Trust what you see, not what you read.

Trust no one.

The Best Commercials Ever.

Bang, Bang, Bang.....Bang.....Bang.....Bang, Bang Bang.....Bang.....Bang.....Bang, Bang, Bang.....

Hello! Is anyone there? Is anyone listening? I'm trapped inside of this tiny little space made of 128 characters. This column of short phrases. This wilderness of small talk and marketing messages. Caught between columns of advertising for single middle aged men and my own profile as in a mirror. All these distant spirits like ghosts chattering away, inviting me to join in. What are the rules this week? I don't want to know. When will somebody break me out of here!

The sea of listening. 

Having emerged from my second Saturn Return I survey the newly opened world, shut down for just about everyone from 2001 through 2008. Those are the years when I pursued most avidly through these pages my personal journey out of rage toward something other than rage, with whoever wanted to listen, read or watch a performance. In the past year I've been tempted many times to leave it all behind, to abandon all communication and forget about the world of signals and noise.

Signal and noise. 

As the noise rises it becomes more of a challenge to listen and really hear what's going on, deep down underneath all the layers of angst, momentary joy, tragedy and joyful slumber, egotistical possessiveness and religious pomposity, political preening and ideological axe grinding, marketing, marketing, marketing, spinning and chatting and positioning and predicting and poisoning and entertaining and escaping and worrying and suffering and exploding and waiting for something to happen...something to change...to change...us...

To let it all go. 

"A mood of universal destruction and renewal...has set it's mark on our age. This mood makes itself felt everywhere, politically, socially, and philosophically. We are living in what the Greeks called the kairos - the right moment - for a "metamorphosis of the gods," of the fundamental principles and symbols. This peculiarity of our time, which is certainly not of our conscious choosing, is the expression of the unconscious human within us who is changing. Coming generations will have to take account of this momentous transformation if humanity is not to destroy itself through the might of its own technology and science...So much is at stake and so much depends on the psychological constitution of the modern human."     -  C. G. Jung The Undiscovered Self

The key is to step back and look at the world from a longer view. Turn off the television unless you can see it with the eyes of a wider vision. Do not allow yourself to be programmed by the talking heads on the screen, or the radio, or the Internet, who are paid to tell you what to think, how to see, when to listen, when not. See the world with your own vision and not the carefully edited visions of others. Feel the world. Feel what you are feeling and not what you think you ought to feel. 

"Planetary democracy does not yet exist, but our global civilization is already preparing a place for it: It is the very Earth we inhabit, linked with heaven above us. Only in this setting can the mutuality and commonality of the human race be newly created, with reverence and gratitude for that which transcends each of us singly, and all of us together. The authority of a world democratic order cannot be built on anything else but the revitalized authority of the universe."   - Vaclav Havel  The Spiritual Roots of Democracy

To what universe is he referring? 

We've lost the collective thread and that's why we are so confused, at odds with each other and ourselves. What is America? Founded at the peak of the Enlightenment to be an incubator of our highest natures, we find ourselves groveling in the wastes of our own misdirection. No problem is so simple that it can be solved. In the midst of plenty too many of us starve. For some the world appears to be closing in and for others it's pulling away. We feel betrayed and abandoned by those we once trusted. 

The worst are filled with passionate intensity.  

Meanwhile the world goes on and the world changes. To understand anything we must arrive at the archetypal vision. There are spirits rising out of the ruins. Every event, good and bad, is a key that's turning. The secrets are let out of confinement. All illusions of control are challenged. We are in continuous dialogue with forces that are much bigger than we are. Bigger than individuals and bigger than civilizations. As big as the movement of the heavens. 

As above so below.

Less than a generation ago a historian named Francis Fukuyama posited the view that history as the battle of ideologies had come to an end; that after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War Western liberal democracy was becoming the final and universal form of human government. Sounds like Star Trek. As it turns out we still haven't decided between liberal democracy and corporate oligarchy.

Meanwhile the wars continue and we are urged to take sides. A society that fails to feed and clothe and care for its people is a failed society. 

Information wants to be free. 

 

Have a Contrarian Christmas. 

_______________________

My apologies to all my Facebook friends.