I received an e-mail this morning from the producers of one of my favorite films, “What the Bleep Do We Know?” It was a letter from one of the movie’s three prime movers, Bill Arnst. In it he responded to a scathing and cynical review of his film in a San Francisco paper the week it opened in that market. There were frequent references to “the media” and their power and prejudice. I found this deeply disappointing, because it was all too clear that he has fallen for all the popular lies about the Fourth Estate. I guess I expected more from a man who would put his own money behind such a wonderful project. I will be writing him myself soon, but for now, I’m writing this article to try to set the record straight about what the media is and is not.

To begin with, the overwhelming majority of organizations that are collectively know as “the media” are profit-making companies, or are at least consciously intended to be. In other words, like all corporations, they are driven by the “bottom line.” To understand their motives, all you have to do is look at the sources of their income: paid advertising. Whether it’s television commercials, Internet pop-ups, or printed ads, by individuals or other corporations, ad revenue is the life blood of any media company.

Now there are other media companies who sell subscriptions or tickets. These include cable television, film studios and their distribution channels. But even they usually make more money on advertising, or at least after-market promotions, than they do from direct sales.

In other words, they are employed by advertisers to put their messages in front of people. Nowhere is this more evident than in the broadcast media and print periodicals of all kinds. Sponsors and advertisers make the decisions as to what they will pay for. And what influences those choices? It’s simple: what sells more cornflakes, gasoline, computers, or toothpaste. If people do not buy products and services, the advertisers abandon one medium in search of another that better serves their purposes.

But the advertisers operate at the pleasure of the buying public. If people do not watch the TV show you sponsor, or if they watch it but don’t buy anything, it’s time to look elsewhere. So at the end of the day, it is the consumer who makes the decisions as to what the media marketplace offers. They vote with their wallets countless millions of times every single day, and no one on Earth pays more attention to those votes than advertisers, unless it’s media executives.

So when I hear people talking about the “power of the media,” or complaining about the choices of this relative handful of executives, I have to shake my head at their lack of any real understanding of what they’re talking about. As Pogo Possum (for those of you too young to remember, a popular political cartoon star in days gone by) once said, “We has met the enemy, and he is us.”

The media is enormously responsive to the preferences, even the casual whims, of their respective reader/viewer-ships. Those who are not, don’t survive long, and they know it all too well. If you want to point a finger, if you want to know what has to change before the media offerings change, you need only look in the mirror, at your friends, neighbors, your fellow countrymen and women. It is our choices that are driving everything. We get exactly what we are willing and able to support and darned little else. How else could it be?

So if you want to rewrite the bill-of-fare on the media’s main stage, withdraw your support from content you object to and thus the advertisers and their products, and lend your support to those who provide you with things you want to see more of. Encourage everyone you know to do so. If, and only if, enough people do this, will things change. Meanwhile, pick up a good book and read it. Choose something that feeds your heart and mind instead of your fear and anger. You do, after all, get what you focus on, and the choice is, and will forever remain, yours and yours alone. It is the only real power that matters. Use it well.

Although the term technology has become closely bound to science, even the word science itself has its roots in a time long before the scientific method was formalized. Basically, it means the search for knowledge. Technology is the application of that knowledge, presumably to one’s advantage.

So technology can be legitimately applied to any endeavor that converts knowledge to practical use. In ancient times, something as simple as using one’s knowledge of the behaviors and characteristics of animals for tracking and hunting food was a technology. Nowadays it applies equally, of course, to computers and bioengineering. We use technology to improve life’s quality as well as its quantity.

Another way of looking at technology is as a means of gaining an advantage over the objects and events in our lives.

I prefer to view it as a form of intimacy. The more thoroughly and intimately we understand the true nature of anything, the more we can interact with it effectively. By that definition, omniscience is the ultimate technology.

I recently joined a large group of Internet users in a project called SETI@home. This project is under the auspices of SETI–the Search For Extraterrestrial Intelligence. SETI gathers radio and x-ray emissions from throughout the Universe and analyzes them, looking for patterns that are unlikely to be of a strictly natural origin. The problem is that they can gather this data far faster than they can analyze it.

SETI@home is an attempt to enlist the help of individuals in cutting the backlog of unanalyzed data down to size. To that end, the people at SETI created a computer program that allows anyone with Internet access to help process that raw data. The program is a screensaver that downloads packages of data and applies mathematical tools to identify probable intelligent sources. When one batch of data is completed, the program sends the results back to SETI and downloads a new batch. Depending on the computer and the amount of time available for the program to do its magic, it may take from a few hours to days, or even weeks, to complete a data set. In my case, I have been giving it about 18 hours a day for over two months. The really cool thing aboutSETI@home is that if you happen to be the one whose computer actually identifies an intelligent source of emissions, you will go down in history as a co-discoverer of the first extraterrestrial intelligent beings! How could I not get involved?

The other day I found myself wondering just how much work my computer is actually doing for SETI. I got out my handy spreadsheet program and started doing some calculations of my own. The results amazed even me. Here is the best way I discovered to express what I found. If a human being could do one calculation per second involving two numbers between 0 and 4 million, it would take one person over 48 million years to do what my machine has done in 60 days. Now of course, few if any of us could do such calculations at that speed, let alone every second for a lifetime, much less for millions of years. Another way of viewing the same thing would be for every adult male in the U.S. to spent a year doing nothing but these same calculations. It would take every living soul in North America to keep up with my computer in real time.

I further computed that a mere 500 computers like mine could in 60 days do as many calculations as a single person could have done if they started at the instant of the Big Bang! This is almost unimaginable. SETI@home was downloaded by 250,000 people the first day it was available! There are over half a billion computers online with millions more going online every day.

To make things even more astounding, Moore’s Law states that the computing power of digital machines will double every 18 months. This has been proven to be true for decades and still is. So in about 18 months, my computer will be able to do the same work in four weeks. Three years later, it will only take one week, and by the end of a decade, a single day.

My reason for mentioning all of this is simply to illustrate the power technology makes available to us, one and all. This, and to lay the groundwork for a view I have held for a couple of decades. More on that presently.

This information is readily accessible to anyone who wants it. Few, if any, care to look. Even fewer put the boundless pieces of simple, raw information together in certain combinations that paint a particular picture. It is not unlike having a jigsaw puzzle, but without a picture of what it’s supposed to look like when it’s fully assembled.

Another example quickly comes to mind, one I realized many years ago. Everything needed to build a computer, a space shuttle, or any other contrivance you choose, has been here and readily available since long before mammals walked on the good Earth. What took us so long to get around to putting all the pieces together effectively was a lack of collective knowledge. It would not be a distortion to say that we, humankind, have spent a long time in school. Of course, the materials needed to create time machines, or transporters, or replicators—a la Star Trek—are all here right now and have been all along. We just haven’t figured out how to put it all together yet.

Another astounding revelation that occurred to me lately is equally simple. It is not a matter of if we find intelligent life elsewhere in this Universe of ours: it’s only a matter of when! It may be later today, or it may take many years, but it is virtually inevitable. The same goes for all the other magical dreams man has had. People dreamed of walking on the moon for millennia before Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin finally did it for us in 1969. But they did. Now it’s a fait accompli.

The popular saying, “What the mind of man can imagine, it can create” is not the most accurate take on the subject. I now see a better version as, “What the mind of man can imagine, it will create.” For it is the imagined itself that drives us to create. The moment we imagine, we lock ourselves into a process that must culminate in creation. This is far more a part of human nature than our alleged “predatory instincts.”

Arthur C. Clark, author of 2001: A Space Odyssey has said that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Yesterday’s magic is today’s technology, and today’s magic is tomorrow’s technology.

Pulling it all together, technology is just one face of our evolutionary adventure. We create what we need to continue playing the game, and we create it at the moment we need it. In fact, what we create and when we do so offer great clues to our true purposes. The history of technology provides a flowchart of our progress toward our ultimate purposes. We do not waste time creating things that do not further our ends. Even the ugly or seemingly insane has a role to play in our ultimate success, though those roles are not always readily apparent. Or is it that we simply don’t lay the right pieces of the puzzle next to each other?

Take a look at the technologies we create and the problems they bring up. For example, for thousands of years, our beliefs about life and death could be handled well enough by some children’s fairytales invented by camel herders in an ancient culture. Not much had changed. But now, we have created technologies that put too great a strain on those feeble and antiquated beliefs. The birth control pill, advanced medical technology, genetic engineering, euthanasia, abortion, and many more innovations leave us little choice but to reexamine some of our most cherished, though not particularly well-thought-out, beliefs about ourselves and life itself. Only a fool would see these concerted developments as accidental. They are coming tied with the same bow because they are just different facets of the same jewel.

I have long loved the phrase, “You have gone as far as you can go without going further.” Well, we have reached that point in a huge variety of ways, with new ones being added daily. Ultimately, it will leave us no choice but to do just what we most need to: reexamine the views that have served our forebears well for millennia, but are now reaching the end of their usefulness.

And, as is our custom, we have divided up into camps (e.g., conservative and liberal) to debate and even do battle to determine whether to stick with the old ways, or find and develop new ones. This is one of the chief reasons for the upsurge of religions fundamentalism, not just in America, but in the world at large. These are people who are desperately hanging onto the past, hoping to die before they have to give it up and learn a whole new way of living in a fundamentally different world.

Make no mistake; even the most rabid progressive is counting on the conservatives to slow the wagon on its relentlessly accelerating ride down the hill of time. And the conservatives are likewise counting on the liberals to find ways to move us ahead without upsetting the whole shebang. What is sad is that we cannot seem to muster enough integrity to do so openly, honesty, right out in front of God and everybody. Instead, we insist on clinging desperately to dogma, enmity, and rancor rather than truth, cooperation, and brotherhood. Perhaps that too will respond to the message of the Internet, the first and only working anarchy in the history of our race. Perhaps that will be its greatest and most valuable contribution to our lives and evolution.

To find these answers we have little choice but to stick around and see what happens next. Tomorrow is, after all, another day.

There is a subtle but critical difference between intellectual and personal acceptance. It took me a lot of years to reach the place where I felt I had to go one way or the other, the conventional reality view or Seth’s. When that time came, my choice was to consciously, intentionally, choose to create a situation in which the only thing that could save me was my own intent to move on, and the magic. There was no “practical” solution, and I did nothing to obtain one. I just climbed into the back seat of the vehicle of my life, and let the magic drive.

It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done to get to that point, a surprisingly easy thing to make the choice, and amazingly easy once I was in the back seat. And guess what? It worked. The magic came through, and a new era began.

Now make no mistake, this new edition of my life was not born 7 feet tall with a lifetime contract with the Lakers. Hardly. But it is solid. Somewhere deep inside there has been a shift in my personal center of gravity. Now when the minions of fear threaten to invade my conscious mind, and I debate whether to take them seriously as I’m “supposed” to, or to trust the magic, trust myself, to create something beautiful out of it, I always slide smoothly to the side that smiles and says, “It’s all working fine, because that’s how I want it, and I am the creator.” So far, every time that has happened, I let the magic work, and always something–often in the form of just the right thought–has come out of nowhere and given me an answer in a timely way.

I have been trying to collect my thoughts about what exactly changed to permit this new round of growth of being. The best I can say right now (I’m not through reviewing it yet) is that I took back some very important choices. By “took back” I mean that they had been on auto-pilot for a very long time, always responding to similar circumstances in similar ways. Now I have taken back my conscious choices in those areas.

It is important to understand that I’m talking about choices that were so automatic, they didn’t seem like choices at all. They seemed rather to be “facts,” “the way I am,” “the way people are,” etc. So what really started to break things loose was when I decided to admit the truth: that I and only I choose what my answers to those questions are, and I’ve been making those choices the same (and I now believe wrongly) for nearly my whole life, and that I and only I can change that by insisting on making those choices consciously again. And I meant it!

Once I did that, I began changing choices about what is true, who I am, and what I will do about it. These changes brought up new questions and drew me into new thought patterns. Priorities changed and powerful new choices emerged. The fear subsided, because I trusted myself not to hurt me, and I found it easier to spend time imagining the kind of person I wanted to be, the kind of life he would have, and the kind of reality he would create, just because of who he was.

These are the choices we make every moment of our lives. Many of them are still on auto-pilot. That’s not a problem. In fact, it’s pretty handy much of the time. The problems come from putting a choice on auto-pilot, forgetting you did it, then finding later that the quality of your life is impaired because of it and feeling powerless to change it. That’s when you need to wake up and remember that it is still, and always has been, a conscious choice. Then and only then can you change it. At that moment, it is as easy as changing your mind. Getting to that point may, however, be somewhat more challenging.

The resistance to taking back manual control usually comes from a fear of making things worse. Our beliefs tell us that, according to their version of who we are and the way life works, this is the only logical thing to expect, so we’d better get used to it. Any thought of changing the choices involved is seen as a threat to an already tenuous status quo. The result? Paralysis. We continue to default to yesterday’s choices, and we stay pretty much in the same rut.

We all have the choice at every moment to take back conscious control of ourselves and our lives. We make those choices who knows how many times a second. And these are the choices that must be changed to produce meaningful growth. There are an unlimited number of ways to go about this, but one thing is always required: intent, conscious or unconscious. Intent is the result of a decision to apply your will to change your way of thinking. Without that, no permanent change is possible. With it, even the sky is no limit.

Notice that I said that the intent doesn’t have to be conscious, though it certainly can be. We sometimes manipulate our intentions at a deeper level. The intent to be born is such a case. The intent to die in a certain way at a certain time usually is, too. These are not ordinarily conscious, but they clearly have their impact.

So nowadays, I ask myself the question “Who do you want to be?” countless times a day. I then ask, “What would he do in this situation?” And then, as best I can, I do that.

So, who do you want to be? Get to know that person. Get inside their head and see what makes them tick. Then ask yourself what they would do if they woke up right where you are. Don’t ask YOU, ask THEM! Then do the best you can with the answer. And make no mistake, it builds, layer on layer, until it changes everything. Use the exercise mentioned earlier, read books, do whatever you think might help. But at the end of the day, it is your choices, moment by moment, about who you are, who you want to be, and how life works that form the palette from which your life is magically created. Your thoughts give it shape, and your feelings give it substance. They are, as Seth put it, “The gift of gods.” And don’t forget to trust yourself in doing so. That, too, is a choice you are already making.

In 1981 I had a neighbor who, while she was friendly enough, always seemed to keep a certain distance. When asked about that, she said she had a rule never to get too close to her neighbors.

One evening I met her coming home, and I saw that something was very wrong. She said her cat, who had been the only constant in her life for eight years, through two failed marriages and other personal crises, had been diagnosed with leukemia. She was devastated.

We talked for hours as she came to terms with having the cat put down. The next morning she knocked on my door. Tears rolling down her face, holding a box containing the remains of her cat, she asked me to help her bury it.

We went to a far corner of the yard, and I dug a hole into which I placed the cat. I gently coaxed her into throwing in the first shovelful of dirt, after which she went inside while I finished.

When I came in, she was sitting at her dining room table crying quietly. I knelt silently next to her and put my arms around her. We hugged and cried together for a long time. All she could say was how sorry she was to have dragged me into her grief. I tried to explain how unspeakably grateful I was for the privilege of being there for her, sharing these deep and genuine feelings, but she didn’t seem to understand. I wonder often if she ever has.

That night I wrote a poem for her, the last lines of which read:

And even as I stroll
through the garden of your soul
I will not crush
a single flower.

As a freshman in college I took my first psychology course in which I was introduced to many new and interesting concepts. Among these was something called “consensual validation.” I don’t recall the precise definition given to this term, but it was something like: “granting validity to a belief or practice, because the group of which one is a member agrees that it is true.”

We all learn about consensual validation very early in life, but it really becomes a serious issue as we enter adolescence. What high school student hasn’t felt the impact of “peer pressure?” Peer pressure is just another alias for consensual validation. And, as any high school student can tell you, it is a powerful force indeed.

Another interesting aspect of this kind of validation is that, while it is something of a majority-rules phenomenon, it can be instigated by as few as one person in the group, provided they have enough influence over a majority of others. In other words, the views of the few become the views of the many, and the views of the many become the “law” for all. How does this actually happen? In some cases, it is quite legitimate. The thrust of the proposition is really in the best interests of the group. But often such is not the case. It is those examples we will be dealing with here.

Yet why do the few, or the one, who start the ball rolling want it to roll in one particular direction? Maybe it is just a way for them to prove to themselves that they have personal power. “Look what I can ‘make’ them do,” may be the motivation for such pursuits. Or perhaps it simply brings about a condition that they feel is to their advantage in the group. Regardless of the actual motivation, the simple fact is that there is some kind of purpose to these coercive approaches, and those who instigate them believe that it is to their advantage to do so. Hence you have the appearance of “perpetrators” and “victims.” But is that all there is to it?

From a higher perspective, some things become clear that are not generally recognized by those directly involved. For example, why do those who become the majority fall in line behind their “leaders?” And why do those in the minority agree to be ruled by the majority? These are all choices made by individuals without which the phenomenon of consensual validation and peer pressure simply could not exist.

Imagine what would happen if the leader suggested that the group adopt a certain idea or practice, and no one went along with it? It dies right there, right? And what if a majority of the group agree, for whatever reasons, but the minority say, “Forget it. I’m out of here,” and withdraw from the group rather than go along? Viewed this way, it is clear that everyone involved is, at some crucial level, giving their voluntary consent to the proposition.

Yet the usual view of such things declares that the leaders influence the majority who are the “perpetrators,” and the minority who comes under their “domination” thus become the “victims.” Nothing of the kind is true. It is better viewed as a willing conspiracy entered into by all concerned, and in which each individual plays a role. The three basic roles are “instigator,” “henchman,” and “victim.” Each of these can contain sub-roles as well. For example, the majority member who goes along with the flow, but secretly thinks it is wrong.

In the case of the instigators, there is almost always some kind of fear involved in their motivation. Why would someone seek power in such a way? Because they feel powerless otherwise. This implies that their life experience has led them to a belief in their own powerlessness, and they are trying to balance that by creating dramatic evidence that they are indeed powerful. And the henchmen are probably doing the same thing vicariously. The victims, on the other hand, share the same belief in the powerlessness of the individual, but opt to express this belief by proving that they are powerless.

So the belief involved, that the individual is powerless, occupies a prominent position in the belief systems of all participants. By playing out their roles in the game of consensual validation, they are simply bringing their beliefs about their own humanity, individually and collectively, to life. And the truth of this must remain secret, or it will fail to produce the desired result: proof of concept. (Imagine what would happen if everyone involved knew quite consciously all that I’ve just said. )

So when you see such processes taking place, look within them and see that all concerned share one or more basic beliefs, and that the group is expressing those beliefs through their choices and actions, and that it is all voluntary despite appearances to the contrary. This is true whether the arena is a political process, or a war, or fraternity hazing. As always, there are no victims or villains, only volunteers.

Freedom is a word that is bandied about capriciously by nearly everyone in these United States, yet is one of the most abused words in our language. In the minds of the founding fathers, it was thought of as an absolute thing: either one is free or one is not. Yet even in their creation of the U.S. Constitution, freedom was abridged in numerous ways. The so-called Bill of Rights was appended to that constitution in an effort to shore up some of the potential injuries to the freedom that was left. But even the Bill of Rights is highly conditional. At the very least, it has been interpreted over time in that way.

In George Orwell’s famed novel Animal Farm, the original manifesto of the animal politic paraphrased the assertion scribed by Thomas Jefferson in our own Declaration of Independence: “All [men] animals are created equal.” Later in the course of events that dictum was amended to read: “All animals are created equal, but some are more equal than others.”

This is typical of the ways in which people—many of whom think of themselves as being well intentioned—have slowly, methodically, over the centuries encroached on the “official” definition of freedom until it is barely a shadow of its original definition. Who, why, and how are the topics of this essay.

First a few comments about freedom itself. Freedom has two basic dictionary definitions:

• The condition of being free; the power to act or speak or think without externally imposed restraints.
• Immunity from an obligation or duty.

These can be more simply put as the “freedom to…” and the “freedom from…” Both forms have one central theme in common: no outside force shall interfere with the experience or expression of the individual.

Yet people have always automatically assumed that some abridgement of utter freedom was absolutely necessary, or even desirable. In other words, the “Land of the Free” really isn’t and never has been. It is only in the context of its contemporaries and predecessors that freedom American style seems free at all. By any objective, absolute measure, we are little better off than anyone else. Granted, the closer approach to true freedom instituted by our forefathers was a distinct and substantial improvement, not only over their previous circumstances, but over any that had come before. But in the harsh light of day, either you interfere with the lives of others, or you don’t. Period. And at an intrinsic level we, as a society, insist on doing so. In other words, we get a big fat ‘F’ in Freedom 101.

The reasons why this “must be done” are voiced vehemently whenever the subject is raised. All such objections to a more ideal state of individual freedom have one thing in common: complete freedom equals anarchy, and anarchy is to be avoided at all costs. Except for the brief period during and after the McCarthy witch hunts of the early 1950s, when communism was the ultimate sociopolitical insult, anarchy has always been considered the scourge of humankind. It brings to mind all manner of misfortune: rape, pillage, murder, and mayhem are only the front runners of the pack of ills it engenders. As far back as ancient Greece, anarchy was considered anathema to civilization, culture, and the pursuit of happiness. Yet freedom has been regarded with an almost religious (sometimes literally) reverence. If you are getting a strong whiff of doublespeak, good. You are starting to get the picture.

How can well-intentioned, sincere, and intelligent people for millennia be guilty of such an obvious and persistent fraud? Simple. They’re scared to death and looking for a way out. I’m reminded of Johnny Carson’s favorite W.C. Fields quote. Near the end of his life, Fields, a devout and life-long atheist, had taken to reading the Bible. When a friend caught him in the act one day and asked what he was doing, he responded in his singular drawl: “Looking for loopholes.” Humanity yearns for true freedom in the face of theirfear of what they would do with it.

Before classical Athens, the fear had a lock on its conflict with our passion for freedom. Then the seed was planted. 2,000 years later—one hell of a long germination—it took root in Philadelphia one hot summer. But it was genetically flawed. The fear may have lost its absolute dominion, but it had not lost its power. It hadn’t even lost its dominance.

Now, over 200 years later, we have retreated farther and farther back into that which we love to say long and loudly is the worst of human foibles: repression. Oh, we have a long way to go to enter the lofty ranks of Hitler et al, but we have nonetheless progressed very little in other ways. How can this be? How can we, as a modern and enlightened people, shred to tatters the greatest political prize of all time for which so many have given so much for so long: freedom? To answer that question we need only to turn to our individual and collective self images.

Here are some hints: “To err is human…”; “After all, I’m only human.”; “All that’s humanly possible…”; “Nobody’s perfect.” Is it coming clear? Just to make the point more…pointedly, consider this cheery little picture: an angry five-year-old with a loaded assault rifle in a room with the people at whom he is angry. Call me prejudice, but I have a tough time seeing this as attractive. Yet this pretty well captures the spirit of humanity’s view of itself, individually and collectively. Here’s another oldie but goodie: “Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.” And there you have it. Interestingly, contained in those very words is a tacit understanding that freedom and power are inextricably bound to one another. What better working definition of power than being utterly free to do, be, and have anything you desire. It may not be the ultimate definition, but would you turn your nose up at it?

Underlying all of this is the simple fact that few, if any, of us escape childhood without the belief firmly rooted in our psyche that to be human is to be fatally flawed. We in the Western world even have a term for it: Original Sin. Eve (and later Adam) sought after forbidden knowledge, as a consequence of which they and their progeny forever were condemned to death. What’s more, according to the conventional wisdom, they richly deserved it. After all, God is good. Right?

As Mark Twain once observed, in his audacious monograph Letters From the Earth, “if we say man invented God, we slander man. If we say God invented Himself, we slander Him. Is there no escape?”

So for thousands of years, man has viewed himself as at best a second-class citizen of this corner of the Universe. He has developed a not inconsiderable mistrust of himself and his fellows, and that mistrust has not been acquired without producing any evidence of its inescapability. In both the individual and collective spheres of human endeavor, we have proven persistently that we are in fact not to be trusted. This view has become so endemic that almost no one, even the most gifted thinkers of all time, have ever seriously questioned it. Even René Descartes, author of the now-famous phrase cogito, ergo sum, “I think, therefore I am,” never considered the possibility that humanity might not be the black-hearted clods they had always seen themselves as.

Is it any wonder then, that for all these years, governments have been instituted to protect us, not just from each other, but from ourselves. Is it any wonder that anarchy—the complete absence of government—has come to be viewed as a juggernaut to be avoided like the Black Plague or AIDS? Is it any wonder that we insist on abridging our own freedom, and that of others, at the drop of a (self-deprecating) thought? How else could it be?

The truly remarkable feature of democracy American style is that it was based on an enormously more generous view of human nature. Our founding fathers were willing to risk more on our intrinsic goodness than any other political force in all of recorded history. And here we are, centuries later, still alive and, after a fashion, well. We are the most admired (and hated) nation on Earth, not to mention the most powerful, the richest, the most emulated, the most envied, the most sought after.

The real dilemma we face now (and in truth, probably always have) is, “where do we go from here?” The answer is obvious from what I have already written. For thousands of years—that we know of with certainty—humankind has been growing ever so slowly away from that paranoid view of itself. We have been doing our level best to make a wardrobe change: from the tatters of the moral leper, to the fine vestments of a free patrician. In many ways, so far so good.

But we have our work cut out for us. We have a long way to go before sanity and truth rule, and the insanities of the past are just a distant and unwelcome memory. The price we must pay is to divest ourselves of the last traces of our self-contempt and replace it with a whole, sane, and truthful appraisal of what it really means to be human.

The term “Human Nature” is another that is tossed around by people whose tongues should catch on fire just for saying it. They talk about it as if they had the slightest clue what they were saying. They think that their own personal version—and at the end of the day, there is no other kind—is a great, cosmic law. Well, I’ve got news for them: natural laws cannot be broken. That’s what makes them laws. If you throw a million people from airplanes at 30,000 feet without parachutes, how many will survive the fall? Let me think. Zero? Now that’s a law: the law of gravity. No exception (we will for the moment overlook the odd Ascended Master who walks across clouds as easily as your swimming pool).

Invariably, people’s definitions of human nature are based on two things: what they have been told, and what they have seen. Neither of these can possibly lead them anyplace but the insanity already described. The only way to escape falling into the same conceptual trap is to think well and freely. That is something that few seem ready, willing, able, and determined to do. As Frank Lloyd Wright once said, “My only sin is the unforgivable one of having [original] ideas.” Even the peer pressure that so relentlessly steepens the walls of the pit of our ignorance is there for a reason: without it, people might get uppity and exceed their place. They might think themselves freer than they ought to be.

The long and the short of it is this: we have been on a quest for millennia to make the world, our human world, safe for real freedom, and our job is not yet done.

It is oft said that the prerequisite of democracy is an educated populous. If that is so, then the prerequisite of a free, working anarchy is much higher. It is nothing less than a sane populous. By this I mean a people who understand the truth about human nature, not just a bunch of ill-though-out mumbo jumbo born of an era when herding camels was something to be aspired to. Sanity in this context means understanding from the depths of your soul that you can gain nothing of value by violating the life, property, or freedom of anyone—not even yourself. It requires us to acknowledge that we are the authors of our own lives, times, and everything within them. It demands that we recognize the vast and unseverable connections we have to each other, the Earth, its inhabitants, and the Universe as a whole. There can be no complete sanity without the final, undisputed acceptance of our own divinity. These are the beliefs that must change before we can conduct ourselves and our affairs in a manner responsible enough to support a free anarchy. Anything less would have painful consequences. Anything much less would be an unmitigated disaster.

How do we get there from here? Simple. First, we have to realize that’s where and who we need to be. Then we look at who and where we are, and plot a course. The rest is just a matter of placing the right foot in front of the left and dealing with whatever it brings up.

And that is precisely what we are and have been doing all along. The difference now is that we are rapidly approaching the point where we are close enough to start doing more of it at a conscious level, rather than the slipshod, bumbling way we have somehow managed to get this far (it only took a few million years).

Yet we have given ourselves one “training aid” after another to keep us headed generally in the right direction. In this century, we have used advanced technology to up the ante. The two most noteworthy of these technical marvels were the atomic bomb and the Internet. These two are far more closely interrelated than anyone supposes. The former all but mandated the latter, for it was out of the military paranoia of the Cold War that the predecessor of the Internet was spawned, and from its ashes that the full-blown Internet erupted (within a few months!) like a newborn hungering for long-awaited life. The Cold War tore us apart and threatened to destroy us. The Internet is drawing us together and promising to make us, at long last, whole.

So we are not without our miracles, we humans, though we do have a knack for taking our sweet time. On the other hand, even one as audacious as me cannot say with certainty that any small speck of it has not indeed been necessary. Regardless, here we are and this is our mission: to heal our beliefs and restore our sanity, if it was ever there to be lost, or to confer it upon ourselves if not.

In the final analysis, freedom is simply a state of mind. In other words, you are as free as you truly believe you are. At this point in our evolution, it appears that our beliefs are, putting it kindly, a mixed bag.

“The War in Iraq” is nonsense. It does not exist. It is entirely fiction. What does exist and is real is a multitude of wars in Iraq, as many of them as there are humans who hold the thought of such a war. Each and all of them are entirely unique, individual, and personal to the thinker of those thoughts. To believe that there is just one war is absurd. It is not real.

Each of us who has a mental image of a war creates that war in the image of our own beliefs, thoughts, feelings, values, and prejudices. It can be no other way. We each have our own perceptions of what that war involves and we assign our own interpretations to those perceptions. Those are the bricks and mortar of our private wars.

None of us can stop or change “The War in Iraq” because it does not exist. We are utterly powerless to effect a change on the nonexistent. We are, however, utterly empowered to change anything and everything about our own private wars, the ones that clearly do exist. The real question then is, “What am I going to do about my war?” And that is the subject of this document.

There are three popular basic views of “The War.” These are: it is necessary, even inevitable; it is an unjust war that should not be fought; it is a war, and that makes it wrong. Let’s examine some of the beliefs necessary to support each of these basic perspectives.

To see the war as necessary you must hold to many beliefs. Among these are: that killing other human beings is not only justifiable but necessary, at least in some circumstances; that the end justifies the means (i.e., that an evil is not evil when it prevents an even greater evil); that good can come from acts that would under other circumstances be reprehensible.

To see the war as “unjust” implies that there exists some war that is just. This is only slightly different than the previous view in that it makes an exception of this particular war. It further implies that if you believed that this war was just, you would be all for it.

To see the war as wrong just because it is a war implies that there is something about war itself that is unconscionable, indefensible, and therefore wrong. There are many candidates for what that unacceptable quality of war is. Among them are: killing, mass destruction, violence, coercion, and many more. Taken singly or in aggregate, they provide sufficient reason to arrive at the rejection of war categorically.

There is one belief that these views share in common: there are victims and villains in war. And for this reason all three views are fatally flawed. There are no victims, only volunteers. No, I don’t mean that people stand in line to be slaughtered by whatever means. However, I do mean that at levels of which few are conscious, it has all been arranged, and even those who suffer and die agreed to play their roles for reasons of their own. My lack of understanding of their reasons does not mean that those reasons don’t exist, nor that I would not agree with them if I did understand, nor that there is anything defective about either the reasons or those who hold them. It simply means that I don’t understand.

I believe that this is so. I believe that everyone involved, from soldier to civilian, from politician to protester, have their own personal reasons for participating in precisely the way that they do. My challenges are twofold: I want to find a perspective from which to view my version of the “event” that pleases me, and I want to understand better what the other participants’ reasons at least might be. More often than not, my success with the first challenge is directly dependent on my success with the second. That is, the more ways I can see why people would volunteer to play their role in the larger event(s), and the more sense it makes to me for them to do so, the easier it is for me to feel good about a perspective that is based on those motives. This remains true for me even if none of the reasons I imagine are actually true! Why? Because I don’t need to actually understand to find peace; I need only accept that there is something to understand.

The whole world is in the midst of an ongoing process of learning, exploration, and discovery. This situation is but one in a long list of dramatic events we have cooked up to aid us in that process. Our individual choices, thoughts, feelings, and actions are at once intensely personal, yet they also add to the totality of the event, and in fact, taken collectively, create it.

For some, it is largely a matter of morality and ethics: is it right or wrong? For others, it is about economics. For others it may be mostly about life or death, freedom or servitude, self-interest or altruism, courage or cowardice, love or hate. This list is virtually endless, and I cannot imagine anyone whose list contains only one or two items. For most, the list of intense issues is long indeed.

What’s more, all the items on each personal list interact with one another (e.g., economics vs. morality, altruism vs. death, etc.). We also project some issues onto others. The hawks project their own reluctance onto the doves, the “victims” project onto the “villains” and vice versa. Clearly this is not a simple, cut and dried debate.

But then that is why we create such things: to fuel our own explorations, to drive us to dig deeper into ourselves for answers to questions so fundamental that their resolution, even to the slightest degree, forever changes our personal and collective sense of what it is to be human. So we are not playing for matchsticks here. The stakes are immeasurably higher. There is an expression, “You don’t shoot off a cannon to kill a fly.” My belief is that we create events and experiences that are tailor-made, in character and scope, to provide us with ideal opportunities to explore, discover, learn, and evolve as sentient beings. It is not at all uncommon that such endeavors seem impenetrable and enigmatic. If they were obvious, they would be of precious little value to us, just as it would be hard to interest Boris Spasky and Bobby Fischer in a rousing game of checkers.

So at the end of the day, we are left with one basic question: how will I define, perceive, interpret, and experience my war in Iraq? Will I see it as an evil, a necessity, a tragedy, or gods at play? Your personal answer to that question will determine the entire character of your war.

Before you give your “final answer,” consider the words of Richard Bach:

“The mark of your ignorance is the depth of your belief in injustice and tragedy. What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly.“

In game theory there is a type of game called the “zero-sum game.” Simply put, it is the winner-take-all kind of game. The name derives from the fact that in zero-sum games, what the winner wins is exactly equal to what the loser loses. If you add them together, the sum is zero.

The prevailing worldview on this planet for the last few millennia has been that life is a zero-sum game. For one to win, another has to lose. The most graphic, and universally accepted, version is “kill or be killed.” Competition is based on it, as are most businesses, schools, even family relationships lean that way.

And we have paid dearly for our devotion to zero-sum. Untold people have died horrible deaths in wars in service of this belief. Countless others have suffered in equally countless other ways because of it. And the pitiful thing about it, the thing that really breaks your heart, once you see it, is that it is all unnecessary, because it is all based on a lie.

The only reason there is any evidence that the concept of the zero-sum game is real is there because we have believed it so.  In other words, it is a self-fulfilled prophesy.

But if that is so, if the zero-sum mentality is just a way of thinking, not a law of the Universe, then what should take its place? What is the real truth about the way things work? The answer is hidden in plain sight: our belief in scarcity must be replaced by a recognition of the truth of abundance.

If there were more than enough of every desirable thing to go around, the zero-sum game would never have gained a foothold. We would never even have heard of it, and even if we did, we wouldn’t be able to make sense of it. It would be too far out of our experience to even relate to.

But we have been so inured with the belief that there is never enough to go around that we feel crazy to even question it. Look around. There is obviously not enough to go around. But there is. We don’t have a scarcity problem. What we have is an accessibility problem. And that is of our own doing.

There is more than enough food to go around. The problem is that sometimes the food isn’t where the hungry people are. But that is a distribution problem, not a scarcity problem. The Universe it more abundant than anyone can possibility imagine. So’s the planet Earth. Plus, everything on Earth is essentially free. Mother Nature doesn’t charge for things like food or coal or water. If you want someone to collect those things for you, they will want to get paid, but Mother Nature doesn’t get a penny of it.

If this sounds a bit absurd, try this exercise. Imagine that we have mastered travel beyond the speed of light (and make no mistake, one fine day we will). At that point the entire Universe will be our oyster. Never again will we be able to pretend that there is scarcity.

Meanwhile, we can limit our context to small areas and pretend that there really isn’t enough to go around, and that will make zero-sum look like a universal law. But even then, even without light-speed travel, zero-sum is not a necessity.

If everything really is connected, if we are all one, then my win is your win and your loss is my loss. That is the end of zero-sum. And what if it goes beyond that. What if what is truly in my best interest is also in your best interest, and vice versa? Then we should all be selfish, not selfless, and everyone would be better off. Or we could be totally selfless, and we ourselves would be better off along with everyone else.

In simple terms, the zero-sum game is a fool’s paradise. It is a seemingly convenient way of explaining the results of a fatally flawed belief system, but it cannot stand the light of day. It is too riddled with unacknowledged and insupportable assumptions.

So let’s start living in the truth, that we are all more intimately connected than any of us can imagine, that there is more to go around than we could ever even want, let alone use, and that what is truly good for one is good for all. This will lead us to many new and wonderful places within our minds, or world, and our hearts. We will soon see that compassion feels infinitely better than anger and revenge, that love feels better than…well…anything! And happiness is simply a choice that we all make every moment of our lives.

And that is why I say, “Zero Sum No More.”