World's big secrets are not so secret

Hi Joe,

I came across your site a while back, through a blog link somewhere. Please continue your work. At the very least, your work, as one of your readers said "just makes you feel less isolated". Less isolated, as in having comfort in knowing that we aren't alone in our thoughts and opinions of the world around us.

I was raised in a single parent family, my Dad was killed when I was 2 years old, he was in the Navy. As unfortunate as that was, I feel that, that actually helped me as far as "wanting" to try find the answers to my many questions I had about death and also the seemingly unjust world. Many people it seems, just do not want to know about or understand the world in which we live. It's just so much easier to let someone else take care of the details and watch over us. Those damned monsters are everywhere!

It took me just about 38 years to finally start making sense of the society/world in which we live. Now at the age of 44, after much effort to learn the "secrets" of the world, I find that there are really no secrets at all. The "Screaming Man" knows all. The trouble is most people are programmed from early adolecents that the Screaming Man is not to be taken seriously and taking the Screaming Man seriously will lead to the questioning of many "things", mainly authority and beliefs. And that does not sit well with the people in charge of such "things".

Of some comfort to me is the information about Ivan Pavlov's research into "conditioning". Many people have heard of "Pavlov's Dog", the experiments in which Ivan "conditioned" his laboratory dogs to drool when they heard the sound of a bell. But, something that is not as well known is that Pavlov's laboratory had been flooded. During that flood (about a week, maybe more) the dogs were without food and generaly unable to escape from their captivity. Some of the dogs died, however, the dogs that didn't die were found to be totaly "UNconditioned" after their stressful experience. They no longer drooled at the sound of a bell.

I'm sure they could have been "REconditioned", but, what gives me hope is that they were "UNconditioned". The programming was reversed, or, in another word, terminated.

A flood of a different kind is bound to come, one that will affect all of the dogs/animals, and with that will come the dawning of a new day.

Please continue your good work, as it inspires many people, maybe even a dog or two.

Understandably yours,

Marty

------

Dear Marty,

Your letter struck several major chords with me. The first one was in your remarks about isolation. Indeed, in an age of incredible communication capability, how can similar souls be so isolated? The reason of course is the monolithic capitalist corporate media, the "One voice speaking to the many," in the background of all our lives every waking minute. It defines our national conversation and self-description, and of course it is not in its interest to include millions of people like us in the one-way national non-conversation. (We are surely a bummer when it comes to instilling "consumer confidence" -- gotta sell them refrigerators, gotta move them SUVs.) The search for meaning is a rather isolated journey in and of itself, and doing it in America in these times is like trying to run the opposite way amid a pack of st ampeding rhinos determined to plunge off a cliff on their way to the mall.

As to the "secrets of the world," I am not wise man, not very brave, and certainly not gifted when it comes to insight. So I am forced to take the simplest and most direct road to anything resembling discovery. And by the lights of to my own mind and experience, I've concluded that the secrets of the world reside in mundane and obvious things. They are net even secrets, but openly presented by life itself. However, they are obscured by illusion, technology and our desires, which are really not our own, but instilled in us by one of the strangest civilizations that ever existed.

Anyway, I think the "world's secrets" are the biggest non-secret existent, always available. The laughter of babies, the churning of the stars overhead and the devotion of dogs, for instance, never go away. And when we engage such profound simplicities, we find connection with the real matrix and meaning of earthly existence. But these simple things are trivialized in a voracious consumer state, rendered too mundane, too sentimental, unless they can be reduced to an artificial experience that can be put on a greeting card for profit, or made into a commercial to sell something. They are reduced to images, rather than experienced, because, hell, if everybody spent hours watching the sky or smelling babies' necks, production would go to hell in the glittering gulag, wouldn't it?

And oh, conditioning! So amazingly obvious, is it not? And if one does not find it obvious, then there are Skinner and Pavlov to explain it to us in such rational, practical and undeniable terms we cannot help but get the message. In my book I had a line that went: "People can only understand what they have been conditioned to understand." In the publisher's editing process I noticed that line was deleted. I had to chuckle at the idea that even sophisticated editors believe they are generating their beliefs, responses and attitudes free of external and societal conditioning. And like you say, any conditioned state can be reconditioned.

I was very fortunate to have a series of traumatic events in my life that forced me to look at the world from a different perspective, just to survive emotionally and intellectually. Beyond that, I was fortunate enough to come of age in the era of psychedelic experimentation with perception itself. Consequently, I learned that through dedicated effort -- and a strange combination of non-effort, non-striving -- it is possible to change one's conditioned consciousness, to recondition one's self from the inside too.

I believe you are right about the Great Flood. It is an apt metaphor for contemplation of the washing away, the destruction of people of false truth and the world they created. It has certainly been a sturdy one, proving durable since 1600 BC when the Chaldean Flood Tablets were first inscribed, interestingly enough, in a city south of Baghdad.

Sayeth the tablet (and I'm taking it slightly out of context here): "The flood was a war ..."

Meanwhile, US soldiers, conditioned like hunting dogs, sift through the sands of Ur, searching for IEDs, oblivious to the bones of Gilgamesh.

In brotherhood,

Joe