Almost everyone I’ve spent any quality time conversing with in recent years has expressed or implied a desire to help create a better world—not just for certain individuals, groups or countries, but for human civilization as a whole.

At its core, the Occupy Wall Street movement has arisen from a similar desire, as anyone really listening to what so many of the protesters have to say should know.

Yet, using the time-honored technique of character assassination on a mass-stereotyping scale, many in the mainstream media have attempted to smear Occupy Wall Street as merely the expression of jealousy on the part of a ragtag bunch of have-nots: the 99% who envy the privileged lifestyle of the 1%.

Another diversionary tactic employed by media spin doctors—i.e., irrelevancy—has been to paint the OWS movement as basically Woodstock revisited, peopled by stoned hippies whose primary character trait, alarmingly, is that they are dirty.

Not only is this characterization untrue and, as comedian Lee Camp demonstrates, hypocritical, since OWS is nowhere near “as dirty as the fraud and corruption on Wall Street”; the protesters have no primary character trait because they come from all over the human spectrum.

To get a feel for the actual demographics (as of October 19) of this wildly eclectic, ballooning grassroots movement whose movers and shakers are, for the most part, anything but drugged or unwashed, check out this academic treatise, Mainstream Support for a Mainstream Movement by Hector Cordero-Guzman, Ph.D.

Fortunately, there are those in high places who fundamentally disagree with the media’s cavalier (and self-serving) assessment of OWS. For one, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman.

In a refreshingly honest interview last week with Rachel Maddow on his investigation of the 1% who caused the economic meltdown through dubious banking practices, many fraudulent, Schneiderman stated flat-out that the protesters in the Occupy movement are merely voicing what a majority of Americans feel:

That there is one set of justice for the 99% (2.3 million of whom find themselves behind bars) and another set the 1% (practically none of whom have been so much as slapped on the wrist for crimes against this nation, certainly, and arguably crimes against humanity).

Rolling Stone columnist Matt Taibbi, famous for his incisive coverage of Fraudclosuregate and related atrocities, got explicit about the injustice inherent in our justice system in a recent blog entitled, straightforwardly enough, Wall Street Isn’t Winning—It’s Cheating.

Debunking the elitist notion that OWS is motivated purely out of economic envy, Taibbi writes that he has been “thinking about this ‘jealousy’ question, and I just kept coming back to all the different ways the game is rigged. People aren’t jealous and they don’t want privileges. They just want a level playing field, and they want Wall Street to give up its cheat codes.”

The “cheat codes,” in Taibbi’s view, Wall Street uses in its rigged ponzi scheme against the 99% include:

“Free Money” (banks borrowing serious cash from what is supposedly our government at zero and lending it back to us stooges at four percent);

“Credit Amnesty” (in which the TBTF banks, in the aftermath of the financial crisis, somehow benefited from more credit, while the average Joe dealing with creditors and foreclosure got screwed out of any credit whatsoever);

“Stupidity Insurance” (where, to quote a Rolling Stone editor, “something for nothing is Wall Street’s official policy,” whereas by now it should be obvious there is no safety net for the people who need it most);

“Ungraduated Taxes” (“Bankers on Wall Street pay lower tax rates than most car mechanics”); and

“Get out of Jail Free” (enough said).

Concludes Taibbi, “These inequities are what drive the OWS protests. People don’t want handouts. It’s not a class uprising and they don’t want civil war—they want just the opposite. They want everyone to live in the same country, and live by the same rules. It’s amazing that some people think that that’s asking a lot.”

The widespread desire on the part of OWS to create a better world constitutes a heavy indictment of the world we do live in, where the 1% lord it over the 99% in almost every way imaginable—yet apparently unimagined by many of the very people complaining the loudest.

This point was driven home this past week in an article by Mike Adams, The Second American Revolution Has Begun, where after endorsing the OWS movement in the main, the author goes on to observe,

“It’s the right thing to do, but what most protesters—and nearly all Americans—don’t fully grasp is that nearly every powerful institution is a criminal racket. It’s not just Wall Street that’s operated like a criminal mob, folks: it’s the U.S. Congress. It’s the health care industry. It’s conventional agriculture, the mainstream media, the processed food manufacturers, the government regulators and of course the entire military industrial complex.”

Continues Adams, “Nearly everything around you is a criminal operation. The banks openly steal your homes while laundering money for global drug lords. The U.S. government runs illegal guns into Mexico while allowing cocaine and heroin back into the USA to be sold at pumped-up black market prices. The mainstream media broadcasts outright lies and complete fabrications as if they were fact. Much of modern medical ‘science’ is complete quackery or fiction, funded by corporations for the purpose of expanding corporate power.”

Even your “local water supply is intentionally contaminated with toxic poisons known as ‘fluoride,’ and the local food supply is tainted with other dangerous chemicals like aspartame, MSG and BPA.”

Don’t believe it? Stop sleepwalking, take a cold shower, breathe, and wake up!

In my blogs, I often urge my readers to wake up—and I mean this literally. In his fascinating bestseller The Source Field Investigations, David Wilcock makes a compelling case that humanity is under a form of mass hypnosis—partly induced by decades of corporatist brainwashing, partly brought on by the human condition itself as we currently experience it.

If we could but wake up en masse from the nightmare of history, and come together as One because we are really One already, spiritually and energetically, then all of our problems—including every single one of those that inspired OWS—would be solved in short order and in miraculous fashion.

So when I beseech my readers to wake up and see things for what they really are, I’m not just speaking to the most egregious somnambulists among us. I’m also addressing relatively evolved individuals, some whom may even be part of OWS.

And of course, to the extent I’m still evolving my consciousness and growing as a human being, I’m also speaking to myself.

We all need to wake up—and we need to do it very, very soon.

The explicit critique of OWS contained in Adams’ article is that, by focusing rather myopically on Wall Street, the movement risks losing the forest for the trees.

Myopia has often been a hurdle to overcome for revolutionaries. Iconic civil disobedient Henry David Thoreau astutely remarked that “there are ten thousand chopping at the branches of truth, for every one digging at the root.”

Another writer with concerns over the bankster obsession of OWS is “Tyler Durden,” editor of the infamous Zero Hedge website, who not long ago observed,

“Zero Hedge is the last to cut Wall Street, with its rampant criminality, conflicts of interest, and corruption, any slack—in fact we are often the first to expose it. That said, we have long found it surprising that popular anger is focused on this particular group of individuals, instead of targeting the just as, if not far more, culpable for the current economic collapse enabling focal point known as Washington.”

The concerns expressed by Adams and “Durden” are valid and need to be factored in for anyone interested in seeing the bigger picture—yet it must be acknowledged that OWS is not monolithic. That’s the beauty of it. The movement can and, I believe, will broaden its focus as new voices and perspectives are added to it.

For my part, as examples of another potentially self-limiting mindset, a form of myopia in its own right, I would argue that “3D” writers like Adams and “Durden”—while revealing many important facts in their tireless rebellion against tyranny—tend to have their own viewpoint a little obstructed by the trenches when it comes to one crucial, multidimensional fact.

This truth is that the current breakdown, and imminent breakthrough, of our civilization is driven ultimately by a Shift in human consciousness that is of an energetic and spiritual—as opposed to purely material or political—nature.

Author Daniel Pinchbeck, emphasizing this dynamic in a timely article entitled Global Revolution Underway, begins by embracing the Occupy Wall Street movement as the “inception of a global insurrection that will not end until the dominant system is overthrown and replaced through a planetary metamorphosis.”

Observing that the “mainstream media continues to play down the Occupy phenomenon, critiquing its lack of specific demands,” Pinchbeck states that “[s]pecific demands are pointless, because the entire political, social, and economic system in which we exist has rotted out from the inside.”

Amen. If we are ever to grow up, individually and collectively, the nanny state must go the way of the dinosaur.

“Demands,” according to Pinchbeck, “would suggest that there is a way to reform the present system, but no reformist initiative is possible.”

In words I feel I could have written myself, Pinchbeck goes on to emphasize the critical role consciousness must play, and is playing, in this time of “constantly accelerating transformation.”

“The process we are undergoing as a collective organism leads to an evolutionary leap of consciousness on a species level,” he writes. “This mutation happens within the next few years—it is already happening now.”

Central to this metamorphosis will be the development of an “integral worldview, a holistic perspective that realizes the value of indigenous and traditional knowledge systems without rejecting the scientific and technical developments of modern times.”

Occupy Wall Street “has erupted as a planetary outcry against economic and social injustice. The consciousness movement has to discover its voice as a part of this movement. The revolution will be spiritual in essence—or it is doomed to repeat the horrific mistakes of the past, and fail.”

For myself, while supporting Pinchbeck’s position wholeheartedly, I’m not exactly proposing a total libertarian free-for-all. An unregulated free market system wouldn’t be free for all, at all, since its starting point would be from a position of gross social inequalities that already exist.

To be honest, at this stage I’m not exactly sure what I’m proposing—just that whatever transpires must involve radical, wholesale change of the very structure of our society—including the role of and our relationship to money—to promote freedom and self-determinism, both personally and publicly.

So I don’t consider myself a Ron Paul supporter. But I emphatically agree that we need less government, not more, more liberty and less Big Brother, so that we can develop into healthy, mature adults capable of solving our own problems.

No child ever learns to behave properly with too many arbitrary restraints. The only way consciousness can expand is to have freedom of movement and space to have it expand in.

It should be noted that the notion of consciousness, as I and others employ it, is often misunderstood. I’m not talking about IQ or anything by nature intellectual.

When I say that consciousness must change for society to do likewise, what I really means is that, for any lasting social improvements to occur, we as a global people must experience a change of heart.

Call it a new “heart-based consciousness,” to replace the old “head-based consciousness” that has not so slowly been destroying the planet and its people.

To take the heart-based consciousness idea that we are all One and make it a reality that can transform our entire world and worldview, we must begin to live this truth.

On the one hand, I fully acknowledge that getting the word out about injustice is a crucial stage in putting all the cards on the table so that the house of cards, at long last, can fall.

On the other, the widespread belief that recourse to purely political or materialistic strategies can solve all of our problems is like flat-world thinking. It’s just not true. It’s not how the universe is constructed and operates.

As I’ve written many times, consciousness creates. Consciousness is the ultimate cause for any effect we seek to understand—and offers the final solution to any dilemma we may experience.

In the words of Neale Donald Walsch in a recent blog about OWS, centered on the importance of changing our beliefs in order to alter our outcomes, “the situation in the world today is that we are trying to solve the world’s problem at every level except the level at which the problem exists.”

According to Walsch, we are attempting to resolve the situation “as if it were a political problem, but it is not … [P]olitical machinations only put a Band Aid on the problem, at best. Then the problem reemerges. It will not go away. So we say, ‘Okay, this is not a political problem. It must be an economic problem.’”

See where OWS could be going unless we all take Thoreau’s advice, stop swatting at the branches, and start digging at the root—which in this case is our outdated level of consciousness in serious need of an upgrade? Precisely. In circles.

“Here on this planet,” continues Walsch, “we have never really faced [the] largest problem of humanity head on. Indeed, we are still attempting to solve the world’s problem at every level except the level at which the problem exists,” i.e., in our antiquated belief systems about what is humanly is possible—which is much, much greater than health care benefits, a mortgage modification, or a higher salary.

“Most of the [OWS] signs say things about behaviors and conditions that people want to see changed,” writes Walsch. “Fair enough. But not a single sign about what creates all of that?”

Bingo. But before we can think big, many of us need to start small. We need to crawl before we can walk. We need to begin with ourselves.

We must learn to love the face in the mirror first while trying on the idea that we are Creators with more power, especially when joined together, to effect positive real change than we ever imagined.

This begins the consciousness Shift, the change of heart, which represents the first, all-important step towards a better world for all.

Only when we love ourselves can we find it within ourselves to love our neighbor. Only when we see ourselves as Creators can we see the Creator in everyone else around us.

This awareness begins to engender what I like to call unity—as opposed to victim—consciousness.

Unity consciousness empowers us to use the healing power of love (whose effectiveness has been rigorously studied by the HeartMath Institute) for self and others, to engender concrete, permanent change in our lives.

As Dr. Glen Rein has shown, and as I wrote about in my last book, love experienced as a coherent emotion is so powerful that it can actually heal damaged DNA—and possibly even evolve it.

In the meantime, while I’m not a lawyer and don’t play one on TV, I encourage you to consider:

Sharing what you know about the myriad evils that now beset our world;

Moving your cash out of any TBTF bank to a local credit union;

Buying gold and silver;

Opting for alternative energy whenever feasible; and

Occupying your hometown.

Just don’t think these approaches, by themselves, will fix anything, on a long-term basis, unless we ourselves are willing to expand our heart-based unity consciousness from the inside out.