George Washington should be remembered more for this than anything else he did: after being effectively offered monarchy, he declined, valuing the people’s sovereignty over personal power.
I found your article truly inspiring. The spiritual dimension gives it a deep sense of meaning. A few days ago, I was reflecting on how reactionary forces operate, and I came across the concept of the “shredder,” which I believe resonates closely with the points you raise in your piece.
Components of the Consciousness Shredder
Media – Channels that disseminate partial, simplified, or manipulated information, creating confusion and misinformation.
Ideological and Institutional Discourses – Official narratives or dogmas that impose a particular interpretation of reality and reduce the complexity of experience.
Emotional Engineering – Strategies that provoke fear, resentment, cynicism, or saturation, preventing deep reflection and personal experimentation.
Discrediting and Ridiculing Testimonies – Marginalizing, discrediting, or pathologizing individual experiences that reflect the distributed memory.
Social Fragmentation and Cultural Dispersion – Division of communities, extreme competitiveness, and hyper-individualization weaken collective channels of consciousness.
Induced Forgetting or Substitution of Memory – Historical or educational manipulation that alters the perception of the past, preventing individuals from connecting with the root of the vital flow.
Taken together, the shredder does not act directly on energy or matter, but on the mirrors and channels that reflect energy: conscious witnesses. It is a diffuse, non-centralized system that exploits disconnection, saturation, and manipulation to interrupt the flow of distributed memory.
Thx Mike. Love your universe. Relolutions will eventually have to find a way to include all the angry young men into a story beyond the revolution. The easy route, turns out to be, the same one the fascists use - blame some "other", direct the anger away. The harder route - doing the work of including everyone into the republic - is, well, hard. Gird your loins everyone. Defiance till death.
Fascinating reflection as always. Seeing the thing clearly from one's perspective, as it unfolds from that angle and height and distance, precedes the ability to remember. As you know better than I, perception prefigures memory. You can't remember what you never perceived in the first place, which explains the systematic attack on reality and its substitution with bullshit, fake crises, outright lying etc. Beyond the systematic replacement of reality with alternative facts, fake emergencies, and constant efforts to distract the distracted from their perpetual distraction, memory substitution after the fact is a most dangerous proposition. As the saying goes, those who control the past control the present. So the fight to preserve one's perceived experience, one's consensus sanity vision of an incident or event (like an election), is primordial. Political reality is a fragile fabric, the collective figment of tissues on which democracy depends particularly so. The sense that the system, as currently being constructed, can be hacked, hijacked, or simply controlled remotely by a fiendish few who possess tools the power and sophistication of which are unfathomable to most of us (i.e., me) scares me to death. For example, I think of the unruly DOGE episode in the early days of Trump 2.0, and wonder whether Elon Musk and crew, far from failing to tame the federal government Goliath, now have full access to all of the most sensitive private information (IRS, SSA, OMB etc.) about all of us, and will use it to benefit someone other than we the people. Without our even knowing it too...
This is so beautifully written and for me it spoke to the reason we are on this earth. To be present fully, to love and bear witness, and to know that we are all part of one cosmos and interdependent. Your words give me hope. Thank you!”
"It seems that every day we're reminded that we live in an era of great power rivalry. That the rules-based order is fading. That the strong can do what they can, and the weak must suffer what they must.
"And this aphorism of Thucydides is presented as inevitable — as the natural logic of international relations reasserting itself. And faced with this logic, there is a strong tendency for countries to go along to get along. To accommodate. To avoid trouble. To hope that compliance will buy safety.
"Denmark is a tiny country with a tiny economy and a tiny military. They cannot defend Greenland. They cannot control the territory of Greenland. Under every understanding of law that has existed about territorial control for 500 years. To control a territory, you have to be able to defend a territory, improve a territory, inhabit a territory. Denmark has failed on every single one of these tests."
“I hope [Stephen Miller is] kept away from young women, because that’s the mentality of a rapist. You can’t defend yourself, so I’m going to take you. That’s basically what he’s saying.”
To know thyself is not a head trip. It is a journey to emotional maturity, to acceptance of your holosapient holistic bodily intelligence. The Srinivasans and Thiels are infants in search of their humanity, their wholeness, tittering in the imaginary space between the ears. Being in the present, the spacious now of the universe, is to rest in security and the comfort of the spheres, not the exit or escape into particularity and meaninglessness
I've just started reading. What you are saying about French and Russian revolutions, I have always believed to be a cautionary tale. Revolutions are coopted and don't end as planned. Now, let me read how you resolve this for our situation.
"Memory is what the universe is." Mike, surprised to see you coming into alignment with the physicist Lee Smolin, who argues that natural laws evolve (implying something like memory there), and renegade biologist Rupert Sheldrake, who finds evidence of this happening within short time spans in records of the average time it takes for crystallization occur in newly invented chemical compounds -- it appears even chemistry has a memory.
Then there's Jung's collective unconscious, and the Theosophists' akashic records. All this points to something akin to Plato's forms, yet not static as he supposed them to be. If this is true of our universe as you suggest, we best live accordingly.
I have come to believe that, just as in physics, there are rules that are determinative in metaphysics. We can intuit them tho can’t grasp them. If we become comfortable with dropping our focus on the horizon, we can rest in an optimism that all is blossoming and unfolding as it should.
George Washington should be remembered more for this than anything else he did: after being effectively offered monarchy, he declined, valuing the people’s sovereignty over personal power.
Yes. Washington was a true hero of history.
Mike, your linking cosmological or universal memory with distributed perspective and ontological reality --- words fail me.. except, thank you.
Amen to that.
A comprehensive definition of the importance of BEARING WITNESS.
I found your article truly inspiring. The spiritual dimension gives it a deep sense of meaning. A few days ago, I was reflecting on how reactionary forces operate, and I came across the concept of the “shredder,” which I believe resonates closely with the points you raise in your piece.
Components of the Consciousness Shredder
Media – Channels that disseminate partial, simplified, or manipulated information, creating confusion and misinformation.
Ideological and Institutional Discourses – Official narratives or dogmas that impose a particular interpretation of reality and reduce the complexity of experience.
Emotional Engineering – Strategies that provoke fear, resentment, cynicism, or saturation, preventing deep reflection and personal experimentation.
Discrediting and Ridiculing Testimonies – Marginalizing, discrediting, or pathologizing individual experiences that reflect the distributed memory.
Social Fragmentation and Cultural Dispersion – Division of communities, extreme competitiveness, and hyper-individualization weaken collective channels of consciousness.
Induced Forgetting or Substitution of Memory – Historical or educational manipulation that alters the perception of the past, preventing individuals from connecting with the root of the vital flow.
Taken together, the shredder does not act directly on energy or matter, but on the mirrors and channels that reflect energy: conscious witnesses. It is a diffuse, non-centralized system that exploits disconnection, saturation, and manipulation to interrupt the flow of distributed memory.
Thx Mike. Love your universe. Relolutions will eventually have to find a way to include all the angry young men into a story beyond the revolution. The easy route, turns out to be, the same one the fascists use - blame some "other", direct the anger away. The harder route - doing the work of including everyone into the republic - is, well, hard. Gird your loins everyone. Defiance till death.
Fascinating reflection as always. Seeing the thing clearly from one's perspective, as it unfolds from that angle and height and distance, precedes the ability to remember. As you know better than I, perception prefigures memory. You can't remember what you never perceived in the first place, which explains the systematic attack on reality and its substitution with bullshit, fake crises, outright lying etc. Beyond the systematic replacement of reality with alternative facts, fake emergencies, and constant efforts to distract the distracted from their perpetual distraction, memory substitution after the fact is a most dangerous proposition. As the saying goes, those who control the past control the present. So the fight to preserve one's perceived experience, one's consensus sanity vision of an incident or event (like an election), is primordial. Political reality is a fragile fabric, the collective figment of tissues on which democracy depends particularly so. The sense that the system, as currently being constructed, can be hacked, hijacked, or simply controlled remotely by a fiendish few who possess tools the power and sophistication of which are unfathomable to most of us (i.e., me) scares me to death. For example, I think of the unruly DOGE episode in the early days of Trump 2.0, and wonder whether Elon Musk and crew, far from failing to tame the federal government Goliath, now have full access to all of the most sensitive private information (IRS, SSA, OMB etc.) about all of us, and will use it to benefit someone other than we the people. Without our even knowing it too...
I have no doubt.
This is so beautifully written and for me it spoke to the reason we are on this earth. To be present fully, to love and bear witness, and to know that we are all part of one cosmos and interdependent. Your words give me hope. Thank you!”
"It seems that every day we're reminded that we live in an era of great power rivalry. That the rules-based order is fading. That the strong can do what they can, and the weak must suffer what they must.
"And this aphorism of Thucydides is presented as inevitable — as the natural logic of international relations reasserting itself. And faced with this logic, there is a strong tendency for countries to go along to get along. To accommodate. To avoid trouble. To hope that compliance will buy safety.
"Well it won't."
"Denmark is a tiny country with a tiny economy and a tiny military. They cannot defend Greenland. They cannot control the territory of Greenland. Under every understanding of law that has existed about territorial control for 500 years. To control a territory, you have to be able to defend a territory, improve a territory, inhabit a territory. Denmark has failed on every single one of these tests."
“I hope [Stephen Miller is] kept away from young women, because that’s the mentality of a rapist. You can’t defend yourself, so I’m going to take you. That’s basically what he’s saying.”
Who said that?
To know thyself is not a head trip. It is a journey to emotional maturity, to acceptance of your holosapient holistic bodily intelligence. The Srinivasans and Thiels are infants in search of their humanity, their wholeness, tittering in the imaginary space between the ears. Being in the present, the spacious now of the universe, is to rest in security and the comfort of the spheres, not the exit or escape into particularity and meaninglessness
Ah Mike, beautiful, philosophical. And we will remember, however, I don't think that will stop history from rhyming.
I've just started reading. What you are saying about French and Russian revolutions, I have always believed to be a cautionary tale. Revolutions are coopted and don't end as planned. Now, let me read how you resolve this for our situation.
Your essays are a work of art. Thank you! And #11 is an especially important anthem. The stuff of inspiration - you are a gem, Mike!
“will be rewritten as the origin story of a new strongman..”. Yes, I see this too.
A disastrous possibility.
"Memory is what the universe is." Mike, surprised to see you coming into alignment with the physicist Lee Smolin, who argues that natural laws evolve (implying something like memory there), and renegade biologist Rupert Sheldrake, who finds evidence of this happening within short time spans in records of the average time it takes for crystallization occur in newly invented chemical compounds -- it appears even chemistry has a memory.
Then there's Jung's collective unconscious, and the Theosophists' akashic records. All this points to something akin to Plato's forms, yet not static as he supposed them to be. If this is true of our universe as you suggest, we best live accordingly.
Thank you, Mike, for these powerful thoughts!
We bear witness to the TRUTH!
We, the People, will not forget what freedom means!
Freedom is “speaking your mind” to a vicious ICE agent waving a gun in your face - and standing your ground!
I have come to believe that, just as in physics, there are rules that are determinative in metaphysics. We can intuit them tho can’t grasp them. If we become comfortable with dropping our focus on the horizon, we can rest in an optimism that all is blossoming and unfolding as it should.
P.S. I love your mind ❤️🔥