Conspiracy Rant
One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.
—Carl Sagan, quoted by Rod Driver, Psychology: Pretending There Is Nothing Wrong
Last week the editor of our local island newspaper gave a Zoom presentation on the dangers of “fake news.” Of course, she wasn’t echoing that famous epithet of Donald Trump to expose the mainstream media. On the contrary, she was staking her alliance with the likes of the New York Times in claiming the high ground of truth for orthodoxy without borders. Gatekeeper of mass propaganda filtered to the local level, she branded dissent out of hand with rhetorical cheap shots like “conspiracy theory,” “truly fake,” “alternative facts,” “stretching truth,” and “suspect information” that “might be considered unreasonable.”
George R. R. Martin
At the same time, the government, the provincial health orders, officially anointed science, are all unquestioned, considered beyond reproach or challenge. While advising that letters to the editor must cite reputable sources and carry disclaimers such as “I believe” and “in my opinion,” the parroting of official propaganda gets a pass and is transmitted without the need for detailed evidence or disclaimer: if Saint Bonnie (Henry, BC’s health officer) says it is for public safety, there is no further discussion.
To break the spell of silence means pricking the balloon of self-righteousness. While the dissenting camp might be accused of the same sin, it comes with a crucial difference. We believe not just in “alternative facts,” but in the right to discuss and debate in a free and transparent forum. This equality of access to public exchange is exactly what the power-holders and their gatekeepers most zealously forbid. The only way their tenuous hold on the narrative of “truth” can be maintained is by refusing to consider any other perspective… because “it’s an emergency.” Because we’re at war. Because we’re right. Because I say so. Because Covid. Just because. Translation: “Because if the people find out we lied, we’re going to prison.”
It’s time to put the democracy back in our democracy, the culture back in our culture, and the freedom back in our freedom of speech.
Taking Off the Mask
A day after canvassing local store owners about infringements on constitutional and human rights, and feeling empowered to assert my own exemption from masking, I entered a cafe and two different stores with no questions asked, and friendlier than usual interactions. In a gallery the person asked me to put on a mask and I simply stated I have an exemption and he assented with a blink of the eyes. Past that, we did end up having a friendlier than usual exchange, which ended with him showing me his own pieces there in the art collection. I was feeling rather buoyed then with my newfound self-respect, for standing up for human dignity.
Then came the eye appointment office. Already warmly invited on the phone to wait in the lobby there, I walked the two blocks from the car and entered to a covid screening table.
—Can you please put on a mask?
—I have an exemption.
She looked a little lost, and turned to her tracing form. When I said I wasn’t interested in that, either, she walked to the front desk for backup. Her statuesque superior came to confirm that I must wear a mask if I wished to stay, otherwise I could go back to my car in the cold. Like a petulant schoolboy, I buckled to the authority figure, fumed and glared at her, spun in a huff and stalked out.
I wondered after, what she must be feeling.
I felt lousy, tight, humbled by my own weakness under pressure, both to blind authority and my own helpless rage. Why couldn’t I be dispassionate like yesterday, empathetic, reasonable in reasserting the issue of my rights, all our rights? With my own freedom on the line, I’d been simply reactive, immature, passive-aggressive.
That evening, it helped to watch Vernon Coleman break down in sobs after the litany of deaths from the experimental gene therapy being administered in what amount to war crimes and genocide. The depth of the problem we’re dealing with here. The scope of the madness, of which masks are but the macabre window dressing.
I found it therapeutic to witness Coleman’s honesty on camera, his willingness to reveal the whole truth and nothing but the truth, regardless of the personal “weakness” leaking out in the process. Maybe it’s not a matter of being polished and rehearsed for these face-to-mask interactions. Maybe, while that life process evolves day by day, it’s a matter of just being honest, and authentic.
Maybe that kind of raw reaction has the most impact on other people, at a feeling level. It’s a willingness to suffer, in effect, rather than to “win” the argument. And in the process the emotional cost, at least, is exposed.
After writing the above, I hear John Paul Rice add (in a panel discussion with Sacha Stone) the encouragement “to be in that place where the manifestation of creation is within the heart as opposed to a reaction to the world, in response to the world.” And where the world insists on oppressing, to stand up anyway, in fear or humility, because “they are never going to let you get your humanity back until you take that authority back within yourself and begin to create it in the world.”
Diving for Truth
We’re diving for truth,
waiting for the salvation of the world.
They are silencing our music, our humanity.
Is this the end of the real human line?
What is real, what is truly human?
What is the one thing that most needs being said?
That we continue, that we share authentically.
That we fulfill our potential to see and say what we must.
That we ride the waves like the surfers of life that we are.
Pausing for breath, then diving again.
Seeking pearls on the ocean floor.
And bringing them into the light.
Six Noble Truths about Freedom and Nature
How beautiful the world was, when mankind was not there. —Big North (film)
- No one can tell me what I will believe or do, based on standards other than those I make or accept of my own free will. The question of free will or determinism is an abstract philosophical argument. As such, it has no bearing on the gut reality of my own choice, moment to moment.
- Whatever we seek or see with patience and persistence and good intention, with our heart and soul behind it, we can manifest in the world. This does not apply to chimeras of Aladdin-like fantasies, but to worthy endeavors judged by our own common sense and deep desire, and supported by like minds and resonant spirits.
- No human enterprise, ambition, social ranking, competitive result, mental confusion or emotional wound needs to be stronger than the equanimity inspired by an immersion, however brief, in non-human nature. And that immersion need not be literally a surrounding wilderness: but only a complete openness to an element of nature, a rock or a spider’s web, which can holographically serve to bring the immensity of the whole into play, reducing the scope of the human question to irrelevancy. Yet the extent of that slice of nature, as it increases, helps determine the effectiveness of the remedy. The conclusion that total wilderness is the optimum environment does not follow without reservation, because it calls into question a more complex consideration of how humans are to live in the world, and the flexible boundary between what is “natural” or wild and what is used for human benefit.
The beauty of nature is unchallenged by the works of human beings. And yet, the photographic art or the inspired description adds to nature’s beauty with more of its own, or with an appreciative spirit that enhances the real thing.- Life is best lived observing the necessity and desirability of a range of natural attributes: sexuality, physical activity and useful work, social amenity, loving relationship, creativity, reflective thought, and spiritual awareness. The balance of these in a particular life will vary in its details according to individual talents, abilities, and inclinations. And this law of balance is subject to its own scrutiny, such that a totally well-rounded lifestyle needs to be tempered by spontaneity and specialization at times. Another way to see this dynamic is to call it order and chaos, or structure and freedom.
Human nature, however alien it may appear in contrast to non-human nature, is still and always a part of nature, and our behavior and works can in this way always be considered natural. This linkage does not excuse us from doing unwise things; but it does help explain that we are not as different from nature’s other beings as we might think. On the other hand, there is an aspect to human nature which is part of but also distinct from all the rest: and this is, if only in degree, so immense as to give us the power over all the rest. The power that is ours alone is not only material; our material power arises from an inner power, a power of analysis and forethought and reflection, that gives us an understanding and appreciation of the whole. If we use this power blindly for its own sake or for material satisfaction beyond respect for other life forms or our own habitat, it will drive us to an ugly or mean-spirited death. But if we use it in recognition of its wonder and source in nature itself, and in respect for the other beings of nature, including the sacred being of nature itself, our efforts to insure our own survival are sanctioned and blessed.
Inversions
Inversions can only last so long. People consciously or unconsciously reject them, and reality doesn’t invert… no matter how many people believe otherwise.
…
The insiders [true believers, adherents to the party line] will suffer shattering disillusionment as reality obliterates cherished belief… and the insiders.
The historically unprecedented scale of present inversions guarantees upheaval and change beyond reckoning when reality’s full force can no longer be denied or subverted. Even those who see things as they are and regard themselves as fully prepared will be shocked by what’s to come. At least they will retain the existential essentials of observational power and logic as they sort through the smoldering intellectual landscape, discard the inversions, and get on with the rebuilding.
–Robert Gore, The Inversion
The Effects of Green Tea
“The first cup brings Joy,
the second, Gladness.
The third brings Wisdom,
the fourth, Madness.”
The ritual progression is both psychoactive and archetypal. It indicates, in sequence:
- innocence
- pattern
- resolution
- logic
The fourth stage allows us to expand on the ambiguous concept of “madness.” The state of madness is not necessarily condemned, but is useful (like logic) for certain purposes. Thus, the “outsider,” though they may be shunned by a hidebound society, may have wisdom to offer from beyond the common ken. The Fool is such a figure, as is also the ancient healer, the witch, the shaman. The artist embodies the role as witness, and one who speaks with that fresh perspective.
Logic itself, like madness, can be limiting, as well as useful. Analysis and abstraction can be a blessing or a curse. The two characteristics are bipolar aspects of the same troubled child: extreme rationality, or a break from reality.…
As I type these very words, they fail to register on the page. I have to switch to an alternate viewpoint (Draft vs. Print layout in Word) to find where they are hiding. Thus to balance the equation of the healthy human—as synchronicity reveals—requires honoring the right-brain gifts of imagination, intuition, improvisation.
Logic serves to interpret the intuitive satisfaction of a resolution as an embodiment of wisdom (stage three above). The movement along the scale suggests a fifth dimension, or more. For now we will confine ourselves to the Native American symbology of the four directions or elements, with a fifth essence known as the sacred. Similarly in mathematics we have the three spatial dimensions and a fourth, time; beyond those we move into the magic and mystery beyond space and time: the Aquarian realm of the fifth dimension. Is that conclusion logical, or simply mad? One day soon we may have to find out.
More tea, anyone?
