The shadow people

John Kaminski has written yet another interesting essay that adds to his already voluminous and important body of work. Rather than taking his essay directly from his website, I've copied it from one of my favourite alternative news sources; the Signs of the Times, because I feel their comments are a necessary addition and clarification of his argument. It seems that John, as well meaning and insightful as he can be, still does not go far enough in recognizing the true terror of the situation in regards to the conditions of this planet as wrought by the soulless, hyperdimensional control system. So, without going into unnecessary detail, I will let the following essay and corresponding comments speak for themselves.

This mad fetish for war is really a case of blaming others for our own guilt, of our own unprocessed fear of death being projected outward into the world

By John Kaminski
skylax@comcast.net

Who is the third who walks always beside you?
When I count, there are only you and I together
But when I look ahead up the white road
There is always another one walking beside you
Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded
I do not know whether a man or a woman
-But who is that on the other side of you?
- T.S. Eliot, "What the Thunder Said"

I resist the notion, now so popular among segments of our desperately flailing human intelligentsia, that beings from other worlds seeded our planet with life, or that these ETs abduct people for demonic Freudian experiments, or that mysterious dark forces, be they angels or aliens, control human destiny for their own petulant purposes.

It's all just too complicated, and it smacks of copping a plea, grasping for some lame excuse, or refusing to take responsibility for one's own actions. I mean, why ascribe evil to some esoteric mystical force when mindless savagery has always been a hallmark of typical human behavior? We need no additional motivation for depravity beyond the inner pit of our own personal darkness.

All these fantastic mythologies are clearly a case of trying to blame others for guilt that is our own.

Yet humanity continues to be imprisoned in the thrall of these supernatural shibboleths, whether the principal objects of our groveling fear reside in the cathedral or the cosmos.

The more conscious among us have always downgraded these sensationalized spirits - whether inspirational or injurious - into mere metaphors for life's natural processes.

But beyond trying to classify imaginary creations that are exclusively based on the unanswered questions about our own mortality looms an even more dangerous question: Why is it so popular to conclude that there appear to be two types of humans on this planet? I'm talking about the basic good and evil split: those who live by lies and relish war versus those who speak forthrightly and covet peace.

I was recently reminded of this dangerous classification trend during a small waterfall of hundred dollar bills that filled my mailbox with many unsigned letters (by readers who strive to keep me afloat for a few more months), by one reader who noted that my willingness to consider the possibility that there were people without souls, called by some "organic portals," was really no different from other discriminatory schemes concocted by the world's worst despots, whether it was - to cite two well known examples - the way Adolf Hitler regarded Jews or Ariel Sharon regards Arabs. (Two peas in a pod, you might say.)

Assigning fundamental differences to various perceived groups was really no different, he asserted. And no less toxic. After all, most of the world's wars have been waged on the claims of one group being somehow less human than another. And most of these slanderous campaigns have been staged as a cynical excuse to steal something valuable from the supposedly evil group. (As is so obvious today in what we call the Middle East.)

So I had to admit the validity of his point. It's simply damaging and potentially tragic to arbitrarily classify any group as somehow morally inferior or intrinisically more sinister than another, even though that's what every religion in the world does to every other group all the time.

But the big problem for me in accepting his routinely moral assertion was that decades of evidence - hey, just read the newspapers! - clearly shows that some hard-to-identify group was provoking all these conflicts throughout history for the express purpose of making large amounts of money from instigating wars.

When you really read the real history of the 20th century, you come to understand that one small group of very rich men has controlled both sides in all the major wars. And controls them still, always counting the cash, but never the bodies.

I don't know about you, but this is not the way my parents taught me to be. Hence, the temptation to contemplate theories that explain heartless avarice and mass murder without a second thought. I tell myself that this is something that I and my friends would not do. So, is there actually a different breed of cat, a darker pigmentation in some human hearts, that rules people differently from those I know and love? Are some people missing some essential biological ingredient of humanity?

The question is .... are there really shadow people? Judging by the behavior of American troops in Iraq, who murder innocent families as if they are only electronic silhouettes in some video game, or of Israeli soldiers, who make sport out of shooting Palestinian children for no reason other than their own Talmud-induced pathology of superiority, it appears that there really are.

I mean, what part of "Thou shalt not kill" - the central thesis of all religious thought - don't they understand? Everyone agrees there are no caveats to this. But in the space between agreement and practice lies the shadow. And tragedy. And very possibly the end of all life on this planet.

Let me take great care to define what I mean by shadow people.

I'm not talking about Art Bell's shadow people, which apparently are visual apparitions that appear when your eyes are focused in another direction, and are never there in the spot you thought you saw them when you actually fix your gaze on that spot. Nor am I talking about Carlos Castaneda's brujos, who apparently are people you talk to who later are proven not to really exist, which may actually have been a private joke about don Juan Matus himself.

I'm not talking about ghosts, spirits, time travelers, ectoplasmic wraiths, interdimensional beings, or people who reside in other physical realities like supposedly Nick Herbert.

I'm talking about people who say one thing and do another, people like George Bush and Dick Cheney (and Bill Clinton and Al Gore), people who mouth pleasant platitudes and then thoughtlessly commit atrocities, which they then spin as heroic deeds essential to your well-being (which presumably is why they always cost so much money).

Could it be true, as many people believe, that these belligerent cads were born without souls? Not likely, I suspect.

And I'm talking about Mr. Ordinary American, too, who, when you tell him that 9/11 was an inside job, his face goes slack and his mind goes blank. And when you present him with the mountains of evidence indicating the undeniability of your statement, he just quivers and turns away, muttering "our government would never do something like that" without daring to contemplate the reality that our leaders "do something like that" every day.

Yes, the fabled Mr. Ordinary American, who, when you tell him the 2004 election was fixed and that Kerry actually won it with a large margin of electoral votes except for the computer shenanigans that reversed the decision, accuses you being some kind of liberal delusionary, even when you explain you have utter contempt for both major candidates, and don't believe a thing either of them ever said.

Mr. Ordinary American, who can't hear a word when you say he threw away the lives of his own children on a war that was lie because he actually believed what he heard on television.

And beyond that, Mr. and Mrs. Ordinary Human Being, residing anywhere on the planet, who believe that some venerated superbeing, usually named God, controls their every movement, and that the God of their neighborhood is most definitely better than and superior to any other God that has ever been invented anywhere else.

What is wrong with all these people? And why are they in such a preponderant majority, so that the wars never cease, and lying for profit has always been the dominant way of life?

Well, I'm going to tell you now. I'm going to make it perfectly clear. I'm going to lay it all out in excruciating detail for you. And if you turn away and say, "That guy's wacked!", that means you're one of the shadow people, still controlled by a demon you dare not confront. But if you understand what I'm saying, well, that means there's still a faint ray of hope for this planet, dim though it may be.

We all carry with us the shadow of death. It is, as the natural scientists have said for a long time, what distinguishes humans from all of our fellow animal species. Foreknowledge of death. It rules every move we make.

To deny that we die, and invent some strategy that when our mortal bodies expire we either go to some cool place - to go bowling with the angels, just as an example - or get sucked into some ephemeral process that some people call the bardo (which is like some dark carnival funhouse where all these scary faces pop out at you, reminding you of every nasty thing you've done in your entire life) and therein choose the time and place (and parents) of your next incarnation - all these mental machinations are constructed to deny the obvious. That when our hearts stop and our brains cease all functions a few minutes later, that's the end of us as individuals. After that, we're mulch. Our contributions to the universe end there, and what we have done is all we will ever possess for all of eternity.

I know that this will come as a shock to many of you, and you will squirm and wriggle and deny with every fiber of your being that this is the case. Why? Simple. Our brains absolutely refuse to contemplate our own nonexistence. They fight with every fact at their disposal to create a scenario where this is not the case, because they are wired to survive, not to cease functioning. And yet they do.

Numerous philosophers have reflected that the human curse is having an infinite imagination trapped in a finite body. Based on the primary instinct to survive, the body's mind rejects the notion of a limited amount of life in time and finds a way to transcend it by any means possible. Logic, reality and reason become nonfactors and spirit is born. And the entire populace commits to the conspiracy, because it gives them the answer they sought. Spirit is born, and the soul is its offspring. And along with them form parasitic religions, which trade on and profit from the desire of people to avoid death by providing concocted formulas to do just that. None of these formulas actually work, but no one in the conspiracy will admit it, because that result is not desired. This is a clear case of reality is not desired. The illusion is more comfortable. Insecurity is eliminated by eternal life.

But because it is not real, the fear remains. The purpose of religion cannot be proven, it can only be believed. And since it is such an obvious lie, the honest mind eventually comes to know it is a lie, and begins to hate itself for lying, for being afraid of the ultimate truth, which is that we don't live forever, and have but a little time to make the most of what we have been given.

Given by whom? We can only guess. We call it God. But even the lamest cleric will admit we cannot know God in its entirety. God is only a word, after all. Some unfathomable process that we call God invented man, but man invented the word and concept of God in a feeble attempt to explain the unexplainable.

And what have we been given? Well, if you're lucky like me (and who knows why?), we have been given a slice of paradise, a sensual experience so astonishingly beautiful that we can make no other sense of it that to eventually believe that a seemingly omnipotent force has created the very conditions of heaven right on this little blue and green spheroid. That's why I always say, heaven is not something somewhere else to be sought, it is right here, and we're put here to make it what it is supposed to be - heaven!

But we - each of us - only get a little time to do it. And none of us every really succeeds, except in small ways, for the benefit of only a few people. But that in itself is exquisite proof that this really is heaven, if only we make it so.

For sure, thinking heaven is somewhere else and yearning for it is the surest way to make this place hell, which is exactly what we've done for the last 5,000 years, thanks in large part to believing that God is somewhere else and we want to go there rather than realizing God is right here, helping us all the time to make the Earth heaven. This has happened in large part BECAUSE religions have told us that heaven was somewhere else, instead of right here.

The only real fruits of religions can be seen flashing from the barrel of a gun, and heard in the moans of the innocent wailing for their unjustly murdered loved ones. This is what religions seek to accomplish, and they succeed, because people have decided not to understand what life is really about, or the true nature of the gift we have been given.

In being greedy and expecting to find a magic formula that will insulate us from the inevitability of death (can't you see it's the way the system works?), we trash the very things that give us life in the first place. And thanks to psychotic marching orders like the Book of Revelation, we are very likely to destroy the conditions that allow us this great gift of life simply because we refuse to accept the condition of our gift, that it does not last forever, that nothing lasts forever, not even our great and wild universe.

That's why I always say, without death, the possibility of goodness would not exist. When you have to sacrifice everything to achieve the right thing, that is love. If we lived forever, none of these things would matter, since we would have everything we wanted, and nothing would mean anything to us.

Therefore, believing that we have everything in the security of an eternal life is precisely what is causing us to trash our planet and murder innocent people with impunity, because the lies our minds know are lies but our mouths nevertheless say in order to vainly attempt to convince ourselves that we don't die are lashing out in unexpected ways.

We are blinded by this false light of our own creation, an inauthentic abomination that deep in our hearts and minds we know is a lie. Yet we are transfixed by this artificial light, because it keeps us from realizing our clock is ever ticking and our lease will be soon be up. (Any resemblance of this light to a TV screen is not purely coincidental.)

To really see, and to really know why we are here, we may not keep insisting that we will live forever by the power of magic incantations and formulas, but we must screw up our courage and wander into the darkness of our own shadows, and begin to understand how the seepage from this gigantic ontological lie is causing all this unnecessary death and destruction. We delude ourselves into thinking that killing enemies prolongs our own life, but that is only a fearful illusion.

Once upon a time I said, true warmth is found in the coldest dream. Now I would suggest that the brightest light is found confronting the deepest darkness.

It is not an exaggeration to say that everything depends on you understanding this. It will not take many more days of ignoring this problem for all of us to perish permanently in the abyss of our own self-deception, with no one left to say this was the epitaph of the shadow people, destroyed by their own fearful religions.

John Kaminski is a writer who lives near the eternal ocean in a fading paradise called Florida. His numerous Internet essays are for sale in anthologies at http://www.johnkaminski.com/

Comment (from Signs of the Times): Another thoughtful piece from John Kaminski. While there are many points with which we agree, our own experience has shown us that one must not throw out that ineffable something that becomes twisted and distorted when looked at through the lens of religion just because a corrupted mirror image of it has been used to justify war and the extermination of "non-believers". We agree completely with Kaminski's discussion of the use and consequences of religion in our world. We think, however, that there is a more sophisticated way of understanding the issues he is raising. He is getting rid of that element which makes the distinction between organic portals and others fundamental, understandable, and something more than the justification for criminal activity raised in the objection by one of his readers.

Kaminski, while accepting that there are two types of people in the world, is arguing that any and all belief in an afterlife or something greater than ourselves is a manipulation put in place by the "Shadow People" to keep us enslaved. He sums this up early in his piece when he writes:

All these fantastic mythologies are clearly a case of trying to blame others for guilt that is our own.

Rather than "guilt", we would use the word "responsibility", and while we put a higher probability on the existence of these other beings than Kaminski does, we are entirely in agreement with his analysis that many people use "fantastic mythologies" as a cop-out. "The Devil made me do it". "The Space Brothers will save us." "I killed for God."

Yet a belief in beings from other dimensions or even in some indescribable something that we unfortunately label God for lack of a better word or better understanding in no way lessens our responsibility for ourselves, our acts, and for our lives. Whether or not there is something greater than ourselves, this responsibility is our own, and we clearly live in a world where people do not accept that responsibility, sometimes because we fob it off on God and sometimes because we say there is no God. Both excuses work. In both cases, we justify the slaughter of others in the name of a higher good, be it religious or political or merely selfish.

The more conscious among us have always downgraded these sensationalized spirits - whether inspirational or injurious - into mere metaphors for life's natural processes.

Here we have more of a disagreement, especially with the use of the value judgment "the more conscious among us". Perhaps they are only "metaphors", but they may well not be. To ignore the potential of their reality, if they are in fact real, would be to fall into a dangerous trap. Perhaps Kaminski's problem is that he feels forced to choose only between the gods of organised religions, in whose names countless wars have been fought, and the anti-religion atheist stance which posits that there is nothing more than this life. Faced with choosing between such a limited pair of options, we can understand that Kaminski has opted for the atheist view. After all, no one ever fought a war over there being no god at all.

There is, however, a major assumption behind the belief that there is nothing more to life than physical reality: that mankind is the crown of creation.

When we look out onto the world, we see a vast array of life, from the smallest one-celled creatures up to Man. There it stops. Is it logical to assume that we are the top of the heap or is it simply a convenient belief because our telescopes have never revealed the existence of more highly evolved beings gazing back down upon us from the stars? [And here we exclude sightings of UFOs or the claims of remains from other civilisations on Mars for the case of this argument.] Many forms of life have only become known to us as our mechanical means of magnifying the very small have developed. It was the microscope that permitted us to see forms of life that we had never before imagined. Before that, we had no idea that one-celled creatures could exist.

Is it not reasonable to leave open the possibility that other forms of life might exist that are higher up on the evolutionary scale, or even the food chain, and that it is the means of perceiving them that are missing? Science would have us limit our tools for viewing such creatures to apparati with needles, gauges, read-outs, computer screens, and the like, tools that have been successful in identifying the extremely small.

But is that a reasonable limit to set?

In fact, many people claim they have seen other types of beings. There are stories that come down through history as myth and legend that describe interactions with them. Accounts from widely separated parts of the globe and widely removed periods of time have a remarkable similarity of detail and description of how these beings interact with humans. Often, as with Kaminski's argument, these accounts are dismissed. These encounters have been subsumed into different religions, and, having already dismissed these religions, the encounters are left by the wayside as well. They are reduced to the level of metaphor.

We think this is a mechanical reaction to the problem.

We think that a more productive approach does not throw out all the evidence but carefully and painstakingly sorts through the data, attempting to make sense of myth and legend by broadening the scope of science. Many physicists think that we must find a way to incorporate consciousness into the mathematical equations that describe both quantum and classical physics. The field has stagnated for many, many decades, and such a plan of research may be the way out. Of course, scientists who dismiss the idea of the ineffable out of hand, before the final Grand Unified Theory of physics is found, have already closed off what may well be the one fruitful path left open to us. Before we "know", they have already decided upon the limit of that which is, and is not, possible.

We think that John Kaminski makes the same mistake.

As our science progresses, perhaps we will discover that what we call "fantastic mythologies" is in fact a "natural process".

Discriminatory Schemes

Kaminski refers to a message he received from a reader who reduces the idea of the two types of humanity to the same argument used by the Nazis, or Sharon, or anyone who wishes to subjugate or eliminate an enemy. We see the pattern playing out in Iraq where many American troops consider the Iraqis or any Arab to be less than human. Kaminski's reader rejects the argument for 'organic portals' because it can be used as a way to draw differences than can justify repression.

Although Kaminski admits the validity of the argument, he goes on to say that the facts strongly suggest that there is indeed a group that is somehow different.

It is an argument that we have also heard against our analysis of the existence of 'organic portals'. At first glance, it may appear to have some foundation. However, when one looks at the details, we see that the theories and classifications that have in the past provided justification for the worst crimes against humanity are very different from the idea of 'organic portals'.

First, in our world, any theory that divides people into groups can be used by some sicko as a justification for oppression. That is the problem of life in a world where some people are driven by an overwhelming need to exert power over others. It doesn't matter what the specifics of difference may be; difference will always be used in a judgmental way to imply a relationship of superiority/inferiority. Differences exist. Should we, because of the danger that someone will use such divisionary tactics to oppress others, cease attempting to group similar things together? Comparing and contrasting are two powerful ways our reason works. To jettison them means we must rid ourselves of our capacity to reason.

But just as modern science and modern society often takes our reasoning abilities too far, that is, yanks them out of context and places them above our capacity to feel and intuit, our comparing and contrasting of individuals must remain in context.

What is that context?

Most schemes used to divide are based upon race, nationality, religion, colour, wealth, birth status, and so on. In other words, they are tied to elements that are part and parcel of the material world and its systems of power and control. In this way, leaders, and those above the leaders, can constantly set people against people in battles over those elements of life that are important in this world, those elements they need in order to maintain their control, their manipulations, their power.

The distinction that we raise between the 'organic portal' and the human has nothing to do with power in this world; it has to do with one's ability to perceive influences that come from that 'ineffable something'. Those who really see and understand the difference of which we speak, will have no interest in lording it over anyone in the here and now, while not acting upon the knowledge could have disastrous consequences for the evolution of their souls.

What is the nature of this action, this application of the knowledge? The finding of ways to conserve one's energy for doing the work necessary to growing the soul, to fusing the many 'Is' of the Personality into our one 'Real 'I'. We learn to stop 'dancing' with the 'organic portals' around us, to stop allowing them to set our agendas. In so doing, we become masters of ourselves, not of others.

Of course, this hypothesis can be used in deleterious ways, but this only shows that, those who do so, do not really understand of what we speak. Nor do they understand the far-reaching implications: that this world is as it is and cannot be changed because half of the people living here are incapable of the changes necessary to make it "heaven on earth". This is their world.

We get the impression that Kaminski has not really understood the implications of the existence of two types of humanity and has not followed through the argument to its logical consequences. The organic portal and the psychopath do what they do, not because they are "bad" but because that is who they are, the way a cat stalks a mouse because it is part of its "catness". These people could no more give up their need for ever greater power or material wealth and success than the cat could stop chasing after the mouse. It doesn't matter whether or not there is a hereafter or beings of a different consciousness than ours. You can factor out all the aspects Kaminski excludes in his argument, and the organic portal is still different, still has a different ontological reality than the person who, as Kaminski describes, would never commit mass murder or be driven by heartless avarice. It is not simply a different version of "cat", as Kaminski uses in his argument above; we are talking about a fundamental difference in nature or essence. Note that we said "difference", not "bad" or "lesser", just different.

Certainly, the question of death hangs heavily over us all. The idea of an afterlife where we are judged and condemned according to our sins is a very useful tool for managing society. It can drive people to sacrifice themselves and live in misery all of their lives for the hope of an eternal reward. It can also inspire people to be the best they can, to be giving, to care for others. Our work suggests an explanation for why some people go in one direction while others go in the opposite.

But again, we think that dismissing the possibility that life doesn't end at death because of the way this threat is held over us by the powers that control our world is too easy, too crude. It is a mechanical reaction, not a well-thought out and considered response. More than that, it may be the response that our controllers hope and plan for, counting on our mechanical nature to be reactive and not creative.

The Other Side

What if our idea is close to reality? What if there is some relationship between soul and genetics, between our genetic make-up and our ability to perceive what are called the 'B' influences? If so, then we must consider the possibility that those who do not have our interests, our real interests, at heart may also be aware of the importance of genetics and may well be doing research into understanding what those genes may be. They certainly have the money, the power, and the scientists to carry out such work. If they were ever to identify these genes, they could then produce weapons genetically targeted precisely at those individuals who had the potential for understanding the deepest truths about our world. In fact, you could almost bet that they would be doing such work.

The mechanical reaction to this knowledge would then drive us more deeply into the cords that bind us to a mechanical fate. We would remain a part of the machine rather than rising above it through the application of our creative potential. We would become its victims.

Our reading of this article suggests to us that John Kaminski has not yet come to grips with the true horror facing us. He still believes that there is some hope in this world, that this world can be changed, can be fixed. Perhaps he had a glimpse and has momentarily taken a step backwards. He would not be the first person to whom that has happened. It may even be worse. Having come to the threshold of understanding what may be the fundamental esoteric truth of our life here on this planet, Kaminski may be been bombarded with attention from the Masters he does not believe exist, or even from the "Shadow People" whose existence he does see. In the face of this ultimate horror, the mechanical force can set in and seek explanations that rid the knowledge of its core, turning it from its higher meaning to a strictly material meaning.

Without understanding the esoteric truth of the hypothesis of the organic portal, one will continue to fight the windmills and never come to see they are an illusion.