Ramblings of a Madman

by musashi on Mon Sep 23, 2013

From earliest days my thoughts have been directed at what some call “other-worldly matters”. My interest in these ‘other’ matters may be described in the following sentence; ‘To experience objective Truth by the direct perception of Reality’.

Living in this world and being concerned with ‘the other world’ creates a conflict of perception and understanding and motive that must be resolved somehow. Questions there are aplenty, and questions beg answers. In this questioning and answering lies certain possibilities and potentials. Dissatisfaction is a concomitant condition, or a precondition, and observation of others (are they dissatisfied?) may imbue one with a particular understanding of human psychology, human learning and, in particular, the plastic nature of reality and morality. (Plastic is a Greek word, meaning “Shapeless”). Curiously, the interest in “other worldly matters” brings a greater understanding of this world. In some circles this is known as the “Lesser Understanding”. When we are young we desperately want to be just like everyone else. To be other than this is a rarity, and this desire clings to the whole life of too many of us. Being like everyone else includes possessing and believing the same information as the majority. In this way culture, values, morals, ethics, mores and paradigms are constructed. Look at the second and third generations of immigrants who brought their own languages and cultures and religious beliefs. They, the followers on, are mostly indistinguishably British in politics, language, accent, attitude and more.

Inherited wisdom, even basic perceptions and understandings of everyday matters – and the most distant and seemingly useless of information – is regarded with suspicion by a seeker. Everything is questioned by an intellect honed to needle pointed razor sharpness by the concern for other worldly matters and the distrust of the world we live in.

For example, we have all been told that cows are vegetarians, herbivores, and eat no meat. This information is so distant from us, as humans, that we never think to question its veracity or accuracy. The limited observation of those who give us this idea is never questioned either, and other of their observations may then be gratefully and unquestioningly accepted.

The absolute fact is that cows are by no means vegetarians, and consume much more meat than any human ever did or could at one sitting. It is apparently true that they are vegetarians, however, and we accept it as such because we do not see cows behaving in the same manner as the carnivores we are familiar with – and nor does it seem worthy of further research or debate. That cows are meat eaters is demonstrably correct, however.

This admittedly insignificant fact leads to other facts regarding human psychology being questioned, and the unreal nature of the human condition begins to be revealed. People do not like to be told that they are wrong. It threatens their place in the paradigm. It suggests that they are stupid, and it is a dangerous practice telling people that they are wrong. Much skill must be acquired before one can do this and survive the experience. That we accept that cows are vegetarians, without question, is symptomatic of our condition.

There are four universal human needs which I have identified, and observe continually, as a result: They are: Love; Belonging; Certainty and Purpose.

Each of these (coincidentally?) is measurably expressed in the film “The Matrix”, and Agent Smith openly accuses Neo of taking away his “Purpose”.

All of these may be threatened by using the simple phrase “You’re wrong!” That simple phrase needn’t be used in those direct terms, but be implicit in merely stating an opposing viewpoint.

Religious wars are the most obvious example of this.

The fulfillment of these four universal human needs are what is offered by many entities (organic and otherwise); for example, cults and their leaders. At this point it might be useful to pause and examine our understanding of “Cult”. It is almost certainly not what we think it is – or have been told it is. Our greatest cult leader is the Pope. Second is the Leader (Emir, or Khalifa) of the Ulema, and third is the Chief Rabbi of the San Hedrin. These are the three most dangerous men in history, and my life is forfeit for saying so. The words themselves are harmless enough, but the hierarchical, institutional, implicate order behind them offers Love, Belonging, Certainty and Purpose. This is what is challenged and threatened.

The Freeman “philosophy” is no different. Or is it? You may care to consider this matter at your leisure.

The number of enemies we have may be counted on one five fingered hand. They are: Religion; Politics; Money; Government; Ourselves.

Religion creates politics, politics draws money to it, money controls government and government enslaves the people and ensures, by various means, that the core programme in Ourselves contains a belief in the others. All of these others can supply, in one form or another, ersatz though it is, the four universal human needs, but the ‘fight’ can only be directed successfully at one of the five – Ourselves.Any other pursuit is to remain within the paradigm.

It is no accident that, throughout the length and breadth of the march of time, shamans, mystics, esoterists (or is it esoterrorists?) and their like have been hunted down and eradicated wherever they were found. Witness the Albigensian Crusade, and it is significant that, when Turkey was brought into the western fold and secularised under Kemal Attaturk in the twenties, a proclamation immediately banned and criminalised the ancient, traditional esoteric teachings of the Sufi in that country. The seven hundred year tradition of the Mevlevi Order – popularly known as The Whirling Dervishes – was driven underground and the state-permitted practice of the superficial remnants became a mere tourist attraction. To all but a few, the function of this whirling is lost, though the chains of transmission of the teaching are evident in other places.

Another, lately arrived and alternative, paradigmatic truth is that – “If we fight our enemies with the same violence that they inflict on us we will become them.”

This is no more than a subtle control mechanism given us by those who would maintain the status quo, and is current in the modern, so-called alternative culture to whom it was issued and from whom it proceeds. (Observe the heightening of emotional content when this is challenged!) This is, as in the example of the cows above, again, demonstrably wrong, and needs only a bare modicum of objective thinking to dismiss it as falsehood.

The argument that to be violent in response to Their violence is to become ‘them’ is an invalid one. If it isn’t, then the soldiers who took up arms and fought Hitler’s fascists became fascist themselves.

Is this not so?

If to take up arms against evil is to become evil, then we are the children of evil men and our fathers are become our enemy. I dispute this, yet my opponents in any debate on the matter would almost certainly be composed of those whose pedigree, intellect, perceptive abilities and intent within the alternative movement are undisputed and above suspicion. They are high profile combatants in this war of survival, much listened to and repeated, but are, in fact, living demonstrations of the mechanisms of inherited or transmitted wisdom obfuscating and delaying enlightened action and being.

The emotional content of humanity is a powerful and, consequently, dangerous thing. It has its rightful and useful place within us, and without it we would be less than we are, but one of the necessary acts of those who are concerned with other worldly matters is to reduce emotional content to its rightful level and proper place of operation. The paradigm we are in, however, contains a number of mechanisms custom built and designed to be constantly in use to raise this emotional content in us. The greatest of these mechanisms is called The Film Industry. It is no mere accident, or desire to give value for money, that the early, silent films, were accompanied by a man on a Wurlitzer providing the musical accompaniment to the unheard words of the actors. Nor is it a merely decorative addition to add canned laughter to sitcoms and comedy shows. We are being directed every bit as much as the actors themselves. When something is missing – in this case, audible dialogue – we tend to replace it with the next best thing. It would have been easy to provide a voice-over for these silent films, but musical accompaniment was preferred.

Music comes to us in two basic forms – the Intellectual, and the Emotional. We may listen uncomprehendingly to the Italian words of “O Mio Babbino Caro”, in Puccini’s Madam Butterfly, but, unless you lack human emotion you could easily, like me, be brought to tears. I do not speak Italian, but the swell of emotion in me when I listen to it is very real. This is evidence that the understanding of words and their meaning, or even hearing them, are not necessary to raise emotional content.

Intellectual music, though never entirely devoid of emotional content, is seldom heard in the film industry’s distributed products – not even in the allegedly factual presentation of a science-based documentary. This is no mere accident for, to be successful in its intent, we must be emotionally involved. If we were not, then the intent would fail and we would cease to go to the cinema, or watch or listen to their products on any other medium. We watch and listen specifically to be emotionally affected! This is why we go – we want to be affected. This demands examination, surely?

Even the alternative media supply their counter-reality offerings with musical accompaniment which takes the fear deeper, or the anger higher. The introductory music to Laurel and Hardy films, for example, contains ridicule and mockery which prepares us for their inept and comical dealings with the world. Without the preparatory and accompanying music they are merely irritating and bumbling incompetents, incapable of learning and doomed to repeat and relive their miseries. The introductory music of any film generally informs us of the genre we may expect to be viewing.

It has been rightly said among those who search for objective reality that the indiscriminate audition of music is dangerous.

Psychologists have long known that if they can engage the emotion content of someone then they can tag on whatever thoughts, beliefs and so on that they might care to. The process is subtle. It is not harmlessly co-incidental that our enemies early on took control of Hollywood. Nor was it a matter of public benefit that the British government created the BBC TV and BBC radio. The timing of this creation? – the 1930’s; heyday of Skinner and the Behaviourists. Before then, the phrase “Everyone knows that!” had little currency. Now, thanks to the mass media, it is indisputably correct, although what “everyone knows” – usually worthless or dis-empowering – is carefully selected to promote and maintain the paradigm. That which is Real, True and Important is known by very few indeed. In this, a point is made of making sure that “Everyone does not know that!”

The routes which supply us are the routes which deny us.

Such pithy one liners, often rhyming, as I have just invented there, are dangerous things – easily remembered, emotionally attractive, and make us sound clever when we repeat them. As such, you are forbidden to repeat it without formal investigation of it. Truth becomes a cliché when overly repeated without real understanding, and even the very ignorant may say ”Everyone knows that!” If we ask “How does everyone know that?” we will see some confusion and internal scrambling for the high ground as a threat is perceived within the simple question.

High emotional content is a barrier to understanding. If you doubt this, then try to reason with an angry man – or one who is recently fallen in love. Both of these conditions are held to be forms of madness.

I speak here of ordinary human love – not the ‘spiritual’, unconditional, universal Love that Idiots and Fools like me say exists, and which, we also say, may be experienced in traveling the path to objective reality. Ordinary human love, we Fools and Idiots insist, is a shadow of Real Love, just as conscience is evidence of our innate sense of right and wrong. The question asked of Phaedrus “And what is good, Phaedrus, and what is bad? Need we ask to be told of these things?” was rhetorical and meant only to return him to his own inner knowing. No answer was necessary – only an inner experience, a return to natural understanding, from which he could proceed in proper action.

Almost all of us – and there are few exceptions – live in a state of unknowing and yet, somehow, we imagine that, in this state, we are able to make right choices of what is right and what and whom to believe.This is not possible.

The 12th century Persian mystic, Mansur al Hallaj, was publicly dismembered for heresy for saying “An’al Haqq.” – “I am truth”, when he told his students he was God. The emotional impact of his statement was too great for the religious authorities who were externalists, and those who judicially murdered him for threatening their beliefs comfortably managed to abandon one tenet of their beliefs in order to condemn and remove him to, they thought, save another: i.e. there is no God but God.

Madmen are held to be “Touched by God”, and are under His protection. No harm may be done them. In their world of externals, only a madman would claim to be God.

When our emotional content is threatened we are capable of many insane actions, temporarily denying our own claims in order to protect or prove our own claims. This alone evidences the condition of unknowing.

One of the hidden lessons here is that state sponsored religion has no Real value, being composed merely of the externals of formal ritual (inherited wisdom) and espousing hope and faith (unknowing) rather than providing a vehicle (action through understanding) by which all men may approach Truth.

This is the reality we live in and it affects all of us. Neither is it restricted to religious, doctrinal dogma, but finds its application in a variety of human activities. We find that the protectors of morality and ethics and religion and law, in every culture and every time, routinely abandon morality and ethics and religion and law in order to uphold and enforce them. The trauma of Orwellian double-think encompasses their troubled and fragmented Selfs.

Thomas a’ Kempis, a Christian mystic, wrote a book eight hundred years ago when Christian mystics were particularly active, entitled “A Cloud of Unknowing.”

In all the passing years, has the cloud thickened or thinned? It is a reasonable question, though really more useful to the actuary than the Madman wandering the world in search of his Beloved.

Musashi.