Leo Foresta

Part I: The subtle side of reality

Free from dogma

Spiritually advanced individuals don’t need an elaborate vision of existence. They are not obsessed with rationalising everything. They take the flow of life as it comes, experience intuitive guidance and have full trust in the universe.

Many of us, however, are caught in the net of conformist thinking invariably presented as rational, but in fact revolving around highly questionable theories.

If we step back and consider things from scratch, we have to admit that we “know” precious little. All we can say for sure is that something we can call “I” is partly conscious. Conscious of being. Conscious of experiencing sensations, emotions and thoughts. Conscious of the apparent existence of other creatures. And that… is about all we can say for sure. That is the “base line” of what “we know”. Anything beyond that base line is pure conjecture. Just hypotheses and beliefs. In other words is anybody’s guess.

Is it wise to accept as gospel society’s official guesses? Philosophy, science, religion; all rest on assumptions. And very narrow limitative assumptions at that. When you probe into them without any preconceived idea, they turn out to be surprisingly devoid of solid logical justification. And most people are completely unaware of these assumptions and of the extraordinary narrowing of perspective that they imply. In previous chapters we drew attention to the postulates implicit in official science, such as repeatability of phenomena, meaningful demarcations between domains, human scale of observation and absence of conscious intention. We questioned their logic and showed how they were used by rulers with an agenda of mind control to prevent potentially powerful ideas from being properly considered and researched.

In part two we shall take a fresh look at world history through to the present crisis and expose judgemental premises widely propagated in society: human primacy, individualism, competition, struggle for life, survival of the fittest…. None of these ideas can be justified. Yet all of them have been forced onto people’s minds as godly truths for generations. But if you leave these false hypotheses aside and consider humanity’s situation, you can see as clear as day light that attitudes and actions consistent with the dominant world view are no help at all. And not only are they no help and offer no solution, in fact they are the problem.

That is why we have to free ourselves from the dominant world view. If we take on board observations of the subtle side of existence a completely different perspective opens up. “All there is” appears as an infinite oneness endowed with energy, information and consciousness, with unlimited interactions, with no boundaries or separations. A continuum of infinite potentialities steeped in absolute love and harmony.

Do such assumptions “feel” right? If they do, that doesn’t “prove” anything, but it’s a signal that something within us, deep in our unconscious, profoundly likes these premises. That is not quite good enough, however. We need to test the coherence of such a tentative holistic world view.

From the widespread evidence of synchronicities we can be pretty confident that intent exists in the big all there is. But we don’t know who or what manifests intent: just our own higher self, the whole consciousness field or some godlike being?

Going back to the base line, in everyday life we tend to experience our “I” as separate from everything else. Can that be squared with the idea of oneness without boundaries and separations? This apparent paradox is worth serious consideration. Let’s begin by realising that our physical body isn’t as closed and separate as one usually imagines. We can all observe that our nails and hair retain roughly the same appearance even though they are actually renewed every so often. We know that dead skin is regularly replaced by new skin. In fact almost all types of cells within the body die and are replaced by new ones. And the human body contains many more cells belonging to guest microorganisms like bacteria and germs than cells that are actually part of the body. In other words, more than half of us, physically, is not “us” but a crowd of other creatures forming an eco-system within us. These creatures constantly exchange complex information between them and with our own body. Like our own cells they emit and receive electromagnetic fields and respond to chemical markers. The orchestration of the ballet of all cells – ours and our partners’ – is nothing short of miraculous. And the ballet is danced at a lower scale too. Atoms within living cells get replaced by other atoms of the same element, and the rates of replacement vary according to the elements and the types of cell. And things are even more in flux further down the scale ladder, in the realm of elementary particles. These, according to physics, are continually moving in a way that is beyond ordinary comprehension.

From all of this, one thing is clear: “I” can in any case not be regarded as a stable solid material entity. It looks more as if some piece of smart software ensures that ever changing elementary particles, atoms and cells keep reorganising themselves into something that is “I”. That smart software enables a complex eco-system of germs, enzymes, bacteria and human cells to live and thrive together through astoundingly clever exchanges of information involving electromagnetic signals and chemical flows. And the electro-magnetic fields involved are not only those produced by cells within our body but also those generated by planet earth or coming from the cosmos. So “I” is not closed and isolated, but is a totally open system, continually involved in myriads of interactions with the rest of the universe.

Let’s now consider the idea of absolute love and harmony in all there is. Why should we believe in absolute love? Partly because people who have been on the edge of death say that they could sense the power of love. Partly also because mystics who experienced transcendence reported being overwhelmed by total love. And mainly because it makes us feel warm and less fearful. A feeling that can’t be in our mind for no reason.

But we have to face the thorny issue of evil and suffering. The obvious existence of a dark side spoils the rosy picture of love and harmony. Or does it? Some traditions offer metaphors of light and darkness being inseparable. You wouldn’t see light if there was no darkness. And you wouldn’t recognise love, benevolence and joy if you hadn’t experienced nastiness and suffering. It is difficult and probably pointless to try and justify the dark side of existence. The fact is that it is all around (at least in human society) and we have to find some way to deal with it without losing faith in pure love and harmony. There is a dark side, we don’t know why, but it can be transcended.

We call it dark, and yet we don’t have to cast moral judgements, like most religious traditions do. There may well be dark entities floating in the big field of consciousness but we don’t need to label them “bad”, and regard them as enemy to be beaten off and rejected. Why not regard them as simply “misguided”, temporarily misaligned with Source, but still part of oneness, like everything else, and therefore worthy of love and compassion like any other creature or entity.

This idea isn’t a piece of gratuitous metaphysics. It is actually implicit in the very practical work of therapists applying spirit release on people suffering from unexplained serious mental or physical conditions. These practitioners operate differently from exorcists appointed by religious authorities who endeavour to get rid of entities in a confrontational mode. Spirit release therapists seek to free their patients from entities attached to them but they do it by encouraging the entities to move on towards the light, by giving them recognition, compassion and love. And the fact is they get effective results increasingly acknowledged by conventional psychotherapists. So the assumption of absolute love and harmony is actually consistent with experiential evidence.

Looking at existence from various angles it is clear that a holistic world view diametrically opposed to materialism is congruent with serious theories in different disciplines and consistent with a vast body of observations. But huge questions are left open that science cannot begin to answer. At some point we not only have to leave science, but give up linear step by step reasoning altogether to embrace pure holistic intuition. Given all the experiential evidence available such a move is totally rational.

Yet most of the scientific establishment refuse point blank to go down that path. Why? Frankly, how can pundits of official “rational thinking” maintain the charade of no intent in the universe, of things structuring themselves into plants, animals and humans through blind evolution guided by chance and soulless “laws” magically emerging from nowhere and remaining constant in all circumstances? How can official medicine sustain the fiction of the human body as a machine, a biological robot to be maintained against mechanical wear and tear and kept in hygienic conditions away from germs? How can intensive agriculture persist in treating soils and animals as mere mechanical and chemical throughput of crude industrial processes? There is so much clear evidence of the complete inadequacy of mainstream materialist thinking that the question arises of how that system of thought can still be embraced without shame and embarrassment by intelligent people in all positions right through to the top.

These people go about their lives trapped in the belief system society imposes on their minds. At times they may call intuition some emotional thought triggered by their ego, but such impulse has nothing to do with genuine connection to Source. Anyone who tries to run his life relying only on the dry reasoning intellect is lost. The contradictions and confusion of our visible world are simply insurmountable. What do you do when you’re lost? You turn to someone hoping he will show you the right way. And you follow. You follow because you think you have no choice.

Most people believe they have no choice. They live in confusion and fear. Mainly fear of death, i.e. of the end of their elusive personality and ego. They see harshness and dangers everywhere. When leaders promise some measure of protection they give them their total allegiance. And they stop thinking by themselves, save for trivialities. In their eyes the system must be right, because it is so strong. And their little “I” feels so weak. The system impresses by its power and appearance of knowledge. Institutions dispensing official knowledge are impressive. And their experts – scientists, doctors, psychologists, economists, lawyers, financiers…- are all intimidating.

If only more folks realised that most experts are probably intimidated themselves, but have learned not to let it appear too obvious. That is the social game which keeps the system in charge. At its summit you find characters whose mindset is totally geared to competition and very adept at disguising their fears. In their eyes any consideration of what makes sense, what is harmonious, what is kind, what is true, counts for very little. Various studies have suggested that a significant percentage of people at the top of the social and economic pyramid are psychopaths, i.e. individuals entirely focused on their own ego, with no empathy whatsoever for others or for anything alive. A possible metaphysical reason why psychopaths are found at the top of virtually every powerful organisation is that misguided entities have done a thorough job of infiltrating human minds and manipulating egos.

A number of people working in organisations where psychopaths occupy top positions tend to become what you might call secondary psychopaths. They weren’t natural psychopaths, but having to survive in an environment where psychopaths thrive, they become like them. They convince themselves that one has to cheat, conceal and manipulate in the competition game, and feel they simply have no option but to do it. Now and again we all display some psychopathic characteristics, because our egos are continually bounced, bruised and hardened by the competitive society. The result is that the pervasive vision of life as a hard struggle for survival appears corroborated by most people’s attitudes. And if you don’t go along with that vision and the sort of rash egotistic behaviour it implies you tend to be regarded as naïve and not to be trusted. With such social dynamics in full swing everywhere, opportunities for serenity and empathy are limited, and there is little room for connecting to Source.

Nevertheless, a significant undercurrent of awareness is growing today despite the conditioning and indoctrination forced on everyone by the system. And more and more people can see it and may be tempted to join the undercurrent. But a barrier of fear tends to stop many of them. Their minds are slaves of a system of thought. Deep down they may know that, and they probably know that the dominant system of though is fundamentally absurd, but that doesn’t give them quite enough courage to set themselves free.

That is about where we are collectively. A minority is very aware, capable of intuitive connection at times, and increasingly aligning their thoughts and actions with a vision of holistic consciousness. A wider group is the process of waking up, but the system is still too strong for them and still holds them in its grip. And the majority remains for the time being under the spell of the world’s rulers and of their way of thinking manipulated by invisible entities.

In this book we are going as far as we can with the rational argument exposing the flaws of materialist thinking and suggesting the merits of a holistic vision. But in the end rational argument is not what determines our beliefs, attachments and loyalties. Deep emotions, desires, fears, most of them hidden in the subconscious; that is what really moves or freezes the mind. But where do the memories of such emotions come from, where are they stored, how does our mind-body-soul system manage to retrieve them, often without our conscious knowing?

There is no clear cut answer to any of these questions. They touch on the very essence of the “I”. On the way the clever piece of software works that holds “I” together as an individual.

In the holistic vision we feel no anxiety to know the precise mechanics of “I”. It’s an open system interconnected with all there is. It is eternal, if that means anything given that the concept of time is probably a product of our narrow intellect.

To round off our exploration of the holistic world view we can take another look at this idea from fundamental physics that potentialities at sub-atomic level turn into actual occurrences only when an “observer” comes into play. At our level synchronicities, which we can all experience, are events with low and sometimes extremely low probabilities that nevertheless do occur and bring meaning to protagonists. And the so often observed law of attraction holds that events are prompted by thoughts and emotions of people concerned. Isn’t the connection with “potentialities” and “observer” at sub-atomic level rather uncanny?

In part II that follows we are going to use our fresh freedom of mind to take a critical look at history through to the current situation and examine the hidden mechanisms underlying humanity’s frantic race through the global crisis.

Copyright © Leo Foresta 2014