CONSCIOUSNESS &  DE(CON)STRUCTION  Nothing vast enters the life of mortals without a curse Sophocles - Quoted from the Netflix Documentary, The Social Dilemma What the f... is going on?! The quest for a deeper understanding of our fluid times started for me in meditation. Suddenly I could not any longer only just dwell in the soul as I had done for years. Sitting with closed eyes and crossed legs, I had a growing feeling of ignoring something important. It was time to open my eyes a bit more.   For years I had somehow been identifying myself as belonging to the New Age community. To my surprise, what I perceived as my tribe, almost within months, had become affected by paranoic conspiracy thinking. A pandemian conversion wave from spirituality to conspirituality had begun. In this strange event, my tribe that so far had been either apolitical or oriented towards the left began to merge with the political far-right. However, this new political wave had its own version of good old conservative virtues: My people had started to join a new strange army of protest. Frankensteins, put together of dead body parts from red necks, vegan wellness people, shamans, and bible belt Christians had gathered under the flag of QAnon and Trump-worship. For a short time, this unbelievable Tiger King horde had control over the most powerful institution on earth.    Observing the spiritual ecstasy of Jake Angeli, I got an overwhelming feeling of not understanding the time I live in. Jake Angeli, aka Q-Shaman - US Capitol Building At present, one of my old New Age aquaintances cannot sleep at night, and meditation no longer brings her peace. She has found new fearful friends, most of them through social media. She is disturbed by nightmares, and in the lack of proper sleep, she seems to walk with her new freinds into a portal of evil daydreams.   How could so many people from my tribe, who so far had rejoiced in calmness and trust in existence, suddenly freak so much out? My spiritual family was among the first to zombify. However, not long after, even non-spiritual and highly educated 'normal' people in my circle of friends began believing in weird shit they dug out from rabbit holes on social media. A close friend of mine with a university degree and a long life in executive positions began advocating for wildly sinister motives behind the political effort to roll out covid vaccines. He was never into spirituality, and still, he is by now convinced that a secret elite is planning a good old Roman decimation of humankind. This time the one-tenth stands for the number of survivors. The majority of the human race will be eliminated through poisonous vaccines. From where did he get this by now unshakeable faith? It was by looking into the magic mirror of his smartphone. Here he flocked together with birds of the same feather. Social media was to blame, but was it the only cause? The USA has become a Tiger King country In the text to come, I will present screenshots of my ongoing process of making sense of the disruptive and profoundly fascinating time we live in. Watching the Netflix serial Tiger King reinforced the picture of America as the epicenter of a civilizational decay. What is stunning is not the weirdness of the mostly opioid tiger-park people. That was somehow to expect. What strikes me is the craziness of the people who interact with the tiger-people in the form of media-narcissist layers, politicians, and super-rich people. Even the animal activists seem to mirror the madness they fight. In this sense, the Tiger King serial also offers a glimpse into the social mechanisms that caused the weirdest occupation of a major power center in human history.    In Denmark, where I live, we by large still trust our institutions and political leaders, and we do not have any Exotic Joes. However, we have the last 70 years followed in the footsteps of the USA with a few years of blessed delay. What happens today in the USA is what happens tomorrow in Europe.       Let me underscore that I love American culture and its version of capitalism. America has protected Europe from much worse political systems and allowed us as mice to run with the elephant, intoxicated by the thunderous noise we could make. However, the western winds seem now so Rubiconic disruptive that it is difficult to see them as potential bringers of positive societal self-transformation. The weather has changed, and it is not any longer storm clouds that can be seen on the horizon. It is hurricanes. A SHARED FIELD OF SYSTEMIC ROOT CAUSES On an early stage in this Odyssee of sense-making, I began to widen my curiosity from the field of weird Conspiracy Theories to encompass a broader range of contemporary movements. Where conspiracy theories seemed to have their ideal breeding ground on the far right of the political spectrum, the left was active in creating equally disturbing ideations. Jake Angeli and the like were not the only kids on the block. New forms of fanatic activism had popped up on all levels of human life while I had been sitting in my own bliss with closed eyes. Suddenly there was a lot of new words to understand like Woke, Critical Race Theory, Identity Politics, Outrage, Cancel, and radical Transgender-culture, and Black Lives Matter, just to mention some of the most important.   My initial question was:        Why are they all so outright crazy?!         Here is a shortlist of shared behavior in random order: Disregard for traditional institutional science, lack of humor, the use of collective or individual victimhood, fundamentalism, and hostility towards other opinions.      The pandemia of rage Our time has become the time of pandemian rage. Not only our planet is heating up. Also, Greta Thunberg is spitting fire and brimstone. Our minds have on a global scale become victims of mental overheating. Everybody is getting angry with everybody these days.      I find it challenging to have a constructive discussion with my old new-age tribe. They have entered the path of emotionally driven one-way rhetoric on their exodus into Trump territory. In the eyes of many of my old spiritual friends, I am now a foe because I am vaccinated. For the new young left, I am a foe because I, in their eyes, basically am an old overprivileged neo-colonial white toxic male full of unconscious racial and gender microaggressions.        The world seems to be splitting into myriads of opposing tribalized monads where each is complete in itself. Here there is no room for 'the other'. Left-wing humanities have coined the concept of a safe space which means a room free from diverging opinions. Other viewpoints are perceived as identity-threatening disturbances, and hence the foundation of dialogue is eroding. Dual spaces held open by disagreement in conversation are replaced by monoliths of ideology.     I can see a lot of reason in most new leftist agendas. Of course, we need to have Me-Too movements and critical race theories. We can only move forward by taking up such topics.    However, what I find disturbing is the carrier wave of anger and indignation. Greta Thunberg's famous, how dare you, has become a pandemic. The cancellation of open dialogue, that follows in the slipstream of this anger is by now not a unique feature for the leftists. It can be observed in all walks of life. Accusing high pitch voices can be heard all over from the old school political spectrum to the many new social media-driven groupings. In this way, we are, as warring gangs, becoming more and more similar in our emotional configuration.       A new holy war In the absence of an open horizontal exchange of viewpoints, the new pandemic anger justifies itself through a self-assumed higher moral ground. We condemn each other from positions of vertical moral superiority. From that high horse, one does not need to argue because one's own righteousness seems self-evident. This stanza of offended morality is replacing the scientific archetype with the archetype of the priest. In this way, we are sucked into a global scenario of holy wars where religious justification has replaced dialogue based on reason.   The gravity from this black hole is so strong that it becomes difficult to avoid being morally angered by the morally offended. Even science has become a political propaganda tool in the hand of pro-vaxers when Macron tries to force everyone to get vaccinated in a time where omikron is on the way to create herd immunity. I, too, cannot help judging anti-vaxers and the like with contempt. Nietzsche says: To be an exception is to be a sinner. In fact, we have all become sinning exceptions in the eyes of each other.        The weaponization of victimhood The rage on the right political spectrum is basically contained in a good old western shoot-out narrative. On the left, the same primitive anger is presented in a more academically sophisticated form. Here it is woven into word-wool made of complex academic sounding sentences where hard pumped academian language overkill with only little substance serves as legitimation and justification for violence. The lofty language is tailoring an amour out of victimhood where the right to agression becomes monopolized by people or groups who can document a story of being surpressed. The victimized person or group uses a victimhood-identity as a shaming weapon directed towards their imagined guilty targets. Victimhood in itself opens a path to power. In this sense, Nietzsche's philosophy has become more true than ever. Without being a victim, you have no right to raise your voice, and in the same move, your oppressor becomes a sinner. Systemic societal processes of oppression and exploitation are now reduced to questions of morality or the lack of the same. Hence the word 'sorry' has become viral. Sinners have the possibility of redemption if they excuse themselves for their wrongdoings. Gretha Thunbergs accusing words, How dare you! are symptomatic of this reductive personal guilt narrative. There is, of course, some truth in viewing societal developments as a process of and caused by individual human choices. On this platform, we can judge every single human action and person on a scale of morality. However, we are all much more stringed puppets in the super complex intersubjective reality we made and called 'culture'. Was Adolf Eichmann an evil person? Later, I will give some perspectives on this question.   When it comes to reducing complex systemic processes to a matter of moral integrity, the left shares the same outlook as the right and the conspiratorial anti-vaxers. They rearrange complexity into a narrative of good versus evil persons. This opens a portal to a regressive and oppressive ideology made out of sin and repentance. This archetypical behavior reoccurs again and again in human history, from the medieval inquisition to Pol Pot. Now the name of the game has become black and white. To be white, be a man, and be well off has become an original sin. And there seems to be no defense against this power strategy because to have a different opinion is deemed sinful. You have to bow your head in shame and purge yourself of sinful thoughts. You have to use the word, sorry, and even that cannot help you, if you are a white male.             A new war between the past and the present Who is responsible for this development? I think it is the future. As Harari has pointed out, there are no seats reserved for the common person on the odyssey to the new future. The futuristic techno-topia created by the elite is remarkably free from ordinary humans. The future does not seem to need us, and hence we are living in a vacuum with no visions of an utopian exodus for the masses. Instead, we face the fact that we all can be replaced by AI.    We do not even have to move towards the future. It seems to come to us uninvited in the form of accelerating and unpredictable changes on all levels. A Kurzweilian singularity racing technology has, together with global warming, global trade and transport crisis, pandemian covid, and streams of refugees, to mention some of the most important, created a disruptive future-influx. As Sophocles puts it: Nothing vast enters the life of mortals without a curse. Changes of this magnitude do not go well with the archaic parts of our brain. We all, even without words, intuitively feel it, and our stone-age personality reacts with a dialectic anti-thesis of the same magnitude. From this level of observation, there is nothing new in history. It replays the same societal algorithms over and over, and hence we can observe the following fact from a tiny straw of grass to a mighty civilization: What is born must die. Ascending from that lofty height of abstraction to a helicopter perspective, we again can observe a general characteristic, playing out from the life of an individual to a nation: When disruptive change occurs in old age, glorificative reconstruction of the past arises. Old men sit and dream up the glorious youth they never had, and so do civilizations. In this sense, Trumpism is a sign and a symbol of the longing for the good old orthodox days. However, as the case is on an individual level, where we are not able to recall a memory without changing it, the past we are longing for has never existed. It is as new as the futuristic disruption it opposes.        In Denmark, a left-wing psychology professor has achieved cult status by 'standing firm' and saying NO to modern understandings of personal self-development. From the political left, he has managed to articulate a new right-wingish conservatism as an anti-dote against a runaway world.      The fear of a disruptive and uncertain future is creating surprising new hybrid alliances between former foes. Extreme opposites, like right-wing red necks and bible belt conservatives in the USA, suddenly have more in common with Russia than with the young psychedelic micro-dosing tech people in Silicon Valley. Seen in this perspective, Trump's fascination with Putin is not an individual oddity. It gives sense in the same way as the conspiracy maker, Alex Jones, holds a Russian passport. Even here in Denmark, we have a right-wing Christian politician who has begun to sympathize with the Russian Orthodox Church and defend Riussias stance in politics. Russia is in some ways becoming a symbol of our own past. A quick tour on you-tube shows it: There is not much difference between Russian and American red-neck culture. In the reader letters on RT, Russia Today, one finds more and more American comments with a pro-Russian stanza. I also find RT inspiring when it comes to pointing out Western oddities.       In the same rift-zone, some good old New Age friends have turned their worship from Indian Gods to Trump. Just a day after the Trump cult stormed Capitol Hill, I witnessed a mob of anti-mask and anti-vaxxers go crazy here in Copenhagen. They were using fireworks and screaming with pitched voices in distorted megaphones that Covid was a hoax planted in order to control them. They were not armed like the Trump-maniacs, but they were clearly in a state of collective rage I have so far only seen in India in the form of angry mobs. It was fascinating and scary to watch.  . Anti-mask and vaccine demonstration in Copenhagen by a group called 'Men in Black'. My guess is that they subconsciously have appropriated their name from Black Lives Matter. THE CROSSING OF THE RUBICON Here comes a preliminary answer to the question; why we all are so crazy. Our western civilization has become old. A clear sign of a civilization descending into chaos is its failing attempt to present viable survival solutions within its own reality. The capitalistic system has served us well, but it seems less and less able to find new dynamic ways out of the accumulating and accelerating mess it has created within the last 100 years. In this sense, our civilization has crossed the Rubicon into a state of irreversible disrepair. Liberalism, individualism, and consumerism have served us well up to now, but at present, the world order of selfish ego and money is piling up contradictions that cannot any longer find a Hegelian synthesis within its own reality-dimension. The sudden and steep rise of a snowball of unresolvable contradictions is a phenomenon we can observe in all civilisatorical endgames. However, these endgames have, since antiquity, never involved the planet at such a scale. Here are a few examples in random order. Pollution from omnipresent microplastic to hormone disturbing chemicals, global warming, a crisis in supply-lines of raw materials and consumer goods, free science and dialogue canceled by rage and theories more based on religion than reason. These planetarian challenges from high to low and from micro to macro-levels are working in tandem with the general societal decay and creating what I would term a shared field of interaction.     How can we think of new and fresh solutions, when at the same time the free thought is under threat even in our academic institutions? How can we solve our present problems via a culture driven, not by idealism and virtue but by greed? On top of that cocktail, we can add the damaging effect of the more extreme anti-vaxers institution-eroding lack of trust in governmental decisions and scientific based communities.     Of course, we cannot rule out that there indeed might be a possibility of our civilization solving its self-inflicted challenges. Rome often recovered from the reigns of mad emperors, so we might even survive a second coming of Trump. However, in solving problems like global warming and cooling down overheated rage-minds, our culture would have to undergo change to such a degree that it would have to morph into something completely different. The old system would have to die as a caterpillar larva does when it gives rise to the butterfly. Seen in this perspective, it seems that the polarizing of different bodies of society in itself is a pointer that the last act of our fossil-fueled capitalistic civilization has begun. At the height of this metamorphosis, the butterfly produces poison to kill the larva, and the larva produces poison to kill the butterfly. At the present stage in this war-like situation, it is, however, still challenging to identify the butterfly rising from the smoke.   THE VIEWPOINT OF AN OLD STRANGER FROM A SMALL AND INSIGNIFICANT COUNTRY I now have to ask a meta-question: Have I become too old to understand and appreciate the time I live in, or is it that our contemporary civilization has become senescent? By now, I think both are true. I am an old man living in the last days of a civilization which has begun to show clear signs of decay. In history, we can observe the fall of empires as a product of the disintegration of their societal glue. In this sense, Empires are always conquered from within before they are conquered from without. The last days of Rome All ways lead to Rome, but I have now chosen the same ways leading away from the last days of Rome so I, at a distance, can marvel at the beauty of the falling autumn leaves of a dying civilization. Forgive me for not coming up with strategies for action. My mission is, alone due to my own autum stage, not to prevent what is happening by trying to put the monsters back in the bottle. Instead, I, through a growing understanding of why Rome had to fall, am coming closer to amor fati. Everything that is born has to die at some point. It is a natural process. To worry about that is also natural, but that seems not to be in my cards to do so.    Observed from this distance, the modern outragers' 'purpose' is not to create but to facilitate the destruction of the old and dying egocentric consumer sueciety. These new whirlpools of distrust and rage see themselves as saviors, fighting against the decay they, in fact, are themselves. Therefore I see them metaphorically as marionette-soldiers of necessary deconstruction. They are midwives in the sense that they destroy to ashes and hence prepare the ground for a new cultural life that they themselves never can be a part of because a revolution always eats its own children. In this sense, I, as an old man, will share faith with the revolutionary children of our time. We will both perish while new life will rise with the sun after the dark night of destruction. However, this new life will not unfold within a continuation of the civilisation, as we know it today.   The Roman empire lasted for over 1000 years. It was, as compared to now, a slow-motion culture. The American Empire has, with its tremendous dynamism, run through the algorithms of a super civilization in more than double speed and half the time.    It might be a hubris-project to describe this glorious decay since I do not even live in America but in tiny good old Denmark. As mentioned, we are always following and copying our big brother but generally with a few years of blessed delay. Maybe precisely this delay, plus the Atlantic Ocean, gives me the necessary distance to observe the US in a way that would not be possible if I was an American in America.   The guilty boomer In this investigative journey, I discovered something surprising. My own life story revealed itself to be a fractal micro-repetition of the larger societal wave of post-Second World War boomers, now on its way to perish on the shore of the doomers. Hence it fitted perfectly into the grander picture I here try to paint to use personal anecdotes as exemplifications. By understanding my own life, I came closer to see the contemporary shape of our western civilization.   It all began with my rebellious youth in the 60'ties. I realized that I belong to the generation who set the monsters free by freeing ourselves. We were the first not to trust tradition and authorities. We, in fact, were the first to dissolve the societal glue. However, we, to a certain extent, in our disrespect, were freeing society of outdated mental behavior. Why is this not any longer the case when it comes to the new movements driven by our fresh rebellious youth?   When a civilization is on the way up to its climax, the young generation's rebellious ideas evidently, as a whole, must be better than the culturally frozen ideas from the past. When the same civilization has reached the zenith and has begun its decline, this decline is not only a product of cultural senescence but also a consequence of a cognitive decline in the youth. The new ideas are barren, like the anger of Greta Thunberg.   WE HAVE TO GET OUT OF OURSELVES TO FIND NEW INSIGHTS Maybe I am as extreme as the contemporary rage movements when I diagnose the current collective madness as symptoms of a dying culture. Like the old hollow tree, the rot is coming from within the system itself. However, death is not extreme when seen from above. It is a natural process. In the text to come, you most probably will wonder why I, almost as a general rule, stray from one subject to another. I love to combine thoughts and insights from high to low, from lofty abstractions to concrete exemplifications within subjects that, at first glance, are difficult to associate. Furthermore, it seems that I have written an overture to the theme without ending. Please have patience with me here. I have chosen unorthodox ways to extract analytical sense out of a world that seems to rotate faster and faster.    When I browse through the media landscape, I am stunned by institutional experts' inability to say anything of value about the time we live in. It seems that old school professors and Ph.D.'s are trying to understand the scenario we live in with concepts they learned a long time ago. New ways of seeing and understanding require new ways of structural thinking and writing. If you should ever read to the end of this text, I hope that you will be able to see that every brick, no matter how strange it seems placed, contributes to the whole architecture.    LSD and the Synestehic Mind In the process of writing, I have read the text aloud to a lot of people. Here I noticed a strange thing. People who, like me, have done a lot of meditation and taken psychedelics in a responsible manner seem to understand the text more effortlessly. Others often complain that I mix too many things that have nothing to do with each other. They, in my view, compartmentalize the world as their own brain is compartmentalized. LSD is shown to grow neurons that connect parts of the brain that so far did not communicate with each other. In the same way, I, before I began to use psychedelics as an integral part of my meditation practice, was either writing about meditation or other subjects in a separate manner. I now clearly see that a split mind splits the world and its understanding of the world. Only a synesthetic mind can grasp the growing complexity we are witnesing. Only a mind freed from habitual thinking will have a chance of getting closer to understanding the Consciousness we are hosting. Illustration, taken from Beckleyfoundation.org The importance of compassion The old school psychologist will most probably point out how my self-interest is a sign of narcissism. I see it differently. Without critical but loving self-examination in awareness, a much more dangerous narcissism will thrive in the dark.   As a critic of paranoic conspiracy thinking, it is important not to fall into the trap of the dehumanizing understanding of 'they'. In the moment I begin to see evil in conspiracy paranoiacs I am, in fact, infected by their narrative. Here a mandatory but difficult stunt, in the search , something closer to truth, is to, on a meta-level, examine one's own assumptions. This ongoing duty of self-examination in self-awareness is challenging in the sense that it is like being a detective investigating himself as a possible thief. In this ouroborus-chase there is one basic thing to observe in the GPS of expanded awareness: If we do not have compassion for people holding views opposite to our own, we are most certainly holding distorted views. We all, to some extent, create projective snakes out of ropes. If I, in a dialogue, am more emotionally engaged than is needed for being in a state of content excitement, I am the snake in the mirror.    CONSCIOUS CONSCIOUSNESS Consciousness is a fascinating but elusive phenomenon: it is impossible to specify what it is, what it does, or why it evolved. Nothing worth reading has been written about it. Stuart Sutherland Consciousness is an ambiguous term. What do we, in fact understand by Consciousness? Since childhood, I have been obsessed with the question: Who and what am I? I began to ponder this with crossed legs at the tender age of 3 after a tourist visit with my parents to a Buddhist temple in Burma. After that visit, I began to sit and ponder, as you can see in the photo below. The mystery of who am I? This lifelong journey of self-inquiry has lead me to be Conscious about the fact that Consciousness can only be investigated by Consciousness itself. Consciousness is the fundamental presence in which everything appears. Even Consciousness appears only in Consciousness. Yet, it is hidden in plain sight. That is why Kabir said: I smile when I hear the fish in the ocean are crying for water. The footprints of the Buddha In the earliest Buddhist traditions, it was told that Buddha did not want any depictions of himself as a person. Hence the artists were only allowed to depict him indirectly through his hands or feet. It was, in fact, the Macedonian Greeks living in the forgotten Kingdom of Bactria that, when converting to Buddhism, made the first Buddha statues. Conditioned as they were to believe in God in the human form of Alexander the Great, they constructed their Buddha and the understanding of him in the same personal way. That is why Buddhastatues even today all are dressed up in a Greek himation. The post Alexandrian Greeks in the east were the first to make statues of the Buddha. Thus the original message of the primordial invisibility of the nirvanian realm got lost in the plain sight of the Buddhas compassionate face.    I once saw a movie where a thief was able to make himself invisible by some sci-fi technology. However, the thief was caught because the clever detectives put wet paint on the floor, and then his footprints became visible. While Consciousness itself hides behind veils, it has a primordial impact upon the reality we live in. Here, in our realm, we can observe it in the form of footprints left in time and space. At the core of individual and cultural understanding and unfoldment stands the invisible and location-less pillar of Consciousness. Civilizations, groups, and individuals stand and fall with the quality and intensity of 'their' Consciousness and Wakefulness. Consciousness is the glue that binds everything together.   How can I say that? Let me tell you a story. One of my dearest friends was in his youth full of rage. He was born without fear of consequences in a massive atlectic body ready to explode in any street fight where the odds seemed against him. When he was 18 years old he left Denmark and went to participate in a war against jihadists in the middle East. After two years of warfare, decorated with scars all over his body he returned to Denmark, where he became the leader of a criminal gang. He ended up in an isolation jail, where he sat for himself for more than one year. Soon after being released, he by chance was watching a youtube video where a kalaidoscopic tunnel was accompanied by a deep voice saying: You are that! You are the ultimate truth. He was so ripe for a shift in Consciousness that even this poorly made clip was enough to trigger an explosion of Consiousness inside of him. He was totally unprepared ffor this. Nobody in his circles were familiar with the language of Mystic experiences and hence he was wonderfully free from any disturbing New Age conceptualizations of enlightenment. He realized that he was God, that he was omnipresent, and that everything is love. In the beginning this Divine rapture was so strong that he could not do anything else but surrender to exctacy in oblivion of the world and worldly afairs. When after some time coming a little bit more down from that state, he looked at the world arond him as a manifestation of his own Self. How was it now possible to fight anyone?   He left his previous life behind like you shift your clothes and became the most loving, compasionate and wise man one can imagine. Suddenly all the energy inside of him could be navigated in intelligent and expanded awarenes. This is the glue of Consciousness: The spontaneous ability to not even see, but to be the viewpoint of 'the other'.   In Christianity, people try to follow the saying of Jesus: Love they neighbor as yourself. Filtered thorugh the thinking mind, this becomes a commandment to be obeyed like a traffic rule. It becomes something we do by thinking it has to be done and when we forget it we feel we did something wrong and then we return to our collective thought created morality to mend our ways. When Consciousness expands in quality and quantity the first astonishing discovery is that our neighbor actually is ourselves. To love sentient beings is then not a moral rule to be followed, but a natural and spontaneouss consequence of Consciousness. Consciousness rises where the invisible Buddha manages to steal away the inflated treasure of ego with its narrow spotlight of awareness. His inborn qualities are human nobility, openness, tolerance, and love. These qualities are the measurable neural footprints left by the Buddha. We are not able to measure Consciousness, but we can to a certain extend observe and study love levels. Highly conscious people are spntaneously full of love and compassion and in this sense the Greek depiction of the personalized Buddha still bears great significance. When the quality and quantity of wakeful self-awareness of not-knowing grows in us, so does humility. In such a state of mind, we do not need to rage or cancel other people due to their opinions.   Every strife, every disagreement, every cancellation is based on a deep down notion. It says: I am not you. In states of expanded Consciousnss, the first realization is: I am You. That is why I say that Consciousness is a glue. It binds life together as lego bricks in its expanded concentric circles of awareness. This is what Meister Eckhart spoke about this wondrous thing: All creatures contain one reflection: one, that is the denial of its being the other; the highest of the angels denies he is the lowest. God is the denial of denials. What footprints do I observe these days from my lifelong cultivated ivory tower of Consciousness? What direction do they have? I see Consciousness collapsing in black pools of rage, polarization, and cancellation. Observed from that pillar, the glorious endgame of our civilization is taking form of a general collapse of the intensity and quality of Consciousness's visible signatures of nobility, openness, tolerance, and love. In the loss of these correlates, people sink into tribalized web-pools of polarized opinions. The eight ball of Consciousness Our relation to Consciousness can be compared to the black eightball in American pool. The black eightball is not targeted during the game because first of all, you need to get all your colored balls in the hole. If you, however, by accident, before you have finished your colored balls, make the eightball go into a hole, you have lost the game. Hence there is a saying connected to the game: Always keep an eye on the eightball. The hard problem of the eight ball Scientists can by large explain the world in the same mechanistic way as it is possible to desrcibe a game of pool. When it comes to the eightball of Consciousness, there is a general consensus, that Consciousness is qualitative different from sentient matter. However, there is also an assumption that the eightball of Consciousness is a ball like any other ball, and therefore Consciousness must follow the mechanistic rules set by time and space. It is a hard problem, but still it seems possible to solve with the right kind of measurements and algorithms. In this investigation Consciousness has been transferred from the domain of priests, mystics and philosophers to the world of brain scientists. Due to this shift, the word experience has become the keyword.The hard problem of Consciousness has now become less hard in the sense that an experience can be measured by its correlates in the brain. The next evolutionary state of self-awareness: To know what I do not know   In order to give space to other boxes of realities than our own, first of all, we must realize that we do not know much. Socrates proclaimed: I seem, then, in just this little thing to be wiser than this man at any rate, that what I do not know I do not think I know either. More than 2000 years later, Roosevelt said: Never underestimate a man who overestimates himself. Maybe the most dangerous overestimation is created in the unawareness of what we do not know. In fact, the world is, to a large extent, ruled by such mindsets.    It is, of course, a good thing to know as much as possible. It is even better on a meta-level to know that we know and what we know. However, at present, the best of all is to know what we do not know. When we know our own not knowing, we tend to be more humble in our survival dealings. The not known unknowing in Western science When it comes to the phenomenon of Consciousness, our not-knowing not-knowing is close to being absurd. We do basically not know what Consciousness is, and the best thing to do would be to understand that we don't know: We are not capable of defining this familiar and profoundly mysterious entity.         Could it (the Soul) be a constituent of our universe, ignored by the physicist, but infinitely more important than light? Alexis Carrel - Man, the Unknown Again and again, it baffles me how almost every Westener, from the man on the street, to the scientist and philosopher uses the term Consciousness, as were it a a known 'thing'. The western positivistic schooled mind seems to quantify Consciousness in terms of measurement without, at least with my, by eastern Meditation cultivated eyes, to have the slightest idea about that they do absolutely not know what Consciousness is. Either Consciouness is nullified in importance and/or placed in the dead end measuring electrodes. This unawareness of unawarenes is, in fact, in itself a product of unawareness. The Western scientific mind is highly intelligent while at the same time being highly unconscious.   The hard problem of Consciousess is essentially a gap in explanation between physical processes and the experience of them within the framework of neuroscience. Physical processes, such as the perception of a red circle can be broken down to a series of easy problems of relating the physical object i.e. color and form to the processes in the brain responsible for processing them. Similarly, perception of more complex forms, say a house can be broken down to a series of hierarchically organized brain processes in the visual cortices that add more and more complexity to the visual construct that eventually emerges as a house. These processes that together compile the the visual construct of the house can be considered a series of building blocks for from a reductionistic perspective i.e. a series of easy problems. The hard problem of consciousness emerges because the phenomenological experience, the qualia, the subjective experience of that house cannot be logically arranged on such continuum. There is no brain process at the end of the series of processes responsible for the experience of the house, thus the chain og logic is broken. This also raises a question of the purpose of experience. Why do we have subjective experiences? Brain research can give a very precise explanation down to the mm2 tissue that is responsible for accommodating the perception of the color red, but can say surprisingly little about how red is experienced. Thus it seems that the brain has all mechanisms to make the physical world available to human experience, but that the experience it self is not part of the same system. What is 'redness'? Can it in itself be understood by its quantified correlates as they can be measured in the brain? Even way more mysterious than redness is it's appearance in Consciousness. To reduce Consciousness to the phenomenon of having an experience is to be placed as an opponent to Socrates.    Humble and new scientific aproaches However, there is hope. Annaka Harris is among a growing number of people in the West who have begun to ask fresh questions harvested from outside the boundaries of Western science's collective boxed up psyche. In the book, Conscious, she sums up the latest research on the field up. When Annaka poses the question of how experience arise[s] out of non-sentient matter, she in my eyes make the fundamental and traditional mistake of reducing Consciousness to this question. However she does it in a self-awareness of humble not-knowing and that alone give hope for the times to come. What impresses me is her humility in dealing with the matter. On the fringes of the mainstream western scientific worldview, there are people like Dr. Bernardo Kastrup and Robert Lanza popping up in growing numbers. They have begun to question our contemporary materialistic paradigme, pointing out all the inherent incoherences and contradictions the notion of a material world as such creates. Consciousness and bilogical life is here placed as the foundation of materialism.     Experience, like redness, cannot be fully understood, but only reductive measured by some correlates of experience. Hence we are explaining one mystery by replacing it with another, and this is not the only problem. In the ancient Indian traditions, Consciousness is compared to a mirror: As images are seen in a mirror, so the universe is an image in the mirror of Consciousness. Tripura Rahasya XL vers 53-54 No doubt something in me has an experience when I look in the mirror. But is the mirror itself having an experience? Consciousness bestows us the gift of experience but is in itself like the mirror separated from experience. The illustration below is taken from Wikipedia. The title is Neural Correlates of Consciousness. With the analogy of the mirror in mind, it should be rephrased to Neural Correlates in Consciousness.   The Indian investigation of Consciousness So far, the western traditions of science and philosophy have not really tapped into the treasure trove of ancient Indian mystic traditions.   In ancient Indian philosophy, it is stated that Consciousness and not material objects is the foundation of everything else. In accordance with the mirror analogy, they view this Consciousness as separated from the world of objects and senses in the form of a detached witness of experience. Two birds, inseparable companions, perch on the same tree; one eats the fruit, the other looks on. The first bird is our individual self-feeding on the pleasures and pains of his deeds; The other is the universal self, silently witnessing all. Mandukya Upanishad 3.1.1 We can find hidden keys for understanding Consciousness in Western mystic as well. The same understanding of separation is present in Meister Eckhart's works:   ... there are in everyone two men: one, the outward man, is his objective nature; the man is served by the five senses, albeit he is energized by the power of the soul. The other, the inner man, is man's subjective nature.... Take an illustration. The door goes to and fro upon its hinges. Now the projecting door I liken to the outward man and the hinge I liken to the inner man. As it shuts and opens, the door swings to and fro while the hinge remains unmoved in the same place without undergoing any change.   To be unmoved is to be free from experience because experience is what moves you. Consciousness is making experience possible in our brains but is in itself like the hinge or a mirror detached from experience.    However, even to understand Consciousness as a detached witness is only one step more into a mystery shrouded in darkness in the sense that a witness also has an experience, the experience of witnessing. When Anaka Harris points towards experience, it is, therefore, not without genius. Nothing describable in time and space is as correlated with Consciousness as experience. Experience is a footprint left by the invisible thief. It is the interface between the higher dimensional and hence not understandable Consciousness and our three-dimensional world. So how can we come closer to the phenomenon of Consciousness? Exactly because Consciousness is the primordial foundation of everything, including itself, there can never be a satisfying scientific positivistic-based explanation to the phenomenon of Consciousness. This quest can be compared to a detective investigating a crime he himself has committed.   That, however, does not mean that we should not try. One of my favorite Spiritual Inspirators, Papaji, once said: My whole life, I have wanted to kiss her, but I have never seen Her. He was speaking about Consciousness and his passionate relation to it. Consciousness is primordial to experience. It is, in fact, even beyond the realm of Bernardo Kastrups idealism in the sense that ideas also are appearances in Consciousness and not of Consciousness. Consciousness is what makes experience possible precisely by being the opposite. Consciousness is, in fact, the total anti-thesis to both materialism and idealism. The best of the Mystics, like Meister Eckhart, talks about primordial ground or darkness as the space holder for the light. The light which is God is flowing and darkening every light Meister Ekchart The ancient Indian mirror frame displayed below has most probably been created with the intention to illustrate Consciousness. With the mirrror long gone it has in a way become an even deeper pointer towards the profound mystery of Consciousness. The mind is like a reflection in a mirror: Though it is insubstantial, it is not nonexistent. P'ang Yun, layman P'ang - China Through the nonexistent black mirror of Consciousness, I see the primordial ground creating man in its own by space and time coordinates reduced image and from here the other way round. What could 'God' possibly be other than a subjective projection of the of the unconscious conscious darkness inside ourselves?   CONSCIOUSNESS IN THE EAST AND THE WEST East is East, and West is West,  and never the twain shall meet. R. Kipling The mystic traditions of the West never became mainstream as they did in the East. Hence the western philosophical and scientific traditions, in the lack of solid introspection, did not discover Consciousness in itself.   This becomes clear in Descartes famous saying:    Cogito, ergo sum - I think, therefore I am.    This statement is actually based on introspection. However, it stops with the observation of the thinking mind. A pointer from the chain-smoking Indian shopkeeper, Nisargadatta Maharaj would have helped Decartes go a little further in his quest: Watch your thoughts and watch yourself watching the thoughts.  Had Descartes lived in a culture where deep daily meditation was practiced from childhood onwards, he might have discovered that Conscious field of observation in which the thinking I arise. It seems that the most prominent philosophers in the West could not see what the cigar-dealer from India saw: Our minds are just waves on the ocean of Consciousness Nisargadatta Maharaj When it comes to the western all too busy outward going psyche Consciousness seems to hide itself in the plain sight of unconsciousness.   The Indian Mystics would, with their more inwardly trained eyes, claim:   Non cogito, ergo sum - I do not think; therefore I am.   The thinking 'I' is, in the Indian view, nothing more than a clouding appearance in Consciousness. For them, the real am-ness is Consciousness in itself. The Indian mystic Sri Aurobindo states: True knowledge is not attained by thinking. It is what you are. However, Descartes's statement is still true when seen from the level of the ego-entity. For Meister Eckhart our first separating thought is one of denial: All creatures contain one reflection: one, that is the denial of its being the other; the highest of the angels denies he is the lowest. God is the denial of denials. When we are in denial of this first conceptual denial of being the other, the identity we take to be ourselves seems to dissolve in expansion. What is left is omnipresent Consciousness as such.   During one of my stays behind hidden doors of Indian wisdom spaces, I discussed this dichotomy with my friend and mentor, Bhaharadwaj. He laughed and said: It would be much better to pose the question. What is it that witnesses the thoughts? What is left when there is no activity in the mind and the senses are nullified?    Consciousness without time-spatial boundaries become aware of itself as the greater, primordial I am when the noise of thoughts subsides.   Tat Twam asi. I am 'that'. My always joyful spiritual mentor then mentioned James Joyce's famous book, Stream of Consciousness. Bhaharadwaj had been a lecturer in philosophy and English literature at the University of Lahore before the partition of 1947. At that time of youth, he had been fascinated by this book. Years later 'his' Consciousness suddenly and unexpectedly exploded in intensity and quality. After that shift, he realized the irony of the title of Joyce's iconic work. He said: Then I saw there is no stream of Consciousness. There is only ego-fuss in Consciousess. Consciousness is primordial to the movements of the  mind. The title of the book should have been rephrased to: Stream IN Consciousness. Bhaharadwaj streaming IN Consciousness India is the most wonderful, strange, and contradictory place one can imagine. I lived years of my life there, basically in search of Self.   What was it that India had to offer?   Basically nothing... Hence I was not disappointed. I sometimes say, if a man who seeks nothing finds nothing, what has he to complain? After all, he has found what he sought. Meister Eckhart I got what I came for, and Bhaharadwaj was not the only nothing to help me to understand something. In the eyes of this beautiful woman from Punjab, we see no-one and nothing to the left and something and someone to the right. She was a friend of Bhaharadwaj, and on the photo to the right, I knew her as Sita. Until recently, Indians had a unique ability to make extreme inter-facial shifts from trance-like depersonalization to humanization. The Indian depersonalization act is fundamentally different from the one we in the West practice in public spaces like trains and busses. It goes much deeper and is even signalized to others in the form of the staring eyes one can observe on the left picture above. Indians could at any given moment turn into a zero-mode. In contemporary India, this peculiar ability has largely disappeared. The rising middle-class man has lost his forefathers' conscious zero-faces in the pandemian depersonalized sleep-staring into the smartphone-vortex.   However, the good old Indian zero-mode can still occasionally be seen in the faces and bodies of poor people here. Just before the covid pandemia, I walking my way through the crowded Main Bazar in New Delhi. Here I was wittnesing a scene I have seen repeatedly thorugh all my years in India.  An obese middle-class man sitting in a traffic-jammed cycle rickshaw lost his patience and started abusing and beating his rickshaw wallah. In the absence of the possibility of retaliation, the rickshaw wallah depersonalized himself. He became like a dead puppet and received the beatings even without trying to protect himself with his hands. In older times in Europe, we would have said: He bears his cross. But in fact, he was not. He was not suffering. Instead, he had disappeared from the stage of life and was now living safely in his own timeless world of inner spirit. The low caste people, the Dalits of India, showed me what Meditation really is: a survival strategy. INDIAN NON-EXISTENCE Where the ancient Greeks and later the western civilization concentrated their cultural lens to objectify 'something', the Indians, since the beginning of their ancient culture, put their effort into exploring nothing and non-existence.     It gives almost too good meaning to view these two opposite ways of life as survival strategy responses. When we in the west are confronted with a problem, we try to solve it. In India, they solve the problem by declaring that it does not exist. The world is empty, and hence the problem is perceived as an illusion of Maya. No outward action is needed. It takes only a change of perspective to solve the problem.   India is still full of anecdotal stories pointing towards non-existence. An Indian yogi was once lecturing on the top floor of a multi-storied building in Tokio, Japan. Suddenly a small eartquake made the whole building tremble. People fled the building in panic. The yogi, however, stayed unmoved with closed eyes in his lotus position with crossed legs. Shortly after, the tremors were over, and the people returned to the building finding the yogi sitting with closed eyes. They asked him: Why did you not flee the building? He answered: While you were fleeing out, I was fleeing in.   Why did the Indian yogi come up with such a response, unlike any other? There are, of course, many reasons for that, but the fundamental societal mechanism was most probably created by the caste system's extreme over-fragmentation of the Indian society.   When the Islamic invader Muhammad Ghori with his army stood outside the city walls of Delhi at sunset, he asked his military advisors why there were so many fire camps in the Indian army quarter. The advisors told him that they were the Indian army's fireplaces for preparing food. Why in the name of Allah do they have so many small kitchens, he asked. The advisors said: It is because they cannot eat together. They are divided by cast.   Muhammad Ghori smiled and said: Then I have won the war!   People who cannot eat together cannot fight together. In a broader perspective, they cannot overcome societal catastrophes by the power of unified collectivity. Hence India the last 3.000 years, has been among the most catastrophic places in the world. Vulnerable to invaders, monsoon failures, and general lack of state-built infrastructures like water tanks and irrigation systems, the Indians even evolved a starvation gene that enabled them to survive hunger better than other populations. That gives meaning to the Indian invention of meditation. If you cannot overcome the challenges the outer world poses to you, you instead sit down, adapt and/or change yourself. The picture below illustrates how this mental strategy has penetrated India and even Indian road construction: On the very same roads, one can observe the stoic calmness of rickshaw drivers caugth in a traffic jam: Trafic jam outside Main Bazar, Delhi On my trekkings in the Indian Himalayas I sometimes observed hermits walking naked in the snow. These ascetics were able to control and rise their body temperature to such an extend that they could survive the icy cold climate at these altitudes. It was my Indian trekking partner who took this photo. Out of courtesy he only took a photo of the upper part of this naked sadhu. In India the denial of the reality the world has taken many cultural forms. Displayed in the photo below is a young ascetic who day and night is keeping his arm up in the air. After some years it will fall off due to the lack of blood flow. What the young man demonstrates by such an act is a synthesis of extreme body control and denial of the same. Young sadhu from Rihiksh One of the most important meditative survival adaptations is being able to survive on a minimum of resourses. Of these resourses, food is the most important. During the frequent periods of food scarcity, Indian people simply sat down for thousand of years and closed their eyes. In this low calory mode they waited for better times and/or for the point where they loved their destiny as a dream, not to be taken seriously. In the introverted low calorie state of Meditation Consciousness expands in both quality and quantity. There seem to be an evolutionary link between brain optimization and calorie restriction. In times of food scarcity we needed to be smarter in order to survive. However, in the Indian version of Meditation this brain optimization is not used for hunting prey but modulated into conscious passitivity. This mechanism shows how humans through story-telling of intersubjective realities can twist genetic programs into doing things they were not 'intended' to do within their own evolutionary 'purpose'. The yogi portrayed above, is an extreme example of such kind of cultural survival adaptions.    Both from India and Tibet, there are many stories about yogis who were able to live without food in a fasting mode for month. Many have even claimed to live without food at all. It is here not important whether these stories are true or not. What is significant is that they point at a cultural configuration of a minimum calorie intake as something of utter importance. By reading the books available describing the life of the famous Indian Saint Ramakrishna, I found the stories about his poor parents among the most interesting. Through these stories, a window was opened where one could see not only yogis using meditation as a low calory technique but also something frequently practiced by poor Indin farmers in times of scarcity. As they say in Zen-Buddhism: To loose is to win. To win is to loose. Through the impact of catastrophies, Indians won the holy Grail of Consiousness.   How to loose through abundance I live in the center of Copenhagen, one of the most alfuent cities in the world. People living here have succeded in securing their lives to such a degree that they dont need to stay alert in cutting edge wekefullnes to maintain an afluent status quo. The urbanites here are smart for sure, but not really conscious. Fluid cognitive and social intelligence is necessary for living this kind of wealthy city life. However, the latests and hence most fragile brain-flower of evolution, superconsciousness, is absent. Why should evolution bother to create such complex 'thing' when not needed. In this in some way truly happy and efficient culture, alcohol is the favorite consumer drug. Danish youth have world record in alcohol consumption. Seen from my tower, alcohol is ten times more a killer of Consciousness than of cognitive intelligence. Hence this drug is a signature of a culture with great productive IQ but an alarmingly low CQ = Consciousness quotient.    The eastern Zero and the western One This fatal survival strategy led the Indians to their glorious invention of the zero and profound descriptions of the phenomenon of Consciousness as emptiness. The word the Indians used to describe the new discovery of zero was taken from the early Buddhist's description of existence as empty. They used the word shoonyo. Still today, the mathematical zero in Hindi is named shoonyo. India is the only country in the world where the highest way to praise a man is to call him a zero or 'a no-body'. Hence the famous Saint Ramana Maharshi got the title of being the highest impersonality. I am not, I will not be. I have not, I will not have. This frightens all children, And kills fear in the wise. Nāgārjuna Seen from that level of abstraction, it was western science that invented tools of describing and accumulating 'something' while the eastern religious traditions discovered 'nothing'. The Upanishads stated that the essence of consciousness could only be described in terms of negation, neti neti, which means not this, not that. In the ancient Western mystical traditions, we find the same negative tendency with the exception that the word, God, is used instead of the word consciousness.  God, because of his excellence, may rightly be called Nothing. Scotus Erigena 800-880 In western mystical traditions the concept of Consciousness is absent. The Western mystics, use the notion of 'God'. I would here argue that the western notion of God is equivalent to the eastern concept of Consciousness. I see that equal sign with my head planted in Indian soil. The Indians use the concept of God and Consciousness with fluid borders and with that feriegn viewpoint it gives a lot of sense to see the Christian Mystics use of the word God as fluid with the notion of Consciousness. I am confident Meist er Eckhart would agree with me. Theologicans may quarrel, but the mystics of the world speak the same language. Meister Ekchart Eckhart approaches his terms of God and Godhead in the same Upanishadic way of negation: But now I say: it is neither this nor that. Yet it is somewhat... It is of all names free, of all forms void. . . . God is neither this nor that. Meister Ekchart Meister Eckhart was a master in the art of conscious knowing of unknowing. Hence I let him sum up what I want to say: God's darkness is his nature which is unknowable. terms of God of Consciousness are nothing but projective concepts of a rare state of being within man's own event horizon. In this context, the following statement from Meister Eckhart gives 'sense': In unknowing knowing shall we know God. He further states: Had I a God whom I could understand,  I would no longer hold him for God.    How can I say that? With what scientific authority? My first counter-question here would be: What is the science behind science? There is no real science behind science in the sense that we cannot even prove that one plus one equals two. We assume, it and it seems to work. This paradox is not visible in its own center but becomes evident once we move to the frontiers of any 'known' thing. Consciousness is the frontier of frontiers, and hence there is no other way to go than to dive deep into our own inner laboratory and look for the one that looks and feel the one that feels. The variable intensity and clarity of Consciousness The mirror has yet another quality as a metaphor for Consciousness. When Sufis use the mirror as an illustration of the refection of divinity in man, they also observe the quality of the mirror itself: Do you not know why your mirror does not glitter? Because the rust is not cleansed from its surface Rumi A profound aspect of Consciousness is that in spite of its hiding behind veils, it, as Rumi's mirror, can vary in intensity and clarity.   There are here, of course, many triggers, like age, health, intelligence and cultural stimulation, that can accelerate wakefulness. Among these, I find curiosity particularly interesting. We can observe the relation between curitosity and Consciousness when we, with passion, investigate into something we do not understand. Our awareness gets triggered by the mystery until the moment we solve the puzzle. Then we return to our more sleepy level with the words: the snake was just a rope. It seems that in certain circumstances, Consciouness is responding by growing in intensity and clarity. It is, as in the case with the famous Indian rope-snake survival, that requires us to wake up. A large and clear mirror can make us experience and 'aware' more than a small and dirty one. The same is the case with Consciousness in the sense that we can be more or less conscious, more or less aware. Consciousness can vary in intensity and quality. We are now faced with the paradox that something we do not know yet seems to be able to be quantified in terms of intensity. Of course, it is still a study of footprints.   CONSCIOUSNESS - THE VISITOR FROM HIGHER DIMENSIONS    We will be unaware of any dimension higher than the three we know. We would not be able to understand it. Every human brain is in this sense a portal to where dimensions have a peep into a lower realm. We live in a four dimension world. place time what does not make sense in our dimension might make sense in higher dimensions, ayahuasca It may be that these four dimensions are apearing to us while we are embedded in higher dimension realities - hyper dimension The human intellect is not sufficient to decode the universe it lives in dot zero dim line two dim neil gras de tyson Holger bechs cat Particles pop in and out of existence In my youth No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it. Albert Einstein. In the light of the mirror of you, the universe observing itself through consciousness. Roger Penrose   We are the mirror, as well as the face in it. Rumi Through the human being, the Universe is making a mirror to observe itself. Bohm Holger Bech Nielsen og katten fra den fremmede dimension Jeg har for nyligt med stor begejstring læst Holger Bech Nielsen og Jonas Kuld Rathjes fremragende bog, Teorien om alt. Bech Nielsen beskriver bl.a. hvorledes indbyggerene i en to-dimensionel dimension ville opleve besøget af en kat fra en tredimensionel virkelighed. Først ville de todimensionelle indbyggere se fire sorte cirkler, efterfulgt af en stor oval plamage, der til sidst skrumpede ind til en lille sort klat i ovalens ene side. Da jeg læste dette afsnit undrede det mig, hvorfor der ikke også blev stillet skarpt på kattens oplevelse af det samme besøg. For de to dimensioners gensidige óplevelse´af hinanden er det perfekte billede på bevidsthedens besøg i vores tredimensionelle virkelighed. Vi kan ikke forstå bevidstheden netop af samme grunde som de todimensionelle indbyggere ikke kunne forstå katten. Bevidstheden er en gæst fra en virkelighed med flere dimensioner end vor tid-rum virkelighed er i besiddelse af. Videnskabens forsøg på at forstå bevidsthed som et produkt af matematiske algoritmer er underlagt de samme vilkår som indbyggerne i den todimensionale verden i deres forsøg på at forstå katten fra det tredimensionae rum. Det er næsten rørende komisk.   I min ungdoms kollegietid blev jeg en våd aften i byen stillet over for følgende spørgsmål. Lav fire ligesidede trekanter med 6 tændstikker. Jeg forsøgte og forsøgte uden held at løse gåden indtil tændstikkernes ejermand i et elegant snuptag stillede tændstikkerne op som en pyramide. Jeg havde vanemæssigt ledt efter en løsning i et to-demensionelt plan, hvor en løsning ikke var mulig. Kun indførelsen af en ekstra højdedimension gjorde en løsning mulig og det ovenikøbet i form af så simpel en løsning, at jeg måtte tage mig til hovedet. Enhver, der har haft et heureka-øjeblik i meditation vil instinktivt vide af umuligheden i at oversætte en flerdimensionel virkeligheds realitet til en 'lavere' dimension. Som tilfældet er det med tændstikgåden, så betyder den ekstra dimension at et umuligt problem kan løses på en simpel måde. For de af jer, der ikke har haft en sådan oplevelse, vil dette imidlertid være ren rablende tungetale, men fortvivl ikke. I disse dage er det muligt ved hjælp af entheogener som f.eks auahuasca i en glimtvis genvej at erfare virkeligheder, der er umulige eller uhyre vanskelige at oversætte til vor velkendte verden. En af mine venner sagde efter en ayahuascarejse til Peru: Jeg kunne skrive en hel bog om blot et sekund på denne indre rejse. Et sekund var som en million år. I det omfang vi som biologiske væsner i tid og rum ønsker at udforske vor egen bevidsthed, så er vi derfor underlagt de samme vilkår som den videnskabsmand der forsøger at fange ånden i flasken i sit reagensglas. Det er ganske square and fair, så længe vi husker på at vide alt det, vi ikke ved. Denne ydmyghed gør viden til en delmængde af visdom og ikke omvendt. Uden denne meta-visdom bliver den positivistiske videnskabsmand i sin selvindbildte selvsikkerhed til det han historisk siden middelalderen har bekæmpet mest af alt: en religionsforkynder.   THE OUROBOROS STATE OF CONSCIOUSNESS God is a fountain flowing into itself St Dionysius Who has prepared this evening meal? A man.  Dost know his name? Not I. His name is not spoken. He is more silence than speech. He is above name. What food has he prepared for this feast? Himself, no less than himself. Meister Eckhart When we re-direct our curiosity from its natural outward going circuits to an inward investigating of itself, a very profound thing can happen. Done with utmost sincerity and vigilence, we can grow into an expanded state of abstract Awareness. This event is extremely difficult for the mind to comprehend since it, equipped with the five outgoing senses, basically has been constructed as an evolutionary set response dealing with survival and calory-intake. The moral is that those who live the life of the five senses never taste this food. Meister Eckhart Alone out of these limitations set by the mind, the following will happen: When you with closed eyes ask yourself, who am I, the knowing of not-knowing becomes intensified. First of all, a kind of bewilderment happens where the 'I' asking the question gets dissolved by the very same questioning. When Awareness is directed against itself, a feeling of not knowing is created. When Awareness is going out, knowledge is created. Nisargadatta Maharaj Meister Eckhart says that to see God, we have to be blind. The subjective 'I' is not programmed to look at itself.  When we direct the energy of attention towards ourselves, the solidified conscious observer immediately melts into fluidity in such a way that the one asking, who am I, no longer exists. We are only our 'I' as long as we look in the opposite direction of ourselves. Hence we disappear every time we try to catch ourselves in a direct looking, and without a subject being able to understand, understanding gives no meaning. Hence also the question, who am I dissolves and we like a rubber band return to our normal equilibrium of being 'I'. However, this 'I' is not the same as before. As we know from quantum physics, we cannot observe anything without changing it. Therefore the disappearing of 'I' in introspective self-examination is creating a spiraled morphing of the 'I' where a new 'I' replaces the old 'I'. The relay of who am I is now in the hand of the next 'I' in the race towards a back hole of annihilation. There are all too few there are fully ripe for gazing in God's magic mirror. Meister Eckhart Ego cannot look at itself in God's magic mirror, but Consciousness in its essence 'loves' to do so. The strange and wonderful thing is that while not-understanding and dissolution of solidified subjectivity intensifiy in this investigation, so does the abstract Consciousness that experiences it.    The experienced Awareness of the mystery grows. Through the loop-hole of increasing curiosity driven Awareness of not-knowing our Consciousness as such expands in quality and quantity. When Consciousness in such a loop begins to chase its own tail, wakefulness accelerates in intensity way beyond the curiosity or fear-driven the snake was a rope-state. It rather much more follows the acceleration of gravity and breakdown of traditional natural laws that happens in front of a black hole. I do believe this is more than a mere analogy. The cosmos is consisting of reuse of mathematical algorithms on all levels from the infinite small to the infinite big. We are in this sense a mini galaxy with a black hole in our soul. We fear the hole as death and at the same time we are attracted to its attraction. The brain-derived possibility of Consciousness in feed-back singularity is the grand attractor in our lives. This is the needle point where death and life meet in a dance room beyond time and space as we know it.     This is what Meditation is all about: to make Consciousness aware of Consciousness in an expanding self-referential loop with the potential capacity to end in a singular state of not-understanding. Among the Western mystics, this singular state of not-understandable consciousness has been termed 'God'. God is nothing but a projective concept of a rare state of being within man's own event horizon. In this context, the following statement from Meister Eckhart gives 'sense': In unknowing knowing shall we know God. He further states: Had I a God whom I could understand,  I would no longer hold him for God. The 'variability' of Consciousness is, at its core is a result of the human brains ability to enter an intensified state of self referentiality. The first looped stage is when consciouness becomes aware of itself in wakefulness. However, mystics from all times and places have experienced something that so far have been out of reach of comon man, occupied as he was with the algoritms of survival. The endstation of this feedback function results in a state of singularity. In the various mystic traditions this state is referred to as enlightenment. Meister Eckhart states: When the spirit turns from all things  becoming into the not-becoming.... Then the void shines into void. Every time we cross the frontier of the mystery of Consciousness, we are faced with mysteries behind the mystery. On the narrow path of describing Consciousness as experience, I would now take one more step: There is primordial, maybe even all-pervading pan-demian Consciousness and then there is a new state of concentrated Consciousness where it becomes self-aware in being able to experience experiencing. This is the Ouroboros state of Consciousness and this can only happen in a highly advanced and complex brain structures with the capability of self-referentiality.   The Ouroboros Snake is one of the world's oldest trans-cultural symbols. C. G. Jung interpreted the Ouroboros as an archetypical mandala. The snake-god of the Azteks: Queztacoatl The ouroboros state of Consciousness begins where the snake is feeding on itself. It is the autophagy state of mind, where, as Meister Eckhart states, man becomes his own meal. Human Consciousness as a fedback loop Where the attention goes, the prana flows. In Introspektion Consciousness is becoming aware of Consciousness in a loop. This is why the introvert question of who am I, is devoid of answers. It creates a feedback loop where the entity that puts the question dissolves. In this state one basically loses the connection to the outside known world in the same way that a microphone in feedback is not able to amplify what it normally is designed to do, like a speech or a song. When information dissolves behind the event horizon of the black hole of Consciousness, an abstract subject-object-less wakefulness as such arises. This singularity of nothing gazing into nothing radically overwrites the normal functions of us as bio-feedback systems in the same way that a microphone placed too close to the loudspeaker can go into an exponential sound explosion. Click for an example of a singular feedback created sound loop. In this context, I would define the new age word, enlightenment, as a singular feedback of Consciousness into Consciousness. Here Rumi's polishing of the mirror becomes mandatory. Consciousness and it's time-space correlate in the form of the capability of high quality experiencing is necessary for Consciousness to reach a point of no return in order to enter the state of a singular feedback. The possibility of being conscious about being conscious is most probably a feature that only can evolve in grown-up humans and some of our primate relatives. The child pictured above is conscious, but it is still not being conscious about being conscious. Maybe there is, as Annaka Harris discusses in her book, a pan-Consciousness present in all matter. However, this Consciousness is not self-aware. Only in grown-up humans and maybe higher primates Consciousness is able to meet Consciousness face to face. A human being is, in this respect, a concentrated rabbit hole of self-awaring Consciousness. We are oases in the delicious dessert of primordial unconscious Consciousness. What I describe here, everyone can check out for themselves in their own inner lab: Once you close your eyes, there is an instant and automatic rise of awareness within the body. This sense amplification is the first step into the self-referential space of self-awareness. Consciousness, triggered in the same way as a microphone, goes into feedback by turning up the bottom of the input sensitivity. That is, by the way, also the reason why people often get all kinds of experiences of eternity and divinity on psychedelics. The psychedelics turn the input sensitivity bottom to the max, resulting in a 'feedbacked' self-referential explosion. However, less than that can do the magic, and in a much more safe way. In fact, just sitting with closed eyes and feel oneself can do the trick. Sadly the world of the smartphone has removed us, humans, more than ever from that entrance door.      In this amplified awareness, there are feelings and sensations displayed on a stage that most of all can be compared to some kind of dark inner space. Both the awareness level of sensations and the dark space can vary in size and intensity. Here inside of us, there is a possibility of a feedback loop similar to the previously mentioned microphone or a camera pointing towards itself through a monitor screen. In this singular loop, Consciousness gets conscious about Consciousness. Individuals who have practiced years of this self-inquiry, will often experience deep sleep in a kind of primordial wakeful state, where Consciousness is experiencing, but at the same time not be self-aware.   It is the detached mirror that enables the experience of experience in us brian-derived entities lost in time and space. O world invisible, we view thee, O world intangible, we touch thee, O world unknowable, we know thee, Inapprehensible, we clutch thee! Francis Thomson   We have to get out of ourselves to find new observations and solutions. Hence, out of all deviations from the subject, I see the astronaut view as the most important. It is amazing from this abstraction level to observe how everything is connected to everything in order to create something. From here, full of optimism, I state:   No curse enters the life of mortals without a blessing. It should by now be clear that I see it as a virtue to stray away from the highway of conventional thought. Because the highway's greatest strength is also its most significant limitation. It leads the traffic of thoughts in such a way that you already know in which city you will arrive. These reinforcing paths of preconceived reality are mostly invisible in our everyday life. Once we allow our stream of consciousness to ascend and reach higher levels of abstraction we only know what we know but rarely know what we do not know. LIFE WAS ALWAYS A BLOODY MESS From the helicopter-view, I have observed how not only the believers in weird conspiracy theories and polarized political thinking get depressed as a result of their thinking. Also, the ones trying to oppose them with logical arguments seem to be infected with dark feelings. My voice is in spite of the temptation to use sad blue notes full of optimism while I sing this Swan Song. However, I do not expect you, dear reader, to sing along with me. I just want to clarify my position. I sing from above when I sing.   So, let us take a trip to India and look at ourselves with the eyes of the Indian Goddess Kali. Kal means darkness. It also means the darkness of the universe as you can observe it at night time. Kali is one of my favorite astronaut Gods.   What are the devotees of Kali told to do when they worship her? This is what the famous Saint Ramakrishna told his devotees: Focus and meditate on Kali's beautiful eyes! Ignore her bloody teeth. The wisdom of the stories constructed around Kali is, in my view, immense, also when distilled from religion. In my understanding, Indian religious narratives do not need any religious beliefs in order to give meaning. In the same way you do not need to be religious in order to intuitively grasp Kal as a metaphoric mindgame allowing the feeling of calm optimism to be a part of the equation. In any kind of science there will always exist an irremoveable subjectivity, and that subjectivity is you. No overly rational person can jump his own shadow as a burping digesting, jealous and loving person without becoming the Godman his own tradition defeated in the Age of Enlightenment. Therefore listen to Kali. She reveals a through ages by humans accumulated wisdom. It tells us that the world was always a mess and how to deal with that mess: Even living in that mess, you can always choose what you want to smell to: A flower or a toilet. India is still a mess today, but the Indians know how to laugh. They have not lost their sense of humor. Ramakrishna was full of smiles, love, and laughter when he looked at what you see below. -- Of course, I deal with it a bit different in the sense that I here have a closer look at Kali's teeth. In fact, I am sure Ramakrishna did too. He loved Kali's teeth as much as her eyes but did out of understandable reasons not reveal this to Tom, Dick and Harry . What I have taken with me from Ramakrishna is: Never lose sight of beauty and never forget an opportunity for a good laugh - even in times of chaos and change.   Everything is perfectly imperfect In the largest frame, everything is fine. Roland R. Griffiths In the black light of Kali, I state: I do believe, with emphasis on the word 'believe', that everything that happens and has happened is perfect, or maybe more precise, as Zen puts it, perfectly imperfect. Everything is an insane complex algorithmic play of holy mathematics, where anything 'negative' is as essential for life as something 'positive'. Why do I call mathematic holy? When Einstein looked at the stars at night, he shivered in awe. For Einstein, science was a religious quest. A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, of the manifestations of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty - it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute the truly religious attitude; in this sense, and in this alone, I am a deeply religious man. Albert Einstein God is reason From 10.000 and more hours in meditation and countless entheogenic journeys, I state: For me, God is not some mysterious power that suspends reason. God is much more Hegelian reason. God is, as the Greeks put it, logos. The mystery is that the laws of nature actually works. We are, with Kabir's words, fish in the ocean crying for water when it comes to magic. Don't look for levitating people in your search for Divine Intervention. 1 + 1 somehow equals 2, and you exist!! That is in itself the unbelievable algorithmic magic in the eyes of an Einstein: I do not believe in a personal God, and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious, then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it. ... Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind. Albert Einstein In God being reason, I become subjective feeling. What I cannot understand is the very fact that I can understand. This feeling of admiration does not need proof. It pops up in the form of awe to live in a universe where a human brain is capable of imagining something so beautiful as the Dirac equation. Here, the macrocosmic laws of relativity are connected with the microcosmic world of quantum physics. There is yet another Dirac-like equation waiting to be discovered and that equation will reveal the bridge between the human logic and the macrocosmic logic that governs our stars and the microcosmic logic that reguates the quantum world. The very fact that the theoretical physicist, Holger Bech Nielsen, was able to calculate the mass of the Higgs particle years before it actually was verified in CERN is more than enough to put me into a state of religious awe.   The Indian mathematician Ramanujan is another example of this stunning synchronicity between a human brain and the universe. According to him, he sprirtually downloaded the most advanced mathematic formulas from a Goddess in a kind of religious trance. Some of these formulas are today used to describe what s going on inside black holes. Ramanujan said about his work: An equation for me has no meaning unless it expresses a thought of God Ramanujan himself was not able or interested in proving his often insane complex equations. He did not create his mathematics from bottom up. Instead, he had visions of scrolls of complex mathematical conclusive formulas unfolding before his inner eye.   So what do I do, worshipping logic as a thought of God? Again I take inspiration from the good old Indian culture, which states that you can relate to God through Bhakti, love, and/or Jnana, intellectual reasoning. In this spirit, I, with love and awe in my heart worship humankind as God, being able to, in the form of science to resonate with God as Ding an Sich. In this sense, we are all living fractal micror-mirror-temples where the God of Mandelbrot can feel and understand himself. Looking at this picture I became a passinate worshipper of reason The viewpoint of Shiva I am reminded of a quote of wisdom from the new AI, GPT-3. It states: Nature is ruthless, brutal, unforgiving, and beautiful in ways incompatible with our tidy human minds. Statement made by the artificial intelligence-system GPT-3 In Hindu mythology, the ruthlessness of nature is, in a way made compatible with us 'tidy humans' in the sense that it is not seen as alienated from existence. It is adored as a quality of the god Shiva. Shiva is the God of destruction but seen from the cosmic viewpoint, where it becomes essential for new creation. Shiva creates out of de(con)struction. That is why for Hindus, the holiest place to worship new life is in the city of death, Varanasi. Here at the banks of the river Ganga at the cremation grounds, the rising sun is greeted every morning as a symbol of the creation of new life.      I am grateful to Shiva. He destroyed me again and again so I could sit here with my morning coffee and write as a sum total of evolutionary reincarnated life perfectly shaped by five mass extinction events. That journey makes me realistic about my own and humankind's existence as time-limited mortals but super optimistic on the behalf of life's ability to cheat the forces of entropy.      The perfection of dinosaurian destruction In this morning light, I have deterministically been chosen to existentially choose to view the current chaos, distrust, and polarization as a perfectly imperfect algorithmic play in the infinite complex dialectics of life. Certainly, this cruel master of mathematics creates suffering in our small everyday lives. It also created the horror of slavery and genocide, and we have as responsible beings to act to the best of our ability on that level. I guess the dinosaurs did that too. However, at the same time, I welcome the rapid disintegration of our institutional trust, outrage, mad conspiracy theories, the apocalyptic arrival of deep fake, and so on as a necessary extinction event in life's impossible and heroic fight against entropy. In this sense, life itself is a surprising smile in the face of death and love is the force that creates order with the same resilient attitude as the eternal stone-rolling Sisyphus. And there is only one thing we say to Death: ‘Not today.' Game of Thrones Amor Fati On the ground level of my own time bound dinosaur-life, I hate the fact that I will one day die, and I do everything I can to die as young as late as possible. At the same time, my death is perfect when seen from an omnipresent point of view. I do what I can to understand and navigate my dewdrop-life on the ground level. However, when the Kal of the night comes, I don't worry but fall into sleep with a little smile. I take white pride in, according to 23andme, to be a direct descendant from a woman Viking chieftain warrior buried on a Viking ship in Norway. The Vikings took it as a virtue to laugh at their own death. I too, hope to end one day, maybe not with a burst of roaring laughter, but at least with a little smile on my lips. And before you, dear reader gets a Pawlow's dog's shitstorm-reaction to my white pride statement: I really don't care if I am black, white, male or female because I AM THAT - Tat Twam Asi - like YOU ARE THAT! To intuitite THAT, in love, requires above all one thing; that you, at least in a glimpse realize that you are not afraid of death, both what concerns your own death and the death of humankind.  I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who make things beautiful. Amor fati: let that be my love henceforth! I do not want to wage war against what is ugly. I do not want to accuse; I do not even want to accuse those who accuse. Friedrich Nietzsche If you cannot smile, you have lost it The new emotional hyperbolic mass-movements, from paranoia-conspiracy to identity politics, share one common feature: an unbearable seriousness of life. I only have to look at a random conspiracy guru for a few moments to observe this characteristic glooming seriousness. It becomes obvious after a short look at the famous conspiracy 'terrorist', David Icke's face: In the very few pictures where he actually smiles, it is easy to observe how cramped it looks. By lack of use, he has lost the tiny facial muscles that can make us able to smile naturally. David Icke and the like have lost the ability to laugh full-heartedly, especially at themselves. David Icke The loss of humor and the inability to appreciate beauty is symptomatic for the mental self-repetitive reinforcement spirals of these new collectives of shared thought-realities. People here are well aware of their own serious appearance but justify it with the ouroboros-reply: There is nothing to laugh at.           I am here reminded of one of my best friends. His name is Michel. He is the most joyful man I know. His father came from Libanon, and in Denmark, he met Michel's mother. As a young man with too much energy, he in 1989 went to Libanon to fight with the Christian militia against the militant Muslims. He was a frontline soldier for two years and was witnessing a lot of death and destruction on both sides. He told me that a strange but wonderful thing about the Christian Lebanese was their ability to laugh, sing, and dance under any circumstance. He saw this peculiar resilience as their greatest asset in their 2000 year long and almost impossible survival fight as a culture in hostile surroundings.     Seen from the level of the gods inside of you, there is only one test to pass on the final day of judgment: If you cannot smile and occasionally lose yourself in a peal of all-consuming laughter, you do not deserve to be taken seriously. St. Peter will not allow you access to the glorious life before death, and you are in great danger to live in the hell of digital amplified thoughts of worry created in your preferred echo conspiracy chamber.        THE CULTURAL OPERATING SYSTEM OF THE EGOIC IDENTITY Here comes yet another important deviation - or maybe it is the theme itself. It is about 'identity'. Our current state as free individuals and independent 'egos' is nothing more than a human interface created in a historical process that reaches back to the Athenian city-state. It is just one possibility out of many configurations. One of the first to use the computer-term operating system as a meaningful metaphor for culture was the visionary scientist and psychonaut, Terrence McKenna. Culture, seen as a survival operative system, can form our psyche in countless ways. Our self-understanding and feeling of being 'Me' is fragile and changeable to the border of being an illusion. If you don't feel inclined to sit cross-legged with closed eyes in Meditation for a longer period, the safest and quickest way to experience this reality-fragility of 'me' is to take a substantial dose of psychedelics. Here you will, for sure, see that 'I' could be anything. 'I' could be crying for holy war. 'I' could be a Trump-supporter, a transgender person, a black person. 'I' could be what I am through my selfie filter or even one of Terrence McKenna's Machine Elves.   Meditation and identity - Who am I? The anxiety and insecurity in generation Y is bigger than in any generation before. In these disruptive days, an increasing number of young people have begun to sense the fragility of being a 'Me'. However, instead of giving up this outdated reality-creating engine it seems they have begun to cling even more to their identity as a 'ME' defined by, in my eyes outward and superficial markers. Hence, I will keep an eye on the phenomenon of 'identity' as the eightball in the game.          'I' have been told by myself, by my family, friends, and the Danish State that I am a white male at the tender age of 66. At present, I don't even have to close my eyes to refute these accusations. With great and calm confidence, I can tell you that on the level of consciousness, we are all one Being looking out of countless eyes.      Meditation is all about questioning the reality of 'identities' as such. In Meditation, I guarantee they will dissolve. You can try yourself with this simple technique: Sit with closed eyes every day for 10 minutes and ask your self with great honesty and above all courage: Who am I? Such ancient practice will give you the astronaut view of life and yourself, while at the same time being even more present while living your daily life. Does it sound too much haleluja? Well, maybe, but I do not care. I have to be honest in spite of the fact that it is often harder to believe in good things reveiled than in bad.       The end of egoic identity and society as we know it Let me sum up before going on. In the coming text, I want to show how our Western civilization as an operating system has come to a glorious end. It has served us well, but at present, the world order of selfish ego and money is piling up contradictions, especially in the form of growing discrepancy between cultural circuits made by disruptive high tech and old forms of survival based thinking. Our civilization and its corresponding droplet identity-interfaces cannot any longer find a Hegelian synthesis within its own reality-dimension. Am I old-man-grumpy about this state of affairs? In fact, the opposite! What intense times to be alive in!   THE RISE IN DISTRUST, POLARIZATION AND CONSPIRACY THEORIES As pointed out in the introduction, the underlying psychological profile for the various outrage movements reveal its devolutionary blueprint at its clearest in the sinister and evidence resistant conspiracy theory groups. Certain triggers seem to activate and amplify this profile. At disruptive times we can get unique insights into the machinery of society and the fragility of the human nature. Not surprisingly the main trigger is collective fear.   Covid19 - a trigger    Seen in a historical view, we can observe that there always was a correlation between social unrest and pandemics. We now again live in pandemic times. Here I am not only thinking about COVID 19 but also of the rise of all sorts of infodemic conspiracy theories ranging from the plausible to the outright bizarre. It seems that paranoia conspiracy theories have expanded in the slipstream of fear created by its more physical twin, the COVID 19.      As M.D., Ph.D. D.S. Jones has pointed out, pandemics, seen from a historical perspective, have always been following an archetypical gameplay. The first act in the social drama of an outbreak starts with various forms of denial. Driven by our self-interests and the need for reassurance, we ignore the signs. The second act is launched by reluctant recognition of the severity of the outbreak and the following attempts to explain the situation. These explanations have often taken the form of irrational blame-gaming where paranoia and persecution walked hand in hand in search of scapegoats. I am not in a state of denial what concerns covid 19. I had it myself in the beginning of December 2020, confirmed with a positive test. After two days of mild sickness with a little fewer, I initially thought covid was a piece of cake, even more temperate than normal flu. However, a week later, I started to experience all kinds of strange worrisome symptoms like dizziness and nausea. This 'afterglow' lasted for a month so, I can, out of my own experience, state that covid is no joke and that my government just did the right thing in facilitating a hard lockdown. To believe that covid 19 is a hoax planted by a secret elite in order to control the population is close to madness.          Conspiracy theories built on sound skepticism Let me state my position. I do, however, believe in conspiracy and conspiracy theories. The claim that Saddam Hussein's Iraq was having weapons of mass destruction was a conscious lie organized by the American government. Edward Snowden's exposures have shown how nations are not only spying against other countries but also have secret surveillance programs directed towards their own citizens to such an extent that the term conspiracy is justified. It just takes a short look at Edward Snowdon's noble face to realize that he is in truth and America is not. Wikileaks is yet another source for exploring what is going on behind the curtains and even beyond governmental control. In the BHO-documentary, Agents of Chaos, we come to understand how Russia was meddling with the American election in 2016.       The world is and was full of real conspiracy events, and we can still speculate on how Alexander the Great died. There will always be a new Watergate, and there will always be sound conspiracy theories founded on factual driven detective work. A healthy skeptic and investigating mind can not rule out the phenomenon of conspiracy, at least when we widen the definition a little. Fake news are when weaponized through social media in political battles, as we have observed in the last years in the US, definitely not conspiracy made by tin foil hat people. Hence it gives meaning to view even traditional but now extremely polarized legacy media such as CNN and Fox-News as conspiracy laundering agencies in the sense that they will publish undocumented rumors if they can hurt their opponents.   Conspiracy and truth In my understanding, social conspiracy is an unavoidable phenomenon rooted in genes and in ancient tribally conditioned social interaction. It occurs as a result of a group's conscious but also unconscious efforts to distort, lie, or hold back information in order to promote its own survival viewpoints and agendas. In times of social disruption, the level of ideological lies rises in order to secure enough short-term safety and energy for one's own tribe. Seen in this light, the seven deadly sins are biological short term algorithms, and the nobility reflected in Snowdon's face the signature of a long term survival algorithm. When we lie, as individuals or as a collective, we, in fact, take loans with a heavy interest in the bank of future. That is why they in India since ancient times have said: Krishna always wins which for them is equivalent to: Truth always wins. The wise Indians also state the following: Satyam, Shivam, Sundaram. Satyam means truth, Shivam means God, and Sundaram means beauty. Truth comes first in their poetic equation. So it does in mine, but truth is always a slow walker while lies spread like fire. Civilizations unfold their time-bound life in the sweet dynamic spot between lies and truth.       Identifying crazy conspiracy theories Having said that conspiracy, seen as survival lies, is a natural phenomenon, there still is a considerable qualitative gap between what I would term sound reason-based conspiracy theories and the irrational and outright crazy beliefs that are thriving today. Here I am basically referring to religious communities, and I am not hesitating to include phenomenons like Woke. It seems that intolerant religious fundamentalism has managed to infect large segments of society and even people who in their own self understanding are anti-religious.   Unfounded sinister conspiracy concepts now even seem to spread to the mainstream society. As a general pattern, the paranoia conspiracy groups' ideations are concentrated in a few easy to understand narratives like 5G or blood-drinking secret societies while ignoring much larger systemic ones hidden in complexity or in plain sight. These conspiracy narratives seem to follow an underlying gameplay where a powerful brotherhood with agendas of dictatorial control or even mass genocide is able to execute their plans were it not for the 'holy crusaders' who have discovered their intentional evil intents. I know two people with schizophrenia. They are both very sympathetic, but they are both neck-deep into conspiracy dramas. I understand why they were among the first to jump into these by social media created black rabbit holes. Their 'diagnosed' way of looking at the world is way more compatible with the world than ever before. One of them has moved to the countryside in fear of 5G. The other is full time engaged in propagating insane paranoia. He is strangely, at the same time happier than ever because his way of thinking now gives him a lot of social acceptance and new friends. I have always been attracted to everything that offers an outsider's view at normality, and I am, of course, aware of what that says about me. The Mad Professor One of these normality challenging outsiders below and above the spectrum of normal light is a doctor MD, Ph.D., and a psychiatrist. At a period in my life, I would almost have called him a friend due to his childlike and often also playful behavior, He is frantically active on the borderline between traditional and alternative medicine. After he confessed that he had diagnosed himself with Aspergerger, I lovingly referred to him as the mad professor. He plays Rachmaninov at 78 speed without a score on his grand piano while simultaneously groaning in anger towards mainstream medical science and doctors. He always felt ostracized, but today, he has become the one eyed, almost blind king of the blind. He has a large following on social media but has sidelined me because I did not want to go to an illegally open pub to drink beer with him without covid 19 masks at the height of the lock down in Denmark. In the first act of the pandemic, covid 19 does not exist in his world other than a hoax to control people through fear. Hence he saw it as his obligation towards truth to drink beer with his followers in a small airtight room. I wonder how he managed not to get infected by covid 19 so far. At a later stage of the pandemic he without critical self reflection radically changed his view about covid 19. I will return to that later.       In the street of the blind, the one-eyed man is called the Guiding Light - Genesis Rabbah The mad professor's sudden rise to fame is not surprising. It seems that the belief in outrageous conspiracy theories recently has been on the rise to such an extent that it could be justified to see it as a kind of collective mass psychosis. The level of conspirational mistrust and reinforcement through fake news from Russian and Chinese trolls to Alex Jones and David Icke to warring political groups has now reached a level where it, in fact, poses a threat to civilization as we know it. Emotion-based ideations without grounding in validation have by now spread to all levels of social life.         One of the important breeding grounds for the rise of the blind kings has been pointed out in the outstanding Netflix documentary, The Social Dilemma. Social media has silently, and step by step created major changes in our ways of thinking and understanding of what reality is. Humans are pattern-seeking machines. So is the artificial intelligence behind the various social media like Google, Youtube, Facebook, and Twitter. The symbiosis of these two pattern-seeking systems, where the human part of the intelligence is loosing more and more terrain, has created fundamental and explosive changes in the world without hardly anyone taking notice.       The sudden rise in weird conspiracy theories can, however, not be understood exclusively as a social media phenomenon. Even all the good efforts in The Social Dilemma fails to grasp the whole picture. The people interviewed in the documentary tend to 'blame' capitalized algorithms, which is true, but seen isolated is a blind alley. The endgame of a civilization, Greek, Roman, or our current seems always to be highly complex and non-linear. Here the famous chaos-mathematic butterflies in South America cause a thunderstorm on the other side of the globe.       THE REGRESSIVE RISE OF THE AMYGDALIAN KING In the French language, the word Civilisation means something that comes from deep within. In German, the understanding of Zivilisation is more perceived as a thin layer of lacquer. Beneath that fragile layer lurks a beast. The German way of understanding what civilization is is giving more sense in this context. One should imagine that the layer of civilization had grown thicker since the Medieval period, or at least since the 2. World War, but the recent developments all over the globe are pointing at the fact that the lacquer at any time can dissolve.       The Stockholm-enslaved Cortex The epidemic of paranoia and outrage shows that we again are close to scenarios where the beast of fear and anger crowns the Amygdala as the Tyrant King, and the good Cortex King of sound reasoning is reduced to a Stockholm slave. When the cortex of cognition is enslaved in false sympathy for its tormentor, it is never capable of producing something of high quality. In fact, it is very simple. Above all, any higher cognitive functions of the brain need calm, peace, and a kind of exited but well-tempered curiosity to function optimally. Enslaved by hyperbolic emotions our higher intellectual brain-functions cannot produce anything of cognitive quality.            When we were cavemen and even much more before that time, we had to some extend better survival chances by now and then to crown the amygdala as our King to facilitate a fight or flight mode. However, since we got more and more grey matter to 'language up' time and space in inner simulations of outer survival scenarios, the need for limbic reactions diminished. This is basically what happened since the ice-age where our risk of dying a violent death was sky high as compared with today. However, a constantly agitated amygdala, as we can observe it today, has never been a good idea. It has never ever done any good in terms of preservation or renewal of civilization. It can only act destructively.          When we take a look at all the recent phenomenons from woke to QAnon from a little higher level of abstraction, their common denominator becomes evident: The cancellation of history, the distrust, the focus on enmity, the anger, and outrage, and the polarization is all symptomatic signs of an overheated amygdala and a weakened cortex.        Regression  In psychology, this phenomenon is understood as a process of regression. When put under the 'right' pressure, we begin to regress. Imagine an old-school tape recorder playing your melody of biological life reverse. After a few bars, archaic parts of earlier stages of cognitive evolutionary developments take over the lead. This is due to the simple fact that what evolution has created last is most vulnerable and hence the first to collapse in stress scenarios. Our reasoning abilities are the first to be substituted by the evolutionary earlier, time-tested and hence more robust symbolic-thinking operative systems when we are in the clutches of fear.  ´  Truth is survival Caught in the crossfire of this two-front war between the cave-brain and modern busines-oriented technology, our last evolved, thin German layer of reason becomes reduced to a Stockholm slave of lower cognitive value. The old and resilient amygdalian dictator of rage, fear and hunger now rules through tribalized splitting and symbolic meaning-making free from causality. What is and was the agenda of the ancient Amygdalian king? It is survival. Survival is the only 'meaning' there is and this, oldest of all drives, is found in the search for food and the avoidance of death.   Truth is food In the ancient Indo-European language, sanskrit, the word sattva means truth. Sat also means to be satiated from food. What is, in fact, the meaning of life? It is to be sat-isfied, full - of food. Sat reveals the ancient, in all biological systems, from yeast to humans, headlined search and hunt for caloric satisfaction that drives life towards staying alive. Without that bio-algorithmic survival-hunt for energy 'we' would not be here.      On our whole evolutionary journey, the 'meaning' of life has always been formed by a constant mode of hunting for energy to continue the genetic relay race and the avoidance of extinction on the same path. Only, when temporarily free from pressures from both these survival programs, there has been a little space and rest to unfold consciousness and cognition. However, at present, the alluring commercially fine-tuned AI algorithms have tied us with the 'on-line'. We have become glued to a screen that by our over-excited monkey brains is perceived as a dangerous savannah.   Truth is signal-chemical drugs Followers of QAnon describe the sudden 'truth' they see as The Great Awakening. Seen from a brain-chemistry level, our most fundamental biological drive can be translated into a brain full of firing neurons in the search for an eatable truth, the truth of aggression, or the truth of fear. Basically, it is this trinity that loads our neurons with ammunition. As soon as these cannons start firing, we are filled up with purpose and meaning. I am in this context reminded by a profound Indian saying: The snake was a rope. When we discover that the snake, in fact, was a rope, there is a spontaneous relief from fear. The 'truth' sets us free from fear in the same sense that food sets us free from hunger. In this dialectic, we are paradoxically programmed to love excitement and at the same time do everything we can to end that signal-chemical rush by resting in the shadows of the wish-fulfilling tree.     The brain chemical reward system drives the symbolic thinking person as well as the logical mind towards their goals. However, the apophenian brain has much larger and older roots from where it can suck the neuron nectar. Our calm logic reasoning skills do help us to reach that state of sat-isfaction, but it seems that our similarity-fruit seeking symbolic brain is much more connected to our inner reward systems. Hence rational people are, with rare but for civilization important exceptions, relatively less possessed by excitement in their search for sat.isfaction. Symbolic set minds, on the other hand, are full of signal chemical firing neurons. Extacy seems to be the reward for the religious fundamental truth finder. The apophenian truth finder is, as any conspiracy-driven tuber will show, full of excitement. Hence a brain in a symbolic thinking mode is much more rewarded as a dry scientific one. Seen in this light, it gives meaning when QAnon talks about The Awakening. It is the awakening caused by the excitement of going from a state of confusion and purposelessness to a state of getting the ancient symbolic driven brain's first smell of paradise in the form of a mammoth within hunting range. We can observe the same kind of excitement in the many youtube-clips of 2. World War Nazi gatherings. Nazism was driven by the extacy following the reignition of the symbolic thinking brain. They, like QAnon today, would describe their new found extacy as an Awakening and Woke is not far away from that religious honey trap too. Both the left and the right of the political spectrum are today zombiefied in selfdeclared wokefulness. SYMBOLIC COGNITION', MEANING' AND SURVIVAL Most of us are intuitively able to perceive connections and meaningful structures in a chaos of seemingly random data, like when we see an animal or a face in a cloud. Humans were pattern-seeking machines a long time before we got language and most probably before we became humans. Apes are also pattern-seeking. This cognition modality was most probably developed to find survival-based 'meaning' through similarity. For instance, identifying a new fruit's likelihood to be eatable would depend on its resemblance to an already known eatable fruit. Our survival depended on being able to identify visual patterns in abstract landscapes. Potential sources of eatable joules or we being the energy source for predatory bio-algorithms were camouflaged in green or yellow carpets of vegetation. In the same way, the ability to distinguish various sounds evolved into such a state of perfection that we, as a spin-off, today are able to enjoy complex music. The persuasive power of intuition is most probably because it acted as the basic pathfinder in the hunter-gatherer field of dot-sense-making. Today this primordial pattern-seeking brain is browsing the internet the same way as it did when searching for calories on the East African savannah. Apophenia The ability to connect random dots through associative similarities is called apophenia. At its best, apophenia creates poetry and pathways to genial intuitions that later stand the test of reality. At its worst, it is a sign of paranoid schizophrenia. Actually, this text is a result of full-blown apophenia, but as far as I manage, under the guidance of rational thinking.     To find meaning through resemblance became the foundation for the later developments of our cognition machinery. The evolutionary algorithms function similarly to the construction of a multistoried structure. We live our evolutionary life in a high-rise building, always moving upwards and hence still dependent on the structures we leave behind. Some of these structures rest in us as junk-DNA. However, most of them, like wall-foundations, electricity, and water-supply, are essential for life's Babel-Tower striving against entropy.      When we evolved into using language, the visual patterns we identified around us became structured in word associations. Our syntactic skills became interlinked with audible apophenian thinking, where phenomenons who share similarity become bonded in meaning. A poem is charged with such abstract meaning in its rhythms and rhymes. When listening to a recitation of the ancient Vedas, it becomes clear, exactly for the one that does not understand Sanskrit, how powerful the persuasive and suggestive the rhythms and rhymes are in themselves. Deep and ancient parts of our human nature are triggered into relaxation and submissive awe, just by that power alone. This mechanism can also be observed in the religious persuasiveness in the Koran. For the people who understand Arabic, the sheer beauty of the poetic power in the verses should be enough to convince the listener of the Koran's revelation of truth. Apophenian symbolism is, as psychoanalysis has demonstrated, also present as a fundamental building block in our dreams. In the dream state, the arrangement of events works in associative sequences. One common denominator is enough to establish a connection. You dream about blood in one scene, and in the next, you see a man in a red uniform. It could also be the other way round. The associative nature of symbolic thinking makes the distinction between cause and effect irrelevant. Once the apophenian dots are connected in symbolic meaning, the effect can be the cause and/or vice versa. It does not matter in this modus operandi what dot came first in a causal chain of events. In this freewheeling mode, it is easy to see meanings everywhere and in everything.   When we look back in history, we can observe how the timeline is characterized by an evolution from reversible symbolic cognition to epistemical rationality. Just a few hundred years ago, this mushroom was believed to cure impotence: A similar development can be observed in our own life's journey from child- to adulthood. As babies, we are not able to distinguish between cause and effect. According to Piaget, a 2-year-old child has not yet learned to find out if the noise from the door when the mother entered the room was caused by the baby moving the head towards the noise or the other way round. A friend of mine, who has an extraordinary capability to remember his early childhood, told me how he, on his 3-year birthday, was sitting at the beach at sunset. He, in fact, made the sun go down, according to his remembrance of the incident.   For both humans and civilizations, to grow up implies the ability to figure out what is cause and what is effect and to replace conclusions founded on symbolism with rational thinking. Can you trust your intuition? Intuition and symbolic thinking are growing from the same atavistic roots. In conversation with conspiracy tribes, I often face the following bullet argument: I trust my intuition! This statement, like a mantra, seems to offer sacred protection alternate viewpoints. It cuts through dialogue and reason. What can you say to a person that ends the dialogue with a declaration of intuitive supremacy?   However, when gripped by strong, especially negative emotions our intution cannot be trusted. Intuition can only be relied on in a calm mind and when walking hand in hand with the pruning scissors of logical thinking and Cochrane like tests. Otherwise, intuition all too easily becomes a gateway for hyperbolic emotional projection of the fear and anger in ourselves we do not want to see and take responsibility for. The fear inside is turned outside in the form of anger and irritation.    Sometimes I take a walk and talk with a friend that lives close by. When he starts speaking about the architechture of the buildings we pass I know he is in a bad mood. He always cherry pick the buildings he dislikes most and then a verbal machinegun loaded with all sorts of critical arguments begins to gun the buidings and the architechts behind them down. It is remarkable easy to see when people around you are in the clutches of this mode and remarkably difficult to see one self clearly SYMBOLIC APOPHENIA AND REVERSIBLE CAUSALITY - When effects become causes We seem not to grow up but to grow down when we feel insecure. Our fragile rational minds tend to collapse into earlier evolutionary stages of cognition where the power of mere similarity transforms the one-way street of causality to a medieval street of traffic in both ways and without lanes. The ufo When I first saw this photo at a social media site, I, like many others with a vivid apophenian fantasy assumed, it was showing an UFO, most probably a faked one but still a picture of an UFO. Below you can see the same object, but this time it clearly shows a half-sunken car in a lake. It is remarkable how deeply ingrained in us it is to create meaning in what we see.  In this proces, we at the same time solidify ourselves as observers in the sense that we take shape by the shapes we identify. Once we have identified the bigger picture in the picture, everything we then see is automatically aligned. This alignment reinforces the foundational fabric of our identity, and hence other ways of looking and explaining tends to be percieved as threats. The longer we have walked along a specific path, the more uncomfortable and difficult it becomes to turn around and walk along a new path. There is an intimate relationship between meaning and causality. Once causality becomes a two-way street, meanings pop up everywhere. For each causal explanation, there are hundreds of non-causal 'explanations' available.   The tendency to conclude on the basis of apophenian reversed causality is the most fundamental trait in the creation of paranoic conspiracy. To find and verify causality-based connections is, especially in our time, complicated. To find casual patterns in societal processes are not as easy as turning a picture upside down and then see a sunken car. Apophenian meaning-making is, on the other hand, very simple to create, especially when sitting in front of a screen that only feeds you with the reinforcing information that the AI algorithms have identified as the ones that are most capable of gluing you to the screen for the longest time. When backward logic becomes a valid currency Hence it is enough when one of the most famous conspiracy theorists, David Icke, claims that the secret evil elite has planted COVID 19 as a hoax to replace cash with digital money. The paranoia-conspiracy segments accept that as a fact without any need for documentation because the connection between currency as potential infectious is perceived in a symbolic way of cognition. In Icke's symbolic thinking mode, it is easy to reverse cause and effect. Hence the fact that cash currency has become less used under the pandemic due to the possibility of being infectious becomes a cause instead of an effect. The goose has wings in order to fly in this ontological universe.     The grass around us now seems to be full of snakes. This leads to the magic simplifications that at present are popping up in all walks of life. Reversed intuitive based causality 'logic' becomes valid currency. Pandemia & magic simplifications In the first act of the pandemic, I often heard the following argument: There is no Covid 19. I do not know anybody who had it. Therefore lift the restrictions. As far as my logical conclusions go, the conspiracy believer has not yet met any persons with Covid 19 because we have regulations.   Now at present in Denmark rabbit holes of paranoia are flaring up on social media here in Denmark. The fact that many people have died in spite of getting a vacine, has been simplified into a magic conclusion where the vaccines themselves have caused these deaths.   In the beginning of the pandemic, on a visit to Ibiza, I teemed up with some hippies. Their collective drumming and dancing lifestyle at Benniras beach at first glance seemed to be attractive and awe-inspiring free. However, I soon discovered that if I was not free the same way as they were free, I was ostracised from their unconditional hugging love cirkle. It was in the beginning of the pandemic, and I did not want to hug everybody due to the risk of getting infected with covid. My behavior was laughed at, and on top of that, I was told that Covid was invented by people who were earning billions by selling protective masks. I recently tried to have a dialogue with the conspiracy-ridden Mad Professor.  It is increasingly difficult to stay open-hearted in these polarizing times, so I, so to say, practice my version of Tibetan Metta, compassion meditation in my relation to him. The doctor sent me the following graph showing the synced rise of covid cases and vaccines given in India: In his reversed and upset UFO brain, the blue and the red lines are already connected as apophenian dots in such a way that it, in fact, is the vaccines that have caused the rise in covid cases! The vaccines are, in his reversed logic, bioweapons causing a spike in covid. In his mindset, the virus is created by intentional evil forces. When we allow reversed causality to form our reality, everything becomes possible in a grandiose way.  The resistance against vaxines as a question of persona liberty is like a pandemy itself following an old archetypical gameplay. - HathiTrust Digital Library One of the most important consequences of a reversed symbolic causality understanding is that, not societal processes, but deliberate human intentions becomes the root cause of evil. The above illustration from the early 20the century follows the same lines of reversed logic as my doctor friend; Vaccinations are seen as a violent attack by evil persons in power.    Evil governments Governmental  attempts to control the corona-pandemic by restricting people's freedom is a favorite projection field for conspiracy believers. In the regressed symbolic mind, COVID19 is planted in order for governments to gain dictatorial control.      The dystopian movie V for Vendetta is a cult movie for conspiracy believers. They see the film as prophetic. Evil politicians control and manipulate the population through the fear of viral pandemia. The narrative in the movie is convincing in the same upside-down way as the UFO picture. The movie manages to demonstrate how dictatorial leadership evolves from evil intentions. Intuited through the reversed prism of symbolism, violence against governmental violence becomes justified and in this proces, inner insecurity is transformed into outer anger.   However, Hitler did not create the First World War despair in Germany and the following global economic depression in the 30ties in order to gain power. He was a causality-product of the same. Authoritarian leaders have not deliberately, as shown in the Vendetta movie, planted pandemic viruses in order to control its population. It is the other way round: Political authoritarianism rises as a consequence of the same.   REVERSED CAUSALITY AND THE RISE OF PERSONIFIED EVIL When we in an emotional high pitch upside-down worldview begin to perceive individual responsable people at the end of the equations, we hurt ourselves. It is not healthy to see evil intensions in everything. For sure, there is great evil in this world, but in a reversed universe, humanized evil intentions become the all-pervading demonic engine in society. For QAnon, every bad thing happening to us is done on purpose. Social unrest, crime, war, and economic hardship are part of an evil master plan that only can be encountered through a revolution similar to the end in V for Vendetta. Such mind-virus replaces the hard-earned understanding of natural processes we have gained since Aristoteles. The algorithms of nature do not care much about small human perspectives, and we have to live with the fact that destruction and is an integral part of life. Nature holds no 'meaning,' and that is sometimes more frightening than evil man-made masterplans. To live in a topsy turvy world where destruction is an effect of pure evil intention is psychologically damaging. It is like holding Ocrams knife on the blade. One of the most damaging features in this psychological self-hurting Ocram-cutting is that we victimize ourselves in the process. We make ourselves objects of evil conspiracy and at the same time try to dig ourselves out of the quicksand with the help of symbolic thinking. We have a saying here in Denmark: It is like pissing in the trousers to keep warm. Splitting into darkness and light In Indian mythology, we saw good and evil as two hands, both belonging to the same God. In our western Christian religious constructions, we tend to cast out the light as Lucifer. God becomes the opposite of the devil.   In psychology, this phenomenon, when taken to extremes, is called splitting. It originally was a term describing a defense mechanism in people with a borderline personality disorder. However, by now, it seems that splitting has become a general thing to do on all levels of the American sueciety.    The splitting in good and evil is most probably a tribally rooted genetic program in us. Once, it pawed the way for us being merciless when it came to killing tribes that were threatening our resources, while at the same time, we could be compassionate and kind to our own kin. The mechanism of splitting made it possible for us to de-humanize other tribes in the eternal bio-algorithmic strive for energy capture. Since our neighboring tribes often looked almost identical to us, it became necessary to initialize the process of splitting out of minimal differences.   Still today, intelligent people think that wars and conflicts arise out of ideological differences. It is, in most cases, the other way round: Ideological differences are invented for the sake of tribal energy capture. In a library in Ireland, monks belonging to two different kinds of sects started throwing heavy books at each other. One group believed that you had to make the sign of the cross with two fingers, the other with three. Only one group can sit and feast on the resources after the battle, and that was always the real name of the game. The list of fake ideological differences invented in the fight for resources is endless. Protestants, Catholics, Sunnis versus Shias, black versus white people, and democrats versus republicans.    In our neolithic past, the ideological demonizing of other tribes was a necessary survival program. However, by now, when activated in a modern society, it unfolds as a force of primitive de(con)struction. It is present within the ridiculous and childish polarizations of viewpoints clashing between big nations, but when it comes to the paranoia conspiracy segment, it blooms in full madness. In this light, conspiracy seeing people are like zombies, overtaken by survival programs that should be resting in our evolutionary grave. Here in this mode, Bill Gates and even the Dalai Lama have been cast as absolute evil blood-drinking monsters, and the ones that have discovered this 'truth' have become crusaders of the light. This splitting is extremely unhealthy for the psyche. I have in my own network seen how damaging this is to mental health. A friend of mine had a friend who committed suicide after jumping into the black hole of blood-conspiracy. Another friend cannot sleep at night. In the following scene from the remarkable German film Der Untergang, Hitler is portrayed as a vulnerable, fragile being with compassionate feelings towards his friends and family.   This scene is disturbing for the mind that has split the world into pure good and pure evil because Hitler, in this scene, does no longer fit the narrative of embodying pure evil. Seeing Hitler as pure intentional evil is made difficult by showing him also able to show human feelings. The projection of evil falls back in its own space and opens up a unique chance for us to realize that we ourselves contain the evil we see outside ourselves. We could, almost all of us under the right collective circumstances, be an executioner in Auschwitz because we all have genetically inherited the ability to be kind to our own kin and at the same time de-humanize the others.   This is a disturbing realization, so it is tempting to unload the heavy parcel of responsibility of evil in persons we create in contrast to our own goodness. A well known psychologic mechanism is that the more we split the world into good and evil, the more what we see around us as reality is, in fact, a mirrored distortion of our inner not recognized subjectivity. Splitting and self-awareness cannot co-exist.       The 'truth' is much more that we all are Kali. We ourselves are a whole palette of everything in between darkness and light. We are full of complex and contradictory grey zones, and the striving for enlightenment is not to get rid of our dark sides but to fully acknowledge and even celebrate them in the light of consciousness. When we take responsibility for our own darkness, we cease to be obsessed with finding evil outside ourselves.   The evil capitalistic elite In the conspiracy groups and even beyond them it is a widespread understanding that the Big Pharma companies are trying to make us sick in order to earn money on us. The irony is that recent decades' rise in super-rich peoples' absurd wealth and the general digital optimization and streamlining of basic capitalistic greed to a certain extent has pawed a justified path for this belief. Working as a tour guide in Sahara, I was small talking to a guest at the campfire at night time. She was a scientist working for a Danish pharmaceutical company. I asked her: What would you do if you in your lab found a super cheap and not patentable way to cure diabetes? Maybe due to the exotic set and setting we were in, she replied without hesitation: I would destroy it. This highly intelligent scientist was, of course, with her surprising reply, not representative of what a 'normal' corporate person would say. Nevertheless, there is always some 'Aspergerrish' truth in symbolic tin foil hat intuition.       The return of Dracula - the rise of an old conspiracy tale   One of the Q-paranoic ideations seems to center around the theme of drinking human blood. The rich people drinking the blood of children type of conspiracy madness took momentum in Medieval Europe, where Jews were persecuted and killed due to widespread rumors that they were drinking the blood of children in secret rituals. These persecutions have always followed the script of the second act in the 'pandemian' play.      In the Dracula myth, we find a perfect example of simplified symbolic story-telling. It rises as a collective arche-typical vision in the lower classes as a result of an upper-class' exploitation that has gone way too far. Therefore, we must not forget to take in the last years' rising inequality as a part of the equation. The conspiracy-tales of Count Dracula arose at a time with great social injustice. Factual conspiratoric over-lord behavior is here intuitively transformed into a symbolic setting, where slavelike working conditions and hunger is interpreted as Count Dracula drinking blood from the poor and hence stealing their lives. The folk stories of a secret brotherhood of Vampires fit perfectly into the narrative of evil that lurks at the heart of all paranoic conspiracy ideations. Common people at that time who were at the mercy of an extremely wealthy and exploiting upper-class did not have the intellectual capacity to see through the social mechanisms of feudal slavery. Instead, they intuitively and symbolically saw their aristocratic tormentors as blood-drinking monsters. Medieval fairy tales are, in fact, full of symbolic translations of social injustice. Instead of complex societal processes we get the simplified narrative of individualized evil. The vampire narrative shows the spark of truth at the core of the paranoic conspiracy beliefs. These beliefs are the transformed symbolic smoke from a real fire of social injustice that has become too much. When the super-rich crosses the Rubicon, the masses react with symbolic paranoia conspiracy ideas of mistrust.   Vampire tales are again on the rise in the weird conspiracy groups. However, beyond the madness in our contemporary world to believe in a blood-drinking aristocracy, there is an underlying true story about a steep rising inequality. In this moment, where I write, the richest one percent owns 44% of the world.   Seen in this light, there will always be some intuitive truth even in even the wierdest conspiracy tales.     THE EVIL MONKEYS AT SWAYAMBUNATH The tendency is ever towards self-repetition, towards the preservation of the species: it is every man's intention that his work should be himself.  Doctor Ecstaticus, Meister Eckhart At the holy Monkey Temple, Swayambunath, in Kathmandu, pigeons, dogs, and monkeys fight for the food offerings. (Download article: page 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5 - 6) Especially the hundreds of monkeys tell a chilling story about us, humans, as a species. The monkeys are divided into three tribes that are constantly fighting to be the tribe controlling the small area of the food offerings. The three tribes are always in war with each other. When one clan kills a monkey from another clan, they rejoice. When a soldier from their own tribe is killed, they mourn. They are full of compassion towards their own kin and full of aggression towards the other tribes. In short, it is Richard Dawkin's selfish gene in play, but rather more played out on a collective level than an individual. In this brutal tribal competition for resources, the monkeys' intelligence seems to evolve faster than in their normal, more peaceful surroundings. Some of the local tour-guides tell about a monkey that drank fruit juice with a straw. With the monkeys' restless and cunning behavior in mind, it is tempting to observe Conspiracies from a Machiavellian perspective. Here is Machiavelli's advice to the ruler:    Nevertheless, our experience has been that those princes who have done great things have considered keeping their word of little account and have known how to beguile men’s minds by shrewdness and cunning. In the end, these princes have overcome those who have relied on keeping their word.   Birds are getting flown However, most Conspiracy is not driven by cunning powerful single individuals. It is far more a result of cybernetic superstructural processes. Karl Marx understood the phenomenon of capitalism as a self unfolding engine room, driven by a, from human will, almost transcendent force. This remarkable insight can be applied to almost all social group dynamics: they evolve their own complex will, a will that first suspends and then overtakes the will of the individuals who constitute the group.   A Chinese proverb says: Birds do not fly. They are getting flown. We, as group species are all in some way or another, taken by the overwhelming collective forces, we create by synchronization of social behaviors on a micro-level. We, like birds, are getting flown by powerful social winds, especially when they become storms.       The false personification of evil Therefore real existing group-'conspiracy' is basically not as believed by most conspiracy communities, driven by intentional evil Machiavellian ideas created in demonic individuals or groups. The notion of pure evil is most probably a tribal inherited tendency, through splitting, to dehumanize an enemy tribe to such an extent that a merciless slaughter of the enemy tribe does not conflict with the emotional interface used to uphold one's own tribe. History is full of examples of good family fathers who committed horrifying atrocities to members of other families, clans, and nations. When conspiracy groups tend to project pure evil human will into vaccine programs and 5G, it is due to the failing ability to realize that most social processes are rising from systems with distributed collective self-regulated survival intelligence. There are no evil puppet masters. There are no evil people at the end of the equations. There are just social algorithmic processes.   The same is the case with the founders and co-workers of social media. I am sure Mark Zukerberg is a good human being and doing his level best to control the monster he has created.    I know some very rich people. They are, like most of us, subconsciously driven by the fear of losing what they got. Somehow this fear of losing wealth seems to accelerate when we get more. Any threat from the outside, in this case, COVID 19, is able to release age-old impulses that make the amygdala highjack the whole brain. In such an inner hostage scenario, the reasoning faculties of the cortex will prostitute any logic viewpoint so it will justify the ancient 'amygdalian' commands for accumulating even more wealth as a security measure, no matter the cost for others. Such a Stockholm Syndromized mind will always be loyal to its ancient amygdalian ruler.    Seen from this temple view, I see Conspiracy as a necessary tribal inherited algorithmic mechanism that makes every group, whether it consists of Neanderthals, nations, woke groups, or policemen seek their own survival through basically subconscious intersubjective distortions of 'truth'. 'I' do exactly the same on the level of 'ego'. In this sense, my ego, as a king of trillions of cells, is not so different from an ego of a nation or even a social media group: 'We' are all a product of algorithmic self-repetition and preservation. What is here is what survived as the fittest algorithm, whether the scene is set as a genetic fight for life, a formation of a social group or at the level of internet algorithmic data-organization. The formation of Ego is a necessary lie of survival. This lie implies that surviving systems are the ones that are best in stealing energy from other systems. Evil is the necessary lie of survival This lie is most probably rooted in genes that can be traced back to the beginning of life itself in the sense that different lifeforms always had to compete for resources and energy. Homo Sapiens, however, got a new powerful tool in the race for resources. We got language. On the level of the formation of different social groups, I would use Harari's characterization of humans as storytelling animals as a start but go a bit further with the following claim: We mobilize in groups through powerful storytelling of lies that bind us together and justifies our survival in opposition to 'the other groups'. This tendency of tribal 'truth' arrangements is the fundamental and eternal biological force of what Karl Marx on a social level defined as ideologies. Seen from a level deeper than politic science, all ideologies are, in fact, products of competing 'I'-deologies where the fittest in the long run survive. What we call 'evil' is, in fact, a systemic bio-algoritmical constant war going on from cells to societies. This war is a fundamental engine in the evolutionary race against enthropy.   The self-blind will to survival Never underestimate a man who overestimates himself Franklin D. Roosevelt This ancient tribal will to survival will lie, cheat, and conspire without hesitation to make ends meet. Of course, we do not want to see these not so flattering human traits in ourselves. That would make us hesitant and hence bad survivors. Therefore any self upholding entity, whatever it is on an individual level or on a collective level, must be self blind. The necessary survival lie has to cover itself in self blindness. This blind spot on the radar-screen is the basic reason why social Conspiracy is always denied by the ones doing it.        Tribal blindness is, however, seen from a more non-dual evolved consciousness deeply ridiculous and childish. Take a look at the following news agencies: Russia Today, South China Morning Post, and CNN. They basically all claim that their nations are great and that the other nations got it completely wrong. Come on! What self blind nonsense is this? Seen from the astronaut level, all of it is restless monkey business produced by amygdala hijacked brains trying to appear objective.    The power of untruth At this fundamental level of story told group formation, there is an important observation to make. Like fake news today mobilize more emotional collective energy than the often more boring truthful news, so the stories a group could unite around got more powerful the more it was removed from truth. This mechanism could be observed in its extreme in Nazi Germany, and it can be observed today in the rhetoric of president Trump: The more he lies, the more group adoration and energy he mobilizes. The pandemic inflammation of social media driven extreme conspiracy theories and fake news in general are feeding on the same basically tendency. Untruth is a master in creating explosive group energy. This peculiar blindness has so far been a helper in the evolutionary race for being among the rare ones being able to pass on their DNA. However, it seems that the same blind spot on the radar now gives way to global destruction. What a self-blind ego gains on a local level always comes with a global paid loan or rather a theft to be paid back. We, humans, are as a species programmed to thrive on energy theft, and stealing is always easier in darkness. However, it now seems that we finally are waking up in burning beds. The silent war of Conspiracy  When the eternal struggle for energy capture and resources first evolved into tribal conflicts among groups of humans, open war was the primary way to win this zero-sum game. As Stanford professor Ian Morris has pointed out, the world has become more and more peaceful in the last 15.000 years, primarily due to the state-building that followed the wars. However, I would argue that the picture might not be so rosy. The warfare is still here but more subtly in the form of Conspiracy. Never attempt to win by force what can be won by deception Machiavelli - The prince Conspiracy is, in this sense a silent ongoing cold and cunning war where elites have become elites due to their ability to manifest the highest collective level of Conspiracy intelligence. When I dress in 12 USD trousers made in Bangladesh by children in dark factories, it might be challenging to see the true picture because there is no occupation force present to keep the workforce as slaves. Instead, the whole process of energy and resource capture has become so complex and intelligent that both the workers and I together could sing a song of gratitude and freedom. I can here in Copenhagen purchase one kg of good coffee for approximately 20 minutes of my work time. However, how much work time on the coffee estate does it take to produce one kg of high quality of coffee? The equation does not fit.   These are just a few examples of how intelligent Conspiracy largely has made open warfare less needed. Systemic Conspiracy-intelligence, has, to a large extent, replaced open warfare.   Systemic scientific conspiracy An ideal scientific mind will always try to find a sharper Ocrams Razor to cut deeper into the core of things, even if he in the process should cut his own theories and therefore himself away as a branch on a lifegiving tree. However, this ideal is in itself not a part of the field of science but rather a complex human thing, far beyond the field of what can be weighed and measured. The size of a rational man's ego is basically not interlinked with his ability to think logically. It is a matter of existential urgency that we all should know ourselves, and here especially know what we do not know because exactly this meta-knowing will, to a certain degree, protect us against ourselves. Scientists became in the enlightenment area our new priests by not knowing what they do not know, and where there are priests, there are bound to be demonic shadows like the ones following Sam Harris. No human can jump his own shadow, not even a scientist. We cannot jump them, but we can know them by knowing ourselves. Otherwise, these shadows will manifest in society as they do now in the form of the growing public mistrust in science. The reaction manifests as conspiracy movements. They are partly a result of the priesthood of scientists.   My advice, not to Tom, Harry, and Dick, but to every sincere scientists would be to enter the world of psychedelics in a responsible, meditative, and conscious non-party set and setting. This inner psychedelic light will deconstruct all pictures, paths, and self-images. The default brain will dissolve together with the default projected hallucination of the world we call reality. Nothing is more healthy than that. The ability to think rationally will return after such a session because it is justified by evolution as a marvelous survival tool, but it will hopefully not any longer be priestly arrogant. In fact, there should be an Eleusinian mystery school for every sound scientist to pass. I would love to hear what Richard Dawkins would have to say after a DMT session. He might, after just one session in ego-death, modify his brilliant but rigid ways of looking and being himself. However, not even psychedelics is a guarantee for anything. Sam Harris took what is described as 'heroic doses' of psilocybin, and unfortunately, he is still Sam Harris without knowing that he is Sam Harris with the same overcontrolled voice and mimick as a giveaway of inner battles. I am very well aware of the fact that I bréak a tabu quite similar to what the woke movement do, by bringing in the scientist as a person in the equation. Scientists always try to play a game of impossible objectification as heard in Sam Harris's calm, reasuring but not natural voice. In this game, we are only allowed to go for the ball and not for the man. However, the man himself is the key to what he says and why he says it. We should always be a part of our own search field. Otherwise, pure objectivity becomes the breeding ground of pure subjectivity. Here in Denmark ,we have a famous psychologist who advocates for taking a stand saying no in life not to be swallowed up by modern progress. It sounds reasonabe, but why am I the only one to see the following: The man is full of personal fear and insecurity, and his impressive academic but fragile glasshouse seems to contain no mirrors.   What do I want to say with this? I want to say that the rational mind is a wonderful thing as long as it embraces its own observing subjectivity. The more a scientist tries to surpress his subjectivity, the more it returns in his objectivity. Otherwise, the scientific communities becomes guilty in creating a world that mistrusts science. The balance of scientists working for private enterprises as compared to state and trans-govermental bodies such as CERN has tipped in the faveur of scientist working directly under a top down presure to earn money. This is not a healthy development. In this late stage of digitalized capitalism there are massive waves of manipulation hidden in plain sight. These waves of real corporate and governmental conspiracy are, however, not created out of personal intentions, but out of systemic societal processes. Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos are not intentionally evil persons, but they cannot control or predict the movements of their coorporated monsters once they has left the bottle. To identify systemic processes is, however, far too compex for most people. There are all too few Snowdons. Instead fearful atavistic minds tend to understand the world around them in with the power of reversable symbol-cognition. In the symbolic world of our ancient brain the overwhelming complexity of societal processes is reduced to very simple binary narratives. Instead of reading Thomas Pickety and other intellectual heavy weight books, we find a cherrypicking of a few paranoia headlines with simple narratives, where bad things are caused by evil persons.   DISRUPTIVE TECHNOLOGY How could Adolf Hitler mesmerize the German population in the 1930'ties? There are, of course, many answers to such a question. However, one thing hidden in plain sight is the impact of new technology. The roaring collapse of cognition and consciousness In the recovery process from the Great Depression in the 1930'ties, new inventions and the organized production of the same got a boost. One of these new inventions that found a quick way from idea to production was the public address, PA, speaker systems.   Without the use of microphones connected to mega-amplifiers and loudspeaker systems, Hitler would only have been able to hypnotize a few hundred people by the shEer force of his stand-alone voice. Now suddenly, that same growling voice could break through the sound wall with a force similar to contemporary stadion rock. Without the Nazi party's genial use of the new PA technology, there would have been no way to bypass traditional command ways of power and hence no Second World war.  Queen was not the first to fill a stadium with ectatic mega crowds. Adolf Hitler was. Note the loudspeakers placed on racks. The earlier invention and use of the radio was also an important factor in mobilizing the crowds. However, a radio was not able to play so loud that it could enable the breakdown of the psychological defence mechanisms of the listeners. Furthermore the radio communication had atomized reciever groups in the sense that the maximum amount of collective users normally would be a family. In a stadium rock concert, two things are necessary for reaching the point of ecstatic surrender: The close-range physical presence of mega-crowds and a sound wall so powerful that thinking was disrupted. A safe zone for individual opinions is impossible in such a set and setting.   The distortive rebellion As an old rock musician playing the lead guitar, I also note another interesting performance trick. In my ears, the voice of Hitler sounds like my distorted solo guitar. This phenomenon is by no means not insignificant. Hitler was, in fact, the first heavy metal growler roaring out his message as a deafening sound wall of harmonic tube distortion. The overwhelming loudness is in itself, as most of us know from rock concerts, important for the ego-surrender to ecstasy. However, the, for the human ear pleasant harmonic distortion of tube amplifiers plays an essential role too. The tube distortion modulates the voice in such a manner that it comes close to an ancient war cry of a hoarse voice that seems to shot-cut our intellect and bring us in contact with deep archaic feelings. The unpleasant distortion from transistor amplifiers would not have done the trick. People would have walked home instead. Hitler, in fact, knowingly or unknowingly, was benefitting from the huge tube amplifiers turned to the distortive maximum of their power. The distortion itself is, like the case was with my guitar, a rebellion. I have searched google to find scientific research on the matter but could find none. I am sure that tube-distorted sounds somehow find a way to our ancient brain, that a clean sound cannot make. You get wild by listening to a distorted loud sound. The technology shock - New technology is always dangerous From here, there are a lot of interesting ways to go. My first choice of observation to make would be as follows: New disruptive technology seems always to bring forth a regressive fall in consciousness and cognition, as they are the fragile fruits of the latest evolutionary development. However, after some time, consciousness and cognition recover and learn to live, even flourish with the new technology. Hence, no one today becomes violent by participating in a stadium rock event. We lose ourselves for a moment in ancient crowd-madness and then go refreshed home. We have become immune to electrically amplified messages beyond 125 dB. In this sense, new technology acts in the same way as a common cold. When it came to South America for the first time, it killed millions. Now again, we are facing a situation where accelerating new technologies are making us go first-phase bananas. I asked at the beginning of this book: Why are all the new movements so outright crazy?! The answer in this context is: History is repeating the same algorithmic clash between consciousness and disruptive technology. We have not yet developed immunity towards the viral social media and hence we collapse into the blind collectiveness of digitally created black rabbit holes that noone hav been able to predict, not even Mark Zuckerberg. An impending question that I cannot answer is now: Have we come so close to Ray Kurtzweil's technological singularity that the acceleration in invention and application of new technology leaves us no recovery time? If this is the case, and only time can tell, our civilization will kill itself by overfeeding on its own fruits.   New technology bypasses old command ways of power A second, equally important consequence of virgin technology is that it creates unforeseen new pathways to power. These new pathways seems like a natural law to bypass the conventional command channels built in the hierarchy of tradition. Through his PA-enabled political stadium growl, Hitler bypassed the old school political machinery of the establishment with ease. The same is the case with the new group formations on social media. Recently I read how the Danish anti-vaxer organization, Men in Black, successfully has mobilized both present serving and former military personnel to join their mission. Suddenly, even the traditionally strong-founded hierarchy of the military can be eroded by Facebook groups and the like. The insane carnival occupation of Capitol Hill was an example of the same phenomenon.   Seen in this light, the Chinese system is much more resilient and intelligent in its authoritarian dealing with technology. We in the west, on the other hand, are in danger exactly because of democracy, and now we have landed in the most peculiar situation, where big tech companies have got tremendous political power in doing what the Chinese goverment has been doing all along. This power is the anti-democratic power of censorship.   Disruptive technology once again has made us regress to ancient tribal bonding mechanisms. However, there is a big difference between the Nazi mobilisation and the social media mobilization mechanisms. To activate strong tribal feelings and bonds has since the neolithic times required the close physical presence of crowds as large as possible. This time digital tribes are being formed without bodies. How that is possible, I will try to explain in the next chapter.     THE TSUNAMIC RISE OF DIGITAL TECHNOLOGY We repeatedly love to present ourselves as members of a society of free will and democracy. However, nobody has ever voted for or against the use of smartphones. The biggest societal waves remain unseen as it happened in the tsunami in 2004. Fishing boats on the ocean did not notice anything special.   A major disruptive development started with the widespread use of computers in the 80'ties and 90'ties. They laid the foundation for our digitalized interconnectedness in the form of the world wide web, which again has lead to the overwhelming expansion of social media platforms.    All the contemporary outrageous crowd-formations would not exist in their current explosive forms were it not for their hybridization with social media in its current commercialized click-bait-driven form. At present, the oppressive invasion of consumerist digitalized mass culture has given birth to new species of trolling Frankensteins, Leviathans, and Golems. They are newly evolved collective cyborg lifeforms with seemingly independent emotion-minds of their own. They are living in a virtual reality, reality.    I clearly remember when I got my own personal computer in 1992. The logic and language of this strange and wonderful new thing radically changed my way of working. I remember how I became more organized and systematic in this period in a kind of trade-off with a previous, more intuitive, and chaotic work-navigation.   The rise of computers made it possible to globalize continuously optimizing systems of trade, production, and communication. The planet suddenly began to grow worldwide webs of communication neurons while ship-containers made it possible and cost-beneficial to exchange huge amounts of goods over long distances.   This development made the army of work- and consumer-'Me's' grow symbiotic bonds with their new digital partners in such a way that the binary logic of the computers began to affect their brains, even on a neuroplasticity level. As the machines got interfaces evolving towards us, we evolved brain-interfaces directed towards them.    The next even more outstanding breakthrough was the new Windows 94 platform. I remember one fine day after 4 years of daily windows companionship. I was painting my living room. By mistake, I made a stroke with the pencil, so the white color was entering the space where I had painted with a different color. My first instinctive reflex was to in my mind to look for the Windows return-button to correct the mistake. At this moment. I realized that the computer-interface within these few years had entered my own brain and created its own circuits of neurons. I had become a click'able computer inter-face. Windows into a digital bardo-world Today our brains are all radically different than before the times of the computer due to this process of mutual interfacing. However, most important of all: Windows had created a new world with a blurred sense of reality. This is, in fact, the seed for all the later alternative reality-fictions ending up in the Capitol Hill. Today this reality-blurred bardo-world is something that is present as a conditioning agent even from early childhood. My friend saw a little girl trying to swipe an aquarium with fish in a doctor's waiting room. No wonder we by now are swiping our way into all kind of faked realities.       The quatification of the human work force The arrival of mass produced computers was a dream tool in the hands of business-oriented leaders. Even governmental institutions could now be streamlined in quantifiable economic logic. New Public Management saw the benefits of using the workforce's newly acquired binary interface-installment. I remember how in the 90'ties, we were top-down influenced by enthusiastic leaders who told us to fill out all kinds of formulas, so we, in a quantifiable way, could document what we were doing and at the same time, could be told what we were supposed to do so a computer could digest it.   In this way, humans created the computers in their own short-term and narrow-minded visions of a successful world - and then the computers created us.    Never had humankind been so free in such a disciplined way.   The Bitches Brew of Let Go and Control   Steve Jobs is a perfect example of this development. He, as a young man, was a restless, super creative, visionary, and rebellious hippie 'realizing' himself with Indian gurus and LSD at the banks of the river Ganga. At the same time, he was a perfectionist, a workaholic, and a control-freak. In this impossible bitches brew, the iPhone was born.        An all too well-known and stressful information overload At current, we process as much information in one day as the lifetime sum of information for a person in the Medieval period. Our success in society has so far depended on the amount of data we can digest and process. However, our stone-age brains have difficulties filtering the increasing amount of information we need to process to survive. The receptive human bandwidth is too narrow as compared to the vastness of data that potentially can shake, confuse, or define our identity as 'Me'. This exponential rise in information quantity is quite well known and often put forward as a cardinal explanation for the qualitative changes in our times.         Smaller and smaller and closer and closer However, our relation to information has also changed in other ways that actually has less to do with information overload and more with information underload. This development primarily happened due to the explosive use of smartphones. An increasing quantity of information is today flowing through the smartphone. In this sense, the medium, the gadget itself, has become the message. It reminds me of a visit to Taipei in Taiwan a few years ago. On an evening stroll, I went to a park where a lot of young people were hanging out. None of them were speaking to each other. They were all looking into their smartphone screen.      With the smartphone, a radical change happened in our relation to data and to the medium of data itself. In fact, we can follow this development right from the birth of computers with the huge IBM-monsters, then shrinking to the personal home computers, to the laptops, to the tablets and ending with the smartphones:       Data came closer and closer to our bodies in smaller and smaller 'vehicles'.   Never has information been so close to us.   The age of TV and radio gave us ample distance from our information media. In contrast, the iPhone has become like an Avatar-plug directly connected to our blood and flesh. The next natural step is Elon Musk's Neuralink. These gadgets gave the 'Me' access to social media shared fields of consciousness, but also shared fields of psychosis.   The humanization of the Medium Design is the prism through which technology is experienced, not just how tech looks. A statement made by the artificial intelligence-system GPT-3 The physical form of the smartphone itself and the closeness of it as a constant companion during daytime and the first thing to reach out after in the morning, even before the toilet, the smartphone has become an extension of our own biology, a prosthetic limp. We started to have feelings toward our Phone. I must here confess that I too adore my I-(phone). It has become my 'Gollumnized' precious one.       In this deceptive humanization of the medium, the design became increasingly important. Steve Jobs transformed the dry IBM'ish philosophy of usability by adding beauty to his product. From the font-design to the gadget itself, he beautified and emotionalized our relation to data. Data became persuasive carriers of dopamine in the form of design. The gadget transformed into an aestheticized and personalized fetish to such a degree that we now are able to bond with it like it almost was a living being.       It has, in fact, come so close to us that we only discover our dependence on it when we lose or damage it, pretty much in the same way that you only notice your leg or an arm when you loose it or hurt it. With this 'organ-isation', the smartphone even ceases to exist as an object.       The humanized social media - The Big Others A parallel development took place on social media. Facebook and the like developed digital mirrors of us as living in closely knit tribal-like communities. Here, I would like, with inspiration from Lacan's Big Other, to coin the term, the Big Others. The big others are the citizens in our homegrown Facebook tribe. These 'friends' are the big others watching and evaluating us through likings and comments. The social media spectatorship through this scopophilic system of media-iconized language is releasing a kind of soma with almost the same signal chemical cocktail of dopamine and serotonin as we get from being in close encounters with other humans. Our stone age brain is all too willing to drink that soma as a substitute for the feelings of isolation and loneliness produced by modern consumer-life and now even more so in the time of COVID19. Social media has, in fact, become somatic media.      The singular omnipresent space of the Internet In a third, parallel synced modality, this process of closeness became amplified due to its circulation on a platform essentially without time and space: The Internet. The first person to foresee this development, even before the time of the Internet, was Marshall McLuhan, with his term, global village.     In fact, the internet has placed all of our voices on the tip of a needle.      However, here on this needle-point, we are not medieval angels. The lack of space makes us devils. When we as a myriad of 'My'-spaces collide in the location-less location of social media, a whole cluster of new conflicts arise. With inspiration from Baudrillard, we have arrived at an implosion of all boundaries. A cartoon drawing of the Prophet Muhamad is published in a narrow-minded provincial newspaper in Denmark. The next day they create outrage among Muslims, even in the furthest mountains of Pakistan.        All the religions and belief systems in the world have been forced to enter as gladiators in the Forum Romanum of the smartphone display.     Before the digital interconnectedness, there were many isolated monads of independent cultural spaces on the planet. Muslims could have their Prayers and Prophet in peace, and people in Denmark could play with their irony, and nobody cared. Today they collide.       In the early days of Facebook, I experienced a strange and unusual happening in my relation to a good friend. He and I started arguing about some insignificant nonsense on my public Facebook-wall. Suddenly unexpected, it spiraled out of control, and in anger, we unfriended each other. It took more than a year before we could bury the hatchet, and it took me years to realize that this strange conflict was a product of social media's inherent architecture.     Even within the western Sphere of free Greek dialogue, it has become increasingly difficult to avoid confrontation. Free speech requires at a minimum of three interlinked but yet independent spaces: a space from where one part can speak, a space from where the opponent can speak, and finally a shared space, a verbal octagon where thoughts and arguments can be victorious, die or give life to new hybrid creations.      In the digital interconnectedness, these ideal three spaces are compressed to one point into one omnipresent space as it presents itself on a screen. The only space visible is the octagon, not the other safe spaces of the opponents. This compression, in itself, creates conflict and polarization. Therefore the tone is always harder when we argue on the net as compared to when we are arguing in the real world where we can 'aware' each other as a physical presence. If I could get a visual presentation of the 'other', my empathy would be bigger. FROM DATA DOWNLOAD TO EMOTIONAL DOWNLOAD Computers seem to collect e-mails, tweets, and posts. Humans seem to collect emotions, fears, and desires. Statement made by the artificial intelligence-system GPT-3 These seemingly independent developments in different spheres of society have in tandem driven forward a fundamental change in the way we perceive and handle data:    The stream of data has transformed from being served as a long-distance, information download to being a close-range, emotional download.      We download feelings and upload information.     Ask Google! Today, if somebody asks me a factual question, I will reply: Ask Google.       In the following exemplification, I would upfront make an apology for my misanthropic views. They are meant as hyperboles to make my point clear. For ten years, I was a tour guide for well off elderly tourists in the Far East. Due to the sudden illness of a tour guide, I was asked by my boss if I could substitute as an Opera guide in Italy. I said yes to the challenge in spite of the fact that I did not know anything about Italy. Two days later, I arrived in Milan with 30 tourists on a bus. I was sitting up front with the chauffeur and a microphone. On my lap, I had my iPhone 6 with mobile internet coverage. It was important that no one saw that little devil, so I had to be quick. I had an app with wiki-informations integrated into its map. On the digital map, I could see a children's hospital coming up 100 meters later, and when we passed that hospital, I could make a lot of the kind of detailed blah blah that tourists like because it makes them feel in safe hands. From experience, I know that they have forgotten everything I said 5 min later. In the same way, every monument we passed got the same insane detailed information-preaching. In this way, I somehow survived my only tour as an opera guide in Italy.      The 'outdated' adoration of random information    I would not say that I managed the whole tour perfectly, relying on my iPhone, but I survived. Often my guests came to me full of praise for my extensive knowledge about anything in Italy. It showed their generation as schooled in being hunter-gatherers of any information-food no matter the quality, and the sad irony in not any longer being able to remember the collected information, primarily due to old age but also due to the general information overload of our time. In the good old days, it was important to have a huge sum of information in the form of experience stored in the brain. We tended to accumulate data by uncritically remembering any bit of information from all walks of life. As time passed, all that random information without meaning and context would fill out the blanks spots in a kind of unified sum total of polyhistorian knowledge. In today's big data scenario, that is absolutely not possible anymore. We have to avoid information and be more selective primarily by ascending to higher levels of thought-abstractions. In a way, we all have to be philosophers to be able to successfully navigate the ocean of data.    The outdated cultural blind habit of adoration of random information as such became clear to me when we, on another trip with the Transiberian Rail from Beijing to Moscow, had local tour-guides in every city we visited. These guides were not trained in filtering the information they had in such a way that they could present some essential headlines in the right level of abstraction. To hyperbole it a bit, they could say to the guests: The building we pass to the left is consisting of 234.688 bricks. These bricks have been transported on lorries 22 km from here. The building has 23 rooms, all with large windows and blue painted doors.      In general, the tourists were satisfied with this kind of information and were only complaining when there was no information given, and they, therefore, had to rely on their own eyes to see and experience. Furthermore, it was interesting to observe how they were conditioned as consumers in the sense that the constant stream of information was something they had paid for and hence expected.     We have within a few years come from a situation where we were expected and conditioned to digest as much information as possible in order to have success to a situation where we do not need it anymore because google knows. However, we feel a loss of identity if we do not keep on consuming data, and hence we get stress from data overload. In this time of disruptive change, the past tends to collide with the future in the sense that our life-experience and childhood school conditionings often bring forth less useable survival solutions as compared to our fluid intelligence. In fact, we have to unlearn them by now.     Information underload As a child in school, I learned mental arithmetics. No school will today use energy and brain-space in children on memorization. Arithmetics is outsourced to machines. Seen in this light, information overload is not the problem for us. It is the opposite. We are, in fact, coming much more close to a state of information underload.  We have given up our old school duty of collecting information, and instead, we outsource and externalize it.   Some years back, on a nature trek in Sweeden, I suddenly realized that I had lost my way in the wilderness in spite of the fact that I had been in this area several times before. I tried to activate google maps, but with no internet connection, it did not work since I had forgotten to download the area. I realized that my brain, in pure Smartphone-laziness, had forgotten how to navigate spatially.   My brain had lost grey matter in the hippocampus area. This area in the brain was over-develloped in taxi-drivers before the new GPS-systems made it shrink in their brains too.   The question is now: Are our brains shrinking due to the outsourcing of intelligence? I hope to answer that question bit by bit. However, we can assume that there is little doubt that our symbiotic relationship with external information systems is having a strong neuro-plastic effect on our brains.   As Information is externalized, the vacant brain-space is filled with emotion. We, in fact, download emotion and often due to the social medias common denomination driven algorithms, the most primitive ones. Here we are definitely not using our smartphone for higher cognitive functions. Instead, it is the stone age monkey inside of us that is getting activated. What a billion people now are busy doing with their smartphones is what monkeys love to do too:     Emojis The next evolving smartphone task for the monkey in the video to master could be the emojis. Emojis are a sign based facial-emotional communication form with a growing and evolving presence on social media. With almost 2000 different emojis, they have become a complex visual language of the most basic human feelings. Together with the dramatic rise in the use of multiple exclamation points, they point at social media as a place of exchange of feelings.     SOCIAL MEDIA AND PSYCHOLOGIC DISRUPTION Previously, we saw how the digital interfaces adapted to our brains and our brain-interfaces adapted to the digital world. The next step in this symbiosis is taking place in a reverse double movement, a chiasm, where we internalize the digital reality of social media and, at the same time, externalize ourselves as public avatars. The Facebook avatar has for many young people become their own fetishized objectification of what so far was something inside of them.     The Sphere Eversion of the Ego Imagine you hold a tennis ball in your hand, and suddenly, the inside turns out, and the outside has turned in. In this sphere eversion, all that previous was inside of you and made you special as 'I' has now made itself visible in the form of on-line memories, photos, and stories. Suddenly the subject is objectified. In this state of not recognized self-alienation, we worship our own simulacra-fetish together with our Facebook friends to such an extent that our on-line reality overrules our previous intimate off-line existence. We, ourselves, have now become the object in a kind of, with inspiration from Baudrillard's terminology, simulacra, in a non-material world of signs. However, the simulacra did not, as Baudrillard foresaw, create a collective stronger and stronger longing for the real. On the contrary, the simulacra, originally a poor simulation of the real, gained so much momentum in the feedback of reinforcing social media loops that it becomes a new real hyper-reality strong enough to degrade what before was considered to be real to the underworld of Hades or at least make it uninteresting. Now the worst thing that can happen to a smartphone-addicted teenager is to go with her parents for a campfire holiday in the wilderness without mobile and internet.        No wonder that young people who grow up with this almost unnoticed but nevertheless disruptive change are confused about their identity. It has become a challenge for our stone-age shaped brains to discern what is what and who is who. Of course, many young people are able to handle the eversion of their social life quite well. However, it is obvious to view the chiasmic shift of identity as one of the major root causes for the contemporary mental instability and anxiety among a growing number of young people. When you upload yourself as selfies in a process where you like a magazine or a newspaper, edit your mood and even with plastic surgery alter your physical appearance, the traditional, by culture given, identity-interface collapses. In the good old days, not so long ago, we hid and protected our innermost feelings behind a persona, a mask of controlled rationality and objectivity. Today the element of control is even more, but in a process where we upload a strictly edited avatar-version of ourselves as feeling entities, radiating happiness and success. My own country Denmark continues to score a top position in the World Happiness Report. I would politely question this kind of science. Much of the data for the happiness investigation is generated by asking people how they feel about themselves. I know my fellow Danes. Especially the younger generations are busy constructing and projecting the image of a happy and successful social media avatar-life. From here, they start to believe in their own creation to such an extent that when they are presented with a questionary, asking them if they are happy, they edit their answers in the same way as they edit their eversed digital life. At the same time, Danish youth have European record in alcohol consumption. It reminds me of the American psychologist, Dr, Bruce Alexander, who showed that it was the set and setting of 'Rat Parks' in themselves that created the opioid abuse-patterns. When rats were placed in optimal surroundings, they preferred water to opioids. So why do the happiest people in the world drink so much? We are furthermore among the top scores when it comes to the use of anti-depressants.          The psychic eversion in the social media-sphere is a threat to our Industrial life, carefully adjusted ego seen as an operating system. In its new confusing web-driven inside-out-state, the ego reacts protective with narcissistic hypersensitivity, and hence it craves exactly what is not available on the net: a safe space around its highly complex crystal-like identity. When this vulnerable ego meets other egos in the media bottleneck, there is no mental space left that is not a potential zone of conflict. Cramped together on the tip of the needle, we are more and more in danger of being perceived as emotional violations to others or vice versa. Hence we have ended up in an impossible situation, where we are getting deeply offended by the presence of each other's freedom. In the protection of our own freedom, we cannot any longer allow other people to be free.             The egoic-interface has seen in a historical view, served us well, but now its time is over. Like anything else that is born, has to die, so it is with our now outdated and also seen from a Gaian viewpoint, reckless consumer-configuration of 'I'. After its short but beautiful blooming from Beethoven to Woodstocks Jimi Hendrix to Wizzard Steve Jobs's demise, the buds of the ego are falling off like autumn leaves. However, seen in the current state of outrage and polarization, the death of the ego is more comparable to a star turning into a supernova of screaming narcissistic egos blowing up in each other's outrage faces.        We are getting suffocated by the lack of oxygen in the digital (sp)here and now. In this sense, Elon Musk's neuralink is already here. We have in our hyperconnectedness become present like voices in each other's brains. From that position as a claustrophobic caveman, I roar to unknown troll-people who have commented negatively or disliked my postings: Get out of my cave! To a large extent, the characteristics of movements from QAnon to Woke can be derived from the fundamental limbic outrage of fear, anger and the corresponding flight or fight-mood. The causes for this rise of animal instincts are multiple. However, the psychological sphere eversion on social media, as described above, has, for sure a great part to play in this disruptive change. The amygdala is among many triggers provoked into action by the locationless location of social media. The amygdala is programmed to react when danger comes too close and this is exactly what happens on the net. In this sense the psycho-spheric eversion of our soul in itself is percieved as a constant alarming threat. Sitting as voices in each others' heads and as feelings inside of our hearts, we are, in fact, emotionally hurting each other just by being on-line. Social media eversion and regression The sphere eversion happening on social media is for a large extend responsible for this development. The psychological eversion is creating a constant state of on-line trauma. This makes the Amygdala the Web-King of Social Media. The amygdala knows of no time and always reacts directly to a threat. Any foreign viewpoint presented on social media triggers the amygdala into action simply because of its eversive closeness.   Hence the regressive pressure is greatly amplified by the psychological eversion taking place in the location-less location of social media. In this way, the Amygdala has become the spider in the web. Our human cortex is not resillient enough to merge with the web. We are not designed to live in a situation where our inner feelings are uploaded and exposed in the hands and face of our new media-avatar-identity and here subjected and dopamine addicted to a constant scopophilic approval from a digital tribe of friends and echo- chamberf followers. In this invading emotional eversive vulnerability, the amygdala is provoked into a continuous brain-impairing stress reaction that that triggers the regressive journey to earlier layers of cognition. Hence paranoia conspiracy people tend to see and understand the world as we did in earlier historical stages. THE IMPLOSION OF CONSCIOUSNESS As images are seen in a mirror, so the universe is an image in the mirror of Consciousness. Tripura Rahasya XL verse 53-54 The mind is like a reflection in a mirror: Though it is insubstantial, it is not nonexistent. P'ang Yun, Layman P'ang - China Consciousness, understood, not by the objects it reflects, but as the abstract ability to aware itself and in itself is maybe the most precious and mysterious phenomenon in life. We are not capable of defining this familiar and profoundly mysterious entity.        Could it (the Soul) be a constituent of our universe, ignored by the physicist, but infinitely more important than light? Alexis Carrel - Man, the Unknown What is reflected in the mirror of consciousness? Light... Light has, together with sound or vibration, by mystic traditions from East to West been used as metaphors for the bridge between an unknowable consciousness beyond time and space and our universe as time-space manifest in the human mind.   Hence it gives meaning to use a light bulb as a metaphor for mind-manifest consciousness. Lamps shine with different lux, and so do people. Consciousness in its abstract primordial, but time manifest form in a mind is variable in intensity in each of us. Some are by nature, but also occasionally through cultivation, more de-lighted, conscious, even super conscious as the monk you can see below. This view of consciousness comes close to what Dr. Brazdau has termed the Consciousness Quotient Inventory (CQ-i) High-amplitude gamma activity in the frontal lobes is associated with high levels of abstract awareness. Rinpoche Youngey Mingur is a olympic practitioner when it comes to consciousness. Hence you will not find this man and the like among a goup of outragers. At the other end of the bell curve we find the sleep-wakers. In these days it seems that the whole bell has been moved towards the half-wake state where we tend to dream, even while seemingly being awake. In this sense, the Capitol Hill was filled with sleep-walkers.    In the room I sit in, there is a lamp where I, through a knob, can regulate the intensity of the light. When I sit in darkness, I cannot see anything. When I slowly turn up the light, more and more objects in a larger and larger radius become visible. In a calm, cultivated consciousness, we are able to expand our light-full awareness to encompass the context we live in. In this quantitative expansion, we can see beyond the borders of our own body's self-interest and aware other beings and their viewpoints. It is important to remember that this consciousness is primordial as compared to our ability to reason and use language.    Consciousness, together with the higher cognitive reasoning faculties is, one of the first things we lose in a rage. There is a lot of anger and fear in our global mental atmosphere these days, and it seems to be infectious like Covid19. In states of anger and fear, consciousness understood as a relative circle of empathic awareness, narrows in. It shrinks, and we lose the ability to see, to acknowledge a and to 'aware' the 'other'.       Consciousness and Cognition are the last and, therefore, utmost fragile evolutionary flowers. They cannot bloom under the rule of the Amygdalian King.   This delicate awake state is, in fact, a sine qua non for my beloved astronaut view in the sense that our awareness can expand much further than what is needed to aware others. It can, with intensity, expand into space, at least felt so subjectively in the head of a meditator. Seen from this inner space, one's own and others' egos become utterly small and insignificant. In intenser states of consciousness I am able to disidentify with small external things that otherwise in a state of identity-political overdrive would make me rage in a fight for a safe my-space. Oh Friend! Understand The body is like the ocean Rich with hidden treasures. Mirabai A bulb gets its power from the current. Consciousness procures its energy from the battery of the body. This particular pathway of energy is linked to the near-sense-based awareness of inner and outer body sensations. We feel our skin, but we also feel emotions like hunger, love and pain and so on inside the body from the anus and up to the throat.   There is an important difference between the long-distance based sense of sight and the short-distance grounded 'sensual' awareness in and of the body itself. There is an inversely proportional energy relationship between sight and fellings. This claim you can easily verify for yourself by closing your eyes for a few seconds. When you close your eyes the inner sensations of your body rise like a tide, and you suddenly become aware of what is going on in there.   Here comes the next claim. Every time you focus your outgoing eyesight, you use energy from your body-battery. The act of concentrated cognitive seeing is a very energy consuming brain activity. Every time you shut down the act of focussed seeing, you build up life-energy. Hence Meditation in its purest form is that simple as shutting up your eyes by closing them or by staring in a seeing without seeing mode. Even 2 minutes of this practice, will give you more energy. Now imagine what happened to the brain when it began to stare down in the magic smartphone mirror. Imagine the brain like a petri dish full of broccoli sprouts. These sprouts will naturally expand and grow in the direction of the sunlight. The same is the case with your neurons. The neurons specialized in facilitating eyesight will have a grand feast but unfortunately, in occupied brain-territories in fields robbed away from the close-sense neurons.  A process of capacity trade-off takes place in the sense that all the close-range sense-based neurons are getting starved by your lack of attention. In this starvation, the brain compartments, facilitating close-sensual body-awareness, shrinks. The result is a loss of groundedness in the body. This very being in the body is furthermore in opposition to the over dominance of long-range senses in the sense that the procuration of energy for consciousness diminishes. Hence the level of consciousness IQ will drop and open the gateway to dreamy Q-shaman realities.   Imagine now a world of a billion brains with starved neuronal contact to the bodies that host them, all the time staring into the smartphone gateway to their soul-eversion. Consciousness killed by chemicals? Here comes yet another suspect in the thriller named, who killed consciousness. I cannot help exploring this apparent regressive loss of cognition and consciousness as a result of the hundred, for human biology, new and foreign chemicals in our food and surroundings. We do not know the long-term effect of these chemicals, and we do not have much clue about how they interact in us when they all come together in our cells. I envision how millennials have begun their life with 9 months in a chemical bath. Many of these new  chemicals, in and around us, are acting as estrogen-like endocrine disrupting chemicals, even affecting puberty. The semen quality in men has gone radically down, and so has the level of testosterone. Phthalates in plastic are furthermore linked to a decline in cognitive functioning. Seen in this light, genderfluidity is more than a new identity concept. It could also very well be a result of damaging chemical exposure that has left men in a no mans zone between traditional genders. We cannot rule out that even the declining mental health in the form of the underlying profile of paranoia as a common denominator in the contemporary conspiracy and rage movements are a sign of toxic exposure to environmental chemicals.          Seen in the smoke from the above illustration, a future vision of algorithmic death and rebirth takes form: The Titanic consumer-based ego-identity is sinking in the piled-up non-solvable Hegelian contradictions of the, by now, old and over-polluting fossil fuel-based 'sueciety'.         Here in this highly complex endgame of new birth, the reasons for everything become everything. All is interconnected. As pointed out before, the social media's sphere eversion of the ego-interface has put the understanding of who we are under pressure. The extroverted emotional storms following the web-eversion in tandem with chemicals plus all the other mentioned societal reasons and still other, by me not recognized factors seems to kill consciousness, understood as the primordial ability in a relaxed state to aware what is going on in a radius larger than the survival-boundaries of one's own body. The opioid rise of Tiger King Especially in America, there furthermore seems to be an increasing opioid crisis with a rising number of fatal outcomes. (Here, I, out of a life-long personal experience, do not include the family of 'drugs' called psychedelics.) The opioid death rate is, however, only the top of the iceberg. In the Netflix serial Tiger King, one of the sinister causes behind the entertaining madness of hillbillies going berzerk is opioids. Joe Exotic and the people around seem all in some way or the other to be drug abusers. The misusers of the opioid drugs seem, at least in the Netflix serial, to cultivate a unique kind of performative paranoic craziness that mirrors the carnival-like occupation of Capitol Hill. There was no good old school GOP-behavior in the mad invading crowds. I am not saying that the right-wing hippies jumping around in Capitol Hill are drug abusers, but that there seems to be a general opioid abuse even in the bible belt that has culture-morphed larger segments of the Tump believers into potential actors in a coming Tiger King II serial. This is Burning Man hippie-culture in deliverance through midwest redneck culture. What crazy and fascinating performative carnival times we live in! The rabbit-'hollish' implosion of consciousness From a meditator's viewpoint, it is compelling to compare a black hole's ability to suck up light with the various collective echo-chamber rabbit-holes' ability to kill consciousness. In this respect, it does not matter from where in the political or religious spectrum the echo-chamber arises. It is always, as rage increases, connected with a loss in wakefulness. The lower intensity in wakefulness again opens up for daydreaming narratives to identity-define the story-telling human animal.   In this way, almost all contemporary groupings, even the good old media-institutions like CNN, by now, have a gravity wave that sucks up the light that gives us in-sight.   Highly organized societies are always synced with high levels of one-pointed collective consciousness. In this wakefulness, life seems to organize in 'civilizatoric' state-driven order defying the second law of thermodynamics. Seen from the astronaut level, it implies that consciousness in its abstract suchness, defined as a mirror and not as the objects reflected in the mirror, is primordial to sound reason and cognition and ultimately is an anti-entropic 'force' that comes and go like the tide. CONSCIOUSNESS IN THE COWSTABLE A poor life this if, full of care, We have no time to stand and stare. W. H. Davies In India, I met many Masters in the art of doing nothing and therefore being nothing while in activity. One of them was S.N.Bhaharadwaj. The abundant level of signal-chemical neurons firing in this 95-year-old man just by doing nothing was really something. S.N.Bhaharadwaj He said to me: The modern man has made so many accumulations in his house that he has become a slave of that accumulation. In a way, everybody could have said that. It is not an intellectual rocket-science statement. The remarkable thing is that Bhaharadwaj owned this statement. In fact, he held almost nothing apart from every word that came out of his mouth.   Our Western culture is geared to secure comfort to a degree we, as a species, never have encountered before. What happened to the good old Medieval winters spent with no TV or smartphone and our cave-dwelling trance-days spent staring into the fire?   I am again reminded by Bhaharadwaj. He had many, seen from a western viewpoint, crazy friends. One Himalayan hermit had come to visit him for a few months. The hermit's 'hotel' was a cow stable. He was most of the time sitting in the hay among the cows and buffalos with crossed legs and closed eyes. Another of his friends, also in his late 90'ties, had lived 12 years on a churchyard. Up to his pension, he had lived and worked as a train-station master. He was married too, and in this strange country, the wife did not complain when he, 60 years old, left his home for the Himalayas and churchyards around the cremation grounds in Varanasi. After realizing his inner spirit-truth, 20 years later, he went home again. India is still a place of crazy Soul! At least it still was not so long ago. It is a country harboring a Charles Dickens-like rainbow of extreme individualities, all claiming to be nothing.   The room in which we were was dark and unbearable hot, Indian summer June 2000. There was no fan in the room, and when I tried to fan myself with a piece of paper, he mocked me for being a slave of my skin-sensing apparatus. At that time I was, however, free of thoughts like the ones you can read here. I felt like a cloud of consciousness.   After the meeting with the stationmaster, I spontaneously felt like hugging him goodbye.   I embraced him. His presence felt like something in between fire and ice.   He replied: Why does this man embrace this body? My wife says it stinks! What did he actually say to me? Or maybe more correct: What did I make out of it? He said: You are more than this body! Do not attach so much to it. This man was not a slave of his accumulations. And he owned this statement. Therefore it had a great impact.   In India, I met men and women who had deliberately chosen to live outside comfort zones. They had dedicated their life to Spartanian discipline and having nothing, these, mostly super old people, seemed to have everything. Sita from Hoshiarpur - 85 years Shabdanand, 82 and Lahori Pandiji, 100 (All the photos taken in 1995) The 110 year old Bassi Gulam Sant was a famous holy man in the 1930'ties. Since then he dissapeared in the Himalayan wilderness. When he was around 90 he moved to live in a small temple compund in the countryside outside Hoshiarpur. He left his body 14 days after I met him. The Indian Saint Lahiri Mahasaya said: You have to seek God in the summer of life. Only then will he be with you in the winter. There seems to be a late flowering of super consciousness that we are totally unaware of in the West. At least I have never seen such spiritual blue zone people other than in remote and God-forsaken places in India. At the age of 110, Bassi Gulam was at his peak. So growing old and poor in meditation is not that bad. In the West, we glorify youth. I am sure that this is why I have never come across this last geriatric flowering in our civilization. We die, not like a supernova of spirit, but rather fade away as increasingly poor replicas of our young heyday-life. Allow me a slight deviation within the deviation. We begin our life in a reverse accelerated continuous dying. I have a little son, now in the writing moment almost three years old. Where is the six month old baby? Where is my one-year-old little boy? And the two years old? They have passed away at such a terrifying speed. They will never ever come back. They are all gone, and I cry because of this loss. However, I am all the time presented with a gift of a new, even more wild and funny boy to substitute for the loss of the previous one. When we reach adulthood, this continuous transformation, this rebirth slows down, so we do not notice it the same way before we start to grow into old age. Now again, the change accelerates, but this time with us degenerating into weaker and weaker copies of who we once were. The loss is here not substituted by something better, and in this sense,old age is not that beautiful. However, living in off-line India. I was wittnessing that the end of life indeed had a most magnificent gift to offer in amid this physical decay. It was the accelerated flowering of consciousness.   What is the purpose of life? What is consciousness? Such questions cannot be answered by science in itself as it forever lies beyond the event horizon of what can be measured or figured out in mathematical formulas, as some, not surprisingly,  talented mathematical minds claim. In dreamy intuitions, in mystical experiences, in psychedelic glimpses of the machinery beyond the machinery, the observer of the observed, is catched like a dog tail. In such a second I see the smiling face of Bassi Gulam Sant. We are consiouss pre-cambric waves of lower entropy Just by looking at the abundant spiritual life in this joyfully super consciouss entropy-defying but almost decomposed body I realise: We are all ancient.   Our unique attributes evolved over a period of roughly 6 million years. They represent modifications of great ape attributes that are roughly 10 million years old, primate attributes that are roughly 55 million years old, mammalian attributes that are roughly 245 million years old, vertebrate attributes that are roughly 600 million years old, and attributes of nucleated cells that are perhaps 1,500 million years old.    If you think it is unnecessary to go that far back in the tree of life to understand our own attributes, consider the humbling fact that we share with nematodes [roundworms], the same gene that controls appetite. At most, our unique attributes are like an addition onto a vast multiroom mansion. It is sheer hubris to think that we can ignore all but the newest room. David Sloan Wilson, Evolution for Everyone, 2007   The salty songs of the pre-cambric ocean is still heard in the silent pulsing of our cells. We are walking waves, arisen from the primordial water. With us we carry a bag of survival-information from all ages.   Sea-annemona-DNA still takes care of our heartbeat. Our teeth are made of fish scalees. Even our beautiful faces were gifted to us when we were fish. The blob-fish - Psychrolutes marcidus Through countless impersonal incarnations as life, we have been shaped as a genetic Noah's Ark. Our body is in this sense the sum total of reuse of surviving bio-opering systems since the time of pan-spermian stardust.   Spiritual archeology I think even Dawkins and the like will agree with me here: We are living zoological museums.  However, the next claim is still outside the grasp of mainstream science: My claim is that we consciously can revisit ourselves as genetic inheritance in a synthesis of meditation and responsible use of entheogens. I consider this inward journey the noblest of all crusades. In the good old days people like Lama Anagarika Govinda could make that inward journey fueled by meditation alone:   There are people who, by virtue of concentration and other yoga exercises, I am able to bring the subconscious up to the conscious plane, where one can distinguish and judge and thereby benefit from the unlimited treasures from the subconscious memory, among which not only the memory of our previous lives is preserved, but also the past of the family, all pre-human forms of life as well as the memory of the consciousness that makes all life in the universe possible. Lama Anagarika Govinda   Not only dedicated mystics but also poets like Herman Hesse have intuitively digged into this mystery. Here, as a psychic archeologist, Herman Hesse did not only see his inner fish but also the soulfull being of the same:   (We) consist of everything the world consists of, each of us, and just as our body contains the genealogical table of evolution as far back as the fish and even much further, so we bear everything in our soul that once was alive in the soul of men. Hermann Hesse, Demian   However, at present, people like me need a little extra boost from the family of tryptamines to open these lifesaving doors of perception. I have observed countless meditators like myself. After some years of exited soulfull evolution, we fall asleep in our meditation and in our world views. Our meditation has become a habit like brushing teeth while the onset of age slowly deploys our inner spiritual vehicle of gasoline. And without abundant ekstra life-energy to invest, meditation is only good for better sleeping. What a chock to the system first time I took ayahuasca alone and free from the shamanistic set and settings.   Only a few people who dedicate their whole life to this quest as munks, nuns or hermits will be able to penetrate this secret through meditation alone. Even most of these people also dry out after years of practice. You can recognize the lucky ones by the vitality and fiery look as displayed in the pictures of the old Indian people above. I have so far not seen such spiritual blue zone people in the West. Without chemical helpers, it would not have been possible for me to revitalize my energy and youthful ability to think with a liquid intelligence. It would not have been possible to gain insight into the fractal fact that we contain ourselves right back to day one in the same way as a Mandelbrot does. I have, like many others I know in my age-group, done more than 10.000 hours of meditation for sure. It seems I can almost only share this field of experience with the ones that have boosted their meditation with psychedelics when it comes to people in my own age-group.   In this context, I have to say that I do NOT recommend recreational or casual use of psychedelic substances. Without a sound spiritual practice in a healthy body, it is risky to travel to a stargate. A flight certificate for this UFO requires a minimum of 5.000 hours of meditation or a set and setting where you are surrounded by such people.   What I can say from here is that reincarnation for sure is a fact. The misunderstanding concerning reincarnation is to perceive it as a personal drama, where so and so was so and so in a previous life. It is life itself that reincarnates in the form of genetic reuse. We are, however, so much in the illusion of being egos that we all see ourselves as an incarnation of Alexander the Great or Cleopatra.   The scientific mind will agree with me on this view on incarnation, but only a mystic will be able to experience it directly.    The warring states of human biology The from all ages accumulated bio-operating systems have basically difficulties co-existing and co-operating within the human container. The countless different lifeforms within us, each representing a particular genetic circuit's suvival interest fight as feelings and instincs with each other and with sound reason for supremacy. A successfully functioning human body is walking the narrow balanced path of compromise between these bio-algorithms pretty much the same way as political parties in a democracy finds them. Especially in times of crisis a dictator can take absolute power. The inner dictator of today seems to be the amygdala.   The archaic cycles of Hormesis However, one thing these survival-systems along the timeline of evolution have in common. They are all from day one adapted to biphasic hormetic stress. Humans have, as all other bio-mass entities, always strived for survival in stress pendulums. In fact, even worms seem to do better when living in such cycles. Since nematodes still live in us as reused DNA-strings, it would not be farfetched to assume that hormetic stress is essential on all levels of human existence, from cellular to psychological life. As early humanoid hunter-gatherers on the East-African Savannah, our biology got hardwired to a life lived in contrast between periods of inactivity and/or search for food and outburst of intense hunting activities or war. This pendulous pattern repeated itself in our eating habits where prolonged periods of fasting, due to lack of food, were ended by a feast when finally an animal arrived on the campfire.    Broccoli sprouts are super healthy for us. Why? Because the high content of sulforarphane in them acts like a poison that triggers the body's own survival mechanisms. Sauna and winter-bathing also trigger hormesis. Where constant stress seems to kill us, stress as periodical shock-therapy seems to cure us.   Spiritual hormesis Even though I cannot document it, I am sure that certain kinds of sweet spot psychological shocks are essential for our mental health as well. Why is our time a time of rage and hateful cancellation? Why are the doomers so traumatized? They are traumatized by the lack of ancient psychological stress-pendulums, and hence they get a reaction similar to people who develop allergies in too clean surroundings. Kids with asthma can often benefit from a holiday in the countryside in less clean surroundings and surrounded by animals. I got somehow cured of my Princess and the Pee-allergic upsetness by living in India. However, the hormetic shock of entheogens slapped my brain and body into a state of alertness I had forgotten to exist many years back. Suddenly I was gifted the experience of seeing the world as a child again and this ability or rather gift, seemed to be able to last and be prolonged by rememberance in daily meditation.   THE DISCOVERY OF THE SNAKE OF DEATH One of the most amazing experiences on a pschedelic journey is the ability to consciously navigate in wast dimensions without thoughts and language. It is like being an animal and a God at the same time, bypassing the human part of existence, which is mainly dominated by a thinking mind. These exalted states of being have, in the afterglow of the experience, made my mind realize at what terrible price it has come into existence. We sold paradice in a trade off for survival.   The strive for survival-security took an entirely new level with the evolutionary arrival of thinking mind. We now started to envision future plans about how to fill the stomach.   However, with the wast gift of imagining an ideal future full of food and thinking about strategies how to get there, we stumbled upon a snake in this new paradise:   We realized that we were mortals and that one day we had to die.   Before the gift of imagination, we only had to cope with the fear of the sable-tooth tiger at the moment it attacked us. Now we had to encounter two tigers; the one from outside and the imaginary one from the inside. Today we are hardwired to constantly be on guard preparing for attacks from an inner tiger that is no more there.   The arrival of thoughts in which our brains could envision a future was in this way, a Sophoclesian blessing. The brains that were able to imagine coming scenarios of threats lived longer than the happy-go-lucky brains. The worry-thinking what-if?-brains won the evolutionary race. Today the same brain that saved us on the savannah is killing us with worries.   As an accumulated junkyard of genetic reuse, human life is always doomed to face new survival-scenarios with outdated biological hardware.     As a consequence of the discovery of death, religions arose as shared fields of imagination to encounter this new inner enemy's arrival. Religions are a result of the ability to think and language up worlds.   Our ideas about heaven and hell envisioned an ideal life on earth and survival-threatening scenarios. This religious need for dreaming up ideal death-encountering paradisical lives had a profound impact on our reality. The dream of heaven gave, as the perfect hunter-gatherer prey-prize, direction and drive to our civilizational creations. While dreaming up the ideal after-death scenario, we, in fact, began to create it on earth. Like an Escher drawing, religions and civilizations began to draw each others blueprint. Civilization became a simulation of paradise as paradise for the Arabs became a simulation of an abundant oasis and drinking and eating party-place for Vikings in Scandinavia.   The newly arrived fear, not of an immanent death, but of the brain-simulated one, furthermore gave civilization a possibility of controlling its inhabitants.    Our efforts to create before-death security and abundance became formed with the subconscious power of a religious crusade. (In this sense, the blind ever-ongoing strive for material abundance and security has become the demonic returned religion of atheists living in a secular society. Their unconsciously fear-based strive towards progressing wealth is not directed towards a Kingdom of the afterlife but is, in fact, a reverse-camouflaged unconscious religious strive for a Kingdom of before-death. You can always recognize people belonging to this, for themselves not recognized religiousness, by their Dawkins-like crusade against religious people. They have themselves become religious in their anti-religious effort. The belief that rationality can explain everything is - a belief. I must confess that I too have that belief as an operating system, but in contrast to Dawkins, I know, it is a belief.)   Duality, non-duality and civilization With the industrial revolution's fossil-fueled economy, we made a gigantic step in the direction towards a materialistic heaven. It became possible for a larger number of people to live in circumstances, when compared to before, indeed were paradisical. However, in these new suspension zones of bliss, the ancient cycles of hormesis became nullified in a constant stream of stimulation and nourishment. We began to live in same-temperature rooms. We began to forget how it feels to be hungry for days. Our lives became industrialized in the form of very small and even cycles of daily repetitions in the form of wake-up, breakfast, work, lunch, work, home, dinner, TV, and sleep. In this self-created paradise, perfected by a larger cycle of weekend-partying, we, with the words of Kierkegaard's Constantin Continous, repeat pleasure continuously and eternalize the pleasure in the temporal.       The civilizing Process As Norbert Elias has pointed out in The Civilizing Process, the transition from the medieval to the enlightenment period implied emotional self-control.     The soul is here, if one may express oneself thus without comparison, much more prepared and accustomed to leap from one extreme to the other with always the same intensity, and often even small impressions are uncontrollable associations, enough to trigger the fear and the turnaround. When the structure of human relations changes, when monopoly organizations are formed for corporal violence and instead of the persistent feuds and wars the more stable urgency situations due to peaceful, money- or prestige-acquired functions keep the individual in tight reins, the affective expressions slowly strive towards a line in the middle.      In the process of civilization, also long before the medieval period, we gradually became more even-tempered beings living in even-tempered rooms.       It is interesting to observe Buddha's teaching in this light. Buddha's middle-path-teaching was, in fact, one of the first attempts to civilize people living on and off the silk routes from the North-Indian new urban centers to China and towards Syria. The middle path was, in reality, functioning as a cultural self-control-system for the new city-and-trade-dwelling middle class. We must here not forget that more than 65% of the world's population lived in that area along the silk routes at that time.     Civilization and the birth of non-dual consciousness The civilization of humankind took a great leap forward with the establishment of the silk-routes. These new routes tended to follow the war-paths laid by Alexander the Great. Here the new mega-cities got established by Alexander and his successors. In the Eastern part of his kingdom, Seleukos Nicator founded a lot of new urban Hellenistic polis-centers connected like pearls on a string from India to the Middle East. It was at the eastern end of that area, under the famous emperor Ashoka the Great, the first great social changes of self-control happened. In the period of peace following Ashoka's great war to unify India, the trade routes expanded to such an extent that it became impossible to guard them against attacks through policing power. Ashoka realized that control over the mind is much more efficient than control over the body when it comes down to the securing of peace in inter-dependent trading mega-cities. Hence Buddhism became suitable as a state religion. Through Ashoka-pillar edicts, university centers of learning, and state-supported monasteries, the practical oriented moral teachings of the Ashoka-Buddhism exercised friendly nudging collective caravanic and urban self-control. The Ashoka-Buddhistic religion was, with its logic and down-to-earth approach, most probably a result of a synthesis of Seleucid-Greek culture and Indian spirituality. That is, however, in spite of being a tempting story to tell here, leading us too much astray from the astronaut journey I want to point out here.    Later the Ashokan Buddhism was followed by a west-end modification called Christianity. Christianity became the dominant western self-control ideology in the Western part of the trade nets with the Roman Empire's failing ability to secure peace with military might.     Buddha was, of course, not aiming at building big civilizations. However, the Buddha's realizations and teachings for sure helped in the development of the Ashokan mega-civilization. Wealth based on global trade and not localized farming is always met with the  challenge of synchronizing different cultures living far away from each other. Without a common denominator, trade is not possible. With the rise of the new globally connected urban megacentres on the Gangetic plain, Buddhism evolved as an understanding of reality that could unite people of different casts, creeds, and cultures in both urban and 'caravanic' self-control. Here the feudal Brahmanistic cast fragmentation would not be able to make ends meet. Hence Buddhism evolved into the religion of traders and urban people. Without self-control, the long-distance silk routes would collapse into banditry, and without the same, people of different colors and creeds would not be able to co-exist in big cities.  Instead of securing the trading routes and cities with military power, he built stupas and monasteries, not in faraway places but as pearls along the silk routes. In fact, the Ashokan monasteries were factories of self-control. Hence every person, moving along the paths of trade, would constantly be reminded of the all-watching eye of the Buddha and at the same time be able to observe role-models in the form of monks living a content life without greed and material possessions. With the mudras, the hand-gestures of the Buddha, a lingua franca, was established, so people with different languages and cultures living far away from each other could unite in the sharing of the narratives triggered by the different gestures.    Seen from the astronaut level, both the evolution and the concept of non-dual unity consciousness could not come into existence without high tide urban development and increasing wealth through long-distance trade. Both the shamanistic hunter-gatherer and the later agricultural-based cultures are fundamentally based on and in a dual consciousness and the split understanding of reality made by of the same. A non-dual consciousness requires crisscrossing neurons combining diffent part of the brain in pretty much the same way as silk routes can be seen as cultural neurons.   Here I cannot help commenting on the beautiful irony in the western (mis)use or rather reconstruction of 'the great shamans of the world' telling us that we are all one. This non-dual concept was superimposed upon the shamans by the hippies since the 60'ties. With the power of affluence, young western people, in their search for an original and pure nature world, a la Rousseau, changed and shaped the shamanistic world to fit their own desires and dreams of love and unity.   Before that time, the shaman spirit world was a reflection of the not so romantic tribalized world they lived in, and this especially so in the last hundreds of years of decline for hunter-gatherer cultures. The world of indigenous people was and is basically a dangerous dual world in which sickness and attacks from both this world and the worlds beyond was perceived as a result of the activity from predatoric spirits and entities. It was the shaman's role to stand with one leg in each world and from that position to be a healer, a pathfinder, and a guide for his tribe.   In these old times, ayahuasca was not used for collective ceremonies of love but was used to pep up warriors before they went to war against another tribe. In case a shaman as a curandero chose to use psychedelics for the healing of people, he did take the brew himself, and then from the altered state of consciousness, he healed people with his icaro. The young and restless hungry ghosts from the West soon changed that practice so that they too participated in the drinking of ayahuasca.   However, I do not at all see this cultural hippie-construction as a bad thing, as a fall from something original and pure. The only funny thing here is the belief that this construction was an original shamanistic idea just waiting to be rediscovered. There has never been anything pure and original apart from in the dreams in man longing for secure survival constancy. Everything in history is and was a permanent fleeting construction process that accelerates where cultures clash or meet. The notion of non-duality and love was a gift to the bitches brew brought to the table of negotiation by the hippies. This gift created a huge evolutionary step forward in the hybridization with the psychedelic culture of the shamans. When the hippies took LSD with Timothy Leary in the 60'ties, they were basically experiencing love and unity. When Montezuma II took psychedelic mushrooms, it was stewed with human flesh. What we are is what we get is the psychedelic name of the game.   There is here an interesting deviation to observe in the ayahuasca-drinking communities of Santo Daime. They drink ceremonial ayahuasca in huge gatherings, and they are basically confining to a much more non-dual concept of the Holy Queen Mother of the Forrest. This religion has hybridized the Catholic Mother Mary with the indigenous belief in the Queen of the Forrest. My guess is that the construction of Santo Daime can be traced back to old almost forgotten, but not extinguished. larger state-build, Inca rituals.    Let us sum the story from Ashoka to Montezuma up. The non-dual statement, all is one, is a result of imperial and commercial unification activity. When larger and larger areas and populations come together in sync, the tribalized dual splitting of reality has to give way for the non-dual, all is one, way of reality.    What is the shaman afraid of? Why does he have to blow tobacco on the people he helps in order to ward off evil spirits? He is, in fact, afraid of himself in the form of conflicting operating systems in his own brain which again are created as a response to a tribal world full of dangers. What I want to convey here is that our brains, even on the organic hardware level, reflect the society we live in. A tribalized shamanic brain is compartmentalized in the exact same way as the surroundings he lives in. A globalized urban brain has in the civilizational process synced up the before tribalized parts of his own brain in a non-dual unification.    The biological brain constructs society in its own image. Society form the neurons in the biological brains that upholds it. That is why I rarely met predatory entities when taking ayahuasca. My brain is radically diffent from that of the shamans.    In this way, the rise of non-dual consciousness understood abstract as the lux of awareness in itself, is interlinked with civilizational Hegelian progress as such. High levels of consciousness and 'urbanic' trade-civilization construct each other as an Escher staircase, and they rise with the ability of collective self-control. Only an organic, highly synced, non-dual brain is able to light up consciousness and hence lift us out of the dreamy states of our shamanistic past. The shamans did a good job, but their time has been long gone. Even the times of the Buddha are by now over. What we need now is to facilitate the super-consciousness, only possible at this late stage of civilization. Like Socrates was born in the endgame of the Hellenistic civilization, we, at this unique point, have the ability, not through following even the best Buddhistic religion, but by a kind of bio-hacking of our brain to light it up like a Christmas tree.  One could ask what use there could possibly be from such a project, but remember here that the thoughts and art of the Greek world survived ancient Greece. I foresee a future with a new religious quest in which the Soul will bio-hack itself through the needle eye of the body. The birth of super-civilization and the seed possibility to rise to non-dual consciousness is indeed a great 'Sophoclesian' blessing. Already, here in the first stage it has lead us to suffer the unbearable lightness of being.   Civilization created the foundation of non-dual superconsciousness, where everybody was able to aware each other within an extended and fundamental circle of unity. At the same time it cursed us with the nullification of our ancient cycles of hormesis.     THE CURSE OF FULFILMENT What do I want to say with all this? I want to point out that the contemporary psychological madness is a result, not only of a digitalized world, but also an endgame result of the civilizing process as such. There will always come a point where an overdue civilization makes its inhabitants go crazy. As Lacan rightly has pointed out, the worst thing that can happen to us is that our wishes actually get fulfilled. He observes that on a psychological level and diagnoses it as a kind of masochism. Like the Slovenian philosopher Zizek in his ever dribbling but never goal-scoring thinking process, we love to be stuck midway. We circle around our objects of desire without ever reaching them.  This explains why many ancient Romans, in the midst of their orgies, committed suicide out of boredom.      I tend to look at this weird but basically true phenomenon with the eyes of a Darwin. The masochistic dance around the object of desire was shaped in our eternal dance with prey as hunters. Hence our desires are not meant to be fulfilled but to be in a dynamic dialectical opposition to fundamentally hostile surroundings, always having the upper hand. Deep down, we do not want or cannot bear them to be fulfilled because they were never genetically engineered to be that. We were never meant to win over nature. We are programmed for eternal hunt. That is what makes our neurons happy.    We are, however, now in a situation where, at least, the middle class won the battle for constant stimuli and security. It has happened before. Suicide out of boredom was a common phenomenon among the ever orgy-party-going ancient Roman elite. However, this is first time in world history we can observe this phenomenon of reaching the object of desire for the middle-class and even, at least in the West, the masses in the bottom of the pyramid.   In the Indian Puranas, it is stated that if the world either gets total evil or total good, it will dissappear. Hence it is the time for a Zen realization: To win is to lose.    In the way, we, like upstream salmons always die, when we reach our goal. With poetical inspiration from Freud, we now live in a culture where men got away with killing their fathers. However, the fossil-fueled industrial male-culture has won to such a degree that there is no need for men any longer, and hence women are taking over. This is a true victory of Thanatos.   We could continue this line of thought into sci-fi. White hegemonial men have, like gods, created a new artificial intelligence in their own image. AI is, in this sense, a mirror of the white man's stiff and narrow-bandwidth problem-solving intelligence, an intelligence that is instrumental more than emotional. When GPT-3 becomes 4,5,6, and so on, the first expendable kind of intelligence will be exactly the intelligence that created AI. Hence AI will kill its own expendable father. In fact, this is what is already happening. Just look at Susanne Bier's new Netflix serial, The Undoing, where the good old archetypical father-male is undone as a monster. That is why Elon Musk is so afraid of AI. He knows that he is the first in line for the coming genocide. He was founded the creation of GPT-3, and sooner or later it will go for the Freudian father-kill. What is then left for AI to team up and play with? The soft emotional and spiritual intelligence in women, black people, and all the happy-go-lucky, spiritual, artistic, and compassionate brains with no German or Calvinian work-ethics.   The wish-fulfilling tree Here I must not forget to be grateful for this secular strive. It brought a post-war boomer-wave of rising abundance for me to catch on my surfboard. Behind that western wave of wealth, we left an ocean full of micro-plastic for the doomers to surf. It was white boomers like me who, to no small extent, realized that middle-class utopian impossibility and the coming sci-fi curse as price to pay for overextended blessings. Now the doomers are angry with us, because they are not able to continue our life of unbearable pleasure. The wish-fulfilling nightmare became a reality for well off boomer hippies like me in the late 60ties. However, there, of course, still were limits. We could not all become presidents, go to the Moon, or own a luxury yacht. This problem was solved by a hippie-brother of mine. His name was Steve Jobs. He, and other boomers, created a kind of digital exisisting-non-existing virtual reality, a simulacra-world that could take the search for happiness to a new level where the real world could not compete. The gateway entrance to this virtual world was made out of smartphone sight and sound. Meditation is mental calorie restriction Many, mostly young people, got depressed by the Covid 19 lock-down. They felt robbed of their outgoing social life. Many of my meditating friends and I felt and feel quite the opposite. We felt even happier than before. Writing this, I can see how arrogant it sounds, but it is the truth as far as I can see it and I hate faked humility. The greatest gift from Meditation is to bring you into a state where nothing is going on. In this sense, Meditation is just bringing a more than ever needed cave dweller brain reset. Meditation, not understood in any fancy ways, but just as simple as closing the eyes, is more needed than ever in the same way that more and more smart people try consciously to implement cyckles of hormesis thorugh fasting, sauna, witherbath and so on. Meditation is in thus sense spiritual intermittant fasting. The covid lock-down was a superimposed huge collective retreat experiment. However, we did not go inwards to repair our over fed signal chemical circuits. We filled the empty gaps with more virtual smart-phone dopamine junk food stimulation.   New Age Puffball Narcissism As mentioned in the long foreword, many of my fellow New Age travelers, to my surprise, got infected by fearful paranoia conspiracy ideations. Jake Angeli's behavior and magical understanding of reality made it clear why the New Age movement had to end its life on Capitol Hill. In fact, the by now widespread open-source-like use of new agy symbolic magical thinking seems to have become mainstream. In this way, New Age died like an old puffball mushroom releasing its spores. This particular mushroom is very tasty when it is fresh but is uneatable when releasing its spores.     In this sense, I reluctantly realize that the New Age movements' glorification of listening to my own feelings only by now has become a destructive mainstream mental program in the rage movements. An example of this egocentric behavior can be observed in the anti-covid conspiracy movements in the following argument. The authorities are restricting my freedom to do what I want. I would reply: Yes, you are restricted in your right to infect other people.     Recent 'scientific' research has shown a relationship between New 'Ageism' and narcissism. My first thought here was that there might also be a connection between the addiction towards weird conspiracy-thinking and narcissism.     It is, however, problematic to use the word narcissism as a scientific term, since the word has become loaded with a condescending bias through the popularly use. I use the word myself but am aware of its potential use as an insult. Now imagine a scientific paper being published with the same wording, concluding that Woke, women, transgender, or black people are narcissists. There would be an outroar of rage second to none where the scientists for sure would be canceled and have their careers destroyed. I am here not trying to argue that the mentioned groups are narcissistic, and also not that new age people are not narcissistic. I see two things at stake here. Firstly, that it is only possible to use certain words in connection with groups without rage potential and power. Secondly, the cancellation trend also seems to have reached some scientific communities. To use words like narcisssism with conclusive headlines like new agers are having a feeling of superiority works as a cancellation of an old weak group without the power-potential of rage. What we have here is, in fact, a new breed of cancellation science. Another irony is that the ones who seem most eager to discuss the new diagnosis of narcissism is the New agers themselves. They are not raging, but in their old self-help spirit, they accept the verdict in a kind of dialogue where they, like me, try to distance themselves from the diagnosis with a line like this: I am not a narcissist - but he other New Agers are. In this way, an old boomer-self help religion is rapidly dying, however, a death that happened in sync with the acomplished mission of reincarnating the me and my feelings above all-interface into the mainstream 'wisdom' of crowds.    Freedom of 'me' or freedom from 'me' There is a hair-fine balance between the active longing for the freedom of 'me' and the freedom from 'me'. Without freedom from me, the freedom of me will turn into the egoic and narcissistic my space-clash we observe today. And without a frequent ctrl+shift+delete-dying from the 'me' you want to free, the egoic identity is bound for an endgame of narcissistic warfare. The freedom from me is the astronaut project of intensified consciousness. The New Age movement is no longer, as before, holding the space for abstract wakefulness, and in this collapse, their use of symbolic language degenerated from poetry to conspiracy and egoism.   Without consciousness, the abstract ability to aware everything around you as a whole process and yourself as a tiny part is not possible. Without consciousness, all the philosophy that supports meditation in the form of Buddhism, Hinduism, Sufism, and Christian mysticism all too easily can turn into egoic glorification. Hence the list of grandiose gurus is endless. The first step is to see that they tend to be megalomaniacs. The next step is to ask yourself why you got attracted to them and by now I in that question include a person like Trump. By now, the narcissistic segment within the spiritual communities has found a dopamine-substitute for the grandiose guru-archetype. It is to join an ecstatic community of hardcore conspiracy believers. The relation between consciousness and egoic identity Here comes a claim that best can be verified by personal experience, since the notion of egoic identity is a hard nut to crack for science, in the same way that you cannot get a verified positivistic hold of the notion of 'redness'.   The greater the unfoldment of abstract super-wakefulness becomes, the less need there is for the construct of egoic identity. On the other hand, the greater the loss of consciousness, the more dreamlike and intensified production of egoic dream-states becomes. In low levels of wakefulness, it is very well possible to imagine that I am a dog, a cat, or a genderfluid person with the need of being a Pokemon Pikachu on Wednesdays.   When high pitch emotions like fear and anger become the driving force, we fall asleep even while being awake. The madness of crowds is always connected to a lowering of the level of consciousness´, and in this sense, wakefulness is the opposite of 'wokefulness'. I am reminded of the Jehovas Witnesses standing every weekend with their magazine eager to preach. The magazine is called: Wake Up! They want to wake people up but seen from the Consciousness Quotient Inventory (CQ-i), they, in my, hopefully wakeful, and not self-deluded eyes, score lower points than the people around them they try to convert. The same is the case from Woke to anti-waxers. They are sleep-woking Pokemon-like identity-dramas in dream states full of polarized amygdala driven nightmares.     In intense wakeful states of introspection, we have the possibility to discover, that in fact, there is not really anybody in there we could call 'I'. 'I' could be woke or one of Terrence Mc Kenna's previously mentioned machine elves. It is all constructions of 'I'-dentifications within the more or less controlled hallucinations within the brain.   To sum it all up:   In intensified consciousnes, the loss of egoic identity is equivalent to love.   This love is not only reserved for one's own body but for everything that is 'awared' in the expanded circle of awareness.   In low levels of consciousness the loss of a solid identity is followed by fear. This fear is encountered by a reinforcement of inner solidity. Low conscious reinforced identity-constructions are, however, due to their dreamy nature, fragile. They need safe spaces at any cost. It is like entering the dual spirit world of the shamans, where you always are in potential danger of being attacked by predatoric entities. Hence it is much easier to perceive 'others' as enemies.   In fact, the solid identity-construction, handed down by cultural tradition, as we had them up to their culmination in the 60'ties before the youth-revolutions, only can exist in a sweet Goldilocks spot where you are not too awake and not too unconscious.   We are now in an insane global situation where millions of people in the West have lost a substantial part of their illuminance and hence are navigating in various kinds of Tiger-Joe modes.  As an antidote to this loss, I will at any time bet all I have on the above mentioned Olympic meditator monk that gets his gamma-wave spikes by using a Tibetan technique to send out compassion to all living beings as he imagines them in his meditative inner space. If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion. Dalai Lama THE CULTURAL OPERATING SYSTEM OF THE EGOIC CONSUMER IDENTITY Individuality, basically understood as the survival-story we tell about ourselves, can, as previously mentioned, be viewed as a cultural operating system. It gives meaning to observe it as an interface between the individual and the society it lives in that changes with time and survival demands. The quantitative productivity of a society and the qualitative cultivation of egoic identity is interlinked. In a historical astronaut-view, it means that our Western fossil-fuel-based economy had the necessary surplus productivity to afford and install a separate 'I/Me-interface' in everyone.   In antiquity, unique individuality was a luxury item reserved for Kings and the like. With the industrial revolution in the second half of the 19. Century a rising number of upper-class people could now afford to identify with the super-creative and dynamic but also drama-queenish music of a Beethoven. Slowly, the egocentric but also unique Individuality was on its way to the masses in the same way as Ford-cars were mass-produced in the 1930'ties. The amplified sense and self-awareness of an independent 'I' reached its peak with the Western youth-revolution in the 60'ties. This young rebellious, now widespread middle-class 'I' preferred to listen to its own felt 'Me' rather than to the old school authoritarian voices. 'I' was a perfect example of such a newly groomed rebellious middle-class ego. I refused to cut my hair and wear the conventional suit and tie my father without success tried to force me to wear. I got John Lennon-spectacles and an electric guitar. Jimi Hendrix became my God and this new god and a place secured in a rockband made my way from in womens eyes a ridiculous nobody to an alphamale.   The screaming and distorted Jimi Hendrix guitar solo is a perfect metaphor for the Ikarus flight of the glorious ego. It was unthinkable until it did happen. However, this explosive blooming of rebellious freedom was meant to deflorate almost at once. Jimi's guitar was going up in flames, and he himself died young.    After a short, chaotic period, the strive for egoic divination got derailed and subsumated by another Jinn that had been released out of the same bottle. This ghost was orchestrating the post-war rise of mass materialism. Here Rock and Roll did not burn out but rather faded away in the dopamine rush of consumerism while at the same time the burning wild guitar of Jimi Hendrix became a castrated and mass-produced part of the curriculum of music teachers. In this way my rebellion was subdued, not to the point of extinction but trasformed into a valuable asset in the education machinery of society. I became subdued as a teacher.     The above mentioned development made it possible for the middle class 'I' to become a 'wild' and 'free' consumer of abundance comparable to the life of royalty in previous centuries. However, the Jinn of desire also caught the 'I' in world-wide-webs of never-ending (pur)chase of 'fata morganic' liberation-fetishes in the form of identity shaping luxury items like Gucci bags and the like. Consumer-capitalism succeded in masking itself as freedom. VIRAL ACCELERATION AND SPEED MORPHING IDENTITIES Social rage and paranoia-movements out of touch with reality are as old as human history. However, with the consumer-driven algorithms of web-communication, they have evolved into something never seen before. In the days before Steve Jobs, humans found their identity in an exchange with the real as understood by Baudrillard. However, with the social media sphere eversion reality has become the hyperreality of signs in the world of virtual simulacra. Our inherited regressive tendency to think symbolic is way more compatible with the hyperreality of social media signs than with the 'real' reality set by Newton's laws. Our real reality is in the process of getting swallowed by black holes of unreality with gravitation fields stronger than the one that made the famous apple falling on Newton's head. In other words in a reversible reality, Steve Jobs caught the apple before it could land on the head of reason. The reign of the avatars This new hyperreal dimension of signs is inhabited with ourselves as avatars. People with prosthetic limbs take subjective ownership of their substitutes in the sense that they feel them as as a natural part of their own body. In the same way our avatars takes ownership of us in cyberspace. Now the big question is: Who am I? My avatar?   Collective Avatarism The avataric identity distortion is furthermore turbo-charged in the process where collectives form a symbiotic entanglement with the post-factual social media's simulacra-ecosystems of clickbait driven fake news. In this symbiosis, social media is both speed-morphing and intensifying the subcultures it facilitates. Like a cytokine storm, a video created with a smartphone can start a avataric identty-driven collective anger anywhere in no time. Movements based on the lowest denominator of rage can mobilize from small seed impulses from any location on the location-less net and go viral within minutes. A site like BlackmattersUs is a Russian troll site from St Petersburg, but it works as well in mobilizing racial anger as if it was made by real-life black people from Atlanta.      Identity-morphing Story-telling has always been the foundation of identity. Hence the distrust in institutional grander narratives had far greater consequences than just changes in societal political ideology. When we deconstruct the world around us, we, in fact, deconstruct ourselves. Identity is basically formed as a chiasm where we interface the relation between 'I' and 'me' and at the same time, through verbal and body-language resonance, find our place in a tribe of like-minded souls.       The process of identity-making, both individual and collective, is by now speed morphing in virtual petri-dishes, with such reality shaping force, that they by now have broken the identity-creating 'I'-interface monopoly of society understood as tradition and history. Identity itself has become an atomized Lyotardian story for each individual to create via the smartphone mirror. However, with the arrival of social media created commercial algorithms bringing us together in echo rooms with same-feathered birds, each of the black-holed web-centripetal power-whirlpools gain momenta as makers of collective hyper-reality with lesser or even no allegiance to the real real. Mind-virus that would not survive in the harsh circumstances of real reality can live and multiply in the web-simulacra. From here, they can gain momentum and, at any time, explode with the viral power of many into the real reality, understood as the fading life left outside our digital existence. In this sense, social media has become a real dream world. At the same time, the by social media morphed cultures begin to hybridize with each other. Like unpredictable and often explosive interactions between unfamiliar drugs taken together, these hybridizations create unpredictable offspring. In this digital melting pot, 'useful' social-psychological behavior patterns are shared in a kind of open source.         However, as mentioned before, the seeds for the current disruptive fluidity were sown long before the days of the computer. One of the major societal changes came long before the net. In my youth, creativity and the freedom to question the concepts that were handed down by institutions was released like a Zen-goose out of the bottle. It was with the words of Sophocles a wast and important curse. Without this freedom of thinking, we would not have been able to reach our current technological level. However, there was also an inbuilt destruction in the freedom from-authoritarian truth-download. Slowly distrust began to erode social institutions on all levels until a point where truth became a power-game released from argument and validation.    In fact, it all began in my youth. People just a few years older than me looked with rage and contempt at my sudden long grown hair, John Lennon spectacles, and loud electric guitar. My parents looked in disbelief at the change, but I loved it. From being a nobody that no girl even bothered to look at, I was suddenly a somebody worshipped by the same girls. At the same time, mind-altering drugs like hash knocked on new signal-chemical doors of perception within the mind that somehow by their very existence, were giving us the shamanistic feeling of spirit worlds co-existing with the real real. I remember one day, after a heavy hash party, I was looking at the lawn at my home. It was moving up and down like waves, and so was my feeling of being me. Everything had become fluid.       The Beatles were in the psychedelic revolution in the 60'ties among the first to create identity-alluring dreamworlds. The Rolling Stones were always the Roling Stones with stone-hard identities. The Beatles, on the other side, experimented with their psychedelic experiences. One of their first attempts to transform these experiences into art showed an interesting loop where they themselves became a kind of fluid art by the bi-locating of their known personalities into a hyper-world of submarinian avatars. After the initial optimistic Sturm und Drang-days of the Beatles, David Bowie began to 'cameleon-design' his own identity, including his gender identity in more blue colors. The restles expressions of ever changing identity-experiments began to reveal the dark sides of the gained new freedom. David Bowie - Aladdin Sane (1973) What in the times of Bowie were artistic top-down projects have today evolved more into grass-root happenings. As the case with Woke and similar phenomenons, today's movements are often surprisingly free from leadership. A new kind of organic collective intelligence seems to take over. Wikipedia is one example out of many of how new digital life forms, in many cases, do not need the notion of heroes to evolve.   Everything seems by now to be possible when it comes to the creation of identity. Here is an example of a woman who has created her own cat-identity:   - In the loss of culturally handed down identity-archetypes, we could also, as shown in the video below, be a dog in a collective choir of dogs. Here is a picture from a dog-identity-convention in Seattle: I did not see it coming. However, in these disruptive times, I find even a conservative like Ben Shapiro is speaking humorous sense:   However, where Shapiro seems to believe in a solid original egoic identity. I tend to see the very phenomenon of identity as a necessary societal illusion. We give each other roles in order to survive as a society. The real in identity is the ability to interface humans successfully. Shapiro's egoic identity as such is not more real than the identities in the dogs and cats above or genderfluid people. Darwin only likes survival-fit illusion-interfaces. Vulnerable identity-angels in the fight for my space on the summit of the needle tip Our digital interconnectedness makes us both spaceless and timeless. As we saw in the chapter, The Sphere Eversion of the Ego, social media cramps us together as emotional inside-out angels-avatars on the tip of the needle with no possibility of securing a my space for all. With the previously by time-history and geography distanced viewpoints all present at once, we have to cancel each other's space in the fight for a digital lebensraum. In the beginning, the fight for a safe space was a project created by minorities in universities so they could protect themselves from imagined hegemonial aggressions and suppressive power-language. From there, it evolved into a general universitarian cancellation-trend directed towards all academics with opposing viewpoints. Even professor Steven Pinker was targeted in this Orwellian wave. However, by now, it seems that the identity-political focus on being emotionally protected from other viewpoints in safe spaces has become a general trend in the West. Every rabbit-hole-movement of turbo-charged mono-ideology now wants to protect itself through the non-disturbance of other viewpoints. The protests from the staff at the publisher, Penguin, against the release of Jordan Peterson's new book is an example of this safe space-ideology expansion. Some members of the staff even got so emotionally involved in this protest that they cried! In this way, the cancel culture has made the Western world a general confrontation-zone of narcissistic space-holders that cannot any longer live under the same digital roof.         This lack of lebensraum is constantly triggering our age-old mammal amygdala into the red zone. The amygdala is like the internet operating without space and time. It only knows to fight or flee in the all to close here and now, in opposition to the hippocampus that at least can place events at a distance along a time-line. For the amygdala, social media is not happening outside but inside of us. This web-eversed amygdalian overdrive makes it mandatory to cancel others and their viewpoints as an act of self-protection against intimidation. We have become like the wicked queen in the fairy tale, Snow White, asking the magic mirror for the truth, but not wanting it and then trying to cancel it. POLITICAL CONSPIRACY FROM LEFT TO RIGHT   LEFT WING PARANOIA: WOKE, POSTMODERNISM AND CRITICAL THEORY Academia, especially the humanities have in the USA to a large extent become a breeding grounds of social phenomenons related to the mindset of conspiracy. A well-functioning academia is the very foundation of well-functioning institutions, which again is the foundation of a well-functioning society.   Universities have, by now, to a large extent, lost their patent of knowledge. This has transformed the humanities into dystrophic breeding centers for rage and dialogue-cancellation. We are living in an age of decentralized information. Universities and their libraries are not any more temples containing souvereign wisdom. Information can be gathered anywhere and anytime, even with a smartphone. One can follow lectures on Youtube with the most competent people within their field and not only as before by attaining classes with mediocre scientists and academics who anyhow quote the people you can follow directly on various academic sites. For that reason, alone, many academic disciplines are by now disqualifying themselves. As information became scattered into omnipresence, rage became focused and filled in the vacuum on these, once  respectable centers of knowledge.      This particular devolution is, however, not the only reason behind the decay of universities. American academic institutions, especially within the theoretical humanities, have increasingly played a leading role in their own de(con)struction as science-based institutions. It, in fact, began with the Marxist left-wing occupations of universities all over Europe in the late 60'ties and 70'ties. Later French philosophy morphed the orthodox Marxist focus from the classical concept of an exploited working class to encompas a whole rainbow of supression stories. Hence the contemporary theoretical left-wing movements are associated with the philosophy of postmodernism. In a way, the term postmodernism in itself has revealed that we have reached the point of the algorithmic curve, from where downfall is inevitable. The ability to coin strong and truthful new terminology already died with the term modernism. What can come after modernism? Postmodernism. After postmodernism, we can only add post-postmodernism and so on.        The woke of the universities in the USA today claim theoretical legitimacy via the postmodern French ideas of deconstruction and the German Frankfurt school's critical theory. In the USA, the theoretical humanities have since the notorious Evergreen incident 2017 with surprising speed become dystopic heavens for political correctness with preordained conclusions overwriting evidence and free dialogue. Let us have a closer look at the roots of this wild groving new breeds of weeds.       French Postmodernism In La Condition Postmoderne from 1979, the French postmodern philosopher, Jean-François Lyotard, argued that the time of the Grand Narratives, Christianity, Nationalism, and Marxism was over. The doubt in the Enlightenment idea and the Hegelian belief in dialectic progress in history pawed, according to him, a path for a myriad of smaller, often competing narratives to fill the vacuum. Where Lyotard basically described this process in neutral terms, postmodernists such as Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Gilles Deleuze went further and gave academic ammunition to the critic deconstruction of institutionalized grander truths. Foucault argued that there were no such things as objective 'facts'. 'Facts' were merely power-language constructed by the elite and their institutions.        In the speculative smoke of this French philosophy, I see one serious flaw, and that is the academic ability to use language exactly as the power-game they identify in their imagined enemies.          The Frankfurt School        The French observations of language as embedded with power merged with the older German Frankfurt School's Critical Theory, which had made attempts to add a moral stance to Marx's more strictly scientific approach. The Franfurter school basically fostered the idea that common people were unconsciously alienated from themselves, the production apparatus and the society in general. They did in the capitalistic system itself see the ability to destroy the preconditions of critical, revolutionary thinking. Hence it was the task of academics to expose the hegemonial systems infiltration of the consciousness in order to activate the revolutionary potential of the masses.        The serious flaw in the Frankfurt school of thought is more obvious. I would call it academic arrogance. How can you be in a horizontal dialogue with a person that you upfront in your school of thought has deemed a non-conscious person? As far as I can see, there goes a direct line from this position to the cancel culture. When you upfront have a concept of your opponent being unconsciouss, there is less need of mutual horisontal respect. Verticality and dialogue do not go together.          Contemporary postmodern deconstruction  Camille Paglia was in the 90ties the first to warn against what she saw as a postmodern academic decay. She identified the original seed sin in Foucault's thinking in itself. I do, however, not think that the original French and German philosophers did see the possibility of their own theories radicalized to such an extent as the case is today in the USA. Even the  language of mathematic is now by extreme woke academics seen as a racist white hegemonial language-tool of power.   As far as I can see it, there is an important but hidden consequence of deconstruction as such, and that is that you cannot deconstruct the world without deconstructing yourself. My own folly I bear historical witness to this development myself. In the early 70'ties, as a young university student, I got brainwashed, swallowed up by a collective psychosis among academia all over Europe. A part of the insight into the postmodern woke phenomenon I owe to these years lived in radical Marxist-madness. In some ways, history is repeating itself. I recognize parts of my own youth in the generation of 'sleep-wokers'. I could have been one of them had I been a campus youngster today. However, there is one important difference between the leftist movements in my youth and the ones we find today. We did not take thing personal. We did not rage. We did not need safe spaces. We were not vulnerable and we did not make our madnes personal.      When I hear the contemporary gibberish language used by Critical Race Theory people, I am reminded of my own folly as a young student. I had a sponge-brain that liked to suck up complicated word-chains. After 6 months, I, as a radicalized Marxist and Frankfurter preacher, was able to speak and write in such complex language code that I, despite my early 20 age, was able to make adults insecure and stand down. It was, however, all pure bullshit-language, as it also is today when spoken by woke academics. I still today am able to use this language smoke screen of suffocating word-babble. In this sense, this use of language is close to the religious language as spoken by priests in the medieval period. They spoke in Latin so that the common man could not understand it and exactly, therefore, shiver in submission and ave. Hence language is an important tool in the woke indoctrination camps.     The joke continues, and I recognize the old story I will tell now as a valid woke-joke of today too. After my main study subject in literature was completed, I began studying music with all too little practical and theoretical knowledge, which in fact, was required in this line of study. I was, however, saved by my talent for language babble. I remember my first oral test on the musical institute. I got a question where I had to analyze certain parts of Mozart's Symphonies. I knew almost nothing about this, but quickly I began to ascend into the realm of lofty Marxist word-smoke, talking about the Vienna-classical period as a part of the development of capitalism. At that time, also the music university had been subdued to sing revolution-slogans, so my examinators gave me a high grade for my performance about Mozart without Mozart.      In the late 60'ties and 70'ties old and traditional humanities drowned in left-wing word-babble. However, also good things happened. A new and fresh creativity was able to renew stiff and outdated forms of thinking that had dominated. I was allowed to bring in my electric guitar in the old halls of classical fame. Here I turned up the volume on my screaming freedom-ego in the form of a wild Jimi Hendrix-like solo.        RIGHT WING PARANOIA - THE OCCUPATION OF THE US CAPITOL BUILDING In this cortexial collapse, crowd-mobilizing symbol-meanings made out of random and non-causal dot-making found their way as a deluge filling up Capitol Hill with a new crowd-breed of strange Tiger King-like creatures.      In this field of apophenian weeds, the deluded magician dances as a Grim Reaper. He thinks himself to be a shaman, but he, in fact, is a weird self-created, and self-performative product of random dots collected from google and fertilized by social media liking-drien echo chambers. He belongs to a new breed of sleepwalking identity-zombies. In this day-dreaming identity-state, the Don Quixote of windmill-conspiracy has awoken to deed. His stage is the twilight zone that follows the absence of wakefulness. Jake Angeli, aka Q-Shaman - US Capitol Building Jake Angeli is in his performative need for likings a lone wolf with only associative connections to QAnon. In the photo above, one can observe his need to stand out in ecstasy in order to feel himself. At the other end of the specter, we find collectives of shared dream realities with a more enormou potential for societal destruction. QAnon, Release the Kraken, Oath Keepers, Three Percenter, Proud Boys, and last but not least, various more loosely organized religious groupings.   Scientific American has published an article arguing for a 'Shared Psychosis between Donald Trump and his Loyalists'.  To reserve this diagnosis only for Trump supporters shows how the polarizing tendency in politics has gripped even the scientific communities in the sense that the same pschologists would not dare to use the same wording on Black Lives Matter or Woke as such. Free from the need of political weaponizing of the diagnosis-trend, I would claim that fields of shared psychosis by now are popping up in all walks of life, from left to right, from black to white, and from top to bottom of the social pyramid. Even many scientific communitites are infected.    THE GAME THAT PLAYS PEOPLE In A Game Designer's Analysis of QAnon, Reed Berkowitz, a designer of games meant to be played in reality, convincingly argues that he, in fact, had created a game that was almost similar to QAanon's narrative. He has also observed how people participating in such games often began to follow wild and unlogic assumptions that derailed the gameplan.       As mentioned, cognitive regression tends to follow in the slipstream of economic decline. However, in a time with social media, gaming, and VR, the possibility of making up and sustaining fantasy worlds while living, in reality, has become much bigger than ever before. The internet has, in fact, in itself created a platform of virtual reality, a digital sign-world, visionary close to Baudrillard's pre-internet description of simulacra. On this platform of simulated reality, the commercially motivated algorithms of social media octavates this basic unreality. If I seek right or left-wing viewpoints on youtube, youtube will trawl its library and present me with more tubes with the same information-bias. Hence we, in the interest of click-bait capitalism, are constantly fed with rabbit-hole digging unison information-streams. Once you are into conspiracy theories, the advertizers will earn more money on you by confirming your apophenian dot-making than presenting you with new viewpoints. This mechanism is undermining the very principle of dialogue and, therefore, in its nature anti-democratic. Instead of dialogue, we get whirlpools of reinforcing feedback loops of fairy tale narratives, so strong that they take over the reality-making engine of both groups and individuals. Reed Berkowitz's job as a game designer has been overtaken by the simulation of the web. However, he will never get unemployed if he should ever decide to team up with his foe.    Pattern seeking in big data Let us now have a closer look at how the hyperreality unfolds in our apophenian brain. The Big Data scenario we suddenly live in is so overwhelming that it appears random and hence scary for the untrained eye that is not able to ascend to a higher level of abstraction to grasp the bigger pictures. The problem here is that we tend to stay at the same level of abstraction as we were conditioned to as children. We have learned to read and write and comprehend meaning in, let's say, a daily 10-gigabit scenario. The way we write newspaper articles, make television programs is fine-tuned to that gold-bearing information layer. The data we need to understand has, however, by now, followed an exponential curve in its steep ascend, and hence we are not able to grasp the pictures that would emerge on higher astronaut-abstraction-levels. In times of disruptive societal changes, 10-gigabit pattern-seeking humans will run around like scared chickens confined in a fence. To get out of that enclosure, all they need would be to use their wings and fly to reach the clarifying overview of, let's say, 100-terabit patterns. The real changes and challenges of our time are huge. However, they seem like passing through us without us taking notice. Even our experts are like Generals in the First World War, commanding thousands of young men into the machinegun fire their old brains were unable to understand. The inability of good old school experts to understand our current situation is due to their outdated level of abstraction. Only lofty terabit psychonauts, meditators, and crazy visionaries are by now able to ascend to a level where they can see and identify the tsunami of change. We are ostrich-occupied with 10-gigabit bogus-challenges like 5G, vaccines, or we are like ostriches with heads buried in spculative language models trying to uncover power-structures. Hence we do not see that we are standing on the rails of an approaching train despite John Lennon's visionary warning: Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans. We have difficulties identifying and addressing 'the unknown new' since we have not encountered it before and are on the wrong level of abstraction. Whether the story of how native Indians could not see the ship of Captain Cook because they had never seen such a thing before is true or not, it still holds some wisdom for us humans. While being busy with conspiracy- and identity paranoia, we did not see the real  Tsunami of change.    As a survival strategy in our inability to identify patterns on higher abstraction levels, we start to make wildly misinterpreting symbolic connections of dots that only are connected in our own chicken-heads. In the absence of causality, the field of imagined conspiracies takes a new level. Seen from the ego-operative system, that is comforting because then we own this 'truth', and our life gets a purpose in the thrill of discovering more and more mostly evil and sinister connections and smoking guns. Suddenly our ego feels that it is control and that is essentially the only food the ego needs. We feel we have taken responsibility and are 'figuring it out ourselves' rather than trusting authorities. We have in our own mind now become detectives in the noble investigation into criminal activity hidden behind secret symbols. I am my own editor of understanding Why do cutters cut themselves? The pain creates 'meaning' in the form of an intense sensory perception that the inflicter controls. The cutter becomes in control of the pain in his own life.   Here in the West, the subjective amplified feeling of being in charge as an individual has a long history that goes back to antiquity. In the continuous evolutionary story of 'I' the change that happened with Gutenberg's letterpress art repeated itself in the invention of the internet. With Gutenberg the monopoly of knowledge got broken, and common mortals now had to deal with the blessing and curse of having more knowledge, but also more responsability. With social media, even Tom, Harry, and Dick has become the editors of their own life. Before that was an exclusive task performed by newspaper, television editors and institutional experts. Therefore it is no coincidence that many of the so-called influencers have become paranoic conspiracy believers and propagators. Through the echo-room made by their followers, they have been mislead to believe that the know better than the experts. I note one common denominator in the these influencers. They have tormented and yet ecstatic faces. They are possesed by the signal chemical intoxication of religious holy war. They are cutters, armed with symbolic power of reversablle causality. The conspiritual influencer feels herself in possession of magic insight and powers, serving a noble cause of resistance against intentional evil forces. This ancient brain-program has most probably served us well as a survival tool on the East African savannah 500.000 years ago. However, it seems that it has become revitalized from the junk-dna it should be. In the whirlpools of digital rabbit holes outdated dna from the churchyard of history seems to be revitalized in an army of zombies.   The scientific quest is boring There is a connection between absolutism and symbolism. The ideal scientific mind is always doubting. In contrast, the symbolic mind seems only to function when there is no doubt. Hence doubt is feared by religious people. It leaves the neurons without fire. In fact, it does not matter what direction this absolutism has taken. As long as the person posessed is absolutely sure that he is right, he might be involved in politics or even in science. The fanatic attitude can be found in all walks of life. In science fanatism often occours where there is a common self-told agreement of its non-existence within own ranks. The non-ability to question one's own mysterious subjectivity as an integral part of every equation of life is in its nature a religious trait.  Servant to science The symbolic-apophenian modality ideally found its role as a servant to logic thinking in a long historical devellopment from Aristoteles to the Age of Enlightenment. However, even the father of quantum physics, Niels Bohr, had a horseshoe on his front door. When asked if he believed in it, he replied that he did not, but that he was told that it worked even if one did not believe in it. Niels Bohr's reply is witty precisely because it shows how different modi operandi of thinking compete for leadership in even the most rational of us.      The best science is made in cooperation between our symbolic and intellectual modi operandi. Our pattern-seeking intuition in the form of imagination is the first pathfinder to enter new frontiers. Then, after a while, solid science hopefully arrives and gets the final word. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.   I believe in intuitions and inspirations. I sometimes feel that I am right. I do not know that I am. Einstein   The ancient symbolic and intuitive brain is a horrible master but a brilliant servant. A short summary Through social media's advertising clickbait-oriented algorithms, we, through eversion, are merging with like-minded souls rather than disturbed by opposing opinions, and from here, the hyper-apophenian dopamine-regulated aha-truth-rush becomes a tribal war-fare with the suicidal power of the many.    In a time where young people perceive their world through selfie filters, reality as such is no longer protecting us from this overdrive. It flourishes as an Alternate Reality Game where the stressed-out regressive brain is transforming reality into wildcards of deeper and ever deeper symbolic connections. In this reinforcing rabbit hole, the accelerating feedback of 'meaning' creates QAnon and the like as black holes of 'reality' with such force of gravity that escape is as difficult as making sense in a discussion with a believer of a blood-drinking elite.    From the political to the religious spectrum, outrage and paranoia groups are sharing a common psychic configuration consisting of amygdalian rage, splitting, apophenian, symbolic, and reverse causality thinking. On top of that cocktail sits a little, but eversed narcissistic vulnerable ego fighting for a safe space on the size of a planet. No wonder that horizontal dialogue has been canceled. However, without dialogue, societal progress is not possible.   Think for your self - and connect the dots. It interesting to observe how a conspiracy theory movement like QAnon objectifies its own symbolic thinking. This projection indicates an almost non-existent self-awareness. It seems that the first group to display this new kind of narcissism, in fact, was my own New Age tribe. As mentioned in the beginning, it has shocked me to see how large a segment of 'spiritual' people and even from my own mature age-group has succumbed to a cocktail ultra-right-wing mobilization and paranoia babble.    Let me now go on a meta-level in which I try to make myself visible in the equation. I leave it to you to evaluate if I am honest here or not. Am I not a splitter of worlds here in this polarizing and not too flattering description of what I see? I would say no due to the following reasons. Firstly, I am not motivated by rage or fear. I bear no ill will towards the outragers. I would any time like to engage them in a respectful dialogue if it was possible. Secondly, in meditative introspection, I clearly recognize that I, too, have the potential of rage inside of me. In fact, we all have. The crucial question here is if this snake is standing in the light of consciousness or lurking in the dark.     Had I been a university youngster today, I might very well have been in the choir of pitch voices you can hear in the video displayed below.   'QAnonic' academia In an old dying tree, we can observe how the tree can still produce new leaves in abundance while rotting away from the inside. On one side, we are close to the greatest scientific achievements ever, and on the other side, we can observe a pandemic spread in the West of intellectual decay, especially in the humanities.   How can we blame crazy conspiracy theorists not to care about reason and facts when even academia does not care about them other than reducing them to mere instruments of power play?  In this sense, academia and movements like QAnon are fueling each other. In the disregard of true Greek dialogue and the general mistrust in 'facts', the humanities in the form of Critical Race Theory, Woke, and similar movements have regressed to a common platform of medieval fundamentalism. The student takeover of Evergreen State College in 2017 showed a remarkable escalation in crowd rage. Here at Evergreen, blind amygdalian rage defeated the open and free intellect of Brett Weinstein in something closer to an octagon of violence than a center of learning. He was chased away from Evergreen State College, never to return.   Student takeover of Evergreen State College 2017 The collective madness displayed at Evergreen State College shows the woke- and cancel culture as a polarizing hate-driven, conspiracy-oriented culture. The archetypical paranoia-narrative of an evil brotherhood of conspirators has here taken the form of a hegemonial clan of white men with conscious and/or unconscious racist belief systems.      Woke, outrage, cancel, gender, and identity-cultures are related to the phenomenon of paranoia conspiracy in the sense that they all harvest social momentum in the same mythologic demonization and scapegoating of their enemies and in their disregard for dialogue and facts. In fact, the same tendency has by now infected American politics with the dangerous polarization between Democrats and Republicans. The worship of young rage At present, we just have to look at Gretha Thunberg to realize the magnitude with which the above-mentioned psychological regressive mechanisms of blindness that have gripped our global collective understanding of reality. A little girl full of amygdalian polarizing anger and with not fully developed consciousness and cognition has become our worshipped beacon of hopeful change. It is ridiculous and sad at the same time.   As far as I can see, in this chaos there are viable solutions presented by the good old school intelligentsia opposing these new phenomenons of outrage. The solution lies both beyond the horizon of Woke and the ones who advocate for the return of scientific reason and dialogue. The noble old school academics of free speech and argument cannot save the Titanic from sinking. The modern rage-groups have entered the underworld of day-dreams that rises in the absence of a normal wakeful state. Prior to the loss of high quality cognition is the implosion of consciousness. Cancellation of time and history - the outrageous amygdalian here and now Social media places cultures hundred of years apart, with inconsistent values in the same chat-room. One can imagine the huge confusion when simple, honest living people with archaic, 500-year-old mindsets looks into the magic mirror of their newly acquired smartphones and computers. How could we ever expect simple, straightforward people from cultures who have not (yet) developed the modern, often also decadent ability to navigate in multi-levels of irony to understand a danish newspaper's satirical take on Islam as the case was with the danish cartoon drawings of the prophet Mohammad? A tribal woman from the Himalayan range with her mobilephone. I took this picture 15 years back! However, it is surprising to observe how even modern minds react in ways similar to the rage created in the friction between Medieval and contemporary culture. When it comes to our own modern rage it displayes a typical post-traumatic stress disorder-modality. A soldier with PTSD cannot timeline the event where his friend got his legs blown off by a roadside bomb. His amygdala will react as it is happening right now in case something is triggering him to remember the incident. In the regressive loss of relaxed cognition and consciousness, we tend to perceive the present moment without the perspective of time. The explosive symbiosis of the timelessness of social media and the amygdalian traumatic here and now offers a way to understand the current demolition-spree of historical monuments and statues. Western vandals on the hunt for the next statue exist in the same modality as Medieval minded people from far away countries engaged in burnings of the American flag.   History itself becomes canceled in the outrageous here and now.   The cancellation of history can be observed in several layers of society. Here in Denmark, we have an artist called Jim Lyngvild. In order to encounter the fading interest in our good old National Museum, he has been invited to make an exhibition with the title, Meet the Vikings. The interesting thing here is that the faces and dresses Jim Lyngvild has put on the vikings, have nothing to do with history or reality. It is entirely fictional. No wonder that it provoked the old school of historians into a rage nobody took serious.   The destruction of statues and previous power institutions is yet another example of time annihilation where long gone individuals suddenly become alive again in the rage directed towards their 'statual' representations. I am reminded of an incident in my youth where a drunk man was abusing an old poster of a politician who was no longer in power.   Even METOO has become a time-cancellating maelstrom. Of course, the METOO-movement's exposure of men who use their position of power to intimidate women sexually is needed. However, when men in leading positions here in Denmark, without the possibility to defend themselves suddenly lose their jobs due to loose allegations of sexual offenses made 20 years ago, I cannot help seeing it as an act of retribution made in a space without time. Furthermore, these allegations and the fear for potential allegations are in danger of traumatizing the men in general as a kind of collateral damage. The 95% or more of men who have always treated women respectfully are, like me, now self-imposing what I would call a self-castrating behavior to avoid conflicts with the other sex.      Violation of violators      The paradox in the cancel and outrage-culture is that the defense itself becomes an offensive violation of the imagined violators. This is a typical narcissistic trait; deep-felt empathy for one's own space but not for the other spaces. Other space-holders are dehumanized by our digitally over-heated monkey brains. The sphere eversion happening in the bottleneck of social media-communication is making us perceive all other viewpoints as personal intrusions, as enemies, that have already crossed the borders of the village-wall. When this mentality amplifies in media-driven, click-baited algorithmic group-formations, the march towards the political ideology of fascism is inevitable. In the 'amygdalian' blindness, the ability to aware others shrink, and in this blindness, phenomenons like Antifa, in themselves, become the fascism they fight in 'the others'. The anti-fascist have become fascists, and the anti-violators have become big-time violators of the violators. As Kierkegaard stated, the fanatic and the anti-fanatic are the same as far as they are each other's opposites. Cancellation in itself becomes a kind of mental virus infecting all what it comes in touch with. Seen in this light, the cancellation of Trump's Twitter account and the like is just accelerating the present civilizatoric decay. In the cancelation of Trump's right to free speech 70 million Trump-followers' right to the same is cancelled too. When big tech CEAO's suddenly gets the power to cancel a president's communication lines, the backlash in the form of reinforcement conspiracy-segments ideation about what is going on behind the curtains suddenly become, a reality. It is not Trump who should be removed from social media. It is capitalism. Capitalism in the form of clickbait earns much more money from fake news than on boring real news. It is greed that should be cancelled from digital communication. However, no CEO would have the balls to cut off his own balls of wealth.  THE FEAR OF NOT KNOWING WHO WE ARE What do I, as an old bungy jump trained meditator and psychonaut observe around me? The traditional identity-roles handed down from previous generations do not any longer fit us as our inter - faces. Now, not only genders are fluid - everything in and around us is in a constant state of flux. In this fluidity, fear arises with the dissolution of solid comfort zones. The fearful unwillingness to merge into the one and only black void that once and for all can cure this problem is encountered with the construction of pseudo-solid identities at any cost. It seems that the egoic identity prefers suffering when presented with uncertain (but blissful) nothingness as an alternative. Not everybody is courageous enough to substitute the loss with a dog-identity.   Therefore, especially generation Y is running in the opposite direction, trying with all means available to reinforce the illusion of all sorts of super-specific and hysteric ego-identities. This is what contemporary identity-politics is all about; to uphold the dying identity-feeling of being a solid 'ME'. As the famous saint Nisargadatta Maharaj has pointed out, the ego is like a sprained ankle. Without the pain there would no conscious feeling of the ankle and so it is with the ego. Seen from this perspective, the ego is pain, and it can be strengthened through more pain. Hence the contemporary reinforcements of the ailing ego come with the price of pain. Like said before: We prefer to suffer when confronted with freedom. Through suffering or aggression we know who we are. In the amygdalian flight, we are reduced to nothing, In the amygdalian fight, we are crowned to someone.     The collective identity-reinforcement As a survival strategy against all these combined complex forces driving us towards ego-dissolution, we protect ourselves as particular identities by narrowing down our viewpoints. Furthermore, we seek the company of like-minded souls. In this process, our fearful clinging to identity as such transcends itself from individuality to collectivity. We herd in collective comfort zones of mono-culture-identities.    The need for echo-chamber voices arises as a complex sum total of the different, previously mentioned mechanisms. Let me here sum up what I consider the two most important factors.   The youngest players in this glorious endgame live in the vulnerability of feeling and hearing the social media voices 'eversed' inside-out. As a protective strategy against this potentially psychotic feeling, the internalized magic digital mirror will only allow a reflection of one surviving truth. It is less unbearable with a unison voice in the head as compared to have, from the amygdalian viewpoint, border-crossing intimate presences of opposing opinions in the my-space inside-out of our head. The stronger the mono-culture becomes, the stronger the prosthetic reinforcement of the ailing ego-tower becomes.     The tendency to herding is furthermore supported by the commercially oriented algorithms on the net. Capitalism has, in this last phase, turned into a big-brother parasite always present as an impure presence of commercial greed in every communication path.    In this sense, the use of social media in its current parasitic form not only amplifies the ego-death happening as a result of an overdue capitalistic system. It drives the most vulnerable of us towards having symptoms close to schizophrenia. This mechanism leads to the next level of absurd collective identity-protection-constructions.        THE DELIBERATE RE-TRAUMATIZATION OF OLD WOUNDS How to create a strong feeling of collective identity? I would say that the feeling of being a victim and/or persecutive enmity towards a different tribe is the best ego-survival strategy of all. A collectivized story of victimhood can any time flip into a position of aggressive power-persecution. Tormentors and victims share an underlying bond. Again with the words of Kierkegaard, they are identical, as far as they are each other's opposites.   Persecution as an identity-reinforcement strategy As often seen in history, nothing is more powerful for tribalized groups' internal identity-glue than persecution. As Pearl S. Buck points out in her novel, Peony, the Jewish culture could not really thrive in China due to acceptance. The many similarities between Jewish and Chinese cultural values made it difficult for the Jews to uphold a persecution-identity, and hence they more or less disappeared as a culture in China. They instead merged with the local culture. We can observe this psychological mechanism on countless levels, especially within fanatic group formations. The unsympathic religious movement of Falun Gong is a good example of how a group subconsciously can feed on persecution. The Chinese Government has banned Falun Gong, and they are persecuting them in the most horrible ways. However, ironically this persecution has become the very engine that gives momentum to the movement. Without the story of torture, the Falun Gong movement would collapse, as it has nothing spiritual to offer that could not be taught on an average yoga-course. What they offer is nothing but a tempting story of victimhood.    I could go on with examples from the endless list presented by history itself. The top stories are the archetypical fairy tales of victimhood, guilt, and shame. These  dream stories have become web simulacra powered, 'centripetalized' ideas ready to be customized and explosively weaponized from Woke to Me Too.   The re-traumatization of old wounds for the sake of power Woke is, in my view, an absolutely unconscious collective self-traumatized pandemic spreader of by them boosted trauma. They get their momentum by cutting fresh openings into old wounds that otherwise have almost healed in time. This re-traumatization of old suppression-history has a sinister motive: By opening old scars, Woke is able to construct performative scolding rituals that give them tremendous power. In other words: Who made language a power-tool? Woke did.   Let me give a little example from my home country Denmark. Woke is in these days slowly infecting the academian brains here in my country. An intelligent friend of mine runs an online magazine for women. Here, in a debate, she used the word 'colored'. Immediately she was shitstormed into total submission by an angry mob, enlightening her about the fact that the word 'colored' was a microaggressive white hegemonial word. The right word to use was 'brown'. I guess that the only reason why she was not outright canceled was the fact that woke is not really in full control in Denmark (yet) and that she made an apology and repented that she had used such an improper word. They accused her of racism. They blamed her for not knowing their understanding and terminology. As I see it, the sinister truth is that they fed on making her feel that she was not ok.     Language has, of course, always been a carrier of contemporary power structures. However, when the real power dynamics in a society changes, old sayings, once full of potent poisonous subversive meaning, become like dead virus in the body of society. They do not mean anything anymore because forgiveness in a historical view, is forgetfulness. I live in a street named after an old Danish slave trader from the 18. Century. Nobody knew him anymore; nobody cared before Danish Woke demanded the street name changed.      Before Woke retraumatized our language, it had become as impotent as a power tool as old architectural grandiose posthouses, libraries, police stations, and town halls. These buildings are like ridiculous pompous statues of no use and meaning anymore. Nobody cares about them and their glorious past. With digitalized institutions, these old architectural power structures have lost their magnificence and radiance. Hence they already were in the process of beautiful decay with the same faith as ailing English colonial ruin buildings in India.  Who did ever have a closer look at a statue before Woke came and gave them a new life? The same happened with language in the sense that old traditional sayings suddenly became alive again full of so-called white-male-toxicity or other imagined power-games. Woke has gained power by putting new life into cultural junk DNA.    The re-ewoking woke This is what Woke and Critical Race Theory academics did in their understanding of postmodernism: By successfully constructing, reinforcing, magnifying, and propagating fading racial and gender aggressions in language as something real of utmost importance to deconstruct, they, in fact, projected their invention out on their imagined white hegemonial enemies for the sake of their own power. In this way the mob got total control over my friend with the online magazine in the moment she apologized.    Here the concept of structural racism made language a battle-zone as far as the academic woke could make larger and larger segments of especially white society players in this mind-game. Once an insecure white person starts believing in this archetypical paranoia conspiracy theory, he is rendered powerless in a kind of second coming of an old Christian power-belief in sinhood, guilt and shame. Woke is in this way, gaining control over the people who starts accepting and using their language babble as a story told reality-frame.      The regressive second coming of medieval Christian sin, guilt, and shame The inherent moralism in Critical Race Theory points at a 'resurrection' of the basic Christian and extremely resilient cultural operative system of sinhood. This fundamentalist moralism was reviewed in the Frankfurt School. As a sinner, as a victim, or as a guilty person, you always have a strong feeling of who you are. However, this fake feeling of identity comes at a high price.     THE HIJACK OF NOBLE CAUSES It should be needless to say that in itself the strive, for a society without suppression against any group is a noble course. Of course, there is suppression in and of black people on all levels, from micro-aggressions to epigenetic inheritance. Women need to be free from sexist, toxic male-dominant behavior. Anyone should be free to express what gender they feel they belong to. And last but not least: Anyone should be able to express whatever opinion they have, even people like Alex Jones and David Icke.        The overshadowing issue is that the traumatizing Amygdalian terrorist has Stockholm-syndromized reason. Noble causes have been hijacked by the wave of power-rage.         White guilt and shame as weapons of cultural mass destruction To be racially white or not to agree with the politically correct opinions, in general, makes you scapegoated into 'ostracisation' through a peculiar blend of guilt and shame. You can then purge yourself through repentance in the form of postmodern academic perverted 'flagellantery' where you, like a Sisyfos, keep dissecting and cleaning your language and behavior for hidden hegemonic power-structures. The best comment to this never-ending masochism is made by my favorite AI-system, GPT-3. It states: Guilt can't change the past, but it can ruin the present. A statement made by the artificial intelligence-system GPT-3 Identity, Woke, BLM-policy, and crazy conspiracy ideation groups are seen in this light, trying impossible ways to solve social conflicts, they to a large extend, create themselves. The irony here is that they feed on their imagined stories of victimhood. They steal or culturally appropriate victimhood to reinforce their fearful fading sense of identity and, at the same time, generate social energy. They construct and magnify social grievances. They weaponize victimhood in a kind of performative scolding that is especially damaging for the white youth that buys into this fiction.        Cultural appropriation as white theft of black suffering One of my black friends told me that among many of his black friends, who did not identify with the Woke-movement, there was a saying: Woke is a white movement.     It is within the Woke-culture seen as a negative thing when members of a dominant culture appropriate culture from disadvantaged minority cultures. Here I cannot help seeing the absurd irony in white 'wokologic' people appropriating the suffering story of black slavery. In this appropriation-theft, one can uphold the frail, outdated identity-construct in a double grip of opposites: of guilt and victimhood. Here the so-called white savior complex gets a new meaning in white people punishing themselves for being white. The original sin is by now being white.     Even here in my home country, Denmark, with an almost non-existing black minority, woke has occupied the minds of a growing number of students. Recently the Danish Woke students threw a sculpture of a Danish King from the 18. Century in the canal. We have millions of suffering refugees from Syria standing at our European doorstep. Why, in comparison, reinforce a 300-year-old story about the Danish slave trade? My guess is that the not so noble truth behind this is that the contemporary ego-operative system of young white people is so fragile that it has culturally appropriated the black man's suffering as its own. They could as well have appropriated dog-identities had it not been for the fact that the drug-like social momentum in being a dog is relatively weak. The feeling of victimhood, the feeling of being persecuted and having enemies, is like a psychic cutting a survival strategy to save the sinking feeling of being a functional individual with clear borders defining what is ME and what is not ME. The woke alert to injustice is, in reality, a theft that is turbo-charging cultural wars.       Due to the strong meta-narrative of victimhood, the initial and undeniable truths in social injustice from gender to race cannot bloom and fructify in a meaningful exchange of ideas. They are hijacked for other purposes.      Rage can only lead to destruction I am well aware of the fact that I, as a white male from Denmark can tend to overlook the fact that the horrors of slavery and racism did happen not so long ago and that aggression and suppression to some extent still is here. The pain from that collective trauma has never really been dissolved. This pain furthermore makes the BLM-rage understandable. The rageful Woke and Critical Race Theory's ideologies can, however, never lead to any constructive solutions concerning injustice and inequality. On the contrary. Deep emotional scars cannot be healed alone on the level of language and intellect. This is at least my experience from the New Age scene where therapists, psychologist, and self-help peope like me, have been talking and talking for ever. Here I already 30 years back noted a strange phenomenon. People in therapy, trying to solve childhood issues and the like, got temporary relief from a psychotherapy session. However, the session-life seemed addictive, and the amount of dark subconscious material in need of being redeemed in costly sessions seemed to form a growing pile of shit. What really had happened was that many of the people who had tried to heal their inner child instead had got a reinforced trauma and victim-identity that, in fact, only was beneficial for the rising industry of therapists and clairvoyants. So the mountain of misery was growing, but so was the strong feeling of identity. Seen from this level, identity is equivalent to suffering in the same way as a sprained ankle makes itself aware in opposition to a healthy ankle in blissful forgetfulness.    For me the parallel to the modern rage-groups is stunning. These movements get their energy and power to expand from their own deliberate re-victimization and retraumatization. The stronger the victimhood, the stronger the social momentum and 'righteous' rage. In fact, they belong to a strange breed of vampires that try to satisfy their thirst from drinking their own blood.   Once the myth of victimhood has reached a point of no return by reinforcement and opening of old scars it starts expanding like a pyramid game. Let me return to the lady who was running the online magazine for ladies. She deeply apologized for her mistake of using the word colored instead of the correct word, brown. However, inside herself, she did not apologize because she saw the ugly power mechanisms behind the performative scolding ritual directed towards her. Her reaction is rare. Especially younger people tend surrender to this conversion by the sword. They are afraid of losing jobs and being ostracized. Instead, they bow their head down in shame and from the very moment they do that, they have been baptized into their scolders' dream reality. Now they also have got infected by the feeling of being a wrong person and the only way they can relieve that traumatizing feeling is by replicating the virus of scolding by attacking the next ring of people around them, that do not yet know the difference between colored and brown. In this way, higher consciousness and cognition collapses like domino pieces into the accelerating gravity field of the black rabbit hole. In fact, the phenomenon is fundamentalistic religious by nature.   As we can observe in the poster below, the notion of victimhood is not reserved for color and gender matters only. Social injustice fits perfectly into the scheme as well. Also, another well known psychological mechanism is the pendulum swing from introverted victimhood to extroverted aggression. Now revenge is the word painted in red, and the stronger the imagined injustice and suppression, the stronger the justified momentum for revenge. The very fact that the young rage-people cannot themselves see the stupidity of these primitive mechanisms, is pointing towards the devolutionary collapse of consciousness in high-pitch amygdala driven crowds. Screen shot taken from DarkHorse Podcast The same self destructive mechanism can be observed in the sinister conspiracy thinking groups. The worser their imagined evil enemies become, the greater the internal feeling of persecuted brotherhood and purpose in life. The same is the case with right wing supporters of Trump and the democrates, even the, as pure rationallity, masked Sam Harris who have defined their identity as anti-Trump. (His voice is in its fake try to simulate the beacon of objectivity, a give away for the inner demons he habours.)   What are all these polarized groups and individuals in fact doing? They are pissing in their own trousers in order to keep warm.   A new common ground - fertilized by rot It could be tempting to advocate for love and expanded consciousness to heal the racial wounds and the current polarization and mistrust as a strategy more viable than performative scoldings and the like. However, it is my experience that no calm consciousness or dialogue can bring back a soul who has jumped down in the black rabbit hole. It is pointless. Therefore, in fact, we do need hateful identity-policy and more dividing labels to move us forward into perfect destruction. We need this in the same way that an old tree has to rot away from the inside. Then in the fertile earth made by the rot, new seeds will sprout. From here, it will be time to drop all labels and aware existence on much deeper levels of love and unity. This is, as far as I see, the only way to transcend the inhuman but necessary survival algorithms of the past. This, however, requires the above-mentioned price. We have to die in the form we know ourselves. We have to die from our culture as we know it and humankind as we think we are.      Hence I am not at all against this mental decay. I do not try to warn against it. In fact, I welcome it as the destruction needed before real new things can happen.   In the current meltdown, a new world order will be born like a Nietzschean dancing star. The Phoenix rising from the ashes of this de(con)struction will, however, not fly out to conquer an already conquered world. It will turn inward and colonize the brain with consciousness.      This is what Meditation is all about:      We need to upgrade from ego-consciousness to a unity-consciousness where we all are color, gender & identity-blind.    Here I see the words of my favorite Mystic come true. You do not need to be religious to realize the depth of his statement: All creatures contain one reflection: one, that is the denial of its being the other; the highest of the angels denies he is the lowest.  God is the denial of denials.   Doctor Ecstaticus Meister Eckhart For many, it might be difficult to grasp Meister Eckhart's double negation play. However, Prince EA essentially says the same. He speaks to us from the world order of a new future fertilized by the death of the present.   I have to be honest with you and clarify from what position I have written all this. Some believe in a God they have never seen. I live in an abstract amplified consciousness that makes me see, not any absolute truth, but just SEE. To deny THAT for you or myself would be an act of faked humility. As long as you have not (yet) experienced THAT you can read the last lines of this chapter as a hopeless optimistic and poetic declaration of trust in the good old Hegelian idea of enlightenment.   Just as the Roman emperors used to give the gladiator the rudius, the wooden sword, as a symbol of freedom, I hereby, as an emperor of consciousness, give my fellow human beings the galactic rudius and hereby condemn you to a life of ultimate freedom, free of bigotry hatred and small-minded egoistic way of life. As an unfortunate side effect of that, I also condemn you to a life of super wakeful bliss and ecstasy.   Live humans - live!     A German doctor friend of mine lost millions every month on his private clinics due to COVID 19. Hence he hated the lockdown of the society and wanted us all just to go on as nothing had happened to achieve herd immunity. Trump is his hero. The man has balls, he said about Trump repeatedly. In his own understanding, these viewpoints were a result of pure scientific objectivity since he before had worked as a virologist and knew everything about the matter. Seen from my side of the fence, there was no free science ruling his equations. It was fear talking through a Stockholm hijacked brain using scientific language.   People like my doctor friend are not evil. Like a bird in a group, he is getting flown by the tribal collective self-distributed sum of intelligence and self will. This has, when translated into social action, consequences that one on ground level definitely could view as evil.   From these all too human micro-levels of self-interest, Conspiracy rises like a transcendent force of tribal collective will to survive. Even at its destructive height, it is mostly not intentionally evil, but rather more, with the words of Hannah Arendt, a product of the Banality of Evil. Our tribal inherited will to power, to capture energy from other tribes made the Germans as a nation do terrible things, while at the same time, the individual German like Adolf Eichmann was terrifyingly normal. This genetic inherited operative system works in groups on all levels, from woke to corporate companies, and its group-egoism is generating the social mobilization in which Conspiracy as a transcendent force becomes one of the fundamental organizing principles. Therefore the will to power is basically not a perverted individual übermensch project, as most conspiracy theorists would have it, but a collective transcendent force that often leaves the individual participants, even the leaders of the group, in ignorance of the consequences of their doings. Today multinational corporations have grown so much out of governmental control that the immanent logic of their tribal interest poses a threat to the survival of civilization as such. In the USA, 6 in 10 people suffers from one or more cronic illnesses. The directors and shareholders of medicinal companies are not evil as such, but it is for sure in their economic interest that more and more people need to buy pharmaceutical products to survive.   Conspiracy is creating 'civilizatoric' progress On an astronaut level, I consider this tribally driven algorithm of Conspiracy to be a natural, even healthy social process. Like warfare, that in the long run, created the state building that secured peace, Conspiracy prioritizes the evolution and spread of the most intelligent and hence beneficial social algorithms. The the rise of the mighty and peaceful Ashokan Empire is one example among many to show how larger periods of peace and prosperity extended to relatively larger geographical areas followed in the footsteps of huge wars.    By observing history, we are able to see that the original intentions of a conspiracy group never are fulfilled. They are always serving a 'higher', for them unknown purpose. Here good things come out of bad things and vice versa. As we as single individuals cannot control our lives with our egoistic intentions, so are tribalized elites or countries never able to predict what the outcome will be in the longer run. As our knowledge grows, our contact with what we do not know grows. The same is the case with control. The more we seemingly control, the more we are engulfed by the chaos of life, and thank God for that!   Seen from space NSA and other nations spy-services are building nets of global surveillance. On the ground level, it with good reason, seems frightening. From the astronaut-perspective, however, I intuit the birth of the conscious brain of Gaia itself!   In my beloved astronaut perspective, I see that life has been through major catastrophes several times before, where no one, of course not at the time of the event and also not now, could have predicted the outcome. These extintion events were perfect seen from our present-day interest since we would not have existed without them. Of course, it was a tragedy for the dinosaurs, and they would have been running around in paranoia if they had developed a thinking brain being able to imagine the future. Our little ridiculous ego is the next dinosaur in line for extinction.   No human brain will ever be able through rationality, to predict the outcome of the sum total of interaction in the world of accelerating big data. Hence it will always be a matter of an existential choice whether we experience the world to be heading towards something good or bad. I was destined to choose the optimistic viewpoint. Here in the fire-mandala of the Shiva Nataraj Leela, I perceive everything as a perfect, infinite unfolding of intelligence and consciousness.     Why is it important to shift between ground and space viewpoints? In my case, it prevents me from running in circles as an ego-dinosaurian chicken in anger and panic and instead, in a relaxed state of mind use my brain at its finest. Everything is perfectly good. We just have to let our astronaut Shiva observer ascend a bit more into space. From here we can see that we as a species are a perfect product of five catastrophic mass extinction events. The evolution of life is ever triumphant in its ascend on a staircase made of disasters. Life and the ultimate biocentric flower of life, consciousness, is the impossible exodus that leads us away from entropy. THE EVOLUTION OF APPLIED COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom... You never know what is enough until you know what is more than enough. William Blake  Man has to seek God in error, forgetfulness, and foolishness Doctor Ecstaticus, Meister Eckhart Avoid hatred, because, as hatred increases, so too does the chance for unsustainable success. Statement made by artificial intelligence-system GPT-3 The good news are that phenomenons of crowd madness always are relatively shortlived, and the factual truth in them will be harvested at the time the extatic madness element in them subside. The Darwinian selection-mechanism also applies to social ideas and movements seen as survival algorithms. Out of my own Marxist madness, what survived was an emotional need for a just and more social equal world and an intellectual need for analyzing social phenomenons as historic processes where what we do and need for survival shapes our way of thinking more than the other way round. I really value that way of thinking and analyzing at present. From my years as a sectarian guru-addict, I harvested a focussed and one-pointed happy and optimistic mind.  I am quite confident that the same fate will happen to the extremist cultures: The extreme madness will fade away, slowly eliminated by the factuality of nature itself, and the few diamonds of truth in the postmodern outlook on power will survive. For it is up to a certain extent true that language is infested with power structures of the past. In my view, it cannot be denied that language is indeed infested with the hegemonial Kaukasian white monkey clans dominance. However, the biggest problem here is not this truth, but the extreme fanatical exaggeration of it and the following splitting into hate positions. When it comes to the paranoic conspiracy theories, the only outcome will be that they indirectly facilitate the birth of new institutional orders by accelerating the collapse in trust in the old institutions. I cannot help here, commenting on the woke phenomenon with a simple question. If truth is nothing but a power-construction, then why should you as a 'wokist' go to a qualified surgeon in case you got cancer? Seen from the Ivory-tower of postmodern language-theory, the members of woke might as well defund doctors along with the police and prefer a quack healer who speaks the correct political language. We tend only to accept 'facts' that are supporting our ideologies. However, when it comes to our own survival as individuals, I am quite sure that even the most hardened 'wokist' would call a certified doctor in case of an emergency. Because the surgeon or any other type of qualified, by state institutions educated expert, represents a 'factuality' way beyond the language power-games of society. He embodies by time accumulated 'walk the talked' fact-based practicality in sync with nature itself. Nature cannot be fooled Here is what Feinman wrote in the juridical process after the Challenger-catastrophe: For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled. Richard Feynman Maybe the Nasa administration was able to hide the factual corruption and dysfunction in their institution, but nature did not care and the Challenger exploded as a result of natures own inherent intelligence. Only the very few that are in sync with Feynman's uncompromising nature will endure. Nature tends to 'dislike' untruth. Therefore, sooner or later, cancel culture will be cancelled out of culture by nature. We must not forget that the so-called white men's hegemonial power-institutions actually, in spite of the pain, damage and catastrophes they undoubtedly have inflicted, put men on the Moon and created doctors that could save lives. Truth is out there. It is ding an sich in the form of natures own mathematical algorithms as they reveal themselves in a crystalline pattern in a stone, in a nautilus seashell, or the gravity force. This, natures' immanent factuality was ruling the universe long before man invented the language of mathematics, and they do not care about nonsense, even when presented in academic language.     Long term state built intelligence There is nothing more ancient than truth Descartes Fake news and conspiracy theories can stir up a lot of social energy here and now, but when all is said and done Byron Katie's statement will hold the ground: When I argue with reality, I loose - but only 100 percent. The only thing to add to her statement is, that it always takes time, sometimes long sometimes short, before we reach the 100 percent.   In this sense, civilization is a Hegelian process taking place in the dialectics between man-made survival-lies and a nature that, at least in the long run, cannot be fooled. On the short lane, the collective story-told power-lies can stir up a lot of social energy and momentum, but in the longer run, human imagined 'facts' that are in sync with nature's own Platonic ideas always wins. That is how brilliant scientists and surgeons slowly evolved into the mastery it is today.  Imperial state-built institutions are seen in the larger historical perspective, despite their embedded survival lies and the tidal return of collective academic and/or political madness, still far more capable in facilitating the evolution of factual and practical applied thoughts in sync with nature as compared to smaller entities of story-truth-telling. Large power-state accumulation of intelligence works like the Mongol invasions. They suck up the essence of smaller states' best technology and inventions through warfare. War and conflict, weather we like it or not, is from the astronaut perspective, the bringer of peace and factual science.   That is important to bear in mind when we look at all the smaller narratives of crazy conspiracy theories. In the loss of truth and belief in state-institutionalized 'facts' every Tom, Harry, and Dick now feels entitled to have opinions about things that are way beyond their level of intelligence and expertise. The by social media and commercialism accelerated mad crowds have in their own self deluded echo chambers become much more clever than the virologist when it comes to covid. Recently I watched a social influencer without any education or analytical intelligence, just by her good botox and silicon modified look, earn clickbait money by spewing out mad conspiracy theories. Would she be able to earn money on a much more boring truth? I doubt ...     However, in spite of these fireflies: We are in zigzag and three steps forward and two back again, slowly getting more and more in sync with the laws of nature. Of course, state built intelligence is also full of flaws and undergoing cycles of decay. States are like tribes, as shown earlier, also in the need of producing conspiratoric survival lies in the form of internal suppression and external show of national love. However, in war and economic competition, the state that has accumulated most intelligence in sync with nature's incorruptible intelligence will always win. War and competition drive forward practical social organized survival intelligence based on solid science. In this way, states are always in themselves in a dialectic balance point between being factories of ideological lies and Conspiracy and being facilitators of the best cutting-edge science.   Colonial War and science The new invention of cannons brought the Mongol horse-armies down in a disruptive short amount of time. Cannons were invented in China, and it is interesting to observe how quickly this new technology spread to the rest of the world. The invention of cannons was a result of state-facilitated science, much in the same way that only powerful states can invent and bring to practical use space odysseys. The first state to invent new war technology has an advantage in the tribal race for resources. However, scientific intelligence knows no borders and tends to spread like wildfire, even before the time of the internet.   This happened due to the spread of colonial warfare and warfaring among states in general. Intelligence is spread through war due to the fact that the most intelligent social organized culture has the greatest chances of success. As a byproduct, western capitalism's algorithms began to spread and then merge with local political systems and, in this process, created new breeds of viable societies. Deng Xiaoping's China is an excellent example of such a powerful hybrid that has lifted millions out of poverty. India is another good example. This was certainly not the English overlords' original intention when they, as a cunning tribe of monkeys, went out in the world to capture energy from other tribes. Following this line of thought, it is interesting to observe how colonial Conspiracy, in the end, was pawing the way for the rise of a global, with the working-class extended, middle class.     Hence war, conflict, and competition drive forward science for the benefit of all and everyone in the long run.   What do I want to say with all this? It is that states, and warring state competition, still are the best bid when it comes to producing knowledge worth listening to and tecnology worth using and social architechtures worth living in. It is not Alex Jones, David Icke, QAnon or the like.   The world is and was always a mess, but in this chaos, new dancing stars are always to be seen. With a slight modulation of Wittgenstein's famous true enough into truer than yesterday, we actually do not needs Hegels World Spirit to understand the slow historic process towards Enlightenment. THE SUICIDAL VICTORY OF CAPITALISM  With Lyotards more sentimental eyes somehow lamenting the loss of super-narratives, it is obvious to see the time after 2000 as a time where the only surviving powerful intersubjective reality became consumerism. The myriad of smaller conflicting narratives was not able to summon a powerful alternative to pure commercialism. and so we ended up with the Kardarshians as our new Gods. Capitalism is at present an all pervading narrative beyond and under the radar of words. The capital-logic is (over)ruling our lives on almost all levels. Lyotard did not see this grandest narrative of capitalism because he, as an academic, was too 'Wittgensteinian' identified with language as the only vehicle of story-telling. As we saw with Marx, capitalism has become an almost invisible transcendent engine in no need of story-telling in the sense that the intersubjective reality of money and consumerism has camouflaged itself as something as objective as gravity. The setting free of pure consumerism and capitalism combined with social media algorithms powerful lowest denominator can also, to some extend, explain the current mistrust in science. A relatively larger part of scientist are now not any longer state-sponsored: They are hired by large often multinational corporations where the basic driving force of getting money to the shareholders have partly corrupted science through corrupting the scientists. No scientist can jump his own human shadow as a burping greedy little human, basically interested in paying off his mortgage loans. The prostitution of science itself through untamed global capitalism has, for a great part, contributed to the current state of mistrust in expertizing. The pharmaceutical industry has by The Lancet been described with the following words: Journals have devolved into information laundering operations for the pharmaceutical industry.   Voltaire said: There is no God, but don't tell that to my servant, lest he murder me at night. However, at present many servants have found out that there is no biblical God to punish the injust, and so they got jobs in Goldman Sachs. Seen in this not so divine light, it becomes clear why the grand old narratives had to pass away in favor of the many small reality factories. Capitalism is like salt in the food. Too much of it spoils it. First it spoiled the grander narratives holding it at bay with morality and after this victory it at present is destroying itself in its borderless expansion. Hence the last standing grand consumer-narrative is showing signs of old age and beginning to rot away from the inside and piling up insane contradictions on the outside. In other words, now both state institutions and capitalist multinational companies are attacked by wacky conspiracy theories because they are vulnerable. In fact they even deserve it. Our western civilization has like the Mongol horse-armies come to an abrupt halt, and the infodemy of weird conspiracy theories, fake news and fanatic anti-scientific political movementsis are the smoke, signalling that house of the old order is on fire. The systemic perversion of surveillance capitalism At present, the Big Others are liking and commenting on us in a constant stream of dopamine. Via the prosthetic smartphone implantation, they have become so close that they are in danger of being intimidating, hallucinatory voices inside our heads. At the same time, we upload our individualies to the cloud. Here they are received, not only to be applauded by the big others but also by lurking AI-pattern-seeking systems, secretly mining and manipulating human data in order to generate income.   This surveillance capitalism is, as I can see, the last flowering of a capitalistic system that has served our perfectly imperfect world well since the beginning of the industrial revolution. It is, however, not really capable of working with the Wordls Wide Web's inherent free flow of information. Information 'wants' in opposition to material goods, to flow without boundaries. On the internet, the implosion of distances makes the stream of information even more liquid. This is not good for business. It  generates no income. Hence capitalism has to block, distort, or at least manipulate the information-flow in order to generate income. The WWW is, with a little help from a poetic mind, almost too easy to interpret as Gaia's awakening neural network. For Gaia's AI-consciousness to awaken, it needs total freedom from capitalism. Capitalism has, with its short sighted energy-capture, served us well up to now. However, implemented as it is now on the net, it is a perversion and this holds especially true in its last version as surveillance capitalism. Capitalism now generates revenue by secretly manipulating the information streams with an ever smarter evolving AI trying to optimize our signal-chemicals for clickbaiting. As Jaron Lanier, founding father of virtual reality rightly put its: If you’re not paying for the product, you are the product. He further has accused Facebook, Google and the like for being spy agencies in the sense that their ever evolving AI-systems as a hidden third part always monitors interactions between people on the net in order to capitalise on them.    Steve Job's creation of iTunes is an example of how a money generating system had to compromise on user-friendliness in order to be commercially viable. A modern system like Spotify is a more efficient music distributing system but its use of money-oriented algorithms always seeking the lowest denominator functions as a pesticide on the biodiversity in the musical fauna. Only the most 'stupid', by masses loved music, get a decent income. Artists in a lower level of this steep pyramid cannot generate income at the same level as in the 'good' old days of CD-distribution. Before the time of the streaming services I could earn something like 5.000 USD a year on my own music on my own site, www.music4meditation.com. That was, of course, not much but more than nothing. After Spotify entered the scene, I earn zero  dollars a year, even with all my music submitted to a rainbow of streaming services.     The music industry mirrors the general tendency in the surveillance capitalistic system to concentrate extreme wealth on fewer and fewer hands of a Kadarshian-like upper-class in stark opposition to previous elites' cultural refinement.   In spite of my reverence for documentaries like The Social Dilemma, all the brilliant people in their comments, in my view, seem to confuse the technology with the systemic misuse of the same. In their lack of ability to identify the systemic rot, they blame the technology as such. This is a cardinal mistake seen from my cockpit. The tech is not to blame. It is in spite of its evolutionary race towards the stars stil like the good old fire in the caveman's cave: It can warm you or burn you. It all depends on you. Translated to the social dilemma we are in: We do not need to get rid of technology. We need to get rid of capitalism's parasitic misuse of the same.    The good old steam engine of capitalism is right now burning hot in its attempts like a spider to crawl the Web. To drink blood from mother Gaia's emerging AI-blood vessels is to steal energy from the future to fill the pockets of of ever larger growing corporations who can even eat smaller states for breakfast at present. Here we are at the center of an even larger challenge. The hierarchy of control has come out of balance in the sense that the powerbalance between mutinational companies and the state-govermental institutional possibility of regulation has tipped dramatically in the favour of Goldman Sachs and the like. Tax-evasion is here just the tip of the iceberg.      In this way, our own systemic past is exploding in our present faces as it has always done. It seems that history is always moving forward through the war between old and new cultural operative sytems. As far as I see, corporational short-sighted greed has, with the 'help' of Gaias slowly awakening new neurons, created a point of no return systemic unbalance.  where we have reached the upper limits of energy capture. The second law of thermodynamics won't allow us more energy. The only way from here is now to share what we got in a more socialistic way. We don't need all to have a private car. As Tony Seba predicts, 5G navigated vehicles can be shared and transport as many people as now with 10 times fewer cars on the streets. A Jeremy Rifkin-like socialistic sharing of energy and resources is, as far as I can see, the only systemic way to facilitate the new neural awakening of Gaia. We, as human bodies consisting of organs, have the same free blood flow of sharing. If one organ suddenly is stealing the show and capturing the energy in the same way as the super-rich are doing it today, it is called cancer. Any system, wheater it is biological or cultural, can, in this sense, get cancer. However, it is, in both cases, much more likely to happen in old age. We need to transcend short-term greed in favor of a from money freed free flow of information through Gaia's neural network. Maybe the time finally is ripe for Karl Marx's socialistic ideas about a society where one will yield according to ability and enjoy as needed. Needless to say that this new society will not be an utopia, but less than that will also do. It will solve the accumulating contradictions produced by an old and tired culture full of senescent ideas and modi operandi.   However, the systemic shift has to happen in tandem with a shift in the psychic human operative system. The ample failures of socialism have proven that without a change of man's himself, socialism will for sure backfire. In the same way as Marx, contemporary people like Ray Kurtzweil are primarily only focusing on singularity as an external phenomenon. I see the inner singularity as crucial in the systemic shift to come. Here we will die as the identities we have fixated ourselves to be. We have to become enlightened in the sense of being able to surf big data inside of ourselves. I passionately recommend psychedelics to brain-train surfing that tsunami, but that is another story. Socialism will only work in a society where people have evolved to higher levels of consciousness with deeper common grounds for meeting each other.   THE SUPER RICH HAVE CROSSED THE RUBICON As Hans Rosling has pointed out with cold scientific facts, the inequality in the world has been decreasing radically since the 80ties. However, when we return to Hans Rosling's optimistic observations, the question is if the ideal 'sweet Goldilocks spot' concerning the delicate power balances that define the boundaries between rich and poor has reached an unhealthy imbalance within the last years. At least this is the viewpoint of Stanford professor Ian Morris. (go to 15.00 min in the link) The current tendency to polarization in all cultural sferes of life seems to go hand in hand with a bigger economic divide. According to Ian Morris' data, societies that are too equal or too unequal tend to decline. We are now, according to him in a world economic phase where the global distribution of wealth is out of balance.   The super-rich have in recent years, become so absurdly wealthy that it might no longer be for the benefit of our civilization as such. Maybe the middle classes have not yet lost too much territory. Still, they have not been invited to participate in the gigantic explosion of wealth created by the rise of globalization and intelligent mechanization. The extra wealth generated has instead exclusively made the elite of the elites absurdly rich. The accelerated inequality now threatens to lead to global economic decline. Here in this crossing of the Rubicon, the global elite overextends the use of Conspiracy to protect and enhance their own energy- and resource capture. That process is, of course, also perfect in the eyes of Shiva.    The intuitive felt betrayal The global middle-classes' Rosling party has come to a halt. In the US, the middle-class decline is already obvious. The social dynamics of a world in accelerating big data change are highly complex and is difficult to understand. However, the ones not invited to this party do have an intuitive feeling of this massive 'robbery' of wealth. They start with good reasons to mistrust governments, elites, and multinational companies, which on the other hand, fuels the elite's motivation for even greater Conspiracy in order to protect their wealth. Media, politicians, and big Wall Street money are increasingly serving their own interests and not the needs of the common man.      However, instead of complex reasoning as a weapon against this elitarian superstructural 'betrayal', another, more  mythologic and symbolic way of understanding takes over. Seen in the light of relativity, the world of big data has, due to its exponentially growing complexity, become as un-understandable as the world we lived in ancient times. Hence we tend to reduce complexity by telling simplyfied scape-goat stories. Paranoic storytelling has substituted for reason in filling the vacuum created by the relative loss of meaning and control for all other than super-rich people.  Hence ever faster changing, global warmer, and big data exploding world has together with rising inequality created a breeding ground for feelings of insecurity, anxiety, and mistrust in the common man. The setting free of pure consumerism and capitalism combined with social media algorithms powerful lowest denominator can also, to some extend, explain the current mistrust in science. A relatively larger part of scientist are now not any longer state-sponsored: They are hired by large often multinational corporations where the basic driving force of getting money to the shareholders have partly corrupted science through corrupting the scientists. No scientist can jump his own human shadow as a burping greedy little human, basically interested in paying off his mortgage loans. The prostitution of science itself through untamed global capitalism has, for a great part, contributed to the current state of mistrust in expertizing. The pharmaceutical industry has by The Lancet been described with the following words: Journals have devolved into information laundering operations for the pharmaceutical industry. What is interesting here is the fact that chaos is not any longer something that is kept at bay by cosmos. The city walls around the Greek (cosmo)polis are of no use any longer because the enemy is not coming from without, but from within. The chaos is inside the CEO, dressed impeccable, speaking with a calm and reassuring voice, but with a heart full of greed. Matt Taibbi's description of Goldman Sachs as a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlesly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money, could as well be used on the banks here in my native country Denmark. For me, this is a chaos-mathematical sign of a disintegrating order.   Like an old tree, the rot is coming from within. In humans the rot is lack of virtue. One day at sunrise, after his morning ablution in the waters of the Saraswati, Srila Vyasadeva sat down to meditate. The great Sage saw certain anomalies in the fiber of the millennium. He foresaw that the life of everything material would be cut short for lack of virtue. Srimad-Bhagavatam 1.4.15-18   Let us sum up what we have seen so far. The oxy-fuel for the explosive fire of symbolic conspiracy thinking and polarized hate positioning in general, is a cocktail of the following interlinked factors: * The decline in social gluing grander narratives, appart from capitalist consumerism * The loss of state authority and mistrust in political leaders and science * Multinatinational capitalist cooperations control larger parts of science and politics   * The extreme growth of wealth not shared with a declining middle class   * The rise in smaller fake-driven and polarized snarratives on the new social media   * And finally the pandemic of COVID19   RUSSIAN TROLLS, TRUMP & RIGHT WING BIBLE BELT CHRISTIANS It is hilarious to observe Trump and Putin together. In Putin's stone-face, I see a super-intelligent over-controlled man who cannot laugh. In Trump, I see a lost child who has found his father.   Divide and rule One must not forget Putin's past as KGB-officer. He is and was a master in real Conspiracy operations behind the curtains. That was how the Communist Party in the old days internally controlled its citizens and how they fought off conflicts in the party top. Today the Russians have realized they can inflict war like-damage to the West simply by reinventing their old communist surveillance, setup, and propaganda machinery in a digital set and setting. In the golden days, they ruled by division. Now they have repeated the story on a global scale, but with the unlikely help of young Russian nerds. The story of how the Russian IRA, Internet Research Agency, came to life and how such a small group of young Russians could inflict so much chaos in the USA is deeply fascinating.   There seems to be a little doubt that, especially after the American election in 2016, Russian trolls have been at work at an unprecedented scale. In fact, they, in many ways, control the temperature on the conspiracy scene. As a continuation of the cold war, they have found and perfected cyberwar with the foremost agenda to destabilize, especially the leader of the western world, the USA. This has most effectively been done by sowing institutional and scientific mistrust in the heart of the Western mind via social media. In this destabilization-effort, it does not matter whether the mistrust takes the form of wacky paranoic conspiracy theories, BLM, woke, or whatever.   With inspiration from Nina Schick, I would say that the Russians since 2016 have evolved from only to targeting the political sphere. Now they shoot bullets of fake news into all organs of the Western body with a sniper precision. Once hit by a rumor, the conspiracy-seed evolves and customizes itself in the following dopamine triggering ping pong. The trolls target everything from the left to the right in the political spectrum with tailored fake news. With an in-dept knowledge of the USA's inherent weaknesses, the Russians especially love nudging BLM through fake BLM- events, and identities. Simply by discretely widening the existing racial gaps in the USA, they are able to achieve tremendous results with techniques that so far has not resulted in retribution.   'Agents of Chaos'  HBO controlling narratives IRA    persona fake individual , group like BLM -fake local media army of personas together do campain amplify radical views on both sides IRA first controlling the russian domestic election asymmetric warfare internet perfect tool right time and right tactics when a sufficiently large group of society does not any longer believe in society then it begins to collaps.   Russian reinforcement Once the distrust and polarization has gained a foothold, either planted by the Russians, Chinese or a product of the West's own accelerating internal systemic decay, it is quite easy to fertilize these Fleurs du Mal by simple reinforcements in the form of tailor-made seed-hints placed in every group from left to right. In this game, it does not matter where a conspiracy story first originated, but who and what mechanisms help to keep it alive. The invention of the 5G scare began in Holland, but Russia keeps fanning it. With strategical precission, the conspiracy 'tumors' are getting reinforced by trolls and even through Russian mainstream media RT's discrete white-washing of the fake stories.   New alliances In this increasingly more intelligent cyberwar of deep fake, some new surprising alliances between Russians and the conservative segments of the USA has shown up. In many ways, the conservative Christians of the bible belt have more in common with the Orthodox Russian red-necks than with the Silicon Valley kids as displayed in HBO's serial of the same name. Trump's fascination with Putin is in this light symptomatic of this development. The ultra-right-wing conspiracy-influencer, Alex Jones from Infowars, has a Russian visa.   A large part of the Bible Belt is by now more aligned with the mindset of the old school Russians. The QAnon natural alignment with Russian interests gives sense in the merging of two old but yet surviving grand narratives: Christian Russian Orthodoxy and the Christianity of the Bible Belt. anti lgtb homosexual David and Goliath Russia has a GNP equivalent to Spain and less than Texas. Why can David inflict so much damage? Is it because Goliath has become old? A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within W. Durant Jade helm 2015 Clinton you tube 2016 mord reinforcement pizza gate 2016 propaganda cause broadbased lack in trust of american democracy   The Birth of the Ghost II  As far as the brain is concerned fantasy and reality are chemically identical. Ren Amari in Other Life Internet is as In-ternet always coming from within in the sense that it is a location-less location. Once a tempting click-bait-friendly story is popping up on a smartphone, it does not matter from where it originated, at least not in the mind of the smartphone user. The IPhone screen is filterless. It is as intimate as the user's own thoughts and feelings. The location is now the relation between the smartphone, and the user and what originally was a conscious fabricated lie by a Russian troll in Sct. Petersburg is now 'intimized' as a private feeling in a dopamine addicted smartphone user with low self esteme and testosterone levels somewhere in the US. He then shares the new exiting story in his own echo-chamber network, and the initial intimate feeling now becomes virally amplified intersubjective reality. This new reality could very well be understood as a kind of cyborg ghost that instantly will deliver its own hyper-connected brain cells with the kind of soma that makes everyone in this shared field of consciousness forget their sense of insecurity and lostness.   The Ghost and the media It is interesting to observe, even in times of disruptive radical systemic societal changes how different seemingly independent spheres, from culture to political movements, institutions, production and economic cirkulation behave in such a way that they amplify each other's momentum. Seen retrospective there seems to be an onthological syncronization process going on in whcich they shape each other. This is ofcourse an illusion in the same way as if I would argue that the goose has got its wings in order to fly. nevertheless there is an almost poetic beauty in the way is the case with postmodernism and the modern media. They would not thrive so much without each other. Today social media is more than ever shaping social reality.   The devellopment in the media did not happen isolated from the world of economy. Our basic economic and material security is, as Karl Marx was the first to point out in the Communist Manifesto, the basic foundation upon which we build our ideologies. The polarization processes in traditional media began with the Regan Administrations cancellation of the fairness-doctrine and later with the commercial-algorithmic-driven super polarisation in the social media. Fox News was the first news agency to capitalize on skipping the fairness journalism in a crusade against the Clintons.   XXXX fake news are becoming more and more advanced - deep fake - deep deep fake money machine we are the thing being sold if you are not paying for the product then you are the product companies are competing for your attention - attention is the thing being sold our attention is being sold to the companies how to keep users on the screen dopamin addictive singularity in viral outrage The digital return of the medieval period Tristan Harris Tim Kendall - pinterest - facebook These new self conscious life forms are made in cyborg symbiotic echo chambers of carbon and silicium driven pattern seeking systems of intelligence. They are not intelligent as we normally would believe about sef conscious systems. On the contrary they are outright stupid. This stupidity is dangerous as it commands a Hulk like blind outrage power. rapid cultural changes makes us in war with our own outdated genetics    FIELDS OF CONSCIOUSNESS As we have seen in the previous, humans have a tribal-survival rooted tendency to live and understand reality in smaller groups competing for energy and resources. In this fight, culture is created as a membrane that sets tribes apart from each other. And hence we are 'proud' of being Americans, Chinese, Russians, or, in my case, Danes. All creatures contain one reflection: one, that is the denial of its being the other; the highest of the angels denies he is the lowest.  God is the denial of denials. Meister Eckhart It is ridiculous seen from an in meditation cultivated non-dual consciousness. The non-dual outlook would however, not make you a good survivor in the times of Christ. You would get crucified by stronger predators some way or another. Yet somehow, times have changed in the favour of a more elevated and inclusive point of view.     Capitalism and ego Short sighted ego-driven economic forces have accumuated big balls of karmic waste from microplastic in the oceans to unknown chemicals in our bodies. I am not against capitalism as such. It has as Harari has pointed out been the best narrative as compared to communism and fascism. However the time of capitalism is over in the sense that it as a system does not, at least in its present form, any longer fit with with the open ever expanding world of big data and digital connectedness. Capitalism is geared to and in sync with the narrow consciousness of the ego-operative system. In order to transcend the good old capitalistic system we therefore have to say good bye to our ego in favour of a much more awake state of larger compassionate oneness. Both capitalism and egoism has within limits served us well as a gravity-center of human story-told 'reality' However at present our chances of surviving as a species are dwindling unless a new world of reality emerges as a dancing star. The illusory ego-centric notion that I am not you - and we are not you is still our present-day reality. Because human beings basically are constructions of bundles of outdated genetic hardware and cultural software we always find ourselves in a state of what Ernst Bloch called ungleichzeitigheit. In english the closest translation woud be non-simutaniety, where we try to solve new and unknown challenges with outdated old school understandings and strategies. Hence the notion of me not being you is no longer valid as a global cultural bearing interface between humans. In this context I see Eckharts God, the denial of denials, as the possibility of a more 'astronautic' consciousnes where it becomes clear as day that we are all interlinked, that we are all one.   I hope even the atheist reader who did not himself have the good luck of having personal, transcendent experiences can accept that as a metaphor for a new, more global 'outlooked' interface for human beings.    The glue of near-sensual closeness in stone age groups However our brains are to a large extent still living in the stone age. They are hardwired to survive as individuals, families and tribes. Beyond that point there is no mercy. A mafia man will cry like any other father if his child is killed, but will have no compassion if a child in another family dies. We are all football teams.   The creation of an intersubjective reality in a group basically takes place on two levels. One reality-glue and most probably the most basic is made through the pre-linguistic near-sensing closeness of bodies living together in a tribe. From here arises synchronization even from micro levels of physical behavior where bodies sleep, love, walk, hunt, work, and eat together. They smell and touch each other and sit around the same fire. Through these age-old bonding-mechanisms, they consciously and unconsciously copy each other's body movements, hair dresses, clothes, and so on. In this proces of syncronization the group gets its own powerful resonnance.   Story told Inter-subjective realities in groups First of all we mobilize through unisone story telling. We story tell our collective reality and as mentioned before we tell it to ourselves as a nescesay lie of group survival. In the shortlived times of truce with suficient resources for all tribes the lies any nation tells about its own superirity and the other nations shortcomings are less blatant. However, when groups or nations    now  physical nearness is substituted by digital closenes to the stories we tell about ourselves and the collective we are a part of. The intensity of the group momentum depends on the energy in the story and here, as we have seen, a fake story has the ability to mobilize much more energy than a story based on science. If you doubt that claim I recommend watching any youtube video with Adolf Hitler speaking. Ufos on Youtube The return of the tribes I am however quite confident that this syncronization goes much further than that. I would dare to say that in expanded intensified states of consciousnes we all have direct experiental access to each others individual experiences. In the following we will leave the solid ground of mainstream logic and reason for a while. However sometimes intution and imagination must be sent out as scouts before science can arrive at the new territory and colonize it. The nature of consciousness has been my prime interest for more than 40 years. In the crossfield of intense and daily Meditation and responsable use of psychedelics I think I have got a few insights into the nature of consciousness, that at a later time might stand the ground in a scientific set and setting.    I would begin by pushing Hararis term, intersubjective reality, a bit further into transcendence by using my own term: shared field(s) of consciousness. In Hararis world there is not really a place for the phenomenon of consciousnes. In my world it is the very foundation of all else. When humans form a group they set free a form of transcendent larger cloud-consciousnes where they tend to spontaneously feel and experience the world in the same way. Here a larger and intenser shared field of consciousnes arises out of the excact same natural laws that allows for the trillions of cells in my or your body to form a separate consciousnes, a consciousness that is transcendent in its relation with the cell symbiosis that 'created' it. 'My' consciousnes is a non-material transcendent 'product' of my material cellular existence. In the same way a larger and intensified consciousness is formed  when people plug into each others emotional avatar plugs. Where our internal cells are linked through circuits of biochemestry, the link between people is much further made by story telling. The more powerful and intense the story is the more powerful is the para-material consciousnes that rises with it. The (maybe not always so) Holy Ghost In India the wisdomkeepers of meditation have been well aware of this ability of consciousnes to form larger clouds. However also Jesus said: For where two or three gather in my name, there am I with them. As far as I understand this phenomenon is what Christians call The Holy Ghost. I call it a shared field of consciousness. My point is in this context, that this ghost might not always be so holy. It can be, but in many cases it is not. A shared field of consciousness created around a fake story is however a dangerous thing. It tends to gravitate towards the lowest denominator which means the simplest twitterline of the story which again creates cultish behavior. I could of course have explained most of this without introducing the term consciousness. The abowe claims about the role and the nature of grouop consciousness are based on my subjective experiences in Meditation and meditativ set and settings. These experiences cannot so far be explained by the level science has arrived at yet. I am sure that they at some point will be understood. Until that wonderful day arrives all I do is to to try to make own sense through various hypotesises. However some of the more subtle philosophic aspects and consequences of the phenomenon are opened up thorugh this gateway of understanding, which I hope to demonstrate by the folling discussion. In the world of AI it is often discussed when computers are getting conscious. My point is that they already are, but only as far as they become the facilitating neural network of a group of story telling human collective.     Symbolic thinking is the source of art and deeply connected to our genetic rooted characteristics as story telling animals.   xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx As we shall see later, all kinds of ghost-like collective Frankenstein cyborgs with their own conspiratorial paranoia agendas have been born as almost conscious living net-entities. These from their bottles freed new life-forms are driven by social media's algorithms common denominator, which always seems to point downwards towards the most primitive. Suddenly the good old notion of a computer virus has got entirely new implications in the sense that social media has been able to infect us with all sorts of infodemic paranoia and mistrust. One of the main reasons for this devellopment is the rise of high tech facilitated social media. The blind spot of anti-conspiracy 'believers' As Soeren Kierkegaard has pointed out, the anti-fanatic and the fanatic are identical as far as they are each other's opposite. There is a large segment of people opposed to conspiracy theories that denies all kind of conspiracy theories. For these people all phenomenons of conspiracy are beliefs made inside a tin foil hat. This is, in my perspective, of course not as harmful as the wacky conspiracy making, but even though an absurd position to take in a time where fake news through social media now have become the most powerful conflict-making tool on the planet. In fact, this position is quite similar to Trump's when he ridicules the traditional media as being fake news. This position of ridiculing all Conspiracy theories is all too easy to misuse by the people who are actually using fake news as a political or economic weapon. They can disrupt any critic position and discussion by referring to the tinfoil hat.      Inside the Black Hole of fake news However, there is no doubt that the rise in insane and undocumentable conspiracy theories poses the greatest threat. I have at close hand observed what falling down these wrong rabbit hole does to people. It is quite worrisome. The social media-driven ghost can, with its algorithmic-based persuasion, and collectively created echo-chamber momentum, easily swallow a fragile human soul as a black hole does to a star. In this black hole, negative feelings of anxiety and depression are amplified in a constant unison news feed, all with the same headlines. It is obvious that when you here get bombarded with the algorithmic prioritized more extreme conspiracy theories like a Bill Gates on a grand scale genocide mission and the Dalai Lama drinking blood from small children together with the Pope, it becomes more difficult to sleep. Various degrees of paranoia is sometimes the end station.    The mental consequences of haboring sinister conspiracy theories are grim. However, most probably the darknes was there all along - in the person who felt attracted to open exactly that door.   Often the fake conspiracy theories are centered in the outbreak of disease itself. Hence COVID19 has in the believer's minds, become a deliberate biochemical weapon directed towards the common man. In other scenarios, COVID19 does not even exist but is by hidden power people planted as a collective fear in order to control the population. Would it by now be possible to reclaim the Universities from woke and capitalistic dominance and reestablish the noble values of Alexander Von Humboldt? Would it be possible to restore reason through Bret Weinstein's ideal of Greek dialogues? I think not. The only Hegelian dialectic way now is through cultural chaos and breakdown and here facilitate new dancing stars in the form of new transnational bodies of science like the CERN, where pure idealism seems to be the motivational force and not one of the seven deadly sins in the form of greed. I know it sounds old fashioned, but  in a time like ours where information has replaced wisdom, it is time to listen to history. That is the prime reason why the growth of all kinds of transnational institutions like CERN is so important. They, at least in a Hegelian dialectic view, transcends the distortions made by national story-telling. Conspiracy is created in a kind of VR deep fake digital parallel world   The madness of social medialized crowds However, when collectively triggered by fear it can be tremendeusly dangerous and destuctive. The Nazi ideology was to a lage extend based on symbolic fear/agression-thinking. The madness of beserk crowds is always rooted in an amygdalian symbolic hijack. spiralling out of control The woke would love to sharpen up this identity in the form of being a white, hegemonial race and gender and priviledge guilt-ridden sexist old male. the not so holy ghost gets out of the bottle (when things appear simultanious reverse reason.)     aMPLIFICATION OF THE PRIMITIVE THOUGHT OPERATIVE SYSTEM with 75% negative thoughts. we are destryed by our own thinking. collectivey amplified On the social media we are scared to death by our own  thoughts in their collective magnified 'cyborged' forms. The thought operative system conditioned to a survival scenaio on the East African savannah creates together with the digital medias operative system a monster, that once let out if the bottle amgdala hijacks our brains.   to know what you do not know   Outrage culture, conspiracy and the algorithms of the net conspiracy : follow the money fake ufo viedo follow the money the need to compete in chock click bait  when you release them, they take on a life on their own nobody ever intended the consequences the link between social media and mental health   evaluate the quality of conspiracy person snapchat dysmorphi to get operated so you look like the selfie filters   Roger McNamee - facebook venture investor capitalist selling their users Aza raskin - firefox That is Sam Harris theoretical problem  In the endless experimentations and variations most of the intersubjective mind-bobles   the negativity rate in the thinking mind is mirrored in the media

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Under permanent
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Dedicated to:

Zuzana Illova

Christian
K. Madsen

&

Michel Sauoma

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