Friends and Frenemies,

What I am about to write is going to resonate with some of us and others of us will scoff and resist at some of the concepts contained within. Life has given me a lot to think about – and be thankful about – and admittedly, I am on a bit of a cosmic tear. But I hope that this essay is read with the same spirit within which it was written, and what that “spirit” is, I will leave for you to decide, but just know that this essay is decidedly very “spiritual.”

Bernie Sanders is waking people up to their own political power. He is not empowering us, but rather he is helping us to remember that as individuals, and as expressions of a higher, collective consciousness, we have the power to make change, and to make a difference. He is using the political platform for his message, but his message crosses all of our collective belief constructs and speaks to the very nature of our humanity.

He is waking us up to the fact that, politically and by extension, across all aspects of our lives, we do not have to accept lesser evillism any longer, that just because something is the status quo, does not mean it has to remain so. The status quo is what it is – until it’s not. And the only way to change it is to simply change it.

He is reminding all of us that we have the power to change our society, that we have the power to change the way elections are run, and he is waking us up to the fact that we have the power to reclaim the democratic process and take it out of the hands of money and put it back where it belongs: political power and democracy belongs to We The People. It does not belong to money.

Only We The People have the power to change things, but because of our entrenched belief systems, we believe we can not. Instead of realizing that each moment is a separate moment containing infinite potential, we believe that each moment is simply a linear extension of the one that came before it, and therefore, at worst, nothing will ever change, nothing can ever change even if it could, we are told that any change must be gradual. It must be incremental, we must be willing to compromise what we know to be true and right if we really want to change. But I call BS on that notion. If nothing changes, it is because we believe that it can’t change, not because change, itself, is not possible.

Baby elephant in chains

When people who capture young elephants to use as labor or to sell as circus entertainment, the elephant’s spirit must first be broken, or it will refuse to submit to human whim. Because elephants are capable of self-awareness, they are also capable of forming belief systems. In order to break an elephant’s spirit, it is bound by chains from an early age. As the elephant matures in captivity, the “trainers,” the people who are breaking the elephant’s spirit, can demonstrate the completeness of an elephant’s submission by keeping it chained by a string. Even though an adult elephant is perfectly capable of breaking the string, it believes it cannot. But once in a while, an elephant will revolt and fight back, and that elephant is deemed to be in a dangerous “must,” or perhaps it’s gone mad, or gone rogue and then it is usually destroyed. That’s what happens to a circus elephant who wakes up and refuses to submit, it goes on what we call a “rampage,” it becomes dangerous to humans, so it is destroyed. Anyone who has read Orwell’s “Shooting an Elephant” knows of what I speak.

Friends, we have become the elephant. We are literally enslaved by our capitalist belief system. Everything thing we do revolves around the getting of money and the spending of the money. We believe that without money, we cannot live, that we cannot exist, and yet … what if all the money in the world disappeared tomorrow? Would we stop existing? Would food and shelter vanish? Would knowledge vanish? Would we disappear? We are perfectly capable of existing without money and yet we are somehow completely enslaved by it. It defines our very existence. Time is money, money is time. The time you spend not in the service of making money, you are in the service of spending it.

Adult elephant bound by a string

If you are eating, you had to spend money to buy food, unless you are lucky enough to be situated in such a way that you can grow your own food. Most of us don’t have that luxury and the production of food has been allowed to fall in the hands of concentrated big business, or what we call here at DailyKos, Big-Ag. Like Monsanto. Giant corporations control our food supply, and we simply have, by collective agreement, allowed it to happen but now we have a large swathe of humanity dependent upon corporations for food, the very same people who genetically modify our food and refuse to allow GMO labelling, the very people, for example, that contribute to political candidates so they can gain access and that’s why lobbyists, whose first interest is their corporate masters, are allowed to write legislation governing the laws about the quality of our food. In short, many of us are forced to eat shit by large corporations and the politicians they pay for.

If you are watching TV in the evening, you are spending money on electricity to power the TV, and you are spending money on broadband to stream video content, you are spending money paying for Netflix, or cable or Hulu. You are sitting within walls that define space that you “own” or rather, space that you are making monthly payments to a bank in exchange for a piece of paper that says you own it, but if you don’t make your payments, the bank owns it. And that is exactly what happened when Wall Street tanked our economy. The banks foreclosed on a bunch of homes and sells them to investment consortiums who rent it back to us at inflated prices and that’s why such a large chunk of what we earn goes toward housing. It’s an unregulated market run by banks, by Wall Street, and they are allowed to perpetuate it by buying access to politicians so that they can help write legislation that allows the bank to continue this practice. Much of Clinton’s money, as you know comes from Wall Street.

We can’t escape money, even though it is just a belief, or so we have been programmed. We have been programmed to believe that the candidate who gets the most money is going to win because money rules our lives, and our very existence cannot exist without the making and spending of money.

What Bernie Sanders is telling is is that we don’t need money to WIN. That we can exist, and we can WIN, without having to beg billionaires for money. The only thing the billionaires are spending money on is access to the politicians they are buying with their money. And what Bernie is telling us, by not accepting the money of big corporations like Monsanto, the Koch Brothers, Wall Street, Big-Pharma and the Insurance Racket, and the Military Industrial Complex, we have the power to exist without those constructs. We don’t have to accept corporate rule if we agree not to. We don’t have to accept a candidate who is funded by corporations who pay her so that they continue to own our food supply, to own our shelter, to own the very things that exist in great abundance but that many are denied due to lack of access to … money.

One thing that struck me about Sanders when I was reading the recent interview in Rolling Stone Magazine, is that he gets this, he gets that we are one, that humanity is part of a greater construct, a part of the Divine Matrix, or God Consciousness, the very fabric against which our particles are arranged to create the reality in which exist, our shared reality. I am a part of you, you are a part of me, we are not individuals existing in a million individual realities, we are all expressions of a single, greater consciousness. We are one with each other, one with God and one with the Universe.

When Bernie Sanders was asked in the recent Rolling Stone interview if he believed in God, here is what he replied:

Do you believe in God?

Yeah, I do. I do. I'm not into organized religion. But I believe that what impacts you impacts me, that we are all united in one way or another. When children go hungry, I get impacted. When kids die because they can't afford medicine, I get impacted. We are one world and one people. And that belief leads me to the conclusion that we just cannot turn our back on human suffering.

I agree with Bernie, we are at tipping point, as a species. Our Sixth Extinction Event, otherwise known as the Holocene Extinction Event, is in full swing, right now, as I type. We have to come together as a species if we want to continue to exist, because the way we exist now, is simply not sustainable.

When we have a belief system that allows some of us to gorge on unimaginable wealth while others of us are denied the basic elements of survival, we simply cannot continue. And Bernie understands that, we are one world and one people. We are all expressions of a greater singular, all-encompassing consciousness and once we realize that, we will be capable of making the kind of shift in awareness that allows to bring about change. Because if we don’t make changes, we will cease to exist as a species.

Global warming is indisputably the single, gravest threat that our species faces at this moment in time. There is no precedent for what we are experiencing. This is the first time in known history that human activity has impacted our planet’s natural geological cycles to the point we simply cannot predict with certainty what will happen next. But we do know that if we keep doing what we’re doing it’s only going to get worse. Bernie Sanders is correct when he links climate change with the threat of terrorism. Parts of the Middle East – The Muslim Worlds – that were once habitable, are becoming inhabitable. Saudi Arabia’s largest aquifer is drying up and they are growing fields of grain in Arizona and shipping it back to Saudi Arabia.

2014 was the hottest year in recorded history, until 2015 came along, and we are well on our way to breaking that record again in 2016. Those portions of the middle east, India and Pakistan that suffered the worst of it, will only to continue suffer and as a result, there will be massive migration, famine, desperation and FEAR. And that will create more theocratic barbarism, and terrorism. It’s already happening. It’s not something that’s predicted, it’s something that’s happening right now and we believe there is nothing we can do about it.

In other words, it’s going to take a great shift in awareness, an evolutionary leap, if you will, in order to make change. And the only way we can do that is if we believe we can. And the only way we can believe that is if we show ourselves that we can do it. And the only way we can show ourselves we can do it, is if we try … and we all know there is no trying, there is only doing.

And that’s what Bernie’s political revolution is all about, it’s about believing that we can. We are taking the YES WE CAN (you remember the hope and change we all craved during the 2007-2008 election cycle) to a new level. We are taking it from a campaign slogan and turning it into a reality.

That’s what Bernie’s revolution is about. It’s about not being afraid. It’s about standing up for what we know is good and right. It’s not letting fear guide us, the way it is guiding some of our leaders with regard to whether or not to accept Syrian refugees. They are making life and death decisions based on fear.

As any good Bene Gesserit knows, fear is the mind killer. Fear is the little death that bring total obliteration. If we face our fear, and let it pass over us and through us, when it is gone, only we will remain. Once we realize that we are not our fear, then we will be able to bring about great change for the good of humanity, for the good of our planet, and we will be able to continue to exist.

Political revolution is just the beginning, as we are going to need more than politics to keep ourselves going as a species. But waking up to the fact that we have political power wakes us up to the fact that we have power, generally.

We have the power to make changes, we have the power to change our reality. We each and every one of us holds the power of creation within ourselves, the power to change our paradigm.

When we wake up to the fact that our chains are merely strings, and strings are merely a particular arrangement of subatomic particles vibrating at a certain frequency at the quantum level of reality, we can simply step out of the paradigm of the bondage that is our collective belief system (or collection of belief systems). We have the power of creatorship. Not only do we each and every one of us have the power of creatorship, we are also the created. We are at once part of creation and creator. We create ourselves so that we can exist and we exist so that we can create ourselves. Descartes was close when he said “I think, therefore I am.” But the “I think, therefore …” is simply a qualifier. We simply are. We are. I AM. When you achieve I AM awareness, then you can BE HERE NOW. And now is the place of infinite potential, now is when and where we make change. We don’t make it later, we make it now, we must live the change.

When we finally come together as a people, as one people, and say ENOUGH IS ENOUGH then we will be able to make change. And friends, that’s exactly what you are witnessing, right now this very moment. The people are waking up to the fact that enough is enough. We’re mad as hell and we’re not going to take it anymore.

Am I right?