Chapter 12. Suckerdom

Table of Contents (this page)

Part III, Chapter 12. SUCKERDOM. (12)

In every age it has been the tyrant, the oppressor and the exploiter who has wrapped himself in the cloak of patriotism, or religion or both, to deceive and overawe the People.” Eugene V. Debs.

“Our commercial media is the parrot voice of power, money and corruption”. Anon.

This chapter has 3 sections,

HOW WE ARE SUCKERS?  (12A)

FIXING OUR PROBLEMS.  (12B)

FEELING GOOD ABOUT OURSELVES.  (12C)

Introduction.  (12.1)

The argument that I have been developing within Part III is that we humans are trying to be gods and consider that this is what life is for. But this section is about what happens when we do this on the mass social scale, and then come up against the same old apparently intractable problems which we try to fix by continuing with these ideas about gods (which I consider the source of our problems in the first place). So, we tend to go around in circles……

The introduction is basically a recap of the situation thus far, and then I look at how we tend to tackle some of the problems of our godship society and how well they work.

This chapter is called Suckerdom which is hardly a nice word, so why am I using it?

We worship gods and model/emulate them as much as we can and we do indeed trust them which is not a good idea. We do this automatically because it is human nature to model and trust those whom we worship. ‘Automatic’ means that we are doing these things unconsciously, so we don’t actually know we are doing these things. (Becoming more conscious or more aware of what is happening inside us is how we become less automatic in our reactions to life. The more ‘automatic’ we are, the more reactive we are, and the less creative we are able to be.)

How we are suckers.  (12A)

What is suckerdom?  (12.2)

We are suckers when we …

  • Copy the gods’ behaviour and values in any and every way we can. Also, their personality traits; the glitter and the glamour, which look like Teflon robotic go-getter for the men and glamourous bitch and/or waif for the women. Too bad if you don’t rate in the copying game.
  • Even consider that the business and salesmen type personality are the ‘correct/right’ way to be. We are always supposed to sell and promote ourselves.
  • Take on their terminology, and compete with all.
  • Believe all we are told because they are right about everything; they must know because they have ‘got there’. We are trusting them!
  • We cannot do ‘buyer beware’ or basic detective ‘follow the money’. We do not query any of this. We have been brain-washed as ‘this is how it is’.

We do this because that’s what we want and that’s how to get there – to be like gods, ie, we will have Pleasure, and can be Safe as well as have Power over others as well as no Effort. We really would like to be able to avoid the ‘slings and arrows of outrageous fortune’, throw our weight around as we please, and just loll around in a nice place, and hold out our hand, and have some nice food and/or drink just drop into it, because others have followed our orders. How nice; what a pleasure!

We expect these things and feel entitled to them. We do not expect to be one of those people who have to follow these orders.

We also tend to unconsciously expect that the more we can be like those gods we want to be, the more they will care about us and fix/rescue us and make everything right for us, as in, they will give us succour, but I am arguing that gods don’t, can’t and won’t care about you, ever. They are busy looking down on you and exploiting/using you as much as they can.

Godship becomes our religion.  (12.3)

The ‘siren song’ of the commercial world is, ‘you are our customer and we need you, so we will fill all your needs – we care about you and you count with us’, and we like this ‘song’ and want to believe it, so we then become dependent upon them, and that is part of the problem. We don’t actually like finding out that this stuff is not true, and we keep on wishing/hoping that it could be. We are afraid of what the alternatives might be, so we don’t query them. ‘Suckerdom’ is that we buy or swallow everything any god tells us, because we want to be gods too, and unconsciously expect them to care about us. We’ve ‘bought’ this stuff and it makes us ‘suckers’ because we have believed them.

But, as we worship them so we model them and because this is all unconscious, as in, it is basically our background, we forget about it and take it for granted. Hence, we cannot do ‘buyer beware’. It’s a conditioning or programming or brainwashing or imprinting. We don’t query this stuff – it is a given because it has ‘gone in’ to us as children. (We are often threatened with ‘believe it or else’ when we are young, so we worry about what the ‘or else’ might be.) It has become part of our background, and we go on into adulthood with these values.

In this manner it has become our religion; godship with its money and power to avoid life while telling all what to do is what we believe in. It tells us what to do and how to live, and what life is for. We do not query it. ‘Exploit, and be damned, and the more I can exploit, the less I will suffer the consequences’. This is sold as ‘get real’; this is how life really is, namely, mean and who gives a stuff. Life is mean to me, so I’ll be mean to you. But however much we are unaware of the Mirror Laws, they are always there and you will also be being mean to your inner self, which doesn’t like it, as I may have said before.

We can’t do ‘buyer-beware’.  (12.4)

The point that I’m trying to make is that as a society we actually seem unable to do ‘buyer beware’ because we’re worshipping, modelling and trusting what we’re worshipping; it’s all unconscious for most of us and it’s a long way down in the unconscious as well. And we can’t change this unless we become conscious of it. As we buy into the ‘greed is good’ theory of life, so we sell our human selves out, ie, we devalue our human potential which remains essentially unexplored and definitely unexpressed.

The trouble with wanting to be a god is that there is no thinking or ‘Till and Keep’ here, just a lovely time being served by others forever (maybe), but this is also what a child gets to have (hopefully) and with any luck can stay a child. Aiming for godship keeps us as children. But if that is so, all ‘children’ get to put up with what the ‘bigger’ people say and you may not like that. Any dependency on our part leaves us as a child. Neither is there any True Self Esteem (TSE) here for anyone and we don’t like that either.

But, the primary trouble with all wants from the other in this life is that we are generally unlikely to get them until we are able to give them first; well, bother.

Godship and feudalism.  (12.5)

Historically, we do this ‘godship stuff’ a lot. It was called Feudalism before, and I’m labelling it godship now. The primary difference between then and now seems to me to be that up until recently peons couldn’t possibly get to godship, and knew that, and protested when/if they could, whereas now the Media sells godship as both desirable and possible for all, and the main aim in life, with failures as ‘losers’ to be peed on, so we hate not getting there; all the more reason to reassure ourselves that we have ‘got there’ regardless of whether we are actually there or not. But the Mirror Laws tell us that as we try to get to godship by ‘doing’ ‘peon’ to the outer other, so we are doing ‘peon’/’loser’ to our own inner self (the inner ‘other’); godship means ‘doing’ ‘peon’ to ‘the other’ as the great comparison and judgement. We cannot do it to the other without unconsciously doing it to ourselves at the same time. Hence it is our own thinking/behaviour/’doing’ that is making us unhappy.

To reiterate from Part II, the distance between ‘winner’ and ‘loser’ here is huge, and is a measure of the distance between your 2 selves within you. There can be no Unity here, ever, but your happiness and satisfaction in life are dependent upon this Unity. This is what this UUS is all about – how and why to get that Unity going.

Godship is a primary recipe for basic unhappiness and dissatisfaction and ‘never enough’. We are ‘off-track’ and lose direction and look for ways to escape.

The media.  (12.6)

The media is how we are told/hypnotized into this conditioning.

The worship of godship with its power and control is throughout the commercial media which is the voice of the gods, and the Media is virtually everywhere. Very few people do not have some form of media on all day and every day in their lives; TV, radio, newspapers, mobile phones, etc. Nowadays younger people use social media a great deal more but this is still simply reinforcing the basic brainwashing.  (The huge social need at the moment is the attempt to lessen our fears by trying to reassure ourselves that others feel as we do, and have the same ‘catch-phrases’ and stories, so it must be OK. We get very cross with people with different ideas, which is showing you that there is a lot of fear underneath.) This is our background/environment.  Having this sort of message going on and on is a brainwashing because humans tend to believe what they are told multiple times, consciously or unconsciously; another word for this is hypnotism. When we are told the same thing over and over it acts as an hypnosis – ‘what I tell you 3 times must be true’, so we don’t query it; we don’t even think that there is anything to query. Having the Media as our background is a conditioning and a programming so we don’t think. All of this has gone into the unconscious.

The message is, if you buy all these things you are told to, you will count; this is a way of being like gods (who do count) who are able to have anything that they want. That is the basic message; what other way is there to be? However, just because we don’t know doesn’t mean there isn’t one.

The eternal competition and judgement of godship promotes fear and denigration along with the belittling of human beings as incapable of thinking anything different from this hypnosis of ours; ie, humans are disempowered.

Essentially, godship is always the appeal to the ‘lowest common denominator of the masses’ you might say, and as such is always appealing to our littlest selves, and it makes us ‘little’, as in, it ‘shrinks’ us, which strangely enough stops us ‘growing up’.

Make money and have power over.  (12.7)

All the commercial media are owned by gods and any stations dependent on commercials cannot be independent. Nowadays commercial means making money with no consideration for others, life or people. This is the way that the gods consider the world and life to be used, ie, dominated, exploited, despised and feared. They only know godship and we are allowing that to happen, as we agree with such values which are pushed at us over and over without any voice to the contrary. This is a very important message, and we do indeed want this; we want to hear that it is possible, and this is how to do it. We never think about the cost to the other unless we happen to be this ‘other’. Even governments are now agreeing with this point of view. We consider money the most important thing and fear its lack in our lives.

Commercial means you are ‘buying’ it, and supporting it as you buy.

The media is the mouthpiece of the gods.  (12.8)

We hear about the ‘freedom of the press’ as another story we are supposed to believe, but proper investigative reporting disappeared from the mainstream how long ago? 15, 25 years or more? No gods allow anything that might reflect badly on them. Nowadays most reporting is down to a ‘he says then s/he says’ dynamic and particularly for political reporting it is back to this personality contest of the Great Leader (see below) with all the Answers – again. Policy gets a back seat and is reported in a manner similar to a sporting match. Hence the huge emphasis on charismatic ‘Leader’ men telling us all the godship answers to life (= make godship people richer via ‘Rush Up’ economics) and still we ‘buy it’.

In this manner the Media simply reports what ‘a god’ says, no matter how stupid, daft or outright incorrect such words may be.

Any angry person with a gun can be a god for a day because he will achieve notoriety; he will count. And he will count a great deal more than so many people who support life and others in so many ways for so many years. What are we doing?

In amongst this worship of the gods is a strong belief that if something were to be wrong/incorrect we would hear about it, but this is truly not so. How would we when the gods can so easily ‘disappear’ them? After all it’s only another peon trying to say something and they don’t count. The ‘ungodly’ is simply not reported.

We want to count.  (12.9)

Gods count, and peons don’t.

Godship promises that we’ll be noticed and have authority; we will count and be taken into account. It also promises safety from life, as well as a much easier one. We are very afraid of being a peon because no-one takes any notice of us if we are, and I suspect this makes us feel very unsafe in life. We will be peed on by others whenever they can, which is very bad for our self-esteem and we don’t like it, hence we will try very hard to get to godship but maybe we won’t succeed. Notice also that the more we despise peons the more we will hate being one ourselves if someone pees on us. As we become more afraid, we want someone else to fix this somehow, as God doesn’t seem to be helping very much.

This is a lot of fear in a lot of people, and an awful lot of comparing and judging and trying very hard to get to godship. A great recipe for a lot of stress and anxiety; no ease here.

It’s all fear, and it’s all being ratcheted up. So much so that we are not going to question these things, but so much so that we must question these things. This is not the way to be. We can talk about love until we’re blue in the face, but love is not here in these systems and won’t be unless and until we become aware of the need to love our own inner self; our own inner ‘other’.

What we get cross about.  (12.10)

We can tell what we are afraid of by the things we get angry about socially and the ways in which we reject others. Victim and Self-Pity turn us into bullies when we can. We want to be rescued from fear, and all of this is played upon by the Media and our politicians. So, what do we get cross about? Some of these are …

  • Illnesses and potential causes of death – we’re supposed to be immortal. We get very cross about terrorists and illnesses and especially afraid about cancer; we hope that all those medical ‘fixes’ of vaccinations and cancer treatments will work. Covid-19 has sure upped the stakes here.
  • ‘Boat people’, refugees; we’re sorry for a few but are very afraid of lots and happy to treat them badly. They might pinch our jobs so we’ll accuse them of being terrorists.
  • Americans hang on to guns like grim death which it is.
  • The reaction to naysayers who question any godship ‘rightness or entitlement’. If any person implies or queries that the gods are not right, eg, whistleblowers, that person is attacked/disappeared by gods who have the money to do so, as well as any god-followers/peons who still want to be gods, and might get there one day. This includes all the attacking over the internet, from people who have an awful lot of time on their hands, because there are fewer jobs, so even more reason to be cross and afraid.

Gods want power over….  (12.11)

Gods will continue to set up and reinforce these systems precisely because they have the power to do so. They benefit from this and they have the weaponry to enforce it. Your choice is to want to join the club or not. If you don’t want to join, you’re going to have to find other ways of gaining correct/proper self-esteem.  And if you do want to join, but aren’t already there, you may get exhausted and bitter in the trying.

…. And so do we.  (12.12)

But we wouldn’t sanction any of this if we didn’t wish that we could do the same ourselves.

As we worship the gods so we agree with what they say, and we want to do this ourselves if we can. We know this is happening because our primary complaint is indeed that of…

‘I can’t get to be a god and I’m afraid I don’t count and I feel peed on. So, I’m a victim of all this, and inside I’m actually very angry as well as afraid, and I’m full of Self-Pity and you should be sorry for Poor Me. But I will still try to get to god(dess), and maybe by force if I can, by doing or saying something that gets reported, ie, other people’s attention, which is a way of counting, even for a short time. I might have some effect on an-other and I might get rescued’, etc, etc.

In the meantime, we entertain and/or drink/drug ourselves to oblivion/death to stop our thinking/feeling about how ineffective and powerless we feel. ‘Eat drink and be merry and consume, for tomorrow we die’.

We will actually go on doing this for our whole lives unless we stop and think about it, and maybe the only thing that will stop us is to become too exhausted to continue.

Why look or enquire?  (12.13)

Well, why bother looking at this horrible stuff anyway? Who wants to know? But if we don’t look properly, we won’t know what to do, and we won’t be able to address the problem correctly, which means it goes on and on, and at the moment it’s getting worse. Socially, we’ve been ‘doing’ godship in some form or other for rather a long time, and the question is, do we like it? Clearly, it’s OK for a few and not OK for an awful lot. This means lots of us aren’t very happy. So, what do we try to do about it?

Our normal method of attending to problems is to study the symptoms and work out ways of fighting/fixing them, but the inquiry of this book is to understand the primary or root cause or source of all these unhappy things, with the premise that we will be much better equipped to sort them out effectively if we know what that source actually is. The trouble is that society’s ‘root causes’ reside in our basic beliefs and values which form our ‘background’ in life, and so we are not conscious of them, but if we can’t See or understand what they are, we can’t do anything about them.

As a society we have a lot of sources of unhappiness, which means a barrage of symptoms that basically overwhelm us and make us tired, and everybody looks at the symptoms, according to their own tendencies. So, we already have lots of ideas about how we try to fix all these things we are afraid of, so we do them and we’ve kept doing them for a long time, and we put a lot of faith into them. I label them, Noble Leader, our Marvellous Technology, and Economics. They are mostly variations on the theme of ‘Throw Money at It’.

Fixing our problems.  (12B)

The noble leader.  (12.14)

Someone will know what to do. Our fears will be solved by the right person.

This is our pervasive social ‘his’-story of the ‘Great and Noble Leader’ leading everyone out of the morass/pickle/trouble/danger to safety, after killing the evil monster out there trying to kill us. And we’re still ‘doing’ it, and there are always ‘monsters’. The ‘Saving the World from the Robots’ is a variation on this theme. This wish for the ‘great leader’ has a lot to do with the search for the great Father. Notice also that ‘noble’ is at the Big Cheese level of the Superiority/Inferiority Caper (See chapter 5).

The primary concern of the masses here is ‘safety’ because we do not have it. We are looking for protection (the P part of TISP.)

The implication is that only one person can do this; ie, he has all the answers and no-one else does.

Another assumption is that everyone benefits from the actions of this one person.

Notice also that there is always an evil monster out there to get us. No matter what we do, it’s always there.

To unravel this myth, we need to look at each concept carefully.

‘Safety from danger in whatever form, and everyone benefits from the actions of this one person.’

We have to face up to the fact that this is a ‘story’. If it were ever true, it is certainly not nowadays. Godship means that the person themself benefits from being a god, plus a few ‘hangers on’. To spell this out, this is private gain for private purposes only. ‘Safety’ has never been the lot of the peon in the Feudal system. The very few that benefit are the ones that live to tell the tales and write the history.

‘Evil monsters’; there are always evil monsters. Nowadays we just make other countries or religions, or ‘boat people’ or ISIS the evil monsters and hence, our behaviour towards them becomes monstrous, so strangely enough, they think we are that.

Notice also that godship increasingly uses fear to herd us to wherever they want us to go, which is usually to spending heaps of public money to buy their current fix which they want to sell – for our good, of course – very noble. Follow the money.

It’s a story.  (12.15)

This story is a godship story and we must ‘call it’ if we want to change anything. It is part of male conditioning, our mechanical thinking, our economic systems, business pressure on governments to be ‘efficient’, and so on. It affects us deeply and has always been nonsense within the competitive feudal system; it was nonsense then, and is nonsense now. There is no safety here for the normal person.

The fact is that societies that managed to live in accord with the natural world were not busy fighting and killing each other or calling each other evil. It is possible to live without this myth, and it is time we learned to. We are a lot more primitive in this than we might suppose.

It is also true that many idealistic young men go through a stage of dreaming about rescuing others through noble deeds, and this yearning is absolutely ignored in our current society, but I suspect that it is a drive that needs to be harnessed, as in, used for travelling in the ‘right’ direction for ‘the other’s good’. I suspect that the Protect role is part of the masculine as the Sustain role appears to be part of the feminine.

Obscene Salary Entitlement (OSE).  (12.16)

Nowadays, the ‘noble leader who knows just what to do’ expects to be recognized for his amazing ‘magic’ abilities and companies are happy to oblige, just in case it might be true. This shows up in the Obscene Salary Entitlement (OSE) for the CEO.

Obscene Salaries are far in excess of the basic wage, which in fact has hardly moved in the last 20-30 years. They can be anything from 10 to 100 times the basic wage or more? To repeat, this is a salary, which means it is paid annually, each year; bonuses may be extra. Notice also that these salaries are being paid regardless of the success or failure of the company, now or in the future! This salary is the equivalent of roughly 10-100 more people on the basic wage every year. We are saying that one person is worth this many people.

OSE is where a company, (or now councils and even some charities!) has the CEO as the Great Leader on an Obscene Salary. This Great Leader being the only one who can lead said company to success, or ‘Who Knows Just What to Do’. We have experience after experience where it is those on the ‘shop floor’ who knew what was wrong before everything went ‘pear-shaped’ or ‘the fit hit the shan’, but we cannot shake ourselves out of this story, partly because it is right through the Media which is owned and controlled by godship, as well as the ‘story’ being right through our cultural heritage. It’s a “deus ex machina” (the god in the machine) style yearning that we all seem to have of getting rescued, when really, the idea is for us to grow up and rescue ourselves (which we’ll be rather pleased about when we have).

We also tacitly assume that if someone is good at something, they will be good at everything. This is patently not so, and yet, we do it, and go on doing it. This really means that most companies would be much better off with 2 or 3 people (see MBTI Chapter 15) working in a cooperative manner bringing all their skills to the table instead of a single (and usually male) CEO. Too amazing a concept – but maybe not paying each of them an OSE?

It’s almost as if the thinking goes, ‘we’ll just pay squillions for the right person and everything will be OK’ with this attitude bleeding into government and shire/county administrations as well, so their ‘top people’ have to be paid heaps.

Also, we know just what this magic person will look like and sound like, so we’ll know who to appoint.

‘Noble leader’ characteristics.  (12.17)

  • The expensive suit. ‘Suits’ hire suits, and they know what ‘expensive’ looks like too.
  • Handsome and well-built, also generally charming and may have few lines on their face even though being over 30. There may be a deep voice.
  • Promise the world.

Handsome and well-built. ‘Godlike’ and privilege are built in; they have an advantageous background (and a mother who is a good manager and served real food).

Charm. The more charm, the less responsibility. Sad, but true.

Few Lines. If someone over 30 has few lines on their face they have neither worries nor cares, about you, or their job, or anything else; beware. They can promise a lot because they are not particularly fussed about whether they deliver or not; they will have moved on to another sucker. You might be better off if you hire someone who cares about doing a good job, if you know what that actually might be.

The deep voice. The deeper the voice, the less they do what they say, as in, nothing happens, but you will feel reassured until you look at whether anything is actually happening. Another sad, but true.

Promise the world. Of course, and they won’t be there to cop any consequences anyway, and you won’t criticize because you want to be a god too. Nor is anyone going to admit that their choices may have been wrong, hence all those ‘golden handshakes’.

But the trouble is that these people hire their own ilk, so you need to prevent them being there in the first place, and how easy is that? Well, maybe do your own research into their background for a start, and a bit of ‘reading between the lines’ can be useful too. Many older women have had to learn to do this, why not ask them?

Vampiring other companies.  (12.18)

Another twist on this OSE story is the hidden and legal ‘Vampiring’ of companies (at least in Australia).

This is where a wealthy person is able to privately buy a company, set themself up as the CEO and pay themself an Obscene Salary annually (and maybe put the wife on a contract for good luck). It will then be only a matter of time before the company is bled dry and collapses. The CEO can afford to go on to buy the next company while the unemployed go onto the dole. It is the Government that picks up these pieces, not godship. The story is that Australian companies cannot compete with Asia, but few companies can compete when they are bled dry. This is happening not just to manufacturing companies.

Another way that we try to ‘fix’ our problems is to put our faith in our marvellous Science, Medicine, and Technology. This is another way that we ‘throw money at our problems’ which will assuredly fix them.

Our marvellous science, medicine and technology.  (12.19)

We worship these. These will fix us. Note that we think very highly of our marvellous modern technology. It proves how intelligent (read, rational) we are; we’re nearly as clever as God, and even if we get in a pickle, we can always work out how to get out of one. We tell ourselves we live longer because of it, (and yet most people do not seem to want another life, so what’s going on here?) and if we really get stuck, we can go to the Moon or Mars. We do like to tell ourselves comforting stories.

And in worshipping these things, we forget that….

  • Nowadays almost no research is actually carried out without vested interest. Hence, it simply cannot be impartial, unbiased or independent; no-one bites the hand that feeds them. Scientists like to think they are noble, but so do we.
  • We cannot and must not trust or believe any claims made by any seller. It really is ‘buyer beware‘. But we don’t seem to be able to do this at all. This is exacerbated by our acceptance of government regulatory officials moving to commercial companies and vice versa. Said government officials want to belong to the gods’ club so they won’t criticize, but that leaves us all exposed to the full exploitation by large pharmaceutical and medical companies, so they do.
  • Medicine does not always save us or fix us no matter what we do. We expect to be rescued, and to not have to contribute to ourselves or take any responsibility, and then we accuse Life of being mean to us as we suffer consequences that have been coming for a long time.
  • Almost all our ‘fixes’ poison us, and then they poison the environment, including alcohol, pharmaceuticals, drugs and sugar, then we pay for the enormous edifice of medicine to make us well in spite of what we do to ourselves and said environment, etc.
  • Gods are highly interested in longevity (read, immortality) especially through medical/technological ‘fixes’, but a life without real meaning or point is essentially boring and living a longer life in such a manner leaves them bored for even longer with all the more reason for them to look for mischief. ‘The devil makes work for idle hands to do’.

I have already argued that the problem with worshipping these particular gods is that we are unable to query these things, so we don’t. We are also particularly impressed by these sorts of gods as belonging to the realm of the ‘rational’ and the intellect. Almost all of our technology is about the fear that life is out to get us, and it is only our marvellous intelligence that can beat it back. If we didn’t think/feel that ‘life is out to get us’, these gods selling us all these wonderful ‘fixes’ would have little to no handle on us, but they do.

To repeat, as we fear that life is out to get us so we try to dominate it, but the more we try to overcome it, the more it will appear to be trying to overcome us – Mirror Laws.

But, a very important way that we look at our world is through the lens of Economics. So, what is that all about and where does it come from?

Advocates of capitalism are very apt to appeal to the sacred principles of liberty, which are embodied in one maxim: The fortunate must not be restrained in the exercise of tyranny over the unfortunate.”

— Bertrand Russell

Economics.  (12.20)

We think that if we can measure it all, we’ll have a better idea of what to do. But in this we are thinking that our fears are because of lack of money. If we had lots of money, like gods, we’d all be fine. Also, Economics and Accounting are the languages of money and measuring, and gods speak the language of power and money. This is their lingo so it’s a good thing to learn it; it will bring control, which is what we want.

It’s full of Magic Words which we never query. The more someone uses them, the more we think they have the answers. These words include.

Uneconomic,

Inefficient,

Market Forces,

Global Trade,

Gross Domestic Product GDP,

Trickle Down,

Jobs ‘n’ Growth.

‘Progress’ used to be another term on the list but is less used nowadays.

Economic theory.  (12.21)

But first we need to look at where our economic theory comes from because it is a relatively recent phenomenon.

This theory was developed by intellectual gods after WW1 to make war to be a positive thing economically, and strangely enough, we’ve had a lot of wars since. Remember, this is a theory, but we take it as absolute, and forget its myriad assumptions.

These gods of Economics …

  • Did not regard Soul-Keeping (housework, childcare etc.) as productive. They couldn’t count its value, so they didn’t. They were themselves male intellectual gods who had nothing to do with this sort of ‘unproductiveness’. And we still think this and still value Soul-Keeping this way, as I have discussed in Equal (see Chapter 9). In this way the invaluable becomes ‘unvaluable’, as in, no Thus, all the things that we do to sustain our souls, not to mention the children, have no value and do not matter. We hold these things cheap and they are not dear to our hearts. This especially pertains to women and other peons, not to mention Nature. In this manner we leave out Life – it’s a pity about that.
  • Decided that Destruction and harm in whatever form (let me count the ways) has a value in terms of it is ‘productive’ when we work to rectify the damage. In this theory destruction is not a cost, in that someone will be paid to fix the situation and it’s ‘productive’ for them to be paid.

So, think of the bombing in Syria. And what about the population there? No homes, no facilities/utilities, etc, etc, and what do they think of this ‘value’? Not to mention what do all the surrounding countries who are trying to work out what to do with the refugees think about this economic accounting.

And these problems are not just Syria; Libya, Burma, Afghanistan…. On and on. But it’s not happening to us so it’s OK.

This is a real ‘sleight of hand’ in the use of words, and is actually a primary source of ‘evil’ within our world, which is a pretty sweeping statement on my part. But it is an utter ‘ducking’ of responsibility and an ignoring/abusing of the needs of Life, to the extent that Life along with human needs is destroyed and killed – hence, evil (evil is the reverse of live). All the big mining companies do it, for starters; well, there are not many companies that don’t, actually.

Changing this single piece of dreadfulness in all the ways that it should be changed would change a lot. Not to mention the Mirror Laws – them again; it’s a good idea not to do this to others, any others, no matter what.

Much of the destruction in Syria is actually about America wanting access to oil/gas for its own purposes, not to mention other countries/states bordering them and/or religions getting in for their own bit. Some would call this theft. How economic is this? And how advantageous for the Syrian population?!

In the middle of this assumption that rectification of destruction has value, is the failure to consider that we actually don’t rectify said destruction very well if at all, and almost never if governments do not enforce it. We don’t hear about these things, or of the long-term effects either. Peons and/or Nature/Life don’t count.

Many people have called this out, and a great deal better than I have, but now our politicians are gods too. And the whole point about gods is that it is a club of gods who talk to other gods who are all protected from the consequences of their decisions/actions that affect you/us as peons. Another way of saying this is that gods take no responsibility. Remember, gods are tyrant children who never grow up because they do not have to.

These decisions and assumptions in Economic Theory entirely leave out the soul, so then we are surprised at our soul-less society.

We do not query this non-sense, but it is high time we did. This is part of our wish to stay as children ourselves doing whatever we want and being looked after and not querying anything and wanting to be gods as well. We are expecting others to look out for us and are cross when ‘they’ don’t, but an Adult will actually look after their own self properly as well as Serving Life.

Note also that economists do like to think that they are a noble and ‘enlightened’ species and that those using Economics will also be noble and enlightened, as of course, all humans are. This in spite of eons of knowing how much humans ‘kill the goose that lays the golden eggs’; ‘by mistake’ of course.

Counting everything.

We think that if we can count everything, then we can solve our problems, but there are problems with what we count and how we count them. So, what do we count, and how do we do it? I wish to give a few examples here of some of the problems that we don’t like looking at.

The difference between teaching humans and telling them.  (12.22)

If we give a human being simply an answer to a question, that is a use of our time which we can quantify in a nominal way. As a metaphor this is like giving someone a fish to eat so we can count what we do by counting the fish or the people. But if someone teaches that person to fish for themselves, what is the value of that? Has the teacher put themself out of a job? Well, not usually. It takes longer to teach than to simply answer, and the amount of time has depended on the human being who is taught as well as the person doing the teaching; it’s longer for some and not so much for others.

Is the new skill valuable or not? To whom? How does the teacher measure this? What about the skill of the teacher in their teaching, which changes as they gain more experience?

We have terrible trouble with counting/measuring these things. In fact, all human endeavour requires these sorts of ‘valuings’ which counting money or items isn’t very good at. Does that mean they’re not worth anything? Well, of course not, but we are forgetting that these problems exist, and aren’t going away in a hurry. Almost all the humanitarian aspects of our society have this problem. This is the difference between quantity and quality.

This sort of problem also pertains to trying to work out what is efficient and what is inefficient.

Assessing our risk of death and what we focus on.  (12.23)

Terrorism vs accidents vs driving a car vs being shot in the USA.

At about the same time as people were killed and injured by terrorist bombings at the Boston marathon, an explosion occurred at a fertilizer factory in Texas killing and injuring many more people.

However, this received relatively little reporting. It was considered an ‘accident’, and did not generate the ‘squawking’ associated with a ‘terrorist’ act. This was a very big explosion doing a lot of damage and hurting many.  To quote from Wikipedia – See, West Fertilizer Company explosion.

“The fire and explosion at West Fertilizer was preventable. It should never have occurred. It resulted from the failure of a company to take the necessary steps to avert a preventable fire and explosion and from the inability of federal, state and local regulatory agencies to identify a serious hazard and correct it.”

You might have heard this sort of tune/song before.

This is not to devalue those affected by the Boston bombing, but we focus on the terrorism. Does this make us any safer? Lots of people die in car accidents, so do we stop driving?

America is awash with guns; so how many people get shot? Isn’t this a type of terrorism or plague? How safe do people feel in that country? And the answer is that they feel afraid, so they need a gun, and nothing changes.

Many women are terrorised at home daily by their husbands, and many die. What changes?

Prevention versus cure.  (12.24)

Industrial ‘accidents’ occur far too many times; often directly attributable to poor training, working conditions, or direction or lack of maintenance, or care, or plain old greed; ie, money/profit being the main driver of the business. Prevention appears not only more expensive and time consuming, it’s boring to boot. Also, the trouble is that if you haven’t had an ‘accident’ you don’t know what you’ve saved by preventing them, so it doesn’t appear on the bottom line. Many people find that it’s actually more fun and exciting to fight a fire than prevent it, as long as they haven’t got in the way; this appears to be human nature.

All of the above present us with problems in what we value and in the end these values are personal or social rather than the impersonal counting of actual items. But we are discounting the personal if that person is a peon, and we only value what gods value, but gods do not value you. What we value is what we think counts or is very important to us or is what matters.

So, if we can count everything, we can work out how efficient we are. Here is another assumption. a. that we can measure what we want to know, which I am arguing has some severe problems, and b. that we can then work out whether something is ‘efficient’ or not.

‘Inefficient’.  (12.25)

Here is another ‘Magic’ word that gods use to bash governments around the earholes with and if something is ‘inefficient’ we drop it all like a hot potato; clearly it is a ‘bad thing’. But we need to look at the word and how it is being used.

Comparing companies and government.  (12.26)

I want to look at some of the differences between companies and governments, because they are not the same, and we get confused if we think they are and try to use the same measures for both of them, in particular, companies as being run by gods who think that governments should be run in the same way. These gods like to accuse governments of being Uneconomic and Inefficient. This is throughout the Media and is actually believed by many people, which is another trap for the unwary. This is so much so that many people consider governments as useless, hopeless and unnecessary.

So, the first thing to look at is what they (governments) actually do (well, theoretically).

Table 12B1 of some of the differences between a company and government.

COMPANY GOVERNMENT
OWNERSHIP Private Public, ie, by all
PRODUCT Some thing Humans
TAX Have to Pay Have to Account
LIFETIME Impermanent Permanent
EARNINGS Disappear up Kept & Distributed
BUY Optional Necessary
SERVICE a cost needed
STYLE Compete Cooperate
POPULATION Exploit Serve
CONSEQUENCES Few All
EMPLOYEES Automated Human Skills
ACCOUNTABILITY Little All

The kinds of jobs offered by companies.  (12.27)

Throughout history the jobs that gods have given peons are the peon jobs. And in all of these jobs the money flowed up and away from the peon, so that the peon could never consolidate, much less develop, their resources. All of said jobs involve exploitation in some manner. So, what happened to those who could not work? Well, that depended on the kind of trouble they were in, but no wonder everybody ‘sucked up’ to gods; their lives depended on it. Notice also that no gods in Feudal times wasted money on education or nursing or suchlike for anyone other than their own family, or on making things safe for their peons unless it hurt their ‘bottom line’, and that was if they noticed.

The humanitarian jobs of education or ministration to the sick, or even the hospices for travellers were left to the monasteries, but in the UK Henry VIII dissolved them, so that must have been interesting. Such things were not and never have been the business of the gods; not to mention, they cost because they take time. What then, is the value of education or other humanitarian endeavours?

It is important to understand these primary differences because they affect how we measure their ‘economics’ and their ‘efficiencies’.

This is especially important when we look at the magic words ‘Jobs and Growth’ and consider that governments should let the gods as owners of companies have tax breaks so that they will create jobs, referred to as the ‘Trickle Down’ effect. Our government politicians are now gods too, so they do not query these magic words as anything other than an ‘everybody knows this’ fact. (But in actual fact, money has always ‘Rushed Up’ and away from any of the jobs that gods provide.) The trouble is that economists who are taught this (‘Trickle Down’ Economics) as fact work for governments, which is a very bad idea because governments then can’t work this out (‘Rush Up’ as the opposite of what they are taught), and lose a lot of money in the process.

Even the IMF (International Monetary Fund) has been reported as recently stating,

Growth rates have not picked up as taxes have been cut for the top 1%. If Trickle-down theory worked, there would be a strong correlation between countries with low marginal tax rates for the rich and growth. There is no such correlation.” Guardian Weekly, 20 October 2017, p.22.

Ownership.  (12.28)

A company is privately owned; it is private money exploiting the sale of a definable product for the benefit of the owner/shareholder/CEO. It may be listed as ‘public’ by having shareholders, but the point about government is that it is ‘owned’ by everybody in a contributory manner labelled ‘tax’ and is a whole different ballgame.

The product.  (12.29)

The company’s product is definable, quantifiable and hence measurable. This is the only way that Governments have been able to ‘hive off’ and sell parts of their utilities to private hands to be ‘more efficient’.

The contrast here is that the Government’s ‘product’ is human development, as in, humans and their abilities to carry out their endeavours, and it uses humans to carry out these aims, and they are the devil to measure because it comes back to what you value or consider important for humans.

The ‘definability’ of the product means that producing it can be managed relatively easily in a straightforward manner, which is what management theory is all about. Management theory is not built for government, (or even non-profit organizations) and should not be used for same.

Earnings and accountability.  (12.30)

The money earned through the business flows up to the owner via the CEO who may be the same person. The earnings themselves will be as legal as they are supposed to be and not one penny more. By that I mean that any creative accounting or more obvious shenanigans actually have to be found and called by someone ‘outside’ the company. (Any whistleblower will definitely be an ‘outsider’.) The accountability is considered to be audited and therefore OK, but has anybody really looked at either the auditors or even what is audited? If any equipment can vary in value by thousands of dollars, eg, computers, who checks what’s actually there?

Everybody looks at the bottom line, but nobody looks at how it got to be that amount, as in, no-one looks at the detail or even whether these details are feasible or probable.

The accountability to the population overall is even less. Most mining companies would be appalled at paying the government of the country for minerals that have been mined to make profit for the company, and yet, who really owns the land, including what’s above it and below it? In Australia, uranium miners are allowed to use monster amounts of water from huge underground aquifers which are precious resources for whom? Naturally this water is being used up, and then what happens to the farms in this large area? Not to mention mining uranium for whom in the first place? There are heaps of examples that we don’t want to think about; too hard.

For a government any ‘earnings’ should go back to the government. There may be quarrels about which department, but it does not ‘Rush Up’ and away, never to be seen again. In these days of Global Trade, ‘away’ can be a very long way indeed.

Tax.  (12.31)

The company pays tax and avoids it as much as possible, which is seen as the correct and clever way to be. Most large companies in Australia pay less than double figures. It is cheaper for said companies to employ accountants who can use all tax avoidance measures to the max, (and there are plenty of those) than to pay it.

Governments must account for their expenditures, and are in general much more in the public eye, and hence more open to criticism, especially from gods.

Lifetime.  (12.32)

The company lifetime is variable. We tend to think that they want to be there forever, but they don’t necessarily and they can disappear overnight, leaving someone else to hold the baby. Far too often this means you and you’ve lost lots of money if you were a shareholder. For the employees, it’s find another job. If it’s really bad, it’s the government that gets to pick up the pieces, and none of this is seen as part of the cost of the company, neither is there any real redress if there is fraud involved. The owner(s) can disappear and/or go bankrupt; how many examples do we have here; Skase, Bond, etc; how many do we need? To repeat, there is a cost here for the government, ie, the taxpayer, that is ignored as part of ‘how it is’. Very economic.

The lifetime of the company affects the attitude toward their product. Whatever it is will be done as effectively as possible as cheaply as possible, which is considered fair enough, but that’s the difference between the commercial world and governments. Governments are here for far longer than a lifetime, and usually a great deal longer than most companies. It usually costs more to build things that last, while the commercial world won’t spend any more than the basic requirement – then it will cost more to replace and/or maintain. The Romans worked this out, but our modern governments are starting to behave more like companies which don’t need to. Most people don’t even begin to account for or even think of any consequences long term; it’s just not very measurable. But this doesn’t mean that they don’t happen. Trying to think ahead makes most people’s brains ache, so they don’t do it, and generally don’t have to.

It is only regulations developed over generations that prevent some of the types of disasters that occur in other countries. The flammability of modern external insulation on buildings is a prime example here. The only reason this disaster in the making hasn’t happened in quite so dreadful a manner in Australia as in London is that Australian building regulations stipulate internal sprinklers, which of course builders don’t really want to do, but here they have to. Building anything public that has to last for several generations or more is dependent on a more service attitude than most companies wish to provide. So there will have to be lots of rebuilding or maintenance required later on. But here is the problem with our economics theory because such things have a cost (not a value) if they have to be rectified or rebuilt. This is such a primary problem with our economics theory and is a major contributor to our primary attitude to ourselves and to the planet. No household would last very long if it tried the same kind of accounting.

All of this overlaps with consequences.

Consequences.  (12.33)

The company has none if it is not there. The Government is expected to pick up the pieces. Nowadays that’s a lot of pieces. Notice that we always expect the government to pick up the pieces. Even companies, eg, big banks in the USA or the East India company in days of yore, expect to be rescued by the government! Isn’t this amazing, but of course, governments are so stupid and unnecessary, (as well as being The ‘cash-cow’ for all the snouts in the trough).

The processes of making the product of companies may involve producing waste or pollution that threatens the land and water in the surrounds, and thus affects others, egs, mining companies with their tailing’s dams, etc, collapsing – an old story that goes on; or oil-drilling companies that pollute the seas/land. This is destruction that is not paid for, or only nominally. The problems with Fukushima are still there, but you don’t hear about it (Fukushima is about very poor design meeting a large natural disaster, along with our inability to ‘rectify’ this situation). GMO and Glyphosate are a problem looming on the horizon. We have examples of these issues throughout the years, but companies are still sold as ‘efficient’ or ‘economic’?! All of this overlaps with earnings and accountability and lifetime. Companies are simply not paying the full costs of their production, and we don’t expect them to either. As we don’t expect them to be accountable or responsible, so we don’t expect such things from ourselves. Look in the Mirror.

The product as a necessity.  (12.34)

To a large extent, companies produce things that are optional for customers/consumers/clients to buy, as in, the customer can choose whether or not to buy that product. This has been changed more recently by private companies now running power, communications, or other utilities, and don’t we all just love the ‘service’ we get from these private companies that own our utilities.

The idea of governments is that they are generally concerned with what is actually necessary for human growth and development. This is a difficult area to define and regulate, but on the whole the way we look at and define governments and what they are for will give us much more clarity about what they should and shouldn’t be doing.  See Protection, below.

The employees.  (12.35)

The production side of most companies can generally be defined fairly clearly and most aspects can be almost automated, and many large companies use robots, eg, car makers. We can see this with Telecoms companies farming out their call centres. They are employing people as cheaply as they possibly can and treating them like robots and there is a very high turnover. Anyone who has tangled with the same knows that ‘your call is not important to them’ enough to answer it, much less attend to the problem. But what amazes me is the inefficiency in terms of how much messing around their staff have to engage in to do any kind of job. This is pretty much the case with Telecoms companies throughout the western world and a very good example of ‘service’ being a blasted nuisance for the company and too difficult to provide, so they don’t. Hence, it’s you who now spends the time trying to get help.

Government jobs are not so easily defined, although they sure try, see below, Death by Management. In general, government jobs are far more ‘service’ jobs, and there are more staff dealing with humans which takes time, energy, skills, and patience, eg, teaching, medicine, etc. What’s more, a skilled person becomes more skilled so do you get rid of them because they want more pay? What’s a skilled person worth? And how do we measure that, especially if we don’t know what’s actually involved. See Also below; Death by Management.

Competition.  (12.36)

Companies are generally supposed to be competitive, and this is considered a good thing and it keeps prices down. But this is also something that we are not looking at. It hasn’t worked for oil/petrol companies which all manage to magically get their prices organized, and it hasn’t worked for Telco’s, or power companies, so far.

Governments are meant to be internally cooperative at least, but that’s changed with all their ‘charging back’.

The bottom line.  (12.37)

Time and again, we refuse to factor in the real costs of whatever we are looking at.

Companies are actually in the business of doing anything that makes them money, and illegal/immoral is acceptable as long as they’re not found out. Great. We know that, but we keep ignoring it, as long as the shareholders are happy. But, it’s everywhere, although that doesn’t make it OK.  Within a company no-one queries the way a bottom line has been reached or has the time or knowledge to do so. It’s as if ‘someone in charge who knows’ has decided how to account for these whatevers and that’s that, so there’s this great silence. I consider this part of the gods/peons problem, where peons have no voice, and just get tired.

Government departments also have problems with real costs. An example here is a situation where one department in Victoria, Australia (where I live) decided that willows on the banks of rural creeks were a weed so they cut them down and just left them beside the creek. Then we had floods and the debris was carried down the creek to the nearest bridge which if not destroyed was blocked and sent floods over and around it damaging the roads. But that was a different department. But it was all preventable. Not to mention erosion of all the denuded creek banks which is what cost to whom?

The above is quite a list of contrasts and could be a warning that thinking that they are the same and treating them in the same manner might not be very useful to us.

It’s governments who are paying for all this.  (12.38)

The primary consequences of our godship attitudes toward companies (what gods manage) and governments (made for useless peons) along with our ghastly economic theories are an edifice that is very hard to undo. These attitudes of the gods lead to the primary problems of enormous pollution, wastes and poisons wrecking our environment and increasingly wrecking our health. Remember, gods can protect themselves from the consequences of their decisions and behaviour, but you can’t. They have no reason to change, so they won’t. And, once again, it’s the government that’s paying for propping us up while our health runs ever downhill and our medical costs ‘balloon’ as do we.

But, ‘he who pays the piper, calls the tune’ and I think it’s high time governments started working out the real costs to all of us of allowing gods to run the show. But we all want to be gods too, and that is the problem.

Death by management.  (12.39)

Businesses are generally in the business of producing something that’s usually definable and therefore countable, while governments are actually in the business of growing and supporting humans. See also below. And humans are the devil to quantify. Teaching is basically ‘inefficient’, as is nursing and other such human endeavours, because they are working with helping humans, so what do we do? Set up the usual god-awful ‘measures’ to make them more efficient, and spend an awful lot of money on the ‘measuring’ in the process. That figures.

Most government departments have been fairly well ‘killed’ over the last few decades as they become more ‘efficient’ and morale disappears below ground level. The idea is that of course, government departments are/were all ‘fat’, as in, there must be overspending everywhere. Hence the fat must go and only economic gods can make them more ‘efficient’ as in, mean and lean, with ‘mean’ being the operative here.

So, the first thing that happens is that an economic manager is brought in to manage a section or department.  This manager may have some sort of training in management theory or accountancy/economics so he’ll know how to use the Magic Words and will be expected to ‘fix’ everything. He will want to measure everything because that is how you manage things, so all you have to do is get everyone to measure what they do. (In the following example I will use rounded figures for simplicity although they will be somewhat out of date.)

But the very first thing is that said manager is paid $90,000 so he will get rid of 3 x $30,000 jobs because these peons were ‘not doing anything’. But then, the person with the $60,000 middle-management job who has been managing them has to pick up some of the work that the $30,000 peons did, which degrades their job, and they have to support themselves more and so are less likely to be able to fulfill their brief which is stressful for them and so on and so on.

Measuring everything.  (12.40)

The next thing the manager does is go around asking people what they do, and starts to try to measure this in terms of time and ‘key performance indicators’ while 2-finger typing up (how expensive and efficient is this?) these amazing ‘organs’ of management which take hours to fill out and nobody in their right mind will ever look at again, (or even understand them?) so they don’t. ‘Work expands to fill the time available’ is really true of these types of managers. In the meantime, the manager still has not understood what the staff actually do, which is provide a service to humans or help other humans to provide that service. In fact, the manager never gets to understand this bit about ‘service’ and will be promoted elsewhere in 2 years or so, while the ‘organs’ of management continue to chew out the time of those staff who actually want to do something, and mount up in some room somewhere. Managers do not work (work is beneath gods); they only manage those that might. The less the job deals with humans, the more easily it can be quantified, so, the more the job deals with humans, the harder it is to quantify, and the more the quality of the job needs to be taken into account. Quantification cannot really measure the effectiveness or efficiency of the person concerned.

Management Theory tells us that managers can manage anything, but said theory comes from the business world, and does not apply to the government departments engaged in developing or supporting humans where you want skills in dealing with humans and/or understanding what they need. Another problem here is that since the manager has no real idea of what is happening or what the department actually does, he can only assess the value of any performance by what people tell him about themselves, which will be to that person’s own self-estimation, which can be wonderful in the face of any ability at all. By this I mean that said manager is unable to assess whether any job is done well or not. Neither is there any ability to ascertain whether the job could be changed or improved because he won’t be able to recognize good ideas, and in fact will be careful to stop the same, because at some level he will be afraid of more knowledgeable people. Not to mention he will not promote them – maybe they don’t use the Magic Words.

Management theory also assumes that all people have the same level of abilities, presumably like robots. This is patently untrue. The difference between those who have no idea, and those who ‘get it’ and are capable can be huge. Who do you want to do the job? But, do you know what a good job is?

Jobs degrade.  (12.41)

The definitions of these jobs have to be set as minimums, by definition, because the manager cannot measure whether the person is actually doing a good job, much less a better one, and is reluctant to reward such a person in the first place, because it costs money. Hence the job will degrade into being done at a minimum level, by someone who will leave at the first opportunity, if they can escape that is. This is particularly so when the manager has no idea of what is involved in the jobs that he is ‘measuring’. Heaven knows what the next managers do; quantifying and tweaking the organs of management? And of course, the ‘efficiency’ of the department is so much better now with so few people left to do the actual work but it all still costs the same. How come we can’t see this? Are we all going bonkers here?

What we are forgetting is that no amount of scaring peons will make them do a good job or care about their work; they’ll do minimum or jack up or get away if possible (and a great many employers are intrinsically afraid of sabotage which will be a direct result of how they have treated their staff, so then they treat their staff even more badly). They (peons) are certainly not going to be particularly cooperative. Fear may work for robot jobs or if you could just kill them if they won’t oblige (Feudalism), but godship cannot understand that a cooperative effort in a cheerful environment can get so much done.

Godship type management cannot allow for or measure/assess any service or humanitarian type attitude that the employed person may have. It is set up for quantity only, not quality. If the quality can’t be measured or rewarded, why expect any peon to stick around? Well, we just haven’t made them afraid enough, of course, but seriously, gods think this way, and will try to increase the fear.

The bottom line is that if you don’t care about your staff you cannot be surprised if they don’t care about you (ML).

The need for knowledgeable assessment becomes even more acute the more your staff are skilled in all the whatevers that are not Economics and Accounting which is where your management will be coming from. In this example I will use scientific research, but it would also include investigative journalism, engineers in the public service and so on. In all of these institutions, the manager will never be able to correctly assess the value of the work done, whether it is properly done, or carried out. He simply will not know enough about it to be able to. There is no understanding of the value of experience, pride in their work, expertise and so on. This is just great for morale all round. It’s also an open invitation to cronyism and favouritism, all of which are so great for good work – sarc.

(Just because most people don’t have anything to do with this basically tertiary level of work doesn’t mean it is not needed within society.)

So, what happens when business says ‘our product is our great gift to the world’, and an independent person has done the research that queries this? This work of skilled assessment is now up against the claims made by immensely well-paid business executives spruiking their products by saying that all the ‘science’ is behind them and their great desire to contribute to the benefit of all. Who ‘calls out’ that this ‘science’ has been bought, or that no detrimental results are allowed to see the light of day, or that no truly independent research has actually ever been done, as in, it’s all corrupted? It has to be someone with not only a knowledge base and expertise which takes decades to build, but that person has to be backed, by whom? Most governments have now been bought out by said companies and are very anxious not to ‘lose face’; backing anyone ‘calling them out’ is not going to happen. The whole point being that it’s the corporations that are touting themselves as they wish, but we need to look at this very important aspect because so many ‘wonder products’ poison us and our children. But, all of this stuff makes us afraid, and rightly so; it’s so much easier to believe the nice business man.

Defrauding.  (12.42)

Another rather large problem that seems to be growing is that said manager/accountant types rise to the top of government departments and then realize how many opportunities there are to defraud the government in whatever way, so they do. This is a reflection of the large number of people in general who think it is OK or clever to screw the government in some form, but in the end, they are screwing themselves (Mirror Laws).

These positions have a great deal of trust involved in them, and in general used to have someone who knew the department from the bottom up because they had worked in various positions in that department, but we all know from management theory that managers can manage anything, and that everyone is replaceable, ie, robots, but how true is this in skilled occupations? Do you want to keep your skilled people or not? Years ago, a large Telco in Australia got rid of most if not all of its experienced technical people, which must have saved the CEO on his OSE heaps. However, the company is not known for its service or its efficiency except in its ability to mess you up and chew out your time, but your call is so very important to them – sarc.

My argument here is that we now have the wrong kind of people in important positions in government, and need to rethink rather than being caught up in all the Magic Words, as in, it’s not about government being the wrong thing to do or be, it’s about the kind of people in charge and how we account for things.

Another thing that gods like to talk about are ‘market forces’ or should we say ‘Market Forces’?

Market forces.  (12.43)

‘This is just how it is’.

We treat ‘market forces’ as if they were forces of Nature that we can’t do anything about. This is actually ridiculous but, again, we’re not looking. These might be forces of Nature for gods but as a human being you need to think about these things. It can make life much more interesting if you do feel able to query it. Hopefully more retirees may start looking at these things, although the problem here is that retirees get lumped in with peons, so, not many people take notice of them, but maybe they can harness the power of the group.

The extension of Market Forces is that Global Trade is a good thing. Well, with no regulation and the ability to do as they please with no redress, and to hide any money from having to contribute to others, of course it’s a great idea – for gods, that is.

Gods get to be gods by being able to hide their money in multiple ways and avoid taxes.

Notice also that the word ‘trade’ tends to imply equal partners. However, nothing could be further from the truth with gods exploiting peons at the individual as well as the actual country levels, as in, rich countries exploiting poor ones.

These Trade Agreements often include the ability given to businesses to sue governments which makes an enormous mess of the sovereignty of said governments within their own countries and consequently their citizens, whose money will vanish into thin air, along with their resources.

A single example of one of the problems of global trade is that food is taken for granted and treated as a commodity or trade item with the assumption that it will always be there, or if not here, we can get it from somewhere else, and that it is the same thing regardless of where it comes from or what has happened to it on its way to you.

But the problem with food from somewhere else is that the cheaper it is, the more likely it has been produced or processed without regard for its freedom from chemicals, poisons etc, or its sustainability or the real cost to its own producers, and not to mention, whether it tastes any good.

Gross Domestic Product (GDP).  (12.44)

We use GDP as a measure of our economic policy, but it tends to be used as a measure of the ‘success’ of the population. Gods might be happy with this, but then our gods are quite unable to see how many of this population are actually unhappy, until these ‘losers’ get shitty and start protesting. But gods cannot hear these peons who may well be the only people who might actually know what to do about unhappiness amongst the ‘plebs’. Remember, gods want us to be afraid so we’ll do what they want, and they have no answers to unhappy peons because it is not a problem for them in the first place, so they actually don’t understand, and don’t believe peons should be listened to.

The global economy.  (12.45)

The Global Economy is a gods’ club and they sure want it, but it’s vile for peons and simply has us all competing for diminishing resources, as we all accelerate into feudalism.  Who in the ‘developed’ world wants to return to the conditions of the ‘undeveloped’ world, but we’re working on it?

Another thing that we don’t notice is that it is greed/theft that leads to war; the country with the greatest weaponry wants control of resources so that that country can continue to consume. Powerful countries want to control the supply so they do. We fear we will not have enough.  Oil is the basis of an enormous number of man-made things that we consume in one way or another. By that I mean that we actually end up consuming some of the plastics that we use, in that we consume it in terms of using it, but we also consume it internally because it gets into other organisms that we eat. (Plastic that breaks down into miniscule pieces is ingested by organisms that end up being ingested further up the food chain, and we humans are at the top of said food chains. The human body has no idea what to do with inert substances, so it (plastic) will accumulate in us, and be very hard to test for, even if its presence is deleterious.)

Money ‘rushes up’.  (12.46)

Feudalism is a Rush Up financial system promoted by gods, where your money disappears into the gods’ private gain. Remember, gods are people who have lost their souls. But they are still human beings doing these things in that it is not a natural edict of some off-earth god commanding us to do it this way, as in, it does not have to be this way at all, and we have plenty of examples of doing it differently.

The end point of feudalism is that money flows ever faster into private hands and fewer of them.

Essentially gods work at owning and closing up the basic resources needed by all humans. They have the money to buy out governments and their policies, and also to make our science and technology concur with their agendas, not ours. And the wealthier they are, the more they can do so, and the global economy allows them to exploit the weakest governments. They can afford and have the military/weaponry to enforce this and do so by killing/assassinating anybody who gets in the way. Just because we don’t hear about it, doesn’t mean it’s not happening. Gods work to keep their godship with other gods, not you.

Meanwhile the gods in government give tax breaks to large companies (and their staff swap between government and companies) so they (companies) will supposedly employ more people, but do they? Do we know who actually does the employing and do we think of other ways jobs could be created. Large companies pay very little tax indeed, and can squirrel their money away overseas. Nor are we looking at the potential for corruption in these situations of such differences in wealth. Money can buy an awful lot if you are at risk of death.

Governments are not looking at the cost of subsidising businesses, and the cost to the government of supporting its people in unemployment and poor health on pensions. This is the worship of godship leaving us blind to the fine unsung human attributes of those who serve society; all those people who have helped us all in some manner.

Gods work to control resources.  (12.47)

The real end-point of feudalism is that gods can and will control the basic resources that humans need to live and can then hold us all to ransom, so they do; that’s what feudalism did. And the basic resources are? Land, air, water and food, (with all of them needing to be clean or else, because the other basic resource is human health to till and keep). Housing is arguably the next level up, but should probably live in the basic list.

Allowing gods to hold human beings to ransom allows exploitation forever and who says no, because other gods don’t? Peons will have to pay in whatever way to access these resources that they need, hence they need jobs to pay for this access. Ultimately this money is lost because it ‘Rushes Up’ into private hands never to be seen again. This leads to no resources, no time and eventually to no health for many, and probably needing support by the other. And it’s governments that are expected to provide this support. But fewer people are paying taxes and the gods can contrive to pay very little.

These are some of the ways in which gods can increase their power, which they will unless we say otherwise en masse, and that means we must see this story for what it is; name it and ‘call it’ and legislate for its control; can you imagine!?

As long as we worship gods, we stay suckers, so our current way of perceiving /thinking about these things is rather a whopping con, but we ourselves are complicit.

Thinking this way is killing us and it’s killing the Earth. The gods think that once they have wrecked the earth they can go to the Moon or Mars and they’ll have the money to do so, which just shows you how stupid gods can get when they are so disconnected from the soul. Gods cannot count what actually matters to life and never have because they don’t know. They are only measuring what matters to them. Think ‘Nero fiddling while Rome burns‘.

Hence, ‘efficiency’ simply means less time spent on anything to do with serving people’s needs, because we are counting them as units, but Time is part of TISPing the Soul, and primary in healing the Soul.

Children need Time; people want Time; relating is Time. In essence, if there’s no time, there will be no love, no Soul and no count for you or anybody.

We are suckers.  (12.48)

We stay suckers until we start thinking. If we don’t query these things, nothing will change, and in fact it’s just getting worse. The powerful get to be more powerful and we all become ever more afraid. All of this leads to dumbing human beings down and an inability to consider options and we become trapped.

Hence, all the more reason to grow up to Adult, and stop taking and expecting to take, suck, and consume. We are here to learn that giving what we want to the other, (whether that ‘other’ is internal or external) will get us to what we want.

We need to fend for ourselves but that’s a bit difficult if you’ve already got stuck, ie, you are not safe with gods.

But we can get together and learn to protect ourselves, and Protect is part of TISP.

In reality, illness, suffering and disease follow poverty and disconnection from the natural world, and really there’s poverty all round in terms of Energy/PEMS, because we have a primary poverty within our Spiritual/Inspirational beliefs. Thus, no growth, no Creativity, and problems with the Split – no internal Unity here. We need to know what really sustains us, and fills/satisfies us; stories are not really that much use.

But, as always if we want to understand how we are so manipulated by gods, and unravel their motives, we follow the money, as in, don’t listen to what they say, look at what they do. Every detective knows this.

Notice that if we did not buy their products they would not exist. So, who has a vested interest in saying/telling us this stuff; who profits here?

Big Pharma, ie, the big chemical companies that affect both Big Medicine and Big Farming is a huge source of poisoning of life, both personal and political. It paints itself as ‘saving the world’ but the world/us/Life needs saving from it/them.

Conclusion thus far.  (12.49)

The whole of the godship system is based on fear and supported by the siren songs of the Media and the gods’ ‘Great Leader’, [as well as it’s the wealthy that create the jobs (Trickle-Down)]. I am also arguing that since godship is based on fear, so judgement and blame come out of that. Our teachings of ‘How God is’ are based on this godship model. They are incorrect and simply promote more fear, and it is past time that we understood this.

To repeat, godship is, was and always shall be, a fear-based system of ‘might is right’ and ‘greed is good’ for the benefit of the few with the might. It promotes fear and leads to an enormous amount of suffering if we include how large governments play ‘ducks and drakes’ with smaller governments’ economies and threaten all with their military might. The 1% as gods are now so large that they can manipulate governments as they please and are basically answerable to none. Think mass poisoning ‘accidents’, oil spills, tailings dam collapses, etc. The US Government’s enormous and very clever military, dealing with death, sits behind the US government. This is the might which will be very hard to fight. The Global Economy suits gods to a ‘T’ because they can escape control as they become more powerful than any single government.

We are afraid.  (12.50)

The trouble with fear is that we panic and we clutch at straws and our brains are switched off (this is part of the fight and flight mechanism) and we just hope that our stories ‘work’ this time, and nowadays there is a lot of fear out there and a lot of stories. The ‘dreadful monster’ ‘out there’ (the current term is ‘terrorist’) is used by so many leaders to manipulate their own people to whatever is wanted, and we stay manipulated and fearful.

My argument is that Feudalism is the end-result of godship, of which I would have thought that we had had a gutful by now, and plenty of examples still around us of how not to do it. But we don’t learn and refuse to look at our past. Remember, Spirit has no memory and can ‘nick off’ anyway, and thinks it all disappears; it doesn’t. There are consequences to all our actions, and they will eventually bite us on the bum if we won’t look at them.

This cannot be changed unless and until we understand why and how these things are ‘crook’ and know that there are alternatives and that they are worth standing up for, because it will be a battle and a struggle. Godship has enormous vested interests; every bit as great as the wealthy were before the French revolution. I do not mean to say that they all need to be killed, but I am saying that they have great power which they can and will wield. Not to mention they’re now perfectly happy to kill you if you get in the way, but who is going to look at that?

Gods will not stop doing godship voluntarily, and as long as we want to be one too, we’re not going to stop them. But if we don’t, Feudalism will get worse.

We are already seeing increasing…

  • Poverty; just a very few with huge (obscene) wealth. I suspect anyone who truly needs this level of wealth is actually mentally ill.
  • Poisons, toxicity and wastes and a consequent increase in illnesses, especially in children.
  • Costs for governments to attempt to pick up the pieces,
  • Refugees,
  • Pillage and plunder of natural resources.

…while your own money disappears ‘up’ to private gain and gone forever.

We are hoping that gods will rescue us from ourselves, and we think we can’t do without them, and they assume that also, but the argument of this UUS is that they (gods) are the problem, not the answer at all.

How long can we go on thinking this? How long have we got?

What are we looking for?  (12.51)

In the end, humans have 2 basic drives, Fear and Love. The fears are sticks for the donkey to make it move and the ‘love’ is the carrots for the donkey to move in the direction of its desires.

All our motives are dependent upon these drives, and all our actions are dependent upon our motives, hence we need to be clear about our motives. If our motives are coming from fear, things won’t work out in the long term, and if they are coming from love, defined here as TISP, they will work out in some manner.

Our basic desire and search as human beings is for Love and we think that happiness comes from finding love. The whole problem is that we are taught/believe/assume from very early on that godship is the way to get to this love and happiness and we don’t query it. So, clearly our search for love with its happiness is a very important primary desire. But as we chase godship so we end up with the primary fear that we don’t count in whatever manner, as if we were ‘not there’ at all, or as if we don’t exist. (Facebook is a way for us to feel that we count in a world that appears to not count us at all.)

To repeat, chasing this desire to feel good about ourselves in this particular manner (godship) automatically brings in fears. This is the warning that there is something intrinsically wrong with chasing godship.

But is Love with its happiness the real answer to what we are looking for? Well, it’s dependent on the sort of Love that we’re talking about, which is why I’ve been very careful about defining Love as TISP.

As I have discussed in Part II, I suspect that we actually want to feel good about ourselves.

Hence, we need to know a bit more about what this ‘feeling good about ourselves’ really is.

Feeling good about ourselves.  12C

Introduction.  (12.52)

Essentially, we pursue godship because we are taught and believe that this is The Recipe or Formula for Love and Happiness which we all desire. But I suspect that what we are really looking for is a Feeling Good About Ourselves (FGAO) and that this feeling is actually more important to us than love or happiness. So, what is this bit about feeling good about ourselves? What does this actually mean, and what is this feeling?

And do we really want it more than Love and Happiness?

Feeling Good About Ourselves (FGAO).

It’s a physiological state.  (12.53)

Firstly, FGAO is a ‘state’, which means it is an internal feeling within the body; your body; no-one else’s. And it is a Feeling, not a Thing. A feeling is both sensory and emotional, but we are supposed not to have them and/or to take no notice of them, because they belong to the body and the body (which is part of the unconscious) is stupid, lazy or crazy and especially, not rational. And yet we pursue this feeling as if our life depended on it, and it does. If we can’t find it, we keep looking and/or get very upset about it, enough to ‘die inside’ if we give up. This feeling is so important to us humans that it makes a non-sense of placing our focus solely on the rational and the measurable! And it’s not even easy to measure!

This feeling is very hard to describe, except for the fact that it feels good and we like it and we like ourselves and life more when we have it!

We seem to have quite a lot of names for this state; self-esteem, self-congratulation, self-worth, self-value, self-assurance, pride, pleasure, happiness, gratification, comfort and there are probably more. So, what are these ‘states’ and their names and how can we tell the differences and sort them out?

It is important to be very clear about this feeling because whatever it is that we are actually looking for must be a huge drive/motivation, because we absolutely pursue it as much as we possibly can, and get very cross if we can’t ‘get there’.

Godship is how to ‘get there’.  (12.54)

Godship is ‘sold’ to us ad nauseam as the Answer to what it is we’re looking for, because that is how we will feel good about ourselves. But, as I have argued, using godship as the formula for happiness and whatever is an attempt to avoid or cover over or allay our fears in Life, and we have to keep telling ourselves that we might get there, perhaps…. because failure to ‘get there’ engenders great fear. But the fears don’t go away, so we try harder to get to be a god. But the fears don’t go away; notice that gods never have enough either. (And gods like us to be fearful because they think that we will do as we’re told, including consuming all their stuff that they make in our wish to be ‘happy’.)

The point being that no amount of godship is actually getting rid of the fears. We may be better at covering them up, but they are there, and there they stay. So, this desire for godship isn’t getting us to love and happiness because there is no internal peace if fears are still there, no matter how far down. And peace and quiet ‘inside’ are two very good indicators for mental and emotional health. Hence, there is something wrong with godship as the answer to our quest, as in, it can’t be the answer; it has to be something else. Not to mention, godship hardly works for all.

Pleasure and happiness.  (12.55)

But we’ll still keep going because we think this is the way to be ‘happy’. Having some measure of godship does give us pleasure, but is that the same as happiness, because we tend to equate them? I suspect the best way to tell is to watch what lasts and what wears off; real happiness lasts and pleasure wears off.

But, notice that we are still looking to ‘out there’ to make us happy. Another aspect is that pleasure feels ‘sweet’, so it will have an addictive quality, and is at the base of all addictions, and as it ‘wears off’ you will be left in a wanting state as before if not worse, and the fears of lack are ever-present, hence you are likely to be angry as well, or repressing same. Real happiness is far more sustaining and brings Fortitude; it also helps us to be far more peaceful internally. So, it may be that pleasure is fleeting and that happiness is the thing that lasts. The interesting thing is that there is a physiological difference in the mind between pleasure and happiness and the biochemical mechanisms support this. See Lustig (2017), ‘The hacking of the American mind.’

We want to feel good about ourselves.  (12.56)

But we still want to ‘feel good about ourselves’, so, clearly happiness is not really sufficient – it must be something else and something more. Notice that most people want it (FGAO) more than love and happiness because they will cheerfully sacrifice (consciously or unconsciously) love and happiness to get it, which they do. Chasing godship always ditches love and happiness, because it is looking for ‘power over’ and pleasure which are not the same as love and happiness.

So, what is it?

What we do seem to agree on is the term/label ‘self-esteem’ or self-value or self-worth, but this self-esteem seems to be quite a nebulous concept in that people have trouble working out what it is, hence we need to be careful about how we define it. I use the term self-esteem. I discussed Self-Esteem in Chapter 8 Desires, but am amplifying this topic further.

Notice also that:

  • we build our self-esteem, so we need to look at its foundations, ie, how we build it and what it is built on. This is what Jesus spoke of as a ‘house’. Also notice that it is we ourselves who each gets to build (or not) this self-esteem, in that no-one else can do this for us; we have to do it for ourselves.
  • we can only build our self-esteem while we are alive. Now, that’s a problem! You need to be alive to accumulate it, because it comes through your self-expression, ie, from your Inner Self, which does not happen when you are dead. (Nothing in any literature on talking to the dead, or about the dead, mentions anything of this kind.)

Two different types of self-esteem. (12.57)

But, as I discussed in Chapter 8 our self-esteem is of 2 different types because we comprise two persons, our conscious which I have labelled the outself, and our unconscious which I have labelled the InSelf. This is our internal duality, (which feels like having 2 people inside us – the one we know of and the one we don’t). [Remember most people use the term sub-conscious for the unconscious, but this is incorrect; our unconscious is indeed unconscious, and the sub-conscious is only a small part of the unconscious. But we don’t want to know and prefer to think that we’ve got it all under control, so we use the word ‘sub-conscious’ instead, which keeps us further from our own truth.]

If the self-esteem is built/accumulated at the outself but not at the InSelf it will not and cannot be stable or secure because it is not true, (your InSelf is also Life, so, if it’s not true for Life, it’s not true) so we spend a lot of effort in shoring it up; this is our ‘pride/vanity going before a fall’; the ‘house built on sand’. The Split between our 2 selves is large and we cannot Merge them; the outself and the InSelf cannot relate, much less cooperate to get to any Merging. This sort of self-esteem is never secure so there will always be anxiety about ‘shoring it up’ which will make us want a great deal of control, but this wanting control is the warning that it is not true. It is basically a false self-estimation (FSE).

False Self-Esteem (FSE).  (12.58)

I suspect that the ‘ego’ as used in the lay manner is another name for the false self-esteem that lives in and is built/accumulated by the outself.

It is characterized by intrinsic insecurity and hence can be very fragile indeed. Women know this one well as they spend their lives ‘walking on eggshells’ when dealing with men.

The words ‘self-gratification’ or ‘self-congratulation’, or ‘self-indulgence’ are warnings that the self-esteem needs ‘shoring up’; there’s probably pleasure here, but it’s only at the outself, as in, there is no ‘other’ here. As there is no ‘other’, so there is no relationship with anyone else at all, either internally or externally.  This is the big red flag telling you that you are heading in the wrong direction. ‘Wanking’ is probably the most descriptive if somewhat blunt term for this false self-esteem.

As I have said before, this has a great deal to do with the current #MeToo movement, which is a protest by women at being regarded as an object solely to be exploited/abused for the man’s pleasure/’wank’. The woman as a person in her own right is discounted and hence, demeaned, and above all, there is no relationship – never was and never will be. The fact that there is no relationship is the problem and the warning; this whole UUS is about the necessity of relationship with ‘the other’! The anger here on the women’s part is that in our society, men are brought up to consider themselves entitled to do just that (gods treating/exploiting women as an object/peon), so they do, and this is part of the godship problem. (See also Chapter 11 on Women.) Notice that it is our ‘bringing up’, ie, our current form of socialization that’s the problem – it’s not intrinsic to human beings.

Our false self-esteem is always at ‘the other’s expense’, because of the Superiority/Inferiority Caper – it’s a one-up or one-down comparison, and if it is at the other’s expense it will always be at yours as well, because of the Mirror Laws. (I might have said this before a few times.) The ‘bigger’ we try to feel in this manner, the ‘smaller’ we are actually going to feel so we will have to defend this ‘big’. This is the ‘bigness’ or ‘inflation’ or ‘the ego’ that needs to ‘die’, but it is very afraid to do so, and will not do it willingly. But it will ‘let go’ if it can imagine a ‘better offer’ of love and/or happiness available, and that is the primary reason for very thorough goal-setting, which see in Chapter 16.

The argument in this UUS is that trying to accumulate this false self-esteem is entirely incorrect for all human beings and hence useless for all. The primary emphasis of our current commercial media is its direct appeal to our vanity and greed which is what our FSE is always wanting to accumulate. But this is entirely ‘bad’ or useless for our lasting happiness, as so many teachings down the years have been saying. Hence, the necessity for being very clear about what the characteristics of FSE actually are and how to recognize it, as well as avoiding it in others, and in yourself.

True Self-Esteem (TSE).  (12.59)

The words ‘pride’ or ‘self-assurance’ are still a problem because they can be a warning that the self-esteem is not true, but they are also available to those with true self-esteem, which is…

If the self-esteem is at the InSelf it will be True and therefore secure and needs no shoring up at all; the ‘house built on rock’. We have it because we have managed to get some Merging happening between our 2 selves. True Self-Esteem accumulates as we Flower, and Flowering depends upon our relationship with ‘the other’, (our ‘Merge’) whether internal or external because of the way that Energy works. (Energy is always mirroring/reflecting your InSelf, ie, your unconscious. For Flowering see Chapter 8.) But, notice, our Flowering depends on giving TISP to the other, which is a following of our Path with Heart. Many good things come out of True Self-Esteem, including happiness, peace, ‘fed/full’ and rest. You will be able to Rest properly because your mind will be quiet.

Our society gets a bit worried about this ‘resting’ or ‘content’ bit, because it looks as though we’ll then have no impetus to achieve, which is something that humans do like to do, (and we’re supposed to put that drive into godship). The quarrel here is about what we want to achieve, not that wanting to achieve is a bad thing. But if we love doing something, that in itself will provide the impetus. God ‘rests’, apparently on the seventh day, and then gets back into it. I suspect what is being said here is that there is proper rest after the effort of ‘giving Life to the other’ in whatever way you wish to do that, and then you will wish to do more ‘giving Life’ anyway because TSE feels so good – and there is always more.

False Self-Esteem is a Taking from Life and hence it takes life from you (ML); your InSelf cannot express itself and will begin to ‘die inside’. Whereas, TSE comes from Giving Life to ‘the other’, which gives you life (ML).

Hence, we do indeed begin to ‘die’ (both literally and figuratively) when we cannot find TSE and try to use FSE to ‘compensate’, except that it doesn’t. One of the bigger problems with thinking that godship is the answer is that we ignore humans who actually have TSE mostly because they tend not to make a big deal out of it, ie, they don’t make a lot of noise or fuss, so we don’t recognize them.

This ‘dying inside’ also helps to explain the rather strange axiom included in Thomas’ sayings of Jesus number 70, about ‘what is within you needing to be out of you (outside of you), or else it will destroy you’, which I would translate as the need to express the InSelf or else. The trouble is that this ‘Or Else’ is actually rather severe even if we don’t want to know about it. It seems to be not just the lack of TSE, but also Shame (drat!) and we sure don’t want to know about that. Both contribute to our tendency to ‘die’ or disintegrate/fall apart when we can’t find our proper Expression of our InSelf which can also be labelled the Expression of our Essence. [See also Internet discussions on Thomas’ sayings, and Novak (2005).] See also Chapter 8, Desires.

Life as an ‘illusion’. (12.60)

This discussion of self-esteem is where the ‘Spiritual’ axiom of ‘Life on Earth being an illusion’ can be clarified.

We need Life on Earth for us to experience how Life, as in, Energy can tell us more about who we are internally, as it reflects/shows to our conscious, the person who is in our unconscious (our unknown internal ‘other’).

The warning about life being ‘an illusion’ or considered ephemeral is not that we should ignore this life, but that if we use anything ‘out there’ to define our own estimation of ourselves, that sort of self-esteem is by definition false; you have used some sort of superiority or inferiority judgement in that estimation (nothing is good or bad but thinking makes it so). Not only do all things ‘out there’ ultimately change, but if your self-esteem is not true it will fail as ‘out there’ inevitably changes. Hence, the warning.

A classic example of this would be the man who thinks that any brand of car could or would define who he actually is as a person, and yet so much of advertising appeals to exactly this wish for this kind of definition – and of course who is he if/as he loses this wonderful thing?

The problem/paradox within this axiom is that its explanation is reliant upon understanding that you have two people inside you, your outself, ie, your ‘known’, and your InSelf, ie, your ‘unknown’, and hence two sorts/types of self-esteem.

But we insist on trying to feel good about ourselves by comparing ourselves to the other ‘out there’ and then judging this comparison in a never-ending effort to get to Superiority in whatever manner, and in our godship society this is considered acceptable and necessary, regardless of however exploitive or abusive for the other, or how much they may not like it. It is also much easier to look for this type of self-esteem; there is always someone ‘lower down’ or ‘higher up’ (the advantage and the disadvantage). We want this self-esteem so much that it really doesn’t seem to matter that we take this easy ‘short cut’; after all, we can, but this is the price we pay for having a mind like ours (and God’s) which can do the ‘compare and contrast’ ‘thing’. But it actually takes effort to accumulate True Self-Esteem, and we’re not that fond of effort (that’s what that biblical ‘Till and Keep’ bit is about).

The Mirror Laws tell us that we’re doing this comparison to our inner self at the same time as we do it to others, and as long as we do this, we simply cannot find happiness because our inner self does not like this comparing one bit. But we think that our lack of success in the happiness stakes is because we are not trying hard enough to be a god, so we try harder and our InSelf becomes increasingly unhappy.

Hence, so many of the teachings down the years have tried to warn humans about this all too normal behaviour.

Searching for happiness using the ‘spiritual’ world.  (12.61)

Many people aim at the ‘spiritual’ as a formula for love and happiness. Spiritual teachers speak of a kind of heavenly bliss referred to as Nirvana and described as a feeling of connectedness to all things including God, but notice that there is not much relationship with ‘the other’ here; there never is. It’s a ”come join me in my ‘success’ because I have found ‘the way’, and you haven’t”.

Hence, to me, there are still overtones of ”whew, I’ve managed to escape the ‘slings and arrows’ etc.”, and simply meditating forever in ‘blissikins’ does not include the differentiation of Self to find out who is there. It also does not include Explore or the Expression of your Inner Self, neither is there much ‘partnership with the other’, or Creativity or ‘giving Life to the other’ or ‘manifestation of Life from within’ going on, which is what I consider humans need to have for their own True Self-Esteem. The connectedness is useful, because we are, and it’s good to know that, but it’s not the whole story. The contrast of ‘a part and apart’ are still at the AO1 level.

Problems with naming things.  (12.62)

The Spiritual world is also full of axioms that might mean something to one person, but can lead to a lot of confusion and misunderstanding. I suspect this is because, as I have explored in Part II, Chapter 6, the spiritual world actually neither understands how we are built psychologically, nor how Energy works, and therefore we do not have an adequate vocabulary to properly name/label our concepts.

The first great stumbling block is the word ‘I’. As I have tried to explain, we are not just the ‘I’ of our conscious; we are also unconscious of the unconscious ‘I’, as in, we don’t know it and cannot define it, and it changes as we go on in life, but it’s still there even if we don’t know about it. Then again, there is also the sum total of both these ‘I’s’ which Jung termed the Self, the full Self or the complete ‘I’. This is why I use the terms ‘outself’ and ‘InSelf’ and Jung’s term ‘the Self’, but we probably need better/clearer terms/labels. Of course, most people are referring to their outself when they use the word ‘I’, but unless we understand how our psyche is actually built and its relationship to God and Energy, we cannot get to any useful explanation of our purpose and our life, and we end up getting confused.

This ‘I’ has an ‘awareness’, but of course, to which ‘I’ are we referring? Not to mention ‘awareness’ as a word has its problems as well. We can think, but we can also be aware that we are thinking. We can also be ‘aware’ of something without being conscious of it. (Hypnotism uses this.) Which bits of our ‘I’ are doing these? Sorting this out requires better labels and definitions.

Jung spent a great deal of time trying to define out these sorts of concepts, but most people do not understand him, and he is not easy to read, hence most of his work is hardly mainstream. Also, lots of ‘experts’ quote him without understanding what was being said, mostly because they were not doing their own inner work. Hence, heaps of misinformation, and heaps of trying to explain, not to mention reinventing the wheel forever, because we are unable to understand what has been found or said before.

Stop wanking.  (12.63)

However, all teachings are basically saying ‘get rid of the false self-estimation because it is not true’, or I could add/say ‘stop wanking’, which is a ruder/blunter instruction, and as useful, as in, it’s a useful instruction, but for most people virtually impossible, unless you have not been allowed to wank in the first place. And that’s where women have the advantage over men, believe it or not; they have less ‘false self-esteem’ to lose because most of them have had to deal with life as well as having to give life to their children, and have had less chance or permission to wank. So, there you go. There is also a security in life in having less false self-estimation, (because less to defend), and I suspect this is what men envy in women. On the other hand, having no proper self-esteem at all is a bummer – all the more reason to look for and find it.

Counting ‘the other’.  (12.64)

Our godship society is our mass version of playing the Superiority/Inferiority Caper (See Chapter 5.) which is the comparing with and judging out there, and we are doing it at the Stage 3 level of despising and it is turning us into monsters; that’s the problem with despising. This is what is generating the fear that we don’t count, but once again, if we want to count, we have to give counting to ‘the other’, ie, take the other into account.

The large irony to me is that this godship society of ours in its full glory considers that the InSelf does not count, in the same breath as considering that any belief in God is for the gullible and deluded, and there is no need to count Life or Nature at all.  But, as we refuse to count the other, so we will feel uncounted ourselves internally (Mirror Laws). Yet your InSelf is your own comprehension of God, Life and your Inner Self, as in, all of them. So, no matter how unreal you consider your inner person to be, treating that inner person and God and Life as if they count is the key to your own feeling of ‘counting’ in your life. And consequently, your ability to find True Self-Esteem which is what you are looking for.

As you build TSE for yourself, you will feel good about yourself and rightly so, because,

  • it includes happiness and an internal feeling of peacefulness/satisfaction/fulfillment and security, and,
  • it has taken effort, and above all,
  • it is a proper expression of your InSelf, and thus and so you have given Life to ‘the other’, and,
  • no-one can take this feeling from you, ever.

All this comes out of giving TISP and following your Path with Heart and is what God does all the time, and it’s a pretty good feeling so that’s why She keeps doing it, and thinks that you might like it too. Hence, your life here.

Worship, (again).  (12.65)

Whatever we worship is of primary importance in our lives because it affects us to the core.

As we worship whatever, so we emulate/model and in particular, trust that whatever; as we worship gods so we try to be gods and do what they say without ever querying it, and worried sick we’ll get to be peons, to try ever harder to be gods; a true recipe for exhaustion.

God tells us to worship God as the first, ie, the foremost commandment, and we interpret that to mean that God needs to be head honcho and reminded that She exists and for us to take notice of Her.

But this commandment is primary as important for our own benefit because we’ll get stuck if we don’t, and stuck we are. God is saying, trust Life/Energy and model/emulate its life-giving powers.

God gives life, and we want to do the same.  (12.66)

God has worked out how to make a Unity of the Duality of Herself with Life/Energy. Her duality is the same as ours and vice versa. It comprises Her own awareness as well as (ie, plus) Her mirror from Energy of the Person She does not Know in Her awareness. She has worked out how to get these 2 selves to work together as a Merging together, ie, as a Unity. This is the ‘Making the 2 One’. It is this Unity that brings in new Life. As God brings in new Life, She grows in Her awareness of Her full Self, which is probably a never-ending process. Humans are built in exactly the same way, comprising our own awareness (what we are conscious of) as well as (ie, plus) the unknown part of us being mirrored by Energy (what we are Unconscious of). To repeat, giving Life is our Flowering and it grows TSE. (See also Chapter 8.)

As God brings in new Life, so Her own TSE grows and Her own satisfaction. She Loves it.

As She Loves it, She couldn’t care less about what you think of Her or whether you take any notice of Her at all; She is doing it for Herself as the correct use of Energy. She is counting both Her Selves and gets them to work together. This is essentially God having a very good time with Energy as the rider rides the horse. This is essentially what you want to do too, and herein lies true satisfaction.

The unity and the duality are both important.  (12.67)

Notice also that the Unity and the Duality are both important and are in a kind of dance with each other; together and apart. Mother and Father Merge/unite and bring in new life – the child – and must work together to foster this new life. (and this is Effort, and there are rewards). But both the mother and the father are also valuable in their own right for their separate skills and abilities, as in, both are necessary separately as the Duality. Remember the attraction of the north and south poles of the magnet as a magnetic force; one end ‘goes in’ and the other end ‘goes out’, and both are necessary, and together they act as a magnet which is a flow of Energy which has a power in it. This is the way Energy works for both the inner and the outer.

God is saying ‘worship Me’ (and My creations, ie, Life) so that you can work out how to copy/model/emulate Her, in your own way, and find TSE which you will like very much. And to do that you need to count your ‘other’; the irony being that godship refuses to count the other at all. Hence, chasing godship is not a good recipe for TSE and you won’t like life if you do (chase godship); that’s what the first commandment is saying. So, what do we do??!! Well, we all seem to only learn the hard way. Looking ‘out there’ instead of ‘in here’ is pretty normal, which is why God tries to warn us, as have many teachers over the years.

Being cared about.  (12.68)

The other thing about worship is that we expect the worshipped person to care about us personally.

As we try to emulate God in how She uses Energy by giving TISP to Her InSelf, so we develop a relationship with our own InSelf, and will be able to communicate with it/them in some manner in line with your own abilities. Your InSelf is your version of God, Life and your Self and as you develop this relationship with it/them it does feel like talking to a loving parent, in that it/they feel bigger, older, and wiser and they know you better than you know yourself. It/they also want you to find your own happiness, and can give you counsel pertaining to your deepest issues including those things that others know nothing about or that you have forgotten about, all of which can feel very ‘magical’. Thus, you will feel cared about, and it/they can actually give you succour which is very helpful and supportive. But it’s a bit difficult for a loving parent to ‘get through’ to a child who does not want to know.

This is the difference between worshipping God (succour) and worshipping gods (sucker) and is, of course, why I use the term ‘sucker’ as being the opposite of ‘succour’, not to mention sounding like the same thing.

Your motives.  (12.69)

As we learn to count ‘the other’, and relate to this person, so we can learn to give Life when we Merge/Unite with this other.

We are here to learn to make a Unity out of our own Duality of our outself and ‘the other’, and it’s this Unity that brings forth Life. Bringing forth Life from within or without builds our TSE, with the proviso that the actions are at the heart, and not at the expense of the InSelf.

Hence your motives for what you do become very important.

We are not giving TISP to the other with the motive of getting it back. This motive will backfire because it is coming from lack on your part (read; in your unconscious), and it is this internal lack that will be reflected back to you by Energy/Life (because your Life is always reflecting your unconscious back to you) . You will be giving TISP properly when you are both needing and wanting to do this for your own sake, and the outcome will delight you and warm your heart (as in, it’s personal and no-one else may be interested). Just exactly what it is that warms your heart is for you to find out. If your heart is warm you will be passionate about it. In all of this you are not really going to know how it all turns out; you’re just doing it because you love it, and sometimes things don’t ‘work out’ in the short term, eg, your ‘children’ can get hurt or even killed. After all, look what humans do to what God gives life to, and God just keeps going.

Remember, God does not know how things will turn out either; She only knows that they do work out for the greater good, eventually. Notice the ‘eventually’, and that might not be in your lifetime, this time. This is what happens when our motives are correct, and in line with the correct use of Energy. One of the primary messages of the bible is, ‘we got into this pickle because we forgot about God and then we got reminded to go back to God, and look at the amazing things that happened when we did that, and then we forgot and did it all over again’.

FGAO is the great want.  (12.70)

Thus and so, what we want most of all is to feel good about ourselves; this is what we search for. But the problem is that there are two different types of this feeling – the one we get when we consider we have won in the competing/comparing game, which is the false self-esteem (FSE) which is the Sup/Inf Caper in full flight, currently touted as The Answer to Life. This is in contrast to the one we get when we Give Life to ‘the Other’, ie, the true self-esteem (TSE) which may take more effort.

The Crux Then of This Whole Enquiry is, (ie, This Is What ‘It All Boils Down To’) …

As we Give Life/Love/TISP to ‘the other’ as God does, we can build TSE (which will Delight us and ‘fill’ us), and so we can Rest in Peace for a while and then go back to doing what we Love as the Path with Heart.

This is the Good Giving. (I don’t want to use the word Serve because too many people turn this into being a servant, but it is a service to life, but it’s not what you ‘ought’ to do, it’s about what you like to do that gives you delight in some manner that is your choice which is ‘your answer to life’.) You are in fact giving yourself life.

While….

As we Take from Life and others, as those who wish to be gods do, (peons are wanting to be gods too) in order to build FSE, we have to reassure ourselves in whatever way we can, but what we get is ‘racket’ in the mind and can never Rest properly because we are always wanting more and thus are never ‘full’, no matter what size we are. This is the road to boredom and ‘dusty death’ and you are the one who is doing this to you.

This is true because of the way our psyche is built (conscious plus unconscious), interacting with how Energy works (reflecting to our conscious what is in our unconscious, which looks/feels like Life ‘out there’ to our conscious). This is what this book aims to show.

Hence, we always have choice which is to either Give TISP/Love to ‘the other’ or Take, in our scramble to cover over our fears, which engenders more fear anyway.

The above is basically another way of saying what an awful lot of our teachings (including Jesus’) are trying to say when they talk about ‘serve or suffer’ or similar, and I suspect many people know deep down that this is true.

Basically, godship is a huge wanting that goes on and on in apparently unstoppable greed and vanity that come out of fear – always. The extension of this is Feudalism and you are likely to get to be a peon especially if you are not part of the white male system and might be unable to get a piece of it. So, here we are, believing that godship will get us to happiness and pleasure, but it is simply the road to ‘dusty death’ or the ‘hungry ghost’ – whatever takes your fancy.

 

Changing this social program.

Our pursuit of ‘godship’ is unconscious.  (12.71)

The first thing to do is to understand that if we are worshipping gods, we will be unconscious of how much we wish to emulate them or why, and therefore we are unable to think clearly about ‘buyer beware’ or any other rational tactic. That’s the trouble with ‘worship’; it’s ‘gone in’ to us very early in our lives from our parents as well as the Media as being the way things are as well as the recipe for happiness. Remember, we are trying to be gods too, or we wouldn’t be ‘buying’ this stuff, as in, getting ‘sucked in’.

It takes a conscious effort to step clear of this mass hypnosis/programming of godship and understand it as an actual recipe for victim/peon as well as for gods and that none of this is any use whatsoever to humans except as a good way not to be. It just drives us all into a kind of gaol/box with no escape. So you will need to think, which of course is something that we don’t like doing; it’s just so much easier to let others do that. But, this effort at the individual level is truly necessary for change.  Humans have so much potential, and godship makes a travesty of that, and so we go on entertaining or drugging ourselves and blocking our unhappiness and boredom to stop ourselves from feeling them.

We need to think.  (12.72)

It is truly very important to understand that there are good reasons to think and that there are internal rewards for doing so, although they may not be immediate. That is the message of this discourse.

The business of this UUS is to provide an alternative model or map that is useful to all. If we have the principles correct, we can build upon them as we aim at implementing them in practice. Knowing ‘why’ we do things, as in, ‘what for’ provides the fortitude (the ‘internal strength’) and focus required to change social systems.

The trouble with being conditioned/programmed as we are is the inability to See anything differently from that, and hence the absolute need to be exposed to different ideas and cultures, otherwise we don’t question anything.

We are being turned into sheep and herded because we are so afraid, and that will continue unless we stop. Fear turns to panic, and when we panic, we can’t think. But we have to think and to think very hard and very carefully about what we want.

When money flows/rushes up to the gods and more people get to be peons, as in, exploited and abused, more people get to fail than to succeed. Many people don’t like being peons and get very angry about it and if they have nothing to lose, they’ll attack the system as they see it. Feeling trapped causes great anger. One of the end-points of godship is a lot of people with nothing to lose. (The French aristocracy forgot about that one.)

Chasing godship leaves us marooned on our own island of selfishness and quite unable to relate except on the most superficial levels of consumption by the herd, including, sport, competitions of all kinds, vast amounts of entertainment, or the latest titillation, plus daily reminders of how mean ‘Life or Fate’ is to poor little us (Victim and Self-Pity).

Feudalism leaves us soul-less and very alone.  (12.73)

This leaves us not only afraid but actually very angry as well. This causes a lot of ‘racket’ in the mind, because the InSelf knows that this system is not right. We just don’t understand that this is not only ‘not right’ for us personally, it is actually not ‘right’ for everybody else as well. And we keep trying to ‘do what we’ve always done’. “If you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve always got.”

The problem with fears is that no amount of running away or shutting our eyes changes the fears, and in fact they get worse. (I’m talking about psychological fears here; we need to respect the physical world.) And when we are afraid, our heads turn off and we can’t think.

The end-point of godship is Feudalism where most of us are peons of some sort or other and don’t like it, and are afraid and very cross about it too. It makes an absolute travesty of human beings and their endeavours, and is ultimately a terrible waste.

At the risk of repeating myself, worshipping gods is killing us all.

Our immune system cannot work properly under godship.  (12.74)

And something that we really seem to fail to understand is that humans need to be happy and peaceful for their immune system to work properly. Pleasure doesn’t do it, both happiness as well as peace are required. We can see this happening but we don’t understand what we are seeing. As godship increases, so do our fears, and so do our diseases and illnesses for many different reasons, including increasing pollution from so many sources, which affects our body’s ability to be fully healthy. Also, our increasing unhappiness at feeling essentially trapped and powerless with not much choice, hence all our walking wounded who have to be supported by governments, so they can take all their pharmaceuticals/treatments which will ‘fix’ them, and governments pay a fortune for. We search for vaccines to stop all this illness, but we don’t understand that if humans are not happy, the immune system will be compromised and cannot mount its full response, so, not all of us can be ‘fixed’ this way, and that has huge ramifications. All the more reason to adopt anti-godship measures.

Meanwhile, to quote Mercola, “nutritional deficiencies, a decline in social interaction brought about by increasing reliance on social media and technology, excessive exposure to electromagnetic fields (EMFs), lack of sleep, lack of “life purpose” or spiritual connection and chronic, unresolved stress are just some of the factors that can contribute to depression, none of which can be addressed by new or more drugs. Specific medical conditions, such as cancer, heart disease, diabetes and stroke are also linked to a higher risk of major depressive disorder”.

Conclusions about our social conditioning.  (12.75)

In the last 4 chapters (9-12) we have taken a long hard look at what we do to each other personally and socially with the emphasis on why we do it, and how we do it, along with the conclusion that not many people are happy about all this; ‘winners’ sometimes, and ‘losers’, not.

The basic problem has been about what we are programmed or socially conditioned to count as important, and of course what we do not count, and the argument here is that these social attitudes bite us on the bum. So, maybe it’s time to look for something that actually fits the human psyche (how we are built) a bit better, but that means waking up from our programming/conditioning.

Our basic assumptions about what counts are incorrect.  (12.76)

This chapter (12) has been about how we tackle the problems that we see in society. And we do that by what we count, ie, what is important to us and what is not. But, in fact, we have great difficulty counting or even knowing what matters, and then we still don’t know how to count it or measure it.

In effect, we have got into these problems because of what we count and the way we count that, and then, we try to get out of these problems by thinking we need to count/measure more, in precisely the same manner that got us into trouble in the first place, that is, we need to look at exactly what we are counting and why we count them before we try to start trying to ‘fix’ our problems.

We really do need to get rid of any commercial/godship economic system that cannot value human endeavour or love or care, or especially, women, because essentially, these systems do not value Life.

Our society does not give TISP to women and cannot – it gives them no value at all.

But we assume we know what counts because that is what our religions/socialization/cultures tell us, and the argument here is that our mainstream teachings as developed by men/spirit, actually don’t know what counts, and thus we don’t understand what is important, and therefore all our counting is up the creek and we haven’t yet worked out why. And the answer is because our assumptions are incorrect, and this book is querying many of our basic assumptions. And for our society, we count godship, and assume that that is what life is for, and that is the problem that needs to be fixed in the first place.

The values of the gods do not value humans, ie, they are inhuman, and that is what is being inculcated to our children because that is what was inculcated into their parents when they were young and their parents had no time for them.

The primary tactic over the years has been to shift the emphasis on to counting things if we can, and ignoring them if we can’t, but this UUS argues that this tactic has got us into enormous trouble, as well as keeping us terribly ‘blind’, and it’s high time we thought about getting back out of said trouble, and we won’t and can’t do it unless we open our eyes and See.

Humans are not meant to be either gods or peons; humans are meant to be human, and able to Create Life. Gods and peons are defined by having that internal split between their own outself and InSelf which leads to Self-Pity, and they are unable to Create Life. And it is entirely your choice; what do you want?

We are doing this to ourselves.  (12.77)

The argument here is that we humans have got ourselves into a monumental pickle, by what we think and assume and what we do. But we need to notice that it is we humans who are doing this and thinking that this is the way to be happy, but it does not and cannot make us happy, and never will. It is not God, Life or Nature doing this to us, it’s us doing these things to us, as well as to Life and Nature, which aren’t happy about this either.

But we can change our thinking.

The more we understand how we think and what we are thinking and why, and how we have got into this pickle, the more we can understand how to get back out of it, and that’s what this book is about. Wrong way, go back – how to get out of this pickle.

As we can change our thinking, so we can change our attitudes to Life and so we can learn to support Life which can then support us. This is the intrinsic power within any human being, and we want that power and search for it.

Give TISP to the soul.  (12.78)

We have looked at how our current tactics for happiness are not that useful, and lead us into unhappiness.

And as we continue to ignore Soul, we get sicker, more poisonous, more ugly, noisy, no time, no safety, no health, no interest – just boredom and overwhelm; no Explore, no Expression of Self, no awe, no beauty, no truth, and no value. Angry (lots), trapped, fear/panic, no thinking, no observing, no remembering and no insight. Just an immense focus on the material external world; judging and blaming, and no way out, and very easily ‘herded’ by others. And staying a dependent petulant child refusing to grow up, much less take responsibility.

So, how do we get to happiness? The primary method for looking at what humans actually need is to look at what the human soul wants and needs to thrive and prosper. And strangely enough, these are Safety (give Protect), Fed properly (find Sustain), and to Count (give Time and Interest), as in, given TISP, which I have defined as Love in Action.

In particular, women need TISP so that they can give that to their children as they wish.

We are truly failing to understand that godship means that we all have to spend our time watching our own backs; no-one is safe here – it’s all dog-eat-dog. But it’s impossible to care for others while having to watch out. In this way, our society becomes progressively unworkable and uncivilized, because what is happening is that we are unable to do anything except fend for ourselves, which takes time and energy, and that time/energy cannot then go into those things that make us human through love. As we spend our lives afraid, we cannot give to others and we cannot grow our own resources, much less think that anything could be different. And in our fear and trying to block it all out, we are failing to look after our children properly. Feudalism went on for so long precisely because most people could never get their noses off the grindstone to look up, not to mention being deliberately kept ignorant and powerless so that they would do as they were told. We’ve done this before; do we want to do it again?

Democracy doesn’t just happen; having a voice doesn’t just mean whether you can vote or not.

Social justice and equal opportunities don’t just happen. Chasing godship which leads to Feudalism reduces choice and traps the young who may be very angry about it. Stopping our thinking with whatever distraction to hand; noise, the media, drugs, alcohol, isn’t working.

We are becoming a society of ‘weasel’ words, and in some respects, it’s our own fault. If we won’t look, we won’t see.

Godship makes us feel unsafe, so if we want to be safe, that’s what we have to give (safety) to the other. Anything we want, we have to give to the other, otherwise we never know that we have it.

So, how do we give safety to the other? Well, we look at how we can make ourselves safe from gods and their exploitation and abuse, and this is called Protection and is part of TISP.

Protection.  (12.79)

We stopped feudalism, or at least slowed it down before, so we can stop it again.

We developed government, although getting to democratic has always been a bumpy ride. But, basically ‘democratic’ is meant to be a collection/group of humans wanting a say in their own affairs, and collectively large enough to resist the gods’ might, as well as set up their own resources for the welfare of all members of the group. Supported by, you guessed it, taxes – how else? This is the power of the human group, which we seem to have forgotten about in the middle of being derided/diminished as peons instead of human beings.

The power of the group.  (12.80)

Our current version of godship is that of the singular endeavour taking all.

But we’ve always had groups, and very successfully too. And quite often taking on the hierarchy (to their surprise and chagrin) and succeeding, with maybe a few bumps on the way (eg, the French Revolution).

And governments are the ideal of the power of the group acting for mutual protection from exploitation by the powerful, and mutual development of the resources that humans need to achieve their full potential.

Governments are thus (supposed to be) a protective mechanism because it protects the ‘littler people’ from gods.

The idea of politicians was for them to represent these ‘littler people’ by representing them in presenting policies for the overall good/’weal’, hence the ‘common weal’ of the majority. But now our politicians want to be and/or are gods, and hence go to bed with them. So, guess who gets sold out?

This is a very good reason to make sure that somehow, we stop gods getting into parliament.

This wouldn’t be happening if the majority of us were not worshipping gods and wanting to be one ourselves. Worship turns our heads off and we just get more afraid and so we worship harder.

Governments need to protect themselves from gods by making sure that peons are turned into people with the resources they need. No-one can develop their potential while they are living hand to mouth. They also need to make the wealthy pay proper, if not more, taxes. Or maybe legislation that precludes such wealth by providing much more effective equality for all, eg, sort the housing out.

Conclusion to Part III.  (12.81)

We have looked at what we humans count, measure and value in our society, in contrast with what we actually need/want for our ultimate satisfaction. My conclusion is that our current social beliefs and values need a thorough rethink. We are very off-track.

Godship is an attitude to life which has its focus on the wrong kind of Self-Esteem, and it sends us up the creek and around the twist and basically very unhappy. In fact, all of us lose; we are killing life and killing ourselves and our future. This attitude is now ‘built-in’ to our current society and we need to understand why and how we’ve become stuck in that.

The idea of this book is that if we are able to understand specifically what we are doing in allowing godship to be ‘built-in’, then we can work out how to build godship right back out again, because the argument in this book is that doing godship is bad for humans in every way.  We can do a much better version of feeling good about ourselves, and it is perfectly possible to do so, hence we look for the best way to start working on that personally and socially.

Now we go to Part IV where I look at how we can empower ourselves as groups and individually using the principles of the previous sections; how we give TISP to the Soul, and what humans need for mutual endeavour and their Flowering.

The first chapter is how the Power of the Group can get us there if that’s what we understand that we humans need. Then I go on to how to look after your body, as well as identify, understand and use your own attributes for your own purposes in getting to where you want to go, as in, empowering yourself.