The Condor and the Turtle:

Wisdom for a “Civilization” Drunk at the Edge of the Roof…

“Great spirits have always encountered
violent opposition from mediocre minds.”

Albert Einstein

The metaphor of the condor and the turtle conjures up two diverse images: the condor soaring with an unlimited view of reality; the turtle crawling slow and steady in its own pace, with a limited view of reality.  When we take the time to carefully observe human behavior, we see this metaphor in the realm of human consciousness. 

Some dare to soar, to fly, to live and create independently, ahead of the masses. These are integrated, conscious human beings that propel new and valuable creative knowledge.  They possess the qualities that characterize the Condor Factor.  I call them “Condorians”.  They are the leaders, the independent integrated thinkers. They are their own authority.

The Turtle Factor encompasses humans who are too intimidated to think, be and live from their own volition.  The “Turtelians” depend on external authority.  Craving guidance and approval from others, they exist in a “follower mode”, a “sheep consciousness” syndrome.  The Turtelians‘ natural state of thinking, living and being is dictated and depends on outside authoritative forces.

Characteristics of Condorians and Turtelians

Condorians Soars Inner directed Wants to live forever Conscious consumer Producer of values Generous/self content Eat to live Authentic romantic love Reduces stress Increased health Real, conscious beings Realizes “Time is finite and precious” (lives in present) Quick decision-maker Exerts with focused effort Totally integrated honesty Lucid reality Problem solver Conscious mind Self-directed leaders Flow, Forward movement Developers Conceptual thinkers Energetic, active Happiness-oriented Enjoys the creative process  (appreciates the 9-month gestation) Is their own authority Connected Conscious being Few Minority (for the time being)

Turtelians Crawls Outer directed Accepts death as inevitable Hypnotized consumer Destroyer of values Envious and greedy Live to eat Procreative, “sex for sex’s sake” Increases stress Disease/death oriented Pretenders, unconscious Thinks “Time is infinite, ” (devalues time.  Procrastinates) Slow.  Retards decision making Low-energy, unfocused effort Dishonest, cheating Mystical thinking Stuck in problems Bicameral mind1 (see footnote) Followers Stagnancy, Specialization Maintainers Linear and perceptual thinkers Lazy, passive, idle Melancholic Looking for a “Two-minute solution” (wants instant results/gratification) Depends on external authority Fragmented Sleepwalker Many Majority (until self-extinction)

CONDORIANS

Condorians exert honest effort to produce and create value for others.  They earn self-esteem through creativity and integrated thinking, and do not need approval from anyone to create.  They perceive time as finite and therefore precious.  Self-motivated, responsible and self-authoritative, they pursue the truth through free and independent thinking.

Condorians act and possess genuine practical and creative power.  As visionaries with uncompromising honesty, they are focused and conscious, mentally and physically alert and active.  Nothing slips by.

Condorians do not sit idle and watch the world revolve away from them.  They orbit in “the constant now.”  They participate in the active motion of the world and integrate their bodies, minds and souls.  Because of their characteristics, the Condorians experience super happiness, health, wealth and pure uncontaminated love.  They are modest and their actions and movements are effective and productive.  They exist in an exhilarating mode of being.

Condorians maintain these characteristics through a clear and lucid state of consciousness. Unfortunately they are few, but they are the natural future, shaping a new world based on the creative genius of humanity. 

“To believe your own thought, to believe
that what is true for you in your private heart
is true for all men — that is genius”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

TURTELIANS

Turtelians. The characteristics of Turtelians include bicameral¹ unconscious behavior, and being mentally dead, merely existing biologically.  They are externally motivated, functioning through the automatic left/right brain functions without self-discipline.  They have no concept of self, no concept of time, and a have a subservient attitude toward external or “higher” authority.

Turtelians are hypnotized by the follower’s mode of thinking, being and living.  They have no intellectual pursuit and are slavishly obedient to faith, and are therefore powerless and helpless.  Their intrinsic motivation is mostly attached to survival issues, with procreation as their main objective rather than authentic and pure love.  They are sleepwalkers pretending to be awake.

These characteristics lead the Turtelians to have self-doubt and a concept of infinite time.  Time for them is devalued, and procrastination is rampant as they postpone the awakened intensity of living in the present.

They find left brain/right brain functions to be antagonistic and live in confusion and irresponsibility as they act in slavish obedience to dogmatic belief systems.  Contradiction is the norm for them.  Excessively non-productive and even counter-productive (nine to five superficiality), Turtelians are envious and lazy.  They try, hope, and act from mostly existential subjective values.  Even their death process is dependent on others.  Turtelians are always in the transitional state of pursuing comfort and security or the illusion of personal freedom.

They are fragmented thinkers who use power games and victimize others to achieve a false sense of self-worth.  The result is a lifetime of anxiety, poverty and envy.  Regrettably they are many, and probably will self-extinguish themselves with time.

“To be idle and to be poor have always been reproaches
and therefore every man endeavors with his utmost care
to hide his poverty from others and his idleness from himself.”

Samuel Johnson

Through bureaucracy and other types of bogus livelihood, Turtelians have prospered off of the Condorians’ productivity.  Turtelians wear many masks.  “Caring,” “loving,” “fatherly,” “for the good of society”,  “for the security of our nation” and “protective,” are a few common camouflages. 

Masking their dishonesty with the age-old tools of mysticism, they create problems where none exist.  They do so with the prolific use of non-sequiturs (Latin for “it doesn’t follow logically from the previous statement”).  In doing so, they distort people’s way of thinking to believe things that aren’t true, and make it commonplace to link a non-value to a value and vice versa.  See more about mysticism in the footnotes² .

In order to soar as a Condorian, one must identify Turtelian  characteristics in one’s life and reverse destructive patterns, transforming them into productive ones.  Through disciplined use of logic, integrated thinking, eliminating the disease of “personal mysticism,” and through Totally Integrated Honesty, one can achieve the Condorian Factor in one’s personal and professional life.  The human may only walk on foot, but can soar with the mind, by simply shifting attention and  awareness.

Until Roger Banister ran a mile in less than four minutes, it was thought to be an impossible feat.  But once he broke that invisible barrier, many more promptly followed suit.  Turtelians constantly meet in­visible barriers.  Most of the time, Turtelians simply ignore the metaphoric wall that prevents them from advancing and developing their true being as it was meant to be, and choose one of two options: 1.  Turn around and retreat, or 2.  Lie down and pretend the wall isn’t there.

Unfortunately, most of humanity readily maintains these Turtelian characteristics by wasting precious and productive time living in confusion and contradiction—the perpetual state of Turtelian  unconscious­ness.

Only a few individuals dare to use the Condorian Factor to free themselves from the Turtelian traps of self-deception masked by “positive thinking” and the popular seminary of psycho babble—pretending to be happy and productive.  As Shakespeare said in Hamlet, “To be honest in this world is to be one in a thousand.”  In our modern world, I believe it is to be “one in a few million.”

When Gary Lee Christensen graduated from West Yellowstone High School in 1990, his salutatorian address raised the ire of some parents and classmates.  He spoke of how he had “survived years of intolerance” because he “dared to be different.”

 “I was a good student when it was not popular to be a good student . . . an Eagle Scout when it was not popular to be a Scout.”  He also added that he had “played the piano when everyone else was playing football.”  He implicated intolerance as a threat to self-esteem.

“You can no longer cling to your friends. Know that by not following the crowd, you can succeed.” Though parents complained and even wanted his scholarships revoked, Gary had enough honesty to deliver a “realistic” view of his experience. And for that, he soared far above the turtles waddling around him. (From The Denver Post, June 5, 1990.)

My grandfather once taught me that “Whenever the people go one direction, make sure to go the other direction.”

Because of daring individuals, human evolution continues.  The dishonesty and self-deception of Turtelians has retarded our evolution, making the environment sluggish and tedious for the soaring Condorians.  This dishonesty becomes the cause of wars, depression, violence, and the inhumanity of human history since the discovery of consciousness 3,000 years ago. **

THE FLYING TURTLE:

The Transformational Self-Evolution Shift

Here we dare to ask; Can the turtle learn to fly?  Metaphorically and metaphysically the answer is yes.  The obstacles are laziness and dishonesty and a dose of utter stupidity.  We have to outsmart the “Amazing Stupidity Syndrome.”  As Einstein said, “Only two things are infinite—the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not sure about the former.”

A transitional stage does exist, a stage I call the “Flying Turtle,” a conscious awakening to the next step of the individual’s evolution.  This is the point to which science and the arts have evolved.  But the fact remains that the turtle is still a turtle and is only on the way to becoming a condor.  This is the stage where artists continue to operate with the Right Brain while scientists lock themselves into the Left-Brain.  The step of integration that can catapult one into the flight of the condor is what the Flying Turtle wants to achieve.

Without inventing machines or superficial metaphors, the Turtle can fly.  Whatever powers of invention are within reach of the Turtles, the key to unlocking the chains that bind them is within thems­elves—in their own hands and minds.  To soar without ridicule may seem impossible in a world dominated by intolerant status quo Turtles.  Jonathan Swift said, “When a true genius appears in this world, you know him by this sign—that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.”

It is human nature to be afraid of such greatness.  In Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, he writes, “Be not afraid of greatness: some are born great; some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them.”  Greatness is often misunderstood.  Ralph Waldo Emerson pondered, “Is it so bad then to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.”

To cure the Turtelian mysticism disease requires discipline and Totally Integrated Honesty in all areas of life—to lead rather than follow, to act rather than react, to move forward rather than just try.  There must be integrated thinking rather than non-conscious non-thinking. Independence must be exerted rather than dependence on others, especially dependence on the direction of external authority.  Courage and initiative should override cowardice.  The use of honest accurate facts should replace out-of-context traps or the “2-minute solution,” the immediate results syndrome of everyday life.

With this new attitude, one no longer fears the “unknown,” but sees it as a place full of potential—the “not-yet-known.”  Rather than being unhappy and stagnant , the Condor strives to be happy, productive, and a producer and creator of values—soaring to unlimited use of consciousness.

When you develop and apply an integrated awareness of these daring principles, you can use your power of choice in your own life to become your true self — a Condor.  All you need now, my friend, is simply to shift and focus your attention, in order to change your consciousness and situation from where you are now, to where you were intended to be — the state of perfect balance.  Are you ready to take this step?  To shift?  It’s up to you.

“There is no greater waste than potential unrealized.”

Anonymous

“An invasion of armies can be resisted but not an idea whose time has come.”

Victor Hugo

Footnotes:

* I do not mean to denigrate these noble animals. I am merely using them (with their permission) as metaphors to illustrate some characteristics of human animal behavior.

1 The Bicameral mind (two-chamber mind) is one that functions in an unconscious, two-step process.  Automatic reactions and thoughts originate in the right hemisphere of the brain and are transmitted to the left hemisphere as instructions to be acted upon.  Bicameral functioning is nature’s automatic learned mode of response, without incorporating conscious thinking.  The Bicameral mind was first identified by Dr. Julian Jaynes of Princeton University in his book, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, 1976, Houghton Mifflin Co., Boston MA.

2 Mysticism.  The definition of mysticism used here is any any attempt to evade and contradict objective reality through dishonesty and deceit.  Although the word “mysticism” may sometimes be used to refer to religions of the occult, this is not the context in which it is used in this article.  

Mysticism is a rampant tendency which distorts human consciousness, promoting dishonesty and creating problems where they do not exist.  It cleverly uses non-sequiters and other illogical statements to distort people’s perception from seeing reality as it is.      

Mysticism causes those who follow to it to react with the Bicameral Mentality.  It encourages them to follow orders from an outside “higher” authority, to escape responsibility, and to behave automatically like robots following orders.  In brief it can be described as the most deadly, dangerous perversion and toxic disease of human consciousness.

The disciplines of the so called new age since the 1960s have been causing this regression back to bicameral mind mysticism.  This is a contemporary and obvious example of the regression to bicameral mind behavior, encouraging the limited consciousness of the “follower mode”, and inciting a state of mass-hypnosis.   This way of thinking causes brain damage, and deeply harms the sanity and spiritual health of innocent practitioners.