Islamic Radicalism and Us

I believe that there are three fonts of radical Islamism/Islamic Fascism today. One is the Muslim Brotherhood from Egypt, two is the Saudi regime in Saudi Arabia and, three is in Pakistan. I believe all three states are deeply involved in funding, supporting and manipulating Islamic movements throughout the world. I think there is plenty of evidence connecting, for example, the Saudia Arabia and Pakistan to Al-Qaida both in creating it in the first place and nurturing, aiding, directing it to perform terrorist acts in the West. Though this opinion is somewhat controversial plenty of analysts have connected those two countries to Al-Qaida. Bin Laden, if he is still alive, and his top people are in Pakistan as are the Taliban they were allowed to escape, from Afghanistan, through a deal with ISI who are largely calling the shots in Afghanistan as they have for a couple of decades.

If it were not for nations supporting terrorism I doubt it would get very far--there would be a different kind of radical Islam akin to Hamas and Hezbollah which are not, in my view, terrorist organizations primarily but rather organizations that use so-called terrorism as a military weapon because they face overwhelming Israeli military superiority. Hezbollah and Hamas have no choice as full spectrum organizations whose main function is to create a convivial society in the face of massive corruption on the part of "respectable" officials (Government of Lebanon and PLO) and, at the same time, military opposition by the Israeli government who want corrupt politicians in countries around them that they can bribe and threaten.

Al-Qaida in contrast only exists to carry out terrorist acts, which is why I believe they are largely directed by intelligence services of the above-mentioned countries. The U.S. and possibly European and certainly Israeli intelligence also support the existence of Al-Qaida (though I do not believe they "guide" it) because it gives them and enemy that will never go away (since they are, largely, agents of "friendly" countries). This explains the notion of permanent war the very state of social reality that Orwell warned us about. Permanent war is the perfect situation for the institutionalization of a permanent international oligarchy. Since this "War on Terror" is so unpredictable it cannot suffer from the disease of diplomacy as the Cold War ultimately did--it seemed logical to the public that, after a while, to negotiate with the enemy rather than risk planetary extinction. There are no such pressures on the War on Terror--there are no real consequences to continuing the war other than a permanent financial drain and, as long as there are bread and circuses, no one will care in the short and medium term.

I would refer, ultimately, to many statements made after 9/11 by news commentators and politicians on all parts of the political spectrum welcoming a "sense of unity" in the American people like it was some kind of Godsend; furthermore, commentators were almost giddy at the idea that the struggle against terrorism eliminated moral ambiguity and enabled us to think in terms of "good guys" and "bad guys" which is a huge psychological relief to the problems of post-modernism. Newscasters were ready to present themselves as soldiers for the cause, many young people volunteered to join the military. Prison camps in Afghanistan had cell-blocks named after countries wherein terrorist incidents had been inflicted on Americans, people urged the military to have the names of loved ones inscribed on bombs destined to slaughter Iraqis, people were rounded up simply for looking Islamic and so on. War offers society a relief from internal contradictions both politically and socially and it is my belief from reading the writings of neo-cons with great interest in the 90's that they believed that the survival of the West was in danger not through external threat but through a "loss of nerve", through a descent into sensualism and moral depravity, through a loss of respect for authority, through the loss of a collective sense of purpose. They believed and still believe that the West needs to find its discipline and virtue through struggle. At the time I agreed with their analysis to some degree; I differed from the neo-cons in that I did not believe such a return to virtue should occur through warfare but through spiritual and religious renewal through religious experiences as described by William James in Varieties of Religious Experience. I thought that when faced with the emptiness of consumerism people would begin to peel away from it as an ideology. Because the neo-cons are essentially atheists it is clear they would not want what I wanted.

At the time (the 90's) I believed there would be a smooth transition to spiritual values through the meeting of the great external threat I believed we faced: global warming and environmental degradation. I felt the struggle to create a convivial life in the face of these threats would be a creative struggle that would, in the end, demand a return to the extolling of a virtuous life and social cohesion through more communal activities in place of the current "cocooning" that is occurring in the McMansions and on-line activities that keep people from truly interacting. I was wrong and naive. The reason why global warming is and was and will be largely ignored in the U.S. is that the current rulers need to have the public massively consume and afraid in order to keep their incomes coming in. "It's the economy, stupid" is the mantra--if doing something about global warming would lower the income of the rich by 5% this would be intolerable.

So, I finally came to the conclusion that the problems of our world are largely about the lack of virtue and social responsibility by the elites and the rich. Societies have always been dependent on the condition and culture of the elites--what "the people" think and do is, historically speaking, largely irrelevant--it is clear they can be manipulated today perhaps even better than in days of yore. Most people like and require authority and a mythical framework within which they can live--making public policy does not fit. Making public policy is up to the elites--how they feel and think about these issues will determine our futures. Before you jump on me on the elites, I don't mean they are a secret organization I just mean that they are those who are most powerful and rich. I pretty much got my POV on the state of modern elites from the book The Revolt of the Elites.

On the Other Hand

If we really look carefully at the situations we live in can we really see anything wrong or untrue? All around us is correct and precisely what we need. This POV is radical. Most people when confronted with this talk about violence, abuse etc. and then say that if we are not pissed off about the state of the world we will do nothing to benefit it. Not so, say the sages. In fact, being pissed off wastes energy, clouds up the mind and takes on an endless trip to precisely the same place we started from as was demonstrated by George Orwell in his book Animal Farm. As Peter Townsend wrote

"Meet the new boss,
Same as the old boss"

The same mentality of anger and need to be right will create the same situation with cosmetic changes whether coming from the left, right or anywhere in-between. Something deeper has to change. Unless we confront the underlying problem we face as a civilization we are trapped. We are the enemy--inside of us, at this point in history, is where the real problem lies. It seems we have no choice at this time but face ourselves--it is the only ground that we can act on. There are some obvious reasons for that at the moment. The current political/economic/cultural forces at work are so powerful, so overwhelming, and so totalitarian in their scope that conventional political or even military opposition is impossible without damaging things further. Technically the current regime in power is illegitimate because it lacks moral grounding. It seems obvious that no morality seems to be recognized except as propaganda to fool the masses. We live in a Machiavellian world with plenty of cushioning for those higher up on the hierarchy to pretend everything is "normal".

There is a great moral vacuum at the center of everyone's life that is covered up by an ever increasing stream of amusement and noise. This is, by the way, true of all classes of society and POVs--those that listen to Rush Limbaugh, Al Gore, Fox News, NPR, Noam Chomsky and even the Dalai Lama or any other spiritual leader. We fill our selves with way more information than we can possibly assimilate and that creates internal noise. The internal noise, in turn, masks the fundamental instability of our cultural situation or positive (dharmic) role.

The first step is to realize that the emperor has no clothes. There is no fundamental basis for our ethical life that we can know for certain unless we have been strictly brought up in a traditional society--even then the contradictions of modernism will drop on you like a fog by just going on the internet.

The second step is to realize, by necessity, that since there is no external or cultural basis for morality that we have to find it in our being since our awareness of being alive is the only certainty we really have. From that point we can then realize that all that really exists when we are quiet and not creating and recreating the stories that whirl around our heads (since the very essence of our current culture is to be surrounded by a whirlwind of stories sometimes deemed information) is the present moment and our witnessing of this moment right now.

The third step is to find, on the basis of our direct perception of this moment those cultural artifacts that make sense in terms of the essential being we experience in this moment. These artifacts can be the basis of a new emergent human culture. On a realistic level we know that this process is bound to be error-filled because we are used to using internal narratives to establish being rather than direct experience.

Having said all that I can only say that some kind of yoga or spiritual practice is the only thing that can contain and nurture these steps thought we may have to remind ourselves that any spiritual path and scriptures are only signs. Religion has debased itself by making the signs into gods and often removing any sense of divinity from its practice. Christianity seems to have attempted and succeeded in that very well but the others have done fairly well as well particularly Islam and Judaism. Yet this situation is entirely correct and perfect for us right now. If things were not as they were it is pretty clear the increasing focus on spiritual growth and yoga would not be there.

Today is the Only Day--the View From Here

I ignored this blog for most of this year while I adjusted my life in ways I didn't understand very well while I was making these changes. I was trying, usually unsuccessfully, to be in the moment but I was in the moment enough to make the changes I needed to make and faced my fears. I look forward to facing them everyday now--if that happens. If not, then I have a day of joy or moments of joy interspersed with confusion, with battling thoughts with impulses to do this or that. Today, I realized that I had a lot of thoughts about all the things I should be doing; also, about what I didn't do that I should have. I should have not allowed my thoughts to distract me doing quite so many moments during meditation. I should have gotten up earlier and, in fact, had no right to feel joyful today I mean I hadn't accomplished anything, in fact, I never accomplish anything etc. You get the drift. Our minds, often become possessed by these urges to experience pain in all its variety--Eckhart Tolle calls it the "pain body", a very useful concept. This "being" is very clever, as all beings are when it comes to survival, and seeks out pain and then "handles" the pain. It causes the problem then takes the credit for "solving" the problem. I may think I "wasted" my day and feel pain but then my pain body turns around and dresses up like a sexy woman and pulls out a bag of comforts and asks me to choose one. I get the "comfort" as a reward for having allowed the pain body to live in my suffering and rather than wait for me to get fed up with it, I am offered something or other that will cause me to turn off my discriminating intelligence that would normally appear and short circuit the problem by turning myself down and/or off with escapes which would have the seeds of future suffering. I would, when the pain body had an opening the next day, become upset that I had done something escapist rather than either face my pain directly using the discriminating intelligence or hand not accomplished something "useful" instead.

We all knot ourselves up sometimes in very intricate and complex ways sometimes in very straightforward ways. Really the knots are not so hard to unravel or avoid. We need not suffer so much--it is that pain-body that seeks to come out at those times it has nothing to do with anything real. The pain-body can disappear and even die. It is not real--it is a self-perpetuating virtual being completely dependent on our attention. The more attention we give to our pain and suffering the worse it is. That doesn't mean, for example, that if we experienced suffering that we have to "forget" about it. It happened and it shaped us to some degree but it is past and gone--it is, essentially, a story or history--an interesting subject not unlike some battle in WWII but nothing that ought to involve our attention beyond that. Here right now, it might be good to give an account of that suffering, as an illustration, again as a story mental to enhance this moment we are, after all, artists of our own life. For us in the West we are blessed with this notion of "the artist" which is sometimes just full of shit but in it's essence has some great spiritual power--I leave it to you to ponder that.

There is personal suffering then there is the large stage of history. All of us are involved and the story is very hard to easily follow--we live in a deep reality that has depth in every direction. Existence itself only appears shallow because we are shallow in our awareness. I sometimes lose myself in the contemplation and in researching all kinds of things that are going on in the world--it is so rich, so astonishing, there are so many threads, tendencies, possibilities, conflicts, opportunities and, above all, paradoxes to put to shame the full collection of imaginative stories ever published or told by any human beings and it is all happening right now at this moment! To not be excited about all this is seemingly impossible.

There are some trends that appear from my vantage point to be dominant. This George Carlin routine may have it right. To be sure, Carlin is pissed off but his goal is to destroy illusions and illusions are what America is all about, i.e., "the American Dream--you have to be asleep to believe it". Carlin never was a genuine hippie in the sense that of "hipness". Hippies later came to mean spaced out and incompetent weaklings who just took drugs--that isn't what hippies were about before they became a weird kind of symbol for rebellioius youth. In fact, hippies were street smart (they had to be) and were searching for truth (in all the wrong places) but at least searching for truth and authenticity and *not* escapism. Drugs were recreational or something that was meant to open up heterfore unacknowledged states of consciousness. That some ended up addicted or using to escape was not the initial impulse.

To digress, there are two issues that show that our civilization has become highly toxic and beginning to display serious behavior problems such that almost any condemnation of it has merit:

Issue number 1 is the ongoing environmental degradation. It is irrelevant whether or not global climate changes or other looming ecological disasters will come sooner or later or will be severe or less severe--the point is that there is a strong possibility that within a generation that serious disasters could occur which could or could have been averted had there been a small adjustment in priorities and life-style. In fact the changes that could have been made would have made life more elegant perhaps slower paced and probably more interesting as attention would have shifter from large scale industrial enterprises to more knowledge intensive and creativity-intensive operations. The change could have been gradual and led by people that knew something about the world other than how to manipulate the public to buy ever increasingly mass quantities of whatever can make the highest profit. I have a reason to believe that alternative energy sources have been discouraged and deliberately suppressed in order to enrich the current people at the top.

Issue number 2 is the so-called "War on Terrorism". When there is a war usually a bunch of soldiers invade a country and conquer the land often times doing a little looting and worse (sorry kids but all soldiers do that) and it is very obvious when it happens. Not so our new "War". There is absolutely no proof that I've seen that anyone that the government claims is an enemy is an enemy. It's all based on assertions by people I know for a fact mean me no good and, in fact, hate everything about me (if they bothered with me at all) and if things continue as they have will put me in a concentration camp if I'm lucky. From my point of view as an old hipster the whole thing is a scam from beginning to end. There is little truth in it. It is like the street. Police get pressure to crack down on drugs so the cops go to the big dealers and ask them to rat on some poor patsy who all of a sudden finds out that the big-boys want to cut him into a big-time drug deal. Naturally he gets caught and the cops relish in their big bust, the dealers lay low for a few weeks and then are back in business as are the cops (I should say "some cops" or the powerful in the Department because most cops are not on the take) taking the kick-backs. That's the way it works. In the same way "terrorists" are usually intelligence assets deployed to some cut-out organization who recurit genuine "believers" who are clearly either demented or somewhat retarded like Richard Reed or Zacarias Moussaoui. Also there are the traditional patsies like Mohammed Atta and most of the other alleged 9/11 hijackers who, in fact, are intelligence assets who wander around from place to place following orders they don't understand while being supplied with lots of money for parties and whatever vices they have (they are usually required to be suggestible and morally weak) only a step above the Richard Reeds.

The tragedy of 9/11 is not only that nearly 3,000 people perished but that the American people fell for the official story. Almost everything about the official story is pathetically weak and uninspired--sort of like "my dog ate my homework" kind of story. While I believe that Jack Kennedy was not killed by a lone assassin, I also believe that a cursory look at the evidence would show that a somewhat far-fetched case could be made for Oswald being the lone-gunman (if you ignore motivation). In 9/11 there is no case at all to be made for the government's story--the story is utterly impossible because there is no there there--in short, no evidence.

I have no interest here in convincing anyone that the government is lying--you can believe the government but if you look at the evidence or lack of evidence I believe you will not longer be able to do that. I don't talk about it and avoid writing about it because it seems you are either the sort of person that believes authority or you're not. I personally wish that we could believe authority--I believe we ought to live in a social structure wherein authority and wisdom can co-exist but it just is not the case today. What saddens me most out of all this is the phenomenal lack of critical thinking that is not only in the masses but, more tragically, in the "educated" classes particularly those that identify as leftists.