Today I want to review a book I have recently finished reading: The Mythic Past: Biblical Archaeology and the Myth of Israel. Let me introduce my subject with a quote from another recent book by Nachman Ben-Yehuda, the Israeli sociologist, who writes:

"How do we perceive our culture? How do we understand ourselves as beings in need of meaning? We are socialized into and live in complex cultures from which we extract the very essence of our identity, but at the same time, we also construct these cultures. How is this process accomplished? What is the nature of those cultural processes…?

"One interesting way of exploring cultures is to examine some of the myriad contrasts that characteristically make up cultures. These contrasts set boundaries, which in turn define the variety of the symbolic-moral universes of which complex cultures are made. In turn, these symbolic-moral universes give rise to and support both personal and collective identities. There are many such contrasts, some more profound than others. There are physical contrasts, such as black/white, day/night, sea/land, mountain/valley; and there are socially and morally constructed contrasts, such as good/bad, right/wrong, justice/injustice, trust/betrayal. The contrast we shall focus on in this book ( Sacrificing Truth: Archaeology and the Myth of Masada) is a major and significant one: that between truth and falsehood. This contrast cuts across many symbolic-moral universes because it touches a quality to which we attach central importance - that between the genuine and the spurious. …

"[T]he demarcating line between that which is truth and that which is not did not leap into existence overnight, but developed gradually in Western philosophical thought over many years. …

"As scientists we must affirm that there are versions of reality which are inconsistent with, even contradictory to, "facts." The realities which these false versions create are synthetic and misleading. …

"Adhering to social realities which are based on incorrect empirical facts and false information is - evidently - possible, but carries a heavy price tag in terms of a genuine understanding of the world in which we live. …

"…Nationalism requires the elaboration of a real or invented past…

"…Nationalist archaeology has no choice but to be political. …In cases of disputed pasts it has to become manipulative as well. Manipulating archaeology to legitimize specific pasts - real or invented - is a potent concoction to use when one wants to forge a national identity and create cohesion by fostering a strong sense of a shared past…"

This is exactly the problem that Thomas L. Thompson addresses in The Mythic Past: Biblical Archaeology and the Myth of Israel : the creation of an invented past that was accomplished long ago, for purposes of forging a national identity among refugees. However, at the time it was originally done, the target audience understood that it was not a real "history," but rather an ideological textbook for the future. The real problems began when another group, some time later, decided to use the same stories (handily already available), for their own imperial ambitions and presented this ideological literature as History. In short, as Thompson and others point out, the "History of Israel" was really created by European elitists seeking to colonize the world and knew a good thing when they saw it.

As Keith W. Whitelam writes in The Invention of Ancient Israel: The Silencing of Palestinian History:

"There exists, then, what we might term a discourse of biblical studies which is a powerful, interlocking network of ideas and assertions believed by its practitioners to be the reasonable results of objective scholarship while masking the realities of an exercise of power. […]

"The cult of the individual which dominates all forms of modern politics in the USA, Britain, Europe, and elsewhere with the use of the power of television, video and satellite only confirms the prejudice that it is great men, and a few women, who shape the destiny of humanity. Any attempt to investigate the underlying currents which have helped shape the preconceptions of these individuals or help to explain their success is ‘persuading’ the populace to support them is dismissed as crude materialism or an unsophisticated Marxist reading of history. […]

"The gradual exposure of the interrelationship of the discipline of biblical studies with politics will provide a better understanding of the forces which have helped to shape the imagination of a past that has monopolized the history of the region…. The unspoken or unacknowledged political and religious attitudes of modern scholarship conspire to obscure the ancient politics of the past."

Essentially, Whitelam and Thompson and others are saying that our history, which is infused with the "transference of the history of Israel to Europe," is a creation of Eurocentric modes of thought. It is also what has brought our world to the precipice of annihilation today.

So the question of who is in power, how they think, what effect this has on society, is not an inconsequential one; we are living with its consequences today.

John Henrik Clarke, (Christopher Columbus and the Afrikan Holocaust: Slavery and the Rise of European Capitalism ), looks at the issue from another perspective which defines the problem, but excludes the cause (people in power "writing history" for their own imperialistic purposes):

"Europeans not only began to colonize most of the world, they also colonized information about the world. They colonized the Bible. They colonized all complimentary images that non-European people held of themselves. The most effective of all of these colonized images was their colonization of the image of God. Through missionaries, adventurers, free-booters and slave traders they began to propagate the concept that God favored them over other people. They were saying, in essence, that all Europeans were the chosen people of God. […]

"The Europeans were now telling their victims that the world waited in darkness for them to bring the light. Where, in actuality, everywhere the European went outside of Europe he put out the light of his victims’ culture, spirituality and cultured way of life. Not only did he not understand their culture, he had no intention of understanding their culture. Europeans declared war on the structure of every society they invaded or were welcomed into as visitors. […]

"In the early years of the nineteenth century, the system of chattel slavery gave way to the colonial system. This was not the end of racism … it was only a radical change in how it would be manifested. The European would now change the system of capturing Africans and other non-white people and enslaving them thousands of miles from their homes. They would enslave them on the spot, within their own countries, and use them as markets for the new goods coming out of the developing European industrial revolution and out of their countries and their labors to produce grist for new European mills. The industrial rise of the West has as its base a form of racism that helped to lay the base of the present economic system we now call capitalism."

Thompson writes:

"The early history of Palestine is a story of farmers and shepherds; of villages and markets. It is about local patrons and their clients and all the early ways of life that have lasted so long in this corner of the Mediterranean. The history of a richly varied people over an extended period of time…

"Our study of the roots and beginnings of historical developments also focuses on the people who wrote the Bible. How are Palestine’s historical peoples related to those who created literary Israel? This is not an idle question. The new history of Palestine’s peoples and their distant beginnings stems almost entirely from archaeological and linguistic research undertaken over the past fifty years. It presents a picture so radically unfamiliar, and so very different from a biblical view as to be hardly recognizable to the writers of the Bible, so thoroughly has our understanding of the past been forced to change.

"There is no Adam or Eve in this story, nor a Noah, Abraham and Sarah. And there is no place for them. Not even Moses and Joshua have roles in this history about the people who formed the Bible and its world. …

"The conflict surrounding the Bible and history - one that has played a considerable role in Western thought since Napoleon occupied Egypt at the end of the eighteenth century - is essentially a false controversy. It has occurred only because our commitment to myths of original as part of an historically based modern world has caused us to interpret the biblical perspective as historical, until faced with definitive proof to the contrary. We should not be trying to salvage our origin myths as history. That hides their meaning from us, and ignores the strong anti-intellectual strain of fundamentalism that underlies so many of the historical interests invested in biblical archaeology.[…]

"Scholars have traditionally talked about the political structures of Bronze Age Palestine as an ‘interlocking system of city-states’. Such terminology is as harmful as it is undiscriminating. Palestine at this early period had no cities, aside from Hazor of the very distant north. It has only villages and small towns. The population of the largest was only a very few thousands at best. … To speak of ’state’ structures among such towns confuses Bronze Age Palestine with Renaissance Italy! […] Palestine, until the Assyrian period, was a land of stable, autonomous towns ruled by their ‘princes’ and chiefs. … Could any town or coalition of towns have engaged in the kind of political struggle, in the kind of financial and military build-up necessary to successfully field an army sufficient to [do anything of significance]? The prospect is unlikely. The archaeological evidence for the military and political structures of Palestine’s many towns and regions stands wholly against it. … It also stands against historical ideas of a Solomonic empire. […]

"[W]hen one investigates the history of Palestine independently of the biblical view of the past, this period betrays little evidence of biblical Israel’s emergence. […]

"There is no evidence of a United Monarchy, no evidence of a capital in Jerusalem or of any coherent, unified political force that dominated western Palestine, let alone an empire of the size the legends describe. We do not have evidence for the existence of kings named Saul, David or Solomon; nor do we have evidence for any temple at Jerusalem in the early period. What we do know of Israel and Judah of the tenth century does not allow us to interpret this lack of evidence as a gap in our knowledge and information about the past, as a result merely of the accidental nature of archaeology. There is neither room nor context, no artifact or archive that points to such historical realities in Palestine’s tenth century. One cannot speak historically of a state without a population. Nor can one speak of a capital without a town.

"An historical state of Israel came into existence and was sustained by the development of an olive industry built with a newly developed and expanded system of terracing in the course of the ninth century BC. This small state was comparable to other states of Palestine such as Ammon, Moab and Edom. It was organized around the settlements in the hill country between Jerusalem and the Jezreel valley… The immediate origins of this population rested in the settlement of the displaced part of the population that had abandoned the lowlands in the wake of the Mycenaean drought…"

It was the basis of its formation that pretty much brought the nascent "statehood" of Israel to an end. There was money to be made from the olive industry and that almost immediately attracted the interest of the Assyrians who basically came in and took over, defeating each local "patron" or kinglet, one after the other. At this point, we learn something very interesting from Thompson. Tiglath Pileser III, king of Assyria, reports that he deported people from Israel and replaced its king, Peqah, with a king of his own choice, Hoshea. As an Assyrian vassal, and from the capital of Samaria, Hoshea, under Assyrian patronage, gains control over the Jezreel valley. This control lasted for less than a decade.

Tiglath Pileser began a process of subsuming Syrian and Palestinian agriculture to Assyrian interests.

Now, here’s the key item: The Assyrian army introduced the policy of population transference which involved transporting peoples across the Assyrian empire. The reason for these deportation were simply imperialistic. People were not necessarily deported because of insurrection, but rather to preemptively eliminate rivals for power. The Assyrians resettled many groups of deportees in Assyrian cities and trouble spots elsewhere. In this way, the imperial government could establish groups within the subject population who were entirely dependent upon the imperial authority.

Sometimes whole villages were deported from conquered territories and used to restore and rebuild cities elsewhere. They repopulated abandoned and empty lands and fractured any "ethnic coherence" that might have produced resistance from the local population. Throughout its existence, this seems to have been a standard policy and technique of the Assyrian empire and was adopted by other empires that followed. The Assyrian ideology of "democratic equality" within the provinces was propagandized as a main benefit of being subsumed to the empire. Thompson writes:

"Taking rulers and upper classes captive and deporting them to regions in the heart of the empire was useful. It punished rebels and got rid of potential troublemakers. It enabled the governors of new territories to create terror through hostage-taking. It complicated any local successor’s claim to legitimacy. At the same time, it put the administration of regions into the hands of local interests who were dependent on the empire for their survival and acceptance. Population resettlement did much more than handle the pacification of newly acquired territories. Undermining the local patrons basic to the political structures of the region, it recreated them as dependencies of Assyria’s patronage.

"The population resettlement programme was backed by extensive political propaganda. The conquerors of new territories couch surrender in terms of "liberation", and "salvation" from former oppressive rulers. Deportation is described as a "reward" for populations who rebelled against their leaders. The people are always "restored to their homelands". Such returns involve the "restoration" of "lost" and "forgotten" gods, following long periods of exile. […]

"Resettled in the great cities of the empire, or in villages and towns of foreign territories, with their survival dependent on their future support of imperial goals, [the deportees] allegiance to the state was assured. Grateful for the freedom and equality in their new homes, they served as countervalent force against any local opposition…

"Some early texts present the Assyrian king as the savior of the people, who, after freeing them from enslavement forced upon them by their rulers, returned them and their gods to the homelands from which they had been exiled. Here, the dislocated peoples were encouraged to think of themselves in terms of restoration rather than punitive deportation; as saved from exile by the will of the king. They became returnees to their homelands, reunited with their lost and forgotten gods. …

"The deportees received land and a renewal of prosperity from the Assyrians upon resettlement, they were given support and protection against the indigenous population, who naturally viewed them as intruders and usurpers. … The ultimate purpose was to wipe out regional and national distinctions and create an imperial citizenry… […]

"Under the rule of the Persian kings, a number of groups and families were transferred from Mesopotamia and resettled in southern Palestine. A new colony was established in and around Jerusalem. Those resettled were accompanied by traditional political propaganda."

I hope that the implication of the above is not lost on the reader. Just WHO "returned to Israel from "exile in Babylon"?

After dealing with the history and archaeology of the region, Thompson turns his attention to the literary world of the writers of the bible. The subtext of this section leads us straight into the bible’s theological world. Essentially, what Thompson is doing is tracking the ideology, what Georges Dumezil referred to as the "line of force". When we have taken a particular text apart and have ascertained, as much as possible from what is exposed to us, the approximate legitimacy of each element, there still remains another question that actually constitutes the essence of the matter: What are the main trends of the whole? What are the lines of force running through the ideological field in which the details are placed? This is often where subjective belief enters the picture, acting as the lens through which we view our past and present, and the scale by which we judge the merits of fact vs. faith.

That takes us back to what Nachman Ben-Yehuda wrote, quoted at the beginning:

"As scientists we must affirm that there are versions of reality which are inconsistent with, even contradictory to, "facts." The realities which these false versions create are synthetic and misleading."

Thompson’s assessment of the theological reality of Judaism is shocking. He takes the reader there in his circuitous and avuncular manner, building layer upon layer of revelation that, once he points it out to you, you wonder why you didn’t see it yourself long ago! In the end, you realize that there is something very dark and disturbing about Judaism, formulated as it was, upon the model of Assyrian imperialism transferred to the "heavenly realms."

The narratives of the Bible, (and the New Testament is only a continuation of the same literary tradition), focus on "faithfulness and loyalty" to the patron, the imperial master. Total acceptance of one’s fate is what is counted as "righteous" and wise. It is in this context that the "son of god" figures. There are quite a few "sons of god" in the Bible, as it happens, and the definition of such is one who accepts whatever fate God has decreed, and does whatever God tells him to do, no matter how evil it may seem in the eyes of others and even his own eyes. In fact, if he is really a good "son of god," nothing that god tells him to do will seem evil whether it is annihilating every man, woman and child in an innocent town, or sacrificing one’s own son. Thompson writes:

"That Mark quotes the song of David from Psalm 22:2-3 for Jesus’ dying words calls up the similar scenes of David and Jesus in their despair on the Mount of Olives. The allusion seems intentional, as the larger context of the Psalm suggests and which Mark’s Jesus echoes… […]

"We should also recall to mind the songs of the suffering servant in Isaiah 42-53 and the story of King Ahaz of Isaiah, 7. Both accept their destiny, refusing to question God. Also like David on the Mount of Lives, Jesus has not put God to the test. In his humility he has followed the path of righteousness. He has put his trust in God. He was scorned and despised by men. […]

"Jesus, as humble servant of the tradition, calls on God to be with him. At this scream, the curtain of the temple that closes off the Holy of Holies that separates God from man, tears in two, marking his death. God is with him!

"This nearly bitter, mocking irony of Mark’s gospel finds its climax in the understanding of the Roman centurion as he hears this cry of despair and death. ‘Truly this man was a son of God.’ … Behind the centurion’s remark lies the hidden, dark side of biblical tradition: God abandons his children. It is Jesus’ cry of despair that brings conviction above all doubt. In Mark’s gospel, Jesus plays out his role of son of God. Like Israel his first-born, like Samson, Samuel and Saul, like the prophets Elijah and Johan, and like Job in his role in this tradition, this role mediates and gives voice to the common human ambivalence about the divine in our lives. One enters the kingdom only in death."

Thompson then goes on to discuss what it really means to "be with God", and how the tradition slyly informs us that the real meaning is death and destruction! Repeatedly, throughout the texts, when "Yahweh, god of armies" comes, there is nothing but disaster - Armageddon.

"The days of Yahweh - when Yahweh will be with us - are days of destruction, days to be feared. The imagery calls up war and destruction as a response of divine wrath and judgment. The development of the metaphor of the ‘day of Yahweh’ as the day on which Yahweh will come and judge Israel draws its strength most directly from a view of the past that sees the destruction of Jerusalem and old Israel as well-deserved punishments sent by God."

Interestingly, it turns out that Yahweh himself is only a "son of god." One wonders, of course, if that is not just another name for Satan!

At one point, Thompson points out the most interesting paradox:

"The historicism implicit in the biblical theology movement of half a century ago is more modern than it is biblical. What is often referred to as history is not a history, but a tradition. It is interested neither in the past nor indeed in the future. Both are but reflections for reality, and, as such, other than reality. The most disorienting difficulty with such readings of the Bible is that they attempt to transpose a perspective of reality underlying biblical traditions into peculiarly modern terms. They permit reflection on our reality, but not reflection on what was real for the writers of the Bible. … This fundamental assumption (and I would say arrogance) of biblical theology had at its core a belief in the inadequacy of the world-view of the ancients. At the same time, it is maintained that a blind faith that this same primitive world’s religious perception could become a saving perception in our world."

Finally, the question that must be returned to is "whose history is it?"

"Writing is an exercise of influence and persuasion. This is just as true of history as of any other form of writing. … History itself is created by its writers. … As such, history belongs to those who do the writing.

"The capacity and vulnerability of a tradition for creative reinterpretation is not restricted much by a tradition’s content, nor by how close it may be to the origins of the tradition in the past. It is almost entirely determined by the bearers of the tradition. A text such as those we find in the Bible is at the mercy of those who claim the tradition as their own and interpret is. […]

"When we ask about those who have transmitted the stories and have brought them through the centuries as meaningful, we can hardly avoid the conclusion that the history of Israel is for the most part, European. Whether Jewish or Christian, this history is a product of, and has been central to, Europe’s self-understanding. Europe has written it - and written it for Europe’s own purposes! […]

"A pre-emptive claim on the history of Palestine supports European intellectual and spiritual claims of continuity with the Bible, and with what is asserted as Europe’s past. Europe’s self-identity as Christian has its origin story in the Bible - a story that reaches back to creation."

And so it is that the history of Palestine, of the Palestinians, has been almost completely erased just as the West, via its handmaiden, the invented Israel, are currently erasing the Palestinians.

A word about style: yes, Thompson is circuitous and sometimes a bit dense and repetitive, but that in no way diminishes the value of the book. Academics do not write to entertain, but to convey often complex ideas that must be developed layer by layer. Nevertheless, I do wish that the material in this book could be presented in a more "user friendly" fashion for the more "average" reader since, in my opinion, it should be propagated widely. Perhaps some enterprising soul will undertake to write "The Truth About the Bible For Dummies."

This book requires patience, concentration, and a good intellect to read and comprehend. But it is well worth it.

How can anybody be sure of anything in this day and time when the world seems to have gone mad and we find ourselves collectively in the position of the hero/heroine of the horror movie who hears a noise. Indeed, the audience can see that the monster is lurking in the bushes (no pun intended) just outside the door, the soundtrack is heavy with ominous portent, and with innocent naïveté and a handy flashlight, the star of the movie puts his or her hand on the doorknob. The audience groans with the agony of knowing and collectively shouts "DON’T OPEN THE DOOR!" But, unfortunately, the movie world is not connected to the world of the audience, and no warning can cross that divide.

In the old days, movie heroes and heroines generally always survived such mistakes by dint of clever scripting. In more recent years, you can never be sure anymore: the hero or heroine is likely to die - reflecting real life - because of their stupidity.

Admittedly, when I was much younger, I only liked the kind of movies where the hero or heroine triumphed in the end. I was always upset and angry - I felt cheated - if the movie ended as real life often does: no haven, no help, no hope. Only later did I realize the usefulness of such movies; that they could be teaching tools that help us to analyze our hopes, our beliefs, our wishful thinking that "right will prevail" no matter what, so that, if - indeed - we ever found ourselves in similar situations, we could circumvent the "failures of intelligence" that led to failures in awareness and strategy. In short, observing how wishful thinking most often leads to disaster in real life, could teach us how to think rationally, how to analyze and predict, and thus, formulate an adequate response to any situation of danger.

It’s a useful concept.

But it still doesn’t bridge the divide between the actors in the movie and the audience that can SEE.

We get a lot of letters from readers and entries in our forum by people who complain that the SOTT Team sound like they are "frustrated" or "insulting" or "repetitious" or they don’t understand that it is all just a cosmic game and we can go home at the end and have a party with all the bad guys. They aren’t aware, of course, of the many discussions we have trying to figure out what may or may not work to get the attention of the reader in a way that will truly serve to galvanize them to wake up. One day we may try one thing, and another day, we will try something else.

At the present time, it seems that much of the outside world is watching America in the same way an audience watches a horror movie. The audience, of course, has the benefit of a "bird’s eye view," and all the clues of music and privileged perspective granted by the movie maker. The actors are in a state of "fantasy," or "wishful thinking," if you like. They have agreed, individually and collectively, to engage in acting out the drama. They have agreed to "forget" all they know about the script so as to more effectively "get into" their roles. When the movie making is over, they all have a cast party, toast each other for how well they managed to fool the audience, and agree that it was a great movie and go home to read another script.

The audience, on the other hand, if they are knowledgeable, will agree that their favorite actors sure had them going there for a bit! They will declare sagely how good the monster was, and how evil the villain was because the actor or actress was such a master of their craft.

Such analogies as audience and movie are often used by philosophers as a way of suggesting that all that happens on earth is exactly that: a grand play and everybody is all the same when the show is over: actors and audience are simply two sides that have agreed to play "parts" in the life of humanity. Certainly, at some ultimate "level" of reality, this may be true in a certain way, but we suspect that it is not at all exactly that simple. I wrote a bit about this in my book: The Secret History of the World. It is a bit esoteric, but I’m going to quote it anyway. It’s my page, I can do what I want.

The great Sufi Shaykh Ibn al-’Arabi explains that "imperfection" exists in Creation because "were there no imperfection, the perfection of existence would be imperfect." From the point of view of Sheer Being, there is nothing but good.

But Infinite Potential to BE includes - by definition of the word "infinite" - the potential to Not Be. And so, Infinite Potential - The ALL - "splits" into Thought Centers of Creation/BEing and Thought Centers of Entropy/Non-being. It can be said that Infinite Potential is fundamentally Binary - on or off - to be or not to be. That is the first "division."

Since absolute non-being is an impossible paradox in terms of the source of Infinite Potential to BE, the half of the consciousness of Infinite Potential that constitute the IDEAS of non-being - for every idea of manifestation, there is a corresponding idea for that item of creation to NOT manifest - "falls asleep" for lack of a better term. Its "self observation" is predicated upon consciousness that can only "mimic" death. Consciousness that mimics death then "falls" and becomes Primal Matter. […]

It has been represented for millennia in the yin-yang symbol, which, even on the black half that represents "sleeping consciousness that is matter," you can see the small white dot of "being" that represents to us that absolute non-existence is not possible. There is only "relative" non-existence. […]

At our level of reality, the understanding that "nothing is real," as has been promulgated by gurus and teachers down through history, is as useless as saying "gravity isn’t real." Such considerations are useful only for expansion of perception. They are not useful for practical application since the energies of creation apparently transduce through several "levels" before they meet in the middle, so to say, in our reality.

Organic life exists at the "crossroads" of the myriad ideas or thought centers of being and non-being. As such, they have the capacity to transduce energies "up" or "down" depending on the "consciousness energy directors" of that unit. […]

Against the opposition of those forces seeking to "capture" energy of consciousness and induce it to the "sleep of non-being," which is gravitational in a certain sense, the energies of consciousness seek to "inform" matter via awakening the self-awareness of those organic units on earth that are capable of resistance to the gravity of non-being. As self-aware "transducing units," the human being has the potential for going either way - toward intensified being, or toward intensified non-being. […]

God creates the good and the evil, the ugly and the beautiful, the straight and the crooked, the moral and the immoral. Between these traits lie the manifold dangers of the path of the seeker of Truth.

Many modern day "teachers" and "gurus" tell us "Since there is only One Being which permeates all things, all we have to do is see everything as only light", and that will transmute the darkness, and we will "create our own reality of light."

Such a statement ignores the fact that the statement "God is One" describes a reality that is a higher level from which our own "mixed being" manifests. The man who assumes that he can become like God at this level just by thinking it, ignores the facts of Being vs. Non-being which outrays from "God is One" at a level of existence that is clearly several levels above our own. Evil is REAL on its own level, and the task of man is to navigate the Cosmic Maze without being defiled by the Evil therein. This is the root of Free Will.

Man faces a predicament as REAL as himself: he is forced to choose - to utilize his knowledge by applying it - between the straight path which leads to Being, and the crooked paths which lead to Non-Being.

Human beings are required to discern between good and evil - consciousness energy directors - at every stage of their existence in this reality. Because, in fact, they must understand that God is consciousness and God is matter. God is good, and God is evil. The Creation assumes all the different properties of the many "Names of God." The Cosmos is full of Life-giving and Slaying, Forgiveness and Vengeance, Exaltation and Abasement, Guidance and Deception. To attempt to assume God’s point of view and "mix everything" at this level, results only in STAYING at this level. Therefore, human beings must always separate God’s point of view from their own point of view and the fact that all creation assumes the divine Names and Traits.

Thus, the first Divine Command is BE! And that includes Being and Non-being instantaneously. Therefore, the second law is "follow Being or Non-being according to your choice and your inherent nature." All creation is a result of the engendering command. So, in this respect, there is no Evil. But the second, prescriptive law determines to which "Face of God" one will return: Life or Death. [The Secret History of the World]

Sure, in the ultimate Grand Scheme of things, everything goes back to source. The difference is that those with the BEing nature of Creativity don’t like the idea of Entropy and they reserve the right to make a choice.

It is easier to resist evil at the beginning than at the end.

And it is oh, so easy to excuse yourself from resisting by just saying: "Oh, it’s just a movie! We can all go home at the end and know that everyone played their parts well…"

There is more than a little scientific support for the above ideas that consciousness - the root of existence and BEing - has two fundamental states: on, or off. In the final analysis, it seems that the metaphor of humanity and its collective "higher selves" being a movie and an audience, may be simply anthropomorphizing creative and entropic forces of the universe for the purposes of "self-calming." The stakes, it seems, are a lot higher and more real.

This brings us to the issue of subjectivity vs. objectivity. In recent weeks, I have been queried by several people who want to know just HOW "Knowledge protects." My response was too lengthy to reproduce here, but I said in part:

As the C’s have said, and this is echoed in the most ancient traditions: "It’s not where you are, but WHO you are and WHAT YOU SEE that counts." This "who" and "what you see" have been somewhat problematical as research subjects, and it has only been in the last three years that clear understanding of these concepts have been articulated. I discuss both extensively in my lectures on Alchemy.

We must regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its past and the cause of its future. Consider an intelligence which, at any instant, could have a knowledge of all forces controlling nature together with the momentary conditions of all the entities of which nature consists. If this intelligence were powerful enough to submit all this data to analysis it would be able to embrace in a single formula the movements of the largest bodies in the universe and those of the lightest atoms; for it, nothing would be uncertain; the future and the past would be equally present to its eyes. Pierre Laplace

Certainly, such an intelligence as Laplace describes would be "Godlike," you agree? And certainly, no one of us human beings is capable of such "seeing," you will also agree. However, what does seem to be true is that this is a significant clue to the solutions to the pressing issues of our day: knowledge that leads to awareness.

Here I will insert a major clue: As the brain interacts with its environment, synaptic circuits combine to form synaptic maps of the world perceived by the senses. These maps describe small segments of that world - shape, color, movement - and these maps are scattered throughout the brain. As the brain’s synaptic network evolves, beginning at birth - or even before - these maps process information simultaneously and in parallel.

Based on our synaptic maps of the world, we are enabled to have e more or less objective view of reality.

Classical physics asserts that the future already exists, as do the present and past. Everything that ever will happen has already happened. But for some unknown reason our minds can only experience the future a piece at a time in what we call the present.

Quantum physics, on the other hand, says that we can never predict the future with absolute certainty. The future does not yet exist in a single definite state. Quantum uncertainty does not deny us all knowledge about the future. It gives us the tools to make predictions, but only in terms of probabilities.

Bohr and other leading physicists of the Copenhagen School say that objective reality is an ambiguous concept at the quantum level. In physics, our knowledge comes only when we actually measure something, and even then the way we decide to perform the measurement affects the results we obtain.

Asking the same question in different ways may give seemingly contradictory answers, but no single experiment will itself provide contradictory information. Some experiments will show electrons as waves, and others will show them as particles. In no single experiment do electrons display wavelike and particle-like behavior simultaneously. Bohr called this complementarity.

Quantum mechanics leaves the observer uncertain about the actual nature of reality. Are they really waves or particles? We don’t know and no experiment will tell us. Detecting one of the attributes automatically excludes knowledge about the other.

There is a striking similarity between life and thought. Just as there are more potential life forms than the planet can hold, there are more potential ideas than our minds can possibly absorb and remember.

Just as evolutionary natural selection may generate change by choosing from among the many potential forms of life, so may thought be able to generate evolutionary change by choosing among many potential thoughts.

The master evolutionary mechanism is found in the wave function of the universe. The observer guides the selection from an infinite number of potential arrangements that the universe may assume from moment to moment.

The universe has many possible future states or potentialities represented by the wave function. The wave function is constantly collapsing into the present as the many possible states become a single state as the present unfolds and possibilities become actualities.

Many individuals have decided that this Quantum Uncertainty means that you can "create your own reality" by what you believe, or depending upon what you give your attention to. This is a popular idea among many New Age types, and is actually the foundation of most religions whether they realize it or not. Let’s have a look at what can be done with a little twist of scientific knowledge:

Hysterica Passio

Chris Floyd October 22, 2004

Now we come at last to the heart of darkness. Now we know, from their own words, that the Bush Regime is a cult — a cult whose god is Power, whose adherents believe that they alone control reality, that indeed they create the world anew with each act of their iron will. And the goal of this will — undergirded by the cult’s supreme virtues of war, fury and blind faith — is likewise openly declared: "Empire."

You think this is an exaggeration? Then heed the words of the White House itself: a "senior adviser" to the president, who, as The New York Times reports, explained the cult to author Ron Suskind in the heady pre-war days of 2002.

First, the top Bush insider mocked the journalist and all those "in what we call the reality-based community," i.e., people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." Suskind’s attempt to defend the principles of reason and enlightenment cut no ice with the Bush-man.

"That’s not the way the world really works anymore. We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality," he said. "And while you’re studying that reality, we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."

Anyone with any knowledge of 20th-century history will know that this same megalomaniacal outburst could have been made by a "senior adviser" to Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini or Mao. Indeed, as scholar Juan Cole points out, the dogma of the Bush Cult is identical with the "reality-creating" declaration of Mao’s "Little Red Book": "It is possible to accomplish any task whatsoever." For Bush, as for Mao, "discernible reality" has no meaning: Po litical, cultural, economic, scientific truth — even the fundamental processes of nature, even human nature itself — must give way to the faith-statements of ideology, ruthlessly applied by unbending zealots.

Thus: The conquered will welcome their killers. The poor will be happy to slave for the rich. The Earth can sustain any amount of damage without lasting harm. The loss of rights is essential to liberty. War without end is the only way to peace. Cronyism is the path to universal prosperity. Dissent is evil; dissenters are "with the terrorists." But God is with the Leader; whatever he does is righteous, even if in the eyes of unbelievers — the "reality-based community" — his acts are criminal: aggressive war that kills thousands of innocent people, widespread torture, secret assassinations, rampant corruption, electoral subversion.

Indeed, the doctrine "Gott mit Uns" is the linchpin of the Bush Cult. Tens of millions of Americans have now embraced the Cult’s fusion of Bush’s leadership with Divine Will. As a Bush volunteer in Missouri told Suskind: "I just believe God controls everything, and God uses the president to keep evil down … God gave us this president to be the man to protect the nation at this time." God appointed Bush; thus Bush’s acts are godly. It’s a circular, self-confirming mind-set that can’t be penetrated by reason or facts, can’t be shaken by crimes and scandals. That’s why Bush’s core support — comprising almost half of the electorate — stays rock-solid, des pite the manifest failures of his administration. It’s based on blind faith, on poisonous fantasy: simple, flattering ("We’re uniquely good, God’s special nation!"), comforting, complete — so unlike the harsh, bewildering, splintered shards of reality.

This closed mind-set is constantly reinforced by the ubiquitous right-wing media — evoking the threat of demonic enemies on every side, relentlessly manufacturing righteous outrage — and by Bush’s appearances (epiphanies?) at his carefully screened rallies, where even the slightest hint of demurral from his Godly greatness is ruthlessly expunged. For example, three schoolteachers were ejected from a Bush rally under threat of arrest las t week. Not for protesting — they hadn’t said a word — but merely for wearing T-shirts that read, "Protect Our Civil Liberties." Thus the faithful "create the new reality" of undivided loyalty to the Leader.

Let’s consider that crucial paragraph:

The view of the Bush Reich is, as it happens, diametrically opposed to the view we promote at Signs of the Times. This view has been stated quite economically by the Cassiopaeans:

Life is religion. Life experiences reflect how one interacts with God. Those who are asleep are those of little faith in terms of their interaction with the creation. Some people think that the world exists for them to overcome or ignore or shut out. For those individuals, the worlds will cease. They will become exactly what they give to life. They will become merely a dream in the "past." People who pay strict attention to objective reality right and left, become the reality of the "Future."

Human beings are both fascinated and repelled by what is called "evil." The fascination stems from the fact that "good" people find it difficult to comprehend how evil can exist in a world that is allegedly overseen by a benevolent and loving creator. And so, they struggle to identify it, quantify it and understand it.

Throughout history, different individuals or groups of individuals have been labeled "evil" by the "authorities" of the time. In our own period, we often find that the mass media will display photographs of murderers with the caption, "The face of evil." The viewer shudders with fear and thanks his lucky stars that such an individual is not a part of HIS of HER life!

At the top of the list of the 20th-century’s most evil people, we find an ordinary looking guy named Adolf Hitler. Like George Bush, he was more comical and absurd than frightening. There are many surviving photographs that show him dandling babies and fondling pets.

Nevertheless, when we gaze upon these old photos of Hitler, our perceptions are automatically conditioned to produce that frisson of fear: this is HITLER, the FACE OF EVIL. We see, in retrospect, that the dandling of babies and scratching the dog’s ears were undoubtedly the propaganda of the time. We know that because we know the history of what Hitler did.

What we all tend to forget is that Hitler could not have come to power and committed Germany to its policies of war and genocide without the tacit consent of the German people and without the rest of the world turning a blind eye to what was going on in Germany. In a certain sense, this makes the entire world responsible for the crimes committed in Germany.

Would the German people have been so susceptible to Nazi rule if there had been a concerted effort on the part of other peoples to assist them in waking up, in seeing their folly?

Why did everyone think "it’s not my business," most particularly those governments that could have acted more strongly to curtail the rising power of Hitler? How much responsibility do they hold for the 65 million deaths of the Global Holocaust that was World War II?

Knowing that the German people were the foundation on which Hitler stood, his soldiers and workers and assistant killers, is one thing; understanding how it came to be is another.

If other countries did not forcefully object, surely the German people thought that the direction Hitler was taking them was at least their own solution to their particular problems, even if not exactly the solution other countries would have chosen.

There was no real consensus of rejection of the Nazi ideals conveyed to Germany in an effective way and certainly, the German people were suffering a variety of serious internal problems to which Hitler’s answers seemed to be good ones.

There was no single moment in time when the German people - as a whole - suddenly "became evil." The Germans - the people susceptible to Adolf Hitler - were a people desperate for identity and economic prosperity. Germany was a country torn apart by overwhelming economic, political and social blows: World War I, the treaty of Versailles, hyperinflation and the Great Depression, were all blows that ruined or diminished the admirable qualities of Germany as a whole. These disasters left the way open for a truly horrifying ideology.

Hitler tapped into this desperation, whipping the people of Germany into a religious, messianic fervor. Little by little, they were induced to close off their consciences as the price that had to be paid for their dreams; they were induced by clever fear tactics and propaganda to incrementally realign their collective morality so that, in the end, the Face of Evil was the face of every supporter of Hitler.

The story of the rise of Adolf Hitler is the single most important story of the 20th century. With this event, in less than a single lifetime, one of the most civilized countries in Europe was reduced to moral, physical, and cultural ruin. The rest of the world was nearly gobbled into this black hole of evil. This should give everyone something to think about - and think about it long and hard.

At present, the model of what transpired in Germany can quite easily be seen by many people as unfolding in the United States today. There were other ways that the history of Germany could have unfolded in that time. There are other ways the history of the United States can unfold.

Complicity does not mean that you have to actively support evil, it simply means that the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.

At Signs of the Times, we are not in the business of telling anyone what to do. We are only here as a lighthouse, a constant sweeping illumination that goes around and around and says, basically, the same thing over and over again. Our readership is growing by leaps and bounds, and we know that there are new readers every day who have not read every daily report for the past couple of years. We also know that there are regular readers who, after reading the page, go back to sleep and think "it can’t be THAT bad." And so, again and again we shine the light, ring the alarm bell, and try to think of different ways to get through to others the extreme peril in which we stand. This brings us back to the issue of how does Knowledge Protect?

In the past three years, as I noted above, we have made some considerable progress on our mandate of discovering what really makes reality tick and how does humanity fit into it. Much of this work is pure science - physics and mathematics - but I’m not going to give you the formulas or the computer simulation codes, I’m going to explain it to you in simple terms.

Our universe seems to be made up of matter/energy and of consciousness.

Matter/energy by itself "prefers", as it seems, a chaotic state.

Matter/energy by itself doesn’t even have a concept of "creation" or "organization". It is the consciousness that brings to life these concepts and by its interaction with matter pushes the universe towards chaos and decay or towards order and creation.

This phenomenon can modeled mathematically and simulated on a computer using EEQT (Event Enhanced Quantum Theory). Whether EEQT faithfully models the interaction of consciousness with matter, we do not know; but chances are that it does because it seems to describe correctly physical phenomena better than just the orthodox quantum mechanics or its rival theories (Bohmian mechanics, GRW etc.)

What we learn from EEQT can be described in simple terms as follows:

Let us call our material universe "the system". The system is characterized by a certain "state". It is useful to represent the state of the system as a point on a disc. The central point of the disk, its origin, is the state of chaos. We could also describe it as "Infinite Potential." The points on the boundary represents "pure states" of being, that is states with "pure, non-fuzzy, knowledge". In between there are mixed states. The closer the state is to the boundary, the more pure, more ‘organized’ it is.

Now, an external "observer", a "consciousness unit", has some idea - maybe accurate, maybe false or anywhere in between - about the "real state" of the system, and observes the system with this "belief" about the state. Observation, if prolonged, causes the state of the system to "jump". In this sense, you DO "create your own reality", but the devil, as always, is in the details.

The details are that the resulting state of the system under observation can be more pure, or more chaotic depending on the "direction" of the jump. The direction of the jump depends on how objective - how close to the reality of the actual state - the observation is.

According to EEQT if the expectations of the observer are close to the actual state of the system, the system jumps, more often than not, into more organized, less chaotic state.

If, on the other hand, the expectation of the observer is close to the negation of the actual state (that is when the observer’s beliefs are not TRUE according to the ACTUAL state - the objective reality), then the state of the system, typically, will jump into a state that is more chaotic, less organized. Moreover, it will take, as a rule, much longer time to accomplish such a jump.

In other words, if the observer’s knowledge of the actual state is close to the truth, then the very act of observation and verification causes a jump quickly, and the resulting state is more organized; pure. If the observer’s knowledge of the actual state is false, then it takes usually a long time to cause a change in the state of the system, and the resulting state is more chaotic.

What this means is that order can be brought out of chaos by observing chaos as it IS and not pretending that it is otherwise.

In short, everyone who "believes" in an attempt to "create reality" that is different from what IS, adds to the increase of chaos and entropy. If your beliefs are orthogonal to the truth, no matter how strongly you believe them, you are essentially coming into conflict with how the Universe views itself and I can assure you, you ain’t gonna win that contest. You are inviting destruction upon yourself and all who engage in this "staring down the universe" exercise with you.

On the other hand, if you are able to view the Universe as it views itself, objectively, without blinking, and with acceptance, you then become more "aligned" with the Creative energy of the universe and your very consciousness becomes a transducer of order energy. Your energy of observation, given unconditionally, can bring order to chaos, can create out of infinite potential.

In the Adventure Series, I concentrated to a great extent on the problem of psychopathy in our world today. I was motivated to do this by the fact that we had been victimized by a psychopath whose behavior was utterly incomprehensible. As a consequence of this research, I was much better prepared to understand George Bush and his Reich and that served to "inoculate" me against the fear tactics that are utilized by the psychopath to paralyze their victims. I realize that Americans who are "stupid" are that way by design. In a sense, it is not their fault. They are no more capable of thinking on their own than the mouse is capable of escaping the claws of the cat determined to eat it.

But not everyone is a mouse. It is for those who are evolving that we continue to keep the lighthouse going. But be aware, the day may come - and sooner than you might expect - when the storm is so violent that the keepers of the flame will abandon the task, knowing that no light can be seen in such Stygian darkness.

In the Adventure Series, I wrote the following:

Could it ever be an evolutionarily stable strategy for people to be innately unselfish?

On the whole, a capacity to cheat, to compete and to lie has proven to be a stupendously successful adaptation. Thus the idea that selection pressure could ever cause saintliness to spread in a society looks implausible in practice. It doesn’t seem feasible to out-compete genes which promote competitiveness. "Nice guys" get eaten or out-bred. Happy people who are unaware get eaten or out-bred. Happiness and niceness today is vanishingly rare, and the misery and suffering of those who are able to truly feel, who are empathic toward other human beings, who have a conscience, is all too common.

Nevertheless, a predisposition to, conscience, ethics, can prevail if and when it is also able to implement the deepest level of altruism: making the object of its empathy the higher ideal of enhancing free will in the abstract sense, for the sake of others, including our descendants.

In short, our "self-interest" ought to be vested in collectively ensuring that all others are happy and well-disposed too; and in ensuring that children we bring into the world have the option of being constitutionally happy and benevolent toward one another.

In short, if psychopathy threatens the well-being of the group future, then it can be only be dealt with by refusing to allow the self to be dominated by it on an individual, personal basis.

Preserving free will for the self in the practical sense, ultimately preserves free will for others.

Protection of our own rights AS the rights of others, underwrites the free will position and potential for happiness of all.

If mutant psychopaths pose a potential danger then true empathy, true ethics, true conscience, dictates using prophylactic therapy against psychopaths.

It seems certain from the evidence that a positive transformation of human nature isn’t going to come about through a great spiritual awakening, socio-economic reforms, or a spontaneous desire among the peoples of the world to be nice to each other. But it’s quite possible that, in the long run, the psychopathic program of suffering will lose out because misery is not a stable strategy.

In a state of increasing misery, victims will seek to escape it; and this seeking will ultimately lead them to inquire into the true state of their misery, and that may lead to a society of intelligent people who will have the collective capacity to do so.

And so it is that identifying the psychopath, ceasing our interaction with them, cutting them off from our society, making ourselves unavailable to them as "food" or objects to be conned and used, is the single most effective strategy that we can play. […]

To allow oneself to be conned, or used by a psychopath is to effectively become part of his "hierarchy" of feeding. To believe the lies of the psychopath is to submit to his "bidding" (he bids you to believe a lie, and you acquiesce), and thus, to relinquish your free will.

In strictly material terms, this doesn’t seem to be much of an issue, right? After all, somebody lies to us and who really cares? Is it going to hurt us to just let them lie? Is it going to hurt us to just go along with them for the sake of peace, even if we know or suspect they are lying? After all, checking the facts and facing the psychopath with truth, and telling them "no" is generally very unpleasant. Remember, the game is set up so that we pay a lot for being ethical in dealing with the psychopath. In material terms, it really doesn’t seem to be worth it because we suffer all kinds of attack - verbal, psychological, and even physical abuse - so it’s just easier to let sleeping dogs lie, right? […]

At best, we can only really penetrate to the level of the psychological reality, observed behavior that is discordant, or self-destructive. And we are thoroughly programmed to help by giving until it hurts, or trying to fix, or to make nice. All of these things, all of these accommodations of psychopathy, on just a practical level, can be seen to "select for psychopathy" in terms of the gene pool.

But on another level, considering the great amount of evidence we have that there is something very mysterious going on that has to do with "controlling the minds of humanity," and covering up something that may affect every single human being on this planet, we find that the issue is crucial. Refusing to accommodate the manipulations and maneuvers of the psychopath may, indeed, be critical to the positive transformation of our planet. […]

And we see that the ultimate aim of the psychopath, as living representatives of the Universal forces of Entropy, of Non-Being, is to MASTER creative energy. To assimilate it to the self, to deprive others of it by inducing them to believe lies.

Because, when you believe the lie of the psychopath, you have given him control of your Free Will - the essence of Creativity. […]

As I quoted above: Thus, the first Divine Command is BE! And that includes Being and Non-being instantaneously. Therefore, the second law is "follow Being or Non-being according to your choice and your inherent nature."

All creation is a result of the engendering command. So, in this respect, there is no Evil. But the second, prescriptive law determines to which "Face of God" one will return: Life or Death.

There ARE such things as "evil planets," and dark stars. And the real question at this time is: Is Mother Earth about to become one?

Wow! It’s been almost three weeks since I have written anything for my blog or SOTT! How time does fly! But, that doesn’t mean that I haven’t been writing; as it happens, I have. Not only am I working on the research for my upcoming book, "The Horns of Moses," I have been working on our Cassiopedia project. After finishing the latest entry on Transmarginal Inhibition as researched by Ivan Pavlov, I thought that it was important enough to bring it to wider attention. Once you read it, I think that you will agree with me that this is the process that has been used on the global masses for quite some time, with a peak of stress inducement on September 11, 2001. Once you read this, you will understand why so many people have been hoodwinked. (You won’t find this kind of in-depth information on such subjects on Wikipedia!)

Transmarginal inhibition

Transmarginal Inhibition, or TMI, is an organism’s response to overwhelming stimuli. Ironically, the popular acronym TMI means too much information, which can be a common factor of transmarginal inhibition in today’s culture.

Research

Ivan Pavlov enumerated details of TMI on his work of conditioning animals via various stimuli, including pain. (It is not true that all of Pavlov’s work was inducing responses via pain as is often reported.)

Pavlov discovered that an organism’s level of tolerance to various stimuli varied significantly depending on fundamental differences in temperament. He commented "that the most basic inherited difference among people was how soon they reached this shutdown point and that the quick-to-shut-down have a fundamentally different type of nervous system." [1] This led him to pay increasing attention to the need to classify subjects according to their inherited constitution before applying experimental conditioning. Not only did dogs respond differently to conditioning according to their temperament, when a dog broke down under stress, its treatment depended on its constitutional type. For instance, Pavlov confirmed that sedatives were very helpful in restoring stability to the nerves of a dog that had broken down, but that the one type might require 5 to 8 times as much medication than that required by another type even if the body weight was exactly the same.

The Four Temperaments

Based on the empirical evidence accumulated through thirty years of research, Pavlov was convinced of the idea of the four basic temperaments. He noted that these temperaments approximated closely to those differentiated in man by Hippocrates. Though various blends of basic temperamental patterns appeared in Pavlov’s dogs, they could be distinguished as such instead of by creating new categories.

The first type corresponded with Hippocrates’s "choleric" type which Pavlov called "strong excitatory." The second type: "sanguine" which Pavlov named "lively", applied to dogs of a more balanced temperament. The normal response to imposed stresses or conflict situations by these two types was increased excitement and more aggressive behavior, but that is where the similarity ended. The "strong excitatory", or choleric, type would turn so wild as to be completely out of hand as opposed to the "sanguine" type which continued to behave with purposeful and controlled reactions.

The phlegmatic type, Pavlov called "calm, imperturbable," and the melancholic was called "weak inhibitory" type. In these two types, imposed stresses and conflict situations were met with more passivity or "inhibition" rather than aggression. The "weak inhibitory" type, or melancholic, whose a constitutional tendency to meet anxieties and conflicts by passivity and avoidance of tension. Any strong experimental stress imposed on such a dog’s nervous system resulted in the dog being reduced to a state of brain inhibition and "fear paralysis."

Pavlov found that the other three types, when faced with more stress than could be coped with by the usual means, would also eventually enter a state of brain inhibition similar to that state entered very quickly by the melancholic/weak inhibitory type. He regarded this as a protective mechanism normally employed by the brain as a last resort when pressed beyond endurance. The "weak inhibitory" type was an exception to the other three types: this type of dog went into a state of protective brain inhibition more rapidly and in response to lighter stresses. The important finding was, of course, that the four basic natures responded differently to different levels of stress both before, during, and after experiments, the most important datum being that the weak inhibitory type was particularly susceptible.

Regarding the weak inhibitory type, Pavlov observed that though the basic temperamental pattern is inherited, every dog has been conditioned since birth by varied environmental influences which can produce long-lasting inhibitory patterns of behavior under certain stresses. Therefore, the final pattern of behavior of any given dog will depend on both its own constitution as well as specific patterns of behavior induced by prior environmental stresses. [2]

The Ultraboundary Response

Later, when Pavlov was experimentally applying his discoveries about dogs to human psychology, he noted carefully what happened when the higher nervous system of the dog was strained beyond the limits of normal response, and compared these states to clinical reports of various kinds of mental breakdowns in human beings. He found that more severe and prolonged stresses could be applied to dogs of the "lively" or "calm imperturbable" type without causing a breakdown, than to those of the "strong excitatory" and "weak inhibitory" types.

Pavlov was convinced that this "ultraboundary" response that he called Transmarginal Inhibition, was the brain’s protective mechanism. When it occurred, it meant that the brain had no other means of avoiding physical damage due to fatigue and nervous stress. He found that he could determine the degree of protective inhibition in any dog at any moment by using his salivary gland conditioned reflex protocol. Even if the dog seemed normal upon visual examination, the amount of saliva being secreted could tell him what was happening in the dog’s brain, i.e. whether the inhibitory response was initiating, and to what stage it had developed.

The Flood and Brainwashing

Apparently, an accidental event led to some of Pavlov’s more advanced experiments in induced TMI. In 1924, there was a flood in Leningrad. Pavlov had conditioned an entire group of dogs before this flood, during which they were trapped in their cages as the water rose steadily in the laboratory. The dogs were swimming around in terror, fighting to hold their heads above water when, at the last possible moment, a lab attendant came, pulled them down through the water, out of their cage doors to safety.

This event was evidently terrifying in the extreme to the dogs. Some of them switched from a state of acute excitement to severe Transmarginal Protective Inhibition. When Pavlov tested some of them soon after, he found that the recently implanted conditioned reflexes had all disappeared. Other dogs which had faced the ordeal were not affected. Pavlov realized that for those dogs whose conditioning had been wiped away by terror, there was a further degree of inhibitory activity that was capable of wiping the mental slate clean. Most dogs that had reached this stage of "brainwashing" could later have their old conditioned behaviors restored, but it took months of patient work. They were, effectively, "newborn". If Pavlov would allow a trickle of water to run in under the door of the laboratory, all the dogs were sensitive to, and affected by, the sight; but most particularly those dogs who had been "brainwashed" by the flood.

Even though some of the dogs had resisted total breakdown, Pavlov was convinced that appropriate stresses "properly applied", could have induced breakdown in every one of them. At the end of his life, Pavlov told an American physiologist that the observations made on this occasion had convinced him that every dog had its "breaking point". [3]

Four Main Types of Stress

Among Pavlov’s most important findings was the what can happen to conditioned behavior when the brain of a dog is pushed to the "ultraboundary" limit by stresses and conflict beyond its habitual response capacity. He was able to bring about what he called a "rupture in higher nervous activity" by utilizing four main types of imposed stresses.

1) The first type of stress was simply an increase in the intensity of the signal to which the dog was initially conditioned. If this was gradually increased, at a certain point, when the signal was too strong for its system, the dog would begin to break down.

2) The second way of achieving the ultraboundary event was to increase the time between the giving of the signal and the arrival of food. If a dog was conditioned to receive food five seconds after the warning signal, and this period was then prolonged, signs of restlessness and abnormal behavior would become evident in the less stable dogs. Pavlov discovered that the dog’s brains revolted against any abnormally long waiting period while under stress. Breakdown would occur when the dog had to either exert very strong, or very prolonged, inhibition. (Human beings also find protracted waiting while under stress to be debilitatin: worse than the event that produces the anxiety.)

3) The third way of inducing a breakdown was to confuse the dogs by anomalies in the conditioning signal. If positive and negative signals were given one after the other, (yes, no, yes, no, etc), the hungry dog would become uncertain as to what would happen next and this disrupted the normal nerve stability. This is also true with human beings.

4) The fourth way of inducing a breakdown in a dog was to destabilize the dog’s physical condition in some way, either by subjecting it to long periods of work, inducing gastro-intestinal disorders, fever, disturbing the glandular balance, surgery, etc.

If, in any case, the first three methods would fail to induce a breakdown in a particular dog, it could be achieved by utilizing the same stresses that had failed, but doing so only after initiating the fourth protocol: physical destabilization. Pavlov also discovered that, after physical destabilization, a breakdown might occur even in temperamentally stable dogs and also that any new behavior pattern occurring afterward might become a fixed element of the dog’s personality even long after recovery from the debilitating experience.

In the weak inhibitory type of dog, new neurotic patterns implanted under such conditions could frequently be readily removed by little more than doses of sedatives. But in the calm and lively types - which often needed to be surgically castrated in order to physically debilitate them sufficiently to cause a breakdown - Pavlov discovered that the newly implanted pattern was quite often ineradicable after the dog had recovered its health. Pavlov thought that this was due to the natural toughness of the nervous systems in such types of dogs. The new behaviors were difficult to implant without temporarily induced debilitation and subsequently seemed to be as strong a part of the dog’s "stubborn nature" as the old pattern.

As observed by Pavlov, tolerence of stimulation varies greatly between individuals. Highly sensitive persons may be overstimulated by the loud volumes in a movie theater or the background confusion of a large social gathering. Other individuals will find those same stimulations as ideal stimulation levels, or even understimulating.

Three Stages of TMI

Pavlov established that the ability of a dog to resist heavy stress not only depended on its type, but its physical condition. Once the ultraboundary had been reached and cerebral inhibition induced, very strange things began to happen in the dog’s brain. These changes could be measured with some precision (by the amounts of saliva secreted), and, unlike with human beings, were not altered by subjective distortions. That is to say, there was no question of the dog trying to explain away or rationalize their odd behavior as human beings do. Three distinct and progressive stages of "ultraboundary" inhibition were described by Pavlov.

1)The Equivalent Phase of cortical brain activity. IN this phase, all stimuli, of whatever strength resulted only in the same amounts of saliva being produced. In the human being, a similar phenomenon is observed when a normal person is in a state of extreme fatigue; they report that there is very little difference between their emotional reactions to either trivial or important experiences. They may say "I’m too tired to care."

2) The Paradoxical Phase. When even stronger stresses are applied (and this can be pain or any other mental, physical, or emotional stress), the equivalent phase passes into the paradoxical phase. In this state, weak stimuli can produce a stronger reaction than a strong stimuli. The reason for this is that the strong stimuli only increase the state of protective inhibition while the weak stimuli can still produce positive responses. When a human being is in this stage, their behavior can reverse in a way that seems totally irrational to an outside observer.

3) The Ultra-Paradoxical Phase. The third stage is where positive conditioned responses suddenly reverse to negative responses and negative ones to positive. The dog (or person) may suddenly find that they like what they formerly detested and loathe what they formerly loved. In this stage, the organism’s response becomes opposed to all its previous conditioning.

Additional research on these phases was done by William Sargant in his work on shell-shocked servicemen.

Significance To Human Psychology

This last discovery has great relevance to understanding similar changes in behavior in human beings. Toward the end of a long period of some type of debilitation, people of very strong character have been known to make a dramatic change in their beliefs and/or convictions. When they recover, they then are known to remain true to their new beliefs for the rest of their lives. There are many case histories of people who experience various types of conversion - religious, political, etc - during times of war, in prison, or after having some prolonged terrifying experience such as shipwreck, plane crash, etc.

Much of human behavior is the result of conditioned patterns of responses that begin to form in infancy and childhood. These patterns of response to reality can persist almost unchanged, but in general, the healthy adult human has learned to adapt their programs to changes in their environment. Other human responses are due to study and learning; driving a car, for example. In the beginning, learning to drive and negotiate in traffic requires a great deal of attention. Later on, it becomes more automatic and the driver can navigate in busy city traffic while talking, eating, or doing any number of other activities. "Driving" has become an automatic program. But if the driver then travels into the country where there is little traffic, he is able to adapt to changing conditions and does this automatically.

So it is that an organism’s brain is required to build ever more elaborate structures of both positive and negative conditioned responses - behavior patterns - to the changing conditions of the environment. Pavlov showed that the nervous system of a dog could develop extraordinary powers of discrimination automatically. A dog could be made to salivate in reaction to a tone of exactly 500 vibrations per minute, not 490 or 510.

Negative conditioned responses, such as anger or "fight or flight" reactions are generally controlled in civilized societies though it is occasionally necessary to activate them in response to changes in the environment such as threat or a life-or-death emergency.

The emotional attitudes and patterns of response are also conditioned in the human being though most people do not like to admit this. We learn as children to feel attraction or revulsion for certain things, people, events, and so on. Words such as "Catholic," or "Communist" can evoke instant emotional reactions that have no relation to any facts or data, but are simply programmed attitudes acquired by conditioning within the family and society.

Use in Mind Control

The work of Ivan Pavlov was found by the Soviet totalitarian regime to be quite useful in pursuing their political policy of indoctrination. As evidence of this fact, it is noted that in July, 1950, a medical directive was issued in Russia for a re-orientation of all Soviet medicine along Pavlovian lines. [4] The reason for this directive is apparently due to the most impressive results that were obtained by applying Pavlovian principles.

Pavlov’s work seems to have strongly influenced the techniques used in Russia and China for the "eliciting of confessions", for brainwashing and for inducing political conversions. This research has, apparently, been carried on in the U.S. by secret services who have a vested interest in "debunking" and marginalizing such information. Most of Pavlov’s findings applicable to Mind Control are reported in a series of Pavlov’s later lectures translated by Horsley Gantt, published in Great Britain and the United States in 1941 under the title "Conditioned Reflexes and Psychiatry." [5] Professor Y. P. Frolov’s book about these experiments, Pavlov and His School [6] has also been translated into English. Later books made little or no reference to most of Pavlov’s important findings along the line of Mind Control. Joseph Wortis, M.D., in his study "Soviety Psychiatry", published in the U.S. in 1950 [7], made a point to emphasize the importance of Pavlov’s experiments in psychiatry, but gave very few details of the last phase of this work that dealt with Mind Control. Other books contain many details of Pavlov’s early experimental work, but little to nothing of his later work relevant to Mind Control and brain-washing.

Pavlov demonstrated that when Transmarginal Inhibition began to take over a dog, a condition similar to hysteria in a human manifested. The applications of these findings to human psychology suggest that for a "conversion" to be effective, it is necessary to work on the subject’s emotions until s/he reaches an abnormal condition of fear, anger or exaltation. If such a state is maintained or intensified by any of various means, hysteria is the result. In a state of hysteria, a human being is abnormally suggestible and influences in the environment can cause one set of behavior patterns to be replaced by another without any need for persuasive indoctrination. In states of fear and excitement, normally sensible human beings will accept the most wildly improbably suggestions.

Social Implications

The means by which TMI operates on the individual is rather clear; what is less clear is how hysteria affects larger groups even moving to the macro-scale. Nevertheless, scientific observers of U.S. society since September 11, 2001, often point out that the events of that day were a classic example of inducing Transmarginal Inhibition in masses of people in order to condition them to accept the destruction of the U.S. Democratic government.

References

• Frolov, Y.P. (1938). Pavlov and His School. Trans. by C.P. Dutt. Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, London.
• Babkin, B.P. (1951) Pavlov. A Biography. Gollancz, London.
• Asratyan, E.A. (1953) I.P. Pavlov: His Life and Work (English translation) Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow.
• Boakes, R. A. (1984). From Darwin to behaviourism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Firkin, B. G.; & Whitworth, J. A. (1987). Dictionary of Medical Eponyms. Parthenon Publishing. ISBN 1-85070-333-7
• Pavlov, I. P. (1927). Conditioned Reflexes: An Investigation of the Physiological Activity of the Cerebral Cortex (translated by G. V. Anrep). London: Oxford University Press.
• Todes, D. P. (1997). "Pavlov’s Physiological Factory," Isis. Vol. 88. The History of Science Society, p. 205-246.

External links

• Battle for the Mind by William Sargant
• Brainwashing: Lecture Notes: Physiological Perspective
• THE BATTLE FOR YOUR MIND
• PBS article
• Nobel Prize website biography of I. P. Pavlov
• Institute of Experimental Medicine article on Pavlov
• Link to full text of Pavlov’s lectures
• The Highly Sensitive Person or the HSP