World Trade Center 'Twin Towers' skyscrapers, the first buildings in history to mostly turn to dust and blow away in the wind
Almost the same month my friend was born, the book Be Here Now came into my life and this is when my spiritual journey started. There have been many twists and turns. This series of letters started with his questions about astral travel, as well as Nisargadatta and Ramana Maharshi, two of my favorite guru-type personalities. I don't know much about astral travel, but I can easily dive into Nisargadatta and Ramana. I took a long route to steer my letters to what you will read below.
September 11, 2015
Dear Friend,
Ramana Maharshi and Nisargardatta Maharaj provided primarily positive avenues to spiritual seekers. They pointed out goals. Without the sense that we have somewhere or something to aspire to, there will be no genuine interest or effort.But UG Krishnamurti and Gurdjieff provided what could be termed 'negative' avenues. They pointed out what keeps us from achieving our goals. They pointed out the walls of our prison. They were unlimited cynics. With Gurdjieff being more astute than UG, he was even more the cynic. Well, maybe not. You judge for yourself.Gurdjieff
It's easy to have a positive outlook and always sugar-coat everything. Everyone will love you, but to point out the problems seems more pragmatic. We need to learn from our errors in judgment, our mistakes, otherwise we keep repeating them endlessly. Pointing out the negative path is more often than not a thankless task. When you point out the negative, or something off-base, fringe, you generally lose friends, it isolates you from people, it labels you a freak. So, I generally never say what is really on my mind. My opportunities to speak openly are almost zero. Closet homosexuals have nothing on me.
However, I have pointed out the negative path to you. You have used the phrases, "This horrible world" and "we are all so ridiculous," to echo my sentiment. This also allows me to keep writing, but I also have this dread that I will go too far.
In his book Life is Real Only Then, When 'I am' Gurdjieff writes:"This other newly arisen aim of my inner world was summed up in this: that I must discover, at all costs, some manner or means for destroying in people the predilection for suggestibility which causes them to fall easily under the influence of 'mass hypnosis'."I consider this to be essential Gurdjieff, his primary motive, his mission statement, to remove from us the burden of our propensity to be so easily swayed to believe a hundred thousand lies passed on to us by those who came before us and manipulated into us by the current culture.
Some of Gurdjieff's methods to lift the veil of "mass hypnosis" is to learn the distinction between what is real (objective) and what is make-believe (subjective), to be aware of how easily we respond to authority figures, to be aware of all the influences that make us believe what we believe and do what we do, to be cautious of our natural tendency as humans to trust each other, to be aware that our minds are so imaginative that it can provide illusory explanations for anything to support our beliefs or our actions.
These methods include the study of ourselves, our culture, our world, our universe. It also includes gaining a perspective of what is important and what is not. It is the acquiring of as much 'objective' knowledge as you can and sifting out the 'subjective' knowledge.
In William Patrick Patterson's recent book Georgi Ivanovitch Gurdjieff, Gurdjieff discusses authority:"Let me explain the hypnotic influence. There is an undesirable quality in everybody and that is authority - "Looking to authority" - is the term - "Reliance on authority." The self reliance which varies according to the individual is due to preconceived notions which are within us, and which are linked up with faith and belief.From the book Views from the Real World, Early Talks of Gurdjieff:
Authority that comes into you from without is erroneous. This error acts as a lever which pulls the machine, making it work wrong, perpetuating the error, and you cannot, having these erroneous conceptions, get rid of this until you have freed yourself from relying on external authority." [page 137]"Man knows nothing, he lives under authority, he accepts and believes all influences. We know nothing. We fail to differentiate when a man is speaking on a subject he really knows, and when he is talking nonsense - we believe it all. We have nothing of our own; everything that we put in our pocket is not our own - and on the inside, we have nothing.In the collection of transcripts, Twelve Meetings in Paris, 1941-44, Gurdjieff says:
Always everything influences us. Every thought, feeling, movement is a result of one or another influence. Everything we do, all our manifestations are what they are because something influences us from without...""You believe. You must never believe. You must criticize everything, accept nothing which you cannot prove. Believing does not count, it is worth nothing."Again in Twelve Meetings in Paris, 1941-44, while the Nazi's were patrolling the streets outside, Gurdjieff said:"You must trust no one, neither sister nor brother. You must be sincere with yourself. .... This sincerity (with another) is a disease."From William Patrick Patterson's Georgi Invanovitch Gurdjieff [page 270]:"Gurdjieff tells him [Fritz Peters] that he assumes that anyone he meets is good, honest, upright, and so forth. So, when he learned the truth about people, he becomes disillusioned. This attitude is a long, slow and improper process.21 types of idiots
Gurdjieff says:You must learn to look right side up. Every person you see, including yourself, is shit. You learn this and then when you find something good in such shit people - some possibility not to be shit - you will have two things: you will feel good inside when you learn this person better than you think, and you will also have made proper observation. Just so, when you can observe self, if you already think self is all shit then when see something good in self will be able to recognize all once and will also feel joy."
Perhaps another way to say "everyone is shit" is calling everyone, without exception, an idiot. From Bob Hunter's The Tyrant Within, we read:Gurdjieff once explained, "Everyone is Idiot, even God. But when these Idiots see another who is another kind of Idiot from themselves, they become angry and curse him. This is very characteristic of these Idiots. Now compassionate means that among this company can sometimes exist Idiots who know that all are Idiots together so they pity all and not become angry. These are Compassionate Idiots. I am Unique Idiot so I am no more this Idiot Compassionate."William P. Patterson describes 'The Science of Idiotism' in his book Ladies of the Rope:"Saturday evenings [at the Prieuré] there would be communal Turkish baths first for men and then the women, followed by a feast and ritual toasting of the Idiots.Collectively, these Gurdjieff quotes leave me panting. Maybe Gurdjieff goes overboard here?
Referred to as ′The Science of Idiotism′, Gurdjieff maintained that this was an initiate ritual that had been practiced for 4,500 years and expressed the secrets of the inner life of Man. It was never to be practiced apart from the sacramental meal and always with alcohol, never wine.
The ritual itself was simple. At the beginning of the meal, the Director proposed a toast, 'To the health of all Ordinary Idiots'. If a person was present who had chosen or been designated as an Ordinary Idiot, the Director added, 'And to your health also', saying the name of the person. Letting a few minutes go by, the Director then proposed a second toast, 'To the health of all Super Idiots', and so on."
There are 21 different Idiots with Gurdjieff being number 18.
These were:Idiots 17-21 constituted a spiritual hierarchy, reflecting progressive gradations of objective reason.
- Ordinary Idiot
- Super Idiot
- Arch Idiot
- Hopeless Idiot
- Compassionate Idiot
- Squirming Idiot
- Square Idiot
- Round Idiot
- Zigzag Idiot
- Enlightened Idiot
- Doubting Idiot
- Swaggering Idiot
- Born Idiot
- Patented Idiot
- Psychopathic Idiot
- Polyhedral Idiot
Idiot 18 presented the highest development which a human being could reach, but in order to attain it, he had first voluntarily to descend again from 17 to 1, the ordinary idiot. The movements of the Idiots was not forward but backward from the Idiot they chose to Ordinary Idiot. The reason was that only in the recognition of one′s nothingness could there be true development toward consciousness and conscience.
Idiots 19 and 20 were reserved for the sons of God.
Idiot 21 is the Unique Idiot (God himself being the Unique idiot)But isn't it interesting that, of all the common spiritual practices, the various yogas and the spiritual literature, that very few, almost none, address these issues of humanity being under a hypnosis, having false beliefs, the need to discern truth from lies and the importance of self-reliance and evidence when it comes to understanding and knowledge?The entirely accurate [psychopathic] Idiot persona of George W. Bush on the morning of 9/11
It seems obvious to me, at this point in life, that to have beliefs that are fantasies, to trust people who are blind, to follow leaders whose only interest is their self-interest, are obvious and enormous impediments to any spiritual progress.
Now, a few comments on the above quotes...
Authoritarianism
I think of you as having an anti-authoritarian streak in you, so I imagine you nodding your head in agreement to much of this. You may never get much in the way of approval for your past 'independent' behavior, so, at least you have it here. Whatever your problems are, take solace that you have more of a mind of your own than most.
There has been a lot of good stuff written about authoritarians and authoritarian followers. Bob Altemeyer is excellent. The Milgram experiment is also a talking point.
Here is an example from my life:
Almost the same day that I graduated from high school I was called in by the Selective Service System to take a physical at some federal building in downtown Cleveland. They were sifting people to determine potential candidates to draft in the gearing-up of the Vietnam War. I went willingly. I followed all their orders, along with 50 or 100 other guys my age. We stood in line, marched in step, we did left turns, about faces, bent over, took off our clothes and stood naked, all without a hitch. It was as if we just joined the army and they were about to shave our heads; there was never a whimper. I'm sure the privates ordering us around, who may have been only a year or two older than us, were foaming at the mouth that they had so much power over us.
I now know that they drafted only the young not because they are more physically able, but because they are so malleable. They don't possess a mind of their own. They willingly do what others say, including hate other people, mutilate, murder, and kill. I certainly had no mind of my own then. I had little self-awareness, no integration of consciousness. I believed in what my elders said, these horrible father figures, these authority figures. I obeyed them without question. A few years later, I even voted for Lyndon Johnson, one of the most insidious men to ever be president. I'm embarrassed by most of my voting record. I was the perfect authoritarian follower. I was totally hypnotized.
You must never believe
This means either you know things based on your power of discrimination or you say 'I don't know.' It absolutely does not mean you cannot know things, nor does it mean there is no need to know things. The more objective knowledge you have, the more protection you have. To discriminate between what is true and what is not true does require an existing knowledge base. Learning the truth of things, knowledge, is difficult at first. It takes time, maybe years. In my case, decades. The more you know, the easier it is to discriminate. The more you objective knowledge you have, the better your BS meter works.
And when some new information comes in that pulls a brick out from under some foundation of a wall you have built, don't let that brick go. Examine it carefully. Other bricks may come out with it. Eventually that wall may fall. To keep propping up a wall that can barely stand on its own with string and duct tape (our fanciful ideas), is a waste of valuable energy. Admit any errors. There will always be blind-spots. I myself hope that never a day will go by where I do not uncover a prior misconception, a falsehood, or learn something new. I want all my my subjective bubbles popped, all my 'sacred cows' thrown to the ground.
When you're not sure whether something is true or not, you can just hold off on making black-and-white judgements. When you stop putting every new thing you hear or read into either the 'yes' or 'no' slots, then you have learned a great skill. You might start to give probabilities to whether you think something is true or not. When you've collected so much information, dots begin to connect, giving you more confidence in what you think may be true. I like to label much of my understanding as 'current working theory' (CWT), with the idea that it is subject to change as more data comes in.
After a time you begin to recognize the veracity of various sources of information. Some people lie all the time; they are not capable of saying anything true. Some people are mostly honest, but slip in lies here and there. Most people who tell falsehoods believe them, entirely; they are not intentional liars, just repeating what someone else told them to say, following the 'chain of command', reading tele-prompters.
You begin to recognize how easy it is for events to be falsified and how often it is done. You begin to recognize the greed or self-interest that lies behind what you are told. You begin to recognize that major news sources and the movie industry are totally incapable of telling the truth. You begin to recognize what is a sound-bite and what might have validity. You begin to recognize word salad, complete paragraphs or even entire books where nothing is actually said, where there is no substance and only comfort words (honor, pride, family, flag, inspiration, deeds, worthiness, loyalty) are written, without embarrassment. You learn that the more prominent the source, the more unreliable it is. You begin to see that if the person(s) speaking is wearing a smart uniform, emblems, badges, medals, sashes, $2500 suits, funny hats, surrounded by ceremony and vigorous applause, that you should be cautious. These are things that people use to hide behind. It represents authority. The kid who lives across the street will always be more honest than a snake in a suit.
It was not easy for me to become confident about whether something is true or not. It is anything but an easy skill to learn.
You must trust no one
This is a hard one.
Early in life I had an epiphany, a religious experience, the understanding that everyone was part of the human family. I thought everyone lived in my heart and I lived in everyone else's heart. This was during the midst of the Vietnam war, so I don't quite know how this happened. Even though every night you could watch the body count, I still had an enormous capacity to trust.
I've been hurt it seems like hundreds of times because I trusted people. I am still vulnerable. We are born with a 'trust in others gene', I think. We aren't a loner species like the orangutan. At one time, before civilization, we lived in small groups, where trust was an imperative to survival. In small groups, the cheaters and liars were easy to weed out. Now they are not.
You can't trust because:Every person you see, including yourself, is 'shit'.
- It is not the world we were born in, where you can trust others. We are surrounded by a world of big fish who eat small fish and there are always fish bigger than us, the intraspecies predators, those who primarily feed off others. If we are here for anything in this world, it may be to learn this.
- The 6% of the population that are psychopathic tend to rise like cream, to the top. They run the country. They infect their self-interest on others that surround them. All these people just want to drain anyone who crosses their path in any way that benefits them. They don't care who they hurt, how many people die in wars, who loses in an economic collapse or suffers in any type of disaster. If they can profit from it, it's worth doing.
- Nearly everyone has a collection of fantasy 'beliefs' that can only impede their quest for understanding reality. Those who do have an expertise in certain subjects can be total morons when it comes to anything outside their area of knowledge and, far too often, they can be total morons in their own field.
- You are attempting to gain a power of discrimination within yourself. You need to become self-reliant in this respect. Trusting others for the truth in any manner is a defect in your power of discrimination.
I suppose that can be understood in a few ways.
In the context of Gurdjieff, it means we generally have little or no self awareness, we have no understanding on how to obtain it, we have no inkling of the situation we are in, we have little possibility of breaking out. We are self-centered, childish, obtuse, living between "I like" and "I don't like". We have no true appreciation for anything, because we are too lazy to truly understand anything. So, we are 'shit'. Seems reasonable enough.In the context of UG Krisnamurti, as he said in Mind is a Myth, we are shit because:... greed is all that is there.For me, I might say what I have written to you before: Our universe is acausal. It shouldn't be here. It is mystical beyond comprehension. Without even a half-hearted realization of this understanding, no one has the perspective to see our predicament or appreciate our place in our world. The world embraces materialism almost without exception. Without an awareness of the mystical in which we are embedded, without an appreciation of it, an awe for the world we live in, we are 'shit'.
What am I to do? You come, I talk. Do you want me to criticize you, to throw stones? It is useless, for you are affected by nothing, having erected an impenetrable armor around yourself. You feel nothing.
You have cleverly rationalized what the gurus and holy books have taught you. Your beliefs are the result of blind acceptance of authority, all secondhand stuff. You are not separate from your beliefs. When your precious beliefs and illusions come to an end, you come to an end.
I cannot convey or transmit my certainty that you and all the authorities down through the centuries are false; that they, and the spiritual goods they peddle, are utterly false.
Once you have seen the extent to which everyone is 'shit', as you gain an objective knowledge base, as you gain a self-reliant power of discrimination and your BS meter begins to work well, at some point you just might be surprised. You will find people who do things that are not 'shit'. Gurdjieff used the word 'joy' when you encounter someone else who is in some real sense 'not shit', and I would have to say, for me, that is accurate.
9/11, Mass Hypnosis par ExcellenceOn September 11, 2001, fourteen years ago, there occurred what may be the biggest mass hypnosis event in the history of mankind. I'm trying hard to think of something bigger, and I can't.
It would be a shame for you to not to take the opportunity to know all the ins and outs of 9/11 because you were alive when it happened, you saw the towers fall, everyone on this Earth is affected by this event, even now, fourteen years later, and this event is still extremely well-documented.
All the Gurdjieff quotes above are just theory without example, until you look at 9/11, the perfect example. You can develop powers of discrimination and a knowledge base beyond your wildest dreams using everything you can uncover about 9/11. There is no soap opera, TV series, set of video games or novelist that has the depth, the complexity and interest of 9/11.
Most people who begin to understand the falseness of 9/11 will see it superficially as one grand lie - that it was an 'inside job'.
Later, if you have the courage and audacity to dive into it, you will find layer after layer of lies, misdirection, diversions. If you arrive at one thing that you know is true, other lies will be waiting behind it that will lead you in wrong directions. You will find endless arguments and disputes. You may never reach bottom, but the more time you spend with it, the more astonishment you may have. Most people leave the subject with their head spinning about certain aspects of it. The may have the feeling they have uncovered a big lie, but often wind up replacing it with other lies.
First Responders
Only those with either a strong self-awareness or a healthy cynicism, at least a modicum of understanding of how the world works, could have understood at the time, on the day of 9/11, what was happening as it happened.
I know how bright you are, and we have not discussed this issue yet. It is possible that you were among those who saw the falseness when it happened. Your troubled youth may have sobered you and tempered the gloss painted over this illusion that was passed before the world. Me? I was just wearing the rose-colored glasses that I have always worn. I believed everything I was told.
Among the few who knew it was an illusion the moment it happened was Bhagavan Das. Excerpts of this interview of Bhagavan Das on Paula Gloria's show, Farther Down the Rabbit Hole, include the following:Bhagavan Das: What took me to India was the bullet that went through JFK's skull and the velocity of that bullet threw me across the Pacific Ocean on my spiritual quest because I knew that was a conspiracy. I knew America was full of shit. Vietnam was a total bullshit trip. The inner world and the outer world made no sense and it was a total illusion. I got it right then and there. I was eighteen years old. I left two weeks after Kennedy was shot.I was 17 when Kennedy was shot, only a year younger than Bhagavan Das. I certainly had not a pin prick of an idea that JFK's assassination was rigged. I didn't run off to India.
What's actually happening is a great opportunity for one to awaken from this dream of duality ...
PG: You were in New York when the towers came down?
BD: Yeah, I was there watching the whole thing happen.
PG: What was your experience?
BD: Hollywood movie set. It was a total, total, total production. It was a total show. It was not real at all.
PG: What do you think was unreal about it?
BD: The whole thing. The way the buildings were imploded. The way it was a demolition job. The way they both dropped and the explosions and everything. Everything about it.
MC: Did you see that straight away?
BD: Absolutely. I saw it straight away. I was watching it, I saw it happen.
MC: So you watched it with your own eyes?
BD: Yeah, with my own eyes.
MC: You didn't see it on TV
BD: No I watched it with my own eyes. I was there. I felt the thunder. I felt the earth shake and the explosion. It had nothing to do with an airplane.
MC: Were all these people who where standing next to you at this time, were they seeing what you saw?
BD: No.
MC: They were just going right away to the TV....?
BD: They were running to the TV and they were totally hooked into the propaganda machine.
MC: So, they wanted to be told what happened.
BD: Yeah, they wanted to be told what happened...
It took me six years after 9/11 before the official story 'that 19 Arabs with box cutters acting on command from a guy who happened to be in a US military hospital receiving dialysis at the time (Osama bin Laden) flew airplanes into the Twin Towers that caused their collapse' fell apart.
World Trade Center 7
In early 2008, I sent the video of the collapse of World Trade Center 7 (WTC7) to several people, who were all college-trained engineers or physicist, to ask what they thought about it. I did not say what the building was. This was my attempt to illuminate them.
WTC7 was a 47-story skyscraper, part of the World Trade Center complex. WTC7 fell later on in the day on 9/11, at about 5:30 PM, but almost no one knows about it. No airplane hit this building. There were some fires in the building and some damage done by the wreckage flying from the falling towers. One BBC journalist reported live that the building collapsed about 20 minutes before it actually did. In the YouTube video you can see the building above her left shoulder.
Its collapse was an obvious demolition. It fell at free-fall speed, right into its own footprint, with only minimal damage to the buildings across the street. But for those defending the official line, their arguments explaining away this obvious conclusion are nothing more than wild hallucinations, which most people, the authoritarian followers, those under 'mass hypnosis,' believe without question.
If it sounds absolutely insane, that is because it is. In spite of the explanations provided for why WTC7 fell being utterly bizarre, they were apparently good enough to justify the creation of Homeland Security, for the government to beat the shit out of Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria and elsewhere, and to continue spending a trillion dollars annually to maintain the US as the super-power of all super-powers.
No kidding. You couldn't make this stuff up.
The responses I received after sending out this animation were something to behold (no real names used here):
Ken, who has a master's degree in physics wrote:"The building is a deliberate implosion by the U.S. government on 9-11. Like the other two!!"Ken became an immediate hero. I had no idea Ken would say that. He later told me that he understood it based on history, not on physics. He knew the underhanded things all countries in power do. Later, however, he thought I was flaky when I mentioned the possibilities that UFOs were real.
Martin was an amazing mechanical engineer who built an airplane in his basement. I cheered when he flew his maiden flight. I sent him three emails with this WTC7 animation. No response. He always responded before. Never heard from him after.
A retired engineer and small town mayor responded (but only after a friendly prompting) with:"Interesting story on building destruction. I'll reserve my comments until I get out of politics!"...and that was the last I ever heard from him.
Greg, one of the most brilliant minds of any engineer I have ever worked with, responded:"Yes, I have to agree that the building collapse looks intentional. It looks like buildings I've seen imploded rather than, say, the World Trade Center on 9/11."When I told him that the building was indeed part of the World Trade Center complex, he responded:"This whole thing is very interesting. In general, I am very skeptical of conspiracy theories, but that collapse just looks so perfect. I'm certainly not an expert. Is this something you just happened to notice or is there conspiracy theory stuff on this all over the internet?"I responded with a long email and I never heard from him again.
Karl, a good friend and tenured professor in a department of civil engineering of a prestigious university, responded with:"I haven't seen this building before. There have been many such demolitions. In fact, CNN showed their 'best of 2007' last week.When I told him the building was WTC7 he responded the next day, but his response was totally off-topic. I've never known him to do that either before or after this email. Perhaps it had something to do with the fact that much of his research funding came from government sources. I know it spooked him. We never discussed anything about 9/11 again. This is a forbidden topic. We can still talk about animal mutilations though.
This building displaces in the vertical direction nearly plumb, which can only happen if all columns and walls collapse simultaneously. Thus it must be an engineered demolition. Fire, earthquake, strong winds or random explosions can be ruled out since they cause damage that is not this symmetrical. Of course, terrorists could engineer a controlled demolition just as well as professionals, but what would be their motive in terrorizing people in an orderly fashion? Car bombs are much cheaper."
In short, nearly everyone I raised the issue with, who were all friends or relatives or neighbors, was not really willing to discuss it, except your dad, but it was always too painful for him to look at on his own in any depth. My wife, who graduated second in her high school class of 600, thinks I am totally delusional and we have barely exchanged three sentences about it. This is a forbidden topic.
So there are about 100,000 registered architects and maybe 450,000 licensed professional engineers in the United States, all qualified to give an technical assessment of WTC7. All of them could easily recognize WTC7 as a demolition job... but what happened? Very few spoke up. How many of them wrote papers about it? I really don't know; maybe a few dozen. It really is an embarrassment to the entire engineering profession. As a group they have lost all credibility to me. Gurdjieff would say, "They are shit."In all fairness to the technical professionals, they are not all dysfunctional. There is a remarkable group called Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth who have amassed about 2,350 skilled professionals who are aware that 9/11 is all controlled demolition. They have built up this group over a period of years, with slow but growing support. All 2,350 engineers or architects give their testimony on this site. These are brave people, all first in line for the concentration camps, if it ever comes to that.
" the book Be Here Now came into my life" classic new age bs
here now = nowhere
on off on off