“The wound is the place where the Light enters you.”  — Rumi

Flashes of Something More

Most of us have heard the term illumination in self-help and spiritual literature. Illumination occurs when we are open to all the potential we inherently possess. When the self is open to its full potential, the world is presented before us with great clarity. Each and every one of us has experienced flashes of illumination — truly remarkable moments — but most of us believe we can only hope to bump into those moments, as if they are out there somewhere, waiting for us to stumble across them. In this essay I will offer you the fundamentals for increasing such moments so that each day can be a remarkable experience.

At a ranch I once owned north of Dallas, where the crisp atmosphere was undisturbed by city lights or pollution, the sky often held magnificent cloud formations and exquisite sunsets, giving the sensation of immensity and expansion. When you are alone with that vast sky overhead, free of stress and worry, free from conversations and distractions, there is a feeling of oneness with your environment, a connection with the consciousness of the moment you are in. That is an example of a remarkable moment of illumination. Just as attempting to describe the sky’s immensity, its cloud patterns and far-reaching sunsets, to someone else cannot convey your experience, so it is with all our moments of illumination. We have to show up for the experiences ourselves.

The poet William Blake understood this in a single couplet that has echoed across two centuries: “To see a world in a grain of sand, and a heaven in a wild flower. Hold infinity in the palm of your hand, and eternity in an hour.” That is not metaphor. That is a precise description of what happens when the filters drop and the mind stops narrating and the moment arrives unedited. Illumination is not something that belongs to saints and mystics. It belongs to every human being who is willing to be still enough to receive it.

The psychologist Abraham Maslow spent his career studying not pathology but health — not what goes wrong with human beings but what goes right. He found that self-actualizing people share a common experience he called peak experiences: moments of profound joy, clarity, and connection that arise spontaneously and are characterized by a feeling of being completely present, completely alive, completely at one with reality. These experiences are not manufactured. They cannot be purchased, scheduled, or optimized. They simply arise when the conditions are right — when the ego is quiet, when the defenses are down, when the person is vulnerable enough to let life in.

“The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science.” — Albert Einstein

What the Body Remembers

When do we have a remarkable moment? It might happen when we are with someone we are overwhelmingly enamored by. There is an exchange that takes place when we share energy with a person we love. Although the exchange is invisible, we know it is real because that energy makes us vibrate. We feel it move throughout our body. There may even be moments when that experience returns to us when we are alone and thinking of our loved one. These are remarkable moments connecting us to authentic reality.

A fundamental law of the universe is that it never forgets our experiences. The level at which every cell and molecule in our body vibrates depends upon both the nature of the moment we are in and the memory of every other moment we have ever experienced. Every cell and molecule in our bodies is waiting for a sign from our environment, for some word or some gesture, to trigger a moment that brings us to a deeper realization. If a present experience triggers a positive experience from our past, then the energy we receive back is pleasurable.

For example, PBS television has been bringing back old doo-wop musicians. Why would doo-wop music be popular in the twenty-first century? Because those viewers remember a special moment in their past when that music brought them something real. It might have been a moment of romantic tenderness while listening on a car radio, or a moment of youthful freedom on a dance floor, feeling life as full of unlimited possibilities. As the music plays, the mind relives past events and the feelings associated with those memories.

Neuroscience has now confirmed what poets and mystics have always intuited: the body does not merely store memories as data points in the brain. It stores them as felt experience, distributed throughout the entire nervous system. The neuroscientist Candace Pert demonstrated that neuropeptides — the molecules of emotion — are found not only in the brain but throughout the body: in the gut, in the immune system, in the heart. Your cells are literally remembering. When a song from 1962…or 2002,  brings tears to your eyes, those tears are not coming from your intellect. They are coming from your tissue, your chemistry, your body’s living archive of every moment you have ever experienced.

Every single moment of our lives, everything we have ever done, is stored. Nothing is ever forgotten and nothing is ever lost. What really matters is the way in which we connect with those memories. We want to connect with the joyful memories, but we also connect with memories we prefer to forget because they were upsetting or traumatic. Experiences that caused us fear, insecurity, anger, or a sense of being violated or unappreciated are also present. Not only are unpleasant memories stored in our cells, they also unconsciously shape much of our daily behavior. So we need to learn how to create moments that emphasize and build upon our positive experiences. The cumulative effect of remarkable moments opens us up into a state of illumination.

The great physician Gabor Maté has written extensively about how the body stores what the mind cannot process. Trauma does not disappear when we stop thinking about it. It relocates. It moves into the muscles, the organs, the immune system. It manifests as chronic pain, as autoimmune conditions, as the unnamed tension we carry in our shoulders and our jaws. Illumination is, in part, the process of releasing what the body has been holding — of allowing the stored pain to surface, to be felt, to be grieved, and to be let go. You cannot be illuminated while your body is a warehouse of unprocessed suffering. The light needs room.

“The body keeps the score.” — Bessel van der Kolk

The Illuminated People Among Us

Take a moment to reflect on people you know who have lived an illuminated life. What distinguishes them from the rest of us? They are not inherently different, but they appear to be living at a different level of consciousness. They exude qualities of lightness, of ease, of being at peace with themselves. They seem to flow through life, and they project an acute awareness of the moment they are in. We can feel positive energy radiating from their presence, even in their writings.

I frequently adopt orphaned baby animals on one of my farms. Because these babies have been abandoned or neglected, it takes a lot of attention and patience before they warm up to you. Suddenly a day arrives when one of them crawls into your lap, kisses you, and expresses contentment in its own unique way. These little creatures connect fearlessly through love. They are not afraid of being dropped or injured because they instinctively know that you will provide them with comfort and joy. The same is true of human infants who have no fear of being dropped by the mother — you can toss them gently into the air and they only laugh and giggle. But if you drop them several times or yell at them frequently, they become afraid. If a toddler does something you disapprove of and you scold and smack them, the child will cower or go hide. Eventually the child will fear you. Those traumatic experiences become embedded in the child’s cells as memories, and it will take considerable effort to overcome the fears that were conditioned by those destructive experiences.

Adults who have been abused, neglected, or denied in their past may hold the energy of those memories tightly, which can constrict their muscles around it. Even their mental constructs — beliefs and judgments about the world — can constrict. If these people lack sufficient remarkable moments in their lives, they may not see the world as a wonderful, positive place with enormous potential for creative and pleasurable energy, but as something threatening and wrathful.

I am sure you have been in the presence of people who seem numb to life. They do not feel anything because they cling to all of their discomfort toward the world. In contrast, we also know people who seem like endless running rivers of love, who are unafraid of opening themselves to life’s bounties and becoming vulnerable in order to accept what the universe has to offer. I have found it very interesting to observe that it is only when people make themselves vulnerable that they are able to grow. There is no growth and no authentic feeling toward life when vulnerability is missing.

The researcher Brené Brown has spent two decades studying this exact phenomenon, and her findings are unambiguous: vulnerability is not weakness. It is the birthplace of innovation, creativity, and change. The people who live the most wholehearted, most connected, most illuminated lives are not the ones who have eliminated risk from their existence. They are the ones who have learned to show up when they cannot control the outcome. That is vulnerability. And that is the prerequisite for illumination.

If we live solely with our past pains, allowing tormenting wounds to register in us physically and emotionally, then no matter what we attempt to do, we will not proceed with an openness that enhances growth and illumination. Vulnerability is a crucial initial step toward illumination.

“Vulnerability is the birthplace of innovation, creativity, and change.” — Brené Brown

The Emptiness We Run From

In order to prepare ourselves for illumination, we also have to learn to stop constantly trying to escape the emptiness we feel nagging at our lives. The emptiness is not real, of course, but we do not even allow ourselves the chance to slow down enough to discover its illusory nature and the truth of our vibrant connection to the world.

One of the most common ways to avoid facing an empty sensation is to occupy ourselves with something or immerse ourselves in our habitual routines. Everything we do to remain busy, including all of our addictions and dysfunctional behaviors, is based upon anxiety and fear of that emptiness, which we would rather avoid or fill than confront.

This has never been more true than it is right now. We are living in the golden age of distraction. The average person spends more than seven hours a day consuming digital media. Social media platforms are designed by teams of behavioral engineers to ensure that we never have to sit with an uncomfortable feeling for more than a few seconds before a notification, a video, a meme, an outrage, or a manufactured dopamine hit rescues us from ourselves. AI companions now offer the simulation of deep conversation without requiring the vulnerability of actual relationship. You can process your loneliness through a chatbot at three in the morning and feel temporarily soothed without ever having confronted the emptiness at its source.

The philosopher Blaise Pascal saw this three and a half centuries ago, long before the internet, long before smartphones, long before algorithms. He wrote that all of humanity’s problems stem from our inability to sit quietly in a room alone. He understood that busyness is not productivity. It is anesthesia. It is the socially acceptable way of avoiding the one encounter that could actually change our lives: the encounter with ourselves.

The British philosopher Alan Watts, who did more than perhaps anyone to bring Eastern philosophy to the Western world in the twentieth century, described the predicament with characteristic wit. He observed that we spend our entire lives running from the present moment, chasing the future, dreading the past, and in the process we miss the only time that actually exists. He compared it to a person who spends their whole life on a journey and never arrives, because the destination was always the journey itself. The emptiness we are running from is not a void. It is a clearing. It is the open space in which illumination can occur — if we stop filling it with noise.

The Illusions of Beauty, Security, and Control

How we busy ourselves depends upon our earlier conditioning, our intellect, and our unique disposition. Some people are afraid of exposing their true motives, so they present facades to cover up their intentions. They might try to fill their emptiness with beauty, surrounding themselves with beautiful possessions or obsessing about their appearance. But there is a fundamental flaw to such strategies.

Imagine for a moment that you are a beautiful person by accepted social standards. But then a day arrives when you realize that your beauty is impermanent. A beauty that only conforms to society’s norms is going to end eventually. How are you going to feel when you are no longer accepted for being beautiful? As long as you are desired, beauty is your opium — it puts you into an altered state. Yet deep inside there is another voice saying: But only for today. What happens if you have no other value but your beauty to bank on, and the currency of your glamour runs out?

This has been amplified to a terrifying degree by the technologies of our moment. Filters on Instagram and TikTok now allow you to present a face to the world that is not your face. AI-generated beauty standards — smoothed skin, symmetrical features, bodies that conform to mathematically optimized proportions — are being internalized by a generation of young people who are measuring their actual bodies against images that do not correspond to any real human being. A study published in 2025 found that sixty percent of young women aged eighteen to twenty-five reported feeling worse about their appearance after using beauty filters. They are comparing themselves to fictions. And the emptiness that follows — the gap between the filtered self and the actual self — is not being addressed. It is being monetized. There is an entire industry of cosmetic procedures, supplements, and products designed to help you look more like the version of yourself that does not exist.

The ancient Buddhist teaching of anicca — impermanence — addresses this directly. Everything that arises passes away. Your beauty, your youth, your strength, your status — all of it is temporary. This is not a philosophy of despair. It is a philosophy of liberation. Because if you can release your attachment to the impermanent, what remains is something that does not decay: your awareness, your capacity for love, your connection to the present moment. Those do not wrinkle. Those do not fade. Those are the only forms of beauty that survive the passage of time.

I have also observed how so many men and women today avoid associating with those who are authentically aligned with illuminative qualities, who could offer them a vital connection to something essential. Instead, they seek people who will provide or support their needs for security. A relationship that is nothing more than an accommodation of our insecurities is a dangerous path. Unfortunately, this is an all too common problem, and children in particular suffer from our mistakes. Fifty-five percent of all marriages in this country end in divorce, and many still-married spouses say they would have already separated if they could afford it.

How is it possible that our society can have such a high failure rate in satisfying relationships? One fundamental reason is that so many people enter serious relationships before they have developed an authentic relationship with themselves. How can we contain so much insecurity, uncertainty, dysfunction, fear, and sense of incompletion and expect something healthy and authentic to come forth?

The philosopher Erich Fromm addressed this with devastating clarity. He argued that the ability to be alone is the precondition for the ability to love. The person who cannot tolerate solitude, who needs another person to fill the void, will inevitably turn the relationship into a transaction — a mutual hostage situation in which both parties cling to each other not from love but from fear. Genuine love, Fromm wrote, is an activity, not a passive affect. It is a standing in, not a falling in. And you cannot stand in love if you cannot first stand in yourself.

“The ability to be alone is the condition for the ability to love.” — Erich Fromm

The Masks, the Multitasking, and the Temporary Repairs

Living an inauthentic life, conditioned by the negative moments from our past, makes us hide our foibles. We are afraid to be identified with our weaknesses and failures, so we compensate by wearing masks and putting on airs. We give the appearance of being secure, happy, responsible, conscientious, and industrious. But then where is the real person? When our masks are removed, we are simply human beings existing on the edge of a void, busying ourselves running around the edges of darkness so we do not have to realize we are already in it.

Carl Jung called this the persona — the mask we present to the world, the social face we construct to navigate the expectations of our environment. Jung understood that the persona is necessary — we cannot walk through life completely undefended. But he also warned that when we confuse the mask with the face, when we forget that the persona is a tool rather than an identity, we lose access to the deeper self. And the deeper self is where illumination lives. You cannot be illuminated through a mask. The light does not pass through it.

With our social commitments and careers, life turns into a huge effort in multitasking. If we have kids, there is even less time left to examine anything meaningful about ourselves. You pass your significant other in the house and forget who each other is. We are trying to do so many things that we can hardly do even one thing well. If you do not give quality time to anything you do, everything will eventually suffer. It is like making an electrical repair in the home: you can either do it properly or you can mend it temporarily. In American society we are masters of temporary repairs — temporary healthcare, temporary commissions that discuss problems without providing sustainable resolutions, temporary measures after every disaster. Little is done authentically and therefore few problems are actually solved.

The concept of wabi-sabi in Japanese aesthetics offers a radical alternative to our culture of performance and temporary repair. Wabi-sabi is the art of finding beauty in imperfection, in incompleteness, in the natural process of decay and renewal. A cracked bowl is not ruined — it tells a story. A weathered surface is not damaged — it has lived. The illuminated life is not a perfect life. It is a real one. And reality includes cracks, losses, failures, and the slow beautiful erosion of everything we tried to make permanent. When we stop trying to repair the mask and start living without it, illumination is not far behind.

The Physics of Imbalance

So what kind of life are you living if it is not a sustainable life? Whenever I am confronted by a choice, I have to decide whether it can be sustained in a complete and balanced way. If it cannot, then I should not do it. Moreover, everything in life, every choice, is an exchange. If I am going to exchange imbalance for balance, then I must surrender everything that generates imbalance.

Wasting time creates imbalance. Giving our energy to pursuits that are trivial and undeserving of our effort creates instability. Absorbing the energy of other people who are not constructive and positive in turn imbalances us. Living in a toxic environment upsets our lives. When we are imbalanced, unhealthy, and caught in a web of inauthentic relationships, everything we undertake is going to be based on a fear of losing whatever it is we feel a need to control.

Jealousy is a straitjacket we wrap around someone else, but it immobilizes us simultaneously. How comfortable are we with ourselves and with another person when we are in a straitjacket together? Envy is another form of control. We see a person with something we do not have and we feel incomplete without it. When we finally acquire the object of our envy, we realize we were better off without it. All we really received for our efforts are bills: an emotional bill, a time-wasted bill, and a misused-energy bill.

The Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius, who governed the Roman Empire through plagues and wars that make our own difficulties seem manageable, wrote in his private meditations: You have power over your mind, not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength. Aurelius was not philosophizing in the abstract. He was reminding himself, daily, that the only equilibrium available to a human being is interior equilibrium. External balance is always temporary. Internal balance — the balance that comes from choosing your responses rather than being driven by your reactions — is the only balance that can be sustained. And it is the foundation of illumination.

Take a glance at all of the things you own and once felt you needed but never really had a use for. They are a concrete example of decisions that originated from a place of imbalance. Fear, insecurity, the lack of an authentic sense of self, the feeling of an incomplete life, and giving up positive for negative energy — all of these create imbalance.

A common phrase we hear is: I wish it were Friday. That is actually a terrible thought, because it means today does not count. It suggests that there is little real life and little real sacredness in today. Underlying this thought is the false assurance that if you get through today then tomorrow will be better. This is simply a negative exchange of energy: an exchange of the reality of this moment for the illusion that tomorrow is going to be a better moment. And how often does tomorrow turn out to be any better?

The meditation teacher S. N. Goenka, who brought Vipassana practice to millions of people worldwide, taught a single relentless principle: observe reality as it is, not as you wish it to be. Do not crave what is pleasant. Do not recoil from what is unpleasant. Simply observe. When you observe without craving and without aversion, what remains is equanimity. And equanimity is the doorway to illumination. It is not indifference — it is the deepest possible engagement with reality, because it is engagement without distortion.

“You have power over your mind, not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.” — Marcus Aurelius

Fear and the Ego’s Front Line

Fear is perhaps the single most important motivating factor locking us down into an inauthentic, artificial life, which curtails much of our potential for growth. We construct our existence out of the building blocks of our fears. Certainly we all go through the motions of making efforts, believing we are changing because we have different experiences — relationships, different jobs and residences, a variety of interests and activities. However, experiences are not truly relevant unless we treat them as lessons and grow during the process of facing them. And the lesson of fear is one of the most important lessons to confront.

One way to deal with your fears is by consciously experimenting with your life and beliefs. If we are afraid of expressing our honesty, some of what we say and do is based on fear. Some conversations cannot be authentic because the conversation aims to be accepted and to avoid criticism and rejection. So for one full day, commit yourself to being completely honest about everything you say and think. Detach yourself from all your fears about imagined consequences and just be honest and allow events to unfold. There is no need to be mean, cruel, or harsh. Simply be compassionate and honest but also uncompromising and see what happens. Speak gently and truthfully to everyone you talk to and observe the responses you receive.

When we are absolutely honest with ourselves, we are raising the standards by which we feel, act, and communicate with others. Living an honest life enables new and remarkable events to unfold for us. We discover that the rewards gained for being honest are far greater than those when we were entangled in our inauthentic, conditioned self.

During conversations, listen attentively without the conditioned ego’s prejudgment. Only then will you be able to respond honestly, because your authentic self will be processing the information. Whenever you personalize a conversation, you become upset with whatever disagrees with your feelings and your needs. The subconscious mind activates when you are upset and launches a volley of conditioned responses, which may result in your reacting from your ego. The ego will try to subordinate the real self because it is the master of all your defense mechanisms.

Why do so few people attempt anything outside the cultural norm? Because their defense mechanisms defend and justify their fears. The ego circumvents authentic risk-taking that would lead to growth and illumination. If people denigrate your inspiration, they are not really listening. They are reacting, not toward you but toward themselves. Their egos, not their authentic selves, are conditioned to react. The ego serves as the frontline attack dog for every belief system, reacting on impulse because that is how it has been hardwired to respond throughout a person’s life. By surrendering the ego, we surrender fear as well. Only after the ego is under control does the authentic self speak, hear, and feel.

The philosopher Eckhart Tolle, whose work has reached millions of people in the twenty-first century, describes the ego as a phantom self — a mental construct that feeds on identification with roles, possessions, grievances, and narratives. The ego is not evil. It is simply unconscious. It does not know that it is a construct, and it will defend its existence with the ferocity of any organism that feels threatened. The moment you observe the ego — the moment you notice yourself defending a position not because you believe it is true but because your identity feels attached to it — you have created a gap between yourself and the ego. And in that gap, illumination begins.

In our current era, the ego has found its most powerful amplifier in history: social media. Every post is an ego performance. Every like is an ego reward. Every comment section is an ego battleground. The algorithms have learned to feed the ego with surgical precision — showing you exactly the content that will trigger your identification, your outrage, your need to be right. And the result is a population that is more ego-driven, more reactive, more defended, and further from illumination than at any point in modern memory. The technology that was supposed to connect us has become the ego’s most sophisticated instrument of isolation.

“The primary cause of unhappiness is never the situation but your thoughts about it.” — Eckhart Tolle

The Transcendental State: From I to We

If you wish to appreciate the meaning of enlightenment, this wonderful sense of illumination, it is important to understand the transcendental state of consciousness. In a transcendental state, you surrender your sense of a personal I and connect instead with the sense of we. In this state you achieve a conscious connection with the entire world. You are present with everyone — all races, ethnicities, ages, and ideas. There is no need to force your ideas on anyone, nor is there a tendency to personalize whatever is being shared with you.

Behind every religion, every ideological belief, every cultural and political difference, there are simply human beings. When you surrender your need to define yourself through your ego with all of its cultural conditionings, and let go of your need to be right, you discover yourself aligned with the correctness of the universe. The universe offers a far more extraordinary connection than anything you could discover when being unconsciously led by the ego.

The philosopher Martin Buber described this shift as the movement from I-It to I-Thou. In the I-It relationship, we encounter the other as an object, a category, a label, a function. In the I-Thou relationship, we encounter the other as a full, sacred, irreducible being. The transcendental state is the permanent residence in I-Thou — the condition in which every encounter, with every person and every living thing, is experienced as a meeting between two mysteries rather than a transaction between two strategies.

So many of us have become master artisans of believing that we are all that matters in the world. We build our homes hedged and fenced away from our neighbors and do not bother to barter and exchange. We may resent the successes of others and fear our own losses. And what do we fear most? The loss of our youth, of our money and success, of our popularity, and of our relationships and security. Anyone who needs to seek their way into the higher citadels of power will most fear the loss of that power and control. We cling to all of these illusions even though they are fleeting at best.

But the authentic self is constantly open to universal truth. Every cell in our bodies contains universal truth, which our minds and bodies can connect with at any moment. This truth is not simply the I we have all come to believe is the center of the universe. It is the we of all life that really matters and is most real.

What do we all have in common? When someone says, “You and I have a lot in common,” the first thing that comes to mind is mutual interests, hobbies, lifestyles, social status. These are all constructs glossing over the more important commonality everyone on the planet shares: we are all human beings with an innate desire to be happy, honored, respected, and appreciated — in other words, a need for true intimacy. When we fail to meet another person as a human being, we get caught up in labels that either draw us closer together or push us further apart. But these distinctions make no difference because none of them are essential. When we meet someone as a human being, with the motivation to honor each other’s experience, an authentic connection is made. This is how two people meet at a transcendental level. This is how peace and love are generated. This is how war and violence are brought to an end.

Every Day, Remarkable

Every cell in your body is aware at the transcendental level until you superimpose your ego’s will and thought upon your body and mind. If your ego says you are no good and unworthy, then you will feel bad and unworthy. If the ego doubts you can do something, you will never do it. The way we identify and associate with an authority figure and a ruling paradigm will also control our perceptions about ourselves and determine our ability to express our freedom to choose and act.

So for a moment, step back and consider a question. What if the many limiting things you have been told are wrong? What if you are really, deep down, a good, smart human being who wants to think and live independently and creatively?

Every day is a new opportunity to reexamine how we can make our life better and richer with remarkable experiences. You can make the rest of your days remarkable. You can become open to the transcendental process, whether through meditation, quiet moments, contemplative presence in nature, journaling, a personal catharsis, or a spontaneous epiphany. The way in which you transcend depends upon your circumstances, but you must open yourself fearlessly to discover that every day is remarkable.

In our era of artificial intelligence, of algorithmically curated realities and deepfake simulations and synthetic companions, the decision to seek genuine illumination — to sit with the discomfort, to feel the emptiness, to let the moment arrive unedited and unfiltered — is perhaps the most countercultural act available to a human being. The entire architecture of modern technology is designed to prevent the conditions in which illumination occurs: stillness, solitude, vulnerability, presence. Every notification is an interruption of presence. Every algorithm is an editor of reality. Every AI companion is a substitute for the raw, unpredictable, irreplaceable encounter with another living being.

To choose illumination in this environment is to choose reality over simulation, presence over distraction, vulnerability over defense, truth over comfort. It is not easy. It has never been easy. But it has never been more necessary.

When you reside in the illuminated state of mind, living itself is an experience of grace. This is the state of illumination. And it is available to you — not as a distant reward, not as the culmination of decades of spiritual practice, but right now, in the ordinary texture of an ordinary moment, if you are willing to stop running long enough to receive it.

The Sufi poet Hafiz, writing seven centuries ago, described it with the simplicity of someone who had been there: I wish I could show you, when you are lonely or in darkness, the astonishing light of your own being. That light has not gone anywhere. It is not behind a paywall. It is not on the other side of a credential. It is not waiting for you to become worthy. It is you. It has always been you. And the only thing standing between you and it is the willingness to look.

“I wish I could show you, when you are lonely or in darkness, the astonishing light of your own being.” — Hafiz

*

Click the share button below to email/forward this article. Follow us on Instagram and X and subscribe to our Telegram Channel. Feel free to repost Global Research articles with proper attribution.

Global Research is a reader-funded media. We do not accept any funding from corporations or governments. Help us stay afloat. Click the image below to make a one-time or recurring donation.