On attachment and giving up

Q: If you are beyond words, what shall we talk about? Metaphysically speaking, what you say holds together; there is no inner contradiction. But there is no food for me in what you say. It is so completely beyond my urgent needs. When I ask for bread, you are giving jewels. They are beautiful, no doubt, but I am hungry.
M: It is not so. I am offering you exactly what you need — awakening. You are not hungry and you need no bread. You need cessation, relinquishing, disentanglement. What you believe you need is not what you need. Your real need I know, not you. You need to return to the state in which I am — your natural state. Anything else you may think of is an illusion and an obstacle. Believe me, you need nothing except to be what you are. You imagine you will increase your value by acquisition. It is like gold imagining that an addition of copper will improve it. Elimination and purification, renunciation of all that is foreign to your nature is enough. All else is vanity.

M: Also I am not afraid because I am nothing that can experience fear, or can be in danger. I have no shape, nor name. It is attachment to a name and shape that breeds fear. I am not attached. I am nothing, and nothing is afraid of no thing. On the contrary, everything is afraid of the Nothing, for when a thing touches Nothing, it becomes nothing. It is like a bottomless well, whatever falls into it, disappears.

Q: You are aware of eternity, therefore you are not concerned with survival.
M: It is the other way round. Freedom from all desire is eternity. All attachment implies fear, for all things are transient. And fear makes one a slave. This freedom from attachment does not come with practice; it is natural, when one knows one's true being. Love does not cling; clinging is not love.

M: ...Cut off imagination and attachment and what remains?
Q: The world remains. I remain.
M: Yes. But how different it is when you can see it as it is, not through the screen of desire and fear.

Q: No amount of effort can make me fearless.
M: Fearlessness comes by itself, when you see that there is nothing to be afraid of. When you walk in a crowded street, you just bypass people. Some you see, some you just glance at, but you do not stop. It is the stopping that creates the bottleneck. Keep moving! Disregard names and shapes, don't be attached to them; your attachment is your bondage.

Attachment is bondage, detachment is freedom. To crave is to slave.

Develop the witness attitude and you will find in your own experience that detachment brings control.

There are always moments when one feels empty and estranged. Such moments are most desirable for it means the soul had cast its moorings and is sailing for distant places. This is detachment — when the old is over and the new has not yet come. If you are afraid, the state may be distressing; but there is really nothing to be afraid of. Remember the instruction: whatever you come across — go beyond.

Questioner: I see you sitting in your son's house waiting for lunch to be served. And I wonder whether the content of your consciousness is similar to mine, or partly different, or totally different. Are you hungry and thirsty as I am, waiting rather impatiently for the meals to be served, or are you in an altogether different state of mind?
Maharaj: There is not much difference on the surface, but very much of it in depth. You know yourself only through the senses and the mind. You take yourself to be what they suggest; having no direct knowledge of yourself, you have mere ideas; all mediocre, second-hand, by hearsay. Whatever you think you are you take it to be true; the habit of imagining yourself perceivable and describable is very strong with you.
I see as you see, hear as you hear, taste as you taste, eat as you eat. I also feel thirst and hunger and expect my food to be served on time. When starved or sick, my body and mind go weak. All this I perceive quite clearly, but somehow I am not in it, I feel myself as if floating over it, aloof and detached. Even not aloof and detached. There is aloofness and detachment as there is thirst and hunger; there is also the awareness of it all and a sense of Immense distance, as if the body and the mind and all that happens to them were somewhere far out on the horizon. I am like a cinema screen — clear and empty — the pictures pass over it and disappear, leaving it as clear and empty as before. In no way is the screen affected by the pictures, nor are the pictures affected by the screen. The screen intercepts and reflects the pictures, it does not shape them. It has nothing to do with the rolls of films. These are as they are, lumps of destiny (prarabdha), but not my destiny; the destinies of the people on the screen.
Q: You do not mean to say that the people in a picture have destinies! They belong to the story, the story is not theirs.
M: And what about you? Do you shape your life or are you shaped by it?
Q: Yes, you are right. A life story unrolls itself of which I am one of the actors. I have no being outside it, as it has no being without me. I am merely a character, not a person.
M: The character will become a person, when he begins to shape his life instead of accepting it as it comes, and identifying himself with it.
Q: When I ask a question and you answer, what exactly happens?
M: The question and the answer — both appear on the screen. The lips move, the body speaks — and again the screen is clear and empty.
Q: When you say: clear and empty, what do you mean?
M: I mean free of all contents. To myself I am neither perceivable nor conceivable; there is nothing I can point out and say: 'this I am'. You identify yourself with everything so easily, I find it impossible. The feeling: 'I am not this or that, nor is anything mine' is so strong in me that as soon as a thing or a thought appears, there comes at once the sense 'this I am not'.
Q: Do you mean to say that you spend your time repeating 'this I am not, that I am not'?
M: Of course not. I am merely verbalizing for your sake.

Q: What am I if not human?
M: That which makes you think that you are a human is not human. It is but a dimensionless point of consciousness, a conscious nothing; all you can say about yourself is: 'I am.' You are pure being — awareness — bliss. To realise that is the end of all seeking. You come to it when you see all you think yourself to be as mere imagination and stand aloof in pure awareness of the transient as transient, imaginary as imaginary, unreal as unreal. It is not at all difficult, but detachment is needed. It is the clinging to the false that makes the true so difficult to see. Once you understand that the false needs time and what needs time is false, you are nearer the Reality, which is timeless, ever in the now. Eternity in time is mere repetitiveness, like the movement of a clock. It flows from the past into the future endlessly, an empty perpetuity. Reality is what makes the present so vital, so different from the past and future, which are merely mental. If you need time to achieve something, it must be false. The real is always with you; you need not wait to be what you are. Only you must not allow your mind to go out of yourself in search. When you want something, ask yourself: do I really need it? and if the answer is no, then just drop it.

Q: How am I to fight desire? There is nothing stronger.
M: The waters of life are thundering over the rocks of objects — desirable or hateful. Remove the rocks by insight and detachment and the same waters will flow deep and silent and swift, in greater volume and with greater power. Don't be theoretical about it, give time to thought and consideration; if you desire to be free, neglect not the nearest step to freedom.

M: My experience is that everything is bliss. But the desire for bliss creates pain. Thus bliss becomes the seed of pain. The entire universe of pain is born of desire. Give up the desire for pleasure and you will not even know what is pain.
Q: Why should pleasure be the seed of pain?
M: Because for the sake of pleasure you are committing many sins. And the fruits of sin are suffering and death.

Questioner: There is a basic difference between us. You know the real while I know only the workings of my mind. Therefore what you say is one thing, what I hear is another. What you say is true; what I understand is false, though the words are the same. There is a gap between us. How to close the gap?
M: Give up the idea of being what you think yourself to be and there will be no gap. By imagining yourself as separate you have created the gap. You need not cross it. Just don't create it. All is you and yours. There is nobody else. This is a fact.
Q: How strange! The very same words which to you are true, to me are false. 'There is nobody else'. How obviously untrue!
M: Let them be true or untrue. Words don't matter. What matters is the idea you have of yourself, for it blocks you. Give it up.
Q: From early childhood I was taught to think that I am limited to my name and shape. A mere statement to the contrary will not erase the mental groove. A regular brain-washing is needed — if at all it can be done.
M: You call it brain-washing, I call it Yoga — levelling up all the mental ruts. You must not be compelled to think the same thoughts again and again. Move on!
Q: Easier said than done.
M: Don't be childish! Easier to change, than to suffer. Grow out of your childishness, that is all.

Q: I gave it up too. I do not read nowadays.
M: What you gave up is of no importance now. What have you not given up?. Find that out and give up that. Sadhana is a search for what to give up. Empty yourself completely.

M: The world is made of rings. The hooks are all yours. Make straight your hooks and nothing can hold you. Give up your addictions. There is nothing else to give up. Stop your routine of acquisitiveness, (...)

M: There is trouble only when you cling to something. When you hold on to nothing, no trouble arises. The relinquishing of the lesser is the gaining of the greater. Give up all and you gain all. Then life becomes what it was meant to be: pure radiation from an inexhaustible source. In that light the world appears dimly like a dream.
Q: If my world is merely a dream and you are a part of it, what can you do for me? If the dream is not real, having no being, how can reality affect it?

M: While it lasts, the dream has temporary being. It is your desire to hold on to it, that creates the problem. Let go. Stop imagining that the dream is yours.
Q: You seem to take for granted that there can be a dream without a dreamer and that I identify myself with the dream of my own sweet will. But I am the dreamer and the dream too. Who is to stop dreaming?
M: Let the dream unroll itself to its very end. You cannot help it. But you can look at the dream as a dream, refuse it the stamp of reality.
Q: Here am I, sitting before you. I am dreaming and you are watching me talking in my dream. What is the link between us?
M: My intention to wake you up is the link. My heart wants you awake. I see you suffer in your dream and I know that you must wake up to end your woes. When you see your dream as dream, you wake up. But in your dream itself I am not interested. Enough for me to know that you must wake up. You need not bring your dream to a definite conclusion, or make it noble, or happy, or beautiful; all you need is to realise that you are dreaming. Stop imagining, stop believing. See the contradictions, the incongruities, the falsehood and the sorrow of the human state, the need to go beyond.

M: No ambition is spiritual. All ambitions are for the sake of the 'I am'. If you want to make real progress you must give up all idea of personal attainment. The ambitions of the so-called Yogis are preposterous. A man's desire for a woman is innocence itself compared to the lusting for an everlasting personal bliss. The mind is a cheat. The more pious it seems, the worse the betrayal.

M: Whatever is conceived by the mind must be false, for it is bound to be relative and limited. The real is inconceivable and cannot be harnessed to a purpose. It must be wanted for its own sake.
Q: How can I want the inconceivable?
M: What else is there worth wanting? Granted, the real cannot be wanted, as a thing is wanted. But you can see the unreal as unreal and discard it. It is the discarding the false that opens the way to the true.
Q: I understand, but how does it look in actual daily life?
M: Self-interest and self-concern are the focal points of the false. Your daily life vibrates between desire and fear. Watch it intently and you will see how the mind assumes innumerable names and shapes, like a river foaming between the boulders. Trace every action to its selfish motive and look at the motive intently till it dissolves.
Q: To live, one must look after oneself, one must earn money for oneself.
M: You need not earn for yourself, but you may have to — for a woman and a child. You may have to keep on working for the sake of others. Even just to keep alive can be a sacrifice. There is no need whatsoever to be selfish. Discard every self-seeking motive as soon as it is seen and you need not search for truth; truth will find you.
Q: There is a minimum of needs.
M: Were they not supplied since you were conceived? Give up the bondage of self-concern and be what you are — intelligence and love in action.
Q: But one must survive!
M: You can't help surviving! The real you is timeless and beyond birth and death. And the body will survive as long as it is needed. It is not important that it should live long. A full life is better than a long life.
Q: Who is to say what is a full life? It depends on my cultural background.
M: If you seek reality you must set yourself free of all backgrounds, of all cultures, of all patterns of thinking and feeling. Even the idea of being man or woman, or even human, should be discarded. The ocean of life contains all, not only humans. So, first of all abandon all self-identification, stop thinking of yourself as such-and-such, so-and-so, this or that. Abandon all self-concern, worry not about your welfare, material or spiritual, abandon every desire, gross or subtle, stop thinking of achievement of any kind. You are complete here and now, you need absolutely nothing.
It does not mean that you must be brainless and foolhardy, improvident or indifferent; only the basic anxiety for oneself must go. You need some food, clothing and shelter for you and yours, but this will not create problems as long as greed is not taken for a need. Live in tune with things as they are and not as they are imagined.

Q: Is there any particular place you would advise me to go to for spiritual attainment?
M: The only proper place is within. The outer world neither can help nor hinder. No system, no pattern of action will take you to your goal. Give up all working for a future, concentrate totally on the now, be concerned only with your response to every movement of life as it happens.
Q: What is the cause of the urge to roam about?
M: There is no cause. You merely dream that you roam about. In a few years your stay in India will appear as a dream to you. You will dream some other dream at that time. Do realise that it is not you who moves from dream to dream, but the dreams flow before you and you are the immutable witness. No happening affects your real being — this is the absolute truth.
Q: Cannot I move about physically and keep steady inwardly?
M: You can, but what purpose does it serve? If you are earnest, you will find that in the end you will get fed up with roaming and regret the waste of energy and time.

M: What kind of Yoga do you want to practice, the Yoga of getting, or the Yoga of giving up?
Q: Don't they come to the same in the end?
M: How can they? One enslaves, the other liberates. The motive matters supremely. Freedom comes through renunciation. All possession is bondage.
Q: What I have the strength and the courage to hold on to, why should I give up? And if I have not the strength, how can I give up? I do not understand this need of giving up. When I want something, why should I not pursue it? Renunciation is for the weak.
M: If you do not have the wisdom and the strength to give up, just look at your possessions. Your mere looking will burn them up. If you can stand outside your mind, you will soon find that total renunciation of possessions and desires is the most obviously reasonable thing to do.
You create the world and then worry about it. Becoming selfish makes you weak. If you think you have the strength and courage to desire, it is because you are young and inexperienced. Invariably the object of desire destroys the means of acquiring it and then itself withers away. It is all for the best, because it teaches you to shun desire like poison.
Q: How am I to practice desirelessness?
M: No need of practice. No need of any acts of renunciation. Just turn your mind away, that is all. Desire is merely the fixation of the mind on an idea. Get it out of its groove by denying it attention.
Q: That is all?
M: Yes, that is all. Whatever may be the desire or fear, don't dwell upon it. Try and see for yourself. Here and there you may forget, it does not matter. Go back to your attempts till the brushing away of every desire and fear, of every reaction becomes automatic.
Q: How can one live without emotions?
M: You can have all the emotions you want, but beware of reactions, of induced emotions. Be entirely self-determined and ruled from within, not from without.
Merely giving up a thing to secure a better one is not true relinquishment. Give it up because you see its valuelessness. As you keep on giving up, you will find that you grow spontaneously in intelligence and power and inexhaustible love and joy.
Q: Why so much insistence on relinquishing all desires and fears? Are they not natural?
M: They are not. They are entirely mind-made. You have to give up everything to know that you need nothing, not even your body. Your needs are unreal and your efforts are meaningless. You imagine that your possessions protect you. In reality they make you vulnerable. realise yourself as away from all that can be pointed at as 'this' or 'that'. You are unreachable by any sensory experience or verbal construction. Turn away from them. Refuse to impersonate.

M: Attachment destroys courage. The giver is always ready to give. The taker is absent. Freedom means letting go. People just do not care to let go everything. They do not know that the finite is the price of the infinite, as death is the price of immortality. Spiritual maturity lies in the readiness to let go everything. The giving up is the first step. But the real giving up is in realising that there is nothing to give up, for nothing is your own. It is like deep sleep — you do not give up your bed when you fall sleep — you just forget it.

Questioner: I am very much attached to my family and possessions. How can I conquer this attachment?
Maharaj: This attachment is born along with the sense of 'me' and 'mine'. Find the true meaning of these words and you will be free of all bondage. You have a mind which is spread in time. One after another all things happen to you and the memory remains. There is nothing wrong in it. The problem arises only when the memory of past pains and pleasures — which are essential to all organic life — remains as a reflex, dominating behaviour. This reflex takes the shape of 'I' and uses the body and the mind for its purposes, which are invariably in search for pleasure or flight from pain. When you recognise the 'I' as it is, a bundle of desires and fears, and the sense of 'mine', as embracing all things and people needed for the purpose of avoiding pain and securing pleasure, you will see that the 'I' and the 'mine' are false ideas, having no foundation in reality. Created by the mind, they rule their creator as long as it takes them to be true; when questioned, they dissolve.
The 'I' and 'mine', having no existence in themselves, need a support which they find in the body. The body becomes their point of reference. When you talk of 'my' husband and 'my' children, you mean the body's husband and the body's children. Give up the idea of being the body and face the question: Who am l? At once a process will be set in motion which will bring back reality, or, rather, will take the mind to reality. Only, you must not be afraid.
Q: What am I to be afraid of?
M: For reality to be, the ideas of 'me' and 'mine' must go. They will go if you let them. Then your normal natural state reappears, in which you are neither the body nor the mind, neither the 'me’ nor the 'mine', but in a different state of being altogether. It is pure awareness of being, without being this or that, without any self-identification with anything in particular, or in general. In that pure light of consciousness there is nothing, not even the idea of nothing. There is only light. (...)
Q: And what about my possessions?
M: When the 'mine' is no more, where are your possessions?
Q: Please tell me, must I lose all by losing the 'I'?
M: You may or you may not. It will be all the same to you. Your loss will be somebody's gain. You will not mind.
Q: If I do not mind, I shall lose all!
M: Once you have nothing you have no problems.
Q: I am left with the problem of survival.
M: It is the body's problem and it will solve it by eating, drinking and sleeping. There is enough for all, provided all share.
Q: Our society is based on grabbing, not on sharing.
M: By sharing you will change it.
Q: I do not feel like sharing. Anyhow, I am being taxed out of my possessions.
M: This is not the same as voluntary sharing. Society will not change by compulsion. It requires a change of heart. Understand that nothing is your own, that all belongs to all. Then only society will change.

Q: I feel my hold on the body is so strong that I just cannot give up the idea that I am the body. It will cling to me as long as the body lasts. There are people who maintain that no realisation is possible while alive and I feel inclined to agree with them.
M: Before you agree or disagree, why not investigate the very idea of a body? Does the mind appear in the body or the body in the mind? Surely there must be a mind to conceive the ‘I-am-the-body’ idea. A body without a mind cannot be ‘my body’. ‘My body’ is invariably absent when the mind is in abeyance. It is also absent when the mind is deeply engaged in thoughts and feelings. Once you realise that the body depends on the mind, and the mind on consciousness, and consciousness on awareness and not the other way round, your question about waiting for self-realisation till you die is answered.

Q: Please don’t tell me that I am dreaming and that I will soon wake up. I wish it were so. But I am awake and in pain. You talk of a painless state, but you add that I cannot have it in my present condition. I feel lost.
M: Don’t feel lost. I only say that to find the immutable and blissful you must give up your hold on the mutable and painful. You are concerned with your own happiness and I am telling you that there is no such thing. Happiness is never your own, it is where the ‘I’ is not. I do not say it is beyond your reach; you have only to reach out beyond yourself, and you will find it.
Q: If I have to go beyond myself, why did I get the ‘I am’ idea in the first instance?
M: The mind needs a centre to draw a circle. The circle may grow bigger and with every increase there will be a change in the sense ‘I am’. A man who took himself in hand, a Yogi, will draw a spiral, yet the centre will remain, however vast the spiral. A day comes when the entire enterprise is seen as false and given up. The central point is no more and the universe becomes the centre.
Q: Yes, maybe. But what am I to do now?
M: Assiduously watch your ever-changing life, probe deeply into the motives beyond your actions and you will soon prick the bubble in which you are enclosed. A chic needs the shell to grow, but a day comes when the shell must be broken. If it is not, there will be suffering and death.
Q: How is the person removed?
M: By determination. Understand that it must go and wish it to go — it shall go if you are earnest about it. Somebody, anybody, will tell you that you are pure consciousness, not a body-mind. Accept it as a possibility and investigate earnestly. You may discover that it is not so, that you are not a person bound in space and time. Think of the difference it would make!
Q: If I am not a person, then what am I?
M: Wet cloth looks, feels, smells differently as long as it is wet. When dry it is again the normal cloth. Water has left it and who can make out that it was wet? Your real nature is not like what you appear to be. Give up the idea of being a person, that is all. You need not become what you are anyhow. There is the identity of what you are and there is the person superimposed on it. All you know is the person, the identity — which is not a person — you do not know, for you never doubted, never asked yourself the crucial question — ‘Who am I’. The identity is the witness of the person and sadhana consists in shifting the emphasis from the superficial and changeful person to the immutable and ever-present witness.
Q: How is it that the question ‘Who am I’ attracts me little? I prefer to spend my time in the sweet company of saints.
M: Abiding in your own being is also holy company. If you have no problem of suffering and release from suffering, you will not find the energy and persistence needed for self-enquiry. You cannot manufacture a crisis. It must be genuine.
Q: How does a genuine crisis happen?
M: It happens every moment, but you are not alert enough. A shadow on your neighbour’s face, the immense and all-pervading sorrow of existence is a constant factor in your life, but you refuse to take notice. You suffer and see others suffer, but you don’t respond.
Q: What you say is true, but what can I do about it? Such indeed is the situation. My helplessness and dullness are a part of it.
M: Good enough. Look at yourself steadily — it is enough. The door that locks you in, is also the door that lets you out. The ‘I am’ is the door. Stay at it until it opens. As a matter of fact, it is open, only you are not at it. You are waiting at the non-existent painted doors, which will never open.

M: To insist, to resist, are contained in the will to be. Remove the will to be and what remains? Existence and non-existence relate to something in space and time; here and now, there and then, which again are in the mind. The mind plays a guessing game; it is ever uncertain; anxiety-ridden and restless. You resent being treated as a mere instrument of some god, or Guru, and insist on being treated as a person, because you are not sure of your own existence and do not want to give up the comfort and assurance of a personality. You may not be what you believe yourself to be, but it gives you continuity, your future flows into the present and becomes the past without jolts. To be denied personal existence is frightening, but you must face it and find your identity with the totality of life. Then the problem of who is used by whom is no more.

M: When the mind is quiet it reflects reality. When it is motionless through and through, it dissolves and only reality remains. This reality is so concrete, so actual, so much more tangible than mind and matter, that compared to it even diamond is soft like butter. This overwhelming actuality makes the world dreamlike, misty, irrelevant.
Q: This world, with so much suffering in it, how can you see it as irrelevant. What callousness!
M: It is you who is callous, not me. If your world is so full of suffering, do something about it; don't add to it through greed or indolence. I am not bound by your dreamlike world. In my world the seeds of suffering, desire and fear are not sown and suffering does not grow. My world is free from opposites, of mutually distinctive discrepancies; harmony pervades; its peace is rocklike; this peace and silence are my body.
Q: What you say reminds me of the dharmakaya of the Buddha.
M: Maybe. We need not run off with terminology. Just see the person you imagine yourself to be as a part of the world you perceive within your mind and look at the mind from the outside, for you are not the mind. After all, your only problem is the eager self-identification with whatever you perceive. Give up this habit, remember that you are not what you perceive, use your power of alert aloofness. See yourself in all that lives and your behaviour will express your vision. Once you realise that there is nothing in this world, which you can call your own, you look at it from the outside as you look at a play on the stage, or a picture on the screen, admiring and enjoying, but really unmoved. As long as you imagine yourself to be something tangible and solid, a thing among things, actually existing in time and space, short-lived and vulnerable, naturally you will be anxious to survive and increase. But when you know yourself as beyond space and time — in contact with them only at the point of here and now, otherwise all-pervading and all-containing, unapproachable, unassailable, invulnerable — you will be afraid no longer. Know yourself as you are — against fear there is no other remedy.
You have to learn to think and feel on these lines, or you will remain indefinitely on the personal level of desire and fear, gaining and losing, growing and decaying. A personal problem cannot be solved on its own level. The very desire to live is the messenger of death, as the longing to be happy is the outline of sorrow. The world is an ocean of pain and fear, of anxiety and despair. Pleasures are like the fishes, few and swift, rarely come, quickly gone. A man of low intelligence believes, against all evidence, that he is an exception and that the world owes him happiness. But the world cannot give what it does not have; unreal to the core, it is of no use for real happiness. It cannot be otherwise. We seek the real because we are unhappy with the unreal. Happiness is our real nature and we shall never rest until we find it. But rarely we know where to seek it. Once you have understood that the world is but a mistaken view of reality, and is not what it appears to be, you are free of its obsessions.

Questioner: How do we learn to cut out worries?
M: You need not worry about your worries. Just be. Do not try to be quiet; do not make 'being quiet' into a task to be performed. Don't be restless about 'being quiet', miserable about 'being happy'. Just be aware that you are and remain aware — don't say: 'yes, I am; what next?' There is no 'next' in 'I am'. It is a timeless state.
Q: If it is a timeless state, it will assert itself anyhow.
M: You are what you are, timelessly, but of what use is it to you unless you know it and act on it? Your begging bowl may be of pure gold, but as long as you do not know it, you are a pauper. You must know your inner worth and trust it and express it in the daily sacrifice of desire and fear.
Q: If I know myself, shall I not desire and fear?
M: For some time the mental habits may linger in spite of the new vision, the habit of longing for the known past and fearing the unknown future. When you know these are of the mind only, you can go beyond them. As long as you have all sorts of ideas about yourself, you know yourself through the mist of these ideas; to know yourself as you are, give up all ideas. You cannot imagine the taste of pure water, you can only discover it by abandoning all flavourings.
As long as you are interested in your present way of living, you will not abandon it. Discovery cannot come as long as you cling to the familiar. It is only when you realise fully the immense sorrow of your life and revolt against it, that a way out can be found.

M: ... give up the false ideas you have about your self. Both faith and reason tell you that you are neither the body, nor its desires and fears, nor are you the mind with its fanciful ideas, nor the role society compels you to play, the person you are supposed to be. Give up the false and the true will come into its own.

Q: I find being alive a painful state.
M: You cannot be alive for you are life itself. It is the person you imagine yourself to be that suffers, not you. Dissolve it in awareness. It is merely a bundle of memories and habits. From the awareness of the unreal to the awareness of your real nature there is a chasm which you will easily cross, once you have mastered the art of pure awareness.

Q: I am in a world which I do not understand and therefore, I am afraid of it. This is everybody's experience.
M: You have separated yourself from the world, therefore it pains and frightens you. Discover your mistake and be free of fear.
Q: You are asking me to give up the world, while I want to be happy in the world.
M: If you ask for the impossible, who can help you? The limited is bound to be painful and pleasant in turns. If you seek real happiness, unassailable and unchangeable, you must leave the world with its pains and pleasures behind you.
Q: How is it done?
M: Mere physical renunciation is only a token of earnestness, but earnestness alone does not liberate. There must be understanding which comes with alert perceptivity, eager enquiry and deep investigation. You must work relentlessly for your salvation from sin and sorrow.
Q: What is sin?
M: All that binds you.

M - Nisargadatta Maharaj 

On love

Love of Life

Attachment to life is attachment to sorrow. We love what gives us pain. Such is our nature.
Nisargadatta Maharaj

Life is pain, life is fear, and man is unhappy. Now man loves life. And that's how it comes about.
Kirillov

Love of oneself

There is no affection like that for oneself...
Buddha

We never love anyone. What we love is the idea we have of someone. It’s our own concept – our own selves – that we love.
This is true in the whole gamut of love. In sexual love we seek our own pleasure via another body. In non-sexual love, we seek our own pleasure via our own idea. The masturbator may be abject, but in point of fact he’s the perfect logical expression of the lover. He’s the only one who doesn’t feign and doesn’t fool himself.
Pessoa

He fell in love with himself at first sight, and it is a passion to which he has always remained faithful.
Anthony Powell

Of all the affections the love of oneself comes first. Your love of the world is the reflection of your love of yourself, for your world is of your own creation.

All you want is to be happy. All your desires, whatever they may be, are expressions of your longing for happiness. Basically, you wish yourself well.
Q: I know that I should not…
M: Wait! Who told you that you should not? What is wrong with wanting to be happy?
Q: The self must go, l know.
M: But the self is there. Your desires are there. Your longing to be happy is there. Why? Because you love yourself. By all means love yourself — wisely. What is wrong is to love yourself stupidly, so as to make yourself suffer. Love yourself wisely. Both indulgence and austerity have the same purpose in view — to make you happy. Indulgence is the stupid way, austerity is the wise way.
Q: What is austerity?
M: Once you have gone through an experience, not to go through it again is austerity. To eschew the unnecessary is austerity. Not to anticipate pleasure or pain Is austerity. Having things under control at all times is austerity. Desire by itself is not wrong. It is life itself, the urge to grow in knowledge and experience.
It is the choices you make that are wrong. To imagine that some little thing — food. sex, power, fame — will make you happy is to deceive yourself. (...)
Do not pretend that you love others as yourself. Unless you have realised them as one with yourself, you cannot love them Don't pretend to be what you are not, don't refuse to be what you are. Your love of others is the result of self-knowledge, not its cause. Without self-realisation, no virtue is genuine. When you know beyond all doubting that the same life flows through all that is and you are that life, you will love all naturally and spontaneously. When you realise the depth and fullness of your love of yourself, you know that every living being and the entire universe are included in your affection. But when you look at anything as separate from you, you cannot love it for you are afraid of it. Alienation causes fear and fear deepens alienation. It is a vicious circle. Only self-realisation can break it. Go for it resolutely.
Nisargadatta Maharaj

When, therefore, the question ‘What should I do?’ arises,w the choice is not between being selfish and being unselfish; for whatever I do I cannot avoid being selfish—all action is selfish. The choice is between being selfish in Schweitzer’s way—by unselfish devotion to the welfare of others—and being selfish in the Buddha’s way—

The welfare of oneself should not be neglected for the welfare of others, however great; recognizing the welfare of oneself, one should be devoted to one’s own welfare.
(Dhammapada 166)

How are we to choose between these two ways of being selfish? The answer is: ‘choose the way of being selfish that leads to the ending of being selfish; which is the Buddha’s way, not Schweitzer’s’.
Nanavira Thera

Sexual Love

Absurdity

The absurdity of love is that it assumes the very separateness it is its nature to wish to unite.
Nanamoli Thera

Love demands identification with something different, which isn’t even possible in logic, much less in real life. Love wants to possess. It wants to make into its own that which must remain outside it; otherwise the distinction between what it is in itself and what it makes into itself will be lost. Love is surrender. The greater the surrender, the greater the love. But total surrender also surrenders its consciousness of the other. The greatest love is therefore death, or forgetting, or renunciation – all forms of love that make love an absurdity.

Love wants to possess, but it doesn’t know what possession is. If I’m not my own, how can I be yours, or you mine? If I don’t possess my own being, how can I possess an extraneous being? If I’m even different from my own identical self, how can I be identical to a completely different self?
Pessoa

Certainly in sexual love we do seem to experience eternity; and this is often taken as religiously significant (by the Hindus, for example, with their Shivalingam, not to mention their temple eroticism).

But what a derisory eternity it is that lasts for a few seconds or minutes and then leaves us wondering what all the fuss was about! As the rude rhyme puts it bluntly:

Cold as the hair on a polar bear’s bum,
Cold as the love of a man when he’s come.

As an advertisement for eternity, sex is a joke. In romantic love, true, we manage to live in a kind of eternity for months and perhaps years: every love-affair lasts forever—while it lasts. But, all the same, when Jouhandeau (quoted by Palinurus in The Unquiet Grave) asks ‘Quand l’univers considère avec indifférence l’être que nous aimons, qui est dans la vérité?’,[ ‘When the universe considers with indifference the being whom we love, who is in truth?’] we have to answer ‘l’univers’. Our past loves can be absolutely dead, even when we meet the loved one again (Darley and Justine in Clea, for example), and it is usually only in favour of the present beloved (if any) that we dissent from the universe’s verdict. And so with aesthetic enjoyment. The transcendental sense of Mozart’s G Minor Quintet, his Adagio and Fugue, the late Beethoven, Bartok’s quartets, Stravinsky’s Octet for Wind Instruments, so evident to me before I joined the army—where was it when I got back home after the war?

Nanavira Thera

A passionate woman, who finds life empty and meaningless when she is not emotionally engaged [in love, or perhaps hate], and fearing the comic as destructive of her passion, may weep at the very contradiction that provokes laughter in a man who has, perhaps, discovered the ghastly boredom of being loved without loving in return ...

Nanavira Thera

Love: The desparateness of separation.
Hate: The desparateness of association.

Christ taught not only love but said ‘I bring not peace but a sword…’ Love is perhaps a good bowl to store hate in.

The love/hate opposition is misleading and not true to facts. Better would be love/fear and greed/ hate. Or perhaps better a triangle which is constantly being forced into a duality by identifying one of the pairs: that is what makes the world go round, no doubt. Trying to make an axis out of a try-angle by axing one angle on trial.

Mourning the loss of someone we love is happiness compared with having to live with someone we hate.

LA BRUYERE

Both hell and love are symbolized by fire—the ‘fires of hell,’ etc, and St. John of the Cross’ ‘living flame of Love,’ for example.

Now there seem to be only two ways of treating a loved thing when confronted with it: either one can unite with it, say, eat it (in which case one has annihilated it, and so lost it) or one can contemplate it and so maintain one’s love unsatisfied, in which case the outlook is perpetual unsatisfiedness (through separation) or supervening boredom (due to change in oneself or the object) turning may be to hate or to forgetting.

“Eternal love” and “selfless love” are both equivocations, and utraquisms—that an unstable state can remain unchanged eternally or that self can be eliminated and love retained. (I can set myself before or after yourself, but that is not to say that I preserve or annihilate myself before the world.)

Nanamoli Thera

Love—what Baudelaire had called ‘that terrible game in which one of the players loses self-control’.

Nothing occasions this weariness (of life) more than the return of love. The first love, it is rightly said, is the only one, for with the second, and by the second, the highest sense of love is already lost. The conception of the eternal and the infinite, which elevates and supports it, is destroyed, and it appears transient like everything else that recurs.

Goethe

The magic of first love is our ignorance that it can ever end.
DISRAELI

At the beginning of love and at its end the lovers are em-barrassed to be left alone.
LA BRUYERE

Love is merely a madness; and, I tell you, deserves a dark house and a whip as madmen do and the reason why they are not so punished and cured is that the lunacy is so ordinary that the whippers are in love too.
SHAKESPEARE

Coition is a slight attack of apoplexy.
DEMOCRITUS OF ABDERA

What they call "heart" is located far lower than the fourth waistcoat button.
LICHTENBERG

Nine-tenths of that which is attributed to sexuality is the work of our magnificent ability to imagine, which is no longer an instinct, but exactly the opposite: a creation.
ORTEGA Y ASSET

Were it not for imagination, sir, a man would be as happy in the arms of a chambermaid as of a duchess.
DR. JOHNSOn

Passion often turns the cleverest men into idiots and makes the greatest blockheads clever.

When we are in love, we often doubt what we most believe.

No disguise can long conceal love where it exists, or long feign it where it is lacking.

There are two kinds of faithfulness in love: one is based on forever finding new things to love in the loved one; the other is based on our pride in bdeig faithful.

If you think you love your mistress for her own sake, you are quite mistaken.

LA ROCHEFOUCAULD

In love, there is always one who kisses and one who offers the cheek. FRENCH PROVERB

The discovery that one cannot well give back or be given back what one has given or been given in the same place is sometimes as painful as the discovery that one is being loved on principle and not froni preference. WILLIAMS

Love is ever rewarded either with the reciprocal, or with an inward and secret contempt.
BACON

No woman ever hates a man for being in love with her; but many a woman hates a man for being a friend to her.
POPE

Mettā

Mettā In English one is used to the one word love (= amour, amore, amor), which has to serve for all. Greek discriminates eros & agape, which duality is very hard to render in Latin or English. English inherits much of its crude matter-of-factness and empiricism from the vulgar Latins who had only the one word, amor, (and Latins of today make do with only l(’amour) and l(’amore).
In Pali one finds there are three: kāmacchanda, sineha and mettā: (physical lust or desire for sensuality; sentimental affection or attachment to individual persons; and loving-kindness or benevolence extendable as a universal attitude to all beings).

Lust is selfish desire seeking satisfaction mainly through the sense of touch and is not interested in the well-being of its object at all. Selfish in the first degree.

Affection can be accompanied by physical lust or not and seeks satisfaction in association with the object (physical nearness, though not necessarily contact). It is interested in the welfare of the object, though unconcerned about anyone else, and does not exclude the harming of others for the benefit of its object. Thus it is selfish in the second degree.

Mettā starts from sineha, but by generalizing becomes unselfish and chooses welfare of all.
Nanamoli Thera

Cioran:

Love at its most impassioned does not bring two human beings so close together as calumny. Inseparable, slanderer and slandered constitute a “transcendent” unity, forever welded one to the other. Nothing can separate them. One inflicts harm, the other endures it, but if he endures it, it is because he is accustomed to doing so, can no longer do without it, even insists upon it. He knows that his wishes will be gratified, that he will never be forgotten, that whatever happens he will be eternally present in the mind of his indefatigable benefactor.

“Neither romance nor temperament,” the Marquise said of herself. We understand why her liaison with the Regent did not last more than two weeks. They were just alike, dangerously external to their own sensations. Does not boredom, their common torment, flourish in the abyss that opens between the mind and the senses? No more spontaneous movements, no more unconsciousness. “Love” is the first to suffer. Chamfort’s9 definition of it is perfectly suited to a period of “fantasy” and “epidermis” in which a Rivarol10 boasted of being able, at the climax of a certain convulsion, to solve a geometry problem. Everything was cerebral, even orgasm. A still graver phenomenon, this deterioration of the senses, instead of affecting only a few isolated creatures, became the deficiency, the scourge of an entire class, wasted by the constant use of irony.

According to Julius Capitolinus, his biographer, Marcus Aurelius raised his wife’s lovers “to the greatest honors.”
Wisdom borders on extravagance; moreover a sage deserves the name only insofar as he is an original, a real character.

For a writer, to change languages is to write a love letter with a dictionary.

The interesting thing about friendship is that it is — almost as much as love — an inexhaustible source of disappointment and outrage, thereby of fruitful surprises it would be madness to try to do without.

It is with good reason that in the sects which held fecundity in suspicion—the Bogomils, for instance, and the Cathari—marriage was condemned; that abominable institution which all societies have always protected, to the despair of those who do not yield to the common delirium. To procreate is to love the scourge—to seek to maintain and to augment it. They were right, those ancient philosophers who identified fire with the principle of the universe, and with desire, for desire burns, devours, annihilates: At once agent and destroyer of beings, it is sombre, it is infernal by essence.
This world was not created in joy. Yet we procreate in pleasure. True enough—but pleasure is not joy, it is joy’s simulacrum: its function consists in deceiving, in making us forget that creation bears, down to its least detail, the mark of that initial melancholy from which it issued. Necessarily illusory, it is pleasure too which permits us to carry out certain performances which in theory we repudiate. Without its cooperation, continence, gaining ground, would seduce even the rats. But it is in what we call the transports of the flesh that we understand how fraudulent pleasure is. In the flesh, pleasure reaches its peak, its maximum intensity, and it is here, at the zenith of its success, that it suddenly opens to its unreality, that it collapses in its own void. The voluptuous flesh is the disaster of pleasure.
We cannot grant that a god, or even a man, proceeds from a gymnastic climaxed by a moan. It is curious that at the end of such a long period of time, “evolution” has not managed to perfect another formula. Why should it take the trouble, moreover, when the one in force functions so well and suits everybody? Let there be no mistake: life in itself is not in question, life is as mysterious and enervating as could be wished. What is not so is the exercise in question, of an inadmissible facility, given the consequences. When we know what fate permits each man, we remain stunned by the disproportion between a moment’s oblivion and the prodigious quantity of disgraces which result from it. The more one reverts to this subject, the more one finds that the only men who have understood anything about it are those who have opted for orgy or for asceticism, the debauched or the castrated.

Why envy or fear those bones which bear such and such a name, that skull which has no love for me? Why, too, love someone or love myself, why suffer in any case, when I know the image I must invoke in order to alleviate these miseries? The sharpened consciousness of what lies in wait for the flesh ought to destroy both love and hate. Actually it manages only to attenuate and, in rare moments, to subdue them. Otherwise it would be only too easy: represent death and be happy . . . , and the macabre, gratifying our most secret desires, would be all profit.
Since procreation supposes a nameless distraction, it is certain that if we were to become prudent, in other words indifferent to the fate of the race, we should retain only a few samples, the way we preserve certain creatures of vanishing species. Let us block the way of all flesh, let us try to paralyze its alarming spread. We are in the presence of a veritable epidemic of life, a proliferation of faces. Where and how to remain, still, face-to-face with God?

 

On the book PsyWar with glossary of the basic terms

 “During the COVID-19 debacle, it is a proven fact that Americans were lied to by a handful of dysfunctional senior federal health bureaucrats who ignored their oaths, silenced dissent, stifled freedom of speech, and dismissed early drug treatments in favor of a mass mRNA “pseudo-vaccine” program. While this never prevented viral infection or halted pandemic progression, it did garner billions of dollars for the participating drug companies.

Marching in lockstep, every American’s right to “Freedom of Speech,” so fundamentally engrained in our constitutional Bill of Rights, was made  a mockery. For physicians, the Freedom of Speech to speak out against the dysfunctional COVID response was twisted into a recognized punishable offense in some states.

As a result, compassionate American medicine, accurate medical research, and the inviolate concept of patient informed consent was effectively destroyed in the United States. Many of our once esteemed national medical associations and colleges, have become nothing more than conduits of “misinformation” espoused by the federal health agencies who now are desperately trying to minimize the injuries and deaths caused by an ill-advised and ineffective mass mRNA vaccination campaign.

How did we arrive here and why has this gone unchallenged? The controversial new book PsyWar is a highly provocative deep dive, which takes the reader through a step-by-step account of how modern communications technology and social media has now been coupled to a biased corporate mass media monopoly. This has created a nightmare of propaganda and censorship that has suppressed the truth of the COVID-19 debacle.

The book outlines the current heroic David/Goliath fight still underway by true physicians, against a small but powerful group of unconstitutionally motivated federal bureaucrats. It is a continuing fight, largely hidden from the American public.

PsyWar is a carefully referenced book with numerous examples that support the authors’ contention that modern cognitive and psychological warfare tools have been employed by the US government as part of a mass formation psychological strategy to mold American opinion. It describes the various tactics used by global governments who now clearly define what is mis-, dis-, and mal-information in the world. It presents often shocking and still controversial histories starting with the 1964 Warren Report, to illustrate the origin of this information control and how modern social media serves as an advocacy conduit used to minimize any set of popular beliefs that the government finds inconvenient.

This book is thought-provoking reading for all Americans who believe that Freedom of Speech is vital for the continuance of our Republic.”

—Dr. Steven Hatfill, pathologist and biological weapons expert, and author of Three Seconds Until Midnight

A PsyWar Glossary

Astroturfing (ergo, fake grass roots) is the practice of masking the sponsors of a message or organization to make it appear as though it originates from  and is supported by grassroots participants. Astroturfing gives organizations credibility by hiding information about the source’s financial or governmental connections. An Astroturf organization is an organization that is hiding its real origins in order to deceive the public about its true intentions.

Asymmetric warfare is a type of war between opponents whose relative military power, strategy, or tactics differ significantly. It often involves insurgents or a resistance movement against a standing army or a more traditional force.

Advocacy journalism is journalism that advocates a cause or expresses a viewpoint with a specific agenda. It is often designed to increase or decrease the Overton window. It is a form of propaganda.

Bad-jacketing. Rumors and gossip meant to disenfranchise and destroy a movement or quell enthusiasm.

Black ops is an abbreviation for “black operations,” which are covert or clandestine activities that cannot be linked to the organization that undertakes them.

Black propaganda falsely claims a message, image, or video was created by the opposition in order to discredit them.

Bot is an automated account programmed to interact like a user on social media. Bots are used to push narratives, amplify misleading messaging, and distort online discourse. The name “bot” came from a shortened version of the name robot.

Botnet is a network of devices infected with malware, controlled by an attacker to launch distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks or spread malware.

Chaos agents are a person or people that purposefully causes chaos or mischief within a group, for their own personal entertainment or as a tool to cause organizational fragmentation. It is a tool often used by intelligence agencies.

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Controlled opposition, disruptors, and chaos agents. Historically, these tactics involve a protest movement that is actually being led by government agents. Nearly all governments in history have employed this technique to trick and subdue their adversaries. However, in fifth-gen warfare, controlled opposition often may come in the form of disruptors and chaos agents. Either “real” people or bots that generate outrageous claims that delegitimize a movement (examples currently may or may not be); “snake venom in the water” or “everyone is going to die who took the vaccine within two years.” Another tactic is placing agents of chaos whose job is to basically disrupt organizations and events. This may also come in the form of “reporters” who assert fake or highly exaggerated news stories, and who most likely are funded by the opposition. “Undermine the order from the shadows” is the tactic here. 

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Cyberstalking involves the use of technology (most often, the internet!) to make someone else afraid or concerned about their safety. Generally speaking, this conduct is threatening or otherwise fear-inducing, involves an invasion of a person’s relative right to privacy, and manifests in repeated actions over time. Most of the time, those who cyberstalk use social media, internet databases, search engines, and other online resources to intimidate, follow, and cause anxiety or terror to others.

Data mining is the software-driven analysis of large batches of data in order to identify meaningful patterns.

Decentralized and highly non-attributable psychological warfare (memes, fake news).

Deepfakes are synthetic media that have been digitally manipulated to replace one person’s likeness or voice convincingly with that of another. Deepfake techniques include using a type of artificial intelligence called deep learning to create convincing images, audio, and video hoaxes.

Deep state is a type of governance made up of potentially secret and unauthorized networks of power operating independently of a state’s political leadership in pursuit of their own agenda and goals.

Denial-of-service (DoS) attack involves overwhelming a system with traffic to exhaust resources and bandwidth.

Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack is a malicious attempt to disrupt normal traffic to a web property.

DNS Tunneling is the use of a domain name system (DNS) protocol to communicate non-DNS traffic, often for malicious purposes.

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Emotional appeal is a persuasive technique that relies on descriptive language and imagery to evoke an emotional response and convince the recipient of a particular point of view. An emotional appeal manipulates the audience’s emotions, especially when there is a lack of factual evidence.

Fearporn is any type of media or narrative designed to use fear to provoke strong emotional reactions, with the purpose of nudging the audience to react to a situation based on fear. Fearporn many also be used to increase audience size or participation.

Fifth generation (fifth-gen) warfare is using non-kinetic military tactics against an opponent. This would include strategies such as manipulating social media through social engineering, misinformation, censorship cyberattacks, and artificial intelligence. It has also been described as a war of “information and perception.” Although the concept has been rejected by some scholars, it is seen as a new frontier of cyberspace and the concepts behind fifth-generation warfare are evolving, even within the field of  military theory and strategy. Fifth-gen warfare is used by non-state actors as well as state actors.

Flooding is a tactic that manipulates search engine or hashtag results by coordinating large volumes of inauthentic posts. Flooding may also be referred to as “firehosing.”

DoD Military Deception Missions are attempts to deliberately deceive by using psychological warfare to deliberately mislead enemy forces during a combat situation.

DoD Military Information Support Operations (MISO) Missions: Military Information Support Operations (MISO) missions involve sharing specific information to foreign audiences to influence the emotions, motives, reasoning, and behavior of foreign governments and citizens. This can include cyber warfare and advanced communication techniques across all forms of media. In the case of a domestic emergency, MISOs can be used on domestic populations.

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Gatekeeping is a process and propaganda technique of selecting content and blocking information to sway a specific outcome. It is often used in news production to manipulate the people by manipulating the writing, editing, positioning, scheduling, and repeating of news stories.

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Hypnosis is a procedure that guides one into a deep state of relaxation (sometimes described as a trancelike state) designed to characterized by heightened suggestibility and receptivity to direction. Hypnosis can be implemented it in digital media, movies, advertising and propaganda. Trance-like experiences aren’t all that uncommon. If you’ve ever zoned out while watching a movie or daydreaming, you’ve been in a similar trance-like state.

Hypnotic language patterns are used to influence and persuade by employing techniques such as lulling linguistic patterns, metaphor, and emotionally appealing words and phrases. Hypnotic language patterns and propaganda  are connected through the use of persuasive and manipulative techniques to influence public opinion and highlights the powerful impact of language on shaping public perception and behavior.

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Infodemic is the rapid and far-reaching spread of information, both accurate and inaccurate, about a specific issue. The word is a conjoining of “information” and “epidemic.” It is used to describe how misinformation and disinformation can spread like a virus from person to person and affect people like a disease. This use of this technique can be deliberate and intentional.

Inverted totalitarianism is a managed democracy, where economic and state powers are conjoined and virtually unbridled. Regulatory control is superimposed upon the administrative state, and a nontransparent group of managers and elites run the country from within.

Limited hangout is a propaganda technique of displaying a subset of the available information. It involves deliberately revealing some information to try to confuse and/or prevent discovery of other information.

A modified limited hangout goes further by slightly changing the information disclosed. Commercially controlled media is often a form of limited hangout, although it often also modifies information and so can represent a modified limited hangout.

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Mass formation is, in essence, a kind of group hypnosis that destroys individuals’ ethical self-awareness and robs them of their ability to think critically. Mass formation within a population can happen suddenly.

Mass formation psychosis describes the individual under the spell of mass formation. Although this term is not found in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), it is our opinion that it is just a matter of time before this amendment will be included.

Mass surveillance is the surveillance of a population or fraction of a population. This surveillance is often carried out by local and federal governments or governmental organizations, but it may also be carried out by corporations. Often specific political groups are targeted for their beliefs and influence.

Modified limited hangout is a propaganda technique that displays only a subset of the available information, that has also been modified by changing some or all of the information disclosed (such as exaggeration or making things up). It is meant to confuse and/or prevent discovery of other information.

Moral outbidding (see purity spiral)

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Nudging is any attempt at influencing people’s judgment, choice or behavior in a predictable way that is motivated because of cognitive boundaries, biases, routines, and habits in individual and social decision-making posing barriers for people to perform rationally in their own self-declared interests, and which works by making use of those boundaries, biases, routines, and habits as integral parts of such attempts. In fifth-gen warfare, nudging can take the form of images, videos, or online messages.

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Operation Mockingbird was organized by Allen Dulles and Cord Meyer in 1950. The CIA spent about of one billion dollars a year in today’s dollars, hiring journalists from corporate media, including CBS, the New York Times, ABC, NBC, Newsweek, Associated Press, and others, to promote their point of view. The original operation reportedly involved some three thousand CIA operatives and hired over four hundred journalists. In 1976, the domestic operation supposedly closed, but less than half of the media operatives were let go. Furthermore, documentary evidence shows that much of Operation Mockingbird was then offshored to escape detection. It is rumored that British intelligence picked up many of the duties of Operation Mockingbird on behalf of the US intelligence community (see the Trusted News Initiative).

Othering is a phenomenon where individuals or groups are defined, labeled and targeted as not fitting in within the norms of a social group. This is a tactic used by the deep state, politicians, and the media. Chaos agents as well as propaganda are used to create a sense of divide. This influences how people perceive and treat those who are viewed as being part of the in-group versus those who are seen as being part of the out-group. This can happen on both a small and very large scale.

Outrage porn, also known as outrage journalism, is a form of media or storytelling that aims to elicit strong emotional reactions to expand audiences or boost engagement.

Phishing is the practice of sending fraudulent communications that appear to come from a reputable source, aimed at stealing sensitive data or installing malware.

Propaganda is a form of manipulation of public opinion by creating a specific narrative that aligns with a political agenda. It uses techniques like repetition, emotional appeals, selective information, and hypnotic language patterns to influence the subconscious mind, bypassing critical thinking and shaping beliefs and values. Propaganda can use a form of hypnosis, whereby putting people into a receptive state where they are more prone to accepting messages.

Psychological Bioterrorism is the use of fear about a disease to manipulate individuals or populations by governments and other organizations, such as Big Pharma. Although the fear of infectious disease is an obvious example, it is not the only way psychological bioterrorism is used. Other examples include propaganda regarding environmental toxins, unsafe drinking water, soil contamination, and climate change risks. Another name for psychological bioterrorism is information bioterrorism.

Psychological warfare involves the planned use of propaganda and other psychological operations to influence the opinions, emotions, attitudes, and behavior of opposition groups.

PsyWar is when psyops is used by governments against a foreign population or even against the citizens of a government (domestically) in a coordinated fashion.

Publicly available raw data and surveys used to sway public opinion by use of memes, essays, and social media posts.

Purity spiral is a form of groupthink where it becomes more beneficial to hold certain views than to not hold them, and more extreme views are rewarded while expressing doubt, nuance, or moderation is punished (a process sometimes called “moral outbidding”). Moral outbidding makes it beneficial to hold specific beliefs than to not hold them. Although a purity spiral often concerns morality, it is about purity.

Ransomware is a type of malware that encrypts a victim’s files and demands payment in exchange for the decryption key.

Realpolitik is political philosophy (or politics) based on practical objectives rather than on ideals. The word does not mean “real” in the English sense but rather connotes “things”—hence a politics of adaptation to things as they are. Realpolitik thus suggests a pragmatic, no-nonsense view and a disregard for ethical considerations. In diplomacy it is often associated with relentless, though realistic, pursuit of the national interest.

Repetitive messaging is a propaganda technique whereby a large number of messages are broadcast rapidly, repetitively, and continuously throughout media without regard for truth or consistency.

Sealioning is a trolling or harassment tactic in online discussions and blogs. It involves the attacker asking relentless and insincere questions or requests for evidence under the guise of civility and a desire for genuine debate. These requests are often tangential or previously addressed and the attacker maintains a pretense of civility and sincerity, while feigning ignorance of the subject matter. Sealioning is aimed at exhausting the patience and goodwill of the target, making them appear unreasonable.

Shadow banning (also known as stealth banning, hell-banning, ghost banning, and comment ghosting) is the practice of blocking or partially blocking a user or the user’s content from some or all areas of an online community. This is done in such a way that the ban is not readily apparent to the user, regardless of whether the action is taken by an individual or an algorithm.

Social credit systems: China’s social credit system is a combination of government and business surveillance that gives citizens a “score” that can restrict the ability of individuals or corporations to function in the modern world by limiting purchases, acquiring property or taking loans based on past behaviors. Of course, how one uses the internet directly impacts the social credit score. This is the origin of the social credit system that appears to be evolving in the United States. Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) metrics are a kind of social credit system designed to coerce businesses—and, by extension, individuals and all of society—to transform their practices, behaviors and thinking.

Social engineering is any manipulation technique that exploits human behavior and error in order to gain access to sensitive or confidential information. Where some scammers would steal someone’s personal information, social engineers convince their victims to willingly hand over the requested information like usernames and passwords. “Nudge” technology is actually applied social engineering.

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Surveillance capitalism is a business model based on the unilateral claim of human private experiences as free raw material for translation into behavioral data. These personal data are then extracted, processed, and traded to predict and influence human behavior. Specific data concerning individuals is the commodity. In this version of capitalism, the prediction and influencing of behavior (political and economic) rather than production of goods and services is the primary product. The economic success of this business model is a major contributor to the profitability of Google, Facebook, TikTok and many other social media companies. The data and tools of surveillance capitalism has been exploited for political purposes by Cambridge Analytica. In many cases the surveillance state and globalist governmental organizations have fused with surveillance capitalism to yield a new form of fascism commonly known as techno-totalitarianism.

Switchboarding describes the federal government’s practice of referring requests for the removal of content on social media from state and local election officials to the relevant social media platforms for removal.

Synergistic use of mixed media to build excitement or to create outrage.

Synthetic media is a term used for the artificial production, manipulation, and modification of data and media, through the use of generative AI and artificial intelligence algorithms for the purpose of misleading people or changing an original meaning. Often referred to as deepfakes.

(...)

Virtue signaling is sharing one’s point of view on a social or political issue, often on social media or through specific dress or actions, to garner praise or acknowledgment of one’s righteousness from others who share that point of view or to rebuke those who do not.

Web crawler, also known as a spiderbot, is an automated Internet program that systematically browses the World Wide Web for specific types of information.

White propaganda is a type of propaganda where the producer of the material is marked and indicated, and the purpose of the information is transparent. White propaganda is commonly used in marketing and public relations. White propaganda involves communicating a message from a known source to a recipient (typically the public or some targeted sub-audience). White propaganda is mainly based on facts, although often, the whole truth is not told.

World Economic Forum (WEF) is one of the key think tanks and meeting places for managing global capitalism and is arguably coherent enough to qualify as the leading global “deep state” organization. Under the leadership of Professor Klaus Schwab, it has played an increasingly important role in coordinating the globalized hegemony of large pools of transnational capital and associated large corporations over Western democracies during the last three decades.

Wrap-up smear is a deflection tactic in which a smear is made up and leaked to the press. The press then amplifies the smear and gives it legitimacy.  Then, an author can use the press coverage of the smear as validation to write a summary story, which is the wrap-up smear.

Yellow journalism is newspaper reporting that emphasizes sensationalism over facts. Advocacy journalists who support government narratives often use it to sway public opinion.

Zero-day exploit is a technique targeting a newly discovered vulnerability before a patch is available.

PsyWor

Enforsing The New World Order

by Robert W. Malone and Jill G. Malone

For a long time, I was more of a homeless nomad ...

 People say I am a hermit, but it isn’t really true in the strictest definition. My dictionary says a hermit is someone who lives alone (true in terms of people, untrue in terms of all the other living things I’m up here with), apart from the rest of society (mostly true, but not strictly so), and especially for religious reasons (depends on your definition of religion, I suppose, but it’s a bit of a stretch for me, I’d say).

I know what they really mean when they say I’m a hermit though, what with my scruffy “Wildman of the Woods” looks and apparent social isolation. I exist in the popular image of what you might think a hermit would look like and how a hermit would live. Probably, even how you imagine they’d talk, too.

I don’t mind being called a hermit, it makes me laugh, but am I really a hermit in the truest sense?

For a long time, I was more of a homeless nomad—“The Tramp of Treig” rather than “The Hermit of Treig.” A vagrant man who haunted the local mountain bothies and existed as legend in the visitors’ books that were kept in those isolated huts. Whisperings of this odd fellow written in pages sitting up on the shelf; the unofficial bothy history lying among the cobwebs, puddles of candle wax, empty gas cylinders, and all the other useless and unwanted crap that’s been left behind by generations of hikers.

It wasn’t till 1986, the year before my fortieth birthday, that I was finally granted permission to build this cabin in the woods. That was when I found my home, and my hermit identity evolved and grew arms and legs all on its own.

I don’t shun the outside world at all. I quite like most people and very much welcome the company of the few close friends and family who come here to stay and get away. Every few weeks I’ll hike out to the local shops for supplies, and get my post, too. I am no stranger to a pint or two at the pub either. It’s just that I prefer to meet people on my terms, or rather, I like to be in control of my own day; deferring only to what the weather wants to do or what the seasons have in store; how I feel, rather than bending to the wills and whims of other humanoids. If you can grant me that, then you can call me a hermit as much as you like and you’ll always be appreciated here, and that’s about it.

Well, it isn’t really. There are some obviously hermit-like behaviors in the way I choose to live. My log cabin in the woods has no clear pathway to its doorstep. It just emerges from the trees when you are only a few paces away from the gate. In fact, if you didn’t enter these woods already knowing I was hidden in here, you’d likely miss my place entirely; but again, none of that is because I don’t necessarily like people.

It is quite funny how incapable we are as a species of seeing anything from any other perspective than how it might directly relate to us. My decision to immerse myself in this place is not one based on pulling away from all of you, rather it is to give myself wholly to this wild space instead. To be a part of the nature here, not forever set apart from it in some sanitized domestic setting, with all its noise and problems.

I came here to find solace. A sanctuary of sorts. A deeper understanding of what this part of Scotland really is. Warts and all.

None of that means I’m necessarily armed with a higher wisdom or that I have developed some spiritual enlightenment or religious purpose—like that hermit fella from the dictionary definition. I don’t think I have a unique insight anyway, but I’ll let you decide that for yerself.

I may live alone, but I’m far from alone in the rich history of loners. The outsider, isolating themselves from the collective in some outlying place, is a consistent theme that stretches right back to the dawn of collective human civilization. For, as long as we have chosen to live together, there are always those who have chosen to live apart.

In ancient times, most populations would have had themselves a semi-professional hermit. Back then, they were celebrated as someone who sat outside of politics, corrupting influences and wider social ills. The hermit was the keeper of the stories, an important standard-bearer and comprehensive archivist of the history of a community. Most significant of all, they were taken as the ultimate barometer as to what was right and what was wrong. Their ability to live without reliance on anything, or anyone, meant they were the ultimate source of apolitical and acultural opinion. The only people truly on the moral high ground. In reality, their chosen lifestyle probably meant they struggled to give constructive advice on any social direction, anyway; as really, what’s the point of sparing any thought for all that rubbish if you’ve already seen how senseless it all is? I know that’s how I feel.

You don’t have to stick up a cabin in the woods and isolate yourself forever to feel the benefits of a little time alone. There are hundreds of thousands of religious scholars, thinkers, creatives and leaders who have headed to the wilderness part-time to form, reflect and refine their world views and ideas. In Christian belief, Jesus of Nazareth was said to have taken to the remote Jordanian desert for forty days and nights, as did Moses on Mount Sinai. Islamic tradition tells the story of the Prophet Muhammad receiving his first angelic revelation while living alone in a cave near Mecca, and Hinduism has seen millions of Sadhus, Hindu holy people, living a monastic existence, in a near-permanent state of prayer, whilst receiving trickles of well-wishers and worshippers.

Much art, science and literature has been produced by those people who chose to temporarily execute their ideas without interruption. Famous recluses, such as the scientist Charles Darwin, writer Emily Brontë, philanthropist Howard Hughes, director Stanley Kubrick, even the Beatles guitarist George Harrison, all found some form and presence through their occasional voluntary seclusion from society.

“Not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations,” American naturalist Henry Thoreau wrote back in the nineteenth century. Prophetic words, which might as well be inscribed into hermit law (if there were such a thing) because, honestly, there really is a little hermit waiting to be released out of us all (before they can promptly disappear for a while to figure it all out).

Protest at the direction of society is probably the biggest influence on the decision to go hermit full-time. A feeling that stretches from a general malaise, right through to a downright disgust, at wider mankind’s environmental destruction, our predilection for warfare, our generally regressive political directions and increasing disregard for others. All fair enough, I’d say, but in modern times I’m afraid its various manifestations have given the formerly good word of the hermit a very bad name indeed. More often than not, introversion and reclusion, the fundamental character traits of a hermit, have become closely associated with those who have a real visceral anger and forceful hostility towards humankind. I hear about them on my radio from time to time. People the news describe as “lone wolves.” These hate-filled fellas who get guns and knives and occasionally go out on these awful killing sprees.

This is absolutely not the way of the hermit, and is a dreadful smear on all those who prefer the quiet life—all introverts, as well as hermits and recluses. This violent phenomenon has taken the former idea that we are gentle, and gently enlightened people, quietly and peacefully engaged in seclusive thought, and then bastardized it as simply time for us to manifest our menace. According to that typecast, some of us are at best weirdos, and at worst potentially dangerous criminals. Today public opinion and press speculation too often paints the hermit, in all their guises, as someone who should be feared and avoided; no longer a person to venerate, and certainly not someone to emulate.

I hope this book helps undo some of the damage because, in truth, both the positions—either that we have some special mystical power or prowess, or that we pose a threat—fall well wide of the mark. It might be tempting to put us all in one convenient box, but ultimately I am afraid we are all individuals, with our own individual thoughts, feelings, and reasons for living as we do. Speaking for myself, I certainly don’t believe I’m particularly special. I’m not armed with some higher knowledge or a greater sense of purpose, nor do I possess a highly evolved set of survival skills, or harbor superhuman abilities to hang tough in terrible conditions. I am just Ken Smith, a man who prefers to do things his own way.

I hope in your reading, you might see some parts of this life that you may wish to adapt or adopt into your own. The freedom of a grand horizon, the taste of something gratefully and sensitively taken from the wild, the liberation to be had from discovering that not everything that is good has to cost you money.

I don’t want you to ever think that my way of life is unattainable and unique to me. It certainly isn’t, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with you seeking the metaphorical or physical wilderness every once in a while for yourself, too. If I can do it, you can do it. After all, as I’ve already said, people like me have existed within every culture on earth. We are just as much a part of human history as we are fundamental expressions of the human condition. We are not an oddity or curiosity that somehow sits enigmatically and inexplicably outside normal human society. We are as much a part of you, as you are of us.

Argh, maybe this beer is going to my head after all (and I can’t even sober up now that the bloody shrew has stolen my last Jaffa cake!), so let me finish on this, and then I’m letting the fire die out and climbing into my bed.

I’ve spent the majority of my life living outside the conventions of mainstream society, and I’ll tell you what I think is weird, and it ain’t the hermit. It’s how entire generations of people have been conned into believing that there is only one way to live, and that’s on-grid, in deepening debt, working on products you’ll probably never use, to line the pockets of people you’ll never meet, just so you might be able to get enough money together to buy a load of crap you don’t need, or, if you’re lucky, have a holiday that takes you to a place, like where I live, for a week of the happiness I feel every day. And then they have the bloody cheek to guilt you into somehow being grateful for it?

No. I’m pretty certain I’m not the weird one, and yet here we are, my friends. Let’s be honest, you didn’t buy this book just because you were curious about me, did you? You’re here because that small part of you, the hermit that sits within us all, wants to know if there is something more, and if it can be done.

Well, it can.

THE WAY OFvTHE HERMIT

MY INCREDIBLE 40 YEARSvLIVING IN THE WILDERNESS

KEN SMITH

Richard Proenneke, Alaskan Wilderness Hermit

Richard Proenneke, Alaskan Wilderness Hermit

Richard Proenneke (1916-2003) spent 30 years of solitude in the remote Twin Peaks region of Alaska, beginning in 1968. Proenneke was eminently qualified for his goal. Considered by observers a "mechanical genius," an amatuer naturalist and meticulous observer, he was eventually employed by the National Park Service for his knowledge and wilderness experience. Proenneke was by no means an anti-social recluse fleeing civilization. He maintained a circle of friends and associates, was "an inveterate letter writer and diarist," and extended his positive attitude toward self, nature, and other people.

Proenneke became known through books and videos. Sam Keith reconstructed Proenneke's first-year journal and published it in 1973. John Branson edited the 1974-80 cabin years, representing Proenneke's years of public recognition. Bob Swerer assembled Proenneke's vast collection of photographs and films into several popular videos. Keith's version captures the style and rhythm of the days and nights, of nature, work, and solitude. Despite editing, Branson's version at 500 pages challenges the casual reader. These years of increaased social involvement and Parks Service dealings sacrifice the pristine solitude of the early years.

Proenneke immersed himself in the details of whatever tasks presented themselves. He built his log cabin from hand tools, explored the mountains and rivers on foot and canoe, meticulously observed animal behavior and habitat, and recorded his thoughts with a sympathetic attachment to the wilderness. At the same time, he regularly corresponded with family and friends, and increased his personal contacts during visits away from the cabin. He made occasional stays in his hometown in Iowa several months between his 1968 to 1998 Alaska life, and had increasing social contact as awareness of his life and project grew. From the beginning, an old pilot-friend flew in food and supplies on a regular basis over the years, permitting Proenneke to perfect his wilderness situation and stay in his beloved cabin year-round. Eventually his stay extended to 30 years.

Keith's reconstructed journals -- which Proenneke appreciated but acknowledged to often be a paraphrase of his rough notes -- reveal parallels to wilderness philosopher Thoreau, whom Proenneke read and admired, along with Aldo Leopold. As editor Branson puts it,

The more one examines Proenneke's life at Twin Lakes, the more one sees Thoreau's philosophy put into practice. ... Proenneke was not a philosopher like Thoreau, but he was concerned about how the individual could find contentmnet and purpose and fit into society and nature.

Proeneke once wrote:

Somehow I never seem to tire of just standing and looking down the lake or up at the mountains in the evening, even if it is cold. If this is the way foldks feel inside a church, I can understand why they go.

And when he returned from the mountainside once, he felt

like a man inspired by a sermon that came to me firsthand, that came out of the sky and the many moods of the mountains. ... Everywhere I looked was fascination.

As his fame spread in the 1980's, Pronneke took on more formal tasks, volunteering for and eventually being employed by the National Park Service while living in his cabin. He is more distracted by filming and Park Service relations and well-meaning visitors, noisy hunters, editors seeking a writing deal, fan mail, and friends overwhelming him with gifts of processed foods. At one point, Proenneke hardly sleeps worrying about all the "garbage" of social intrusion he has unwittingly brought upon himself with the Keith book and film showing nationally.

My cabin and cache have been full to overflowing for quite some time and each new load makes me wonder where I will stow it all. ... I do apprecite everything but wish they would consider the poor miserable brush rat mmore fortunate tham they and spend their money to beat death and taxes.

The earlier years better reveal the remarkable degree of self-sufficiency that Proeneke attained in survival skills. His skills made his wilderness odyssey seem natural, inevitable, even easy. He was a sociable hermit who would not suffer in an emergency or despair in solitude. Despite his unassuming manner, he was a meticulous craftsman proud of his individual accomplishments but modest enough to keep a perspective, even in his private thoughts and in the heyday of fame.

Proenneke has good advice on what the modern wilderness hermit requires: an absence of needs, simplicity in food, enough physical exercise as a source of health, patience with weather and circumstances, making due with hand tools (with the bonus of the work increasing one's confidence). Just as important are the more philosophical characteristics: understanding the relativity of time, distance, and events, resigning oneself to the natural life cycles, and holding an appreciation of simplicity in what is beauty and pleasure.

In addition to his journals, Proenneke documented on film everything about his environment, from his cabin-building to the natural setting of his daily life. The early writings and images especially are an invaluable testment not only to one life but to the dreams and goals of the aspiring wilderness hermit.

Proenneke entered the wilderness at 51, and in 1998, at the age of 81, having stayed in Twin Lakes year-round for 30 years, entrusted his cabin to the National Park Service, which has maintained it ever since for visitors. He subsequently lived with his brother, and suffering ill health, at a nursing home, until his death in 2003 at age 86."

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL REFERENCES

BOOKS: One Man's Wilderness: An Alaskan Odyssey, by Sam Keith from the journals and photographs of Richard Proenneke. Anchorage: Alaska Northwest Books, 1999, c1973; More Readings from One Man's Wilderness: the Journals of Richard L. Proeneke, 1974-1980, John Branson, editor. Lake Clark, AK: National Park Service, 2006. Also available on the web as http://www.cr.nps.gov/history/online_books/lacl/proenneke.pdf

VIDEOS: Alone in the Wilderness (2003), Alaska Silence and Solitude (2004), The Frozen North (2006). Like the book, the video Alone in the Wilderness covers the first 16 months, with narrative from Keith's version of Proenneke's journal.

Source →
https://www.hermitary.com/articles/proenneke.html

Books on hermits - reviews

 

"The Way of the Hermit: My Forty Years in the Scottish Wilderness; London: Pan Books,2023; The Way of the Hermit: My Incredible 40 Years in the Wilderness; Toronto: Hanover Square Press, 2024, by Ken Smith with Will Millard.

From the outset, Ken Smith (b. 1947) indicates that his motive for being a hermit is not religious or spiritual. Early factors include introversion, his working class origins, indifference to schooling. At 15 Smith quit school to work for the UK Forestry Commission; he enjoyed the solitary outdors in later job.

The decisive event was a harrowing incident in his late twenties living in native Derbyshire, when a gang of skinheads assaulted him to the point of near-fatal brain damage requiring four operations, two months of hospitalization and ten months without working. Recovered and re-entering society, Smith soon became disillusioned by the values and priorities of the world around him, concluding that "I knew I needed to escape that system and all its trappings, as quickly as I possibly could." He worked outdoors a while longer, scrimping and saving for his exit.

The first venue was travel to northwestern Canada and Alaska to experience wilderness living, in part inspired by reading Richard Proenneke (1916-2003), the American hermit and survivalist, author of One Man's Wilderness: An Alaska Odyssey (1973). Returning to the UK, Smith tramped about the country a while, staying in a series of bothies in northwestern Scotland, before resolving to live in a wildness cabin of his own. But Smith had no property. By chance he learned the name of the landowner of the largest estate in the Treig area, and petitioned him for some land for constructing a log cabin for himself.

Not only was Smith granted permission but he was even given employment as a ghillie, that is, a ”manservant” attending to the estate owner’s hunting and fishing expeditions and their guests —— plus oversight of all aspects of estate land maintenance. Smith readily accepted, soon constructing his log cabin by hand, and over the years perfected his survival skills: hunting, fishing, foraging, gardening, construction, wood-chopping —— and walking (the latter including walking twenty-five miles one way to a village shop for supplies).

The rest of the book describes the "way" of the hermit, or, perhaps, the way of the solitary-minded wilderness survivalist. The Way of the Hermit is chock-full of anecdotes, ruminations, insights, and practical wisdom, lived advice about wilderness, nature, winter survival, and lots of stories. Ken Smith is a modest, congenial, and reflective host to the reader, generously offering a unique and thoughtful memoir.

© 2025, Hermitary.com

Solitude: The Science and Power of Alone Time, by Netta Weinstein, Heather Hanson, and Thuy-vy T. Nguyen. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2024.

As the authors note from the outset of the book, the science of solitude is new but growing quickly, as attested within these pages. Evidence collected for this book reflects thousands of interviews, surveys, conversations and psychology lab sessions, with diverse groups of people by age, gender, ethnicity, and geography. From anecdotes to testimonials, the goal of the authors is to compile a grand picture of solitude and alone time habits and practices, turning these observations into insightful conclusions and helping establish a working sense of solitude for everyday people.

The presentation is congenial, conversational, informal, entertaining, and useful. Two of the authors (Weinstein and Nguyen) are academic psychologists, and one (Hanson) is a science journalist.

Chapter One quickly summarizes the history of eremitism and historical hermits distinct from solitude to focus more broadly for the est of the book on the concept of solitude as relevant to everyone else. (A few historical names — Pascal, Emerson, Thoreau — will recur in later chapters.) The premise of the book is -- as the title of Chapter Two indicates -- that “Everyday Solitude [is] for Everyday People.” In short, solitude offers a range of applications that can function within the needs of everyone.

Solitude is simply time alone, and how one chooses to be aware of solitude in daily life, or occasionally as disruption or curiosity can differ widely per individual. Scientists still do not define solitude broadly because solitude applies individually, and even varies within one person. But enough is known by psychology today to present vectors of solitude, or, rather, forms of solitude expression, as the authors do.

These solitudes are presented as four broad types: 1) complete solitude, or Buddha-style solitude, 2) private solitude, or down-to-earth-solitude, 3) companionate solitude, or partners-in-solitude, and 4) public solitude, or Alone in a Crowd. Thousands of interviews and research studies illustrate these wide applications, and the authors set out to document representative examples.

Solitude is distinct from involuntary aloneness, and is specifically not loneliness. Solitude is a natural condition of daily life’s ebb and flow, contrasting one moment to another individually, socially, collectively, or in conscious withdrawal, however long. A highlight of a conscious solitude is the benefit of autonomy, resilience, and a flow with nature.

To illustrate the benefits of solitude, the authors use the metaphor of a compass. Here the directional points are not geological or cultural but show the relations between what solitude does. So, north represents self-refection; south: rest, relaxation, and renewal; east: enrichment and creativity; west peak experiences and the good life. Thus we start with self, yielding a comfort zone, then moving to engaging with life and peaking with an internalization of the benefits of solitude. This parsing of sequential stages is essential for the average pursuant of solitude because it provides a psychologically healthy approach that builds on experience as much as psychological observation in the first place. Nothing need be rushed, skipped, or assumed. The auhors present a path or way, reflecting both science and historical wisdom.

Two chapter titles encourage beginners as well as seasoned practitioners. Chapter 9: "Can We Get Better at Being Alone?" and the final chapter, 10: "Solitude Across a Lifetime."

All this may sound familiar to readers comfortable with the subject of hermits and eremitism. But reading the many conversational snippets and anecdotes in this book will be pleasant confirmation that many average people are already attracted to the benefits of solitude and are waiting for a practical presentation and "how to." To further motivate readers, the authors even offer a helpful concluding “solitude checklist."

Take your solitude pulse.
Start small, stay mighty.
Adopt a thoughtful approach.
Create a framework.
Be curious.
Opt for a low-sensory environment.
Be open to experimentation.
Believe in belonging.
Practice “integrated emotion regulation."
Beware “sneaky infiltrators."
Plan for and protect periods of solitude.

This book is a delightful excursion, easy to read, easy to identify with the many sources the authors include, and a refreshingly positive invitation to incorporate solitude into daily life.

© 2025, Hermitary.com

How to Cut the Gordian Knot of Feminism

Feminism, it seems, is at the nadir of its disrepute. Almost everyone, from the far right to the far left, seems to have a complaint against the feminists, most of them justified. And yet at the same time, feminism seems to be unstoppable in its influence. Few criticize it in general terms, let alone that the entire experiment was a mistake. Indeed, one place feminism seems the most solidly entrenched is among the “neoconservative” operatives of the establishment Right.

And so feminism marches on, apparently impervious and oblivious to the opprobrium in which it is held by millions.

Only a few eloquent souls, like academic Janice Fiamengo, are willing to confront feminism head-on and criticize it in depth for its “hatred of men, social dysfunction, and victimhood ideology.”

Yet when asked in a recent interview if she had a “magic wand” solution to reverse the destruction, Fiamengo seemed to share the general assumption that such a thing is not possible.

But I believe it is, and what is more it is feasible. We can continue trying to cut off the multiple hydra heads of the feminist monster or disentangling the various threads of the Gordian Knot. (Perhaps a more modern analogy is playing Whack-a-Mole.) Or we can cut it with one fell swoop.

We can break the back of feminism and bring the malcontented ladies under control once-and-for-all. I did not think this up by myself. It was first proposed by Professor Daniel Amneus, the greatest scholar ever to confront feminism and the catastrophe of fatherless children.¹ It was also suggested by the late Phyllis Schlafly, who made a career of combatting feminism (starting with her single-handed defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1970s) — and a name for herself as one of the most influential political figures of the 20th century — when even most men were faint of heart. She must surely be considered one of the most effective political operators of all time and one of the few who combined political skill with ethical integrity.

According to Amneus, feminism’s central impulse is the demand for unlimited sexual freedom and female-dominated reproduction, surpassing in importance all else on its agenda and to which all else is ancillary. “A woman’s right to have a baby without having the father around is what feminism is all about.”

This is what gives feminism all its leverage over men, over society, over all of us. “The linchpin in the feminist program is mother custody following divorce,” Amneus insists. “Pull that pin…and the feminist structure collapses.” More than anything, this is what undermines masculinity and patriarchy and turns the most stout-hearted men into frightened, cowering sissies – at the same time that it turns their children into aggressive nihilists, rebelling against their impotent fathers and everything else. “Until then, men must remain afraid of women, of marriage, of feminism.”

And it does not stop there. Men today increasingly fear not only “the divorce court judges”, as Amneus said, but all government officials, who learned from the matriarchy how to create and enforce the other bureaucratic tyrannies of the “Deep State” and who understand that ordinary men heading families pose the principal impediment to their power.

The feminists’ first substantive achievement, after obtaining the vote, was the welfare state, and their next major accomplishment was no-fault divorce. Both of these governmental innovations furthered their professed goal of decimating the American family by transferring sovereign authority over children from married fathers to single mothers — first in low-income communities, and then among everyone else. Beneath the political radar screen, the subtext enabling both developments was court decisions that gradually weakened married fathers and shifted power to divorcing mothers. This shift was codified in the no-fault divorce laws, which were the proud achievement of the feminist bar associations. The National Association of Women Lawyers describes no-fault divorce as “the greatest project NAWL has ever undertaken.” Within very few years, “no-fault divorce became the guiding principle for reform of divorce laws in the majority of states.”

As long as women can divorce at whim, take along the children and everything else, and consign men to state-enforced servitude, men must fear them. Nothing cows men and extracts concessions with remotely the same effectiveness. As the poet said, “The hand that rocks the cradle is the hand that rules the world.”

This is why repealing no-fault divorce and making the marriage contract legally binding — with a presumption of father custody — will break the back of not only the divorce/custody machinery but the entire feminist movement. In fact, a legally enforceable marriage contract will carry an effective presumption of father custody: Women may file 70%-80% of divorces, but mothers – who are confident of getting custody of the children – file close to 100%, almost always without any legal fault grounds.²

Other Injustices?

All the other injustices men suffer — all of which are less important anyway and leave them open to the accusation of “whining” — can be rectified more easily once this is addressed and implemented. Here is why:

Women’s two major weapons and source of leverage over men are sex and children. If they control these, they control men. Nothing does more to weaken the patriarchy, not even abortion, because if women can claim monopoly control of the children there is no extortion they cannot commit and no price they cannot demand from men – both fathers and politicians. Fear of this is what emasculates all men and makes all women despise men generally. Only women who despise men demand “equality”. Women who respect men understand – as they have understood for millennia – that male strength benefits women as well, and a woman gets the full benefit by marrying a strong man.

Further reasons why child custody exceeds all other issues and injustices in importance and urgency:

Nothing is more important to men. Most would willingly endure any injustice and the most gruesome physical abuse (and many do) rather than lose their children.

Nothing is more cruel to children than their parents’ divorce and being torn from one of their parents.

Nothing is more devastating throughout society. Fatherless children are plausibly identified (even by tradcons and some liberals) as being the most destructive social problem of our time. Single mothers and fatherless children are tearing down our entire civilization.

Nothing does more to pervert government power and corrupt governmental ethics, to erode protections for citizens’ rights and civil liberties, and rationalize tyrannical measures. This starts with the judiciary but extends to the entire state machinery.

Another Wish List?

Moreover, this is eminently achievable. It will not be accomplished by the conventional political methods of organizing pressure groups, lobbying legislatures, litigating in courts, commandeering the media, protesting in the streets. No, men have little hope of achieving any of that, and there is no point in bothering with it until men first mobilize the leverage they already possess.

What is that levarage? Simple, the Marriage Strike: Men are already refusing to marry, date, reproduce, or even associate with women. This spontaneous, de facto boycott is sad and tragic for all — unless, unless it is mobilized as leverage to force changes in the custody laws. I have described the enormous potential of the Marriage Strike elsewhere. The point here is that the conventional political methods are not working for men, but they do not need to work. Men do not need to shout in the streets (let alone tear off their clothes), which is not masculine behavior anyway. Men can act more effectively from quiet strength. They have this unique source of leverage, which is already growing in strength day-by-day. They only have to harness it for the purpose.

1 Daniel Amneus, The Case for Father Custody (1999). I discuss his solution more extensively in my most recent book, Who Lost America? Why the United States Went “Communist” — and What to Do about It” (2024).

2 See my book, Taken Into Custody: The War Against Fathers, Marriage, and the Family (2007).
***

Father Custody Will Restore America

In fact, it is the only thing that will.

The responses to my previous post (above) were so positive and thoughtful that I decided to follow it up with some specifics.

Previously, I suggested that restoring marriage as a legally binding contract, with a presumption of father custody of children in case of divorce, will do more than anything else to break the back of feminist power. But it will do much more than even that.

It will do precisely what Donald Trump promised to do: restore American health and strength and “Make America Great Again”. Trump is flailing now, because he will not confront the ever-worsening family crisis and the federal government’s role in causing it, and the rest of us are not holding his feet to the fire.

It will require that we all summon the courage to face down the feminists on this one matter above all others, curtail the most repressive and abusive government machinery ever created in the United States, and confront forces that intimidate the most stout-hearted men like Trump (Musk, RFK, Jr, et al.), because that it precisely what they are intended to do: emasculate.

By the way, father custody has nothing to do with fathers being "presumed to be the superior parent," as one reader wrote. A father can manifestly be the worse parent, and the principle still holds (and in any case, no government official has any business deciding which parent is superior). It does not presume that "single fathers make better parents than single mothers" (though evidence suggests that they do).

The point of father custody is that it will keep families together and allow children to be raised in intact homes. Mother custody means discarding fathers and raising children as single mothers. Father custody does not mean discarding mothers; it means that the mothers who wish to leave cannot take the children with them. Families will remain intact, because fathers’ authority will remain intact.

Here are some specific benefits:

Family and Marriage:

It will restore the family and the marriage contract, by making it enforceable in law. It will provide the protections that both men and women lack in cohabitation. Spouses who violate or abrogate the contract will be held liable for the consequences to the other spouse and children.

It will eliminate most divorces and broken families, especially with children. With fault grounds, and if fathers are guaranteed custody of children, women will stop initiating close to 100% of divorces involving children.

Marriage will be respected and restored, because men will understand that their parental rights (and their property rights after childbearing) will depend on being married to the mother. They will therefore insist on marriage before having children. Women who balk will stigmatize themselves as unmarriageable. Both men and women will marry and reproduce with the assurance that their children and everything else cannot be taken arbitrarily (for “no fault”).

Young men will once again be motivated to improve themselves, study, work, serve in arms, invest earnings, marry and start families, rather than living lives of idleness, knowing they can have secure families to protect and provide for.

Same-sex marriage will become irrelevant and with it the rest of the radical sexual political agenda: feminist, homosexualist, transgenderist — all of it.

Children will be raised to respect parents and (unified) parental authority, other traditional authorities, marriage, traditional moral values, legal and other obligations, and men.

Adolescent rebellion against parents and society will be diffused, thereby starving political radicalism of new recruits.

It will discourage abortion and undermine campaigns to liberalize it by discrediting the notion of sex-for-pleasure, except among a few unmarriageable women.

The war between men and women will be pacified.

Welfare and its Ills:

The bloated welfare machinery will become largely unnecessary, because little incentive or justification will exist for women to go on welfare.

The worst effects of the welfare system will be eliminated, especially the destruction of families, which will mostly remain intact.

Chronic, long-term poverty will be alleviated, because in the West it is produced almost entirely by welfare and broken homes.

Violent crime will be all-but-eliminated, especially that committed by fatherless youth. Other forms of criminality and self-destructiveness, such as substance abuse and truancy, will also be brought under control.

Government intrusion into citizens’ private lives by social workers and other functionaries will have no justification.

It will eliminate ghettos, revive inner cities as prosperous and safe neighborhoods, and restore urban life as the center of civilization.

It will elevate African-American communities, still enslaved to welfare and incarceration. Other impoverished communities and minorities, such as native American reservations, will be similarly resuscitated.

Child abuse will be all-but-eliminated, virtually 100% of which takes place in the homes of single mothers or in foster care. This will further undermine the police powers of social workers and other functionaries.

Welfare will no longer serve as the magnet for illegal immigration.

The corrupt and mischievous child-support system will be rendered superfluous.

Constitutional and Judicial Integrity:

Judicial integrity will be restored by eliminating the oxymoron of “no-fault” justice. Dispensing real justice will once again be the only legitimate business of courts.

The integrity of the US Constitution and Bill of Rights will be restored, almost every article of which is now openly violated by the family law judiciary that is supposed to be its guardian: the Contract Clause, Habeas Corpus, the Searches and Seizures Clause, Due Process Clauses, and the entire Bill of Rights will be restored to full operation.

Family and household privacy will be restored by prohibiting lawyers, judges, psychotherapists, and other forensic officials from interferng in the private lives of legally innocent citizens.

Ethically, it will separate the sheep from the goats. Legal practitioners and others who protect and defend fraudulent marriage contracts, based on “no-fault” terms, will expose themselves as unethical and unscrupulous, and they will lose business.

The integrity and effectiveness of the police and penal system will be restored by redirecting them toward real crimes rather than gender crimes such as vague forms of domestic “abuse” and other manufactured criminality: thought crimes, speech crimes, political crimes, etc.

The integrity of criminal justice will be strengthened by removing the subterfuge that courts are overwhelmed by criminals whom they must presume to be guilty and from whom they may extort pleas and confessions of guilt.

It will cut off the supply of rogue prosecutors, who learn their trade in divorce courts and child-support prosecutions.

It will relieve prison overcrowding, which is caused entirely by welfare and fatherless homes.

It will alleviate homelessness, which consists overwhelmingly of men who have been plundered, incarcerated, and rendered unemployable by family courts.

State and Economy:

The family will again become a productive economic unit, contributing to the economic prosperity of the United States and any western or other countries that follow the US, as they have already followed it into sexual chaos.

Property rights will again be secure, because they will no longer be abrogable whenever an emotionally unstable person “falls out of love,” yearns for sexual freedom, or takes children as hostages for emotional and financial blackmail.

Taxes can be reduced by eliminating most of the domestic budget devoted to welfare, law enforcement, incarceration, health, and education — ills caused by fatherless homes.

State government operations will be brought under control by ending their elicit, back-door funding using child-support money.

Educational integrity and achievement will be restored, because intact parents can better control truancy and monitor their children’s education.

Immigration law will no longer be manipulable and evadable by fraudulent “marriages” of convenience.

Military Strength:

The citizen-in-arms will again become the norm, removing military authority from desk-bound functionaries and lawyers and returning it to active male soldiers.

Military strength will be reinvigorated by dismantling the military’s welfare operations, removing single mothers from its payroll, ending its role in social engineering, eliminating sex scandals, reducing the number of clerks and lawyers, and making it again the foremost bastion of masculinity.

Europeans will be compelled to devote adequate resources to their own defenses rather than sponging off Americans in order to enjoy their own welfare states.

Sexual liberation of foreign populations will no longer serve as an acceptable excuse for foreign-policy adventurism and military interventions.

Various government matriarchies — welfare/divorce/education/military/ national security — will be put out of business and boys will be emancipated to become men, because they will be raised, instructed, and commanded by their fathers and other men.

Churches and Religious Faith:

Churches will be revived as the first-line guarantors of the marriage contract, giving them a vested interest in its integrity and enforcement and restoring them to their traditional role of supporters of the family and watchdogs of the judiciary and of all government operations.

Parishioners will expect that violations of the marriage contract by church members will be addressed in the first instance — before initiating litigation — by the church that consecrated the marriage. This will re-create the incentive for people to join churches, marry under their authority, demand support and justice from clergy, and restore their traditional role of overseeing both family and civic life.

Parishioners will expect their churches to scrutinize any state intervention in families whose marriages they have consecrated. This includes demanding that churches and clergy have standing as legitimate parties to all government proceedings that adjudicate such marriages and demanding that justice be done to wronged parties.

Churches that fail in these responsibilities will be stigmatized as false churches and abandoned. True and false churches will be readily distinguishable. True churches that accept these responsibilities will see their pews refill.

Churches could even return to their traditional role of providing poor relief, supplanting welfare dependency and making poor relief again a temporary and exceptional provision by coupling it with enforcement of sexual morality.

Churches’ finances will benefit from tax reductions permitted by the elimination of welfare and reduction of accompanying ills, such as incarceration.

It will undermine the appeal of Islamism, Hindutva, and other forms of radical religion as alternatives to the weak and effeminate post-Christian West.

Men and Masculinity:

Demanding this change will in itself provide a single concrete rallying point and focused goal that will unite men, give them purpose, and motivate them to elevate themselves and one another as active, engaged citizens.

It will provide an alternative to and discourage extreme, destructive, or unsustainable male responses such as gangs, hyper-masculinity, sexual hedonism, homosexuality, marriage strikes, Men Going Their Own Way (MGTOW), “incels”, or media “influencers” and gurus.

Male headship of families and from there of communities will be re-established. Exceptional women can still be leaders and advisors, but the norm for citizenship will be married male heads of families, owning property and serving in arms.

More:

Nitpickers and obfuscators will be silenced, because no valid arguments can exist in favor of a fraudulent contract. Once a debate is forced into the open, the goal can be accomplished in the process of dispatching the spurious arguments that will be attempted against it.

It will help reestablish principles of free and open debate, because this was the first such government oppression that was subject to full media and academic blackout.

One adverse side-effect must be expected: an increase in trumped-up accusations of domestic violence and other gender crimes. This is easily addressed however and must be confronted and restored in any case, because allowing knowingly false criminal accusations is obviously intolerable and indefensible in any judiciary of integrity or free society.

We know that it will do all this, because it is what built the western political and economic powerhouse nations of the nineteenth century. And it will cost nothing economically, because it requires only a single change in one obviously unjust and indefensible law.

What it will demand is precisely the focused male fortitude that the feminist matriarchy wants to neuter and has already neutered throughout the conservative political class. Summoning the courage to demand this will in itself restore men to their authority and benefit us all, including women who want strong men, safe homes, economic prosperity, less state interference, and happy, thriving children.

Other measures to rectify injustices against men can also be undertaken. But this must be the central, unifying objective, around which all else must be pursued: men applying their newfound resolve to restore their authority over their own children and then over society. Nothing else is remotely as important. Without this, we are just playing Whack-A-Mole.

Other measures that purport to reform divorce/custody law— waiting periods, compulsory counselling, mediation, joint custody — these are faux remedies and excuses for inaction, and they will only perpetuate the fraudulent contract of western marriage and the fraud of “no-fault” justice.

We must also discard the illusion that inaction is a viable option. The feminists and their allies are searching relentlessly for new methods and excuses to acquire the authority and assets and earnings of men and criminalize any who resist — even men who do not marry, cohabit, date, or have any personal association with women. Eventually, if men remain passive, they will find a way.

Stephen Baskerville is Professor of Politics at the Collegium Intermarium in Warsaw. His books and recent articles are available at

www.StephenBaskerville.com.