a reply to:
EmmanuelGoldstein
I consider myself not a conspiracy researcher but rather a reality researcher with a sub-heading of conspiracy researcher. The main reason I joined
ATS was in that search. No longer wanting to study the ''big time'' ideas that humans had developed over our time here but more wanting to study the
thoughts on reality of individual thought, other individuals, as I considered myself.What do iconoclastic thinkers think about it all.
There is this general classification that the masses of people have put on them.The sleepers. We hear it here all the time with words like sheep and
sheeple and others I'm sure you are familiar with. THose who have not woken up to whatever ''truth'' that seems so powerful to the rest of us, no
matter who the rest of us are. From this comes the call to ''wake up WAKE UP''.
To me, it's not a matter of waking up but rather maturation. Maturation into a world that is so complex that none of us can really get a grasp on it
when we first begin to take our place in the world of individuality. In the case of any young indiviudal(and here I see that a young individual can be
ten years old or fifty years old) there is often a spark, some conundrum that hits that persons consciousness and cracks it open. Maybe a teacher,
maybe a certain sentence in a book, maybe a scene in a movie. Maybe just a flock of Canada Geese flying by can toss a person into a reflection mode of
seeing themselves as something other than all of that. And this of course has been covered in many books and philosophies over the years and still
remains as a major field of study. Consciousness. And from where ever and how ever that spark in a person is ignighted, it's not immediately a flame,
just a spark, a spark that will take a whole life time to finish making that person who they might truly end up being.
My perspective in that earlier reply comes from my own youth when I was in that initial ''spark'' phase of my life. I carried that spark like a badge
of supriority, knowing that I was not one of the masses but instead an individual. My mental gymnastics and reflections had carried me into what I
later came to know was called Descartes' Cogito Ergo Sum, I think therefore I am. Yet I had never read or even heard of Descartes at that time.
From there I took my fledgling self and began to wander the wide world of information and then encountered a teacher, one who spoke to my own course
of individuality in a sea of unconsciousness. He was a ''teacher from the East'' one who had taken the fundamentals of both Eastern and Western
thought and synthesized them into a ''new philosophy'' that could usher in a world full of mature individuals. People who could mature and provide
examples that others could follow.
Sound good? It did to me. That is how I was suckered into the cult of Sun Myung Moon, whose cult is more commonly known as the ''Moonies.'' After four
years of my prime young life stolen from me, or rather willingly handed over, I managed to extricate myself from the mental chains his cult teachings
I had accepted. When I left, in 1974, I left behind hundreds and world wide hundreds of thousands of people who did not then and still to this day
have not managed as I had. They are still there, turning and twisting each and every thought they have with mental gymnastics the defy the
imagination.
It's with that experience that years later I read Icke. And Jones. With both, the warning system I had developed over the years began to buzz. Both
offered too much information packed up front. Information that would seem wise and well informed to a novice or as I called it earlier in this post, a
young ''individual''.
So while I appreciate that both of these cats can serve as a match to ignite the opening of minds, which is good, they also can provide the match that
can start a mental conflagration that can consume and destroy the mental capacity of any who fail to pull away from them and walk on their own.
Sorry to have taken so long on this reply, but I felt is necessary to dive into my own history to make my cautions about those guys more
understandable.