They search the culture when they arrive
To build a vehicle to drive
You see some thing familiar but not the whole truth
Behind image and projection is a booth
Flying saucers and Jews are history
Agents of change that demand respect
In the margins more often than you'd expect
At liminal times of anti-structure
There as catalyst and trickster
Flying saucers and Jews are religions
It matters not if disbeliever,
Doubter, faithful or hater
In praise or in bile
In worship or denial
Flying saucers and Jews are important
They affect the course of things
In radiating concentric rings
Everywhere and nowhere
It is important not to stare
Flying saucers and Jews are dangerous
To your employment and your sanity
To culture and humanity
Your life and home and such
And especially if you know too much
Flying saucers and Jews are secret
There are shadowy groups of men
Who have this as their ken
Causal forces are kept from you
Whether UFO or Jew
You'll lose family and friends
Who won't follow 'round the bends
They'll think you mad or cruel
Or just a hopeless fool
They will not hear your facts
And they will not have your back
Their worldview is their ground
So they must assume it's sound
They don't want to leave confused
Or think that they've been used
So they start on the offense
And say you don't make sense
The alternative seems bad
To learn and become sad
Ignorance is bliss
But there are some things they have missed
A person's sense of reality is established by their upbringing, their education, their experiences, their culture, society and community, their friends and family, their idols and enemies, their values, beliefs, politics and religion, the books they read, the programs they watch, the people they listen to, the knowledge they have accumulated and the questions they ask, their fears and joys, their feelings, intuitions, hunches and reactions, the wisdom of their soul, intelligence of their mind, and awareness of their body through touch, taste, sight, smell, hearing and all the other senses, by their health, their habits, their diet, their dreams, by what must be said and what goes without saying, by those things not mentioned, and to some extent, by reality itself.
The fuddy-duddy fundamentalists are no fun. A youth still discovering their world may do well to push against the edges, to think new thoughts and create new conceptions. That's where great art and ideas are born. The old ideas can be too constrictive and conservative for an optimistic young person without the information or experience to place them in context. Why can't we have candy for dinner? It's because the grown-ups are mean, they hate you, and they lack the imagination to conceive how great a plate full of candy would be.
What happens when the objective pretentions of a society come to answer to the whims of the uninformed and unreflective? What happens when our collective efforts to dwell in the same reality are stymied by conflicting experiences, definitions, protocols and ideals? The danger is an appeal to subjectivity, a defeatist surrender to incommensurable contradictions that borders on solipsism. We see things differently, therefore we cannot know the truth. I can't see your point of view, therefore I can't see you. You're so wrong as to be effectively unreal, and I'm under no obligation to grapple with phantoms.
It would have been relatively easy when things were boring. When everyone had the same information, the same experience, and the same faulty reasoning, everyone was wrong together, and there was no trouble. Divisions of caste and class were stifling to the odd outlier, but they ensured that no one pretended to know everything. As long as the priest was mumbling in a dead tongue, it was much harder to dispute his points by using the same words.
Print a copy of the good word for everyone in their own language, then tell them they all have an equal capacity to understand it, and you have created a recipe for discord. Send all human knowledge through the air into the palm of an incurious idiot who believes the ideal of equality is a measurable fact, therefore they're not an idiot, and you stand the risk of breaking down reality itself.
Undoubtedly there is an objective reality beyond human perception. It may rely on the attention of God or spirits in order to establish and maintain itself within the quantum soup, but it's there in a way that sympathetic parties can agree on. Even when different perceptions of reality conflict, the fact of their disagreement attests to some fundamental reality. The disagreement itself may be the only real thing that can be agreed upon.
It just doesn't follow from the purported existence of objective reality that anyone should be able to observe it accurately. To think so is a pleasant fiction to ward off madness. As such, a common perception of things is not presently a viable goal. It was easier when we knew less. We know more now, and we don't all know the same things.
There are in fact limits to the powers of reasoned empirical science, of logic, and of fact, but the greatest limitation may be different understandings of what constitutes science, and different valuations of that project. Something being illogical means nothing to someone who doesn't know what logic is, but then blasphemy means nothing to someone outside the religion.
It seems inevitable that we will all be very offended for the foreseeable future. It's the inevitable consequence of a fractured society that can't agree on the operative criteria of what constitutes truth. Is it fact or feeling, subjective or objective, collective or individual? At a time when there seems to be more disagreement than ever before, merely stating one's own perception of what is can be received as a personal attack, to say nothing of an attack on the world itself. It is actually the means of interpreting the world that is being threatened, a worldview that the person has come to identify with personally. The ego is threatened along with the idiom.
As long as it's the case that even the best of us are bound to some extent by our perspectives, and our infinitely divisible society is still up in the air about what we collectively can believe, being right won't be enough. Winning the argument logically is of no use if your counterpart murders you in a rage.
Understand that the people in this place have strange ideas and customs. They do this weird dance, and everyone always wears these hats. They have a litany of taboos you want to stay away from. They're good people, though, for the most part, just a little superstitious.
We must become anthropologists of each other. Beyond all differences real and imagined, we are all human. Mastering one language does not mean you can speak to all people. The more humanity fragments, the more facility in different conceptual languages will become valuable. The greater the multiplicity of perspectives, the more it is incumbent on those sure of their own ground to venture elsewhere. One must not simply refute the other, but learn the language well enough to understand how a nonsense statement sounds to a native speaker.
In the end, it may fall on those favouring the cold rigour of reason to cultivate the empathy necessary to get us through this alive.
When I was six years old, I saw a flashing electric blue rectangle descend from the night sky. I thought it over, and decided this was not the sort of thing I should talk about to anyone ever. Because I couldn't talk about it, I gradually forgot about it. This is the story of my intellectual journey.
When I was thirteen I bought Fingerprints of the Gods. I discovered in that book that humanity's past might not be a single simple linear ascent to greater sophistication. So I took Ancient History in high school, where I was told that humans began as apes, and civilisation began with pyramids. There was no acknowledgment of any uncertainty in this story, so I kept my mouth shut.
I tried LSD, psilocybin, mescaline and synthetic phenethylamines, dextromethorphan, salvia divinorum, and a weak preparation of dimethyltryptamine. These helped me to apprehend that every person has a spark of divinity within, an eternal consciousness watched over by an absolute awareness that precedes the universe. It's not the sort of thing you talk about, so I didn't.
I went to university for three things: film, theatre, and the critical examination of culture to determine what the hell is wrong with the world. I learned how to use a primitive camera for greater authenticity, how to pretend that a wooden box is really a chair, and how to place the blame for all the ills of the world on straight white men like myself. Marx and Freud got together with Adorno and Marcuse to say that I was a born oppressor whose guilt was proven by my denials, a pathological sort of person who must be repressed to encourage tolerance. I saw the mental dressing down that occurred when you didn't agree this was all brilliant stuff, so I gave up on participating in seminars.
Disillusioned with academic cultural studies, I applied my philosophy education to the perils and opportunities of the internet. What could be gleaned from those who spoke only to niche audiences, or took advantage of anonymity? I found that most every time there was a subject considered too crazy to countenance by polite society, there was at least a kernel of truth to it. Every time, too, there was someone who took that truth too far. I didn't want to be a fool or to be thought one, so I didn't even begin to engage with any of these interesting topics, except to study them.
The Earth is almost certainly round, but I haven't been to space or studied the physics of planetary formation, so I have to take someone's word for it. The return of flat earth theory is likely being helped along by intelligence interests for the study and manipulation of the population, but as a thought experiment it's a peerless gauge of a person's capacity for challenging their assumptions. No, the Earth isn't flat, but all it would take is a vast intergenerational conspiracy to deceive you on the matter. It's a valuable exercise to consider the inconceivable for a moment or two.
Vaccines are described as safe and effective, but their inserts list serious conditions as side effects. The unconscionable opinion of the science-denying anti-vaccine Dr. Andrew Wakefield is that the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine should be issued separately at different times as three generic vaccines instead of one patented product at once with a greater potential for adverse effects. This is why people have tried to silence and destroy him. Vaccines may claim credit for the benefits of nutrition and sanitation, but the basic theory is still sound.
The elite meet in secret to party away their cares and perform ritual magic to absolve their consciences, but they always have, and the world hasn't ended yet.
There is strong laboratory evidence for mostly weak but almost universal powers of precognition, telepathy, clairvoyance and psychokinesis, but the people claiming strong powers have more reason than most to fake them.
JFK wanted to limit the power of the central bank, tell the people about UFOs, and cooperate with the Russkies to go to the Moon, so everyone got together to kill him, but he was probably Abraham Lincoln in a past life, so he may already be back.
Crop circles are mostly faked, but the people who regularly make them feel compelled to do so by an unknown force.
Stratospheric aerosol geo-engineering seems like it might be a real thing, but if we're all being contaminated by metals falling from the sky and seeping into our brains, then the people saying that necessarily have addled brains, and shouldn't be trusted.
Bread and milk are very bad for you. You shouldn't eat them. But they're delicious.
9/11 was executed by Saudi terrorists with help from Mossad, the CIA, and members of the Bush administration, but everyone fucking knows that.
Some people are absolute jerks, and when the delicate equilibrium of your brain is tipped so that you stop breaking down endogenous DMT at the normal rate, you spontaneously trip out on your own brain juices and your asshole boss turns into a lizard. But that still doesn't prove there aren't reptile people.
Unidentified Flying Objects are a mixture of psychological, social, optical, and piezoelectric phenomena coupled with the observer effect operating on chimeric projections of consciousness grounded in other layers of reality, distorted by terrestrial psy-ops instigated by boys with toys they want to keep secret.
But before I had found all of these qualified positions, I was willing to throw myself into one. Dr. Steven Greer said that he could use a combination of remote viewing protocols with Vipassana meditation to call down these UFOs. I had just read some relevant books, and I dimly recalled seeing something in my youth, so I decided to reverse engineer Greer's methods and see me some UFOs. With a vague sense of addressing myself to interdimensional star people, I continually asked in my head for a period of several months if I could please see some saucers. It worked, but what do you say about that?
After years of coping with the psychological fallout of seeing a fuckton of flying saucers on request, I came to terms with the mystery of our perennial interaction with others from a distant land, whatever the truth of it is. I made my peace with the unspeakable at last. I had weathered the gauntlet of conspiracies and the occult, of all the impossibly crazy ideas a person can consider, and I had emerged half-sane and not completely unreasonable.
It was around this time that it was pointed out to me that the critical theory I had read at university as an apparent critique of "our" own culture was actually disproportionately written by members of an ethnocentric tribe that considers itself as distinct from, and superior to, our deplorable culture. It wasn't sober self-criticism at all.
It was then that I realised that actually paranormal phenomena are relatively easy to discuss. You may accept or deny them. Jews can only be praised or ignored. To do otherwise is to invite accusations of stupidity and evil, for having the misfortune of asking a question that has been rendered curiously cartoonish.
Imagine that meaning is a real thing, a stuff, not an airy nothing that you make up. Imagine that ideas and feelings are a river flowing beside you, and you can dip your toe in or dive in completely. Imagine that everything you think goes into that river.
The notion of signs and portents, synchronicities and other suggestive coincidences is out of fashion with most in the Western world, but very much alive with a few. Occultists and New Agers, drug takers and UFO abductees are often forced to get used to the notion, that they can sometimes engage in conversation with their surrounding environment and the events that occur within it.
There are at least a couple of ways to do this. One is to simply go through your day with an anticipation of magic. Treat every encounter and unexpected deviation from your plan as a potential message just for you. Look for the meaning, learn the lesson, hear the message.
Understand that this is clinically a sign of madness, so don't advertise it too broadly. You may even find that sharing your synchronicities with a sympathetic party will be less than you hoped for. The significance was specially made for your consciousness, and on some level your consciousness may have participated in its creation. In any case, only you know the weights and measures of your own mind, so no one else can validate your synchronicity for you. Simply give yourself permission to perceive as significant that which feels significant.
Look for meaning and you will find it. Follow it and you'll find more. There is no precise content here that needs to believed. Maybe you're getting in touch with your Higher Self, or guardian angel, or the spirits, or God, but the channel can be hijacked by devious demons leading you astray just as readily as any other information source you might use. That goes doubly if the whole affair is just a projection of your mind.
Synchronicities are cues to remind you to be conscious. Even if it's only a mis-fire of the meaning-making part of your brain, that should alert you that your brain is bored and wants something meaningful to do.
So much for the worldly path. Go outside right now and you may well run into an old friend, or see an amusingly relevant advertisement on the side of a bus, or find something you've always wanted in a shop window. What qualifies as a synchronicity is mostly subjective, but you must meet the process halfway, with intentions and reactions. Probabilities are constantly aligning themselves into improbabilities, if you can only notice it.
But is there any more that can be done to harness this peculiar mystery, and make it more useful? For instance, are we forced to tailor our meaning from whole cloth every time something surprising happens? I don't think so.
It's my understanding that many Native American tribes could use the aforementioned method along with a codified understanding of the significance of different animals. Go for a stroll through the woods with a problem on your mind, and the first beast you see may deliver an insight or a hint for a course of action. But the natives generally didn't have a system of writing, and we certainly don't have ready access to a tradition of totemic symbolism. Historically speaking, we found other ways to acknowledge this phenomenon.
In the European north, it was runes. In the south, the Tarot. Far to the East, the I-Ching.
Each of these was a language. They were developed and interpreted in an attempt to establish a system that could represent all the stations of life, all the configurations and permutations of consciousness that a person might experience, based on the philosophies and belief systems from which they emerged.
Undoubtedly there are elements of the human psyche that are so firmly instantiated as to be effectively eternal, but the colour and flavour of consciousness is continually evolving, particular to a certain time and place and culture. Anyone born today in the West to normal parents can't help but be playing at something outside of their immediate reality when they employ these methods. The Tarot deck on which most are based was itself a modern construction, an erudite and reverent attempt at authenticity. That's laudable, but even Traditionalists today have grown up in a world in which you must make your own authenticity.
This is primarily a proposal for the obsessive systematisers among you. Not everyone is able or inclined to produce a comprehensive conceptual system. I did it accidentally.
The first step is to legally assemble a large music collection on an electronic device. There should be several thousand songs at least. The words, tones, timbres and genres should all speak to you personally on some level, to your own typical range of thoughts, moods, and feelings. It helps if you have a modicum of variegation in your soul. If you only have one mood and only ever listen to one kind of music, we may be wasting our time here.
If, on the other hand, you know yourself a little bit, and know what you like, and know what you care about, and you have questions, and goals, and intentions, you are prepared for step two. Simply randomize that collection, as you may have already been doing, but do so without the assumption that a random order can't convey anything. Turn on "shuffle" and press "play," unfocus your mind a little, and imagine there's an ethereal DJ, intermittently spinning deep cuts to get your attention.
Consider that if you were sitting outside of materiality with certain cosmic standards discouraging direct intervention, a random system might represent a permissible loophole. The interpretation of the message is on the embodied human. Maybe that song title or lyric is a direct response to what's on your mind, or maybe you're reading too much into things and going a little crazy. Maybe there wouldn't necessarily be anything wrong with that.
This doesn't discount logic or reason. You can still check one idea against another to see if it holds up. You need not be bound to otherworldly intuition or divinatory crapshoots. Merely understand that we habitually seek patterns and meaning, and even if that's only a vestigial impulse it can still help us. Ultimate truth is great, but the subjective apprehension of truth may be more valuable for personal psychological health or life success.
The message here is that there are messages everywhere. We live inside a synchronicity machine, so it can sometimes be hard to see its activity. That's why it's useful to try to represent the world in miniature in a book or deck of cards. But maybe ancient esoteric symbolism from a foreign culture doesn't speak to you. That's okay. Make your own Tarot.
Load up a digital jukebox with songs that make your soul sing. Play the music and think about what matters. Make connections and associations. Is there a perspective from which that verse may be relevant to my situation? You will learn something, even if you absurdly overreach in the interpretation.
It won't always work. You can't make demands of it. But take this with you: when your heart lights up because the radio seems to be playing a song just for you, just don't be a heartless coincidence-monger. Revel in that moment of being connected with yourself and the wider universe, and it will happen more often.
This blog was created with the vague, perhaps competing notions of showcasing a portfolio of original creative and philosophical thought on the one hand, and venting the unspeakable on the other. It's not impossible that an intellectual idiom can be hammered out by the white-hot fire of frustrated logic, but dissatisfaction with the discourse of peers, friends and family does not guarantee a more successful expression in angry isolation. Highfalutin obscurantism is an inviting refuge for the disappointed intellect. Striking a balance between the limits of the herd and the excesses of nature's dangerous experiments may be a fool's errand, but how else do society and the individual proceed forward together?
I safely and lazily retreated from either honing my craft or sharpening my knives. It seemed sufficient to simply mark the passing absurdities of our day, as if they could speak for themselves, but the pace of unbelievable things has accelerated beyond my means to document. The things that are shocking, ridiculous, unprecedented, ingenious and idiotic have become too numerous to even point to, much less comprehensively comment upon, even less still to interpret into any sort of artistic form.
We are living in a self-generating satire, a comic construction so sublime as to offer proof of the Divine Comedian. Parallel realities compete for dominance, gods and priests old and new battle for people's souls, and history is upended. Opinions are cheap, truth is costly, evidence is abundant and arguments are counterfeit. It is a comedy of errors, if only to observing disembodied eternal spirits. It's frequently a hellish slog for those of us who must navigate it on the ground.
It's my preference and inclination to locate these incompatibilities of meaning in the airy arena of our thoughts, values, and culture. This has been my cultural and academic education. The magic dirt of Canada makes us all Canadian. My Greco-Roman, Judeo-Christian, Celtic and Anglo-Saxon heritage makes me see the world in a certain way, but I could see it differently, if not for the last several thousand years, and I would still be the same person. Given enough time and the right presentation, any true idea can be communicated to anyone, once the language barrier of culture is overcome. Right?
The idea works well enough on its own, but it does not permit expansion. Where did the culture come from? The people. Where did the people come from? The environment. These values permitted these people to persist in this place. Such adaptation is not arbitrary, but it may be more or less suitable to a different environment.
But what actually is an idea? Where does it come from? Does it bubble up from the neurons, or float down from the ideal world?
If the brain produces consciousness, and the brain is a product of evolution, and every other product of evolution expresses variance based on environment, it would be reasonable to expect different capacities to conceive, communicate and comprehend ideas among groups that have developed with different social and environmental pressures. As an opposable thumb permits one to grasp an object, there are many heavy, slippery, misshapen ideas that one must exercise extra mental appendages in order to pick up. Why should that capacity be universal? The human form is highly variable in every other way.
If psyche and soul are indeed one, and all our thoughts emanate from a voice that ultimately resides in a higher realm, our truth must be found there too. Assuming greater control of destiny attendant to a greater perception, our souls might be expected to shop for vehicles with the features necessary to satisfy our way of driving. Speed, handling, gas mileage, all must be considered by the discerning driver. A soul with any self-knowledge would pick the brain best-suited to its personality. Even accounting for the possibility that we all have the same origin and destination, we are nonetheless taking different routes at our own pace. Even the most cosmic perspective problematises universalism.
These are the further questions of culture. Are perception and action profoundly informed by cultural differences? Certainly. Does that culture exist in a special space containing nothing but culture? No. Acceptance of either a biological foundation or spiritual roof to the house of culture forces the consideration that cultural perspective cannot be the fundamental source of difference. Perspective comes from where you stand, and how tall, and how good your eyes are, not only where you turn your head. You can try to walk a mile in someone's shoes, but you can't wear their feet. If culture does not exist in a vacuum, it must be tied to things more or less tangible.
Whether biological animals invented culture to connect as a group, or God invented culture to separate into individuals, we have arrived at an impasse. There is a traffic-jam of meaning, and road rage is getting scary.
This is very uncomfortable business. The residues of old religions and the seeds of new ones overlap with science and politics in ways barely perceptible. Knowledge of history and understanding of philosophy are inadequate to the volume of our rhetoric. Passionate displays of moralising mask ignorance and apathy. Some are emboldened, others terrified. It is the best of times and the worst of times for truth.
It's a time for new stories, new ideas, new voices, new media. The format will continually evolve, but this endeavour cannot continue as a quixotic catalogue. My need to practice word-using must be brought to the task of considering the challenges of this crazy age, and to engage with them in a mode more real than bemused observation, sarcastic astonishment, or detached horror.
In the course of just ten years, the reading skill necessary to understand popular songs in America has dropped a whole grade level, to somewhere between second and third grade. Between Hip-hop, Rock and Pop, and Country, Country fares the best, with Blake Shelton’s hit "All About Tonight" requiring an incredible 5.8 grade reading level (the song challenges with such utterances as "concoctions" and "Gatorade"). With electronic dance music already degraded to a series of farts and burps, it's only a matter of time before all music will be fully comprehensible to babies and smart dogs.
“A child develops best when, like a young plant, he is left undisturbed
in the same soil. Too much travel, too much variety of impressions, are
not good for the young, and cause them as they grow up to become
incapable of enduring fruitful monotony.”
A giggling old man employed as a humanitarian mascot thinks that universal secular ethics and common sense will inevitably defeat regressive imperialistic theology rooted in violence and oppression--so there's nothing to worry about. The nice man said so.
The stress and depression experienced by confined and farmed fish has prompted the first glimmer of awareness in their farmers that our dinner has feelings too. We can only hope that humanity's farmers will reach the same conclusion.
Because of the brain's preference for virtuous memories, unethical actions have a tendency to be poorly remembered, and therefore repeated. The ego's defense mechanisms encourage dishonesty to discourage psychological distress. The petty blind spots of individuals thus accumulate, weaving a lying web of dissimulation and deception we like to call society.
The application of new exoplanet data to the Drake equation has added several exclamation marks to the Fermi paradox, the suggestion that we observe a problematic dearth of aliens around. Either there are other intelligent civilisations already visiting, or we can expect our own civilisation to inevitably collapse very soon. Possibly both.
