#he's not against a new sect or society emerging

[blanketempress]

thinking about archon Arzel again

he's infinitely patient with fledglings, putting all the blame for their actions on their sires ; we're not the sabbat here, we take responsibility for our progeny and their actions. neonates get a stern talk. ancillae get no mercy. elders better watch their fucking backs.

it might pass as him being soft, and in a way it is, but in the end the lines are blurry between his personal beliefs and the traditions, they're fully engrained in his behavior and he just got very good at justifying them

everything is about making sure business runs smoothly for everyone, and preparing the next generation as best one can. and he'll use any means necessary to ensure others respect these two goals.

[syn0vial]

The Official Star Wars Fact File: Zam Wesell

(Unofficial translation by me, syn0vial. Please forgive me for any mistakes, I've studied Spanish for some years but it's definitely not my first language!)

Zam Wesell was an exceptional figure that belonged to an equally exceptional species, the Clawdites. The bounty hunter was an unorthodox and extraordinary being who left a mark with her short life and career.

The Clawdites have always been oppressed and never been trusted. It is something that is accepted as natural in life. Their society arose due to a gene therapy that cured a sickness, but also created a new species, condemned to be exiled from the principle habitable zone of the planet Zolan. All Clawdites can change the color of their skin, but only a few are capable of altering the texture of it, and there are even fewer that can change its shape. Only a small number—very capable beings, dedicated and with great self-control—could take the form of another being for an indefinite period of time.

Shape-shifting results in great pain and discomfort for a Clawdite; they must use oils and ointments to stop their skin from becoming horribly cracked. Yet, in contrast to even the best of her species, Zam Wesell could not only change form with relative speed, but could maintain it while resting.

Combat Training

In Zolan society, those that deviated from the rigid secular norms were persecuted. Clawdite society was less restrictive, but even they showed apprehension about some of Zam Wesell's activities.

In the semi-anarchic society on the Clawdite-dominated continent of Sultur, where Zam was born and raised, the clans were governed by warriors known for their boastfulness. In general, the strongest prevailed, but even the boastful owed loyalty to their clan. Among them all, the best warriors of Zolan were the Mabari knights. They were part of a religious order that would not admit sinners among their novices. The religion of Zolan preached that the untruthful were the worst sinners of all. Despite this, Zam, when she was with them, successfully hid her true nature long enough to reach the third level of mastery in the Mabari martial arts, before being forced to flee Zolan.

Zam relocated to the corporate planet of Denon, where skills like hers were in great demand. The corporate security organizations always needed new employees and with Zam's shape-shifting ability, it didn't take much for her to ascend to the rank of sergeant. Nevertheless, this was only the beginning of her career. She calculated each step with utmost care; in this way, she quickly rose to become a very well-paid corporate bodyguard.

She was a self-proclaimed "progressive" and never forgot her planet and her people. She always sent huge sums of credits to Zolan, to radical Clawdite groups dedicated to the emancipation of their species; it is unknown whether she was truly invested in the situation of her species or if she only wished to provoke unrest.

Outlawed: Zam Wesell's journey before she became a bounty hunter was a winding one. She was denounced on her home-planet, Zolan, for being Clawdite and even more so, for her ability to shape-shift. After learning martial arts in a religious sect of warriors called Mabari, she abandoned her planet.

Clawdite Assassin

Since leaving Zolan for Denon, Zam Wesell had accepted work that provided huge profits and little excitement. Not much happened before she left her job as a bodyguard and sought a change of scenery.

Her experience in the risky world of industrial espionage on Denon had perfected Zam's deadly skills, while also allowing her to develop a web of contacts, financing, and gear to start her career in earnest. Finally, she could establish herself as a bounty hunter. She had adopted as her identity the appearance of a short, attractive female human, as a means of securing more work and hiding her true Clawdite face. With practice, although not without pain, she managed to maintain this appearance even while sleeping. She also adopted a uniform, a purple jumpsuit that could adapt to both her human and Clawdite forms, and that helped protect her skin.

Above the jumpsuit, she wore a flexible armored doublet and a protective skirt. The skirt's connected segments concealed an impact-absorbing system that offered protection against attacks from behind. Her helmet had its own light and incorporated a commlink under the veil that hid her face. In the heat of combat, her true Clawdite face could emerge, which the veil helped hide. Zam's belt had a series of compartments and essential devices for her profession, including the holster for her KYD-21 blaster. In front of her doublet, she carried a small respiratory device. These tubes inserted into Zam's body and allowed the device to function through her lungs if it was required by the atmosphere. The uniform came complete with a certain number of Mabari objects, among them an ancient cape clasp, an emblem on her helmet, and combat gloves. All these objects were ingraved with inscriptions from sacred Mabari texts.

We're bounty hunters, Zam, not heroes: The partnership of Zam and Jango Fett began long ago, long before she was contracted to kill Padme Amidala. The two bounty hunters respected each other. Zam had the honor of knowing the son of Jango, Boba Fett.

Elite Assassin

It was fated that the paths of Zam Wesell and Jango Fett would meet, but it would prove a very dangerous crossing.

Zam Wesell was considered one of the best bounty hunters of her generation, and she believed it. So it was logical that she would come to be known by Jango Fett, considered the number one in their profession.

One of their first encounters [Syn's notes: preceded five years by their true first encounter in the game Star Wars: Bounty Hunter] took place after Antonin Vigo, of the Black Sun, contracted Zam to kill Dreddon the Hutt. She took the form of a red-headed slave and successfully carried out the mission. Just as she was about to take her leave, Jango Fett appeared. Zam discovered that she was not going to be paid, nor was Jango, who had taken out Antonin at the behest of Dreddon.

Zam and Jango both knew of each other's reputations. The mutual respect that they had and their simiar ethics led them to allow one another to go on their way. However, the two would meet again shortly afterwards when a dug named Fernooda contracted Zam.

We've Got To Stop Meeting Like This: Zam and Jango were contracted to recover an ancient artifact. She let him do all the hard work; then ambushed him and made off with the idol.

Jango, you're always complaining about my shapeshifting: The mutant power of a Clawdite was very useful in her work and elongating her arm to grab hold of the idol that both she and Jango Fett were searching for. [Syn's notes: The presentation of this information is a little misleading. Zam catching the idol like this occurred well after this job for Fernooda, when both Zam and Jango were working together to keep Fernooda's boss from using it in a terrorist attack.]

I know that there's a man under that mask: Zam managed to get closer than anybody to the mysterious Jango Fett, with the exception of his son Boba. Even so, she knew that a relationship between them would affect her work, and thus decided not to push it further.

It was an awkward situation, since Fernooda had assigned the job to Jango, but had decided to ensure its success by also contracting the Clawdite. The aforementioned mission involved recovering an idol that had been in the possession of Fernooda's boss. Zam, who knew that Jango had also been contracted, let her rival do the dirty work before springing an ambush. This time, she insisted on seeing the face of the man under the mask. She was so transfixed on him, that she didn't realize there was an enormous insect, the guardian of the idol, about to attack her.

Without knowing why, Jango came to Zam's rescue and, recognizing that she was in his debt, she allowed him to leave with Fernooda's idol. Thus began the strange and exceptional relationship, even friendship, between Jango Fett and Zam Wesell. [Syn's notes: As mentioned earlier, their association truly began with the events of Star Wars: Bounty Hunter, but perhaps this is the point things got a little more personal between them.]

Partners: Without a doubt, Zam and Jango worked well as partners. The question was whether they were willing to let their affection become more important than their work.

Mutual Empathy

Although it was nearly inevitable that Zam Wesell and Jango Fett should encounter one another again, the first reunion that occurred between the two bounty hunters did not go as either had expected.

At first glance, the mission seemed simple. It involved an assignment that Vigo Antonin, of Black Sun, had given to Zam Wesell, and the contracts from this organization were always lucrative. Certainly, the jobs offered to bounty hunters of Zam Wesell's level were never easy.

The target was Dreddon the Hutt. It was never a good idea to threaten Black Sun business and Vigo Antonin wanted to make an example of him. Zam used all the resources at her disposal to investigate and infiltrate Dreddon's organization. Her Clawdite powers allowed her to adopt the form of a human dancer that appealed to the Hutt. She needed all her concentration to maintain this form during a prolonged period, but Zam was very good at what she did. The disguise completely fooled Dreddon. Hutts are very difficult to kill.

Poisons and blasters could not guarantee that Dreddon wouldn't have time to call for his guards, so, to end his life, Zam restrained herself to placing a microbomb hidden in one of Dreddon's amphibian snacks when he was about to enjoy a private performance from his favorite dancer. The result was somewhat chaotic, but decisive.

A Private Affair

Just when she was about to leave, Zam heard someone approach. She grabbed her blaster and hid, waiting to see who could be intruding on her mission. She was almost happy to see Jango Fett, the most infamous bounty hunter in the galaxy, next to the corpse of his client.

Zam had successfully completed her mission and would soon receive a rich reward for her troubles. What's more, she could make fun of Jango Fett for the murder of his client. She had him at her mercy, pointing at him with her blaster, knowing who he was and what he was capable of.

Unfortunately, Zam's good humor soon went up in smoke. Jango had returned from completing a contract for Dreddon: killing Vigo Antonin! Thus, neither Zam nor Jango would be paid. Fett took the first opportunity to draw his blaster and with that both bounty hunters were in the same bind.

Zam was the first to lower her blaster, with her trademark style. With a twirl and a grin, she pointed out that the problem was that neither of them wanted to make the first move. She then flounced off, leaving Jango alone with his thoughts.

It's a weird rock: The artifact that Fett and Wesell had to recover was an idol that, as they would discover, bestowed mysterious powers upon its owner. [Syn's notes: ...If "mysterious powers" means "ownership of extremely explosive chunk of rock," then yes, that is correct.]

A New Contract

However, Zam needed work. The matter with Dreddon had left her without anything to show for it. A dug named Fernooda offered a contract shortly after she returned to her base of operations, but he warned her that he had already contracted another bounty hunter for the job in question: Jango Fett.

Zam readily accepted the job, since it seemed simple. Recovering a little statue from the natives of the jungle planet Seylott that had been stolen from Fernooda's boss. She had already decided to let Jango do the dirty work and ambush him at the temple's exit.

Jango's Revenge

It seemed that this time, Zam Wesell had won. She even managed to get Jango to remove his Mandalorian helmet. The scarred face she saw was handsome, if a bit gloomy. Then, a huge carnivorous insect attacked Zam from behind. The other bounty hunter ignored Zam's cries for help, taking the statue and running.

My client offered 50,000 Republic credits: The paths of Wesell and Fett crossed once again when the dug Fernooda contracted them to recover an object that the natives of Seylott had stolen from his boss. Immediately, the instinctive sense of rivalry returned between the two bounty hunters.

Heroes of Coruscant

Zam thought that she was doomed, Jango Fett had taken off, leaving her to be devoured by the enormous monster on Seylott.

While fighting to escape, Zam was surprised to see Jango return. He told her to take out all the explosives that she had on her and prepare to detonate them. Zam didn't have much option but to trust him, although she wasn't sure that he wouldn't get both of them killed. Fortunately, Fett's jetpack got them out of trouble. Zam picked up Jango's helmet from amidst the smoke and the dust left from the creature's destruction, gave it to him, and allowed him to take Fernooda's idol; afterwards, she turned and left, smiling as she told Jango to take care until next time. There would be a next time, Zam assured her rival, although this didn't seem to bother Fett.

However, Wesell wasn't satisfied. She had heard rumors here and there, and soon learned the truth about her mission on Seylott. The idol had been under the power of the Force-sensitive natives. The Annoo-Dat general Ashaar Khorda wanted the idol to use as a weapon capable of generating explosions that could destroy an entire planet. Even worse, Khorda's target was Coruscant.

Zam traveled quickly to Kamino, where she met with Jango and, to her surprise, with his young son Boba. She believed that Boba's mother had been killed and Jango said nothing to the contrary. Instead, he listened impatiently to Zam's story about the idol. Zam ended by saying that, since she and Jango had found the weapon, they owed it to the people of Coruscant to stop Khorda's plan.

Under the Mask: Zam Wesell was one of the few people who could elicit affection from the harsh and implacable Jango Fett

A Matter of Conscience

Jango wasn't interested, since he wouldn't be paid for the work and his son needed him on Kamino, but Zam convinced him that there were countless children that needed him on Coruscant. Jango Fett, an orphan rescued by strangers, softened his position and finally accepted his first time working together with Zam Wesell. [Syn's notes: Again, second time since Star Wars: Bounty Hunter.]

Zam had seen Khorda's right-hand man, the dug Fernooda. Thus, she took on his appearance in order to discover Khorda's and his lackeys' plans. They found out that Fernooda planned to place the idol in one of the planet's central reactors, where the explosion would cause a chain reaction that would destroy the planet completely.

Jango and Zam, along with a solitary Jedi, found the mad killer, after following the clues that he and his gang had left. Together, the three proceeded to defeat the gang and recover the idol. The Jedi could absorb the Force of the idol and leave it without power once more; although at the cost of his life.

Safe Return: Zam Wesell worked together with Jango Fett to seize a powerful Force artifact and return it to its owners. She managed to convince Jango to accept the mission.

Zam and Jango took the idol back to Seylott, earning them the gratitude of the natives. They were requested not to return ever again, something that the bounty hunters had no intention of doing. Upon returning to Kamino, Zam was not fooled by Jango's complaints of not being paid, since she knew that, deep down, he knew that returning the idol had been the right thing to do. It was the same impulse that had saved her on Seylott. She said goodbye to Jango with a kiss on his scarred cheek, so he wouldn't feel it had all been for nothing. It seemed that Zam had won again.

Altruistic Mission: Zam's desire to prevent the deaths of millions of people in a terrorist attack shows that she had a certain sense of conscience.

The Final Mission

Jango Fett made an atypical decision: subcontract Zam for the most dangerous assignment.

Jango wanted to spend more time with his son Boba. The boy's education was very important to him. However, the most famous bounty hunter in the galaxy had many offers of work. He accepted most of them and the rest he passed on to Zam Wesell. She worked alone most of the time, although they worked together occasionally, to the benefit of both of them.

Assassination Contract

A man that Jango knew as Tyranus, the same that had given him work with the Kaminoans, requested that he accept a special mission. It involved the killing of a high-order politician who had interfered in Tyranus's business. The pay was very good and Jango was happy to be able to pass it on to Zam Wesell. It seemed like a simple job.

The target was a senator dedicated to public life, something that would make her an easy target for an intelligent assassin. However, the target was also a queen of Naboo, friend of the Jedi and a central figure to the supreme Chancellor of the Republic.

Direct Hit: Ostensibly, Zam Wesell had killed the senator Padme Amidala with a bomb on her ship, but the victim ended up being a decoy, making it necessary to take another approach.

Reckless Driving: Zam realized that she was being pursued by Jedi. Her skill at the wheel of a speeder allowed her to traverse the busiest districts of Coruscant, but her pursuers wouldn't give up the chase.

To Kill a Senator

Zam chose the occasion carefully.The target was to return to Coruscant for a crucial vote, and her landing would be predictable enough. Zam used her capacity for shapeshifting to discover the time and place of Senator Padme Amidala's return.

With her usual cunning, Zam managed to place a bomb on the target's landing platform and then left to observe from the heights of a building a kilometer away. From there, she waited for the moment of truth. Amidala's silvery ship landed, flanked by fighters. The senator came down from the ramp and the moment her foot stepped onto the platform, Wesell detonated the explosive. There were few survivors and the news was full of stories and images of Zam's success.

Double Action

Zam Wesell believed she had completed the mission, but her satisfaction was short-lived. Amidala was apparently alive in the rotunda of the Senate at the end of the day, a very irritating outcome. The woman killed on the landing platform was a double. Fett was angry, along with his client. There could be no more mistakes.

Fett spoke with Zam and gave her a glass tube with two kouhuns inside. He cautioned her that they were extremely venomous, since she wasn't an amateur.

The bounty hunters counted on an ASN-121 droid, programmed with the location of Amidala's quarters, to deposit the deadly cargo. Then, Zam sat and waited for the return of the robot.

It was emiting an alert signal. Zam saw through her scope a Jedi holding onto the droid. Not even the droid's destruction could shake the Jedi, and soon she was being pursued through all of Coruscant, with her skills as a pilot put to the test.

Just when she thought she had lost them, one of the Jedi jumped onto her speeder. In the subsequent skirmish, her vehicle was damaged and she was forced to land. She sought refuge in a bar with the Jedi close behind.

Death of a Hunter

Seeing one of the Jedi at the bar, Zam approached as close as she dared, knowing that he could deflect a blaster bolt if warned in time. Unfortunately, the Jedi was much more astute, igniting his lightsaber with a twirl and severing Zam's hand that held her blaster. The pair of Jedi dragged Wesell's wounded body into an alley to interrogate her.

Ground Chase: Zam, without her speeder which had been damaged, had to flee on foot. She got into a bar, where she intended to ambush her pursuers, but Obi-Wan Kenobi attacked her with his lightsaber before she could fire; Wesell was badly injured.

One of them, the younger one, pressed Zam to reveal the name of her client. At first, she resisted, but then, after the Jedi spoke again, began to tell her captors what she knew.

The poison dart that Jango shot ended Zam's life before she could speak a word. She died quickly from the venom's deadly effects; she didn't suffer. This was the last thing that Fett could do for a friend.

[arcticdementor]

“One fire drives out one fire; one nail, one nail; Rights by rights falter, strengths by strengths do fail.” — Coriolanus, Act II, Scene VII

This brief excerpt from Coriolanus cuts to the quick of the Intellectual Dark Web (IDW), and their exaltation of individualism over tribalism and rationalism over ‘barbarism’. Coriolanus carries a dubious honor Shakespeare’s other works do not. The Roman tragedy was his only play formally banned under a liberal democracy; Its militarism troubled Allied censors in post-war Germany. In the play, Shakespeare elucidates the essential nature of all conflict: “strengths by strengths do fail.” Only a power can overcome another power, only a tribe another tribe.

The IDW can be divided into three principal factions: The New Atheists, led by Sam Harris, are vociferous critics of Islam, ‘Trumpism’, and woke fervor. The ‘Hard Liberals’, flagshipped by Bari Weiss and the Weinstein brothers, share many of the same viewpoints as the ‘wokeists’ they oppose, but seek to advance their position through discourse and persuasion. Finally, there are the Right Liberals, embodied in polemical figures like Ben Shapiro, Dave Rubin, and to a lesser extent, psychologist Jordan Peterson.

Almost every ‘member’ is concerned with the threats unfettered tribalism pose to civil society. In response to the January 6th Capitol events, Weiss asserted that America’s “liberal consensus is dying because of ideologues on the left and the right who hate the other side more than they love the country.” She goes on to call for respect of “our common identity as Americans.” But Weiss has her diagnosis of American decline backward. There is no ‘America’ as she describes. The liberal consensus scrapped American identity for parts during its sixty-year campaign of deindustrialization and deterritorialization. Regional identities were evacuated for hagiographic narratives of migration. Offshoring hollowed out once-proud cities and towns, annihilating regional elites and common livelihoods. Secularism disintegrated Americans’ shared moral universe, and catapulted cosmopolitans and heartlanders in opposite directions. The issue is not too much identity, or too much ideology, but too little, and of little quality.

As media theorist Marshall McLuhan believed, weak identities produce violence. Without metanarrative frameworks, senses of belonging, and ties to somewhere, man becomes violent to prove to himself he exists. The frontier, the high seas, the contemporary Middle East, are all replete with “people minus identity.” What Weiss sees as overactive tribalism is its obverse: a multitude of weak identities struggling to prove to themselves that they still exist. If you put swathes of the country under spiritual and material siege, they will lash out. The solution, then, is not to embrace a sort of vacuous pluralism or individualism, but to create strong collective identities, and remove the threats to these identities currently provoking violence.

On some level, Weiss knows this is the case. Her hero, Natan Sharansky, chaired a clandestine committee that removed Palestinians from East Jerusalem so Israelis could settle there, and consistently rebuffs taking any actions that may limit Israeli sovereignty. Fair, but the luxury of nationalism isn’t extended to Weiss’ American compatriots, the Trumpists she considers beyond hope. The civil strife and violence of today is, as ever, ‘a quest for identity’, something that civility and moderation themselves can never provide. These are the fruits of strong identities and political order, not its preconditions. There is no middle ground between evangelicalism and transgenderism, nor nationalism and globalism. Not even facts themselves supersede this tribal paradigm, and have themselves all but disappeared.

In honor of Caius Martius’ conquest of Corioli, he is given the name Coriolanus. After being urged to campaign for consul, he is ejected from Rome by envious patrician demagoguery. Rather than retreat into glum hermitage or inglorious sinecure, Coriolanus claims it is he who forsakes Rome and its people: “that do corrupt my air, I banish you!” He throws in his lot with an enemy tribe, the Volscians, and plots to destroy Rome. The IDW, almost entirely liberal to its core, is incapable of following him, because ultimately they’re true believers. Despite their own banishment, their own disdain for BLM and Antifa vulgarity, they’re unwilling to part ways with liberalism. If their cause was noble, or even viable, their antagonism toward political reality would be admirable.

…

The relationship between power and knowledge runs down to the very foundation of every society. At its metanarrative heart, there will always be something beyond criticism, justified by itself alone. Blasphemy laws arise to defend this core from injury, and to protect the people from being led astray. Today, the ‘seamless garment’ of kaleidoscopic minority ‘rights’ are this unquestionable center in American public life. This, the IDW understands — but their response is woefully inadequate. They seek a revival of an open public square, in which they will compete and triumph in a ‘battle of ideas’. Joseph de Maistre saw clearly in his Generative Principle of Constitutions that society’s spiritual core is not determined by elocution or intellectualism. As he writes, “fundamental principles of political constitutions exist prior to all written law.” It is not that a critical mass of Americans was persuaded to support abortion, gay marriage, or Black Lives Matter. These were victories delivered by judicial fiat or mass intimidation. Power inscribes new constitutions in man’s heart, and moves society in its stead. The IDW, an elitist project without elitist influence, can not change society with either podcast or polemic. Only power can do that.

This isn’t to say the IDW is all pacifism and pusillanimity. Sam Harris, for one, is perfectly fine with vituperation against an enemy. The targets of his ire are typically religious yokels, either domestic or foreign. His lengthy defense of torture and belief that “some propositions are so dangerous that it may even be ethical to kill people for believing them,” show that Harris is, as any other tribal, focused on rewarding friends and punishing enemies. Carl Schmitt’s friend/enemy distinction expresses itself among rationalists as well as zealots. What is different is that erstwhile IDWers are spectacularly bad at discerning ‘friend’ from ‘enemy’.

Brett Weinstein — who was famously forced to flee Evergreen College with his wife after protesting a banishment ritual inflicted on white students — recently waded into a ‘Wokeism’ Clubhouse discussion, brandishing his anti-racist credentials, only to be coerced into a struggle session, silenced, and pressured for Venmo reparations. Weinstein appealed to the purported common moral framework shared by those in the discussion, saying “I’m not a classical liberal, I’m an actual liberal.” Despite his protestations, his on-command affirmations of BLM and transgenderism, he was utterly routed. The Clubhouse coup against him isn’t fantastically unreasonable. Brett is claiming ostensible membership in the tribe, only to object to their victories on the grounds of procedure or politeness. He agrees with the leaders’ underlying premises regarding white supremacy, but refuses to take the radical action which necessarily accompanies that claim, for this tribe. IDW Girondins will proceed to the guillotines apace, in lockstep with the out-groupers.

Coriolanus’ mortal hamartia, his error in judgement, fell along the same lines. On the precipice of conquering Rome, besting his foes, and securing eternal glory, his mother intercedes with him on the city’s behalf. Rather than proceed with the siege, Corioalnus makes peace between Rome and the Volscians, and is promptly sentenced to death for his service. Unlike the IDW, he dies in heroic defiance of his captors. The error, however, is the same. In an attempt to remain tribeless he slights both sects and engineers his own destruction.

…

Postmodernity is a thoroughly haunted epoch. Dead ideologies are revived as kitsch, and past visions of the future hang over popular consciousness and political projects. We are a society in the void between history’s end and its rebeginning. History is idling, waiting to be restarted. The public square is a battleground, and only one tribe will enjoy it as their own in victory. Peterson knows this, though his tyrannophobia prevents him from understanding it fully. While his postmodernization of traditional symbols and stories provides the postliberal right a new means of popular interface, his politics provide neither solace nor solution. For civil society, facts, and ‘normality’ to reemerge, a decisive victory is necessary. Strong collective identities build strong societies, and these identities do not emerge from individualism or rational pursuit.

By and large, the IDW is a spent movement subsisting on podcast sinecures, fractured by Trump, incapable of accepting America’s tribal realities and lacking the understanding to resolve them. In a desperate attempt to escape from ideology, it only tumbles further and further into its maw. As facts themselves fade into ether, its members are left advertising an Enlightenment project long since dissolved. There are no longer any facts, only data flows to be instrumentalized or ignored. Collective identities are in terminal decline, desperately scrambling against deterritorialization through violence. Rights by rights are faltering, and discourse cannot save us.

As we explore our haunted and stagnant era, searching for exit, pining for unity, we see as T. S. Eliot did: “Only at nightfall, aetherial rumors/Revive for a moment a broken Coriolanus.” A resurrection of Coriolanus, one who refuses to turn back, will be necessary for America to survive until the Final Resurrection. Those ready to leave the dark will light the way.

[ill-will-editions]

QUARANTINE LETTER #4

A fourth letter in our quarantine series, from our friend Icarus.

-----

EVERYTHING IS TRUE, NOTHING IS PERMITTED

“They’ve already destroyed everything, all the structures we believed in, trusted. Maybe we’re in a transitional phase, you know? There’s some sort of substitution going on. Meanwhile, we’re navigating in a tremendous vacuum, vaguely oriented by the stars but with no true reference point. Our compasses have gone wild, spinning madly, attracted by thousands of magnetic poles. We might as well throw them out the window, they’re obsolete. It’s just us and the night sky, like it was for the early explorers, while we wait for new, more advanced navigational devices to be invented. My only fear is that the stars have somehow gotten out of place and will be no help as references either.”

- Ignacio de Loyola Brandao, “And Still the Earth”

Dear friends,

It can be strange to intervene in someone else’s debate, but I don’t believe you’ll hold it against me if I do. Over the past weeks, I’ve rather enjoyed the commentary and exchange of letters between my friends, August, Kora, and Orion.  Something about the reflections of my friends is missing for me still, so I’ll chime in without wasting too much time, I hope.

QUARANTINE: INCOMPLETE—WHAT WE THINK IS HAPPENING IS ONLY SOMEWHAT ACCURATE

Today, millions of people are working. In warehouses, in offices, in fields, kitchens and storerooms; from the computer, the sorting room and at construction sites, millions of Americans are sharing the coronavirus with each other and with their neighbors. Many of them are asymptomatic, a portion are not sick yet, and certainly some of them are still hiding their symptoms from their families, employers, and coworkers. No zombie apocalypse is complete without the inconsiderate hot-head who insists, deceptively, that his injury is “nothing, it’s fine, let’s keep moving”. Orion wrote that the virus imposes “its own temporality, which immobilizes everything.” If only.  

   Logistics, shipping, freight, warehousing: these are some of the largest sectors of the 21st century workforce, and they are all on overtime. From Whole Foods to Old Dominion, these disposable workers are simultaneously killable - insofar as the market facilitates their endangerment via assured contact with the virus - and indispensable, insofar as they must not be allowed to strike, unionize, or cease working that this society may minimally function. In these industries, overwhelmingly, black men and immigrants are crammed into job sites without any protective equipment. In other words, they are proletarians in the classical sense, and they are still at work. A true quarantine, a dignified exodus from the commodity society and its extensive productive apparatus, would halt all forms of labor and toil, a circumstance as yet unrealized. If we can say we are living in a quarantine, we must say that it is still incomplete.

AUTONOMY OR AUTOMATA?—THE PANDEMIC AFFECTS ALL OF HUMANITY—WHICH NO LONGER EXISTS AS SUCH

What we once called "society" (an entity which now insists it can survive unity and distance simultaneously, even distance for the sake of unity), has been replaced by billions of apparatuses. These apparatuses constitute a vast ACEPHALOGRAM - a system of machines designed to trace and retrace the consciousness of a world that has definitively lost its head.

The period of real domination opened by the aggressive economic and political restructuring in the 70s, 80s, and 90s - “globalization” - has pushed a vast quantity of workers out of manufacturing and into service related industries. Services being overall less profitable then commodity manufacturing and heavy industry, other technological implements such as we see emerge from Silicon Valley have filled the gap, so to speak, of lost profits for the economy by allowing large advertising and analysis firms to mine directly the collective human ambitions in art, sex, politics, culture, and society. To open up this mine, which has produced an existential ruin comparable to the environmental ruin associated with mineral mining, the internet has developed as a global network of pseudo participatory information systems. The data thirst of these industries cannot be sated by the administration of facts from the center or top, they must be produced by the masses directly. But technology does not simply catch data falling naturally from the sky or running off the gutters of consciousness. It produces data by arranging relations such that they produce content that can be bought and sold. Under such conditions, the medical, political, technological and ontological crisis of a pandemic cannot help but be experienced as a video, a collection of tweets, graphs, memes, as background noise, as a conspiracy theory, as a genre in the endless relay of notifications.  

THE MIDDLE OF THE BEGINNING OF THE END—WHAT MAKES INDIVIDUAL INTERPRETATION POSSIBLE, MAKES COMMON UNDERSTANDING IMPOSSIBLE.

The truth is that social media has allowed billions of people to coordinate themselves into large and small containers of meaning and virtual energy. These containers, ecosystems of signs and signifiers, by dint of their polycentralized arrangement, function as an epistemological subversion of established truth-making infrastructures that require a certain amount of hegemony or global purchase: the scientific method, fact-checking, and debate. Occasionally, the understanding produced in these containers, theory-fictions more than anything else, incidentally conform to an intensity with physical correlatives capable of overpowering police infrastructures and seizing public space, as we saw across the world in 2019. More often, the echo chambers, as they are often called, curtail feelings of common dialogue and the perception of shared futurity that would be seemingly embedded in such a “global” sharing of information. This curtailing allows people of all “types” to be bundled together as data sets, insulated from the experience of true diversity of thought, of experience, of analysis. The polycentralized arrangement of the internet today may be even less participatory than previous eras of information sharing, even though it doesn’t feel that way.

Commentators and critics have used the ongoing crisis to delay the moment of our collective education with unwavering ideological entrenchment. At work, it is not uncommon for me to hear small business owners and day traders talk about the failures of socialized medicine in  Italy, implicitly endorsing greater privatization in the US. Among activists, liberals, and leftists, it is impossible to imagine a greater indictment on the privatized, decentralized, healthcare system than what is taking place. Apocalyptic Christian sects believe the government is going to repress churches for gathering, and social justice advocates believe the coronavirus crisis will be “the same, but worse” on every oppressive axis. It’s hard to imagine another reflex.

While they recognize that the internet has plunged billions of people into a pulverized simulacrum, some of my comrades would have us devote ourselves to the dissemination of real news, of verified and sober analysis, of scientific rigor, in order to combat the prevailing disarray. This warms my heart just as it saddens my intellect. We have always been machine-breakers, in a way, revolting against the forward and crushing movement of industry to preserve a less alienated experience of reality, labor, and community. We aren’t wrong for that. We should be reliable sources of information, but not because we will convince people with our reports — which may no longer be so possible online — rather because we believe it is the right thing to do, and because we can at least proceed on a clear and shared basis with each other. But what other strategies could we utilize for analyzing the world that would allow us to act within the protracted vertigo, without trapping ourselves or others in ideological camps, and without losing revolutionary aspirations in a world where global verification of facts seems impossible, but where universal need for a transformation, fascistic or revolutionary, feels like common sense?

EVERYTHING IS TRUE, NOTHING IS PERMITTED—THE SYSTEM REDUCES ITSELF TO A PURE FLUX OF DYNAMICS

“We dreamed of utopia and woke up screaming

A poor lonely cowboy that comes back home, what a wonder”

-Roberto Bolano, “Leave Everything, Again”

For millennia, the administration of public facts was the cornerstone of political power, and stamping out alternative readings the chief objective of the repressive machinery. The ruling bureaucracy has organized itself to prevent any global loss of control. They’ve always done that. What is surprising is how readily, since 9/11 at least, perhaps much earlier, they have abandoned many important methods for doing so. As the possibility of imagining its own future became increasingly stamped-out, the reigning order abandoned any pretense of pursuing the ideals it propped itself up on, its sole promise being to ward-off unforeseen eventualities. Without embarrassing myself with long-winded arguments about things I am ill-equipped to discuss - certainly less knowledgeable than my dear friends are on such matters as philosophy and critical works - I’d prefer to refer to an argument advanced by Brian Massumi in his essay “National Emergency Enterprise”. In this piece, he argues that a primary strategy of governance is to identify all possible causes of a scenario. The market refashions environments that submit the living tissue of relations one and all to technological “dataveillance”, information which, in principle, allows the administrators of such a system to model its every possible outcome, translating every action into a trans-action, while ensuring that every aberration meets a form of control. He utilizes the example of a forest fire, but we can just look at the pandemic and it’s consequences.

   The ruling class everywhere, has argued and governed as if the coronavirus is "merely the flu", justifying late responses and insufficient care, while also closing borders and taking emergency measures as if we are living in a veritable plague. There are strategies attached to every discourse, interests silently advanced with each interpretation, and powers produced and mobilized by every kind of theory and operation. Anyway, we have been living in the fall out of multiple convergent strategies for controlling and responding to this situation.  The governors of the world, at least of the democratic countries, are basically throwing things against a wall and seeing what sticks.  We can imagine that modeling and predictions are conducted endlessly based on analytics produced through data mining and network analysis purchased from Google, Facebook, Twitter, and elsewhere. As technocratic governments subordinate welfare states to the "science" of neoliberalism, the nihilism of the powerful today subordinates everything to the "science" of control.

Anyway, who organizes oblivion today acts with no principles and can only speak in lies. What does this mean for the rest of us?

NOTHING IS EVERYTHING, TRUE IS PERMITTED—TRUTH DOES NOT REQUIRE A SUBJECT ONLY LIES DO. LET'S KEEP IT REAL, WHATEVER THAT IS.

   We can and are responding to this situation. The most important thing, from my perspective, is that we develop a vibrant enough ecosystem of strategies, corresponding to the largest possible interpretation of facts, without dividing our sympathies and concerns into rival fiefdoms and ideological sects. There are benefits to arguing that nothing of the situation is unique, that in fact the worst off before are the worst off now, that today simply represents an opportunity for us, etc. I am not among the comrades advancing this position, but I want to see the results of that framework as soon as possible, if it does not in fact raise the threshold for meaningful interventions. There are benefits to arguing that the quarantine is not deep enough, that the politics of mobilization have failed utterly to devastate the economy, but that a true lock down of the world could resemble the worlds first ever international wildcat general strike. I want to hear advocates of this position contend with the possibility of carceral interpretations of this argument. For those planting survival gardens, for those running autonomous rent strike hotlines, for those training in firearms, I want us to develop a shared enough perspective to see that there is a simple unity in our strategies, which is what is precisely, and incorrectly, attacked in Kora’s most recent letter to Orion: our autonomy. Beyond any individualistic misinterpretations, it is my perspective that the ability of human beings to self-authorize our activity, to determine our shared destinies, to control supply chains, vital infrastructures, and means of subsistence without the mediating factors of the market, are necessary prerequisites for a dignified life on earth. This is not to say, as Kora has intelligently argued, that anyone could come to control the unfolding course of history - a delusion that preppers, governors, and revolutionaries have all held - but precisely that autonomous, self-organized, structures are the only structures capable of responding quickly enough to the destabilizing, frightening, and uncertain futures lying in wait regardless of what we or anyone else do. We must utilize the current situation to repolarize the circumstances to the best of our ability around foundational concerns of power: on the one hand, there are all of the people of the world, some of them bastards we would not live with, and our shared need for dignified healthcare, housing, sustenance, and livelihood; and on the other hand there are all of the bastards waiting this out on yachts, manipulating public data for the sake of a geopolitical PR battle, utilizing the pandemic to pursue totalitarian power fantasies and clampdowns. We don’t need to steer the ship forward, we need to be able to swim in the wreckage.

Sorry, I wrote too much. Thanks for reading and I look forward to reading what others think soon.

-- Icarus

04.11.2020

STATE OF EMERGENCY, DAY 40

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

[drapeau-rouge]

Petty-bourgeois Revolutionism and Reformism

Originally appeared in Communist Viewpoint, May-June 1970. By Don Currie.

Fundamentally, petty-bourgeois theories of "reform and revolution" objectively serve capitalism. The petty bourgeoisie as a middle class is undergoing rapid destruction in the advanced capitalist countries. Under the hammer blows of monopoly it vacillates between the monopoly bourgoiesie and the working class—hence its ideology is vacillating, contradictory, inconsistent and unscientific. The working class and the Communist Party always seek the support of the non-working-class strata of the population in the struggle against the common enemy, monopoly.

At a time of rising mass movements in which the working class is beginning to assert its leading role, the ruling classes in the advanced capitalist countries require a variety of forms and forces to fight scientific socialism and the Communist movement. Petty-bourgeois theories penetrate the working-class movement disguised as neo-Marxism and perform a service to the monopoly bourgeoisie by engaging and oppoinsg Marxism-Leninism. The proponents of anti-communism consciously utilize and manipulate these trends since they all espouse anti-Sovietism. Herein lies the great value of the petty-bourgeois "revolutionary and reformist" ideologists to the monopoly bourgeoisie.

The opportunism of the petty-bourgeois ideologists lies in their worship of spontaneity, contempt and fear of the working class. At best they indulge in a superficial critique of capitalism, but do not seek to change it fundamentally through struggle to transfer political power to the working class and its allies—the dictatorship of the proletariat. They strive to stand between the working class and the monopoly bourgeoisie. The effect of petty-bourgeois ideology within the working-class movement is to maintain the working class as an appendance of the bourgeois parties and to divert the working class from the Marxist-Leninist vanguard parties.

The proponents of petty-bourgeois theories of "reform and revolution" are becoming more active and are assuming new forms. There has been a coalescence, an interpenetration and identity of views between revisionist trends, various forms of petty-bourgeois revolutionism and petty-bourgeois reformism in Canada.

On the face of it these anti-Marxist trends appear to have differences. These differences, however, are not on fundamentals. On fundamnetal questions of bourgeois ideology there is agreement.

On what basic questions is there agreement among petty-bourgeois revolutionists, reformists and revisionists? First of all, tehre is the rejection of the fundamental question of Marxism-Leninism, i.e., the dictatorship of the proletariat and the leading role of the Marxist-Leninist vanguard party. They all counterpose leninism to Marxism and deny that Leninism is Marxism in the era of the world-wide transition from capitalist to socialism, in the era of the socailist revolution and the building of socialism.

In the July 1969 issue of Canadian Dimension, Professor Eugene Genovese, Professor of History at Sir George Williams University in Montreal, declared, "Leninism, a brilliant success in underdeveloped countries, has been a dismal half-century failure throughout the advanced capitalist world . . . the American left must find a third way or forever wander about in despair and impotence."

The "third" anti-Leninist way is being diligently sought after by the petty-bourgeois ideologists. What this "third way" should be was offered by Herbert Marcuse, the oracle of the "New Left" and darling of the CIA. Marcuse's system of views is a non-class, anti-Marxist view. Marcuse asserts that there are no exploited classes, only "repressed" majorities. He calls upon this "repressed" majority to "carry out a radical change, revolution in and against highly developed technically advanced society." This call for revolution is without distinction equally applied to socialist as well as to capitalist countries. Marcuse is rabidly anti-Soviet and advocates "libertarian socialism." Marcuse blandly dismisses the working class as the motive force for revolutionary change, declaring that "it is to a great extent integrated into the system." According to eMarcuse the motive force for "radical change" is the amorphous "repressed majority" led by the "New Left." The need for a Communist Party is declared by Marcuse to be outmoded. "What we can envisage is not this large centralized and coordinated movement but local and regional political action against specific grievances—which will depend on political guidance and direction by militant leading minorities."

This elitist, profoundly reactionary theory is popularly known by the pseudonym "New Left." It is the ideology of the petty-bourgeois reformists and assorted self-styled revolutonaries who attempt to lead these movements in the direction of deaf and accomodation to capitalism. (It is not to be confused with the mass movements that are arising in capitalist coutnries directed against monopoly rule.)

The "New Left" is not new and it is not left. It is a variety of petty-bourgeois ideology in the period of sharpening class battles in the advanced capitalist countries. It arises objectively as a result of the continuing destruction of the petty bourgeoisie. It is the world outlook of a doomed class—hence it is despairing, anarchist, adventurous and inconsistent.

Prior to the anti-monopoly movements in the advanced capitalist countries, especially in the U.S.A., assuming the mass character they have now reached, petty-bourgeois reformism and revolutionism was confined to the universities and to small sects in the labour movement. As the crisis within the advanced capitalist countrise deepens and socialism and Marxism-Leninism become a point of attraction for the masses, petty-bourgeois revolutionism leaves the confines of the universities and attempts to penetrate the labour movement. It seeks to lead the working class away from struggle into opportunist and adventurous dead ends.

The defeat of the sally of imperialism in Czechoslovakia was a powerful setback to petty-bourgeois revolutionism everywhere in teh world. It was in Czechoslovakia where all of these tendencies emerged as united anti-socialist force, encouraged, aided and abetted by imperialism in a vain attempt to resurrect bourgeois democracy. It is interesting to note in passing that large numbers of the more prominent "New Left" leaders from North American "happened" to be in Czechoslovakia coincidentally within the August 1968 events.

Among these was James Harding, Canadian "New Leftist" who was interviewed in the student-radical journal New Generation of  which he is an associated editor. Harding said that the Czech "reformers" aimed at three goals: 1. Special status for the Slovak people; 2. Abolition of the centralized power of the Communist Party to be replaced by a socialist pluralism and 3. Adoption of a Yugoslav type economy. "I strongly favor the first two," Harding declared.

Harding's gratuitous support for the Czech "reformers" reflected the position of the main tendency within the "New Left" movement at the time. In essence it threw its support behind anti-Sovietism, anti-communism, bourgeois nationalism and reaction all down the line and was diametrically opposed to the fundamental interests of the Czechoslovak people.

Gustav Husak in the January 1970 issue of World Marxist Review replied to all such "friends" of Czechoslovakia and their theories of a "reformed" socialism:

"It is to Lenin's credit that he smashed the theories of spontaneity advocated by all kinds of opportunists who held forth about capitalist automatically growing into socialism. Lenin substantiated the need for the Communist Party actively to influence the historical process. Our Czechoslovak experience corroborated the soundness of Lenin'st eachings on the need for a new kind of revolutionary party, the vehicle for revolutionary class consciousness, for a party that will be the leading political force in socialism and the organizer of the masses."

The identify of views between revisionism and "New Leftism" is borne out by Gustav Husak's description of the attitude of the Right tendency in the leadership of the party:

"The former party leadership, or ratehr its Right-opportunist-minded section, made no effort to show that Leninism as a class doctrine makes a distinction between capitalist society and socialist society, that there can be no return to the model of bourgeois democvracy because socialism is based on public ownership of the means of production, that its class and social structure differ from the class structure of any capitalist state . . . In capitalist society power is in the hands of the bourgeoisie and is used against the exploited. In socialist society, on the contrary, all power is in the hands of the working people, headed by the working class."

". . . That is why our party cannot and will not unite on the basis of an accentuated national exclusiveness, that is, nationalism; cannot and will not unite on the basis of anti-Sovietism. On the contrary, the only correct Marxist-Leninist way to unity of our party is unification based on the scientific world outlook of the working class, building a mature socialist society in our country based on proletarian internationalism and socialist patriotism, on the principles of close cooperation and friendship with the Soviet Union and other socialist states and with the international Communist and working-class movement."

This is the answer of the whole international Communist movement to the attempt of the imperialist forces, in collusion with and with the active assistance of the petty-bourgeois reformist forces to mount an attack on socialism from within.

Petty-bourgeois reformism and organized labour

The setback of the petty-bourgeois theories of "democratization of socialism," "libertarian socialism," "the students as the new revolutionary vanguard" has compelled further refining of petty-bourgeois revolutionary theories. The Guardian, U.S. petty-bourgeois radical-paper, sees strength in the basic weakness of "New Leftism" in its rejection of Marxism-Leninism. The Guardian declared, "The great strength of the New Left has come from its ability to change course when the demands of the political struggle indicate change."

The petty-bourgeois radicals in Canada are trying to turn their recent defeats in victory by centring more attention of the organized labour movement. This is a more dangerous tendency since the leadership of this trend in Canada is spearheaded by a group of petty-bourgeois reformist intellectuals who hold prominent positions in the New Democratic Party.

The emergence of the petty-bourgeois reformist group at the last convention of the NDP has been hailed in the bourgeois press as the emergence of a new socialist party.

Marxists do base their assessment of political movements on what these movements say about themselves and much less on what the capitalist press says about them. The Central Committee of the Communist Party of Canada greeted the emergence of the "Manifesto" of the group. It is a reflection of the growth of militancy in the trade unions which is finding reflection in the NDP. This development takes place on the background of the growing rank-and-file criticism of the policy of the right-wing social-democratic leadership of the trade union movement which has pursued a cold-war class-collaborationist course within the unions throughout the entire post-war period. This old encrusted leadership rose to power during the advent of the cold war and aided and abetted the anti-Communist campaigns within the unions. Today more and more Canadian unions are wiping out anti-Communist clauses in union rules and demanding militant bargaining, more political action to defend the right to strike, picket and organize, and counter the state-monopoly drive to impose an incomes policy on the working class with a program expressing the interests of the working people.

The Central Committee of the Communist Party of Canada statement wanred that the manifest of the Watkins group evades "the central question of genuine socialist policy," the attitude to the state and working-class power, the leading role of the working class in bringing about social change, the overriding necessity of working-class and trade union unity and unity of the left in the struggle to achieve it. "Needless to say the struggle for genuine socialist policies cannot succeed around anti-Communist banners," the Central Committee declared.

The group, known as the Watkins group after its best-known spokesman, Melville Watkins, declares in its manifesto: "A central objective of Canadian socialism must be to further the democratization process in industry. The Canadian trade union movement throughout its history has waged a democratic battle against so-called rights and prerogatives of ownership and management. It has achieved the important moral and legal victory of providing the working men an effective say in what their wages will be."

The implication of the statement is that the exploitation of the working class has ceased except for its exclusion from having a say over the introduction of technological change. If this were achieved, the working class would have competed the struggle for socialism. "What is needed," claims Anthony Carew, research director for a large Canadian rail union, a Watkins supporter and advocate of "industrial democracy," "is a system of industrial democracy which will parallel our political democracy." Ed Broadbent, NDP Memebr of Parliament, goes further and claims such a reform would mean the winning of socialism. Broadbent claims, "A socialist society is one in which there is direct or indirect democratic control in all institutions which have a major effect on a man's life . . ."

The petty-bourgeois reformist theory of industrial democracy, also referred to as "workers' control," is an attempt to deny the objective nature of the class struggle, the necessity of overthrowing capitalism and the establishing of socialism. It is a wholly reformist view of the road to socialism. It is the reflection of the propaganda of the monopoly bourgeoisie that modern capitalism has done away with classes and class struggle and has overcome the fundamental contradction between social production and private appropriation. The fact that petty-bourgeois reformist leaders of the trade union movement peddle this view doesn't make it any less reactionary and wrong.

One of the authors of the manifesto, Charles Taylor, vice-president of the NDP, outlines a theory of classes in no way dissimilar to that of Marcuse except for the jargon used. In contrast to Marcuse's assertion that the working class has been "integrated into the bourgeoisie," Taylor asserts that the big line of division in society is "between the majority who participate in the affluent society and the one-quarter of the population who live in or below the poverty line." The effect of the attempt by the reformists to divert the attention of the trade union movement to the fight for "industrial democracy" is many-sided and full of pitfalls for the working class.

To raise the slogan of "industrial democracy" at a time of intensification of the attack by monopoly on the living standards of the working class detracts and weakens the wage movement.

The reformist claim that to direct the trade union movement to teh struggle for "worker control" now is a revolutionary proposal and will by itself lead to the rise of socialist consciousness is a denial of the srength and need for the scientific theory of Marxism-Leninism to triumph among the most advanced sections of the working class and of the need for the Communist Party guided by scientific socialism to lead the struggle for socialism. Socialism cannot arise automatically from the struggles by the trade unions for reforms. Socialism can only be achieved by a revolutionary struggle for power which transfers political power from the capitalis class to the working class.

A telling criticism of these petty-bourgeois reformist theories was given by Gus Hall, general secretary of the Communist Party of the U.S.A., to their 19th convention and deserves wide discussion among trade unionists. Comrade Hall said: "Now we should be clear that we are for higher economic demands. We are for taking away the prerogatives the bosses should never have had to begin with.

"But we must ask: What is the effect of demands in the area of what is called control off the process of production when the question of ownership of industry is not on the order of the day? When demands for workers' control are related to questions of change of ownership of industry from private to public, there are no problems. Now some will say 'If that is the problem, why not throw in the idea of take-over?' But that of course is nonsense unless the objective conditions are ripe for it. The idea that simply demanding control will create the objective conditions is no less nonsense."

"Demands for control which are made when the objective conditions are not at the level for a take-over tend to turn into their opposite. They are demands for control over industries that will continue to be privately owned and will continue to operate for private profit. Under these conditions, they become demands for class partnership. They are based on the concept of labour and management operating the plant smoothly together. Even the struggle for such demands tends to create the partnership concept.

"Some ideologists on the 'New Left' have now raised the question fo the fight against management prerogvatives as being 'revolutionary' in nature, seeking to set this issue against other important demands of the workers, especially wage demands. Some even go to the extent of describing the struggle for higher wages as corrupting and exerting an anti-revolutionary influence on workers and the trade union movement.

"The Communist Party rejects such doctrines. Both the struggle for higher wages and the struggle against management prerogatives are struggles for reforms. Inherent in both struggles is the possibility of increasing the class consciousness and socialist consciousness of the working class, if Communist and other class-conscious wrokers are in tehse struggles and exert such influence."

It is the Communists that give the mass movements of the people a revolutionary orientation. It is Marxism-Leninism in action, the organized purposeful activity of the vanguard party that can join reforms to the struggle for socialism. Any description, analysis or policy that divorces the Communist Party from the working class, which fails to take into account the role the Marxist-Leninist party must play at every stage of the struggle lands in the camp of petty-bourgeois reformism or revolutionism.

The fact that many would-be revolutionaries advocate petty-bourgeois theories with the best of intentions only points up the challgenge to the Communists to win all those who are seeking a revolutionary alternative to the ideas of Marxism-Leninism.

"The big bourgeois is case-hardened; he knows that under capitalism a democratic republic, like every other form of state, is nothing but a machine for the suppression of the proletariat . . . The petty bourgeois, owing to his economic position and his conditions of life generally, is less able to appreciate this truth, and even cherishes the illusion that a democratic republic implies 'pure democracy,' 'a free people's state,' the non-class or super-class rule of the people, a pure manifestion of the will of the people, and so on and so forth." - V.I. Lenin

[vishwajagritimission]

India is regarded as the Land of Saints | Sudhanshu Ji Maharaj

India is regarded as the Land of Saints. From time to time many spiritual saints have taken birth on this land. They all had one common message i.e. righteousness and universal brotherhood. During the medieval period from the 13th century to the 17th century, the saints spread the message of Bhakti of God and this period came to be known as Bhakti Movement period. Guru Ravidas descended on this earth during this period as an emissary of God to guide humanity on the right path. He was a mystic poet whose devotional songs and verses made a lasting impact on the Bhakti movement and society as a whole.

The Bhakti movement urged the locals to keep aside the age-old traditions of rituals and casts and only to express their love for god. Bhakti as a concept refers to devotee’s love for God, a personal God who may be formless, Nirguna or Saguna, a supreme reality or power to whom he surrenders himself, a total surrender to god with unconditional and intense love. The word “movement” is widely and popularly used to refer to the emergence of Bhakti ideology and the establishment of new sects or panths which separate themselves from the rest of the population.

Principles of Bhakti Movement : The main principles of Bhakti movement were : (1) God is one & only one (2) One should serve humanity to worship God (3) All are equal (4) Worshiping God with unconditional love and devotion is better than performing religious ceremonies (5) Not to follow Caste distinctions and believe in any superstitious practices.

The idea was to get rid of the evils which had crept into the religions and spread harmony.

The impact of the movement

Few movements have influenced as much as the Bhakti Movement that started as a ripple deep down in what is today’s Tamil Nadu, in the 6th -7th century. Over the next few centuries, this ripple of movement turned into a tidal wave that spread as far north as Punjab. Emphasizing the idea of a personal God, it helped them to break free from the caste system that held sway at the time. In doing so, the movement gave a new lease of life and ensured that it stood up against the many evils in the society.

Guru Ravidas gave the message of peace, harmony and fraternity.

Bhakti movement teachings were focused on equality of mankind and universal brotherhood. The Bhakti movement of the great saint is a source of inspiration for us to create a just and humane society. In our daily life, we must practice Bhakti, intense and unconditional love for God. To love God for what He is – is Bhakti. Bhakti has no conditions. A bhakta ( Lover of Lord) loves God and has complete faith in god. Bhakti is a sacred emotion. It is sublime. It takes the bhakta to the highest level of consciousness. Intense bhakti is the cause of the merger of self with the Supreme. The thought that if God fulfills our wishes the way we want then only we will love or respect Him, should never come to mind.

You must remember that Guru Bhakti is the very first step towards attainment of God. The only path to Bhakti is the devotion towards Guru with all love and humility. Our Bhakti for God and Guru should grow day by day. The guru mantra shows the path of intensifying devotion to God. We must do our daily practices of japa and dhyan, then only grace will flow into our lives. And we will be eternally surrounded by the love and grace of God. When our Bhakti deepens and reaches the pinnacle, we become one with the Lord.

So, whatever you do in life. Do it with full devotion and faith.

[warsofasoiaf]

Any chance you want to give us some analysis of the psychologist and chaplain on the Unity, Sister Miriam? Reynold did a pretty solid job making her more than some crazy protestant fundamentalist, and some of her "We Must Dissent" critiques on how technology is being applied have a tinge of your own cynicism, although filtered through the lens of an extreme evangelical.

Miriam is one controversial character. On the surface, she’s a Bible-thumping fundamentalist, her preferred government choice is even called “Fundamentalist,” her facial expression even seems to scream: “Jesus is watching you.” Yet this does the writers a deep disservice, as evidenced by the other factions, they are capable of writing fully-realized characters and philosophies.

We don’t get an actual declaration of what sect of Christianity Miriam, or even what ecumenical form Christianity took at the time the Unity took off, all we know is that apparently the United States transformed into a theocracy at some point, so it’s probably some sect of Protestantism. Truth be told, it doesn’t actually matter whether we do or not, Miriam expresses herself well enough through her own quotes. She tends to express herself primarily in two ways, fierce condemnation of reckless progress without regard to morality, and a softer, comforting tone likely given among her own flock. This is key for Miriam, she cares about her people in a way that faction heads do not. Morgan, Santiago, and Zakharov see the virtue of their progress as proof of its intrinsic morality, Yang is nihilistic, Deidre is rushing off so much with her plants and fungus that she’s losing touch with her humanity, and Lal is bureaucratic, impersonal, and more than a bit hypocritical, concerned with style over substance. Miriam wants to ensure that the spiritual wellbeing of her citizens is protected, and she truly practices what she preaches: “And so we return again to the holy void. Some say this is simply our destiny, but I would have you remember always that the void EXISTS, just as surely as you or I. Is nothingness any less a miracle than substance?” The fate of humanity is ever precarious and Miriam knows that people can be pushed close to the breaking point, and she is there with the balm of Gilead to get people to feel better. Her people believe in her too, they’re more than willing to support a large military before feeling discontent and fight hard to accomplish her goals. More than any other faction, Miriam expresses sympathy for the downtrodden. On the other side, she is strict and condemnatory toward others who refuse her message and her AI is fairly aggressive. In this sense she still has that sort of militant preacher vibe, but it’s to the credit of the writers that they took this archetype and fleshed it out. Like every other faction, Miriam has her strengths and her weaknesses, things she can be lauded for and criticized.

One of the big criticisms levelled at Miriam is that she is either a Luddite, a technophobe, or suspicious of science itself. She is none of these, her approach to research stems from a true sense of social conservatism. After all, she’s a psychologist and she understands the chemical states of matter, she is both clearly educated in multiple scientific disciplines and has no intrinsic distrust of science: “Evil lurks in the datalinks as it lurked in the streets of yesteryear. But it was never the streets that were evil.” This quote suggests that she considers the datalinks evil in and of themselves, but other quotes give her a more complete picture. Look at this selection of quotes from her key work, “We Must Dissent,” her treatise castigating the technological development of the other factions: 

“Already we have turned all of our critical industries, all of our material resources, over to these… things… these lumps of silver and paste we call nanorobots. And now we propose to teach them intelligence? What, pray tell, will we do when these little homunculi awaken one day and announce that they have no further need for us?”

“And what of the immortal soul in such transactions? Can this machine transmit and reattach it as well? Or is it lost forever, leaving a soulless body to wander the world in despair?”

“Will we next create false gods to rule over us? How proud we have become, and how blind.”

Miriam is clear, she wants others to think about what they’re doing. The pursuit of progress without being cognizant of the risks and costs arguably helped contribute to the catastrophe of Earth. What things have the labtechs at the University of Planet failed to take into account, what corners did Morgan cut in pursuit of the next great product, what happens to the mental state of people in Deidre’s psychic networks? She celebrates beneficial advances in technology, she even refers to the plasma accretion process creating “new miracles,” she’s afraid of it’s misuse. That’s why she doesn’t accumulate research points in the first couple years and that’s why her research is slow. Sure, there is less funding for laboratories over churches as well, but her greatest concern is to understand how these changes will effect the psychology of her people and of the society at large. The end-game techs are in no uncertain terms terrifying. Controlled singularities, self-aware colonies, molecular reassembly, all of these things improperly considered are an extinction level event on their own, but each faction continues to roll them out, eager for gain, not knowing what next they will unleash because they lack the wisdom of restraint. Her dichotomy is best summed up in two quotes: “Beware, you who seek first and final principles, for you are trampling the garden of an angry God, and He awaits you just beyond the last theorem.” This sounds like a fire-and-brimstone street preacher, but it’s the other quote that accompanies Quantum mechanics that is exceptional: “Men in their arrogance claim to understand the nature of creation, and devise elaborate theories to describe its behavior. But always they discover in the end that God was quite a bit more clever than they thought.“ The proof is in the pudding there, while the former appears to be direct and so a bit of fiery language can be expected, this appears to be a reflection or philosophy. Mankind is flawed and refusal to accept it leads to catastrophe.

Protestantism doesn’t have a Pope or Patriarch and instead professes a universal priesthood, suggesting that Miriam’s administration is modeled with theological and secular components, influencing the other but not under the direction of a religious caste. A Democratic Miriam loosens the restrictions and military funding for greater promotion of the self through community and activity, while a Police State Miriam utilizes a state of emergency and herself as governmental head to act in preservation of her people and their souls. Miriam preserves fundamentalism, which likely strips funding from labs in the interests of devoting the majority of the social fabric to religious concerns and the totality of existence as universal believers, protecting them from foreign influence without becoming the paranoid police state of informants that a Bloodraven might promote.

Economically, Miriam forbids nothing. A Planned Economy probably is fashioned similar to Christian communialism through common ownership and shared industry, justified in sermons and enforced through a small army of bureaucratic clerks. A Free Market Miriam resembles the American South, with an emphasis on charitable giving and a strong sense of community. A Green Miriam acknowledges that resources are limited and so encourages thrift and voluntary deprivation for the sake of the community, using less so that others might have more as proscribed by Christian virtues.

Miriam forbids Knowledge as a value, and this makes sense given what is mentioned above, pursuit of knowledge for its own sake makes one heedless to its risks. If Miriam values power, she has probably come to accept the necessity of a holy war as the only way to save mankind from its own recklessness. Wealth Miriam likely focuses more upon the prosperity gospel, where good people gain money through goodness, build industry to employ others, and so on.

A Cybernetic Miriam probably has increasing automation to permit others freedom in their tasks and devote themselves more completely to other matters, but this doesn’t sound appealing to Miriam who fears the machine rising against the master. A Eudaimonic Miriam is almost certainly the one she would elect to pursue, finally creating the paradise on Planet and letting people live in goodness, good in word, good in thought, good in action, good in faith. Thought Control is again, a sinister one, the people finally rendered docile believers, where Shepherd Miriam finally has her flock, where sin is such an evil that it must be prevented at all costs, though if I had seen Miriam do this, the last thing I would say before I was invariably hauled off to the Punishment Sphere is: “And what of the immortal soul?”

Thanks for the question, TBH.

SomethingLikeALawyer, Hand of the King

[inhumansforever]

Inhuman of The Day

June 16th - Karnak

A member of the Inhuman Royal Family.  Karnak is the son of Mander and Azur, dignitaries of high status in old Attilan.  Mander’s sister, Rynda, had been the queen and was the mother to the crown prince, Black Bolt.  It was believed that both Mander and his wife, Azur, possessed excellent bloodlines and that Terrigenesis would endow both their sons with tremendous Inhuman gifts.  Yet when their elder son Triton emerged from the mists he had been transformed into an aquatic being with green scales who required a water-based atmosphere to survive.  Although Triton would eventually go onto be seen as a great warrior highly esteemed among The Inhumans, his initial transformation was viewed as shameful and monstrous.  Azur was so distraught over her elder son’s transformation that she chose not to subject her younger son Karnak to The Terrigen Mists.

Instead, young Karnak was sent to live in the Tower of Wisdom where he learned the ways of a secretive sect of gnostic Inhuman monks.  There Karnak was taught philosophy, spirituality, along with an esoteric and highly effective brand of martial arts.  Karnak had been an especially gifted and precocious child to begin with and he greatly excelled under the monks’ tutelage.  Through his studies and meditation Karnak cultivated the ability to identify the weakness of all things.  

This awareness enables him to perceive the precise points of vulnerability in any given object.  Identifying such points of weakness, coupled with his skills as a martial artist, aided him in becoming a highly formidable warrior.  He could strike an object and, knowing the precise point to hit, shatter it into countless pieces.  

As Karnak further honed these abilities, his perception for weakness has expanded beyond the physical.  He is now able to perceive points of weakness in a more abstract fashion, such as spotting the weakness in a tactical plan, philosophical theories, or even the base sense of another person’s sense of character.  

Following his return from the Tower of Wisdom, Karnak’s judgement and enhanced awareness earned him the position as the advisor to his cousin, King Black Bolt.  Although Karnak has not always seen eye to eye with his king, he has frequently remained Black Bolt’s most staunch advocate, chastising any who would question royal decree.

Karnak’s strict pragmatism and unyielding adherence to the customs and laws of Attilan notwithstanding, he has maintained a very close friendship with his cousin, Gorgon, whose impulsivity and hedonism cast him as very much Karnak’s opposite.  Their differences aside, Karnak and Gorgon greatly enjoyed each others’ company and the two have embarked on many adventures together. 

As a member of the Royal procession, Karnak has fought valiantly in numerous battles in defense of Attilan.  He has matched wits against foes that include Magneto, The Mandarin, Blastarr, Ultron-13, Ronan The Accuser, and of course Maximus The Mad.  Karnak assisted in rescuing Queen Medusa from The Wizard, helped save Ahura Boltagon from the clutches of Blackheart, and was a field martial during the Kree/Shi’Ar War. 

Along with his role as an advisor to the king, Karnak was also heavily involved in the training of the younger generation of Inhumans.  The queen’s niece, Luna Maximoff, was among Karnak’s most prized pupils. 

Karnak experienced something of a psychological crisis in the wake of The Fall of Attilan and the release of The Terrigen Cloud.  It still remains unclear what exactly had led Karnak to feel so despondent and undone (it is possible that he became aware of the encroaching alternate realities and the end of existence as entailed in the lead up the to the Secret Wars event).  In any case, Karnak seemed to come to the conclusion that his knowledge and awareness of this secretive matter made him a risk that needed to be eliminated.  He took his own life, leaping from the top floor of Avengers’ Tower and falling to his death.

Although Karnak’s body died, his soul or essence lived on.  It turned out that Karnak is a distant relative to the new Inhuman known as Lineage.  Lineage’s specific Inhuman powers allows him to keep the souls of all his past descendants within him, ushering forth any given decedent to advise him and provide secretive information.  

Karnak’s sentience found itself trapped within the limbo-like confines of Lineage’s mind.  Initially mistaking this limbo as hell, Karnak came to see the confinement as a type of prison… and like any prison it was not without a flaw, a means of escape.  

Karnak ultimately divined this flaw and exploited it, causing him to burst out of Lineage’s midsection in a fully reconstituted version of his former physical being.   The whole turn of events was quite confusing, but the long and short of it is that Karnak was reincarnated and reunited with his former allies among the Inhuman Royal Family.  

Having died and being reincarnated has had a profound effect on Karnak, leading him to delve into his spiritual studies with an invigorated interest.  The original Tower of Wisdom had been destroyed when old Attilan fell.  Karnak has since constructed a new Tower in the desolate plains of an undisclosed rural countryside.  He has amassed a group of followers, acolytes made up of humans and Inhumans alike.  

The basic tenets of Karnak and his followers’ faith is a bit difficult to describe.  Based in an ancient philosophy of old Attilan, it appears to be something of a combination of Taoism and neo-nihilism .   He believes that life is fleeting and ultimately meaningless and the full and entire acceptance of this raw truth brings about an awareness and contentment that frees one from the obscuring illusions of meaning.  Shedding himself from the distracting shadows of faith, belief, and the construct of existential meaning, Karnak is able to see things as they truly are: empty and ultimately insignificant.  And it is this true, unadulterated vantage is what allows him to perceive the fault in all things. Karnak’s reinvigorated dedication to this rather stark and disquieting philosophy has left him a good deal alienated form others.  He has yet to rekindle his old friendship with Gorgon; the humans that he interact with are terribly frightened and disquieted by him, and he has rarely participated in mission alongside his fellow Inhumans of New Attilan.  

Karnak has not gone through Terrigenesis.  He seems to prefer to keep it this way, which means that he had to keep an eye out for the Terrigen Cloud (in that exposure to the cloud would trigger his transformation).  He avoided the cloud by monitoring its location as well as sequestering himself in hermetically sealed chambers within the new Tower of Wisdom.  What might occur were Karnak to ever go through the transformation of Terrigenesis remains unknown.  With the cloud’s destruction, however, it is a matter he no longer has to concern himself over.  

At some point following his resurrection, Karnak was recruited by the governmental agency Shield to help rescue a young Inhuman named Adam who had been abducted by a splinter faction of the criminal organization, Hydra.  Karnak went in search of this youth only to discover that Adam’s new Inhuman powers offers him a powerful degree of reality manipulation.  Adam’s gifts led him to essentially take over the terrorist splinter group, reforming the group into a cult that worshipped him.  When Karnak finally confronted Adam, he discovered that the young man had become everything that Karnak hates: a false god, fabricating an artificial sense of meaning by offering his followers the comfort of manufactured faith.  Karnak was ultimately able to defeat Adam, delivering a precise jab that irreversibly injured the part of Adam’s brain that control his powers.  The whole affair left Karnak feeling quite bereft as he came to feel that both cold reality and warm illusion were equally unsatisfying and that existence is harsh and lonely.  

As a possible byproduct of these feelings, Karnak began to spend more time among his fellow Inhumans of New Attilan.  He took particular interest in the young new Inhuman, Iso, whom he saw the potential for true greatness.  Karnak helped encourage Iso to lead the Inhumans in defending an attack on New Attilan by an army of Iron Man battles suits.  

Later, during the Inhumans/Mutant War, the X-Men attempted to neutralize Karnak by trading him in a psychic illusions generated by Jean Grey and the Midwhich Cuckoos.  Karnak was eventually able to escape his confinement, but he was occupied long enough for the rest of the X-Men to sack New Attilan.  The war between the two groups ultimately concluded when Medusa destroyed the Terrigen Cloud, thus ending its threat to end all Mutant life on Earth.  

More recently, Karnak found himself a member of the loosely cobbled together team of Secret Warriors battling against the Hydra forces who had taken over much of the continental United States.  The destruction of the Terrigen Cloud had essentially doomed the Inhuman people to extinction, a matter that seemed to invigorate Karnak’s nihilistic disposition.  At first he voiced a lack of concern for the fate of mankind and Inhumankind.  His attitude then appeared to change when he saw that young Lunella Lafayette (Moon Girl) was among the Inhumans who had come to rescue him from a Hydra internment camp.  

It turned out that Karnak’s entire participation with the Secret Warriors was all part of a highly complicated scheme to obtain a new source of Terrigen, consolidate power and seat Moon Girl and the new leader of The Inhumans of Earth.  Karnak believed that young Lunella possessed the intellect and cold pragmatism needed to rebuild Inhuman society from the ashes.

It was additionally revealed that Karnak has a son.  Where this son had been and the identity of the boy’s mother is has remained unrevealed.  About nine years old, Karnak’s son is named Leer and it appears as though he has been indoctrinated into Karnak’s specific outlook and philosophy.  

Prior to the Secret Empire event, Karnak had handed over Leer to the reneged Mutant geneticist known as Mr. Sinister.  Karnak and Sinister had entered into a pact to unlock the secrets of the Inhuman genome.  Karnak hoped that doing so would facilitate a new means through which latent Inhuman powers could be unlocked; where Sinister hoped to weaponize this information as part of his efforts to direct the evolution of Mutant-kind.  Leer was offered to Sinister essential as a test subject for Sinister’s experiments.  

As to be expected, Mr. Sinister ended up reneging on his end of the bargain and Karnak manipulate d the Secret Warriors into helping him get Leer back, misleading them into believing Leer could be the key to defeating Hydra.   The truth of the matter was eventually revealed.  Leer was rescued and Hydra was ultimately defeated by other means.  Sinister had managed to unlock Leer’s Inhuman powers, but failed in his efforts to create a synthetic form of Terrigen.  The combined forces of the Secret Warriors the Royal Guard of New Attilan were able to defeat Mr. Sinister.

Moon Girl declined Karnak’s proposal for her to become the new leader of The Inhumans.  Karnak had managed to manipulate his way into control of The Enillux Corporation, yet Lunella handed this control back to Ahura to fully punctuate her disagreeing with Karnak’s outlook on what is best for the Inhuman peoples.  As punishment for his unscrupulous subterfuge, Iso decreed Karnak as forever banished from New Attilan.   

Karnak’s misdeeds notwithstanding, it appears as though he has been forgiven by Medusa and Black Bolt and offered a home on the new Inhuman lunar settlement of Arctillan.  Karnak’s further adventures are set to be told in the pages the ominously titled Death of The Inhumans series scheduled to begin this July.  

[gravitascivics]

KANT BE SO

Yes, a cheesy title, but in its way, it hits the point of this posting.  This blog, after rendering a cursory description of how Romanticism got started in Europe, now begins describing its introduction into the US.  And in that, one comes across familiar titles:  “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” by Washington Irving along with his “Rip Van Winkle.”  There’s James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans and the depiction of Puritanical morals in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter and Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick.  

But of direct interest to this blog are the essays and other non-fiction works of Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson.  And with these efforts, one can see that many Americans readily took up the themes their European counterparts had been expounding.  That included a high dose of moral judgement, an emphasis on individualism – from a more psychological perspective – and the importance of intuition, more on this in a bit.

They also promoted an almost reverence for nature – especially in the case of Thoreau – in which the message was it was “naturally” good while society was indulgent and corrupt.  Of course, as the last posting described and explained, these themes were recurring in Romantic offerings in Europe as those artists and writers took aim at the Enlightenment’s reliance on reason.  And to underline this divorce from Enlightened thought, American Romantics hit upon a term that they felt emboldened their disdain, that being transcendentalism.

Why?  That question takes one back to Europe.  There, the origin of this anti-reason strain gets an initial upstart not from an anti-reason argument, but one that placed certain restraints found in the works of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke.  In their works – to use a Lockean term – the mind at birth was a tabula rasa, a blank slate.  

It, then through experience, perhaps resulting from the succession of rewards and costs that one encounters, one “learns” to see those things that one should pursue and what one should avoid among what all those encounters teach a person.  In that one learns, from observing how one’s mind works, to reason since reasoning increases the probability of success.  To that argument, Immanuel Kant sought to qualify it.

He did not argue that reason and the ability to reason were not important aspects of learning and decision-making, but he claimed there was more going on in the mind and those processes of sorts were inborn abilities.  And that needs to be explained.  To begin, yes, at birth one experiences and/or observes isolated things out in one’s surroundings, but that is all a subject can do that relates to his/her reasoning ability.  

That is, each encounter is merely observing a sensation.  At that stage, reason could not do anything with each sensation or, to use the jargon, each thing-in-itself.  As such, each is phenomenal, or datum and one cannot pass any judgement about it.  To this point, there is agreement with David Hume in that Hume’s skepticism questioned the human ability to draw any conclusions even if colliding billiard balls then move away from each other.  

But, Kant adds, that upon that pure information, one has built-in a mental capacity – not based on experience – that allows one to make judgements of what underlies or constitutes those experiences.  And that is what Kant called with the unfortunate term, noumenal (roughly pronounced new-ou-min-al).

This noumenal is a totally different realm of knowledge into which the mind can tap.  It is through this element that the mind can investigate the nature of things or to pass judgement as to its ultimate truthfulness, its functionality, its morality, and other qualities that transcend its physical qualities, i.e., beyond one’s observation of the things-in-themselves.  And here, according to Kant, one does not use reason – reason only deals in the phenomenal.[1]

All of this review reminds this blogger of what he reads concerning contemporary psychological study of these human, mental abilities and processes.  For example, Nobel prize winner, Daniel Kahneman, writes:

 Our everyday intuitive abilities are no less marvelous than the striking insights of an experienced firefighter or physician – only more common …

[quoting Herbert Simon] “The situation has provided a cue; this cue has given the expert access to information stored in memory, and the information provides the answer. Intuition is nothing more and nothing less than recognition.” …

         An important advance is that emotion now looms much larger in our understanding of intuitive judgements and choices than it did in the past. [An] executive’s decision would today be described as an example of the affect heuristic, where judgements and decisions are guided directly by feelings of liking and disliking, with little deliberation or reasoning.[2]

 All this gets heavier as one plunges into Kant, and the purpose here is not to do so – even if this writer could – but to give the reader a sense of why Romantic Americans adopted the term transcendentalism.  In doing so, they probably extended Kant’s purposes, but it did fit into what they wished to promote.  As with their European counterparts, they had an attitude against reason and Kant’s transcendent argument fit their designs.  Allen Guelzo explains:

 There were, Kant said, two things which amazed him – the starry heavens above, which were phenomenal, and the moral law within which belonged to the noumenal.  Never the twain would meet, at least methodologically. Philosophy could not become transcendent.  But, through the gift of the noumenal, it could become transcendental.  Reason, and all of its limitations, half heartedness, and sterility, could retire off the stage and minds could rejoice in knowing the certainty of external phenomena and the intuition of transcendental wonder.[3]

And wonder seems to be what many Americans were searching to find in the 1820s and 1830s.

As with the Great Awakening, the first signs of this transcending that is Transcendentalism appears in the Boston area.  It devolved from Unitarianism, a Protestant sect springing from the days of the Great Awakening, on the Harvard campus.  By the early 1800s, it had become the most prominent religion in the Boston area.

Upon the election of Henry Ware as a professor of divinity as early as 1805 and the ascension of John Thornton Kirkland as president of that college in 1810, a certain natural evolution from Unitarian beliefs took hold, an outgrowth or sort of rebellious thinking that promoted free consciousness and initially valued intellectual reasoning.  

But this view moved on and began to question such Unitarian biases of mildness, sobriety, and cool rationalism.  They, the self-anointed Transcendentalists, sought more intensity.   Parallel to otherwise Unitarian beliefs, they went looking for more visceral spirituality in their beliefs and in the religious experiences that they encountered.[4] These notions took root and led to the eventual founding of the Transcendental Club in Cambridge in 1836 under the leadership of George Putnam, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Frederick Henry Hedge.

The club had female members and of note, Thoreau was also a member. It published a journal, The Dial. But the club and its movement did not enjoy widespread influence during the 1840s.  As a matter of fact, it did not hit its stride until later in the mid-nineteenth century.  At that time, Transcendentalism influenced a growing movement known as the “Mental Sciences.”  Later, it took on the name “New Thought.”  It considered Emerson its intellectual father as well as depending on a long list of influential British writers of those years.[5]

It turns out that these Americans had little direct exposure to European Romantics and most of what they understood or knew of them came to them through the works of Thomas Carlyle and Samuel Taylor Coleridge.  It is through their presentation of Romantic ideas that this blog will next look at and report on their influence.

[1] Henry E. Allison, “Kant, Immanuel,” in The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, edited by Ted Honderich (New York:  Oxford University Press, 1995), 435-438.

[2] Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow, (New York, NY:  Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2011), 11-12.

[3] Allen C. Guelzo, The American Mind, Part II – a transcript book – (Chantilly, VA:  The Teaching Company/The Great Courses, 2005), 23-24.

[4] Ian Frederick, “The Emergence of Transcendentalism,” American Studies at The University of Virginia, University of Virginia (November 2014), accessed September 13, 2021, Rise of Transcendentalism (virginia.edu) .

[5] “New Thought,” MSN Encarta, Microsoft (November 11, 2002), accessed September 13, 2021, New Thought - MSN Encarta (archive.org) .

[timespakistan]

Karachiites face immense hardships as protests against Machh carnage continue Massive traffic jams were again observed in various parts of Karachi on Thursday as the Hazara community and Shia groups continued with their protest sit-ins and demonstrations at over 20 spots in the city to show solidarity with the Hazara families protesting the Machh tragedy in Quetta. Eleven miners of the Shia Hazara community were brutally killed before dawn on Sunday while they were asleep near a remote coal mine in the mountainous area of Machh in Balochistan. The Islamic State (IS) claimed the responsibility for the attack. As the bereaved families in Balochistan have not buried the bodies in protest and are demanding that the prime minister should pay a visit to them, Shia groups, including the Majlis Wahdat-e-Muslimeen (MWM), the Shia Ulema Council, the Jafria Alliance, the Imamia Students Organisation and the Jaffaria Students Organisation, along with the Hazara community have been holding sit-ins on various roads of Karachi to express solidarity with the families. Protests are underway since yesterday at 20 locations in the city, according to a statement by the Karachi Traffic Police. These areas are Numaish, Kamran Chowrangi, Airport to Natha Khan, Shah Faisal Colony, Gulistan-e-Johar Morr to Johar Chowrangi and Safoora Chowrangi, Malir 15 to Quaidabad, Khuda Ki Basti, Surjani and Steel Town Chowrangi, Ibrahim Hyderi and Korangi, Nipa Bridge, Power House Chowrangi, Safari Park, Nazimabad’s Five Star Chowrangi, Gulberg, Ancholi, Azizabad IRC Imambargah, Nazimabad Board Office and Nazimabad Chowrangi 1. According to a traffic official, Rangers and police have also been deployed to assist the traffic police and ensure the law and order in these areas. However, traffic has been severely affected due to the protests and the commuters are being directed to take alternative routes. Civil society protests The Joint Action Committee (JAC), a joint platform of the civil society organisations, on Thursday staged a protest demonstration outside the Karachi Press Club against the killing of 11 Hazara mine workers in Machh. Carrying placards inscribed with demands to protect the lives of Hazaras, the participants called for an immediate arrest of the terrorists and demanded that the family of the victims be provided with over Rs1.5 million in compensation for each slain worker. Speaking on the occasion, JAC leaders Karamat Ali, Anis Haroon, Qazi Khizar and Saeed Baloch condemned the killings of the Shia Hazara workers in Balochistan. They described the prime minister’s attitude as stubborn for not visiting the bereaved families, who have staged a sit-in in Quetta and are not ready to bury the victims before the prime minister visits them. They condemned both the federal and Balochistan governments for “their failure to protect human lives in the province”. They said the FC had several checkpoints at every nook and corner, but despite that, the terrorists killed the workers and fled away easily. They called the terror activity a failure of the security agencies and the provincial government. Wahid Baloch, Dr Riaz Shaikh, Seema Maheswari, Paryal Marri, Habibuddin Junaidi, Zehra Akbar, Asghar Dashti and other activists also attended the protest. Later, some JAC leaders visited the main protest sit-in at Numaish Chowrangi in Karachi. ‘Protests to continue’ At the main sit-in camp set up by the MWM at Numaish Chowrangi, MWM leader Allama Baqir Abbas Zaidi said the peaceful sit-ins would continue across the country to show solidarity with the families of the Hazara community’s martyrs “until the heirs themselves announce the end of the sit-in and the burial of the bodies”. Leaders of various political parties, including Pakistan People Party’s provincial ministers Nasir Hussain Shah, Shehla Raza and Saeed Ghani, MQM-Pakistan’s leader Kishore Zahra, Pak Sarzameen’s leaders Shabir Qaim Khani and Dr Arshad Vehra, visited the camp to show solidarity with the Hazara community protesting in Quetta. In another sit-in, MWM leaders Bashul Ali Hussain Naqvi, Allama Dali Anwar Jafari, Allama Sadiq Jafari, Allama Mubashir Hassan and others spoke to the protesters. They asked the prime minister to visit the heirs of the martyrs and fulfil their demands. Call for operation Shia Ulema Council (SUC) leaders said terrorists had killed innocent labourers once again, posing a new challenge to the law enforcers. Addressing a press conference at the press club, SUC leaders Allama Muhammad Hussain Masoodi, Allama Syed Bair Hussain Zaidi, Allama Nasir Ahmed Qalandari and other Shia scholars said foreign forces were supporting the banned religious parties and effective action was necessary against them. “This is not the first attack on the Hazara tribe and the Shia community. Leaders of the banned parties openly issue fatwas for killings,” said Masoodi, demanding an operation against the proscribed outfits. “Anti-state elements are conspiring to divide our society on the basis of sect and religion, and this is the first step towards the collapse of the system,” he said. SUC leaders urged the national security institutions to take action not only against the banned outfits but also against those who were involved in spreading hatred and indoctrinating youths with hatred. ‘Vacate one passage’ Sindh Information and Local Government Minister Syed Nasir Hussain Shah has appealed to the protesters to vacate one passage of the blocked roads on humanitarian grounds to facilitate the movement of the emergency service vehicles, including ambulances, adds our correspondent. Speaking to media persons at the press club, he appealed to the religious scholars leading the protest sit-ins to vacate some passage of the blocked roads to facilitate the movement of patients through ambulances and to ensure oxygen supply to the hospitals in the city. He also appealed to the prime minister to go to Quetta to show sympathy with the bereaved families. Entry test cancelled Due to the blockage of main routes, the Federal Urdu University of Arts, Science and Technology postponed the entrance test for the undergraduate programme of Pharmacy-D. A day earlier, the varsity had circulated the test schedule. Later on, the varsity convened an emergency meeting in which it was decided to reschedule the test. The varsity will announce the new date for the test later. https://timespakistan.com/karachiites-face-immense-hardships-as-protests-against-machh-carnage-continue/7739/

[arcticdementor]

Sometimes a piece of writing so perfectly distills a cultural moment and mood that it deserves to be given outsized attention. That's very much the case with Farhad Manjoo's op-ed column in Thursday's New York Times, "The Perfect Pronoun: Singular 'They'."

…

The first thing to be said about these convictions is that, apart from a miniscule number of transgender activists and postmodern theorists and scholars, no one would have affirmed any of them as recently as four years ago. There is almost no chance at all that the Farhad Manjoo of 2009 sat around pondering and lamenting the oppressiveness of his peers referring to "him" as "he." That's because (as far as I know) Manjoo is a man, with XY chromosomes, male reproductive organs, and typically male hormone levels, and a mere decade ago referring to such a person as "he" was considered to be merely descriptive of a rather mundane aspect of reality. His freedom was not infringed, or implicated, in any way by this convention. It wouldn't have occurred to him to think or feel otherwise. Freedom was something else and about other things.

The emergence and spread of the contrary idea — that "gender is a ubiquitous prison of the mind" — can be traced to a precise point in time: the six months following the Supreme Court's Obergefell decision, which declared same-sex marriage a constitutional right. Almost immediately after that decision was handed down, progressive activists took up the cause of championing transgender rights as the next front in the culture war — and here we are, just four short years later, born free but everywhere in chains.

How should we understand this astonishingly radical and rapid shift in self-understanding among highly educated progressive members of the upper-middle class? (In addition to calling himself a "cisgender, middle-aged suburban dad" at the opening of his column, Manjoo confesses that he "covet[s] my neighbor's Porsche," so it seems exactly right to describe him in this way.) I suspect Manjoo would say that his consciousness has been raised. Once he was blind, but now he sees. Once he slumbered, but now he's awake — or "woke."

Others have noted the religious connotations of the term. This has even been reflected in the prevalence of the formulation "Great Awokening" among sympathetic journalists seeking to explain the trend. It gets at something important. A kind of spiritual-moral madness periodically wells up and sweeps across vast swaths of the United States. In the 18th and 19th centuries, these Great Awakenings were decidedly "low church" affairs and invariably emerged from America's plethora of Protestant sects. Today, for perhaps the first time in American history, it is a nominally secular, progressive elite that finds itself swept up into a moral fervor and eager to overturn (linguistic and other) conventions in a surge of self-certainty and self-righteousness.

…

What is it, exactly, that Manjoo finds oppressive about the use of gendered pronouns? In addition to raising a fusty objection to the ungrammatical use of a gender-neutral plural pronoun to refer to single, gendered individuals, grammarians might also point out that English is far less gender-infused than many other languages. Latin, French, Spanish, Italian, German, and many other languages divide the world into masculine, feminine, and sometimes (but not always) neuter nouns. Masculine chairs, feminine houses, and so on, reflected in definite and indefinite articles and pronouns in every sentence ever read, written, spoken, or heard in languages across the world. Talk about a prison with little prospect for escape!

…

But what is this freedom that Manjoo and so many others suddenly crave for themselves and their children? That's more than a little mysterious. Slaves everywhere presumably know that they are unfree, even if they accept the legitimacy of the system and the master that keeps them enslaved. But what is this bondage we couldn't even begin to perceive in 2009 that in under a decade has become a burden so onerous that it produces a demand for the overturning of well-settled rules and assumptions, some of which ("the gender binary") go all the way back to the earliest origins of human civilization?

The beginnings of an answer can be found in the writings of a number of thinkers who have analyzed, often critically but from a range of religious and political perspectives, the potential excesses of liberalism and democracy — and especially the antinomian logic of individualism. Alexis de Tocqueville, Robert Nisbet, Christopher Lasch, Walker Percy, Michel Houellebecq, and others have reflected deeply on what might be called the phenomenology of individualism — how a society devoted at the level of principle to the liberation of the individual from constraints can easily produce citizens who continually feel themselves to be newly enslaved and in need of ever new and more radical forms of liberation.

…

This is how a progressive in 2014 can consider it an unacceptable limitation on individual freedom for gay couples to be denied the right to marry — and base that argument on the claim that a gay man's love and natural desire for another man, like a lesbian's love and natural desire for another woman, is irreducible and ineradicable — and then insist just five years later that it is an unacceptable limitation on individual freedom for anyone to be presumed a man or a woman at all.

As Andrew Sullivan has powerfully argued, the two positions are fundamentally incompatible. The first, which morally justifies same-sex marriage, presumes that biological sex and binary gender differences are real, that they matter, and that they can't just be erased at will. The second, which Manjoo and many transgender activists embrace and espouse, presumes the opposite — that those differences can and should be immediately dissolved. To affirm the truth of both positions is to embrace incoherence.

But that assumes that we're treating them as arguments. If, instead, we view them as expressions of what it can feel like at two different moments in a society devoted to the principle of individualism, they can be brought into a kind of alignment. Each is simply an expression of rebellion against a different but equally intolerable constraint on the individual. All that's changed is the object of rebellion.

Will Manjoo's call for liberation from the tyranny of the gender binary catch on in the way that the push for same-sex marriage did before it? I have no idea. What I do know is that, whatever happens, it's likely to be followed by another undoubtedly very different crusade in the name of individual freedom, and then another, and another, as our society (and others like it) continues to work through the logic of its devotion to the principle of individualism.

The only thing that could halt the process is the rejection of that principle altogether.

[thesilentrevolutionoftruth]

Explanations by Ptaah and Billy...

Important Excerpts from Contact Conversations:

Six-hundred and Twenty-third Contact

Whitsunday, May 24th, 2015, 9:53 pm

 Billy

… It troubles me again that I have to say something in regard to the overpopulation, because the world must be saved from it. Unfortunately, however, nothing is done about it, because, on the contrary, the entire thing is still promoted by the governments and authorities by human beings still getting money for having children, in this regard, be it high amounts for births or other monetary benefits which are paid out by the authorities, and so forth. Furthermore it must also be said that often, recklessly and irresponsibly, without thinking, wanted or unwanted offspring are brought into the world by human beings who are incapable of bringing them up. As a consequence of lacking the right education, these children then fall into asociality, become depraved and engage in modes of behaviour which deviate from the societal norms and harm the society and burden the world. Naturally, however, there are also quite normal human beings who are righteous and good citizens, who produce descendants who then contribute to the overpopulation. Thereby, very many parents only think of themselves and of their own joys which they want to have with children, however no thought arises that thereby also one must pay heed to the wellbeing of the Earth and bear responsibility for it, and indeed in the regard that through the machinations of the increasing overpopulation, nature and its fauna and flora as well as the climatic order are destroyed. The Earth is not only full of human beings, rather it is boundlessly overpopulated. And this overpopulation continues to grow at a frantic pace; consequently the Earth becomes incessantly fuller, namely, with an average of around 100 million human beings per year. Already the world population amounts to over 8.5 billion and increases incessantly further, because nothing is undertaken against it by either those responsible for the world and the mightful ones of state, or by the population of the world, such as in the necessary form of a regulated worldwide stop to births and a therewith connected birth control. Already for decades, that has been bringing about many kinds of very bad consequences, such as also come forth quite unambiguously from the limited natural resources on the planet Earth, which are feloniously exploited for the sake of vile profit, inflicting monstrous wounds on the Earth which cannot be healed. The whole Earth, its climate and nature, with its fauna and flora, but also the human being of the Earth himself/herself, are disadvantageously burdened as a result of the overpopulation and tremendously irresponsible machinations, through which irreversible destructions are called forth, the origin of which is not caused by nature, rather it is solely attributable to the criminality of the terrestrial humanity. If the facts of the increasing environmental pollution due to the mass of humanity are viewed and considered as well as the increased global warming and the fact that very many more human beings increasingly annoy each other, as well as that the mighty ones of diverse countries always evoke new wars worldwide, and terror organisations of many shades carry out their felonious mischief, then the future of the Earth for the terrestrial humanity does not look exactly rosy. Unfortunately, the fact is that, in defiance of the risks in regard to the overpopulation, in regard to useful and right solutions, the whole thing of a worldwide stop to births and an effective birth control is quite tricky. If namely that is spoken about, then immediately the personal private right of the human being is put forward, which is cut back and limited by such measures, because the begetting of offspring and therefore having children would indeed be an absolutely private matter and it would be unethical to dictate to human beings how many children they are permitted to have. But that can really no longer be the case, if the humanity and the home-planet Earth and its climate, nature and fauna and flora are to be preserved and continue to exist – however with very many fewer human beings who poison and destroy a tremendous amount less of the biosphere, possibilities for life, the planet, nature and its fauna and flora. But that is not thought about, rather only that a birth stoppage and a birth control would be a despotic regime that would disregard the fundamental right of human beings in regard to reproduction and personal freedom. Therefore, regarding this, rigorous measures are rejected, because the human being is simply the only being on the Earth which can consciously decide in such a private form, indeed, that he/she can bring as many children into the world as he/she wants and as he/she pleases – regardless of which consequences emerge from that, and regardless of if the Earth thereby totally perishes and the humanity perhaps exterminates itself, because the overpopulation becomes so great one day that it can no longer sustain itself. There are many examples for that in regard to past great cultures, which simply vanished from the surface of the Earth. And such events are also known in the animal world, such as when an animal population becomes too big it then either ends its own life or it is reduced to a bearable amount through illness or rampantly spreading diseases. Therefore it is urgent that finally options are taken into consideration which curb the population growth, and indeed not only a little bit, rather, tremendously, when it is considered that the planet Earth is only made to accommodate a population of 529 million. Therefore it is urgently necessary that every single human being of the Earth, woman as well as man, ultimately helps so that a worldwide birth stoppage and a regulated, fair and right as well as federally controlled birth control comes about. Solely through that alone can the environment and the humanity generally be saved from their downfall. If the entire catastrophic disaster is considered which since 1844, in the new age, has been caused through the machinations of the Earth humanity and the continuously growing, horrendous overpopulation, in the form of thousands of kinds of eliminations and destructions to the planet Earth, the climate, the bodies of water, fields, meadows and forests as well as to the entirety of nature generally and to its fauna and flora, as well as due to other monstrous things, such as illnesses, wars, disadvantages, rampantly spreading diseases and terror in regard to the Earth humanity, then no words can be found any more for that and everything can only be clothed in the term ‘horror’. And if a prognosis is to be made for the Earth humanity, then all there is to say is that a gloomy future is to be expected, because the frightful effects of the population growth impact on the environment so destructively that everything and anything will perish. Thereby playing an important role is also the factor of the human being of the Earth becoming older and older, whereby there is also research undertaken for a radical prolonging of life, which will lead to very many very old human beings contributing to the overpopulation growing even more. Many who research extending the life have tried already for a long time, and indeed already since ancient times, to find out how the life of human beings can be endlessly lengthened. And as everything in the present time develops very rapidly, in the coming decades they will really find ways to solve the problems of aging and dying. That will certainly mean much difficult research work, and will be no more stoppable than the growth of the overpopulation, if intellect and rationality are not finally used in order to recognise the effective reality and its truth and to necessarily take the right measures and carry them out to the bitter end, in which only 529 million human beings, or at the most, perhaps one billion human beings, populate the Earth who then must strive over many centuries or even millennia to arduously regenerate everything that today’s humanity has eliminated and destroyed since 1844 in only around 170 years, already making great areas of the Earth uninhabitable. It is fundamentally necessary that now finally there is a beginning to working out measures that reach worldwide against the overpopulation and very quickly implementing them, because if there is simply further waiting and nothing is done then the entire thing will only become very much worse. The world population grows every day by hundreds of thousands of human beings, and this is also when those around 160,000 who die are subtracted. The entire thing is comparable with the nine-headed Lernaean Hydra from Greek mythology, with which, when one head was cut off, immediately two more would grow back. Concerning human beings, that means that when one human being dies, two new ones are born. But the governors, the mightful ones of state, the politicians and authorities do nothing against that, just as the humanity itself does nothing, consequently the overpopulation can further spread. In the new time – and indeed especially already from the 20th century, which however self-evidently also applies to the current time – it was and is always arranged for that small, bigger and very big families are supported by the state, by religions and sects as well as by aid organisations, and so forth, and indeed even when the couples cannot afford any children or they do not care about the children and let them go to rack and ruin. Actually, today it is the case that the more child money and social welfare is paid, the more children are conceived and born, which – as insane as it is – promotes an excessive begetting of children more than ever, because conscienceless and irresponsible ‘parents’ speculate on the child bonuses and social bonuses as well as on aid money and gifts. The fact that also that contributes to no thoughts being made in regard to the overpopulation does not worry anybody. Mammon entices, and only in this regard is there a calculation, because the human being has only developed in this material direction. Therefore nothing else concerns him/her, also not all the catastrophes such as earthquakes, wars, rampantly spreading diseases, primeval storms of all kinds and extreme weather catastrophes, terrorism, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions, felonies of a political or religious-sectarian kind, as well as tremendous forest fires, and so forth. But quite especially the insidious global disaster of the overpopulation does not worry anyone, nor are its eliminating and destroying consequences seen, nor are the global climatic warming, environmental pollution and the exploitation of resources as well as the depletion of resources, and so on and so forth. However, the limit to the individual freedom is where it is necessary in order to preserve – that is to say, to save and make healthy and capable of life again everywhere – the continued existence of humanity as well as of the planet Earth as well as its nature, fauna and flora. However the human being of the Earth takes the right to continue to irresponsibly cultivate the overpopulation, which has already been in excess for a long time, to an even greater degree. This is so because he/she has fallen into the delusion – at least the absolute majority of humanity – of having an individual right to selfishly not give a damn about the environment, the planet, the waters, wetlands, acres, fields, forests and meadows, all of the fauna and flora and about the prosperity and adversity of the individual human being and indeed of the entire humanity. Thereby he/she has fallen into the delusion that he/she may accept that everything essential for life is ruined, eliminated and destroyed, if only his/her own egoism and wellbeing and all personal advantages can be maintained. Only a few are concerned that, with this irresponsible action and this mode of life which is antagonistic to life, the right to existence and to life of not only individuals, rather of all human beings is curtailed and put into question. The ones who act selfishly do not deal with the rights to life of the community in the form in which they deal with their private right, which they claim for themselves, because truthly they stop at nothing and let their fellow human beings die miserably, if they thereby gain an advantage for themselves and, according to their understanding of personal rights, can irresponsibly bring more children into the world than is allowed to them and can be rightful. They have fallen to the delusional belief that they are allowed to procreate at the expense of fellow human beings and without any consideration for them, for nature and its fauna and flora as well as the planet, and indeed without a responsible family planning and world-population planning being necessary. However, the fact is that in earlier times of the history of humanity, that was effectively unnecessary, but in the current time of the terribly rampantly spreading overpopulation, it must be an absolute necessity based on a consciousness of responsibility. Earlier it was also the case that before Dr Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis came (born 1st July 1818, Buda, Budapest, Hungary; died, 13th August 1865, Vienna, Austria) and introduced an effective hygiene in the hospitals, innumerable children and women died at childbirth and thus nature had culled in a brutal way, as it also had through illnesses, hunger, war and rampantly spreading diseases, and so forth. Now, however, since the human being of the Earth has raised the quality and duration of his/her life very much and continues to drive it higher, he/she must change his/her thinking and adapt to the new time as well as to its circumstances and thereby also to the necessity of a worldwide stop to births and an effective birth regulation, in order to put a stop to the overpopulation, to reduce it and to no longer let it continue to spread. The entire humanity of today must concern itself with a very greatly changed reality and do everything conceivably necessary to indeed still prevent the ultimate great terrors which inevitably arise out of a further idiotic-stupid cultivation of the overpopulation. The matter is indeed hard to tackle and means great terror for the Earth humanity, but it is always better to make a painful break than to endure the agony which is endless and comes with an inevitable demise. A worldwide stop to births with a following birth regulation is the best compromise in order to master the overpopulation dilemma, even if thereby in this regard the personal rights of the human being must be reduced for the good of the entire humanity as well as of the planet, nature and its fauna and flora and their continued existence. If thereby all other rights of freedom are protected then the general welfare of the entire Earth population as well as of the planet, nature and its fauna and flora actually have a real chance of being saved – otherwise…

 This section translated by FLAU

 Source

http://au.figu.org/623rd_contact.htm

 www.futureofmankind.info/Billy_Meier/Contact_Report_623

 http://billybooks.org/

SEE THE BOOKSTORE ON WWW.FIGU.ORG

http://theyfly.com/new-translation-talmud-jmmanuel

http://www.figu.org/ch/files/downloads/buecher/figu-kelch_der_wahrheit_goblet-of-the-truth_v_20150307.pdf

http://www.futureofmankind.info/Billy_Meier/The_Pleiadian/Plejaren_Contact_Reports

https://creationaltruth.org/Library/FIGU-Books/Arahat-Athersata

https://www.theyfly.com/articles-billy-eduard-albert-meier

 Spreading of the Correct Peace Symbol

https://creationaltruth.org/Portals/0/Images/Library/FIGU%20Stickers/Verbreitet%20das%20richtige%20Friedenssymbol-1.pdf

 Ban-Srut Beam - Last Prophet - Line of Nokodemion

[antojai]

History of Reiki

There have been many attempts to explain the history of Reiki, but unfortunately, in the past, many of them have been based more on myth and an attempt to validate a particular style of Reiki and for the most part, lacked accurate information. Realizing the need for a factually based history of Reiki, I’ve spent over twenty years researching this information based on written records and interviews with those close to its development. The result is the following history of Reiki, which is derived from evidence based facts.

Reiki Before Usui

Many consider that Mikao Usui or Usui Sensei as we reverently refer to him, was the creator of Reiki and that the word Reiki applies only to the healing modality he discovered and developed. Yet, when researching the facts concerning the origin of Reiki as a healing modality, we find that prior to Usui Sensei developing his style of Reiki, there were at least four other styles of Reiki healing that were being practiced in Japan. This information comes from Hiroshi Doi Sensei and from Toshitaka Mochitzuki Sensei, two Japanese Reiki researchers. A more detailed understanding of this subject is explained in the book, An Evidence Based History of Reiki.(1, 2)

 Mataji Kawakami Created Reiki Ryoho in 1914. Author of Reiki Healing and Its Effects Published 1919.

In 1914, Matiji Kawakami, a Japanese therapist, created a healing style he called Reiki Ryoho and in 1919, he published a book titled Reiki Ryoho to Sono Koka, or Reiki Healing and Its Effects. The other Reiki healing styles in use at the time were: Reikan Tonetsu Ryoho created by Reikaku Ishinuki, Senshinryu Reiki Ryoho created by Kogetsu Matsubara and Seido Reishojutsu created by Reisen Oyama. It was during the time that these Reiki styles were already in use that in March 1922, Usui Sensei had his mystical experience on Kurama yama in which he was given the Reiki energy and from this developed his style of Reiki, which he called Usui Reiki Ryoho. It is interesting that Usui Sensei chose this name as it tends to indicate that he knew of the other styles of Reiki Ryoho in use and was indicating that this was his style of Reiki Ryoho. And because of circumstances that developed during World War II along with the work of Takata Sensei mentioned later in this section, the other forms of Reiki fell into disuse or remained relatively unknown while Usui Reiki continued to be practiced and grew in popularity

In considering what should or should not be called Reiki, we must consider that not only have there been many systems of Reiki healing that are original and do not have a lineage going back to Usui Sensei, but that the Reiki energy has been around at least for thousands of years and in fact some feel it has been around since the beginning of time. Reiki energy is something that anyone can make use of and of course many have, so with this in mind, it appears logical to assume that any system that makes use of Reiki energy can be called Reiki, not just those systems that can be traced back to Usui Sensei.

However, because of conditions in Japan after World War II and the fact that Hawaya Takata had brought Reiki to the west, Usui Reiki became the predominate form of Reiki practiced throughout the world. Because of this, a thorough understanding of Usui Reiki is important as it will give us a foundation for understanding Reiki, making it easier for us to connect with its essence.

The Inscription on the Usui Memorial

The Usui Memorial

The history of Usui Reiki begins with a look at the inscription on the memorial stone that was erected in 1927 in Tokyo, Japan in memory of Mikao Usui Sensei, founder of the Usui Reiki healing system.

The inscription on the Usui Memorial, dating from 1927, was written by Juzaburo Ushida, a Shihan (teacher) who was trained by Usui Sensei and able to teach and practice Reiki the same way that he did.(3) He also succeeded Usui Sensei as president of the Usui Reiki Ryoho Gakkai (Usui Reiki Healing Method Society). Masayuki Okata, also a member of the Usui Reiki Ryoho Gakkai, was the editor. The English translation was done by Tetsuyuki Ono and is reprinted here from the book, lyashino Gendai Reiki- ho, with permission from the author, Hiroshi Doi.

The large kanji (adopted Chinese characters used in the Japanese writing system) at the top of the memorial stone reads: “Memorial of Usui Sensei’s Virtue.” The remainder of the inscription reads as follows:

What you can naturally realize through cultivation and training is called “VIRTUE” and it is called “MERIT” to spread a method of leadership and relief and practice it. It is people of many merits and a good deal of virtue that can be eventually called a great founder. People who started a new learning and founded a fresh sect among sages, philosophers, geniuses etc., named from the ancient times, were all those as mentioned above. We can say that Usui-Sensei is also one of those people. 

He started newly a method to improve body and spirit based on REIKI in the universe. Hearing of the rumor, people who would like to learn the treatment and undergo the cure gathered from all quarters all at once. Really, it was very busy indeed. 

Usui-Sensei, whose popular name is Mikao and whose pen name is Gyohan, came from Taniai-village, Yamagata- district, Cifu Prefecture, and had forefathers named Tsunetane Chiba who had played an active part as a military commander between the end of Heian Period and the beginning of Kamakura Period (1180–1230). His father’s real name is Taneuji and his popular name is Uzaemon. His mother came and got married from the family named Kawai. 

Usui-Sensei was born on 15th August, 1865. Having learned under difficulties in his childhood, he studied hard with efforts and he was by far superior in ability to his friends. 

After growing up, he went over to Europe and America, and also studied in China. In spite of his real ability, however, he was not always successful in life. Although he was compelled to lead an unfortunate and poor life so often, he strove much more than before to harden his body and mind without flinching from the difficulties. 

One day, Usui-Sensei climbed Mt. Kurama, where he began to do penance while fasting. Suddenly on the twenty first day from the start, he felt a great REIKI over his head, and at the same time as he was spiritually awakened he acquired the REIKI cure. When he tried it on his own body and members of his family also, it brought an immediate result on them. 

Having said “It is much better to give this power widely to a lot of people in the world and enjoy it among them than to keep it exclusively by his family members,” Usui-Sensei moved his dwelling to Aoyama Harajuku, Tokyo in April, 1922 and established an institute, where the REIKI cure was instructed openly to the public and the treatment was given, too. People came there from far and near to ask for his guidance and cure, and they over-flowed outside, making a long line. 

Tokyo had a very big fire caused by a great earthquake in Kanto district in September, 1923, when the injured and sick persons suffered from pains everywhere. Usui-Sensei felt a deep anxiety about that, and he was engaged in a cure, going around inside the city every day. We can hardly calculate how many persons were saved from death with his devotion. His activities of relief, in which he extended his hands of love over to those suffering people against this emergent situation, can be outlined as noted above. 

Thereafter, his training center became too small to receive the visitors, so he built a new house in Nakano outside the city in February 1925 and transferred there. As his reputation got higher and higher, it was so often when he received an offer of engagement from everywhere throughout the nation. In accordance with these requests he traveled to Kure and Hiroshima, then entered Saga and reached Fukuyama. It was at the inn at which he stayed on his way that he caught a disease abruptly, and he passed away at the age of sixty-two. 

His wife got married, coming from the Suzuki family, and she is named Sadako and has a son and a daughter. The son’s name is Fuji, and he succeeds to the Usui family. 

Usui-Sensei’s natural character was gentle and prudent, and he did not keep up appearances. His body was big and sturdy, and his face was always beaming with a smile. But when he faced the difficulties he went ahead with a definite will and yet persevered well, keeping extremely careful. He was a man of versatile talents and also a book lover, knowing well in the wide range from history, biography, medical science, canons of Christianity and Buddhism and psychology up to magic of fairyland, art of curse, science of divination and physiognomy. 

In my opinion, it is evident to everybody that Usui-Sensei’s cultivation & training were based on his career of art and science, and the cultivation & training became a clue to create the REIKI cure. 

Reviewing the fact, I understand what the REIKI cure is aiming at is not only to heal the diseases but also to correct the mind by virtue of a God-sent spiritual ability, keep the body healthy and enjoy a welfare of life. In teaching the persons, therefore, we are supposed to first let them realize the last instructions of the Emperor Meiji, and chant the 5 admonitions morning and evening to keep them in mind. 

The 5 admonitions in question are: 

1. Don’t get angry today. 

2. Don’t be grievous. 

3. Express your thanks. 

4. Be diligent in your business. 

5. Be kind to others. 

These are really the important precepts for a cultivation, just the same as those by which the ancient sages admonished themselves. Usui-Sensei emphasized that ‘This is surely a secret process to bring a good fortune and also a miraculous medicine to remedy all kinds of diseases,’ by which he made his purpose of teaching clear and accurate. Furthermore, he tried to aim at making his way of guidance as easy and simple as possible, so nothing is difficult to understand therein. Every time when you sit quietly and join your hands to pray and chant morning and evening, you can develop a pure and sound mind, and there is just an essence in making the most of that for your daily life. This is the reason why the REIKI cure can very easily spread over anybody. 

The phase of life is very changeable in these days, and people’s thoughts are apt to change, too. Could we fortunately succeed in spreading the REIKI cure everywhere, we feel sure that it would have to be very helpful in order to prevent people from disordering their moral sense. It never extends people anything but the benefits of healing long term illness, chronic disease and bad habit. 

The number of pupils who learned from Usui-Sensei amounts to more than 2000 persons. Some leading pupils living in Tokyo among them gather at the training center and take over his work, while other pupils in the country also do everything to popularize the REIKI cure. Although our teacher already passed away, we have to do the very best to hand the REIKI cure down to the public forever and spread it much more. Ah! What a great thing he did; to have unsparingly given people what he had felt and realized by himself! 

As a result of our pupils’ recent meeting and discussion, we decided to erect a stone monument at the graveyard in his family temple so that we may bring his virtuous deed to light and transmit it to posterity; so, I was requested to arrange an epitaph for the monument. As I was much impressed by his great meritorious deed and also struck by our pupils’ warm hearts of making much of the bond between master and pupil, I dared not refuse the request, but described the outline. 

Therefore, I do expect heartily that people in the future generations would not forget to look up at the monument in open-eyed wonder. 

— Usuida, in February, 1927. Edited by Masayuki Okada, The Junior 3rd Rank, the 3rd Order of Merit, Doctor of Literature. Written by Juzaburo Usuhida, The Junior 4th Class of Services, Rear Admiral. 

 Mikao Usui (Usui Sensei), founder of the Reiki System of Healing.

Mikao Usui, or Usui Sensei as he is called by Reiki students in Japan, was born August 15, 1865 in the village of Taniai in the Yamagata district of Gifu prefecture, which is located near present-day Nagoya, Japan.(4) 

He had an avid interest in learning and worked hard at his studies. As he grew older, he traveled to Europe and China to further his education. His curriculum included medicine, psychology and religion as well as the art of divination, which Asians have long considered to be a worthy skill.(5) Usui Sensei also became a member of the Rei Jyutu Ka, a metaphysical group dedicated to developing psychic abilities.(6) He had many jobs including civil servant, company employee and journalist, and he helped rehabilitate prisoners.(7) Eventually he became the secretary to Shinpei Goto, head of the department of health and welfare who later became the mayor of Tokyo. The connections Usui Sensei made at this job helped him to also become a successful businessman.(8)

The depth and breadth of his experiences inspired him to direct his attention toward discovering the purpose of life. In his search he came across the description of a special state of consciousness that once achieved would not only provide an understanding of one’s life purpose, but would also guide one to achieve it. This special state is called An-shin Ritus-mei (pronounced on sheen dit sue may). In this special state, one is always at peace regardless of what is taking place in the outer world. And it is from this place of peace that one completes one’s life purpose. One of the special features of this state is that it maintains itself without any effort on the part of the individual; the experience of peace simply wells up spontaneously from within and is a type of enlightenment.

Tenyo Shrine which is a short walk from where Usui Sensei was born in the village of Taniai. The Torii or archway is inscribed with words indicating that it was donated by Usui Mikao in 1923.

Usui Sensei understood this concept on an intellectual level and dedicated his life to achieving it; this is considered to be an important step on Usui Sensei’s spiritual path. He discovered that one path to An-shin Ritsu-mei is through the practice of Zazen meditation. So he found a Zen teacher who accepted him as a student and began to practice Zazen. After three years practice, he had not been successful and sought further guidance. His teacher suggested a more severe practice in which the student must be willing to die in order to achieve An-shin Ritsu-mei.(9, 10) 

So with this in mind he prepared for death and in February, 1922, he went to Kurama yama, a sacred mountain north of Kyoto. He went to fast and meditate until he passed to the next world. It must be kept in mind that he was not looking to discover a method of healing, but was seeking to experience this special spiritual state. In addition, we know there is a small waterfall on Kurama yama where even today people go to meditate. This meditation involves standing under the waterfall and allowing the water to strike and flow over the top of the head, a practice that is said to activate the crown chakra. Japanese Reiki Masters think that Usui Sensei may have used this meditation as part of his practice. In any case, as time passed he became weaker and weaker. It was now March 1922 and at midnight of the twenty-first day, a powerful light suddenly entered his mind through the top of his head and he felt as if he had been struck by lightning; this caused him to fall unconscious.

As the sun rose, he awoke and realized that whereas before he had felt very weak and near death from his fasting, he was now filled with an extremely enjoyable state of vitality that he had never experienced before; a miraculous type of high frequency spiritual energy had displaced his normal consciousness and replaced it with an amazingly new level of awareness. He experienced himself as being the energy and consciousness of the Universe and that the special state of enlightenment he had sought had been given to him as a gift. He was overjoyed by this realization.

When this happened, he was filled with excitement and went running down the mountain to tell his Zen master of his great good fortune. On his way down he stubbed his toe on a rock and fell down. And in the same way anyone would do, he placed his hands over the toe, which was in pain. As he did this, healing energy began flowing from his hands all by itself. The pain in his toe went away and the toe was healed. Usui Sensei was amazed by this. He realized that in addition to the illuminating experience he had undergone, he had also received the gift of healing. He also understood that this was his life purpose; to be a healer and to train others.(11)

In April 1922, he moved to Tokyo and started a healing society that he named Usui Reiki Ryoho Gakkai (Usui Reiki Healing Method Society). He also opened a Reiki clinic in Harajuku, Aoyama, Tokyo. There he taught classes and gave treatments.(12)

At first, all Usui Sensei had was the healing energy. Over time he developed his system of Reiki practice. Most of these developments came in 1923 after the Great Kanto earthquake and tsunami that did extensive damage in Tokyo and killed and injured many thousands of people. Because there were so many people in need of healing, Usui Sensei decided he needed to do something to speed up his ability to train teachers. 

It was at this time that he developed many of his practitioner techniques such as Gassho, Byosen scanning, Reiji-ho, Gyoshi ho, Seishin-to-itsu and so forth. He also developed a formal attunement method or Reiju kai, making it easier for others to learn Reiki and to become teachers. Prior to this, the method he used to pass on the Reiki ability was to simply hold the students hands, but this took a long time. The Reiju kai made transferring the Reiki ability much faster. Also, he had many different ways he performed the Reiju Kai, not just one.(13) During this time he also developed the Reiki symbols of which he had only three. These are the three symbols that we currently receive in Reiki II, which he called Okuden. He did not have a Master symbol. This important point was confirmed by Hiroshi Doi Sensei, a member of the Gakkai, and in discussions he had with several of the Gakkai presidents and many of the Shinpiden members.(14) This idea was also confirmed by Arjava Petter Sensei, who had contact with Shinpiden teachers from the Gakkai and with its president.(15)

These same sources also indicate that Usui Sensei also gave many attunements to each student, not just one or one set. The purpose of the student receiving the attunement over and over was that this process continually acted to refine and develop one’s ability to channel Reiki energy, thus making the energy one channeled more versatile and able to heal a wider range of conditions, to heal more deeply and in a shorter time. The philosophy of Usui Sensei was that there is no limit to the quality and effectiveness of the Reiki energy available in the universe and an important purpose for all students was to continually seek to improve the quality and effectiveness of the Reiki energy one is able to channel.(16)

He called his system of healing Shin-Shin Kai-Zen Usui Reiki Ryo-Ho (The Usui Reiki Treatment Method for Improvement of Body and Mind)(17) or in its simplified form Usui Reiki Ryoho (Usui Reiki Healing Method). 

The first degree of his training was called Shoden (First Degree) and was divided into four levels: Loku-Tou, Go-Tou, Yon-Tou and San-Tou. (Note that when Takata Sensei taught this level, which in the West we refer to as Reiki Level I, she combined all four levels into one. This is most likely why she did four attunements for Level I.) The next degree was called Okuden (Inner Teaching) and had two levels: Okuden-Zen-ki (first part), and Okuden-Koe-ki (second part). The next degree was called Shinpiden (Mystery Teaching), which is what Western Reiki calls Master level. The Shinpiden level includes, Shihan-Kaku (assistant teacher) and Shihan (venerable teacher).(18)

Demand for Reiki became so great that Usui Sensei outgrew his clinic, so in 1925 he built a bigger one in Nakano, Tokyo. Because of this, his reputation as a healer spread all over Japan. He began to travel so he could teach and treat more people. During his travels across Japan he directly taught more than 2,000 students and initiated twenty Shihan,(19) each being given the same understanding of Reiki and approved to teach and give Reiju in the same way that he did.(20)

The Japanese government issued him a Kun San To award for doing honorable work to help others.(21) While traveling to Fukuyama to teach, he suffered a stroke and died on March 9, 1926.(22) His grave is at Saihoji Temple, in Suginami, Tokyo, although some claim that his ashes are located elsewhere. 

After Usui Sensei died, his students erected a memorial stone next to his gravestone. Mr. J. Ushida, a Shihan trained by Usui Sensei, took over as president of the Usui Reiki Ryoho Gakkai and was responsible for creating and erecting the Usui Memorial stone and ensuring that the gravesite would be maintained. Mr. Ushida was followed by Mr. Ilichi Taketomi, Mr. Yoshiharu Watanabe, Mr. Toyoichi Wanami and Ms. Kimiko Koyama. The current successor to Usui Sensei is Mr. Mahayoshi Kondo, who became president in 1998. 

Contrary to what we have been told in the West, there is no “lineage bearer” or “Grand Master” of the organization started by Usui Sensei—only the succession of presidents listed above.(23) Among the twenty teachers initiated by Usui Sensei are Toshihiro Eguchi, Jusaburo Guida, Kan’ichi Taketomi, Toyoichi Wanami, Yoshiharu Watanabe, Keizo Ogawa, J. Ushida, and Chujiro Hayashi.(24) Contrary to one version of the Reiki story, Mr. J. Ushida, not Chujiro Hayashi, was the Gakkai’s successor to Usui Sensei. It is also important to note that the first four presidents of the Gakkai who followed Usui Sensei were Shihan who had been trained directly by Usui Sensei, and the last of these was president of the Gakkai through 1975, thus assuring that the Gakkai understanding, practice and teaching methods were the same as that of Usui Sensei. 

 Dr. Chujiro Hayashi

Before his passing, Usui Sensei had asked Chujiro Hayashi Sensei to open his own Reiki clinic and to expand and develop Reiki Ryoho based on his previous experience as a medical doctor in the Navy. Motivated by this request, Hayashi Sensei started a school and clinic called Hayashi Reiki Kenkyukai (Institute). After Usui Sensei’s passing he left the Gakkai.(25)

At his clinic, which was located in Tokyo, he kept careful records of all the illnesses and conditions of his Reiki patients. He also kept records of which Reiki hand positions worked best to treat each illness and condition. Based on these records he created the Reiki Ryoho Shinshin (Guidelines for Reiki Healing Method).(26) This healing guide was part of a class manual he gave to his students. The handbook was to be used only if the practitioner was not able to use Byosen scanning to find the best hand positions to use. Many of his students received their Reiki training in return for working in his clinic.(27)

Hayashi Sensei also changed the way Reiki sessions were given. Rather than have the client seated in a chair and treated by one practitioner as Usui Sensei had done, Hayashi Sensei had the client lie on a treatment table and receive treatment from several practitioners at a time. He also created a new, more effective system for giving Reiju (attunements).(28) In addition, to increase the value his students received while he was traveling, he developed a new method of teaching Reiki. In this method, he taught both Shoden and Okuden (Reiki I&II) together in one five-day seminar. Each day included two to three hours of instruction and one Reiju.(29) Following the Usui method, students were encouraged to receive Reiju on a regular basis from their local Shihan or teacher after completing Hayashi Sensei’s class so as to continue to refine and develop the quality of the Reiki energy that they channeled. 

Because of his trip to Hawaii in 1937–38 prior to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, he was asked by the Japanese military to provide information about the location of warehouses and other military targets in Honolulu. He refused to do so and was declared a traitor. This caused him to “lose face,” which meant he and his family would be disgraced and would be ostracized from Japanese society. The only solution was seppuku (ritual suicide), which he carried out. He died honorably on May 11, 1940.(30)

After this, Hayashi Sensei’s wife Chie Hayashi took over his clinic and ran it for some years, but eventually she retired; with no one to take over this position, the clinic came to an end. It is likely that some of Hayashi Sensei’s students continued to teach but most of these have also passed on. In 1999 it was discovered that Chiyoko Yamaguchi Sensei, a Shinpiden or Master student of Hayashi Sensei, was still alive and practicing. She was encouraged to teach and began doing so. Fortunately, I was able to take her Reiki I&II class in 2001 in Kyoto, Japan. Chiyoko Yamaguchi passed on in 2003. 

 Hawayo Takata

The following is a summary of Takata Sensei’s version of her early years leading up to her contact with Reiki at the Hayashi clinic. It comes from an interview that appeared in The (San Mateo) Times, May 17, 1975 titled “Mrs. Takata Opens Minds to Reiki” by Vera Graham: 

She stated that she was born on December 24th, 1900, on the island of Kauai, Hawaii. Her parents were Japanese immigrants and her father worked in the sugar cane fields. She eventually married the bookkeeper of the plantation where she was employed. His name was Saichi Takata and they had two daughters. In October 1930, Saichi died at the age of 34, leaving Mrs. Takata to raise their two children. 

In order to provide for her family, she had to work very hard with little rest. After five years she developed severe abdominal pain and a lung condition, and she had a nervous breakdown. Soon after this one of her sisters died and it was Takata Sensei’s responsibility to travel to Japan, where her parents had resettled to deliver the news. She also felt she could receive help for her health issues in Japan. 

After informing her parents and attending the funeral, she entered a hospital and stated that she was diagnosed with a tumor, gallstones, appendicitis and asthma. She was told to prepare for an operation but opted to visit Hayashi Sensei’s clinic instead. 

Mrs. Takata was unfamiliar with Reiki but was impressed that the diagnosis of Reiki practitioners at the clinic closely matched the doctor’s at the hospital. She began receiving treatments. Two Reiki practitioners would treat her each day. The heat from their hands was so strong, she said, that she thought they were secretly using some kind of equipment. Seeing the large sleeves of the Japanese kimono worn by one, she thought she had found the secret place of concealment. Grabbing his sleeves one day she startled the practitioner, but, of course, found nothing. When she explained what she was doing, he began to laugh and then told her about Reiki and how it worked. 

Mrs. Takata got progressively better and in four months was completely healed. She wanted to learn Reiki for herself. In the spring of 1936 she received First Degree Reiki from Dr. Hayashi. She then worked with him for a year and received Second Degree Reiki. Mrs. Takata returned to Hawaii in 1937, followed shortly thereafter by Hayashi Sensei, who came to help establish Reiki there, and his daughter. In February 1938, Hayashi Sensei initiated Hawayo Takata as a Reiki Master.

This house is where Takata Sensei’s clinic was located in Hilo, Hawaii where she gave Reiki sessions from 1939 to 1949.

Takata Sensei practiced Reiki in Hawaii, establishing several clinics, one of which was located in Hilo on the Big Island. She gave treatments and initiated students up to Reiki II. She became a well-known healer and traveled to the U.S. mainland and other parts of the world teaching and giving treatments. She was a powerful healer who attributed her success to the fact that she did a lot of Reiki on each client. She would often do multiple treatments, each sometimes lasting hours and treat difficult cases everyday for months until the client was healed. To help with this process, she often initiated members of a client’s family so they could give Reiki to the client as well.

Takata Sensei had a unique way of practicing and teaching Reiki that was noticeably different than how Usui Sensei or Hayashi Sensei had practiced and taught. The late John Harvey Gray was one of Takata Sensei’s most respected students and in fact she indicated that he would be one of three Reiki Masters that were to carry on her work after she retired.(31) He indicates in his Reiki book that Takata Sensei had changed the way she taught Reiki because she said that the Japanese style was too complicated and would be difficult for the Western mind to learn. Because of this, she said she had simplified the system. This included the development of her own hand position system, which she called the foundation treatment. This consisted of eight hand positions, which were on the abdomen, the shoulders and head. She also included some additional positions for the back if the client needed them.(32) This varied considerably from how Usui Sensei and Hayashi Sensei practiced in that they taught Byosen scanning as the way to find the best hand positions for treatment. They also indicated that Byosen scanning was the most important practice technique for a student to master after the practice of continually receiving repeated Reijus. Yet, Takata Sensei never taught this technique. She also did not teach any of the other methods used by Usui Sensei and Hayashi Sensei such as Gassho, Reiji-ho, Kenyoku, Gyoshi-ho, Koki-ho and so forth. Additionally, she had a different attunement method for each level of Reiki, taught her students that the attunements empowered the symbols and taught a Master symbol that was given to Master students. In her system, the Master symbol was needed in order to give attunements, and it could also be used during Reiki sessions for purposes of healing. She did not encourage her students to receive as many attunements as possible as was taught by Usui Sensei and Hayashi Sensei, but taught that just one set of four attunements for Reiki I and one or two attunements for Reiki II and one for the Master level are all that are necessary.(33)

The simplified system that Takata Sensei taught was effective and has proven to produce valuable results for her students and their clients. Because of this, Takata Sensei can be considered an important innovator of Usui Reiki Ryoho. 

One thing that is important to understand is that if it were not for Takata Sensei, Reiki would most likely have fallen into obscurity and never have been practiced by people all over the world; even in Japan it would have been mostly unknown. This is because after World War II, the United States required Japan to unconditionally surrender. This placed the United States in complete control of Japan. One of the conditions the U.S. required is that all those practicing any kind of healing be required to have a license. Some of the healing groups did get licensed, but the Usui Reiki Ryoho Gakkai decided that they did not want to be controlled by a licensing board and instead chose to go underground. They decided that the members were not to talk to anyone outside their group about Reiki and that they would only practice Reiki with each other. This made it difficult for anyone to find out about Reiki in Japan including the Japanese. Also, because it became very difficult for new members to join, the membership slowly declined. This problem exists even now, and the Gakkai membership continues to slowly dwindle. If this continues, at some time in the not too distant future the Gakkai is likely to come to an end. 

Because Takata Sensei learned Reiki in Japan and returned to Hawaii and began teaching Reiki before World War II, she prevented Reiki from being lost. She was a great teacher and promoter and taught Reiki classes all over Hawaii and in many parts of the U.S. mainland. Before her passing, she taught 22 Reiki Masters who carried on the tradition.

The Evolution of Reiki

One thing I came to realize from my training experience is that there is no limit to the possibilities offered by Reiki. As demonstrated by Usui Sensei, Hayashi Sensei and Takata Sensei, Reiki is something that is meant to be developed. This is true for the techniques one uses to practice Reiki, but it is also true for the quality of the healing energy.

Reiki energy comes from an infinite source and because of this, regardless of how developed and evolved ones healing energy has become, one will always be channeling only a small portion of the potential healing energy that is available; it is always possible for the quality, effectiveness and benefit of one’s healing energies to improve and this includes what takes place in the Attunements, Placements and Ignitions.

Usui Sensei alluded to this when he said he wasn’t at the top of the Reiki healing system, but one step below.(34) It is also important to note that according to the Bible, Jesus, who is considered by many to be a great healer and spiritual master, said that we could do everything he had done and even more.(35)

Reiki Continues to Develop

Takata Sensei required all the Masters she trained to charge a fee of $10,000 for the Master level. She taught that this was a required fee, and if you did not charge this fee, then you would not be teaching Usui Reiki. The fee wasn’t based on the length or quality of training she provided, as no apprenticeship was included.(36) The actual length of her Master training has not been documented by any of her Masters, except for Bethel Phaigh, who reported receiving both Level II and Master within a few days.(37) However, my conversations with a few of her Masters indicate in at least some cases her Master training lasted only a few days. According to Phagh, the high fee was to instill respect for the Master level. However, the high fee, along with the tendency of Takata Sensei’s Masters not to teach many other Masters, was causing Reiki to spread very slowly.

Iris Ishikuro was one of Takata Sensei’s Master students and Iris also had other training as a healer. She was involved with the Johrei Fellowship, a religious fellowship that includes healing with energy projected from the hands.(38) She had also learned another kind of healing from her sister, who worked in a Tibetan temple in Hawaii. After Takata Sensei passed in 1980, Iris decided that she would follow her own inner guidance and teach for a more reasonable fee. As far as I know, she was the only one of Takata Sensei’s twenty-two Masters who did this. The others continued to charge the high fee for Mastership.

Iris trained only two Masters. One was Arthur Robertson and the other was her daughter, Ruby. She asked them to always charge a reasonable fee. Ruby decided not to teach Reiki. However, Arthur Robertson did begin teaching in the mid-1980s. The reasonable fee allowed many more students to become Reiki Masters. He began giving Master trainings with ten to thirty students in each class. Those that Robertson taught trained others and the number of teaching Reiki Masters quickly increased.

Because Iris Ishikuro ignored the price restriction that Takata Sensei had placed on Reiki, she became the pathway through which Reiki would spread more quickly and eventually be passed on to people all over the world. In light of this, it is likely that the majority of Reiki people in the world have their lineage going back through Iris Ishikuro.

Arthur Robertson had also been a teacher of Tibetan shamanism and had learned a healing method that made use of several symbols and an attunement-like technique called an empowerment. This method had similarities to Usui Reiki. After becoming a Reiki Master, he developed an alternative method of Reiki that was a combination of the Tibetan style of healing and Usui Reiki. The parts from Tibetan shamanism were the use of two Tibetan symbols—with one being used as a Master symbol—and the Violet Breath. It also incorporated the use of the three symbols from the Okuden level of Usui Reiki. He called this system Raku Kei.(39) Robertson taught both the Takata-style Usui system and Raku Kei,teaching them separately in different classes.

Usui/Tibetan Reiki

My first Reiki Master teacher, Diane McCumber, learned Reiki from Arthur Robertson and was taught both the Takata-style Usui system and the Raku Kei system. While I learned both from her in March 1989, she mainly taught the Raku Kei system. Later the same year, I was also taught the Usui system by Marlene Schilke, who had also learned from Arthur Robertson.

By combining the Usui and Raku Kei systems I developed the Usui/Tibetan system of Reiki. This system kept the four Usui symbols as taught by Takata Sensei and added the Tibetan symbols and violet breath as taught by Arthur Robertson for a total of six symbols. I taught this system from the beginning of my teaching practice in June 1989, when I taught my first class, and continued with this system through 2013.

Karuna Reiki ®

After becoming a Reiki master, student began showing me symbols I had not seen before and asking if I knew anything about them. When this happened I would keep the drawings of the symbols and any additional information they had about the symbols. After a while different students would show me symbols, some of which I had seen before and tell me that another teacher was teaching the symbols and wanted to know if I was going to teach them. I suggested they go to the other teacher and take her class. Eventually they came back to me and said they had talked to the other teacher but decided they didn’t want to take a class from her but asked me if I would research the symbols and create a class as they preferred to learn about the symbols from me. It seemed like I was being guided rather directly to create the class.

I contacted some of my best students and expecially those who were sensitive to healing energy and clairvoyant and asked them to meet with me over a weekend to experiment with some new Reiki symbols. When we met I prayed for guidance and asked the we would be shown how to create a class to teach the new symbols that would provide new beneficial healing energies for the students.

This process worked and between 1993 and 1995, a new style of Reiki was created. At first we called it Sai Baba Reiki as we had been told that three of the symbols had come from Sai Baba, a guru in India who has since passed on. When I discovered he had not channeled the symbols, I was guided to rename the system Karuna Reiki ® and then later guided to trademark the name.

Karuna Reiki ® has 8 treatment symbols and at first had 4 master symbols. After Holy Fire Reiki came into being, I was guided to upgrade it to Holy Fire Karuna Reiki ® and make the Holy Fire symbol the master symbol. 

Japanese Reiki Techniques

I also sponsored Arjava Petter and his former wife Chetna Kobyashi to teach their Japanese Reiki Techniques classes in 1999 and 2000 in the U.S. and so had the great opportunity of thoroughly learning the Japanese Reiki healing methods that had been left out by Takata Sensei. In addition, I have studied the Japanese Reiki Techniques with Chiyoko Yamaguchi Sensei and her son, Tadao Yamaguchi Sensei, and also with Hiroshi Doi Sensei and Hyakuten Inamoto Sensei. This broadened my understanding of Reiki and helped me in many ways. (See my lineage chart on page v.) I continued to keep an open mind about the possibility of channeling ever higher levels of Reiki energy.

Holy Fire Reiki

In January 2014, during a session with Janice Jones, a spiritual advisor I had been seeing for the previous 19 years, I was made aware of a healing energy that was more refined and contained a higher level of consciousness than anything I had previously experienced. During the session, I was given the symbol and the attunement for it and was told I was to begin teaching it as part of the ART/Master class scheduled to start the next day. The energy around this experience was so clear and powerful that I trusted what I was told and followed the instructions. The energy guided me through that first teaching experience.

The Tibetan symbols including the Tibetan Master symbol and the Tibetan Fire Serpent as well as the violet breath, were retired and replaced with the Holy Fire. (All of the Usui symbols including the Power, Mental/Emotional, Distant and Master symbols were retained.) The attunement process was changed to an Ignition for the Master level and then later a Placement process for Reiki I&II and ART. These new methods of passing on the energy were significantly different, requiring little interaction with the students, yet producing amazing results. The students experienced meaningful healing experiences and were very happy to be taking part in something so new and beneficial. This system is easier to learn and to teach and yet works better than any healing method we had been aware of.

The Essence of Reiki

As we meditate on Reiki energy, both when giving treatments to others and to ourselves and when teaching classes and giving attunements, and now with Holy Fire Reiki when giving Placements and Ignitions we become aware of a wealth of positive qualities that are embodied within the essence of the Reiki energy. These qualities transcend states of consciousness we usually are aware of and take us up into ever more refined feelings of peace, joy and happiness. In addition, they are also capable of helping us develop healthy, positive traits in our personalities.

However, since Reiki respects free will, it will not heal us or develop these higher states unless we invite it to do so. This requires that we be willing to change. The ability to recognize unhealthy personal qualities within ourselves and be willing to let them go is necessary if we are to move forward with our personal healing. Those who accept Reiki as their spiritual path and are devoted to allowing it to heal them completely and surrender to its ability to do this find that Reiki will guide them more quickly along the path of healing. This process can include improving the quality of the Reiki energy that one is able to channel as well as helping to develop all the qualities that are healthy for a person to have.

As the quality improves, Reiki can heal us and those who come to us for Reiki sessions and classes more easily and more deeply. As the quality of Reiki energy one is able to channel becomes more refined and effective, one becomes more aware of the essence of Reiki and the amazing places it is capable of taking us.

The positive, healthy traits Reiki is capable of developing within us include patience, love of self and others, non-competitiveness. It moves us into a place of acceptance of others’ ideas and beliefs and helps us to be non-judgmental, empowers our ability to forgive, develops gratitude for friends and family and for all we have and experience, improves the quality of joy and peace we experience and most importantly increases our connection to the Source of Reiki so that an ever stronger feeling of safety develops as Reiki more easily guides our lives and watches over all that we do. 

This understanding helps us to appreciate that Reiki has an unlimited potential. This idea is validated by the fact that both Usui Sensei and Hayashi Sensei encouraged their students to further refine and improve the quality of Reiki they were able to channel. It is also apparent from the idea that if Reiki does come from an unlimited potential as most Reiki people agree, then no matter how effective our Reiki has become, it’s always possible for it to become more effective. This concept can be likened to a library. Once one has a library card, one has access to the books in the library, but that doesn’t mean that one has read all the books and can apply all the knowledge and wisdom they contain. The same is true of Reiki. Simply having received the attunements or Ignitions does give you access to the Reiki energy, but that doesn’t mean you are able to channel the highest and most effective qualities of Reiki that exist. It simply means you now are able to access the Reiki energy and if you give it permission and work with it, it can refine your ability to channel ever higher and more effective levels of healing energy. This awareness becomes even more apparent with Holy Fire Reiki and, as you shall experience in this class, an ever higher level of joy, peace and love will show you how wonderful and important it is to allow yourself to receive this gift.

 References: 

1. This section comes from an article titled, “The Future of Reiki” that appeared in the winter, 2015 issue of Reiki News Magazine.

2. William Lee Rand et al., An Evidence Based History of Reiki (Southfield, MI: The International Center for Reiki Training, 2015). See www.reiki.org.

3. Tadao Yamaguchi. “Excerpts from Light on the Origin of Reiki” Reiki News Magazine (Spring 2011), 19. Included in this article is a photo of the 20 shihan taught by Usui Sensei. The text below the photo indicates that these are the students of Usui Sensei who were authorized to teach in the same way he taught. Juzaburo Ushida is in the photo.

4. Inscription on Usui Memorial, Saihoji Temple, Suginami, Tokyo, Japan.

5. Inscription on Usui Memorial.

6. Toshtaka Mochizuki, lyashi No Te, (Healing Hands) (1995), 227, ISBN 4-88481-420-7 C0011 P1400E.

7. Yamaguchi, Light on the Origins of Reiki, 61.

8. Shiomi Takai, “Searching the Roots of Reiki,” The Twilight Zone (April 1986), 140–143. This article can be viewed on the web at www.pwpm.com/threshold/origins2.html. (Note that this Japanese magazine is no longer in business.)

9. Frank Arjava Petter, This is Reiki: Transformation of Body, Mind and Soul, From the Origins to the Practice (Twin Lakes: WI: Lotus Press) 44.

10. In an alternate version of this story it is said that Usui Sensei’s personal life and business had failed and that he had gone to Mt. Kurama to meditate to gain clarity on what to do to solve his problems. See Takai, “Searching the Roots of Reiki,” 140–143.

11. Hiroshi Doi, Iyashino Gendai Reiki Ho, A Modern Reiki Method for Healing, rev. ed. (Southfield, MI: Vision Publications, 2014), 31. This story has been passed down within the Usui Reiki Ryoho Gakkai. According to Doi, it is also written in “Kaiin no tame no Reiki Ryoho no Shiori” (Guide of Reiki Ryoho for the members), September 1, 1974.

12. Yamaguchi, Light on the Origins of Reiki, 63–64.

13. An Interview with Hiroshi Doi, Ashiya City, Japan, October 24, 2016.

14. In an email from Doi Sensei he said there is misinformation being circulated about the Gakkai using the DKM, which is most likely based on translation problems. Doi did meet one person who apparently studied with Usui Sensei and was shown the DKM as part of his training, not as a symbol, but as a spiritual concept, but this person was not a Gakkai member and no longer practices Reiki.

15. Frank Arjava Petter, This is Reiki (Twin Lakes, WI: Lotus Press, 2012), 174.

16. William Lee Rand, “Interview With Hiroshi Doi Sensei, Part I” Reiki News Magazine, Spring 2014, 27. This interview is also included in An Evidence Based History of Reiki, which is sold by the ICRT.

17. This is based on the translation of an original document written by Usui Sensei. See: www.reiki.org/japanesetechniques/5principles.html.

18. Walter Lubeck, Frank Arjava Petter, William Lee Rand, The Spirit of Reiki(Twin Lakes, WI: Lotus Press, 2003).

19. Go to Reiki News Magazine (Spring 2011), 18 for a photo of Usui Sensei and the twenty Shihan. Note that while all in the photo were authorized to give Reiju-kai, some were not Shinpiden. In those days some of the centers did not have a Shinpiden to give Reiju so Reiju was taught to the leader of the center.

20. Yamaguchi, Light on the Origins of Reiki, 63–64.

21. Takai, The Twilight Zone, 140-143.

22. Inscription on Usui Memorial.

23. Frank Arjava Petter, Reiki Fire, (Twin Lakes, WI: Lotus Light, 1997), 26. ISBN 0-914955-50-0.

24. This list comes from the research of Frank Arjava Petter.

25. William Lee Rand, “An Interview with Hiroshi Doi, Part II,” Reiki News Magazine, (Fall 2003), 13.

26. A translation of this healing guide can be found on p. 63.

27. Frank Arjava Petter interviewing Tsutomo Oishi, a member of Usui Reiki Ryoho Gakkai.

28. Rand, “An Interview with Hiroshi Doi, Part II,” 12.

29. Yamaguchi, Light on the Origins of Reiki, 28.

30. Ibid., 69.

31. See the letter Takata Sensei sent to her students in 1977 announcing her retirement and naming three of her Reiki Masters to carry on her work in An Evidence Based History of Reiki, 108.

32. John Harvey Gray and Lourdes Gray with Steven McFadden and Elisabeth Clark, Hand to Hand, The Longest-Practicing Reiki Master Tells His Story (Gray, 2002), 93.

33. Information received from Bethel Phaigh in her classes as well as interviews and discussions with other students of Takata Sensei.

34. Usui Reiki Ryoho Gakkai via email from Hiroshi Doi Sensei.

35. John 14:12 (NIV). “I tell you the truth, anyone who has faith in me will do what I have been doing. He will do even greater things than these, because I am going to the Father.”

36. A few of Takata’s master students did travel with her and take a number of classes, but Takata Sensei always did the teaching so this would not have been an apprenticeship in which the student did some of the teaching, but a review of her training.

37. Marianne Streich, “How Hawayo Takata Practiced and Taught Reiki,” Reiki News Magazine (Spring 2007), 17.

38. Ibid, 174.

39. Personal interview with Arthur Robertson at the Spiritual Frontiers Fellowship during the summer of 1989.

Credit to Reiki the Healing Touch by William Lee Rand.

www.reiki.org.

[rudyscuriocabinet]

I had not forgotten my promise to consider whether we should make the patient an extreme patriot or an extreme pacifist. All extremes, except extreme devotion to the Enemy, are to be encouraged. Not always, of course, but at this period. Some ages are lukewarm and complacent, and then it is our business to soothe them yet faster asleep. Other ages, of which the present is one, are unbalanced and prone to faction, and it is our business to inflame them... If your patient can be induced to become a conscientious objector he will automatically find himself one of a small, vocal, organized, unpopular society, and the effects of this, on one so new to Christianity, will almost certainly be good. But only almost certainly. Has he had serious doubts about the lawfulness of serving in a just war before this present war began? Is he a man of great physical courage --- so great that he will have no half-conscious misgivings about the real motives of his pacifism? Can he, when nearest to honesty (no human is ever very near), feel fully convinced that he is actuated wholly by the desire to obey the Enemy? If he is that sort of man, his pacifism will probably not do us much good, and the Enemy will probably protect him from the usual consequences of belonging to a sect. Your best plan, in that case, would be to attempt a sudden, confused, emotional crisis from which he might emerge as an uneasy convert to patriotism. Such things can often be managed. But if he is the man I take him to be, try Pacifism. Whichever he adopts, your main task will be the same. Let him begin by treating the Patriotism or the Pacifism as a part of his religion. Then let him, under the influence of partisan spirit, come to regard it as the most important part. Then quietly and gradually nurse him on to the stage at which the religion becomes merely part of the 'cause', in which Christianity is valued chiefly because of the excellent arguments it can produce in favor of the British war-effort or of Pacifism. The attitude which you want to guard against is that in which temporal affairs are treated primarily as material for obedience. Once you have made the World an end, and faith a means, you have almost won your man, and it makes very little difference what kind of worldly end he is pursuing. Provided that meetings, pamphlets, policies, movements, causes, and crusades, matter more to him than prayers and sacraments and charity, he is ours - and the more 'religious' (on those terms) the more securely ours. I could show you a pretty cageful down here, (pp. 32-35)

Excerpt from C.S. Lewis ‘Screwtape Letters’