The Long, Hard Struggle for the Light

NOTE: Blogspot blocked my Visible Origami blog because they said it had "the characteristics of a spam blog." funny stuff. So, I am posting the next Visible Origami post here and will remove it once the robots at Goggle figure it out.

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Of all the subjects that interest me, none hold such a fascination as metaphysics and the area of occult history. Metaphysics deals with first causes; the subjects of being and knowing, what is real and what is not. It’s often theoretical as opposed to strictly empirical. It should be understood that these two touch and that the one side is well aware of everything on the other side while the other side is generally only aware of itself.

Occult history and recorded history differ remarkably in their view of what happened and why it happened. Occult history, according to some, is precise in its recollections while recorded history is, more often than not, a revision and a fabrication. It is fabricated and constantly revised to serve the designs of those who seek to have humanity serve them; as slaves, as canon fodder, as experiments and for any purpose they may wish to employ humanity in.

A number of readers have wondered why I bother writing about socio-political and cultural issues. They wonder why I’d spend my time hosting a blog like Smoking Mirrors or Reflections in a Petri Dish.

Some writers, who labor in the field of metaphysics; whether it is in a clinical or a religious sense, will tell you that the manifest universe isn’t real. They posit that this realm, which the physical senses interpret, is no more than an illusion. There are sound arguments for this. Certainly those who have activated certain yogic senses or awakened siddhis can testify to the impermanence and insubstantial nature of the manifest world. Some of them can move in and out of it at will and perform acts that defy explanation by empirical scholars. However, if you have ever tripped and fallen while running on the sidewalk, you know that this world can seem very real indeed.

This is why some of us write about life in areas that hold less interest for ourselves and our readers than the more rarified areas of a more permanent existence. It’s about the pain.

Most of us do not possess yogic senses or awakened siddhis. Most of us cannot move in and out of this world at will or perform acts that defy explanation by empirical scholars. Most of us are trapped to a greater or lesser degree by real and assumed responsibilities, circumstances and ignorance. Telling us that there is a brighter world beyond might well be true. I am certain it is true but... how does that help us here?

Most of us would help an animal in difficulty; brake or swerve to avoid it on the highway, would help another person according to our ability or feel distressed if we could not. Most of us have some good advice based on past errors of judgment, experienced or observed.

If you have studied history and observed the events of your time; if you possess objective awareness you can see personalities and patterns and how they conspire together to create the conditions we are in. It becomes increasingly clear that humanity is divided into various groups with different intentions and agendas. These groups have remained static across the span of history.

There are those whose intention is to profit from the needs, appetites and gullibility of their fellows. There are those who wish to help their fellows. There are those who are only concerned with themselves and their families. There are those who are ignorant and those who are very clever and they can be found in all of the groups I have mentioned. There’s no point in going any deeper into the minutiae of this. The complexity of the human heart is beyond the scope of this brief essay.

Sometimes life on Earth is not as difficult as at other times. Sometimes it seems as if the majority of us have gone mad or fallen into a sullen despair. No matter how good or bad it gets, somewhere the good life is flourishing and somewhere there is Hell on Earth.

One might well know that this is all temporary. One might have the knowledge and resources to insulate themselves from the trials of the day. But if one is a human being they cannot fail to be aware of the pain and suffering of others. Suffering comes from ignorance. If it is possible to remove some degree of ignorance from the lives of those suffering it would, for some of us, be a worthy cause.

Sometimes the predators among us are very deliberately focused on increasing the ignorance of the population to serve their interests. It is hard to imagine that so many people cannot see that this is happening at this time. I assure you that it is. A small minority of ill made men and women are very intently at work on increasing human ignorance and suffering. They have a large support base of lesser informed souls who have been seduced into believing that they may increase their own fortunes by supporting the ends and intentions of the powerful few. Some are motivated from greed and some from other drives and some are only very stupid and confused. The aggregate collection of these groups in a common purpose makes for a dreadful state of affairs.

In occult history there are many occasions when nothing could be done; when events had to play themselves out. During these periods, many wiser minds withdrew from the chaos and waited it out. At the same time there remain those who were compelled to oppose, by word and deed, the evil machinations of the twisted few and their hosts of ignorant armies. Imagine how black it would seem if not for the voices raised against this terrible empire of lies.

It could well prove futile and quixotic. There is slander and acrimony all around for any who dare to dispute the lies and challenge the powerful. According to many who have left the record of their words and thoughts upon the scroll of history, it isn’t about winning. It’s about striving for the light. It’s about knowing what the right thing is and making that your sole purpose for carrying on. It’s about the useful ignorance of ignoring the seemingly insurmountable odds and living and working for the greater good regardless of the personal cost.

It’s about sealing your ears to the mocking wind of all the little voices singing in the mutant chorus of the deluded and deceived. It’s about being honest and true in the face of every lie and outrage leveled against you. Evil cannot win. It always defeats itself. It is the very nature of evil to consume itself and fade away. We triumph, quite simply, when we endure. The bright unquenchable spark of our higher nature cannot be defeated by the collected darkness of the entire world. This is something occult history has shown and which metaphysics proclaims. The movie is not greater than the screen upon which it is shown.

We may be deluded ourselves. We will, not infrequently, make mistakes. We will fall and we will despair and we will struggle all the while... but as long as we are honest with ourselves we will provide a telling counterpoint to the insanity of the day.

It isn’t about marching into Rome at the head of a victorious army. It isn’t about laurel wreaths and a cheering crowd. It isn’t about celebrity and awards; a place in history, a big funeral with somber eulogies and a large headstone. It’s about telling it like it is and putting it on the line and not being discouraged at the difficulty of the times. It’s about striving for the light so that, just possibly, against all odds, you just might let some light in.

Visible sings: ♫ Listening to God in the Morning ♫
'Listening to God in the Morning' is track no. 13 of 13 on Visible's 2007 album
'The Sacred and The Profane'
Lyrics (pops up)

Remembering Buckminster Fuller

I often think of Buckminster Fuller and his global village concept. I used to love to pore over diagrams of planned dome communities that were eco-friendly and managed everything from waste to traffic by being intelligent; by having the right master plan. For those who may not know what a master plan is, it’s a plan that allows for projected growth within an existing schematic.

My nature is to study trends, both globally and personally. I can’t do much about the former but I have a lot of say in the latter. Global trends have a lot of influence over personal trends, whether those affected know it or not. It might be something as casual as fashion and it might be something more ominous like manufactured fear for crowd control.

Awareness is a given and I think we can all agree that it is different in a plant than it is in an ant and different in a dog than it is in a human. My personal observations lead me to believe that there is a distance between various humans as great as that between a dog and a human. If you’re aware of something you are somewhat informed about it. if you’re not aware of it then it is affecting you without your knowledge.

Sometimes the river rises and it can be dangerous. Sometimes it doesn’t and it’s not. Everything has trends and trends always repeat and bring with them particular social and political circumstances. Given the nature of karma it is impossible that this would be a perfectly peaceful world. This is a world where one should, as Mayakovski said, “expect the unexpected”.

Given that the world is an unstable place, composed of 4 warring elements manifested out of a 5th it behooves the observer to pay attention to trends. Some periods are not as safe as others and it’s smarter to live on the margins; to take note of geophysical areas where shit and fan are not interactive and migrate. It doesn’t matter where you presently are; you’re never that far from a place where shit and fan are not unpleasantly interactive. If you live in China or the Middle East you might have more of a problem but that brings us back to karma.

It’s always better to get karma paid off as quickly as possible. Most people aren’t concerned about this any more than they are concerned about getting out of debt as soon as possible. It’s the present trend, America-style to be deep in debt because you can and somehow it will work out. There are ways to pay down karma without directly addressing the specific karma. Effort in a particular direction can counterbalance the scales. The more intense the effort the more intense and rapid the result; physics teaches this.

In the 60’s we had; great music, LSD, communes, free love, spiritual teachers and a generally easier pace and lifestyle than we see now; even if you had no money it wasn’t that bad and you could do something about it. Before I get to the present I want to comment on a period where things changed for the worst because of a couple of things. Ronald Reagan waved his wand and all of a sudden poor people couldn’t live in their own neighborhoods anymore and the mental institutions were opened and the street became the out-patient clinic for the former residents.

In the present we have; bad music, cheese heroin and sundry, condos, AIDS, social reformers and a much less easy pace and lifestyle, unless you are in that minority class of the financially blessed because, these days, it’s all about the money. It wasn’t always about the money. It was perfectly fine to be poor. For some it was an actual choice. Sure, there’s always been censure but this is a world of conflict. We’re never short on Pharisees and demagogues. Sometimes we see less of them, sometimes we see more.

Nobody did much about manifesting Buckminster Fuller's global village concept. Today, with suburban sprawl and urban congestion, which is unable to keep pace with the population explosion, Fuller’s ideas seem prescient and valid. Fuller once said that he could design a structure that would cause a couple to get a divorce in a week. He was talking about condos.

It’s all about a few people making the highest possible profit that accounts for all of the shoddy manufacture- via cost cutting- and execrable taste. They want the biggest bang for the buck. Because these people finance the politicians who are supposed to serve your interest they get away with murder, literally. This isn’t a good trend.

The interest only, adjustable rate mortgage, housing scam is rocking the world’s economy and you haven’t heard the end of that by any means. Many of us reported on this some time ago. We were laughed at the same way as when we pointed out the determined march toward martial law. We’ve come a ways down the road since then and some of these things now loom large. The same people are laughing the way they laughed at Buckminster Fuller. Not many people are well read concerning Buckminster Fuller. Let me say that he wasn’t just about domes.

There’s this trend that always appears in human affairs where the population becomes less and less aware and less and less involved in what is going on around them. There’s this trend that appears where the few screw the many all the way up to the point where really bad things begin to happen. Oswald Spengler made some very interesting points about how these cycles and trends tend to repeat.

There’s this condition in human affairs to do what is expedient because it is cheaper than doing it right. By this time the world could be far more efficiently designed. In some countries in this world you can see that efficiency at work, but never at the maximum level because every country has sociopathic types who want everything they can get. Utopia doesn’t happen here and some people have tried. It doesn’t happen because the world is the world is the world. It doesn’t have to be but it is.

In some countries you see streetcars and bike paths and recycling (not the America kind where they just take the material and offload it in the dump too). In some countries most of the people really care about what is going on and you can’t mess with them or there will be riots. That’s a good thing. In America you see conspicuous consumption and you only have to look at the rapidly mutating body types to see where that leads. Big pigs can’t turn the place into a sty without the help of all of the other not-so-little pigs. Some would say that the prohibition against eating pork comes from a time when it could be unhealthy to consume it. I don’t believe that at all. I think it’s about something else and I’ll leave that to your imagination.

The thing about trends is that they do change. Presently a lot of the trends are bad. It’s something to think about. We’ve had a lot of bright people pass by this way. Buckminster Fuller is certainly one of them. We didn’t pay any attention to him. We don’t pay attention to a lot of wonderful inventions and breakthroughs in the fields of energy and medicine and a host of areas because they interfere with the profit margin. Some of these people are bankrupted, sent to pariah-Ville and on occasion killed. That’s the world and that’s karma too.

It takes a special kind of personality to ‘really’ think outside the box. It takes a determined soul to break away from the global trends and break their own trends on their way to the discovery of a new frontier. Our new frontier is the mind but it doesn’t mean much if we don’t exercise it. I want to thank Buckminster Fuller for having taken the time to come here and share his dreams, even if very few people paid attention. I want to thank a bunch of people that I’m not going to name for having taken the trouble and the knocks for saying something different and bucking the trends. I am grateful.

There are a lot of ways to improve your life no matter what global trends portend. There are safe harbors and new frontiers. Most of humanity is locked on rails and that’s karma too. They will suffer often, they will dance on occasion and they will mourn and regret. A lot of people are hanging on to the top of a wall and they are afraid to let go. Their hands are growing into the cliff. It’s too bad because the ground is only inches beneath their feet. The leap of faith is only as wide as your fear.

Visible sings: ♫ Vanity ♫
'Vanity' is track no. 7 of 13 on Visible's 2007 album 'The Sacred and The Profane'
Lyrics (pops up)

The Squatting Beast of Materialism

It’s alive. It squats and broods and hungers over the world like an enormous malevolent spider. It feeds on desire, fear and need. It is made powerful by collective belief. It does not exist yet it does exist because it is fed and grows strong on its arcane nourishment. It weaves a web and the world is suspended in it. It senses every movement. It knows you are there.

Just because you can’t see it doesn’t mean it isn’t there and just because you can doesn’t mean it is. That’s one of my maxims. It came to me one day like everything else and it gets used a lot. It’s the same with, “Leave good footprints.” you don't know whose path you'll cross.

There is no evil except materialism and all other evils come out of it. Maybe I should define evil first before I start attributing a source to it. What evil may or may not be, changes depending on who is contemplating it. We’ve got the idea of absolute evil and we have relative evil. Sometimes evil is anything we don’t like or anything that gets in our way. Often evil is anything we don’t understand. It’s a slippery thing, a sort of peeled and greased potato. Good is too. Most of the people who read here already understand this and we can forgo all the abstract delineations of what would take whole volumes to explore without doing much more than confusing the issue when, “what’s puzzlin’ you is the nature of my game.”

Let me go back to the first line, “There is no evil except materialism and all other evils come out of it." Let’s forget about what religion says; we don’t want to argue anything from that position because religion may well be evil too. Let’s just focus on things spiritual and things material and what a certain focus or concentration on either implies.

The first murder that we know about is when Cain killed Abel. His motivation was material gain. Can you think of any crime that isn’t committed for material gain? Think about it. Yes, you could say that there have been those under the delusion that God was commanding them to kill others. You could say that people have been killed because someone didn’t like them, or feared them. With such a subject as this you could go on parsing, analyzing and contorting until your hair falls out. Let’s not go there; it’s still materialism if it’s happening here based on anything you believe relating to it.

The material world is an illusion that is defined by the mind observing it. I’m not saying it doesn’t exist. It does exist. What I am saying is that it’s different depending on who is observing and defining it. There is one material world on which most of us agree; a car is a car, a tree is a tree, you get the idea. Then there’s the personal world of matter which can extend into the bizarre and beyond. What something means, how it makes you feel; the collective intricacy is beyond comprehension. How we view the material world and whether we are aware of more subtle worlds, shapes our motivations. We think and speak and act according to what we believe to be real.

In the sphere of the occult there is a Tarot card called The Devil. He holds up his right hand in a gesture which says, “What you see is all there is”. That is the definition of materialism, right there. You don’t need a longer explanation. If you study the figure in the card you might notice that it is a composite of different animals. You’ve never seen this figure moving in the bush or flying in the sky because it doesn’t exist. That is the point of the author who materialized the card. What you see isn’t all there is. Physicists have long proven this empirically true (grin). It’s a scientific fact that what you see is not all there is. When someone acts on incomplete information they are in error. The original definition of ‘sin’ is “missing the mark”.

Things are not what they seem. Arthur Edward Waite, discussing Black and White Magic, once said, “On the one hand we have something that is certainly dangerous and on the other hand something which may only be foolish.”

Rather than continue dancing around here, I’m just going to say what I think. I’m not going to get caught up in explaining everything, which is impossible (because I don’t know everything), or circling the subject like a bird over a ploughed field. I’ll just tell you what I think and you can be the judge of it.

Most people worship material things and that makes them a Satanist whether they know it or not, whether they are a Christian or not, whether they believe in Santa or Satan or not. Hmmm... if I take the ‘n’ in Santa and move it to the end of the last ‘a’... well, this kind of thing can go on all day; just like Christ and Chrishna. Pardon my liberties on that last example.

We have this thing about us that causes us to deny what we are seeing even while we are seeing it. This is often because it is an inconvenient truth. It doesn’t matter if Satan exists in the way so many millions believe him to. What matters is that they do believe it and that gives power to the idea. The idea has power because of human belief and that’s the case with anything else as well. It’s one of the reasons that the first thing fascists do when they set out to take over a country is to control the press and the flow of information.

There’s a quote by Christ in the Bible... “Wherever there are two or more gathered in my name, there I am in the midst of them”. That’s true of Satan too. It’s true because collective belief makes it so. It’s how Ouija boards operate. Connected, collected belief is very powerful. It manifests.

When people become powerful in the material world it is because they have a certain skill in manipulating it. Often they are born into the right circumstances or make the right connections and that is no accident. In any case (and forgoing an explanation about all of this), take a look at the manufactured world and study the words and actions of those with a global impact on it. Look at what Rupert Murdoch does and how what he does affects the minds and lives of those who partake of his offerings. Look at television; what are you seeing? Listen to the radio, what do you hear? You hear music and information about the material world sponsored by material products. TV just adds visuals to the same sort of thing presented as skits about the material world.

Here’s an interesting story. A few years ago Bush attended The White House Press Correspondents Dinner which was also attended by Ozzy Osborne who got a whole lot of attention... that’s more than passing strange. Here’s what Bush said there in reference to Ozzy, "The thing about Ozzy is, he's made a lot of big hit recordings...'Party With the Animals,' 'Sabbath Bloody Sabbath,' 'Facing Hell,' 'Black Skies' and 'Bloodbath in Paradise.' Ozzy, Mom loves your stuff." Mom loves your stuff?

When you look at things like Las Vegas and the Disney Worlds you see massive undertakings that seem to be legitimate realities but you don’t know what you are seeing. You see hundreds of talking heads on TV speaking in a language you understand about things that seem real to you. You can also see many religious leaders with bad hair talking about the world beyond and getting paid for that service here. Much of what will prove meaningful to you in and outside of time is the source of your recompense for whatever you do here and what you value in life. The world desires your appreciation more than you can possibly know. It relies on it. Attention is currency. Everything the world does is geared toward capturing your attention. This may, in a sense, be the only evil there is and which leads to the commission of everything else that is loosely and subjectively defined as evil.

All the celebrities and those beneath the radar who serve and facilitate and in some cases lead them; I’m talking about world leaders and bankers and industrialists, religious leaders and lawyers and all sorts of name individuals as well as performers, are all part of a system that is regulated in ways that are not immediately apparent. There are protected groups of them who traffic in sex with small children, who arrange for and enjoy torture and death as entertainment, who engineer wars and famines and refuges camps, that prance about in a blood-soaked world that masquerades as Disneyworld and Las Vegas and under the veil of which all manner of things occur. Every now and then they throw one of their members to the wolves and decry the behavior that so many of them engage in.

All your wars and crimes, all your bad manners and other unfortunate behavior, all your pain and pathos, all your fear and loss are spawned by your belief in materialism. We pay a heavy price for this, returning again and again to this location to perform as the victims of our previous acts upon others and all the variants you can imagine. This is a world of strange magic in the service of strange appetite. Mind how you go.

Visible sings: ♫ God's Not Dead ♫
'God's Not Dead' is track no. 3 of 11 on Visible's 2001 album 'God in Country'
Lyrics (pops up)