We Are The Shadow

"The culture as a whole and most of its members are insane. The culture is driven by a death urge, an urge to destroy life"

Dear Derrick Jensen. Premise Ten is my absolute favourite.

The moment that the eyes of your spirit start to open -or, to put it another way, the moment Ajna awakens in your energy body - you start to become aware that culture is not your friend.

I am disengaging daily from this culture: this toxic mimic of what it is to be alive in a living system, this Wetiko charade that passes for life at this time in this place.

And yet - I am not unhappy. I support Anarchists all over the globe, those who have felt the rage of trying to be a human animal within a decidedly inhuman system, those whose only answer is to fight back, to try to smash the machine, to monkeywrench the systems of control. I understand their pure anger.

But I don't see myself out in the streets in black hoodie wielding a half brick excoriating the pigs and agitating to be locked up - does this make me a hypocrite? From some perspectives, maybe.

But from where I sit, detached to a large degree from the social norms and societal urges, I can see what's maybe only obvious to someone like me, hanging out on the edges of the system. That is, it is all our Stuff.

Every mind-warping atrocity, every dazzling act of Grace. Each gulp of swallowed bile and every moment of transcendental ecstasy - all Us, all Ours.

The blinding light is the fact that we All - rocks, humans, sparrows, coltsfoot, spin-up quarks, colossal regions of inter-galactic dark matter, PitBulls and quartz crystals - are responsible for All This. It is our Making and Shaping, our Creation , whether of Frankensteinian provenance or Angelic manufacture... all, All Ours.

And it's maybe time we woke up a little more to this fact. That there's no sinister human-hating force controlling the world from Davos; no subterranean culture lords rubbing their secret hands in glee at the next bit of greedy perfidy launched upon an ailing world- or if there is, they're Us.
McKenna again: "The real truth that dare not speak itself is that no one is in control, absolutely no one..."

No One but Us, that is. And we need to own up to that.

Last word I leave to Neil Kramer - that somewhat mad, wholly authentic, English gentleman of words:
"The antidote to the poisonous odium is to fundamentally acknowledge that we are the shadow. No-one else is to blame. The responsibility lies with us. With you."