The obsolete consciousness XIII

Yesterday I went to the movies to see the film "Zero dark Thirty".

This violence from both sides, extreme, refined, cruel.....both sides wanting "the good" (!!!)....

And these little men, at the top of both organizations, thinking they are important, taking decisions way beyond their true dimension, playing with their electronic toys......

I came out feeling we are very basic in our evolutionary path.......

The obsolete consciousness XII. Beleifs

"Man has always sought something more than the daily living, with its pain, pleasure and sorrow; he has always wanted to find something more permanent. And in his search for this unnameable thing, he has built temples, churches, mosques. Extraordinary things have been done in the name of religion. There have been wars for which religions are responsible; people have been tortured, burned, destroyed; for belief was more important than truth, dogma more vital than the direct perception. When belief becomes all-important, then you are willing to sacrifice everything for that; whether that belief is real or has no validity does not matter as long as it gives comfort, security, a sense of permanency."
(J. Krishnamurti, 1970 in a public talk)

This explains a lot of present conflicts and wars.....I wonder if a deep understanding (not just intellectual) is possible about this issue, this way of working of our brains......

The obsolete consciousness XI

Without comment...

(32 children killed in Syria...in a "civil war"......with both sides trying to "improve" the future of the nation and the people living in it......)

Paleolithic thought patterns

Today is a sunny day, I am not in the country where I usually live, in the afternoon I seat outdoors in the South Loan and I read an interview with Edward Osborne Wilson in New Scientist magazine. In between other interesting things, I find one sentence:

"We have created a Star Wars civilization but we have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology."

And this sentence inspires me to think that "not the content of our thought process, but the way our thought operates is paleolithic or pre-paleolithic" and we are not aware of it.

The obsolete consciousness X

I am reading about the Nuremberg trial after WWII.
One of the people on trial was Hermann Göring, who was a was a German politician, military leader, and a leading member of the Nazi Party.

Göring's last days were spent with Captain Gustave Gilbert, a German-speaking American intelligence officer and psychologist, who had access to all the prisoners held in the Nuremberg jail.

Göring spoke about war and extreme nationalism to Captain Gilbert, as recorded in Gilbert's Nuremberg Diary:

"Naturally, the common people don't want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship. ...voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country".

This means that a conditioned mind is manipulable*. That a mind that is not aware that is conditioned can easily be manipulated using the reflexes of the conditioning.

In this case he mentions: "being attacked"....."lack of patriotism"....."danger". It goes all in the same direction: our mind is conditioned to be safe, to defend against danger, and to do it through the sense of group (patriotism).

And the lack of awareness of being conditioned, of being conditionable, makes us susceptible of being manipulated.....the whole World War II maybe was a just a big manifestation of conditioning and manipulation........is violence just a consequence of conditioning/manipulation?

Is this obsolete?

*According to the diccionary: "capable of or susceptible to being manipulated"

The obsolete consciousness IX

View this

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VtnFpXKgeDY&feature=related

and ask yourself if our consciousness, as it presently is, is not obsolete.
It has brought us till here with the miriad reflexes, one of them, maybe the primordial one, the search for security, even if by brutal means.
But it is coming to a crisis.
Evolution will no longer be darwinian, but will be in consciousness

The obsolete consciousness VIII

This separation in beleifs, in religions, in nations, in groups. This apparent wanting "the best for the people, for the world", no matter the method used. This lack of respect for life and for human lives. This lack of compassion. This deep conviction that we are separated....
All this is a sign of an obsolete consciousness. We should not judge this as right or wrong, but maybe we should see it at another level, as symptoms of obsolescence in our consciousness, of which we are also a part....
This realization may be an alternative......

The Obsolete Consciousness VI: The Holocaust part I

I read this book last spring, and I wanted to share it with you, and hopefully engage in a dialogue about its content.

Only four men commanded Nazi extermination (as opposed to concentration) camps. Franz Stangl was the "Kommandant" of Treblinka, one of the most terrible camps. After the war he escaped to Syria and then Brazil, where he lived with his family and worked in a factory.
After extradition to Germany, he was tried for the deaths of around 1,200,000 people. He admitted to these killings but argued: "My conscience is clear. I was simply doing my duty ...". Found guilty on October 22, 1970, Stangl was sentenced to life imprisonment. He died of a heart attack on June 28, 1971.

Gitta Sereny talked to him in prison for about 70 hours, asked him questions of how he came about to be in charge of an extermination camp, how he felt then, how he was feeling now, what relationship he had with his family.
I think she does not go deep enough (maybe it is not possible) in the psychological roots of organized cruelty, I have the feeling that Stangl himself does not know how it all happened, only that it happened. But this unique book has some parts which are quite thought provoking.

One point that emerge from reading the book is that Stangl was not a psychopath or a nazi fanatic. He was rather a "grey" person, a person that wanted to please his superiors, that wanted to ascend in the rank, that wanted to do a "good" job, that wanted to be somebody.....and on top of all he loved his family (!!!)

It seems that the main power behind the holocaust was an IDEA. Just an idea. The idea of a superior race (übermensch). And the moment you project the idea of a superior race, automatically you have inferior races. What a power an idea, a thought, could have.

And how obsolete a consciousness that can generate and pursuit to the end, unchequed, such idea.....

The obsolete consciousness V

The organization Banktrack has released a study showing which finantial institutions/banks are financing the companies manufacturing cluster bombs.

Cluster munitions pose a serious threat to civilian populations during and after a conflict. Cluster munitions are designed to blanket a large area, sometimes as big as 4-5 football fields. They spread a large number, sometimes close to 2000, of submunitions or bomblets. Distribution of submunitions over such a broad area results in a large chance of civilian casualties during and after the attack. Many bomblets or submunitions fail to explode on impact. They remain on the ground like landmines that kill and injure civilians long after the conflict has ended. 98% of cluster munitions victims are civilians.

A part of the consciousness has created a huge finantial system to have its own security no matter if it is by using force and maiming another part. It considers itself a part, separate from the whole. Such economic system, based on this fragmented consciousness, can never be fair and seems to lead to imbalance and conflict......

(picture, above: a boy wounded by a cluster bomb in Irak in 2003, by A. Niedringhaus; below, a cluster bomb)

The obsolete consciousness IV

The picture top most was taken from Marie Claire (September 2010), a well known fashion magazine. The text to the right of the picture says:
Jacket, 1990$, by Oscar de la Renta;
top, 595 $, Phillip Lim;
pants, 147$, Plastic Island;
shoes, 1395$, Michael Kors;
ring, 280$, Alexander McQueen

The bottom picture is a child picking through trash at a garbage dump in Philippines (1990).

These huge differences are another sign of an obsolete consciousness.......

The obsolete consciousness III

The Aral sea from space in 1985

The Aral sea from space in 2009

The Aral Sea was one of the four largest lakes of the world with an area of 68,000 square kilometres (26,000 sq mi), the Aral Sea has been steadily shrinking since the 1960s after the rivers that fed it were diverted by the Soviet Union for cotton irrigation projects. By 2007 it had declined to 10% of its original size.

The region's once prosperous fishing industry has been virtually destroyed, bringing unemployment and economic hardship. The retreat of the sea has reportedly also caused local climate change, with summers becoming hotter and drier, and winters colder and longer.

The ecosystem of the Aral Sea has been nearly destroyed, not least because of the much higher salinity. The receding sea has left huge plains covered with salt and toxic chemicals – the results of wepons testing, industrial projects, pesticides and fertilizer runoff – which are picked up and carried away by the wind as toxic dust and spread to the surrounding area. The land around the Aral Sea is heavily polluted and the people living in the area are suffering from a lack of fresh water and health problems, including high rates of certain forms of cancer, lung diseases, tuberculosis and certain types of cancer. Infectious diseases are common ailments in the region and liver, kidney and eye problems can also be attributed to the toxic dust storms. Health concerns associated with the region are a cause for an unusually high fatality rate amongst children and pregnant women.

This kind of separation from Nature and this kind of interaction with the environment is another sign of this obsolete consciousness.......

The obsolete consciousness II

On August 6th 1945, at 8:15 a.m. local time, the plane Enola Gay dropped an atomic bomb onto Hiroshima. Just 43 seconds later it exploded 1,900 feet above the city, killing 140.000 people.

One part of this obsolete consciousness had learned how to obtain energy by splitting matter. Another part had decided to use this knowledge to fight another part of the same consciousness, divided by something called nationality. Another part flew over Hiroshima and dropped it..... Then a part of the consciousness celebrated the success with joy and another part was crying with pain......

(see a re-enactment in this video)

The obsolete consciousness I

The Dongria Kondhas people inhabit the plateaus of the Niyamgiri hills in India. The Niyamgiri Hills where the Dongria Kondh dwell are covered by superb natural forests and home to many rare species like the Golden Gecko and the Giant Squirrel. The Dongria Kondh call themselves Jharnia meaning those who live by the Jharana (streams). Hundreds of perennial streams flow from Niyamgiri hill, and there are hundreds of Dongria villages by the streams. The Dongria are the protectors of these streams, hills and jungles and are revered by people in the nearby plains.

A british based mining company, named Vedanta (ironic name as "vedanta" refers to the branch of Hindu philosophy that teaches the Ultimate Nature of Knowledge), wants to turn the the Niyamgiri mountains into a giant bauxite mine to feed its refinery at the foot of the mountain.

It is the mineral wealth lying beneath the slopes of the Niyamgiri mountains that has drawn Vedanta to Niyamgiri. If the flat-topped hills are destroyed, the forests that clothe them will be destroyed, too. So will the rivers and streams that flow out of them and irrigate the plains below. So will the Dongria Kondh.

This is a manifestation of the obsolete consciousness which has been pervasive in this time of human evolution.....

See the video