{"id":1114625,"date":"2023-07-02T02:31:49","date_gmt":"2023-07-02T02:31:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/caitlinjohnstone.com\/?p=13083"},"modified":"2023-07-02T02:31:49","modified_gmt":"2023-07-02T02:31:49","slug":"fifteen-useful-facts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2023\/07\/02\/fifteen-useful-facts\/","title":{"rendered":"Fifteen Useful Facts"},"content":{"rendered":"Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):<\/em><\/a><\/p> <\/iframe><\/div><\/div> <\/figure>\u2756<\/p>1<\/strong>. It\u2019s easier to understand what\u2019s going on in the world when you mentally \u201cmute\u201d people\u2019s narratives about what\u2019s going on and just look at the material movements of wealth, resources, weapons, and people. That\u2019s how you separate what\u2019s real from the manipulations and empty narrative fluff, how you see who\u2019s doing the taking and hoarding, and how you figure out who the real aggressors are in international conflicts.<\/p>2<\/strong>. The three most overlooked and under-appreciated aspects of the human experience are consciousness, the extent to which conditioned thought patterns dictate our lives, and the influence of propaganda.<\/p>3<\/strong>. We live in a civilization that\u2019s so pervasively steeped in lies and manipulations that the only way to have a truth-based relationship with reality is to drop all your assumptions and premises about what\u2019s true and begin examining everything from the very beginning with fresh eyes.<\/p>4<\/strong>. The phenomenon known as spiritual enlightenment is a real thing which we are all capable of realizing, and the fact that this potential exists within our species has many far-reaching implications for what we are capable of attaining as a civilization.<\/p>5<\/strong>. Everything is beautiful. Not seeing the beauty in something is always the failure of the perceiver, not the thing being perceived.<\/p>6<\/strong>. Happiness is the natural default position of human consciousness. It\u2019s only through egoic delusions that we trick ourselves into unhappiness.<\/p>7<\/strong>. There are strange untapped potentials within our species which our philosophies don\u2019t touch on, our religions don\u2019t anticipate, our academia doesn\u2019t acknowledge, and our common worldviews don\u2019t account for.<\/p>8<\/strong>. Reality is nondual. There\u2019s no real separation between the perceiver and that which is perceived, or between any of the objects in sense perception. All is indivisible.<\/p>9<\/strong>. The self is an illusion held together by believed mental narratives and fear-based energetic fixations. This illusion can be seen through and transcended.<\/p>10<\/strong>. It\u2019s possible for two people to keep falling more and more deeply in love with each other for their entire lives, as long as they\u2019re both intensely curious about each other and both keep growing and discovering new parts of themselves to love.<\/p>11<\/strong>. The feeling of guilt is useless and can safely be dropped entirely. The only people who might benefit from feeling some guilt are the sociopaths and psychopaths among us who never experience it anyway. For those among us with healthy empathy centers, guilt is unnecessary to motivate good behavior and often becomes a tool that manipulators use to control us.<\/p>12<\/strong>. Antisocial personality disorder, more commonly known as sociopathy and psychopathy, is one of the greatest obstacles to human thriving. That there really are creatures among us who don\u2019t think or feel like the rest of us do and frequently use their lack of empathy to climb the ladders of wealth and power sounds made up (and even sounds like the basis of many racist belief systems), but it is a fact. Not until our species becomes so emotionally intelligent and awake that sociopaths and psychopaths are unable to thrive in it or go unseen will this problem disappear.<\/p>13<\/strong>. You can recognize sociopaths, psychopaths, and other narcissists in your life by paying attention to how much energy they pour into convincing you to believe stories about others, about themselves, and especially about you. Someone who often spends energy trying to get you to believe negative things about yourself is someone you should get out of your life as quickly as possible.<\/p>14<\/strong>. There really is a struggle in our world between light and darkness, though it doesn\u2019t look how the movies tell us to expect it. Those in power seek to keep their dark deeds hidden in darkness by maintaining government secrecy, propaganda and censorship. The manipulators in our own lives seek to keep their manipulations and misdeeds hidden in the same way. Even within our own personal psychology there are dysfunctional structures which seek to remain hidden in the unconscious. Humanity\u2019s struggle is to bring that all into the light.<\/p>15<\/strong>. A sincere devotion to knowing the truth is the path toward happiness, health and harmony, for humans as individuals and for humanity as a collective. Knowing what\u2019s true about ourselves uncovers our inner dysfunctionality and leads to healing and enlightenment. Knowing what\u2019s true about our world leads to an understanding of the abusive nature of our power structures and societal systems. Continually striving toward the light of truth will bring us all home.<\/p>___________<\/p>All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. My work is\u00a0<\/em>entirely reader-supported<\/em><\/a>, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, throwing some money into my tip jar on\u00a0<\/em>Patreon<\/em><\/a>,\u00a0<\/em>Paypal<\/em><\/a>, or\u00a0<\/em>Substack<\/em><\/a>, buying an issue of my\u00a0<\/em>monthly zine<\/em><\/a>, and following me on\u00a0<\/em>Facebook<\/em><\/a>,\u00a0<\/em>Twitter<\/em><\/a>,\u00a0<\/em>Soundcloud<\/em><\/a>\u00a0or\u00a0<\/em>YouTube<\/em><\/a>. If you want to read more you can\u00a0<\/em>buy my books<\/em><\/a>. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list\u00a0<\/em>on Substack<\/em><\/a>, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I\u2019m trying to do with this platform,\u00a0<\/em>click here<\/em><\/a>. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.<\/em><\/p> <\/picture><\/div> <\/figure>Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2<\/p> \n

This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley): \u2756 1. It\u2019s easier to understand what\u2019s going on in the world when you mentally \u201cmute\u201d people\u2019s narratives about what\u2019s going on and just look at the material movements of wealth, resources, weapons, and [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":557,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1775,7905,1790,461,1865,583],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1114625"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/557"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1114625"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1114625\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1114627,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1114625\/revisions\/1114627"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1114625"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1114625"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1114625"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}