The first cities did not arise from the influence of financial powers. If it were just as simple as securing material resources, society would never have moved past the tribal era. The first cities were established not by chieftains and material wealth but by priests, and we still insist on our priests serving as intermediaries between us and ourselves.

We don’t actually struggle with the world. Especially in this age, we struggle with our projection of the world, our experience of the world as we believe it to be. It takes very little to paint just a slightly better picture of the world than we form reactively on our own. Add a bit more and you get to include a system that includes you as the one in charge, and people swallow it hook, line and sinker as they say.

Are the priests politicians? Oh, there are many temples now. Politicians are an old temple still in power but falling out of favour. Mass market celebrity is a newer, more popular temple, and the industrial powers today are at the top of the totem pole.

Do any of the temples genuinely help us? They help themselves, and secondarily us, if that. They can’t avoid helping us entirely. They draw their power from that field of human consciousness or spirit that we all share in. So they can only exercise their power by keeping at least marginally in touch with those forces.

Can I use the same methods they do to turn the tables and create my own secret society? You cannot truly create a secret society, but the same powers or principles that empower them are equally available to us. The intelligence behind them actually favours no single human being, and by intelligence I do not mean personality, more like information and thus computational potential.

Is the Occupy movement really onto something, or are they being manipulated? They are somewhat on to something, but they have so far camped only on the outskirts of the issue. What it needs to be is the start of a new culture, rather than a protest of the old, but that takes a great deal of work.

I think those large displays make the purpose obsolete. It becomes a turf war instead of a statement. Did it work better in the 60s? It did not.

Humanism fails to access the force that existed before humanity. Idealism refuses to face the uglier truths that are necessary to truly tap the power of the forces I speak of. Science is right about much of what they are discovering about the human brain, but where they are in error, and the error is significant, is in the assumption that all these features are accidental, that they arose from a simple Darwinian model. This force lives in relationships, but gives no basis for relativism.

Ideas by themselves are not enough. They are enough to control others. They are not enough to empower the self. In the mysteries practiced by the secret societies, they all use one metaphor, an “awakening” of the seeker, and this awakening is not accomplished by education. That trains well, but empowers no one. If anything it deepens sleep. Their rituals often involve weird symbolism and dramatic challenges because they recreate an experience of the inner “construction” of the human mind. On an experiential level, they make every part of the human mind work to the point that, like a koan, it ceases to behave in its habitual way, and only then can the awakened one or “initiate” really understand the insights and skills they are taught.

Your thoughts are welcome. Be well friends.

Travis Saunders
Dragon Intuitive
~science,mysticism,spirituality~