First, who are “we”?
We are the ordinary human beings of the world, whose instinct is to stop harm being done to innocent women, men, boys and girls.
A grand experiment is being conducted in Gaza. It seeks to discover how far that instinctive human response to harm being done to innocents can be suppressed or overridden by conditioning.
That the instinctive human response can be suppressed or overridden is nothing new. It is ancient. The iconic climax of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey depicts a primal ancestor discovering the first weapon.
The rest is history.
The scenes of hell we are seeing from Gaza are the sum total of that history. It seems that even the great and awful lessons of the Jewish holocaust, the Rwandan holocaust, the Armenian holocaust, innumerable wars, pogroms, mobs, witch hunts and injustices, and the subsequent efforts of humanity—enormous efforts like the Nuremberg trials, which gave rise to the United Nations and the Geneva Conventions—to repair the damage have not yet served to break the demonic circuits of wrath and vengeance.
Many are seeing the crisis in the Middle East—the centre of the world as we know it—as our last chance.
It is rare for human beings to decouple themselves from those circuits. They summon the total charge available to us as energetic beings. We become wrathful gods, vengeful gods, re-enacting the Upanishads, Sumerian myths, Greek myths, the Bible, the Quran. We are charged with the power to smite all before us. Each of us has the power to destroy the world.
It takes a rare human to look beyond the crosshairs of rage. It takes a kind of peripheral vision, which takes in the consequences of all actions. In the video above, an ordinary human being, an American citizen who happens to be Muslim, embraces the murderer of his unfortunate son, a pizza delivery driver.
This father channels the divine power of compassion. Decoupled from demonic circuits, he sees the tragedy of the young man in the dock—a man who could not decouple himself from demonic circuits, stabbed to death the young man who delivered his pizza, and was condemned to 31 years behind bars. This magnificent act makes sense of the opening line of the Quran:
Oh God, the Most Beneficent, the Most Merciful.
It takes a rare human to embrace the collective suffering of the Jews, from Exodus to 2008, decouple himself from the circuits of vengeance and call the world to attention at their operation. The late Gerald Kaufman, veteran Labour MP, did just that in the UK House of Lords in 2009, after Israeli PM Ariel Sharon’s Operation Cast Lead, a 22-day military incursion into Gaza, which claimed 1400 Palestinian lives, most of them civilians. Readers wishing to know the background to Operation Cast Lead may start here.
Recently, hundreds of American objectors to Israel’s vengeance on the “human animals” of Gaza, staged a sit-down protest in New York’s Central Station. Many of the protestors were from Jewish Voice for Peace. There were 400 arrests.
Click the “Watch on YouTube” button to gauge global reaction to the video. Trust me, it is medicine to the poison channeled elsewhere.
It’s not often that Piers Morgan gains the respect of humanitarians or Muslims. His many critics were incensed at his interview with Palestinian Ambassador to the UK, Husam Zumlot. Morgan kept repeating the same question, did Zumlot condemn the Hamas attack of October 7. I discuss this here.
But Morgan is gaining the respect of journalists and viewers, among them humanitarians and Muslims, for inviting Husam Zumlot, British activist Lowkey and American Palestinian surgeon and comedian Bassem Youssef onto his show, Piers Morgan Uncensored. After yelling obscenities at Morgan during the Zumlot interview, I find myself nursing a cautious respect. Is Morgan genuinely moved by humanitarian concerns? Is he concerned with truth, as a journalist? Or is he a shrewd broadcaster harvesting subscribers?
Yesterday he invited Brooke Goldstein, founder of End Jew Hatred, Glenn Greenwald, (Jewish) investigative journalist and founder of independent news outlet The Intercept , and (American Muslim) Wajahat Ali, Daily Beast columnist and author of Go Back Where You Came From, And Other Helpful Recommendations on How to Become American.
Watch the video and discern for yourself who does a better job of decoupling from demonic circuits, and sample opinion via a quick glance at the comments. This is not an exercise in trying to figure whose side you’re on—we will come back to the question of sides—but in gauging demonic circuitry decoupling.
The Covid-19 grand experiment got demonic circuits firing on all sides. It was China. It was the CIA. You were a Nazi if you took the vaccine. You were a Nazi if you did not. I wrote a number of articles about it, calling for recognition of the mirror between the two sides and thus for a middle ground. e.g:
We are seeing the same thing in the ME experiment. One side arms itself with the victimhood of Jews from Exodus to October 7, the other with 75 years of apartheid oppression of the Palestinians. The war of words and images rages on.
I am participating in that war.
As a British Muslim (nominally), I have grown up with the Palestinian cause. It was frequently part of family discourse. I attended demonstrations. I once shook hands with Tony Benn.
I also made efforts to see the issue “from the other side,” engaging as best I could, as best they could, with Jews and Israeli Jews. Working at a Jewish creative agency during the Second Intifada of 2000, I remember an Israeli designer who had secretly designed a poster calling for the repatriation of Jewish Settlers either to Israel proper or to their country of birth. I also remember an argument with an Israeli account manager becoming heated.
At risk of virtue signalling: my diaspora of friends includes several Israelis; I am a great admirer of Noam Chomsky, Norm Finkelstein and Gabor Maté. I was once invited to the Hampstead home of an Israeli osteopath. He showed me a photograph of Haifa, his birthplace. It looked lovely. Another photograph showed him in military uniform. He had been a sergeant in the IDF. Sensing danger, we moved quickly on.
Uneasy with the lack of mention of the Middle East crisis I was seeing in my Facebook feed—and frustrated at the near total lack of engagement with my posts —I resorted to courting controversy. The other day I posted this:
It gained a little attention—16 likes and 88 comments, of which at least 10 are mine. So far I have not been able to convert that attention to subscriptions here on Substack.
Yes, this is a writer looking for an audience. Yes, this is exploiting tragedy for personal gain (or trying to). Yes, this is ego.
And yes, I caught flak for it.
Those against said I was using Facebook—home of pics of cats and haircuts—to guilt trip and shame people into agreeing with me. Apart from anything else, it wouldn’t work. Or how did I know what people really thought? There are valid reasons for not engaging with such a toxic fight on social media. I should be spreading love, not fear and loathing.
Those in agreement (perhaps) hit a few like buttons. One, who happens like me to be from a Muslim background commented.
To be honest, I remain disappointed by my mainly non-Muslim, mainly white FB friends. To be honest, the disappointment is mostly about their lack of engagement. The suffering artist in me wonders how much time does it take to hit the Like button or click a link? Do they know or give a shit how long it takes to research and write and edit? Am I not at least sticking my head above the parapet?
I have spent much of the last month on this. On my laptop. On my phone. Online and real world relationships have suffered. I wonder if I am damaging projects I am involved with. I wonder if, despite my near zero following, I have made onto some watchlist or other and will sooner or later be cancelled.
And like you, I am sensitive to the death throes of the Matrix. For that is what we are seeing. That is what we are in. Many, including Slavoj Zizek are calling it.
It is difficult not to be glib, saying it. It is difficult to convey its full import. Yet is is there. A nub of heaviness in the gut, in the heart, at the back of the head. Something inside us and yet not us is being activated. Demonic circuits ON.
Many will light up with the dark charge of these circuits. Many will react. Many more will repress. Some will wade half-assed into battle, touting propaganda in lieu of knowledge. Some will compete for the podium of victimhood. Others will lend their vocal cords or limbs to demonic energies. Maybe a Jewish kid gets thumped. Or a Muslim bus driver is besieged in his bus. Many will turn away, disgusted at Jews or Muslims or Hamas or the IDF. Some will write essays and hope they are read. Some will skip to the cat and haircut pictures.
Some will seize the confusion of the day to visit violence on women and children. Some will use the fog of war to drop bombs on ambulances and hospitals. The injustice will trigger other circuits, sooner or later nuclear circuits. This is not doom-mongering. We are already there. The ordinance dropped on Gaza is already equivalent to two nuclear bombs.
It is not for me to condemn those squeezing the triggers, or blowing the smokescreens of misinformation. It is not for me to condemn those who play God.
What to do? What not to do? There is no formula.
Speak or stay silent? March or stay home? Act out or go within? Witness or turn away? We must each be true to ourselves.
And what does that mean? There will be false turns, mistakes, slips of tongue and foot and maybe fist. Demonic circuits are well disguised. It seems to take a holocaust, a nuclear bomb, a tsunami, an apocalypse to uncover them.
Some will say, The hell with all that. Do what that wilt shall be the whole of the law. I think that’s a hell of a risk to take. Better at least to spread your bets and do unto others as you would have them do unto you. And be damn sure of what you would have done unto you!
The extermination of thousands of people collapses the complexities of the Matrix into two dimensions, a line, a hairline, “a silver line at the end of the world and beyond that nothing.” This is the tightrope we must all walk, this vanishingly fine line between the worlds.
Gateway to NaturalWisdom Co’s new shamanic self-mastery programme, The Mesa of Alchemy is a four month online retreat for anyone seeking to transform demonic circuits.
Work with the four elements, the shamanic mesa and the Gene Keys to unlock the genius of your natural wisdom and find purpose, creativity and last ing connection in life.
Take your place among 22 travellers and be held in sacred space as you move through 5 stages of alchemical transformation. Unwind wounds. Clock your circuitry. Find compassion for yourself, your universe and everyone in it.
For more on my forthcoming novel, LIGHT, and other words, music, magic and graphics, visit my website.
I very much understand "demonic circuits ON". When I try to sit with the sensations that arise in my body when I confront the torment of my Palestinian brothers and sisters trapped in Gaza right now, it is so intense and so scary that I feel like I am going to die and I can't feel it anymore so I turn away from it into anger and hatred and yes, even desire for vengeance against the perpetrators.... I have been working to expand my capacity to hold the suffering, to just sit and be with it and to fully feel it and alchemize it without escaping into hatred..... all I can say for myself now is that I have not given myself over to those dark forces, but not losing to them requires I severely limit my online time and engagement right now. Love to you brother.