Oeaohoo

Yes, Nietzsche was a more profound thinker. I only mentioned him as an example because certain aspects of his philosophy fit in with this trend and I know you are familiar with him. Better examples would be Neo-classicism, Romanticism (particularly Percy Shelley and the English Romantics), Rousseau’s Noble Savage and so on. I know you would! I would say that postmodernism is a fall even below the ego. People are extremely collectivistic today, living from one “trend” and social fad to the next… This all comes back to the basic theme of interpreting history as an upwards or downwards trajectory.

The Self has been regarded as a transcendental entity for millennia so I assume that by self here you mean the ego. It’s not so much that the ego is a transcendental agency as that the ego can pursue its own self-interest up to the point at which it finally realises that what it really wants is annihilation in God. It is important to understand that this sort of naturalistic pantheism didn’t really exist except as an aberrant anomaly in the ancient world. It is a projection of the post-Renaissance anti-Christian cult of youthful exuberance, blissful nudity, extravagant sensuality, rococo elegance and so on onto the past. Nietzsche’s war against “pure spirit” in the name of “the instincts”, “life” and “nature”, for example. Nature for the ancients was always a reflection of something more than Nature. I actually agree that the ego is superior to eco (that is to say, to mere Nature). The ego is human and Nature is sub-human; Nature is the realm of fate whereas the ego is the realm of will. Both are inferior to the metaphysical plane which is the realm of Providence or Divine Will. Ecology is certainly not final or the highest spiritual ascent. Of course it is easier to approach God from a state which approximates God but that doesn’t mean that you must be in such a state to do so. After all, God is not a state. Anyway, It is called the “left hand path” because it is harder and more dangerous. Yes, there is a way in which failing to develop an ego is similar to transcending the ego. Interestingly, I made the same point about postmodernism the other day and you didn’t seem to like it: “God includes all distinctions and so all distinctions dissolve in God; postmodernism denies all distinctions and so there are no distinctions in postmodernism. They look the same but that is because the latter is a radical negation of the former”. Replace God and postmodernism here for “post-ego” and “pre-ego” in your evolutionary formulation and you have the same point.

Yes, that’s a nice way to put it. It gives “a flight of the alone to the Alone” a new meaning…

Guess I better stop walking around with that water bottle down my trousers then… What if it is just that women today like feminised men who are weak and vulnerable? In my experience masculinity is about striving and not accepting oneself just as one is. Only if you have already cultivated depth and purpose through the insufficiency and striving of masculinity, otherwise you are just a self-satisfied clown. I think this fake masculinity comes from the superficiality of modern life. Society today does not reward virility and nobility and women use the judgment of society to judge men. Men are therefore forced to prove their masculine nature with the woman herself. However, most women are not interested in manly things like the ruthless pursuit of truth, self-sacrifice and honour, hierarchy and discrimination so they recoil from the men who force them upon her and choose the fun feminine man. They would, however, be interested in the fruits these things would provide in a healthy and functional society.

Awake to what?

Well, if you’re going to worship the self you might as well do it well. The present narcissistic and self-obsessed world presents a certain opportunity in that true selfishness can be a spiritual path. After all, God is the Self. It seems to me that the few people who realise God in the present world situation will do so by pursuing their self-interest right up to the point of self-annihilation! Actualized itself is a very good example of this. From a spiritual-historical perspective I am very much against the religion of self and of self-help. However, like you yourself said this is just where we are today and you have to start from where you are. I agree, Woke Advertising has become a whole industry now and an ideology of lazy self-acceptance is perfect for keeping people dull and uninspired. I’m not sure what you mean by this. I would say it is just getting more and more absurd, devolving… Roman disdain for labour > Catholic work as prayer > Protestant “work ethic” > Socialist inverted religion of the Worker > ultimate depravity of work in postmodern world. Indeed! Slave morality, as Nietzsche called it. Of course the contemporary workplace is a very superficial and stupid environment. I recently quit my office job because it was such a degrading and alienating environment. I’m sorry if you are currently having to deal with it!

Yes, Gurdjieff was right to say that in most cases “man is a machine”. That doesn’t mean that you have no free will though because like you yourself have said you are not the body that is trapped in this matrix of manifestation. Your very existence is an expression of the infinite freedom of God, which is also your true nature. Then it’s time for a prison break-out! That is basically what spiritual awakening is after all. You have to realise you are in prison before you can break out though which is what is happening to you now. You are still free to do all these things. However, you might be realising that even so many of our ordinary desires are mechanically inherited from culture… Maybe some of these desires are not appropriate for you anymore. This all sounds like quite a typical Dark Night of the Soul and an awakening to just how asleep you have been throughout your life so far. Of course, this is not intended as a criticism of you specifically as almost everybody is asleep… You may not be interested but it can be useful to contemplate the problem of fate and determinism from a metaphysical perspective. It is significant that Fate is often associated with feminine figures: for example, in Greco-Roman mythology the three Fates are all women and the Norns (Fates) in Nordic mythology are all goddesses of destiny. A late reference to this can be seen in Shakespeare’s Macbeth with the three prophetic witches. Women represent Nature, the sublunary realm, the world of illusion (Maya) and the physical power of manifestation (Shakti). It is possible to overcome Nature herself, and along with her all fate and determinism! The virile masculine Hero was often conceptualised in antiquity as the one who overcame fate and the wheel of causality. The meaning of Buddha attaining to ultimate Liberation from Samsara (the wheel of causality and the cycle of life and death) is really no different. Realising how stuck you have been in the deterministic world should be an exciting call to: Be the hero! ”Become what you Are”, as Pindar said…

There seems to be a subtle contradiction in what you say here because the desire to eliminate suffering is natural to the experience of life itself. Accepting suffering is of course possible but it goes against the grain of nature, so if the aim is not to try to eliminate anything why eliminate the intention to avoid suffering? Suffering can be used for liberating purposes but in many cases the intention to avoid suffering is entirely spiritually appropriate; after all, the whole point of Buddhism is to depart from the world of dukkha (suffering)!

It is rather that self is the new global religion. For the wiser practitioners of this religion self-help is included within that but many others are not really helping themselves at all, they are just indulging their lowest and basest self. Often today the self is applauded precisely in contrast to any ideal of self-improvement: “you’re beautiful just the way you are”, “I don’t need to change for anybody”, “don’t let anybody rain on your parade”, and so on… In the post-second-World-War Western world self-expression seems to be the highest value; the quality of that self, unfortunately, seems to be of much less importance! Sometimes it even seems like the worse your self is the more it is deemed you should express it, like Yeats beautifully described in his poem The Second Coming: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / are full of passionate intensity”. Working hard isn’t the same as self-help and some self-help folks are rather lazy! The religion of work seems to have been more prevalent during the industrial period (the Protestant “work ethic”) and the Soviet era (the glorification of the ”Worker” in Socialist doctrine and the art of Marxist realism) but it definitely still persists today. Many people now, though, would ideally like to abolish work altogether, and this is no wonder given the pointless and mechanical nature of most of the work available today. Interestingly, labour is one of those words which the Christian faith inverted: in ancient Latin civilisation, “laborare” had largely negative connotations and it was even synonymous with toil and misery. In Christian civilisation, however, phrases like Laborare est Orare (to work is to pray!) emerged and the early forms of the fetishisation of work which you have described are probably to be found here. Of course, Latin also had the word “Opus” to refer to work in a higher sense. Incidentally, this is one of the ways in which Nietzsche was right that modern leftism, particularly socialism and the cults of Work and Change, are a sort of secularised Christianity. The same is true for words like humility and pity whose connotations were also largely negative; after all, we still call bad experiences “humiliating”!

Yes, I think this is true when Kundalini arises naturally on the spiritual path or when it is integrated within a safe context in which there is space to make the necessary changes that this new energy will force you to make. It is much less true, however, when it arises spontaneously/accidentally or when it has been aroused through physical practices without the necessary psychological and spiritual preparation. There is the additional problem that people often don’t know what they are getting themselves into with the spiritual path. In my experience, it is very difficult to retrace your steps with Kundalini; like the flaming Cherubim which guard the doors back to Eden once the Snake has gotten Adam and Eve kicked out! Fortunately I had already been through a dark night of the soul before getting involved with Kundalini practises. Even then, until we are fully awake there is always more self to die to! Yeah it’s very similar to psychedelics in that way. I would disagree with one thing here: it isn’t necessarily as simple as trusting in the process. There are all sorts of physical, spiritual and even intellectual problems which can arise as Kundalini unfurls itself. Sometimes it can be hard to find the right advice for a given circumstance; then again, there are people with deep knowledge of this field around today. So long as one can sift through the corresponding accumulation of nonsense all-too-readily available today they’ll probably be fine. You’re an infinite being playing the character of a finite being and that character can very easily be annihilated. The problems with Kundalini that many people experience generally arise when these two come into conflict. Kundalini forces them to move towards the infinite but their finite being is not able to catch up with the process. This can be very dysfunctional. Ultimately there is nothing to fear but relatively there is. Here, we are playing the game of relativity and it is better to play it well!

Narcissism could even be a spiritual path by taking the ego to its absurd conclusion. This is the esoteric meaning behind many of the evil Gods in mythology: Seth, Satan, Prometheus… Not only that but the evil figure often has an initiatory function: for example, it is only through Seth killing Osiris that Osiris was able to become the Lord of the Underworld. Being the victim of evil is often what drives people towards spirituality. William Blake certainly understood these things, not only in his famous saying that “the fool who persists in his folly will become wise” but also in the following description of John Milton’s theological poetry:

@Razard86 Remember that Kundalini is a feminine energy. Kundalini will show you the boundless nature of ultimate Reality because that is the feminine polarity. The masculine polarity is the one which gives form and finitude to the feminine substance. Ultimate Reality is the union of these two principles so it is simultaneously finite and infinite, in the sense that it is an Infinity which contains all finitude within itself. The Shiva Nataraja is an excellent symbol of this reality. It is not possible to integrate the pure feminine principle of boundless freedom alone into ordinary life because by definition it is a total violation of all structure and order. This principle has to be reconciled with the masculine principle which will allow you to see all of reality as the interplay of Form and Formlessness. This vision occurs at the Ajna-Chakra and is finally unified in the ultimate Liberation characterised by the rising of Kundalini to the Sahasrara-Chakra and out of the body.

@Bobby_2021 At the most fundamental level, reality is composed of an infinite variety of forms (Logos) and an infinitely formless substance which receives these forms. Humans have the capacity to align their intellect with this Divine Intellect (Logos) - the metaphysical storehouse of the forms and ideas from which everything is manifested - and human sciences are (at least supposed to be) a reflection of this. That is the real meaning of Adam naming the animals in Genesis, for example. Of course biology is not reality itself, that doesn’t mean it is just “pulled out of their ass”. The modern science of biology, like all other sciences of our day, seeks to map out reality ever more tightly without ever pursuing it directly, which was the approach of the sacred sciences of antiquity. I can agree that modern biology is mostly socially constructed because, in the world where “God is dead”, science is rooted in a denial of the metaphysical dimension. I can even more or less agree that biology can only exist through the mediation of a society, though a single person could engage in biology so it doesn’t necessarily require a social circle. I think this emphasis on social constructivism is something to do with the dominance of Hindu and Buddhist ideas in New-Age circles (particularly the latter, as Buddhism with its emphasis on no-self and the void lends itself very well to a nominalist philosophy), Stage Green anti-logocentrism and postmodern deconstruction. It is possibly even related to the feminisation of modern society as the formless substance is feminine while the form-giving essence is masculine. It is also related to the preference for Love over Truth in spiritual circles and the general preference in modern society for sentimentality and passion over logic and reason.

Why is biology a social construct? Biology means bio-logos, the human discriminative faculty applied to the biological realm. The realm of bios itself, therefore, must be outside of and separate from (relatively speaking) the human discriminative faculty. Notice also that the idea of a “social construct” implies a profane conception of society and the humans within it: what if God ordained society and the human discriminative faculty? “In the beginning was the Logos”!

One of the basic problems of political analysis today is a failure to distinguish between polity (rule of the virtuous many) and democracy (rule of the corrupt many), as Aristotle defined them in the Politics. In common parlance today both of these concepts are included under the name of “democracy” - such that any claim that not every vote is equal within the democratic process is conceived of as “a threat to democracy” - whilst for some others democracy refers only to polity (rule of the virtuous many); for these latter people, democracy itself (as rule of the corrupt many) is a “threat to our democracy”! The real question in politics today is: who are the virtuous many? Who’s vote should be taken seriously? The same distinction between two groups - one who define democracy as “vote of all citizens regardless” and the other who define it as “vote of the virtuous many” - is useful here. For the latter group, democracy has become synonymous with the maintenance of the decadent global American empire, so the values of this empire are what defines virtue: a bizarre mixture of bread crumbs of tradition, corrupt corporate capitalism and woke neoliberal ideology. Anybody who diverges from this value system is not included within the “virtuous many” and so is regarded as a “threat to democracy”. It is only natural then that those members of the first group who do not share these values would turn against democracy as defined by the latter group. They are the enemies - “the corrupt many” whose vote should not be taken into consideration - of this democratic system and so it would be absurd for them to support it. Many believers in this latter form of democracy (rule of the virtuous many as defined by the decadent global American Empire), however, seem to be surprised when the people their democracy has defined as enemies… define democracy as its enemy in return! After all, this is the basic delusion of liberal democracy: the attempt to transcend without including the distinction between in-group and out-group, friend and foe, us and them. As a metaphysical aside, in one of Leo’s videos (probably the one on Gödel or paradoxes) he showed how self-referential systems breed paradoxes. Democracy is a self-referential system (people can vote on how they feel about democracy itself; by voting for an anti-democratic leader, for example) so the paradoxical situation can emerge where the citizens of the democracy democratically elect somebody to overthrow the democracy! Is that democracy or isn’t it?

@Matt23 Just skimmed through it, way too many hyphenated words and vain pontificating. Truth should be simple! So much of Stage Yellow just seems like nerds mentally masturbating and sharing their ejaculate with an internet community. Maybe I’ll come back to it another day!

@Carl-Richard Interesting song, hadn’t heard it before. It reminds me of this (beautiful intro and outro!): Listening to Holdsworth, I always feel it’s a shame he didn’t branch out a bit more into other genres. His stuff all seems to be very locked within the heavy jazz fusion sound world.

Exactly. One side says that anybody who isn’t on their side wants to overthrow democracy, the other side… wants to overthrow democracy! A match made in Heaven. Being a minority doesn’t necessarily translate to being oppressed. There are many cases, most in fact, in which a minority rules over a majority. This can be true even when the minority is alien from the majority beneath it. For example, after the Normans had overthrown the existing elite in England, everything was reoriented towards their styles and values. It was forbidden to even speak English in the courts! Yes. What we live under today in the West is really the tyranny of Chaos ruled by an oligarchy of corporate executives and pretending to be a democracy.

@Philipp Yes I relate to what you say. I am 24 now, I was definitely not solid Yellow (I don’t believe in Spiral Progress but it is fine for this sort of communication) at 20 as I had and still have certain unresolved tendencies in most of the earlier stages but I have always tended towards holism and systems thinking. Incidentally, I was drawn to Nietzsche during these years and in this regard because, though he was not a solidly Stage Yellow thinker, he has an intense disdain for all forms of duality in the practical domain: between work and play, thought and act, cause and effect, and so on. As far as Stage Yellow university programs are concerned, I’m afraid I cannot be too specific as I feel a deep disdain for modern academia. I have just noticed through mostly reading and occasionally listening to podcasts (for example, the podcast Hermitix often has Yellow-level thinkers on it) that a few of the most discerning and insightful people within the academic realm are increasingly seeing the shortcomings of even Stage Green thinking. For example, I recently read about an academic publication called Claiming Knowledge: Strategies of Epistemology from Theosophy to the New Age which sounds like a very Stage Yellow approach to the history of religion. I have also noticed that rejected elements of Stage Blue are being reevaluated within academia from a higher context: certain universities now seem to be somewhat open to the study of esoteric religious doctrines such as Western Esotericism which was introduced by Dame Francis Yates; early prototypes of systems thinking like Oswald Spengler (author of The Decline of the West, an attempt at a metaphysics of history which tries to formulate a model of human civilisation) and Mircea Eliade (author of A History of Religious Ideas) who have been rejected from the history of ideas because of their very vague and in fact mostly negative relation to right-wing movements are getting renewed attention; there is a stronger emphasis in modern academia on an interdisciplinary approach and many academics seem to be realising that deconstruction can only take you so far. Other people on here can probably tell you more about Stage Yellow thinkers within academic science, neurology and the study of consciousness, artificial intelligence and things like that. However, these are all still very much fringe phenomena and most universities today are deeply embedded in Orange, Green and to a lesser extent Blue. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_study_of_Western_esotericism

@Razard86 It is not that monogamy is better than polygamy. They simply serve a different function and reflect a different orientation towards life and transcendence. Monogamy is fit for sattvic cultures whose orientation is towards transcendence of the earthly and animal condition. It is the least natural and so like you say it often goes along with increased violence and material instability; it’s real purpose, however, is not material but spiritual so all of this is a false refutation of the value of monogamy. Polygamy in the form of polygyny is fit for rajassic cultures and civilisations whose orientation is primarily towards the active application of spiritual principles in the world. After all, God is Unity and the Goddess is Infinity; God is the One and the Goddess is the All; God is Truth and the Goddess is Love. It makes sense, then, that a society whose main intention is the active application of spiritual principles would allow men (as incarnations of the One and Unity) to take multiple wives (as incarnations of the All and Infinity), but not vice versa. Polygamy in the form of polyandry (women taking multiple husbands) is fit for tamassic cultures whose orientation is towards the body, the Earth (as “Mother Nature”) and the tribal totem. It is the most natural but it lacks a transcendent dimension, except in dark expressions such as necromancy (black magic) and ritualistic forms of dark and chthonic ecstasy. Each of these have their own place in the hierarchy of existence and can be beautiful or terrible in their own way.

@Razard86 I am not against primitivism or “demonising polyamory” as everything has its proper place. It’s just that Stage Green likes to exalt it and even fetishise it as some ultimate ideal, like the “Noble Savage” of that precociously Green Frenchman Rousseau. For example, “What really makes something primitive?” is a classic Stage Green response, and so is your romanticisation of the idyllic peaceful lifestyle of those peoples who were “conquered and killed off to small numbers by those oh so advanced selfish, killing, monogamists you refer to. Those same monogamists who lie, cheat, still, kill, suffer from mental illness, and then kill themselves. Issues that those primitive societies you refer to, barely had.“ I don’t agree with Spiral Dynamics but that doesn’t mean I don’t understand it. It is so basic anyway! A model fit for children… The common definition of primitivism is misguided: the (mostly) Western historians and anthropologists who formulated the modern conception of history mistakenly assumed that everybody in the distant past was living how Australian aborigines and African tribes lived at the time of their theorising and writing, just because it was a superficially more rudimentary form of life which they had immediate access to. This is an arbitrary assumption, however: those African and Australian tribes could just as well be degenerated residues of ancient civilisations as so-called “primitives”, and why assume that pre-historic peoples lived in the same way as “primitive” people today? I have already defined primitivism above. The examples you gave of polygamy fit exactly the description of primitivism that I described! You suggested that an African Matriarchy practise polyandry and I specified that the primitive societies which practise polygamy are characterised by “cults of the Earth and of the Mother”! African ritual is very much based on frenetic dance whose aim is ecstatic possession (the Yoruba gods who “ride” the intoxicated subject, for example) which is exactly what I when I mentioned “frantic and Dionysian rights involving dance, sex and a ritualistic use of drugs”! I even said that you would find it offensive! You make so many assumptions. I understand that sex is not a merely bodily phenomenon (though it can be and today generally is). After all, sex is a reflection of the fundamental polarity of manifest existence and sexual union is a reflection of the underlying Unity of these twin principles. Even Stage Blue tradition tells us this: Plato’s Myth of Er in which before a metaphysical Fall all humans were hermaphrodites; Genesis, in which it is written ‘In God’s image he made them, Man and Woman he made them’; Purusha/Prakriti in Hinduism, Binah/Chokmah unified as Kether in Kabbalah, the alchemical hieros gamos and so on indefinitely.

This is probably where is important to distinguish between Eastern and Western Europe. I am from the UK and can very much confirm what Bobby_2021 says. Most universities in the UK were created during the industrial period: they have gone from being a factory of workers to a factory for the broke and woke army! I can’t tell you what a disaster UK universities have become: it is a sick joke, a total parody and perversion of education. Of course, France - the home of le nonséns de la postmodérnisme - is even worse and other Western European countries are following the same track. I understand that parts of Eastern Europe are somewhat “lagging behind” but I’m sure they will “catch up” sooner or later! I have noticed though that early Stage Yellow seems to be emergent particularly in the Nordic countries and the Netherlands and many of the most advanced thinkers in Europe over the last few centuries originated from Basel in Switzerland. Yes academics can be quite grounded because the university provides with a safe context in which to apply themselves creatively. Society at large has stopped providing this so many people outside of university today lack this basic sense of containment. The only real option today open to those for whom such institutions could only be a stifling limitation is to create such a context for oneself. The Boomers are the ultimate degenerescence of Stage Blue and there is a lot of Orange in them too. Real Stage Blue doesn’t make silly jokes about women in the kitchen and so on, it appreciates and respects women in their proper place in the hierarchy of human existence. There were many highly respected women in the Catholic hierarchy, for example. They are certainly one of the real issues but my guess is that they will be dead soon; then you might have some new real issues to deal with!

Exactly. In my experience modern universities are nowhere near Yellow. Some of the sciences are till stuck in Orange (they have even fallen back into an even more intense version of objectivism and positivism to defend themselves from Green deconstruction) and the humanities are just an indoctrination into postmodern nihilism and Frankfurt School anything-but-Hitlerism. Not to mention that the life people lead at university is barely even Blue. Naturally, people like to pretend that partying every night, having promiscuous sex and taking dangerous drugs is Green love and openness to experience but I don’t think so. I was at university for 3 years and I didn’t meet a single systems thinker, mostly just Orange nerds and Green hippoids. Also, the university structure itself is a sort of Blue-Orange hybrid (traditional hierarchies integrated with capitalist superstructure). All of that being said, I have come across some academic writers and thinkers around today who are at least intimating Stage Yellow. Even someone like Mircea Eliade in the last century was moving in that direction from within the academy. It’s just very rare and personally I don’t believe that most people are up to the task of rising to that level; maybe they can prove me wrong! I would even say Purple! People generally have a very disenchanted worldview today. Yes, this world needs a good ol’ fashioned conquering!

In most parts of the world today the same phenomenon of mass male failure are observable: in Japan, for example, there are the “Herbivore men” who have lost the capacity for traditional masculine assertiveness and directionality and in extreme cases the Hikikomori who isolate themselves from society altogether. In the West we see a society becoming more feminised by the day, emphasising safety, security and material comfort above all else, so that masculinity is actively discouraged for young men today except in very crude and degraded forms like the “Real G”s of modern music and celebrity culture. It is the ‘dominance of women in the household’ during ‘extreme forms of democracy, characteristic of tyranny’ which Aristotle spoke of. There are a few women who will lament this loss of virility in men and seek out a real man, but many will laud over it as the “new man” who is not afraid to express his weakness and his sentimentality, probably because they like having their man as a little dog they can use for their own vanity and pleasure. In all of these places it is most generally reflected in declining birth-rates and the loss of any desire to assist in the preservation of one’s society. There are very weird and sad male sub-cultures today such as the anime waifu, multifarious fetishes for muscular and masculinised women representing a deferring of the masculine role, exponential increase in varieties of sexuality which deviate from the norm, and so on. I don’t think it is enough to simply view all of this as men falling into traps who just need a little self-help advice. They are symptoms of the broken nature of modern society which no longer adequately encourages people to contribute to anything greater themselves. After all, this would be “toxic masculinity”!

It sounds like you have aroused Kundalini somewhat but not so much as to stir up a Kundalini awakening. It is worth bearing in mind that Kundalini and Shakti are just the way that one tradition refers to this energy; we are really just talking about the latent power of the Goddess within the body. It is always moving through you to some extent otherwise you would be dead or you would be some sort of pastiche James Bond Super-Man with no femininity at all! Even practises like meditation can amplify this energy. In other traditions, it is like the Snake which enticed Eve (whose name literally means “Living”) and then Adam to be thrown out of Eden and thus thrust into the suffering and turmoil of mundane life (that is why it is sometimes called the “life-force”, and it is very significant that Gnosticism reinterpreted this myth so that the God of Eden Jehovah was actually an evil Demiurge whilst the Snake in the Garden was guiding them towards liberation and transcendence.) It is therefore also somewhat akin to the Holy Spirit in orthodox Christianity which is guiding people back to the real God. You can also see this symbology on Hermes’ Caduceus and even in Zarathustra’s two animals being the snake of chthonic wisdom and the eagle of proud freedom.