ULTIMATE RESPONSIBILITY

The English conspiracy theorist David Icke was universally ridiculed when he was reported as saying on the Terry Wogan Show on BBC TV in 1991 he was the son of god, and all those that govern the world are reptilians.

Actually he never said he was the son of God. What he said was we are all children of god, which is a statement everyone can agree with surely? And OK we may struggle with the notion that the Queen, the President or the Prime Minister is actually a reptile in disguise.... but if we look at the nature of the people that rule over us we can see that they operate almost exclusively from what neurologists call the R Complex – the part of our brain that is reptilian in nature.

If we look through all the world’s myths, including the story of the Fall of Man in the Bible, we find an abundance of reptilians, principally snakes and dragons.  Think of Smaug in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings; think of Fafner in Wagner’s Ring drama. What are these reptilians - these dragons - doing? They are consumed with fear and they spend all their days sitting on their hoards of gold guarding the loot they have accrued.

It’s a sad way to live. Yet I have met several millionaires who live no differently. They seem to have little joy in their lives. They are consumed with fear and they tend to propagate fear wherever they go. For some bizarre reason people think they are important because they have money and the power that goes with it...

So I have come to believe that Icke has understood something absolutely fundamental about the human condition and from this understanding has been able to clearly foresee the peril in which the human race stands today.

In the West we have ceded responsibility for our lives. We have allowed the reptilian mentality rooted in fear and acquisitiveness to predominate not just in the corridors of power but throughout our everyday lives. These forces have been responsible for atrocities across the Globe, but we’ve been too busy accumulating our own little hoards of gold to notice what is going on beyond us.

I recently watched the films of Tolkien’s books The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings with my kids. The moral of The Lord of the Rings is very simple and extremely apposite in the world we are experiencing today. We are threatened by the same reptilian power that threatens Middle Earth. We have allowed it to infiltrate every facet of our lives.

In Tolkien’s book the only solution to the predicament faced by Middle Earth is to return the Ring that is the symbol of the evil Sauron’s power to the place where it came from – the fires of Mordor. This is the task that young Frodo Baggins is given. And it becomes increasingly arduous as Frodo approaches the mountain where he must cast the Ring back into the fires from which it came.

The human race is now in the position of Frodo at the foot of the mountain. We have a clear choice. Either we make the supreme effort required to climb the mountain and return the Ring of Power whence it came, that it may be dissolved and the human race may continue on its path upwards, or we kowtow to the power of the Ring, and of Sauron, and accept our lot as slaves for the foreseeable future.

What does this Ring of Power symbolise? What is its significance for us in 2021?

The Ring of Power for the human race can be equated with the mass delusion that governments and drug cartels are looking after us and have our best interests at heart; more than that the Ring of Power represents Devolved Responsibility, our failure to take responsibility for our own lives and those around us. The Ring of Power is the contract we make with life, or the contract that is made for us, the moment we are born.

In Richard Wagner’s Ring drama the only way the dwarf Alberich can steal the fabled gold from the depths of the Rhine is to renounce love. Similarly the only way the god Wotan (Odin in Norse mythology) can build his great symbol of omnipotence, the castle Valhalla, is to barter the goddess of love. The message is clear. Love and Power are mutually exclusive of each other.

This may seem like a truism; but it is a truism that goes to the heart of our present predicament.

We have been conditioned to think the concept of love is one of two things: either it refers to our love for somebody, or it is a religious concept. If I say ‘love and power are mutually exclusive of one another’ it may seem I am making a religious statement, that I am invoking a sentiment that you might hear preached from the pulpit , invoking Christ’s pronouncements in the New Testament ‘Love your neighbour as yourself’, or a hippy notion such as ‘Make Love Not War’. However you think about it, chances are you will see it as an idealistic notion that is more or less unattainable in the real world , except in strictly delineated compartments – the love for your partner, the love for your parents and your children, the love you may offer up to God once a week in church, synagogue or mosque.

But what Tolkien is saying in the Lord of the Rings, what Wagner is saying in his Ring drama, is that love and life are synonymous, they are one and the same thing and this is the thing we are in. This is what being alive is about. But we are not aware of it. We do not feel it except in exaggerated moments of ecstasy. And this is because of the way in which we live, the way we deploy our consciousness. The way we live is an abuse of the life we have been given. I have seen talk of a Zombie Apocalypse. We don’t need to anticipate it. We are already living it. We have become zombified through our addictions and through our technology. This is the reverse of how we are meant to live. The English philosopher Colin Wilson reckoned we have a design fault and it is hard to disagree.

When we enter into society we sign the same contract Alberich signs in Wagner’s Ring. We renounce love (synonymous with life) in favour of lust, lust for power, for control, for acquisition which slowly but surely erodes, and ultimately annihilates the life force within us. And it isn’t just the life force within us. It is equally the life force around us and beyond us. We are at war with Life.

For millennia we have been swindling our way through, attempting to believe it is possible to do these two incompatible things at once – to live in love while we scramble after control and power in our lives. We have accepted the contract. We have told ourselves ‘this is the way it is’.

And we’ve been wrong. This isn’t the way it is. Somewhere along the way we took a wrong turning, when we allowed ourselves to be bamboozled into giving away our sovereign rights, when we no longer thought that we were here to live joyful creative lives, but we were here to fight and to struggle and to evolve.

I’ve always been fascinated by words and their origins. The other day I was looking at what happens if you write LOVE backwards. What do you get? EVOL. Of course there is only one letter different from the word EVIL, in the same way only one letter differentiates LIVE from LOVE.

But there’s another way to look at it. What would be the logical way to conclude this word EVOL? How about EVOL-VE? There may be no linguistic justification for this. But it did make me think that in the same way as LIVE and EVIL represent inversions of each other, so it is with the notions of LOVE and EVOLUTION.

Love is a state of being. It is not going anywhere. It is not doing anything. It just is. It is a state of being that is always in a condition of being with, with the world that you are in, with the body that you are in. It’s the divine spark within us...

It is not something that we put on and take off. It is the condition into which we are born. It is the condition out of which we are born. It is the glue that holds the whole universe together. For it is the condition by which atoms and molecules and viruses and microbiota come together and fuse and separate and fuse again to make us what we are. It is the condition which suffuses all of Nature. It is the reaction to light that is the cause of all life. It is at the heart of photosynthesis. It is at the heart of all biological processes, because simply put it is the force of attraction and repulsion endlessly recreating itself that makes us what we are.

Evolution on the other hand is always separating, always developing, always going somewhere. This notion of evolution that we have adopted depends on individuals separating themselves out from the mass, on asserting themselves and their right to be heard. This is what we celebrate in all the world’s great movers and shakers.

And this is what we all think we have to be doing – all the time, because this is what we are educated to believe from the moment we come into consciousness. We are here to be evolving and developing. And in order to evolve we start raping the world around us, even in spite of ourselves. We grab bits of the world and fashion those bits to serve our own ends. We all do it from cradle to grave. Some become spectacularly good at it: the likes of John D Rockefeller, the Rothschilds and Bill Gates are obvious examples.

And we call this survival. Darwin called it survival of the fittest. It is the essence of the society we all inhabit from bottom to the top.

We all have our love affairs and our passions, we all have moments when we experience the divine spark within us. But we compartmentalize these away from the main business of our lives. We compartmentalize love, we compartmentalize the divine spark, the life within us. We may affix it to one person, one group of persons or a thing. But the one thing we don’t do – because we think we can’t, because it seems impractical and superfluous – is make it the guiding principle of our lives.

The sad fact is we all behave in the same way as the Mafiosi who goes to Mass on Sunday and having said his Hail Marys and made his confession feels sufficiently absolved that he may continue his career of extortion, murder and pillage on Monday.

The Ring of Power is the license that we give ourselves to do this. To enter into a contract with society, to relinquish love and life, to relinquish the state of being that we are born into, for the state of being that is imposed upon us, a state of being that is always in opposition to, in competition with, that refutes our biological origins, refutes the fact that we are a part of the natural world, that relinquishes the right to joy in our lives.

Until we renounce this contract that we make nothing will change. This is what Gandalf realises. This is what Frodo must learn in Tolkien’s masterpiece.

Now we all have to learn it.

The Ring is a symbol for your intent to turn Nature against itself, because this is what you have been told it is to be a human being. To renounce what is natural in you in order to attain power and control over everything that is not you. Thus a human life has become a declaration of war on the rest of creation predicated on your conviction that by virtue of being a human being you are something special, and apart from, or rather above, the rest of Creation.

This syndrome is endemic in the human condition. But the problem is we don’t realise the fact. If we live in a democratic society we live with the illusion that we are free. And now we are discovering the degree to which this is not the case.

The chief difference between the way in which the human species survives and the way in which the rest of the animal kingdom survives, is we trade and we barter for a living. We affix a value to commodities and services and then we are compelled to assume an identity within the system of barter in order to ‘earn a living’. No other creature ‘earns a living’. All other creatures seek for themselves a living, and Nature supplies it – if human beings haven’t got there first and decimated the possibility of Nature supplying it.

The advantage of the system we have developed is that we do not have to forage and scavenge for our daily bread. Rather we have to find a means to offer ourselves through contract to the society we find ourselves in and employ whatever qualities and gifts we find we may have in exchange for the currency that is being traded.

We are compelled to barter in order to survive. In every system of barter there is always a principle and a subordinate, a seller and a buyer. The logical conclusion of this system of barter is that inevitably the power becomes concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, until eventually we arrive at the situation we have now arrived at where power rests in the hands of so few (less than 1% of the global population) and the other 99.999% are placed at the mercy of an infinitesimally small elite. This syndrome has been accumulating over centuries.

The reason the system of barter is controlled by fewer and fewer individuals is the market will always be controlled and dominated by the most cunning and the most devious, that is those in whom Natural Law is least present, those whose consciousness is almost wholly dominated by the R complex, the reptilian part of the brain - the snakes, the dragons and crocodiles. It is in this respect that I believe Icke is spot on in his analysis, though I do not believe it is necessary to view it as an external force. I believe it is encoded within each one of us.

This capacity we have to abstract from reality, to think rationally in purely binary terms, has enabled us to develop the barter society which in its turn has enabled all the diversity and creativity at which the human race has excelled. But the system of barter that we have perfected has nothing to do with Natural Law. Natural Law is rooted in organic biological life, in which every instance of life is equally vital and equally important.

The more I have thought about it the more convinced I am that the situation we find ourselves in, in 2021, has been an evolutionary inevitability encoded in humanity from the start.  From the moment we came to consciousness symbolised in the Bible by the story of the Fall.

Adam and Eve, parents of us all, listened to the serpent in the Garden of Eden and ate of the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil and immediately became aware of their own nakedness. They became self conscious.

From this moment we started to think, we started to abstract ourselves from Nature, and develop a world inside our own heads, what Immanuel Kant called The Empire of the Mind, which concept has seduced Mankind ever since. From this moment we started to divide out our experience into binary opposites, we started to name and separate everything out into its individual qualities and attributes, we started to converse with each other, and above all we started to self identify.

And it was from this moment we grasped the Ring of Power, and determined that we could do without God; we could do without our biology; we could organise ourselves and we could EVOLVE, self consciously evolve into higher and higher beings, until we leave the body and our biology behind us, cast off as so much offal.

This denial of the fact that we are embodied, this refusal to acknowledge our biological origins, this refusal to identify with the body as being an intrinsic part of what we are, is at the root of the rise of Technocracy that insists on viewing the human being as a machine to be tinkered with, educated and improved. Technocracy is the logical conclusion to our having been at war with Nature, at war with Life and by association at war with Love.

There have been massive advantages and massive pitfalls in the system of life we have evolved. The advantages speak for themselves – the rise and fall of innumerable cultures and civilisations. Convinced of our own inherent superiority through the development of our capacity for rationality and intellectuality, for analysis and problem solving on an epic scale and the development of our intense imagination we have produced geniuses the likes of Einstein, Tesla, David Bohm and Wilhelm Reich. No other creature has come close in terms of changing the face of the planet and carving it according to our own distinctive vision.

Nevertheless the pitfalls have become increasingly obvious. Principle among these is that we have divorced ourselves from the organic biological origin of our existence. We have forgotten that we are biological creatures, no different in essence from the beasts of the field, the birds of the air and the fish in our seas. We have forgotten that we are living in symbiosis with trillions of microorganisms that have made us what we are from the inside out. If God is anywhere he exists in the organic universe, in the soil, in the microbes that teem over the Earth and teem over and within every living creature. In demonising the microbe we have demonised God, we have demonised Life.

God is an unnecessary concept. We are living in the midst of a constantly evolving miracle. We are an intrinsic part of that miracle; but because we have only ever been concerned with controlling and organising that miracle we have forgotten this absolutely critical fact. We are now in the position of Icarus who made wings for himself to fly, and flying too close to the sun crashed into the sea.

We cannot blame anybody but ourselves for the dilemma we find ourselves in.

We deplore the blatantly deceitful, nay iniquitous, ways of the world’s billionaires and so called philanthropists, but fail to see they are only doing on a grand scale what we all do on a daily basis in order to survive. When we look at them we are only looking at ourselves writ large. It is the system that’s rotten not the individuals that exploit it. The Power of the Ring is the power that we all serve.

In the past twelve months we have been shown so much that we may never have wanted to confront before. Myopia is endemic in the human condition. What we confront now is an existential crisis that originated at the outset of human functioning, originated with our inception.

All my life I have lived with the notion that ‘this is the way the world is - there is gross injustice and iniquity in the world and there is nothing I can do about it. All I can do is what I can do in my own little life. What can I do to help the millions being persecuted in Syria, the millions dying in Africa? A donation to Oxfam, a donation to Save the Children perhaps and my conscience is clear...

Well I know now this was never enough and the reason we’re in the predicament we’re in is we’ve all gone on for too long thinking in this way. Now it’s payback time.

The fact is we are ALL implicated in every act of atrocity that has ever transpired on this planet. There are no excuses. This is the responsibility automatically conferred by the gift/curse of consciousness.

We now have an opportunity to do more than salve our consciences. Now we have an opportunity to say Enough is Enough. No more. I am not cooperating any longer in a system that is responsible for  wrecking the lives of millions, that is responsible for perpetuating untold misery, poverty and disease, a system that is evil, that is against life.

Now the ogre is knocking at our own front door. It is no longer over there in Africa, over there in Syria. It is here. And suddenly we can see clearly the lies that have underpinned our so called civilisation. And it’s been a monumental shock – a shock to realise the extent to which we have deceived ourselves, to which we have been living a lie.

The task facing us now in 2021 is immense. Because it entails learning to refute what appears to define us, the contracts that have bound us to the operation of the society we inhabit. It entails taking responsibility, not just for ourselves, but for all of Creation, namely the entire ecosystem of which we are a part, down to the smallest microbe that supports life on this planet of which we are a part.

This doesn’t have to be an onerous thing. This is about rediscovering what we truly are before we were contracted, before we started lusting after the Ring of Power. All it entails is saying No to anything that is going to harm that ecosystem in any particular. We have to say No to masks. We have to say No to vaccines. We have to say No to social distancing. Because all these measures are immensely damaging to the ecosystem of which we are a part. Far more damaging than the carbon we release into the atmosphere. Look at all the misery around you in 2021.

The problem we have is we have been asleep. And because we have been asleep we have been co-opted by the very system we have created. There can be no better illustration of this than the way in which the entire globe has allowed itself to acquiesce to idiocy and continues twelve months on to allow itself to be bludgeoned into acquiescing to idiocy.

This saying No is not going to be easy. You may find yourself unable to go to the shops, to a pub or a restaurant, you may find yourself unable to leave your house, you may even lose your job. And this is inevitably going to lead to endless moral conundrums.

What does a young mother do who has to put food on the table for her children and is told her social security payments will be stopped if she doesn’t cooperate with the regime that seeks to enslave her and her children? What does anybody do who has to support a family and cannot do so without cooperating with tyranny? There are no easy answers. This will not be easy. All anybody can do is what their individual conscience allows.

In The Lord of the Rings it takes just four hobbits, lead by a great wizard, to complete the job – albeit they pick up a great company of dwarves, elves and trees along the way... What we see in The Lord of the Rings, graphically brought to life in the Hollywood films, is a revolt of all that lives and breathes against vast armies of sub-humans (reptilians) that have only one aim , namely to extinguish all that lives and breathes. Tolkien’s tale has never been so apposite.

We got into this mess by failing to pick up the responsibility that our capacity for reflection and consciousness confers. The only hope now is for each of us to take ultimate responsibility in whatever way we can. That is responsibility for Life with a capital L. Not just our own little lives. This means every doctor and nurse, every government official, every employee of the corporations that are leeching off the human race, needs to take responsibility for what they are cooperating in.

Already we have seen the strength of individual conscience that has awoken across all levels of life - all the doctors and nurses that have come out and said ‘this is a fraud and we are killing people’. Suddenly whistleblowers are everywhere. And it is these courageous individuals that are leading the way, because they are taking ultimate responsibility. They are saying they cannot and will not cooperate with something that is endangering lives and goes against their conscience. It is a very simple matter of not being prepared to turn a blind eye just because it is inconvenient not to.

This is all that any of us can do. Individual conscience is not a small thing. It is everything. It was the failure of individual conscience in the face of tyranny that led to the Holocaust. When the day of reckoning comes nobody should be able to stand up in court and say I did this because I was told to do it. It’ll no longer wash. This is the central lesson we learned from the Nuremberg Trials. Let us not forget it now.