My Personal Journey to Awakening - Part 1

A journey into the darkness and finding the light...

Photo by Compare Fibre on Unsplash

In The beginning there was darkness…

While I grew up Jewish, had my Bar-Mitzvah at 13 and didn’t have any pork (mmmm…bacon) or even a cheeseburger well into my adult life, I wouldn’t say I was ever religious and one of the classes I hated most throughout my entire school years was bible studies (which are mandatory in Israel).

This was mainly because I always found them so far removed from reality that the whole thing felt senseless, boring and a waste of time.

However, looking back at it now with my altered view of reality, I see a lot of things in the Jewish bible (or the “Old Testament” as it’s known to Christians) which seem very pertinent to our times.

One of them is this bit from the story of creation in the book of Genesis:

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.

And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.

And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.

And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.

Going through my own personal journey of awakening, I now firmly believe that we are currently in the midst of an epic battle of almost biblical proportions between the forces of darkness and the forces of light.

However, unlike in the bible where god divided the light from the darkness and allowed both to co-exist, we now must eradicate that darkness and ensure the light achieves full, unconditional and uncompromising victory.

What is Awakening?

The Cambridge dictionary defines “awakening” as:

the act of starting to understand something or feel something

I guess that’s a good definition as any but my personal definition for “awakening” is: Starting to see the full and unfiltered TRUTH.

There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that the world is currently in the midst of what many refer to as “The Great Awakening” where more and more people are starting to see not just what has really been happening in our world since the start of the third decade of the 21st century, but way way before that.

They are starting to see that in a way, “The Matrix” wasn’t just a brilliant movie but an elaborate exercise in “predictive programming”.

One thing that the Matrix movie kind of hints to but isn’t emphasized enough in general when it comes to the awakening process, is the fact that while it is a process which is absolutely crucial for every human to undergo, it is also extremely painful!

For me personally, I can say that following my full awakening, I have definitely displayed many symptoms that can be attributed to Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and clinical depression.

Simply put: IT HURTS LIKE HELL!

My personal context of awakening

I believe that the awakening process is deeply personal and every single human will experience it in a different way which is derived from their personal background and life experiences.

For me, the awakening process was deeply influenced by my family history.

I was born in the former USSR and my family migrated to Israel just before my 4th birthday.

Both my maternal grandmother’s and grandfather’s lives were touched deeply by the events of World War II.

My grandmother lost her younger brother who was buried alive in a mass grave when the Nazis invaded the USSR simply for the ‘crime’ of being Jewish. My grandmother was able to escape at the last minute with nothing but the clothes she wore that day.

My grandfather spent the entire war as a military doctor in the red army and took part in the final battle in Berlin of which this is probably the most famous image:

My grandfather was awarded the Order of the Red Star commendation for his bravery throughout the war and in the final battle for Berlin specifically.

Growing up listening to their stories (which were few and far between as neither was overly keen to talk about the horrors of that era), I learnt on a subconscious level that humans are capable of both great acts of heroism and unspeakable acts of cruelty.

In 2002 I migrated to Australia on my own and despite the challenges I faced (amongst them, getting used to the Aussie accent and learning to understand its distinctive ‘twang’), I considered Australia not just as my home but literally a heaven on Earth pretty much from day dot.

My awakening begins

Fast forward to the year 2020.

The year started on the right foot for me.

My partner and I were fortunate enough to go and see my childhood icons Queen performing live in February of that year with Adam Lambert making a great effort fitting into the enormously huge shoes of one of the greatest musical icons of all time: Freddie Mercury.

Then, a mere 3 weeks later, everything changed:

We all know what happened next and I’m sure that your experience during those times was very similar regardless of which part of the world you were living in at the time.

For me, I can honestly say that at that stage of the game I trusted my government and my Prime Minister unconditionally (even though I didn’t vote for them).

Since coming to Australia, I always believed that it was an extremely well run country with mostly honest governments on both federal and state level who were doing their best to do the right thing.

I paid my taxes on time and in full, voted in every election (voting is compulsory in Australia) and in general was a contributing and productive member of society.

I also considered myself extremely lucky and privileged to be living in the “lucky country”.

I followed all the “health advice” religiously. Kept my social distance, washed my hands and stayed inside during the multitude of lockdowns. I even wore a face mask when my government asked me to. I was absolutely convinced that they had nothing but my best interest, and that of my fellow citizens, at heart.

And then, something happened…

Sometimes in March of 2021 (don’t remember the exact date), I came across a post on the website of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), which is Australia’s public broadcaster and pretty much my go-to source for news and information since first coming to Australia, featuring a radio interview with one of the most prominent immunologists in Australia, Professor Robert Clancy, a Member of the Order of Australia.

Here is the audio of that interview in full:

“Mmmm. Very interesting. Hydroxychloroquine sounds quite promising” I thought to myself. “Definitely seems like something the department of health should look further into”.

What did the government do? they maintained their previous stance and existing restrictions on the prescription and use of Hydroxychloroquine.

This despite the fact that Professor Clancy published an opinion piece following his ABC Interview in which he stated in no uncertain terms that he does not oppose the vaccine rollout and thinks that these products are a “critical” tool to fight the pandemic and save lives. He also said that:

Vaccines, however, do have limitations. They need to be paired with effective, safe drug treatment. I believe two candidates are safe, cheap, available and effective. They are ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine. Australian health authorities, however, say there is not enough evidence to support their use in the treatment of COVID-19. I disagree with them.

“well, they must know what they are doing” I thought to myself.

“Surely with all the experts and resources at the disposal of Australia’s public health authorities, they will do what is in the absolute best interests of the public and will never deny them a treatment that is safe, effective and extremely cheap to administer”.

With that, I moved on with my life continuing to religiously follow the latest “health advice” and support the various government measures, including lockdowns.

Fast forward to June 2021 and I was going through my Facebook feed. I stopped using Facebook almost entirely for personal use since late 2018 but started to do so again during the pandemic in order to stay across the news and that all important “health advice”.

I came across this post on the ABC Newcastle Facebook page:

I clicked through and it was Professor Clancy again in another interview on the Drive show of ABC Newcastle, this time talking about Ivermectin and its potential great benefits in early treatment of COVID-19.

He also sighted research from Israel by Prof. Eli Schwartz, founder of the Center for Travel Medicine and Tropical Disease at Sheba Medical Center, one of the leading public (i.e. government-owned) hospitals in Israel.

Professor Schwartz just completed at the time a clinical trial on Ivermectin, a drug which has been approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for decades as a broad-spectrum antiparasitic agent, as a potential treatment against COVID-19.

The clinical trial was a “double-blind, placebo-controlled study” which according to the US National Library of Medicine is:

The double-blind randomized controlled trial (RCT) is accepted by medicine as objective scientific methodology that, when ideally performed, produces knowledge untainted by bias.

The results from that clinical study conducted by one of Israel’s leading and most experienced medical professionals (and the person who first introduced the concept of “travel medicine” in Israel) speak for themselves:

Schwartz said the drug was shown to help “cure” people of the virus within just six days. Moreover, the chances of testing negative for coronavirus were three times higher for the group who received ivermectin than the placebo, he told The Jerusalem Post.

“From a public-health point of view, the majority of patients with corona are mild cases, and 90% of these people are isolated outside of the hospital,” Schwartz said. “If you have any kind of drug that can shorten the duration of the infectiousness of these patients, that would be dramatic, as then they will not infect others.”

Moreover, instead of isolating for a minimum of 10 days and maybe more, this period could be shortened, benefiting the economy.

Finally, although Schwartz’s study did not focus on this, he said the results indicate that it is likely if the drug were given at the beginning of one’s illness, it could prevent deterioration and hospitalization.

The full article from the Jerusalem Post, Israel’s most popular newspaper in English, can be found HERE.

Back to Professor Clancy:

I clicked on the link from the Facebook post mentioned above to the page on the ABC website. The interview with the Professor was embedded as an audio file and I was out at the time and didn’t have headphones.

“Ok, I’ll just save it to my phone and listen to it tomorrow when I have more time” I said to myself.

The next day, I went back to the ABC Newcastle Facebook page, found the post in question (see above) and clicked through.

I was greeted with the following screen which has been on that URL ever since:

“Ok, that’s strange. Must be some website error” I thought to myself. “I think I have that interview saved on my phone from Yesterday. Let me see if I can find it and listen to it there”.

Well, I found it alright and there it is in full and as-is:

I kept checking that URL every day for a week to see if the post was back up and it wasn’t. It remains missing to this day.

“Ok, that’s really bizarre. That interview seems kinda important to me talking about what is potentially a life saving treatment that is cheap and easy to administer. Why would Australia’s public broadcaster, whom I respect and trust unconditionally, remove such an important piece from their website while the pandemic rages on and half the country are in lockdown? This is obviously not a mere website error” I thought to myself.

And thus began my journey down the rabbit hole…

My awakening gathers steam / Here comes the pain

I kept having this niggling feeling that something wasn’t quite right.

I started scouring the web for more and more information about Hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin and kept coming across more and more research from around the world that indicated that not only were Hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin safe to use but that they were both extremely effective as an early treatment for COVID-19 and incredibly cheap due to both being off-patent which meant they could be manufactured anywhere and for very low cost.

Two articles that especially caught my mind were:

• A follow-up piece on the clinical trial conducted by Prof. Schwartz in Israel which I already mentioned above.

Here are the bits that especially caught my eye:

Ivermectin has been approved by the US Food and Drug Administration since 1987. The drug’s discoverers were awarded the 2015 Nobel Prize in medicine for its treatment of onchocerciasis, a disease caused by infection with a parasitic roundworm.

Over the years, it has been used for other indications, including scabies and head lice. Moreover, in the last decade, several clinical studies have started to show its antiviral activity against viruses ranging from HIV and the flu to Zika and West Nile.

The drug is also extremely economical. A study published in the peer-reviewed American Journal of Therapeutics showed that the cost of ivermectin for other treatments in Bangladesh is around $0.60 to $1.80 for a five-day course.

And

In Schwartz’s study, some 89 eligible volunteers over the age of 18 who were diagnosed with coronavirus and staying in state-run COVID-19 hotels were divided into two groups: 50% received ivermectin, and 50% received a placebo, according to their weight. They were given the pills for three days in a row, an hour before a meal.

The volunteers were tested using a standard nasopharyngeal swab PCR test with the goal of evaluating whether there was a reduction in viral load by the sixth day – the third day after termination of the treatment. They were swabbed every two days.

Nearly 72% of volunteers treated with ivermectin tested negative for the virus by day six. In contrast, only 50% of those who received the placebo tested negative.

IN ADDITION, the study looked at culture viability, meaning how infectious the patients were, and found that only 13% of ivermectin patients were infectious after six days, compared with 50% of the placebo group – almost four times as many.

“Our study shows first and foremost that ivermectin has antiviral activity,” Schwartz said. “It also shows that there is almost a 100% chance that a person will be noninfectious in four to six days, which could lead to shortening isolation time for these people. This could have a huge economic and social impact.”

The results of the clinical trial were documented in a peer-reviewed scientific paper Prof. Schwartz and his team wrote which has been published in May 2021 in the very prestigious and reputable International Journal of Infectious Diseases.

You can read it in full HERE.

• Multiple stories started to emerge from the State of Uttar Pradesh in India where the local health authorities started a state-wide roll out of COVID kits to people testing positive as cases started exploding there, especially with the emergence of what is now known as the Delta variant. One of the only therapeutic drugs included in the kits was Ivermectin. There is also this study from as early as August 2020 by researchers from the Uttar Pradesh University of Medical Sciences and their conclusion is as follows:

Based on evidences it seems prudent to use IVM empirically and conduct well designed controlled randomised trials to prove its efficacy in vivo.

Here is Dr. John Campbell, a retired Nurse Teacher and A and E nurse based in England, discussing the content of the COVID kits distributed by the Uttar Pradesh government and the impact they had on infections and mortality rate (spoiler alert: it’s pretty dramatic):

Meanwhile in Australia:

1. Sky News (the second most popular 24 hour news channel by viewership) received a seven day suspension from YouTube for posting videos of interviews discussing Ivermectin & Hydroxychloroquine.

2. The Royal Australian College of General Practitioners (RACGP) posted a warning on behalf of the TGA (Australia’s equivalent of the FDA in the US) warning people not to use or import Ivermectin as it is not “approved” for the treatment of COVID-19 patients.

3. The TGA themselves followed up shortly after and on September 10 2021, just as the rollout of the COVID-19 Injectables started to ramp in Australia, has issued a formal blanket ban on prescribing Ivermectin for the treatment of COVID-19, a move that was followed up by regulators in the US, UK, Canada, NZ and many other jurisdictions.

Here come the Injectables

First of all, I’d like to state for the record that I am the last person you would call an ‘anti-vaxxer’.

I’ve had every child immunisation you can think of, multiple vaccines during my military service in the Israel Defence Forces (IDF), more tetanus shots than I can remember and plenty of travel vaccines such as typhoid, yellow fever and Japanese encephalitis.

Science is one of my greatest interests in life even though I never pursued it professionally.

I’m the kind of person who could watch the Discovery Channel for hours and read articles about various scientific topics (and especially Astronomy) on Wikipedia just for fun.

I had no philosophical, moral, political or religious objection to taking a COVID-19 vaccine provided it was indeed safe and effective.

However, it is the “safe and effective” bit of these injectables that I started to have growing concerns over.

By the way, I refuse to call these products a “vaccine” because they simply are not. The CDC and other regulatory bodies around the world changed the definition of this word as the rollout of these products began in order to fit their agenda.

As the rollout of the COVID-19 injectables started to ramp up and expensive advertising campaigns, corporate initiatives and even outright bribes started to be used, I came to the realisation that there is definitely something wrong here.

I wasn’t categorically against taking one of these products but I also remembered this piece from the early days of the Pandemic in which Prof. Ian Frazer, the creator of the HPV Vaccine Gardasil, for which he won the Australian of the Year Award in 2006 said:

The challenge is that coronaviruses have historically been hard to make safe vaccines for, partly because the virus infects the upper respiratory tract, which our immune system isn't great at protecting.

It's a separate immune system, if you like, which isn't easily accessible by vaccine technology. Despite your upper respiratory tract feeling very much like it's inside your body, it's effectively considered an external surface for the purposes of immunisation.

It's a bit like trying to get a vaccine to kill a virus on the surface of your skin.

Your skin, and the outer layer of cells in your upper respiratory tract act as a barrier to viruses, stopping them getting into the body.

And finding a way to neutralise the virus ‘outside’ of the body is very difficult.

This is partly because only the outer layer of cells (the epithelial cells) get infected, which, compared to a severe infection of internal organs doesn't produce the same immune response, so is harder to target.

It's hard to produce a successful vaccine if the virus isn't activating a strong immune response.

And if a vaccine elicits an immune response that misses the target cells, the result could potentially be worse than if no vaccine was given.

One of the problems with corona vaccines in the past has been that when the immune response does cross over to where the virus-infected cells are it actually increases the pathology rather than reducing it so that immunisation with SARS corona vaccine caused, in animals, inflammation in the lungs which wouldn't otherwise have been there if the vaccine hadn't been given."

In another interview from that time, Prof. Frazer said:

The vaccine may not stop the spread of the virus in the community.

That’s if a vaccine can be developed at all.

Given what some of the leading experts in the world have said publicly, I thought it will be prudent for me to take a “wait and see” approach and at least wait until these new products, some of which are using a brand new technology (mRNA), complete their clinical trials.

But then came the mandates….

Initially the mandates came from the private sector, including from industries where it made very little sense, especially given the WFH (work-from-home) phenomena which was (and still is) prevalent in those industries.

But then, the various state governments jumped in on the action.

Here is an ad from my local state government of Queensland ‘promoting’ the mandates:

This ad was accompanied by this ‘campaign material’ which all restaurants, cafes, pubs, sporting venues, tourist attractions, healthcare facilities and many other places in the state were OBLIGATED to display…and enforce:

Those business owners and managers who refused to follow the state government dictate to DISCRIMINATE based on whether someone took it in the arm or not, were treated worst than many drug dealers and murderers and many lost their businesses and were forced to close them down.

Think this is bad? Check out this absolutely deranged Press Conference with the Chief Minister of the Northern Territory (another Australian state) at the time.

However, as bad as things were in Australia, this was a mere warm up to what happened in New-Zealand, Canada or the US.

To be continued in part 2

As you can see, my journey to awakening has been long and pretty intense.

This post is already pretty long and we didn’t even get into the ‘good bits’ yet where I truly tumble down the rabbit hole and the associated emotional and mental trauma that came with that.

I get to that in part 2 which you can find below:

My Personal Journey to Awakening - Part 2

I’d also love to hear about your personal story of awakening.

Care to share?

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