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Friday 22 February 2019

1984: The Eternal Return


Shameful piece of social engineering of young people, at a primary school just down the road. Get 'em young, get 'em young.

And last week saw the strike by children about climate change. In one respect, I suppose, it's great that some kids are concerned about the world they live in. But unfortunately it's once more a socially-engineered concern. By a system that's 'taught' them how climate change is as much a fact as the sun rising every morning. By a system that whisks these young people away from the world of children prematurely. Ejected from that world of magic, mystery, exploration, of real learning for the soul. Young, impressionable beings thrust into the careworn, nuts-and-bolts, fretful world that is modern mainstream adulthood. No place for 'soul development', for the inspired and inspiring daemon to have its say and its way.

As might be expected, comrade Nicola Sturgeon tweeted her solidarity with the kids on climate change. Good on you, Nicola.

Climate change. What do these children actually want? To be released from worry, I guess. For politicians to do more about climate change is what they say. But what? It's one of the light-bulb moments in that little clip from Jordan Peterson on the subject I linked to recently. He points out the obvious: even if runaway climate change is a reality, what are you going to do about it? Nobody has a clue in truth. All the 'solutions' are no solution at all; they will make next-to-no difference. They are merely cosmetic jobs with socio-political motives, emanating from unsavoury mindsets.

From what I can make out, real solutions could involve wiping out China, India, and the USA. That will dramatically reduce carbon emissions, which are apparently the source of all evil. Not a big vote-winner, however. Other than that, I am at a loss. Just like everybody else.

As for the kids, there is good news. From what I can see, there are some who succumb pretty much completely to the social engineering, to the narrative about life that's spewed out to them. There are others, though, and plenty of them, who never go completely under. There is something in them which remains apart from the crappy, fear-and-panic, hopelessness-inducing conditioning. We could call it their soul, their daemon, their inner self, their genius. But it is something beautiful to behold, shining through and beyond the muck and mire that's heaped upon them. While social engineering fails to get to this, those young people are still in with a chance....

     



Tuesday 12 February 2019

Tomorrow is Another Big Day

Part One: Strange Days Again

Strange days have found us/ Strange days have tracked us down.

Thanks Jim. Actually, I still miss you; wish you were around. I'd like to know what you made of it all nowadays: what you saw.

Jim Morrison. Poet, mystic, musician. Sex god, drunken oaf. Literate, coherent, obnoxious, senseless. Charming, vulgar, old before his time.

Jim Morrison: a great adventure gone hideously wrong, his soul aborted. A life sated in twenty years and seven, nothing left to achieve here. Call it a day and start anew.

Strange days indeed. Today's strange days. Good? Don't know. Bad? Can't say. Strange. For sure.

Mind you, has there ever been a time when life has not appeared strange? Morrison was singing about those strange days fifty years ago. Now those days certainly seemed strange enough. It felt as if we were on the cusp of a global revolution in consciousness, the world about to be turned upside down and inside out.

Or imagine living through the first half of the twentieth century in western Europe. Two World Wars, manifold millions of ordinary folk killed, just like that. Isn't that a bit weird? Inconceivable. Inconceivably awful.

And today? Well there are those who contend we are living in critically bad times. The creeping forces of globalism, of soul destruction by imposed uniformity continue their slimy march. White genocide in Europe, we are told. The sinister totalitarianism of political correctness in its excess. The persistent assault on freedom of speech from many directions, from many people and organisations in high places. The ever-more hideous and ludicrous lies, distortions, and half truths churned out by the propaganda machine that is mainstream media. Come back 1984: you are paradise in comparison to all this.

And then there are those who claim we are living in critically good times. Change is afoot: big change, irreversible change. You won't find it in the mainstream media, for obvious reasons. But Empire, New World Order, call it what you will, is on its last legs. Despite its desperate and nefarious tactics, it's not getting everything its own way. It's not working any more, falling apart at the seams. Those with goodness in their heart are beginning to win. There are people who see this. Neil Kramer believes it is happening, in the USA at least. The world is on fire. A new dawn is coming, just over there on the horizon.

As for me, I just don't know. To be honest, I sometimes feel a bit out of all that these days. Both points of view may be right, simultaneously. I just can't say.

Part Two: Default Setting

Barely a day passes, it would seem, without the activities of 'mainstream media' becoming more ludicrous. To be more specific, to be dealing in distortions, half-truths, quarter truths, untruths, bias, prejudice, selective reporting, lying through omission. And others that elude me at this moment, no doubt.

This tendency, to push a particular agenda, or at least a certain way of looking at the world and what it consists of, has been long in evidence. But the transparency, blatancy, of the matter has really come to the fore in recent times. You don't need to have a PhD in detective work to see it happening.

I come across the sentiment at regular intervals, every time a particularly obvious example comes to light: 'Surely this will be the tipping point; surely this is the piece of reporting mendaciousness that will bring everyone to their senses, and bring the whole rotten edifice tumbling down.' One day it may well happen - and it is a process undoubtedly gaining momentum as I write. But to understand why the dishonourable carnival still limps along despite it all, we need to be cognisant of the default setting.

I used to have a friend with whom I would talk about, among other more gratifying topics, 'the news'. Typically, my friend would regale me with details of the world and its affairs such as he had gleaned from the BBC, the Telegraph, and the rest. There would ensue a conversation in which this view would be steadily deconstructed, and he would see most clearly how things are not always as they seem, or as they may be presented. We would go our separate ways, to return to discussion a couple of weeks later. In the intervening period, he appeared to have forgotten everything we had agreed upon previously, and had gone back to his original position. This happened a fair number of times, until I realised and accepted that he wasn't going to change. After every conversation, he would return to his default setting.

All of us have a default setting. It is typically pretty rigid, but it is not set in stone, and it can be moved. An important facet of 'spiritual life' is to become acquainted with this default setting, then begin to shift it, loosen it up, dissolve it eventually. It is where we feel at home, where things are familiar and we do not feel threatened. It may not feel very nice, we may not even like it, but it's where we feel secure. It's our own version of reality.

So it takes more than just seeing that the BBC news is biased and selective to really effect a change in world view. Large numbers of people see something, only to return to their familiar, fantasy default. Better that than to find your whole world turned upside down. Wilful ignorance, really. So the received version of the world as transmitted by mainstream media weighs in with a big advantage to begin with. Only the brave will transgress its dictates. And hence the slow pace of change; until now, that is.

Part Three: Outrage

Yes, outrage. Or sometimes the absence of it.

One of the more important topics of 'real news' to be around nowadays concerns freedom of speech and its erosion; which translates online into censorship of the internet. It's a subject that has featured on Pale Green Vortex increasingly frequently as time has moved on.

Something which seems to me so basic, concerning a most precious and beautiful a freedom, does not evoke the same response in everyone. I have sometimes wondered why, and surmise that it is to do with the default setting. You see, if your default setting exists completely within the box of conformity and conventionality, if you don't have a truly original bone in your body, then you will fail to see what the fuss is about. To you, it has no relevance, holds no import. There are those who do not need freedom of speech; they will never flex it anyhow.

And then there's outrage. Look all over the place - and not just in 'alternative news media': I have seen concerns voiced sincerely and coherently in comments on Daily Telegraph articles. The internet, and how the Big Dudes of social media - primarily Google, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube -are methodically nibbling away at what can and cannot be expressed through their channels. So long as what you have to say falls within the orbit of political correctness and the programmes of the ruling political elites you are OK. But step outside that, and they'll increasingly be after your head.

I personally get pissed off every time I read about such a move. Yet at the same time, we have to admit that this surprise and outrage is very naïve. I mean, these are enormous multinational companies, which come with everything that enormous multinational companies normally come with. Did anybody think that Facebook and Twitter would be in the vanguard of the revolution? That they would turn out to be totally impartial mirrors of whatever anybody wished to say or report?

The Golden Age of the internet was probably 5-10 years ago. Now it is up to those who really care, those with fire in their belly, to establish proper alternatives, real forums of freedom. How's it going to work out? Well, that's another 'Don't know'.

Part Four: Avatar

And now for something slightly different; though its relevance should become apparent as we proceed.

Let's talk avatars. The more traditional meaning of 'avatar', and the one with which I have been cognisant for many years, is as an incarnation of a deity or similar: goddess, Buddha etc. The term crops up, as far as I am aware, most frequently within Hindu traditions, especially with regard to the avatars of Vishnu. Ten of these are enumerated, and we eagerly await the coming of Kalki, the tenth and final one. The appearance of Kalki will herald the end of Kali Yuga, our current Age of Darkness.

Subsidiary meanings have sprouted from this root definition. Today, an avatar does not need to literally be an incarnation of a deity, but can be the embodiment of a particular philosophy, or of a world view, the weltanshauung as it's termed in German thought. In the film 'Avatar', it refers to the embodiment of human consciousness into a N'avi lookalike (the blue people). And in the world of computer games, of which I know nothing, an avatar is apparently your character in a game.

So why have avatars turned up here, in this article? Well, you see, as an example, there are people alive on this planet who consider Donald Trump to be an avatar. Literally an incarnation of a great god; or someone put here by other dimensional beings, in order to work through him; or embodying a philosophy, a message we might say. 'Trump-as-avatar' people tend not to pay overmuch attention to the details of every policy or decision that he makes; that is not the point. To them, Donald embodies something which transcends all that. The true spirit of America, maybe: proud, independent, resourceful, individualistic, enterprising. Great destroyer of the globalist-elitist nightmare of mediocrity embodied in modern times by the likes of Obama and the Clintons. Everything that mainstream politics has been in the process of eroding for several decades. He embodies, therefore, the spirit of constructive chaos, unpredictability, a trickster-cum-joker figure.

People who continue to rage against Trump as if he is the only nasty person in western politics clearly don't get it. Unfortunately, some of these people have become so far removed from the mythical, magical, archetypal aspects to life, have fallen so completely for the nuts-and-bolts version of reality, that they fail to see myth when it is staring them straight in the face.

Life is not just nuts and bolts, however anyone might protest the opposite. And at this point a more extreme, and arguably bizarre, example of avatar-as-embodiment-of-the-age comes to mind. We are heading into dangerous territory, walking on dodgy ground. Hold onto your helmets or go and eat doughnuts. You have been warned.....

To start with: Miguel Serrano. I first came across Serrano a couple of years ago while researching alchemy, opposites, and Jung. You know, the sort of stuff that sometimes gets me going. In one article I read, there were a few quotes from Miguel which  resonated and were highly relevant to the themes that were preoccupying me at the time. I discovered that Serrano had produced a book in which he recounts his meetings with both Jung and Herman Hesse near the end of their lives. It is a short and poetic document, and I felt a rare 'mystical sensitivity' perfume the pages of Serrano's writing.

I followed the paper trail. Two more books of Serrano's: El/Ella; Nos, Book of the Resurrection. These two, both, also seemed to be expressions of a mind that was truly steeped in mystical experience. And from a person able to communicate something of his inner experience in a way that was rare indeed.

Follow the paper trail further; and this is where it got a little uncomfortable. Not only was Serrano a man of  unusual mystical sensibilities; he was also, I discovered, one of the leading lights in what is sometimes referred to as 'Esoteric Nazism'. In this offbeat little corner of human endeavour, Adolf Hitler is regarded as an avatar, no less. A man to stand up and fight for the pride and nobility of the white Germanic/Aryan peoples, against the tide of hostility and mediocrity threatening to destroy it forever. Not what we have come to normally think.

It's the play of dualities at work again. It's the name of the game in this world, continuing unabated as a consequence of most people's blind ignorance of its internal dynamic. Any position will inevitably throw up its opposite. And the more extreme the pole, the more extreme its opposite will be. Action, reaction. We bounce from here to there, then back again; thus goes on 'the world'.

From my cursory understanding of world history, I would say that the notion of Hitler as avatar, saviour, whatever, is something that is perfectly understandable (which is entirely different from 'justifiable'). After the First World War came to its inglorious end in 1918, it was kind-of decided that it was all the fault of Germany, and the German nation should be made to suffer accordingly. This seems to be the substance of the Treaty of Versailles in 1919. The German nation was duly punished, forced to give up much territory, pay enormous reparations, and generally endure imposed hardship for its sins. Such treatment of a proud people, who incidentally had contributed enormously to all that we call western culture and civilisation, was not going to be taken on the chin forever. So when a bizarrely charismatic somebody turned up offering hope, promising to return pride to the maltreated and mistreated, even emphasising their uniqueness, it's hardly surprising that he went down a treat. And the rest, as they say, is certainly history....

There are those who claim that it was all planned anyway, as part of a longer-term strategy for German wipeout. That World War One wouldn't be sufficient so, using the principle of extreme dualism, that nation would be defeated and shamed still further. Total humiliation would throw up extreme hubris, and a good excuse to have another go at them.And the process continues to the day, with mass immigration of incompatible peoples, for example.

I offer no personal comment. I am in no position to do so. I don't know. As the months and the years pass, there are more and more things that I simply don't know. And I sit increasingly comfortably with that unknowingness. But the 'Trump and Hitler as avatars' theme is so far off the map of current mainstream political correctness that it gains fascination for that alone. This is my own play of opposites, between the dictates of sickly modern mainstream and the bizarre out on the edge. The one throws up the other. This at least I do in the light of awareness.

As for Serrano, I would prefer it if he hadn't been an esoteric Nazi. It would make me feel more comfortable reading his mystical literature. I do see how he arrived at this point, but can't go along with the path he follows: his mysticism he takes too literally, translating too readily mythical reality into literal reality. Conjecture easily takes on the guise of fact. It is all too simple to devise complete philosophies from mystical experience and theory, but it is a dangerous thing to do. In my book, the deadly game of opposites throws up no great heroes in the grisly debacles of twentieth century European history.

The world manifests in stark inconsistency. So be it; let us sit with it. Actually, there is no choice.  

Images: Strange Days album cover
             Kalki avatar (apparently)