Another View of Occupy

This essay also came across Facebook, but the author has given permission for his friends to copy and re-post it.

The author is Antero Alli, a filmmaker, radical astrologer, and performance art/ritual "instigator" living in Berkeley, CA.  I have worked, played and grieved beside Antero, and respect him to my marrow.  I think this is one of the finest things he's ever written.

On the Occupy Movement...

by Antero Alli on Saturday, November 12, 2011 at 4:25pm

The Occupy Movement.  At first, I did not know what to think about the Occupy Movement except that it looked like a massive protest against Wall Street greed and the oppressive Banking Industry.  It’s about time, I thought.  As a teenager in the Sixties, I recall how that revolution took to protesting against the USA in Viet Nam -- but  Occupy was not about war, it looked like it was about money...about how 1% of the populace was controlling global finance and how the 99% were getting the short end of the money stick. That was my first impression yet it felt too simplistic to me, like, the tip of the iceberg.  So, I stepped back and kept watching.

As more and more cities across the world found solidarity in the Occupy movement, I saw and felt a new kind of hope as more and more people left their cocooning homes, got out onto the streets and talked to each other.  This much alone remains worthy of celebration.  As I witnessed more people waking up to each other and sharing their personal and collective grievances and outrages (around being victimized by an oppressive 1% economic minority), I saw a deeper force of rebellion surfacing; a force deeper than money.  If the protest was triggered by the shock of economic oppression, the essence was not economic but social - was this a social revolution?  This perception felt like I was closer to understanding something important but I didn’t know what it was yet.




My mind backtracked to the Eighties’ Reagonomics era when consumerism seriously spiked towards a perpetually increasing investment of collective consciousness into the dollar.  By this time, money was also barely worth the cloth it was printed on (as an almost infinite amount of cloth kept being printed). I imagined millions of people being gradually duped, and duping themselves, into thinking money was more real than its intentionally symbolic nature.  Without realizing as much, many of us were eating the menu instead of the meal in a  collective hallucination resulting from confusing the symbolic for the real, the virtual for the actual.

Do the research: money is not “real” - money is a confidence game measured by Wall Street and consumer credit.  By the dot.com era, not only was money on the brain in a bigger way but the internet became the hot, new vessel for absorbing collective consciousness.  Here in cyberspace, countless “second life” online communities and pornographic  promises seduced anyone whose mind had already slipped enough to confuse the virtual for the actual.  Meanwhile, global banking systems and people’s hard-earned cash were transferred into the virtual domain of digital economics.  It’s a magic trick!  Where did all the money go?



Back to the Occupy Movement. As I see it now, the O.M.. is not a protest against the bad economy, though many O.M.ers may disagree, but a protest against the entire culture itself. Money was just the catalyst or rather, the absence of money shocked the collective consciousness that’s been overly-invested in money for too long.  At its highest level, the O.M..  looks like it’s spearheading a cultural revolution in an attempt to extract itself from the influences corrupting our shared humanity.  These influences include whatever destroys our capacity to discern between an image of something and the reality that image represents. At essence, this “image vs. reality” confusion seriously diminishes not only our capacity for direct experience but more critically - of trusting firsthand experience as a source of authority.

At its core, I see in the O.M.. the human spirit struggling to assert itself over the brain-numbing amnesia we’ve all been subject to over the last thirty years.  To what degree O.M.. succeeds in breaking cultural trance on a scale that actually makes a difference  is yet to be seen.  In my world, this trance was broken long ago.  From my perspective, cultural trance can only be truly broken within -- at the level of the individual.  From here, we can branch out in contagion by our living presence to catalyze the awakening of others and to become strengthened by those whose personal example inspires our own.

Culture is bound together by language and words. Words, like drugs, can act as triggers to neurological states but when words (and symbols) are confused for the realities they represent, we can easily fall under their spell and become as legends in our own minds. If you can fashion your mind to see beyond the mind, you may begin accumulating enough 'cultural immunity' to stop wasting precious time and energy fighting the culture.  The culture will always win that fight.  Culture is not our friend.  Culture will eat you alive and spit you out. There’s a big difference between fighting against something and knowing what is worth fighting for.  I think what is worth fighting FOR is consciousness itself.  Don't take my word for it.  Break trance. Take a moment out of time and see for yourself.  Are you ready to occupy your consciousness ?



artwork by James Koehnline www.koehnline.com