1 “Do not let your hearts be troubled. You believe in Goda; believe also in me. 2 My Father’s house has many rooms; if that were not so, would I have told you that I am going there to prepare a place for you? 3 And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to be with me that you also may be where I am. 4 You know the way to the place where I am going.”
5 Thomas said to him, “Lord, we don’t know where you are going, so how can we know the way?”
6 Jesus answered, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. 7 If you really know me, you will knowb my Father as well. From now on, you do know him and have seen him.”
a 1 Or Believe in God
b 7 Some manuscripts If you really knew me, you would know
John 14:1-7 (NIV)
Over the past week, three articles stood out for me and provided confirmation that the ways of our modern life were predicated on deceptions, fears and life-destructive activities. In the order in which they were brought to my consciousness, they were: A Deep State of Mind: America’s Shadow Government and Its Silent Coup, Inside the Invisible Government: War, Propaganda, Clinton & Trump, and The Destruction of Reason in West. Individually these three articles help us to triangulate and shed light on the root cause of all our global agonies, but together they encapsulate the ultimate pathology in the mindset of our collective unconsciousness on the planet. Three troubling videos then consolidated this understanding and again are worthy of further reflection as they highlight the globalisation of collusion of life-destructiveness, and the undermining of the life-affirming potential of peaceful participation of people and planet for shared prosperity. (Please see: America: Freedom to Fascism, CORPORATE FASCISM: The Destruction of America’s Middle Class, and Meet the Renegades: Michael Hudson.)
Interestingly, in response to my sharing The Destruction of Reason in West on social media, one of my colleagues commented:
“How insane. The West definitely has its problems and non white people are generally on the sharp end of them but praising a murderous dictator is not a rational counterpunch. My two cents.”
This got me thinking. How do we know what is in fact truth and in tune with reality, and how do we know what is propaganda and in tune with manufactured deception? This is not a trivial question, as depending on what side of the truth fence you sit on, your interpretations of people, events and situations will be totally biased one way or the other, and the consequences of these conflicts in worldviews can have catastrophic consequences for one and all.
My lifelong search for truth has brought me within the spheres of influence and concern of two prophets, one ancient and spiritual, and one modern and secular. Although these messengers of truth are products of different times and spaces, their message is one and the same and resonate with each other in helping guide us forward in that search for truth. Given the opening quote, you by now would have guessed, the ancient prophet is Jesus of Nazareth who embodied truth in his recorded words and deeds, by his living his life with integrity given his life’s challenges, up to and including his execution by the political, economic and religious establishments of the time.
When on trial by Pontius Pilate, this is what has been recorded:
33 Pilate then went back inside the palace, summoned Jesus and asked him, “Are you the king of the Jews?”
34 “Is that your own idea,” Jesus asked, “or did others talk to you about me?”
35 “Am I a Jew?” Pilate replied. “Your own people and chief priests handed you over to me. What is it you have done?”
36 Jesus said, “My kingdom is not of this world. If it were, my servants would fight to prevent my arrest by the Jewish leaders. But now my kingdom is from another place.”
37 “You are a king, then!” said Pilate.
Jesus answered, “You say that I am a king. In fact, the reason I was born and came into the world is to testify to the truth. Everyone on the side of truth listens to me.”
38 “What is truth?” retorted Pilate. With this he went out again to the Jews gathered there and said, “I find no basis for a charge against him.
39 But it is your custom for me to release to you one prisoner at the time of the Passover. Do you want me to release ‘the king of the Jews’?”
40 They shouted back, “No, not him! Give us Barabbas!” Now Barabbas had taken part in an uprising.
John 18: 33-40
For those of you who are well versed in the Christian Bible, you would at once recognize that these verses come from the Gospel of John, which is totally different from the three other synoptic Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke in essence and style, where the former is more esoteric and riddled with deep hidden meaning and significance, and the latter three are more exoteric and more amenable to a simpler literal surface understanding and appreciation.
From my vantage point, these verses in modern interpretation highlight the pervasiveness of false flag operations by the ruling class back then, and remarkably they point to and instruct us on the resurrection of false flag operations in the modern period via proxy groups of imperial hegemony such as the life-destructive organised drug and gun cartels (both legal and illegal) and the life-destructive organised fundamentalists that have hijacked the peaceful religions of tribal unity of Moses, Jesus, Mohammed, and even Adam Smith and distorted them at the behest of the ruling classes. These are the modern day Barabbases that have been given a free pass via the modern day high priests (aka secret “intelligence” services) who are responsible for the enabling of insurrections and uprisings, death and destruction around the globe. The testament to this reverse projection can be found in the meaning of the word Barabbas as found in wikipedia:
“Barabbas’s name appears as bar-Abbas in the Greek texts of the gospels. It is derived ultimately from the Aramaic בר-אבא, Bar-abbâ, “son of the father”.
Let that sink in for a while.
A modern day prophet who has understood the divisiveness and life-destructive tendencies of our modern day religions (inclusive of our modern capitalist system) is Professor John McMurtry and he has sought a secular path of truth seeking based on rational validation of empirical life facts. His life’s work of research in distilling rational principles and criteria from a fuller and better understanding of our life-supporting systems in our society and on the planet has positively influenced me in ways unimaginable before my encounter of his magnus opus The Cancer Stage of Capitalism: From Crisis to Cure. His academic home page describes his latest focus:
“Since full-time research leave, I have respnded to two main streams of requested research publication and communication. The first has been keynote lectures, conference papers, articles and chapters with a unifying concern – to lay bare the value syntax of the now ruling world system and its reflective realms of philosophy and theory as blind in principle to their common life-ground and its universal necessities at organic and ecological levels. Logic and scientific method, the nature of the mass media, 9-11 and the 9-11 wars, the corporatization of higher education, and social justice theory have been interconnected areas of this deep-structure analysis. My work in these and other areas is also featured in a full-length film (Zeitgeist), periodic public radio interviews from Chicago-New York (Progressive Radio Network) and other international venues.
My second and principal research and publication stream over the last seven years has followed from the invitation by the Secretariat of UNESCO/EOLSS (Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems, Paris-Oxford) to construct, author and edit Philosophy and World Problems as an online multi-volume study relating world philosophies East and West to the determining problems of life on earth from the past into the present global crisis. Three sub-volumes entitled Modes of Reason, Western Philosophy and the Life-Ground, and Philosophy, Human Nature and Society have been constructed and edited with distinguished philosophers contributing to five topic areas in each of these general fields. The longer title study by me is an encompassing step-by-step critical study of world philosophies across fields to explain the inner logic of each canon and school in relationship to universal world problems across cultures and times towards principled resolution in life-coherent terms (as spelled out at the end of this webpage). This research program under the auspices of UNESCO has deployed the new ground and method of life-value onto-axiology to excavate, explain and resolve life-blind presuppositions of the world’s major thought-systems from the ancients East and West to Modern and Contemporary Philosophy, including related theories of the social sciences. The underlying core assumptions and principles of each thinker and school have been critically explained and related to the world in light of three related meta questions:
(1) What are the ultimately regulating principles underlying the distinguishing concepts, arguments and theories of each?
(2) Where do they most deeply fail to take life-and-death issues into account and otherwise mislead us in how to think and live?
(3) How can reason, felt being and action – the ultimate fields of value – comprehend and enable individual, social and ecological life in more coherently inclusive ways across differences and distances?
By following these lines of question through humanity’s most influential theories of what is real, true and good, life-value onto-axiology moves underneath dominant specialty divisions which have increasingly lost their life bearings amidst planetary, social and ecological collapse. Two further refereed works have been completed for the UNESCO Encyclopedia to explain the ultimately underlying principles of the major world religions from their primary sources East and West. For a summary outline of the collected works on this project now available under my name at the world’s most comprehensive research site, see the last section of this webpage.”
Professor John McMurtry implicitly provides the answer to Pilates retort, “What is truth?” in his article for UNESCO, WHAT IS GOOD? WHAT IS BAD? – THE VALUE OF ALL VALUES THROUGH TIME, PLACE AND THEORIES. Here is a summary to that article:
“Values, what is of worth or not, and why, define the human species across differences, domains and ways of life. They construct the meaning of life. The world crisis of life support systems which humanity now faces is explained as a predictable consequence of the long failure of theory and policy to ground in values which enable human life and life conditions – even as the air, soil and water degrade, climates and oceans destabilize, a rising half of the world is destitute, public sectors and services are privatized for profit, and species become extinct at a spasm rate. This analysis step-by-step excavates the core defining principles of the major theories of value across philosophical traditions, and explains why their answers to the questions “what is good, what is bad?” fail to provide any coherently adequate ground of worth. In contrast to known values and value-systems, an underlying “value of all values” is systematically explained and reconnected to lived values and life support systems as the lost life-ground of all human values through place and time.”
His influence on my thinking has been littered across my blog site where you can find some of his writings reproduced along with my understanding and ruminations of this understanding.
So with regards to the articles and videos I watch and share, I now always use the life-valued lens of interpretation and the life-valued compass of steering to guide me towards the truth. If a point of view or school of thought is life-blind in its manifestation of life-debasement and destructiveness, then it is a dysfucntional false belief system. (Please see my attempt to apply this dictum to a better understanding of the universe in general and to life and consciosness in particular: The (Un)Intended Consequences of Dysfunctional Belief Systems.) Using this life-valued metric can also guide us to what is beautiful, good and just in this life and to help us identify the false prophets in our midst, which are consolidating and organising under the false guise of miseducating and misinforming of what is “truth” in this world.
The falsity of their machinations is ever evident as their modus operandi is based on deception, fear and incitement of violence both within and across their borders. Let us take for example the growth of the police states and the globalization of the armament industrial complex. Do they act in life-enabling or life-disabling ways? When we attack indigenous communities and desecrate their sacred grounds with oil pipelines for coveted neighbourly goods and monetary gains, how is this activity life-affirming and in touch with reality? When we attack other nations because of their constitutional rights and obligations to use their elected trust for creating public policies and creating credit via public banking for investing in the health and education of their people and the provision of vital public infrastructures, why do we corrupt and subvert their leaders with economic hitmen, jackals and if not successful bomb them to hell, all because we again covet their natural resources for control and monetary gains?
If the modern day imperialist were secure in their “true” belief systems, why do their actions speak louder than their words. Isn’t it a sign of mass insecurity and cowardice when you have military bases in many other’s backyards, and wars are also fought against countries wanting to dissociate themselves from the petrodollar recycling scheme which funds and enables this sprawling military industrial scheme? How is all of this contributing to the peaceful participation among people of the planet for shared prosperity for one and all as per the principles expressed in the sustainable development goals of the UN. In answer to my colleagues comments, please ask yourself who is the real wolf in sheep’s clothing and let us count up all the untimely deaths over the years especially by the drone wars in recent time, to determine who is the murderous dictator in our midst?
The Adverse Childhood Experience study is the singular most important body of evidence to show why we need a war on war and police brutality, as when we create instability in other people’s backyards and especially in our own, we create untold amounts of adverse events for our children that would have negative life consequences and ramifications for generations to come. All the evidence in our midst point to one group and one group alone who is creating and enforcing disastrous policies which are democratic in name only, but most definitely fascist in implementation.
There are many more examples and counterexamples I can give here, but given my line of reasoning, I would leave this as an exercise for you the reader to help develop a greater discernment of this life-valued reasoning and understanding to guide your way to the truth.
I will leave you now with two prayers that have been a major source of comfort for me during these trying times:
O Lord, remember not only the men and women of goodwill, but also those of ill will. But do not remember all the suffering they have inflicted upon us. Remember the fruits we bought, thanks to this suffering: our comradeship, our loyalty, our humility, the courage, the generosity, the greatness of heart which has grown out of this; and, when they come to judgement, let all the fruits that we have borne be their forgiveness. Amen.
Anonymous, Ravensbruck concentration camp
Lord Jesus Christ, you have taught us to be merciful like the heavenly Father, and have told us that whoever sees you sees Him. Show us your face and we will be saved. Your loving gaze freed Zacchaeus and Matthew from being enslaved by money; the adulteress and Magdalene from seeking happiness only in created things; made Peter weep after his betrayal, and assured Paradise to the repentant thief. Let us hear, as if addressed to each one of us, the words that you spoke to the Samaritan woman: “If you knew the gift of God!”
You are the visible face of the invisible Father, of the God who manifests his power above all by forgiveness and mercy: let the Church be your visible face in the world, its Lord risen and glorified. You willed that your ministers would also be clothed in weakness in order that they may feel compassion for those in ignorance and error: let everyone who approaches them feel sought after, loved, and forgiven by God.
Send your Spirit and consecrate every one of us with its anointing, so that the Jubilee of Mercy may be a year of grace from the Lord, and your Church, with renewed enthusiasm, may bring good news to the poor, proclaim liberty to captives and the oppressed, and restore sight to the blind.
We ask this through the intercession of Mary, Mother of Mercy, you who live and reign with the Father and the Holy Spirit for ever and ever. Amen.
Pope Francis’ Prayer for the Extraordinary Jubilee Year of Mercy
