…the sick individual finds himself at home with all other similarly sick individuals. The whole culture is geared to this kind of pathology. The result is that the average individual does not experience the separateness and isolation the fully schizophrenic person feels. He feels at ease among those who suffer from the same deformation; in fact, it is the fully sane person who feels isolated in the insane society – and he may suffer so much from the incapacity to communicate that it is he who may become psychotic.

~ Erich Fromm (Anatomy of Human Destructiveness)

Nineteenth-century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) championed individual strength of will and independent, reasoned deliberation above the irrational impulses that animated most of society. In “The Wisdom of Life and Counsels and Maxims”, two essays from his last work, “Parerga und Paralipomena” (1851), he discusses how to order our lives to obtain the greatest amount of pleasure and success; then he offers guidelines for living life to its fullest. But for Schopenhauer a life well lived should always reach beyond itself to a higher plane.

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“The Matrix Trilogy Decoded” by Mark Passio was recorded on September 15, 2012.

In this video Mark Passio breaks down the hidden meaning of the “The Matrix” movies. It would serve you better if you watched all three movies before and/or after watching this video.

This event was held as a fundraiser for the “Free Your Mind 2 Conference” coming up in April of 2013 in Philadelphia. It is a three-day conference featuring top-calibre whistle-blowers from across the country who will shed light upon our world’s problems and bring forward empowering solutions.

This unique event will build upon the success of the first “Free Your Mind Conference” in 2011, with a continued focus to spread awareness on the topics of consciousness, mind control, subversive occult influences, holistic body-mind-spirit health, and solution-oriented approaches to the problems humanity faces in these challenging times.

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“Remember, remember the fifth of November,” for on this day, in 2020, the minds of the masses shall be set free. So says code-name V (Hugo Weaving), a man on a mission to shake society out of its blank complacent stares in the film V For Vendetta. His tactics, however, are a bit revolutionary to say the least. The world in which V lives is very similar to Orwell’s totalitarian dystopia in 1984: after years of various wars, England is now under “big brother” Chancellor Adam Sutler (played by John Hurt, who ironically played Winston Smith in the movie 1984) whose party uses force and fear to run the nation. After gaining power, minorities and political dissenters were rounded up and removed; artistic and unacceptable religious works were confiscated. Cameras and microphones are littered throughout the land, and the people are perpetually sedated through the governmentally controlled media. Taking inspiration from Guy Fawkes, the 17th century co-conspirator of a failed attempt to blow up Parliament on November 5, 1605, V dons a Fawkes mask and costume and sets off to wake the masses by destroying the symbols of their oppressors, literally and figuratively. At the beginning of his vendetta, V rescues Evey (Natalie Portman) from a group of police officers and has her live with him in his underworld lair. It is through their relationship where we learn how V became V, the extremities of the party’s corruption, the problems of an oppressive government, V’s revenge plot and his philosophy on how to induce change.

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In the modern world there is hardly any leisure, not because men work harder than they did, but because their pleasures have become as strenuous as their work. The result of that, while cleverness has increased, wisdom has decreased because no one has time for the slow thoughts out of which wisdom, drop by drop, is distilled. A problem such as the prevention of war, the urgency of which is obvious to every one, is dismissed with a shrug of the shoulders in the hope that circumstances will solve it without the aid of human thought. But circumstances, unaided, are not likely to be so kind.

~ Bertrand Russell

Humanity’s ascent is often measured by the speed of progress. But what if progress is actually spiraling us downwards, towards collapse? Ronald Wright, whose best-seller, A Short History Of Progress inspired Surviving Progress, shows how past civilizations were destroyed by “progress traps” – alluring technologies and belief systems that serve immediate needs, but ransom the future. As pressure on the world’s resources accelerates and financial elites bankrupt nations, can our globally-entwined civilization escape a final, catastrophic progress trap? With potent images and illuminating insights from thinkers who have probed our genes, our brains, and our social behaviour, this requiem to progress-as-usual also poses a challenge: to prove that making apes smarter isn’t an evolutionary dead-end.

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