GREY ZONE
or
some thoughts on the nature of persecution

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I. GHOSTS IN THE MACHINE

for a long time i’ve been thinking about putting together a solid rationale about my ‘spreading the word’ activities in public, or in other words, about my endeavours of establishing a ‘professional loophole’ to cut through the super-tight and mindbogglingly complex mudpit or spiderweb that, to mankind’s utter shamefulness, has been established, with almost everyone farcically contributing, as our notions, angles and vantage points of ‘human reality’. such an undertaking obviously involves enormous issues, reaching celestial levels as high and infernal levels as deep as counteracting the ‘methodical’ removal of organs, of lives, ideas, of gods, or the suppression and persecution of worlds, countries, philosophies, careers, individuals, universes, etc. while on the level of the merely mundane, it involves the shedding of light into the ridiculous struggle of ‘who is right and who is wrong’ that has turned out to be a kind of pivot of all human pettiness and its brainwashed, instigated arena of ‘survival of the fittest’, probably since the beginning of time. or at least since keen opted to eliminate his brother able, only to satisfy his jealousy-driven ‘desire’ to keep up appearances by wiping away that which is still 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 book ‘systemics’ and privately to people around me) and what an inescapable entrapment they entail for everyone feeling ‘right in their mind’ of belonging to any particular group or party ‘wholeheartedly’. for any force of destruction, this particular human flaw of ‘belonging’ makes it perfectly convenient to stir the direction of such a 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 ‘belongers’ both a left and a right faction to fight with, thus keeping the ignorant sheep both purposeful and busy while in the end having them kiss the feet of the invisible puppet masters all the same, regardless of who those decide to let ‘win’ for the time being).

those group canons, it turns out, are also the notions that might be boxing-in mankind beyond redemption during the last kalpa’s ‘final hours’ (sounds crazy, doesn’t it? believing this or not, is up to everyone ‘individually’, unthinkably would this be a matter of ‘collectivity’, would it not?). who’d dare taking the role as a so-called ‘agitator’ in this utterly hopeless game play? isn’t the ‘nature’ of the group, like it is for any individual, the mere ‘survival’, ie carrying itself forth into the future and thus fighting off, expelling, annihilating anyone or anything threatening such a course? who’d be able to re-question the originally set-down canon when almost everyone follows along with it – wholeheartedly – towards its ‘predestined’ final destination? and even if such an agitator did come along, sacrificing themselves for a higher cause (like let’s say, suicide terrorist have been brainwashed to do), how could they stand any chance to counteract the movement of a notional wave, based on the undermined, untrue values connected with money, evolution, consumerism, commerce, art, culture, welfare, relationship, intimacy, cultivation, the divine, etc, upon which each individual’s life thread, boxed-in within this wave, is literally and totally ‘attached to’?

any ‘real change’, then, rather than being caused by a different political climate or some other surface changes of the existing framework, could only be achieved from within each individual’s mind and heart (each particle of the 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 phases of formation, stasis, degeneration, just like the universe itself …)

this then means, that within our being lost in delusion (trapped within the dimensional confines of particles called planets and molecules) and the inherent danger of just carrying-on the immersion and entanglement in this collective downwards wave, each individual is required to take their very own stance and position. would your spouse or 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’ themselves? if a machine that you for any variety of reasons 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, to be more blunt in god’s name, would 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, then, every individual is required to take their ‘position’ within the machine, break free of all collective notional chains to choose their very own colour and shade and position, according to their most fundamental and therefore most likely ‘true’ conscience, and according to values that prove right throughout time-frames and space-frames that are universal rather than habitually-notional, the areas of grey that lie between the extremes of blackness and whiteness can be said to be the only ‘meeting point’ left for any real freedom-of-choice. or the no-where-land from which to go into the fewer and fewer available future directions. or the only reliable manifestations of an inherently infinite variety of individuals. or, maybe even going this far, the only available zone to stand on for any individual’s ‘ultimate’ future and thus ultimate, true ‘survival’.

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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 extremes of distorted communicative ‘expressions’ like rape, theft and murder). it really seems ultimately as easy as that. i’ll give two trails of thought as an example.

a. would a naked new-born baby be required to pay (or accrue a financial liability) by the mere fact of emerging from the mother’s womb, of below-the-surface existence, into the realm of ‘us people’ walking the earth – of attaining visibility among ‘divine children’ (a quick side note: get the book ‘evolution cruncher’ if you’re still an ardent ‘believer’ of evolutionary doctrines) upon whom it is bestowed to be living and breathing under the same sun? wouldn’t anyone ‘human’ agree that by the time such a situation occurred, mankind as such really wouldn’t be ‘here’ anymore and only consisted of ‘slaves of slaves’ (maybe the antipode of the biblical ‘dreamers of dreams’)? and yet – honestly – how far away are we from an actual situation like this? and how can it be related to matters of corruption and persecution? doesn’t at the root of ‘human freedom’ lie the freedom of any worldly debt at the decisive moment of worldly visibility? and could any humane intervention ever honestly dare to put a taxation on such naked visibility? what about awkward existing canons of notional judgements through postcode and caste / class systems? what about governments either subsidising or penalising offspring? what about the emerging internet trend of being forced to pay in order to not be exposed to incorporated, machine-made ‘messages’ that are constantly snaking under our skin?

b. when eve took the bait of the ‘forbidden fruit’ in one of our greatest gnostic tales, in other words when she succumbed to the first ever recorded ‘marketing strategy’ (“thou can be like god and thou shall not truly die”), this can be said to be her own fault and she’d have to pay what she owed due to her ‘turning her back to the dao’ no matter what. but when she afterwards ‘sold the product’ to her husband also, wasn’t this kind of abusing his trust and regard for her integrity (that she’d ‘sold out’ unbeknownst to him just a moment ago) starting the whole chain reaction of later ‘wrongdoing’? of course, this lesson also teaches to not trust anyone, no matter how closely we feel that we are to them or they to us. 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, god-making machine. a ‘group’ starts with two, doesn’t it? to me personally, it teaches that between the fact of being visible (“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 myriads of layers of heaven.

now, of course, there is nothing wrong with the concept of ‘temptation’, is there? would it not be impossible to truly ‘test’ the integrity of anyone without such a principle? on the other hand, what makes a demon king ‘righteous’? would it not be compassion (apart from their nature of incessantly probing for ever more ‘truth’) that causes demons to not overstep the line, go over to the other side and simply ‘rape’?

what kind of relationship 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 relationship is in its nature ‘erotic’ or ‘sexual’ and the insertion of money or the taking and the gaining of advantage through such a transaction could be identified as the root cause for faulty / karmically burdened bloodlines, the propagation of false values and presumably lie at the heart of any kind of degeneration or corruption that undermine a given system?

so by bribing oneself into visibility on another one’s forehead or bottom through the incentive of fame, gain or other kinds of worldly ‘reward’, i feel this is overstepping the above-mentionend universal mark into indecently seducing and, i guess, also ‘raping’. furthermore, once this is achieved, the continuation of such bribery into elimination of everything else (suppression, persecution, etc) 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 you ass. and another 5.000 to exterminate any other brand entirely from your mind and body.”

while on the other hand, the genuine support of neighbours and friends and products, only relying on this very ‘genuine support’ that comes from truly within, remains on ‘this’ side, the grey side, and is subject not to the laws of a ‘machine’ but only to heart-to-heart transactions and its soft and grey laws of cause and effect, grace and warmth, giving and taking, receiving and warranting – even if sometimes vice and spite are getting involved. as long as there is no ‘machine’, it still seems (and i’m assuming this is the same for both you and me) all beautifully and purely righteous and ‘human’.

as another side note, should we be wanting to make even more psychoanalytical sense of the adam and eve story: perhaps in the continuation of likening temptation and seduction to sexuality and eroticism, one could regard the surrender of eve to the temptation of the devil as a cancellation of the (marriage) contract between her and adam. had adam merely seen it as only that and coped with the fact of having lost yet another ‘helpmeet’ (after his ‘sister-wife’ lilith, his ‘daughter-wife’ eve as well), he would’ve not ‘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 transmigration and its accompanying mortal suffering. (this little exposition is meant to shed also more light, perhaps, into the enormity of levels that the whole male / female mystery that i’ve been looking into so deeply throughout my life and work touches upon).

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III. TAKING THE GREY STANCE

coming back to our original premise of group canons, deception and persecution, we’ve seen how ‘powers’ are at work that are separating us humans from the laws of heaven and from each other’s hearts via the insertion of what’s called in here a ‘machine’. psychologically, this would be achieved by abusing our being bound, karmically, to a mysterious life script. and spiritually by taking advantage of every single gap that we could possibly have left open 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 (and indeed is!) inescapable, as long as we obey its laws and not step into individuality and its various shades of greyness in order to obtain true, higher teachings that can ultimately liberate us from being stuck in what’s been instilled and conditioned as a state of being ‘human’. but that’s easier said than done, isn’t it?

in the cultivation world there is the saying of “seeing but not seeing, hearing but not hearing, thinking but not thinking etc” or of shedding attachments while being fully immersed in them. shedding sentimentality while being completely soaked in it through a love affair or filial piety. shedding attachments of competition and jealousy while everyone else infringes upon your interests and gloriously advances through scheming and fighting while you’re left behind short-changed and losing. so it’s all easier said than done. but this directly relates to what is meant with grey zone and greyness. letting go of the mechanics of the wave / machine and obtaining true laws while taking our own stance towards them. although not ’agitating’ or ‘revolting’ against the system that we’re obviously a part of, we do in earnest what we’re supposed to do while at the same time connect with and relate to what is true and above or even outside of this confined system. there is of course group within group within group within group. 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 available loopholes in the machine that would allow me to step forward into plain visibility. at the same time, since at the core of my work was ‘writing’, i was required to analyse, reflect upon and minutely record what i was going through as well as what was going through me at the same time.

as the machine was particularly set-up to regard and postulate as ‘visible’ or ‘existing’ only what the influence of media and the power of money hype the masses of ‘sheep’ into believing that it is (‘based’ on warped group canons of corrupt academia, fake expert opinions, purported critical acclaims, hustling must-see successes, blabla, the list could go on and on) there was hardly any room left 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 be still active and visible in a structure where supposedly without ‘money’ or the ‘helping hand’ of hand-picked ‘installed’ authority one is left to vegetate along the fringes of ignorance, scape-goating, poverty, bad-mouthing, scolding, jealousy, taking advantage, intellectual rape, cultural negligence as well as the usual power games and the almost self-ironic, cynical wallowing in pettiness and mediocrity, etc?

“the media is the message”, came to be known during my media art studies. like so many messages, mcluhan’s confident claim turned out to be also just a bubble of hot air. media without a message, does it exist? maybe, but what would be the point? a message surely requires a medium or a ‘carrier’ to be carried along.

messages are infinitely manifold, aren’t they, and they can be ‘created’ at will, at any time. as brain scientists are aware nowadays, thoughts are already messages, with matter emanating in the form of waves being 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.

what is the difference between a sales message and a benign message? here we’re approaching again eve and temptation territory. is it only the intelligible company logo in 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 subliminal or underhanded? what if the message is bold and true and sharp but at its core also graceful and solemn and ‘shockingly’ doesn’t actually ‘sell’ anything?

in the world that we live in, i think everyone would agree that messages have taken on the form of annoying noise persistently surrounding us. without meditation or a proper ‘shelter’, i guess, they’ve become inescapable and all-intrusive. come they not from papers and billboards, they’d be exchanged and sold as notions and opinions by friends and family and partners. who is right and who is wrong? what do we know anyway? what to talk about? when all is said and done, who truly, honestly believes that the whole purpose of human existence lies in the rewards and promises attained through the dogged execution of fundamentally laughable group canons?

is ‘art’ a benign message or trying to sell us something? is literature that has been filtered through a tightly kept agency system genuine knowledge and benevolent philosophical truth or is it hoodwinking me to the ‘other side’ through the intellectual preparation of a stir-fry of bullshit?

the grey zone in whose shade i was eventually meant to walk was what street art and street kids were doing ‘innocently’ on the one hand, and what high-end advertising and branding agencies were attempting on the other. my former path included getting to know both worlds, as vastly as they might be apart from each other, quite a bit. so my foray into the grey zones of visual presence amidst a closed-circuit machinery incessantly churning out deceptive group canons of fake reality was as follows:

step one was to find a quick and elegant way of leaving my messages in public places. the ‘crisis’ offered the timely backdrop of many abandoned or empty spaces that seemed more than perfectly suitable to serve as a carrier or medium.

step two was making sure that none of those messages would cause any tangible damage. blue tacking was the starting point. they should rather be casually left behind than methodically affixed. they should be able to be easily taken off by suppressors, cleaners, persecutors or the simply ‘offended’ without leaving any (or at least as few as possible) stains or traces.

step three was to walk a fine line with any material that i subsequently produced between somewhat sales messages, benign or graceful messages and sharp wake-up call messages. in short, to produce what i feel is ‘good art’.

step four was to rather than widely scatter mass-produced offset material, to selectively leave as presents hand-crafted pieces of art, to be regarded as sweet and / or mindful ‘gifts’ other than self-indulgent nuisances.

step five was to eventually ‘identify’ equally grey ‘supporters’ and thus give everyone whose paths i happen to cross a chance to take their stance by saying “hello” with cheeky gestures of ‘sticking’. while in turn it gave me a chance to ‘isolate’ and subsequently avoid those sites / individuals / entities / institutions who’d react to my ‘contacts’ negatively.

step six was to generally not do this in any underhanded way but to offer the courtesy of allowing a tracing back to the root from where those ‘gifts’ are coming from. (this was also ‘tempting’ everyone with the ‘freedom’ to persecute the already persecuted, should they feel inclined to take such a position).

step seven was to go about distribution without any stress or urgency but to do it whenever ‘fate’ called upon strolling any particular part of town (or out-of-town or any other town).

step eight was to establish a ‘brand’ which wouldn’t need any logo or particular origin in the long run but would represent more like an entirely different framework of thoughts and values where anyone could eventually get involved without the need to ever be an ‘official’ part of it. there were neither invisible nor open contracts and any support could at any point be as casually dropped as it could be endured, embraced or openly cherished.

step nine was enjoying the grey support that i eventually received (which turned out to be by far more than expected) and work through the pangs of anger, suppression and persecution that also occurred occasionally. as a general rule, i never took anything personal and never got worked up into some kind of obsession or frenzy while at the same time any boldness in my approaches was always left subject to considerate rationality and artful humour. “sticking but not sticking”. detachment was the key to everything that i did, anyway.

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IV. CLOSURE AHEAD

while jotting down the above lines i noticed that i’d started to somewhat slide into past tense here and there. considering the present unfoldment of events, it is probably true that my work in this regard has been done. we shall see.

in my heart i feel that i did find enough available gaps in the machine, and that i did achieve timely delivery of a message of ‘truth’ and upright ‘reasoning’ through successfully bypassing the complex web of lies and deceit – to eventually reach out to other kindred hearts and spirits that have had the wisdom, foresight and sharpness or for a long time even been ‘longing’ to hear. the rest, i guess, is up to everyone themselves.

after having assimilated myself to the great law of dafa for many years now, the jesus or messiah stuff that so many people have been programmed to believe in / pray for / hope for doesn’t seem to exist at all like they thought. and even if such magical / mystical figures would manifest at some stage, they’d sure to be fake just by the mere fact of having the ‘unrighteous’ audacity of claiming to be a / the new prodigious ‘saviour’. or by even going so far as to show-off any powers that would leave ‘ordinary’ people no other choice than the ‘gnashing of teeth’ that jesus in his time talked about or a more ‘modern’ televised jaw-dropping ‘awe and submission’.

instead, in closing this christmas 2012 exposition on the dangers of groups, crooked canons and the inevitability of subsequent persecution, i’d like to paraphrase from dafa that everyone has to pay themselves for whatever karmic debts they have accrued over the course of their present and past ‘incarnations’. within the dao of the great law, no one ‘is allowed’ to do it for them.

and that regardless of which saint or enlightened ones who’ve ever come down here to ‘save’ people, they’ve merely established a culture for what cultivation or the ‘law’ are really about. and for what exactly might be happening when the final moment arrives, the end of the end, the closure and the secret reason for the creation of this particular realm / dimension of the cosmos – heaven, earth, underworld or the so-called three realms.

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Reinhard Schleining
Vienna, 19th December 2012

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