Tea Time: Drink Deep

The advice from the last Tarot/Oracle forecast was Review & Release, (and a lot of self-care and solitary time). There’s nothing more I’d like but a few days of doing nothing but reading and drinking tea; grounding and sinking into our new reality.

Via Laura Bruno:

From Making shamanic sense of the election:

This is why I think Trump is doing  us all a favor. He is exposing so much cultural shadow that none of us can turn away and ignore it. He is a radiant embodiment of the sexism, racism, heartless capitalism, aberrant individualism, spiritual vacancy and twisted masculinity upon which our culture is built. It’s no coincidence that Trump doesn’t present cogent plans for the future. He is playing a role in an initiatory ceremony, and his role is not about the future, it’s about showing us the “right now” – what needs to be cleansed from us, or left behind in order to develop as human beings. That creates a lot of discomfort, but it’s part of the work we need to do.

I think those who recognised Trump for what he was have done shadow work, but for others, I’m still watching many in denial (the “oh I supported him for his economic policy” supporters). I’ve often watched the tendency of those ahead of the curve in wisdom/compassion/intelligence to give too much benefit of the doubt to those lagging behind that they’ll catch up soon and things will be fine. I don’t foresee a quantum leap in the general populace’s  fear of complexity, nuance, and diversity. Their fears are exactly what led us here, and in the meantime, there’s probably going to be a lot of still relying on bullying, intimidation, shouting to “be right”.

In other words, lightworkers (whether or not you accept that label) may despair in how slowly this is moving along. But we have nothing else to do except to deal with it.

From Dispatch from the Trumpocalypse

We’ve been careening down the long skull-shadowed corridors of history for a long time, and the lessons of history keep repeating. People are always angry and pissed off about the human condition, and there are always charismatic con men able to channel that anger for their own purposes. What most conscious people learn early on is that society is not your friend. There are stable periods when the perks of civilization seem to make the tradeoffs worth it, but human collectives tend to be driven by lowest common denominator forces—fear, anger, greed—and you never know when those primal irrational drives are going to rise up and assert their power to create tragic magic.

Good time to add this link: The Cinemax Theory of Racism. And really any of John Scalzi‘s posts in the aftermath of the election should be required reading.

How do I tell my daughter that her online ‘truth’ is a conspiracy theory?

The idea that the whole news media could collectively shut down a story because it was uncomfortable to the government just didn’t make sense – not least because of competition, the search for status and the profit motive. Yes, facts could be suppressed because of libel laws and gagging injunctions – but not because of a conspiracy among, say, the editors of the Daily Mail, the Guardian and the Today programme. They all had too little in common and too much to gain by breaking a big story.

Among the mix of pro-Trump supporters, I know there were those who did so because they wanted to speed up the dismantling of the establishment, what with the CABAL’S GRIP OVER OUR WORLD OMG but

Don’t lose sight of consensus reality

The trouble with conspiracy sites is that many of those theories have highly circumstantial and/or edited “proof”. Their assertions are also every niche knowledge. My personal view has always been that conspiracy theories can be “kept in view” but never bought hook, line and sinker. I’ve never felt that the behavior and emotional language (usually on the negative side) on these sites could be separated from their content. Information is as valuable as the effort put into the getting, understanding, and sharing of it–and if it done completely without respect to truth or the humanity of the audience–I feel it’s time to question the sources.

Fear can be equally used for manipulation by state media as it is by conspiracy sites. Lack of discernment can be equally applied to each one. If anyone consumes information and media like they follow their favorite football team (“this source is always right but never that source never is”), that  is not discernment, it is a different type of intellectual captivity.

Alexander Pope may have put it best:

A little learning is a dangerous thing ;
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring :
There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
And drinking largely sobers us again.

From The Internet is One Big Grey Pill

New economy values embodied by online culture constitute a grey pill: something that chips away at big and easy answers with a thousand little “yes, but…” questions.

4/ In the real world there are only red pills that awaken your consciousness and grey pills that muddy it, once awakened.

5/ There are no blue pills that allow you to return to the false sense of security provided by a more innocent stage of intellectual development.

6/ A red pill is a dose of information that awakens you to the existence of a world beyond the one you are unconsciously immersed in, like a fish being taken out of water.

7/ Red-pill moments sensitize you to the previously invisible boundaries and structural lies of the world you knew, and make you alive to astounding possibilities beyond it.

8/ They also gain you membership into a community of those who have been awakened by the same red-pill, and recognize each other through various shibboleths.

9/ Red-pill moments are not necessarily moments of mystical enlightenment. They simply reveal to you the finite game-like nature of a specific world.

10/ The meatspace world is great at generating red-pill moments. Every powerful book and every soul-stirring religious sermon contains one.

11/ The online world too, is great at generating red pill moments. Some readers have called my Gervais Principle series a red pill for corporate life.

12/ The problem with red pills is that you can get stuck in a false consciousness created through affiliation with fellow possessors of “secret” (but really just closed off from critical questioning) knowledge.

13/ This is in some ways worse than being unawakened. You convince yourself that you know “the truth” rather than merely being awakened to a few confining lies.

14/ There is, however, a way forward: immersing yourself in a vast sea of information. This chips away at your treasured certainties, one small belief at a time.

You can read the full piece here.