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Harvey - Contemporary
Spiritual Plagues...Part Two:
Hemorrhagic Stupiditas
By Diane Harvey
merak@sedona.net
8-8-1

We are a species whose determinative gift is the notoriously two-edged sword of intelligence. This is combined indissolubly with the necessity to choose continually how to wield the gift. We are reasonably free (so far) to apply our innate intelligence toward the goal of becoming wise. We are obviously equally free to employ ourselves inventing ingenious methods of degradation, degeneration, and destruction. Intelligence joined to free will is the fundamental construct of our existence, whether we like it or not. We are therefore obliged at every moment to be moving toward either greater ignorance or greater wisdom. According to how we are using our minds, we will be heading toward either the creative or the destructive ends of the spectrum. Provided we are conscious at all, intelligence is always in operation, in individuals and in groups, and having its effects accordingly. That we have a genius for the pursuit of wisdom has been amply demonstrated in the brilliant achievements of individuals throughout history, and periodically in larger groups and entire cultures. That we display an equal capacity for racing downhill toward wholesale annihilation has also been repeatedly proven. And right now, the sum total of our choices is adding up to extraordinary peril. If our civilization could be perceived as an individual, it would present the spectacle of a genius, dead drunk and staggering around the edge of the Grand Canyon in the throes of delirium tremens. That the innate intelligence is still there somewhere is hardly a cause for self-congratulatory rejoicing.
 
No matter how intrinsically intelligent we are, we are nevertheless a civilization in the process of dying of a case of stupiditas. The word stupidity comes from the Latin word stupiditas, meaning senseless. To be senseless means: acting without sense or sound judgment; unreasonable; meaningless; having no power of sensation or perception; unconscious; incapable of sensation or feeling; contrary to reason. People suffering the deadly ravages of stupidity are unconscious, disconnected from the meaning of their own perceptions, and incapable of normal sensation. They are devoid of the power of judgment, and lost in meaningless behavior. Such a situation, however much we are accustomed to seeing it, actually describes a catastrophic mental illness. The physical body may live, but normally functioning human awareness is not present and accounted for. The person may act, emote and speak, but all too often this constitutes mere "sound and fury, signifying nothing." Sensitive responsive consciousness has departed and has left walking, talking, passively conditioned Homo roboticus behind to go through the motions.
 
Our so-called mass culture is little but a gargantuan petri dish overflowing with the virus of contagious stupiditas. Lethal germs of stupidity flourish in each crevice of its glittering crackpot surfaces. And the root cause of such overpowering levels of fatal ignorance is clearly observable. Mass stupification arises directly from the base motives infesting nearly everything manifested all around us. Cause-and-effect is one single inevitable movement in time and space, from start to finish. The end of any activity is hidden in the beginning, in the hidden seed of intention. It is true that the best of intentions may have unexpected and unhappy consequences. Nevertheless, these are nowhere in the same category as the prolonged and wretched material, psychological, and spiritual results of dishonest and corrupt intentions. Any activity of any kind that originates from the motives of greed, selfishness, arrogance, and the will to manipulate others will eventually bear the bitter fruit of self-destruction. This is the underlying natural law that no individual or group can escape forever: what we sow, we reap, to the last decimal place. The simplest fact of life, this is, and understood for millennia, yet our entire civilization pretends never to have heard of it. Of course, all are free to deny the reality, if they care to, of enthusiastically participating in a runaway materialism of ravenous greed and supernatural levels of stupification. And all are free, should they wish to do so, to feign ignorance of the ever-increasing degeneration emerging from every particle of this mass culture. What people say to themselves or others in self-justification for enjoying it is neither here nor there. Their intelligence will suffer regardless of what self-serving expurgated version of truth the conscious mind is dutifully reporting. What any of us say we are up to when we hope to disguise a grubby motive from ourselves or from others is irrelevant. Life itself registers everyone's intentions at every moment; commensurate effects are thereby set in motion, and no hoodwinking has ever been possible, nor ever will be possible.
 
The conscious intention to create distortion, addiction, weakness and uniformity of profitable behavior is at work behind the scenes everywhere. The basis of our entire civilization is the direct control and manipulation of the whole human being in order to wring yet more profit from deliberately confused, enfeebled, and entranced human souls. So far relatively few of the total numbers existing within this horrific system seem even to be aware of the fundamental assault on human value and dignity inherent in such a bottomless pit of a bottom line. Nevertheless, it is this primary intention that has resulted in the manufacture and distribution of the contemporary spiritual plague of Hemorrhagic Stupiditas. To acquiesce and to freely participate in the deadly end products of a culture founded on the extremes of ruthless greed is fatal to natural intelligence. Nearly every corporate/military/government/social offering is deeply rooted in festering greed, and is therefore crawling with the highly contagious micro-vermin of profoundest ignorance. Short of merciful death, it is becoming impossible to avoid spending a great deal of time and energy trying to avoid direct contact with that which will make you stupider if you so much as touch it.
 
These days stupidity itself is becoming a cradle-to-grave condition of seemingly outwardly normal existence. Nothing else describes accurately what has happened to so many human beings, no doubt originally born endowed with normal human capacities. This civilization is oozing stupidity at every pore. The vital organs of the State, the legislative, executive and judicial members of the Body Politic, are fatally infected. All the social constructs running our lives are reaching the end of viability in a slow agonizing convulsion of idiopathic idiocy. The remorselessly self-serving, willfully insolent and shortsighted greed-eaten motives of powerfully criminal fools will certainly result in increasing suffering on a vast scale. Our entire world is presenting symptoms of rapid onset of the final stages of death by senselessness. Nature itself is unraveling by the day. We have rotting, dying, fished-out oceans, sterile toxic used-up soil, no more fresh water, a deforested and ever more lifeless planet, and incalculable quantities of innumerable poisonous substances metastasizing everywhere and in everything. And even at that, apparently the thickening, sickening, enveloping fog of stupiditas was not quite complete. To entirely finish off the last of the natural systems we depend on, a hidden coterie of Big Brains is secretly altering the entire atmosphere with non-breathable deadly materials in order to deploy new weapons and communications technology. Human nature, that very potent aspect of the web of life, has fallen into the final convulsion of pretending it is separate from all other life, and therefore expects to be excused from obeying the laws of nature.
 
Incessantly mutating forms of the virus of irrationality are proliferating unchecked. The invisible germs of stupidity instantly attack when anyone has a close encounter with almost any product of our overflowing petri dish of ruthlessly enforced meaninglessness. And "any product" means just that. Near-fatal introductory levels of unreason are offered through the direct intravenous feed of the "educational system". Massive doses of the stupiditas bacilli offered as "education" at early ages are all too often quite sufficient to ensure life-long crippling levels of hopelessly conditioned passivity. Then there is the beloved practice of voluntarily sustaining repeated and deliberate brain damage by means of offering the poor mind itself on as a sacrifice to television. Television is nothing but the primary bioreactor for the manufacture and distribution of the plague of stupiditas. It effectively dilutes what little self-awareness and potential for wisdom remains after being mangled by the constricting torments of educational procedures.
 
Then there is the way so many people are forced to undergo the torments of the damned, stealthily referred to as "earning a living". It is worth noticing that just as being naturally and fully alive is becoming more and more difficult, the pressures to reduce our existence to the goal of earning money, as a substitute for living, are becoming ever more demanding. In other words, to earn a living is increasingly meaning being obliged to act directly contrary to spiritual common sense in order to be allowed to exist here at all. Many thus give way to the ocean of meaninglessness in order to satisfy the dark side's plan for us all: to become perfectly unconscious lifelong consumers of pointless "lifestyles". And of course, ever-present throughout the petri dish world, are the specially concentrated forms of the virus: the stupid-pills disguised as corporate food and drink, which keep a steady flow of concentrate-of-dumbdown moving right along through the cultural bloodstream.
 
Well, but we are so used to all this, and that is the very worst of the outwardly banal appearances of business-as-usual all around us. People really believe: "This is just our culture, yes? Surely it can't be all bad." But it is in fact shockingly stupefying. It is simply difficult for most to see through the heavy protective shell of numbing custom to the writhing vitals within. The nature of all viruses is to wear protective coverings that hide their true activities from their hosts. As it is, too many people do not perceive the ghastly gist of it all. Therefore they do not act to correct the fundamental problems, but spend their best energies vainly trying to satisfy the insatiable appetites of degenerative materialism. Unfortunately, little of the underlying causes of our predicament are ever noticed precisely because the awareness necessary for noticing has already been diluted to infinitesimal proportions.
 
The only remedy for the raging disease of contagious stupiditas resides in the individual ability to remove oneself and one's family from the sources of contamination as much as possible. As more and more people do this, very beautiful new ways of living are slowly emerging from the ashes of force-fed mass ignorance. These new experimental ways of life tend to subtly combine the most sensible forms of past ways of living with the technological advances of the present. There is an ever-growing army of souls in active rebellion against the death-wish petri dish stupidity-culture, and their achievements are quietly rippling out across the globe as waves of sane intention. The common key to any and all useful new forms of life is wise sustainability, and this is true in all levels of our existence. Physical health absolutely requires the health of nature, and there is no possible avoidance of this basic truth. Human profit motives that destroy nature simply destroy human nature simultaneously. Therefore we will either creatively work out new forms of co-existence that support a flourishing natural world, or die out altogether, as so many other civilizations have before us. The same requirements hold true for our emotional lives. Negative emotions do not sustain a human being in health or happiness, and yet so many still cling, in the throes of stupiditas, to a multitude of degrees and kinds of emotional negativity as if our lives depended on it. Fortunately, at the same time, rebels for greater livingness are willingly learning to live in the harmonious and sustaining emotions of loving kindness, trust, loyalty, caring, sacrifice, and mutual good will. As emotional wisdom deepens, our abilities to maintain and strengthen worthwhile relationships, while instinctively avoiding debilitating ones, are rapidly evolving, and in this is the hopeful path to sustainable relationships.
 
Mental sustainability is founded on the capacity to think clearly without being rushed to conclusions by overpowering emotional attachments to the answer. We cannot be said as a species to think well yet, and these days what passes for the thinking process bears less resemblance than ever before to the real thing. What we (unthinkingly) call thinking is often merely a reformulation of second-hand thought-wads. Original thinking is still quite rare, yet each individual is in fact an origin of thought of some kind of another. Words pass through our minds constantly, and they need not be turgid streams of other people's used mental waste products. Although it takes effort to learn to do our own thinking, we are all more or less capable of learning the process, given half a chance. And lastly, when the topic of spiritual sustainability arises, this remains as ever the most crucial requirement of freedom of conscience. To encroach unasked upon the personal sacred territory existing between each one and the Creator of all is an unthinkable act of totalitarian arrogance. And although the fanatical wars of groups of belief systems still destroy the happiness and very lives of countless members of the human race, some day humanity will awaken from this ignorant and fear-driven stupor as well. In the meantime, the highest sanity most of us can attain is a basic realization that this is dazzlingly enormous, complex, multileveled universe. The Mind and Heart and Purpose of the Creator of countless galaxies are obviously very capacious indeed.

 
 
 
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