“The choice is not between violence and nonviolence but between nonviolence and nonexistence.” – Martin Luther King Jr. 

If you have not read part 1, click here –> Part 1

The most important thing to point out during this time of worldwide protest is that all the problems in the world start with us – individually. The system, the global machine of commerce and government control, needs you to interface with it for a relationship to exist between the two. Just like you logon to the internet, you need a computer to gain access to the World Wide Web, and without one, you are unable to reach it. It is the computer that is the interface that lies between the person and the internet. That being said, what we need to realize is that there is an interface that lies between each individual person and the system itself. Once we are aware of this interface, we can either limit or eliminate the amount of energy and attention we give it rather than being completely unaware of it.

As I said in “Occupy Yourself – Not the Streets”, with an attitude of boycott rather than protesting in the streets, we can, at the individual level, harness our power and direct our lives toward a positive change without dealing with the negative effects of public protest, and in fact, when we do engage in public protest we are behaving in a manner that the system wants us to. Although this helps us disconnect from the system to a certain degree, what we need to comprehend is that we need to approach the world’s problems at its root cause: the ego of man.

It has been said that the ego of man, the internal dialogue within that strives to maintain a sense of self, has three main characteristics: the need to control, the desire to judge, and the yearning for acceptance.  When we take a sober look at the world that surrounds us, it’s very apparent that the world is built on these three characteristics of the ego and is built to exploit them perpetually. No one can deny the amount of energy that is put into motion from all around us to how we look, how we act, and how we are different from each other. The ego strives to create a sense of self to sustain that it is different from others and through the method of judging, comparing, and defining, it emphasizes its significance. The ego has this built in tendency to create enemies and by creating these enemies, the ego gains a stronger sense of itself. In fact, the solitary ambition of the ego is to continuously achieve a sense of itself compared to the world that surrounds it without any end. We can see this all over the world with consumerism, wars, and racism to name a few. If anyone has tried to figure out why they have felt a sense of emptiness in their lives, one only has to look at the nature of the ego and its endless desire to have significance. Simply put – the ego will always desire more no matter how much attention you give it.

The nature of the ego’s behavior of perpetual desire to define its sense of self is the motivating force that compels people into action, and by extension, is the interface that lies between the individual and the global system. By becoming aware of this interface, we can embark on taking control of our unconscious reactions and turn them into conscious responses. And when we do this, we remove the predicable behavior the global system is expecting, thus derailing its control over us. With the boycott method and the ego interface in mind, we can start to remove the chess pieces off this chessboard that we are playing on – helping us to, one day, get up and walk away from it all together. The Occupy Movement is part of the chess match that the global system has grips on and when we decide to occupy ourselves instead, we relinquish control they have over us.

To help you keep the three characteristics of the ego at the forefront of your awareness, all you need to do is think of the acronym – JAC.

You need to get to know the ego’s best friends – JAC:

J – Judgement

A – Acceptance

C – Control

I asked my buddy what he was trying to convey with the sign that he was holding up at occupy Toronto and this is what he had to say:

The whole premise behind the “Get Money Out of Politics Now” sign can be interpreted in many ways and it has.  The message we were trying to get across was the corruption and influence corporations have on elections in the form of lobbyist with their own self serving agendas and their impact on the everyday politics once the party they lobby is in power.

Have you seen the latest news on the U.S. passing a law to give the military unprecedented power to detain citizens? Everything America stands for is being destroyed by this government. The U.S. is a dictatorial government trying to control every aspect of its citizens and now, turning its military against its citizens. How is this promoting national security?