***UPDATE – a slightly more polished and beautifully type-set version is part of the SYSTEMICS II book.

(made available to read online for free once-in-a-while or generally with a donation based password.)

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[ some thoughts on the nature of persecution ]

I

GHOSTS IN THE MACHINE

For quite some time I’ve been thinking about putting together a solid rationale about my ‘spreading the word’ activities in public, about my endeavours to establish a professional loophole that cuts through the complex and tight spiderweb that’s been established – with almost everyone farcically contributing – as our notions, angles and vantage point of ‘human reality’. Such an undertaking raises such enormous issues as counteracting the removal of organs, of lives, ideas, even of gods … or the suppression and persecution of universes, worlds, countries, philosophies, careers, individuals, etc. While on the merely mundane, it involves the shedding of light into our ridiculous struggle of ‘who’s right and who’s wrong’ that has turned out to be a kind of pivot of all human pettiness and its brainwashed, instigated arena called ‘survival of the fittest’ – probably since the beginning of time. Or at least since Keen opted to terminate his brother Able, only to satisfy his jealousy-fueled desire to keep-up appearances, by wiping away that which is Pure and True from the surface of the earth. Or to be more precise, to remove someone else’s above-the-line Visibility for the sake of upholding a wicked, below-the-line Lie.

Those who I’ve managed to reach know that I’m talking about Eric Berne’s Group Canons a lot (in the earlier book Systemics and privately to people around me) and what an inescapable entrapment they entail for anyone feeling they belong to a particular group (or ‘party’) wholeheartedly. For any force of destruction, this particular flaw of ‘longing for belonging’ makes it perfectly convenient to stir the direction of such neatly coherent group anywhere they want to. Macchiavelli, as most of you know, teaches its manipulative top-level skill via the introduction of a secret force that is giving the unsuspecting (be)longers both a Left and a Right faction to contend with. Not only is this keeping the sheeple purposeful and busy while in the end they’d kiss the feet of the covert puppet masters all the same (regardless of which faction those forces have decided to let win for the time being). These Group Canons, it turns out, are also the primary cause boxing mankind in during our present ‘final hours’.

Who’d dare taking the role as ‘agitator / saviour’ who challenges those canons in such a hopeless endgame play-out? For it’s the nature of a group (like it is for any individual) to ensure its continued ‘survival’ – i.e. carrying itself forth into the future and thus fighting off, expelling, annihilating anyone or anything threatening such a course. Who’d re-question the originally set-down Canon when almost everyone goes along with it towards its final destination? Even if such an agitator did come along, sacrificing himself for a higher cause (like suicide terrorists have been brainwashed to do) – how could they stand any chance to counter the all-encompassing socially-engineered notional wave that’s based on undermined values of money, evolution, commerce, art, culture, welfare, relationships, intimacy, cultivation, the divine, etc? Each individual’s life-thread is literally and totally attached to those? No wonder they nailed Jesus the Christ on a cross even though his version of the Buddha Law would save them from facing disintegration.

Any real change then, rather than being caused by a different political climate or some other superficial changes of an existing framework, could only be achieved from within each individual’s heart (each particle of the collective / cosmic wave) – no? Was there anything wrong with the system as such in the first place, anyway? Systems come and go, don’t they, and are subject to the developmental phases of formation, stasis, degeneration just like the (old) Universe itself.

This then means, that within our being lost in delusion (trapped within the dimensional confines of particles called Planets and Molecules), each individual is required to take their own stance and position. Would your spouse, your parent or your boss be able to ‘save you’ or absolve you when ‘closure’ (truth arriving at the surface) eventually arrives? Would you be able to forgive them your having been ‘ruined’ while they say “sorry” and refer, in the futile attempt of a rational apology, to only having ‘followed orders’ or just didn’t know any better? If a machine that you feel is vital to be part of causes you to do things that harm others (maybe even harm exactly those who’ve got the courage to not play an active part in the machine) – would any The Hague court simply shrug-off your ‘sins’ because of the ludicrous reasoning that ‘a machine is simply a machine’? Who’d be able to take the blame for your not having known better, your having been ‘unfortunately’ deceived? Your basically going against your very own conscience? Could there be any graver sin than going against one’s own Conscience?

If every Individual is required to take their stance within this grinding Machine, break free of any collective chains to choose their own colour, shade and position – according to their most fundamental conscience, and according to values that prove right throughout time-frames and space-frames that are universal … if they manage to do that, then the areas of Grey that lie between the extremes of blackness and whiteness are the only room left for any real freedom-of-choice. They’re the no-where-land from which to go into any available future directions. Or the only reliable ground offering an infinite variety of individual future choices. Or – maybe even going this far – the only available zone left for us to stand on for the survival of narrative warfare .

 

II

SEDUCTION AND ADVERTISING

What I can see now is that corruption to the integrity of a given system begins with the exchange of money or other favours for mere visibility – and from there invariably ends with the distorted systemic expressions like rape, theft and murder. It’s literally as easy as that. I’ll give two trails of thought as an example.

A

Would a new-born baby be required to pay (or accrue a financial liability) by the mere fact of emerging from the mother’s womb? Of attaining visibility among us divine children whereupon it’ll be living and breathing under the same sun? Incarnation into a Gnostic Cave. Wouldn’t everyone agree that by the time such a situation occurred, mankind as such really would be no more as it only consisted of ‘slaves of slaves’. You’ll own nothing and will be ‘happy’. No man or woman around. And yet – how far are we away from a situation like this?

One might ask: how’s this related to corruption and persecution? And the issue is this: could any human intention ever contemplate to put a taxation on naked visibility? What about judgements through postcode and caste / class systems? What about governments either subsidising or penalising offspring? What about being increasingly forced to pay in order to not be exposed to machine-made messages constantly snaking under our skin? Is any of this genuinely human? Or may be other forces – alien and external – at work here?

 

B

When Eve took the bait of the ‘forbidden fruit’ in one of our greatest Gnostic tales, basically she succumbed to the first ever recorded ‘marketing strategy’ – “Thou can be like God and thou shall not truly die”. This key event, a deviation from the Garden’s Law, can be said to be entirely her own fault and she’d have to pay whatever she owed due to turning her back on the Dao, no matter what. But when she afterwards ‘sold’ the product to her husband also – wasn’t this abusing his trust in her integrity (that she’d sold out just a moment ago) de-facto starting the whole chain-reaction of all later transgressions? Of course, this lesson also teaches us not to trust anyone, no matter how closely we feel we are to them. To never, by no means, succumb to leaving the purely Individual and thus safe Grey Zone and instead take a Black or White (or Left or Right) position inside the however dazzling, money-spewing, fake god-making machine.

A group starts with two, doesn’t it? To me personally, it teaches that between the fact of just being visible and audible (“Hey Eve, you cutie, I’m a really cool snake with a rather interesting proposition”) and between hard-selling (“I trick / bribe / swindle / fondle you into believing in me”) is a difference as vast as going from one end of the galaxy to the other.

Now, of course, there’s nothing wrong with the concept of ‘temptation’, is there? Would it not be impossible to ‘test’ the integrity of anyone without such a principle? On the other hand, what makes a Demon King ‘righteous’? Despite their negative expressions such as Hate or Spite – would it not still be Compassion that prevents demons from overstepping the line and rape?

What kind of connection ultimately exists between the Tempter and the Tempted? That’s an interesting one. Could one not in a way say (in accordance with Psychoanalysis) that such a karmic match is by its essence ‘erotic’? And that the insertion of money or the taking advantage through leverage could be identified as the root cause for burdened bloodlines, for the installement and propagation of false values? Aren’t they fundamentally the cause of corruption that undermines a larger system? The cancer in the societal tissue?

Bribing, forcing or blackmailing oneself into visibility on another one’s forehead or bottom through the incentives of fame, financial gain or other worldly reward schemes is overstepping the universal mark into indecently seducing, I feel. Once such a course has been taken, the elimination of everything else from one’s acquired ‘human asset’ really isn’t that far away anymore. “I’ll pay you 1.000 to put my logo onto your chest. 2.000 on your forehead. 3.000 on your arse. And another 10.000 to exterminate any other competitor entirely from your mind and body.” Could it be more black or white?

On the other hand – the genuine support of neighbours, friends and products remains on the grey side. Such a ‘contract’ is free and open and aboveboard. It’s subject not to the laws of a machine but based on freely chosen heart-to-heart transactions. Its soft and grey laws of natural cause and effect, grace and warmth, giving and taking, receiving and warranting (even if sometimes vice and spite are getting involved) seem to be entirely ‘human’.

Should we make even more psychoanalytical sense of the Adam and Eve story, one could regard the surrender of Eve to the temptation of the devil as a de-facto cancellation of the marriage contract between Adam and her. Had Adam merely regarded it as just that and coped with the fact of having lost yet another girl (after his first ‘sister-wife’ Lilith who apprarently walked out on him – his ‘daughter-wife’ Eve as well), he wouldn’t have sold out to the same doomsday mistake that his wife sold out to and only Eve on her own would’ve had to face subsequent karmic retribution through mortal decay.

 

 

III

TAKING THE GREY STANCE

Coming back to Group Canons, Deception and Persecution – we’ve seen how powers are at work that separate us humans from the Laws of Heaven via the insertion of what I call a Machine. Psychologically, this had been achieved by abusing our being bound, karmically, to a mysterious so-called Life Script. And spiritually, by taking advantage of any gap we could possibly have through not studying an upright Law truthfully (Judaism, Buddhism, Daoism, Christianity, Confucianism, Catholicism and of course even more so all related behind-the-scenes Cultivation / Gnostic / Scholarly studies).

The Machine seems inescapable as long as we doggedly obey its laws and not step into individuality and its various shades of greyness. As long as we remain a part of the Machine, it isn’t possible to obtain true, higher teachings that would liberate us from being stuck in our socially-engineered state of supposedly being ‘human’.

In the cultivation world there’s the saying of “seeing but not seeing, hearing but not hearing, thinking but not thinking etc.” Shedding attachments while we’re fully immersed in them. Shedding sentimentality while being soaked in it through love affairs or filial piety. Shedding attachments of competition and jealousy while everyone steps on our toes – even tramples our entire world. Everyone gloriously advancing through scheming and fighting while we’re left behind short-changed and losing. That’s what cultivators need to do and it’s obviously easier said than done.

It also directly relates to what we mean with Grey Zone and Greyness. Letting go of the Machine and obtaining True Laws while taking our grey stance towards them. Although not agitating against the system that we’re invariably a part of, we do in earnest what we’re supposed to do while at the same time increasingly connect with what’s above this confined system. There’s of course group within group within group within group in a multidimensional cosmos. Universes within universes …

When I was myself faced with the full gist of suppression and persecution towards my work (the more I knew, the less a position in society I was allocated and the more suppressed and ignored and persecuted I essentially became), the path that I was required to walk included finding loopholes in the Machine that would simply allow me Visibility. At the same time, since the core of my work is writing, I was required to reflect upon and minutely record what I was going through.

As the Machine was particularly set-up to regard and postulate as visible – ergo existing – only what the influence of media and the power of money hype the masses into believing that it is (based on corrupt academia, fake experts, purported acclaims, hustled successes – the list goes on and on), there was hardly any room for righteous work to survive in such an ill framework. So the challenge was as follows: how to side-step the isolating grid of media and come to reach people directly? How to still be active and visible in a worldwide structure where supposedly without the help of ‘money’ or the ‘hidden hand’ one is left to vegetate along the fringes of ignorance, scape-goating, poverty, scolding, jealousy, intellectual rape, cultural negligence – as well as the usual power-games covering-up the secretly harboured ill-will from an unreflected wallowing in one’s own mediocrity and self-pity. Not to mention paid agents and schemed acts of sabotage undoing all efforts to even ‘try’.

“The media is the message” came to be known during my media art studies. Like so many messages of our day, McLuhan’s over-confident claim turned out to be also just a bubble of hot air. Media without a message, how could it exist? A message surely requires a medium or a ‘carrier’ to be carried along. Messages are infinitely manifold and can be created at will and at any time. As brain scientists are aware nowadays, Thoughts are already messages, with matter emanating in the form of waves as their medium or carrier. Whom or where do they reach? Not only secret services know about Telepathy.

Furthermore, messages are alive, I believe, and this is in accordance with what the Buddha school says about all matter in the cosmos.

So then what’s the difference between a sales message and a benign message? Here we’re approaching again Eve and Temptation territory. Is the difference only an inserted company logo at the bottom right-hand corner? What if the message is decipherable only by the subconscious or the initiated and hidden for everyone else? What if the message is crooked, tainted or underhanded?

What if the message is bold and sharp but at its core also graceful and solemn and shockingly doesn’t actually sell anything?

I think everyone would agree that messages have taken on the form of Noise persistently surrounding us. Without meditation or a proper mental shelter they’ve become inescapable and all-intrusive. Come they not from screens, papers or billboards, they’d be aired as ‘opinions’ by relatives, friends and partners. Who’s right and who’s wrong? What do we know anyway? What to talk about?

When all’s said and done, who honestly believes the purpose of human existence lies in the rewards and promises obtained through the robotic execution of fundamentally laughable Group Canons?

Is art a benign message or trying to sell us something? Is literature filtered through tightly kept agency systems genuine knowledge or philosophical truth? Or hoodwinking us to the other side through a stir-fry of bullshit?

 

IV

CLOSURE AHEAD

After having assimilated myself to the Great Law for some time now, I can see that the Saviour stuff so many people believe in and hope for doesn’t seem to exist at all. Any such figure would be fake just by the mere fact of claiming to be a ‘Messiah’ (some say the word is derived from the Egyptian ‘messieh’ which is the anointing oil for a pharaoh taken from crocodiles). Yet I do see that the “gnashing of teeth” that Jesus talked about for the end of days is no empty talk. Everyone has to pay themselves for whatever karmic debts they’d have accrued over the course of their present and past incarnations. No-one is allowed to do it for them.

I can’t see how the Machine is fundamentally evil or wrong in any way, but instead I can see that it has its place as a cultivation environment. What’s a Demiurge anyway? Just doing their job, lol. If people can’t decide for themselves where they stand and what they stand for, who could do it for them? Who’s left of you if you’ve given away your conscience and responsibility? Many religious folks have talked about this world being a ‘test’ of sorts. Test for what?

Visibility is one thing. What can and cannot be seen is up to you.

 

[ Winter 2012 ]

 

[ tags: original sin, visibility, karmic debt, no-mans-land, grey area, adam and eve, temptation, seduction, marketing, advertising, freedom, thoughts, belief systems, cain, keen, abel, able, killing brothers, stomping to the ground, surface appearance, breakthrough, publicity, masses, narrative warfare, survival, … ]