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​I want to share some changes with you, and also ask for your sense of what I’m noticing – a boulder in the middle of the path. 

That boulder in the middle of the path has different sides but it’s symbolized by the Great Reset. Have you heard of it? The Great Reset is the 4th Industrial Revolution, what Klaus Schwab, head of the World Economic Forum calls “a fusion of physical, digital and biological identities.” Vaccine passports hint at the fusion and may be a precursor of what a fuller rollout looks like. A coming social credit system, already well along in China, has permissions granted for what we used to take for granted, based on compliance to state, commercial and banking recommendations. Control extends to “virtually” all parts of life. I won’t be going into it here as my focus is on how it impacts the inner and consciousness work we’re interested in. (The person who explains this most clearly for me is Alison McDowell. A great example is here, starting at the eight minute mark.)

My sense is that the powers-that-be are set firmly on the Great Reset and that it’s not so much a future as a present thing. But how do we put its agenda together with our own? How do we show up in our own lives, for the Reset.

I don’t know if they can accomplish the Great Reset but one thing seems certain: This fusion is the stated plan of many of the world’s most wealthy, powerful and networked (in a business sense) people. I take what they say seriously. Covid, masking, lockdowns, vaccine passports, the war in Ukraine too could very well be connected to this stated agenda too as many people who’ve risked their lives work and livelihoods to speak up have said. A Central Bank Digital Currency is on the way that it will render cash obsolete and make access to funds dependent on compliance to what corporate, bank and government interests think is good for you.  This influences  our ability to determine what’s good for ourselves and our family and to speak freely without fear of punishment.

So this is the boulder in the middle of the path, as I see it. But here’s where it gets interesting.

The two worlds of consciousness and inner work (on the one hand) and the deepening of global control on the other, don’t talk to each other. They are two solitudes and not in the popular consciousness of the spiritual community. On the Integral Forum, for example – Integral Philosophy is a sophisticated, widespread and useful map based on levels of consciousness – I found it hard to find mention of the Reset. It’s largely outside of the spiritual Overton window of what we can politely speak about.

Is that true? Am I missing something here? I’d much benefit from your perspective and contribution here.

There’s lot that can be done. One we name something and face it we find a truer relationship to it. We know from group work that when different perspectives are held in consciousness, a collective intelligence starts to form that’s greater than the sum of the parts. Shift and transformation happen when all the parts are in the room, and when we are. 

How is the Great Reset showing up for you? I’d love to hear your thoughts and feelings on this.

I’m interested in spiritual perspectives and solutions to what’s happening in the world. I’m also interested in what’s going on out there on the ground. It can seem as if these two worlds exist independently of each other. To use a very Canadian expression, one drawn from a long-ago book by Hugh MacLennan about the French and English in Canada, they’re two solitudes.

I’ll share what I’m seeing and sensing, for better or for worse, trusting that it’ll be in service to bridging two very different modes of understanding. Assume it’s “as Andrew sees it today.” It’s not the truth and not the final word but a foray into a challenging area. We don’t talk about it much, perhaps sensing how contentious it is and how much trouble we can get into.

I acknowledge that there are two sides. I also think that this is a psychological operation, a battle for the definition of what’s real and true today. You must make up your own mind

It seems to me that what’s been happening over the last few weeks in Canada (where I live) isn’t primarily about Canada. It’s about the globalist and transhumanist agenda of the World Economic Forum (WEF) and the Great Reset to completely transform every aspect of life by 2030. Canada is a front line player in this agenda, an agenda which is being rolled out with slightly different timelines and agendas everywhere. Everywhere implies that the rollout is spatially located but that’s not true. It’s rolling out in the invisible world of cyberspace control and world collaboration in every sphere. Governments, technocratic corporations, banks, legacy media and more are part of this trust. The anger and mistrust in Canada is a response to this. The mandates and lockdowns in Australia, disrupting entire populations where there are almost no cases, is another front-line example of the same rollout. But as I see it, everyone everywhere is part of it.  

What we see happening in Canada are mostly downstream effects of something happening upstream. We’re like people building on a riverbank when a great flood is surging down the river. Goodwill, earnestness and prayers will not help those who misidentify the problem for a long time.

I appreciate independent researcher Alison McDowell who connects many of the dots for me. She connects the larger agenda of the WEF with the earlier subjugation of the indigenous peoples of the Americas. As it was for them, our local economies and livelihoods are being brought to heel in order to being a free people into subjugation and dependency. Promises are made and not kept as a way of bringing the populace to powerlessness and, effectively, slavery. Now. we too are being herded into the loss of our ways of livelihoods. We too receive compliance rewards for agreeing to the diminution of our freedom and punishment for calling it out and resisting. This process is only beginning.

From this perspective we’re pretty much helpless without recognizing the extent of the problem. As has been pointed out in the spiritual literature, a first step in liberation is in realizing that one is in chains – asleep. The effect of the plan of the WEF and the Great Reset, is an end run around democracy and its pillars – the constitutions and bills of rights, free and informed press and more.

Why is this happening in Canada? Perhaps because the truckers stepped up. Perhaps Canadians’s agreeableness may be mistaken for weakness. Another factor may be the fact that many prominent members of the Canadian government are graduates of the WEF’s young global leader’s program. These include two party leaders (Trudeau and Jagmeet Singh) as well as multiple high-ranking members of Trudean’s government. These include Chrystia Freeland (Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance), Karina Gould (Minister of Families, Children and Social Development), Francois-Philippe Champagne (Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry), Ailish Campbell (Ambassador to the EU), Elissa Goldberg (Assistant Deputy Minister for Strategic Policy), Renee Maria Tremblay. (Senior Counsel, Supreme Court of Canada).  Merkel, Macron and Putin are also all graduates of the young global leaders program.

The agenda of the WEF implies all the measures we’re seeing now. The cheery catchphrase, “You will own nothing and you will be happy,” says it nicely.  

This agenda is also an assault on the church and the people’s reliance on the almighty. The Great Reset is an attempt to replace an individual reliance on God with a group reliance on state control through technology. The direction is toward one blockchain to control them all.  

What just happened in Canada is a skirmish in a much larger fight for freedom from a future of forced social compliance. As I see it, the push toward compliance will come in wave after wave. The end of one will mean that another will be along almost immediately. We will continually think we’ve gotten to the bottom of it only to find that that wasn’t the bottom. Naivete is dangerous and could be catastrophic.

From this perspective, the direction will include waking up from our assumption that the system has our best interests at heart. It’ll look like turning toward each other, deepening friendships, telling the truth, persevering, risking showing up in community. All things we’re not very used to doing. It’ll mean closer and trusting relationships with others, especially locally. Online connections will be important because relatively few people see what’s coming and allies will often be far away. All these directions are at odds with conventional life in our communities so we’ll be inclined to stay silent. The risks of looking foolish or vulnerable for speaking to it can be profound.

But what do you think, good reader? Your feedback is gold. It helps others make up their own minds about what they think and feel. It’ll help me know where you”re at and be reflected in future groups and ongoing explorations. I’ll have much more to say about it myself.

The trucker’s protest near where I live in is a tremendously powerful force for change. Jonathan Pageau, an excellent youtuber writing on “The Symbolic World,” compared it to the siege of Jericho where “the walls came tumbing down,” as the song has it. The energy is excited, quite clear and part of what we need. I say this to preface what I’d written on protest a few weeks ago, which I’ll share here . . .

I like this from writer and farmer, Wendell Berry. Protest that endures is moved by a hope far more modest than that of public success: namely, the hope of preserving qualities in one’s own heart and spirit that would be destroyed by acquiescence.

I love the question and I want to respond to it.

 but I’d like to up the ante on it or at least ask something else first!

What are those qualities of heart and mind that would be destroyed by acquiescence? If we’re to preserve them we must first know what they are. As it is, we are by no means certain to know because we ourselves are changing. All the ways we would measure and know who we are have shifted and are shifting further.

This change in identity has been going on for a long time, but now faster and faster. It’s hard to overstate how profound the changes are. For a very long time, our sense of agency and community belonging has failed to keep up with the rate of change so we’re likely feeling behind. We’ve been uprooted.

We might trace this movement back to the enclosures in the British Isles as, beginning in the sixteenth century, public lands were moved over into private ownership, thoroughly uprooting large numbers of people in large parts of the country. More recently and just a couple of generations ago we might have been part of an intact faith community and shared other cultural and communal values with our neighbors. That’s no longer the case. Nor is it the case that that the social cohesion is easy to make up psychologically or even spiritually. The result is unprecedented levels of psychological ennui that affects individuals and makes its way into all the institutions of society.

Everyone from the priest in his chapel to the owner of the bowling alley feels it. And how does it look, this ennui?   

From the inside a great number of us feel caught in an isolating personal performance as we try and look like we’re succeeding enough to get by with all this uprooting. We try and save face by acting normal. I tried to do this passing for normal a lot. I can only say that failing at performance as a way of life is better than succeeding at it because at least, knowing we’re in chains, can keep us alive to the possibility of waking up. And there is such a possibility.

People caught in an isolating personal performance don’t know where to start deal with a concern that is ill-defined or even invisible. We may just feel the effects. Everything goes topsy-turvy in that world and feels off balance. We may lack trust and find  “the other” starts to look like an enemy. We may ally with people on the basis of crude symbols and slogans that are easily manipulated by markets and governments. Social media tempts us into belonging to causes and perspectives we’re not sure what to feel about.

So back to the original question, how do we discover what the qualities are we want to maintain. And  how do we actually maintain them? There aren’t easy answers. Not now and not ever. These are the important questions that people trying to wake up – not to mention philosophers – have always wrestled with.

The answers aren’t a concept because mere concepts, unless taken fully to heart and lived aren’t very valuable. Think Facebook slogans.

Any answer is a work in progress, a response from now. I want to say what interests me about this because I don’t hear it often. As I see it we work with others on the things that we know in our heart of hearts we run away from and distract ourselves from. We work with others on this, the more committed and taken seriously the better. We take these questions to heart as if our lives depended on them because in a real sense they do. Avoiding the challenges always set us up to get involved in more trouble, not less, because this is a time of change and what’s in our heart needs to be part of that change. We take note of the tendencies we inherited and gathered from our families of origin, because though these may be unseen and invisible – they usually are – they remain incredibly influential. We take the things we hide and run from and bring them to consciousness and to our peers to work with. As we do that, perhaps we find our role in the public story that’s around us.

As I see it, those are ways we can move toward protest that endures, one that brings what’s most important to us into it.

(Part 1 of 2)

When you don’t speak out it’s a millstone around your neck. It plugs into a sense of shame and unworthiness, the feeling that your voice isn’t worthy of being heard. From there it’s just a hop away to the sense that “my experience doesn’t matter.” And that’s almost the same as “I don’t matter.”

We evolved in tribes and deeply want to be connected to the tribe or group. We want to contribute to it and we want our voice to be heard.

But there’s a definite risk to doing so: The tribe has a consciousness of its own and that consciousness doesn’t tolerate non-conformity because it threatens the cohesiveness of the tribe. The tribe doesn’t know what to do with it.

I think this is a fundamental human problem: How do we fit our unique I into the collective We?

Or perhaps I need to say it’s a fundamental problem for me. This is the question that fascinates and drives me personally. I think it’s key to our evolutionary survival. The tribe needs individual gifts to make it’s way through our multi-faceted emerging crisis.

But often the gifts are held back because of what I’m pointing to.

The tribes we belong to, including family, work and spiritual communities, put invisible pressure on us to behave, think and feel in a way the tribe approves of. Members conform to this pressure invisibly and seamlessly out of love and loyalty to the group members. It’s what being a group member is.

Trouble is, this out-of-consciousness conformity to group norms creates a conflict with the depth of the self. Now the “I” must suppress its own knowing so as to not jeopardize its good standing in the group. It gets drawn toward the who-am-I-to-say-this “shame” side of the shame-gift continuum. As I see it, this dynamic is more or less always in operation..

The I and the We are in a dynamic tension. They struggle to make room for each other but they’re not sure they can afford it. This is stressful because the stakes are high. The risk is potential exclusion for the individual, which in the long history of the tribe has often meant death. On the other hand the tribe is threatened by deep change and wants to close it’s ranks against the truly new. Usually neither the tribe nor the individual know that it’s through this dynamic tension that new things come into being.

Oy vey!

How do we work with that?

Basically in a “conscious group,” which I define as one one that names this unconscious problem and makes a light-hearted welcome for the tension that’s there.

I’ll share Part 2, thoughts on the “conscious group” in a few days.

In the meantime I’d love if you share any thoughts or comments on the blog. I love when you write me personally but I’d prefer to see more conversation within the tribe, rather than privately. That said, feel free to write!

Summary:

• Although we’re responsible for our health, in a dangerous time there’s a powerful pressure to hand it to the state.
• The state can’t take care of us.
• State control isn’t at an end. It may hardly be at a beginning.
• The way forward is based on a psychological / spiritual capacity that is outside of this closed-loop control system.

Is any of this true? Let’s look at it!

Who’s the boss?

Who’s responsible for making decisions that govern our health? Traditionally it’s the individual, little old us.  Who else could make the critical decisions that determine our physical and psychological well-being and future?  

The answer would seem obvious on the surface but it’s not nearly so simple. The political and medical authorities, first for a couple of weeks and now indefinitely want to take care of it for us.

This is dangerous from a psychological point of view. If we’re not responsible for our life and health, then we’re expecting someone else to do that for us. Psychologically we’re in the child’s position. The child is still hoping, hoping against hope, that the parents will take care of her even as she drifts into adulthood and even elderhood.

This didn’t come out of the blue.

Over the last several generations we in the west have been encouraged to avoid this self-responsibility in many areas, none more than health. Jesuit social commentator Ivan Illich was one of the first to point to it in the early 70s in his book Medical Nemesis. He praised the amazing advances in medicine in the early 20th century but claimed that medicine would in the future cost more lives than it would save. Around the time of the writing he revised this to say his future prediction had already happened.  

The problem he saw was that the view of health as an individual responsibility was being supplanted by medical statistics and mass data. The body and it’s care was given over to experts under the guise of risk estimates and statistics.

Many other factors (post-modernism, neo-Marxism, rising identity politics among them) have contributed to “the long slow march through the institutions” and a world in which individual responsibility has taken second place to group power. One example was a growing trust in insurance companies who more and more were trusted with determining what was “safe” and what wasn’t. Preoccupation with safety rather than risk or challenge or self-responsibility became a widespread social norm: If the insurance company mightn’t insure the school bus on a given snowy day, the bus didn’t run.We live in a culture based on prioritizing safety and comfort rather than meeting risk and challenge.

But it’s worse than that!

Sure this psychological immaturity is unhealthy in itself. But it’s downright dangerous if the nanny state, the “parents,” have become tyrannical. And this is where I think we are now.

The sentence below from a video from distinguished professor and psychotherapist Franz Rupert rang true for me very early in the Covid scare.

“The orthodox medical system, with all its ramifications – ministries, offices, universities, doctors, medical industry, all of that – is like a traumatized mother who imposes her trauma survival strategies, her false and unilateral ideas about disease and health onto her children, and makes them the objects of her survival strategies.”

He’s claiming that the medical establishment and by extension the state is out of control and has lost its way when it comes to Covid. Not only does the medical system claim for itself the health responsibility that belongs to the citizen, it blatantly censors competing views and punishes dissent. Ruppert’s video and countless others have been censored. All of us who don’t comply with the prevailing narrative risk exclusion and non-belonging. We risk being next.

The citizenry however has been well-conditioned to not see this, to accept increasing control and not push back. It’s understandable. If Joe Citizen has lived as an adult psychologically dependent on mother or parents, both in his own life and with respect to the state, he won’t want to risk losing that imaginary protection. Going along with creeping or galloping social control will feel safer to him than speaking up or pushing back – even if it’s not. At least it pushes the problem down the road.

So that’s the bad news. But there’s another side to it too- there always is – and that other side IS up to us. Counterintuiive and hidden, it has to do with reclaiming our own voice, our willingness and capacity to speak up for ourselves and each other.

It’s that taking back responsibility. It’s not easy but it’s the best game in town. I’ll speak to it soon!

In the meantime, I’d love to know what you’re seeing with any of this? Is social control this bad or better or worse? What are you seeing and sensing about Covid, or the lockdowns and the way forward? Please take a moment to leave a comment and share what’s alive for you.

It helps me when you share this post with friends who might like it.

All the best, Andrew