A. Duality: The Default Thought System
Topics: Dependence on unstable factors, Manipulation by greedy entities for whom the end justifies the means aka “covert elites.” Us and Them. Psychological Operations
In a recent YouTube video discussing the assassination of Charlie Kirk, Chase Hughes, author of The Tipping Point, argues that mainstream media perpetuates a hard-core binary narrative, portraying society as a battleground of far-right and far-left extremists. It discourages independent thought and aggressively shapes public perception to fit a covert agenda. It rejects the notion of society as a collective of ordinary people engaged in everyday activities—eating, sleeping, walking, talking, loving each other, or quietly watching the sunset from a front porch. Instead, it fosters division by legitimizing rage and promoting violence as a reasonable means of resolving conflict.
Aligned with powerful political figures who depend on large sums of money to remain in office, its lackeys are incentivized to impede pending legislation that holds individuals accountable for their words. It promotes hate speech under the aegis of free speech and supports anonymity through avatars, which conceals the identities of those who spread its vitriol. Like criminals (naturally it’s all “legal), these so-called masters of the universe…a wealthy elite with vast resources…are driven by an insatiable desire for power and wealth. According to Hughes, this “covert elite” dreads nothing more than the erosion of their influence, a threat they perceive if and when their billions begin to dwindle to millions. While rational people who appreciate the zero-sum nature of life experience JOMO, the joy of missing out on the downside of greed and other unhealthy psychological tendencies, this cohort suffers greatly at the hands of FOMO, the fear of missing out, which motivates them to continue exclusively pursuing shallow material ends.
1. PsyOps and Covert Elite: Manufacturing Consent Through Duality
Duality is the belief that the appearance of things is the reality of things, which leads to unintended consequences. However, the covert media elite, actively promotes duality at every level. It capitalizes on the illusion that our individual fears and desires are distinct, when, in truth, they are proxies for a single universal longing: to be free from fear and desire itself.
The media amplifies fear, broadcasting it relentlessly across every communication device, day and night, not because reality is inherently threatening—one it is investigated, it is revealed to be remarkably benign—but because the mere perception of threat transforms rational, clear-thinking individuals into easily manipulated, fearful, violence-embracing fanatics. This urgent message lights up our screens: I can’t love and respect you because you’re different! This propaganda, masquerading as the light of truth, fuels division as the covert media’s profits pile up in darkness and ordinary people worry about financial security in daylight.
If universal common-sense values gain traction, media’s fear of losing control intensifies and rational voices…think Spinoza, Mahatma Gandhi, Yitzhak Rabin, and Martin Luther King Jr. are unceremoniously unalived. The media sees people, even our grey-haired leaders, as little more than lifelong children for whom facts rarely Trump fears.
Manufactured Consent
Recent history illuminates how unconscious forces shape behaviour. Eddie Bernays, author of a book published in 1928 entitled “Propaganda” and the inventor of the concept of “manufactured consent,” pioneered the application of Freud’s theories of unconscious drives to public relations, advertising, and consumer marketing. He argued that appealing to subconscious forces—rooted in Freud’s concepts of id, ego, and superego—enables companies to sell products and shape consumer culture more effectively than relying on rational appeals. Bernays orchestrated campaigns that linked consumer goods to deep-seated emotional needs. For example, he rebranded cigarettes “Torches of Freedom”, symbols of women’s emancipation, tapping into universal desires for rebellion and equality, significantly boosting tobacco sales among women and indirectly among men who felt the need to bond women attached to cigarettes, hardly a desirable outcome for the health of the nation. Note that the billboard wants us to “Reach for a lucky instead of a sweet.”
By encouraging physicians to endorse a heavy breakfast of carb-heavy toast, clogging eggs and fatty bacon, he framed bacon as a wholesome, doctor-approved choice, leveraging trust in authority figures to cement its place in American breakfast culture, to the delight of hog and egg farmers everywhere.
Psychological Warfare
PsyOps, which is just propaganda, in wartime situations may be useful to defend a country’s values, but in the hands of materialistic sharks binge-feeding deep in a peacetime ocean of affluenza, it is proving to be a nightmare, because it encourages and legitimizes hate. Yes, we have our small everyday dislikes upsold as hates, but we generally keep them to ourselves, or only share them with intimates we trust. Normal societies don’t promote it. Hate only injures the hater in the beginning but dwell on it and people die unnecessarily when it eventually spills into action. Not in droves, but enough to scare the hell out of society, keeping the coffers of the covert elite overflowing with almighty God’s hard-earned dollars, and ordinary people at each other throats. By perpetuating a hard-core binary narrative, this dark arm of the media ensures that division prevails, obscuring the loving beautifully intelligent spiritual oneness behind it.
Sadly, Hughes’ gloomy analysis is mostly correct and toward the end of his video he briefly mentions the word God, which is the next step, but the video ends with a desire that this assassination becomes a tipping point presaging a return to sanity. Rational people want a tipping point to be sure, but what tips one way eventually tips back the other way when the next demagogue captures the imagination of a disaffected citizenry. Life is a self-equilibrating zero-sum matrix.
B. What’s God Got to Do with It?
Topics: Action (karma) yoga and knowledge (jnana) yoga. Good (dharma) and evil (adharma), religion and Self inquiry
Reality does not need a big remote God person sitting in a transcendental sky passing judgement on us…our own healthy and unhealthy actions reward and punish us sufficiently. God is the total network of physical, psychological and moral laws into which we are unceremoniously thrust by our karma. Vedanta rhetorically asks, “What isn’t God?”
PsyOps, as Hughes presents it, operates in the dark material side of the psychological sphere. In the best of all possible worlds, religion should fill the other side and encourage the growth and maintenance of the heart and mind. Unfortunately, it seems this isn’t the best of all possible worlds, in so far as history not only lights up the moral benefits of religion but also the immense harm inflicted over the last few thousand years by unpurified religious zealots. To its credit, it has not failed to point out the good and evil foisted on us by secular entities of all persuasions, either. Evil, popularly known as the “devil” by certain primitive religious types, is just ignorance of the perfection of God’s creation and all the entities in it. Ignorance is destroyed by God knowledge.
The Universal Expectation of Non-Injury
Unlike Neo-Vedanta, which has thrown the God baby out with the religious bath, traditional Vedanta points out that our relationship with our primary caregiver…God…precedes our relationship with our worldly parents, who shape our spiritual and material values going forward. God appears in this world as a universal expectation of non-injury in thought, word and deed, what Vedic culture calls dharma. It is built-in. Saints and most ordinary people appreciate and practice it. Even scoundrels are mindful of it and the worst of our lot…hit-men, who seem to enjoy a certain sympathy among haters… sleep with pistols under their pillows.
No man is an Island – Karma Yoga
Sane individuals appreciate the fact that we are interdependent and that it pays to honor all beings as perfect children of God, in so far as we depend on each other to fulfill our number one priority, survival. No man is an island. Without shared spiritual values life is war. Common sense Karma Yoga is the way to practice true religion. It is offering all your actions to God before you do them and taking the results as gifts from God. If you respect God, you will respect yourself. Needless to say, if you respect God, you will not offer God-insulting actions to the world, which is non-separate from God and the world will benefit. Because the field of existence is conscious it naturally loves you back and your self-esteem grows. Vedanta explains the benefits of Karma Yoga as worship of God exhaustively in the Bhagavad Gita so there is no need to unfold it in detail here. There is no downside to the practice of Karma Yoga, whereas the consequences of commitment to desire and fear-oriented actions is always subject to the zero-sum rule: joy and sorrow prove to be woven fine.
The Value of Values
Understanding the value of values is an important aspect of Knowledge (jnana) Yoga, which is based on verses in two chapters of the Bhagavad Gita. Without a moral compass pointing true north, freedom isn’t free. Sanity is appreciation of universal values: don’t lie, cheat, or steal, etc. Needless to say, in affluent societies sanity is unappreciated but fortunately like insanity, it is contagious. Vedanta defines insanity as ignorance of the wholeness of the non-dual nature of reality, an appreciation of the identity of a pure and perfect God and God’s pure and perfect “children,” meaning all sentient beings. If you believe that you are separate, inadequate, and incomplete, you are insane because there is no evidence to support this conclusion, apart from the well-meaning but incorrect belief inculcated by your secondary caregivers, your parents and society beyond. Sin, the belief in separation, is yummy fodder for the mainstream media, not to mention certain religions, allowing both to manipulate us to their hearts content. It must be quarantined.
A Straightforward Solution If you don’t feed ignorance, it collapses. You starve it by asserting the truth. Try it on your own mind. Educate yourself like this, “I’m a pure and perfect human being as God made me. I’m whole and complete before duality turns me into an American or a Russian, man or woman, rich or poor, black or white, liberal or conservative etc.” Seriously commit to Vedanta and it will set you free.
C. Beyond God and Man
Topics: Non-duality, Free will, The unborn Self
God creates, sustains and destroys the universe. It doesn’t live or die because It was never born, unlike all living and non-living things in the creation. It is unintelligent to rely on the whims and fancies of individual living beings for our security or to trust collective karma to protect us from the tangled web of desires and fears motivating our actions. The Bhagavad Gita points out that whereas the creation is zero sum, God Itself is no-sum. No sum means that reality is non-dual, appearances to the contrary notwithstanding. There are no parts to add and subtract. There is nothing to gain and nothing to lose…only peace. And because there are not two things in reality, God and sentient entities intersect, meaning they share a completely secure identity. Both the creator and Its creatures are unborn existence shining as blissful awareness/consciousness, the spiritual factor. As previously mentioned, “What isn’t God?”
If I am eternal unborn consciousness I needn’t worry about life and death, killing and being killed. Because of this fact, Vedanta seems to sanction violence and has been regularly accused of being atheistic, which could not be further from the truth. Life and death are part of the zero-sum matrix. Only the body/mind/sense complex, which is not myself, lives and dies. Nothing can be done about it, so worry about it is a waste of our precious mental and emotional resources.
Is the Kirk killing about life and death or is it about something else? If I identify with the body, life is a valuable but unreliable resource. It is valuable because it is so beautiful, but it is unreliable because life implies disease, old-age and death. So, whereas the security of the body is our most important desire, it is also our greatest fear. See the zero-sum.
Free Will
From the spiritual point of view, life and death is a ho-hum no-sum because I am an eternal spiritual entity. But from the material point of view, it is a precious but precarious gift. The question now becomes, am I free to choose my identity?
From Dependence to Independence
We know that dependence on the world doesn’t work, but God is reliable. It brought me here, knows what I need to do and has gifted me with the talents and abilities to achieve success. Understanding that as an active doer, I may influence what happens but do not control what happens, I live my life as Karma Yoga. Keeping in mind the Creator’s gift of life I offer my actions as gifts of love, learning from unwanted experiences. My work is my worship. I am sensitive to others’ feelings and avoid sharing beliefs and opinions, which I usually sell as hard and fast knowledge, that might hurt them. I don’t lie. I shift my focus from my birth parents to a no-binary Mother/Father God and associate mostly with spiritual companions, which transforms sentimentality into true sentiment.
Reflection Teaching
When I look in a mirror, I see the frame, the glass, and my reflected face. The frame and glass belong to the mirror, but the face is mine. Similarly, objects belong to the world, but joy belongs to me.
Once I acknowledge my dependence on God and no longer require it, I transfer my devotion to the one and only Self. This final step is difficult because my attachment to things and beings made me weak. To overcome weakness, I assert my true identity as the eternal unborn witness of all that is. Everything depends on me, is born in me, rests in me, and dissolves into me. Scripture…God’s words…informs me that I am nondual existence shining as consciousness, the cause and support of the world. I need no external support. The Heart knows it is true.
Knowledge Yoga Builds Confidence.
I trust God, but do I trust myself? Vedanta (knowledge yoga)builds self-confidence. Each day, I gain the power to face its challenges. I don’t reject God but pray to God for success in Self inquiry. Self-dependence is true independence, while God-dependence is still dependence. I never feel completely satisfied when I experience dependence. The world exists because it is known to exist, but it is only apparently real like a dream. An apparently real phenomenon is as good as unreal phenomena, which means that you can stop depending on the world because it is unreal. If you knew it was unreal when you set out to conquer it, would you set out to conquer it? God is real but that doesn’t make me real unless I can discover the point where we are non-different. Vedanta is god’s words meant to reveal our non-difference from existence shining as whole and complete consciousness.
Join the seminar in October for Astavakra Gita which continues this train of thought and explains confidence building.
The Tipping Point, a video by Chase Hughes: https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/?tab=wm#inbox/WhctKLbmmDMlRhbWngNKRZjLzGhRfSqNbmXNmNcqJFwbsWQQrKJtmgtZjgHVTNJHjjlXXkg?projector=1
