An artcle by Sha'Tara...

Consensus Reality Versus Individual Reality
                
[thoughts from a    ~burning woman~    ]

Aldous Huxley wrote, “For in spite of language, in spite of intelligence and intuition and sympathy, one can never really communicate anything to anybody.  The essential substance of every thought and feeling remains incommunicable, locked up in the impenetrable strong-room of the individual soul and body.  Our life is a sentence of perpetual solitary confinement.”

On a similar vein, Henry David Thoreau said, “Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.”

What were these observer/writers conveying to us?  That we are truly cut off from one another and spend our lives trying to communicate, yet afraid we may succeed in doing so and remaining content to share common gossip instead of personal thoughts and ideas.  We choke to death on the wisdom we fear to share with others.

That there are problems of monstrous proportions on this world is undeniable.  I don’t watch, listen to, nor read the ‘news’ media, yet I am assaulted daily by the enormity of the horrors taking place, horrors we are conditioned to accept and made to feel there is nothing that can be done about them.  We are to trust those in power to take care of these things, for, so we are taught, that is their purpose.

In thinking about this it seems obvious to me that therein lies our problem: we trust certain entities, divine or human, long after they have demonstrated they cannot and certainly should not, be trusted.  With daring personal honesty we could admit that our gods, rulers or leaders are our greatest liability.  But we do not possess the power of personal integrity to challenge this state of affairs.  We are not self-empowered.  We do not have a working sense of personal responsibility for what happens all around us.  So helplessly we cry out for help and getting none, we blame and blame and blame until something ‘exciting’ comes along to distract us.  And that’s the way the System will keep it as long as it has the final word.

Earth is a place of consensus reality, at least for its humanoid Earthians.  There is no place, or very little, for the individual.  Oh certainly there are plenty of famous ‘individuals’ but if you watch or listen to them you realize they are not individuals at all but minds, mouths, arms and legs for the collective machine.  They are the ones who get paid (very well indeed, and ask yourself why a basketball jock deserves more respect, adulation or pay than the plumber who shows up at your house at 10:00 PM to stop a leak and save your basement from flooding) to consolidate the sense of corporate awareness, or consensus reality.

There have been individuals who appeared at times who did not speak for the status quo, nor support consensus reality.  We know who these are because everyone of them died a violent death at the hands of the System.  Not one of them ever escaped persecution, not one.  

History demonstrates that under the rules of gods, kings, emperors, dictators and so-called democratic regimes Earth has been tottering along between short eras of ‘enlightenment’ in certain accomplishments in arts, philosophy and technology only to plunge again and again into periods of intense barbarism and darkness.  We are once again facing an end to a fleeting period of feverish accomplishments and advancements on every possible front.  Yet each accomplishment has been paid for by endless barbaric wars and destruction of the natural environment.  Our technology, entirely dependent on non-renewable and vanishing resources, is not mature enough to pull us through the great cross-roads facing us.  It is a childish concoction, loud, brash, greedy, selfish, polluting, extracting perhaps a hundred times more of natural resources and labour than it needs to sustain itself, or even to grow into something beautiful.  All because it serves consensus reality – is consensus reality – and is smothered by overpaid bureaucratic baby sitters and chaperones.

As I see it, Earthian technology will not survive to even reach puberty.  With it’s demise, billions will die in the next ‘black out’.

There is of course a way out of this.  But that would require a change of mind.  A turning from reliance on consensus reality to the creation of an individual reality.  It requires self-empowerment and a personal choice to wean ourselves from the Big Tit to go it alone.   To refuse to be told what to wear, what to say, what to believe, who to vote for, how to shop, where to shop, what kind of weather to expect or who to love.  To practice a kind of advanced form of ‘satyagraha’ or peaceful non-cooperation. 

There are a few beginners’ easy steps to this.  First and obvious, turn off the TV – permanently.  Turn off all radios -- permanently.  Refuse to read the news, even what comes for free – nothing is ever free.  Make a deliberate effort to avoid all products that are foisted on ‘consumers’ with loud, brash, racy, flashy advertising that costs billions of dollars which you, as the ‘consumer’ end up paying for.  Keep in mind that all those hated commercials are tax-deductible to the billionaires who buy them and play them.  Think of it as a quadruple insult: not only are you being harassed by these unconscionable types, but they make you pay for the TV time they are on; they make you pay for them as part of the product’s price and they make you pay their share of taxes which your so-called government allows them to write off.

Of course, to even begin to grasp what I am communicating above – and remember what Huxley wrote – your goal has to be, not saving a few dollars, nor should it be a giving up, but one of reaching the state of personal reality completely outside consensus non-thinking.  Decide who you want to be as an independent individual and become exactly that.  Aim as high as you can and although you will likely never reach your goal, it’s the process of moving from slavery to real freedom that will become as exhilarating as it is relentless.

It’s in his thinking process, or lack thereof, that the Earthian keeps his world in a constant state of mindless violence and death.  I am changing that.  What are you doing?