Truth Workers

It’s undeniable that the world is in a state of acute disaster.¹ We have here a collective illness that won’t go away without major intervention.

But by Natural Law there is an equally remarkable influx of truth-telling happening. It is a cure equal to the need.

The Cosmos is nothing if not symmetrical.

Visionaries

Truth flows into my reality every day. Sometimes it comes from artists, sometimes from spiritual teachers, sometimes from “political” thinkers.

But the word political needs qualification. Its primary American usage is straightforward enough: it refers to the staged national sport wherein our two established parties, both exorbitantly funded by the same corporate interests, attack each other in the media.

The word’s other meaning is less straightforward, and more intriguing. In conversation, “political” is sometimes used, via an unconscious linguistic bait-and-switch, to refer to all global affairs, whether they have to do with politics or not. Thus the disclaimer “I’m not political” often means “I don’t follow the news.” The speaker is declaring a lack of interest in anything outside of his local and personal life.

How odd it is that the word for governmental systems (politika = affairs of state) should have come to mean any and all current events.² Surely we need a new term, to encompass those who, though they agree with the “apolitical” folks that party politics is a disgrace and a fraud, nonetheless feel themselves a part of the wider world enough to pay attention to what happens in it. This group includes progressive thinkers, visionary artists, social justice activists and everyone else engaged with the agonies and ecstasies of collective human life.

Ours is an era of incessant self-informing, where every global crisis is as immediate as the phone in our pockets, yet seems more than ever outside of our control. Many of us have developed an aversion to hearing about anything that is not light and pleasant, so painful is the barrage — especially as delivered by the corrupt media system, which instills not intelligence but fear and helplessness. Nothing could be more understandable than the desire to shut it all out.

But “apolitical” is not the right term to refer to this sense of overwhelm, and cynicism is not a viable alternative to caring.

Shutting down in any form is bad for the soul.

A buzz

Whatever form it comes in, truth is a buzz. We know it when we see it, because it makes us feel alive.

There are truth workers in the arts, like Jean-Philippe Mul, who devote their lives to a vision without any guarantee that it will manifest in three-dimensional reality. There are geniuses of their craft like Robin Williams and Philip Seymour Hoffman, who stick around for only a handful of decades before cashing in their chips.³ There are others, like San Francisco Safe House founder Glenda Hope, who labor cheerfully into old age.

From the point of view of psychic impact, a truth worker’s effect on the world has nothing to do with how successful her work is, at least not in the way our society measures these things. Her impact has to do with the authenticity with which she donates her inner gifts. It has nothing to do with external recognition, and everything to do with self-knowledge.

The Universe doesn’t care how many likes we get.

From the transpersonal point of view, what defines a truth worker is that they respond, through the center of their chart, to the moment.

This, I believe, is what changes the world. The integrity of our self-expression, conditioned by the necessities of our place and time, alters the mass vibration.

Open-Source Everything

I recently became aware of a truth worker who emerged from the least likely place imaginable: government espionage.

Robert David Steele is a highly trained policy wonk who broke rank. A former Marine who spent 10 years in the CIA, he now travels around the world lecturing about the coming revolution.⁴

Steele sees the escalating inequalities and environmental crises on Earth leading to an inevitable implosion of the current global order. His rectifying vision, exhaustively researched and documented in his latest book, The Open-Source Everything Manifesto, proposes that policy decisions should be made not through spying and secrecy but from open public sources available to everybody:

We are at the end of a five-thousand-year-plus historical process during which human society grew in scale while it abandoned the early indigenous wisdom councils and communal decision-making. Power was centralized in the hands of increasingly specialized ‘elites’ and ‘experts’ who not only failed to achieve all they promised but used secrecy and the control of information to deceive the public into allowing them to retain power over community resources that they ultimately looted.

As is often the case with truth tellers, his ideas are simple yet profoundly radical. He calls out the way global wealth is illicitly aggregated and concentrated now, pointing out its “largely phantom” nature (think of the tiny figures streaming across computer screens on Wall Street.) Real wealth, by contrast, is “community wealth, defined by community knowledge, community sharing of information, and community definition of truth derived in transparency and authenticity.”

He envisions a genuinely sharing economy; not the faux-“sharing economy” touted by digital billionaires. “Over the course of the last centuries, the commons was fenced,” he says, “and everything from agriculture to water was commoditised without regard to the true cost in non-renewable resources.”

Steele talks about recognizing, and then learning from, mistakes made during the era now dying: the Industrial Age. The lucidity of his ideas savors of wisdom.

Everything is connected

There is a theme that is sounded by all visionaries, across an infinite spectrum of beliefs and theoretical models, in every place and epoch: that of holistic understanding.

Leonardo de Vinci wrote that the realization of holism is a criterion for true intelligence.⁵R. D. Steele says the same thing: “Properly educated people always …understand both cause and effect, and intertwined complexities.”

All systems — whether we’re talking about a molecule, the human body or planet Earth — are made up of inextricably interconnected parts. Each part knows what all the other parts are doing. If any part is out of whack, it negatively impacts the whole.

If we believe that the Universe itself works this way, we gain a new respect for the principle of balance. We might even be tempted to discard the notions of “good” and “evil” entirely, and replace them with balanced and imbalanced.

So here is another thing that truth workers do: they try to re-balance systems. Steele does so with geopolitical theory.⁶ An acupuncturist does so with needles.

Some of these re-balancers are destined to become role models for many. Their devotion to the truth is like a contagion, a passion that ignites us on a heart level. Their inspiration inspires us — to do our own work, whatever it is. An astrological way of saying this is that they drive us into the center of our charts.

All people, all living things, are part of the earth life, and so are sacred. No one of us stands higher or lower than any other. Only justice can insure balance; only ecological balance can sustain freedom. … To this… we dedicate our curiosity, our will, our courage, our silences, and our voices. To this we dedicate our lives. — Starhawk ⁷

Notes

1 Dis- (away from) + astros (the stars); which we might interpret as “seeming to depart from cosmic law.”

2 I think this semantic confusion comes from the same unconscious illogic that conflates a country’s ruling elite with its people; e.g. Saddam Hussein is a wicked person, so let’s bomb the people of Iraq.

3 I don’t hold it against anybody that they contracted to stay on Earth for X number-of-years instead of Y number-of-years. I don’t think cosmic impact is assessed quantitatively. This does not mean I do not ache for the suffering these artists experienced – suffering that was not unique, merely more visible (and, notably, much more so once they’d died) and extravagant than yours and mine.

4 In a recent interview with the Guardian, Steele says, “I see five major overlapping threats on the immediate horizon. They are all related: the collapse of complex societies, the acceleration of the Earth’s demise with changes that used to take 10,000 years now taking three or less, predatory or shock capitalism and financial crime out of the City of London and Wall Street, and political corruption at scale, to include the west supporting 42 of 44 dictators. We are close to multiple mass catastrophes.”

5 Nassim Haramein lists Leonardo’s four Principles for the Development of a Complete Mind:
1) Study the science of art.
2) Study the art of science.
3) Develop your senses: especially learn how to see.
4) Realize that everything connects to everything else.

6 From the Guardian interview (op cit): “What revolution means in practical terms is that balance has been lost and the status quo ante is unsustainable. There are two ‘stops’ on greed to the nth degree: the first is the carrying capacity of Earth, and the second is human sensibility. We are now at a point where both stops are activating.”

7 From The Fifth Sacred Thing, which is being made into a feature film.