The Thousand-Year News Cycle

Who today can possibly imagine events, from catastrophes to weather phenomena (what’s the difference), to worldwide, historical happenings unfolding in a predictable, almost orderly manner? No one can, of course, because we believe all events, including cosmic ones, are random and are therefore unexpected (not to mention, unpredictable). But is that really so? Or is that another of the modern delusions we superstitious humans harbor with such care and delight?

To people in Antiquity (from 500 B.C. on back to the dawn of time), the future was NOT dark – it was full of light – and fairly straightforward to discern. It was full of light (and maybe even sweetness) because they themselves shone that light on into the future. By simple acts of piousness – by making offerings to the gods – by making sacrifices, the people themselves shone their love from the past into the future. As we all know, although we may often forget the fact, light is a purified form of love... so there’s significance to the sacred imperative: “Shine your love into the future!”

Now, there’s a sacred duty to consider next time... Today, we’re tackling other conundrums. And, what can be more fun than deciphering another riddle from the past? After all, it’s just more light into the gloom of the present.

We all know that if you go deep enough into the past, the farther you go, the scantier the “record” gets. Not too far back into the past there comes a time, rather very late in human existence, when there are no records at all. Roughly speaking, it’s tough to find any records (esp. written ones) that predate the Late Bronze Age. By the way, modern primates don’t use the tripartite division for Early, Middle, and Late Bronze Age anymore – now it’s all just one color – the Bronze Age.

You leave the room for ten minutes and these knuckleheads rearrange all the furniture without telling anyone. It was probably too much to have to think about! Things ought to be “simple” for consumption by the modern herd-animal... And, more historical detail certainly wasn’t going to help promote the political nonsense of the day, that is, to prove the argument that human beings are violent savages and that war is a natural human activity that’s been going on since time immemorial. So... they’ve discarded whole tracts of History!

Let’s not let scholars and academicians bore us with their “expertise,” or lack thereof... For ancient people there really was no such thing as History, at least, as we understand it today. History only begins to exist when “individuals” come to the fore... when someone named “King X” claims something or other to himself (in its earliest manifestation, this claim was usually a divine one... “King X is the son of god X, etc.”). But this conspicuous individuality is relatively late in the course of our development and evolution as human beings on this planet – very, very late, indeed. In fact, it just happened a couple of centuries ago...

Moreover, why does it seem as if through vast stretches of time nothing much took place? Was it because things were more static in the past? Outside of Ancient Egypt, there are no major empires attested to before the end of the Bronze Age – the last thousand years before the Iron Age. Likewise, before then, there were no wars to speak of either. Practically no wars are attested to until the end of the Bronze Age and the beginning of the Iron Age. Now, they call that critical transition period, the Bronze Age “collapse” (how apropos). What’s the deal?

The past must have been dull without wars and famines... But if there were no wars, there must have been something going on... Why didn’t folks in our ancient past record the “news of the day”? Was it because there was no need to, since their news-cycle was a thousand years long...?

History Is The Record Of Our Egoism

In Antiquity, and more so before the Classical Period, from which we get most of our “history,” there was no news – not in the sense we understand the word “news” today, as “a report or information of a recent event.” Not even reports of events past, in other regions, kingdoms, or cities were reported. The reason is mainly because such events were not of an unexpected nature. The death of a beloved or hated monarch was not a newsworthy event. The ancients knew people died and it was simply a matter of time that such-and-such a king would kick the bucket, and invariably, they eventually did! When or how it actually took place was totally irrelevant to the ongoing course of life, and even to “matters of state” between kingdoms, such as they were in olden times (diplomacy is an ancient art, and while it is not practiced today, since it requires brains to do that, in the past, diplomacy had nothing of the unforeseen in it).

Let me give you a concrete example: Herodotus, who lived in the early 5^th Century B.C., went out (like journalists of the past century used to do) and actually talked to people and tried to “see” things for himself before writing things down. But he was the exception, the oddball... Events, like the death of the monarch, the start of the last war, all these things were written down after the fact, and usually way after the fact (it was by then old news, and very cold news!). Then again, by the 5^th Century B.C. it was way late in the course of things anyway, and the danger at that time was that by then memory flagged. People’s memories weren’t as robust as their ancestors’, they couldn’t remember what took place a thousand years ago anymore because their memory stretched back only a century and not much more. Things had to be written down, or they’d surely be forgotten.

As hard as it may be to believe today, when events seem so sudden and haphazard, not to mention frightening and revolting at the same time, there used to be a one thousand-year news cycle. That’s how long events of any import were actually remembered by large numbers of people around, let’s say, 5,000 B.C. (and earlier in time, of course). You can say that “oral tradition” had something to do with the retention of great events in the collective memory of a people, tribe, or clan, etc., and you wouldn’t be wrong, but there was more to it than that. Individual people actually remembered stuff – they had memory (something we lack today).

The clarity and concreteness of the memory enjoyed by our ancestors back then is something we have no inkling about today when we use the word “memory” as a function of remembering some past event. If you have a clear picture of even a single event that you alone witnessed before you were four or five-years-old, you have the quality of memory reserved to less than 1% of the human population. If you can remember anything before you were seven-years old, with the clarity of today’s experience, you have a great memory, perhaps as good as 5% to 10% of the human population. The rest of us can’t actually remember what we had yesterday for lunch...

I Don’t Remember, I Don’t Recall...

I’m talking here about a genuine, independent memory, not the “false memory” so prevalent today, which is not a memory at all, but a logical connection made of and buttressed by testimony from other witnesses present, or material evidence, including photographic images, which are contemporaneous with the “event” remembered. Such evidence may be used in court, but alas, reality is never present in a court of law – that’s just institutionalized theater. Here we’re dealing with the real deal, and a genuine memory is something precious – something held within the living soul (i.e., it’s not something you lie about, claiming it as a memory, in order not to pay for damages).

And speaking of courtrooms... here’s another factor for which memory was a substantial contributor – Justice. Memory was the glue bringing people, the tribe, or clan together by being the arbiter of fairness in dealings between individuals of the community – both in the sharing of material resources and in imparting punishment. 

The old Biblical condemnation: “The sins of the father shall be visited upon his children and the children's children, to the third and the fourth generation...” is telling us something real. It was possible to condemn someone’s family or clan (and at that time, “blood ties” were stronger than they are today) over many generations because people remembered back across the generations to what each individual did (or how they behaved with respect to their obligations to Jehovah). This kind of “justice” was indeed possible only thanks to the thousand-year, or by that time, the hundred-year “news-cycle.”

Memory of injustices, blood feuds, poor dealings, etc. were kept alive by each member of a community across generations, so it was very hard to get away with petite or even grand larceny (much less something more unsettling, like murder). People having the ability to remember everything about “you,” your family, your ancestors, and also the life of the community itself, pretty much kept everyone in line. Tough to finagle your way out of a bind, when everyone knows what you and your ancestors have done! (Kind of like our current Police State, in America and Europe, wherein cameras and false testimony play the part collective memory once did, in order to condemn everyone for jaywalking, or worse, littering).

Although “tradition” and “history” was handed down from ancestors to descendants in a long, unbroken chain, through chants, music, folklore, legends, and especially myths, giving ancient people a leg up on us modern, mindless sheep, nevertheless, in the past, people had already an intuitive knowledge of events to begin with.

By “events” I don’t just mean human events, those actions by people either individually or in concert, which affected the community. Such actions were rare, since people then were guided by a more or less intuitive consciousness – they were guided by leaders. And, even without these leaders, people knew how to act and did so, generally, in a beneficent manner.

You could say their lives were ruled by the gods (the neteru) in the sense that the great cycles of nature were repeated over and over again, with very slight variations, and these disparities were not considered significant. Which explains why Ancient Egyptians didn’t even record the appearance of supernovas in the night time skies, since to their way of thinking, it was not an “accident” which brought the phenomenon about, and as a result, it was not newsworthy!

Memory As Identity

Memory was, in more ways than one, the great common pillar of identity for ancient people (external features of race and ethnicity had nothing to do with it!). In other words, people didn’t flock together because they had the same colored feathers, so to speak. Not at all, folks got together because they shared a common memory, which was attached to the geography of the region in which they lived (the rocks and stones also helped them remember). They congregated and were united in their lives by shared feelings brought on by those events which they experienced together (both good and bad, although I have my doubts such a judgement was ever made in light of most events).

There were several reasons why this lengthy “news cycle,” this prodigious memory, was a gift enjoyed by the populace at large. They had help, naturally... and I don’t mean simply the help of the gods (although that was always a factor). One of these factors was that, as a matter of course, nothing much unexpected ever took place – that’s why ancient people didn’t have History, or any need for such an artificiality to explain what had gone before.

Naturally, nothing unexpected or unpredictable occurs today either, it just seems that way to us because we live enmeshed in superstition and fear and we’re constantly surrounded by a bubble of distraction that insulates us from the real world. Further, we shy away from “connecting-the-dots,” especially the more obvious ones, because we fear reality with every fiber of our being. Despite the fact that the vast majority of people today are convinced that things “just happen,” nothing could be further from the truth.

To the modern way of reckoning, almost everything that takes place around us is an accident, or some kind of a “coincidence.” This pseudo-fact keeps us in the dark and relieves us of all responsibility (and what is superstition, if not the dire flight from responsibility?). The modern idea of a coincidence would not only be a totally alien concept to someone living in 5,000 B.C., but a factual impossibility. And nothing to them was “foreign” when it came to nature, her eternal cycles, and the fabric of her Reality. Therefore, that “consistency” in reality still remains in place today. We simply choose not to look at reality in any of its manifestations... perhaps it’s the repetition that bores us (we’d rather digress into the repetition of the 24-hour news-cycle and get distracted from having to pay attention to her Reality).

Living under the illusion that “shit happens,” separates us from reality, and it gives us leave to not pay attention to what’s going on. People in ancient times didn’t have that luxury – knowing what’s going on was likely the razor thin difference between life and death. But we no longer live under “Damocles’ sword” hanging by a horse’s hair over our heads, or so we tell ourselves. You can believe whatever you want, but that usually doesn’t change the facts on the ground... (of course we live under worse delusions than Damocles’ sword, we just don’t want to own up to it!).

I’d Be Lazy If I Weren’t So Tired...

And so it goes... It’s a kind of laziness that’s endemic to our time, a stupor, a sleeping through things which gives us a false sense of security (why else would we be so cock-ready to give up our political freedoms and our human rights to be protected from “others” who are allegedly after our ill-gotten “wealth” and privilege). We simply don’t want to be bothered... and since most of us don’t wish any ill to anyone, when something bad happens, and we hear about it on the radio, the tube, or on the Internet, then it seems to us like something “out of the blue.” Or we chalk it up to “divine intervention.”

But seriously folks, we’re just living in denial. Is war and famine something that happens out of the blue? Another accident? Like global warming...? As if the weather were not a reflection, and true echo, of what we’re doing: “This last super-storm, I had nothing to do with it! I just consume gasoline and plastic like it’s going out of style, and run the electricity and water all day long... What’s wrong with that??”

Yeah, heard that, done that...  Our long-gone ancestors didn’t live in our superstitious times, of course. Such mumbo-jumbo would have probably driven them mad. In our phony reality, wherein everything that happens has a “hidden cause,” which is magically out of our control, we can continue to be oblivious to the consequences (since we’re ultimately responsible for what we do, if we were to fess up, we’d have to discard this “magical” cause for our troubles, and own up to what our actions are really doing – not a ticket for political success!).

The ancients didn’t live under the illusion that things “just happen” without “rhyme or reason,” as we claim to ourselves today. Human beings at that time were not easily surprised or overwhelmed by events because they were not detached from their natural environment the way we are today. To us, it’s our neighbors fault, our government’s fault, or God’s fault, and if he weren’t dead, we’d be vociferously claiming we have no control over what God does... Can a weasel be more specious than that? (I apologize for the insult to weasels...)

Were ancient peoples to be surprised that a storm came in? That an earthquake struck? Hardly. Nothing nature could throw at them, including the rare famine or drought, was ever going to catch them unawares (especially since they knew they had created the earthquakes and famines themselves!). This was simply not possible since they were in constant union with the external world, not only through their gods, but also the lesser natural and elemental spirits which inhabit the ground, the rocks, the trees, the streams, and the wind.

Not to mention, they had a memory that went back centuries, and they knew that when their ancestors did such-and-such, then something “bad” happened. And, since they weren’t knuckleheads like we are today, they didn’t repeat stupid behavior ad nausea merely to “make money,” or cheat someone (which is really the same thing).

Memory Is Our Conscience

Even without consulting their oracles or their gods, our ancestors would know days or weeks in advance when a storm was brewing (and more accurately than our Met Service does), and likewise would know months in advance, if not actually years in advance, when a drought was inevitable. Most of the time, humans were successful in avoiding these pitfalls, at least, until more recent times, let’s say, around the Middle Ages, and then into the Renaissance, when people, especially in Europe, no longer had anything but a tenuous link to their natural surroundings.

Well, by the Middle Ages the gods were gone... we simply abandoned them! Yet, people were still in touch with nature. For a time, even onto the 14^th Century A.D., they had traditional folklore, folk wisdom and apotropaic magic to rely on. But this knowledge was being permanently lost thanks to the witch hunts, book burnings, and the lies and superstitions introduced by the Roman Church (not to mention the internecine wars and crusades they fanned over the continent with glee and abandon for centuries).

If it rained a thousand years ago, it’s going to rain again! Where’s the surprise in that? If you’re going to burn down your surrounding forest, no birds will be around (and other animals) to fend off bad weather and colder winters (life maintains the temperature of the planet constant – death both rises and lowers the temperature). Likewise, if you burn the forests of the entire planet, then the weather is going to change... and it won’t be for the “better.” What’s “news” about that?

There’s nothing complicated or magical about it. We just think it’s “magical” because we have succumbed to the Big Lie we tell ourselves (i.e., we’re not responsible for anything we do, and collectively, for anything that takes place). As I said, we can make the lie a plausible one as long as we sever our connections to the real world... to our “little voice” inside. To our memory! Memory, as I’ve explained, is a kind of “conscience” and if you can shut that off, you can do any gruesome thing without sensing its immediate consequences.

Losing our Memory is what our “modern,” materialistic life-style brings with it. We’re dependent entirely on an artificial environment generated by electricity, we have nary a conscious connection to the natural world as it is... Of course, despite our denial, we have a connection to the natural world, and a deep one at that, so deep in fact that we can’t escape its consequences. We simply prefer to ignore the consequences, hoping someone “downwind” or “downstream” will bear the brunt of it.

In the meantime, we’d rather remain blissfully asleep and unbothered.

An Idiot By Any Other Name...

Getting on near April again, and fools and appearances are, as they say, against us! They don’t whisper, nor do they murmur, they yell! We gnash our teeth at the “hardness of our fate,” yet fools and appearances speak against us. In this world in which we have to fear and love, they’re always getting in the way (at least, in the way of a free lunch). 

In our “modern age,” in our present evolutionary state, fools and appearances can’t be helped. Although we may defend against clumsy spectators and familiar curiosity, we’re always exposed! As Freddie always said: “We have been woven into a strict yarn and shirt of duties and cannot get out of it...”

Well, we may have rent and torn at that yarn since his day... to the extent that the fabric of society is more than frazzled (if one is to be mistaken for a naïve fool, as one more of the bleating who actually believe what the media reports). 

In the tumult and uproar, it may have gone unnoticed, but it’s through duty that idiots are woven into our lives, right into the very stitch of our social fabric, into the yarns of clumsy spectators and nasty observers. What is this “duty” which no longer hounds us as in Freddie’s day, nor tugs at our collars, nor yanks at our conscience? Where have our moral obligations to our brethren, our community, our living environment, to the noble gods, gone?

Nevermore! They’re no more. No one owes anyone anything (except the banks, of course!). It used to be that everyone was looking for someone (that must have been during the Summer of Love), today, it’s everyone looking at themselves! The youthful narcissists and their “selfies” (as in: “Here I am with that unloved, dour hijacker! Hey, we didn’t get blown up?”). We are no longer duty-bound, bereft of self-less love, and all we have left are the bitter dregs of fear... the great masses of spectators, those not-so-meek herd-animals have nothing to live for; nothing to die for either.

And so it was, that before the word “idiot” took on its more vulgar meaning of “stupid,” “lacking intelligence,” and worse (in the States, until the ‘50s, idiot was used as a technical-legal term for “mental retardation”), it had a more poignant meaning (not that “idiot” isn’t poignant when it’s use properly and to identify and describe the proper individual or collective). The word comes to us from the Greek. You can always leave it to them to endow everything with a clear and salient meaning. The Greeks knew a thing or two about idiots in general, and “idiot” had a very special meaning, which has since been lost in the transit of time.

 “From these things therefore it is clear that the Polis (city-state) is a natural growth, and that man is by nature a political animal, and a man that is by nature and not merely by fortune citiless is either low in the scale of humanity or above it (like the “clanless, lawless, hearthless,” man reviled by Homer, for one by nature unsocial is also ‘a lover of war’).” -Aristotle- Politics, ca. 350 B.C.

We want to recall Aristotle’s axiom about human beings being political animals, especially today, when we reference idiots... (idiots such as: The Donald or Hillary, who are not “above it” but rather they are below the evolutionary stage of mere animals, for they are “war lovers,” and therefore, not worthy of being called “political” in any real sense of the word. Idiots is by far more accurate and should be the term used henceforth.).

You’ve got to hand it to Homer too! He was no slouch... Blind as a bat he may have been, but he listened! He could sense the throbbing of the blood, the pulsing of the ka-double, the vibrations in the wind, and in the air itself he sensed the gods singing and dancing. Undisturbed by sight or the brightness of day, his ears touched at the same time as they heard, and that’s how Homer got the rhythm for the hexameter!

Citizens and Idiots Lend Me Your Ears

Back to our friend Aristotle... He said that we were political animals for a reason – to be a “political animal” was something vaunted and desired in the “citizen” of the Polis. An idiot, therefore, was someone who cared nothing for, was totally disinterested in, or did not partake in the affairs of the Polis. In other words, someone alien to the affection of their fellow brothers and sisters – someone whom the ancient Greeks despised since they felt such an individual was “too individual” and not a part of their community, and was as if living apart from humanity. After all, such an idiot, as Aristotle observed, was either on a higher evolutionary path then the rest of humanity, or relegated to be lower than an animal... more than likely the latter.

“For it is the special property of man in distinction from the other animals that he alone has perception of good and bad and right and wrong and the other moral qualities, and it is partnership in these things that makes a household and a city-state.” -Aristotle- Politics

Hmm... “the good and bad and other moral qualities,” those very values which have disappeared from the modern state and even the household of the modern herd-animal. It’s as if selfishness and egotism have silenced the individual’s conscience, removed the word “morality” from the vernacular, and from everyday social behavior as well... To act “morally” was the duty of the citizen of the Polis. This is why Freddie was right when he said we’re “bound by duty” to the fabric of our communities. But alas, we’re certainly not in Athens anymore... and we’re not in Kansas either!

We’re in a state – a stasis – which the Greeks would consider to be utter chaos. Going even further back in time, I doubt the Ancient Egyptians would have had much stomach for it either. They didn’t even have the word idiot – since there wasn’t anyone remotely resembling an idiot among the Black People. Their “Polis” was like the energized buzzing of a harmonious beehive (something as diametrically opposed to our current state and how it conducts its affairs would be unimaginable!).

It’s not simply the fact that the “modern state” (what used to be the Polis) is ungovernable... Aristotle’s insight that the natural growth of the “city-state” is ultimately human, seems to indicate that it’s not the institution per se, but the individuals, its so-called leaders and those making up its membership that are lacking; in other words, they also happen to be idiots.

Let us take a moment to consider what made the Polis governable in antiquity. Not to intimate that in ancient Greece, or even in Athens, there was any semblance of “democracy” as modern idiots understand the term (in Athens there were many women and slaves, which amounts to the same thing – non-citizens). No, it had nothing to do with power. It had to do with duty (to the Ancient Greeks it was a sacred duty – an expression of philo – or self-less love). The only essential thing that made an ancient Polis governable, therefore, was the small number of idiots around – the rest were either slaves or citizens.

It’s not that complicated... it’s almost mathematical. Today, things are mathematically “unbalanced,” you may say, to the detriment of the State and of Politics in general – the “political animal” has degenerated considerably. There’s no art or power, and certainly not any “art of governing” or “political science,” required to figure it out. Whether a nation or a people can be governed depends on Number – the ratio of idiots to citizens the nation or territory possesses. How can anyone govern today when selfish idiots outnumber dutiful citizens a million to one? (Make that a billion to one).

Governing is a duty, and that naturally, doesn’t enter into the modern political calculus. All that matters is the attainment of selfish, personal power. Governing, dealing with the proper management of the “household” (a.k.a. Economics), which explains why women were the only ones to manage such, was the highest duty. When it comes to the “common good,” that is the “household” of the many, that’s something first-rate idiots like Trump or Hillary cannot fathom. They fail to take the “human household” into account... and once in power, they’ll never take account of anything, and much less responsibility for anything! Like most first-rate idiots they haven’t paused yet to think things through (thinking things through is simply not within the skill set of the normal, run-of-the-mill, first-rate idiot!).

Is it any wonder then that we are surrounded by idiots? We’re not only surrounded by them, but being led down the slippery slope to Armageddon by them! It’s exasperating, but true. It’s a demeaning and unsavory task to have to deal in or with Politics, so I won’t belabor the point, and I won’t be going down that rat hole any time soon. To speak of or about first-rate idiots and politicians (well, they amount to the same thing), is beneath a mere slave anyway. Nevertheless, the state of affairs in our decadent age (and not just in Politics and Economics!) is such that fools and appearances are always against us... 

                                                    Happy April Fool’s Day!

Science Is Dead

So it goes... That’s what Kurt Vonnegut would say, if he were still with us... Another “deity” bites the dust. Another worldview, that of materialistic science, which by the end of 18^th Century was poised to set the rules for everything, danced briefly in the limelight during the 19^th and early 20^th Centuries, and then was gone, virtually in its prime. What’s 200 years in the life of a godling? An abortion or a crib death... what else could it be?

During the centuries in which it thrived modern science was a mighty colossus, a virtual leviathan astride the world of thought, and even of Philosophy, usurping this latter Art, and proclaiming itself its “father” and supreme arbiter. Talk about an Oedipal complex! Lest we forget, Science killed God himself – and then blinded the rest of us! – to atone for its crime.

Its subsequent attempts to become the next deity, to be the sole and unequivocal “authority” about everything – to dogmatize the Maya of the material world – only wreaked havoc in the world, making the last two centuries the bloodiest in all of human History (and the wanton destruction isn’t slowing down in this millennium either!).

With the term “Science” or “modern science,” I mean its trunk and all its branches, and disciplines (or lack thereof), including its root (i.e., Mathematics). The field of Mathematics is by far the more robust part of its cadaver, and it’s the most “alive” by virtue of its Art being the result of “pure thought,” and requiring great gobs of “imaginative thinking” in order to be understood and used as a tool.

What is to be mourned about the end of modern science? Almost nothing. Its only saving grace was the “scientific method” – its only worthy discipline or legacy. The scientific method (Observe, Question, Experiment, Analyze, Repeat) was the backbone of our scientific knowledge. One could say, without being too romantic, that in it lay the wisdom, beauty, and eventually the “truth” of questioning everything.

Now questioning is done with, and not just in the temporal world of politics, economics, and the rest of the pseudo-sciences! I’m only saddened, or is it being nostalgic, that along with its “authority” over the masses, the demise of modern science has also dealt a deathblow to a very human activity – thinking! The rational and the logical, like thinking itself, went down the drain with the bath water...

I’m not shedding any tears, mind you. Although with every passing, even that of a lowly, material god, something is lost. What’s lost is faith, the handmaiden of dogma. And, I say good riddance to them both!

Death By Dogma

When I say “science is dead,” what do I really mean? What has actually “died”? After all, like Religion itself, modern science was nothing but an abstraction – a way of thinking about the world (an extremely materialistic way at that). Science was nothing more than yet another Weltanschauung, albeit one based on Rationality, the only scion of the Enlightenment.

But what you see in the world is always what you want to see in it... Everything else is nonexistent as far as that goes. And dogma is the tool that helps you “crystalize” that belief, that point-of-view, as a leitmotif for all your subsequent thoughts and beliefs about the world you live in.

Dogma wants everything frozen, narrowed down and tidied up in little rows and columns... it wants everything living to be dead. It wants a snapshot of life only, the pin through the insect for its specimen collection, a digital “on or off” signal, not a spark of imagination or a trace of feeling to be kindled from it all. Dogma requires that everything remain exactly as it is forever, preserved for posterity, if you will, in an immutable state – in other words, it wants everything good and dead, and under a display window.

It’s our animal nature, our lowest desire(s). Dogma is what gives the powers-that-be “authority.” What is Authority? In ancient times the power of authority was unquestioned and unreasoned, since Authority came directly from God or the gods (i.e., divine authority). Later, that is, closer to our own historical times, this Divine Authority was usurped by men, mostly kings, who claimed they were the “sons of God,” or other such malarkey and that their right to rule came from God (the gods were already gone by then, so no one could ask them if this was in fact their will or not).

Today, and since the Renaissance, authority is the façade, the means through which the “ruling class” exercises their “will to rule” (or what’s left of it); i.e., their dogmas, which are their laws, their profits, their class/race/gender privileges, etc. Through dogma, all of these ephemeral abstractions receive a patina of “divine order” – the very same bright sheen the physical/materialistic sciences acquired after the death of God. If you’re going to compare yourself, compare yourself to the best...

Dogma generally has to do with the preservation of a “system of values.” Dogma is the “mummification” of a set of rules to live by – ecclesiastic laws were the first to be codified; i.e., mummified (think of the Council of Nicaea in 325 A.D. and how it established Christian dogma throughout the Roman Empire, etc.). That’s still going on, albeit, with less force behind it.

Of course, you can’t have anything mummified before it’s dead, now can you? Belief in Christ by the Romans in the 4^th Century was pretty thin indeed. One could have well assumed it was long “dead” (actually, thanks to the Gnostics, and the many other cults which sprung up around the Christ-event, it was quite alive, especially in Rome, since the ancient Romans were nothing if not tolerant of other religions). “Heresies,” such as they were, were only in the eyes of the Roman Church, the arch-reactionaries of their time. The early Church being the last remains of the Roman Empire, and was made up of those who wished to maintain power through the authority of what was left of the fallen empire.

In reality, the greatest heresy yet perpetrated on humanity is that which the Roman Church achieved through the suppression of freedom of religion and through the massacre of millions in Europe from the 4^th to the 14^th Century (e.g., the Cathars of Southern Europe, or the Jews and Moors of Spain, who suffered the last of the many holocausts the Church perpetrated after the Council of Nicaea). Few people know that before and especially after the Crusades in the Middle East against Islam, the Church had its bloodier Crusades in Europe, where the most pernicious heresies thrived (i.e., wherever in Europe free thinking and religious freedom brought peace and prosperity). Thus the mummified values of Ancient Rome (e.g., its laws, its castes, its blood, its institutions, and its form of government, etc.) are still with us, thanks to the Roman Church.

Dogma, is not just an official system of principles or tenets concerning faith, morals, behavior, beliefs, etc., as in the Church. Dogmas can also encompass the rules and regulations of any institution, and as we can see, these give the Authority de jour something sacrosanct – a “bigger than you” feeling to it (well, they also have the lawyers, guns, and money to press the issue when necessary).

So what has also died with the death of materialistic science? Why “Authority” itself – the very divine order of the Cosmos. After all, what system of values can be maintained without a divine order?

She Blinded Me With Science...

Speaking of “scientific endeavor,” I thought it’d be apropos to announce modern science’s death on the heels of this month’s reports in the Corporate Press about some scientific activity being carried out somewhere... I was awe struck. Someone’s actually doing science somewhere on this planet? I was made giddy by the news, my knees rattling with the excitement of it (I’d been waiting such a long time for any signs of life... well... what can I say?).

There were two of these reports, which raised my misplaced hopes, because of their unusual nature. It’s not every day that “the cure for cancer” is announced without the least bit of hoopla or euphoria (self-aggrandizement yes, jubilation no). Outside of the words “dramatic remission rates” in the headline, one would think nothing really special happened...

“Twenty-seven out of 29 patients with an advanced blood cancer who received an experimental, “living” immunotherapy as part of a clinical trial experienced sustained remissions, according to preliminary results of the ongoing study at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center.” Feb 16, 2016

If medical research “scientists” had perfected a “cure” for leukemia (blood cancer, one of the gnarliest of all) with “sustained” remission rates, I asked myself why this wasn’t front page news. Maybe because the press release came from marketing folks in the Bio-tech industry? Or perhaps because the sample pool was less than 30 cases? A bit shy of credible evidence, wouldn’t you say? And maybe because the 27 who have survived, did so for the testing period only? Who knows? Seriously folks, my Biology professor would have flunked me if I’d presented proof for my hypothesis with a sampling of only thirty... If this is today’s “scientific method” in action, I’m Napoleon Bonaparte!

Science’s motto today is self-fulfilling prophecy first; proof and good evidence, be damned. And, this is the state-of-the-art in modern cancer research, mind you. Who cares, right? I’m so relieved we can go on with our usual debauchery unabated, without the fear of having to suffer for it. I know that no matter what I do, modern science will save me on my death bed.

The miracle of engineered T-cells has no limit we are told. The seductive half-truths and outright lies from the “geniuses” in Bio-tech and Big Farma knows no bounds. We can deal with any cancer that comes along through the manipulation and modelling of T-cells. Genetically engineered immunology is the new rave. What cancer can stand up to our clever manipulation of “living” matter? Leukemia? Hepatocellular carcinoma? You name it, we can cure it!

Even being generous by calling this claptrap “science” (it’s not – it’s merely another application of “science” done generations ago) what is one to conclude? Well, at least, let’s admit to being more than lax about our “scientific standards” these days... and let’s allow for the benefit of the doubt concerning these claims for the “cure for cancer.”

So what does this mean in a practical sense? Because they never say WHEN these “cures” will be available to the public, and for WHOM they’re being designed. A cocktail of “engineered” immunotherapy drugs (which may or may not include “living” T-cells) can cost up to USD $14,000 per dose... Sticker shock? Let us say one is a septuagenarian and wishes to live another decade, what would one’s net worth have to be to continue with the therapy for that length of time? Be sure to check with your fund manager and upgrade your pension portfolio before submitting your name...

I guess that answers the question emphatically, doesn’t it? Isn’t that modern, Corporate Medicine working for you? Yeah right, and at the price of one shot of that potion, you’ll die of a heart-attack! (Like the common cold, they haven’t found a cure for that one yet.)

Pollyannaish reports aside, this brave new world of forever dodging Death through chemical and radiation therapy, T-cell cocktails, and immunotherapy drugs of all sorts (except for the ones that get you high... natch!), doesn’t pass the nose test. This kind of “triumphalism” is just the kind of foul-smelling odor you’d expect to be oozing out of a rotten corpse.

Where No Man Has Gone Before...

The other curious announcement from the “scientific community” was a little closer to “real science” (i.e., less Corporate Marketing), although it’s still kind of “far out” there. It has to do with the announced “proof” of gravitational waves in space from LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory) at MIT.

“Scientists made the 'the scientific breakthrough of the century' with the detection of gravitational waves. When the waves were detected, they knew they had been caused by two black holes 30 times the size of the sun colliding. The discovery was the first time anyone had detected the warping of space-time caused by a collision of two massive black holes. These gravitational waves, created 1.3 billion light-years from Earth, help confirm our universe was created by the Big Bang, and will give an unprecedented glimpse into its beginning.” 17 February, 2016

It’s been a busy February in the scientific world! Isn’t the announcement of this “historic” proof of Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity not science at its best? It certainly is! One good apple doesn’t spoil the bunch (it’s the other way around!). And, it is indeed science that’s being practiced when proofs for basic theories are put forth. This particular “proof” in support of Einstein’s original Theory of General Relativity, first expounded in 1915, while millions of Europeans were killing each other for no good reason... is laudable. Chapeau!

What are we to make of these gravitational waves? They rule, that’s what! How will our values reflect this new found “light” at the end of the telescope? O.K., the LIGO gadget is an “observatory” and not a telescope... yet what’s “new” about it? Nothing – it’s another application. The “thinking,” the “imagination,” and the “inspiration” came from one school dropout 111 years ago!! It took Einstein ten years to accommodate “accelerating objects” to his Theory of General Relativity – from 1905 to 1915. But essentially, it was one spark of creative thinking that gave birth to his theory (i.e., he imagined the Cosmos in his mind’s eye and then formulated the theory).

I mean, when has modern science delivered, or coughed up, its last miracle? Was its last hurrah Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity? Was its swan song Quantum mechanics? Proving that there are gravitational waves out in space-time is certainly not going to alleviate world hunger, now is it? Quantum physics won’t either! So what does Science leave us as an inheritance? A 50-year-old warning that we’re warming up the planet? We only need to see the rate of species extinction in the plant and animal kingdoms to have any doubts in that regard...

What has Science done since Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity? Precious little, I’m afraid... The “golden age” of science vis-à-vis Relativity was in the 1960s and 1970s, but that was due to a series of “observational” discoveries that led us to understand black holes and quasars better (more application through the slight improvements in technology) so that the Big Bang Theory came into sharper detail. Yet there was nothing new in this short-lived period of glorious science. Proving an existing theory is once merely “method,” and not the “imaginative thinking” that Einstein used to develop something new. What real science requires in order to produce a new hypothesis about the Cosmos, or any other physical aspect of Maya, and then to prove the theory developed through the scientific method, is precisely this initial imaginative thinking (i.e., the living spark which Einstein kindled in order to come up with his Theory of Relativity!).  

To be fair, Bohr and Planck, and a couple of others, have taken “imaginative thinking” in the other direction – into the microcosmic – into quantum physics. Nevertheless, Physics has not taken a step forward since Einstein, Bohr, Planck (et al). That’s more than a hundred years ago! And this can be said about any other field of modern science – I suppose the word “modern” ought to be jettisoned along with its non-thinking bits. Conclusion: No new thinking has taken place since before World War I!

And herein lies my point – we’re flying on fumes! Nothing new has emerged in Science since the dawn of the 20^th Century – not a single innovation! Yet all Corporations talk about is “innovation” (yeah, it’s just marketing shill), but the corpse is still as cold as it was yesterday, and the year before, and the century before that... No new knowledge, no new theories, zilch, nada... To be gracious, not “one step forward” in over a hundred years is not the sign of life one would expect to perceive in anything living... Seriously folks, we’ve got a real stiff on our hands.

Despite these unprecedented “announcement” of “historic scientific work” being done this month, the assessment is not good. Discoveries, new proofs, and advancement in real scientific research are not just scant, but non-existent. No new ground is being broken. Frankly, if this is all the “pure science” we’re doing as an “advanced” civilization – and it is – then science has no future even if it weren’t dead. Although a hundred years late in coming, one is still bound to state the obvious: Science, as such, is indeed as dead as a doornail...

Science Was A “One-trick Pony”

Let’s agree on a definition, otherwise, we won’t know what the heck we’re talking about. Science is: “Systematic knowledge of the physical or material world gained through observation and experimentation.”

Under that rubric, and being as kind and naïve as possible, the announcement from LIGO is only the first half of the deal – only the ‘kit’ of the ‘caboodle.’ Observation is essential to the “scientific method,” naturally, as is Experimentation. But both Observation and Experimentation are at their lowest levels in centuries! If you were to use a rough measure, such as the amounts of money funding scientific research (pure science) in areas unrelated to the MIC and war-making (this includes Information Technology and all its subordinate industries), and compare that to research aimed at education and well-being (just to use a coarse value), the amount going into scientific research on the latter is not only negligible – it’s risible!

The question asks itself: How much “systematic knowledge of the material world” is sufficient knowledge? How much “wiser” will we become if we were to gain more “systematic knowledge of the material world” than what we already possess? Isn’t something systemic and dogmatic already dead? How much more “death” will make us a scintilla smarter?

We already know all there is to know about the material world – down to the “string” level. In quantum physics we’re already scratched a tear through the “fabric” of pure Maya. Don’t we know everything that can be known through our crude instruments about sub-atomic particles (quarks, etc.)? The fact is, we know “too much” already, otherwise we couldn’t “use” this so-called knowledge to the nefarious ends to which they are actually put (i.e., turning everything into yet another weapons system).

The ‘Day After’ Of The Gods

Why has no one yet taken notice that the “corpus scientificum” is way past rigor mortis?

They say that everything that dies lives again... or to paraphrase that saying of ancient wisdom: “from death new life comes.” Maybe from science’s passing something better will come... Naahh... that’ll never happen.

So what can be said about “materialistic science”? Especially today? It’s “magic” has run out and the smoke-and-mirrors trick is getting tedious indeed! Maybe it’s not the fault of science per se, but rather the fault of our own mentality (or greed, to put it more bluntly).

In our time, Science was driven by a certain mentality. A closed one – a dead one. Dead, materialistic thinking can’t produce anything new. What’s living can’t emerge from a corpse, unless you believe in Bugonia – the spontaneous generation of bees from the carcass of an ox or cow. I know we live in the most superstitious times in the History of humanity, but having faith in Bugonia is pushing it a little far.

It’s simply not possible for modern thinking to understand much of anything that’s not purely materialistic. Our thinking lacks imagination, it has no nuance to speak of. Science is driven according to a mentality that has become so vain and self-glorious that it’s downright infantile. To begin with, anything that’s not visible doesn’t exist, and if anything is incomprehensible then it’s damnable. If things that cannot be explained by the academic mind don’t exist, we live in a very poor world indeed!

“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, 
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” -William Shakespeare- “Hamlet” (1.5.167-8)

Whatever happened to “scientific” imagination and curiosity? It must have died with the rest of the corpse, I suppose. In a way, the “scientific method” has been turned on its head – to become a means of denying rather than affirming. For every affirmation, such as LIGO’s gravitational waves “proof,” there are millions of “denials” of every sort.

Likewise, the simple fact that scientific endeavors such as LIGO’s to determine the “fabric of the universe” is news, ought to tell us a lot. It tells us, unconditionally, that such work is extremely rare – so rare that it merits coverage in all major mainstream media (in the back pages, of course!).

People must not be disturbed by thinking, or rational thought. People must not question Authority. People should not be distracted from their entertainment and their vain desire to live like “celebrities” allegedly live. Just keep your nose to that little hand-held device and pay no mind to what’s going on around you. We control the vertical, we control the horizontal, and you just never mind about any of it.

An alarm should be ringing somewhere, except that there is no “there-there” to speak of...

May I be the first to sign Science’s death certificate? Others may have been tolling the death knell already, but by now there is no doubt about it. And judging from what little Science has to report to our daily life – anything of the mildest practical benefit – why even bother? (Not to say that all knowledge has to be “useful” or “utilitarian” – there should be some knowledge for knowledge’s sake, just as there should be some art for art’s sake).

Alas, Science’s brief reign of terror was more toxic and far more deadly than the Old Testament God (Yahweh or Jehovah, et al), piling up dead bodies at an astounding rate (soon to overcome the rate of reproduction itself!). Yet few, if any, have stopped worshiping at the altar of modern science, and its obvious successor, namely, Money.

Given the prevailing global economic conditions, we’ll see how long that paper godling lasts...

Who’s Been Sleeping in My Subconscious?

Yes, I used to keep a dream journal. I was even given a beautifully bound “book” with empty pages, by an equally beautiful woman, so I could jot down my night time excursions when I awoke. What a nice gift, now that I think about it… That was when women actually paid attention to me – but that was a long time ago!

I was flattered, of course, because I had heard that many real artists, and some would-be ones, kept dream journals (to protect the innocent, I won’t rattle off any names at this point). I was eager to formalize my dream tracking because I believed dreams could be a useful aid to my creative efforts while I was awake. I no longer have this book – lost in the hassle of moving or constant travel. Nevertheless, I still remember a few of my youthful dreams thanks to that “dream book.”

Although I don’t continue with the practice, except to make it a point to remember my dreams (although, in the morning, they don’t even get short shrift once I do remember them), the simple effort of “remembering,” that is, going over one’s pictures of the night’s dreams before fully getting out of bed in the morning, is a wonderful mental exercise. It’s difficult at first, since most dreams are usually chaotic and appear to be utterly meaningless (when they’re not funny or obscene), but if one persists over a period of time, it gets a lot easier.  

I always felt there was something cool about what went on at night while I “wasn’t there.” In other words, when I was sleeping – oblivious to all that goes on in the darkness of the unconscious. Things forgotten have a way of percolating back up to our conscious level like an inverted aquifer (shy as that may be of a useful metaphor), and such memories are, like dream remembrances, well worth keeping tabs on. While I can’t vouch for this being the case, I’ve always had the sneaking sensation that dreams are woven into a tapestry that is worthwhile making some “sense” of. At least, to the point of asking why they appeared at a given point in my life.

Well, when I was younger, my enthusiasm to discover those hidden secrets of my subconscious soon waned. As the pages of my dream journal filled up with my passionate, but idiotic scribbles, it kept turning into a “diary” of dream events. I didn’t see the threat though them. I didn’t recognize how these dreams were really just feelings “in picture form,” and I couldn’t make heads or tails of it (of course, at that time, I was immersed in all the daft trends of materialistic psychology as purveyed by that cottage industry, and worse), so eventually, I slouched off and stopped.

But enough about me. I wanted to talk about dreaming and the phenomenon of sleep, because they are such a big part of our lives that we simply ignore. Think of it. Over a third of our lives is spent sleeping. We’ll get that time back after we’re no longer here, but it certainly does make me wonder what we actually “do” while we’re sleeping. And, dreams are the only “tangible” things that connects us, through a circuitous weave of tenuous memories and remembrances to our sleep time. Naturally, the most palpable thing we get in the physical plane from sleep is health!

Never before in the History of humanity have people slept so little, which explains why we’re the least healthy people of all time!

Do you think that the ancients, those living before the Iron Age were tired when they woke up in the morning? Do you imagine that the Black People suffered from CFS (Chronic Fatigue Syndrome)? Not likely! If they had, they’d be well on their way to an early grave… Life was not as forgiving as it is today with all our machinations and medicines. We ought to start thinking a little more along realistic lines before popping too many pills to regain wakefulness. Reducing stress and sleeping more would go a long way towards dealing with that modern syndrome, and with the lack of “animus” that fatigue entails.

That’s right, us moderns sleep little and do even less once we’re allegedly awake. I argue we never are truly awake during our daytime hours, if such hours are being kept in our life. A little sleep shortens your life by weakening your health (your inner forces, which include those underpinning your immune system). A lot of sleep restores your health and replenishes your inner forces. And herein lies the secret to sleep – it’s how we restore not only ourselves after each new day, but our whole universe.

I wish I could be more precise, but unfortunately, the nature of the beast is such that a great many false ideas have been wrapped up in what the sleep state is, and what dreams actually are – and, since we know squat about them and what causes them – they continue to be a mystery to us. In this day and in this dark age, it could hardly be otherwise…

Sleep and Wakefulness

The “eternal” cycle of day and night… the spinning of our planet around its axis… at one point facing the sun at another away from it, conditions our physical bodies to require sleep. Therefore, we truly have two types of consciousness – the daytime (waking) consciousness and the night time (sleeping) consciousness. We enjoy lots of differing degrees of consciousness within those two states, but generally, we’re not aware of them (e.g., “daydreaming” is a “sleeping” consciousness we experience when we tend to fall back into “sleep” because we’re either bored, distracted, or fatigued.

As a result, it seems that there is a “waking” consciousness – filled with all the sense impressions we receive in our day-to-day – and a “sleeping” consciousness, which is for us as unfathomable as a black hole. The two states of consciousness are tightly woven into us with the circuit of the sun and the rhythmic cycle of day and night (which in our subconscious is still a highly mysterious phenomenon). And because when we fall asleep we lose consciousness, intuitively we know that sleep is a lot closer to a state similar to death than our waking-state. We don’t remember anything while we’re asleep and what we believe we remember, namely dreams, are only the brief passing in and out of the sleep state. Sleep always seems to us, intuitively, like falling into a warm oblivion, and we forget everything… Then, rather jarringly, it’s that darn alarm clock again!

And just as there’s a waking-state and a sleeping-state, we have an intermittent “transition” state period in between them, when we come in and out of our bodies. These brief transitional states are when we actually dream. The very “dreaming” we do is that transition out of our material state and then back into it (this may occur several times during the night even when we’re not fully conscious of being in our bodies).

Dreaming, therefore, was always a sacred state for people in ancient times. They knew well what was really going on as they passed into their nightly slumber and out of it the following morning. They felt it and understood their own feelings about it. And, might I add, back 4,000 years ago, and farther still, we were conscious of where we were. Back then, we were compelled to fall asleep soon after the sun went down (not like today, when some of us night owls can be awake all night and sleep during the day!). It wasn’t a choice then – it was rather instinctive – we’d fall asleep after sundown whether we liked it or not!

That’s why communal celebrations often lasted over several nights. These were religious, or sacred, experiences for the Black People (and all ancient people, everywhere!) – a kind of “endurance” test. In the distant past, we knew “intuitively” or “instinctually” (however base you want to get) that staying up “past our bedtime” was stealing away something the neteru gave us – HEALTH and LONG LIFE – a chance to be with them, in their domain, while we slept. That was the sacrifice people made. They sacrificed their “health” to honor the neteru/gods – that’s how deep our commitment was to them.

Rituals and rites grew out of this wisdom to become part of the Mysteries – in more recent ages these “events” were the cherished Dionysian Bacchanals – which were usually centered around the new moon or the full moon. Staying awake while we should be in the “other realm,” namely, the spiritual realm, was done as a form of “penance,” if you will. We forewent one to three nights of being in communion with the neteru (the higher beings of the spirit, which in our Western tradition are known as angels and archangels, etc.) in order to honor them. But that was O.K., because we got to drink a lot of wine and party all night.

Sleeping induces a “slowing down” of basic bodily functions, like respiration, blood flow, and nervous activity, etc. (these physiological changes are the by-product of sleep or meditation, but are really a foreground or superficial “benefit” compared to what we gain from sleep in our will and emotional life). For once we fall asleep, and get past our physical “boundary” delimited by what we remember of dreams, we are in a milieu where there are no sense impressions, or sense-bound feelings, thoughts, or actions… Once we fall asleep, we’ve left our bodies behind.

Life Is A Dream, But Dreams Are Not Even Dreams

Let us imagine that dreams are what the popular culture assumes them to be – irrelevant flights of fancy. Thanks to Freud we have many misconceptions about dreams. The eminent psychiatrist should have paid heed to his one-time colleague and adversary, Jung, to get a better grasp of dreams for they are part of our “collective unconscious” (although Jung’s conception seems equally abstract if you don’t follow his idea through to its conclusion).

What Freud missed is that we dream in retrospect about the future.

Say what? Yes, we dream what we haven’t yet lived through, yet it’s there because “everyone” has had a similar dream to ours and we’ve all lived through the same experiences (in our sleep consciousness, which is where Reality starts). A dream is based on our physical form, our appearance, our material surroundings, and even our material circumstances. All of which are the stuff of nightmares if you think about it too much.

Ever dream of being rich? Probably not, unless you feel yourself rich, or are otherwise satisfied emotionally (even if your net worth ain’t worth much). We dream our circumstance… we dream our “reality” to a great extent. When you do dream of being rich, or a feeling akin to what you imagine being rich feels like, then you’re doing well (even if your bank account disagrees with that assessment!). Either way, it’s a fleeting feeling.

Why? Because invariably, during our waking state, being rich feels just like being poor – it feels like shit – it feels like raw Fear!

And here’s another thing that’s true of dreams… Remember, we all dream the same things, mostly the same feelings… You may imagine it otherwise, and that’s fun for you, but while we’re asleep, we’re all in the astral plane together. The astral realm is one “made up” of Feelings. There’s nothing there beyond Feelings (and that includes everything in the universe that can be felt, so don’t think you’re being short-changed). Mostly, feelings of… yep, you go it—Fear… in one form or another (one degree of intensity or a lesser one, but it all adds up to the same thing).

Dreams may trigger neurosis, as the Freud believed (actually, the neurosis triggers the dream), but whatever does take place, believe me, no one dreams a surreal dream, ala Salvador Dalí, or anything like that.

Our dreams may be “weird” because they don’t fit right in with our daytime waking “logic,” but they’re never far-off enough to be “surrealist.” That’s a Hollywood convention (where Dalí worked in the 1940s) and fun to banter about at a cocktail party (do people still have cocktail parties anymore?).

Yeah, I can hear the complaints from here… people have their opinions and their a priori judgments and they’re hell bent on them – nothing will loosen their death grip on these stupid ideas…

That’s not so! I dreamed of a cat playing the sousaphone, or was it really an elephant?

No, you didn’t – unless your cat or elephant actually plays the sousaphone in a marching band during your waking day – you “saw” no such thing! Don’t recommend teaching your elephant an instrument – they already have a pretty big horn to play with as is!

How do you know? Didn’t I just tell you that we’re all asleep in the same place (a.k.a. the astral plane)? And, depending on what part of the Earth you’re sleeping there are quite a few people there with you, at the same time? Then why didn’t we all dream of your cat, or that same musical elephant? The answer is: because you only sensed it…

What happened is that you felt your cat or your elephant playing the sousaphone in your dream, but it wasn’t rendered that way to your inner eye (i.e., yourself watching inside your widescreen, HD home theater and entertainment center inside your head/heart/limbs). Actually, this “inner eye” stuff is overblown, since you dream with your limbs, mostly your hands, and if you’re a footballer, with your feet too.

In your actual dream, your cat, your dog, your elephant (if you have a big enough backyard for it), your mother, your friend, etc. was just as he, she, it was in your waking state, but your feelings made that person, animal, or thing, whatever you’ve imagined… and usually, that’s not something “purple” or exotic in any way, shape, or form. Your Feeling does color your dream world, but it doesn’t color your “pictures” of it, except when you recount your dreams. We simply lack the “art” and the organs to picture our feelings (at least, as precisely as we believe we dream them – since we dream them as a kind of hyper-reality).

So, what does it mean if you dream of your elephant playing a sousaphone? If you had dreamed of your wife, husband, mother or father, that way, we can get really Freudian. What does it really mean? Ahh… well, it means something to YOU, and here we enter in the multi-million-dollar industry of dream “interpretation,” Tarot reading, and other forms of charlatanism. It doesn’t mean anything, except what it made you feel, and whatever you can make out of that, which normally isn’t much since we dream through our feeling life and we aren’t ever either aware or very much in tune with our core feelings.

In my mind, the more important question should be: What does my dream reveal of what my inner feeling life is on about? (Forget about what’s being “externalized,” we need to get into our own hearts first!). The best we can say is that it’s your subconscious speaking to you. It’s telling you what’s up, as far as your being and that of the astral realm – a shorthand to your well-being, if you like. The subconscious (what we don’t remember) has its “economy” also, it wants production and disdains waste. Everything you’ve seen, heard, or sensed during your waking day, even things you haven’t actually paid attention to, will be presented back to you, as if upon a mirrored reflection (it’s not the mirror or the reflection, but something else...).

Really? Why? Because your ka-double is very much like a mirror reflecting light. Those are the images populating your dreams – feeling images they are and that’s why they’re difficult to interpret. Dreams, like the economy, has its own lingo in the form of pictures (or symbols, if you prefer). Although, if you pay close attention while you dream, you’ll also hear sounds, words, music, and whatever else pulls at your feelings, or your “heart strings,” should you have any. Like I said, by being “constrained” to the astral plane, to the reality of feelings only, if you will, you’re not being short-changed as far as the widest possible spectrum of experiences is concerned… (in fact, you’re only constrained in the material plane, since there’s a far broader range of experiences possible in the astral!).

We Awake To The World We Made While We Slept

As we awaken, we “build up” the world again, based on what’s been reflected back to us. Usually, it’s what’s been reflected back to us as part of a memory (the ka-double is what retains our memories). Reflections of light, form, movement, and time, as we left our body (khat) when we went to sleep the night before. The dreaming we do is the “glue” (or Lego set) that allows us to “rebuild” the world we’re coming back to inside our bodies the next morning. Otherwise, we wouldn’t be able to “reconstruct” the world each morning as we return to it… we’d have a different world each day. A world of our own making.

A world our feelings generate based on what we experienced during the night… Alas, that’s not to be in our present incarnation, in this particular age, because we can’t “bridge” the ka and the khat the way we could in the past in order to bring back the Feeling and Willing (acting we’ve done) in the sleeping state into normal, daytime waking consciousness. Why? Because we’re not conscious of it (what we did, felt, thought in the astral region) and therefore, we miss the opportunity to remake not only ourselves, but our entire material surroundings.

Whatever Freud believed dreams were, our Western culture has adapted itself to his way of thinking of it. Like him, we’ve narrowed our own powers into a lifeless, materialistic “manifestation” of things. Any wonder that what is hidden from us tends to take on a superstitious, dark tint? We live in the most superstitious times in all of human History because we don’t “see” anything when we look at things, since we’re looking at them as something we’ve hidden in our subconscious (or the unconscious, depending on the psychologist de jour). In other words, a kind of memory we’ve buried (according to novelists and psychiatrists – is there a difference?) for some ungodly reason (usually murder, incest, sexual abuse, or something worse, right?).

As a result, these “horrible” memories are somehow “gone” from our daily waking consciousness. We don’t want to go into our “inner feelings” and look around in there for them. Yet, there they lurk beneath the surface, waiting for us to fall asleep in order to haunt us once more. All well and good, while we can keep such feelings of fear “suppressed” – or vainly try to… and yet, nothing is hidden forever… and therein, I fear, lies the rub.

Happy dreams!