*wysiwyg, its not sci-fi anymore

OK, I give in, its time to write rather than experience.   Let's start with Su's most recent and insightful post with the artwork I can't keep from visiting as if it were the golden compass reaching out, pulling me deeper into each sublime, anti-directional vortex of purity, so what about the world, love is all that matters anyway.  The sooner they can get with the program, the better off we will all be. Yes, freed slaves, amen, Praise Jah I-Mighty! I decided to explore Su-san's thesis concerning deep thought "... alongside which arises a shallow thought."  The Beagle-Basset and I took off to the highest ridges in search of burn scars to paint, in fact it was going to be an episodic story within a story within a story.  Right away, well, as soon as we were a mile or more beyond the familiar, Su's statements on thought veiled themselves over a widespread cluster of Flannel Bush and Pinyon Pine.  Here is what happened: The journey was all about observing the wonders of Nature, the awesome variety of vegetation and the animals' habits and spare, but clever habitations, especially the Quail coveys who live inside thickets made by wandering Pinyon branch and tumbleweed.  We never reached any burn scars, the truth is I don't want to see them.  By this time next year, so much overgrowth will have reborn and within another year, there will be few, if any signs of wildland fire.  If you must see it, you'll have to peel off layers of bark to get to something burnt.  The obvious conclusion is our Mother heals herself.  Interpret that as the uselessness of a careless, sloppy, gullible species, unlike pollinators, unlike birds, unlike the variety of predators who manage species populations and species who turn the Earth and clean the seas for new life all on their own.  What do we offer anyway, but to capture them and throw them into laboratories, zoos and aquariums, drown them in oil, sell them and cannibalize them? When you are told the specialty of the house is a delicacy, you'll know you are being served Murder with Geno on the side smothered in Vampire gravy.  What I think Su san means by petty thoughts are actually guideposts we do not much like, thinking our previous state to be so deeply satisfying, we want to stay there.  We know exactly what she means, but I've made the effort to track what could really be happening when our minds depart from the exquisite as an apparent pettiness suddenly intrudes its way into our bliss.  These guidepost thoughts can be anything, but the ones we dislike the most are those having to do with an issue or conflict that requires your immediate attention. Your calm has attracted your sense of responsibility, desirous of balance, since only in a clear state will you be able to explore and satisfying all necessary criteria. 

Line up your petty thoughts for a minute and see what they are saying.  Try it now.  Perhaps seen this way they become warnings so that you may act to preserves your balance.  Or, perhaps the abundance of petty thoughts centered in one particular area of interest is telling you truths you would much rather deny.  While we can look to many events as being designed personally for us by The Forces, petty thoughts have a way of itemizing the bigger picture and thus initially appear to us as small, insignificant details, mostly unworthy of our character and therefore unworthy of note.  However, when you think of them as guideposts, you could be educating your way out of many mysteries and coincidences surrounding your journey.  Our minds can know far more than we allow, we are personally in charge of setting our own limits.  In this strange, hungry and dangerous period on Rogue Planet Earth, we are trained to ignore the obvious.  The obvious is of course, the elusive you are seeking.  I am certain we discard the obvious many times in the course of one single day because the obvious is socially damned.

This brings us around to the social acceptability of institutionalized belief systems in existence long before we came into consciousness, such as the death penalty, a pharmaceutics sponsored media ceremony packed with symbolism which Vivek recently compared to ritual sacrifice.

As the hours preceding the Troy Davis 11:08PM execution drew short,  a white supremacist was executed in Texas at 6:10pm, followed the next day by yet another execution in Alabama.  (I could hardly believe my eyes!) We tend to recall the seemingly never ending racial prejudice of the old South, and yet a white man in Jasper, Texas is taken out for his murder of an African American which might in the long run mean nothing, but Texas does have quite the record, does it not?  Rick Perry has allowed 234 executions to go ahead during his three terms as governor.  Does he think this makes him a popular guy? Surely the arguments pro and con will go on until the concept of execution is wiped off the face of the map.  I educated myself on both crimes and present you with another conclusion.  It matters not who is guilty, what matters is no execution brings back the victim. 

People clamor for justice in exactly the same way they clamor for the nanny state to do something, by God.  They have been fed the lines of dogma since birth and will never let it go. This is domestic violence and Stockholm Syndrome writ obese. They believe with all their hearts and minds they should have their high value justice, like a cheeseburger and fries, like flags and symbols of a superior race, like some sort of warranty for performing in a lifetime of going along to get along and paying taxes.  The very word justice and its ugly sister, revenge, will always be there because it is perceived as deserved, legalized payback by and for the people victimized by the crazies living among them.  Of course, they aren't crazy themselves, or disturbed, or misguided, or unclean with buried secrets, are they.  My friends, when you see these things unfolding, taking over your thoughts and visuals, you are witnessing the triumph of nothing less than the representative self.  The outside persona as media interviewee, justifying, defending and auditioning to win his/her rights that somebody must pay for every evil in their upside down zeitgeist where evil is the new angelic.

When are they going to face their truth?  This is why I've often inferred the ending of the War is far away.  What you see is what you get which has a way of inflicting worse as overpopulation bulges out of control.  I suggest the amount of evil may well be in close parallel to the amount of humans occupying the planet.

Justice and revenge are way up there on the to do list meaning that which we must resolve before moving ahead is possible.  They are waved about as threats, ultimatums and punishments and it should be especially obvious in this millennium they are ineffectual gaping holes in a crumbling overall system that appears to have no idea where it wants to go or how to save itself, instead over-breeding, over-consuming in the very face of resource depletion, crippling debt, mass indigence and over-entertains itself from sheer lack of anything better to do, void of creativity and absent any sensitivity at all to the necessary stewardship of the very Earth from which all of us should be down on our knees in humble gratitude for the incredible experience She provides every living species without exception.  I would go so far as to say every living species, sentient or not, but non-sentient is another myth designed to comfort yourself as you crush the hapless moth desperate for his freedom.  You can see how even the extremely smallest among them work themselves into frenzy trying to flee your assistance.

I wouldn't waste your brain trying to figure out what course of action is required, it is akin to attempting to unwind any institutionalized belief - beliefs frequently founded so long ago in a very different and far less crowded world, designed by ancestral representative-selves indulging their victors' pomposity in sealed Dickins-lite, that everyone acting it out in the present forgot what they are doing while conveniently blanking out the most elementary knowledge, All actions bear consequence. Those who perpetuate the backward system, thirsting for just-us and preaching revenge are intractable.  The integrated you, lacking a representative-self, cannot argue with an actor.

Perp (or not), victims and their clinging spokespeople, including the tragedy media and that vast complex of Death Cult-carpet baggers, I am sad for them all who willingly choose to blot out the healthier, higher understanding and greater purpose resident within the potential of every human being.  If we could just get to that place where everyone's minds/hearts/souls, those beaten down, dammed up, the authentic human underneath the publicly acceptable face interacting superficially with the publicly acceptable public, felt completely free to respect the oneness of all, in concert with right intent and right action, organically unable to harm, disrupt or disturb, there would be no need for the cages and needles, the cameras, the drones, the prejudices and the hatreds and evil deeds.  To change harmful beliefs held by others, you first must set the example for why that change is necessary.  To heal a terrible infection, you must first disinfect the affected areas.... and so forth.

For more on this subject, and as I mentioned earlier, Vivek shares his perspicacious revelations on the master scheme in three consecutive essays over the last three days.  I relish his discoveries.  They key into those realms we are not yet developed enough, and possibly never will be at this rate, to fully grasp, although we try and some of us come close, concerning the whole miraculous mystery, the Grand Design aka Something unEarthly, slippery, indefinable and just how it applies its magic to little citizen Earthlings.

You could get the idea we are nothing more serious to "it" than billions of nano-particulates in a glass of water.  Everything disastrous that happens is because "it" spilled the water, added more water, added alien flavorings to it, ran it through a coffeemaker, threw in some teabags and lemon, or sand, dust, electricity, dropped it, stuck it in the dishwasher or smashed it while having a tantrum.  We might be leftover crumbs on its table, brushed off and vacuumed up with all the physicists and scientists explaining how his/her theory means lah de dah.

a select destiny

"... Be careful where you're walking
You might step in something rough
Be careful where you're talking
And saying all that stuff
Take care when you are breathing
Somethings funny in the air
And somethings Im not saying
Bout what's happening out there
Its inside out ..."
Traveling Wilburys, from Inside Out

Having seen Avatar again recently, there is no question we, the Humans, have it all wrong.  Well, that is IF we were designed to thrive within the same galaxy as Pandora and her allied planets. We may not have been elected for living in harmonious balance. We may be something else, a rogue planet, the balance the Universe requires, as if no particle is complete without an antagonist.  Is good complete without evil?  And vice versa?  There are stories, such as Earth is the prison planet, or Earth is the feed lot for aliens.  The truth is we have no way of knowing for certain with the exception of how we have performed historically as a species dwelling on this planet.  We have performed exceptionally poorly, stupidly and foolishly.  Can you imagine Pandora with her ability to call species from like-minded galactic bredren and sistren destroying herself from the inside out?  Never!  If however, there is nothing like Pandora in existence and the other planets are stuck in a me, mine rotation, we have before us the grandest opportunity ever to make a difference, an opportunity presently being blown up, blasted, fracked, radiated, microwaved, tasered, tortured, denied, whipped and generally debased as geographic slave congregations under the watchful technological eyes of the plantation overseers who happen to be far worse in carrying out punishments than their oblivious masters busy keeping their infinity pools overflowing.  I fear the change we know could come about will not happen within our lifetimes and I doubt anyone reading here could become inured, although it is possible, albeit briefly, perhaps a few days at most.  I know those few days are hard when it happens, but you bounce back, you know too much. you feel too much, you see everything and what you don't see, you soon will.  You see when you are not trying to see.

There is no beauty without ugliness, The Tao, v.2
watercolor on Arches '06

One of many thousands of things I've read online over the years was a piece on depression claiming people who are depressed are actually more in tune with the reality of their situations.  They are fearful of what they see and it pains them physically.  Compassionate friends or family want to help them come out of their pained state because the depressed are a drag on the health and happiness of the greater clan and will perform a variety of comforts designed to lift the depression and return the depressed to a more satisfactory state.  It can work, but only temporarily.  It cannot work in the long term because the state of depression is the state of seeing our fundamental realities, slaves on a rogue planet where anything could and will happen.  Taking comfort for granted is living a lie.  There is no perfection without imperfection.  The Jane English and Gia-fu Feng translation of the Tao Te Ching says, in so many words, there is no beauty without ugliness.

Under heaven all can see beauty as beauty only because there is ugliness.
All can know good as good only because there is evil.
Therefore having and not having arise together.
Difficult and easy complement each other.
Long and short contrast each other:
High and low rest upon each other;
Voice and sound harmonize each other;
Front and back follow one another.

Therefore the sage goes about doing nothing, teaching no-talking.
The ten thousand things rise and fall without cease,
Creating, yet not.
Working, yet not taking credit.
Work is done, then forgotten.
Therefore it lasts forever.

But on a rogue planet, the balance can change as easily as the heartbeat of life.

Sometimes it makes us feel like the walking dead.  Cats with nine lives who have multiplied the odds as they keep coming, back to back, each should have claimed us we say, yet we live to see more.  And more again.  Something we cannot define with science and logic is happening here, a grand design, some not-of-this-world intention we are simply not at the rightful stage of development to comprehend regardless of our effort.  I believe this makes us a unique product of evolution to remain invincible in the face of pure unadulterated evil where vast and continuing material loss strips us to the lowest category of Earthly life and it has no influence at all, we go on in trust, always looking forward, accepting each test as triathlon athletes determined to pass and not just well, but intact, because in spite of the incessant repeats, it makes the good, the pure, the honest, the natural reverent and holy, gifts from somewhere else reminding us the world we desire really does exist and one day we are destined to reach it.