(***My editor is tied up this morning, please forgive the typos!)
What’s real right now?
Biden’s economy is booming. [SOURCE]
Our elections are safe and secure. [SOURCE]
The 2020 election was the most secure in history. [SOURCE]
The vaccines are safe and effective. [SOURCE]
Donald Trump is a rapist. [SOURCE]
MAGA is a movement of radical extremists. [SOURCE]
Ukraine has a path to victory against Russia. [SOURCE]
Attacking Iran is the path to peace. [SOURCE]
Fidel Castro is an American martyr. [SOURCE]
This is a game of choose your own reality.
Take your pick.
While my knee-jerk instinct is to viciously obliterate each of these bald-faced lies, it feels like time would be better spent letting them fall where they lie. Too many people are drinking this Kool-Aid. We need only to acknowledge the fact that millions of Americans believe these ridiculous lies, and then knock the dust off our boots and walk on in search of practical solutions.
As Americans on the left and right both continue to whistle past the graveyard, as the government continues to cook the books to boost Joe Biden, as the administration makes every effort to ensure the southern invasion continues unabated, and as the MIC and money grubbing war hawks continue to push for World War III in the Middle East, I’m reminded of just how powerful gaslighting can be.
What we are witnessing right now, is a form of cleverly induced collective psychosis. As previously reported, there is a science to this level of psychological manipulation. In TR 200 - How They Hack Your Mind, we learned that our minds can be “profoundly influenced by physiological means,” through the inducement of “nervous excitement,” which leads to a state of increased suggestibility and mental confusion.
This science allows for a “variety and range of religious viewpoints”—AKA political viewpoints—to be “firmly implanted” in the public’s mind. In simplest terms, the elites have long understood exactly how to convince the public of damn near anything. Now, with the advent of weaponized artificial intelligence, social listening, sentinel surveillance, and algorithmic social interventions, their capacity to capture and fracture the public psyche has been taken to an entirely new level.
Of course, the obvious question is: what can be done about this systematic physiological hijacking of humanity?
Just as there is a science to enslaving the mind, there is also a science to liberating the mind as well. Uprooting firmly implanted lies and illusions, and subsequently stepping out of the mental cage and freeing oneself from mental slavery, requires both elevated awareness and summoned will power. It requires effort and concentration.
In an excellent essay titled Gaslighting: The Psychology of Shaping Another’s Reality or How Mass Perception is Manufactured, Cynthia Chung boils it all down to this:
“If we choose to walk in this life blind to what is the good, if we reject the possibility and potential for a positive change, we will certainly condemn ourselves to living in a hell, but that is not reality, that is our self-affirmed creation.
The choice is ours to make and the solution is rather simple, it is through our own self-will that we can walk out of this mental prison.
And it is our own self who will have to become our hero in the process.”
Where the focus goes, the energy flows.
What Cynthia is saying here, is that when we become “blind” to what is good, we inadvertently condemn ourselves to living in a self-affirmed hell. Reversing this thought, by focusing on what is good in life, the many little things that we have to be grateful for, we step out of the illusions of doom and gloom.
This may seem pretty self-explanatory, but it’s worth noting this process impacts us at the physiological level. Gratitude releases the happy hormones that directly combat stress, which provides us with a workable strategy to battle against the “nervous excitement” that’s being used to heighten our suggestibility to implanted ideas.
“The choice is ours to make and the solution is rather simple, it is through our own self-will that we can walk out of this mental prison.”
The mental prison is fear, stress, and confusion. All it takes to reduce fear, stress, and confusion is to recognize the power of our own free will. We do not have to be afraid, or feel stress, or allow ourselves to be confused, and yet many people fail to realize these very visceral experiences can be overcome through the power of choice.
In essence, we can choose to “opt-out” of feeling this way. We do so by shifting our mental focus and cultivating a positive and empowering mindset. The most powerful tool to do this is using the power of our breath. Breath control, as I used to tell my yoga students, is the most basic building block of self-control.
When we learn to control our breathing, we learn to control our heart rate and our emotional state of mind. Of course, as with anything, this takes practice.
In time, with sufficient repetition, it becomes second nature.
Once you have internalized the habit of better breathing—one of the Tools of Transformation—you can use this as a tool to create an internal physiological shift anytime you need to. That means that an energetic boost and mental clarity are never far away, so long as you learn to recognize the need (i.e. learn to tune into your mental and emotional state) and have practiced enough to be proficient.
Interestingly enough, learning to work with your breath also increases will power, which in turn provides a greater sense of empowerment and feeds into a greater degree of grit, determination, and tenacity. The reason for this, drawing upon my own personal experience, is because controlling my breath proves that I can control my mind, which means I can control my brain and my body.
That means that I am in charge.
Me. Not my monkey brain, or even my broken body, as I had to learn the hard way.
And if I am in charge, the positive possibilities become as endless as my ability to make productive choices. No longer am I the victim of circumstance. Even if I’m trapped in a broken body (as was my personal experience when learning how to apply these lessons), I’m still the master of my destiny and the captain of my soul.
It seems almost childish and silly to say such things out loud, but these are profound truths—and these are precisely the truths that are being buried under the relentless deluge of propaganda that would have us believe we are helpless to change the course of fate. Everything is out of our control. There’s nothing we can do to stop it.
Our fate, as dictated by powerful global forces, is in fact inevitable.
That’s what they want us to believe.
Don’t buy the lies!
While all of this is easy enough to understand, there is a common pitfall. Even when we are aware that mental tampering is a threat, even when we understand how to discipline our minds and muster the will to resist, there is still a loophole that allows the powers that be to mess with our minds, kind of like the way a cat plays with a mouse.
That loophole is overconfidence. In other words, it’s ego.
Cynthia’s article above provides this warning:
“It was thus our deeply programmed “survival instinct” that was found to be the key to the suggestibility of our minds. That the best “survivors” made for the best “brain-washing” in a sense. Since the focus was purely on adaptation to the environment in order to survive and not in questioning nor challenging our surrounding circumstance.”
Unpacking that a bit, why were the best survivors found to be the easiest targets for brainwashing? Because their focus was on survival, logically adapting to circumstances to stave off the worst case scenario. However, the hangup here, the loophole, is the fact that our minds cannot distinguish between real and imaginary threats. Neither can the mind make the distinction between real and imaginary stress.
This is why psychological operations are so damn effective.
But, once we understand this loophole exists—that our survival instinct can be activated by an imaginary threat, and that as strong survivors we are highly susceptible to these suggestions—we can learn to question the veracity of circumstance and challenge the perception that impending doom is inevitable.
This is the function of discernment, as we were recently discussing. It’s using our inner awareness to monitor our thoughts, suspend emotional reactions and pause what appears to be “rational” decision-making, long enough to reestablish and maintain our connection with the reality that exists outside of our head.
Here again, we find grounding in gratitude to be a powerful and useful exercise.
What’s real right now?
I am alive. I am breathing. I have a heart beat.
That means I have free will and can exercise the power of choice.
I can choose what to believe, how to think, and how I want to feel about things.
Though much of reality is beyond my control, there is still much that I can control—I can literally control my heartbeat, my brain, and my body, I control my reactions and physiological responses, and I can do all of this with the power of my breath.
Once I’ve assumed the captain’s seat, I can make choices and direct my physical and mental energy toward positive, productive outcomes. No matter how incremental or small, I can use each victory to gain traction and accelerate in a positive direction.
These truths hold true, even when the sky if falling.
Perhaps the most profound internal shift we can make, relative to the never ending gaslighting about a hung election and a civil war, WWIII, economic collapse, global famine, digital enslavement, etc., is to realize that not only can we survive all of the above (and more), we can actually choose to THRIVE throughout the process.
Never let them steal your joy.
TR 538 - Learning to Thrive in the Midst of Chaos by Rejecting the Gaslighting and Lies