Dear Friend and Reader:
What are the spiritual implications of the government and corporations spying on us? We’ve all heard of these programs, which range from having our cell calls monitored to having our disk drives mined for data and information that will be used to sell us things. We might consider the political implications, but when we look at the issue from what you might call a psychic perspective, we learn something interesting.
In the new subscriber edition of Planet Waves, I work with the concept of “there are no private thoughts,” introduced among other places in A Course in Miracles. As the quickening happens and the mental environment shifts closer to the nonphysical dimension, we are designing our technical tools to resemble what we want our minds to become. We get to liberate ourselves from ego boundaries such as age and gender if we want — and we also become vulnerable to being observed by anyone capable of it.
Why don’t we protest? Well, maybe it feels better to know that someone is out there watching us. Maybe we seek the freedom of knowing that we don’t have any secrets, or that those secrets are easily found out — something that seems to be a necessary step in spiritual growth.
In this edition, I also give 12 signs of interpretation, covering the current Sun-Saturn conjunction and next week’s Libra New Moon. In the Libra horoscope I write, “In the next few days you will see that there is indeed a point of reconciliation. You may not get a look at it for very long. It may show up as one of those fleeting possibilities you notice in a slightly altered state of mind or think of right before you fall asleep. But there is in fact a point where everyone’s needs meet in a way that benefits all.”
In the Aquarius horoscope I write, “The idea here is not to ease back entirely and coast along, but rather to apply your ideas as they come and develop your talents on an ongoing basis, as a kind of intuitive experiment. You can afford to be a little less goal-centered and a little more exploratory.”
And for Pisces, I suggest that you, “Open up a space in yourself that can be filled by the inspiration that is currently pouring in, and that will do so increasingly over the next couple of weeks as the Sun makes a trine to the Chiron-Neptune conjunction.”
The Virgo birthday audio is ready, and we have new writing from Judith Gayle in Political Waves. Don’t miss this amazing edition! Purchase a single copy or sign up for a subscription to Planet Waves.
Yours & truly,
The interview with…
Data –> Patterns –> Extrapolation –> Prediction –> Markets
We each leave an audit trail clearer than a slug’s slime..
Follow that.. it may lead you somewhere.. that has value.. (to whom?)
Okay, now to my point..
Private implies Public. So… Let’s move the boundary, eh.. We all conceive that in linear fashion, don’t we?: Ergo, if I have LESS privacy, something of mine is MORE public AND if something of mine is less ‘public’, it is more private. That’s the logic right?
WRONG!
If that logic worked in practice, we might have nothing to worry about; in fact things would genuinely BE SAFER.
However, there is no such thing as a ‘public’.. it is a myth!
There is no meaning without interpretation and whoever controls the normative interpretation has the operational power of making judgment (and, most importantly) enforcement.
When you or I lose privacy, we DON’T lose it to any kind of public domain, but to an oligarchic hegemony – people who control interpretation and attendant sanction.
If a *true* public had access to private information, the collective’s consensus would define the information’s significance (e.g. the diversity of interpretations supplied by each constituent of said public, would mitigate oppressive and manipulative outcomes.)
My/your/our loss of privacy is not to any public forum/arena, however. It is sequestered by an equally private institution – one which does not surrender its own secrets; which is hardly a fair exchange.
The reason people are unconcerned is because one’s relation to ultimate power (conceived of as God, or the state, or whatever) is unilateral, to all intents and purposes, on a routinized basis. One does not talk back to the law and reason with it or call it into question. One might, but it is futile, as nobody listens and acts favorably in response.
So I become Stoic and I simply avoid trouble and take the rap when the axe falls. Hopefully, I don’t get cut too badly..
People do not know how to resist unwanted and imposed top-down change, effectively, and so they minimize harm – pragmatism, the disease of our times..
Instead, we get caught in red herrings; debates, which are the playground of the powerless when it comes to operational issues. If I can’t change it I can FEEL as if I’m trying, by talking about it – meanwhile the earth spins and power has its way.
On 10/1/10 6:40 PM, ” ” wrote:
Hi Eric,
Don’t quite know what to say about this lead-in article on ‘spying’. I don’t think that DHS and the NSA read “A Course in Miracles” though, and the old saw of ‘you have nothing to worry about if you have nothing to hide’ is rather worn out, wouldn’t you say? It is the intention coupled with the technology that is at the heart of the debate. When more and more people end up on no-fly lists because they protest and disagree with the governments policies, then the intent is flawed. When the FBI raids a protest group’s headquarters (based on electronic surveillance) simply because they are exercising First and Fourth Amendment rights, then how does that square with this all being part of our spiritual growth? I, for one, do not see it this as helpful at all, but apologetic. Besides, I’ve been down the Course in Miracles road, and found it wanting in a lot of respects. Then, I discovered that Helen Schucman’s husband worked for the CIA, and was implicated in the notorious MK-Ultra mind control experiments in the 60’s.*
So, I must say that I strongly disagree with your views on this one. Nuff said.
Regards,
_____________
Hi ________
It might help if you read the actual article. It offers a more complex analysis, with the history on the issue. I am not saying that what’s happening is right or healthy; I say explicitly that it’s unconstitutional; and I’m saying that it’s in fact happening — and I want to figure out how and why.
Incidentally, Thetford and Schucman were not married. She was employed in his office, as his secretary. Bill was gay, and Helen was married to someone else. From everything I’ve read, she was the actual channel/scribe of the Course and he was the typist and assisted with editing. The unrevised manuscript is widely available. I have plenty of issues with the Course but one of them is not the mind-boundary theme. I have no need for a book to tell me about that one. Anyway — here is the article, called Glimpse Behind the Veil.
http://planetwaves.net/astrologynews/1044310787.html
There is also a discussion going on at Planet Waves.
http://planetwaves.net/pagetwo/2010/10/01/what-are-the-spiritual-implications-of-government-spying/
ef
–
Eric Francis, Editor
Planet Waves, Inc. – http://planetwaves.net/

*Quoted From Wikipedia quoted by Planet Waves reader in his email:
Career and hiring of Helen Schucman
For the next five years after his graduation in 1949, Thetford worked as a research psychologist in both Chicago, and later in Washington, DC < http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington,_DC> . According to Colin Ross, from 1951 to 1953 Thetford worked on Project BLUEBIRD, an early CIA mind control program that led to Project MKULTRA < http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_MKULTRA> .[2] < http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Thetford#cite_note-1#cite_note-1> He spent 1954 and 1955 as the director of clinical psychology at the Institute of Living in Hartford, Connecticut < http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hartford,_Connecticut> . From 1955 to 1957 he was an assistant professor of psychology at Cornell University < http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornell_University> ‘s CIA-funded[3] < http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Thetford#cite_note-Marks-2#cite_note-Marks-2> Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology[4] < http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Thetford#cite_note-3#cite_note-3> .
In 1958 he accepted an assistant professorship, which later developed into a full professorship, at the Columbia University < http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbia_University> College of Physicians and Surgeons. During a portion of this same period he also served as the director of clinical psychology at the Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital < http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbia-Presbyterian_Hospital> . It was here that he would stay for the next 20 years, and it was here that he first met Helen Schucman < http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helen_Schucman> , hiring her as a research psychologist and assistant.

From: Planet Waves SL [mailto:horoscopes@planetwavesweekly.com]
Sent: 01 October 2010 4:29 PM
To: Planet Waves SL Subscriber
Subject: [Planet Waves SL] What are the spiritual implications of government spying?
i was thinking that God must be really bored with everyone by now, just about as bored as all the intel agents assigned to watching facebook. Imagine you have a masters degree in middle east studies and get a nice g-man type job, and you are assigned to facebook hell to read what everyone did on Friday night. You got a degree for this?!
Unless you are doing stupid criminal stuff, why worry? I have read that some of the criminals cannot stop the bragging on facebook. They are sort of like Paris posting the photo of her great handbag on twitter. LOL. Stop worrying so damn much.
“We want to let it be okay because that reassures us that ‘we’re not doing anything wrong’.”
I think you are hitting the proverbial nail squarely on its hard little head. Need for healthy Sexuality is at the crux of Self, but Guilt is at the crux of non-everything.
When I was a kid I hand-lettered a quote for my dad that I found somewhere that I thought he would like. He liked it very much, and I think it hangs on his wall still. My parents met in seminary….they are liberals and all about “change”….yet within the constraints of modern day christian teaching I ask; how can real change ever be?
This is the quote:
“I read a book that a man called Christ went about doing good. It is very disconcerting to me that I am so easily satisfied with just going about”
As a kid I was fascinated by the different ways that I could interpret (or feel) these words, fully understanding the “christian” intent, but knowing there was something deeper that was not being said.
As an adult, while still finding merit in the ideal of ‘doing good’, I also see that “just going about” is not really all that disconcerting. Perhaps shiting the ideal to Being of God is better than “doing good” or certainly than the trigger Guilt words “being good”.
And from there I suppose I could digress into all the daddy’s watching me “am I being a good little girl” stuff.
Seems to me that points back to current political issues called Palin and ODonnell etal
So many merry.go.rounds.
xO
For sure we need to define privacy, and the boundary, in a way that’s useful and that works. The idea that god is watching all the time is a function of language and of guilt. It’s a highly abstract notion of god that can only come back to seemingly concrete terms of right and wrong where everything is basically wrong. This, we found out from a book, or what someone said about a book.
The concept seems to go back to the Jews and their particular notion of omniscient deity; as opposed to say Zeus for example, who nobody thought monitored your every thought (he was too busy). In psychological terms we’re talking about the superego, the internalized parental structure that tortures us with a litany of right and wrong – where most things are wrong. To think that the lord of the universe personally cares about whether you said a certain word or thought a certain thought and is personally going to damn you for doing so is blatantly egotistical. God cares THAT much? About someone’s minor transgressions?
It becomes quite the cudgel in the hands of those seeking power over others.
No doubt the government is tapping into the pre-existing guilt complex with its many spy programs. We want to let it be okay because that reassures us that ‘we’re not doing anything wrong’.
I am enlightened by your theory/s. (as per usual).
Hm…and being one who has about zero interest in facebook-ish things …..I find the whole thing fascinating — but then, I’ve “felt connected ” and “read minds” and known that ideas pop up in more than one place at the same time and “talked” to ‘dead’ people and on and on and on since I can remember (which is a very very very long time).
So – your idea that this is a way to open the gates to that inter-connectedness rings true. Or if not “open the gates” then “Give it a Name” and make it “respectable” because after all we are in the age of technology.
The intensity between NEEDING PRIVACY because of the MIS-Use of information (bullying) and our NEED TO BE ONE is an interesting pushme-pullyou isn’t it.
“The Spiritual Implications of Government Spying”?
Though I haven’t practiced Catholicism for 38 years, the programming revolved around being spied upon. To reinforce the church’s teachings – and her sadistic streak – my mother taught me that something as simple as stubbing my toe was proof positive that God was punishing me for something evil I had thought or done. Like Santa -who decided daily if I was “bad or good” – God’s constant presence controlled my every movement. I was so afraid of pissing him off and going to hell that developing a sense of privacy was impossible. I lived the twisted version of instant karma long before I became conscious. It stunted my growth by prohibiting exploration. I realize my experience is extreme, but I have a point to make:
I agree that having nothing to hide is freeing and that esoterically “all thoughts essentially belong to all men”; but monitoring every behavior out of fear is an assault on the psyche. It robs us of our creativity.
I don’t think raising children in an evironment akin to living in a fish bowl is going to benefit them spiritually. The masses who raise them support our government acting like God/Santa. As it stands now, they love legislating morality and killing “evildoers” across the ocean. They expect the government and corporations to do good by them too. Isn’t there a Bible verse about not offering pearls to swine?
Perhaps the spying seems as innocuous now as Woody Allen’s parody, “Sleeper”. But remember, it was loosely based in part on Orwell’s “1984″. Not nearly as funny.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/csm/20100929/ts_csm/329052 (xray vans)
deceptions . gov
http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2010/10/01/new-high-fructose-corn-syrup-scam.aspx
The Corn Refiners Association (CRA) has petitioned the U.S. FDA to allow manufacturers the option of using the term “corn sugar” instead of “high fructose corn syrup”.
and blatent spying with cancer:
‘Feds radiating Americans’? Mobile X-ray vans hit US streets”
By Patrik Jonsson – Wed Sep 29, 7:45 pm ET
Atlanta – For many living in a terror-spooked country, it might seem like a great government innovation: Use vans equipped with mobile X-ray units to scan vehicles at major sporting events, or even randomly, for bombs or contraband.
But news that the US is buying custom-made vans packed with something called backscatter X-ray capacity has riled privacy advocates and sparked internet worries about “feds radiating Americans.”
I’m sure your theory as to why we don’t care (or don’t seem to care) about being spied upon is valid, but I think there is also another reason:
we don’t realize what the consequences of this spying will be. We’re in denial about how barbaric our own govt can be, given free rein.
I include myself in that group. It’s hard to remember how repressive the oppressor can be when you are not witnessing it directly.
But most of the good people we live next to in this country don’t try to cultivate any awareness at all. They just want to be entertained, 24/7.
So don’t kill the buzz, man. Go ahead and spy just don’t block the view of the plasma TV.
peace, GG
Indeed.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuskegee_syphilis_experiment
We have to see this for what it is, which is sadism, not science.
didn’t the US govt do the same thing with black men in Tuskeegee, Alabama — also with syphillis? how many different populations did they think they had to test on/mess with?
Apropos of secrets, privacy and sexuality, maybe you’ve seen this article about the US conducting medical experiments using sexually transmitted infections in Guatemala in the 40s. Notably it was not just any kind of infection — STIs were used and they were used on people likely to spread them.
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/wire/sns-guatemala-std-study,0,4155801.story
The United States apologized Friday for an experiment conducted in the 1940s in which U.S. government researchers deliberately infected Guatemalan prison inmates, women and mental patients with syphilis.
In the experiment, aimed at testing the then-new drug penicillin, inmates were infected by prostitutes and later treated with the antibiotic.
“The sexually transmitted disease inoculation study conducted from 1946-1948 in Guatemala was clearly unethical,” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said in a statement.
Eric (and all),
No need to respond to this, but I wanted to tell you how much more I have been getting from my horoscopes ever since you wrote about the importance of the moon sign. I am a Cancer with a Sagittarius moon, but it had never occurred to me before to read the Sagittarius horoscope. Since I’ve been reading both, it’s like all of a sudden I have the full picture. In fact, sometimes the Sag horoscope speaks to me even more clearly than the Cancer one (maybe because Moon relates to emotion and intuition?). Whatever the case, I just wanted to thank you very much. You never fail to provide an insight that helps me to focus more consciously and productively on both my inner and outer life.
Peace,
Melissa
eric:
I spent most of the day yesterday commenting on this diary at Daily Kos on the Rutgers incident.
Read it and the comments, for I think they are quite compelling and sychronous to the Venus-Mars conjunction in Scorp (and a little Sun-Saturn in Libra as well!), and totally supports what you have written.
Here is a comment I made near the top of the thread:
We’re watching a decline in valuing other people’s sensitivities, and exchanging the value of one’s privacy with that of what can you expose as entertainment with this technology we have at our disposal.
I think arodb has a great point — this is an event worth “feeling” in our consciousness. We may, as a society, have taken a wrong turn away from respecting each other, and instead have turned to bullying — as a way to belong.
On an individual level and a societal one, we need to be very very wary. This signals to me a kind of social sickness. A moral decline
and here is a response to it by a blogger named phaktor:
It is a moral decline and a very serious one. It has happened to me. First, nobody is much qualified to talk about this unless it has happened to them. Those who are psychoanalyzing Tyler make me laugh, especially when they suggest it was the “outing” that bothered him. It has nothing to do with that. It is the violation of personal privacy during our most vulnerable moments. There is no way most people can understand the experience. Their opinions are empty intellectualizations. The suicidal reaction is intense and almost automatic for anyone with normal sensibilities. This is not the same as performance or someone knowing when they are observed. It is a terror beyond comprehension because the person did not know they were observed and had no opportunity to conceal what an actor or exhibitionist would be able to conceal. It’s not “reality tv”.
If you can make it through the first few days you will have to develop a strength of character which most mere mortals will never comprehend — including those who did it to you.
It will be a shame if this becomes a gay/straight thing with gays claiming the high road and the victim status; because the people who did it to me, and most of those who participated in the festivities afterward, were gay. This is not something straights dreamed up to do to gays. It is something self-centered, callous people do who have either not considered the pain which it inflicts or who don’t care. It is, like arodb reflects, a serious issue about our fundamental respect for the human rights of others as a society.
Dear Eric,
To answer the question “Why Don’t We Care” I think, referring to your statement about A Course in Miracles, that more and more people do care. But, that word but deletes what came before it, to some extent they believe, I can be searched all they want, I don’t do anything wrong.
People are very much aware of the Patriot Act, that obviously was prepared long before 9/11 happened, it had to be if you ever looked at it, at least 200 pages long. Congress didn’t even read it before voting on it. It virtually deleted the Constitution. People are aware of all the problems with our food, big Pharma, the AMA, Monsanto, the banks, big corporations; just today there was an article on Natural News.com that Bill Gates in a video says that 6.8 billion people are too many and will soon be 9 billion so the way to reduce the population is by vaccinations, sterilization and health care. People DO know about these things and are frustrated about what to do about it. Now, they are also worried that the government will investigate them or arrest them or imprison them with no trial or legal advice.
What they are selling is FEAR and doing a great job of it.
All your articles and your web site are educating people about these abuses as many other web sites are doing. Sooo, now they want to put the FEAR into even going to these web sites, saying anything about them on their blackberries or cell phones or emails or Facebook. Scorpio rules CONTROL, and that’s exactly what is happening.
I don’t know what the answer is. I applaud you for having the courage to put these things out for people’s knowledge, education at least their awareness.
The “sheeple” are being kept so busy, (Americans work longer and harder than any other people), that many are just too tired to do anything more than come home and collapse in front of the box. How many actually read all these sources of information? How many actually believe it?
You have the brains the knowledge and the courage to tell us, I am humbled. People better soon start to DO something never mind just care.
Mimi
do you have data on that?
Curious about the astrology of the Nigerian bombing. This is a human rights issue, the nigerian delta has long been a playground for the bloody ways of oil barons.