Opportunity

Once every so many purple moons I manage to get off a fairly decent article. I can already tell this won't be one of them. The reason is simple: Like the rest of the non market-gambler, nonpolitico, nonbureaucrat nation, I have been slammed back into the psychedelic, but oh-so-unavoidable, "real" world. The reason of course being the current state of our would-be democracy* as it has been played on Wall Street. The attack on our system of finance and how it is impacting all of us is bad enough, the calls of "Deus ex Machina!" easily eclipsing the worst Greek tragedies, those many plays that were spared the ravages of time by dieing a quick death on opening night. I guess we'll call that free market theater. I marvel at the Milton Freedman's of this world (may J.P. Morgan rest his soul,) those clever avant-capitalists who vociferously championed the virtues of unregulated capitalism, the same lot who ran to Arch Angel Hank as soon as they realized Financial Armageddon was at hand. In other words, leave us alone to rip off anyone we choose, but when we stand to lose, save us, and to add soy sauce to the wound, save us with more Chinese debt obligations extorted from the very people whom we ripped off in the first place. What was that again about letting the market sort out the winners and losers?

[*We talk the talk, but we have never walked the walk; the US is a republic, our constitution an economic document, not a political document.]

What I am concerned about even more than this, is the very serious attack on individual freedoms quietly underway in this country, but that few are paying attention to due to the dramatic diversionary effect of the Stacked Market, an effective military tactic if ever I've seen one. But you can relax, this is not about politics and I would never presume to tell anyone who to vote for anyway.

What this article is about is opportunity. Opportunity and choice. For some time now I have been whining about how we need to come together in groups to focus on achieving balance in Human Race Consciousness. I hope to make a case for that here.

What I can't help but think about lately is how the highly evolved and morally equitable (to some, anyway) current monetary system of the United States has suffered innumerable heart attacks all through the life of the nation, some more notable than others: the Heart Attack of '07 a true Hall of Famer. That would be 1907. This one gave enough cause (fear) to bring about the Immaculate Birth of the Federal Reserve in 1913, an economic coup I'm sure inspired more by Oz in the Wizard of Oz than in the communal lifestyle of those first Christians of the New Testament. And who can forget Black Tuesday, bringer of the fabled Crash of '29 that launched a decade-long fight between Hardened Capitalists and their Enemy Socialists of the New Deal. Where the Great Depression (Great? See how we've been conditioned to think?) was a national referendum on those two economic systems, the outcome little more than a temporary compromise, which was finally eliminated by Arch Angel Ronnie, I can't help but think the black hole we're currently being sucked into will be a referendum on nothing, rather it will be the final chapter in the Great American Experiment: It will be interesting to see if there actually is an inauguration next January.

So, getting back to choice and opportunity, what could I possibly mean by that given the current State of the Union? I make an assumption when I write this, which is; I am writing to people who put considerable effort into raising their own consciousness, who are quite serious about their Spiritual Side, who truly understand this idea of mitakuye oyasin (we are all related) and nto' tem, (my kin,) that we are all One. Some say that the reasonable person will acquiesce to compromise when confronted with the positions of an unreasonable person, in the vain hope both parties can be served. But the unreasonable person will press on until she/he has completely dominated the situation: Unreasonable people, by definition, do not compromise. Nor do they give up. And so, the world is run by unreasonable people, the most unreasonable rising to the top.

One of the well-ignored accomplishments of traditional Native American societies is that they made decisions based on consensus. Not by majority rule, not by compromise, not by dictatorial mandate, and not by secret cabal. By consensus. Another major distinction, openly attacked by early Euros, was this crazy idea that the land "owned" the people, that one could not own the land any more than one could own the sky. Which, by the way, modern American legal theory has managed to overcome. At first I bristled when the Supreme Court ruled in favor of municipalities using the principle of eminent domain to raise their tax base, or to eliminate "blighted" neighborhoods. Then it hit me; we were doing the same thing to ourselves that we did to the Indians. I had to laugh.

What we are seeing today, in my humble and admittedly limited view, is the full expression of a Human Race Consciousness that is seriously out of balance. Further, I am not at all convinced that we, as a species, have ever been in balance, romantic Polynesian fantasies notwithstanding. The more I learn, the more I think about it, the more I meditate and get answers from Spirit on it, I tend toward the idea we are on a Search and Embrace mission. Even those people we would characterize as unreasonable.

I recently gave a test presentation of the Group Medicine Wheel workshop. The bottom-line purpose of doing group wheels is to discover what we have been ignorant of, or passing over, on any of the issues the group would take up. Is there an emotional aspect to the Stacked Market, for instance? And I'm not talking about the adrenaline rush of that daily roller coaster ride so many players are addicted to. Is there some physical aspect of religion we are unaware of? The propositions and answers we might pose to and get from a group wheel, respectively, are bound up in assumption and language. You'll notice, for instance, I phrased these two questions answerable with a simple yes or no. They should be phrased as, "What is the deep emotional aspect of...," or "What are the physical ramifications of...?" Too many of today's questions are seriously hampered with assumptions. The purpose of Group Wheels is to shatter those assumptions, deconstruct the proposition put to the Wheel, and consider it in light of the four main human aspects; physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual.

Political activism is good, I suppose. Though hazardous. The first hazard is the entrenching of one's position. The second is the illusion that after the election, our job is done, now it's up to the politicians and their new army of unelected officials, many of whom enjoy considerable power spirited away from the unwashed masses. Our electoral college is just one example of how power is high-jacked from the voter, even before the first ballot chad is not properly punched. Stalin had it right. It doesn't matter who votes. It only matters who counts the votes. (A little research on DieBold might be in order here.) Consider the election of 2000. If you were Republican, your vote counted as 1.0000 votes. If you were Democrat, your vote counted as .9893 votes. Looks like the same mathematicians and physicists who thought up the calculus for all those winning derivatives were on the job long before the rest of us realized it.

I would lay out just one more idea before drawing my conclusion. People who pursue spiritual growth tend to believe prayer, personal actions, meditation, spiritually focused ceremony, and visualization can, and do, bring about change. That engaging any of these helps set up the conditions that bring about change, even where we cannot figure out how to do it on our own. In fact, that's when most of us get real prayerful, when we're faced with something we haven't got a clue how to fix. I expect there's a good bit of praying going on right now.

The sad fact is neither presidential candidate has asked any of the "right" questions; why do private investors own our money supply and system in the first place, why do we still use the electoral college, when are we ever going to become a true democracy with proportional representation and one vote per consumer (we are no longer citizens, sorry), why has nobody pursued 911 as the inside job it is, why are we ensuring the wealth of literal, not virtual, crooks, why are we really in Iraq and for whose benefit, and on and on and on. It is because of this I have such little enthusiasm for either candidate. Once again, I will likely vote for the lesser of two evils, which is getting really old. But this is precisely why we need now more than ever to step up working in the spirit realms. After all, if we claim to believe in the things we do, in the power of prayer and ceremony, in the synergistic power of a group working together, then it seems to me we should be pursuing this path above, or at least in addition to, all others. Especially after the polls close.

The opportunity is here, now. We all know about the Chinese symbol for danger and opportunity being the same for both. That is because inside every dangerous situation there is tremendous opportunity for change. And unless you have the capacity to go to New York City and buy a ticket big enough to make a real difference, not just anticipate another windfall profit (sorry, Mr. Buffet) I would argue the best place to deal with these issues is in that one place where the playing field truly is level, the spirit world.