Stop Pretending You’re Not God

by Grow Up Conference | Feb 25, 2024 | Media Partners, The New Agora

Stop Pretending You’re Not God

By Gary Z. McGee

“You are something that the whole universe is doing, in the same way that a wave is something that the whole ocean is doing.” ~Alan Watts

Everything is connected to everything else. You are an integral aspect of this interconnectedness. In fact, as far as you are concerned, you are the pivot. You are the universe becoming aware of itself. When you finally let this sink in, the implications can be life changing.

This is no small thing. In the time before this sinks-in, you were merely a thing—filled with doubt, existential angst, and mortal dread—tossed about on an ocean of uncertainty. In the time after this sinks-in, you realize that you are the ocean itself—filled with hope, curiosity, and humor—diffracted into a unique wave of miraculous probability.

You were always God in disguise. Especially when you realize that God was only ever the infinite interconnectedness of all things. As a crucial aspect of this interconnectedness—indeed, as the only aspect of this interconnectedness that’s aware of itself as far as you know—you are the infinite cosmos individuated. You are Infinity pigeonholed into a finite construct. You are the finite integration of an infinite expression.

You are God playing peek-a-boo with itself.

So, Nietzsche said, “God is dead”? Well, yes and no. It depends on how you look at it. Yes, the old caterpillar God of religion had to die for the spiritual butterfly of God to reveal its true nature: Infinity itself penetrating in and through all things and connecting everything to everything else.

In this sense, yes, the old gods had to die for God as Infinity Itself to shine its true light. No belief required. Just surrender. Just faith, honest circumspection, and open curiosity.

Here’s the thing: God has always been a psychosocial symbol for our finite perception of an infinite reality. It has always been the symbolic personification of our utter inability to grasp the infinite. It’s the archetype of pigeonholing the incomprehensible into the comprehensible.

We must destroy outdated notions of God in order not to get hung up on obsolete evolution, antiquated wisdom, and parochial notions of permanence. Indeed, we destroy God in order not to fool ourselves.

But we also must rebirth God in order to humble ourselves. So as not to get too far ahead of ourselves. We rebirth God in order to rebirth meaning itself. For there will always be the unknown. There will always be the Infinite which dwarfs our finitude. There will always be something bigger than us. There will always be a Greater Mystery, and we will always be trying to figure it out.

As Bruce Lee said, “All fixed set patterns are incapable of adaptability or pliability. The truth is outside of all fixed patterns.”

This is why it is your responsibility alone to break your fixed pattern of yourself (your cultural/religious/political conditioning). The truth will always be outside your fixed pattern of yourself.

This is the power of discovering the God within. When you can finally admit that you are God, you can finally get down to the difficult task of self-overcoming. You can finally get down to the brass tacks of your own empowering life-death-rebirth cycle.

Self-overcoming is a chisel for the hardened beliefs within you. Use it to humble yourself. Use it to destroy your illusions and murder your delusions. Use it to unsettle your settled mind, to shock your chakras, and to reevaluate all your values. Use it to discover the God within yourself.

As Camus said, “The greatness of man lies in his decision to be stronger than his condition.”

You were always God in hiding. Discovering the God within yourself is merely the parting of the veil. It’s the cutting away of delusion. It’s the crumbling away of untruth. It’s seeing through the facade of all the religious pretense that came before. It’s the complete eradication of everything you were culturally conditioned to believe.

Discovering the God within, is a mighty blade that cuts through delusion, illusion, and belief. It reveals that God was always hidden within you. That Man is God asleep, and God is Man awake. That the Self was only ever a vital illusion, a tool you were culturally conditioned to use to leverage the overwhelm of cosmic interconnectedness.

As Plutarch stated, “The eye with which I perceive God is the same eye with which God perceives me.”

Discovering the God within (enlightenment) is the eye with which you perceive God seeing clearly enough to realize that it is the same eye with which God perceives you. Suddenly, you are fractal Buddha. You are Christ consciousness. You are the pinnacle expression of the human condition heretofore. You are the fountainhead, the source, the center of all things in circumference with the center of all other things.

As Black Elk said, “The center is everywhere.” You are the center. Once but a mere moth, now full-frontal fire. Before this realization, you were merely God asleep. After this realization, you are God awake. And you can no longer pretend to be asleep.

You become a firebrand so red-hot that the outflanking universe has no choice but to take it right on the flank—seared and sealed and put on notice that you’re not just a speck in the universe, you are the entire universe in a speck. You are God coming out of hiding and there is adventure to be had, there are connections to be made, there are outdated gods to kill, there are settled mindsets to unsettle, there are deaths to rebirth.

For the God in yourself is on a Truth Quest. It’s the part of you that understands that everything is connected to everything else. It’s your disconnected self in search of connection. It’s your independence in search of interdependence. It’s the part of you that understands that religions are merely steppingstones toward true spirituality.

The God in yourself understands that the search is the thing, not what’s found. The Truth Quest is the thing, not the “truth.” The journey is the thing, not the destination. The interconnectedness of all things is the thing, not the experience of being a single thing.

The God in yourself isn’t looking to follow a religion. It doesn’t necessarily need to follow this or that law, tenant, or commandment. All it needs is the Truth Quest, the open-ended journey, the vital inquisition. It is a questioner, an explorer, and a creator. As Lao Tzu said, “Highly evolved people have their own conscience as pure law,” And there is nothing more “highly evolved” than an individual who has individuated the God in themselves.

The world doesn’t need more run-of-the-mill people pretending to be asleep who believe God is something outside of them; it desperately needs more courageous people no longer pretending to be awake who realize that they are God personified.

Image source: We Are Everything by Julian Majin

About the Author:

Gary Z McGee, a former Navy Intelligence Specialist turned philosopher, is the author of Birthday Suit of God and The Looking Glass Man. His works are inspired by the great philosophers of the ages and his wide-awake view of the modern world.

This article (Stop Pretending You’re Not God) was originally created and published by Self-inflicted Philosophy and is printed here under a Creative Commons license with attribution to Gary Z McGee and self-inflictedphilosophy.com. It may be re-posted freely with proper attribution, author bio, and this statement of copyright.

Welcome to Mixed Reality: A Fake Place Where Fake People Are Trapped Forever

by Grow Up Conference | Feb 25, 2024 | Media Partners, The New Agora

Welcome to Mixed Reality:

A Fake Place Where Fake People

Are Trapped Forever

by James Corbett
corbettreport.com

“Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.”
– Frank Herbert

The worst thing in the world is to be right.

No, that’s not quite right. Let me amend that. The worst thing in the world is to be right about something horrific and inescapable, a looming danger that you can see approaching from the distance but whose progress you are powerless to prevent no matter how loudly you ring the alarm.

This is the lesson of Cassandra, the Trojan princess of Greek mythology who, having deceived the god Apollo, was cursed with the gift of uttering true prophecies that were never believed by anyone.

And, agonizingly, it is also the lesson I have had the displeasure of learning through personal experience during my 17 years of creating The Corbett Report.

I produced podcasts warning about transhumanism and technocracy before most people even knew what a podcast was.

I filed a report on Medical Martial Law in 2009, back when quarantines and forced vaccinations were treated as the far-out fantasies of Hollywood script writers.

And in 2021 I warned about the coming of the next stage of The Media Matrix: the metaverse.

Now, here we are in 2024, and, once again, the general population is just starting to catch up with what we Corbett Reporteers have seen coming for years.

So, are you ready for the horrors of an always-on, constantly connected, interminably intermediated “mixed reality”?

No, of course you aren’t. Here’s why.

VISION PRO

Have you encountered one in the wild yet? You know, a real, live Vision Pro wearer?

Maybe not. But, chances are, you will soon enough.

For those not in the know, Vision Pro is the sexy new $3,500 mixed-reality headset from the same bitten-Apple gadget porn designers who brought you the iPhone and the iPod and the iWatch and a seemingly never-ending assortment of Chinese slave-made fondleslabs and digital doohickies.

The Apple Vision Pro—the latest object of fetishistic devotion from the wizards of Cupertino—is being marketed as “an infinite canvas that transforms how you use the apps you love” and as an “introduction to the era of spatial computing.”

So, what does this commercial claptrap really mean? What does a “mixed-reality headset” actually look like?

Well, like this, of course:

If this is your first time seeing the Vision Pro in use, you would be forgiven for concluding that we are experiencing an invasion of transhuman cyber-soldiers. But don’t worry, it’s not that. It’s just the beginning of the dystopian cyberpunk horror film that is the world of 2024.

Anyway, you can go to the Apple site and watch the promotional materials to learn all about this new technological marvel and how it will soon change all our lives for the better . . . but you don’t need to do that. You can just read one of the many, many, many, many, many, many “news articles” (read: advertisements) for the gadget that have been generated in the dying dinosaur media of late.

“WATCH: Man in Apple Vision Pro headset crosses street, officers pause ‘in bewilderment,’” reports Fox 5 San Diego.

“Stop Wearing Vision Pro Goggles While Driving Your Tesla, U.S. Says,” The New York Times informs its readers (while subtly implanting the idea that this new gadget is so awesome you’ll literally never want to take it off).

“I lived inside a Vision Pro for two weeks. Here’s what it was like,” gushes Chris Velazco, the hard-hitting, no-nonsense, definitely-not-compensated-by-industry tech reviewer at The Washington “Democracy Dies in Darkness” Post.

And yet, despite how incredibly NEW AND EXCITING all of this “mixed reality” Vision Pro hype appears to be . . . doesn’t it seem vaguely familiar?

Well, it should seem familiar. And I’m not just saying that because I predicted it in my Things That Will Absolutely, Definitely, No Doubt Happen in 2023 article at the beginning of last year

That’s right! Everyone loves their phone . . . and now their phone can love them back! And they’ll never have to worry about forgetting their phone at home ever again!

(Ahhh, satire!)

No, this should seem familiar because you almost certainly saw it (or at least the COOL AND EXCITING gestural interface the Vision Pro relies on) in that 2002 summer blockbuster, Minority Report. In reality, Minority Report was not just a COOL AND EXCITING! action flick from Steven Spielberg and Tom Cruise, but a masterclass in predictive programming. For years afterward, everyone was citing every disturbing new technological “advancement”—from the creepy digital marketing billboards that could identify you by eye scan and address you personally by name to the amazing gestural technology that allowed Cruise (as Detective John Anderton) to waltz his way through oceans of digital information like a composer conducting a symphony—as an example of a Minority Report-style dystopia coming into view.

Well, in case you didn’t know, Minority Report‘s amazing ability to predict the future was no mere happenstance. In fact, Minority Report was a textbook example of predictive programming, in which we were inoculated against our current-day invasion of Vision Pro-wearers by witnessing it all on the silver screen before it came to pass in reality.

As I reported 12 years ago in PSYOPS 101: The technology of psych warfare:

Minority Report is a 2002 Hollywood sci-fi movie from director Steven Spielberg presenting a dystopian future of pre-crime, total surveillance and police state technology. Unlike many science fiction fantasies, however, the technology depicted in the film has already proven remarkably prescient. From statistical analysis programs like IBM’s Blue CRUSH that purports to be able to predict criminal “hotspots” to drone technologies that are beginning to look more and more like the police tracking robots depicted in the movie, Minority Report has proven time and again to have been ahead of the curve in predicting technology. This is not accidental. During the film’s pre-production in 1999, Spielberg invited a panel of experts to a three-day “think tank” in Santa Monica, California. Including architects, biomedical researchers and computer scientists, the group wrote the “2054 bible,” an 80-page book detailing the most likely technological, sociological, architectural and political changes of the next half-century.

That’s right! The wizards of Holy/Wood and their scriptwriting sorcerers actually convened an ad hoc “think tank” to write a bible of the future, in which they boldly “predicted” what our world would look like in 50 years. And that ragtag bunch of young up-and-comers—including the corpulent, Hillary-worshipping Jaron Lanier of The Social Dilemma fame and Shaun Jones of DARPA biowarfare infamy and Steward Brand of Whole Earth Catalogue notoriety—just happened to put together a movie that depicted a number of future technologies (like the gestural interface technology that is now creeping out random passersby on the street in New York and other tech-enslaved hotspots) with eery accuracy.

Funny how that works, isn’t it?

Here are the real questions: Why are the Holy/Wood magicians and the news repeaters and the tech giants and seemingly everyone else in positions of power so invested in getting us to strap a computer to our face? What is this tech takeover really about? And how is this technology going to start changing us as a species?

A FAKE WORLD FOR FAKE PEOPLE

The scenes of Vision Pro-clad transhumans walking around our cities is nightmarish enough. Merely watching these not-quite-here people trying to interact with their fake online digital spaces at the same time as they’re navigating crosswalks and driving cars is anxiety inducing in itself. But what does it look like from their perspective?

Once again, as a clued-in Cassandra of The Corbett Report community, you will already know the answer to that question. Specifically, you’ll be able to cast your mind back to Lesson 3 of the Mass Media: A History online course (“Caught in the Web”) in which we experienced “hyper-reality“—the immersive simulation of the augmented reality of the future originally developed in 2009 by filmmaker Keiichi Matsuda as part of his master’s thesis at the Bartlett School of Architecture in London.

Viewers of that non-stop assault on the senses will no doubt remember how incredibly overwhelming that imaginary experience in a “mixed reality” environment is at first, with an ordinary bus trip . . .

. . . and an ordinary shopping trip to the grocery store

. . . being transformed into a kaleidoscopic eyegasm of information, messages, advertisements and activities, all displayed for the film’s first-person protagonist (Juliana Restrepo) on a display presumably being projected into her eyes by a Vision Pro-style headset in some near-future setting.

But you will also remember that gut-dropping moment when the protagonist’s headset comes under cyberattack and she is forced to reboot her system, revealing the bare, boring, non-hyper-reality underlying the frenetic visual display on her device.

What makes Matsuda’s film so powerful is that it demonstrates not only what the world might look like for those who choose to strap themselves into the mixed-reality nightmare of the Big Tech overlords, but also how utterly addictive such an unreality can become even after a few short minutes of exposure. The revelation of the simple, unadorned supermarket aisle in all its drab reality is a gut punch to those viewers who didn’t even realize they were already starting to get drawn into the digital matrix being overlayed on the screen.

As I say, if you did take the online mass media history course and you did get through Lesson 3, then you experienced this moment for yourself, and you already know it to be true. But, in case you’re one of those people who can believe something only when it’s confirmed by third parties, here’s your confirmation:

“Beware: The Apple Vision Pro may rewire our brains in unexpected ways”

That’s an article by Adam Rogers at BusinessInsider documenting an experiment conducted by a team of researchers led by Jeremy Bailenson at the Virtual Human Interaction Lab at Stanford. In that experiment, subjects attempted to wear an Apple Vision Pro or a Meta Quest (Zuckerberg’s Facebook equivalent of the mixed-reality goggles) for weeks at a time, and the results were shocking. As it turns out, the “passthrough” process by which these devices take the real world and then present it to its wearer via the digital screen begins to have profound dissociative effects on the gadget’s user after prolonged periods of use.

Because passthrough captures and then re-renders reality, it can have an unnerving, distancing effect over time. When Bailenson’s colleagues actually tried to talk to people, the world turned into a giant, confusing Zoom. Video chats, as we’ve all experienced, are plagued by delays in responses and missed social cues. Conversations lose subtlety, but it’s good enough for a meeting. But passthrough magnifies the effect — the people you talk to start to seem unreal. Up close, they look like avatars. Farther away, they become just part of the background.

In other words, the difference between the digital world and the “real” world starts to blur. The digital world may seem more “real” but only at the expense of the “real” world losing its sense of reality.

So, what is the end result of such a process?

Do we begin to lose our cognitive faculties altogether?

Do we start to imbue the machines and bots and algorithms and avatars that form the fabric of this mixed-reality universe with humanity?

And, most worryingly of all, do we forsake our humanity altogether by engaging in this fake digital world? That is to say, if we continue to follow this path—if we strap on the goggles and literally immerse ourselves in the Media Matrix—do we start to become machines?

NOW, LAUGH AT CASSANDRA, AS YOU HAVE BEEN PROGRAMMED TO DO!

“Are you suffering from conspiracy fatigue?”

by Grow Up Conference | Feb 25, 2024 | Media Partners, The New Agora

Mark Carter’s – Ascension Intention-From Shadow to Light!

“Are you suffering from conspiracy fatigue?”

With the ascendance of the internet, mankind has been offered an unprecedented platter of previously hidden information. Sifting through the various claims and counterclaims can feel like a full-time unpaid job, for those with the time luxury to plumb such murky waters.

The increasing reader/viewer focus on central banking dynasties and their self-serving machinations has been pivotal in shifting mass political consciousness toward the need for monetary rights and justice. Many have traced the insidious web of financial corruption into legal structures, organized medicine, the education system, the media complex, and other establishment power structures. Some people have explored the cult aspect behind central banking and parasitic usury, tracing occult practices back through the centuries and millennia.

At the end of the day, though, how much of our precious time do we want to spend exploring a shadow realm, versus activating more and more Light expansion in our beings and worlds? Enough Light annihilates shadows, just as “perfect love casts out fear”.

I believe that our primary focus should be on becoming conscious and clear about our own inner reality, our true feelings, our strengths and weaknesses. By knowing ourselves authentically and deeply, we can discern which aspects of our lives are well developed and can be offered in conscious service to others, and which aspects would benefit from conscious self-improvement and the assistance of other beings who have developed skills in helping us illumine our blind spots and heal our wounds.

We must give ourselves the gift of feeling our inner world, connecting more deeply with our Source, allowing emotions to surface and harmonize, loving and forgiving ourselves and others. This regular practice roots us in spiritual soil and nourishes our bodies, nurturing peace, confidence, and focused growth in fruitful directions. We spend less time in a confused, fretful mind and more time in the unified, glowing Heart. Ultimately, an alchemical transformation takes place on an inner then outer level and we emerge purified.

Then our highest path becomes more self-evident and we’re able to move forward with grace and purpose. Creative solutions are able to manifest more effortlessly and joyfully, often surprising us with their Divine timing and the inspired allies who enter our lives to improve them and activate fresh opportunities to collaborate. Our journey becomes more of a joy and less of a struggle, and we’re better able to contribute our unique gifts to mankind to help uplift everyone and assist Higher Beings to fulfill the Divine Plan for Planet Earth.

‘May your day be radiant with abundant loving Light that shines the way for you and others!’

-Mark Carter – I hope you enjoy my first post from what should be a long running column-

Ascension Intention-From Shadow to Light

Main Image by Patrick Ennis