Wow, even though many of you tend to go off-topic on other threads, for an off-topic thread, this one's really got some good stuff on it, which illustrates why
The One Truth is such a great forum. :p Hey, if
La Casa Del Sombrero™ can periodically praise itself, then we can too. :p
Anyway, I want to thank you all for the intelligent discourse, and Fred for his wise words in the video, but I wanted to comment on one little thing that
Nothing wrote. ;)
There's clearly a pattern of repeating cycles, but in this case, it's a perversion of the Yin/Yang dynamic. They've got humanity running all the way from one end of the basin to the other end and back again, just like the water in the oceans gets sloshed around by the gravitational effects from the moon and gives us different tides.
High tide in the west is low tide in the east, and high tide in the east is low tide in the west. And it works just like dangling a carrot in front of a horse's face, too. After all, the grass is always greener on the other side, isn't it? ;)
What baffles me is that humanity never seems to realize that all these tendencies are cyclic, and that what goes around, must, will and always does come around again. You can even see this dynamic in economics. Politicians have their mouths full about economic growth, but with finite resources, you cannot have economic growth without that there would be an economic recession elsewhere, and vice versa.
When people get sloshed around like the water in a basin, they don't have the mental acuity to stand up and say
"Stop, we will have no more of this!" Or as Adolf Hitler said,
"Arbeit macht frei" — i.e. doing labor liberates you from existential contemplations. People are too busy trying to stay upright as the tidal waves push them in one direction or the other, and with their noses right on top of it, they even get tempted to enjoy the ride when the tide happens to appear favorable to them.
When I was a young boy, my dad went out working and my mom stayed home to clean the house, do the shopping, cook the food and do the laundry. Then the whole feminism thing came around and women wanted to have careers, just like men. And what happened? With two incomes instead of one, people were able to buy more stuff and go on vacation longer, or to more exotic places. So the prices went up. And now couples cannot even afford anymore to have one partner stay at home and run the household while the other one goes out to work.
So now, with both partners having to go out to work, the corporations benefit from an increase in productivity, but it's still just as hard to buy stuff as before, because the prices have all gone up. And in the evening, when both partners come home exhausted from a hard day at work, there's no time anymore to properly raise the children.
No, you come home, you take a shower — maybe a little bit of sports before that — and you have your dinner and you switch on the TV, which shows you a couple of fragments of mindless entertainment in between the commercial blocks that are meant to convince you to spend more money on stuff that you don't even really need.
Raising the kids is the school's job. But the school says that it's the parents' job. So now we've got a whole generation of daycare kids who haven't been taught anything about ethics, and who have been spoiled rotten with useless toys when they were little — as recompense for the fact that their parents couldn't really spare the time to give them an upbringing, as well as because the magic of birthdays and Christmas somehow got lost in the never-ending onslaught from the advertising industry, with ads specifically targeting children and making them yearn for the same toys that the other kid from across the street has.
Anyway, I digress. But what I'm getting at is that evolution does not always mean improvement. It is most often just being sloshed around from one situation to another. And that's what happened with the hippies too. The drugs made it happen. They couldn't see that they were being manipulated by the very establishment they were supposedly standing up against.
And now look at many of those former hippies. Do the names Larry Ellison, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates ring a bell? They were hippies too at the time. And you can rest assured that they've done their share of acid trips. And they all grew out to be the very same type of sharks that they protested against while they were hippies.
Soviet communism, same thing. It was supposed to provide the answer to the exploitation by oligarchs, aristocrats and fascists, and then ended up becoming the very thing they had been protesting and revolting against. If you haven't read George Orwell's
"Animal Farm", then I seriously recommend it.
"All animals are equal" became
"All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others."
And what about the foundation of the United States of America, which was supposed to become "the land of the free and the home of the brave"? Even its very origins as a nation were corrupted, because the European white man either massacred the natives of North America or drove them into reservations, stole the land that these natives had been living on in harmony with nature, and then abducted people from their homes and families in Africa to work said stolen land as slaves. So freedom for whom? And where is the bravery in abduction and racial subjugation? And what about "Republican president, Democratic president, Republican president, Democratic president"? Good cop, bad cop, good cop, bad cop?
And what about the Abrahamic religions? First there was Judaism. Heroic, but with an unforgiving and often cruel deity. Then came along Christianity, and Jesus — if he ever really existed, then his name would have been Yeshua, because "Jesus" is a Latinized name — preached forgiveness, tolerance and patience. And then that very same Christianity went on to become a ruthless empire that conquered half of the planet, brutally, gratuitously and cruelly tortured and murdered people, and stifled all scientific knowledge for 800 years wherever it contradicted Roman Catholic lore. Even kings and queens feared Rome.
But even before the Roman Catholic empire became the ruler of the entire West, there already was another variant of the Abrahamic religion. And it was by far not as tolerant and forgiving as how Christianity started out. And it, too, started spreading, just like Catholicism. And it, too, has committed some of the most horrible crimes against humanity — and still is, at the hands of some of its worst fanatics, such as the Wahhabi.
My point is that there's always a pattern. Hegel already said something to the effect of history repeating itself for those who choose to ignore it. Mankind has been ignoring its own history for way too long, and they're still doing it. I agree with Fred in that regard. The great ascension et al isn't going to happen, and looking unto saviors is merely a denial of your own responsibility in it all. The magic lies within ourselves, and
that is what we should look to.
Here are some words to contemplate, and they are mine — this does not come from any talking head... When you make a circular motion in a flat plane, then you're always going to end up right back where you started. However, if you add another dimension that is perpendicular to the flat plane, then your motion of going around won't be a circle anymore. It'll be a
helix, and you won't end up arriving back at the same point as whence you started. Going around will then lead you to a whole new and very different level instead. ;)
:eyebrows: :eyebrows: :eyebrows: :eyebrows: :eyebrows:
P.S.: KeepTrying, I am going to move this thread to
News & Updates, because it is too on-topic for the
Off-Topic forum. :p