I Have Seen Him in the Watch-Fires of a Hundred Circling Memes

You will not have to fight this battle. Take up your positions; stand firm and see the deliverance the Lord will give you.
2 Chron. 20:17

Mens cujusque is est Quisque" – "Mind Makes the Man". The bookplate of Samuel Pepys (1633-1703). (source)

One more day to go until Election Day---most likely my last blog post before the polls close.

Eight years ago I started this blog to post movie reviews as I drove around the country in self-imposed internal exile, on what amounted to a long personal quest I had undertaken during a period in my life.

The movie watching was a hobby I had undertaken at that point in my life, as something to do that kept my focus day to day, when I needed that. Simply put, I had decided to see every movie that came out, and eventually that included visiting as many different movie theaters around the country as possible. I kept it going that way for two years before I couldn't take it anymore. It was a marvelous time, although I would never want to repeat that experiment again, for many reasons, not the least of which is that I simply don't have the time

But even from the start I always intended to express much more than movie write-ups in this blog. It always was connected to the larger goal I had in my mind, and in some ways I feel as if the entire thread of what I have written so far here (well over a million words by now) has been leading up to this moment.

In regard to tomorrow and the election, I've made my predictions and thoughts clear, so I won't rehash them here. Instead I want to make some observations about this moment of history in the broader sense.

Whatever happens tomorrow, and in the days ahead, I can say this has lived up to all my expectations and exceeded them. Yet in some ways it feels as if it is all just getting underway.

One big takeaway from this, as I was just telling a friend, is a stark realization of how my viewpoint of the world, and of reality itself, diverges so much from so many people I have known. I have been aware of this for some time, and have grown accustomed to it to some degree, even having lost close friends along the way because of it, but the chasm now seems so great that I wonder how many years must pass in the future before I can hold a pleasant and unguarded conversation with many old friends and acquaintances, without feeling as if we are living in two different universes.

You haven't really lived until you've had an old friend look at you as if you were a Martian, for some innocent remark.

This observation alone is fascinating is how it points out the degree to which human beings can differ in their perceptions of truth and reality. It raises the question: how does one that one is perceiving reality in a way that is anywhere close to the truth? How does one know one is right, if others believe so differently, yet also believe themselves to be as correct as you?

Why is one's own reality better than someone else's, if they can differ so much?

If I have no grounds to settle this question, then how I can be righteous in what I do and what I say?

In moments of contemplating these questions, I fall back on my faith, including the scripture of other religions. In that regard, I'm reminded, as I have been so often in life, of the plight of the warrior-hero Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita, the ancient Hindu epic. I first read this a long time ago when I was a freshman in college, for a course on Asian Civilization. It made a big impact on me even then.

In the midst of a great battle between two mighty and rival armies, the hero Arjuna becomes disgusted and discouraged, in part because of this very type of uncertainty over the meaning of what he is doing. Why does all this chaos have to happen? Why must I personally take part in this war?

Arjuna thus stops his chariot and throws down his arrows, refusing to take any further part in the battle.

(source) Arjuna, dressed in courtly costume with a quiver slung over his shoulder and sword and buckler at his side, folds his hands in anjali mudra and kneels before his charioteer, Kṛṣṇa.

Then it turns out that his lowly chariot driver is secretly Krishna, who manifests before him in his full splendor and reveals to him the greater plan that is at work in the battle. He tells him to pick up his arrows and get back into the fight. Gird up your loins. Play your role in this, he tells him, in essence, even amidst your awareness of your own incomplete perception of the ultimate reality.  At least that's the interpretation I took from the text a long time ago.

So I have no problem doing my part, in a spiritual sense, and knowing that others are doing their part as well, even if it to oppose me with all their might and being.

Yet in many ways this ferocious war we are in right now doesn't even feel like my battle anymore.

Looking across this great battlefield we are in, and this conflict in full glance, I can assert that something massive has taken place over the last year, something far more significant than an election. It is nothing less than a breathtaking and unparalleled shift in the collective center of gravity of the awareness of the nation and the world as a whole. There has been nothing like it in my lifetime, and perhaps there will be nothing like it again.

As a means of contrast, four and half years ago, in June 2012 I stood on the curb outside a hotel in Fairfax County, Virginia with 300 other people screaming our rebukes at the most powerful people in the world---names that most people would know---who were arriving in limousines to a conference. Then we chanted slogans at them in their conference rooms on the other side of the fence during their meetings.

I had driven all the way across the country to be there, as the call went out. Most of well-known people in the alternative media were there, and I got the pleasure of meeting many of them.

It was exhilarating like nothing in my life to that point. We felt like a tiny little group making a stand, for free humanity against those who would bring about global enslavement of mankind on many levels---the Establishment, if I can use the term in sense I have regularly invoked it in my blog. At least that's how we saw it, and it was clear we were all of like mind.

From our secret sources the inside of the hotel, we learned that we had taken the folks there quite off guard and that we had truly rattled them. We caused severe interference in their vibe. Over the next couple years I was proud that we had driven them out of North America, at least that particular regular meeting of them, and they never have come back (so far).

Now it has all changed. Where once there were thousands of us aware of this, now there are tens of millions, yelling and cheering exactly the same message we were yelling four years ago. Somehow it has all come together in a way I never could have foreseen, at least in such a peaceful way. This has been the real significance of the Trump campaign, and why it has not been about him really at all. It's clear from his speeches that he was not even aware of this himself until perhaps a couple months ago. Now he seems to know what is going on. The people following him certainly do.

But like I said, the campaign is only a vehicle. It goes far beyond that now. So many have woken up to so much, especially among the younger generation, that it is too late to go back.

It tells me that the isolating and exile part of the struggle is over for many of us like yours truly. It is time to move onto other responsibilities. I'm happy about that.

The kids coming up right seem to have arrived with a built-in awareness about so much that was completely opaque to my generation. The future for America looks very good, even at there may be many tribulations and hardships to come during this transition.

On the other hand, this destabilization of the center-of-gravity of collective awareness has left many people, especially in my own fossilized generation and older,  in a state of dire unease that their reality, and their concept of the flow of history itself, is no longer being "enforced" in the way that allows them to continue within the parameters of stable awareness to which they have long become accustomed. What is happening around them feels to them like an insult to the psyche. I have been there. I know.

Among them, during the intensity of this election, I sense a growing brittleness of awareness, and contraction of the spirit, as they hunker down to preserve the existing reality as much as possible (with the aid of the cocoon Establishment media and Pop Culture, which was largely designed to precisely this). 

Not surprisingly, most of the rhetoric they offer is in the form of fear and hatred, and the hurling of robotic insult, all the while proclaiming that they are "battling fear and hatred." Such is the nature of psychological projection in these states of duress. To me, the uniform predictability of this reaction (which is lately effectively only in being risible) is a sure sign that they are losing.

They were promised a New Age for the new Millennium, and in fact we are certainly at a great turning of history. But this is not the one they thought they were getting. They thought they knew the shape it would take, because it was promised them by leaders of a revolution.

But history does not work like that. The concept of the future they were promised was partly true, but was also the dream of false prophets who assured them history was on their side.  

No one gets to decide that. No human being at least. 

The earth will keep turning on its own despite all your will to stop it. The question you face is will you be the nail that tries to hold its rotation in check, that gets ripped out mercilessly without the slightest dint in the momentum of the world?

I don't wish any of these folks harm. They are doing their own part, playing their own role, after all, based on their own perception of reality. Mostly I pity them, because they are missing out on experiencing one of the phenomenal shifts in human consciousness in a very long time.

I don't seek the slightest iota of vengeance, for I understand them. I don't want to "crush" them personally, although I think it would be very helpful if the election itself is landslide that breaks the will of Establishment to fight for a least a brief while, to give us a all a little space as the Wheel of the Ages turns into a new formation.

I wish I could do more to help them directly, because I know the days and years ahead are going to be increasingly psychologically stressful for them in ways they cannot anticipate now, no matter how the election turns out. The reality they believe in is disintegrating, and there is nothing that can be done to preserve it at this point.

I know that is not my role in this to help them directly like that, person to person, at least not anymore. I was never very good at that kind of thing anyway. Many people I know (especially people of my own age that I met in high school and college) react with a polarity against the opinions I offer them. Once I realized this about myself, I changed my style of rhetoric drastically to account for it, in a jiu-jitsu style of persuasion. The Postmodern Age is the Age of Irony, after all.

So for years I simply told myself that one day it would all come to this, with "reality" disintegrating, and perhaps for one person I knew, I could be that person they once knew, who said all those strange things that didn't make sense at the time at the time, but perhaps I said something that stuck in the back of their mind, and could be remembered by them as that person who somehow "made it to other side" with his psyche (mostly) intact.

Because that's how it worked for me. One of those people, who helped lead me to where I am, was once a bitter political foe, when I was a progressive liberal and he was a conventional neocon conservative. We lost track of each other for years, and in the interim (2004-2011), both of us underwent a huge awakening that changed our points of view to be radically altered but now nearly identical in many ways. We got a great many laughs about it.

When we found each other again, on the other side of the continent, we agreed about nearly everything. He is now my closest friend, because he is one of only a few people in the world to whom I can be completely frank about many things, and whom I know that will understand what I am saying.

The truth converges. I don't need to see eye to eye with my friends, but in the end, I guess I have a hard time fully trusting anyone who hasn't, at some point in their adult life, undergone a complete upheaval of their beliefs about the world, amounting an effective overturning of their reality, to the point of believing nearly the opposite of many things they once believed to be true. 

As for me, going forward, part of me wonders if I need to keep writing this blog anymore after eight years.  Maybe it has served its purpose for me. I truly don't know.

Certainly it has been very useful lately as an open workshop for the project that now calls me, which has been the purpose of my long exile and quest, and which must become the center of my creative attention, at least the writing part of my creativity.

I suspect I'll keep going writing it in some form, since it is useful for me, and there are people who like it. I have never wanted a big audience, at least not for this forum. Intimacy, even in public, was important for me. I have often thought that I was simply leaving a record of one person's thoughts to be discovered in the distant future long after I am gone. I've been happy with that idea.

But things probably will get too interesting not to comment. Yet even Samuel Pepys, who lived through very extraordinary times, and left such a marvelous legacy for people in later centuries (which I have been reading lately), eventually stopped writing his diary at some point.

We'll see how I feel on Wednesday morning. 

Peace and love to all.