For 26 years, I taught the exploration and integration of body, energy, emotion, mind and spirit. My 2003 book Ageless Wisdom Spirituality: Investing in Human Evolution (AWS) suggested Ageless/ Perennial Wisdom was necessary to meet humanity’s global challenges. As a member of the (trans-traditional spirituality) Forge, I helped create the Call to Global Spirituality Citizenship (www.globalspiritualcitizenship.org), hoping to bring such ideas into the popular arena.

Recent occurrences started me questioning Freedom of Thought and the interface between Private and Public. Rather than getting my opinions out, should I shut my mouth because Big Brother might actually be paying attention!? The first occurrence was that several well-established, traditional, shiatsu organizations in Ontario were suddenly banned from teaching (some heavily fined) because they were not registered/ qualified under the Private Career Colleges Act 2005. They were small with no organizational muscle or “credibility”. The second was a CNBC program on Google, which revealed that Google keeps the IP addresses of all searches, which are available to the US government under the Patriot Act! Within the last few days, the US Library of Congress announced it was keeping all Tweets for “posterity” and the Privacy Commissioners of 10 countries - Canada, France, Germany, Ireland, Israel, Italy, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Spain and Britain - criticized Google for “negligence in protecting user privacy”. The USA was absent in this initiative.
What if a powerful body – political, corporate, governmental etc – decides I (or any law-abiding citizen) was not just insignificant, but a “threat”? Apart from all I have published or spoken in public, Facebook, Twitter and Google now provide loads of multi-media personal information. Is there a picture of me looking drunk or “high” or with nubile women? Telephone conversations and emails are easily intercepted; life style habits are exposed through bank accounts, debit and credit cards (your “credit rating”), and through GPS tracking of cars, cell phones etc. Such investigation is not restricted to black-garbed terrorists!!

If I was taken to court, could I financially withstand the army of lawyers Government or a large corporation would summon? Having lived and taught Oneness and Interconnection, “both-and” thinking, the existence of Qi or Prana life energy etc., could I “prove” the legitimacy of all this in an environment of “either-or” thinking and within which the definition of “reality” is rigid, simplistic, “quantifiable cause-and effect”? How could I prove “consciousness” much less argue there might be different levels of consciousness available to adult human beings? I would be ridiculed! Ironically, if we take a detached look at what “hard-headed reality” has created for us, the Ridiculous is not hard to find. 

If you think the above legal, nightmare scenario is far-fetched, research Monsanto’s many ruthless legal campaigns. This Vanity Fair article is one example: http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2008/05/monsanto200805. Another is Monsanto’s persecution of Percy Schmeiser (www.percyschmeiser.com), a 79-year old farmer, around whose property Monsanto’s genetically modified (GMO) seeds were growing. Don’t seeds blow in the wind? Anyone seen the movie Erin Brockovich? How come no one wants GMO “Frankenfoods” and yet they constitute the majority of all we actually buy and take into our bodies? 

All this is not just conspiracy-theory paranoia, since it is verifiable. However, facts don’t necessarily impact us if we (including non-Americans) are indentified with a Belief, which in this case is mostly the American Dream. For some time, I have sensed a growing Disconnection in the USA (and in my own country, Canada) between Illusion and Reality.. and the inability to recognize innate quality. Chris Hedges’ explores this Disconnection in depth in his Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle.
A few related thoughts and facts:

The last 60 years, corporate and technological power has exploded and transformed society in fundamental ways which are still not recognized by our populace or leaders. President Eisenhower warned about the rise of the “military-industrial complex” and its effect on government, while subsequent Presidents, especially Reagan and George W, openly and enthusiastically supported it. Corporations wield enormous power within society generally as well as in the depths of government and politics. Often they are “too big to fail”, even if they are blatantly corrupt. For many people, even the exploited poor, corporations are seen as synonymous with the “national well-being”. This is an unexamined and probably flawed assumption. Venerable corporations and institutions (including the Catholic Church) have collective egos as fallible and flawed as individual egos... except their impact on individuals is greatly magnified because of their sheer size and power!

A direct result of corporate monopoly has been the acceleration of the gap between rich and poor and the negative impact of “quality of life” issues, the consequences of which have been analyzed in detail in the book, The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality makes Societies Stronger.

Blog space is ending. To end, I think we need a shift in the way we think and feel, which I feel can only come about because of a (spiritual) shift in consciousness. We need to recognize wisdom in individuals apart from celebrity/ marketing and how much money they have. How that can come about is a question which I hope will come into the popular arena. I have a few ideas!