Talking to Noone

       [a short story]

It was dark.  Night actually.  Sometime in the night.  I heard a voice, best described as spectral.  I am dreaming, I thought as I tried to wake up but I was already awake, obviously, or I was dead.  Deep in the silent night it’s often difficult to know if one is alive or dead.  Especially when in your mind you have become convinced that “death” is just another form of life, one you’re not quite yet comfortable with. 

So let’s say I was alive then, as you would understand that to mean, that I was in a body, and that body was actually functioning.  I could move with it, or make it move things.  That kind of being alive.  For the record.

The voice trembled some.  It was difficult to place in terms of gender, or age. It was the voice of an old male child who never quite gained its adult voice.  The voice of someone who had done a lot of smoking, perhaps died from it.  Again, what does that mean… nothing.  And I was dead wrong in my evaluation so let’s not spend more time on that. 

“I would tell you of things you should know ere this night ends.”  Said the voice.

“Who are you?” I had to ask, you understand.  It’s simple human curiosity.  We always want to know whom we’re addressing (or undressing, but that’s another topic.)   

“I am Noone” the voice said.  It pronounced it “Noo Nee”

“What sort of language is that?”  I asked.

“It isn’t a language, it’s a statement.  I am a statement.  I am supposed to be read, not heard.  This is terribly inconvenient.”

“You’re telling me!” I exclaimed, somewhat exasperated.

“Yes, indeed I am telling you.  That’s why I’m here, to tell you.  But I’d rather be read.  Can you read me?”   

“No, I can’t.  You’re a being, (and I thought, I sure hope so!) not a book, or a parchment or scroll.  You can’t be read.  Spell your name for me, I’m confused by it.”

“No one.”

“Ah well, there you see, you got it wrong in the pronunciation.  It is no one.  That’s not a name, it means you don’t exist.  You are no one.”

“I know.  That’s why I keep telling you I’m meant to be read.  I can articulate only what I can read.  I don’t have a spoken language, only a written one.  I am from a written world.  We are not a language, or even languages.  We are words, we exist only in words, sentences, paragraphs, and of course the more advanced of us exist in stories.  I’m just a word construct.” 

“So how can you make a voice, then?  How can I hear you audibly?  How can you articulate, as you put it?”

“How could I answer that?  Perhaps putting words together creates certain images and looking at those images, sound emanates in the mind of certain beings?  Perhaps… wait… perhaps when I’m near you I’m no longer Noone, I mean no one, but actually someone, or some one?”

“You mean like a living ghost?  A “for real” ghost?” 

“I cannot read ghost.  I do not relate.  Perhaps we word beings do not know of your ghost concept.  If I were a ghost, what could I do?”

“Well, not much.  You could haunt places, make ghoulish sounds and scare the bejeesus out of credulous people.  Come to think of it, this would be a good time to try it out.”

“A-good-time.  You want me to be happy?”

“Oh, don’t be so literal.  No, I mean it’s Halloween.  It’s believed that ghosts come out on Halloween and do all sort of mischief, or scare non-ghost types.  Ghosts are spirits of the dead, some long ago, some recent.  Some ghosts are demons from fire worlds.  It is believed they can be nasty.  They can even rob you of your soul and when you die to have to become one of them.”

“Not a good time, then.  Not a good time at all.  I don’t think I want to be a ghost.  I think I would scare myself and that would be very inconvenient.”

“Speaking of inconvenient, what was so important that you had to wake me up for, and we had to go through this whole mishmash of weird introduction?”

“Oh, yes.  I almost forgot, but I can’t forget, I’m words after all.  I’ll read myself to you.  You are Anson Jones.  You are going to be thirty three years old on October 31.  You have made your living from words, having written several novels and three books of poetry.  All your income has derived from the use of words.  You are a very fortunate man.  On midnight of October 31 this year you have qualified, from your life-long use of words, to become a word being.  You will be translated into a book.  But not just any book.  You will become the most important book on Word World.  You will, in fact be so important, you will be published as a trilogy. You will enjoy a long shelf life in every library on Word World. 

That has never happened on Word World and the anticipation is heating up, a river of ink needed to maintain written word speculation on what your entry will do to our social life, our economics, our very encyclopaedic space.  Some articulate it as a revolution.  Some write that it is an apocalyptic event.  A few crazy word splitters even write that you are he who was predicted to come; that you will bring us into a third dimensional state of consciousness.

So, Mr. Anson Jones of Earth, we shall all await your arrival with bated breath – as a figure of speech of course, we do not breathe as such, we write it.  Thank you.”

“What can I say to that?  Nothing.  I went back to sleep thinking it was a silly dream after all.  Was I surprised when I woke up this morning and realized I could not speak, that I could only write my thoughts down?  Not really.  I just know I used the word “inevitable” a few too many times in my novels.  It was sure to turn and bite me in the ass sooner or later. 

Albert Camus

Why am I reblogging this? I don’t know exactly. It strikes me as a deep truth, even if I’m not entirely sure why. If I have a reason for posting, it is that I too long ago recognized the futility of the materialistic/religious life lived to benefit others who think of themselves as superior yet were so obviously inferior in every way. “…absence of any profound reason for living… the uselessness of suffering.” Indeed, life without purpose was to me an endless drudgery, a curse. And when all I had to look forward to was either heaven or hell, and I was convinced that heaven was unattainable, that didn’t help. Suicide (which I survived) seemed like the right answer. Then came the concept of setting up a purpose for myself, one that transcended this time, and all time, and I never looked back. The mere suggestion that I should end it all now would be unthinkable, perhaps even insulting. Yes, we live in terrible times, and yes, my visions tell me they are about to plunge into horrors unimaginable and yet, all of that bolsters my desire to see it through to its natural end. And after that, not heaven, not hell, but the rise of the Phoenix.

Donald Trump: The Man in the Mirror

It’s almost over!  But the main story it has ridden within, that will never be over.  

Some days ago I posted some thoughts on “the Donald” which, for reference, can be reviewed here:  https://shatara46.wordpress.com/2016/10/15/some-very-brief-comments-on-the-donald/  

Since then I’ve seen many articles and posts saying essentially the same thing.  The following by George Monbiot,  http://www.monbiot.com/2016/10/28/the-man-in-the-mirror/  which I couldn’t “Press This” or “Reblog” so copying, perhaps expresses the thought best of all.  This is a mirror no one likes to gaze intently into, yet if we do not, how can we ever hope to change?  Ah, but excuse me for assuming: do we actually DESIRE to change, or do we simply wait for “the world” to change for us?

The Man in the Mirror

28th October 2016

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Donald Trump is not an outlier, but the distillation of our dominant values
By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 26^th October 2016

What is the worst thing about Donald Trump? The lies? The racist stereotypes? The misogyny? The alleged gropings? The apparent refusal to accept democratic outcomes? All these are bad enough. But they’re not the worst. The worst thing about Donald Trump is that he’s the man in the mirror.

We love to horrify ourselves with his excesses, and to see him as a monstrous outlier, the polar opposite of everything a modern, civilised society represents. But he is nothing of the kind. He is the distillation of all that we have been induced to desire and admire. Trump is so repulsive not because he offends our civilisation’s most basic values, but because he embodies them.

Trump personifies the traits promoted by the media and corporate worlds he affects to revile; the worlds that created him. He is a bundle of extrinsic values– the fetishisation of wealth, power and image – in a nation where extrinsic values are championed throughout public discourse. His conspicuous consumption, self-amplification and towering (if fragile) ego are in tune with the dominant narratives of our age.

As the recipient of vast inherited wealth who markets himself as solely responsible for his good fortune, he is the man of our times. The Apprentice tells the story of everything he is not: the little guy dragging himself up from the bottom through enterprise and skill. None of this distinguishes him from the majority of the very rich, whose entrepreneurial image, loyally projected by the media, clashes with their histories of huge bequests, government assistance, monopolies and rent-seeking.

If his politics differ from those of the rest of the modern Republican party, it is because they are, in some respects, more liberal. Every vice, for the Republican trailblazers, is now a virtue; every virtue a vice. Encouraged by the corporate media, they have been waging a full-spectrum assault on empathy, altruism and the decencies we owe to other people. Their gleeful stoving in of faces, their cackling destruction of political safeguards and democratic norms, their stomping on all that is generous and caring and cooperative in human nature have turned the party into a game of Mortal Kombat scripted by Breitbart News.

Did Donald Trump invent the xenophobia and racism that infuses his campaign? Did he invent his conspiracy theories about stolen elections and the criminality of his opponents? No. They were there all along. What is new and different about him is that he has streamlined these narratives into a virulent demagoguery. But the opportunity has been building for years; all that was required was someone blunt and unscrupulous enough to take it.

Nor can you single out Trump for ignoring, denying and deriding the key issues of our time, such as climate change. Almost all prominent Republicans have been at it. In fact, across the four presidential debates, not one question about climate change was asked. Even when politicians and journalists accept the science, it makes little difference if they avoid the subject like the plague.

James Madison envisaged the constitution of the United States as representation tempered by competition between factions. In the 10^thFederalist Paper, written in 1787, he argued that large republics were better insulated from corruption than small, or “pure” democracies, as the greater number of citizens would make it “more difficult for unworthy candidates to practice with success the vicious arts by which elections are too often carried”. A large electorate would protect the system against oppressive interest groups. Politics practised on a grand scale would be more likely to select people of “enlightened views and virtuous sentiments”.

Instead, the United States – in common with many other nations – now suffers the worst of both worlds: a large electorate dominated by a tiny faction. Instead of republics being governed, as Madison feared, by “the secret wishes of an unjust and interested majority”, they are beholden to the not-so-secret wishes of an unjust and interested minority. What Madison could not have foreseen was the extent to which unconstrained campaign finance and a sophisticated lobbying industry would come to dominate an entire nation, regardless of its size.

For every representative, Republican or Democrat, who retains a trace element of independence, there are three sitting in the breast pocket of corporate capital. Since the Supreme Court decided that there should be no effective limits on campaign finance, and, to a lesser extent, long before, candidates have been reduced to tongue-tied automata, incapable of responding to those in need of help, incapable of regulating those in need of restraint, for fear of upsetting their funders.

Democracy in the United States is so corrupted by money that it is no longer recognisable as democracy. You can kick individual politicians out of office, but what do you do when the entire structure of politics is corrupt? Turn to the demagogue who rages into this political vacuum, denouncing the forces he exemplifies. The problem is not, as Trump claims, that the election will be stolen by ballot rigging. It is that the entire electoral process is stolen from the American people before they get anywhere near to casting their votes. When Trump claims that the little guy is being screwed by the system, he’s right. The only problem is that he is the system.

The political constitution of the United States is not, as Madison envisaged, representation tempered by competition between factions. The true constitution is plutocracy tempered by scandal. In other words, all that impedes the absolute power of money is the occasional exposure of the excesses of the wealthy. What distinguishes Trump’s political career is that, until recently, his scandals have done him no harm.

Trump disgusts us because, where others use a dog whistle, he uses a klaxon. We hate to hear his themes so clearly articulated. But we know in our hearts that they suffuse the way the world is run.

Because this story did not begin with Trump, it will not end with Trump, however badly he might lose the election. Yes, he is a shallow, mendacious, boorish and extremely dangerous man. But those traits ensure that he is not an outsider but the perfect representation of his caste, the caste that runs the global economy and governs our politics. He is our system, stripped of its pretences.

http://www.monbiot.com

Let’s Talk about War (Part 2)

   [thoughts from   ~burning woman~  ]

But the spirit of war haunted the land.  Here and there remained small groups who did not go back to the land but instead sought out and began to reclaim the old technology of their gods.  These were led by the Nephilim, a race of “giants” (the term applies equally to their size as well as their superior intelligence) resulting from breeding between the ‘gods’ and cloned proto-human females.  They remembered enough to re-start earth-based civilization and the rest is history.  The driving force of the Nephilim leadership was their warlike nature and like the “gods” their forebears, completely lacking in empathy.  They were sociopaths to their very core. (Remember that when you wonder about your current Earthian leadership.) Serious leadership among even today’s Earthians can only be held by legitimate descendants of Nephilim rulers or “blue bloods.” 

The Nephilim built fortified cities and engaged in systematic plundering of the planet.  They developed militaries and weaponry to hunt down the hunter-gatherers, enslaving them and taking their children and females as trophies and spoils of war.  Once the war was launched (but of course it hadn’t stopped: it had been brought to the planet by the gods and they’d left the seeds of it in the minds of the Nephilim and the programmed Earthians) it could never be stopped.  City-states, nascent nations and empires went at each other and since writing was invented, recorded history shows how that went.

So much fighting and death on one world alerted and brought in the Peace Makers.  These came from outside the confines of this universe.  You don’t need to know their provenance, it wouldn’t make any sense to you because, even if you were able to make yourselves believe in such entities you’d want to believe they were sent by your “gods” to help you.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  Your “gods” hate and despise you.  Suffice to say, the Peace Makers were few in numbers – they always are.  They infiltrated temples, learning centers and even the political arena. Their goal was to expand the awareness of the species, introducing it to the concept of peace; of a state of being without external conflict.  They also introduced the concept of love.  But because both “peace” and “love” are absolute values, the proto-humans were incapable of comprehending their significance (they still cannot).  And the leadership, of course, was adamantly and violently opposed to any and all efforts expended to help the species by the Peace Makers.  (Good to remember that as well.)

The Peace Makers trained some humans into the greater “mysteries” of peace and love but these would-be spiritual leaders simply “lowered” the bar, re-writing the concepts as relative values instead of absolute.  Peace and love not only became bastardized in both meaning and value, they inevitably became exclusive.  Thus, even with peace and love being bandied about loudly and furiously at times, nothing could ever change and war continued to feed civilization’s frenzy.

To recap: you are not about to plunge into “another” world war.  If you continue on the current path you will ignite and suffer the horrors of a third “global battle” – not a war.  You are already at war.  You were always at war and you will continue to be at war until you change your mind; until you re-invent yourselves; until you reject all aspects of violence “against” anyone or anything.

The people who introduced you to the concepts of love and peace weren’t idiots.  They knew you were capable of understanding what those stood for.  But they had no illusions that you would bend every mental effort in that direction: it’s not how you were made.

Your initial programming which is in your soul implant, is to be attracted to violence; to respond to every violent attack with same.  The male of your species was particularly designed to be selfish, greedy, aggressive, competitive, bullying, controlling and sexually insatiable.   They made you so you would thrill at all forms of violence.  Raping women and slaughtering their children in front of their eyes were one of the very first “bonuses” of fighting wars.  The slaves, gold, jewellery, lands and cattle, those belonged to your lords.  They gave you violent sports as entertainment when you were in danger of waxing philosophical and becoming soft.  Your mentality always leans towards mob violence.  Your militaries are just controlled forms of mob response to lust of conquest or perceived threat. That’s the only way your gods could be certain that no matter how horrible your conditions, you would fight for them without qualms; without thinking the right or wrong of it.  They set the ball bouncing, and that ball, well, it just keeps on bouncing.  It’s bouncing higher and higher every day.

Now your numbers are over seven billions – an insane number, far beyond your planet’s limited capability to sustain; far in excess of your natural limits to growth.  Only your questionable alien and planet-destroying technology makes it possible to keep your numbers on their exponential growth curve.  Without technology; with the least little glitch that could kill your computerized systems across your cities, on your transportation grids (particularly in the air), your numbers would plummet and as horror piled upon horror your final downfall would (and will) see your numbers down to around a billion, give or take. 

War will only account for a small percentage of your fall in numbers however.  Most of your coming generations will succumb to various anthropogenic, very negative planetary changes; lack of potable water; disease-laden air; mutated GMO foods that will eat your internal organs as well as destroy any wild plants or animals you may hope to survive on; dead oceans, seas and lakes and nuclear radiation.  They will suffer general immune system breakdowns now being deliberately introduced by vaccines and drugs mandated by your warped leadership whom you still trust because they’re making you feed on your own fears.

And your wars will continue for as the pressure mounts your competitive programming will give rise to more fear.  Your anger at, and hate of refugees and other “aliens” will peak into genocidal madness.  Like your “gods” before you, you will unleash your weapons of mass destruction against each other and destroy your own living space.  As these things happen you will never understand how they were completely preventable. 

They are preventable, for a very limited time.  But you cannot comprehend that all of this mayhem, madness, and death is the work of one individual; that blame is just an excuse; that each one of you is directly responsible for the continuation of “The War” because you simply don’t want to, thus cannot, believe that you can stop it. 

Not as a collective: your programming will immediately cut in to prevent that, but as an individual.  Individualism is your programming’s Achilles’ heel.  Your designers made you so you would only understand collective work, how to function in groups, mobs, controlled collectives, from your nuclear “family” to your empires. 

The Peace Makers gave each of you a key to turn off the programming.  That is your individual mind.  That is the power of a human being and when you learn to use your key, you too will become human.  Empathetic and humane to a fault.  But until you accept yourself as an individual, different, separate and unlike any other individual; thinking, talking and acting as a self-empowered, self-motivated and compassionate individual, nothing can change for you.  You will continue to feed the machine of war and it will continue to destroy you, cycle after cycle.

Generation after generation, you choose war.  You choose to believe that by killing you can solve life problems and yet you cannot “see” how the more death you inflict, the more life becomes your enemy, and you become life’s enemy.  You, as you are currently, as a collective, are a  disease to be eradicated from this world, and from all memory.  Is that what you really want?  To die; to condemn your own children to certain death because becoming an individual seems so weak?  How little you understand the concept of power! 

Let’s Talk about War (Part 1)

                [thoughts from   ~burning woman~  ]

(Note:  This is a five page essay.  I decided to break it up into two parts of approximately two and a half pages each.)

Preamble: for those who find the following confusing, let me remind you that I often “channel” information.  When that happens, you will find that instead of “we” I use the “you” to let you know that this information isn’t something I (the entity known as  ~burning woman~  ) am making up as I go along, but information being given to me via thought-forms which I learned to transcribe into Earth languages many decades ago. 

It’s not actually “channeling” as such, it’s received information meant to be given to anyone I feel may want to know, or … needs to  know?  You can also think of it as a prophecy, in the classic historical sense.  And you can, of course, also label the following as the twisted thoughts of a very sick mind.  However you look at it, it won’t change any of the facts, or information contained herein. 

War is a topic that is very much on earth peoples’ minds these days, primarily because earth’s “most powerful” empire has reached it’s zenith and is helplessly, almost carelessly, careening into external and internecine warfare preceding it’s final throes as a world power.  History is repeating itself and because earth has shrunk so much due to population expansion and speed of information, the entire planet is feeling the shock waves of yet another imperial collapse.  The sharks are gathering and the feeding frenzy has already begun. 

So, let me talk to you about war.  Contrary to Earthian popular belief, history doesn’t recount wars, either started, fought, lost or won.  What your history tells is stories of series of battles fought over the millennia.  You haven’t been fighting wars but battles.  Since the inception of your civilization (there is only one) you’ve been at war.  In fact every attempt at giving a new face, or new location, to your civilization has been predicated upon war.  No Earthian civilization is possible without war; it begins and ends in war.

You will insist that you have fought great and terrible wars, for example WWI and WWII.  Read your history more carefully and you realize that WWI did not end, it went into a short hiatus for adjustment purposes, proxy realignments and materiel re-stocking then picked up again bolstered by much advanced and deadlier technology.  No sooner was WWII ostensibly ended that another “war” opened up: the “cold war” only it wasn’t all that cold.  There was Korea, then Vietnam.  But those were only the main ones that concerned the powerful West. Revolutions and civil wars raged on many continents.  Bloodbaths in Africa, Central and South America, Malaysia.  Purges in China and the USSR.  Barely mentioned in your mainstream media, lost to your short-term memory.

The real war you are fighting began the very day you decided to kick-start your own civilization but it would never be your own, you didn’t invent it, you cloned it, over and over again, always with the same futile results.  You may shake your head here, because this makes no sense to you.  It makes no sense because you never see the whole picture.  The critical missing information is, you don’t know where you come from; who you are as a species; nor where you’re going.  You have no solid foundation for your existence, just speculation.

Let me give you an infinitesimal synopsis of your actual (not official) history.  Roughly, based on on-going interpretation of archaeological finds, a half a million years ago an aggressive complement of ‘space pirates’ (you know them as your gods, or God) came upon this solar system.  They tried out some of its worlds, finally settling on earth.  They built bases here, there are many remnants of those.

Why earth?  Earth had minerals, air, water, and abundance of wildlife to kill for food and pleasure.  So it began.  Over time, say after one hundred thousand years, these pirates found that as pleasant as earth was, its environment was inimical to them.  They experienced an aging process which caused these very long-lived sentients to face physical death and their highly sophisticated medical knowledge incapable of countering the problem.  So their workers on earth refused to continue under those conditions.  They rebelled, that is, they had a general strike, and had to be returned to the home planet.

The minerals needed extracting, particularly gold, highly prized for its beauty, but also necessary to maintain a viable environment on the pirates’ wandering planet which some call Nibiru.  Gold stabilized the environment – I can’t go into the science of that. What is relevant here is that they were in desperate need of workers acclimatized to earth whom they could control, that is, over whom they would have power of life and death at all times, hence the decision to clone a breed of sentients using DNA from a local bipedal race of proto-humans (earth-adapted creatures known as Neanderthals) and mixing it with their own so the new slave would have speech capability and a rudimentary understanding of sophisticated technology and ability to learn basic commands.  So they invented ‘man’ and put the creature to work in their mines, their launch pads and their fields, gardens and homes.  They also cloned amazingly beautiful women as sex toys, all part of the story.

Over time, the pirates had a falling out and began warring with each other, something they indulged in on their home world, hence their desperate need for remedial resources.  The proto-human clones were re-programmed (you call it brainwashing) and trained for warfare.  They were used extensively in these endless resource and land claim wars and while the A’s (aliens) were few, the humans were proliferating so much it didn’t matter how many of those were killed: there were always more.  The wars intensified with no clear winners or losers, as is always the nature of war, and finally the pirates’ civilization collapsed in nuclear explosions and cataclysmic effects of alien weaponry and they abandoned the planet.  The very first civilizing empire on earth collapsed.  (It wasn’t quite that simple, but it suffices for the purpose of this article.)

Left to their own devices, without the leadership and technology of their gods, the Earthian creatures suffered terribly from famine and diseases and for a time lingered in hopelessness and died in vast numbers.  Atavism came to help the remnants and gradually most of the survivors returned to the wilderness and learned how to survive and even live very good lives without a technology their forebears had not been able to exist without.  They knew how to make basic tools and weapons with wood and stones and they had fire.  These you call hunter-gatherers. (Leaving out huge amounts of fascinating information here because my topic is war.)

(Part 2 next)