Deceptive Circuits and Honest Cycles: Conspiracies and Qi Gong

It's been a while since I've posted here and I feel like rambling for a bit and we'll see how that goes. What's on my mind at the moment, lying at the center of a spectrum of other issues, is the central yin-yang like duality of the Truth and the Lie. It underlies everything in our existence, a shifting matrix of gradual contradiction and periodic correction, continually reconfiguring our world into new images. Of course a yin-yang, as fantastic an image as it might be isn't necessarily the best image to use for the process, really you have to picture a nested hierarchy of cycles, for some lies are larger than others just as some truths are more profound, and are exposed with lesser frequency - and greater consequence - than their more trifling, little white kin.

I'm sure anyone reading this can think of several examples of what I'm talking about here, both within the wider world and in their own personal experience. Perhaps a lie we ourselves fabricated and spread, or a lie fabricated by another that we believed, and sometimes no doubt a little of both because after all, doesn't all lying involve a little self-deception? There are numerous motives to lie, though all ultimately come down to the desirability of wielding some sort of power over others. It is in the nature of a lie, after all, to centralize information within a limited sphere, and thus through deception to alter the perception of reality which is almost, but crucially not quite the same thing as reality. Information is power: allowed to flow and it becomes a current, bottle it up, however, and gain potential.

The temptation to use a lie to gain power is therefore quite great, and we might naturally assume some lies to be greater and more powerful than others. The bigger the lie, the longer it would take to be perceived, the larger the numbers deceived, and thus the more potent the power derived. Most lies of course are small, benefiting perhaps only a single individual's marital infidelity and affecting only those in his immediate family (as well of course as secondary and tertiary consequences in those affected by the actions arising out of the neuroses of any children, due to their home being broken, assuming of course the affair is eventually revealed.)

What's in the brackets there really gets to the crux of the whole lie vs truth thing, because the problem with a lie is that when it runs into the truth it tends to be negated, along with everything directly connected with it. Lies can be used to build things: returning to the image of the electric circuit, a lie acting as a battery can drive a circuit. The larger the potential, the greater and more complex the circuit that can be driven off of it. Maintaining the potential requires keeping the negative charge out of contact with the positive; however, in order to provide a source for the current, some contact must be allowed. It is this fundamental issue that consumes both electrical engineers and conspirators: not enough contact between the poles, and the circuit will not run; too much, and it shorts out.

Of course in one case we're talking electricity and in the other we're talking a fundamental element of consciousness. Discerning falsity from truth, T from F, 0 from 1 is really what consciousness is all about, even at such a simple level as, is something in one place, and not another? You can draw parallels with this process right down to the subatomic scale and I don't think this precise metaphorical mapping is at all an accident though this essay, right now, isn't the place to go into that. Right now I'd like to talk about another similarity, one between the logarithmic scale on which lies make a perfectly straight power law distribution, and the idea of fractal cycles of nested time.

Daily rotations of the earth, cycles of the moon, the motions of the Earth and other planets about the Sun, precession, and the orbit of the Sun within the galaxy combine to make a nested hierarchy of cyclic time that uses natural rhythms of the cosmos to map time on various scales. You could go in the other direction, too, and derive time using the same principles from the vibratory motion of atoms, providing a comprehensive map of time at every scale. Many modern thinkers have suggested that there are direct correlations between time and human consciousness, pointing to the rise and fall of empires, civilizations, and even civilization itself as resulting from the influence of various cyclic effects. This suggests of course that there would have been previous civilizations, arising during previous cycles and interestingly enough as the 21st century has progressed evidence of these has turned up at sites around the world.

Now, if there were to be a connection between cyclic time (and all time, ultimately, is based on cycles) and cycles within human consciousness and civilization, what sort of stares at me in the middle of all that, pulling the two together and uniting them as one is the dynamic between truth and lie. The larger the lie, the longer the cycle; the greater its power, the more its consequences when the truth negates it. The greater the negating truth, the longer its calming effect ... until some time later, another lie, large enough to again displace the truth, comes sidling up and into people's minds.

One of the reason's the whole 'cyclic time' idea is becoming so fashionable these days is that we're at the transition point for a whole lot of cycles. A lot of people are sensing this and it's showing up in our personal lives and in world events: human consciousness mirroring the cosmic cycles that gave rise to it. Right now is a pretty special time: with the flow of information within the circuit of human consciousness at such massive levels, it's become impossible for the truth to be entirely bottled up. The only way to keep the current from shorting out is to make sure there's plenty of distractions around, so that what grains of real truth escape are protected by obscurity. Still, that's an imperfect defense, and as events proceed ... the current rises ... the flux increases ... and more and more of the circuits 'short out'. More people have a run-in with enough truth that they stop being useful to the wider system, because they've started questioning everything about it and these days, once you go looking for truth you're bound to come across it.

The problem of course is that a system that's been built to run on lies can't run anymore when the lies are exposed. That needn't be the case but it's the situation we find ourselves in now and perhaps, it's been that situation for a very, very long time which again of course brings us back to the idea of cycles of time. Some lies, after all, are very much older than others.

This explains, of course, the massive growth in the conspiracy movement for a conspiracy, after all, is nothing more than a group agreeing to lie together, and very often of course to lie a great deal to one another as well which is what things like initiations and security clearances and need-to-know are all about. Any lie, if the truth is to be known by more than a single individual, must become a conspiracy to survive and given the way in which lies pervade our shared cognitive world (advertising, propaganda, victor's history, religious manipulation, censorship, faked research, secret research, fraud, to name but a few examples) we might reasonably expect conspiracies to be similarly pervasive. In fact to anyone who bothers to look it becomes obvious quite soon that there are quite vast conspiracies operating today that have exerted great influence over the course of human history for periods reaching perhaps in some rare (or at any rate particularly deep) cases back for thousands of years. As but one example, the Catholic church might be seen as a conspiracy on the part of the Roman Empire to extend its domination to the level of the soul and thus obviate the need for legions, a conspiracy that itself drew on magicoreligious mind control techniques (an old an sophisticated form of conspiracy) pioneered in Egypt and Babylon.

I am not saying that there is one, overarching conspiracy that guides the whole of the world. Some are larger than others and many larger conspiracies contain smaller ones (the CIA is a fine example of this), of which the wider conspiracy remains ignorant. Thus, it is certainly not my suggestion that there is some singular Conspiracy that wields overwhelming control, for that is not the case, and as often as not one conspiracy is in conflict with the interests of another. And yet a great deal of what overt control does exist, exists due to conspiracies ... conspiracies that become more easily exposed every day, in less time and to more people ... and those whose minds are touched by a few encounters, grow more sensitized to subsequent run-ins.

So when things like swine flu happen, it's no surprise that for a lot of us, the very first instinct we had was to suspect a conspiracy, and sure enough the warning shout of 'bioweapon!' has been heard across the internet.

These are dark, doom-laden times we live in. The economy is an ongoing train wreck in slow motion, the globe teeters on the brink of a war more catastrophic than any in history, the biosphere is stretched to the breaking point and the Earth herself shudders as though in sympathy. Yet at the middle of that we find that our species is being confronted all at once with the truth about all of the lies we've been telling ourselves, individually for our whole lives or just a few years, collectively for our entire history or perhaps, only since 9/11. It's in the nature of a lie that when it comes down, its collapse is catastrophic for everything connected with it and that, I think, explains a lot of what's happening now.

Of course it doesn't have to be this way. It never did. At any moment we always have the choice of telling the truth, or continuing the lie ... even if it's just telling the truth to ourselves, and ceasing to believe a lie that we've swallowed. That choice is always present, and sadly few take it with any regularity but, that could change. It really could. It's as easy as telling the truth, starting right now.

There's something interesting going on in China right now, symbolic perhaps of the whole theme of this essay. When one thinks of China these days, one imagines giant sweatshops, rank upon rank of identical residential towers housing standardized workers, spirits broken through decades of ruthless Communist party suppression (and lets not forget to the Communist Party, one of history's great conspiracies.) Whatever comes out of China seems to be tainted, whether it's baby formula or children's toys, as though they cannot help but export back some of the pollution engendered by their pursuit of one lie (limitless growth) in exchange for another (fiat currency.) This is no accident; from the fruits shall ye know the tree, and China's been planting its orchards in some pretty rotten soil, recently.

I'm sure, however, that you've also heard of Falun Gong, the dissident movement that, for a decade now, the Communist Party has done everything in its power to stamp out. The Falun Gong are a loose-knit crew, united only by their practice of the Qi Gong (or Falun Dafa) energy discipline and their following of the short text spiritual text Zhuan Falun, authored in 1994 by Li Hongzhi. The movement's central tenets are Truthfulness, Compassion and Forebearance (their characters, 真，善，忍, shown above) and it's due to their cleaving to that first principle that the government, it seems, has taken such a dislike to them and invented, just for them, things like the death-bed, a modern innovation on the good old medieval rack. I myself just found out about this new innovation in torture whilst searching for a picture to illustrate this point and ... something else that struck me, was that all the pictures that came up were re-enactments. No doubt the government claims that these wild tales are all overly exaggerated, even flagrantly fabricated but ... then we come running up against that Truthfulness thing and really, do you think such people would lie about these things?

Of course, such people must be persecuted. For how useful is a woman who has made truth a pillar of her life, to a system of control based on manipulation through lies? Ultimately, force must be used instead, in such a case ... but even the most brutal of regimes prefers to minimize physical violence, expensive and inefficient as it is, and so any movement towards a general truthfulness amongst the controlled population must be stopped.

Of course, history teaches that such a movement is simply made stronger on its own persecution, and that remains the fact today. According to the Chinese government's own statistics, the number of Falun Gong practitioners is currently between 75 million and 100 million people. The latter estimate edges up on 10% of their total population. Now, you might argue that the government is inflating the numbers in order to justify their own continued crackdown, but you might also argue that their downplaying the true extent of their problem, in order to make the situation seem better than it is to the global investment class to which they owe fealty. Either way it seems apparent that there are a very large number of individuals in China who have dedicated themselves to truth, compassion, and forbearance.

How useful do you think they will prove as soldiers?

Well, that seems like a good note to leave off on for today. Light at the end of the tunnel, or just the bright circle in the big patch of yin, either way it is darkest before the dawn but even in the blackest of nights the light remains, if you look for it, for there must always be the seeds for the rebirth of the next cycle and those are everywhere you care to see them.