WMail ezine "Radio Silent" Essay

        A hundred years ago, there were no automobiles and no aeroplanes (except rare prototypes), no radio or television, electric lights made a shimmering new wonderland of the cities, telephones and telegraph were state of the art communication, and railroads were just beginning to convert from coal to oil as fuel for their steam locomotives.
        Here at the beginning of the XXIst Century, we are bombarded by electromagnetic radiation of a thousand frequencies, every minute of every day – from cell phones and wireless internet, satellites, radio and TV and microwave towers, from garage door openers, 'fast pass' units at gas stations, microwave ovens, and the HAARP Project. And low frequency sonar testing by the U.S. Navy is killing the whales.
        There is nowhere that anyone can hide from this invisible onslaught.

And we each are bombarded with more data in a day than Leonardo da Vinci absorbed during his lifetime. There are now mini-TV sets showing advertisements in elevators and in line at the grocery store, and both innocuous muzak and thumpa-thumpa boom-boxes are everywhere, and chain movie theaters blatantly show a half hour of noisy ads to their paying customers. And the monotony of traffic while listening to talk-show fulminations and the bone-crushing ride along our decrepit streets and highways don't help any.
There is not a moment's peace, for any of us but the most confirmed Luddite.

The content of this electronic barrage is either violent or mind-numbing or prurient, demanding that we sell our souls for shoddy material goods that are priced beyond our means. Current pay scales match those of workers on the pyramids, and we've all been downsized and demoralized and secret-taxed in order to swell the already-bulging coffers of the Oligarchy.

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        But there is someplace that the Individual can retreat to, an 'inner sanctum' that is available at all times, though the Culture-Structure would keep its existence unknown and access out of our reach. The Culture-Structure's enmity toward this achievement is based on one fact: it is free to all who can accomplish it.
        In fact, the purpose of the constant storm of sleazy factoids and half-baked revelations – which MUST be of historic importance simply because the media purvey them – is to prevent you all from access to that still center of the Self, an objective state of mind that I call 'Radio Silent'. (I also use the term 'Zen state', because Eastern practices sometimes achieve the same end; the anthropologist Carlos Castañeda described an equivalent event that practitioners of ancient shamanism call 'stopping the world' – which is cessation of all that is not a Zen state: which latter is the self-generation of Being, of direct access to the world, without the filter of your automatic internal dialogue.)

This skill is learnable, like any other skill, but the problem, the almost-natural difficulty, is that all of Western culture (and plenty of Eastern) is designed to oppose this innate practice. Even those who pretend to teach yoga generally cannot access the product that they sell.

        Virtually every reader of this essay is reading along while the Little Voice In Your head gives a running commentary, an internal play-by-play recitation of opinion, conjecture, injunction, advice, warning, and general babble. You all listen to it, or tune it out, or argue with it, but the commentary persists non-stop. I am certain that you have one, whether you can tune it in at the moment or not: the only humans who do not have a Little Voice In Their head are those who were born deaf. The Little Voice is automatic, you cannot turn it off, it goes everywhere that you do.
        And this automatic Little Voice that you have no control over is what you believe is meant by the term Thinking.
        Sorry, guys. This is the False Mind, a little device that has been installed to interfere with your ability to – or even knowledge of – that which is the center of your Self, the Working Mind. For the Working Mind philosophy does not deliver something that you do not already have, this Working Mind, but instead this philosophy is designed to reveal and encourage you to develop the dormant Working Mind that already exists by reducing your allegiance and obedience to the False Mind installed by the Culture-Structure, at the behest of the Oligarchy.

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        Any Individual can attain the internal state of Radio Silent – the elimination of the chatter of the False Mind / Little Voice – by any number of means. But the key, as always, is to recognize that the problem exists, to take Responsibility for your willingness to entertain the False Mind / Little Voice, and to take a Stand for the elimination of this interference with your Self-hood.
        You have to turn away from this familiar, life-long habit, which will always be there ready to return at the slightest invitation or weakness of Will. You have to reduce the garbage that the False Mind / Little Voice feeds on, to exorcise gossip-mongers among your friends and among the media. Begin to work with Objective facts: who said what?, who did what?, when did it occur?, did it occur?

        Reduce the input of garbage, and confront the automatic machinery that is in place. No surgeon can remove it, no Mozart-via-headphones can cloak it, even za-zen cannot get rid of it. The drug industry is based on removal of the False Mind / Little Voice, and yet notice that you are returned to 'normal' after the effects of the drug wear off. The action necessary is to develop the Working Mind – thru Reason – the strength of which will wear down the False Mind / Little Voice. Build up your Working Mind by honoring Values that empower. The increase of your dormant Working Mind will reduce the attention paid to the False Mind's dis-empowering content.
        The speed with which you move toward skill at attaining Radio Silent is entirely dependent on the effort that you make. You cannot fake the development of the Working Mind: you perform Right Action, or you do not.
        By reading Ayn Rand instead of Danielle Steele, you produce a move in the right direction. You might produce dribs and drabs of improvement by watching PBS instead of the Wrestling Channel, but you will produce even more by immersing yourself in that which empowers. Seek out great books, art, and intellectual pursuits of all kinds – to counteract the pull of the Culture-Structure for sleaze. Read the biographies and writings of great men – Churchill, Tesla, R. Buckminster Fuller, Albert Camus, Edward Abbey – and of great women – Amelia Earhart, Frida Kahlo, Eleanor Roosevelt, Helen Keller, Rosa Parks.
        You can sit and watch a sunset or sunrise or moonrise, or play patty-cake with a toddler, or take up a new non-verbal hobby, like whittling or crochet. Or spend actual unalloyed Quality Time with your children or spouse, without use of electronic gadgets or crowds or the glandular rush of velocity.
        Pursue and engage in content that empowers, as antidote to the disease of the Culture-Structure. Read stage plays by O'Neill, Ibsen, Shaw. Fiction by Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Twain. Read non-fiction by Joseph Campbell, W. Edwards Deming, Eric Berne. See great romantic-heroic films by John Ford [1894-1973], Akira Kurosawa [1910-88], Frank Capra [1897-1991], films by François Truffaut [1932-84] and Ingmar Bergman [1918-2007] and Satyajit Ray [1921-92].

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The garbage-mouth automatic False Mind / Little Voice in your head would revolt another human being if they could hear it. But they are likewise busy pretending that they don't have one, lest the secret be revealed. As long as everyone maintains the secrecy, as in "The Emperor's New Suit" by Hans Christian Andersen, then the Oligarchy and the Culture-Structure are in control where you are. You regain control when you say that you are going to develop your innate Working Mind, when you say that you will empower yourself by confronting the existence of your automatic False Mind / Little Voice, when you take on the intention to reduce the False Mind / Little Voice so that you can listen to the Silence.

I say that 'God is in the Silence'. To the extent that you can turn off or turn down or ignore the blather of your False Mind, then you have a chance at becoming a God. The ability to listen to the Silence will provide you with access to Objective Reality, to your Self, to your Working Mind – that which empowers. Just the intention to begin the journey is the Second Step to developing your Working Mind.

Silence is your only access to your Self, and to the extent that that you do access Silence, you will become a god among men, because the Self is the source of all Power.

The preceding is an excerpt from Chapter 33 of my forthcoming book, "Working Minds: A Philosophy of Empowerment".

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The WMail Newsletter EssaysVolume III - Issue #30: December 2002

"Radio Silent"

The WMail Newsletter Essays
Volume III - Issue #30: December 2002