I've updated my favorite links a bit

Cindy Sheehan has a new website and a new radio show called "Cindy Sheehan's Soapbox." Check it out! Also, I've put up my friend Padri's blog called "Free the Wheat." It looks great from what I've seen, but I'll admit I haven't been able to read much of anyone's blog lately. Hey, Heather and Jeff, send me your blog addresses again so I can link those as well (if you want me to!).

Who were you before you were born?

I was thinking of maintaining a separate blog to dedicate to esoteric matter much like Les Visible does with Visible Origami, but I don't blog enough as it is. Besides, what could be a better topic to discuss on a blog called "What They Don't Tell You" than the fact that we are much more than our physical body, and our consciousness will, in fact, survive our physical death.

Sometimes I liken humanity as an enormously wealthy immortal being suffering from Alzheimer's, being mercilessly abused by a greedy, coniving "caregiver." Think about it. What power would there be in immortality if you're stuck in a cycle of declining health followed by total amnesia every 70 years or so? But a benevolent God may have designed our lives this way if the object of life were, in fact, to learn spiritual lessons.

I've always believed in reincarnation (ironically only recently challenged on discovery of what may be a researchable past life). Over the years I've stumbled upon some otherwise baffling conditions that don't make sense if you accept the Western assumption that personality, talents and hang-ups come from only two things: Nature and Nuture.

Foreign Accent Syndrome:
Wherein people who have suffered damage to the part of the brain associated with speech suddenly acquire a foreign accent. The "scientific" claim is that this is simply due to the elongation of certain vowels making it "sound" like a foreign accent, but I beg to differ. I saw one (English)woman on youtube clearly speaking in a Jamaican accent, and another (American) clearly is speaking in a French accent. Both seemed genuinely embarrassed about this, but couldn't help it. And what do you make of this? -- Czech speedway rider knocked out in crash wakes up speaking perfect English

Gender dysphoria:
A "woman trapped in a man's body" or vice-versa. I would include transvestism in this category as well.

Body Integrity Identity Disorder (BIID):
This is a truly bizarre condition wherein the subject desires to have a limb amputated, and doesn't feel whole unless it is. Could this be the unconscious playing out of karma from another life? Dr. Ian Stevenson has done a lot of work correlating birthmarks and birth defects in children with injuries they claim to have incurred in a previous life. Check it out: http://www.sinor.ru/~che/birthmarks.htm (BTW, does anybody else see the similarity in the faces of Peter Stuyvesant and Gouverneur Morris? Both had wooden legs).

Savant syndrome and child prodigies
[For that matter, how does one account for the genius of Helen Keller, blind and deaf since she was a toddler, at perceiving and communicating her interpretations of the world? What about this painter who was born without eyes?]

Obviously, sexual dysphoria and BIID run counter to the Darwinian idea of "survival of the fittest." So nature should not account for these complex psychological conditions, both of which have compelled people to remove their own body parts. Both are *strongly* discouraged by our culture. This begs the question: are human beings motivated by something else outside biological and cultural imparitives?

Foreign accent syndrome and amazing, inexplicable skills by children and the severely handicapped are more benign conditions, but just as puzzling. These skills or attributes suddenly appear out of the blue. Is it possible to have access to resources outside the generally recognized realm of brain connections forged from years of habit and/or pratice?

I think it's possible to access memories, skills (and be bothered by neuroses) that stem from outside our current existence on Earth. But that's my take. If anyone else has a better explaination for these conditions, I'd like to hear it.

Healing with sound

As the title implies, this is one of my more esoteric posts. Those who follow my blog/postings on other websites know that I'm deeply concerned about the use of directed energy "non-lethal" weapons/social control mechanisms that can be used covertly influence behavior or even torture people. "Directed energy" pretty much refers to energy waves, i.e. sound (light is an energy wave, too, on a higher frequency).

But the knife that cuts can be a scapel that heals. Since I've been on a fast and not so inclined to be running around lately, I've been more introspective searching around the Internet for ways to heal. (Well, mostly just youtube ...) Here are some sites I wanted to collect in a post for easy reference ...

Remake yourself.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rYyocM48HJ8

Solfeggio Tones from Mountain Mystic 9

Chakra sound healing
[simple but effective]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=URFnBeW423E

Shekinah
[The first time I saw this, it struck me as so dopey and over-the-top, I had to laugh. It seemed like a perfect satire of the New Age Movement. But there is no question this woman really believes in what she's doing! And then I asked myself, how does this Western woman know how to throat sing like that? I mean, that's a pretty obscure tradition from Mongolia and it takes years of study to be able to do it well. I watched the video again, and everything she does is done with purpose. I sense she really is working with some powerful energy there ... or she believes she is, which is pretty much the same thing.]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYt9cSIvZZs

Fast to shut down Guantanamo prison

I'm on a new fast. This 11th I was at a San Francisco truth action as usual, but this Jan 11th also marks the 7th anniversary of the opening of Guantanamo Bay Prison in Cuba. So after a couple hours of handing out "demand a new investigation of 9-11" literature, we were joined by a contingent of World Can't Wait with their orange jumpsuits, demanding an Guantanamo Bay shut down. Cindy Sheehan and many of her supporters were there, and Cindy spoke to the crowd, asking them to support her in a 9-day fast until Obama takes office to SHUT DOWN GITMO!!! Here's a news story about it: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/01/12/BA3C157IVP.DTL .

Need to do a lot of stuff on the internet, hope to blog more later ...

Been going to a lot of protests lately ...

I went to one this morning, this one on the 30th



and another one that shut down traffic when they started the ground invasion.

Once again, the news tried to ignore or distort the size and makeup of the protests, saying things like "hundreds of Arab-American protesters" when protesters numbered in the thousands and comprised a huge cross section of the American public, including many Jews. Today at the Federal Building where Nancy Pelosi's home office is, there was a whole Jewish band with us.

Right is right and wrong is wrong. Why aren't UN peacekeepers putting a stop to Hamas's "oh-so-scary" rocket attacks (no one was killed until Israel started firing, BTW, and Gaza has food, water, gas and all entry and exit points blocked off to them.

I'm heartsick about what's going on in Gaza right now, and very worried this will be used as a springboard for a wider war -- meanwhile Israel continues its land-grab that has been going on for 60 years financed with American tax dollars ...

Hats off to the guy who took off his shoes

to hurl them at the war criminal who ruined his country and threatens to ruin mine!

This is what Iraqi reporter Muntader al-Zaidi said as he threw his shoes at George Bush, who made a surprise visit to Baghdad yesterday:

"This is a gift from the Iraqis. This is the farewell kiss, you dog. This is from the widows, the orphans and those who were killed in Iraq"

A lady from my Code Pink mail list suggested: "... we take photos of the bottom of our shoes, print up the photos and tape unto a postcard (made from card stock paper or cardboard) and then write what the Iraqi journalist said and mail to bush."

I'd like to add that faxzero.net offers 2 free faxes a day. Hey! One per shoe!

Propaganda

Here are some quotes I picked out from this article:

"Mighty little force is needed to control a man whose mind has been hoodwinked; contrariwise, no amount of force can control a free man, a man whose mind is free. No, not the rack, not fission bombs, not anything—you can't conquer a free man; the most you can do is kill him."
—Robert A. Heinlein, If This Goes On, 1940

"One of the most horrible features of war is that all the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting."
—George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia, 1938

"Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one."
—Charles Mackay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, 1841

Did you ever stop and think about how much energy, money, etc., humans invest in deception? It seems like such a waste. Not that all lies are bad ("You look fine!", "It's not that noticeable ...", "Of course I didn't forget!"). But the nature of lies is impermanence, because they can never stand up to the truth. All lies are like what the song says *we* are, dust in the wind. Once exposed to the light, they must fall away, though anything of substance they may have been propping up comes crashing down, potentially causing some real damage.

Truth is what's left after all lies are pierced. It is the only real thing in the Universe, and ultimately the only thing of any value. But here on Earth we haven't reached "the Ultimate" yet, so Truth often plays the role of the ugly stepsister, or even the skunk at the picnic.

Lately I've been under the impression, probably a false one (but there's a truth behind that falsity ...) that a lot of energy has been directed at me, personally, to believe in a bullshit stack of lies to divert me from what I *should* be doing, whatever that is. Like I said, I'm probably deluded in that belief, but I can clearly see this is happening to the American people in general.

I can't stand to watch television anymore. It seems that everything in the "news" is an irrelevant distraction or an out-and-out lie. Where do we go to get the truth?

One of the bloggers I follow, Les Visible, says we should meditate. I think this is an excellent idea, but it's not for wussies. So many of our false comforts are based on lies. We all will feel pretty naked and cold when these are stripped from us. But I can tell you that as a nation, the United States has some pretty stark truths it must face in the immediate future. I also get the sense that the better we can deal with our own personal truths, the better we will be able to deal with these more collective truths and their effects.

[See also: awakeninthedream.com]