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The phenomenal luxury and ease which materialism affords intrinsically incite the ego to take over the individual consciousness. The better off you are, the more you have, the harder it is to let go. Harder, that is for the ego to let go. The trap of ego is built into the materialist system and is part and parcel of the mechanism of the second great economic revolution of humanity, the industrialization of the planet. This is because the industrial revolution which evolved the machine created three features that serve to harden the ego: jobs, surplus wealth, and urbanization. This is the essence of the effect of the 12:60 paradigm, time is money. The purpose of the machine is to transform raw resources into consumer commodities through humans at work at a great variety of jobs whose purpose it is to create surplus wealth to be invested into more machines and to buy the commodities produced by the machines. The consumer identifies with his or her job because it is the means to his/her wealth. Ego thrives on this identification. The end result is to create a consumer society inevitably living in ever greater concentrations of urban areas – that’s where the jobs are. The urban living increases the possibilities of the ego with different styles and manners of entertainment, fashion, etc. Witness the endless varieties of magazines that now exist, each catering to a different ego-taste. With globalization, through the instrument of marketing, the entire population is turned into consumers and there is nothing that does not become merchandise or a consumer commodity of some kind – even spirituality. Spirituality is purveyed the same way real estate is, and the purveyors all have business cards declaring the specific form and type of spirituality they are selling you. Unequivocally: genuine spirituality is thoroughly egoless and has nothing to do with buying or selling egotistical benefits of any kind. Genuine egoless spiritual practices all have but one aim: to elevate the soul or true self beyond the egotistical grips of the lower self, that is to dissolve the illusion of the ego altogether. One Time One Earth One People – Let’s make it real!” In the end time, with the democratization of the human mind, there is a tendency to reduce all values to a base level, so it is easy for anybody to assume they know it all already, and that no one can tell them anything. This is ego anarchy. Often, in this kind of climate, anyone who may know something and tries to communicate from this position is called a guru or cult leader, and so is dismissed from having any value or credibility. If you read about the classic Sufis, the writers stress that there has to be outer law – shari’ah – first before there can be the release into true spiritual freedom. The only reason rules, outer law, covenants of spiritual discipline (Buddhists call it samaya) ever existed was to harness the energies of the lower self, and help direct us to our original nature. Once we have recovered our original nature – the true self – then we experience freedom. Nowadays, in postmodern global society, there is a consensus that all that “stuff” about discipline and outer law is just authoritarian brainwashing, and point at present day Muslim society (with some justification) as if to vindicate themselves. So, generally, in the West, with the rejection and breakdown of the older social values, due to the dehumanizing effect of industrialization, there has been an increasing rejection of all discipline and “outer laws.” As a result, there are many people who believe any kind of rule is an authoritarian falsehood, and so mistake indulgence in the lower self for freedom, thus contributing to the barbarism and degeneration of the closing of the cycle. In this social environment the real problem isn’t drugs but ego. The indulgence in the lower self is really the indulgence in ego. At one time, Kropotkin’s classless, anarchistic vision (“property is theft”), and anarchy in general as espoused by thinkers like Herbert Read (an art historian no less), was a viable answer to the hectic mechanization of life. But that was when people could still think. The 'drainbows' are obstinately rebellious because their egos control them and they feel they have the right to do, be or say anything any time it pleases them. No one is going to tell them anything. It’s not just the youth who have ego problems, of course, but just about everybody else in the world, as well. But while the older generation of egomaniacs tend to be insufferably neurotic and pretend to be civil, those of the younger generation are often just plain barbaric – not that the one is better than the other. As any yogi will tell you, the mind has to be controlled, not by Big Brother, but by your higher self. The New Time cannot be lived without mental discipline. If we cannot transcend our ego we cease to be human. The ego is the biggest factor contributing to the incapacity of global civilization to save itself. The superhuman is the one who recognizes that he/she can no longer be controlled by the ego. We must move quickly into a spirit of selfless service and cooperation. The seventh ray “Age of Aquarius” is calling! The existing systems of organization have brought us to this crisis. Earth can no longer afford anything but a unitary system of self-governance in accord with the universal laws and principles by which the whole of nature abides. In actuality all of the universe is governed by and functions according to pre-established laws synchronized by time. Only humankind violates the universal order, insisting to live by laws that accord with and support its lower self, and at variance with the laws of nature. As a consequence, humanity, in a state of cosmic oblivion, plunges on towards its own self-destruction. Seen from space Earth has no national boundaries. The notion of national boundaries is a hallucination stemming from the political disorder of the human mind, the end-product of Babylonian-Gregorian history. As such, the nation state is one of the greatest stumbling blocks toward achieving biospheric integrity and noospheric unity. We need to be educated about what the effects of the shift to the noosphere will be on human self-perception and consciousness. The solutions we seek are to be found, above all, in changes within our spiritual consciousness, for as we think so we become. Pax Cultura Pax Biospherica. Only the emergence of a new planetary culture of peace can restore stability to the biosphere. This is predicated on a new time and a new calendar which reformulates the human mind into a perpetual harmony, establishing a new life mission – time is art, to replace the old, time is money. The new time values will assist in the conversion of existing wealth and institutions according to renewed artistic and cultural priorities that reintegrate the human back into the biosphere. A consequent abandonment of the concepts of nationalism and privatization of wealth will aid in converting to the new cultural-artistic social goals. “Art Now, War No More – That Beauty May Prevail On Earth.” How long is the present system going to last? The handwriting is on the wall. The increase in natural disasters this past year (2005) alone has left many humans numb and frightened. By the time of the third major event, the Pakistan earthquake, the world had run out of emergency relief funding and capacity to respond. We must see in the catastrophes the opportunity to rebuild and direct ourselves in a new way. If we also consider that many of these disasters are the result of the effects of our own greed and thoughtlessness upon the environment, then might we not want to do something about changing ourselves? For this is what is required – a whole system effort to rescue and rebuild the planet from too many centuries of sheer mismanagement and ignorance of the biosphere. The catchwords for the coming Cosmic Civilization – the Seventh Ray Age of Aquarius – are service and cooperation. These can only happen genuinely and fully when there is a liberation from slavery to the ego, and a complete awakening in the primordially pure state of non-ego, which is our essence and the essence of the order of cosmic reality as well. Waking up actually refers to a spiritual awakening - resurrection of the Soul in Time.
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