Social Unrest and the Work

When the World Falls Apart, Pay Attention:

I. A cosmic prank
Reality, said Gurdjieff, is an exquisite joke—most of us are asleep, dreaming with our eyes open, and occasionally someone hurls a pie at the face of our felicitous illusions. And what better pie than social unrest? Let us begin with a paradox: turmoil is a ladder, and sometimes the ladder is set on fire. But it still gets us upward, if we climb with conscious attention.

II. The Work in the furnace of chaos
Ouspensky recounts that in In Search of the Miraculous, as “revolution and war are moving close; all around the madness of mankind is becoming more and more apparent,” he emphasizes that the only way to understand cosmic laws is “to observe them in himself, and this through the special forms of the work which are rapidly developing in the group”
Implicit here is a recognition that when external reality fragments—when society shatters in riot or upheaval—it becomes easier to spot the fracturing within.

The universe is poking the slumbering Work with its razor-sharp fragments. The noise of dissent, the clamor of the streets, are not enemies of the Work—they’re its percussion section.

III. Effort, Intentional Suffering, and group vibration
We turn to the Fourth Way teachings for context—Gurdjieff emphasized conscious labour and intentional suffering as the bedrock of transformation. “Conscious labour is an action… present to what is being done… and intentional suffering is the act of struggling against automatism... In Beelzebub’s Tales he states that ‘the greatest “intentional suffering” can be obtained in our presences by compelling ourselves to endure the displeasing manifestations of others toward ourselves…”

Imagine a group sitting in the Eye of the Storm—arguing, resisting, getting upset. In that friction, the Work reveals itself. The dissonance becomes the tuning fork for self‑observation. Social unrest isn’t a distraction—it’s the ember that scorches the veil of sleep.

IV. The “bone buried deep” and the necessity of effort
In Beelzebub’s Tales, Gurdjieff purposefully constructed his prose to be labyrinthine, stating that he would “bury the bone so deep that the dogs have to scratch for it”.

In the grand allegory, layers of obfuscation are not obstacles—they are the Work in material form. Social unrest, then, is a similar kind of deliberate complexity: a challenge to be met, not avoided.

If life were a soporific lullaby, no one would be coaxed awake. But when the ground shakes—cultural norms detonate—our receptors awaken. The bone rattles, and the dogs (us) start digging.

V. Truth, study, and the communal furnace
Ouspensky quotes Gurdjieff: “To speak the truth is the most difficult thing in the world; and one must study a great deal and for a long time in order to be able to speak the truth… the wish alone is not enough… to speak the truth one must know what the truth is and what a lie is, and first of all in oneself.”

Social unrest forces us to confront lies—not the easy ones that politicians propagate, but the personal ones inside the mirror. We cannot hide behind polite acquiescence when crowds roar. The Work, especially within groups, thrives when it's stripped of pretense, when its members must stare at their own reflections in the glass shards of upheaval.

VI. The Playful Cosmic Joke
Cosmic irony loves a riot. The Work wants drama—in the absurdity of the fray, we find opportunity. The group is neither safe nor still; it is a pressure cooker. Let the pressure build. Let social unrest be the tuning of the cosmic dial that clears frequency.

In Beelzebub’s Tales, Gurdjieff embeds layers of allegory—beings, satellites, Kundabuffer, cosmic law—yet beneath it all is the point: evolutionary jolts break ossified thought. Likewise, group work amidst external unrest cracks open the door to awakening.

VII. Conclusion: Unrest as essential ferment
So: if the Work in group form is an alchemical brew, social unrest is the yeast. The bubbles—self-remembering, observation, intentional suffering—will not rise without it. Ouspensky's moment of “madness of mankind” surrounding his group wasn’t coincidence—it was the crucible of awakening.

When daylight fractures, we see the divisions within us; when society reels, the Work is no longer abstract—it is urgent.

Let us then salute the riot, not as nihilistic chaos, but as the cosmic slap that enlivens consciousness. For as Gurdjieff’s deeply buried truths demand, the deepest work comes not from comfort—but from the soul-chilling hum of a world in vertigo.

Then We Changed

 

You were the mountain and I was the wind.

"I have birds in me."
I whispered through your trees.

 I breathed over your body, cool, invigorating, stirring the leaves, bending the boughs, scattering the snow from your greatest peaks.
Water cascaded down your face and flowed away to distant lands.

"You have trees on you."
I whispered into your ancient caves, brushing over moss, moaning through your dripping stalagmites.

Invitation

When I was a wee lass the woman down the street was very concerned that I was out of touch with "reality."
My mother assured her that I was playing pretend.

I was a very good play pretender. I rarely said things like:
"Let's pretend there is a little man living in an underground house beneath our own house."
Instead I said:
"The little man won't answer the door under my bed. Something might have happened to him. I'm going outside to find him."

I knew the trick to the best kind of play was not saying "Let's pretend," or "I'm only pretending." I knew that all play was equally real and unreal, that bravery, kindness, and trust were true whether you were dreaming, pretending, telling a story or playing "real life."

Certain truths are especially hard to grasp in "real life." Fairy tales and certain types of pretend can remind us, show us, and teach us the things that are not allowed or are undervalued in "real life."
They can remind us that "real life" is a game we began to play long ago, a very dangerous game in which you choose masks to wear and insist they are the real you, a game that demands that no other games, no other stories, no other worlds are "real." They are ONLY pretend, and only the "real life" game is important.

And if you play "real life" with us and play it well we will love you, and be proud of you, and you will feel safe, never needing to worry about the unknown, about the dark, about the mysterious, or about the possibility that you yourself are less "real" and not in fact the masks you have been wearing, but rather an innocent traveler who stumbled into a deadly serious game with eternal consequences; that you may never be able to leave the game because you will be convinced that you are not playing a game but rather are having a "real life."

And what if you were so lucky that someone stronger, someone with a better memory of the multicolored land beyond "real life",  started to play a different game with you, a game that bleed into "real life", and you started asking yourself, "What is real?"

Not just, "Is this a real game? Or something else?" but "Is 'real life' real?"

And what if by asking yourself these questions, rather than asking your benevolent benefactor (who could never actually answer these questions for you) you began to remember that you aren't "real", that you are a pretender, a storyteller, a dreamer, a liar trapped by deadly seriousness (a.k.a gravity) in a heavy game. A game in which your abilities to play have atrophied, a game that didn't just start when you were born, because actually time is a function of the "real life" game and you have been trapped on the wheel of "real life" for much "longer" than you realized.

And what if you remembered this for a moment and began to learn to play again thanks to a trickster who started playing a game within a game with you and called it deadly serious...

What if? What if?

“If you are a dreamer come in
If you are a dreamer a wisher a liar
A hoper a pray-er a magic-bean-buyer
If youre a pretender com sit by my fire
For we have some flax golden tales to spin
Come in!
Come in!”

― Shel Silverstein


So let's not say, "let's pretend." We're better pretenders than that. Let us be open hearted and true whether our experience is real or imagined. Let us play in earnest, let us play with levity, and flexibility (fluxability?) and bravery, and kindness, and trust.

Let us play in bright axiom.

Walker on White

All the birdies sing for me because I am a golden child born of winter morning and an endless spring of the heart.
Do you see her long flowing robes of silver, the sterling furs, the crown of antlers? My mother the wild wood has come down to dance for my birthday and silver moons shiver off her undulating belly, rams frolic at her heels, foxes lick her finger tips and prance into the hollows of ancient trees.
They have music in their cars, I think, and I smile imagining all the lonely people listening to music while they drive. I imagine Oberon noticing their music and then I realize that they are music, that the highway, the sea, the trees, the entire globe and everything shimmering on its skin is music.
What God knows or cares that we call them cars and we believe we are hurrying to important things in them?
No God knows or cares, or no God that I would see worthy of admiration.
The Lingua? Let them take the words from my brain and scatter them like crumbs for the birds. Blue birds, black birds, doves, sparrows let them feed on the remains of a psychotic break as the language bleeds from the artifice formerly known as myself and the Ligua dies and I cease to exist.
Will this be my birthday mother, when you touch my face with long pale fingers and I go black eyed to the mulch and white worms? Will I dance and sing ecstatic as moon eyed coyotes tremble faun-like and drink the dew from your lashes? Will grasshoppers make of me a dress for their bodies and wear me wherever they go? Will I dream animal dreams under a velvety blanket of darkness, the sun setting orange and pink over my brow?
Music in the pulse, in the breath, in the teeth, music without words scattered across the universe in the pulsing of white stars.
I am pushing up delicate green tendrils of life, unnamed, daughter of unnamable. We are all united here in the kingdom of light and dark, dancing our dance.
Do you see her long hair flying like pale streamers to tangle with moths reaching for the moon's pale fire? Do you see her eyes glittering as dark pools where deer lower their heads to drink? Do you see her thus etched out in shapes loaned by the usurper demiurge? Or can you see what I see with eyes like burrows prying into the womb where silky rabbits dream?
I remember human and I laugh. I laugh at hands and eyes and shit, always at shit.
The Sabbath is then over, as my head comes back together and I know the meanings of the sounds that carve a world in my nervous system. Always forgetting what we were and are and will again be only to remember it again when Lingua is once more toppled from his throne.
Does the chick return to the egg? Of course. Capitulate. Fall away, I command it, fall away like leaves of gold and umber from the stark white bodies of trees, oh Lingua.
Come winter bleak, dear winter. I am a walker on the white, two faced, undying shape shifter. A golden child born of a winter morning and an eternal spring of the heart.
Cup my waters in your hand and touch them to your lips if you would join us in the kingdom forever. And on my right hand sits brother Michael and on the left Uriel, for about me flames the pentagram and in its center stands the six rayed star.
Etched in the lego of our entrapment, but building freely. Cracking the world's shell and building it again.
I will return. But which is the coming and which is the going is not mine to know.

Queen

At last the darkness envelops and comforts me with its sweet anonymity and gracious propensity for allowing all things to be as they are without judgment. THOUGHTS POUR out like the blood of my womb, the life force of my own body expelled or released before it could be tampered with by the seminal poisons of the sun.
Three men stood around a large chess board balanced on a concrete wall in a park filled with tents and vendors pedaling their wares. The black man stood tall and lean dressed in white, his bald head shining under what sun there was that afternoon. Around his neck a large even armed silver cross gleamed. Another man was from the south and sat upon a drum and beat it while his opponents worried over their next move. He wore a straw hat. The third man left no impression. He was only a man.
They asked my name and I told them. At first their eyes all widened and they begged to know if it was true that my name was "Gitana" - Gypsy. I corrected them and explained the spelling.
“I know this name.” the black man said, “It is the name of a Sumerian Goddess and of Adam's first wife. I know you.“ His eyes like black suns scorched my white flesh, reading the story of me as if it was written in sinew and bone this time around. “Don’t ask me how I know these things.” he said, closing the matter and returning his attention to the board.
Adam's first wife. You know me black man, wherever you meet me. You see the woman who would not submit to organic dominion. The witch who would not be a wife. The demoness who eats children. In the light of day we meet in our present guises and you recognize me. You remind me of who I am even as I am on the brink of forgetting for a moment.
Startled, I try to ask your name. You do not answer, as if you do not hear me, but I know that you hear. You hear but you will not utter your name in the presence of a witch, you will not utter it lest any others hear it, lest anyone else recognize you.
Men will mistake me for something else, they will long to run fingers through brassy hair, will hope to posses, to consume what they take to be another daughter of Eve placed on this earth for their own uses, to breed more men. But you are older and wiser than men.
I have no choice but to retreat to the shadows. You play these games still, with utter seriousness. You must yet fear the darkness that was bequeathed to me. I do not.
I live here as I did before ever there was a world, before ever fools juggled flaming torches or knelt at my feet and begged for my love. Before ever there were lips to stain or fruits to stain them. Before ever there were games to play.
You have here a queen of heaven, of the stars, a virgin queen. She who will not submit. She who will not join the other beasts of burden in serving Adam born of the dirt.
But you play games, on squares of black and white, endeavoring to capture the king of the opposing color, ever watchful and fearful of the queen, the queen whose movements are unrestricted, whose experience and relation to space and time is unlike that of any other piece on the board.
You play the game with utter seriousness, and if we meet you ask me to play with you. My willingness to play only serves to deepen your suspicion of me. How could you trust the one who has agreed to be your adversary?
It matters not at all to me. I return to the place where I have always been, in the darkness that envelops and comforts me  with its sweet anonymity and gracious propensity for allowing all things to be as they are. Without judgment. Without divisions or categorizations.  Into the chaos of the abyss. I withdraw from the sun spun world of dirt to breed something other than men.
Whether you know this name or not, whether I remember it or not,  I am who I am.

The Punishment that was the World

The chief ruler came wearing his crown of gold and green jewels, his robes of purple silk that moved like a sweet scent on the wind. He called as a boy would after a beloved dog:
"Adam! Where are you?"
For he did not understand what had happened, being himself blind.
And trembling behind a blossoming rock rose bush Adam said:
"I heard your voice and was afraid because I was naked; and I hid."
Gritting his teeth and lolling his blind eyes the ruler let loose an anguished groan that filled the sky:
"Why did you hide, unless it is because you have eaten from the tree from which I have commanded you not to eat from? And you have eaten!"
Mountains exploded. Birds fell from the sky.
Adam sought forgiveness and said:
"The woman that you gave me, the woman of clay and bones, of tree and soil, she gave to me red and white flesh, and I ate."
Thunder rolled from his lips as the arrogant ruler cursed the woman. It came as earthquakes, and horrible frozen rain, as salty tears.
The woman, also eager to please now that the terrible ruler stood before her with glowing eyes and fire that threatened to burn the life around her, she groveled and said:
"It was the snake that led me astray. The snake, a seducer. I listened to it and I ate."
They turned to the snake and cursed its shadowy reflection. They stood powerless, not comprehending, not remembering that it was a form they themselves had modeled.
Powerless, not comprehending that it was a form they themselves had modeled, they turned to the snake and cursed its shadowy reflection.

From that day, the day of storms and fire, the snake came to be under the curse of the rulers. It moved nearly blind, without legs, winding across the earth’s surface in endless pursuit.
Until the all-powerful man was to come, that curse would be upon the snake, red and green, black and white, it was the curse of all snakes.
The Rulers turned to their Adam, their man of soil and dirt. They took him in hand, giving him a final kiss. Then they expelled him from the fecund garden. His wife followed, wearing leaves and twigs; for they had no blessing, they were under the curse, following the twisting line of the snake into the world beyond the golden gates and bright sun.
Out of jealousy and fear, the Rulers threw mankind into great distraction, into a life of toil, disease and hardship. It was the great distraction, the plan so that mankind might be occupied by worldly affairs, what would be known as the human life.
Consumed with the need for water, food and safety, these concerns would come to absorb the whole of them, using all their mind and strength; after their physical needs where satisfied there would be nothing left of the being to devote to the holy spirit.
The rulers tasted the bitter tongue of hatred, knowing that their creation could see, while they, the creators of this being, were blind. It called up their rage and they turned themselves into winds of fire, streaking across the universe in bursts of bright red anger that exploded into stars. They cursed Adam and watched him walk into the cold of the world, his woman at his side, expelled from the garden so that he might never learn his advantage over them, so that he might never learn that he could see what they could not.

Thoughtfully, Beautifully

The problem is the music putting ideas into their heads, words not their own running in lines like trains along tracks, tracks all forged in the simple melodies of these songs. All of my thoughts have been cooked out of my head, my senses dulled by the sun blazing on and on. The people made in the music and baked in the sun lay around wondering vaguely how they came to be at the bottom of the valley. Dressing their dogs up and wearing the least possible amount of clothing themselves, these Southern Californians run on iced coffee and sex. These are the two lures that get them to race through the course like lanky long faced gray hounds after the rabbit. Is there a story in there somewhere? Or is it only a poem? A verse in the song that makes us, an incoherent stream of experience, one line of code, pure data in the form of color and sound. The sweet bitter taste of coffee and cinnamon, the scent of vanilla body wash rising from heated skin bronzing under the solar disc rolling overhead, Apollo driving his chariot over water and earth without compromise.
Why don’t we all sit together and make our own song? After all, we’ll all soon be bones or ash and it won’t matter where the broom was or who opened the window while the air conditioner was running. Such resentment because life hasn’t been made thoughtfully, beautifully, but has rather happened to us when we should have happened to it. A sword slicing through a piece of blue sky like a knife through lemon meringue pie, purposeful, unrelenting like the tap, tap, of a wood peckers bill into the trunk of a tree. Bit by bit, measure by measure, taken in careful steps laden with the intent to savor and cherish. That was the way to do it, but we schlepped through it, clinging to vague ideas, promises regarding tomorrow and other distant futures that could never arrive because the first steps would never be taken and someone else would be blamed for the inaction.
What is missing is not a something that can be held in sweaty hands. All we will ever need, the most glorious thing we could ever obtain is already here and we are closed to it, blind to the wealth that is real and irrevocable; this liberty that is mind, this river that is love and never ceases to flow.
The problem is the music putting ideas into their heads, words not their own, words that tell us what should be, what could be, but never what is. Where is the rejoicing? The explosion of self that is being all that I am in this moment with lungs and heart and brain pouring pure poetry and hands that can do. It is our hands that give us some unusual potential as makers. But what good are makers that take no action, that never make?
Creators that do not create are something else, listening to the lyric that someone else wrote as if it were absolute, this reality the only reality. These are consumers, the walking dead, with tiny dogs in purses and the urge to create subverted so that all they really need to get by is a jar of Vaseline and a stack of pornographic magazines, and ideally some one to stick it into or to take it from, words not their own running in lines like trains along tracks, senses dulled by the sun blazing on and on.
Whatever happened to the darkness, the womb where things are allowed to gestate and come to fruition? There is no room for creation in the endless prying light. All things skim by on the surface, racing towards the future on the tracks forged in the simple melodies of this popular song. When will we all meet in the darkness, within the depths below? Shall we really wait until there is nothing left of us but bone or ash? Is it then not too late to last and love? To persist and adore? Is it then not too late to sing our own song, to use our hands for something more challenging than instant gratification?
That song, the resentment in that voice, the sad helplessness of flesh trapped within the life unlived, sagging with age, the bitter threat to run away once again. Time runs out. All songs happen through time, all songs begin and end. It is the little flourishes in between that count the most.
Did we make it ours? Live up to our deepest nature as makers? Or did we let it rush by on those rails that were supplied by the manufacturer, let it rush by only to make bone and ash, bitter sweet taste of coffee and cinnamon, blue sky un-sliced?
It should have been made thoughtfully, beautifully, and without compromise. It should have been made in the dark. It should have been our own.

Answers

I have nothing to say that will give you the answers to the wordless questions that burn in your heart. Those anguished muffled screams from your breast and the muted cry of an entire body take shape in the paunch that hangs over the belt and the ache of shoulders and the sorrows whose source seems to be diffused in the atmosphere like vapor. Vapor of my heart suffocates me and I oscillate between desiring affectionate company and craving the solitude of a deep dark warm cave. Perhaps in another way all I am seeking is that same deep dark exile, the reprieve of momentary annihilation.
I don’t have answers for you. My question is my self, the answer is the same. You are out here looking for something that no one can give you. If you want to know the truth then look into the abysmal well of self. It could be that you are happy, and that my dark mood doesn’t suit you. I happen to think, however, that happy people don’t look for answers. Show me someone who is tortured wondering why they are so happy, or why life is so just and fair and lovely.
People with questions are dissatisfied, admittedly to varying degrees. Some are miserable while others have only vaguely disquieting feelings that lead them to search for the source of the disquiet. If I had a greater magick I would never stoop to attempt to say anything directly to any one. I would have written you a fairy tale.
Notice also my need to say that “you” are looking for something. I want to set myself up as someone who knows more and to know more there must be someone else who knows less, so I have invented you. This is the sickness of all those who want to tell you “the truth” or “illuminate” your mind. Everyone who wants to tell you something factual, deliver the answers you seek, is a hungry liar. Even those who are well intentioned are liars. For example they may feel that what they want is to help you when in reality what they want is to be helped. They want to give you what no one can give them. They have made up some answers or been given some “one size fits all” explanations that they hope to pass on to you for your betterment, but one size fits all is the same as one size fits none.
If you want to know what is wrong find a mirror. For so much of my life I have assumed that others felt like me. Only now I see, the impressions which formed me may have varied in innumerable ways from those that formed you or any other given member of humanity. What ails me is a personal affliction, and what ails the world is me and my affliction.
There is always a chance that you feel a little bit like I do. Then in some way you might be comforted to think that you are not entirely alone with your shouting heart, that somewhere out there, someone else’s heart is shouting, and they are scrambling to find the reason, working desperately to save that heart from the terminal illness that filled it with woe.
Good heavens! If only I could lay my face in some grass or press my body against a boulder or a tree. If only I could be free to be alive instead of always fighting for that feeling. If only I wasn’t so angry… then what? What would I be, what would I have to do, what would you be reading now?
And of course there are others who are right now fighting for their mortal lives and some of them feel more truly alive than I do now. I am a spoiled white girl sitting in her high tower willing to dish out her opinions and advice while feeling sorry for her woes. I am like a house cat. I just want to get out. I just want to die so that I can feel alive.
That is my answer. If you want the truth then die or come close to it whenever possible. Turn yourself (hence the world) upside down. Revolutionize it. That is the only choice you have.

Electrical Impulses

The power of movement. A simple thing, taken for granted by those creatures that have long possessed the ability, but ask any cactus or man locked in a tiny cell and they will tell you that the power to move about freely is most precious of all. In the very beginning of your life, it was the first thing to be active in you, your movement center. You wriggled, you cried in hunger, and your body happily relieved itself of the wastes that were left in its system. You learned to crawl, and to walk and to grab and to hit. Viola! You had the most essential skills needed to maintain your existence on this planet. You had the power to translate electrical pulses sent from your brain via your nervous system into motion, activity, into an adequate response to some stimuli, such as music, or the sight of a hungry wolf, or the smell of a roasting pig.
The subtleties that could be added, the endowments of the intellectual and emotional centers, would do you little good in this plane of existence without the foundation of this first essential power, the fully functioning motor center. Now you have the ability to do, and with the addition of the other two powers, you have a heightened capacity for subtlety, a desire to find a purpose to put your fantastic abilities to the test. You’ve got the car, now baby drive it!
What are you going to do? What are you going to make of the multicolored world? How are you going to organize all that sensory impute? How does it make you feel? And what are you going to do with it all?
You can see an electrical pulse. See it in the way your limbs go wiggly when we hook them up to a loudspeaker. See how you groove and shake and twirl. That is the power of movement. It gives a shape to the unseen forces that are ever at work in the universe.
This truth is so obvious, so apparent that it seems to be hidden from us. We are blind to it. The ancient Greeks, however, were appreciative of this secret. They honored the human form, took great pleasure in athletic feats, not only as the triumph of the motor center, but as the culmination of all the aspects of the human being and even as a representation of those mysteries which are seen as originating elsewhere.
As above so below.
As within so without.

Now

For one moment the world is startlingly clear. I can see it, beyond the veil of senseless brain chatter. The world is a bathtub, the kind that doubles as a shower, and I am staring up the tiled side and at a square air vent. I can see the fuschia towel hanging over the frosted plastic doors that roll on their aluminum track. I can see a bottle of ginger beer, green and perspiring on the ledge, but most of all I see the tile wall rising up on one side of me, I can see where it gives way to drywall and turns into the ceiling and pools around that square vent.
It is the most beautiful world. Strange and alive. I stare at it from the bottom of the tub where there is just enough water to warm the back of my neck, head, shoulders, buttocks and feet. My knees are bent because I am too long for the tub. The water level is too low to reach over my breasts and belly so they are exposed to the pleasantly cool air while my back side soaks in the salty wetness.
Then I close my eyes and drift back behind the veil to visit ghosts of princes past, I can see their eyes, angelic eyes, so sweet and troubling, (we know what angels do with earth women when they’re rambling down around the upper crust, the bible tells us so), and I wonder why they rode off into the sunset without me, when we could have seen the world as I have just glimpsed it together.
Whatever other ruminations blanket me are lost when I open my eyes to see again. Let me see again for a minute. My eyes go wide and look upon the ivory chamber encapsulating me and everything is silent. My mind holds its breath.
Then again I close my eyes and my mind exhales a torrent of thoughts. The first few bursts are poetry, words winding around the experience I have just had, like weeds choking out a garden, but lovely flowering weeds just the same, the sort I will use if I ever leave the bathtub and find a place to write them down, if I can remember them then...
Poetry gives way to crystallized theories, ideas about what it means to be alive, to perceive what I have just perceived. Courses of action are suggested and examined based on these new theories and then it comes down to a simmer, to a vaporized mass of memory and desire.
But for one instant I pulled all of the desire overflowing from my cup back into the vessels and let it boil. Too much. It overflows like water from a bubbling fountain and my focus is lost, a sailor adrift in the fog, waiting for the disabling conditions to pass. I do as much as I can with the situation as it is and wait for the mists to clear again, some time.
I sit up and drink the ginger beer. I slide back down into the water and it sloshes over my face, disturbed by my movements. Again I gaze upward, but this time I am thinking about what I saw before. I am thinking about the previous experience so that even if I am having a similar experience now, I don’t notice due to this trick of effleurage.
This is how I birthed my children; by rubbing my fingers on the bed sheets so that the sensation of doing so was carried to my brain, and due to the extreme sensitivity of the nerve endings in my finger tips, that message was received and processed by my overwrought nervous system before the notification that something tremendous was going on below the navel, thereby deadening the sensation of birth pains. In the same way, the mind froths with postulations based on the past and makes projections extending into the future to escape the intensity of NOW, the now that, like a star, is too brilliant to hold onto for too long. But if you can manage it, then for one moment the world is startlingly clear. And deathly quiet. And starkly radiant.

My Life as a Creator Dog

I have been trained like some berzerker attack dog to hammer on the keys to the rhythm of the beat and spill out golden sinews of thought and emotion without censorship. It is a developing habit, a thing I do almost effortlessly. Once I am in the chair, once the headphones are clapped over my ears and the music begins to trickle along the channels of my nervous system, I respond. Just as rubbing a thigh will warm other more secretive parts to the point of yielding up some gooey magick, so a few drops of sound may be administered to my ear canal and the result will be the warmth and wetness of an aroused mind.
This is what we want. We want habits that carry us through in the desired direction. We want to create every day to strive to be truly worthy of the phrase, “made in the image of God”. God must not be one who sits on his couch watching reality TV produced by some creative other, munching his popped corn and sipping his orange Fanta and waiting for the time when he will have to relieve himself. Certainly that is not the God in whose image I was made. That is not the God that I would aspire to be.
I make myself in the image of a creator god, one who rolls clay and breathes fire into it for six days and rests only on the seventh before resuming his work again the following day. Do, Re, Mi, Fa, So, La, Si, and Do again. The unending music of busy busy hands rolling and tapping to eke something out of the hard cold matter, the unyielding mother. We rub her and ply her sleeping flesh in an effort to rouse her from her deep deep slumber. Eventually even she will warm up under that persistent touch. This is the work of rescuing enchanted princesses frozen in spells of isolation and lethargy, waiting for true love to return the rose glow to pallid cheeks.
Rise! Rise!
Each day I come and set myself in supplication before you. I spin at the wheel, stoke the fires of the kiln, roll dough into the shapes of ginger children, paint upon the walls of the cave and sing my heart into a roaring ball of fire, a sun to awaken the life held dormant beneath your icy flesh.
Watch!
Here it comes now, the life so long hidden in subterranean galleries beneath a fog of slumber rises to the call. Timid green shoots break through the black top soil, pushing their budding little heads up towards my affections, seeking out that promised kiss from the sun.
We are makers. Doers, creators, builders, makers. Makers that roll the matter of the mother into unexpected forms, designs sprung from a pattern so entrenched in our genetic make up that we are blind to it.
There are always guard dogs, bitter pups on chains, not doers or makers, but stoppers and destroyers that would say that only the devil supplies such dreams as these that I weave, as these dreams that weave me. Not even for them will we yield, but instead work in the darkness, in secret, always shaking the sleeping world with gentle loving finger tips to make new life from the old in the same way that mushrooms spring up over heaps of decay and convert death into the life of their own kind.
Feed me your death, sleeping queen. Angry watch dogs set to protect her slumber, big black dogs, nip at my feet when I would step off of the table of the world and call in other dreams, universes of light and color and sound that would transform the sleeping queen forever and make her unrecognizable to trembling pups.
We call this change the end times, the end of the world as we know it, the end of the ages of sleep, the awakening that must come if enough makers stand around prodding rolls of reality flesh with pins, until riddled with such holes, the colors of the unmade spill through like water through a colander creating fountains of incomprehensible life. Not an end as trembling dogs will bark, but a beginning, a beginning made in each moment of concentrated making, a making done now, for the sake of its own existence as a state, as a position of matter in space and time, without fear or obedience to futures or pasts.
Some dogs have been trained to stop trespassers, and others, like myself, have been trained to run out into the wilderness and fetch the strange and bring it back inside the city walls. We each have our habits which move us like the gears in a clock. We makers are no less mechanical than our frightened brethren. Our nature is the same. The difference is that we are using our nature to be of service to something beyond our own nature. We have taken up the work of programming our own routines for the purpose of becoming makers, so that when Pavlov’s bell is rung, we don’t just salivate, we stand and dance and sing a song.

Impermanence

How many days have passed that I have said nothing at all and let the opportunity slip away? Today I had the vision of snow melting on the branch of a conifer tree, the perfect visualization of impermanence, ice transforming slowly to water as it drips away. I thought of it in conjunction with falling, with forgetting, with taking two steps down one trail then loosing consciousness and taking up another and, with it, two steps in a new direction, over and over, so that I, like all my kindred, do nothing more than stomp in a confused circle.
I see it right now. I am a machine, a clockwork doll rotating around and around like one of those darling little wind up chicks that can manage to hop to the end of the table. The voyager is not like a passenger in a car, not like the cream filling inside of the Twinkie. The voyager at first is an observer. A person watching a movie, watching a little puppet show and becoming absorbed in the plot. Upon developing particular sympathy with a particular character, it soon finds that it has fallen into the play. It drips into the story like snow slipping off a branch, little, by little. The voyager forgets itself, becoming the puppet without noticing that a transference has occurred.
Etanna is nothing at all. She is a flea circus. A trap for an unsuspecting cosmic observer to become entangled in. It could be a good show if the observer remembers themselves and suddenly takes hold of the puppets strings and moves her around in accordance with the story line and in sympathy with the character while also remembering its true nature.
I can see a little withered old woman talking to me, the kind that makes me think of apples and gnarled forests and hand sewn dresses and curly hair. She was talking just now in the back of my mind and I could almost hear her voice although I could make out nothing of what she said, and when I noticed her, she evaporated. She was kindly. But that of course is how I remember her now. She was a dream I almost dreamt, except my pillow was missing and I was in the middle of saying something else.
Everything in me is rattling loose. Good things and bad things are welling up from within me within a matter of minutes. Forget what has gone unsaid for a day. There are things arising every minute to be lost again in the next and I am not quick enough yet to make anything of them.
While laying in bed or standing over the kitchen sink I experience Satori. During “enlightening time”, while I sit poised to type away and share whatever great vision makes me visionary, I go schizophrenic more than sage. I see shadows out of the corner of my eyes moving around. They move more than ever and without startling me in the least. They continue to move for a while after I’ve noticed and turned to look at them. That strange something that I saw out of the corner of my eye is still a strange something for a few moments while I regard it. I see it, but it fits into no category at all. I see this thing which is not anything as far as my brain is concerned and so, after regarding it and drawing a blank, it turns back into the shadow of a plant or even the plant itself. It doesn’t really have to be a shadow. It can be an actual object such as a stone or a shoe or a box or a chair which begins to crawl across the floor or otherwise move around and, when I look at it, it keeps going for a minute or two and doesn’t seem to be anything I know any name for, and then it goes back to being a stone or a shoe or a box or a chair or some thing which has a name and could plausibly be occupying the space that has arrested my attention.
I know. If you’re feeling friendly, you’re thinking. “Brain tumor.” And if you aren’t, you’re just thinking, “Cuckoo”. What if I did have a brain tumor though? Could you really say that it was the cause of the anomaly or couldn’t it equally be that the anomaly was the cause of the tumor? But that’s not what I really hoped to say. I think though, that telling you something was better than telling you nothing. How many days have passed that I have said nothing at all and let the opportunity slip away like melting snow? Lost days ripe with lost worlds diminished to fine vapor.
Today I did not have a vision.
Today the visions had me.

Death

We are immersed in a culture so afraid of dying that it’s only purpose is to live, at any cost, in any way that one can manage. And yet each one of us will die eventually, despite our best effort to outmaneuver death. In the end, we have not lived at all, we were always avoiding death and doing things based on whether or not they might lead to our demise or to bodily harm or to shame. We might long to see the step pyramids nestled in the pulsing wet bosom of Central America but choose not to take the trip because the politics of the region are unstable, there are scorpions and snakes in the jungle, there are thieves and murderers waiting for victims outside of the airport and the plane might crash before they can even get you. You might be sold into white slavery, your organs might be traded in the black market, you might be arrested due to a minor misunderstanding and rot away in a third world jail cell where you may contract a life threatening disease.
So, for all of these reasons, you do not do the thing that you long to do. Instead, you go to work and come home and pay your taxes and change the oil in your car and watch the movies that Netflix delivers to your mailbox, like some crawly thing creeping in the shadows hoping that the hungry crow won’t find you. But she will eventually, she always does, no matter how skillfully you avoid living, you can never avoid death.
One day you will go for your routine checkup and the doctor will tactfully announce that they have detected something abnormal and would like to run more tests and after more tests he will solemnly explain that you have cancer but might recover if you undergo chemotherapy. You’ll agree, clinging to the idea of complete remission, a full recovery, so the treatment will begin and it will make you feel sicker and your hair will fall out and you will have trouble paying your medical bills and, within three years, you’ll finally die with a bad taste in your mouth, hooked up to an IV in some hospital, leaving your family buried under a mountain of debt.
You will be dead without ever having seen those pyramids where kings and priests plucked beating hearts from warm bodies and held them out before the eyes of the mesmerized crowd below, before rolling the now cooling body down the steps and bringing out another hot screaming live one. You will not know what it is like to walk in the jungle listening to the monkeys scream and the insects hum and catch a glimpse of the vivid plumage of the quetzal bird before she flies away after the blue butterfly. You will not know what rich heart you sacrificed when you opted to stay safe and comfortable rather than embrace an experience of the real, will never receive the secret communication that was meant for you alone and might have been transmitted to your deepest being, coursing from the ancients stones into the soles of your hiking boots and up your legs until it bursts in your chest and washes over every cell of your brain like waves crashing over a breaker. You will die without understanding why you should have gone, without guessing why you should have spent your days under the hot brilliance of the glorious sun without fear of the hungry black bird that circles perpetually over head.
You will die without ever having lived.
Staying alive is not the purpose of life and death is a doorway which you will definitely cross.
In both life and death, keep your eyes wide open and place fear aside, like an old battered hat.

Annihilation Shall Be The Name Of The New Federation

If only my fingers could flap fast enough, my synapses fire rapidly enough, my elaborately configured mechanical creation respond with electric lightening speed to the whispered request of that other subtler I… The "I" that is the emptiness between the human who sits cross legged on the floor and the white candle flickering a foot away. The "I" that has never existed and will never exist and is eternal and imagined, very real, as real as the Narwhale, hunted to near extinction for its magickal horn. The "I" that is not at all and yet is, voiceless, a whisper of nobility, dignity and nothingness. The "I" that is free of any agenda and waits silently, aimlessly, for something to come and rouse it from slumber. The "I" that is locked in a high tower and awaits its prince, the "I" laying out on the table with electrodes strapped to its inert body waiting for the lightning to strike and for the good doctor to shriek with excitement, the "I" sagging under its crown on the throne, listening to the whispers of the deceitful counselor awaiting the arrival of the replacement that may slay him and make the kingdom anew.
That eye suspended in the invisible skies of mind is one thing, and the thing that can move is another. This wriggle jiggle body bot, this conglomeration of nations, the united states of human experience, pumping blood, pressing out Carbon Dioxide and gulping in oxygen, producing subtle chemical cocktails which cause my breasts to be tender and swollen and my voice to be high pitched. This other thing that I am, this thing that is, this thing tied to the earth, to the planet that is an extension of its lesser body, this mortal creation with its precious and fragile shelf life due to expire in another 60 to 80 years if it isn’t knocked abruptly from the shelf before then, to shatter upon the sterile linoleum beneath the fluorescent lights and then be no more, it is something Other.
These two "Me"s, each one representing it’s own federation; on my right hand the federation of the dying and on my left hand the federation of the undead, both sides ever at war and yet ever longing to embrace in some final ecstasy which will blot out the existence of each and birth something new and entirely unknowable; the new empire of the eternal light and night, the explosion that results from the union of opposites, the newest latest and greatest coming of Christ; half worm, half eaglet, a winged serpent twisting through the forgotten tunnels of time and beyond them in the endless abyss of the uncreated. One eye blind in the light, the other blind in the dark.
Whatever either "I" imagines, whatever either "I" hopes for cannot be the end, for our children are never as we imagine they will be, they are something else, unpredictable, a synthesis of what came before, a frightening new evolutionary mutation which may succeed or fail to meet the standard of any of an infinite number of categories in which they will be judged by David Hasselhoff or Paula Abdul.
This right now, this moment, is the frustrated lovemaking of the sky and the sea, one which seeks the clarity of the stars and one that seeks the tangles of the deep. No, not one, one nation and one other nation causing a sensation, an appalling congregation of fertilization on behalf of the acceleration of creation fostered by intense aggravation.
Who are the judges really? And when and where, by which angels from which rung of what ladder will the categories be drawn up and decided upon?
What you know is not real. What you know is the fictitious nonsense of a sedated dreamer. What you deem wisest and worthy is spittle on a mad man’s bib, wait a moment and a nurse will wipe away your loftiest definitions of self, the universe, god, and everything.
Yes, I have been like one of those bad moms on a day time television talk show, broadcast to the populations of the Western hemisphere of that planet earth in the milky way galaxy (which goes by a different name in different company) that confesses that she has allowed her teen to have sex under her roof, only I’m much worse than that, I have allowed serpents and birds to mate within my own consciousness, and not (like those other moms profess) because I thought it was the safest place for them to be, but because there are few other places where angels and demons can get together and do the nasty. There are only so many mind blown mortals, walking about, staring wide eyed at the world, wearing around their necks signs, written with invisible ink, which say:

"Speakeasy through me ye Gods and Devils…
and fuck prohibition!"

This that you have stumbled into, these ramblings, are the dirty linens left behind by monsters of sky and water, alien entities like Spaniards and Indians, attracted like the opposing poles of magnets, things which come together via compulsion laced with reluctance. These things meet here in the house of the holy, in this den of sin with the understanding that Annihilation shall be the name of the new Federation.
If only I can move fast enough to be of service. If only my fingers flap fast enough, synapses fire rapidly enough, mortal body bends and bows gracefully enough, heart breaks open wide enough, then let me serve the new kingdom. Let me be servant to the Federation of Annihilation.

Retriever

It is with heavy droopy limbs that I plod away at my keyboard attempting to bring you a message from beyond. With this tired and decaying biological miracle I struggle to open up a fissure into a hidden realm, a place where creatures shimmer in 7 or 12 dimensions at least, so that what you or I could see, even with the use of some subtle sense outside of biological eye sight, would seem to be ever moving and crawling, as if its flesh were composed of millions of pyramid shaped cells, always falling off and being replenished, just as our own skin cells flake off, leaving us continuously in a brand new skin. What if I were aware of the newness of this drowsy contraption in every moment? Really it is the drowsiness which hinders such a perception. Just as when you wake in the morning at the tolling of the digital alarm blinking with its red eyes formed of squared off Arabic numerals and feel that you can’t possible move, but force yourself up, and just by taking yourself through the motions of a person who is awake, the sleep begins to slip off of you, in the same manner as the aforementioned skin cells, just as you wake yourself up in the morning by showering and dressing, even if you feel like an animated corpse, so do I go through the motions of being the awakened messenger, even though inspiration is lost somewhere in the fog.
Just by lifting my satchel up and heaving the strap over my sagging shoulder, and strapping on my little winged sandals and using bobby pins to affix my little golden winged helmet securely upon my head, I heighten the chances of delivering a message today. Don’t think that I’m having illusions of grandeur; that I believe I am retrieving from the beyond some golden truth which I will deliver to you. Certainly not. I am like a good Labrador running out into the tall, seemingly impenetrable reeds to fetch a dead bird and bring it back to my master’s hand. Then I, the master, will turn the feathered thing over in my hand and look at it wonderingly.
‘Is this what I shot from the sky? Is this my own true nature?’
And I, the servant, will wag my black tail and loll my pink tongue and cock my head to the side imploring the master to give me some more work to do before I resign myself to lying around on the rug licking my own genitals or waiting at the front window to bark at the mailman, whilst the master reclines, atrophying in a lounge chair, watching images flash on a 20 inch square cathode tube monitor adorned by insect like antennae, perhaps even watching images of duck hunters. So I whine a little and wag my tail, and the master nods and raises the rifle and waits for something to move across the blue screen of our mind. BLAM! We don’t know what it is until we’ve caught it and killed it. Then we examine a corpse and ask ourselves,
"Is this a bird?"
If we were to assume that everything we could observe about dead birds was the truth about live birds, that would be an error. Could we really hope to learn about the nature of flying birds by shooting them down? We could at least be in a relationship with them, which is what we long for, the unification of our holy trinity, the master, the retriever, and the illusive quest. The bird is a dream, and the master is a stalker, and the retriever is a warrior, a fine infantry man doing the rough work. Meanwhile the general keeps an eye on the whole picture and plans and urges the infantry on towards the flag which dances intoxicatingly in the wind. When at last we tear it down and hold it in our sweaty grimy palms, what is it that we will have attained? We will not know, even then, while clutching it, all that we will have is its discarded outward manifestation, so that we will have to ask ourselves:
‘What could a flag be?’
A flag is a dream. A general is a stalker. An infantry man is a warrior.
Then we will turn our nose to the new horizon and begin the quest afresh. The relationship will manifest through a new set of outward forms.
This is the glimpse of the hidden which I will deliver; an artifact which marks the place where the mysterious passed in a lightning moment of awakening. It was present and alive for a moment in a fleeting relationship between you, and I, and its own unknowable nature. The byproduct of that union, of the heat that was generated when we closed the circuit for a moment and nearly shattered the illusion of separation, is the thing which we can hold in our hand when the circle is broken again , a dead bird, a photograph, a blog entry, a key to remind us that once we breached the gate of no gates, and if we strive for it, we will do it again.