dark clouds, silver linings

"Arrows of neon and flashing marquees out on main street.
Chicago, new york, detroit and it's all on the same street.
Your typical city involved in a typical daydream
Hang it up and see what tomorrow brings. ..."
Grateful Dead


The vain and powerful personhoods continue to expand their reign swallowing whole the lesser of their kind like black holes as the only source of statistical profit left to economies. Money makes its own laws.  It makes its own friends and followers and hangers on and suck ups and blood leeching parasites.  Unless it infringes on protected territory, any source of hefty profit, especially carpet bagging, is worshiped and fully supported regardless of how it is achieved, although you'll note with "the gift to health insurers", a loophole of choice was left up to the states to accept or deny medicaid expansion and now we are seeing many states hesitate and back off,  they can't even handle their current volumes. 

A state's denial of funding to expand their health support services can be seen as an intentional enrichment of the fundamental gift.

Meanwhile, environmental disasters continue to expand in parallel.  The heat is on - still, and this is only July - encouraging the very real possibility one or more derechos, superfires, floods and droughts will happen again. Power outages will eventually become so unwieldy, there will be many locations the power simply cannot be returned.  If you have ever been in a disaster, you would have seen funding generated by your state's declaration of emergency, go where it is declared to be needed most (the strings attached), which is not the same as restoration of "normal".  The victims of Katrina can tell us all about that.  Normal is relative anyway.  Our normal now is living side by side the existence of mass illusion, its clear failure in sight if by nothing else than by the ubiquitous, ugly consequences of control by proxy.

prox·y
noun, plural prox·ies.
1.the agency, function, or power of a person authorized to act as the deputy or substitute for another.
2.the person so authorized; substitute; agent.
3.a written authorization empowering another person to vote or act for the signer, as at a meeting of stockholders.
4.an ally or confederate who can be relied upon to speak or act in one's behalf....
From Dictionary.com 
5. a robot, android, battery powered remote controlled model plane, boat or car or a skillful hologram
...not from Dictionary.com


As always,  I am more concerned with how all of this plays out on the little people.  Recently, there was an urban structure fire started by leftover fireworks which destroyed two apartment buildings.  I saw it develop while walking the dog.  It was a typical dusty triple-digit late afternoon on our return to the homestead of these weeks, I could see black smoke billowing from the end of the blocks, blocks crammed with tiny apartments void of ameneties or landscaping, culminating at the cusp of stripmalls.  The reports said 48 people were displaced, four injured.  The location and construction details reported in the aftermath indicated a rather low rent complex, which tells you right away some of the 48 had to have been foreclosure victims previous to becoming renters.  And now, where do they go?  Unless they were paying a monthly storage bill, this time around they lost everything.  (Interesting how storage ops blossomed over the past twenty years.  Moneys abhors a vacuum.)  My heart goes out to these people.  I want them to know they still have themselves and there are multitudes of rewards available when the slate is suddenly wiped clean, that whatever material objects stood in the way of the truth matter none to the awakening out of illusion where real life begins, that great suffering is required to rid the mind of trivial nonsense and their character and actions will shortly reveal themselves to be capable of so much more than previously thought possible.  As they trickle into the illusion's help agencies in humiliation bent sideways with desperation, they will find the system was never designed to give them back their "normal", for many of them, revelation awaits while perspiring in long, noisy lines only to be referred somewhere else and somewhere else again until it all becomes a circular journey of last hope where false belief is shattered in the process of testing faith in a system based on infinite economic advancement.  The helping hand they really need is at the end of their arm.

Our own lives are a testimony to the truth.  Nothing worth the effort is easy, occasionally you will be burdened beyond your capacity to function and overwhelmed at every turn.  You will have very little agreement if any at all.  Your spirituality will be crudely shoveled aside ... temporarily.  All the while, the more sincere your suffering, the more your very survival becomes apparent, standing in stark contrast to the situations you recognize from books and films as the dead end of your downward spiral. In this way, the totality of your life itself is a quest, a quest forever seeking higher ground, you know you've come a long way when the judgement of your peers has no bearing on your existence at all. Besides, who among us is in any position to cast judgement, the very act of judging a sacrificial practice.  We look to the animals and fowl to see judgement as designed by Nature, the lame Quail excluded from the tribe as invitation to predation.  The one-eyed squirrel, not long for the living under the glare of a hungry Redtail. Magnify these precious offspring of Earth to what we see being pressed upon the beleaguered little people and right away it become obvious, suffer your way into the lair and trust you will be, ah, safe?  There is only one way out and it is being handed to us every day, but many still don't get it, so thick and impenetrable are the hypnotic gasses producing weakness, beware the beckoning poppy fields on the yellow brick road while seeking your way back home. 

There comes a point where you must let it go in order to regain your personal spiritual being.  Compassion is the guide here.  Dwelling in anger over situations over which you have no control only carries you deeper into the illusion. A case in point would be that of a dear friend going through a continuing crisis taking place thousands of miles away from her present where her last living relation is failing rapidly under the spell of a fundie faith healing couple who have already achieved the "aunt's" signature, placing everything in trust for themselves.  While the situation is sad and gruesome in its many twist and turns under the illusion of control, especially the part where just whom is it exactly who can exercise the most power, calling in law enforcement and making reference to friends in high places, this one small story evolves into a dirty little war with the fallout effecting hundreds of uninvolved others, each of whom have some unrelated contact with the offices of either side, all doors to repair are thus sealed making it impossible to navigate through the fog of schadenfreude as one camp works to destroy the other. I listen to the explosions with half of one ear, mindful that should I allow it to impair my objectivity, there will be no one left standing.  When we enlarge the preditorial details of this sole situation, we will at once discover the motivation behind the curtain of compounding complexity, pain exacerbated by false belief and judgement based on hearsay, which in the bigger picture is the primary role of media, and can only result in worsening the state of our current condition.  Every single minute, somewhere, behind the faceless, nameless, tormented bodies of overpopulation, the little dramas and wars of the human species play out in timeless tragedy. We see it all the time, enough to think surely others see it too.  But they don't, not yet! Only through the experience of intense suffering does such suffering turn to prolonged despair deep enough to call it off at which point the absurdity of invited desolation clarifies the spectacular futility of the quest.  If, in such a place, you possess the insight to SEE yourself, consider yourself blessed.

Suffering is welcome as the universal deifying force enabling us to manifest beyond the barrier of impossibility.

And then there are many others, of course, who seemingly through no fault of their own, are forced to suffer silently since the mere scent of their vulnerability lays the foundation for greater torture.  These would be the elderly, the elderly workforce, the battered and abused victims of domestic violence, abandoned and abused children, children in cash motivated foster care and the kidnapped, hijacked innocents at all levels who quickly learn which side their bread is buttered.  We visited a strip mall chain store over the weekend and were waited on by a sweet, chatty, twice-widowed woman easily in her mid-eighties.  During the course of our visit, for one simple inexpensive item, she was unable to produce a receipt for purchase because her elaborate computer system kept going down.  Each time it failed, she called out to Mister Bill, premier salesman, who responded if and when he so desired and when he actually came over to us it was with loud vocal abuse and intent to show off his technical prowess at her expense.  It was quite a show.  It took over an hour of him shoving her out of her chair and ripping through stacks of files and wires before our meager tranasction was deemed satisfactory.  I had sad visions of this woman's everyday ... how she must anticipate and prepare herself to endure the abuse of her bullying co-worker sixty years her junior.  You might see this woman's position as hopeless, desperate for income and acknowledgement at all costs to her pride, but we should know well by now, pride is just another set of rusty pliers in the devil's toolbox.  The truth is, while Mister Bill sought the spotlight, it is she I applaud for maintaining her cool.  

We can't know how long it takes others to walk away from incessant self harm.  We only know that living the mantra of Doing No Harm is salvation.  And now, while the sky breaks apart and the world bleeds, salvation for ourselves is more available than ever before.  We should not fear the mystical appearance of sudden salvation for our loved ones is unavailable because I can testify to the fact everyone gets there on their own timetable without our input.  This too can be witnessed time and again.  All it seems to take is some serious forthright analysis during disaster before your loved ones will be telling you things you didn't know.  The resourcefulness that has taken all of us this far, is still very much alive.  The only thing typical about illusions is the constant pressure to make everyone of us dependent on a mirage in spite of our inate self-reliance and spirituality.  Those two elements exist within all of us and are the two traits for which there are no boxes to check on applications for aid.  They remain off the grid, immune to technology which is the same as immune to control by proxy.

Control by "proxy", by the way, is the chief reason many personal relationships fail.  The proxy in such a case is, of course, the usual suspect, our ridiculous, aggressive Mr. Bill-ish nemesis, the Representative-Self.  No, no Mister Bill 

***

I remain in fairly full agreement with most 2012 Apocalyptic revelations and predictions.  Where we are today is much more and far worse than where we were last year at this time.  I realize many of you do not agree the horrors of these days have overpopulation at the root and find myself not at all divided, convinced we have over-bred ourselves beyond the Earth's capacity to support life AND always willing to give great credence to the many additional causes still operating, morphing, mutating at full throttle and taking down everyone and everything so unfortunate to inhabit the geographies and civilizations in their way.  Maybe LIBOR's scandalous interest rate manipulations will finally create the Grand Global Debt Jubilee and maybe pigs fly.  Expect anything, anything at all, to come crashing through your windshield now, obviously there is no limit to the Wetiko imagination for make believe, insane justifications for criminal/satanic behaviors and interior decorating with matching swags and drapes. 

Forget them, just forget it all.  We must stand back and remain as completely unaffected as humanly possible.  If the Higgs Boson gives body to matter, removing it would take everything apart, right?  Think Tao.  Let us give them NO mind and instead bow our heads and fold our hands in the humblest thanks and praises to the Supreme Creator Divine for our brief journey on such a beautiful planet complete with her incredible Mother lode of lessons.  We are very fortunate.