Part One

I suppose that it really kicked off in the mid-1960s. In Britain (and in many other places) the previous twenty years had been a period of remarkable conformity and uniformity. After the collective trauma of the Second World War people were, in general, more than content to just get on with life again; do what they were told, what was best, what was all part of developing a new society again. Build back better. Go to work, have a family, buy a little house, be thankful that the state was looking after you more and more, as daddy welfare state came into being. You get the picture.

I know the truth of this, because I was there, at the tail end anyhow. I hated it. I dreamed of being free of the conventions, the conformity, the small-mindedness. By age six, I looked around me and saw nothing stimulating, exciting, pointing to the further horizons of existence, which I just knew were there waiting for me.

I was not alone in this feeling. A substantial minority of kids my age sensed something similar. The age of adventure was upon us. You looked at the old society of parents and grandparents, and were remarkably unimpressed. 'Is that it? Is that life? Is that all you've got? No way!'

And so was born a generation in which, while the majority continued to follow the well-worn paths laid down for them by, well, someone, there were others, plenty of others, who, to use a favourite word from Buddhism, saw the deep unsatisfactoriness of it all. Not only that, some sensed that it was all arranged to be so, and maybe things could be arranged rather differently, for the greater emotional and spiritual satisfaction of the human beings living on planet Earth. In various ways and to varying degrees, en masse people began to 'wake up'. And for the controllers, the powers-that-be, or pretend-to-be, this created problems. Enough people begin to rebel, do things differently, see through the shitshow, and it's game over. Thus begins the very important task of the system of control: managing the awakening.

Evidence is there from the beginning. Theories abound surrounding the 'hippie movement' (a creation of the mainstream, but let's go with it for now....), propagated by people who like making up theories. The official narrative relates the birth of hippie as a kind-of spontaneous phenomenon, possibly driven by increased wealth and leisure time. Not so, say a number of 'alternative researchers'. It was largely conceived by those perennial bad guys, the CIA. They infiltrated the youth movement(s), with the aim of diverting them away from active opposition to the war in Vietnam, civil rights and anti-racist movements, and the rest. This was to be achieved largely through flooding the movement of subversive youth with large quantities of psychedelics, LSD in particular. The aim of this was to stupefy the kids, turn them towards inner contemplation, dull their activism. Manage their awakening.    

Drawing on personal experience and research, I suggest that there is a grain of truth in this. That the CIA had a hand in enabling LSD to get out to the masses is reasonably documented. 'Acid Dreams' by Martin Lee and Bruce Shlain tells some of the story well of the CIA's early involvement. This is, however, only one aspect of a far more complex phenomenon.

'Hippiedom' was neither purely spontaneous, nor was it purely the result of a conspiracy. And the results of the CIA conspiracy were hardly successful. Being the CIA, they could only possibly see LSD as a mind-control drug; that is the limits of their mentality. They could not imagine the other side of it, the entrance to the truly spiritual, to real inner freedom, which the psychedelic could, to some at least, open up. The space in consciousness where the CIA and their buddies are seen as they really are, a bunch of pathetic psychopaths.

John Lennon describes the situation well: "We must always remember to thank the CIA and the army for LSD, by the way. Everything is the opposite of what it is, isn't it? They brought out LSD to control people, and what they did was give us freedom."

Part Two

As the years have passed, the nefarious intent of the controllers has become ever-more transparent to anyone who is not pathologically blind to psychological truths staring them in the face. This became more evident post-9/11. And with the onset of the convid era, the life-destroying agendas of the dark forces have come right to the surface. They are evident on a daily basis, in every word uttered by politicians and other 'authorities', in every lie spouted by the mainstream media, shameless blobs of negativity that they are.

Inevitably, this results in more and more people stopping and having a look around. Why is everything apparently so bad? Why doesn't anybody ever say stuff that will improve my lot? Why does it show no sign of coming to an end, but just seems to go on and on, getting worse every year? Does it really need to be like this? Or is it intended? Bang! Awakening....

'Managing the awakening' is now big business. It has to be. It has an enormous army of foot soldiers in the form of internet trolls, infiltrators of all manner of group that refuses to toe the line. Groups objecting to windfarms have been routinely subverted by members of energy companies in disguise. The same will be true for many types of campaigns. Some of these spies and disseminators of falsehood are paid for their services, while others indulge their illusions free of charge. It's a dark and awful business. What kind of psychological and emotional state are you going to end up in if your major activity in life is spreading lies and deceptions, and confusing well-intentioned and honest folk?

The energies of large numbers of people beginning to wake up to the fact that things could be better - and large numbers of people simply with a good heart and positive intentions - have been vampired on two main fronts. There is the climate change agenda; and there is the woke agenda.

Part Three  

The global warming/climate change narrative captures many of those who genuinely care about the state of this planet, along with some who purport to have a more mystical connection with Gaia. Huge numbers of well-meaning and goodly-hearted people, many of whom sense that something's not right with how things work, have had their feeling hijacked. They have been re-routed into a cause which, on inspection, does not have anything much to do with ecology at all. Instead, it is about power and control.

Try explaining that to an extinction rebellion dude. Most anti-global warming enthusiasts believe that they are somehow being radical, 'alternative', even, anti-establishment. In truth, they are propagating the very system that they think they are railing against. 

Just check it out for a moment. The climate change story has its roots in the deep state, in think tanks full of dirty water among other dark corners of the universe. The Club of Rome makes no secret of its role in inventing this climate change narrative, as a means to 'unify the world' against a common menace. Maurice Strong is another early proponent of the global warming hoax. He was an extraordinarily wealthy oil baron. Then folk like Al Gore. Why on earth would you take your lead from nefarious entities? Your awakening has been well-and-truly managed.  

The same goes for 'woke culture'. It's a world populated by people who consider themselves to be nice and caring shit-hot individuals. It doesn't work out that way. Woke people love black guys, lesbians, refugees, immigrants, ethnic minorities, girls with penises, you name it. In fact they love anybody, provided they agree with their wokeism. If you happen to disagree with them, they mysteriously withdraw their love.

If you voted for Trump, for example, or for Brexit; if you feel that being British - or French - is something to be happy about; if you say that there is something special about gender, and it ain't so fluid; if you question whether some of those refugees are really refugees, or are they economic migrants. If you air these or many other points of view, the lovely people of woke reveal another side to their sense of equality and human rights. They show themselves as intolerant in the extreme. They will hurl rage unfettered in your direction. They will want you silenced, censored. They are repressive, oppressive, overly authoritarian, and in league with big tech coming out of Silicon Valley. In other words, they peddle a form of fascism....

Once more, if we take a look at the some of the movers and shakers of woke culture - 'Hope not Hate', more accurately 'hate not hope', is an example - they are funded by George Soros and his web of organisations. Check George out if you're not familiar. You wouldn't want him as grandad. It's all deep state diversion of the well-meaning but naive and undiscerning. Or the simply lazy, who don't do their homework. 

Part Four

It goes without saying that (some forms of) awakening go hand-in-hand with (some variants of) spirituality. Correspondingly, many spiritual groups and spiritual advocates have become infected with these less-than-enlightened attitudes.

Take Tibetan Buddhism as it commonly manifests in the modern west. Gone are the wild, crazy, dangerous, and sometimes dodgy characters who populate the history of Dharma from the Indo-Tibetan tradition. Chogyam Trungpa, for example. He could not exist in modern cancel culture times. He would be cancelled before breakfast time. As one friend put it, people today want Trungpa without the dirty bits. It doesn't work like that. 

There will be exceptions. But in general Tibetan Buddhism as publicised in the modern west is a watered-down version of the original magical thing. 

And while we are on things Tibetan, a special shout-out for the Dalai Lama. For a long time I have recognised that he is a religious man rather than spiritual. He is often referred to as the spiritual leader of the Tibetan people. I don't know what Tibetans think, but to my knowledge he is head of the Gelug-pa school, one of the four main traditions of Tibetan Buddhism. I don't know how non-Gelugs regard him.

Anyhow, he is top of an ecclesiastical tree, similar to the Pope or Archbishop of Canterbury. His role is political, and he seems to be cabal through and through. Check out his website. There you will find him congratulating Rishi Sunak on his becoming prime minister, praising Macron on his re-election earlier this year. And this is not to mention his advocacy for the untested experimental convid shots. A visit to his website always makes me feel sick.         

The Buddhist organisation which I once belonged to, nowadays called Triratna, has gone down a similar path. There are exceptions, but many members have taken up climate change and woke ideas with an enthusiasm. What's more, and what's worse, they appear to believe this has something to do with Buddhism and Buddhist ethics. Wrong, wrong, wrong. It's to do with lacking discernment, not doing your homework out of fear of having your worldview punctured, or out of sheer laziness. It's about taking on beliefs popularised by people in dark suits and at the top of power structures without analysing the basis of these social structures. What reason have those on the search for enlightenment for trusting such unenlightened and anti-enlightenment people? 

The beliefs have their effect. For example, it manifests in the way that some individuals within this organisation deciding against having the experimental convid shots were treated in a way that was not exactly kind. I heard of them being spoken to harshly and dismissively, undergoing ad hominem attacks, being shunned by the group. And this by people who consider they practice universal loving-kindness. The love includes everyone apart from those who disagree with you, it seems.

An old friend and acquaintance has seen something of this, and has written a book, in part about how this is not Buddhist teaching, and therefore is not a good thing. I applaud his move, and I hope his book will have a seriously beneficial effect. He is Mahabodhi, and his book is 'The Western Gulag'. 

I have only scratched the surface. This subject is vast, and one I find somewhat tedious. It's as if, after a nightmare interlude with convid, we're back with the same old issues that were scattered through my writing four or five years ago. Better return to this theme another time. Feel free to yawn or snooze...