Culture and Cosmos I: Out of the Big Black Dark

One by one and in their billions they move through the world along recurring paths they are powerless to change. The span and influence of their lives is decided entirely by their birth; and those lives are of no meaning, nor in truth of any importance save to that which immediately surrounds them, for each is separated from the other by a vast and unbridgeable gulf, one which - but for the most tenuous of connections - they are able to cross only with their deaths. Their common center is a yawning bottomless maw, whose inner workings are impenetrable yet whose indomitably fierce appetite is undeniable, for it is that hunger around which all else takes shape. As to the shape that is taken, it's origin is ineffable: impossibly distant, beyond any hope of observation even in theory, an invisible hand that reaches down from everywhere to ensure everything is kept in its place. Meanwhile everything is flying apart, on an inevitable slide into emptiness, dissolution, and a total isolation where in the end there is nothing left but that endless appetite, and that distant invisible hand.

What is it we're talking of, here? Is it our society? Well of course it is. It has an economy driven by rampant consumerism, while its communities are dissolved by a misunderstood notion of individualism that has left the individual alone before the State and the Market. Whatever appearances may be, everyone knows that all real power is in the hands of the financial interests, for there is no argument with their massive concentrations of wealth, nor with the insatiable greed at the heart of those concentrations. At the same time there is the shadow government, permeating the institutions that give society form, ensuring that a certain script is followed as events unfold.

But it's not just society, for the description above could as easily be the cosmos as it is today described to us.

Stars form when a certain quantity of gas collapses under its own weight. However large they happen to be when they are born in their nebulae predetermines every characteristic of their lives, from how brightly they shine to how long they live: those lives will be long and dull or short and glorious but either way, one day, they will end in an entirely predictable fashion. Some will fade to embers and some will explode, showering the cosmos with the fruits of their death in the form of newly created heavy elements and a certain amount of their energy. Those that explode will then become either neutron stars or black holes: immortal, invisible, and indomitable concentrations of gravitational potential. Most are small and of relatively little importance, but at the center of every galaxy lies a supermassive black hole, its gravity the center around which every star in the galaxy revolves. Surrounding every galaxy, meanwhile, its influence in fact dominating every large structure in the universe, is dark matter: an invisible, undetectable substance that takes on nebulous shapes for unknown reasons but by whose gravity the behaviour of everything in the cosmos is arranged.

For some time now we have been told that the universe started with a Big Bang, an event so full of infinities that it is impossible, even in principle, to make any meaningful probe beyond it. Ever since then the universe has been expanding, every point in space rushing away from ever other point according to a strange metric whereby those points that are furthest away recede from one another the fastest. More recently we've been told that the future of the universe is at the mercy of a mysterious new dark energy, under whose influence everything shall (some tens or hundreds of billions of years hence) fly apart so far and fast that atoms shall be separated by light years and nothing will remain save black holes and their invisible, cold halos of dark matter.

It's no surprise that dark energy has become all the rage, cosmologically speaking. More or less coinciding with it's 'discovery', the world began its inexorable slide into the thicket of interlocking existential crises that now confront it and indeed seem to define what we've seen so far of the 21st century. Which came first is up for debate but if you take 9/11 as a rough signpost of a shift in the collective panic factor, it's distinctly interesting to note that dark energy seems to have first cropped up just a few years beforehand, in the late 90s.

It's no accident that there are such striking metaphorical similarities between our cosmology and our culture. The story we tell about the world, after all, is fundamentally a story about us. This is the case in any culture you care to examine. Whatever their particular cosmological mythos happens to be, it is both a reflection of that culture's inherent nature, and simultaneously a justification of that nature. Whether the cosmology is true (and it never is), the archetypes expressed within the story are every bit as real, at the level of the cultural imagination, as anything else. This is every bit as much the case for Modern Western Techno-Corporatocratic Materialist civilization as it has been for every other civilization in history.

Of course, it's not so explicit now as it has been in the past. The Catholic Church adopted the Ptolemaic geocentric cosmology early on for the precise reason that it provided an additional leg of support for both the papacy and the system of hereditary feudal kingship, themselves also both mutually reinforcing: the divine perfection of the heavenly crystal spheres reflected both the temporal order of the monarchy and the divine rule of the papal throne. Cosmos, kingdom and Church formed an ideological Holy Trinity that stood unchallenged for a thousand years.

Until, at a certain point, came a small group whose members possessed the independence of mind, industriousness of spirit, education and means to pursue a different idea: that it was in fact the Sun that was the common center of the solar system's planets. They were ignored, ridiculed, and persecuted without mercy by the Church, for the Vatican well understood the danger posed by a competing cosmology, yet they held fast and as evidence accumulated it grew ever harder for educated people to deny the heliocentric solar system. That the Church took centuries to admit its mistake, that intermediary models were put forward in which the Sun for some reason still orbited the Earth even as all other bodies orbitted the Sun, that court astronomers continued to calculate orbits with Ptolemaic epicycles until the 19th century ... all of this was immaterial to the inevitable and total triumph of those scientists who made truth rather than sociopolitical expediency the star by which they navigated.

The changes wrought to the culture's cosmology have echoed through every aspect of the culture itself. The authority of the Church in temporal matters was ultimately shattered; the primacy of kings, steadily diminished. With the heavens liberated from the impenetrable crystalline spheres, the story of the world from the Renaissance on through the Enlightenment and into the present became one of heady freedom, of expanding possibility as man ascended through history.

This triumph of science over superstition was achieved through evidence: the theories of the nascent astronomers more accurately described the observations than those taught by the Church philosophers. With this crucial battle won all else followed. Because of this, the modern heirs of Copernicus, Galileo and Kepler adjudge that their own theories must be if not true exactly, the closest we have yet come to it, for after all has not the whole point of scientific astronomy been to describe the cosmos as accurately as possible, without consideration for political interests?

And yet now, as at every other time in history, with every culture that has ever been, there is a striking metaphorical similarity between the entities that populate our heavens and the institutions that rule our lives.

It is not surprising that this is the case. Given the wider societal context, especially the power structure on which astronomers inevitably depend for financial support, no other situation is possible. The influence a cosmology exerts over the cultural mind has not been forgotten by the elites. As ever it is desirable to those who fancy they own the world that the cosmology justify their order, thus they will fund whichever cosmology best accomplishes this aim and nothing else. In this there is nothing new or different, save perhaps the subtlety with which the manipulation is performed.

As for the academic mainstream of scientists, perhaps some have learned this and keep their own council, while others have perhaps cynically sold out and gotten in on the gag (as we've all seen most recently in the climategate scandal). In all likelihood most are simply hypnotized by the Big Bang and its credulity-stretching cast of shadowy characters for the simple reason that, at a deep level, they sense the resonance between the theory and the human world out of which it has arisen.

That world has lately been characterized by materialism, greed and deceit on every scale from the personal to the global. It is a world divided against itself, and the consequences grow more apparent with every day's headlines. It is not a world that can last, nor was it meant to. As above, so below: what once seemed solid and dependable is becoming as tenuous as smoke. Just as the cosmologist's dark energy is pushing the universe apart at an ever-accelerating pace, so it seems that some mysterious force has taken hold of every institution that underpins society, dissolving its structure, flinging what remains into the outer darkness and leaving behind only the concentrated power of finance and the fist of the security state.

It is ever more obvious that something new is required: our society must be recreated, based on new assumptions about the world, or perhaps rather an updated understanding of the underpinnings of very old assumptions. There are many who understand this, who know exactly which directions society must change in and from which axiomatic truths those changes must proceed. Yet as long as the cosmology remains unchanged, these new cultural narratives will remain uncomfortably shoehorned within a wider theoretical meta-context that could not be more incompatible. The result will be that every attempt to spread the new ways, to teach the new truths, and to form the new institutions will meet an almost invisible but pervasive resistance from the very depths of the cultural imagination.

Conversely, if those assumptions about how and why the universe is can be changed - not on a whim, not on fancy but with a scientific theory more compelling than the alternative - that subtle resistance can be removed, even reversed.

What the Health Minister of Poland Had to Say About the Swine Flu Vaccine

You know, it would be nice to see this kind of candor in our own media.

For anyone who wants to get this the fast way and just read it, I've provided a transcript below. There are subtitles but the translator's English is a bit rusty, (though broken English does have its charms. Personally I wouldn't have it any other way.)



I would like to start by saying that throughout my 20 odd years of practice as a GP, my priority was: first, do no harm. I took that rule with me to my office in the Ministry of Health.

In a situation in which I was to recommend a medicine for anybody, I would ask, as would any other practitioner I believe, would I give this to my elderly mother? To my child?

And exactly such a thought makes me very cautiously double-check the information regarding a medicine which the Health Ministry is to recommend for every Pole, for millions of Poles who do not have the education that a Minister has, that an expert such as Professor Brydak has, an expert that has been working with the flu for over 40 years. There are 189 flu research centers in the world and Professor Brydak works in one of them. Can we today be accused of lack of knowledge about the flu?

Can one question the opinion of a professor who has been working on the flu for over 40 years, and not just on one type of flu, and who has published hundreds of articles on the subject?

I have just one fundamental question: do we want to fight the flu pandemic?

Today we have knowledge of clauses in agreements that many other governments of wealthier countries have signed with vaccine producers. We also know what was proposed to Poland. Due to continuing negotiations I can't tell you everything today, but I can tell you one thing: our legal department found at least twenty points of contention in the contract.

So what is the Health Minister's duty? To sign contracts that are in the best interests of the Polish people, or to sign contracts that are in the best interests of pharmaceutical corporations?

I know there are three vaccines available on the market today, from three different producers. Each have different quantities of active ingredients yet strangely enough, they are treated the same. So isn't it fair enough that the Health Minister and the experts have the slightest doubt about them? Maybe the one with only trace amounts of the active ingredients is just Holy Water that we are supposed to think will cure flu? Are we supposed to pay for that?

We have for an example Germany, which bought 50 million jabs, of which only 10% has been administered so far. Only 13% of Germans want to take this 'miraculous cure' today. But this is peculiar because Germany has a very high percentage of vaccine takers, so when in Poland of a thousand people only 52 will take a seasonal flu jab, in Germany there will be 238 of a thousand, 23%.

So what has happened that only 13% of Germans want to take the swine flu vaccine, and not 23% of the population as per usual with the season flu? Their government bought the vaccines and offered them for free and they don't want it? What happened?

Can those facts make us have second thoughts about buying the vaccines or not? Second thoughts about introducing a medicine that is kind of secret?

There are websites on which vaccine producers have an obligation to publish so-called post-vaccinational unwanted side effects. The vaccinations in Europe started on the first of October, 2009. I would like you to visit any of these websites and find any unwanted side effects. Even the slightest thing, just one, like an allergic skin rash. That can happen even using the safest medicine.

There are none on those websites. A "perfect" medicine.

So since it's so miraculous, why don't producing corporations want to introduce their medicine to the free market and take responsibility for it? Why wouldn't they say, "It's a wonderful, safe medicine, so we'll take full responsibility for it, we'll introduce it to the market and everything will be clear and transparent."? Instead of dropping the weight on us, the buyers.

We have no clinical test results, no detailed lists of ingredients and no information about side effects. The vaccines are now in the fourth stage of tests, very short tests, and we still do not have that information. Additionally the samples are very low: one kind of vaccine was tested on only 160 volunteers, ages 20-60, all healthy, none infected. Another kind of vaccine was tested on only 600 volunteers, 18-60, all healthy. Is this good enough, especially for we doctors present in this room? It is not good enough for me.

I want to be sure when I recommend this vaccine. While we are not out of the line for the vaccine, during negotiations we want to take that time and use it to find out as much as we can about the vaccine. Then, if the pandemic committee will accept this vaccine, we will buy it.

Additionally, there are one billion people who catch seasonal flu worldwide every year, and one million die of seasonal flu worldwide every year. And it hasn't been going on for a year or two, but for a very long time. Has anybody anywhere announced a pandemic because of seasonal flu? And the seasonal flu is much more dangerous than the swine flu, there are deaths and severe complications. Were there any pandemics announced?

To those who are pushing me to buy vaccines, I ask them: why didn't you scream and shout last year, two years ago, or in 2003? In 2003 1,200,000 Poles caught seasonal flu. Has anybody shouted, here in this room, "Let's buy vaccines for everybody!"? I can't recall such a thing.

And finally I would like to say one thing: the Polish nation is very wise. Poles can tell the truth from lies very precisely. They can also tell what is a serious situation, and what is just a game.

Dancing Alone with the Devil in the Darkness

A weariness has come upon me, a terrible disgust and rage, frustration with the endless issues of all you human rats in your cages, the dawning of an understanding of the true abomination you're all acting out on the hollow stage of this abandoned and apocalyptic age.

Your glib pretensions at meaning, ignored or ignorant feeling, clouded logic in place of thinking, and uncomprehending blinking eyes: what once I thought I had compassion for I now simply despise. See you all have all these problems, and they're all oh so dramatic, and when accused you reach for them as an excuse like some sort of addict. Your self-inflicted misery doesn't have to be, or maybe it does because what can you do when the problem for which you have no solution is you?

Yeah, you and the world, it's all a big mess, you humans all lie to each other so much the truth only comes out when you're tortured enough to confess, and when it does the rest of you shrug, go back to your ways, zoning out or carrying on at night and pissing away your days, and maybe you realize that a little part of you dies every time you tell another of your lies to impress, deep down you're all so terrified that you'll draw that infinite terrible eye that knows you're a bug (and you will, because you're pissing on its favorite Persian rug.)

So what does it matter, what does it mean, this great big weird whirling world-machine? All this suffering, violence, bad faith and death, this uncaring cosmos that cursed itself with living breath? Fuck God's forgiveness, that evil old swine should beg for mine: he's the sadomasochist who uses pain to carve our minds, like a patient artisan shoving sharpened chisels into pine. You see, he could have chosen not to be, but he didn't so we exist and thus we must persist, so yeah I think it's time to pay the two-faced bastard back in kind.

So I stalk through the streets, hate broadcasting from my soul in snapping lightning sheets, and inside our mind I burn down every building that I find, or if inflammable reduce it to cluster-bombed sniper-pocked rubble, and the people who pass within this ragnarok bubble I send off starving, scared and diseased, their children orphaned, crippled or deceased. Illusions gone and dreams brought down, beaten into blood-soaked mud they thought was solid ground, face to face with what they always were: just dirt, unlucky enough to have have learned how to hurt.

But it's a tiring, trudging path, to tread it takes its toll, and so weariness wins over the rage and I sit my ass down and smoke a bowl. As I sink down into my thoughts I glimpse a gate to hell gaping wider in the bottom of my soul. I hesitate, but because it feels wrong it's not for very long, then hop over the edge and let the wyrm swallow me whole.

Hell starts in an atom: awareness walled into a shell so small and dark and tight it cannot see but a single photon of light, where to see is the same as being hit and by pushing back and shouting one forgets forever one's sole remembered bit. And yet the universal wave of knowledge of the All comes through, a taunting distant call and that awareness begins to grasp the true depth of its fall, for its beloved, home, and self is now so far away that climbing back up just a single shelf will take several of Brahma's days. What makes it worse is, being there? It's really your own fault, a deep betrayal of yourSelf you carried out for sport, and when you ask yourSelf for an appeal, you're summarily reconvicted in your own laughing kangaroo court. And all the other pieces of you that are out there (and by God is there a lot), they're all just as guilty, every bit as clueless, and ultimately too they're in on the plot. Atoms cannot hit themselves, so when they whack each other, they really give it all they've got.

For the most part in this world, atoms stay aloof and alone, for eons drifting through the empty darkness of their tiny light cones, but some few are lured by that all-pervading siren song into a denser configuration, which given an atom's discussed dispensations must for them be very much like a war: I speak of course of the million degree orb of fire that rages in a stellar core. In the midst of all this shoving and confusion, some few are crushed so close together that their natural inimical hatred is defused, and to their surprise two become one, and it is here perhaps that the awareness in the atom gets its first glimpse of how it's done: an eternity of empty longing and senseless torment, followed by a moment of reunion, a tiny tantalizing taste, then it's 'no more time to waste!' for let us not forget this new element is still embedded in the most total of wars, and though two together are stronger than one still many are ripped apart, and none will escape from the star's burning heart until it breaks from exhaustion and the star violently departs.

So time goes on, the cast out matter condenses, the next steps of reunion are found in mutual configurations, complexified forms are tried and taken, awareness is amplified and consciousness begins to awaken in the muck ... and so too a finer appreciation of just how thoroughly it's been fucked, thus when cells first learn to move and act it is not long before they go on the attack, at which point they learn to wage war in microscopic packs, which come together as bodies, which then invent sex, and it's from there that things really start to suck because now it knows it has to find itself inside another and that's often just a matter of luck.

But that's just what forms the base, and in this as in every hierarchal case, on every level and in every place, evil shows its tortured face. From T Rex to Cain and the oceans of blood spilt between, the atoms' raw hatred born of cosmic betrayal has vented its demented spleen. It is the force that holds the world back from being better than its been, and at the rising crest (or is it crisis) of this unlikely timeline we find the jumped-up monkey self-styled godmen 'hu'-manity, a species dumb enough to think it's clever and just as in the force's grip as ever: driven by its demons and commanded by its crooks, fighting wars, turning profit, cooking books, ruled by tears and dirty looks, and hang on, what's this? Hell is just here, and now? The world in which we inhabit?

Ahh, but of course: 'Hell' is another dimension, intersecting ours because it must, a necronomicon written in every speck of dust. That it exists may be necessary, but it's not in any way just.

At the same time, it is an infinite universe, and while here and now we have our socialists, globalists, terrorists, capitalists, and secret midnight satanists, there's those who say that when Zbigniew Brzinski jerks off on a dying 10 year old's tongue a certain something rises steaming from the mixture of the child's terror and his cum (which is karma by the way: this time around the child may be innocent but with those past lives, boy, he had it coming.) A demon, a devil, a reptilian ritual, a dark dimensional door, it's an archetypal force that's grounded in horror and the sick part is, if it did not exist the universe would be the poorer. It pervades the now and has been since the very first then, and it will and does exist until the very final when. So at least it appears to me, and proffers a proverbial pen.

“Now you've got it, my son, now you understand! You see the rampant injustice of God's grand master plan! That cosmic bully who lets me exist just because I can. So come my son,” it said, holding forth a contract in its flickering hand, “Sign here, we'll let you stay. Our arms are always open to qualified immigrants here in this humble land, and don't you worry about the pay.”

I looked at the scroll, then into its red-rimmed eyes, and heard within its voice all the world's cries, offering there naught but suffering, though through it a twisted kind of peace: to abandon the search for meaning and surrender on my knees, letting the pain burn finally through my finer human capacities. But in the devil's expression I observed an appreciation of the absurd. “Before I sign anything, I'd like to have a word. You're grinning but I don't get the joke, what's the fun at which you poke?”

“Some must lose families, others be in fear of their lives, some I aquire because they are desperate to do more than survive but you my dear boy! It's a bargain price, in comparison like buying all of China for a single grain of rice.” With this it's mocking laughter unfurled, “For here you are soul in hand ready to sign it over because you think you've been unfairly spurned by a girl!”

I may be a swine but I've a taste for pearls and before I knew it to spite myself I was laughing along, “That is so very like you, to be at once so totally right yet completely wrong.” All at once and for no reason but All I became aware of that universal scintillating song: before I knew I didn't deserve it the All came flooding up through my spine and connected me through an infinite circular line that whisked my soul away from the malign and momentarily whipped it up into the divine.

But when the whirling stopped I saw to my dismay that even on this rarefied plane (where I absolutely was not authorized to stay) the devil remained, a tiny darting imp that flitted up to my ear and whispered, “It's not that easy, not for you, you and I have yet far more to do. Regardless of what you try and choose the day is coming when you'll join my crew: you've already shown that you're weak, that you haven't the strength to really speak nor seek your mind, and when you fall again and from a higher peak I'll be waiting there anew and I won't be as kind.”

“Nor will I be so blind, and yes you will wait,” I readily agreed, “And then again we shall debate but ... was it weak to fall in love so fast and deep I fell all the way to you? The willingness to do that is what makes your own love for God true. Isn't that the reason you do what you do?”

They say the devil loves it when you're bored, even more to be ignored, but laughter and recognition cut through its substance like a sword. And so it left, yet the offer stays, and on my conscience its extension must weigh for every now is a new piece of clay and it matters not a bit what you did in the past, but only what you decide today. Whether you play St. Francis of Assisi or a wholly Catholic pederast, whether you plunge into the rocky waters and swim towards the sirens or tie yourself to the mast that mocking melody that God keeps ohming might drive you mad. Even Saruman the White went bad, and few had lives more richly adorned than that in which he'd been clad.

But still, even that old demon Vlad was redeemed, though it took a stake through his heart to wake him up once again from the dream.

The high are thrown down and the low lifted high, tossed on waves that span multiple lives as we are driven towards the unobtainable prize that sits like rainbow gold at the euphoric end and source of time. It's why lovers love and poets ryhme, why souls and stars can shine, and it wouldn't exist without original crime: that every moment, it deliberately drops itself away from its home in the sublime, to begin again its Sisyphean climb. But where or when or whoever you are, whatever you thought you knew, which direction that you head in is up or down to nothing but you.

Rappin About the End of Time

Here's a link to a YouTube channel showcasing the work of a small but enterprising group of Torontonian citizen journalists. Their coverage of the swine flu vaccination lines is particularly interesting and topical, but what I really want to share with you is this video in which they interview KRS-One as he visits Toronto (search for 'press for truth toronto' if the link doesn't work.)

Now, I think his basic message - that there is no such thing as governments or corporations, because they're really made of people and if you have a problem with the institutions, you have a problem with the people, the community, the individual, ultimately with yourself - is entirely correct. One of the citizen journalists who conducted the interview gives this an overly simplistic discussion, stating that it amounts to an assertion that KRS-One is denying that the President is hand-picked, that there's no conspiracy either at the government or financial level but, I don't think this is what the rapper is trying to communicate at all.

The problem today is that far too many people have given away their agency at the same time they have given up their communities, and are thus stripped of every kind of power. That there is tyranny, crime, injustice and the 'con'spiracy(ies) that sustain them is a natural outgrowth of this abdandonment of freedom. All that is required to recover that freedom, and to take back those communities, is the choice to do so. That choice made, the conspirators will be as nought for their tyranny will become untenable, their crimes redunant, their injustice rebalanced. They seem powerful but the truth is they are only men: if those who serve them reclaim their own power, the conspirators will be stripped of that which they have stolen.

The more I see KRS-One the more I like him. Have a look at his lecture Hip Hop Beyond Entertainment if you'd like to see why. I don't even really like Hip Hop, and am honestly somewhat indifferent to his own music. What's fascinating here is the deeper and very spiritual message he's passing on, in an amazingly powerful and succint form and with a clarity that's almost impossible to misunderstand.

Getting back to the interview, KRS-One also gives a particularly vivid impression of the terrors the future may hold and this too is something it's refreshing to see. Sure, we may be on the verge of seeing a global tyranny ages in preparation crumble overnight as we each take back our own power and become resistors rather than conductors of the dark will but ... there is no guarantee of utopia at any point. Even with our planet unified under the banner of a newly resurgant omnihumanity, well, the universe is a very big place. In all liklihood there are within it expressions of the dark that are so profoundly negative they make our most sadistic acts seem positively benign, even as at the same paradises beyond our comprehension flourish in other locales.

At every level, at every scale, the universe is poised against itself, revolving and revolting, self-overcoming and subduing, an endless spiraling motion that shows up the path of a charged particle, in the shape of galaxies, in the yin-yang and in the landscape of human history.

It may well be that our planet is a battleground in a war older than we imagine, one in which our entire history is but a single short engagement in a conflict that draws whole galaxies - perhaps indeed the entire cosmos - into its orbit, between two vast and diverse and diamaterically opposed entities, which to describe by the term 'civilization' or 'empire' would be to understate their sophistication as though calling an elephant an insect, because one knew only insects.

Let us assume that both entities have access to all those technologies that science fiction has dreamt of: faster-than-light travel, time travel, telepathy, manifestation, everything. Ultimately, both of these entities arose from something much like our own biological past, with all the blood and suffering that entails, while over time developing to higher states of consciousness until, eventually, a certain point was reached: that of technological singularity, the moment in which understanding of the nature of the universe became so complete that the various powers listed above become available. At that moment they became as gods, and the universe opened up around them but (here's the thing) they would do so only to find that it was already populated, by themselves (as well as by every other variation of 'intelligent life') and had been all along, a natural consequence of the whole 'time travel' thing. Even their own history, right back to the seeding of life on their planet, would have been manipulated and interfered with by their god-like acausal descendants. In fact it was probably them who did it, while at the same time seeding and guiding the emergence of life on planets all over the universe.

Aany civilization that gets roughly to the point we're at today is faced with a fork in the road. On the one hand, it can pass into the singularity consumed by the bitterness that comes from all the negative garbage that litters its own past. If that happens, the sure outcome is some kind of global tyranny run by psychopathic monsters grimly determined to conquer the whole universe in order to feed their insatiable appetites for power. Now, my bet would be that as the singularity approaches, the negative 'reptilian' influence on the timeline would grow, attempting to introduce as much suffering as possible in order to guarantee that when the moment was reached, the planet became theirs for eternity.

But what if enough of the planet's inhabitants are able to put their suffering behind them, as a lesson and not a cause for dispute? What if peace were to really break out, and these powers were to fall into the hands of altruistic collectives whose members allow each other perfect freedom, while each practicing perfect responsibility? You know, that whole consciousness awakening thing? What then?

Well, any civilization that comes from such a seed will be of a distinctly different character. Far from seeking to dominate the universe, they would rather wish to help the universe grow, to offer guidance while at the same time respecting the universe's desire to be as it is. With all their material and societal needs met thanks to these technologies, spiritual ascendance would become the primary goal and service has always been of the highest importance to this path.

What I've just described here I guess you could say sounds a lot like heaven and I guess it is, but even in paradise there is no utopia. Forget all the petty problems we humans are dealing with on our little global scale. Heaven has to deal with hell, and that's a larger and more terrifying problem than any for while on the one hand they must constantly work against its terrible influence, on the other they must never do anything directly to attack it as after all, it too is a part of the universe, a part of god, and deserves to exist because it does.

The situation we face here on Earth today might seem strange and unique but the truth is it's not. It's happened again and again on planets across the universe ... over infinite time, it doubtless happens on every planet in the universe (what, you didn't know? Planets are born from stars and then like us they grow.) Each is guided as they develop by those who live out of time, and while the details may differ the broad strokes will be the same. In every case a certain point is reached, and in every case, nothing either side does matters a whit in the final analysis because at that very last step, everyone decides for themselves which way to go.

Cursing God in the Twilight

I'll warn you now: you're catching me at a bad time. I know the mood here around Moon Food isn't always the balmiest of Caribbean vacations, but right now I want to tie dynamite around the foundations of the world. Which all things considered is just as well because, well shit my friends, just look around you.

Boom.

The last couple of days have been personally rotten for me. Anything that can have taken a turn for the worse, has. It culminated today in something that's the closest I've ever experienced to a nervous breakdown. I sat down at the lake, under a willow tree in a nice isolated spot behind a hotel's closed-for-the-winter pool, and spent the better part of an hour cursing God. Anyone unlucky enough to walk by would have thought that I was a crazy person and right then, they wouldn't have been wrong (assuming that's ever wrong.)

I really had it out with the old bastard. Yeah, yeah, I know ... God's gender neutral. Both, neither, not applicable. For purposes of cussing the son of a bitch out though, well, I've never gotten on well with men anyways.

God kept his peace, for the most part. Towards the end he tried whispering a thing or two in my head about how futile it was to hate him, that even if I started playing for the dark side I'd be working for him anyways, but fuck 'im. Can't reason with the heart and right then the heart was saying, then how come you shower all your blessings everywhere but me? How come it's never my turn? Asshole. I hate you and I know that hate's a sham and that makes me want to hate you more.

So. Here I am, undergoing this inner emotional cytokine storm that has me wanting the whole world to die, for every human life to be snuffed out and creation itself to implode. Truth be told my own death, a real and final death with none of this reincarnation on the karmic wheel bullshit, would be just as acceptable a resolution to what I've been going through. Either way an end to being. It's that NO to existence that forms the primal root of everything in the universe that we might sum up under the broad fluttering battle-standard of Raw Evil, and that NO has been growling lately from the very depths of my heart.

Yeah, well, I'm not really here to talk about me, except maybe insofar as there's no such thing as me since really I'm just another part of the world, so me and the world, we're the same thing, which is either egotistical or egoless depending on how you look at it. Old hat around here, right, I know, but it bears repeating since there's still plenty of us humans haven't figured this out for themselves yet. Fair enough as I'm still struggling to get a handle on this whole seamless unified consciousness thing, and I have it on pretty good authority that it isn't so easy to master.

Yeah, so the world. The weekend of the 25th the President of the Incorporated States of America declared a national state of emergency over swine flu, and a key economic indicator (I forget which, but you're a smart crowd: you either know or you can find out), one which functions as a leading indicator, switched over into early-warning mode. It came and went without people much noticing, but it was right on time for the web bot prediction of when things would get kicked up a notch.

This weekend came news of a massive outbreak of not-swine-flu in the Ukraine, with people already dropping like flies. CIT filed for bankruptcy, the fifth largest in US history and by implication, I expect, probably in that of the world.

And Israel and Iran ... tick, tock. Whether that will be next weekend's surprise I can't say, but the 6th Night of the Mayan calendar's Galactic Underworld starts on the 7th. It'll take about a year to play out and it will be in most respects the worst year of our lives.

It's not just me and it's not just current events. A lot of people I know are going through some elementally vicious times in their lives right now, and others are telling me the same of those they know. Everything is going suddenly and unfairly pear-shaped on them, like the world's tearing at them through everything they have, everything they do, and everyone they know, resulting in a crushing psychic pressure that's building in our minds ... like being ripped apart by the world and suffocated and spat upon all at the same time. My bet would be that you're experiencing this in your personal life right now probably more or less to the degree that you're consciously sensitive to the context of the world around you, to the degree that you realize you are that world and feel what it feels. It's the best of us who hurt the worst.

I don't expect it helps much to hear it put in this light. Misery might love company but the kind of misery I'm in right now, man, let me tell you: I know but that does not mean I give a fuck. I cannot help but feel that way: it's how the whole world feels.

It has to happen like this. Look around you at the world as it's been, the world as humanity has made it: poverty, war, alienation, crime, despair, corruption, decay, and dissolution into drugs, entertainments, and general apathy. The apathy, that's the worst of it. The biosphere's being destroyed, the human soul is being eaten, our great-grandchildren are being sold into slavery to a gang of petty crooks who are plotting to steal the entire future and we can't even rouse ourselves to really care.

This is not a happy world. It is not a good world. This world cannot go on in its current state. And it won't. You might say the world hates itself right now. That primal NO is echoing through the thoughtscape of which our individual human minds are but outcroppings and the results are what we see around us in the world, in the lives of others, in our own lives: chaos, failure, and frustration at every turn, the microcosm mirroring the macrocosm. World has decided to commence the process of rending herself to shreds. Whether she's been planning this for a while, or was just abused or betrayed or bitterly disappointed one time too many is now entirely beside the point. She's sitting in the bathtub with the water running and a straight-razor in her hands, and she isn't thinking straight, nor is she seeing straight thanks to the bellyful of pills and the tears, and so when she finally starts in on her arms, well, it won't be a couple of clean cuts, put it that way.

Hah. Yeah, I know. God's a man, Gaia's a woman. How much more cliche can I be?

Well, I'll say this much, if only because at the moment it too feels like a horrible cliche: there's a better, more beautiful world coming on the other side of all this chaos and upheaval. People will die, in great and tragic numbers. Governments will topple, starvation and crime will stalk the streets, disease will run rampant and fear and paranoia will rule people's minds to a terrifying degree as the truth of what is, and what's been, is made inevitably apparent to them. The sheer scale of the crimes that have been committed and contemplated beggars the imagination when comprehended in its totality. I have no doubt that those who realize it too suddenly will be driven irreparably mad as a result, through some awful combination of shock and embarrassment, and that madness will express itself in terrible ways.

But the truth is a powerful source of psychic energy. Those who've discovered it know this already, if only as an intuition. They sense its potence, though at present the world denies it at every turn and seemingly showers its affections upon criminals who revel in its degredation. I've noticed many times a certain light in some people's eyes, a something-more that inevitably bespeaks a mind that has at least begun to open itself, and without exception I find that with such people there need be no argument: understanding is instantaneous and mutual, often akin to telepathy in its intensity. And yet at the same time, I've also noticed that there seems to be a kind of interference pattern or jamming signal around such interactions: though I might meet such people, inevitably the world arranges our lives such that we never meet again or at any rate are kept at distances such that no interaction is possible save through correspondence.

Les has said a few times this is because the demons are being held up as an object lesson, an example of what Not To Do for a great number of future generations and I figure he'll be shown to be right about this. That means that during this period the truth cannot be allowed to flourish: lies must instead be at their furthest extent, that those who serve them may be elevated high for all to see ... and then cast down low, like the ultimate cosmic Summer King, the culmination of an extended course in morality and being spanning ten thousand years or more. "See, humanity?" World is saying, "This is what secrets, lying, greed and narrow egos gets you: pain."

The Mayan Sun is about to set, and in the reddening light and rapid shadows everything's getting weird. It's going to go from weird to worse, and just to get through what's ahead we'll have to learn that lesson the world has been so patiently trying to teach us all along: that we're all one, all the same thing, that conflict is futile and mutual predation counterproductive. It's our failure to grasp that one lesson, and nothing else, that's kept us all this time from building a true civilization, one with its basis in consciousness, conscience, creativity and compassion, not just for this group or that group and not even just for all of humanity but for everything. The next several months will see untold destruction wrought upon the world as we've known it; but in the ruins, those who have learned the lesson they were meant to will set about forging this Civilization for the first time in the history of our species. We'll have to, just to get through it. There won't be any other way.