The Dire Straits Diaries - Part Two
The Belief Wars: Divide and Conquer
By Diane Harvey
11-7-1

So many of us are feeling reduced to quietly observing the exponentially
explosive chain reaction of mass insanity with increasingly heavy
hearts. The dank fog of fear surrounding all forms of protest has
already succeeded in muffling the voices of a number of previously
enthusiastic activists. This sudden social climate change signifies the
onset of a chilling nuclear winter rapidly overtaking the land of the
free and the home of the brave . Overnight, we find ourselves merely
free to agree, or be seen as traitors to a simpleminded and heavy-handed
national cause.

Yet nothing in this unfolding sequence of mindless reactions-at-large is particularly
surprising. For all those who are reasonably free of mass cultural
programming, it is easy to understand that this global nightmare has
been long in the making, and has a terrible inevitability about it.
Considering humanity s past, and considering humanity's collective level
of awareness: what else could have happened?  And at the same time we
know that, in another way, the world madness in progress has been
resolutely conjured out of thin air. The predicament we find ourselves
in exists for no other reason than that the human race has been
deliberately conditioned to just such an end.

We are witnessing the gruesome culmination of generations of carefully
applied external manipulations, focused on shaping our emotional
reactions to our belief systems. Belief is the most easily harnessed
energy in the human mechanism, and until we begin to see who manipulates
our deepest beliefs, and why, we are silly putty in the hands of
darkness. Generation after generation, those whose business it is to
retard human evolution bring to bear the most powerful and subtle forces
of social engineering on us all, from birth onwards.

As a result, most human beings reach adulthood having
internalizing unquestioned belief in the superiority of their own
version of disparate political systems, religions, tribes, races, and
nations. This constitutes a deliberately fabricated schism at the basic
level of human existence. And from this fundamental lever, applied at
the deepest point of human life, all manner of evil stealthily arises
and invisibly stretches forth its tentacles.

We are hypnotized from birth into accepting interminable variations on a
stunningly simple lie. From this single twisted misconception, entire
worlds of complicated evil grow. On every level, from the personal to
the national to the international, this same basic error invests human
emotion and thought: If I am right, then you are wrong. If my way is
right, then your way is wrong. If my religion is true, then yours is false. My
country is good; therefore yours is bad. Mankind is being carefully kept on
this crudest level of misunderstanding about the nature of reality, and of belief itself.

Just as the physical landscape of the planet derives its beauty from
exquisite variation, so does the human race. Monoculture on any level is
a false stasis and leads directly to disease and death. The health of
nature depends on and delights in endless variations on basic themes,
and this is as true in human nature as it is in the other kingdoms. It
is no accident that almost all people are raised to view the natural
proliferation of differences as threatening and hateful. There is
endless profit to be made from causing such a fatal lie to take root in
the consciousness of the human race. Divide us at the core, indoctrinate
us into fearing the most wonderful quality we have to offer, and you
have a juicy species traumatized at the very heart of itself, and
therefore ripe for endlessly repeated plucking.

The human race has been here for quite some time now, scattered across
the surface of our beautifully balanced whirling top. And all along,
carried on the back of this enigmatic sphere, cycling majestically
through the empyrean, we ve been looking around and thinking it over. In
doing so, an astonishing variety of ideas and beliefs about what all
this means have arisen and flourished throughout human history. This is
a fact. And the sheer number of vastly different human belief systems
tells us something crucial. It tells us that almost everyone believes in
some kind of invisible power behind the material scenery. To stretch out
our minds beyond our small selves, to reach toward a greater truth, and
to form beliefs about all this is as natural to us as breathing.
Hardwired into the human brain is the necessity to search for greater
truth. And this is why it is the nature of belief itself that has been
methodically used to manipulate us into endless divisiveness, hatred and
wars. Belief is the foundation of life for the majority of the human
race, no matter what forms it may take.

And that s it. That is nearly all we have completely in common as far as
our personal political, ethical, existential, religious and spiritual
convictions go. We mostly agree that the Creator and/or the Creation is
good, and that we humans didn t create ourselves, or the planets, or the
solar system, or the billions of galaxies receding into infinity all
around us. We agree, as a species, on little else when it comes to the
details of anything at all, let alone religion and the higher realities.
This is the basic fact of our lives. The great secret of the human race
is that we contain the seeds of divine powers, and this is what
threatens the forces of darkness in the universe. Our evolution in
consciousness has been forcibly derailed and detained, time and again,
throughout our history. And now we have reached the point where our
inability to thrive on differences, combined with technological weapons
of mass destruction, has led us to the outskirts of annihilation. We
needed to become far more conscious than we are, and now we are stuck
with facing physical, emotional and mental chaos devoid of sufficient
collective awareness to deal with it wisely. Each of us at the very
least has a slightly different perspective on reality, and at most, we
may disagree about everything. But that we should experience this as a
problem requiring mutual murder has been an idea cunningly and
successfully nurtured in order to prevent us from understanding
our essential unity. Because if we experienced the spiritual fact of our
basic unity in any large numbers, then and there the long reign of the
forces of darkness on this planet would come to an abrupt end. Only by
the ancient method of divide and conquer can we be prevented from
entering into the awareness of our spiritual destiny.

So here we are. We are actually capable of imagining ourselves to be
grownups, even as we kill each other more and more cleverly and in
larger and larger numbers. We indulge ourselves in boastful and deadly
inter-species primate displays, brandishing banners of low-grade
rhetoric.  The human mouthpieces of the various types of insanity
manifesting on earth right now all act as if vainglorious language can
disguise the ridiculously primitive level of our behavior. Perhaps
nowhere is this so excruciatingly, tragically absurd than in our ability
to use our various religions as a weapon against others. We do not
listen even to common sense in this regard, let alone higher wisdom.

We have allowed ourselves to be manipulated into
accepting endless religious strife as some sort of naturally occurring
event. Yet we have been blessed from the beginning with the limitless
gift of individualization, and are not a hive, a flock or a herd in
complete thrall to a mass shared mind. This treasured invaluable
individuality allows for each human being to exist as a separate and
potentially free agent. And even so, despite the obvious relation
between freedom and inevitable differentiation,
we still Hate for God's Sake. Nothing ever was or ever will be more
pitiably absurd than this fundamental folly. Oh, but it is so very
profitable to those who feed off the subjective unconscious energies of
the human race. And they will do everything inhumanly possible to
enforce our continued passionate adherence to this most powerful of all
delusions.

Therefore our little planet here is temporarily boiling over again with
heated-up bipeds waving the black magic wand of pointless mass death. To
the funeral march of hysterical sloganeering, all over the world, forces
are waving bits of cloth and chanting death mantras before the maddened
bull of mass consciousness. The unthinking levels of reactionary
patriotism and religion have begun to break out uncontrollably. What do
those who love humanity and wish it well do at a time like this? We can
only try to point out that when humanity suffers, there are those behind
the scenes who always reap the benefit. We know something about who is
really going to profit from this chaos: out of the present carnage,
there are great fortunes to be made and delicious worldly powers of many
kinds to be consolidated.

It s not only religion, of course, that inspires the worst of our
behavior towards one another. Any belief system will serve to galvanize
the ego into despising others. No matter what combination of beliefs
anyone has, about anything at all, these will serve as a basis for
loathing others of unlike mind. What this says about us is that we are
still so childish we can t face the obvious: which is that our personal
belief system is not the beginning and end of universal realities. This
fact is more threatening and deranging to undeveloped human spirits than
any other. We fearfully imagine we will lose our minds and souls merely
by recognizing that belief is somewhat personal and somewhat limited,
like everything else we have, are, and do. It takes serious and
sustained effort these days not to become at least mildly acquainted
with a large number of people outside our own little personal worlds.
And it is becoming exceedingly hard to ignore the fact that there are
likable and interesting people adhering to belief systems other than one
s own. Likewise, within our own chosen belief-circle, we will no doubt
notice a certain number of unpleasant, underdeveloped humans. This is
just the way it is. Yet as long as we are capable of caring first about
the belief system, and only secondarily about the quality of the human
being, we are being divided and conquered by the forces of hate and
darkness.

These interminable human belief wars are deliberately created and
sustained, dutifully serving a very dark purpose for those who wish to
control this planet and keep stupefied all who live here. So long as we
are easily diverted into religious wars, and endless struggles for other
types of internecine belief-supremacy, we will not be noticing who is
causing and fomenting all this behind the scenes of our earthly
institutions. We won t be observing who benefits from all this directed
hate and mayhem. We won t be tearing the veil away to take note of
what groups and what forces arepromoting and encouraging human divisiveness.
While we are busy, nicely distracted into loathing one another wholesale, in the name
of God and of all our other basic beliefs, the forces of global totalitarianism sit
back and smile. They believe in nothing at all, except the single goal
of our standardization, degradation, and enslavement. They are
undivided. They have no other aim except the domination of the human
species, and to quench all sparks of individual freedom once and for all.
And their genius is in using religious differences, economic differences, political
differences, and social, cultural, and national differences for their own ends. Their
technique is to strike these discordant notes whenever possible, and to
amplify each sour chord until hapless humans mechanically dance in mass
step to their orchestrated tunes. They are experts at slyly manipulating
and encouraging us to hate each other, in every possible way, while they
are quietly, secretly and openly, dismembering the human race and
feasting on the twitching remains.

The ultimate cause of war framed as a religious activity is the absence
of the awareness of God in the heart of the human race. The primary tool
of terrorism per se is the near-ubiquitous presence in human hearts and
minds of the abysmal force of hatred. This perpetuates itself through
the self-righteous, self-justifying cooperation, to one degree or
another, of the majority of human beings. Once these forces of
accumulated hatred erupt, and physical warfare is set in motion, the
unfolding battle is inevitably, obviously, difficult to bring to a halt.
People caught up in the immediate physical struggle to survive have
little leisure for or interest in contemplating the deeper origins of
their situation. Yet whoever is not thrust into such a brutal level does
have the time and responsibility to consider the deeper meanings of our
collective predicament. While outward battles rage, each of us more or
less on the sidelines might do well to ask of our own conscience whether
or not we are contributing in the slightest way to the vast general pool
of human hatred. There will never be any real freedom or peace on earth
without such painfully honest self-questioning. Because, in reality,
there are very few of us who are not at least occasionally puppets in
the hands of hate. Most of us are still aggressively angry at times, and
quite enjoy that hot little surge of accompanying hate.

Technically therefore, almost all of us perpetuate some degree of
emotional or mental terrorism against others, even if well within the
dismally low standards of socially acceptable limits. And the ones who
deny this with the greatest fanfare of self-righteous anger are, of
course, the worst offenders. God is Love. There is no getting around
this highest truth. We can and do lie to ourselves and to others about
the real names of the forces we allow to run rampant now and again
through our beings. But the truth of God as the
embodiment of impersonal Love remains forever unmoved by our fear of it.
And eventually, if we have the spiritual courage to let it, this truth
may set us free. Since impersonal and all-encompassing Divine Love is
the only reality that can ever unite the disparate little paths of human
beings, the human species is facing a starkly clear choice. Either
figure out what it means to love one another, or die.