The Shroud of Maya and the Web of Paranoia

It's sad, these days, how suspicious we must all, ultimately, be of one another. These are not innocent times, and especially for those of us who have had our unveiling they are very dark times indeed for we realize that we've been lied to, consciously and persistently lied to about a great number of things by people we thought we could trust and going back for a very long time. The history of every civilization preceding ours is thrown into doubt, and ours? So little is to be trusted. Oh, the outer forms, the things that are taught in schools, yes, that of course was largely true and often beside the point because there was so much else that happened, all of it quietly forgotten, obscured, or misplaced or simply not talked about ... and of much greater consequence.

Our recent history, of which we can know more should we be able to steel ourselves to look, is terrifying. Anyone who has delved into the hidden world of government black ops from MKULTRA to COINTELPRO and all of their vicious offspring down the years, anyone who knows of projects named after innocuous things like blue books and paperclips, has had to grapple with the fact that an enourmess amount of the fucked up events that have happened over the years have been a result of deliberate tampering with the minds of the population at every possible level, both psychological and cultural, using drugs and lies and catchy songs and artful misdirection, the tools of hypnotists and conjurers, always drawing the eye away from something it really should have been looking at.

Ever read the Protocols of the Elders of Zion? I'll admit it, I haven't. I am familiar with the part talking about control of the media, how their control would be so subtle as to extend to those who appeared to repudiate them, and to those who repudiated the 'repudiators', and even beyond that. To have, at every level of apparent 'truthfulness', agents who were paid to speak just a certain amount of truth, and no more. Or, perhaps, to slip in certain ideas here or there, guide the opposition in directions that will prove fruitful for the hidden masters. That was all written about over a century ago, and it describes our current situation to a T. At every level, there's paid, controlled opposition. Count on it.

Ah, but how to know it? That's the trick. The problem with the system, what makes it so truly devious, is that with shills at every level it becomes essentially impossible to filter them all out. They're everywhere, and anyone who really grasps this becomes unavoidably paranoid. Who to trust for information? Tell me you haven't wondered if Alex Jones is a long-term deep cover CIA agent, his purpose to act as an agent provacateur herding everyone who's figured out the scam into a disastrous uprising at exactly the wrong time? Do you know for sure Rense isn't being paid to waste everyone's time on ridiculous UFO shit when they could be doing something constructive? How do you prove that SOTT, say, isn't being secretly funded by the Russians in order to plant vicious paranoid lies about the American government, a long-term 'sowing dissent' project. Or that Michael Rivero isn't paid by the Saudis or the Iranians for the same purpose? Or that David Icke isn't just a schizoid who's being put on display by MI6 in order to just generally fuck with people's heads? Maybe this whole War on Terror things been straight all along, and it's just that we've all bought into a massive enemy psy-0p.

Do I believe that?

Naw. But I ask myself almost every day whether I do or not, if what I'm seeing is really there, or just an artifact of what, for whatever reason, I want to be there. I'm no stranger to wishful thinking, no stranger to the fascination of terrible, elaborate lies. Anyone who wants to can go back and read every blog post I've ever written since 2004, and if they start at the beginning they'll immediately get that chilly 'paid neocon shill' vibe. Truth was I was just a dumb kid with a smart mouth and too much time on the internet who'd bought into some pretty serious lies, but can I prove that? Not to your satisfaction, I can't. Not to yours or anybody's. And now that I've told you you'll have to wonder whether or not maybe I am getting paid to do this, or whether maybe I'm just a shallow opportunist jumping whatever trends look hot (the latter would probably be closer to the awful truth. Of course I prefer not to think of it in such personally uncomfortable terms, but anyone else would be perfectly welcome to hold such an opinion and I wouldn't think the less of them for it. I'll be burning off the karma of those early years of the Terror War for a long time to come, regardless of how few know or care.)

Here's the thing: these days, that dark shadow of suspicion falls on everyone, unavoidably, darker on some and lighter on others, but universal nonetheless. In a sense it's always been thus, and indeed must always be, for the impermanence of the manifested means that it is not fully real, what in Hindu cosmology is called maya, the illusion of matter. It is in our materialistic age however that this suspicion truly clouds our souls, so that none can ever be fully out of the shadow. No matter what we do, how much we know, we must proceed with the knowledge that some of what we think we know simply isn't so. We must hold our beliefs lightly.

But let me ask you this: whose headlines are you more likely to trust, SOTT's or the New York Times'? Whose take on things are you more likely to believe, Lou Dobbs' or Alex Jones'? You know one of them might be paid opposition, but the other one most certainly is, so you go with the maybe and take everything it says with exactly as much salt as you feel it requires. You can't trust anything out there fully, for so deep can be the cover that disproving any accusations once made, whether the accuser ponders them within herself or shouts them to the whole world, can be virtually impossible. Everything and everybody gets tarred, sooner or later, if they stick around long enough.

But in the end, you have to trust at least to a certain degree. Even CNN can be trusted, insofar as it can be trusted to be CNN, for even a propaganda organ will have to reflect reality if only enough to conceal its lies (and the way in which that reflection is distorted often gives clues to the shape of the lies, and maybe even the direction things are intended to follow). Whether Cable News Network or Guerilla News Network, you have to trust that whatever information you get from a given outlet is whatever information you are intended to get from it, and treat it accordingly.

The recent spat over at the Petri Dish between nobody and m_astera was what started me on this, if you haven't yet figured that out already. For anyone who didn't read it, both of them have been posting comments at Mirrors as long as I've been there, more or less. m_astera always seemed to be an all right sort, so far as I could tell, but recently he's been off about Chavez all the time. Now, Chavez is probably one of the only leaders in the world right now with any sort of international credibility, and his recent expelling of the Israeli embassy certainly puts a shine on his reputation, but m_astera actually lives under his regime and considers him to be every bit the bastard that the rest of his kind are.

And now, thanks to nobody's eventual reaction to m_'s comments, everyone will now and from here on out have to wonder if the man isn't a paid CIA mockingbird. nobody makes a good case, one I certainly can't refute ... but is that because m_ is what nobody says he is? Or is the reason he derailed the conversation (now and on a few other occasions, I understand) from the Holocaust onto Chavez (which is a stretch) simply that, having to live under the man, he's developed a genuine hatred for him, one that became a bit of an obession and caused him to start acting weird? To be honest, I don't know for sure one way or another. Does the fact that m_ has so far entirely failed to respond to the charge mean he's guilty? Could be. Then again how should he respond? Can he say anything that wouldn't sound like exactly what a paid CIA plant would say? Can he prove he's genuine?

Can you?