Category Archives: society

What the games people play now…

When I was 26 my  University professor gave me a book to read: Eric Berne:  “The Games People Play”. This was one of the milestones in my personal development. Up to that point I was convinced that I was a profoundly good and honest person, that I was genuinely attempting to create good and whatever else an unconscious self-image tends to tell us, and we are more than ready to believe all that.

I have the habit of reading books by referring everything to myself, trying it out in my own skin, you would say. So, by reading attentively the many games people play, I found more than one in which I had been habitually engaging in. What a shock.

What are these GAMES?

In case you don’t know the book – you really should read it, it was groundbreaking in the 70’s for contemporary psychology in many ways (Get it HERE) I give you a short explanation:

The term “game” refers to the behavior of individuals in a group, from the family up to the whole society, which is governed by certain rules. The rules are not necessarily conscious in the same way as we don’t know the rules of our own mother tongue. In fact, most are not, but that doesn’t hinder us from playing our games according to them. These games which we are “playing” in our lives are not really fun and delight as the term might suggest, although some are while many can  lead to negative and even tragic outcomes.

Here a video from the 60s about the book

Where are the exit-rules of the games we are playing?

Since the time I read that book I am in research to find a possibility to exit these games. The characteristic of them is that they normally don’t have an exit rule in the initial set of rules. Once you are in you are in, there is no easy way to get out again. I learned a lot about psychology and how therapists try to explore ways with their clients about how to get out of their games which are troublesome or dangerous for them, from addiction to violence, destruction of all kinds or just inadequacy in facing the life challenges which inevitably arise. Do they find the exit rules? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Why and why not?

Psychotherapy and the mindset change

Basically, what therapists try to do is open up the client’s mind to realize how restricted their view is of their world, how limiting the beliefs they have about themselves, the others and the world. If the client is open and courageous enough – and if he/she has enough trust in the guidance, then, slowly, they can become available for different ideas and able to adopt them. This often is connected with the uncomfortable feeling of loss, the painful  need of giving up cherished ideas and convictions which were so habitual and “easy” to dwell in, while the new mindset is still new, uncomfortable and feels awkward.

People like the Easy Button

Woman behind computer, happy
It’s easy! I get it at once!

In order to avoid the feeling of being endangered by the new, people are much more likely to believe and trust in those “mentors” who promise the easy way, the way that allows us to behave badly whenever we like, by feeding us the illusion that we have a right to do that. “I am the victim of other people’s actions”. No need to check out the game we are playing with them. It is enough to assume that THEY are playing dirty games with us and we are the righteous “saints” with only good intentions. (As I said before, this is what I once believed firmly for myself. I certainly know how that feels and how I unconsciously had created my saintly victimhood!)

Politics and Ideologies: a Game or “Just A Game”?

4 cards with words: just a game
Life is just a game?

I realise that the present discussion on gender identity, equity, “metoo”, patriarchy, immigration and what not, are all falling into this overall game the rules of which are to be made very clear before we even can think about finding a solution. What game are the radical feminists playing? The social justice warriors, the neo-nazis? What game are the politicians playing from whatever point of the spectrum? What game are we “normal” people playing when we enter into the discussion – or when we avoid taking a stand and stick our heads in the sand?

Some games are quite obvious, the more people present themselves in a radical way the more we might be right in guessing what the rules are which they use and try to impose on others. We are the others. So how do we respond? Either we accept the attribution of their rules on us – then we play THEIR game, not ours. Or we refuse to play their game and that can be much more difficult and painful than just “follow the flow” and avoid confrontation.

Whose game do we play?

If we haven’t learned to set healthy boundaries, we probably will choose the first pathway and be swept away into a flow of events which can lead into some dark place which we hadn’t foreseen and we wouldn’t have wanted. But once we are in, it is dangerous, almost impossible, to get out again. As a German, born shortly after WWII I certainly know about all those people who found themselves part of the machinery – because they didn’t take a stand when there was still a possibility to push back against the malevolent development. By a generations-long training in obedience most people were unable to stand up against what they rightly perceived as “not right” in the hope of getting away with it. Understandable, but not good! They accepted to play “their” game, the game of the manipulators and power-hungry individuals and they gave their own power over to them.

Back to the question: how can we exit the game?

Symbol for EXIT
Fight, Flight or Freeze?

First of all we need to realise that we are a player in the game, that the reality we perceive is not just as it is, inevitably, but that its unfoldment is following certain rules.

Second we need to uncover the rules which are fundamental for the game and find out if there is an exit rule available and then use it to get out

Games without exit rules

They seem to behave like a train without brakes on a slope: rolling down by itself with increasing velocity until the final disaster. What possibilities do you have? Jump off the train and don’t care if others will save themselves or not? Or will you run and look for the emergency break and save everybody with what you are doing? Fight, flight or freeze? What is your habitual unconscious response?

I know, this is a very tricky question. These mechanisms exist in our biology to protect us from unpleasant surprises and threats of danger. Today we often don’t run away physically, but we flee into our head, into our imagination instead of facing reality. We freeze by repeating obsolete beliefs and actions and we fight like Don Quichotte against the windmill. Overwhelm and mental overload lurks around the corner, despair, depression or over-activism tell the story of our attempts to face the challenges.

Exiting from our own games – and now? 

We might have succeeded in exiting the most fatal games in our own psyche and understood what we as humanity are doing. That brings us to the next round: how to spread the knowledge and inspire people to join us, to exit their private games in order to become able to together exit the global game of collective madness.

 

All boils down to these questions:

  • black background with colored words around ethicWhen will we humans, who have become conscious of ourselves as living beings, become conscious of our responsibility as co-creators of the world in which we are living?
  • When will we adopt the courage to stand for and embrace life in all its forms and commit to enhance it and to work to overcome the shadows, the ignorance and short-sightedness which is still weighing on us with ever more destructive potential thanks to our technological intelligence?
  • When will we find a practical world-ethic which allows us to live and grow together in good will and joy?
  • What do we need to be and do, to successfully exit the seemingly eternal games which are played by we individuals, in our communities, among our nations and wherever humans are involved?

 

Why I don’t give money to Wikipedia anymore

Last week I got a mail from Wikipedia where they asked me to send them, again, some money. I appreciate Wikipedia in many ways, but here is why I don’t send them more money.

I wrote to Wikipedia to let them know WHY I won’t send money. I got an answer to my letter in which they talk about the volunteers who contribute and edit the entries and that practically everyone of us can contribute. Yes and NO!

Here my final answer where I highlight some entries which are problematic in my opinion. “Independent board” (independent of WHOM?) is not the same as a “non-biased board”!

I wrote:

You write: “Wikipedia volunteers are strongly focused on the editorial values of non-censorship, neutrality, verifiability”, It sounds great, and that is simply not true. Who are these independent people? The scientists in the board who are known to be strongly defending the current paradigm of an material worldview and the official stories given by the official institutions?

Some examples:
Dr. Judy Wood has researched in depth, using her scientific knowledge as a (formerly) respected professor to show that the official story of 9/11 is false. She even sued the official report as scientific fraud. Well, many people tried to insert her to Wikipedia. WHERE IS SHE? Wikipedia is supporting the forces which are protecting their power and their lies, while honest dedicated people are either not mentioned or the articles on them are highly biased by giving the summary that, actually, they are all wrong or somehow weird.
 
It took many years until Ken Wilber was represented properly in Wikipedia. I witnessed the innumerable attempts of friends very literate in his work, to change the previous entries which had put him into the “new-age-fancy-stuff” edge. This has changed, thanks God. 

 

The Roswell UFO incident: You still present an interpretation of this incident which has been proclaimed as true by the military. If you, at least, could take off the suggestion that these explanations of the military are true. If at least you could speak also about the masses of documents and testimonies which tell another story! 

My conclusion:
Your decision board is deeply biased in helping those who want to hide the truth from the people and is colluding with the psychological warfare they are using against us normal people in not wanting us to know what really happens.
 
My suggestion: Allow serious people whose ideas are more advanced to sit in your boards and become a less protective institution focused on the old paradigm: Allow new findings and ideas to be listed, without negative or positive comments, just in a neutral way. Allow people to think themselves when they can get the facts.
 
In the present way of your data, unfortunately, you are judging and you are biased towards certain opinions and convictions.
 
That’s why I don’t send you money anymore, although, all together, you are doing great work. With Jordan Petersons words: “Clean your own room” before you can have a really positive impact.
 
Thanks for listening – and hopefully it will inspire your organisation to have a deeper look on itself.
 
Adelheid in Italy
(Searcher for the truth)
For you, reader of the blog, I would like to add:
Read the book of Dr. Judy Wood “Where Did The Towers Go?” (http://amzn.to/2Emdrqc) as I did. If you have a logical and scientific understanding and if you are willing to see the truth you cannot deny the evidence. I warn you, it is hard to digest and your view about the goodness of governments and other institutions will be shattered. But in my experience:
Truth sets free!

Open letter to Robb Smith and Integral Life

Integral Life had organised a big conference last weekend in Colorado/USA where people from all over the world could participate via live streaming. That’s what we did and there were some things I wanted to bring to the awareness of the Integral Community which are of concern to me.

For who doesn’t know what “Integral” is: A short introduction by Jeff Salzman in our Wisdom Factory HERE

My open letter:

Hi Robb,

Heidi here from Italy with some feedback to and considerations of the conference. First of all: THANK YOU! It was great to be able to attend from Europe via Live Streaming – one of the miracles of modern technology for which I am very grateful.

 

There was a lot of interesting content offered by many competent and interesting people, I enjoyed it greatly, even at 3 am in the morning! I especially appreciated Helen Palmer and her reminder to not be attached to what we believe what we are and what we think is right or wrong as seen by the filters of our unconscious conditioning.

We see reality through our unconscious conditioning

In the light of Helen’s talk I want to send you some of my observations: I noticed in you a strong bias to not take into account the possibility that things could be different than we have seen them so far. In a true integral setting I would love to see openness to look into those things we “traditionally” considered not valid.

Specifically I am talking about a question from the audience about Wikileaks and conspiracy theories. You quickly swept it from the table together with laughing at the topic of “extraterrestrials” as science fiction, invented for movies for popular amusement – or, if you see it from a different perspective. for instilling fear and an unconscious bias in favor of the idea of threats coming from the universe towards us on earth. And this as a justification to increase our military force.

 

Do you believe in the power of science to reveal the truth through facts?

REAL science which tries to falsify the hypothesis instead of trying to find a few good arguments for an already existing idea? (as you defined good science in the conference). If so I suggest that you read Dr.Judy Wood’s “Where did the Towers go?” And then, please, give a new response regarding “conspiracy theories”. What you find in this book is pure scientific physical evidence which defies all the official stories about 9/11 and also the counter-conspiracy movements which, themselves, where undermined by forces which didn’t want the TRUTH to be known. The book is an extended forensic study of what has been found – or not found – in connection with 9/11 and you will ask yourself: “How could I believe in the stories”, what so many of us did: preferring to keep the eyes closed and to stay attached to our fundamental belief in the goodness of the world and, especially, in the US Government.

People fear to lose their attachments and don’t want to look at what reality is.

Lately, we showed the movie “Unacknowledged” to a group of expats here in Italy and it came out that we Europeans had no problem giving credence to what the disclosed documents were saying. The Americans among us just didn’t want their belief in their government and country to be compromised. Conscious or unconscious bias?

The movie shows declassified documents about UFOs. Yes, they exist, there is a mass of evidence, and only a few days ago many thousands of documents were officially disclosed around the topic of Extraterrestrials, even mainstream media talked about it. With some probability, though,  this is a new move towards fostering the belief about a  threat from outer space with the hope of “uniting humanity” against a common but constructed enemy, in order to begin a war and justify the crazy increase in military expenses to the benefit of a few psychopaths, reminiscent of the “weapons of mass destruction”.

And again at the cost of a huge number of people, if not of all humanity this time. What the USA did to its own people on 9/11 to justify a war (a very ancient strategy btw.) is absolutely appalling, horrible and unjustifiable. The fact that people still believe in the airplane story is only understandable from a psychological perspective and is deliberately ignoring evidence and “common sense” in order to protect old beliefs from where we draw our feeling of security.

Yes, we need to focus on the positive and to give our power to that. But we also need to not be blind to what reality is in this world of samsara.

POWER

Robb, you showed a chart about the power in the various stages and its expression. This is fine. BUT WHERE IS THE ABUSE OF POWER DISCUSSED? And what we can do to stop it? In the 30ies so many people in Germany didn’t believe in what was about to come – despite all evidence. We are in the same situation today. We don’t want to see the evidence for what is really going on and prefer to wrap our minds around Trump vs. Hillary. This is a huge error and limitation which i see expressed even with we people who believe to be at the cutting edge of development.

This is very much preoccupying to me as a German woman of the post-war generation. If WE laugh about things which the psychological warfare of the past 70 years has so thoroughly prepared us to do – who else can have enough perspective to really look behind the scenes and see from a broader point of view?

BTW, Hitler’s specialists in psychological warfare have been employed by the US military and the Hollywood films about Ufos are part of their strategy.

 

My wish for Integral Life and further events would be to include those topics which are very important to address in the light of co-creating a better future. I also wish the community to become more “integral” in many ways which it is definitely not (yet).

If the main perspective is still “masculine” as expressed in the numbers of male vs. female presenters and in the structure of the setting of the event as well as in the featured topics of this conference about technology etc. then, please, consider to embrace science fully and look for those who are dismissed for doing science that threatens the official narrative – or are silenced and even killed when it comes to fields like free energy. The list of victims of doing “unwanted” science is long! Dr.Judy Wood is one of many who lost their job because they discovered the truth behind the official stories.But, at least, she is still alive probably due to the existence of the internet which makes it much more difficult to just eliminate uncomfortable people.

Integral needs to take a stand here!

With gratitude, appreciation, love and hope

Heidi

Why Do People Ignore History – And Risk to Fall Into The Same Horrible Mistakes?

In these weird times of chaos and totalitarian tendencies in the world, some timely questions came up for me on Quora. Answering them I felt back into those times when I lived in freedom surrounded by a totalitarian communist country and my question came up ever more pressingly: Why Do People Ignore History – And why do we risk to fall into the same horrible mistakes? How can the radical left today be so insensitive to what their ideals REALLY create? My generation still experienced it in Germany and our parents’ generation can tell you what right wing totalitarianism feels like. Both are devastating and murderous – and we are directly steering towards abandoning our freedoms for totalitarian human-despising ideas.

Below I want to share with you my answers to the questions:

  1. What was the main reason for the Berlin Wall?
  2. What were the differences between east and west Berlin during the period of the Berlin wall?

 What was the main reason for the Berlin Wall?

So why was the wall built? It definitely was not a wall like the one in Israel or the planned Trump wall along the Mexican border. Those are designed to protect the country from the influx of foreigners. Not so the Berlin wall. It was built to keep the people inside their own country, to keep them in the prison of an totalitarian state.

The Exodus

In the months before the wall was built, an increasing number of people had been leaving East Germany every day by walking through the “Brandenburger Tor” – as my ex-husband did as a teenager with his mother and brother, carrying with them only a bag with their most important belongings. The East was losing not only the best brains, as another commenter says, but virtually everyone who anticipated the future to come and were courageous enough to leave everything behind. They came from all over the country to Berlin, trains overcrowded with people eager to leave the east.

Blatant differences within Berlin

In the time when the wall was built the difference between East and West was already so striking that a blockage was needed because otherwise soon there would have been a state with nobody living there – and that obviously was not acceptable to the regime. The country couldn’t offer anything attractive to their people which would inspire them to stay (see my answer to the difference between East and West Berlin below.)

An end to the mass flight from East to West

Berlin Wall: the structure of the border line
Berlin Wall: the structure of the border line

The wall was built in only a few days, and the flow of people escaping increased tremendously in these last days – until they were trapped by the solid wall and the “security strip” alongside. In the beginning many people still could overcome the wall, jump from the windows of houses right on the border line or swim through the river but very soon these possibilities were brutally controlled by  walling up the windows, by guns and self-detonating bombs. Many people lost their lives when they tried to escape after the wall was built and the wall became the symbol of a totalitarian state which is ready to use utmost brutality against their people who want to be free.

A fence all around the East

border surveillance tower
Surveillance towers all along the border, in view of each other

In the same time all East Germany was surrounded by a strong fence and self-shooting facilities which would kill people when they tried to climb over the fence. An uncultivated open area near the fence called “the death strip” was created everywhere in order to see any movement of whatever came near the border from the innumerable watch towers. People trying to escape were brutally killed. I used to live about 10km from the border in my youth in West Germany, and we often went to the border to see the “progress”. At the beginning we still could wave to people over there, later they were moved away to houses further from the border.

Deception is part of the evil

In order to fool people from inside the country who thought they might escape by climbing the fence at the border, all geographic maps available in East Germany were falsified: the streets and villages in the border regions were wrongly inserted into the map and only people who lived in the area of 10 km from the border-fence (I am not sure how many km, maybe more) were allowed to be in or even enter into this “special zone”.

 It is hardly imaginable for people who are used to living in a Western democratic country that this was the reality, and even more difficult to feel into what suffering the regime caused to their people.

(Read on Quora:)

 

What were the differences between east and west in Berlin during the period of the Berlin wall?

I lived in West Berlin from 1972 to 1984 as a (West German) university student. Life in the West of the city was very particular, you could find everything, culture and nature. Cultural experiments all over the place, experimental theatres etc. alongside with traditional rituals like the Christmas market in the (then) centre at the ruin of the Kaiser Wilhelm Gedächtniskirche.  It was exciting and rich, vibrating and colorful. An optimistic response for the fact that we were surrounded by the East.

A fascinating City

Kaiser Wilhelm Gedächtniskirche
The center of West Berlin – a memorial for the horrors of war. (pic found in Wikipedia)

In West Berlin you could get everywhere with public transport – although sometimes with 20 minutes or more waiting in a freezing night, and you could bike on extra lanes. And if you had a car it was pretty easy to get everywhere – except to the east part, obviously.

Two underground lines passed under the East territory and it was ghostly when the train slowed down at the closed stations. There was dimmed light and armed police wandering around. I was always happy to come out on the other side again. It was a dark feeling of danger and oppression, also when we went from West Berlin by the mandatory and guarded highways to West Germany, which we did very often.

Visits in East Berlin for Theatre Performances

Several times a year we went to East Berlin, mainly for attending theatres. There was the famous Brecht Theatre “Am Schiffbauerdamm” and the “Komische Oper” with its artistic director Felsenstein who experimented with a new style of  opera in which the singers were really actors and not just standing around singing as had been normal in the past.

What other contributors on Quora said was accurate: West Berlin was shiny and tried to show up as a brillant city while East Berlin was grey and monumental in the “new center” with the ugly expression of socialist art and architecture.

The deception tactic of communist states

In those times all money was directed to the capital to give the impression to foreign visitors that East Berlin was a thriving city – and East Germany a normal country. That it was certainly not so and you could see it in many ways: the full supermarket in East Berlin with dozens of shelfs of THE EXACTLY SAME product (!!), the strange atmosphere everywhere, including in the almost non-existent restaurants or in the cafés where you were treated like sheep, The big Dom (= main cathedral) without the vault and with pigeons living in it and only a few meters from the main “tourist” areas: houses which were about to fall apart and full of projectile holes in their facades.

It was worse in other parts of East Germany

Connecting streets between villages were interrupted and the warning sign far enough before the fence and mined strip
Connecting streets between villages were interrupted and the warning sign far enough before the fence and mined strip

It was not easy to visit other parts of East Germany for “normal” people. I had relatives in Leipzig (Lipsia) and, from a certain time on, western residents of areas close to the east German border were allowed to go there for a visit and sometimes we could meet them there for a day. Better don’t ask what it took to get a visa and the procedures at the border!

I knew also Leipzig from several visits, a major city further south, and the difference to East Berlin was enormous. Let alone small cities or villages. You must have seen it to really get a feel how communism has destroyed everything. When I visited Albania in the early 90’s I knew already from East Germany how things look like in such a country. But Albania, then, was a huge shock, and East Berlin and East Germany seemed to me a paradise in comparison to Albania. The poverty and destruction was unbelievable – and, from what I am hearing the same now is going on in North Korea, even maybe worse, although WORSE is really hard to imagine when we are used to our 21st century civilisation.

Coming back to East Berlin.

Every time we went there was connected with fear: You and your car were controlled thoroughly, both ways, in and out.  It could take an hour or more and you never knew if you would be back home that evening because they could find something or invent something to keep you as a prisoner. (It happened to a friend of mine who, after a year or so, was BOUGHT back into freedom by our government).

The Money Game – The Real Reason Why Tourists Were “Welcome” in the East

Coin: DDR MARK
Coin: DDR MARK

Every time when you entered East Berlin you had to pay quite a sum for the visa and you had to exchange money 1:1 (although the real value was around 1:4) which, additionally, was hard to spend in one day only as there was hardly anything to buy which you would also want to buy. I myself bought musical scores, whatever they had, not knowing if I ever would use them. Those I actually needed were not available with 95% probability.

Weird Rules to Keep You in Fear

You had to spend all the East money before going back to the West as if anybody wanted the cheap and worthless aluminum coins on our side of the city! You could get into trouble if you had forgotten to get rid of the east-money before entering the control section.

Totalitarian regimes create an intolerable climate!  Anyways, I came to assemble quite a library of musical scores which, later on, I actually used and was happy about that as they cost much more in the West – and still do today.

Summary: It is no joke to be in a totalitarian police state, not as a visitor and not at all as a resident.

 

Observing present revivals of totalitarian movements on the right AND on the left make me fear that the lesson of 20th century communism and its bloody and oppressive impact on millions of people has been already forgotten – and people who promote neo-communist ideas haven’t learned anything from history. Ignoring history brings the risk that our societies fall back into the same horrible mistakes of the 20th century. What comes out are not situations in which ANYONE wants to live, except the very few who are in power!

So, please, don’t adhere to totalitarian movements which see only black and white! That in itself is the beginning of totalitarianism.

Read on Quora

 PS: Today Berlin is unrecognisable. I went through the streets, on foot and on bike and it was difficult to even find the places where the wall closed away the other half of the city. There are some spaces where the location of the previous wall is marked and very few rests of the wall for memory. It has become a different city, but the on where I lived for 12 years is still very alive in my memory

Pictures from pixabay.com