The Intuitive Review: Inside WikiLeaks - & Julian Assange

The following is one of my intuitive reviews, where I peer into the heart of the creator. To find out more about my intuitive reviews, click here.

One of the radical concepts I have developed as a futurist is that of Integrated Inquiry: using the intuitive mind during research. To engage in Integrated Inquiry, a researcher has to release of control, and allow himself to be guided by a non-local intelligence. It’s a direct affront to the ‘rational’ mind’s insistence that it is in control.

I mention this because I have just read Daniel Domscheit-Berg's fascinating book Inside WikiLeaks (no prizes for guessing what the bullies called him at school!). The way I stumbled upon the book was serendipitous. About two weeks ago I was walking in the outdoor shopping plaza area in Discovery Bay, which is the lovely spot where I live on Lantau Island, Hong Kong. I had been at the coffee shop there for a while, and when I left I had a strong urge to go to the bookshop just a hundred or so metres away. I rarely go to that bookshop because it is rather small (and I have too many books as it is!). But when I ‘looked’ at the bookshop in my mind’s eye I felt a strong sense of excitement pulling me towards the shop. I stopped and double checked it. The excitement stayed in my chest area, and I ‘saw’ the precise bookshelf (and the book, less precisely) that I was to buy. It had a blue cover. The strength of the feeling led me to conclude that I was not projecting (from desire), and so I headed for the bookshop. I went straight to the shelf I had imagined, and there I saw Daniel Domscheit-Berg's book. It has a black cover with bright blue in the middle, and I instantly felt this was the book I was meant to read. So I grabbed the book and bought it.

Daniel Domscheit-Berg was formerly a WikiLeak's spokesman, and was the number two man at the organisation for a few years, under Wikileaks’ founder Julian Assange. I found the book intriguing. I was particularly keen to see whether the Julian Assange I had ‘channeled’ over six months before was in any way similar to the Julian Assange that Daniel Domscheit-Berg knew. I was fascinated to find that the book does indeed accurately reflect many of the issues which I previously wrote about in regard to WikiLeaks, radical transparency, and Julian Assange.

Let me remind you of what I wrote previously. At the height of the WikiLeaks drama near the end of 2010, when Julian Assange was accused of raping two women in Sweden, I wrote a series of posts about WikiLeaks and Julian Assange. I did this because I felt intuitively pulled towards the saga. In fact I had quite a few dreams (while sleeping) and visions (while meditating) about the whole drama, and it was almost as if my hand was being forced to write about the subject. In hindsight I can now see that Julian Assange’s idea of radical transparency, where most government information is freely available to all, is absolutely vital for all our futures (though not precisely in the way Assange thinks). I also learned that the subjects of Assange and WikiLeaks are of great interest to others. The post where I looked into the psyche of Julian Assange is the 3^rd most clicked post amongst more than300 posts here on 22C+.

My previous insights about Julian Assange

What were my intuitive insights those ten months ago? At the time I had read little about Assange or his organisation. I only knew what I’d seen on the news, or read in one or two newspaper articles, and the information was quite general in nature. It wasn’t much to go on. So when I ‘read’ Julian Assange’s psyche (see below), I was basically reading ‘blind’. I have to admit his psyche was quite easy to read, as his shadow side is quite pronounced. Here’s the essence of what I wrote.

… Assange is the archetypal rebel. The thrust of his consciousness is directed against systems. This thrust in turn emerges from a deep anger and sense of injustice within him. These are the core of his soul issues…

Looking a little deeper into the karmic level, the one metaphor which stands out is “chains”. Assange is locked up, unable to move, a metal chain tied around his midsection like a metal lasso. He is struggling to get free, to speak, to express his anger at humanity, at the system. There is a searing rage at the injustice of it all…. His anger creates a deep seated desire for revenge, to get even…. A key result is that Assange finds it difficult to trust people, and fear of betrayal is another central soul issue.

…there is a rather highly developed ego in Julian Assange, with a great sense of intellectual and moral superiority. This is really what gets him into most trouble. Here we see a second archetype: The God-man… When I look into the consciousness field of Assange, one overriding ‘story’ I see is that from the movie The Matrix. He sees himself as a neo-Neo, fighting the Matrix (the system). In that movie Neo (Keanu Reeve’s character) is himself a Christ figure.

Notably, Julian Assange describes himself as an atheist. In many ways his story describes the limits of the ego state as it attempts to control and dominate the system, but without a deeper awareness of Spirit. This is the wall that all egos hit, as they attempt to “rule the world”.

Ultimately the Rebel and the God-man combine to express some of the dominant psycho-spiritual projections of our age.

Destroy the system!

Fuck you!

They are morons!

I am smarter than them all!

I know all.

I am in control.

Self-liberation is Assange’s destiny… To get the “lesson”, he must learn to forgive. He has to forgive those who hurt him, who abandoned him. He has to forgive the system, and he has to forgive humanity and to release the burning rage within himself. The power has to first come from within before there is empowerment from without.

The Julian Assange described by Daniel Domscheit-Berg in Inside WikiLeaks is very similar to what is described above. But before I relate those claims, does Domscheit-Berg have a personal agenda here? In the interests of fairness, I have also channeled Domscheit-Berg’s psyche within the context of his drama with Assange.

The Shadow of Daniel Domscheit-Berg

Domscheit-Berg’s shadow, like Assange’s, is relatively easy to read because the projections are so strong. In many ways Domscheit-Berg and Assange are mirrors of one another, as their soul issues are quite similar.

Before you read on, remember any shadow reading is ‘ugly’. It is a reading of the dark side of the mind that is hidden from public view, and quite often even hidden from ourselves. The key to integrating the shadow is to fully acknowledge it without judgment. To help others heal, we can witness their shadow without judgment. I simply suggest you reserve judgment of Domscheit-Berg here. I often channel my own shadow in certain circumstances and come up with stuff that is equally ‘ugly’. However I am able to assume greater responsibility for my shadow projections, because I acknowledge them and do not deny them. When the projections of the shadow are not acknowledged the inevitable result is ‘drama’. In the case of Domscheit-Berg and Assange, the projections are great, and to put it bluntly, the result is one huge shit fight.

When I intuitively looked at the energy of Domscheit-Berg as projected at Assange, the essence became clear. Domscheit-Berg wants to bring Assange down. In fact energetically he has his hands round Assange’s neck. He is enraged at Assange, feeling betrayed by him.

How dare you! Fuck you! Who do you think you are? Do you think you are Jesus Christ or something? I’m superior to you! You are just an Australian peasant. You are nothing! I am smarter than you are. I will destroy you! Fuck you! You are not Jesus, you are the anti-Christ! I will destroy you! I will kill you!

That is the essence of it, and the book should be read an analysed with this agenda of the author in mind. One positive in Domscheit-Berg’s favour is that I do sense that he has a strong conscience. However conscience is often overridden by the power of the shadow, when that shadow becomes too expansive.

Inside WikiLeaks and Assange

So what exactly does the author write about Julian Assange? Firstly there are are in fact some positives in the book. Domscheit-Berg describes Assange as brilliant, hard-working and ferociously committed to his cause. Assange can be voraciously charming, he says. Assange is a man who is obsessed with the WikiLeaks cause. But Domscheit-Berg comes not to praise Assange, but to bury him.

Through the admittedly projected lens of Domscheit-Berg’s mind, Inside WikiLeaks reveals a Julian Assange who sees himself as God-like and all powerful, a man who cannot allow others to share the stage with him as an equal. The Australian WikiLealks head is depicted as being almost paranoid about being the only one being able to claim the title of ‘founder’ of WikiLeaks, and reacts with great jealousy when he believes Domscheit-Berg is attempting to take any of the credit. Assange, Domscheit-Berg writes, is driven by a strong need for attention, to be elevated in status. Although Domscheit-Berg does not spell it out, it is clear he feels that Assange desires fame and attention above all else. Thus Assange comes across as bullying, condescending and demeaning; not to mention bigoted in his attitudes towards women. He is also vengeful and petty at times.

After describing some of their positive early days together, Domscheit-Berg soon turns to some of the less pleasant aspects of their relationship. He writes:

I had the feeling that something must have gone very wrong in his life. He could have been a great person, and I was proud to have a friend who had such fire in his belly, who was so utterly committed to ideas and principles and changing the world for the better. Someone who just got up and did things without concern for what other people said. In certain respects I tried to copy this attitude. But he also had a dark side, and this increasingly gained the upper hand in the months to come. (p.68)

That dark side quickly becomes apparent.

In early 2010 his (Assange’s) tone toward me changed radically. “If you fuck up, I’ll hunt you down and kill you,” he once told me. No one had ever said anything like that to me. No matter how frightened he was that something would go wrong, a threat like that was utterly inexcusable. (p. 71)

On another occasion Assange is alleged to have written to Domscheit-Berg that “If you threaten this organization again, you will be attended to.” (p. 238) Assange is alleged to have circulated a message that “Daniel has some kind of disease, it’s some kind of borderline paranoid schizophrenia.” (p. 238)

Assange’s wanting to maintain power and control above all others is another strong theme in the book. According to Domscheit-Berg, one of Assange’s favourite sayings is: “Do not challenge leadership in times of crisis.”

Above all Domscheit-Berg paints a portrait of Julian Assange as a man incapable of trusting others, and with an almost paranoid fear of betrayal. This is precisely what I picked up when I looked at Assange’s psyche back in December.

Assange in many ways comes across as the archetypal go-it-alone, overly rational, modern male, dissociated from the human spirit. Left alienated in a disconnected cosmos, Assange has but one article of faith:

We often discussed the theory of evolution. If he did have faith in anything, it was the theory of evolution. Julian thought that the stronger members of the species not only prevailed, but produced heirs who were better able to survive. Naturally, in his view, his genes particularly deserved to be reproduced. (p. 211)

My sense is that the world of hackers is in large part a compensation for the powerlessness that alienated male egos feel in the modern word. I have stated that Assange has a God complex, and Domscheit-Berg too has elements of this within his psyche. Early in the book he relates how he once sent deliberately annoying emails to others from an address called “god@eds.de”.

A strange darkness

When people are at each other’s throats, so to speak, it is inevitable that there are strong projections of dark energy directed between them. This energy will be unconsciously projected with the agenda of shaming, belittling or even destroying the other person. Having developed my own Integrated Intelligence quite strongly, I can easily feel when someone is projecting such energy at me (or me at another). Interestingly, at one point Domscheit-Berg describes a weird chronic condition which he develops during his darker days with Assange. A prime symptom is that he experiences his eyelids as feeling too heavy. This can be a indicator of being psychically attacked. Dark energy commonly results in a subtle sense of anxiety or fear, headaches, drowsiness and a general sense of chronic fatigue. In this case the severity of the drama between the two men has resulted in an ongoing exchange of dark energetic projections between them.

WikiLeaks becomes what it hates

One fascinating aspect of life is that we often become the thing we hate most. This is in part because we tend to spend a great deal of energy projecting at what we hate; and secondly what we hate is often a representation of elements of our psyche that we have repressed. The result is ultimate irony, or perhaps ultimate hypocrisy, if you like. Thus it is that Assange becomes “…a dictator who decided everything on his own and withheld information from me…” (p. 177). When Assange kicks Domscheit-Berg out of WikiLeaks, the reason Assange gives is straight from a military handbook: “Disloyalty, insubordination and destabilization in times of crisis”. (p. 200) Considering that WikiLeaks was set up to counter the unchallengeable power of people and organisations, and their hiding of information, this is a great irony indeed.

Yet the most striking aspect of WikiLeaks as depicted by Domscheit-Berg is how much deception WikiLeaks has engaged in. Domscheit-Berg claims that Assange and WikiLeaks came increasingly to rely upon jargon in order to obfuscate truth, and to make themselves appear to be knowledgeable in situations where they were in fact largely in the dark. They have also deliberately hidden information, distorted truths and invented lies in order to manipulate public opinion and create an image of the organisation which Domscheit-Berg states is untrue. At one point WikiLeaks released documents which revealed that the Julius Bar bank was hoarding billions of dollars from disreputable sources. When questioned about the source of the documents, Assange lied and said there were three independent sources. In fact there was only one single source.

Finally, Domscheit-Berg raises a valid concern about WikiLeaks. Ironically this defender of radical transparency is now in possession of hundreds of thousands of confidential documents. Yet WikiLeaks now has intimate, ongoing arrangements with five major media groups including The Guardian, The New York Times and Der Spiegel. It is these organisations who now decide “what is of public interest and what is not.” (p. 267) Such a scenario is not transparent at all, and it seems that, at least in terms of these particular documents, power has merely changed hands. WikiLeaks has thus become “a global political player” (270) and is no longer a politically neutral party. This, states Domscheit-Berg, is not what it started out to be.

Ultimately, the fallout between the two men is almost embarrassing to read. The two are like cats on a fence at midnight, hissing and clawing at each other. Take for example this transcript of an online chat between the two men, which appears near the end of the book. “J” and “D” refer to Julian and Daniel respectively.

J: How many people are represented by these private chats? And what are there
positions in the CCC?
D: go figure
D: i dont even wanna think about how many people that used to respect you told me that they feel disappointed by your reactions
D: i tried to tell you all this, but in all your hybris you dont even care
D: so i dont care anymore either
D: other than that, i had questions first, and i need answers
D: like what agreements we have made
D: i need to understand this so we can continue working
D: you keep stalling other peoples work
J: How many people are represented by these private chats? And what are there positions in the CCC?
D: start answering my questions j
J: This is not a quid-pro-quo.
J: Are you refusing to answer?
D: i have already told you again that i dont see why i should answer to you
anymore just because you want answers, but on the same hand refuse to answer
anything i am asking
D: i am not a dog you can contain the way you want to j
J: i am investigation a serious security breach. Are you refusing to answer?
D: i am investigating a serious breach in trust. are you refusing to answer?
J: No you are not. I initiated this conversation. Answer the question please.
D: i initiated it
D: if you look above
D: twice already
D: i want to know what the agreements are in respect to iraq
J: That is a procedural issue. Don’t play games with me.
D: stop shooting at messengers
J: I’ve had it.
D: likewise, and that doesnt go just for me
J: If you do not answer the question, you will be removed.
D: you are not anyones king or god
D: and you’re not even fulfilling your role as a leader right now
D: a leader communicates and cultivates trust in himself
D: you are doing the exact opposite
D: you behave like some kind of emporer or slave trader
J: You are suspended for one month, effective immediately.
D: haha
D: right
D: because of what?
D: and who even says that?
D: you? another adhoc decision?
J: If you wish to appeal, you will be heard on Tuesday.
D: BAHAHAHA
D: maybe everyone was right, and you really have gone mental j
D: you should get some help
J: You will be heard by a panel of peers.
J: You are suspend for disloyalty, insubordination and destabalization in a time of crisis.

There is not much positive say about the mental maturity depicted in this communication. At least Domscheit-Berg didn’t edit out his own typos!

Is there hope for radical transparency?

Domscheit-Berg concludes Inside WikiLeaks with the following wish for the future.

Our society needs citizens capable of thinking and acting on their own. People who do not shy away from critical questions because they are afraid of being disappointed. Our society needs people who are able to distinguish good information from bad and to make good decisions based on that knowledge, instead of relinquishing all personal responsibility to messiahs, leaders and alpha wolves. (p. 278)

Is this vision possible today?

Julian Assange and WikiLeaks supporters dream of a world of ‘radical transparency’. This is where information is freely accessible, and governments and corporations do not hide the truth from the public. However, what the Domscheit-Berg/Assange drama clearly shows is that free access to information is not enough to create a ‘free’ world. Information is merely the surface of the system. It is a common delusion of the unbalanced and disembodied ‘rational’ mind that consciousness is primarily a state of information processing. It is much more than this. Consciousness is embedded within powerful fields of intention, and these strongly influence human behavior. They act in the same way as attractor fields in physics, pulling us towards those relevant fields. What the precise mechanics of the forces involved are, I cannot say. Science will describe those in time. Yet as an intuitive I know for a fact that such forces exist, and that they are very, very powerful. A true understanding of human behavior will not arrive until these fields of consciousness are acknowledged and understood.

No amount of information can free Julian Assange and Daniel Domscheit-Berg. No amount of information can free any of us. True freedom – what I call ‘conscious transparency’ - can only emerge where there is healing of the emotional body, and when the past released. This is because these consciousness fields work through our emotional bodies. Domscheit-Berg and Assange are two damaged individuals whose egos have created narratives of power and control in order to avoid feeling their personal pain. This is what all ‘drama’ comes down to. It is basically the single common denominator behind most human suffering, and most of human history.

In the end, what the WikiLeaks saga shows us is that freeing up information cannot free the human spirit. That requires an inner journey, a healing journey. It requires us to visit the spirit, and that is a place that neither Julian Assange nor Domscheit-Berg have not visited, at least not at any great depth.

Until there is healing, there will be no free world, no radical transparency and certainly no conscious transparency. The dramas, the power and control will continue. It is time we humans came to understand that. Some already understand it, and some are close to understanding it. Yet most are not. 

Not yet.

Marcus