Of Being in the Faltering Empire, but not Of It

The title of this essay echoes and old Zen Buddhist maxim of being in the world, but not of it. What might this mean to us?

If we are physically here, we are in it. We may have to pay our centralized government wherever we live, and many of you live outside the United States, but it is the same requirement. Ir takes a percentage of our income as taxes. We must go through this as the power of the state is coercive: law is the legitimization of force by a collective. Even though we have to outwardly comply, inwardly, we, at least in the U.S., can hold and pass on the knowledge that the Internal Revenue Service is a private corporation and that our Constiitution makes no provision for collecting such a tax.

In metaphysical terms, and I hope my memory serves here, as there are few sources available to look this up, inside the bark of the World Tree (Taman Joki or Yggdrasil) is the personal zone of influence, our thoughts, our emotions, our memories, our choices: this is in Ilinen. Outside the bark of Taman Joki we find the outer forms which we must follow, conventions, laws, contracts, mores, which exist in Alinen.

We often cannot choose our present circumstances. We can, however, choose to fight to alter them, to plan and work to alter what we do not find life-supporting or enhancing. Also, we can choose how we shall feel about it. We can choose to adopt a mental stance where one does not feel like a victim nor a piece of driftwood, blown about by winds and tides of the Fates. We can chose to see ourselves as powerful within whatever latitude of action, what choice that remains to us in an increasingly overly-ordered, authoritarian society. 

To this latter point, never, even during the polio epidemic of the 1950’s, which the author remembers, was it suggested that people live in virtual house arrest or that children be forced to go around masked. There is in the last few years an overall loss of individual self-determination and personal liberty. I repeat, despite this, we can choose to act with in what remains.

During the previous totalitarian Russian regime (and the current one is moving ever closer to a version of it) families lived in close proximity in state-ordered flats, often three families’ sharing one kitchen and bathroom. Opposition to the regime could not be open, so these oppressed people began using stencils, mimeograph machines, crude things by the standards of today’s technology, to write and copy tracts, passing these along to other citizens, usually within the same apartment block. This movement was called Samisdat. They. operated in what little freedom of action remained, but there was something life-affirming and uplifting to the spirits of those oppressed by oligarchy and officialdom in the mere act of expression, even decades ahead of Russia’s short-lived democracy prior to Putin.

Our status in the West or in the U.S. is not as different as we would like to think. A couple who politely question the forced globalist anti-Western indoctrination of their children at a school board meeting had their home searched by our Secret Police. These operate, as theirs did, with little accountability to the law they swear to uphold. Theirs was first known as NKVD, later as KGB, now as FSB and ours, similarly, has three letters. Outer form matters little. The progressive choking of liberty, especially that of expression in the West often done by government subsidized or governmennt founded organs such as Facebook is one of the opening actions of an oppressive state apparatus. In Russia the actors therein were Apparatchika- in ours, the Deep State and its roadie “fact checkers,“ apparatus mouthpieces who posit their options as facts. The only action that might set it back is mass, non-violent civil disobedience, and mass free expression (never violating civil bounds by being inflammatory or calling for violence, etc.), because restriction thrives if we bow to intimidation.

 We see this where a parent who objects to official, institutionalized  anti-European racism in the form of Critical Race Theory, that is being a required subject in schools and was being required of many federal employees until President Trump banned it via an executive order, is labeled a “domestic terrorist.” The parent who objects to explicit homoerotic instruction to children below 12 in public schools stands to be labeled the same. In this topsy turvy world, expressing a dissenting opinion can be construed as an act of violence, exactly as in the People’s Republic of China.

This applies to health matters as well. To present real research and valid scientific facts which contradict forced mass vaccination or lockdowns the presenter is a “disinformation agent” and, to the Red Guards in the federal bureaucracy and Secret Police, another form of “terrorist.” The irony, especially if you bother to look up the actual meaning of ‘terrorist’ as someone who supports and / or conducts acts of terror or mass violence to influence public policies is that there is NO terror advocated by the questioners or the parents at the school board meeting in the above examples.

Our challenge, as we try to live as spiritual beings in a time of tumult, will be to try not to live in fear, anger, or outrage. Try instead to be objective, to look into the inner causes of the phenomena which you observe around you. Understand that, when you hand someone a badge, a gun, and a six figure income, and basically the latitude to intimidate law-abiding, non-violent citizens, to carry out an administrative policy that is not even in the laws of the land, this is what can happen. It’s not that the secret police person is evil- he can however, in an atmosphere where evidence disappears, the press is threatened or bought off, and any dissent can be criminalized, become a jaded apparatchik, carrying out the details of. repression.

A We must, in these times, hold our vision, hold our space, and realize that any “hot heads’ you may hear from or anyone who tries to incite an action on your part that can be used to justify further state interference in your life, further repression, is most likely an agent provocateur. These “confidential informants” (CI’s) often do the dirty work that cannot be traced back to their secret police handlers in exchange for monthly stipends and lighter sentences for their own violations of the myriad federal laws. They do here as they did in NS Germany or Soviet Russia, baiting citizens to capture more souls for the labor camps or gulag. Our version is the vast chain of ‘holding facilities,’ private prisons, and federal and state institutions. In these is held the largest percentage of any population in the world, compared to the overall population of a country.

We must instead plan and act in small steps. Realize that some federal agencies, ignoring the often drastic and sweeping damage done by prescription drugs, or minimizing it, are finding every rare or minor possible reaction to any herbal product and publicizing this under the guise of doing a public service. This happened before in the eighties, where a harmless amino acid found in chicken and turkey had been extracted the Japanese capsules were sold here. ONE bad batch was received and the FDS banned tryptophan sales for several years. In a predictable development, this coindiced with products their colleagues had developed- sleep aids; “Lunesta” and “Ambien” are two which come to mind. 

The best response might be to learn the best natural sources of tryptophan to use instead of expensive (don’t forget the expense of the mandatory periodic doctor visits to be allowed to keep using a drug,) and often addictive chemicals that the allopathic Apparatus promotes. If you want to think more deeply on this latter statement, reflect on the existence of support groups for persons trying to get off addiction to prescription anxiety, depression or pain medicines, such as Cymbalta, Clonopin, or Xanax.

Plant benevolent herbs and learn their uses. When they decide to ban garlic because it has anti microbial properties or ginger because it has been used to settle the digestive tract, it will be great if someone you know raises these plants and if you can obtain seeds or bulbs from them, as the apparatchika can and do track seed purchases. If the “regulatory agency” makes it illegal to sell feverfew or mugwort, and that day may be coming, plan to barter for it. 

Such small actions in the USSA, just like in the former and re-emerging USSR created a separate way of doing things, a “gray economy” where basic human needs are actually met in the shadow of state micromanagement and oppression.

Keep positive. Such systems can’t last. They usually get resource use, trade, technology, and economics wrong and stifle the very engines of enterprise that allow a society to function. I hope, of course, that we don’t end up with 72 years of it, as Russia did. All we can do is to keep ourselves and those around us sane, centered and resilient, holding a positive intention for a better future and with the pen and the (respectful and lawful) voice, argue for that better outcome.
Therein is health and wholeness, as best we can hold it in our thoughts, conversations, and for those of us who are in a faith, our prayers. You can’t help being in this world unless you’re of the lucky few who can set up a miniature functional society, however small, on the outskirts of a crumbling order, but you don’t have to reflect it, to carry it, to obsess over it. Do not, in short, be of it.