Thoughts on Education, Pt 1

I have mentioned a couple of times on here that I chose to commence a university degree last month, having sworn, after quitting uni the first time round in Feb 2008, that I would never, ever return to higher education. My prior experience of uni was pretty hellish - I basically sleepwalked into doing a modern languages degree because it was what was expected of me by my school and by my family, and the whole subject was treated as though there actually was no other option but to go to uni. I wasn't at all sure that uni was for me in the first place, but to say so was deemed heresy at my academic-driven school, and I began to believe that perhaps everyone was right when they insisted that if you don't get a degree, you're destined to be a failure earning a crappy wage stacking shelves/flipping burgers all your life.

My initial apprehension aside, I found the reality of uni to be pretty dire. Many students seemed to be there mainly to get drunk and piss around all the time, as if they'd finally been let off the reins now they were living away from home. The stuff we studied on my languages course was predictable and, to me, meaningless & futile: mediaeval history, crappy philosophy, and bullshit literature, which all seemed to be designed not to expand minds (my dad always told me this was what uni was all about), but to promote homogeneity of thought. AAAARGH!!! At the time I was also getting into conspiracy in a big way which confirmed my suspicions that university was all about brainwashing, and I was feeling increasingly claustrophobic & ill because of the whole experience, so in the end I was like "fuck this" and quit halfway through the second term. Whew!

Within a month of quitting, I proved everyone wrong and actually managed to get a non-crap job, WITHOUT A DEGREE. It was an administrative thing, not exactly what I'd most love to be doing in an ideal world, but in the absence of any better ideas, I was quite content doing that job and earning a reasonable wage for it. Had I not found my new university course which is ideally suited to me (more on that next time), I could easily have stayed within that organisation and worked my way up. Hence my advice to young people debating whether or not to do the uni thing...

- Uni is great if you're REALLY passionate about your chosen subject and if you're CONFIDENT it will lead you directly into a fulfilling career, e.g. If you've got your heart set on being a doctor or something.

- So many people have degrees nowadays that they are no longer that special; if you have an average degree from an average university, you will not stand out from the crowd in the job market, which is surely why most people go to uni in the first place - they think it's a one-way ticket to a fantastic career. Because bachelor's degrees are so commonplace, lots of people do masters/additional degrees just to get ahead, which involves more time & more debt. Do you really want to get sucked into studying for half your life? Think long-term.

- THERE ARE ALTERNATIVES. At my former workplace, I met young people who hadn't even done A levels - they'd left school at 16 to do apprenticeships, and had slowly worked their way up to pretty good positions. They've been making money the whole time while uni students have been racking up debt. AND they're gaining valuable work experience which might be as impressive to a potential employer as your average honours degree, depending on the type of experience gained. Based on what I've seen, young people who work are more mature and responsible than their peers who are full-time students and have never had jobs - uni students live a pretty sheltered existence generally. Uni is nothing like the world of work.

- If you don't have a clue what job you want to do in future, don't go to uni just for the sake of it. The perfect career is not likely to magically pop into your head. If you don't feel drawn to any particular vocation and if deep down you aren't bothered about being rich and would rather live a simple life, you'd be better off doing a straightforward job - not necessarily mindless but not stressful either - and earning what you need to survive, and being happy. I've seen people who've done the rat race thing and earned tons, they've basically sacrificed their time and wellbeing and human relationships JUST to earn money so that one day they might be able to enjoy a luxurious retirement, IF they live that long. Isn't there more to life than this?!?!?! It reminds me of the song lyrics by Metric expressing the futility of the rat race:

Buy this car to drive to work
Drive to work to pay for this car

Anyway in my next post I will cover my reasons for going back to uni, despite all I've said above. In the meantime here are some links to explore.

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http://in2worlds.net/supplement-to-working-for-the-puppet-people

http://www.henrymakow.com/000561.html

Dark Night of the Soul

Wow. I've been having a major (well, major in my world) crisis the past week or so. Just feeling physically, mentally and spiritually exhausted, a little bit crazy, chaotic thoughts, apathetic, and tons of self-doubt on top of it all. It's one of those phases that feels absolutely terrible and like it's going to last forever, but there's a glimmer of hope in the back of your mind that if you get through this, you might just come out the other side and have a major breakthrough. Maybe it's just crazy me who goes through these trials, I don't know. I think "dark night of the soul" is a fitting term, and in fact, this entire year has pretty much been a dark night of the soul for me, although don't get me wrong - there have been a lot of high points too.

The timing of this particular episode seems significant; I was meant to be attending a spiritual conference all weekend, the first one I ever felt drawn to go to. But as it happened, I simply felt too exhausted to go in the end, and was in no mood to talk about spiritual stuff at all. Did this mood just 'come over me' to prevent me going to a potentially transformative event? Or was it a helpful warning of sorts? I don't know. Perhaps it was just coincidence. I also wondered if my university course was getting too much for me - as of September I'm studying a degree in Steiner education and I feel I've found my niche, or at least I've found the only university course that wouldn't leave me tearing my hair out within five minutes. Still though, I have felt oddly claustrophobic/restrained/frustrated at times now that I'm back in academia. But maybe that's a personal weakness. Overall I really like the new direction my life is taking.

Anyway, enough of this introspection. Hopefully one day soon I'll get around to writing about stuff which may actually be useful to someone.

War is Peace

I can't help thinking this whole business of awarding Obama the Nobel Peace Prize is some kind of desperate attempt to rekindle public support for him, now that people generally seem to be losing faith in his Messiah status. Perhaps it's hoped that this will help boost his "good guy" image. Well, if dear old Barack is such a peacemaker, why hasn't he taken steps to withdraw military forces from Afghanistan/Iraq? Would someone please tell me what the point of these wars is? (Don't say it's got anything to do with fighting terrorism.) What a farce this "Peace" prize must be. Then again, it was awarded to globalist Henry Kissinger in the past, charming man that he is, so what can we expect.

I'll take this opportunity to repost my thoughts on Obama written earlier this year, formerly hosted on my now-defunct Dare.nu website....

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I’m naturally sceptical of anything massively hyped or praised by the media and the public at large; Barack Obama is no exception. Even when I disregard all of his ultra-left leanings, questionable background, the NWO minions he surrounds himself with and the fact he may not even be eligible for role of President due to his dodgy birth certificate, my intuition tells me that he is bad news. I’m tempted to brand him "a nasty piece of work". But don’t tell that to the swooning public, who see him as some sort of Messianic figure.

He’s so obviously in bed with the elite that it’s actually nauseating to see him worshipped as some kind of beacon of "hope and change". More of the same, more like - or perhaps even WORSE. Thanks to his charisma and oratory skills, he can get away with far more than George "not the sharpest tool in the box" Bush, and could feed virtually any line to the public and they’d swallow it. Am I the only one who finds his zealous, glassy-eyed supporters a little scary? And his Youth Brigade? And this? Even if Obama is NOT the new Hitler (even though their rise to power has some disturbing parallels), his policies should stand ALONE on their merits, without this kind of propaganda. This is cult of personality and it does not belong in politics. Again, it echoes of Nazi Germany. People think they’re immune to brainwashing and propaganda and fascism ("it could never happen in America") but Hitler had the masses in a hypnotic trance the same way Obama does now.

What also irks me is the reverse-racism thing that’s going on with him. I once saw a comment on the internet that actually stated, "It wouldn’t matter if Obama turned out to be as bad as Bush, because he’s black". Imagine the outcry if this sentiment were reversed in support of a white leader. Skin colour should not be an issue in politics; as I said, a candidate’s policies should stand on their own merits. Sure he’s (half) black, but that doesn’t mean he’s a competent president or even a good person. It doesn’t mean he’s not 100% in cahoots with the global super-elite.

Finally, I’d like to comment on the problem-reaction-solution dynamic that’s evident here. In this case, Bush was the problem (in the eyes of the masses), the public cried out for change in reaction to Bush’s perceived failings, and Obama was presented as the solution to the problem. (Notice that the new Prez failed to define what that nebulous "change" would be - it’s classic empty rhetoric, yet people still applaud him and cheer and faint at his speeches.) But of course, the right/left-wing two-party system is a false dichotomy; there really is no difference between Bush and Obama in terms of the agenda they serve. They’re puppets controlled by the same puppetmaster. I feel that Bush laid a good bit of groundwork and now Obama will build on it, taking us a few steps closer to the New World Order.

Normally I ignore the mass media and politics, thinking it’s all staged and a farce. But I observed this US election and the media furore surrounding it and shook my head at it all. The only seemingly sane voice to be heard, from what I gather, is Libertarian Ron Paul - advocate of freedom AND limited government (the two go hand-in-hand). But can any politician be 100% independent of the elite agenda, and still get their voice heard and mount a serious campaign? I doubt it. So who knows. But I do feel this is an interesting time in history, so I’m observing it all from a distance with a sceptical mind.

UPDATE (June 2009): I subscribe to a newsletter pertaining to all things spiritual and conspiracy-related, from an esoteric Christian perspective. I got an email recently and was kind of surprised to read their take on Obama: according to them, he is not working for the elite at all, but purely his own selfish agenda, and his election was not part of the elite’s plan. That threw me for a loop. Personally I find it hard to believe in light of the fact that the elite-owned media seemed to aggressively promote Obama, and the fact the whole election process is questionable anyway. I suppose the jury is still out on the new prez...

When I listen to the news....

....or any form of media really, I feel like someone's trying to trick me, like they're trying to pull the wool over my eyes as to how this reality works and what's really going on in the world. In their Matrix-version of reality (which they do a great job of imposing on everyone), the political system is democratic and just, our votes count for something, we're fighting in Afghanistan to combat terrorism, the threat of global warming is looming, etc. etc. ad nauseam.

When you're inundated with this kind of information day after day after day, you don't really have time to pause and reflect and just think for yourself. I often wonder what kind of worldview, what values and ideals and beliefs a person would have, if they had never been exposed to media influence directly or indirectly..... perhaps I can never know. But I do know that I personally am able to think much more clearly and critically having minimized my exposure to television, radio, mainstream news, magazines etc for the past few years. And as a consequence my spiritual growth has taken leaps forward too.

I shall do a full post on television soon.

Fighting the commercialism

Our culture is sooo wasteful. We buy & throw away so much junk. Because everything is mass-produced, ubiquitous and cheap, no one has to put time and effort into making their own stuff now, they can just go to a store and buy it - thus, things lose their value. I'm into knitting and crochet, making toys and clothes and things, and I know that when you've put your heart and soul into making something you value it so much more.

It's partly the pace of our lifestyles that's to blame. With both parents working now, in most households, we haven't got time to waste on making clothes and stuff - we let someone else do it, and we even expect our meals to be cooked for us. And the big companies have been all too happy to provide an array of processed junk foods for our convenience (but to the detriment of our health).

It was a trip to the shops today that got me thinking about all this. I was aghast at all the Halloween stuff that's in all the stores this time of year - rows and rows of sweets, accessories, costumes, masks, toys etc. People seem to be on autopilot: oh, it's October again, time to start buying all the same stuff we bought last year and then threw away. And once Halloween is over the Christmas stuff will start coming out. And after Christmas, all the Easter eggs will be going on the shelves. It's like a game. And I'm wondering, who is falling for this year after year?!?! Doesn't it get a little...repetitive? Is no one seeing through all the commercialism? Guess not.

Fortunately, to counterbalance all the insane over-the-top-ness of it all, there seem to be more and more people yearning to live a more simple, frugal life. And not just because of the recession. I'm doing my bit to bring back the old arts & crafts, trying to start a knitting revolution. ;) I've got both my grannies into it again, as well as a few ladies from the office where I worked earlier this year, and it's always a conversation-starter when you're sitting on the train knitting some fancy-looking thing.

I've vowed to make all my Christmas gifts for people this year. I think I'll be making a lot of amigurumi toys. Maybe I'll put up some pictures on the blog...

Dealing with Negative Influences

How can we pinpoint and root out negative influences from our lives? First of all, I feel it's necessary to define the term 'negative influence'. Initially it occurred to me to describe it as anything outside of you that takes away your peace. That's still a decent definition, but it doesn't apply universally; for example, sometimes we need to hear the truth for the sake of our personal growth or to shatter our illusions and shake us out of our comfortability, even if that truth temporarily takes away our peace or makes us uneasy. The ego might shy away from the truth but our souls should not.

But of course, if you perceive that something or someone is repeatedly having a negative effect on you, draining your energy, sapping your enthusiasm, or perhaps hampering your spiritual growth, it's perfectly reasonable to acknowledge this and politely boot said negative influence out of your life. You are probably familiar with the term "energy vampire" by now. Well, I had one of these in my life until recently, when I finally realised the effect this person's unrelenting negativity was having on me and began to distance myself from them. They are the kind of person that you try to help, counsel and support, and just when you think you've made a breakthrough and they've left behind their old ways of thinking and come to a new understanding, they go and say/do something that proves they really haven't changed a bit. And their constant soul-sucking, draining negative talk wears you out and induces doubt and fear in such a subtle way that it is almost imperceptible unless you're very self-aware (which I am trying to be better at!), but the effects are cumulative over time. So thank goodness I finally recognised it and am feeling more like myself again without constantly having my energy sapped by negative talk.

Besides negative people, I can think of another very detrimental influence that usually goes unrecognised: the media. Particularly television for its mind-numbing effects, but not only that.... also daily newspapers selling you a hefty dose of lies and stories of war, murder, doom and gloom... 'fashion' magazines telling women they won't be attractive unless they can fit into size 0 jeans... the radio pumping out generic songs day after day, of which many lyrics promote subtly destructive messages. Most of these influences, if not overtly negative by most people's definition, at least serve to uphold the status quo.

At the end of the day, no one can pinpoint negative influences for you. You have to practise self-awareness in an almost meditative way; carefully observe every thought, feeling and reaction as you go about your day. Are there certain people, activities, places, habits that repeatedly induce negative or non-constructive thought patterns? Does someone in your life sap your energy by continually criticising and complaining? Do you feel unduly fatigued/depressed after eating certain foods? Keep observing & questioning in this way, and you will start making connections between your external life (other people, events etc) and your inner life (your moods, thoughts and feelings).