http://www.otterjoy.com/newsarchive2009/news1423.html
Tar and Saski arrived back and were frankly relieved to find Mel and Cantilip lounging in The Room looking healthy and normal, a relief which lasted about five seconds.
“There is this recurrent image,” said Mel. “The eight of us are walking hand in hand into the Light.” But then he said: “It’s like a flashback.” He paused. “The thing is, none of us can any longer keep a lid on what we are.”
“Then you must return to the Denzines and learn,” said Tar briskly.
Sure, Dad, sure.
“Even Hass?” asked Tar.
Mel didn’t answer directly.
“What I understand is that everything I have been taught since I first managed to stammer why? was directed at keeping my feet on the ground. Nothing is whole!”
“Everything is whole.”
“The healing lies in the balance? Papa – “ which Mel hadn’t called him since he was about ten. “ – how is it possible to be both alive and dead?”
“Darling,” said Saski, “you do not appear to be doing badly so far.”
“Do you understand that – that in earthpower I am Master of Kadun or more exactly - ?”
“Of course, darling,” said Saski.
He’s going to say it, thought Tar. He said it.
“What does it all mean?”
“I want my sons home,” said Tar.
Mel realized it was an order.
“Shall Essa order his son home!”
“Where,” said Tar softly, “is home?”
But Cantilip said: “You leave with Sarat Maya, Karula.”
“And Mitch of course,” said Mel.
She didn’t seem to think Mitch mattered.
And Fal, thought Mel. Is that it, only women can heal Kadun? Then death returned and said: Then Shavli must rule Kadun.
“No!” said Mel, then realized he had spoken aloud.
Tar looked alert. Mel explained.
“You become obsessed with death,” said Tar.
And Mel said: “That is the matter of Kadun?”
Cantilip cried out: “Don’t you see! No-one foresees our deaths because we’re dead already. It IS a flashback. Maya was right, we’re dead and we don’t even know it.”
“This is madness,” said Tar.
“That,” said Mel grimly, “is why we’re going to sane it.” No-one laughed. He turned to Cantilip. “We’re packing.”
“You return to Azt?” Tar kept his voice level.
“Great heavens, no! We are going to Fidub.”
“Wring his neck for me,” said Tar.
“We’re putting our own gloss on it,” said Mel. “We understand that. Or we are putting Azt’s gloss. Refracting it through what we think we know. What are we seeing?”
“It was illusion,” said Cantilip. “Karula and I weren’t there.”
“Unless of course,” snapped Mel, “you were dead.”
As the door closed behind them, Saski lay back in an attitude of complete collapse.
“Appalled beyond belief,” said Tar. He held her, then stood back and laughed. “Get packing. We, my lady, are going to Azt.”
“I shouldn’t have said that,” said Cantilip. “Total loony.”
“True-untrue,” said Mel. “Not true-true.”
“Catharsis,” said Cantilip.
There’s a heli-pad on the roof, drop you in Cho’s back garden in an hour.
But Por reported that they hadn’t left.
“They’re just sitting up there, talking.”
“Stop calling it death,” said Mel. “The part that’s there not here, the part we can no longer keep down. Death is a gloss and a corruption. We’re not seeing it as it is.”
“Because it’s been kept down, it – it isn’t properly integrated, That’s why it’s so erratic.”
“No balance.”
“Yes,” said Cantilip. “No. Mel, we’re doing this to ourselves.”
“We know that.”
“Why are we doing this to ourselves?”
He rested his head on her shoulder.
“I guess because we’re scared shitless.”
“We’ve brainwashed ourselves. There is no choice. No choice but to wander round Azt bare-headed, no choice but to behave as though Azt had been at peace for a thousand years. Do you not think the rational part of our minds rebels?”
“Thinks we’re suicidal,” said Mel.
“Think of a prey-animal, Mel. A rabbit. If rabbits had human consciousness how long d’you think they’d last before going psycho?”
“Simply as a result of existing,” said Mel.
“We’re not built for it.”
“Except we are,” said Mel.
“The ‘there’ part to which – to whom?”
“Nit-picker!” said Mel.
“To what the fear is meaningless, says, hey, man, it’s cool, what’s the hassle.”
“You’re dead already,” said Mel.
“What is the one thing our – hah! – uncensored selves have not experienced?”
“Total terror,” said Mel.
“Of losing you,” said Cantilip.
“Of losing you,” said Mel.
“Because,” said Cantilip.
“Because,” said Mel.
“It’s not terror at one’s own demise,” said Cantilip.
“It’s absolute powerlessness to prevent,” said Mel.
“Anything happening to any of us,” said Cantilip.
“Love is destroying us,” said Mel.
“Nobody told us,” said Cantilip.
“What could they have said?”
“Imposed detachment!”
Mel gave a little start, then turned and kissed her gently on the cheek.
“We have been so stupid. What is not whole?”
“What is forced apart. Oh Mel.”
“Love, they told us, love with all your heart and soul, become one.”
“It only works,” she said.
“When nobody wants to kill your beloved!”
“Grubby little rational minds. We understand the risk. We accept it.”
They looked at each other in horror.
“Letting go.”
“Of each other.”
He took her hand and began slowly to recite.
“I who am One, who am One with the One, and You who are all, Protector and Preserver, Creator and Destroyer, in whom all are One, give peace to this house and all within.”
It began to rain, but they didn’t mind. Finally two wet little rabbits descended and found Tar and Saski gone,.
We want to talk to a grown-up.
“It’s the opposite of everything we’ve been taught!” shouted Mel. Am I shouting? “Sorry.”
“No,” said Por. He ploughed on. “Cantilip leaves you? Is she not free? You let go.”
“That’s different. She has choice.”
“Here – the here part of you – accepts totally she is – discrete.”
“But there we are One – “
“What is time?” asked Cantilip. “It doesn’t matter. We shall meet again and then it will be for ever.”
“That is faith,” said Mel. “Must we cross in real time to know!”
“You do not trust?”
“What?”
“Love.”
We are dead and do not know it. It is as simple or as sophisticated.
“What Fal is doing is projecting – realizing, real-izing, making real.”
“Must we suffer the terror and the loss?” asked Cantilip.
“For what?”
“To be free.”
“It seems to me,” said Por, “your little minds are doing a pretty good job so far. Feel it.”
Cantilip lolled across the Plaza, half her head blown away. Mel’s mind shut down. “Feel it.”
Mel walked slowly through a hostile, jeering crowd. They’ll kill him, said someone helpfully. Cantilip retched. “Feel it.” Mel stared at him blindly. “Feel it.” Cantilip sprinkled earth on Mel’s grave then screamed No!. Mel alone in bed turns, reaches for empty space. Desolation overwhelms him.
“Poor little rabbits,” said Mel. “Such complicated minds.”
“Or,” said remorseless Por.
“I am walking behind your coffin,” said Mel steadily. “But the sun is in my hair and I am laughing. It doesn’t matter. What is in the coffin is not you. It has nothing to do with you, with us. Because you are beside me, clutching my hand. So why am I crying?”
“Do we have to make up our minds!” shouted Cantilip.
“No,” said Mel. Immediately it flashed into his mind: time is foreshortened. Oh shut up! he said to his mind. “We’re dragging ourselves under, aren’t we. How do we get out?”
“Only by turning our backs on the whole thing.”
“Not.”
He wrote at length to Sarat.
How can I be this stupid? thought Sarat. There’s one thing we didn’t do. How can I be this thick? We didn’t sit on it together!
Once more he approached the throne, his mood much OK buster, now you get your come-uppance. He sat firmly and with what the tabloids would have called a very male gesture of possession sat Maya on his lap. She snuggled against his chest and put her arms around his neck.
Well? asked Sarat. They surrendered their minds to each other, melded.
Er, yes, well.
I/we look around. Where are we? In the dream, if it is a dream, there is the distant sound of hammering. We follow it, taut, aware of being defenceless in a dream, if that makes sense. We seem to be in a tunnel. Under the earth? Under the Palace? The fault. We do not find these terribly comforting thoughts. Our feet are getting wet. A trickle of water from behind has reached us. The trickle becomes a steady flow. This is a very uncomforting thought indeed. Shall we outrun it? Did we not proclaim we wished to cleanse the sewers of Azt! Er, yes. Not with us in them. At least we know where we are. Must there not be a moment of unspeakable terror? Feel it. I have led you to your death! That is clearly not an ‘us’ thought. At least we’ll go together. But the water levels out at waist-height. We’d better swim! This is clearly the maddest trip yet. We begin to strike out for land. The beaches of Fidub appear before us but recede with each stroke. The fault.
We’re so convinced we are shaping the trip we don’t try to shape it. But then what’s the point. Think, think, think ourselves onto the beach. Here we are, vigorously towelling our backs as the sun beats down and the earth cracks beneath us. We cling to the edge of the fault. Steps appear, worn by many weary climbers. We begin our descent to the centre of the earth.
For a moment they clung to each other taut.
“Why,” demanded Maya, “did it stop when it was just getting interesting?”
Sarat’s mobile rang.
“Oh,” he said. “Another kind of disturbance in the ether.”
Tar and Saski surveyed the plotters.
“You are all mad or only Mel and Cantilip?”
“Darlings,” said Saski, “you didn’t finish growing-up. Now you must grow up on the job. It is hard.”
“Oh, is that what happened?” said Sarat.
“You don’t look too bad,” allowed Tar.
“Smile for the camera,” said Sarat. “It’s probable I went mad when I was 17. I may just be getting over it."
“Cho,” said Tar, “if you took a break.”
Sarat smiled wanly.
“D’you think he could cope?”
“What has Mel said?” asked Hass.
“I have said I wish my sons home. Perhaps all five of them for a short while.”
“I thank you,” said Sarat.
“You are not here,” said Tar.
“Something else has happened,” said Sarat.
“We are feeling just a little fragile,” said Maya.
Tar caught up with the missing episodes. He put his head in his hands.
“Mel and Cantilip must sit.”
“We’d got there,” said Sarat.
Mel had got hold of a graphics program. He sat back from the monitor.
“There! I thought I’d externalize it.”
Cantilip looked at the eight of them walking hand in hand into the Light and began to cry.
“I did that,” admitted Mel. “Then I thought – supposing – “
He opened another image.
“Oh Mel!” She laughed and cried at the same time.
“First I put silver blur round each of us, which I found rather cheering. No change of state. Then of course the blur all joined up and the blur is what joins us. So in the end I had the beginning of a solid block of silver blur and then I thought paint out the people, because the people are the blur. But in the middle of the people.”
In the middle of a shimmering radiant block of silver were eight tiny rabbits.
“What is it that our little brains are screaming at us that we cannot begin to accept because it’s so sick, so crazy?”
“There is no difference between life and death. But we know that or we shouldn’t be as we are.”
“Poor little rabbits. Then I thought something else. I thought we’re going through the Light.”
“That’s a bit scary,” said Cantilip. “But it’s still a flashback.”
“How do I know what time does? Does it ask me? Except maybe it’s something we’ve done. We are at the interface.”
She looked around Mel’s old bedroom and began to giggle.
“Cosmic, man!”
“I know, I know! But mentally we’ve taken ourselves over the top and that’s what we don’t know.”
“Because it’s we who are calling the shots. Our little brains are squealing that there’s something we need to let hang out here…”
“Life is death. It only sounds so repulsive because time programmes us to see it linearly.”
“When my grandfather died, I knew he just wasn’t there. He was somewhere, but not there. A dead person is sort of conclusive.”
Mel thought of his dead.
“Yes.” Then, “It’s what Mitch said. But not linear. Every moment in life is the opportunity to come out of the dark into Light.” But then he frowned. “I can’t believe the Anile court didn’t know that.”
“Anile Throne Excursions,” said Cantilip. “Suppose – there’s the Interface, capital I. What all the trips are about is interfaces. No barriers. What is being screamed at us is everything is whole.”
He was summoned to the telephone.
“Make up your mind!” he said with some acerbity.
“Your mood has not improved?”
“Somewhere,” said Mel, “I’m a happy bunny. I just haven’t got there yet.”
Cantilip began to bunny-hop around him. He smothered a laugh and agreed to return to Azt. Then he began to bunny-hop too. They were in love and under a lot of strain.
The Matter of Kadun (inner and eso): life, death, eternity and Gaia (2)
I have sorted my posts, sometimes necessarily loosely: given the premiss that today's evil is a nasty little alliance between the fascist religious who hate the independent exercise of heart and mind that is being human and the Stalinist materialists who deny the independent exercise of heart and mind that is being human, both resulting in total contempt for individual sovereignty, it's a toss-up whether posts letting rip on the subject pertain to Marxism or to religion. Also, some of this is simply letting rip at multiple targets, frequently with the most pernicious use of Rude and Unnecessary Language.
|  I am an otter: I ott. I am in a situation where all reason and all decency are turned on their heads. Mental ravage passes me by, partly because I have self-command, partly because my family background is entirely red. Having a grasp of fact is useful too. The fascist clowns calling themselves the Left don't like me very much, in particular the retarded and illiterate products of 'the new universities'. I laugh at them daily and take them for a trip upon my magic sailing-ship, so their senses are all ripped and their minds don't seem to grip - not that they gripped much to start with.
If you do not like my novel The Anile Heir, you define yourself as the enemy of freedom, democracy, love, women's rights, gay rights, reason, intellect and the search for truth. Doctor is far too arrogant and stupid to actually read what I write. It is enough that it upsets the bigoted sleazy little fascist IQ80 bedpan-washer he calls 'the graduate nurse', who therefore has a free hand with my body.
Here is a picture of me otting. I told them right at the start that there were all sorts of interesting things in my family attic; the hammer is jolly good for crushing skulls and the sickle for disembowelling. Would they listen!
Clearly nothing is going to change until these repulsive cowardly animals are dragged out into the open and clearly it is I who am going to have to do the dragging, via the successful publication of something or other, doesn't matter what - a particularly witty guide to flower-arranging.
You are not self-forgetting by definition if you are forcing others to obey you. Grace is paramountly not forcing oneself on others other than to restrain them from forcing themselves on others. To love one's neighbour as oneself is not to inflict beliefs he or she finds questionable on him or her. People are and have to be free to go wherever they might be going. Society's business is limited to demanding they behave tolerably to each other and ensuring they are free to travel. We do not know.
Gentlemen, of your courtesy (they are usually male if not gentlemen), back off. Your behaviour is loutish and uncivil, intellectual thuggery and self-aggrandisement.
We are being fed a reduction of Christianity to fascism, the refusal to acknowledge the polarity in the thought of Christian nations between love and power, the privileging of faith regardless of what that faith entails, contempt for unbelief, regardless of what that unbelief entails. Science and learning are as ever the enemies, for they take us beyond the arbitrary ceilings on thought of dogma to the world of physics and biology, to other readings of Jesus as a Kabbalist, a Sufi, Brahma, the false identification of the enemies of the Church with the enemies of Jesus. If one does not live in the mental world of the 1st century AD (or indeed the 7th), if one does not submit to these worlds, one is flawed and insensitive; if one does, one is blessed, a superior form of life. Just obey.
Irreducible evil
Time to return to civilization, to cease sullying my mind with contemplation of the scum of the earth.
And shall be written in letters of fire.
They really don't like the idea there is no alpha baboon in the sky, beating his chest and punishing uppity females. They like even less the idea that that field of human experience known variously as expansion of consciousness, self-realization, Union with God is a matter of physics.
Sleainte! | |
Of course there's nothing to say that the more creative, artistic and indeed pragmatic cave-persons didn't get a certain amount of shit from their fellow-tribespersons. I am returned deliciously to my initial reaction to the shit
Wroth was that maker of pictures -- hotly he answered the call:
"Hunters and fishers and trappers, children and fools are ye all!
Look at the beasts when ye hunt them!" Swift from the tumult he broke,
Ran to the cave of his father and told him the shame that they spoke.
...
Straight on the glittering ice-field, by the caves of the lost Dordogne,
Ung, a maker of pictures, fell to his scribing on bone
Even to mammoth editions. Gaily he whistled and sung,
Blessing his tribe for their blindness. ~Heed ye the Story of Ung!~
Full poem below:
THE STORY OF UNG
Once, on a glittering ice-field, ages and ages ago,
Ung, a maker of pictures, fashioned an image of snow.
Fashioned the form of a tribesman -- gaily he whistled and sung,
Working the snow with his fingers. ~Read ye the Story of Ung!~
Pleased was his tribe with that image -- came in their hundreds to scan --
Handled it, smelt it, and grunted: "Verily, this is a man!
Thus do we carry our lances -- thus is a war-belt slung.
Lo! it is even as we are. Glory and honour to Ung!"
Later he pictured an aurochs -- later he pictured a bear --
Pictured the sabre-tooth tiger dragging a man to his lair --
Pictured the mountainous mammoth, hairy, abhorrent, alone --
Out of the love that he bore them, scribing them clearly on bone.
Swift came the tribe to behold them, peering and pushing and still --
Men of the berg-battered beaches, men of the boulder-hatched hill --
Hunters and fishers and trappers, presently whispering low:
"Yea, they are like -- and it may be -- But how does the Picture-man know?"
"Ung -- hath he slept with the Aurochs -- watched where the Mastodon roam?
Spoke on the ice with the Bow-head -- followed the Sabre-tooth home?
Nay! These are toys of his fancy! If he have cheated us so,
How is there truth in his image -- the man that he fashioned of snow?"
Wroth was that maker of pictures -- hotly he answered the call:
"Hunters and fishers and trappers, children and fools are ye all!
Look at the beasts when ye hunt them!" Swift from the tumult he broke,
Ran to the cave of his father and told him the shame that they spoke.
And the father of Ung gave answer, that was old and wise in the craft,
Maker of pictures aforetime, he leaned on his lance and laughed:
"If they could see as thou seest they would do what thou hast done,
And each man would make him a picture, and -- what would become of my son?
"There would be no pelts of the reindeer, flung down at thy cave for a gift,
Nor dole of the oily timber that comes on the Baltic drift;
No store of well-drilled needles, nor ouches of amber pale;
No new-cut tongues of the bison, nor meat of the stranded whale.
"~Thou~ hast not toiled at the fishing when the sodden trammels freeze,
Nor worked the war-boats outward through the rush of the rock-staked seas,
Yet they bring thee fish and plunder -- full meal and an easy bed --
And all for the sake of thy pictures." And Ung held down his head.
"~Thou~ hast not stood to the Aurochs when the red snow reeks of the fight;
Men have no time at the houghing to count his curls aright.
And the heart of the hairy Mammoth, thou sayest, they do not see,
Yet they save it whole from the beaches and broil the best for thee.
"And now do they press to thy pictures, with opened mouth and eye,
And a little gift in the doorway, and the praise no gift can buy:
But -- sure they have doubted thy pictures, and that is a grievous stain --
Son that can see so clearly, return them their gifts again!"
And Ung looked down at his deerskins -- their broad shell-tasselled bands --
And Ung drew downward his mitten and looked at his naked hands;
And he gloved himself and departed, and he heard his father, behind:
"Son that can see so clearly, rejoice that thy tribe is blind!"
Straight on the glittering ice-field, by the caves of the lost Dordogne,
Ung, a maker of pictures, fell to his scribing on bone
Even to mammoth editions. Gaily he whistled and sung,
Blessing his tribe for their blindness. ~Heed ye the Story of Ung!~
Rudyard Kipling |
| |
What anyone who has ever tried to teach the human race anything worth knowing has taught is that we should try, pretty please, to see what is there, not what is imprinted on the insides of our skulls, escape from self, come out of our heads.
Everything, everyone, is what he, she or it is. One should perceive what he, she or it is, not what one's festering fettered brain tells one he, she or it is, must be.
Ideologies crash on reality. It is possible that some totalitarian rulers do not start evil but are driven to oppression in order to maintain unreality, or in other words lies.
To say I am on the whole surrounded by those with cunt-for-brains is therefore no more than to say that they are those suffering the bane of Hom sap.
Unfortunately they're supposed to be scientific types.
Followed to its source all this crap surrounding me disappears into thin air. It has no basis in reality only in the ravings of spastic loons, what exists only in their heads.
Since it is not demonstrable, there is no evidence to persuade me of its veracity. The impotent ape must use brute force to attempt the submission of others to the words in its head.
That which is not demonstrable cannot be binding. The central demonstrable fact in the current farce is of course the alloy rod in my spine, dismissed in favour of words that exist only in the heads of the nutters.
Indeed in our day-to-day lives we are bound by that which is demonstrable. No, dear, do not drop the Ming vase on a concrete floor. Nor take the watch/wallet/mobile of another, nor walk out in front of a bus, nor stab someone in the stomach.
You are perfectly at liberty, should you weigh 20 stone, to insist you are not overweight, but you should not expect the acquiescence of others. What is happening to this society is demand others acquiesce in the delusions of others. 'It's their reality.' Well, isn't that just bloody tough. It is what they choose to believe.
It is demonstrable that if persons make some modest attempt to love their neighbours as themselves they do not mug, murder or maim others and so things work a whole lot better.
It is not similarly demonstrable that if people love their enemies something good results, since their enemies may go ahead and massacre them anyway.
The destruction of the universities is of course a major security issue. PLM who have been taught to think properly keep the air clear and stop the nation's thought disappearing up its own arse, which is of course what the thought of this nation is doing.
Once a society abandons being grounded in fact and reason, the door is open to the abandoning of free enquiry, whether historical or scientific.
If there may be more than one set of physical laws and since the physical laws that we do begin to grasp are distinctly more bizarre than previously discerned there is no necessity to posit gods and demons as the source of what have been deemed supernatural or paranormal phenomena.
At least ten million Britons are atheists and probably many more. The December 2004 YouGov poll found 35% of the nation to be atheist. The FT/Harris poll of 2006 found more than half the country to be atheist or agnostic. The 2001 Census identified 9 million atheists (National Statistics Online - Religion in Britain)
6.3% of Britons attend church on Sunday. The Government hypes the Census finding that 71% of us identify ourselves as Christians. Whatever the respondents meant, clearly they did not mean formal observance.
Tom Paine in The Age of Reason (1794) described Jesus as 'a virtuous and amiable man' who preached 'most excellent morality…It is upon this plain narrative of facts…that the Christian mythologists, calling themselves the Christian church, have erected their fable, which for absurdity and extravagance is not to be exceeded by anything that is to be found in the mythology of the ancients.'
Many people of all faiths and none have engaged with the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. In the words of Jesus Christ Superstar, 'he's a man, he's just a man', and engagement with him does not mean that we have the slightest interest in the notion that God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son to it.
Like most people in this country I have my own views. I am not even slightly interested in being bound by what others choose to believe. I choose to believe something different. I am surrounded by said spastic loons who think the convictions of the orthodox religious must mean something to me, meaning that I must accept these convictions represent an arbitrary ceiling to my thought, areas I may not explore, questions I may not ask, because they got Troof. In fact of course these convictions mean exactly nothing to me.
|
| |
Like something from the Middle Ages, is it not, a witch-hunt, my repeated gang-rape by slobbering vacant animals, drugged to the eyeballs on the opium of the people. The many faces of obscenity have been repeatedly listed. I am surrounded by mad spastics, among whose more pathetic delusions are probably that the rest of the country would agree with them that I represent ultimate evil and should be punished for offending against the ravings of the Stone Age and that the permission of peasant and priest alike is required before setting pen to paper. I do not expect the appreciation of those for whom the world was fixed in the Stone Age. I do not expect them to be familiar with theories of the multiverse or consider the working of the human mind. I expect them to keep their filthy hands off me and if necessary to be made to do so. I do not expect the political classes and the so-called scientists of medicine to be complicit in permitting animals to burn me at the stake. Science indeed is threatened by these vermin, it being the case that science does not come on their radar, but I did.
Every -ism is an an attempt to make aspects of reality, transient realities, temporary realities into absolutes, metaphors for reality into literal truths.
Every -ism is undermined by and eventually crashes on reality, the reality of the physical universe, the reality of individual humans in all their variety, insistent on being what they are not what they're told to be, the reality of the existence of a multiplicity of other ways of looking at the world. This is what happened to Christianity. This is what happened to Marxism.
The vehicle is mistaken for the destination. The shape, size, colour or velocity of the vehicle does not matter. What determines the destination is the driver.
If it is imprinted on your consciousness that Jesus is Lord or there is no God but Allah, you must arrive somewhere where Jesus is Lord or there is no god but Allah, unless of couse somewhere along the road something clicks and you have learned to let go of all your preconceptions.
If other things are indelibly imprinted on your consciousness, then you must arrive where these others things are so, because you are shaping the road, unless of course etc, in other words if you stop shaping the road.
The key to totalitarianism is the supposed helplessness of individual human beings. There is nothing inside. Either they are helpless without the assistance of whatever version of the divine multi-vitamin in the sky happens to be current or they are individually helpless and only collectively capable, whether as the proletariat or as the Volk. On no account must any individual think he or she is significant or empowered.
Rejection of the notion human consciousness shapes the trip lies behind acceptance of 'revelation'.
There is the question of whether everything that occurs to persons is self-generated or whether it may be a connection with other times, other places, other dimensions and the further question of whether such a connection ever is or can be pure or whether it must be refracted through what the human mind thinks (both consciously and unconsciously) must be.
There is the impossibility of the primate brain believing such a connection, should it exist, being a result of human capacity and consequently its convictions that some higher entity is revealing something to it.
There is the incapacity of the primate brain to deal with its own personal 'big bang', consciousness, and to believe itself capable - that that which sustains, that which reveals, that which is everything, is within, 'the force that through the green fuse drives the flower'.
“However simple, however sophisticated, however down to earth, however numinous, it’s always you, you the – “ Mel stopped suddenly. “I was going to say, you, the corpse, who shapes the trip.”
“But that is not at all what we are talking about,” protested Mitch. “We are talking about the beliefs of the living as to what will happen.”
“NDEs.”
“The whole point of NDEs is they are not dying.”
“We have no idea what being dead is like,” said Maya. “Cho was really quite sharp.”
“We know there is a continuum.”
“Shaped by us.”
“I don’t think,” said Hass, “this is particularly getting us anywhere. Exactly what is happening when we sit?”
“Cho said it was a conduit. I think we’re finding stuff we already know but don’t know that we know and we’re very bad at understanding what we’re telling ourselves.”
“We’re shaping the trip.”
“Certainly. And a pretty restricted trip it is too, confined solely to a rather limited social circle.”
“It would seem to me,” said Mitch “the universe should return to school for it surely has a problem with making itself plain to folks.”
The Matter of Kadun (inner and eso): life, death, eternity and Gaia
It came to Karula: sometimes they talk as though they’re separate species. “I do not think,” she said, “at the most fundamental level anyone has ever explained to me the difference between earthpower and – “ She clapped her hand over her mouth and whistled.
“We, humans,” said Mel, “are finite and infinite. You can’t have a one-sided piece of paper. The separation is illusion. Earthpower is the approach from one side. We are the other. Each contains the other.”
“Together,” said Mitch drily, “you represent ultimate reality.”
“The interface,” said Mel. “Where one side of the paper joins the other.”
“Of course one knew that theoretically,” said Cantilip briskly.
Karula spluttered.
“Then it – then neither is the end of the trip.”
“It’s the beginning of the trip,” admitted Mel. “It is advised not to go further.”
“But you do!”
“That’s quite different,” said Mel.
“Physical,” said Hass helpfully.
“Cuddles,” said Venga.
“We have to be human,” said Mel. “To know we are love. Anyone who doesn’t at some level acknowledge that is intolerable to himself and all around him. “
“Most of the messes people get into are because they think they can extinguish human,” said Hass. “Go around intoning, ‘I do not need’. Fine. Starve to death.”
“’Nothing matters.’ Watch other people starve to death. We seem to have somewhat digressed.”
“They do not understand which part of them is saying these things
...
Mel frowned.
“That sounds like an ultimatum.”
“Oh, my dear boy, no.”
“What then?”
“I shall not offer fatherly advice. For that you have a father.”
“The real problem,” said Mel, “is Hass was there too.”
“No, Mel, that is not the real problem. The real problem is Zur loves you.”
Mel managed a small smile.
“I can’t think why. I’m treating her very badly. For – for 98% of my young life, it was inconceivable I visit Azt, let alone live there. Everything has shattered, do you see, good, bad, indifferent. Everything. For 98% of my life, Zur was my life. “ Then I realized I was Master of Kadun. “Everything must be remade.” Time. Time stretched out before him like an endless field of flowers. But that is only because I am dead. We are finite, damn it! Infinite and finite. Mitch’s voice echoed in his mind. I have no problem with the notion I am finite. Here and there, alive and dead, Azt and Zur, Zur and Van-senok, why is nothing whole? The image returned. Hand in hand, the eight of us are walking into the Light, capital L. “Meanwhile I need a vacation!”
“To that at least I give unqualified assent.”
...
“There is this recurrent image,” said Mel. “The eight of us are walking hand in hand into the Light.” But then he said: “It’s like a flashback.” He paused. “The thing is, none of us can any longer keep a lid on what we are.”
“Then you must return to the Denzines and learn,” said Tar briskly.
Sure, Dad, sure.
“Even Hass?” asked Tar.
Mel didn’t answer directly.
“What I understand is that everything I have been taught since I first managed to stammer why? was directed at keeping my feet on the ground. Nothing is whole!”
“Everything is whole.”
“The healing lies in the balance? Papa – “ which Mel hadn’t called him since he was about ten. “ – how is it possible to be both alive and dead?”
“Darling,” said Saski, “you do not appear to be doing badly so far.”
“Do you understand that – that in earthpower I am Master of Kadun or more exactly - ?”
“Of course, darling,” said Saski.
He’s going to say it, thought Tar. He said it.
“What does it all mean?”
“I want my sons home,” said Tar.
Mel realized it was an order.
“Shall Essa order his son home!”
“Where,” said Tar softly, “is home?”
But Cantilip said: “You leave with Sarat Maya, Karula.”
“And Mitch of course,” said Mel.
She didn’t seem to think Mitch mattered.
And Fal, thought Mel. Is that it, only women can heal Kadun? Then death returned and said: Then Shavli must rule Kadun.
“No!” said Mel, then realized he had spoken aloud.
Tar looked alert. Mel explained.
“You become obsessed with death,” said Tar.
And Mel said: “That is the matter of Kadun?”
Cantilip cried out: “Don’t you see! No-one foresees our deaths because we’re dead already. It IS a flashback. Maya was right, we’re dead and we don’t even know it.”
“This is madness,” said Tar.
“That,” said Mel grimly, “is why we’re going to sane it.” No-one laughed. He turned to Cantilip. “We’re packing.”
“You return to Azt?” Tar kept his voice level.
“Great heavens, no! We are going to Fidub.”
“Wring his neck for me,” said Tar.
“We’re putting our own gloss on it,” said Mel. “We understand that. Or we are putting Azt’s gloss. Refracting it through what we think we know. What are we seeing?”
“It was illusion,” said Cantilip. “Karula and I weren’t there.”
“Unless of course,” snapped Mel, “you were dead.”
As the door closed behind them, Saski lay back in an attitude of complete collapse.
“Appalled beyond belief,” said Tar. He held her, then stood back and laughed. “Get packing. We, my lady, are going to Azt.”
“I shouldn’t have said that,” said Cantilip. “Total loony.”
“True-untrue,” said Mel. “Not true-true.”
“Catharsis,” said Cantilip.
There’s a heli-pad on the roof, drop you in Cho’s back garden in an hour.
But Por reported that they hadn’t left.
“They’re just sitting up there, talking.”
“Stop calling it death,” said Mel. “The part that’s there not here, the part we can no longer keep down. Death is a gloss and a corruption. We’re not seeing it as it is.”
“Because it’s been kept down, it – it isn’t properly integrated, That’s why it’s so erratic.”
“No balance.”
“Yes,” said Cantilip. “No. Mel, we’re doing this to ourselves.”
“We know that.”
“Why are we doing this to ourselves?”
He rested his head on her shoulder.
“I guess because we’re scared shitless.”
“We’ve brainwashed ourselves. There is no choice. No choice but to wander round Azt bare-headed, no choice but to behave as though Azt had been at peace for a thousand years. Do you not think the rational part of our minds rebels?”
“Thinks we’re suicidal,” said Mel.
“Think of a prey-animal, Mel. A rabbit. If rabbits had human consciousness how long d’you think they’d last before going psycho?”
“Simply as a result of existing,” said Mel.
“We’re not built for it.”
“Except we are,” said Mel.
“The ‘there’ part to which – to whom?”
“Nit-picker!” said Mel.
“To what the fear is meaningless, says, hey, man, it’s cool, what’s the hassle.”
“You’re dead already,” said Mel.
“What is the one thing our – hah! – uncensored selves have not experienced?”
“Total terror,” said Mel.
“Of losing you,” said Cantilip.
“Of losing you,” said Mel.
“Because,” said Cantilip.
“Because,” said Mel.
“It’s not terror at one’s own demise,” said Cantilip.
“It’s absolute powerlessness to prevent,” said Mel.
“Anything happening to any of us,” said Cantilip.
“Love is destroying us,” said Mel.
“Nobody told us,” said Cantilip.
“What could they have said?”
“Imposed detachment!”
Mel gave a little start, then turned and kissed her gently on the cheek.
“We have been so stupid. What is not whole?”
“What is forced apart. Oh Mel.”
“Love, they told us, love with all your heart and soul, become one.”
“It only works,” she said.
“When nobody wants to kill your beloved!”
“Grubby little rational minds. We understand the risk. We accept it.”
They looked at each other in horror.
“Letting go.”
“Of each other.”
He took her hand and began slowly to recite.
“I who am One, who am One with the One, and You who are all, Protector and Preserver, Creator and Destroyer, in whom all are One, give peace to this house and all within.”
It began to rain, but they didn’t mind. Finally two wet little rabbits descended and found Tar and Saski gone,.
We want to talk to a grown-up.
“It’s the opposite of everything we’ve been taught!” shouted Mel. Am I shouting? “Sorry.”
“No,” said Por. He ploughed on. “Cantilip leaves you? Is she not free? You let go.”
“That’s different. She has choice.”
“Here – the here part of you – accepts totally she is – discrete.”
“But there we are One – “
“What is time?” asked Cantilip. “It doesn’t matter. We shall meet again and then it will be for ever.”
“That is faith,” said Mel. “Must we cross in real time to know!”
“You do not trust?”
“What?”
“Love.”
We are dead and do not know it. It is as simple or as sophisticated.
“What Fal is doing is projecting – realizing, real-izing, making real.”
“Must we suffer the terror and the loss?” asked Cantilip.
“For what?”
“To be free.”
“It seems to me,” said Por, “your little minds are doing a pretty good job so far. Feel it.”
Cantilip lolled across the Plaza, half her head blown away. Mel’s mind shut down. “Feel it.”
Mel walked slowly through a hostile, jeering crowd. They’ll kill him, said someone helpfully. Cantilip retched. “Feel it.” Mel stared at him blindly. “Feel it.” Cantilip sprinkled earth on Mel’s grave then screamed No!. Mel alone in bed turns, reaches for empty space. Desolation overwhelms him.
“Poor little rabbits,” said Mel. “Such complicated minds.”
“Or,” said remorseless Por.
“I am walking behind your coffin,” said Mel steadily. “But the sun is in my hair and I am laughing. It doesn’t matter. What is in the coffin is not you. It has nothing to do with you, with us. Because you are beside me, clutching my hand. So why am I crying?”
“Do we have to make up our minds!” shouted Cantilip.
“No,” said Mel. Immediately it flashed into his mind: time is foreshortened. Oh shut up! he said to his mind. “We’re dragging ourselves under, aren’t we. How do we get out?”
“Only by turning our backs on the whole thing.”
“Not.”
...
Mel had got hold of a graphics program. He sat back from the monitor.
“There! I thought I’d externalize it.”
Cantilip looked at the eight of them walking hand in hand into the Light and began to cry.
“I did that,” admitted Mel. “Then I thought – supposing – “
He opened another image.
“Oh Mel!” She laughed and cried at the same time.
“First I put silver blur round each of us, which I found rather cheering. No change of state. Then of course the blur all joined up and the blur is what joins us. So in the end I had the beginning of a solid block of silver blur and then I thought paint out the people, because the people are the blur. But in the middle of the people.”
In the middle of a shimmering radiant block of silver were eight tiny rabbits.
“What is it that our little brains are screaming at us that we cannot begin to accept because it’s so sick, so crazy?”
“There is no difference between life and death. But we know that or we shouldn’t be as we are.”
“Poor little rabbits. Then I thought something else. I thought we’re going through the Light.”
“That’s a bit scary,” said Cantilip. “But it’s still a flashback.”
“How do I know what time does? Does it ask me? Except maybe it’s something we’ve done. We are at the interface.”
She looked around Mel’s old bedroom and began to giggle.
“Cosmic, man!”
“I know, I know! But mentally we’ve taken ourselves over the top and that’s what we don’t know.”
“Because it’s we who are calling the shots. Our little brains are squealing that there’s something we need to let hang out here…”
“Life is death. It only sounds so repulsive because time programmes us to see it linearly.”
“When my grandfather died, I knew he just wasn’t there. He was somewhere, but not there. A dead person is sort of conclusive.”
Mel thought of his dead.
“Yes.” Then, “It’s what Mitch said. But not linear. Every moment in life is the opportunity to come out of the dark into Light.” But then he frowned. “I can’t believe the Anile court didn’t know that.”
“Anile Throne Excursions,” said Cantilip. “Suppose – there’s the Interface, capital I. What all the trips are about is interfaces. No barriers. What is being screamed at us is everything is whole.”
He was summoned to the telephone.
“Make up your mind!” he said with some acerbity.
“Your mood has not improved?”
“Somewhere,” said Mel, “I’m a happy bunny. I just haven’t got there yet.”
Cantilip began to bunny-hop around him. He smothered a laugh and agreed to return to Azt. Then he began to bunny-hop too. They were in love and under a lot of strain.
Sarat: The Matter of Kadun (inner and eso): life, death, eternity and Gaia (1)
Sarat: The Matter of Kadun (inner and eso): life, death, eternity and Gaia (2) |
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Alcibiades. Please, Pericles, can you teach me what a law is?
Pericles. To be sure I can.
Alcibiades. I should be so much obliged if you would do so. One so often hears the epithet "law-abiding" applied in a complimentary sense; yet, it strikes me, one hardly deserves the compliment, if one does not know what a law is.
Pericles. Fortunately there is a ready answer to your difficulty. You wish to know what a law is? Well, those are laws which the majority, being met together in conclave, approve and enact as to what it is right to do, and what it is right to abstain from doing.
Alcibiades. Enact on the hypothesis that it is right to do what is good? or to do what is bad?
Pericles. What is good, to be sure, young sir, not what is bad.
Alcibiades. Supposing it is not the majority, but, as in the case of an oligarchy, the minority, who meet and enact the rules of conduct, what are these?
Pericles. Whatever the ruling power of the state after deliberation enacts as our duty to do, goes by the name of laws.
Alcibiades. Then if a tyrant, holding the chief power in the state, enacts rules of conduct for the citizens, are these enactments law?
Pericles. Yes, anything which a tyrant as head of the state enacts, also goes by the name of law.
Alcibiades. But, Pericles, violence and lawlessness--how do we define them? Is it not when a stronger man forces a weaker to do what seems right to him--not by persuasion but by compulsion?
Pericles. I should say so.
Alcibiades. It would seem to follow that if a tyrant, without persuading the citizens, drives them by enactment to do certain things--that is lawlessness?
Pericles. You are right; and I retract the statement that measures passed by a tyrant without persuasion of the citizens are law.
Alcibiades. And what of measures passed by a minority, not by persuasion of the majority, but in the exercise of its power only? Are we, or are we not, to apply the term violence to these?
Pericles. I think that anything which any one forces another to do without persuasion, whether by enactment or not, is violence rather than law.
Alcibiades. It would seem that everything which the majority, in the exercise of its power over the possessors of wealth, and without persuading them, chooses to enact, is of the nature of violence rather than of law?
To be sure (answered Pericles), adding: At your age we were clever hands at such quibbles ourselves. It was just such subtleties which we used to practise our wits upon; as you do now, if I mistake not.
Xenophon, The Memorabilia (trad. HG Dakyns)
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I who am Dill, Cantilip, Asyrion and probably Rosa Luxemburg into the bargain am bored shitless by the evil morons who have repeatedly worked me over, not that they have achieved anything thereby. What they have worked me over for is below.
All human beings are intellectually, emotionally and sexually autonomous. My mind and my body are my property. Keep your mitts off them and we'll get alone fine.
Liberty is a function of love. Control is a function of self-will.
We are humans not baboons. We have hearts and minds and our business is to exercise them.
The world does not stop because one human has provided his take on it, whether that human is Mohammed, Gautama, Jesus, Moses, Paul, Newton, Crick, Einstein, Marx, or a completely unknown sociology student in Luton. Out of this surfeit of information, people choose what they think. Necessarily therefore people have conflicting views. If you wish to believe the entire world is contained in one book, to which the content of all other books must conform or be forbidden, as do some Muslims and Christians and indeed Marxists, that's your affair. You are also clinically insane. That's your affair too. Just keep your madness away from the rest of us.
Religion is a multi-faceted affair. Organized religion is the suppression of a multi-faceted, intricate reality. Organized and political religion is largely the official representatives of a bunch of psychiatric cases whose hallmark is that the universe is as defined by a guy or guys a large number of years ago because 'God' told them that was how the universe is. If you do not believe the earth is flat, you are not a 'real' Jew/Christian/Muslim/Hindu/Sikh etc.
Flat-earthism has very obvious basic tenets:
There is an alpha baboon in the sky whose majesty and whose self-appointed representatives must be spoken of with awe, respect and blah.
This alpha baboon, like his human counterparts, requires people on their knees to him saying how wonderful he is.
Creationism
Women and gays belong to different and inferior species
Usually this is held true of those of other races also
Heaven and hell and virgins and eternal flames
Frank affirmation of human self-centredness, the assumption the rest of the world revolves around them and is subordinate to them, the unquestioned belief that 'I' is the centre of the universe and they can demand others comply with them, the unquestioned enshrining of pure ego as divine will
Thinking, autonomy, independent judgement of mind and heart. are evil, for the rather obvious actual reason that anyone who thinks regards the ravings of the acolytes of a minority death-cult as sick crap and the given reason, which a child of six can see through, or at any rate a child of six not drugged from birth, that it is the evil of self-will, of thinking one knows better than 'God', or in other words them.
The earth is not flat. It is not the complex and many-faceted entity called religion that is a problem, but the notion that the guys who described the universe and its inhabitants a couple of thousand years ago could not have been wrong and those who believe their version of the universe may not be criticized, corrected or derided.
Human beings live in imagined mind-constructs of reality. They look at the world and the people in it and see what they think is there, what they want to be there, what they have been taught is there. These inventions of the world may be formalized into doctrines such as Christianity, Islam or Marxism. Such doctrines are grids on reality, cages leaving out some bits, inventing others, to produce an all-encompassing explanation of the world.
These delusional mind-constructs of reality the naked ape calls and demands others call absolute reality unless it is forced to accept realities that exist outside its head. This is not merely a question of lack of education or intelligence. Learned gentleman made confident assertion of the nature and abilities of women. This is why freedom is essential. Among other things, reality is the existence of a nation of 60 million individuals, each of whom has his or her own take on life.
The unmitigated evil of orthodox religion is reductionism: it reduces humans to helpless gibbering apes, terrorizes them into fearing thought and langugage. When a representative of the Pink Hippo speaks, there is instant suspension of all rational processes, all speech, instant suspension of all decency, all morality, because what the worshippers are taught is to be evil on command. There is a manufactured hysteria concerning language and thought. We are supposed to be chimpanzees. We are not supposed to be able to deal with words and ideas. We are supposed to react like hysterical inadequates faced with words and ideas we do not like. We are not supposed either to be able to think or to be capable of accepting that others think.
In the world of the ape, there is neither love nor mind but only power.
You are not self-forgetting by definition if you are forcing others to obey you. Grace is paramountly not forcing oneself on others other than to restrain them from forcing themselves on others. To love one's neighbour as oneself is not to inflict beliefs he or she finds questionable on him or her. People are and have to be free to go wherever they might be going. Society's business is limited to demanding they behave tolerably to each other and ensuring they are free to travel. We do not know.
We are being fed a reduction of Christianity to fascism, the refusal to acknowledge the polarity in the thought of Christian nations between love and power, the privileging of faith regardless of what that faith entails, contempt for unbelief, regardless of what that unbelief entails. Science and learning are as ever the enemies, for they take us beyond the arbitrary ceilings on thought of dogma to the world of physics and biology, to other readings of Jesus as a Kabbalist, a Sufi, Brahma, the false identification of the enemies of the Church with the enemies of Jesus. If one does not live in the mental world of the 1st century AD (or indeed the 7th), if one does not submit to these worlds, one is flawed and insensitive; if one does, one is blessed, a superior form of life. Just obey.
Liberty enables the pursuit of truth. Liberty demolishes proclaimed truth and clears the path to actual truth. Liberty enables the falsification of proclaimed truth, for instance the conviction of many learned men in the C19th that women were incapable of university education. Liberty prevents lies being universally held as truth. If two people have opposing versions of events, only one can be true. Liberty ensures both are heard. Liberty ensures the facts are known.
If the facts do not wholly prove the matter one way or the other, liberty leaves others free to choose what they believe. Liberty does not prevent any given individual from living in a world composed of lies. Liberty prevents those lies being forced on others, such that we must all live in the world of the mad. Liberty enables laughing at those who demand lies prevail. Liberty enables the voicing of countless possibilities, alternatives to the authorized version. Liberty enables science. Liberty enables people to look at all the ideas about life, about people, the human mind has come up with.
Liberty enables the belief in and practice of religions other than that of the Church of England. Elements in British Islam would do well to bear that in mind.
Democracy is a negative value-judgement on power. Power is suspect. Power must be made accountable, subject to checks and balances. We the people are not done to, the passive recipients of what our masters dole out: we control what is done to us, because we the people are the sole source of power in a democracy. We give them power to do what we want. They have no power over us to ‘transform’ us into anything we do not want to be, they are not set on high to dictate to us, mould us, impose a society based on lies. The behaviour of all public officials must therefore be transparent; we cannot determine if they are doing what we want unless we know what they are doing.
The Left is atheist and feminist. The nonsensical alliance between the worst of Islam and the worst of the Left should be abruptly terminated by the sheer derision it should invoke.
The Roman Catholic Church was kicked out of Britain in 1688. We do not wish it back. Nor do we wish an Islamic theocracy instead.
It is not necessary to believe in the Christian or any other 'revelation' in order to love one's fellow-humans.
Blair is a usurper, a cuckoo in the nest, contemptuous equally of the fight for liberty in this country and the shared history of the British Left.
The fascist religious claim ‘the individual is God’ in modern secular society. Their god is incapable of error. The individual makes no such claim. Their god claims to rule the world. The individual claims dominion over only his or her mind and body. It is they who pretend to divinity claiming dominion over all in the name of their hallucination and self-will.
The fascist religious decry moral relativism in secular society but the relativism is theirs: The Good is whatever they say is good This may observably be what the sane think The Bad.
The essence of the Enlightenment was a transfer of power from being arbitrary and unchallengeable, the carrying out of the supposed Word of God, to being accountable and in the hands of fellow fallible human beings who are required to justify their actions and can be dislodged from office. Instead of the governed having to justify themselves to the self-appointed representatives of an imaginary master in the sky, it became the governing who had to justify themselves to the governed.
We are being taken into Never-Never-Land where the most basic facts of political and intellectual history are ignored as though they never were: 'defamation' and derision of religion have been standard form for some 300 years and are the root of the free world.
Legislation criminalizing such 'defamation' and derision strikes at the heart of the West and forces us back to the C17th, fact and reason subordinate to mad fables. Such legislation also leaves Britain defenceless against Saudi and Vatican interference.
Only in the Sixties when it seemed the back of political religion was finally broken did women and gays finally fly.
Heterosexual males are a minority, about 40% of the population, and are neither divinely nor historically appointed to rule.
Essential to Marxism is the development of consciousness. The average Marxist knows diddly-squat about consciousness, which is probably the primary reason the revolution hasn't happened and isn't going to happen and attempts to make it happen have ended in tears.
Socialism has proved a lethal disease. Much of the Left is in denial about this. PANTHER is not in denial.
Despite its abysmal record, Marxism does not claim to be infallible. Argument by authority is a fallacy. There is no dogma stating Marx, Lenin, Engels could not on occasion have been wrong.
As much as any ancient religion, Marxism is a product of its time and place. It is necessary to distinguish general principles from those which are relevant only to mid-C19th England. This is not 1850, comrades.
The end-point of the exercise is the withering away of the State. It is not necessary to massacre millions of people in order to fail to be non-statist.
If people are free, one of the things they are free to do is make money. That is not an issue. The illicit exercise of power by capital is an issue.
The enemy is not capitalism or Marxism. The enemy is power.
Licit authority upholds equal rights or punishes those who transgress against them. Illicit authority suppresses equal rights.
There isn't going to be any 'Muslim take-over', there being a ready-made army in waiting of approximately 30 milllion, only 10% or so of whom would have to stir our stumps to actually do anything.
Personally speaking (just call me Schroedinger's cat)
I do not think it necessary or useful to attribute personality or volition to energy. I think humans are capable of transcendence. I do not believe in God. I think the experiences of mystics are a matter of physics. It is necessary to any civilized society that people be required to make some minimal attempt to love one another, which is to say that they do not bash each other's heads in and overcome self-obsession, conviction the world revolves around them and their desires, others must do and be what they are told to do and be, others are their property to be murdered or maimed as they desire, a conviction shared between the Ayatollah Khomeini and Fred West.
There is one perfectly good sense in which humans are puny and insignificant, and that is as a part of the universe, which as we know is like big. We are not required to find a hill-top to stand on to daily tell the universe how small and meaningless we are, what crap we are or others are, how we hope the universe will forgive us for existing, how much we beg it to let us do its will.
There is and has been for as long as humans started to think about these things, an area of human thought in which belief and unbelief meet. The orthodox of course both know about it and strive with all their might to enforce division. That is pantheism, the proposition everything is in essence god, you, me, the fly buzzing against the window, the lilies of the field. 'Are ye not better than they?' Different: ye have the capacity called consciousness to know what ye are.
To write of goodness, truth, beauty and love, of 'avatars of living grace', is to demonstrate the evil, falsity, ugliness and hate of orthodox religion, which is of course something the free world has long been aware of, but that is apparently unknown to our Beloved Leaders.
'Avatars of living grace'
There is light, energy, power, perceived by some as 'God'.
Before this the little primate brain cowers in fear or not as the case may be.
There is no ‘Law’.
Love is Light. Light is energy. Energy is power. Energy is not, however, authority, hierarchy, pushing other people around.
‘The law’ is projection onto that power by the fear-filled unevolved fractured ape-brain of the heterosexual human male of what ‘must be’. What ‘must be’ is not what is.
Transitory states are taken for abiding truths.
Fracture is taken for the Whole.
Agency is introduced where no agency exists.
There are glitches in space and time not sendings and revelations.
Love is what some people label God.
Neither God is Love nor Love is God are susceptible of literal interpretation.
Supposing you're a writer, wanting to get certain key-points across. God is for everyone, the poor and uneducated and the rich and learned alike. Shepherds, definitely shepherds. Shepherds are good. But God is Everyman not a child of privilege. The rich and learned are not commonplace in stables. Lightbulb moment: let's have some travelling scholars.
You want to make it clear God is knowable and approachable.
At the other end of the story you want to make it clear God is not about earthly power.
If my kingdom were of this world, then would my servants fight for it.
You want to make it clear love is stronger than death.
'And is it true? And is it true?' Probably not. what does that have to do with anything that matters?
Every -ism is an an attempt to make aspects of reality, transient realities, temporary realities into absolutes, metaphors for reality into literal truths.
Every -ism is undermined by and eventually crashes on reality, the reality of the physical universe, the reality of individual humans in all their variety, insistent on being what they are not what they're told to be, the reality of the existence of a multiplicity of other ways of looking at the world. This is what happened to Christianity. This is what happened to Marxism.
The vehicle is mistaken for the destination. The shape, size, colour or velocity of the vehicle does not matter. What determines the destination is the driver.
If it is imprinted on your consciousness that Jesus is Lord or there is no God but Allah, you must arrive somewhere where Jesus is Lord or there is no god but Allah, unless of couse somewhere along the road something clicks and you have learned to let go of all your preconceptions.
If other things are indelibly imprinted on your consciousness, then you must arrive where these others things are so, because you are shaping the road, unless of course etc, in other words if you stop shaping the road.
The key to totalitarianism is the supposed helplessness of individual human beings. There is nothing inside. Either they are helpless without the assistance of whatever version of the divine multi-vitamin in the sky happens to be current or they are individually helpless and only collectively capable, whether as the proletariat or as the Volk. On no account must any individual think he or she is significant or empowered.
Rejection of the notion human consciousness shapes the trip lies behind acceptance of 'revelation'.
There is the question of whether everything that occurs to persons is self-generated or whether it may be a connection with other times, other places, other dimensions and the further question of whether such a connection ever is or can be pure or whether it must be refracted through what the human mind thinks (both consciously and unconsciously) must be.
There is the impossibility of the primate brain believing such a connection, should it exist, being a result of human capacity and consequently its convictions that some higher entity is revealing something to it.
There is the incapacity of the primate brain to deal with its own personal 'big bang', consciousness, and to believe itself capable - that that which sustains, that which reveals, that which is everything, is within, 'the force that through the green fuse drives the flower'.
“We have to be human,” said Mel. “To know we are love. Anyone who doesn’t at some level acknowledge that is intolerable to himself and all around him. “
“Most of the messes people get into are because they think they can extinguish human,” said Hass. “Go around intoning, ‘I do not need’. Fine. Starve to death.”
“’Nothing matters.’ Watch other people starve to death. We seem to have somewhat digressed.”
“They do not understand which part of them is saying these things…What were we talking about!”
The Matter of Kadun (inner and eso): life, death, eternity and Gaia (1)
Cf. Neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you. (Luke 17: 21)
To say 'the incorruptible must put on corruption' is merely to say what is infinite temporally manifests itself as finite.
Love demands acceptance of the right to be of the most fractured, abject, incomplete, fearful, ludicrous, deluded,, irrational and repulsive of human beings, detachment from their folly. It does not demand submission to it.
‘In a time of the breaking of nations’ all that is fractured, abject, incomplete, fearful, ludicrous, deluded, irrational, repulsive in human beings is to be venerated because of the meme of ‘the sanctity of religion’, in no small part due to the occupancy for ten years of Downing Street by a pair of savages and governance by their hangers-on.
For the moment I am mostly otter, not only Schroedinger's otter, but also Saki's. Having, however, evaded the fate of Saki's otter, I have at moment no plans to become a small brown Nubian boy, a small brown otter being just as good.
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