I have long lived my life under the auspicious assumption that the government can see everything I do. I smoked a lot of pot in the years between 19 and 22 (I am thirty now and the worst thing I put into my body is the result of making poor choices in fast food lines).

But for those of you squares out there who never indulged in this psychotropic flower bud which grows naturally from the earth and is processed naturally through the body; let me tell you that the worst you've heard about it is true; extended use is likely to lead to social and pyschological disengagement where anything can happen.

If I were to register a guess about human tragedies and travesties, I would be prone to believe that some sort of psychotropic substance was involved in the Columbine Massacre of 1999.

But I digress.

Prolonged use of any body chemistry-altering substance can cause a character type insanity. I believe this is because eventually the mind has to either turn and see itself in the moment or turn away and float from reality completely.

What it basically comes down to is partial disengagement followed by observation, extrapolation, interpretation, theorization, and a gut check followed by a choice. The choice is either between re-engagement or complete and total disengagement.

The mind that chooses disengagement is gone forever. There is a spiritual door that opens once within each of us, at the level of the Third Eye, and which cannot be reopened once shut out of ignorance.

The Man in Black only comes knocking twice; and I'm not talking about Johnny Cash here. It's gonna go much easier on you if you open the door the first time he knocks because it makes the time between knocks much more pleasant to your soul.

It's the Hero's Journey that we're talking about here, the one that Brad Pitt spends years in the gym working out the vein in his left ass check to step inside the role of for two hours to make you forget that he abandoned his Hollywood marriage of convenience to Jennier Aniston for what appears to me to be a shot at true love with Angelina Jolie.

I made a conscious choice in my mind to reengage, to open the door at the first knock and face the Man in Black who is just standing there with his ash white hand out letting you know that he'll be back to collect someday all too soon.

It truly is a gift that this moment offers, the ability to be able to step out of the moment (an ability which indeed creates the Mind itself). The Mind is just a repository of emotional flashbacks which somehow get assembled into a personality that erroneously mistakes itself for something as real as the flower sprouting from a branch on a willow tree riding the wind that gently blows its petals in all directions. The Mind isn't even a whisp of matter but yet feels heavier than the known universe.

So when one makes to choice to re-engage from this point of understanding, one doesn't tend to fuck around with the little stupid things that only waste the moments between knocks.

It's balls to the wall or none at all after this point.

The biggest lesson from studying the history of our species is this: There is nothing that human beings, having lost their mind to a governing body, are not capable of doing or conceding to. Why do you think that Patrick Henry was so adamently opposed to a Federal Constitution? Because what is going on the world today is a result of government run amuck. And for a brief chance, our country had a choice to make about individual liberty; Patrick Henry knew that the choice we made, to consolidate under a Fedearal Constitution, would lead us into the global situation we are mired in today.

But there is, however, always a flip side to history--that without that choice we would have fought no civil war. Without that choice, one of the most brutal institutions of humanity would never have been stopped so early in our social evolution as a species. There would still be too many heavy chains in America if it it weren't for the the spiritual values in the hearts and minds of the good people of Western civliization, particularly those in the United States who fought a viscious color war so that the rest of the world wouldn't have to.

And I will now please the liberals in my audience by openly admitting that while the Nazi's killed twelve million enslaved human beings in the gas chambers of Europe in a four year period; The Portuguese, Spanish, and English enslaved and milked an entire race of human beings for almost six hundred years. That's a lot of ghosts in chains and those chains continue to stretch into our world today and weight it down with burdensome emotion.

This doesn't even take into account what we did to the American Indians.

Make no mistake about it, the history of the American people has been written in blood, but also know that it is the blood of all colors which brought our particular full flavor of democracy to its powerful perk today.

But I'll also please my conservative audience members by saying, "Big deal! Get over it! Pay attention to the problems of today because tomorrow's problems can worry for themselves and yesterday's problems are as worthless as owning a planet incapable of sustaining human life."

Remember that the mind is a repository of emotional flashbacks and that history is even less than that. History is second-hand knowledge of emotional flashbacks, and whether it is being typed into an Apple PowerBook on a Gulstream G450 or in buffalo blood on a cave wall in France fifteen thousand years ago; the words we write and most of the things we say are utter inconsolable bullshit which should be disregarded and filtered out on a regular basis.

In fact, mental bullshit is the primary by-product of all human civlizations throughout history--followed closely by plastic.

It's what you do with memory that counts and I choose not to engage with emotional bullshit that doesn't apply to the present moment and the challenges it brings.

The NSA is spying on us because it has to. It has to because we as individuals are responsible for making personal choices in our lives which demand a totalitarian government presence in every aspect of them in order to keep society in some form of working order.

We are responsible for Jack Abramoff and his ilk being able to manipulate and stroke the strings of our government.

We are responsible for surrendering our invaluable individual liberties to state power run amuck and we must also be responsible enough to understand that this poor choice against individual liberty has created the loss of humanity on a grand scale and the worthless global internal security of our species which has come along with it. Not to mention the lower standard of living for all which results when individual choice in the pursuit of happiness is stifled under the auspices of the common good.

We have done that. We are responsible. The buck stops here and if you pick up one end of the stick you inevitably pick up the other end as well.

Our goal, now that we are aware of this spying as well as the ovewhelming need for it, and in full consideration of the current state of affairs in the world, should be to start making choices right now, this moment, that will create trust in the minds and hearts of those around us and hence in ourselves. Only from this point, can we begin healing locally that which cannot be touched globally--the human heart and its eternal struggle with power, love, and death.

If a concentrated mass of human beings begin making the right choices in their relationships toward one another in the same place at the same time, we will have another human rennaissance on our hands and one more Great Awakening in the heart of the greatest civilization that mankind has ever produced. Call it America, but the truth behind it is so fragile that to even whisper its name could cause it to shatter into a million pieces like the Roman Empire.

I say, keep it up my NSA friends. Keep reading my emails, my instant messages, catching satellite photos of me scratching my ass while I'm walking in a crisp, bathrobe winter morning, getting the Sunday paper with its ads that will no doubt make me want to buy more shiny rudders of convenience than I could ever need.

Keep tracking my IP logs, subpenoing my Google records, and my cell phone statements.

You people keep doing whatever it is you need to do to make sure that some fanatical lunatic supporting whatever god doesn't detonate a biological, chemical, or nuclear weapon and I'll just be right here, on Boys Wear Pants, Men Wear Trousers, telling you what I think about things. I'll be going to work and taking care of my family and friends in the hopes that if I ever need it, they will take care of me.

This is, after all, how society works best--right?

TAGS: Alexandra's "Enemy of the State" Post, NSA, Spying, Psychology, Philosophy, History, America, The United States of America, The War on Terror, Joseph Campbell, Jiddu Krishnamurti, Patrick Henry, Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie,Jennifer Aniston, Individual Liberty, Libertarian, Socialism, History

After reading Alexandra's post about the upcoming BBC special featuring the famous atheist and evolutionary-biologist Richard Dawkins, where he calls religion a "virus" and faith-based education "child abuse;" I realized how middle of the road I had become.

My outlook on organized religion a decade ago would have fit perfectly in with Dawkins viewpoint. I had major bones to pick with organized faith especially in light of the (at that point) recent multitude of priest molestation cases that were coming out.

But beyond that, on a philosophical level, my problem lay in the inherent contradiction that so many of the devout seemed to live their lives and proselytize to others on the basis of.

Here is how I still see it: Religions are constellations of metaphors.

All words and thoughts are expressed in terms of the five senses and are always encapsulated within the framework of time and space. The letters T-R-E-E are not green leafy arborial life forms that take in carbon dioxide and synthesize it into energy which then gives off oxygen. But yet when I write those letters, immediately my brain conjures up an image of just such an entity and this is what is known as a metaphoric symbol. Human society would be impossible without the communication of ideas and images both written and verbally.

The problem comes about when you have a metaphoric image that is referring to something outside time and space (e.g. G-O-D). GOD is a concept referring to something absolutely beyond human knowledge and hard-fact experience, even the word thing is deceptive because things are in time and space. So what we talk about when we talk about God is literally transcendent of all our thought, knowledge, and expression.

Personally, I have absolutely experienced the complete loss of self and dissolution into pure connection with whatever it is beyond the word, but it is utterly impossible to try and communicate this to other human beings because what one is essentially trying to describe is the loss of ego, the loss of experience, in terms of an experience.One always sounds like a damned fool when they start down this path of exposition, so I rarely bother any more.

The problem, however, comes about when individuals mistake the symbol for the reference and begin idol worshipping their words, ideas, and books as if they held some sort of sacred power apart from the transcendent mystery they are supposed to be leading one to the gates of. This is when religious wars, beheadings, driving planes into buildings, burning witches, and a general lack of the presence of the divine becomes common place.

On the other hand, after even a cursory study of history, one must come to the inevitable conclusion that organized religion, outside of sexual desire and the passionate conquest for food and shelter, has always been the primary organizing force of human society, in fact has been the galvanizing force which focused the primary desires of the human animal.

People who think as individuals need to ability to go beyond the metaphor, to lose themselves in the space between thoughts, to gain a true communion with the boundless intelligent energy that lies beyond all words and which comes before birth and after death, the unifying and underlying factor of existence itself.

But people who tend to think in terms of the herd need a galvanizing force to focus their spiritual energies in directions most beneficial to society.

Here's the bottom line--if your religious beliefs result in negativity and even murder upon your fellow man, then you are a worm living by the creedo of other worms. On the other hand, if you are left with basic respect for life and the boundaries of existence that must be present in every individual's mind in order for a civlized society to be maintained, then you are walking in the spirit of the Lord, sitting at Samhamsrarah, the immovable point, worshipping at the Prophet's feet or whatever blasted metaphor you need to use for communion with the divine.

One of the most brilliant statements ever recorded by Jesus was that the heart of the Lord is Mercy.

Intelligence thinks wide and focuses small while ignorance thinks small and focuses wide.

God is not in the details but rather beyond them.