CONSPIRACY THEORY and THE SPIRITS OF THE DEAD

When events occur that disrupt our settled sense of the world, that is difficult for many people. For some, it is an opportunity. The curtains are, briefly, open, because the world was of course never settled, it was always fluid. But that is also why conspiracy theories intensify and proliferate in times of crisis.

 

The word 'conspiracy' comes from the Latin meaning 'to plot': ie someone has done something to you, whether it was 9/11, the death of Diana, or Covid 19. In this way the anxiety of living in an uncertain world is relieved by blaming it on someone else. So strong is this need, that facts are overlooked. This is shown by the constant refrain of the conspiracist for others to 'look at the evidence', which is exactly what they are not doing. To be concrete, some of the theories proliferating at present include linking Covid 19 with 5G, Bill Gates and deliberate engineering by the Chinese in order to gain economic advantage over the US. Or that the whole thing is a hoax.

 

There is a theory that Coronavirus escaped from a lab in China. That seems like a possibility from what I have read, but probably not the case. However - and here is the key - if I was a conspiracist I would be insisting that the lab escape was the case, and that it was deliberate. There is little room for doubt in conspiracy theory.

 

Another avenue to look at is 'agency'. I think that conspiracists feel they are acted upon, rather than acting, in their lives. At least, to an extent. I know conspiracists - and I won't mince my words when I say that what they talk in this respect is nonsense, disturbed, bonkers - who are clearly agents in their own lives at quite a deep level, they may be quite long in the tooth, yet when it comes to how they think of the collective, and governments and big business especially, they feel they are acted upon to a degree that is irrational: they are convinced they are being manipulated by powerful people and forces that I can never quite pin down, and usually they have an evangelical desire to 'wake others up', which is in itself revealing. They feel certain they have the hidden truth that the 'sheep' do not see (for myself I find it hard to be certain about anything!) And these people and forces acting on them are BAD GUYS, they make these big simplistic judgements on them that they would never make about people they actually know (and most of us do that with politicians, don't we?) More than that, there may be forces that are alien in origin that are manipulating us.

 

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I offer Shamanic consultations, usually by skype, in which we can talk over anything you want to talk over. I may use the Medicine Wheel, Journeying, Astrology, Tarot or anything that works. And it centres around listening to ourselves in a deep way. I work on a donation basis, and I am happy with whatever is easy for you: I love this work. Contact: BWGoddard1@aol.co.uk 
 

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I don't know what to do when people start to come out with this stuff, because there may well be other ways in which I respect them. The one thing I know I can't do is discuss it with them, because I am up against a need to believe. But for me it is a big limitation in my relationship with them, because I like to think about the world and what is happening in it without someone insisting that Bill Gates - who has given away $30 billion - means harm. Gates may be misguided, but that is a different matter, and I have my own reservations about him in this respect.

 

The collective noun for lemurs is a conspiracy. (And therein lies a nickname for conspiracists). And 'lemur' is from the Latin meaning 'Spirits of the Dead'. Wow! I think etymological and mythological connections need to be taken seriously. So conspiracy theory is the Spirits of the Dead speaking. Have you seen the Judgement Card in the Mythic Tarot? 

 

It shows the dead arising, and means old gifts emerging. It points to what I was saying about agency. Whenever our power, our gifts, are suppressed, they come out in wonky ways, often projected in negative form on the world outside. So this is my case. The conspiracists' urging of others to 'wake up' is really a message to themselves to wake up. To claim whatever it is in themselves that they are not claiming.

AUTHORITY

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I'd say it took me until my mid 50s before I began to have a balanced response to external authority. And that has been tied up with finding my authority within - the Emperor card in the Tarot. And I think that is a big quest. Of course we all think we are our own masters. And then we mind terribly what other people think of us! And we get offended, which I think is a useful experience.

I am talking about the centre of the Medicine Wheel. A deep sense of who we are cannot be separated from a deep connection to Spirit. It is open and flexible and hard-won and will always guide us.

So for myself, I would switch between being afraid of external authority (because I didn't properly have my own) and conforming for that reason, to being afraid of external authority and rebelling and attributing dark motives to those authorities. (I think a lot of conspiracy theory comes from this place.) At a certain point, I decided just to drop it all, and it made life a lot easier.

At present, external authority looms large in our lives. There are government lockdowns all over the world. It is a time when we can look at our relationship to external authority and to our own authority.

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I offer Shamanic consultations, usually by skype, in which we can talk over anything you want to talk over. I may use the Medicine Wheel, Journeying, Astrology, Tarot or anything that works. And it centres around listening to ourselves in a deep way. I work on a donation basis, and I am happy with whatever is easy for you: I love this work. Contact: BWGoddard1@aol.co.uk 

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We can on the one hand feel secretly reassured just by the fact of being told what to do. I am not opposing the rules by saying this, but I do observe a certain righteousness in some people around following the rules. Or we can rebel and feel there is some dark motive on the part of governments going on, we can't say exactly what, but somehow we just know it. Or we can stay with that piece of gold within us that is our inner guide, and let the governments, in all their limitedness and cack-handedness, get on with whatever it is they are getting on with. 

We can't change the world. But we can be in that still place within that sees clearly, and we can pray from that place and know it will do something, even though we can never know what that is. There is a much bigger picture, a Spirit picture, behind the world that we see, and there is so little we can know, but acknowledging that keys us into the sense of the Great Mystery within which we live our short lives.