us is essentially a thought thinking itself, a thought made of energy. Energy that is eternal and infinite.

By thinking with focus, with passion, with determination, we access our unlimited energy to create or experience anything we want. There are no victims when all are infinitely powerful at their core. There is only forgetfulness of our nature, failure to access will, and a choice to let the bullies make all the decisions.

Bronte Baxter

© Bronte Baxter 2008

Anyone may copy or republish this article on another site as long as they include the copyright and a back link to the “Splinter in the Mind” website at www.brontebaxter.wordpress.com

Link to the original article

The last chapter examined human nature and argued, through reasoning and experience, that we, at core, are thought-energy-will. That is how we animate our bodies and how we move through the field of matter.

Thought-energy-will in the form of “I” is an individual, a little spark that woke up within the infinity of intelligent potential that some physicists like to call “the unified field.” We are each pieces of the Infinite, totally connected with the Infinite, yet independent as doers and experiencers. As individualized expressions of thought-energy-will, we are the way the Infinite expresses itself, the way it creates. We are the reason for creation. Our individuality is precious to the Infinite, and if we ever dissolved that, we would defeat the purpose of life.

The part of my being that makes me individual is my unique thought and will. The will is the impulse within me to do and to choose and to create. What I do, choose, and create is unique in all the universe. No other impulse of the Infinite (no other individual) will ever or can ever observe life from quite my perspective, nor will they ever do or allow or create exactly as I choose to.

Our choices and inspirations are based on our positions where we stand as an individualized sparks of infinity. When all the sparks know their nature as the Infinite and at the same time fully engage their individuality, the world will become like a symphony, with every note sounded full and sweet, harmonizing with and adding to every other note. It will become a colorful flower field, every blossom vibrant in its distinct and separate uniqueness, yet each contributing to the perfume and beauty that is all the flower field together.

Religion works against this. It tells us to surrender our will to something greater, but the Infinite actually delights in our will and its expression. Religion tells us to dissolve our ego – the author of our doing, creating, and choosing – into the cosmic ego of the whole. This is completely counter to the purpose of the Infinite. It would be like every flower in a garden surrendering itself to the garden, wilting in its self-hood instead of being the best flower it can be. The entire garden would die.

Each person is an individualized expression of thought-energy-will – like a car and driver, moving across the universe. Mind is the automobile, energy is the fuel, and will is the driver. Telling me to surrender my will is a way of taking over my thought and my energy.

The car goes nowhere without a will to drive it. If I step out of the driver’s seat of my life, merely reacting to the world instead of initiating things in it, someone else will climb behind the wheel and direct where I go. This is especially true if I invite such an arrangement through self-deprecating prayer or by prostrating myself before the gods in mantra meditation.

When we dissolve our will or ego, “I” no longer exists. All that remains is the shell of what was once a person. We are left with body (energy) and mind (thoughts). The lights are on, but no one’s at home. Or rather, someone new has taken up residence, the entity to whom one has surrendered one’s ego or will. Some call this enlightenment. It’s actually possession. The will has been abdicated, that which makes us uniquely human. One becomes a vessel for the will of that to whom one has given oneself.

Decades back, when I was a girl, religion outright asked for surrender of the will. That’s back when will was talked about still in common parlance. Now, religion has evolved and asks instead for surrender of our ego. But will and ego are the same thing. By demonizing our desires, by telling us ego is arrogant and selfish, religion has made the will seem like something that must be relinquished for perfection or goodness to be attained.

In fact, when we surrender that spark, through “namah-ing” our way through years of mantras or asking Jesus to save us, the very reason for our existence is defeated. We become empty shells, sounding to the noise of that which blows through us and possesses us. That entity is not God, for True God is the Infinite which never wants to take over anything. God desires its children’s freedom, their will unfettered, so they may dance wherever and however they like, and in so doing, delight their creator.

When we truly get that we are thought-energy-will in our essential nature, that this impulse is our spirit, the eternal and infinite personhood that animates our body, then it becomes possible to command the body and control it. We understand that every physical limitation is a limitation of thought, and that thought can reverse it. If all matter, including our bodies, is made of nothing but energy, then by thinking our physical energy patterns different, they must change. We’ve accepted that we must age and die, and so we do. But if we decide to reject that thought and supplant it with a better one, we can order the body to thrive and to live forever.

This is why I went into such detail in my last article examining what we are at our core. Because unless we intuitively get that, unless it’s something we’ve reasoned to ourselves, so thoroughly and deeply that it becomes our essential reality, then the idea that we are thought-energy-will pulsing in an infinite field of potential is only a pretty concept. It must become our most fundamental experience. When our true nature becomes as clear and real to us as the ground we walk on, we can start to live from that reality, with the authority that understanding grants us. We can ordain things and they happen. We can tell the body to do what we will. We can infuse the body with the infinite energy of the unified field and never need to eat (take life from others) in order to survive. We can survive on our essential, infinite nature.

And if all beings learned to do this, if all egos understood their essential power and immortality, no one would need to feed on anyone else. We all would exist in our own self-empowerment. The basic premise on which this universe is founded would dissolve, and that premise is the need to take life from others in order to live. The universe would start to operate on a different principle, the principle of its essential unlimited potential.

Let’s look at this from another perspective. Jewish mystical texts, as well as other esoteric manuscripts, describe the shape of the universe as a torus. A torus looks like a doughnut, a doughnut capable of turning in on itself. Think of it like a piece of vacuum cleaner tubing, taped to itself to form a circle, a doughnut shape. Imagine rotating the tubing, so the part that is the top moves toward the center, then down to the bottom, then back up to the top again. That is the description of a torus.

In this model, the universe is a black hole on one of the sides of the torus, a white hole at the other side. The white hole is constantly spitting out new creations – new worlds – that live, thrive, then decline as they move around the outside to the reverse side of the torus, where they are absorbed by the black hole there. (Astronomy now actually postulates that there is a black hole in the center of the universe, toward which all galaxies are constantly moving.) As they move through the center of the doughnut, worlds are destroyed then recycled, emerging on the other side of the torus – through the white hole – as new forms. Individual forms have been consumed; new forms have been created. And so the cycle of creation and destruction continues.

This torus is the physical shape of the universe, according to mystic sources, and the shape resembles that of someone eating, digesting, and defecating. Food in (at the black hole end), food processed (interior of the doughnut hole), food out (at the white hole end). In this way, the torus that is the universe resembles the interior shape of human and animal bodies: mouth at one end, digestion and transmutation of food in the center, anus at the other end. And just as animals defecate, their feces fertilizing the earth and becoming new plants, that which was defecated gets consumed again in the form of a new dinner. This torus system is the pattern or shape of the universe we live in. And it is our essential shape as organic beings, as long as we are eaters, dependent on taking life to survive.

The torus also appears to be the shape of Brahman, the Vedic/ East Indian name for the entity or consciousness that is or upholds the universe. Brahman is another name, in India, for the cosmic Self. It is that consciousness which those pursuing the traditional concept of “enlightenment” are striving to attain. Brahman functions in a self-destructive feedback loop. “Curving back onto myself, I create again and again,” says Krishna in the Bhagavad-Gita, speaking for the consciousness of the universe. Energy in, energy out. Galaxies dissolved, galaxies created. An endless cycle of creation and destruction. The universe is like a dog forever chasing its tail.

The ancient mystery schools depicted the reality of the universe another way: through the symbol of a snake swallowing its tail. (Picture a dot on the torus, and the path it takes as it moves from the top inner side down the outer side, across the bottom, up the inner side and back to its position on the top. It makes a perfect circle, which is the shape of a snake swallowing its tail.) The symbol is one of self-destruction, because a snake that devours itself will die. The universe will also someday die, because it cannot go on eating itself endlessly. In time its energy will wear out, from the endless recycling project. The universe will implode.

Brahman (the consciousness whose outer form is our universe) knows this, and it is terrified. That’s why all its children are terrified. All beings are afraid of death, and are subject to death. Because the great entity we are part of, the universe, is subject to death. Like Brahman, the great torus, we little toruses must eat to continue our existence. Or so we think. But in fact, we are no more in need of consuming others to continue existing than a dog needs to chase its tail in order to stay alive. It’s a thought we had that became a belief. It’s a thought Brahman had, that became a belief. And what we think, we manifest as reality.

The universe is self-destructive because it thinks that way. Brahman eats its children because it thinks it has to, to survive. Brahman is an insane parent, pursuing a course that is madness, knowing no other. But healing is only a thought away. Brahman only needs to conceive of another possibility, and it can change its pattern of existence.

In fact, Brahman, like us, is an individualized expression of the unified field: pure and infinite intelligent energy. If Brahman could but remember its nature as infinite, it would stop trying to eat itself. It eats itself in an effort to consume energy, because it thinks it will run out. But its very nature is thought-energy-will, and the energy it expresses from is infinite. By remembering that, Brahman would no longer need to consume itself to stay alive. It can simply shine in its own self-effulgence. It can bask in its own infinity of energy, and dance an endless dance in the forms of its immortal children. The insanity can end, when the insane thinking ends.

We are children of Brahman, and we also ARE Brahman, as a leaf is an individual but is also the plant it is part of, as a cell is an individual, but also the body it is part of. If the leaves change their minds, the plant changes its mind. If we, as children of the universe, wake up to our essential nature as unlimited and undying, then Brahman, our parent, must wake up to the same. If we stop needing to consume and stop agreeing to be consumed, consumption stops – not only for us, but for that which we are a part of. The universe starts to change its mind with every one of us that changes our mind.

When enough people wake up to our limitless nature, Brahman will wake up, and the torus that is the universe will morph into a new shape. The insanity will end, and the dog will stop chasing its tail. The need for anyone to devour anyone else will cease, and the lion will lie down with the lamb. It all starts with remembering what we really are, then using our wills to ordain change from that infinite, powerful place.

The definition of religion is from the root “religio,” which means “to bind back.” Think of the torus that is Brahman as a great firework explosion, where the sparks reach outward, then curve back to their source. Religion gives us the thinking that binds us back to the hole in the doughnut, where we must be destroyed and recycled.

By seeing through the lies of religion, by refusing to surrender our wills / egos to Brahman or to any other limited entity that religions may call God, we free ourselves from the need to cycle around from birth to ultimate death. We identify with something much greater than Brahman – the infinite intelligence from which Brahman and all universes sprang.

In so doing, we immortalize ourselves, body and spirit. We save ourselves, and we also save the universe. For being its unit members, we are the universe.

Keep in mind that Brahman is not the Ultimate Reality (although people in the Eastern religious traditions will tell you that it is). If Brahman is the cosmic consciousness of this universe, and as such is a limited consciousness (as we have seen), then the Ultimate Reality is beyond Brahman. The Ultimate Reality must be the pure ground of Being, from which all universes emerge, ours being but one of them. Brahman, the entity, thinks it is all there is – the ultimate of the ultimate – but that is not the case. Other universes exist, each with its own overmind or consciousness . Brahman is only one of these, only one of myriad universes.

Surely not every universe – not every cosmic child of God – is insane the way Brahman is. Surely not all of them are ignorant of how to live off the infinite energy they were conceived from. Surely there must be some creations that already exist in a state of eternal paradise. Because all possibilities exist in the Infinite Field that gave birth to all the worlds, and not all of God’s cosmic children can be that dumb!

If living a life free of birth and death is possible – and reason tells us it must be – then we can transform our universe into its own unique paradise. It’s only a matter of stepping out of the rut of old, engrained ideas – the dogmas we hold as unquestionable absolutes – and moving to a new way of perceiving, willing, and being. What a grand challenge and adventure!

Bronte Baxter

© Bronte Baxter 2008

Anyone may copy or republish this article on another site as long as they include the copyright and a back link to the “Splinter in the Mind” website at www.brontebaxter.wordpress.com

Link to the original article