What would Eckhart Tolle do with incontrovertible proof that 9/11 was an "inside job"?

Having been a long time reader of Eckhart Tolle's works and frequently listen to his audio books when driving I find myself wondering how somebody like him would react under certain conditions of stress or high emotion. How would "Power of Now" factor in, say, if Eckhart Tolle was stopped in traffic somewhere and somebody drove by and lobbed a hand grenade into his vehicle? Would an adrenaline rush ensue? Wild manic thought? ("Run!") Would the unthinking observer to his own thoughts slow things down? ("How interesting, there is a grenade in my car and my ego and my pain body are having a party"...*kaboom*..."and that's...ok")

Then as a lifelong junkie for conspiracy theories and fringe science I find myself more often asking myself the question "so what if it's true" with a completely different tonality lately. I used to think that if certain things were true it would be a travesty of unspeakable proportions and somewhere, somehow, there must be hell to pay for it! Now I wonder how I can just be free of these things and ask myself how I can be sure I'm not making a given situation worse. As a result, I find myself questioning all kinds of things that I think people are assumed never to question.

Many things we take for granted today are sustained by that lack of awareness, in fact they rely on it. Things like patriotism. Why is my particular country great and everybody else's morally inferior? Is it because I was born here and that's it? It seems pretty tenuous when you think about it, but we are encouraged from a very young age not to. Every political state, every power structure has a bunch of bodies buried in the backyard somewhere. Here in Canada, the land was taken from its original inhabitants in a pretty one-sided manner, the treatment of the Japanese during World War Two, and our complicity in various black-bag ops around the world (I won't name them here) all come to mind. Our hands our dirty, so is every other country's. But we are trained to never look at this with a critical eye. Suffice it to say that we are the greatest hockey nation on the face of the earth, our beer rocks and we are not Americans and that's about all it takes. Canada, number 1, eh.

My country does stuff and has done stuff that we would use as justification against another country for war. Happens all the time and every country does it. When we do it, it's ok. When you do it, it's war! It's a type of culturally ingrained one-sidedness I've heard called "American exceptionalism" that applies to everybody. It seems to make patriotism an absurd belief that 2 + 2 = 4, but only when we're the ones adding it up.


After 9/11 it became off-limits to critically examine patriotism. Bill O'Reilly told us if we didn't agree with the pre-emptive war on Iraq we should just shut up. It was on all "loyal" Americans to do so. Loyalty is as interesting as patriotism in this context. What are Americans expected to be loyal to? That's another question which takes people into off-limits territory.

The "9/11 was an Inside Job" meme is sure to earn anybody who even entertains it a whole handful of labels they wouldn't readily invite on themselves. If the prospect of that possibility is too disruptive to your worldview to even consider critically, how about looking at some other less disturbing "fact" that you're expected to swallow without reservation, like Consumer Price Inflation is currently running 2.4% annually. Start there, see if any of your direct observational experiences in your own life seem to contradict that. Start doing that more often.

The 30-second guide to the "Inside Job" meme is this: The Project For a New American Century published "Rebuilding America's Defenses: Strategies, Forces, and Resources For a New Century" a year before 9/11 that almost wishfully hoped for "some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor"... and then it happened. And the same guys who founded PNAC (Rumsfeld, Cheney, etc) happened to be running the administration at the time. Odd that.

If I posted on this blog "my life would be a lot easier if something 'happened' to my business partners" and a year or so later they were both in a cab that exploded or a plane that crashed, that blog post would come back to haunt me. Especially if I also took out sizable insurance policies on them shortly before the event.

So I read an interesting overview of the 9/11 as Inside Job which cites Edward Luttwak's Coup D'Etat: A Practical Handbook a book which practically lept off of a used-bookstore shelf into my hands many years ago. Luttwak mentioned 3 preconditions to a successful coup, we have been looking today at number 2, the second requirement of a successful coup d'etat is....(drumroll please)

a passive people not likely to react to a takeover

And that is certainly what we have today. We have a populous so docile, so tamed that not only would they not react to a takeover, it would be surprising if they noticed it.

But, then there are those people who do notice it, or at least suspect it, or perhaps even consider the possibility that it has taken place. What are those people to do? Personally when I hear "calls to arms", most of them fall flat for me. Go out into the streets as part of a mob with a placard that reads "9/11 TRUTH NOW!" Give me a break. It seems as mindless to me as "They hate us because of our freedoms". It doesn't matter what's written on the placards - slogans numb thought. It's the secret sauce the advertising industry pays billions to maintain.

Which brings us to the true dichotomy of today's post, if I'm such an Eckhart Tolle fan, shouldn't I welcome that which kills thought? Shouldn't mindless conformity be encouraged, promoted and cultivated? Is Eckhart Tolle an agent of the New World Order? Hell, who isn't.
I've a long held cliche "one man's sewing circle is another's shadowy cabal". It means that from the Herd's perspective, anybody who manages to separate themselves from the Herd and achieve any kind of noteworthy repute, will be suspected by some sub-section of the Herd as being an Agent of the New World Order or The AntiChrist.

Would Eckhardt Tolle be out in the streets with a "9/11 TRUTH NOW" placard if he knew that the whole inside job meme was true? For some reason I would expect not. I don't think he would say "So what?", but I wouldn't be surprised if he said "Is that so?". Would a vengeful mob form around the thought body "Is that so?", calling those responsible onto the carpet and paying retribution? I doubt it.

So does the Eckhardt Tolle approach give us anything useful in response to this hypothetical construct? I think it does. I think where we arrive if we look at it is a place where mobs don't exist if everybody is present and conscious within their own lives. It's not that the correct response to "9/11 was an inside job" may very well be "Is that so?". What is more important is the correct response to "Those people over there are evil, we must do something!". If everybody responds "Is that so?", then the 9/11's stop happening and we'd live in place where the government was a purely administrative functionary - keeping the traffic lights operating, etc. They wouldn't spend their time calculating what has to happen "out there" because everybody "in here" just wouldn't buy into the hysteria. "Iran is run by a sub-human!" Now that's a "So What? Have you fixed the damn levee yet? It's almost hurricane season here"

My personal suspicion is that the mob, the populace, the Herd, can by definition only be motivated into doing the wrong thing and to make things worse. If they're all fired up about something and ready to act on it, it can only end in trouble.

Those who truly wish to do The Right Thing™ can only be present, get grounded and not allow themselves to be swept up and away by other people's agendas.

Part II: How does one become present and grounded in a world full of hysterical mobs?

We are told to begin becoming aware of the "spaces". Echardt Tolle advises us that a good first step is to start paying attention to the short silences between the words you hear. My first exposure to the concept was in Daniel Goldman's Emotional Intelligence where he discusses the "space" between a stimulus and your reaction to it. I read that book a couple years after getting sober and it was literally the first I had ever heard or even thought or made aware of that space. "There's a space between a stimulus and my reaction to it?" I exclaimed. I had no idea. My entire life until then had simply been one long reaction to things. The revelation that there was a small gap, no matter how imperceptible it was at the time, between an event or stimulation and "my" response to it meant that there was some space there for me to enter the situation, by "me" I mean my real being, not my automaton self which, when oblivious to that buffer zone of consciousness would just fly off on auto-pilot and react.


Event/Stimulus -> [Insert you here - take a deep breath - analyze situation - acceptance ] -> response = A world where everybody goes around leading their lives in relative peace and prosperity


or


Event/Stimulus -> Response = a world of lemmings where the masses are perpetually pushed around by those who know which buttons to press.


So here are my 7 steps toward being able to increase the size of the gaps between the stimulus and the response, 7-steps toward functioning from your own internal being, how not to be "among leaves blown on a furious wind"

1. Watch less television. Every sucessful person I've ever studied from the modern era has little use for it and they all advise against it.
   
2. Get your news privately: by this I mean seek out specialized, competent news and analysis that is not really for public consumption. In my case this varies from The Privateer to Marc Faber's Gloom Boom Doom Report and Stratfor. CNN and CNBC are just comic relief for me.
   
3. Eliminate Debt: While Television was the opiate of the last generation's masses, insurmountable debt is how the next generation of slave mobs will be grown and controlled. Avoid consumer debt like the plaque. Get rid of any you have. Use productive debt (leverage) with caution. Don't over-leverage.
   
4. Shed your addictions: Identify what your most debilitating, life limiting addiction is. Make a decision to leave it behind. Do so. Repeat as required.
   
5. Think!: Analyze those things you are expected to swallow without question. Are the premises true?
   
6. Don't think!: Your mind is a tool, don't confuse it with who you actually are. Your thoughts are not you, they're just thoughts.
   
7. Avoid Mobs: General Rule of Thumb: Most members of most crowds are followers. If you're following something or somebody, how closely have you examined what you're actually doing?
   

All of which is easier said than done, but if you spend your time on the above, at least you won't have time to screw up anybody else's life.