Social Uprooting

Social Uprooting

“Once absolved of all extrinsic mediation, once withdrawn from any constituent relation to organic integrity or socio-psychological form, being is free to undertake creative sequences that (like Mandelbrot’s self-replicating fractals) are indifferent to scale. […] Within one-all there can be no fundamental difference between cosmic and molecular, far and near, moment and whole, instant and eternity. Once they have been sufficiently uprooted from any actual constraints or territory that might contain them, the molecular and cosmic merge in a single open movement which deploys space as such.” - Peter Hallward, Out of This World: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Creation

“Once absolved of all extrinsic mediation, once withdrawn from any constituent relation to organic integrity or socio-psychological form, being is free to undertake creative sequences that (like Mandelbrot’s self-replicating fractals) are indifferent to scale. […] Within one-all there can be no fundamental difference between cosmic and molecular, far and near, moment and whole, instant and eternity. Once they have been sufficiently uprooted from any actual constraints or territory that might contain them, the molecular and cosmic merge in a single open movement which deploys space as such.”

- Peter Hallward,

Out of This World: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Creation

“Unfortunately there can be no doubt that man is, on the whole, less good than he imagines himself or wants to be. Everyone carries a Shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is. If an inferiority is conscious, one always has a chance to correct it. Furthermore, it is constantly in contact with other interests, so that it is continually subjected to modifications. But if it is repressed and isolated from consciousness, it never gets corrected and is liable to burst forth suddenly in a moment of unawareness. At all events, it forms an unconscious snag, thwarting our most well-meant intentions.”

Carl Jung

Wall Street Blocked Elizabeth Warren From Her Consumer Protection Board And This Is What They Got

A clip of Massachusetts freshman Sen. Elizabeth Warren posing a simple question to bank regulators this past week has been viewed more than 1 million times, putting it on pace to become the consumer advocate’s most-viral video hit to-date.

Three separate clips of the back-and-forth on YouTube combine for over 900,000 views, and a clip by HuffPost, which was the first to report on the exchange, has generated well over 200,000 views. It was Warren’s first foray on the Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee.

The question that flummoxed the bank regulators: When was the last time you took a Wall Street bank to trial?

Heartbreaking hilarity ensued. 

Plaintiffs and supporters in the Hedges v. Obama lawsuit challenging the controversial indefinite detention provision set forth in § 1021(b)(2) of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). Earlier in the day, February 6, 2013, was argument before the 2nd Circuit in which the US appealed the historic ruling by Judge Katherine Forrest in favor of the plaintiffs.

“Let me start with this, well, what has happened is that we have undergone a corporate coup d’état and it’s over, they won. The major structural assaults carried out by the the Bush administration have been embraced by the Obama administration, all of them whether it is the expansion of imperial war, drone attacks, looting of the U.S. Treasury by Wall Street, and most importantly, the assault on civil liberties. The assault on civil liberties under the Obama administration is worse than under the Bush administration:

 The radical interpretation of the AUMF to authorize the assassination of U.S. citizens.

  The FISA Amendments Act which retroactively makes legal what under our Constitution has traditionally been illegal: the warrantless wiretapping, monitoring, and eavesdropping of American citizens, and we know that all our personal information is stored out in supercomputers in Utah.

  The use of the Espionage act to shut down whistleblowers, I have friends who do investigative journalism and they will tell you they can’t even get a government official to talk to them anymore on background for fear of going to jail, anything that challenges the official narrative. Anyone within the system of power with a conscience who rises up to expose war crimes committed by our government will no longer speak.

 Finally, the NDAA.

You have to ask yourself why. Why is there a steady assault, a stripping away of our most cherished civil liberties? What’s happening? What’s happening is that the corporate state which is, to use a business term, harvesting the nation and stealing as much as fast as they can on the way down, knows the combination of economic decline and climate change. They’re running scenarios, I can assure you, in the NSA and everywhere else. They know that eventually, there will be blowback. Eventually, people will respond and they want the powers to, in essence, criminalize any form of dissent.”

 - Chris Hedges, 34:45 

“For to him who does works of love the veil of Maya has become transparent, the illusion of the principium individuationis has left him. He recognizes himself, his will, in every being, and consequently also in the sufferer. He is now free from the perversity with which the will to live, not recognizing itself, here in one individual enjoys a fleeting and precarious pleasure, and there in another pays for it with suffering and starvation, and thus both inflicts and endures misery, not knowing that, like Thyestes, it eagerly devours its own flesh; and then, on the one hand, laments its undeserved suffering, and on the other hand transgresses without fear of Nemesis, always merely because, involved in the principium individuationis, thus generally in the kind of knowledge which is governed by the principle of sufficient reason, it does not recognize itself in the foreign phenomenon, and therefore does not perceive eternal justice. To be cured of this illusion and deception of Maya, and to do works of love, are one and the same. But the latter is the necessary and inevitable symptom of that knowledge. The opposite of the sting of conscience, the origin and significance of which is explained above, is the good conscience, the satisfaction which we experience after every disinterested deed. It arises from the fact that such a deed, as it proceeds from the direct recognition of our own inner being in the phenomenon of another, affords us also the verification of this knowledge, the knowledge that our true Self exists not only in our own person, this particular manifestation, but in everything that lives. By this the heart feels itself enlarged, as by egoism it is contracted. For as the latter concentrates our interest upon the particular manifestation of our own individuality, upon which knowledge always presents to us the innumerable dangers which constantly threaten this manifestation, and anxiety and care becomes the key-note of our disposition; the knowledge that everything living is just as much our own inner nature, as is our own person, extends our interest to everything living; and in this way the heart is enlarged. Thus through the diminished interest in our own self, the anxious care for the self is attacked at its very root and limited; hence the peace, the unbroken serenity, which a virtuous disposition and a good conscience affords, and the more distinct appearance of this with every good deed, for it proves to ourselves the depth of that disposition.” - Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation

“For to him who does works of love the veil of Maya has become transparent, the illusion of the principium individuationis has left him. He recognizes himself, his will, in every being, and consequently also in the sufferer. He is now free from the perversity with which the will to live, not recognizing itself, here in one individual enjoys a fleeting and precarious pleasure, and there in another pays for it with suffering and starvation, and thus both inflicts and endures misery, not knowing that, like Thyestes, it eagerly devours its own flesh; and then, on the one hand, laments its undeserved suffering, and on the other hand transgresses without fear of Nemesis, always merely because, involved in the principium individuationis, thus generally in the kind of knowledge which is governed by the principle of sufficient reason, it does not recognize itself in the foreign phenomenon, and therefore does not perceive eternal justice. To be cured of this illusion and deception of Maya, and to do works of love, are one and the same. But the latter is the necessary and inevitable symptom of that knowledge.

The opposite of the sting of conscience, the origin and significance of which is explained above, is the good conscience, the satisfaction which we experience after every disinterested deed. It arises from the fact that such a deed, as it proceeds from the direct recognition of our own inner being in the phenomenon of another, affords us also the verification of this knowledge, the knowledge that our true Self exists not only in our own person, this particular manifestation, but in everything that lives.

By this the heart feels itself enlarged, as by egoism it is contracted.

For as the latter concentrates our interest upon the particular manifestation of our own individuality, upon which knowledge always presents to us the innumerable dangers which constantly threaten this manifestation, and anxiety and care becomes the key-note of our disposition; the knowledge that everything living is just as much our own inner nature, as is our own person, extends our interest to everything living; and in this way the heart is enlarged. Thus through the diminished interest in our own self, the anxious care for the self is attacked at its very root and limited; hence the peace, the unbroken serenity, which a virtuous disposition and a good conscience affords, and the more distinct appearance of this with every good deed, for it proves to ourselves the depth of that disposition.”

- Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation

White House Reporters Pepper Jay Carney With Questions About Drone Memo.

White House reporters tried in vain to get information from press secretary Jay Carney about a newly released paper that deals with the Obama administration’s killing of American citizens.

The paper, which was obtained by NBC News, lays out some of the government’s justification for the assassination of Americans with drone strikes. The memo says that the US can order the killing of Americans if they are believed to be senior Al Qaeda members, even if they are not actively plotting attacks.

Carney was asked about the paper at the very beginning of Tuesday’s briefing. He called the strikes “legal, ethical and wise,” and said that they were constitutionally sound.

“The president takes his responsibilities very seriously,” Carney said. “And first and foremost that’s his responsibility to protect the United States.” He added that the strikes were conducted “in a way that is fully consistent with the Constitution and all the applicable laws.”

And that, essentially, is all he would say, despite a torrent of questions about the paper.

ABC’s Jon Karl wondered why it was more humane to “drop a bomb” on someone than to torture them. He also asked about the ACLU’s blistering criticism of the paper.

Carney kept referring to a speech given by John Brennan, the current nominee for CIA chief, and saying that the program was consistent with the Constitution.

“You’re taking away a citizen’s due process,” CBS’ Bill Plante said. “Doesn’t it deserve a broader debate at a broader court hearing?”

“The administration has … reviewed these issues,” Carney said. “Shouldn’t they be considered beyond the executive branch?” Plante pressed.

“Internally, they have been reviewed with great care,” Carney said.

Causeless Happiness

The pursuit of happiness outside ourselves can only lead to sorrow because anything attained can be lost. Even the search within ourselves can lead to suffering because of unconscious beliefs and misperceptions. In his sword-swinging yet playful manner, Adyashanti cuts to the heart of what’s really true and points to the causeless happiness that comes with knowing the sacred reality of who we are.