Choosing up sides

Some reflections on my travels during the Corona occupation and afterwards

It seems we are living in a time of extreme polarization. Republicans against Democrats, and generally a lot of right-shift everywhere, and everybody calling each other fascists or Nazis. Pro-Trumpers against never Trumpers, and pro- and anti-vaxx, with the interesting twist that the anti-vaxx movement seems to lean republican, but Trump has bought the story hook, line, and sinker, probably purely because they played into his vanity. Still it seems that with ongoing revelations, he might eventually realize that he was had. Certainly RFK Jr. is beginning to make his presence felt with increasing clarity. All at the same time we are still feeling the effects of the Pluto-return in the chart of the US, with the ongoing revelations, and uncovering of abuse scandals, in the medical arena, in government, as well as celebrity scandals. There seems to be no end in sight. We are constantly being challenged to choose up sides, and cancel culture reigns supreme, with amazing twists at time when people are on opposite sides of different issues, and agree on one but not on another. Then what do you do? Maybe one option is to not take it so seriously.

The whole Corona occupation was a huge JAFO for me - Just Another Forgiveness Opportunity - with the ongoing realization that the answers are never in the pairs of opposites, and that truth is always the silent third in any binary decision scenario. In actual practice, sometimes you can feel that when for a moment you might feel relief that some extreme situation is getting resolved, but then soon thereafter you start feeling as if the pendulum has swung too far.

I feel immense gratitude for the people whose clear mindedness helped me see through the mess fairly quickly, but still it hit me like a ton of bricks when I looked out my window in the early days of the lockdowns, and my street reminded me of my native Holland under German occupation in World War II. I may not have lived through it personally, but I grew up around the stories, and movies were coming out about the experience.

Once the data from the Diamond Princess came out, I realized it was nowhere near as serious as it was made out to be, and I told friends that if in that kind of a confined environment only 17% of people “caught it,” and only a few older people died, it could not be all that contagious. Then I stumbled into the early articles of John Ioannidis, which confirmed my skepticism, and I was able to talk some friends down from their fear reactions by just using the numbers, but all around us the media were fanning the flames, and it was hard to hang on to common sense. I had always had my doubts about the notion of contagion, realizing that you first had to be susceptible, and that if you were in reasonably good health, that was the first step towards avoiding serious issues. Fortunately the American College of Lifestyle medicine posted an excellent information page about the nutritional approach to the issue, though they later took it down, but then Dr. Nandita Shah of Sharan, India posted her excellent video of how to recover from Covid, essentially without any allopathic medicines, but all natural methods, based on a deep understanding of how the body heals itself. Then came the vaccine scam.

That it was a scam was clear to me very soon, once I realized that the definition of vaccine had to be changed in order to sell this one, not to mention developing a vaccine takes 10 years or more, not 10 months. That did not sound kosher to me. By the time it came rolling around, I had not yet had Covid, but I figured I was low risk, following a fairly healthy diet, and having no meaningful comorbidities, for it was already clear that the deaths were among older folk with multiple comorbidities, and when I had something that was diagnosed as “Covid,” I was over it in five days, without meds, just lots of liquids, stupid TV, and a lot of rest. All of which reinforced my convictions that it was mostly a non-issue, and that the vaccines were a gamble with more risk than benefit. But in Democratic NYC, the pressure was enormous.

I tried my best to stay calm myself, and occasionally to try to calm down some worried friends, but the world around me was clearly mad. From the outset, I was a natural skeptic, but I also began to follow the discussions that were going on and some of the people who were instrumental in maintaining some common sense in spite of all the craziness, were John Ioannidis, who I mentioned above, but then Sucharit Bhakdi, Paul Frijters, Denis Rancourt, Mike Yeadon, Reiner Füllmich, Sam Bailey, and her husband Mark, and over time many others, including Suzanne Humphreys, Jesssica Rose, John Beaudoin Sr., Peter Breggin, Karen Kingston, and many, many others. It was a relief any time these people spoke up, but still, even there it was not always peaceful, for there was the virus/no-virus debate that split the community. It never ends.

I started writing a column on America Out Loud that started with my take on an apparent misunderstanding in a conversation between Dr. Peter Breggin and Prof. Mattias Desmet. Desmet was evidently trying to talk about the latent content, and Breggin was sticking to the manifest content of the story, and they talked right past each other. The column developed into a wide ranging exploration of health and healing, not to mention healthcare reform. I cycled back regularly to the vaccine issue, and then recently, the entire vaccine idea seems to be up for discussion and one of the significant issues is autism and vaccination as the likely cause. This is now starting to get serious attention. Here are links to some of my recent articles:

• https://www.americaoutloud.news/the-theory-behind-vaccination-is-fatally-flawed/

• https://www.americaoutloud.news/reframing-an-entire-paradigm/

• https://www.americaoutloud.news/dont-eat-eggs-mr-kafka/

• https://www.americaoutloud.news/love-is-all-you-need/

• https://www.americaoutloud.news/not-enough-scientific-research-autism-truth-heals/

• https://www.americaoutloud.news/autism-a-hindu-view-with-an-anthroposophical-flourish/

• https://www.americaoutloud.news/anthroposophy-and-autism-nirupama-raos-journey/

• https://www.americaoutloud.news/the-vaxx-autism-nexus-is-beginning-to-be-taken-seriously/

And I’ve had some interesting, mostly private reactions as a result, including another case of a non-speaking autistic child, who can read minds at least with his mother, and also with animals, who seek him out if they need help. I have been listening to the Telepathy Tapes and the Talk Tracks extensively. What comes through is that the world is not in touch with the kind of model of the mind that is familiar to me through my studies of non-dualistic traditions, which has focused primarily on A Course in Miracles for the last 30 years. Certain personal experiences have underscored the oneness of the mind for me, and made it tangible. Even the ego, which sees itself as many, but it is one in the end. There is only one mind.

One Mind and the “para-normal”

Within the metaphysics that ACIM proposes, it may be easier to understand certain para-normal skills, including savant skills. I will try to provide a short version here, just enough to address this issue. Fundamentally only oneness is real, it is all there is. “maniness” is Maya, is a psychotic state, is a dream reality, rooted in the mistaken thought that I could separate from God, and start my own show. Think of the evil spirit telling Jesus: My name is legion, for we are many - that is the ego speaking. To quote the Course:

²Into eternity, where all is one, there crept a tiny, mad idea, at which the Son of God remembered not to laugh. ³In his forgetting did the thought become a serious idea, and possible of both accomplishment and real effects. ⁴Together, we can laugh them both away, and understand that time cannot intrude upon eternity. ⁵It is a joke to think that time can come to circumvent eternity, which means there is no time. (ACIM, T-27.VIII.6:2-5)

Our problem thus is silly beyond description, it is not having a strange idea, it is taking it seriously. Had we cracked up at the silliness of the idea, we would have avoided a lot of hassle.

In practice, you can see how we spend our time in chasing windmills, particularly when we are all taken with some idea of doing “good,” which to all intents and purposes is always imbued with a glory role for my ego. For if we identify with the ego, which is our false self, and not who we are in truth, we need to keep a double-entry bookkeeping system to demonstrate to the world that we are real. Let’s just take the Covid vaccines as an example. Taking a vaccine in the first place is entirely and ego thing, for it is born from the belief that I am just a body, subjected to the threats of a hostile universe, that is run by a dualistic God, who we have blamed for creating the world per the creation stories, and we think we may mollify him and escape his wrath by sacrificing a little now, while we are well, to avoid an imaginary illness we may or may not get later. In other words, take a little poison now, to prevent the off-chance we get the disease later. We trade certain harm now, in order to avoid an imaginary, but uncertain harm later. It is completely psychotic behavior.

No wonder that, with the very obvious harm of this particular vaccine, questions arose. And more and more people woke up and spoke up. It is really hard to believe how the world has stuck to this germ theory of disease, even though its originator, Louis Pasteur, dismissed the theory at the end of his life, when he said: Le microbe n’est rien, le terrain est tout. (The germ is nothing, the terrain is everything.) Thereby he conceded to his opposite number, Antoine Béchamp, who thought terrain theory was a better model, in other words, the infections were opportunistic occurrence and were symptomatic of the underlying unhealthy conditions in the “terrain,” the body. In other words, there are sick people, but there are not diseases to be fought.

Every time we fight imaginary conditions, those are Don Quijote’s wind mills. I have struggled with this a lot in my admiration for the people who had the courage to stand up to the general madness of this vaccination, which clearly was going to do more harm than good. Biology 101 would tell you that. But our politicians and our medical establishment all have a stake in maintaining the model, so they were shouting “safe and effective,” like so many Jim Joneses, in a repetition of Jonestown in Washington, DC and soon thereafter in theaters all across the country and the world. And people drank the Kool-Aid, for they all bought into the delusion. If nothing else, the fact that countries with low vaccination rates made out better, proved that the vaccines were nothing but a sort of a limited self-immolation.

Once you start seeing the madness for what it is, you then join the opposition, for we want to prevent the repetition of such a horrible event, but if you pay attention, you notice that this is just the same thing in reverse. With good intentions, but pointless nevertheless. Paraphrasing JWK, in any binary choice, the truth is always the silent third.
Keith Kavanagh is a student of Ken Wapnick, who was also my primary teacher of ACIM, and in the following video he shares how he was dealing with anxiety, and how the process of forgiveness of the Course, which ultimately means disengaging from the false meaning of our thoughts led him to freedom from anxiety (and more). The monkey-mind (the thoughts you think you think, but which are not your real thoughts, as per the Course) is anchored in duality, and as long as we buy into duality we are buying into the ego, maintaining the choices within the pairs of opposites as true choices validates the false self as a real actor in a real world, but which is all fictitious.
The Course shows us the way out, and Keith explains it masterfully in this video - there is a door in the mind that we can access if we wave the clouds of obfuscation aside which are the ego. In other words, we can learn to bypass the binary choices. Experientially, it always seems to me that the tipoff of their unreality is that moment when you notice that the pendulum is swinging too far the other way, and it is good to listen to that discomfort and to realize that there must be another way. Listen to Keith explaining it:

Within the one mind, we can sort of intuit how in the case of incomplete individuation there could be simply a failure to develop some skills, and an increase in developing certain other skills, such as telepathy, or mind reading, and savant skills. It is all possible for in the one mind it all exists simultaneously. At the time of my final exam, I would read Plato in Greek between exams so as not to have to talk to nervous class mates, and my mind could wander to Plato’s academy, and twenty five years later, Ken and Gloria Wapnick launched the academy classes at their Foundation for A Course in Miracles in Roscoe, New York, and once again I could drift off to Plato’s academy - the Course is very Platonic in concept.

Vaccination and the Gestalt of Autism

In my recent columns on America Out Loud, I have been exploring the gestalt of vaccination, and the gestalt of autism, and maybe through writing it is becoming somewhat clearer to me. At the end of the day, the movie you’re watching is the world and your own life in it. The world we see is our projection, that is the direct result of seeing ourselves as a separated self. So we are always watching the ego at work. In the Gita, the conversation is between Arjuna and Krishna, on his war chariot before engaging the battle on the battlefield of Kurushetra. Ken Wapnick always spoke of watching the play from the balcony with Jesus next to you, or simply sitting in the movie theater with Jesus at your side, so we can ask him to look at it like he does. We are simply the hero of our own dream (as per the title of Section VIII of Chapter 27 in the text of ACIM), and we have the option of completely identifying with the character on the stage or the screen, or stepping back and looking at the scene with Jesus, and instead of following the ego’s judgments to let him guide us, and disengage from the action.

In terms of vaccination, I had an MD father who did not believe in the vaccination paradigm and was pretty clear that it would cause more problems than it solved. I remember once asking him why the vaccinated kids were sick all the time, when I was about 8 years old, so in the late fifties. Now we know, thanks to the work of Dr. Paul Thomas and many others that this is normally the case. The unvaccinated kids are generally healthier than their vaccinated peers.

The concept of vaccination always reminds me of a saying of my maternal grandfather: … therefore man suffers most from the suffering he fears. Mutatis mutandis, this means that we fear a future illness, which is based on a probability (fictional, and which we usually over-estimate) and in order to prevent this imaginary problem in an imaginary future, we convince ourselves to make a small sacrifice today, by putting some poison in our body. In other words, again, this is all completely psychotic behavior, for none of it is real. But the adverse reactions come fairly promptly, including death, numerous health problems, including autism.

Here by the way are some of the more excellent recent reviews of the field of autism from substack.

Mapping the entire field of autism causation studies in one article

Unraveling Autism’s Surge

While it obviously is important that this research be done honestly, I am focused more on the overall Gestalt of vaccination and autism. My own view of the gestalt of autism has become that it is a form of PTSD, as expressed above. When we choose to experience an ego lifetime, we enter into a game in which we take our own existence as a separated individual seriously, and we (the mind) project a body on the one hand, who plays my role on the stage, and a world as the stage in which we play that role. The fundamental issue of the ego-self is guilt for if we exist, that proves we have shattered the oneness of God and Heaven, and imagine God is now angry with us. The Course teaches that the world was made as an attack on God. It is critical to understand that.

2. The world was made as an attack on God. ²It symbolizes fear. ³And what is fear except love’s absence? ⁴Thus the world was meant to be a place where God could enter not, and where His Son could be apart from Him. ⁵Here was perception born, for knowledge could not cause such insane thoughts. ⁶But eyes deceive, and ears hear falsely. ⁷Now mistakes become quite possible, for certainty has gone. (ACIM, W-pII.3.2:1-7)

In this world we constantly project our guilt onto others. That is the game: we start out thinking we are a victimizer (destroyer of Heaven), which we repress instantly and now imagine ourselves a victim, and an angry God has it in for us. We flee the mind by now making up a body and a world, where we can hide from God, and we see reflections of ourselves in a myriad of variations, all ego’s imagining they are alive in the world. The only good thing about it is that when we project our issues onto the screen, we can see what they are, and change our mind about them, which is what the Course’s forgiveness process entails. All of this is merely an hallucination, the world and the body are projections in the mind, resulting from the separation thought. Since we’re on the topic of the Course, Gary Renard has just produced a free 16-page introduction to the Course, based on the introduction to his 4th book, The Lifetimes when Jesus and Buddha Knew Each Other.

Our role as victims in this world, begins by us being the perfect little victims, babies, conceived through no fault of their own, in a hostile world. In our role as victims, we need enemies, so we dream them up as well:

A brother separated from yourself, an ancient enemy, a murderer who stalks you in the night and plots your death, yet plans that it be lingering and slow; of this you dream. ²Yet underneath this dream is yet another, in which you become the murderer, the secret enemy, the scavenger and the destroyer of your brother and the world alike. ³Here is the cause of suffering, the space between your little dreams and your reality. ⁴The little gap you do not even see, the birthplace of illusions and of fear, the time of terror and of ancient hate, the instant of disaster, all are here. ⁵Here is the cause of unreality. ⁶And it is here that it will be undone. (ACIM, T-27.VII.12:1-6)

We constantly project out that others betray us, which validates our victim role, and one particular version of the victim role is surely that the parents who were supposed to love us, hand us off to some cult priest (we call them doctors), who performs a satanic ritual on them, vaccination. The parents are acting in good faith for they are member of the cult. Sensitive children may experience this as an attack, and autism may then be seen as a form of PTSD, particularly because this ritual is repeated numerous times, so the traumatization is repeated numerous times before the child grows up. The symptoms include a lack of motor control, which the anthroposophists read as a disrupted integration of the physical and etherial bodies, and that concept makes some sense.

To continue this analogy a bit further, we now have a form of SRA (Satanic Ritual Abuse), which is performed on children numerous times while growing up, starting before they can speak for themselves. No wonder some of them become non-speakers. The cult is one that nobody would join voluntarily, for the vaccination produces endless medical problems which make the subjects customers for life of a system that started out by injecting them with poison, but since everyone buys into it, nobody sees anything wrong with it. But this cumulative trauma is the induction ceremony, and some sensitive kids bail out in the form of autism.

However, if we consider that the mind is one, and we are really nothing more than a multiple personality disorder that is having a conversation with itself, which we call our life in this world, then we see that some people simply did not fully complete the process of individuation, and they may not have developed certain social skills, ranging from bodily control to speaking ability. But, maybe not that surprisingly, they do develop certain other skills. Not having words as a distraction, maybe they now have the ability to read minds, and this has the advantage that they can also read minds and screen people for intent, simply locking out people that do not respect them.

⁹Let us not forget, however, that words are but symbols of symbols. ¹⁰They are thus twice removed from reality. (ACIM, M-21.1:9-10)

Among us ‘voice users,’ as we are sometimes referred to by the non-speakers, our words may provide cover for our intentions, even if it is well-intended, like a white lie. To them it does not work that way, for with direct mind reading there is no way to isolate or hide the intention. It is all right there.

The underlying psychotic belief, germ theory, can also be easily understood, for once we think we are a separated individual, enemies prove our reality. A virus is kind of an ideal enemy, for they are too small to see, nobody can prove they exist. Their reality is maintained purely by the psychotic need to see them. The opportunities for projecting guilt are too numerous to mention, we can project guilt onto the virus now, if we are sick with an infectious disease, and we can blame the kids, or the neighbors, or colleagues at work for transmitting the virus, or at the very least we can project a future threat, and we can blame the doctor for the adverse effects of the vaccines, and later the adverse effects of the medications, on and on, this is the gift that keeps on giving, we have an endless supply of black jacks to go around for what this is, is truly a game of black jack. Parents can blame each other for the decision to vaccinate or not to vaccinate. Or if vaccines are not involved, they can blame each other’s genes if they have any kind of a special needs child. Too often these situation have led to divorce.

In short, the whole scenario is full of opportunities to blame people, which is that the ego wants, as long as we are engaged in that game we have no time to be who and what we really are. But in the Course, Jesus teaches us over and over again:

³I am not a body. ⁴I am free.
⁵For I am still as God created me. (ACIM, W-rVI.in.3:3-5)

And every new JAFO is just another chance to come closer to that realization, for the truth has never wavered, even if we are having a nightmare. Eventually, we will wake up.

You are at home in God, dreaming of exile but perfectly capable of awakening to reality. ²Is it your decision to do so? ³You recognize from your own experience that what you see in dreams you think is real while you are asleep. ⁴Yet the instant you waken you realize that everything that seemed to happen in the dream did not happen at all. ⁵You do not think this strange, even though all the laws of what you awaken to were violated while you slept. ⁶Is it not possible that you merely shifted from one dream to another, without really waking? (ACIM, T-10.I.2:1-6)