A nightmare is a frightening dream that, while dreaming, is mistaken for reality. Thought is a virtual-reality and like a dream or nightmare, it superimposes its make-believe over something much more fundamental, our true authentic nature. Growing exponentially, and for countless centuries, the enchanting dream called thought, memory, and culture blankets human consciousness like thick black smog, rendering humanity’s natural heart and mind faint, a ghostlike shadow. So thick and deep is this enchantment that entire human capacities are forgotten, not modeled and lost in a single generation, while the dreaming mind doesn’t miss or even care about what has been lost, a dehumanizing cycle that spawns even more loss. And to this, we now must add technological virtual-reality, media, and the instantaneous dream-theater called the internet, empowered and controlled by the same enchantment that unifies and covers the earth. For all but a very rare few, this enchantment is all that most ever know.
Obedience training and conformity was John Taylor Gotto’s description of compulsory schooling embedded in a compulsory culture. Unquestioned acceptance of the given was Jean Piaget’s description of the early child. The model given is the model grown. These two forces, absorbent-conformity, driven by the hypnotic addiction of media, a show, a virtual reality that is not living or alive, rather a dead counterfeit, best describes the dream that we have become, especially our children who desperately scream for authentic models that are not enchanted, for in their unconditioned hearts they still remember, but not for long.
In a dream that is sadly not a dream, I slipped my bio-passport under the scanner, opening the metal gates that lead down steep steps to a waiting bullet train headed into the future. I take a seat and stare as the train begins to move. Flashes of neon-graffiti, revealing how my six-year-old daughter might live, are glowing on the dirty subway wall… No, I don’t want Carly to live in the dream I see flashing through that dirty window.
Where instead of water 1,000 tons or more of micro-plastics rain down from the sky every year.
Where adults wear and force their children to wear, masks that hide what they think and feel.
Where people walk far apart because they are afraid to touch or to be touched.
A world where hugs and holding hands are dangerous.
Where sharing lemonade from the same cup is forbidden.
A world where everyone fears the air they breathe for, who knows, it might harbor some invisible scary something?
Where tiny machines are injected in our bodies that alter how we feel, what we think, and if we live or die, our very genetic code, by remote control.
A world where microwave radiation is beamed from space, by drones and from poles in every neighborhood that weakens the structured-water in every cell of our body allowing those robots floating in our veins to be monitored day-and-night from any place in the world.
Where people can no longer believe anyone or anything because what is real and true has been twisted inside out for just that reason.
An environment where just one, of an estimated two billion species, because of their enchantment and false identity, drives all others extinct.
A planet where the living biosphere bakes while no one notices or cares.
A place where the thoughts people think are shaped and controlled by what they see and don’t see, on tiny screens that are addictive like heroin, instead of trusting direct experience.
A society where nobody can be trusted because they might not agree with what the screen says is true.
A community where sociopaths masquerading as politicians, medical doctors, teachers, researchers, and yes, parents, actually believe the stories they tell themselves and their children.
Where children in homes, schools, and neighborhoods are injected, by force, with toxic stuff, over and over, by people they think love them, injections that cause their delicate bodies to turn against itself (autoimmune reactions), children who, in their pain, are sold more stuff to fix what the injections cause, but never do, like a person about to be hung forced to dig his or her own grave before they die a slow death and made to pay for the privilege.
A world where a shared artificial reality displaces organic intelligence and even worse, where that authentic nature is declared taboo or superstitious, by machines that define and control most everything.
Where appropriate insight and truly intelligent action, emerging from the ground of empathy, compassion, and interdependence, is a myth told to children like fairy tales, a distant reality reserved for superheroes.
Where gene-altering sequences are slipped secretly into our bodies that in time, a few generations perhaps, reduce, even eliminate targeted groups of human beings.
A world where travel, attending school, or making a livelihood is restricted to those who obey, pay allegiance, and conform.
A planet where once robust and vital oceans, teeming with diversity, are mostly dead.
A place where nothing is wild; no elephants, no eagles, whales, frogs, butterflies, or bees.
A society and way of living where the very rich view everyone else as cattle to be managed.
Where despair fills the spaces in the human heart that hope used to live.
A global brain whose blinding ideas and beliefs about itself and others crush and make invisible the deeper, far more fundamental, qualities we share with each other and every living thing.
A psyche who, like a rapist, pushes aside hope and mystery with its hubris.
Where mothers and their unborn no longer experience the ecstasy of natural childbirth.
A model of learning that replaces the living, organic intelligence of play with obsolete data.
Where crafted, calculated, and reincarnated fear murders the capacity to experience joy.
Where humanity lives increasingly inside machines, becoming what they see, believing they are free.
A world where genetic tinkering finally puts an end to authentic human qualities.
An earth inhabited by robots or robot-like people who will never conceive or even miss what has been forgotten.
Still staring, but awakening slightly from that dream another takes its place; the image and words of J. Krishnamurti I filmed in Ojai, California, in 1985.
“Unless I fundamentally change, the future will be what I am now. See the truth of this. The simple fact. Not that I am persuading you. Not that you’re being told or computerized. This is a simple fact. If I am vicious, cruel, brutal, today, as I have been in the past, I’ll be that way tomorrow. You can’t get away from it. If I am quarreling with my wife or husband and so on, I’ll do it tomorrow too. So the future is now. And to break this chain in which we are caught, there must be a mutation NOW.”
The dream, with its blinding enchantment, one crisis after the next, blasting simultaneously on our screens, has nearly put an end to us all, the sixth great extinction. To keep dreaming is suicidal. The mutation Krishnamurti spoke about, the only thing he ever spoke about, is waking up from the dream and discovering in that ‘other’ state that the dream is just a dream, and not who or what we are at all. And with that awakening, something fundamentally new begins, and not a moment too soon.
Shaking myself, the train, the windows, and flashing graffiti disappears leaving an insight: empathy, compassion, and interdependence, with its organic intelligence and action, is not a dream. Everything needed to stop and step-free from the nightmare we share is at hand, and in abundance, right now, but invisible when we are dreaming.
What is left of my life is dedicated to ensuring that my daughter, and as many of her peers as possible, the future of humanity, experience directly what a true and authentic human being is; that they walk in beauty, hope and wonder as they resist the tyranny of machines and machine-like people who don’t understand, know, or experience what empathy feels like. Then the real challenge, the real insight flashes; to help Carly and her playmates discover, retain and honor that, I must live it myself, and not tomorrow.