The big news this week, last week, was the disclosure that an alien signal, a transmission, had been received in Russia and western scientists were now searching for more evidence of extraterrestrial contact from that sector. I will discuss what this means and how to contact aliens but it all relates to overcoming a cosmic "wall" so to make things easier I will first discuss the nature of walls in relation to some recent media magic. SKIP TO THE NEXT ALL CAPS TO READ ABOUT WALLS AND CONTACTING ALIENS.
I have not taken any notes since my last edition but did notice a number of noteworthy things and just hoped to remember them by the time I wrote this but I've been delaying for about a week. In that time there have been a few events I could have been "waiting for" to illustrate my points here but mostly I feel like I have been dragging this on instead of breaking through since I haven't made enough of a priority of writing these when they come to me and end up including too much. Regarding my love life I don't usually talk about it when things are wonderful, it's like bragging and I know she would prefer me to not talk about it at all - it is still very rare that she feels like acknowledging that we are together. And when things get tough enough and I don't feel like I have anyone to talk with, I will mention it here, but I feel like I am breaking faith with her if I do that and then go ahead and do it anyway because things are so bad at the time I don't care anymore or hoping my experiences could help someone else. But I realized last night that after rushing through "Sons and Lovers" because it was so intimate at a time when we were to busy to discuss the kinds of issues it raises as we might relate to them I started reading "The Tenant of Wildfell Hall" and can "relate" to it in many ways as well - but currently feel like the "Loss of Love" archetype has been something we have been "acting out" in our personal life more than actually losing love. It relates to what we deal with but is of course very different, just as I could see my lover, or myself, as either of two characters in a relationship and we trade roles in different contexts. I'm happy that I feel secure enough that we "can be" or are in love, without bragging about that and jinxing it, that I don't want to tie things into "my life" in this edition but you can see by what I focus on how it could relate. I'm just glad I don't feel the need to use this to work out a devastating problem in my own life but can hopefully use the information for helping anyone overcome that devastating problem of the feeling of a loss of love.
This is really intended to talk about aliens and alien contact. I apologize for going the "long way" around but I do believe the secret to overcoming "distance" relates to the secret of overcoming walls and discussing the nature of walls can make this easy. My lover was very busy with her career and preparing for Denver Pagan Pride which finally happened a week ago. I tried to understand that her obligations meant she had little time for me and tried to not take it personally but sometimes I didn't do that well and felt I was being shut out so I was sensitive in recent weeks to various mentions of the "walls" we make between us. I would like to say, now, that the distance we felt was all due to "time" and "business" and of course that is not all there is to it, but let me act like it was to avoid making this personal. I guess I can't be surprised that I end up revealing more of my personal life here than I usually intend, considering Life and Art are like multiple personalities of the same identity and I'm reading a book where the male lover writes all his closest confidence in letters to his friend then the female lover writes all hers in a diary she gives him, therefore Us (and his letter-reading friend) and so I end up doing more of the same than ever before in these pages in the time period I have been reading it. Gaga and Taylor broke up, as far as I know, in this time, too, and I have absolutely no speculations about her love life but hope these musings could help her or any of millions of others who suffer from feeling any sort of "division" from love. And even more than that I believe these lessons about overcoming walls can help Billions of us even when the walls are of other kinds, including the vastness of space of economic disparity, and aren't seen specifically as obstacles to Love.
From the magical perspective where Everything is Love and Magic, of course any wall is part of a barrier to Love. So this is how to overcome and take them all down, how to turn walls into bridges. How to overcome trolls, or satisfy them so they are no longer trolls haunting the memory of spaces that bridges have since spanned. First some mentions of "walls" from my TV viewing about a week ago. It started in Paradise, Bachelor in Paradise. Jen said that Nick had a wall that would not come down, that if he would let his wall down and let her in,emotionally, she could fall in love with him, marry him, etc, but as it was going she didn't think it would work. To me and I assume much of the audience his "wall" seemed to be made of "he's still 'in love' with Amanda" (or more likely in a "contest" with Josh), using Jen as a placeholder or to try to make her jealous, to make himself feel good without opening up to her, like a nice shirt or hat he is proud to have "won" and wear for status but not a relationship. Basically he isn't in love with anyone just strongly seeking the idea of a good connection to preserve an image and in this way he reminds me of Evan and Jared who seem to "only like girls because they think they're supposed ta" as Fry's grandad said on Futurama. I could go off on a tangent about "walls" versus "boundaries" in sexuality, and I could have gone off on another tangent about how the diary-letter-reader-writing we do in "Wildfell Hall" can be used to explore the "I and I and I" idea. Let me just say this: we all have natural boundaries but it is a collective social stigma that tries to make "walls" between people such as "all gays over here and all straights over here" or "men on this side, women on this side" (don't worry, I'll leave restroom tangents for someone else). But we personally use those "wall materials", even if we don't believe in or agree with society's rules, we use the same "bricks" to wall ourselves off in more unique ways. We may reject sexism and homophobia in society but end up with some of their refuse as barriers between us and other people. We may, for ourselves anyway, have broken down the "walls" of society but we can still stumble upon the rubble or even end up stacking it up around us.
Grant told Lace she had a wall and as they were getting closer she popped it up to shut him out, flirting with other Paradisers (or Paradiers and the typo faeries just suggested to me - good joke - parodiers) to make him angry. Walls make people angry, you know? Not that there is a "reason" or excuse for anger, just that is how it works. I just read Helen (Wildfell Hall) say how important it was to curb her temper, that she was glad she was as good at it as she is and planned to get even better at it to deal with the life she was in. I'll smoke the first bowl of the morning to that, since Anger has been my major malfunction as well and weed can be one of the best guards against it, allowing us to see things differently and overcome wounds of pride which are so often the seeds of anger. Or the seeds of walls, even if those walls are not "anger." For Lace, she was afraid of Love and intimacy, afraid to lose herself too much in love and, like most everyone, had developed a tough exterior or shell to guard her heart against hurt or disappointment. She tells Grant she did not know nice guys like him existed, implying all her dates before were jerks. This wall is to keep out jerks, but I still have it, even if you are not a jerk, and running into it makes you feel like a jerk, so what do we do to either get you the "I'm not a Jerk" key of Trust or dismantle the wall somehow by realizing I no longer need it? The first is the "easy" way, to fall in love with someone, and is still challenging enough for most everyone. The more mystical option which we all end up taking, at least slightly, but we might grow more by really going for it, is to become in love with everything. Learning how to remove personal walls can be great practice for removing them for the whole world but not everyone will realize that as a goal or feel that is their responsibility but the best love does lead to these conclusions and ambitions as well. "Merely" personal love might re-arrange some walls from "between you two" to "around you two" but that seems more like a silly hypothesis than anything that actually happens - when everything is truly connected you can't Only Extra-connect two things.
I don't want to do the full "I and I and I" tangent but I do want to leave a clue: Psychadelics make you easily see this in the mirror but you can do it anytime if you try. Let your eyes "see through you", unfocus until you see three eyes in the mirror. The middle one is the image of both of the others, seen by both at the same time. It is "one" being made by the merger of two, or four and this "one eye" doesn't really exist without the others, the additional "I and I" yet it is the only "one" where they all meet, and you can "fall back from it" to either side, into your face where it is your left eye or your face where it is your right eye, and I can't begin o describe all you can do "zooming" in and out from one channel of light into another or back around full circle. I'll just say this, for now: all consciousness is in your eye, and in your other eye, in a different order. Being able to merge them allows you to see all of it at once and also the differences in the "codes/orders" reveals the nature of Illusions, too. Either seeing others as "more you" - kind of like we can kind of assume everyone in our dreams are all "in our head" and also kind of know that's not fully true - or seeing yourself as more Yous than you can imagine, as everyone else, too, can open up the ideas of this. And this kind of thinking certainly makes walls obsolete, but for "safety" sake let me talk about it some more in the way people who still believe in walls, who aren't fully merged, can understand better.
Lace had a "typical" wall up: Here is "Too Close", here is where I have been hurt before when I felt someone share this space with me, felt the bliss of that, then felt alone. This is not a temporary space, if you truly come here, you never leave. This is Love, this is forever, you don't pass through for a weekend of a month. I don't mean this is "typical" in a bad way, like it is mundane or ordinary, it is one of life's most fantastic quests, the trials for Love. I am just saying it is typical because a lot of people feel this way. Nick has a typical wall, too, of a different kind. I didn't see his first season but I saw the season where he came on a week or two later than all the other guys which gave him kind of a game-cheater, thinks he's better than everyone else image and he was "the bad guy" for that season. Maybe it relates to trying to shake that image but either way I see him as someone who has professed love to multiple girls on national TV. I don't find fault with that, in principle, and I imagine I could end up doing something very similar to that in some ways because I do love people and seek to love people with less and less restriction. But of course Nick was trying to tell each of them that they were "the girl" for him and it naturally becomes harder to believe with repetition to other girls. Was he trying to tell Jen that? No, he was showing that he could "hold back", that he did not have to say "I'm falling in love with you" every time. He's showing America that he does not have to say "I love you" to everyone. But Jen is the only one who should Really matter to him - "my religion is you" and she is the one who wants him to say that SHE is actually the one for him and he can forget all about Amanda and Jojo and whoever else when he is with her. But of course he "can't" forget about Amanda because she is there and his ego still smarts from "losing" her to Josh. The problem is he still cares about that, he hasn't realized what a tool it makes both him and Josh to treat people like prizes to be won or fought over. Jen is really sexy, beautiful, smart and communicative and could be very easy to fall in love with and certainly seems willing to fall for Nick, she just needs him to stop putting up a wall. But he can't because he is "all wall" in this relationship. He's just acting like he isn't still "In Love" with Amanda, which is hard because he still "has to" have concern for her as a friend that she does not end up with Josh (when the more self-reflective person would realize he and Josh are treating her the same way, like a possession, and either of them would have to change to be good with her) and his whole "image" going into the relationship with Jen was just his "mask" of "I'm not still hurting over Amanda, etc" and "I do really like girls, honest, I just have to pick the Only One for me before I fall in love so I can't have any more of these pesky 'second-thoughts'" - but for some reason he never gave Jen the chance to be "that girl", obviously because, for whatever reason, he is still "holding out" for someone else, maybe Amanda, maybe Jared, maybe someone we haven't even seen on TV, or not yet.
I know I'm being very snarky about Nick and maybe it's because I can relate to him and feel silly for times I spent missing awesome opportunities for love by insisting that there was only One person for me, or that I knew certain specifications about who that person would be. Let me address this from the next angle, from Family Ties. That same night, a week or two ago, after watching the Bachelor in which Nick and Lace's walls are On Display, I saw some blueprints of Alex P. Keaton's Wall. Before I go back to the 80's I should mention Carly's wall she kept up towards Evan - "it doesn't look good for my image or reality TV stock to be with the dorky Penis guy whom no one finds attractive" - but I won't. Or I could address Iggy's "you're kicked out, Vinnie and you don't get to stay even though you are hilarious, Daniel, because he has a Lamp and Temper and no sense of humor or actual affection, THAT's more my kind of challenge." Or Vinnie's "she was my only chance, the only one for me, I couldn't possibly consider anyone else" or Jared's "this sexy twin wants to make out with me but I have to maintain my cold devotion to someone who doesn't in order to prove 'sex' isn't a factor to the Super-Nice, Super-L, Super-(non-sexual)-Lover - I can't be swayed from The One by 'mere sex' with anyone else" or "I'm too 'nice' to let you move on and too 'nice' to have sex with you without The One-ing you so just be obsessed about me, which I will find irritating, even though you're a million times hotter than any girl who would even talk with me in real life, I am scared of your passions because to me having sex with a girl is just something you're supposed to do with as little 'result' as possible so can anyone fix me up with a Barbie doll, like, an actual doll?" I guess I resent Jared's popularity more than any of them because he is Such a dork, but gets credit for it, like I may be dorkier but no one gets excited by that and in some ways I may be less dorky and that's not impressive, either. But the worst thing about him is I recognize this idea, because I used to suffer from it, that sex is somehow wrong or so important you can't go for it without a REALLY good reason like she is the Only Girl you could possibly love, which just sounds closet-gay when I type it now. I know I used to feel that way. Now I can't imagine I would turn down Emily if she wanted to make out with me if I didn't have a lover that such actions would upset. It's that simple, but I will move on.
Anyway, the same night the Walls came up on the Bachelor there were two episodes of Family Ties that stood out to me. The first was Alex's last day of high school. He and his girlfriend were studying for their final exam but kept making out. He was preparing to give his valedictorian speech then is surprised when she becomes valedictorian instead of him. He is jealous and upset, disappointed, and I believe it is the end of their relationship because he can't get over it. It hurts his pride and egotism and challenges the basis for his superior and sexist ideas - which should be the easiest part to overcome, this would be the chance to realize his sexist ideas were wrong, proof of it since he surely thinks of himself as one of the smartest males, to be second-place academically to a female. The whole idea, the lesson he could learn if he was truly as smart as he pretends, is that sexism and his other superior, ego-driven ideas are wrong. Once he started to question and deal with that he could break down the other things that hold him back. The problem is that for Alex, like most of us, the problems that hold him back are "him", they are part of his own identity. He would change his beliefs and change who he is if he started to change, for love, and this is exactly what he is afraid of, becoming who he really could be. Love is the path to becoming, it will demand we change and improve. We have to in order to stay in love. Alex chooses to leave the Love behind instead of facing this challenge, instead of growing, and too often we all make this choice. This is the choice of putting up a wall, of "hiding yourself away" as Kevin Seconds sings, and it is the obstacle to Love. Everything is truly love and everything between it is walls and while they seem necessary, for a time, ultimately they must all come down because the true world of love will prevail. In the meantime we each have our own versions to practice with.
The next episode of Family Ties that night Alex was older, even after college, maybe, and was dating Monica, or whoever Cortney Cox is on that show. They are going to couples therapy since Alex has such an emotional wall up and one of the other couples includes a "Hey"-talking guy played by Billy Baldwin, I think. Alex hates it but decides to study up on what the group therapy folks want to hear and is a smashing success the next session when he dramatically announces he is repressed and hugs almost everyone to show he's trying to overcome it but of course it is all an act. When they really get into it to try and address his true fears it turns out she has some doubts, too. I can't remember the resolution but there is a parallel between Alex merely acting the role of realizing he is repressed and her acting the role of "relationship" when she is studying to be a therapist. Now I kind of wish I had taken notes after all since there was a subtle clue there, something about the wall, "his" wall, protecting both of them from what they did not want to face - maybe that they were at the end of their relationship. Maybe that's why I forgot it, because I don't want to face that in my own life.
My friend told me that maybe my problem, getting into some arguments recently with my lover, is that you never want to compare yourself to people on the Bachelor. I see the point but also see how easy it is to see mistakes when others make them and how it can help to relate those to your own life and want to fix your own mistakes, but only if you have the space to do so. Otherwise arguing about something that happened on TV when nothing really happened is a waste of time. Having said that "all of this" could be a waste of time but I feel a magical use for it. I truly feel the connection between events in my life and various art and media I encounter. I want to finish a book once I begin it because it is engaging as a story but also because I want to move past that point in my life - or I want to read it slowly and savor it. This is the reason I was slow reading Lorna Doone, wanting to savor the parts of my life that had me writing fairy tales regularly, and rushed through Sons and Lovers - I felt there were lessons there I simply could not address, did not have the right time for, and needed to come back to, like taking a pass on a game show. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall was in between: I don't want it to drag on, I want to get past all this part about why they can't be in love or why she fell out of love with her husband and will be glad enough to escape those threats in my own life. But I am also enjoying it at a regular pace, not trying to rush through it, just because it is an enjoyable story. But when I remember I have Black Elk Speaks, which I have only just begun but feel it's magical power immensely, and Morrissey's Autobiography, in hardcopy at the top of my list and maybe 60-something more Classics on my "100 Classic Books" DS game after this - I want to finish it. But I have to finish this, too, this writing. I feel like I will likely write at least one more while reading "Wildfell Hall" because I think, hope, the story will return and transform around the current romance. And I feel like the last year, or two, I've been veering off-track in life and in this gagablog in the same way I never read the Artpop lyrics but said I would write about each song, as I heard it, first, then a year ago went off on a tangent from that because I was waiting for more "Sexxx Dreams" to use as illustrations. In that year I had at least two dreams featuring Gaga, mystically, and did not "connect" and push through that edition. Then in recent months I had a few dreams with other girls in them, in somewhat sexy contexts, but didn't use that as enough to get me back on track. While working things out to be more in love with my lover, through risky times, I've also ended up recording some of our best songs so far for Foxzen recently and getting more story ideas. I just have to get into the habit of making the art that occurs to me, more, and get all this other stuff out of the way. That's why I wanted this to be about walls, in order to break through them and learn how to get rid of them.
Alex tries the traditional approach of therapy to address his issues but he "outsmarts" the system by putting on an act. We all do this throughout life. Life itself, and all the art and media we see, is potential lessons to learn. We avoid the work and feel we "cheat" or outsmart the system by putting on a mask that is over the wonder and curiosity about the world, an uncaring mask that keeps love out and makes change less likely. This mask is basically what we think of ourselves, our intellect. When we see magic, or love, it's like an escape hatch, a trapdoor, out of this maze of walls. I see them all the time in these little magical occurrences: I said something weird but nice to my lover and she replied "I'll take that as a compliment" and at the exact same time, on a TV commercial, in chorus with her words the actor said "take that as a compliment" - and I'm glad that happened and thank the fairies for it because she was kind of saying it dubiously when it came out of her mouth but when it came out of the TV, too, at the same time it seemed to magically confirm that it was, indeed, a compliment. I did not take notes but I did leave two bookmarks in my electronic copy of Wildfell Hall so I will check those now before moving on to contacting Aliens. The latest was on my page 1881 where he says "Helen, you witch, do you know you've entailed upon me the curses of all my fiends?" when he tells them of their engagement, since they bemoan losing the first Bachelor of their complete set. I think I noted it because of the word "witch" but first let me say, regarding his "wall" that this is a prime example of how to build one, to prioritize "friends" or social standing over one's Lover. Religion, Love, is what brings us together - the literal meaning of religion is to Re-unite. Helen hopes her purity of purpose will redeem Aurthur but he does not have the same goal, his religion is not Her as she tries to make hers Him, but of course only the most Loving example of Religion would bring them together, or the same value of love, and he only seems to be focused on the value of love as a thrill and pleasure and is afraid of the changes he would need to make, the loss of walls, to enjoy the deeper thrills and pleasures of it with Helen. But there is always that chance and even where they are now in my reading, living together but completely out of love, she still holds out that hope for him and would forgive him because as the one who never ceased to love him at that deepest level, beyond walls, she believes she knows his true heart is still with her. And the truth is we are all together, in love, and the pain of it is when we believe we can only be there with "that" person and can't be with them for whatever reason, because of whatever wall there is. Now the reason I left the bookmark was because of the word "witch" and how that has always been a direct clue to something magical - I noted that almost every classic book I have read in the last year or so have all had some mention of a "witch." The first time it happened in this book was the very first pages where the main character's brother hopes the Tenant of Wildfell Hall is a witch because that would be exciting. Now it comes up again, calling her a witch for casting the spell of love upon him, as it were. The truth is that this love-spell could be his way out of the despair that his own flaws will lead him into. The truth is that witches, magic, have been presented as "scary" by this society because society is afraid to change, afraid to lose the walls that make it what it is. But we have to change, we have to come together. Artists tell us we need to and we believe them and are inspired by them but we still fear actually going through it. Magic, love, art - when we actually get into it and do it - is that reconnection, the motivation, energy, and process of reconnecting all in one. And we get better at it but the whole process of getting better is the path and starts coming together quickly, conspiring to help us along.
I'm glad I bookmarked this because now, somehow, it reminded me of a conversation last week at Denver Pagan Pride. A man asked me about witches and magic because he was afraid some bad folks had put a curse on him and he wanted to escape it. He used the Wizard of Oz as an analogy and it gave me an easy way to talk with him, to connect with him and use a vocabulary he could understand to talk about magic. Maybe it helped remind me of this just yesterday I put in the Robots DVD when I have not seen that movie in years and there was a Tin Man extra who did a Yellow-brick-road skip with some other robots, then a little dog runs up, and at the end makes a "Now I know I have a heart..." comment - and I probably saw a few other Oz references this week, including some nice art at the comic shop, but that is the one that stood out. I just bring it up to show how magic comes up like a clue and works like a secret passage.
The first bookmark was on my page 515, Rose lamenting what her mom tells her is the way things should be, which I felt must be at the core of the problem for the whole society and the rest of the story. Mom tried to teach her that "in all household matters, we have only two things to consider, first, what is proper to be done, and, secondly, what's most agreeable to the gentleman of the house - anything will do for the ladies." When the mom asks Gilbert, the "hero" of the story, if he agrees with this "very good doctrine" he basically says it works for him but would be better if she took more thought for her own pleasure because it does concern him and makes him happy. This makes him a "good guy", in this era. I guess the only reason I want to mention it, now, is to say it is "society first" that sets the structure that allows the sexist preference for one gender to exist. Its the way walls work and are used that perpetuates any oppressive system or personal arrangement that's why this will be about getting rid of all of them, once I get into it. Thanks for your patience.
I didn't bookmark it but there was one more page I wanted to mention. My friend came by one day last week and had watched a documentary about Syd Barret. A few weeks ago I watched some of a David Gilmore show at a hotel, then a couple weeks ago I think I played "The Madcap Laughs", but Pink Floyd was not on my radar other than that, recently. One of the things he reported from the documentary was that Syd had been reading a lot of Tolkein and Casteneda in those days. I've read them myself and started to see a connection, a lesson for me, emerging and then later that day or the next day I read a page in "Wildfell Hall" where Aurthur calls Helen his "petty tyrant." This couldn't be "mere coincidence" to me, especially considering the timing of these "encounters." I assume Don Juan had read this book, or the phrase had become somewhat commonplace - just now was the first time I considered that it might have been a commonplace phrase when Anne Bronte wrote it, I assumed she invented it until now. Anyway, I know it was in use before Castenda mentioned it, and to me that changed the way I think about it somewhat. It certainly expands my understanding of how a petty tyrant can be "not just bad." I guess I thought I was insightful to use the idea of a petty tyrant to describe anyone who makes trouble for you, since seeing those challenges as a way to grow allows you to stay positive in the face of them. If I can have that same positivity when dealing with the struggles involved in being in love I can see my lover as the positive "petty tyrant", so much more powerful by "ruling by love" than one who rules by force, the way you wish Arthur could see Helen so he could be inspired to live up to her ideal and change, for love. Generally I don't want to use his words, he's a cad, but if you take it to mean "ruler" instead, as Lorde wants to be, Queen Bee, or the Queen, the G.U.Y. who "aims for full control of this love" as Gaga sings, it's a very desirable thing.
Altogether Love is the much stronger motivator than fear but Love can be so scary, itself, from where we all live "on the outside" that we choose to face petty old fears instead to distract ourselves from the harder challenge of loving. We focus on fear of loss of security or other more abstract fears. We make walls to deal with the fears for us, move on to other fears and leave a labyrinth of walls behind us until no one can find us and we can't find our way out. Love, magic, is shortcuts and trapdoors through all of this and we encounter them all the time, it's just a matter of learning how to make the most of them - and how to recognize them in all the strange forms they must take to sneak up on us, camouflaged, in this world of walls.
I know I teased all about how this would describe how walls were made, how to get rid of them, and how to contact aliens. I feel like I've been talking around it all, about the why we need to do this, to fall better in love, and need to get right down to the How. I was going to start this way but felt all the media stuff would be seem more pointless, afterwards, so I went ahead and wrote that first. But here we go, I will make a shortcut at the start, too.
SKIP TO HERE TO READ ABOUT WALLS AND CONTACTING ALIENS. Ok, those were all some clues from "this side", now I will write from the Other Side of this Cosmic Wall I'm describing.
What do all walls do? Physical or emotional or "financial" - whatever theoretical Barriers there are, they all do the same thing. They keep something out or in. They provide limited access via doors, gates, etc. Why do they make separation? Because one side of the wall enjoys advantages denied to the other side. In a world where everything, everyone, is truly connected, since we all share the same fate and Buddhism, etc, this mass of barriers makes no sense, it wastes a lot of energy, or consumes a lot of energy to perpetuate itself. Walls are silly things made of fear. Fear is silly to begin with and when it is taken too seriously it becomes more solid than it really is, than anything really is, it becomes a wall. We have the classic worldwide examples of fearmongers trying to sell us actual walls between countries, jail walls between people, and various values of real estate, etc. There is an island for sale off the coast of Florida and as loving as I claim to be even I kind of want to buy it, we're just trained to be that way. And we have our own countless examples of walls we put up between ourselves and others. It goes on and on, believe it or not I did not mention every episode of TV where this idea comes up when I wrote all of that above, just a few examples from one day. Love stories are about people's triumph over these walls. The negative progress of civilization can be measured in number of walls built and the positive progress can be measured in number of unneeded walls being removed. There is a cosmic barrier between us and the other intelligent life in the universe and the same methods of "wall-removal" can and must be applied to break through them. So how does it work?
First you might as well recognize the magical reality of what science calls a holographic universe: everything is truly interconnected, everything is even within everything else according to a pattern or code that confounds our ideas of Time and Space as separate. Or, we have an illusory pattern or code which perpetuates the experience of time and distance and keeps us from seeing the true, all-present reality - but of course we get infinite glimpses of it. The contact with a civilization 95 light years away and the way the story was reported in our earthly media gave me the clues to this Cosmic Wall between us. First, the contact was made in May by the Russians but it didn't become a news story in America until our scientists got on the hunt, apparently, in late August. Right off the bat this shows one of the fallacies characteristic of living on this side of the cosmic wall, "outside" (or incarcerated) of the understanding of interconnectedness - the idea that something is not happening unless it is happening to you, or unless you can prove it. It shows how much time is wasted that I suppose they first had to see if there were good reasons to doubt the signal, since the last time one of these instruments detected a radio-signal from space, or whatever it was, it turned out to be "two microwaves in the office talking to each other" creating some interference. (To me, re-reading this, that sounds more like an alien disguise, like fairy-glamor to appear as a flower or other creature.) So now, three months later, the news came out here and they are saying our scientists are looking into it, too. Maybe it did make the news in may, Maybe it "just happened to be" overshadowed by the news that the Russians had hacked the DNC, if that was around then - just a hunch, and I like the suggestion of "scale" of things to "worry about" since at the time the news was making it out like the story was "those naughty Russians" when most of us wanted to know, earlier, what Hillary was up to. And of course alien contact kind of trumps both angles and at the same time goes with the "reveal the truth, no matter who does it" theme, certainly. Of course they don't want to jump to conclusions before they can verify it but it also just shows how strong that wall between nations is that we can't just be happy for the Russians and proud of their discovery, even hopeful for it to be true, as soon as it first happens, even if it will take us a while to get everything together to start trying to verify it an make "our own" contact. In the future, if this is the first contact with Earth from another planet, no one will look back on it and be sad it was "The Russians" who picked up the phone, they will just be glad for all of us that we finally got the call.
I feel like I got dragged back into talking about things from "this side" of the cosmic wall just because I wanted to make that dig at Trump's wall, which he recently, allegedly, discussed with the President of Mexico, I think, to make fun of him, and I didn't even do it. The point is that walls are silly, they "protect" us from the other side which we deem unworthy of being with us. Maybe they are there because of the way things have been but assuming they will always be there is assuming people will never change and improve, or insisting that some people don't deserve the avantages that can make life improve. We are outside of a Cosmic Wall which leaves us out of contact with the "privileged" people in the universe. But we can change and improve and be part of that. To do so we must remove the walls within us - this is using holographic reality. We want to break the barrier "around us", in "Space", but must realize the way to do this is within, by breaking the barriers that keep us apart and steal our energy to maintain their own unnatural, isolating system. I realized this applies to the universe when I heard the earthly scientists speculations on how much energy it would require to send the signal they detected. I don't remember the term, some name like Kardashian, and they said it would take a Kardashian Level 2 civilization, or something, to send a signal that strong in all directions. This means that the energy required for them to send this signal this far in all directions would be so great they would have to be able to harness the energy of their entire solar system, an incredible, ridiculously impossible amount of energy. Or, they could be a Kardashian Level 1 civilization, if they could harness all the energy that fell on their planet from the stars, like if we were completely covered in completely efficient solar panels - that would be the energy level required to send a signal in only one direction, towards us, but have it strong enough to reach this far, 95 light years away. All of this seems impossible but the main thing it says to me is that "this is the way we understand it from this side of the Cosmic Wall." Because we obviously don't understand something about the way they send the signal and the energy requirements for it, and why should we understand as the "inferior" people in this regard? When people put up a wall it is based upon the idea that the other "can't be like them." It becomes true, walls make people angry and resentful and even want to fight or give into base character traits to overcome the wall. But the best way to overcome a wall is to show how everyone deserves to be together because there is no real inferiority or superiority, only what has been created by walls of fear and reactions of misunderstanding.
We have not shown that we can be trusted to communicate with the rest of the universe, but we can. The whole idea that a signal must be sent in a direction, like a bullet, or in all directions, like an exploding bomb, is a symbol of how our understanding is limited by our own trolled beliefs about ourselves. Of course if it would take that much energy to send a signal the main ways we can think of sending one, they didn't do it like that. They did it another way and we can't expect to figure out how until we know more about how it works and the only way to do that is to escape the ways we assume it works and open up to new possibilities, what you could call looking for a magical solution or inspiration, a eureka moment. If we can put aside nationalistic boundaries to work on this, together, in a way we somehow never managed to do in response to the self-threat of climate change we created, we can make a lot of progress towards discovering how intergalactic communication really works. Even better, at the same time overcoming those differences can finally result in the end of war and spare us all the death, suffering, and expense that war keeps causing for us. We have to show that we want to be together, with ourselves, in order to reveal our inner character which deserves to be together with the rest of the universe. In a way, as an Infant Civilization, we have all been enacting the same temper tantrum throughout history, trying to show we are clever and powerful enough to be exclusive to one another in order to join the ranks of the Celestial Snobs, because we think that is what they require for membership. In fact, the magical understanding of working through opposites should reveal that this very process of trying to prove the worthiness of exclusivity has been what is causing our own exclusion and by practicing inclusion, instead, we will reach the point where we will be included in Celestial Society. It's not that they are snobs, it's that we have been on this misguided quest for superiority that makes us unfit to associate with, we're too distrustful and violent. And that distrust and violence has been built into the system and is part of the security of the well-off. It's the reason Kapernick is bravely protesting the National Anthem and, in contrast, getting swept up into perpetuating the system is why Obama cowardly criticizes him. But if we listen to our true hearts that yearn to be together and overcome all divisions we will. It's a tension towards and away from togetherness and what always pulls us apart is fear. It's either fear of the "other", which becomes established as foundations of the system in walls, or fear of our own change which makes us take comfort behind walls ourselves. I used a national, issues example but you can say the same thing about relationships. We do desire to be together but the tyranny of how things have been, of our own issues and mistakes, or the dictates of how society says they have to be, can pull us apart if we give into those instead of staying true to the quest for love. If we can cut out the things in society that make us violent and distrustful to each other, if we can get through fears in relationships so we can make the most of love between the most people, if we can end systems of oppression based on fears and overcome walls and borders, we can free up the energy and innovation to speak to the heavens and speak heavenly to each other. It is all part of the same thing and we just need to get into it to see how it brings us all together.
It's easy to imagine a time in the near future when we have contact with alien people. Such an event would make us feel "more alike than not alike", even more than that iPhone commercial. I thought we would start to feel that way after scientists determined that all modern humans were generally from one type of humanity amongst many different human types, most of whom died out as far as we know. But contact with aliens would make us all feel our "sameness" even more directly for having a different kind of "other" to relate to. I believe we will find more in common with aliens than we expect, too, especially when we become our better selves and are able to relate to each other, and others, in the best and most respectful possible ways. I was going to say it is easier to imagine a time when we have contact with aliens than to imagine people in one country having fearless contact with people of other countries whom they deem "aliens" but that is just because the Force of Racism is so strong with this one, America, and too many other places. I think they reversed the Brexit vote because they realized that being motivated by these "fears of aliens" led to decisions that were bad for everyone. Hopefully we can realize that everywhere. When you look at Aliens as a symbol of the more interconnected future, like witches or magic, you can see how our fear of them hold us back in the same ways our fear of love holds us back. If we can trust someone to make contact with them and trust ourselves and be trustworthy to make contact, we will. This goes for the "alien" others from other countries, planets, or the other side of the bed.
There was another commercial running recently I wanted to mention, about a cable service, where the kid is giving a speech and says "the only thing we have to fear is Buffering" - because her internet was too slow to properly do the homework, is the idea, and "buffering" popped up. She gives a great, impassioned delivery, but it stuck out to me for another reason. Fear is an illusion. Fear is the product of illusory ideas about each other that come from this system of controlled misperception. Fear is the idea that some people, some kinds of people, can't be trusted, an unwillingness to realize that all signs of distrust are the products of the system putting people at a disadvantage, forcing people into bad conditions that unduly try their natures and create systems to bring out the worst in people. Fear is based upon the idea that people and conditions can't change. It perpetuates itself because once we start working through it, dismantling the system that is made from it, it will all go away. But it isn't real, the real life of harmonious acceptance will replace it. And we keep making progress towards that change. We know we can move past fear, we know we can change and live together better. The only thing holding us back is the worldly power and momentum of that fear and it's ability to put obstacles in the way of change. Trump represents the momentum of outdated, unneeded worldly power, perpetuating itself to no good end, and Hillary represents the ability to put obstacles in the way of change in the very name of change. But personally we believe in the worldly power structure and compromise ourselves to give into it, to play the game, and our minds are mostly trained to distrust the magical opportunities to escape it, love and magic and art. When fear is seen as an illusion, one destined to fade away as we make more progress and change more for the better, the only thing keeping us back is the barrier to change, the "buffering." I assume a computer buffers a signal so too much change does not happen at once. This is what our troll-politics have been doing so expertly lately that it's too obvious to even talk about. They act like "we" can't handle too much change, making things too much better, all at once. All that's actually going on is this false system's last attempt to perpetuate itself, acting "too big to fail" when they already failed their most basic principle, democracy, in order to keep things this way.
Bridges are the opposite of walls. Where there were natural obstacles before a bridge helps you over it. Where there was something we made for one purpose that hurt another, a bridge helps reconnect the old purpose. The reason trolls live under bridges is bridges represent progress and the troll represents the lingering "need" for an obstacle or opposition. A internet troll, or someone trolling you in real life, or the way Helen's husband and mistress are trolling her in Wildfell Hall, knows something good, is maybe jealous of something good, and tries to ruin it by insisting on something bad, a lie or a petty action. All progress is good but some people can't let go of the old way, when things were hard, and in bitterness want to make things hard for everyone else, even though it is just them doing it, now, it's not necessary for any reason other than the flaw of ego, trying to maintain a wall where a bridge should be, or openness. We keep paying their tolls, all the trolls that hold us back, just so we can forget about them and move on. But that dooms them to doing it over and over again. We need to find a way to convince all trolls that their true life does not lie under bridges, trying to make them like walls for people instead. Their true life lies in moving on, maybe even coming with us, to the other side of the bridge.
We have the first contact with aliens but we can't figure it out. It's like we saw a light over the cosmic wall and so far all we can think is how to punch through to get to it, we haven't even looked around for a gate yet. But just knowing someone is over there can be enough motivation to try new ways of getting to them. Knowing we will, ultimately, meet, and imagining what that will be like, and how we will possibly be very good at it if we can't practice first on meeting other earthlings with more respect should be enough to inspire us to work towards the goal of togetherness, it should be a good sign. Of course just like our own potential with robots and AI some will project our own current flaws upon the others, assuming no one can live without violence or something, and try to scare us away from the Future. Just like our limited understanding thinks the only way aliens could send a signal is with our kind and amounts of energy and in directions we would think about. But we will discover it by improving ourselves and the discoveries will all increase our improvement as well.
I feel like I am paying a toll, in a way, by writing these, just as I feel like I am paying a toll by reading and watching shows while looking for a message for me, a lesson I can take to help move on to a new realm. My own issues and reservations have been trolling me, I can relate to them through characters and also be reminded of how these same forces troll the world. But my best chance is to overcome them in myself and I know that will involve not just reading great stories and writing these but writing great stories myself, pulling the whole process together like seeing two eyes merge into the third. And I know I will but need to use that knowledge and faith not to sit back comfortably and wait for the stories to find me but to do whatever I can to find the ways to them. I have had great pleasure and success learning this lesson in music, allowing myself to make songs even when I'm not feeling my very best and realizing that the process always makes me feel better and the goal is "beyond me", in the realm of love, anyway. I was reminded of how Carly on the Bachelor in Paradise says that her love with Evan is not just the best love she has ever felt but the best anyone has ever felt. Love isn't a place to be jealous or a contest, I could hear part of myself, the jealous part, say "no way your love is as great as mine is or was at it's best!" but the Loving part of me said "yep, that's it, that's how it feels, you're on the right track, anyway." And who knows how true their love is, or if that is even a thing, but you can see how she only got to feel that way by getting over her hold-ups about him and even if it doesn't end up as "all that she hoped" you can at least tell it was a good thing for both of them, it was progress towards becoming more who they can really be. We can all open up in more ways like this, maybe in more dramatic ways, maybe in more simple ones. Once we try we will find much more is there.
How do we get past the Cosmic Wall that keeps us from communication with other planets? We realize we are already in contact with them, spiritually, and the same lessons we learn in this realm apply to working out the "differences" in that one, but we have to go for it. Being able to see things from the cosmic perspective can help us see how and where to go for it but free will demands that we not be told what to do so we have to earnestly seek that connection to crack the code and get the directions. The good news is the code is in everything but we have to be flexible and open enough to consider things more than we tend to, to look for those deeper connections that merge what seems to be two things into one because we know they are there and are brave and feel safe enough to discover what's between us. It's like looking into your own two eyes in the mirror until they, you, become one amidst the awareness of your multiplicity and it's like looking into anyone's eyes until you become one between the illusions of separation. It's love and like aliens and fairies and magic it's really all around us, everywhere, it's only we who have been focused on such a rare and narrow angle that it seems like there is nothing else.
Isn't it ironic to think how our indication that a civilization would be "more advanced", more powerful, is that it would require massive energy to send a sphere of transmission, but the "less advanced", less powerful transmission could be sent with the greater knowledge of where to send it? Wouldn't someone who had that much power, that was that much more advanced than the directional-senders as they are more advanced than we are, wouldn't such a intelligence also have the knowledge of where to direct the signal and not need to make a sphere? The bigger point is that the sphere and direct signal are both way too "inefficient" to make any sense according to how we understand them. So we must be misunderstanding them. There could be basic things about energy we don't know, such as a signal that picks up energy as it moves. There could be basic things about the structure of the universe we can only imagine but are currently stuck in an oversimplified and wrong set of assumptions. When we question what makes some of these conclusions preposterous with the idea that it will be a clue to changing our understanding of the universe, and we are willing and open to that change, we will discover how these signals are sent and why and likely become able to interpret them. All things will come together if we try, if we go for it, but to know what to go for we have to have something to believe in. I'm going for art, for love, and I do believe in it but still I've needed to do all of this to talk myself into it, to pay off my own inner trolls who hold me back. But I'm also ready to heal their wounds and reclaim them as part of me, parts that only turned sour because I neglected them and what they truly needed, acceptance and to feel like part of the whole. Some of them, like ones that left me feeling insecure in relationships, seemed to only demand acceptance from someone else but I can truly heal those feelings and not be held back by trying to prove "I'm" good enough anymore, to anyone, even me, but just go for it and be the best of all of me that I can. I can use this analogy to see how I have been holding myself back because it seems impossible to get the energy to cross "95 light years" to my goals but I know when I get going everything becomes possible
Before I end this I opened up a book, Uncle Wiggly's Airship, to get one more example of media magic to make up for all the ones I forgot to note in recent weeks. It was a story called Uncle Wiggly and the Soap Bubbles and the page I read was the first one where Nanny Jane Fuzzy Wuzzy asks him if he is going on an adventure. He says he doesn't know, he may be on a grand adventure or just a pleasurable cruise but he plans to enjoy it. She recommends he carry along a yeast-cake on his journey and explains that since yeast makes bread rise it would be useful in case his airship bubbles broke to make the airship rise. He takes the advice, When I asked myself why I turned to it, what the message was, I decided it was simply magic, the yeast bun being a magic charm to help the ship fly, and an example of this holographic universe in action. I'm reminded of some of the first magic described in "Black Elk Speaks", the prophecy of the future time, living in desolation by grey houses, and the way to cure snowblindness, and some other ones, all coming from Dreams. I have to take my own advice, utilize magic and art more and more, go with it, to reach that state where dreams become real to me, too, and I become part of that shamanic power system. I feel like this gagablog has been a book club and journal for me lately but I look forward to the Journeys of interacting with actual people, actively, and more Art, and really living these things instead of talking about them. Black Elk speaks of magic with such familiarity it reminds me that while I claim to believe in it my belief can be much deeper the more I really act upon it. Same for art and Love, I need to stop giving myself advice and start taking some and running with it. I need to break down some walls, for sure. I did meet a girl at Pagan Pride named Natascha who really impressed me, even bought our Foxzen album and felt she would be really impressed by it, which made me very happy. I had Love and Rockets song "Natascha" stuck in my head for a few days after that then finally played it the other day along with some of their other songs. One was "Don't worry" and I just now, in closing this, remembered that line and how it grabbed me at the time: "I'm gonna break down some walls for sure, I'm gonna break down some walls forever, ain't gonna sing the blues alone (no more?), ain't gonna sing the blues forever I don't worry, I don't worry at all."
And this reminds me of the last thing I was going to say, when I had a spiritual crisis and my mom's friend from her dream group said she had a dream where I had to eat six cans of green beans. I've thought about this on occasion, and have eaten hundreds of cans of green beans since then. But I also realized that there have been a few times in my life since then that I was really aware of eating a can of green beans, as if it was "one of the six." I felt this way the other night, and wondered if this were truly the third can of "those" green beans I was making, or possibly the sixth. I didn't want to be "through" with whatever it was, in a way, these many years later, and wondered if it might be the first, if even the other two or three times I had "very consciously" eaten green beans they did not compare to this one. But it also made me realize I could be more aware of any can of beans, or anything I ate,or anything I did, and there are levels of "opening" out of lesser lives and consciousnesses that make the greatest of previous moments seem mundane by comparison. I suppose this can be compared to when people say "I thought I was in love before but now that I am with THIS person I realize nothing compares to this." The truth is love is there for all of us and when you really feel it you can see that potential in everyone and want it for everyone else, too. This is why magic, love, and art are always like this, it is their nature to be shared. As much as we are trained to think we want to claim things and secure them from others, like good little masonic wall-builders, these true paths of motivation teach us along the way that they are experienced by sharing them, not hiding them. The same understanding will allow us to communicate with aliens and ourselves because we will realize we are the ones hiding behind our own walls of fear. Once we are open to it we will see how everyone and everything surrounds us and permeates us with love. Its just funny that, as we are now, we have finally discovered our "first" clue from "out there" and it happens to be in a direction we somehow "know" to be 95 light years away. I suspect we're always getting these signals, and many other kinds, all the time, from all directions, but if we go with what this suggests to us with the greatest hopes - connecting with others and within ourselves -we can use this figure to decode the rest and learn how the whole universe interfaces. Sorry, I'm in a hurry to just get this out there, wrap this up and do some other things but I would like to return to these concepts soon and try and explain them better and more directly.
And of course I suspect the best way to do that will be to finally return to Artpop and Sexxx Dreams, so we'll see. I have a lot of catching up to do, when I think about it, but if I get this intergalactic thing worked out I should have some clever ways of sneaking around to do it.
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