They went on doing business, arranged for journeys, and formed views. How should they have given a thought to anything like plague, which rules out any future, cancels journeys, silences the exchange of views? They fancied themselves free, and no one will ever be free so long as there are pestilences. —Albert Camus, from The Plague
Robert F. Kennedy recommended his son read this novel by Camus. The story of a stoic few who stand together to fight the monstrous evil that has entered their lives. RFK Jr. mentions it in the movie The Real RFK, Jr. So on my last visit to the musty quiet of a used bookstore I looked for it, found it, and now as I read it, the old yellowed pages fall from the binding whenever I turn a page. But how contemporary this book is!
Pestilences are all around us these days, like Abandoned Intelligence is all around us, everywhere. We are surrounded. Sometimes I find peace at night in the dark with everything turned off. The wifi, on a timer, shuts down after bedtime. With everything inside the house turned off, the frequencies continue pulsating from the neighbours on all sides. From the far away satellites in the skies overhead. Surrounded.
Thanks to these bandwidths beaming all around us, criminals of the covid crisis are being ratted out of their hidey holes where they have lived anonymously or famously but never honestly. You can find their dark accomplishments in their villainous histories, more believable in a horror movie than in real life. We are all living under these villains and liars parading in white coats of all-knowing science. We are surviving the pestilences they have created. We will survive them and their murderous shots. They go for destruction. They go against nature. We will live, trusting nature, and its wisdom in our bodies. We will live.
Long ago, before I met the motorhead— the fake guru who spins tall tales of awakening out of one side of his face, while his unseen face inflicts pain and trauma— way before that villain entered my life, I had a vision. I had sat myself down on a cushion to search. I was looking for something hidden, something I sensed was present but I could not see it.
What time passed I dont recall. In settling, still and quiet, a vision came. I wrote about it afterwards:
This is a feminine energy, ancient and powerful but afraid, afraid of being taken over. Here is a mother goddess, wanting to rock us in the cradle of loving kindness but there is something dark and evil she fears, some force that covets power over us. We are so familiar with that dark formlessness we do not recognize it. Its omniscience is like the air we breathe. We cannot see it but it is integral to us. The shadow to our light.
To know the beauty of this goddess is to understand mathematics, geometry and an abstraction from the material world. My mind wants to grasp this knowing, to apply it in my work, and with a sick feeling I know this is her fear. To be used and controlled by a purpose not her own. There is a glimpse of the darkness in me, wanting to claim her, use her, albeit with what I imagine are the best of intentions. But my grasping to take her arises before there has been any reverence or awe or devotion, before there is any wonder, what does she want?
Then came a masculine energy, like an old man separating strands of my hair with withered fingers, staring through a microscope at the teensy-weensy life that lives on my scalp. Hes lost and alone like old men who have hung on past their wives deaths, confused as to why, and cut off from real living, apart from the feminine. Theyre looking for meaning in the infinitesimals, only made visible with machines.
A few days later, this journal entry:
I saw a king sssnake on the road and pulled over to watch its sserpentine movess, to ssee it coil in reaction to a passssing car before carrying on acrossss the road. I watch it move into the grassss. Suddenly I thought, I should have grabbed it! Brought it home to live in our yard, to protect us from the rattlers. Then I remembered that goddess, the feeling of wanting to grasp, to possess, to own something of nature, to use it for my own purpose without regard for its purpose.
And then this scribble:
What would it be like, pure knowing? Clear perception. I look upon presented ideas through the medium of my mind. Whats beyond what I can see?
The motorhead was forever harping about pure knowing and whats beyond the self. Years before meeting him these ideas filled my meditations, how to see and know what is? Attaining that, what is beyond a personal level of clarity? These ideas and questions are surely universal. Nothing special in my experience of them. Nothing out of the ordinary in the longing that comes with such thoughts.
A poet I like has moved from paper pages, what you can bend and tear, into the online realms of social media, substack, zoom and etc., now with a new identity. The Philosopher. If that isnt a trigger from having been a perpetual student at The College of Integrated Philosophy, then one of his poems absolutely provoked an over the top irrational reaction. It would be easy to blame the martinis and the bad timing of opening my phone to read the lines, just beyond yourself, its where you need to be…
In the cult, we were told this for years. Past any critical thinking self was exactly where the motorhead wanted us to be, easier to control, easier to lie to. Back on my phone, I let loose in the comments with unrestrained feeling. I hated seeing someone I admire heading down the primrose path to gurudom with concepts that carry people away from this world, our bodies, ourselves and the actual nature of things alongside the politics of our world that most everyone wishes to avoid. See the movie trailer for Civil Wars. A clerk in a dress shop simply says it’s best to stay out of it. Just go beyond all this messy killing each other stuff. Avoid the fray. Dont look up! Sit still and go beyond the self.
This nonchalance deprives us of the humiliation that could wake us up. Consider what western propaganda has asserted about Russia. Is it not a verifiable projection of bad behaviour on the part of the west and the hand puppets of NATO? How to live with this knowledge? Be humiliated! Be humbled. Be wise to the propaganda machine that is dividing the world. First, the humiliation. Than the grief. Start with the closest thing, the thing you dont want to feel. Feeling. While it is still accessible to humans! Admit we have been duped and dumbed down and misled by operations that use everyday people as slaves in a genocidal operation created by puppet blowhards of the 1%.
I wrote some very snarky things in a comment on the philosophers page, and then deleted it the morning after, mortified. With feelings disinhibited, I can be a real live wire. A carnivorous plant, closing at the slightest touch. Feeling triggered, the door of the heart slams shut behind me and Im glad of the division between myself and others. That is the effect of trauma when its not transformative. That is the effect of a fake guru offering redemption in one hand and psychically slapping you with the other. It is the effect of a shot gone wild in human bodies around the world, the safe and effective killing. An honest marketing meme for GAVI would be We are preventing future deaths by killing you now.
James Baldwin offered some valuable health advice: Youve got to tell the world how to treat you because if the world tells you how you are going to be treated, you are in trouble.
I dreamed I was in an airport and found a bookstore. I walked in and roamed through the aisles, realizing this was the online philosophers shop. I asked for him and someone went and he came back. I introduced myself and he recognized the name from my snarky comment. I apologized and he looked at me for awhile and finally said, I accept your apology and if youre open to advice, you might exert some self-control in the future.
There are stubborn stumps of shame, grief that remains unsolvable after all the years spent with the motorhead, but when I sit still and quiet for awhile, I can invoke with awe the presence of an energy natural and womanly. A power that includes everything and everyone, a power so great and good and naturally attentive to holding humanity with care. At the same time, it is a power that is tremendously vulnerable, despite its range and dimensions. I think St. John of the Cross may have written about her, a perfect knowledge you can only know by not knowing:
And if you really want to hear it,
This highest science consists
In a most sublime sensing
Of the Divine Essence;
It is an act of clemency
Which leaves us not knowing
Beyond all science knowing
Yes. Holding the Paradox.
Have a say and a tow
A bounce and a bang
The nurturing yin,
the clemcy of yang.
Standing alone virtually burnt
Deep knowing of whats been actually learnt
Beyond all science, phych and disappointment
knowing.