Imaginations are running wild
“How strange when an illusion dies. It's as though you've lost a child.”
― Judy Garland
Nothing is more beautiful than lies, or uglier than the truth.
With a fictitious image in mind, we dress ourselves in the fanciest illusions to not only trick others but more importantly trick ourselves, creating narratives to conceal the unpleasantness of reality. Consequently, these false images generate alternative worlds and pluralities of “my truth,” which have taken root in the discourse of daily life leading to peril when “my truth” clashes with the unknowable absolute truth.
Imagination is a funny thing; nothing I described is or ever was “real.”
By some miracle, words popped out from my mind to a screen and then to another screen, constructing an internal image through the imaginative processes that discretely occur everyday but few take careful notice.
Are these internal images ever “real”?
In some way they are, they’d have to be to influence what we consider as physical reality, but the misinterpretation of these images as reality itself has become a serious problem, evermore more apparent through each passing day. When images are mistaken as truth itself, which is the issue I take with statements like “my truth,” we begin drifting further out into a brooding tempest storming over dark uncharted waters and our anchor, the truth, has been ignorantly left on shore.
What horrors await us? Sirens, or Monsters of the Deep?
The rulers and principalities of darkness are well aware of this mechanism.
In the allegory of Plato’s Cave, shadows cast on cave walls that fabricate reality for prisoners enslaved from childhood and are prevented from seeing much of the cave. The prisoners have been acclimated to accept the shadows as objective reality, which is carefully controlled by keepers of the flame who orchestrate a show much like professional puppeteers and playwrights.
Prisoners can only see what they’re shown, and the totality of what they see is reality.
According to Socrates, a freed prisoner would never believe the bright flame or objects casting their shadows were true reality. If a freed prisoner were dragged outside, they would be blinded by the sun and painfully rebuke their unfamiliar surroundings. Returning to the cave would also blind the prisoner, and the remaining captives would infer that the outside world was far too dangerous and likely kill anyone who would dare challenge the soothing shadows on the wall.
While an interesting allegory, humorously describing the psychology of a “normie,” there’s a subtle twist: How does one know that the world experienced outside the cave is in fact "the real world"?
Natural philosophy is possibly one of the most difficult subjects and likely why many outsource their thinking to an “expert class,” an educated elite who have recently replaced traditional clergymen and priests, the ones who have a closest connection to God, or in the case of scientism those with the closest connection to material reality.
After rejecting organized religions as mere shadows and vectors of control for the impudent sedated masses, the so-called enlightened are lured into the realm of objectivity with its temptatious promises to know and control the world through scientific technique. But the marvels of material progress create the greatest illusions of all since demonstrable results are undoubtedly the most convincing arguments, creating a state where many mistake their own mental processes as objectivity.
Followers of science are generally not practitioners of science, and through subjectivism masked as objectivism fall victim to carefully crafted illusions.
Tragically, one of the worst illusions is cast by the ego itself.
“Believe nothing of what you hear, and only half of what you see.”
— Edgar Allan Poe (1845)
From the material Maya to the great spiritual illusion, the Gnostics built on this view by extending the shadows to the entirety of material reality claiming this too was a grand deception architected by higher order spiritual beings.
But like every other idea, there’s no absolute certainty. Our models of reality are still mirages in the eye of the mind, and infallible human thought can never fully grasp the totality of the absolute, no matter how much advanced technology is invented. Under these circumstances a silent war has been declared to conquest and control material reality, leading us into the forbidden realms of darkness where those shadows dancing on the wall have becoming beings in their own rite.
What isn’t an illusion?
Actors, singers and celebrities all use false personalities to subdue their audiences, which isn’t a secret but somehow sedates sickening numbers of the population. Dramatizing their personal lives on social media, which is still a fiction, inflates this illusion even further; irresistible to the fanatically obsessed.
A show within a show, because nothing pacifies the ego like performative opiates.
And none of this crap is even real! But too many need it be real. Fictional stories and imaginary friends are for kids and should be discarded well before adulthood. Of course if the coldness, cruelty and ugly nature of reality can be opted out by playing pretend, then why not? It doesn’t matter if the actors, who appear to live hellish lives in reality, have made unspeakable and horrific sacrifices to obtain their glamour, because all that matters is the image and the addictive illusions those lies feed.
Not surprising when fiction has bled into everyday life.
Corporate organizational charts read like a star charts. A title and placement in a virtual tree turns a regular human name into a demigod, as if promotion and ascension into some non-physical hierarchy magically grants new authoritative powers, which are only realized through the images created in the minds of workers.
Daily I often find myself asking, what isn’t bullshit?
Not so different from the illusions built into entertainment and the workforce, politics crafts images in the frail minds of the public to support the thirsty ambitions of the ruling elite. And with the current state of affairs, the contrast has never been more dramatic. “Convicted felon” Donald Trump versus esteemed president Joe Biden. After the not-so-surprising gaffe of a “debate,” if you can even call it that, the media has taken the opportunity to declare that Biden is possibly not suitable for presidential candidacy; a fact anyone with a brain could easily see well before this farce.
For those who haven’t been paying attention in the last few years, the media really does manufacture consent. Brainwashing is real! Even if countless voters were aware of Biden’s condition, the media has now consented that opinion.
Media manufactures and provides consent as addictive shadows on the wall.
The fake political system should come as no surprise since our monetary system operates on the basis of imagination and word play. Once built on the exchange of tangible goods and services, our system has devolved into a trade of illusions using an illusory medium as exchange, and without media providing consent for that opinion, the masses will never hear our pleas for a return to sanity and soundness.
Frankly, this state of affairs is downright terrifying.
“The media's the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent, and that's power. Because they control the minds of the masses.”
— Malcolm X
Our modern society operates and relies on these images, shadows dancing on the wall, rather than competence, skill and honesty. Consider the common images of school, where you gain an education and get a job, which produces — what? — significant numbers of highly skilled workers in the workforce? Is that true?
Have you ever thought about what happens to most students entering a workplace?
Funny enough, the hiring process relies more on image than it does actual skill. What are your “credentials”? Which like “credit,” is another word for belief because the job market is almost entirely perception-based, and so you could have all the talent in the world but it must have a visible image for it to have marketable value. People will not buy what they cannot see, and the brighter the image the more likely the sale.
Naturally it should be no surprise that Prince’s Law, which claims that 50% of the output in a workgroup is performed by the square root of its workforce, mirrors what I’ve experienced personally. The majority of workers make up for their lack of skill by constructing images that lead to pointless meetings, middle managers fabricating mediocre bullshit, and let’s not forget about union representatives…
More energy is spent on images than producing real goods and services.
Whether people were unaware of Biden’s clear cognitive decline, or they felt they had consent once “public opinion” was disseminated, doesn’t matter, because what matters is the behaviour resulting from media programs. And that’s all this is, a series of programs for the mind. What someone thinks internally is irrelevant if their behaviour doesn’t coincide. Be mad at this hell world all you like, but if you do nothing about it then your resulting behaviour is the same as if you loved it. After all, program means “trained to behave in a predetermined way,” and it doesn’t matter if you believe the tax pays for the roads or it’s used as a system of control.
All that matters is behaviour.
Was the tax paid or not?
And so what’s the right behaviour? Well I’m no ethicist, but for me it’s the set of actions that produces the most harmony, nourishes life and aligns most with the truth. Whatever image supports that resulting behaviour is good enough for me because those are my values, and values are at the heart of this entire discord of events. What you choose to lend your attention to is what shapes the future.
What image do you want to see reflected in the world? What reality do you want to see? Do you want to see hunger, famine and poverty? Do you have the power to multiply a few loaves and fish? Ask yourself what images do you want to become real.
What you value and what you do are the only things that matter.
The illusions are and always have been mere transients.
For me, it’s time to plant potatoes.
Great point regarding Prince's Law. Today, it's likely that only half the workforce's square root is even competent. Excellence is no longer important. "The times, they are a-changing," the poet wrote.
So very good. I will now begin to read all of your missives. The understanding that our reality is formed by our thoughts is so profoundly and simply, true. That thought is something I have been squeezing into my brain-hole ever more over the past few years, reading from Schwaller de Lubicz to Evola and many points between (and now you!) and, of course, Walter Russell. The more I read of Russell, it seems the more I “find” others such as yourself and the more I see this concept — “[that] we sing the world into existence” — as being paramount. Excelsior, good sir! Or, perhaps, onward and back to the Iron Age!