Ancient Confession Found - 'We Invented Jesus Christ'

8 October 2013
London from PRWEB UK Website

Joseph Atwill is the author of the best-selling book "Caesar’s Messiah" and its upcoming sequel "The Single Strand."

[Jesus Christ] may be the only fictional character in literature whose entire life story can be traced to other sources.

 Biblical scholars at the 'Covert Messiah' Conference at Conway Hall in London on the 19th of October 2013. 

American Biblical scholar Joseph Atwill will be appearing before the British public for the first time in London on the 19th of October to present a controversial new discovery:
ancient confessions recently uncovered now prove, according to Atwill, that the New Testament was written by first-century Roman aristocrats and that they fabricated the entire story of Jesus Christ.

His presentation will be part of a one-day symposium entitled "Covert Messiah" at Conway Hall in Holborn. Full details here.

Although to many scholars his theory seems outlandish, and is sure to upset some believers, Atwill regards his evidence as conclusive and is confident its acceptance is only a matter of time.

 "I present my work with some ambivalence, as I do not want to directly cause Christians any harm," he acknowledges, "but this is important for our culture.

Alert citizens need to know the truth about our past so we can understand how and why governments create false histories and false gods. They often do it to obtain a social order that is against the best interests of the common people."

Atwill asserts that Christianity did not really begin as a religion, but a sophisticated government project, a kind of propaganda exercise used to pacify the subjects of the Roman Empire.

 "Jewish sects in Palestine at the time, who were waiting for a prophesied warrior Messiah, were a constant source of violent insurrection during the first century," he explains.

"When the Romans had exhausted conventional means of quashing rebellion, they switched to psychological warfare. They surmised that the way to stop the spread of zealous Jewish missionary activity was to create a competing belief system.

That's when the 'peaceful' Messiah story was invented. Instead of inspiring warfare, this Messiah urged turn-the-other-cheek pacifism and encouraged Jews to 'give onto Caesar' and pay their taxes to Rome."

Was Jesus based on a real person from history?

 "The short answer is no," Atwill insists, "in fact he may be the only fictional character in literature whose entire life story can be traced to other sources. Once those sources are all laid bare, there's simply nothing left."

Atwill's most intriguing discovery came to him while he was studying "Wars of the Jews" by Josephus [the only surviving first-person historical account of first-century Judea] alongside the New Testament.

 "I started to notice a sequence of parallels between the two texts," he recounts.

"Although it's been recognized by Christian scholars for centuries that the prophesies of Jesus appear to be fulfilled by what Josephus wrote about in the First Jewish-Roman war, I was seeing dozens more.

What seems to have eluded many scholars is that the sequence of events and locations of Jesus ministry are more or less the same as the sequence of events and locations of the military campaign of [Emperor] Titus Flavius as described by Josephus.

This is clear evidence of a deliberately constructed pattern. The biography of Jesus is actually constructed, tip to stern, on prior stories, but especially on the biography of a Roman Caesar."

How could this go unnoticed in the most scrutinized books of all time?

 "Many of the parallels are conceptual or poetic, so they aren't all immediately obvious.

After all, the authors did not want the average believer to see what they were doing, but they did want the alert reader to see it. An educated Roman in the ruling class would probably have recognized the literary game being played."

Atwill maintains he can demonstrate that,
"the Roman Caesars left us a kind of puzzle literature that was meant to be solved by future generations, and the solution to that puzzle is 'We invented Jesus Christ, and we're proud of it.'"

Is this the beginning of the end of Christianity?

 "Probably not," grants Atwill, "but what my work has done is give permission to many of those ready to leave the religion to make a clean break. We've got the evidence now to show exactly where the story of Jesus came from.

Although Christianity can be a comfort to some, it can also be very damaging and repressive, an insidious form of mind control that has led to blind acceptance of serfdom, poverty, and war throughout history.

To this day, especially in the United States, it is used to create support for war in the Middle East."

Atwill encourages skeptics to challenge him at Conway Hall, where after the presentations there is likely to be a lively Q&A session.

Joining Mr. Atwill will be fellow scholar Kenneth Humphreys, author of the book "Jesus Never Existed." 

by Travis Gettys

October 10, 2013
from RawStory Website

The Christian faith is the result of the most successful psy-ops program in history, according to a self-professed American Bible scholar.

Joseph Atwill will present his controversial theory Oct. 19 in London that the New Testament was written by first-century Roman aristocrats as part of a sophisticated government project to help pacify Jews in occupied territories.
Julius Caesar

Atwill, author of "Caesar’s Messiah," claims he’s found ancient confessions by the scriptures’ authors that they invented Jesus Christ and his story as basically a form of propaganda.

 "Jewish sects in Palestine at the time, who were waiting for a prophesied warrior Messiah, were a constant source of violent insurrection during the first century," Atwill said.

"When the Romans had exhausted conventional means of quashing rebellion, they switched to psychological warfare. They surmised that the way to stop the spread of zealous Jewish missionary activity was to create a competing belief system.

That’s when the ‘peaceful’ Messiah story was invented. Instead of inspiring warfare, this Messiah urged turn-the-other-cheek pacifism and encouraged Jews to ‘give onto Caesar’ and pay their taxes to Rome."

He says that Jesus was not based on an actual historical figure, but Atwill argues that the events of his life were overlaid on top of actual events from the First Jewish-Roman War, waged by Emperor Titus Flavius in Palestinian territories.

 "The biography of Jesus is actually constructed, tip to stern, on prior stories, but especially on the biography of a Roman Caesar," he says.

Atwill said he understands that his theory is bound to upset Christians, and he’s hoping skeptics will come to challenge him after his lecture as part of a symposium, "Covert Messiah," along with Kenneth Humphreys, author of "Jesus Never Existed."

 "Although Christianity can be a comfort to some, it can also be very damaging and repressive, an insidious form of mind control that has led to blind acceptance of serfdom, poverty, and war throughout history," Atwill says.

"To this day, especially in the United States, it is used to create support for war in the Middle East."

The Real History of Christianity

Gods and Religions on Planet Earth

Caesar's Messiah

In the presence of anger

The brain when faced with violence undergoes a rapid chemical change; it reacts much quicker than the blow. One’s whole body reacts and there is immediate response; one may not hit back, but the very presence of anger or hatred causes this response and there is action.
 

In the presence of a person who is angry, see what takes place if one is aware of it and does not respond. The moment one is aware of the other person’s anger and one does not react oneself, there is quite a different response. One’s instinct is to respond to hate by hate, to anger by anger; there is the welling up chemically which creates in the system the nervous reactions. But quieten all this in the presence of anger, and a different action takes place. 

JKRISHNAMURTI

(Questions and Answers, p 23)

The Pleiadian Message

A Wake UP Call for The Family of Light

There are multitude of cultures and societies that exist throughout the vastness of space, and these societies and cultures have been on and off this planet from the very beginning.

It is not just that we the Pleiadian have come to assist. We are only one grouping from one star system. There are many who have journeyed here for many reasons. The majority of the extraterrestrials are here for your upliftment.

Though there are also those who are here for other reasons.

We give our version of things only to bring you into higher consciousness. We do not wish to say that this version and only this version is how it is. This whole teaching is designed for the great purpose in mind, and the stories that we tell you are setup to take you to a higher plane of consciousness, that is our intention.

You are magnificent beings members of the Family of Light. And you come to earth at this time on assignment to create a shift, to make a change, to assist in the transition.

You were told before you came here that there would be much assistance at different junctures and at your development different entities would present themselves upon the planet in different capacities to trigger you, fire you up, and to remind you, not for us to do it for you. We are one of those triggers, a Catalyst.

When you hear the name Pleiadians you feel a connection because we are assisting you in bringing your own information, your own knowing, forward. You, yourself, chose to be here, you are on assignment to bring memory forward and to bring the value of human existence back to the forefront of Creation, you are needed.

You have been in training for this assignment for lifetimes, and you did not come unprepared. All that you need to know now is inside of you and it is your task to remember your training. This is not a lifetime when you are going to be taught new information. As we said before, this is the lifetime when you are going to remember what you already know and we are just here to remind you of it. That is part of our assignment.

Humanity is an experiment, humanity has been designed as has just about everything else that exist within creation.

• Prime Creator began experimenting with creation a long time ago in this universe for the purpose of greater self exploration, self gratification and self expression
• Prime Creator brought energies and essences of light, extensions of itself into this universe and endowed those extensions with the gifts that it had
• Prime Creator said to these extensions of itself "Go out and create and bring all things back to me"

Earth was a beautiful place, located on the fringes on one of the galactic systems and easily reached from other galaxies.

It was close to many way portals, the highway that exists for energies to travel throughout space. Some of the creator gods were Master Geneticists.

 

The Master Geneticists designed various species. Some human, some animal by playing with the varieties of DNA that the Entities of this information contributed to make Earth into this exchange center of information, this Life Centre this Living Library.

The original planners of Earth were members of the Family of Light, beings who worked for and were associated with the aspect of consciousness called Light.

They designed a place where galaxies would contribute their information and where all would be able to participate and share this specific knowledge.

Earth was to be a Cosmic Library, a place of incredible beauty that experimented with how information could be stored through frequencies and through the genetic process.

The project of the Living Library on earth was eventually fought over.

 

During earth’s early history there were wars in space for ownership of this planet. Skirmishes took place and earth became place of duality. Certain creator gods who had the right to do whatever they wanted, because earth is a freewill zone, came in and took over.

When the skirmish occurred a certain group of entities fought in space and won the territory of earth. These new owners did not want the native earth species, the humans, to be informed of what took place. Uninformed, the species would be easier to control.

 

That is why Light is information and Darkness is lack of information. These entities beat out Light and earth became their territory.

These new owners who came here 300 thousand years ago, are the magnificent beings spoken of in your bible, in the Babylonian and Sumerian tablets and in text all over the world.

They came to earth and rearranged the native human species. They rearranged your DNA in order to have you broadcast within a certain limited frequency band, whose frequency could feed them and keep them in power. They worked in their laboratories and created versions of humans with a different DNA - the two stranded double-helix DNA.

The original DNA pattern was left within the human cells, yet it was not functional, it was split apart, unplugged.

We, as Pleiadians, came back through time, into what would perhaps be called our past, we came back in order to share a frequency with you, a frequency that each one of you has agreed to carry on this planet in order to change the DNA of the rearranged human race. Earth is assisting in its own way the evolution of the universe. It is where the plan begins to blossom and what happens on earth is going to effect many, many worlds.

The creator gods, who have been ruling this planet, had the ability to become physical though mostly they exist in other dimensions.

They keep earth in a certain vibrational frequency while they create emotional trauma to nourish themselves. There are some beings who honor life before everything else, and there are also beings who do not honor life, do not understand their connection to it.

Who are these beings who came in and asunder to the original plans to earth? Who are these space beings, we sometimes refer to as the ‘dark t-shirts’?

These space beings are part human and part reptilian. We call them ‘the Lizzies’, because we like to make things a little less emotional, a little humorous, so that you don’t take them so seriously and get so upset. We are not here to frighten you, we are here to inform you.

They have fed of your emotions. One of the big secrets that has been kept from you as a species, is the richness and wealth that accompanies emotion. You have been steered away from exploring emotion, because through emotion you can figure things out. Your emotions connects you with the spiritual body. The spiritual body of course is non physical, existing on the multi-dimensional sphere.

Why are we telling you all this? Why do you need to know it? You need to know it because the living reality is re entering and merging with your dimension.

As you awaken to your history you will begin to open your ancient eyes, these are the eyes of Horus, which see not through the eyes of a human being, but from the point of view of a God. They see the connectedness and the purpose of all things, for the ancient eyes are able to see into many realities and to connect the whole picture… the whole history.

All of this is to be felt, allow your brain cells to click into being without your rational conscious mind wanting to define things down to the most minute detail. This experience involves raising a feeling inside yourself and then, one day, at one moment, in one afternoon having overwhelming sense of knowing, having a composition of a thousand pages long come alive in 5 seconds… a divine ecstasy!

Before you came into the body, all of you committed to the designing events that would fire your codings or blue-prints that would activate your memories, then you came into the body and you forgot. All of you have had your blue prints and codings fired to some extent because you understand that there is a divine purpose or a divine plan that you are a part of.

 

You hold the history of the universe within your physical body.

What is occurring upon the planet now is the literal mutation of your physical body, for you are allowing it to be evolved to a point or it will be a computer that can house this information.

The firing of the codings and the realization of your identity are going to become phenomenally intense, the reason for this is the evolving DNA. When you have 12 helix-es of DNA in place those helix-es will begin to plug into the 12 chakra system. The 12 chakra are vortex centers loaded with information that you must be able to translate.

You have to become super beings in whatever reality you enter because as members of the Family of Light, the branch of renegades, this is your forte.

As a member of the Family of Light you know the inside scoop, you come as ambassadors to make realities merge and become more informed within themselves so that everyone involved can release fear and become uninhibited. As you grow and come to these higher realms of recognition you will break through what feels like cement blocks, layers of yourself that had held you down.

Think of the frequency that has limited the human experiment as a radio station, the human experiment has had one radio station on for 300 thousand years, same old tunes, the human experiment was unable to turn the dial and hear a different band, so the same frequency was broadcast, this created a quarantine 'a feeling off' of this planet.

The creative cosmic rays sent by Prime Creator and the original planners pierce through this frequency shield. They bombard earth, however, they must have someone to receive them. Without a receptacle these creative cosmic rays would create chaos and confusion.

You as members of the Family of Light come into this system to receive these rays of knowledge. You then disseminate the knowledge of the new life style and the new frequency to the rest of the population to alter the entire planet.

 

The ultimate tyranny in this society is not controlled by marshal law. It is controlled by the psychological manipulation of consciousness through which reality is defied so that those who exist within it do not even realize that they are in prison, they do not even realize that there is something outside of where they exist.

 

We represent what is outside of what you have been taught exists. It is where you sometime venture and where we want you to dwell it is outside of where society has told you can live.

What we want more than anything else is to assist you, as members of the Family of Light to succeed in liberating the humans. Focus on the dance of yourself. To what tune will you dance and to what magic will you perform and to what heights will you be willing to push consciousness to give it a new definition of possibilities.

Members of the Bringers of the Dawn or Family of Light work in teams, you don’t go into systems alone, you need each other to do this work because you cannot hold the frequency by yourself.

By going in as teams you increase the odds of successfully carrying out the plan. You are like rays and like spirals of the central sun that are very intelligent and you are guided by a great intelligence inside the central sun.

 

The members of the Family of Light are much more than human. Characteristically you are supreme achievers in the multi-dimensional realm. One applies for a position in the multi-dimensional realm as a member of the Family of Light.

 

If you were to have a business card printed up for yourselves when you are in full memory of your identity, it would say something like:

"Renegade Member of Family of Light - Systems Buster - Available for altering systems of consciousness within the free world universe - On Call!"

We speak to you as if you are not human, because to us you are not.

To us you are members of the Family of Light whom we know your multi-dimensional selves. We speak to you about dealing with humans because it is your assignment to integrate with them, soothe them and awaken a spark of Light within them so that they are not all destroyed as with that this place can house a new species and a new realm of activity.

Our final words including thank you to all of you who recognize the Light source that is a part of your identity and that moves you to follow the silent whisperers that echoes down the golden spiral to the corridors of your own being,

We honor you. We recognize you and we are here to assist you. We are all here at the Family of Light to bring that choice and that freedom to evolve back on to this planet.

Family of Light, WAKE UP !!!

A Message... - The Pleiades from Giancarlo Giacomeli on Vimeo.

“Capitalism has failed”

Reaganomics architect: "Capitalism has failed"

A review of The Failure of Laissez-faire Capitalism by Paul Craig Roberts

by Kevin Barrett

Dr. Paul Craig Roberts is unquestionably one of the world’s leading political economists. His many awards include induction into the French Legion of Honor for his historic contributions to economics.

Dr. Roberts is still widely viewed as an apostle of free markets. He is perhaps best known as the Reagan Administration Assistant Secretary of the Treasury who ushered in supply-side economics and helped downsize government. When such a towering figure of free-market thinking says that laissez-faire capitalism has failed, it signals a seismic shift in his own thinking, or in history’s trajectory. Or maybe both.

Paul Craig Roberts says it’s the world, not himself, that has changed. He argues that the shift to supply side thinking – and subsequent slashing of tax rates and freeing up of markets – was a good idea at the time: the late 1970s. The big problem of the 1970s, Roberts says, was “as a result of inflation pushing up nominal incomes and saddling taxpayers with higher tax rates.” In those circumstances, cutting taxes to free up money for the markets reversed the vicious circle of higher taxes – less investment – a smaller pie – even higher taxes that was then ravaging Western economies.

This guy is obviously not a socialist. So when he says that free market approaches have failed, and it’s time for governments to jump back into economies in a big way, he must have some compelling reasons.

Those reasons should not be mysterious to anyone who has witnessed the implosion of the American economy during the past two decades. Roberts’ key points include:

*Markets are not self-regulating – they can only function if a referee ensures fair play, which is why deregulation has ushered in an era of pervasive looting and criminality.

*By deeming the biggest private financial institutions “too big to fail,” the market’s punishment for bad decisions is removed, encouraging limitless irresponsible and criminal behavior by the biggest players in the no-longer-free market.

*The destruction of labor unions has removed the power balance between labor and capital necessary to a viable free market.

*Jobs offshoring, which “has destroyed the productivity advantage of first world labor,” hollows out the real economy and cuts the connection between markets and human welfare.

Roberts argues that Americans have been socially, educationally, politically, and economically dispossessed by the new robber barons. Orwellian legislation including the NDAA with its indefinite detention provision, he says, has repealed the Bill of Rights and led to “the degeneration of American democracy into a police state.” (Elsewhere Roberts has noted the role of the 9/11 inside job in the destruction of American democracy.)

The annihilation of political freedom has accompanied the economic assault on the middle class. Roberts marshals a range of statistics showing that “the wipeout (of the manufacturing workforce) has been across the board.” Worse, “the knowledge jobs are being outsourced even faster than the manufacturing jobs…employment in First World jobs in the US has collapsed…America has become a ‘superpower’ with a Third World work force in lowly paid domestic service.”

Obviously such “superpower” status cannot long endure. In a recent interview on my radio show, Dr. Roberts suggested that the fall of 2013 would be viewed by future historians as the moment when America’s reign as world’s hegemon ended. Roberts cited the USA’s failure in Syria, its government shutdown crisis, and newly assertive statements and moves by Chinese leaders as evidence that a seismic shift in great power relations has occurred. The days of the US dollar as chief global reserve currency – which allows the US to print money that is not backed by actual goods and services, and force other nations to accept it – appear to be numbered.

But it isn’t just the decline and fall of a hollowed-out US empire that concerns Roberts. An even bigger problem, he says, is the exhaustion of global resources that once seemed limitless. Resource depletion necessitates a shift from an “empty world” to a “full world” economic model, he says. In economic terms: “Even if countries are able to produce empty-world economic growth, economists cannot tell if the value of the increase in GDP is greater than its cost, because the cost of nature’s capital is not included in the computation.” Roberts cites Herman Daly, who says elites “have figured out how to keep the benefits for themselves, while ‘sharing’ the costs with the poor, the future, and other species.”

In championing a “full world” economic model that privileges a sustainable steady-state over endless, dubious growth – and human welfare for the many over profits for elites – Roberts has come full circle from his role as the growth-oriented free-market champion of the Reagan years. Let’s hope the world listens, and heeds his advice even more than it did the last time around. If we survive for another generation, the Legion of Honor may have to give Dr. Roberts another medal for making an even more important contribution to political economics – and the trajectory of history.

The illusion of being different

A human being psychologically is the whole of mankind. He not only represents it but he is the whole of the human species. He is essentially the whole psyche of mankind. On this actuality various cultures have imposed the illusion that each human being is different. In this illusion mankind has been caught for centuries, and this illusion has become a reality. If one observes closely the whole psychological structure of oneself, one will find that as one suffers, so all mankind suffers in various degrees. If you are lonely, the whole humankind knows this loneliness. Agony, jealousy, envy, and fear are known to all. So psychologically, inwardly, one is like another human being. There may be differences physically, biologically. One is tall or short and so on, but basically one is the representative of all mankind. So psychologically you are the world; you are responsible for the whole of mankind, not for yourself as a separate human being, which is a psychological illusion… 

If one grasps the full significance of the fact that one is psychologically the world, then responsibility becomes overpowering love. 

JKRISHNAMURTI

(Letters to the Schools vol I, p 20)

Scientists Are Convinced Mind Transfer Is the Key to Immortality

Screenshot from
Battlestar Gallactica intro
via YouTube

by Meghan Neal
September 26, 2013
from Motherboard.Vice Website

Call it mind transfer, uploading, brain backup, whatever - the idea of copying the human brain to a computer so it can live on without the body has a strong hold on futurists, neuroscientists, and folks that just want to live forever.

Also Stephen Hawking.

At screening of a new film about his life this week, the cosmologist said he believes it's possible to retain a digital version of the brain after the body dies - though it probably won't happen in his lifetime.
"I think the brain is like a program in the mind, which is like a computer, so it's theoretically possible to copy the brain onto a computer and so provide a form of life after death," he told a crowd in Cambridge, reported the Guardian.

"However, this is way beyond our present capabilities."

The quest for immortality has been enjoying a moment in the limelight this month, not least because of Google's new moonshot project, Calico, which will focus on studying the science of aging - namely, how we can stop it from happening.

Larry Page is just one of a crop of influential wealthy businesspeople that have poured millions into immortality research lately. But while Calico tackles how to slow down our physical decay, many futurists believe that the key to extending human life isn't the body, it's the brain.

These thought leaders in cybernetics gathered this summer in New York City for the Global Future 2045 International Congress, organized by Russian multimillionaire Dmitry Itskov.

Itskov grabbed headlines for claiming humans will download digital copies of themselves into android avatars by 2045 - just how a Cylon downloads its consciousness into the next copy when it "dies."

Futurist and transhumanist Ray Kurzweil, Google's director of engineering, suggested at the event that we'll be able to transfer the entire human mind to a computer within four decades.
"Based on conservative estimates of the amount of computation you need to functionally simulate a human brain, we'll be able to expand the scope of our intelligence a billion-fold,” Kurzweil said at the conference.

Indeed, for all its sci-fi fanfare, technical singularity is rooted in science.

And there are continuous advances in cybernetics lending credence to the claim that mind transfer holds the key to a post-mortal human race. Massive supercomputers are getting better at simulating the human brain. Artificial intelligence experts are developing increasingly smart machines that can reason, think, and learn by mimicking the brain's cerebral cortex.

And brain-computer interfaces - machines that can effectively read your mind - are advancing fast.

Still, the concept of digitally preserving the human mind is based on what’s theoretically possible, not a step-by-step roadmap. One of the biggest holes in the theory (and there are many to poke) is more philosophical than scientific: the notion of whether consciousness would survive the digital switchover in tact.

Or even beyond that, what about the soul? Or whatever it is that makes you you, beyond the biological puzzle pieces.

For the Battlestar Galactica fans among us, it’s the mystery of what made Boomer No. 1 still love the Chief after Boomer No. 2 fell for that other guy, even though No. 2’s consciousness was directly uploaded from the first.
 
Can a virtual brain in a robotic avatar experience love?
 
Can emotions be uploaded?
 
And if not, is a digital immortality even worth it?

Giant Hominids

As certain texts attest, there were giants in the earth in those days and the Sons of God (El Elyon) mated with the daughters of men. Why not call them angels (or reptoids) or the gods themselves? It’s not really fair to regard them as invaders; they were travelers and investigators of sorts, intent on creating a changeless hive. In their original home they could best be regarded as dragons.

The caste system of India is the best example, as one of the remnants of the system of these ancients {based on body shape and rigidly determined breeding}. That’s what the antediluvian global civilization looked like; it was built as a total autocracy, rooted in slavery - from the perspective of the early third millennium.

The rigid caste system was excused as a method of helping humanity to evolve beyond its forgetful condition; individuals would, on death, remain fixed on the Earth, resonating back into a particular body shape incarnation after incarnation, theoretically ascending through the hierarchy placed there to allow a ‘guided enlightenment’ based on a pyramidal system known as the ‘way of Typhon’. This was a method of ‘enlightenment’ attempted en masse, using a hypnotic thrall laid across the population.

Today’s hominid cultural organization follows this pattern laid down upon the past; non-Terrestrial hive mentality grafted onto the mammalian biological underpinnings of Earth, a mirror of the layering of the hominid brain.

Morning Reflection

November 28, 2010 at 3:08 am
By Bronte Baxter
Splinter in the Mind
http://brontebaxter.wordpress.com/

One of my first thoughts when I became conscious from sleep this morning was a prayer. I feel close to God at that time, and often utter one. I asked God to help me and all beings find a consciousness of resting in his love, as the need to feel God’s love seems to be at the root of all the guru chasing and spirituality espousing. It comes from our insecurity, as beings focused out into the world who have emotionally lost connection with our source.

I asked God to show me whatever I’m missing that keeps me from being the flawless being he envisioned on creating me, because I surely cannot claim to meet my own standards of ideal humanness. And I asked to be shown where my thinking may be wrong – to be corrected when it strays, and to be guided by truth.

In that moment I felt the aloneness of holding the philosophy I do, espoused in this time by such a tiny minority. And I asked, “Are we wrong? Is it indeed like the crowd of “the enlightened” say? Is the highest human achievement feeling a blissful silence and having a perception that all is one and nothing really matters because nothing is real? Are we rebels just missing something?”

The answer came back in my heart: “No. By identifying with the consciousness that is the mind of the universe, ‘the enlightened’ identify with that which creates and destroys. They accept destruction as part of the divine plan, as having equal value with creation. Their bliss is the relief from trying, from steering, from exercising their will. It is the bliss of one who closes his eyes driving and releases his hands from the wheel, allowing the car to fly to wherever it goes. It is the bliss of surrender. Theirs is the peace that comes of giving up. The tranquility that comes of aligning with things as they are.

“This is not what I want for My children. This is not union with Me. Creation and destruction are not My consciousness. I know only life. I am the opposite of destruction. I sustain all things. I will life to all beings. My dream for the universe is that all my children will live in joy forever. I do not will that the stars burn out, that galaxies smash together in riots of destruction, that the innocent rabbit gets shredded by the hawk. Mine is not the consciousness that conceives of these things, for destruction is a failure to live, and I am life eternal.”

And I saw that when people identify with Brahman, the mind of the universe, as the highest consciousness, as their consciousness, they have only opened to consciousness of a larger part of themselves, not to the ultimate consciousness of their complete being. They have only achieved the consciousness of the myopic being and laws that run this world, this physical world that extends throughout known space. They have not reached past the boundaries of Brahman’s creation and destruction, to the source of all possibilities, that field of life that contains different universes, with different sets of laws, where destruction is not part of the equation. Universes where God’s unique expressions live in joy forever, not subject to death or lifespans, never running out of fuel, never needing to feed and extend their lives by stealing the fuel of others.

Deep in my heart, I was reminded that, that those of us who seek for something more in life than enlightenment are the hope of the world. By refusing to accept, by scoffing at surrender, we forge a path of life and light with the life and light within us. We mark the heavens with streaks of color as we strive to dance a forever dance as eternal sparks of the Infinite, dynamic eternal sons and daughters of God. We destroy death by refusing to accept its rightness, and suffering by refusing all the excuses for why it must exist. We reach past the Brahman consciousness within us, which justifies all that is, to touch and feel the consciousness of all that can be. While the preachers of enlightenment and the hoards that follow them dissolve one by one in the great maw of Oneness consciousness, we rebels march forth with the torch of hope for different kind of world. A world that moves by different laws, that operates on different principles, a world unheard of before. A world we are creating, with every manipulation we refuse to succumb to, with every excuse we refuse to accept, with every mouthful of suffering flesh we refuse to eat.

Two extra terrestrials are working with the American government

Paul Hellyer, former Minister of Defense of Canada reveals: 

Some ETs Species who have visited and still visit Earth: Zeta Reticuli, Pleiadians, Orions ETs... 

Tall Whites living on US Airforce Property, 

CABAL: Military Industrial Complex, Builderbergs, Cartels... 

Shadow Governments, Ruling Elite, Rockerfellers, Bushs etc.

Reading Gandhi and Avowing the Impossible

October 4, 2013 by Vinay Lal

Review of Faisal Devji,  
The Impossible Indian:  Gandhi and the Temptation of Violence  
(Cambridge, Mass.:  Harvard University Press, 2012).  

[First published in The Book Review, Delhi, Vol 37 no. 10 (October 2013).]

It was not so long ago that Mohandas Gandhi was, at least to the academic world, a largely forgotten figure.  In the 1980s and 1990s, as postcolonial thought in its various inflections became quite the rage in significant sectors of the Anglo-American (and Indian) academy, and the ‘master narratives’ of the Enlightenment, as they were called, came under sustained interrogation and assault, attention would come to be lavished upon those figures who were viewed as the torchbearers of resistance, critical of deeply embedded frameworks of interpretation that had given succor to elites, and harbingers of a politics of emancipation for those, especially, relegated to the margins.  Curiously, though Gandhi is a critical figure in the histories of struggles against colonialism, racism, and the oppression of women and minorities, he remained singularly unattractive to the most prominent postcolonial theorists and intellectuals of other stripes.  He was seen as a distinctly unsexy figure, dismissed as a ‘doer’ rather than ‘thinker’, scarcely worthy of the company of Aime Cesaire, C.L.R. James, or the much lionized Fanon.  The stately Edward Said was habituated to giving lists of the great figures of anti-colonial resistance, but in the thousands of pages of his writings there is barely any mention of Gandhi’s name.  When at all attention was bestowed on Gandhi by a famous intellectual, it was more for effect than out of any serious consideration of his thought, perhaps nowhere better illustrated than in Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s extraordinary and one should say careless attempt, in A Critique of Postcolonial Reason (1999), to suggest that sati could be associated with “Mahatma Gandhi’s reinscription of the notion of satyagraha, or hunger strike, as resistance.” As she adds, “I would merely invite the reader to compare the auras of widow sacrifice and Gandhian resistance.  The root in the first part of satyagraha and sati are the same” (p. 298). Since when did satyagraha and “hunger strike” become synonymous?  Fasting is no doubt part of the grammar of satyagraha, but does anyone suppose that satyagraha can be reduced to hunger strike?  And is there no distinction to be made between fasting and hunger strike?  One would have expected a great deal more from someone who has been a relentless advocate of careful and hermeneutic readings of texts.

Much, however, has changed in the course of the last decade.  Gandhi has found favour in the most unusual circles, though for reasons that are far from apparent, and scholarship on him is flourishing.  It surely cannot be that the world is in the throes of violence—indeed it is, but not demonstrably more so than in previous decades—and that Gandhi now appears not only eminently sane and reasonable but prophetic in his insistence on nonviolent social and political transformation.  It may be that many of the most widely admired figures of our times, among them Nelson Mandela, the Dalai Lama, and Aung San Suu Kyi, have openly declared themselves as beholden to Gandhi in helping shape their worldview.  Even the Commander in Chief of the greatest military force in the world, Barack Obama, has described Gandhi as his spiritual and political mentor, and he once went so far as to tell American schoolchildren that if there is one figure from the past with whom he could have dinner, it would have to be Gandhi.  (We need not pause here to reflect on how the evening might have shaped up, since Gandhi ate very little and well before sundown—yet Obama’s observation seems to have been offered without any pinch of salt.)  It is certainly possible to entertain the idea that, at least from the scholarly standpoint, other ideologies—liberalism, conservatism, Marxism, constitutionalism—are seen as having run their full course, and that some indulgence towards Gandhi’s ideas is seen as permissible.  All too often, of course, nonviolence has been the last rather than the first option for those who style themselves revolutionaries.

Faisal Devji’s The Impossible Indian is easily both one of the most stimulating and disturbing books in the Gandhian cornucopia.  Devji proposes to set forth ‘a new case’ for Gandhi ‘to be considered one of the greatest political thinkers of our times’ (vii), just as the analytical philosopher Akeel Bilgrami, another relatively recent convert to Gandhi’s ideas, has argued that Gandhi was ‘the greatest anti-imperialist theorist who ever wrote’.[1]  Much has been written on the subject of nationality, but Devji’s reading is altogether fresh:  considering the role of Indians within the empire, he argues that ‘it was neither India nor South Africa that provided Indians with a nationality, but satyagraha, considered as a practice without origin or destination of any territorial sort’ (49).  Gandhi in this fashion also controverted the usual assumptions about ‘minorities’ and ‘majorities’, a language born of modern political arithmetic, and a letter to Jinnah in 1944 reinforces the notion of nationality wrought in the crucible of struggle:  ‘The only real though awful test of our nationhood arises out of our common subjection.  If you and I throw off this subjection by our combined effort, we shall be born a politically free nation out of our travail’ (cited at 64).  Devji writes with considerable elegance and even panache, to be sure, but also with the aim of unsettling conventional readings and what we deem to be ‘common sense’.  One of the more fruitful results of this intellectual exercise is the chapter tellingly entitled, ‘In Praise of Prejudice’—shades here, as throughout this book, though hardly acknowledged, of the impress on Devji of the seminal readings of Gandhi, and more broadly of Indian political culture, advanced by Ashis Nandy.  Gandhi worked to develop ‘the prejudice that remained between Indians there into a basis of friendship’ (70): neither friendship nor prejudice are amenable to a calculus of interests. Though both friendship and brotherhood furnish models of egalitarian relations, Devji argues convincingly that Gandhi was ‘an advocate of the former against the latter’ (71).  Unlike brotherhood, which may be ‘flouted a hundred times without ceasing to remain brotherhood’, friendship rests on a much more fragile foundation, having ‘to remain disinterested to be itself’ (69).  Devji weaves into this discussion a consideration of Gandhi’s stance on the Khilafat Movement and pan-Islamic politics, a subject on which even Gandhi’s most ardent admirers have often found themselves parting company from the Mahatma.  Devji’s complex interpretive moves cannot be rehearsed here, but suffice to say that he does not agree that the ‘Khilafat episode’ must be reckoned as one of Gandhi’s greatest failures.  Quite to the contrary, it is here that Gandhi demonstrated the true meaning of friendship, and it is only a cheap calculus of interests which makes us suppose, quite erroneously, that Gandhi sought reciprocity from Muslims—for example, a promise to refrain from cow slaughter—in exchange for his support of the Khilafat cause.

The six chapters that have been patched together to comprise this book thus bristle, to varying degrees, with arresting insights—even if, as is sometimes the case, our understanding of Gandhi is not visibly advanced. A case in point is the chapter entitled ‘Bastard  History’, where Devji tackles the question of Gandhi’s ‘intellectual and political antecedents.’  Brushing aside those conventional histories which invoke the names of Tolstoy, Ruskin, and Thoreau, or Raychandbhai and Gokhale, Devji avers that, with the possible exception of the Swadeshi Movement, ‘it is impossible to point to any historical example that might provide a precedent for Gandhi’s use’ of nonviolent practices and his deployment of the ideas of ahimsa, satya, and so on.  If Devji is unfamiliar with the work of, say, Howard Spodek on the antecedents of Gandhian satyagraha in Gujarati political culture, or of Dharampal’s treatise on the history of civil disobedience in Benares, it would be a severe shortcoming; but if he has deliberately chosen to ignore these histories, and many more come to mind, the reader would certainly profit from understanding why they are of no consequence.  But this is scarcely the worst of the matter:  Devji then makes bold to suggest that ‘Gandhi’s ideas and practices emerged instead from a past of conflict and violence’(11), and he suggests that the ‘Indian Mutiny of 1857 . . . provides the only historical precedent for several of the practices by which Gandhi’s politics was known, including  non-cooperation, encouraging native manufactures and the working out of  new moral relationship between Hindus and Muslims’ (11).  The Rebellion of 1857-58 gave rise to Hindu-Muslim fraternal relations, much to the consternation of colonial authorities; Gandhi similarly championed Hindu-Muslim unity.  Muslim soldiers in 1857 were keenly aware of Hindu concerns about ritual pollution without believing in them; and, in a similar vein, Hindus supported the cause of the Caliphate under Gandhi’s leadership (29).  But, apropos Gandhi, the argument borders on the bizarre.  Devji has established absolutely nothing:  he admits that ‘Gandhi’s own references to the Mutiny were invariably negative’ (11), though, in truth, Gandhi scarcely mentioned the Rebellion.  It is not accidental that though elsewhere in the book Devji routinely cites Gandhi, as he must, this chapter does not have a single reference to Gandhi’s writings or pronouncements.  What Devji has to say of the Rebellion is interesting enough, but as an exercise in the genealogy of ideas that informed the worldview of Gandhi, the chapter is utterly unconvincing. 

Devji’s book bears the subtitle, ‘Gandhi and the Temptation of Violence’, and it to this that we may finally turn for the centerpiece of Devji’s argument.  There is no gainsaying the fact that the question of violence is central to any assessment of Gandhi’s moral, spiritual, and intellectual outlook, even if the instinct of most people has naturally led them to ahimsa in thinking of Gandhi.  There are some commonplace arguments that are now firmly established in the scholarship, among them Gandhi’s distinction between nonviolence of the strong and the nonviolence of the weak, his avowed preference for violence over cowardice (134), and his frequently voiced claim, especially towards the last several years of his life, that he preferred that India be left to anarchy rather than continue to have the country subjected to British rule.  The notion that the British were there to mediate between the Hindus and Muslims is one for which Gandhi rightfully had absolutely no respect.  Gandhi entertained a suspicion of the ‘third party’ (169), whether the colonial state, the national state, or any other body—an idea first seeded in Hind Swaraj (1909):  the doctor, for example, comes between the patient and her own body.  Here, however, Devji becomes too entranced by his own argument, and cleverness lords it over judiciousness and wisdom.  Thus, we are assured, Gandhi had ‘a desire for civil war’ (161), he was despondent over the refusal of the Congress, the League, and the British ‘to heed his advice about the desirability of internecine warfare’ (164), and that he remained ‘cheerful’ as the violence raged all around him (168).  Indeed, there may have always been the ‘temptation of violence’ for Gandhi, but we might just as well accept Oscar Wilde’s aphorism, ‘I can resist everything except temptation.’

Why, then, the ‘impossible’ Indian?  Each reader will make her own interpretive moves, and some will no doubt gravitate towards the view, held among others by Ambedkar, that Gandhi was one ‘impossible’ person, cunning, disingenuous, and a master of manipulation.  Others will surely embrace the view that stands at the other extreme, and is best typified by Einstein’s admission that it was nearly impossible to believe that someone such as Gandhi ‘ever in flesh and blood had walked upon this earth’.  The Gandhians are likely to suggest that the Mahatma made no impossible demands upon others that he did not first impose upon himself.  Yet what Devji has in mind in describing Gandhi as ‘the impossible Indian’ seems to be far removed from all of this, and may even extend well beyond the reading that he himself explicitly puts forth, namely that an impossible tension exists between Gandhi’s stern advocacy of nonviolence and his keen sense that the most genuine embrace of nonviolence resided in the confrontation with, rather than mere repudiation of, violence.  In invoking Gandhi as ‘the impossible Indian’, Devji appears to be gesturing at the kind of possibilities suggested by Derrida in his essay, ‘Avowing—the Impossible: “Returns”, Repentance, and Reconciliation’.  The impossible enhances the potential of what exists; or, put differently, the possible only revels in its full potential in the face of the impossible.  There is no wise and ethical politics without the impossible.  Whatever its other limitations, Devji’s The Impossible Indian suggests as much about Gandhi and in this respect has opened up new avenues of exploration into the rich politics and inner life of a person whose contribution to contemporary political and ethical life by any measure was sui generis.

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[1] Akeel Bilgrami, ‘Gandhi’s religion and its relation to his politics’, in The Cambridge Companion to Gandhi, eds. Judith M. Brown & Anthony Parel (Cambridge University Press, 2011), 107.

SOURCE: http://vinaylal.wordpress.com/2013/10/04/reading-gandhi-and-avowing-the-impossible/