From Swami Beyondananda: From the New Deal to the Real Deal

[Dover]

Dear Friend:


Please excuse the generic nature of this letter. I am trying to reach as
many people as possible with one flick of the “send” button.

To paraphrase Tom Paine’s words written on the eve of the American
Revolution, “These are the times that try our souls.” And now, 230 years
later as we stand on the brink of an American “Evolution”, where we
finally evolve into the conscious sovereign citizens our Founding Fathers
imagined, our hearts and souls are being tested like never before.
These times of great challenge are also times of great opportunity. In
order to evolve to the next level, we must courageously face our “human
family secrets” and learn to use every spiritual, intellectual,
psychological and physical tool in our collective toolkit to shift our
planetary course from mutually-assured destruction to
mutually-beneficial construction.

I am asking for your help and participation in a massive movement to
weave the spiritual ideal with the political “real deal” so that our
institutions become congruent with our highest principles. Sound too
idealistic? Well, consider the alternative …

In addition to my travels as Swami to remind us to “wake up laughing,” I
am applying my past experience in political science, personal growth,
spirituality, writing – and of course, comedy – to help us all face the
truth and embrace the opportunity. The three projects in formulation are:

1. A readable, compelling, straightforward – and yet optimistic – book,
Wake Up, America: We’re Not in Kansas Anymore, Toto, designed to take us
as a country and a world from where we are to where we truly want to be.

2. The Council of 100, a confederation of spiritual, cultural, business
and political leaders, to provide the influence and the “moral
authority” to heal the body politic and bring about the American Evolution.

3. A Course in Freedom, an interactive, multi-media curriculum designed
for grassroots teach-ins everywhere.

I am working with an awesome team to develop these projects, including
Byron Belitsos of Origins Press, Alan Hutner with Transitions Radio, and
Bill Kauth, author of A Circle of Men and founder of Lifeboats. Launching these
projects will require roughly half of my work time over this coming year, and as
Swami has said, “There’s no such thing as a free launch.”

In order to support this work Telecosm, a nonprofit 501(c)3 corporation,
is providing a sabbatical grant funded by your tax-deductible
contributions. If you feel you would like to participate in this way,
please respond to this email with your mailing address and I will send
you a more formal prospectus.

If you are not able to contribute on that level, please consider
subscribing to my Notes From the Trail newsletter for just $10. A $25
subscription will also get you a copy of Swami’s new book, Swami for
Precedent: A 7-Step Plan to Heal the Body Politic and Cure Electile
Dysfunction. You can also go to the Wake Up Laughing products page and
give yourself (and the people you know) the gift of cosmic comedy and
healing laughter.

Thank you for being part of the wave of awakening on the planet in these
times. May more and more of us wake up laughing, so we don’t need to be
shocked by a loud and scary alarm.

Steve Bhaerman
Homepage: http://www.epiphanet.com/~wakeupl/index.html
______________________________________________________________

Notes From the Trail -- January 11, 2005


Hanging By a Threat

by Steve Bhaerman

There’s a poignant and powerful scene in the classic Humphrey Bogart film, “African Queen.” Bogie and Katherine Hepburn are desperately trying to get their boat out of the swampy river and into open water and safety. At one point in the sweltering heat, he is slogging through the bog pulling the boat with a rope. Finally, the mud becomes so thick they can go no further. Hopeless and exhausted, they give up. They collapse on the deck awaiting certain death from dehydration. It is only then that the camera pans up and we see that they are just a few hundred feet from the mouth of the river and open water.
Many folks who were active in the recent post-election investigations -- not as Democrats, by the way, but as liberty-loving people alarmed at a regime taking liberties with our liberties -- are no doubt feeling like they’ve been slogging through deep mud, if not actual quicksand. Aside from Michigan Congressman John Conyers, Green Party candidate David Cobb, Libertarian Michael Badnarik, the indomitable Jesse Jackson and finally Sen. Barbara Boxer, the rest of progressive officialdom seem to have gone to sleep. Meanwhile, the mainstream press, for the most part buried any mention of any recount activities, or any potential challenge to the results.
This, by the way, is a classic strategy in “crazy making”: Present as the “truth” something that defies both the physical senses and the common senses. The strategy is working so far. Those whose eyes, ears, sniffer and guts tell them that this “election” is just the latest neo-con con by a gang who’s become bolder in their perpetrations, have been effectively marginalized as a bunch of flat-earthers who’ve gone off the deep end. Meanwhile, the media’s complicity in refusing to even examine the possibility of shenanigans threatens to leave representative democracy gasping for breath at the shallow end.
How discouraging can it be to read online testimony of outright fraud in Ohio, of tampering with the machines, of a lawsuit that even John F––– Kerry quietly joined, and see no mention of it in the “liberal” press? How easy it would be to swallow the blue pill and go back to being a complicit consumer of mainstream media babblum, never realizing that the current unrepresentative undemocracy is “hanging by a threat.”
Hanging by a threat.
The entire legitimacy of the current government is hinged upon the threat of terrorism. The veiled threat, of course, is the threat against those who threaten to expose the war on terror as the real terrifying threat. Shielded behind the “war on terror,” the administration’s lies and perpetrations have been allowed to stand -- with the exception of the courageous and heartening 8-1 Supreme Court decision against indefinite secret incarcerations at Guantanamo.
The only thing that is holding our current political reality in place is a wall of lies. And the only thing holding the wall of lies in place is our willingness to believe them, or worse yet our willingness to pretend we believe them. As Arundhati Roy says -- quoting local villagers in India -- “You can wake someone who is sleeping, but you can’t wake someone pretending to be asleep.”
Lest we resign ourselves to death by inertia as the Bogie and Hepburn characters did aboard the hapless African Queen, let’s return to the movie. In the very next scene, torrential rains come and lift the boat, and drift it out into open waters. Well, that’s Hollywood. In the real world, if we want to obliterate the wall of lies in a tsunami of truth, we can’t wait for an act of God to lift our boat. We have to start the wave rolling ourselves. But listen -- this is good news!
Consider the energy and vigilance it takes to hold a lie in place, or in this case a web of lies. Consider the level of buy-offs and intimidation required to keep people silent and marginalized. The truth is irrepressible. The truth will out, the truth always will out. Consider that despite all of the “ethic cleansing” in government departments (and most recently the CIA), there are still ethical people who know something is wrong. The only thing keeping them from popping a hole in the official story and allowing the truth to leak out is fear that they will be isolated and condemned as traitors -- or worse. It’s one thing to be afraid that an unpopular opinion will get you stoned. It’s another thing fearing it will get you Wellstoned.
So it is up to us -- millions of us who don’t buy the official story -- to raise the waters of truth enough to float the boats of any officials with the courage to venture on to uncharted seas. And -- since no one else seems to be doing it -- it is up to us to weave together all of the perpetrations: the selection of 2000, the “investigation” of 9/11 that leaves too many unanswered questions and unquestioned answers, the lies and stonewalling that led us into Iraq, and now the election that has a reek of fraud that seeps through even the thickest stonewall...cont'd

http://www.wakeuplaughing.com/hanging_by_a_threat.html

[Dover]

1. Highly recommended.......

This is off topic but didn't think I needed to give this its own thread.

Just saw a very good documentary called Tibet: Cry of the Snow Lion, narrated by Martin Sheen. (picked it up at the video rental place).

If you are not up on Tibetan culture and it's tumultuos history as a warrior nation that did an about face to become a nation devoted to peace (and who invested the equivalent of the U.S.'s military budget on educating monks and enlightening souls), then watch and learn. It makes a dream such as Kucinich's Dept. of Peace, more easily imagined and aspired to, though there are no illusions about the price that must be paid.

The Tibetans are currently in a desperate struggle to save their culture and religion from a slow, unyielding genocide by China.