“I am.”
(The I in the Pyramid)
Showing posts with label pyramid. Show all posts
Showing posts with label pyramid. Show all posts
Thursday, April 1, 2010
Monday, September 21, 2009
And the guilty shall hang
"What I mean is that if all this power really is in the hands of just a few stinking-rich, power-hungry, unscrupulous bastards who don't give a toss about anything but their own little fucked-up ‘elite’ of likeminded arseholes, then it doesn't really look very good for the rest of us, does it?"
Vix was almost shouting, and could see heads turning inside the coffee-shop. He lowered his voice a little, leaned over and looked Mr. Friend straight in the eye with the most intense look he could manage, and said: ”They know what they’re doing, don't they?”
Mr. Friend slowly sipped his coffee, and then replied calmly:
”Well, of course they do. What did you expect?”
Mr. Friend was sitting at the usual window table at the coffee-shop when Vix had arrived.
Vix realised that it must have been several months since they last met, but when he walked over to the table to make his presence known, Mr. Friend had simply glanced up from his paper and said: “What? You’re not having any coffee?”, whereby Vix cancelled his line of ‘hello, long time’ and walked over to the counter to order.
As he returned with the coffee in hand, Mr. Friend had looked up at him briefly, and said: “Quite chilly draft in the air. Bit early, don’t you think?”, and just continued to read.
It didn't take long before they were getting to the point of dismantling the workings of the world, and they were now deep into a heated discussion on one of their favourite topics:
”But if it's all true, then the game has already been lost by anyone who would wish to oppose these fuckers,” Vix said in an almost desperate tone.
”It could well be so, but remember one thing; if you play a game of poker, you don’t win by having the best cards on your hands."
"No?" Vix shrieked.
"No. You win by convincing your opponent that you have the best hand. This is the true tactics of every ’closed’ scenario - it can’t withstand the exposure of daylight.”
"Are you insinuating that 'they' don't have any real power?"
"Of course they have real power. They have all the power you and everybody else on this planet have given them. And all the power that most breathing men and women throughout history have sacrificed to them by believing in their lies," Mr. Friend stated matter-of-factly.
"Oh yeah? You're blaming the victims for making this mess now?"
Mr. Friend narrowed his eyes at Vix, resembling some kind of pointy-faced bird: "If you choose to let yourself be controlled, it's your choice, your responsibility. And your own mess to clean up."
"That's quite stale, if you ask me," Vix replied.
"So is Nature."
He had to think for a second. Things were being said that collided heavily with his whole view of the world, or at least the view of the world he’d always wanted to have, but still he found it very hard to argue against the logic of what Mr. Friend said.
But his emotions were working in overdrive to try and find a way to oppose the old man’s sickening confidence in his own insight.
"Listen! How the hell can people even know about this? They don’t know that they’re being controlled. Therefore, it leaves them no choice. The authorities of all nations are all keeping the lid tightly screwed-on as always, and trying to oppose anything in a more active way either gets you locked up in jail, or will get you parked in the fringes of society – stowed away like a freak at a sideshow - way outside the whole system. And that just leaves you free to be poor and have no influence whatsoever."
"Now that's a thinking man speaking! More of this, please." Mr. Friend smiled and gestured as to give Vix a round of applause, to yet another large portion of irritation.
But Vix swallowed and continued: "Without any political, spiritual or financial influence, you are by society's standards a nobody, and nobodies don't change the world. Or am I wrong?"
"No, you're not wrong, Victor.” Mr. Friend looked him straight in the eye. “You are, in fact, very right.”
Vix felt confused, and somehow empty, now suddenly being right.
Mr. Friend continued:
“’Illuminated’ outcasts have never really stood a chance at saving either humanity or the planet, have they? More often than not they haven’t even been able to save themselves - no names mentioned, no offence taken.”
“So, no Saviours, then.”
“I strongly doubt it. For anything to change in this world on any scale of significance, it seems to require vast collective efforts. Only when new ideas start to move the masses do such ideas become important, and only then do they have any lasting effect.”
“But that leaves us truly fucked in all orifices. The masses have long since proved that as long as they’ve got their trash televisions and their bellies stuffed with cheap beer and drive-by junk food the last thing they need is new ideas for the world.”
“Ah, the language!” Mr. Friend pretended to be offended.
“But seriously. It’s a lost game, this one. People are so immersed in their cultural prisons that even though they were about to recognize and act on the notion they have deep inside, that everything is simply wrong, and start searching for a way out, they will have nowhere to turn. It’s no point changing your mental diet if the whole forest is poisoned.”
Vix felt defeated by his own arguments.
Mr. Friend quietly scratched his moustache as he sat looking very calmly at Vix. His eyes had lost some of their usual darting quality and had some kind of unfamiliar warmth in them.
Almost a kind of softness.
“But you have forgotten one aspect, Victor,” he finally said, after a sip of the now lukewarm coffee. “It’s something we’ve discussed many times before. A place where all information - ‘secret’ or not - can be found for anyone who bothers to take a closer look."
"What? The Internet is gonna save the world now?"
“No, no, no. Not your beloved Internet. As such,” Mr. Friend shook his head. "History!” Mr. Friend shouted, in a hissing, whispery voice, like in a movie containing at least one dwarf. “History is the key! Knowledge of history is the real power.”
He tapped the table with his now rolled-up newspaper as he said this, as if to make Vix feel that these words were of the greatest importance possible.
“But I take it most people think that money is the real power,” Vix suggested.
“I’ve hinted quite strongly that the power gained from controlling history by far transcends that of controlling money. But also knowing your history will get you much further than the worldly riches any person without the right heritage can ever expect to accumulate. That said, most people can't resist a bribe the moment the size of the bribe size exceeds their personal threshold - usually situated somewhere just above mid-way between their moral and their greed – so it’s a tough one, I agree. But it’s a way out.”
Vix didn’t consider Mr. Friend’s solution a genial one, but decided to follow the line of thought for a bit.
"So you mean that if people knew their history, they would have a chance at withstanding the power of the world’s false authorities?"
"Yes I do! If people knew the real story, and had some light shed on what's been going on throughout the years, they would probably understand that there really wasn't much to fear to begin with, and would ask more questions instead of following the whims of charlatans."
"We should all just turn on the lights, you mean?"
”Exactly! That’s when you’ll realise that the monster growling beneath your bed at night really is just a mouse with a megaphone.”
This made Vix smile, and gave him a slight feeling of relief.
He sipped his coffee.
”So that’s the whole game, then? Distracting people from the real knowledge that lies within history. I guess it’s simply a question of hiding a couple of fruitful trees in the forest?”
”Absolutely,” Mr. Friend looked content.
“But in a way it’s still quite similar to the hiding of spiritual knowledge in the darkness of occultism, only this time there’s nothing being covered up, it’s just a foggy mass of information if you don’t know what to look for,” Vix suggested, knowing that this would trigger Mr. Friend on the subject of people’s spiritual health once more.
“Quite so, Victor. If you want to take away people’s spirituality you have to make sure to hide it very well and make it look threatening enough to scare them away from trying to get it back. It's amazing what torturing, hanging or burning a few thousand mothers, sisters and daughters on stakes can do to an onlooker. Especially to a child. I guess seeing someone you love burn to death in front of your very eyes has an immense impact on your future willingness to dwell in "witchery" yourself. And you might not be so keen on advising your own children to touch on the subject either when the time comes for you to raise kids of your own."
“An overly effective cure for eradicating all future generations' spiritual heritage, in other words."
Mr. Friend seemed too happy with the lack of resistance in the conversation, but Vix decided to let him go on undisturbed:
”But it’s not just in the area of people's spiritual health these muddling techniques are at work. The same mechanism lies behind all the secrecy of military and government 'intelligence' matters, or even in so called 'National Security'. Make it seem dangerous enough to oppose the System, and soon you'll have people eating any lie you give them, in fear of the punishment they would face by seeking the truth."
”But then there really is a big, global conspiracy going on. Like the really crazy people discuss on the Internet; in which those who seem to be fighting the big wars on opposite sides are secretly meeting in darkened rooms, comparing notes and making decisions to make each other even more wealthy through arms sales and other forms of war-profiteering. You mean I shouldn’t trust the ’official’ version of anything at all, refuse vaccinations and watch out for reptilian-looking politicians?”
Mr. Friend laughed.
”All of your paranoid fears are probably quite true – if you want them to be. But let's put this a bit differently: There’s nothing in this so-called civilization of ours that hasn’t been planned by human minds in one way or other. From roads to commercial campaigns to the price of sugar to the distribution system of ’illegal’ drugs to the banking pyramid to...”
”What’s the banking pyramid?”
”The world's financial system. But you'll soon understand this." Mr. Friend went on: "So. From the banking pyramid to the voting system of Florida to the road systems of the world – well probably not the road system of London Town, but you get my point.”
”But, Banking Py...”
”All of these things can be perceived as conspiracies as long as you’re not aware of the fact that they’re simply the results of the human will at work to begin with, but instead realize it slowly over time.”
”What? That we’re being tricked all the time without realizing, but that some have started seeing the truth? Sounds a bit too close to 'The Matrix'.”
”No. I mean that most are being ignorant and lazy most of the time. There really are not that many areas in which anyone cares to cover up their underlying motives anymore. They just trust this human laziness and the fact that people won’t use their brains unless they absolutely have to.”
”Yeah, right. For example?”
”Shopping mall psychologists.”
”What, shrinks who have their offices located inside shopping malls? Big deal. I’d go crazy myself by spending a whole day in such a place.”
”No, I’m talking about psychologists hired to assist architects behind designing shopping malls, and who later assist the stores to arrange their stock in such a manner that their customers react in a certain pattern and consume more goods. And obviously far more than they actually need in life.”
”Aha. Come to think of it, I think I saw a documentary on a bloke whose job was something along these lines on Discovery Channel once. He made sure the colour of the carpet on the floor inside the store didn’t differ from the one in the corridor outside, as people unconsciously would perceive it as a psychological barrier, which prevented them from walking into the store. And that men's clothes weren’t hung on tall racks, as women often do the shopping for their men and are statistically shorter.”
”Now did you? And what did you do about it? Did you rush out into the streets and scream ’conspiracy!’, standing outside your local mall in the rain with a megaphone, handing out leaflets, warning every poor soul who passed through the doors? Or did you set up your own internet site to end this evil conspiring shopping empire?”
”Well, no. I considered blowing myself up at the premises of the newsagent down the road, but then I strongly doubted that old Ali had the turnover to employ such conspiring services and decided to let it rest.”
“I’m sure you did.”
“Well, he does keep his fags just in head-height behind the counter, though. Makes it really hard not to pick up a packet as you pay…”
”Hmm. You’re a wise little snot, aren’t you?” Mr. Friend all too-transparently enjoyed the direction this discussion was taking again.
Vix didn’t let the opportunity lie.
”Ok. So modern shopping malls are cunningly designed so that people are being manipulated further into consumerism, which in turn holds up the unjust trade-balance of the world, so that the capital powers further cement their position. I see that. But what are you getting at?” he said in a slow, stoned voice that he thought would have suited such a statement.
Mr. Friend fired back:
”I’m simply pointing out that before you start screaming about a global conspiracy of enormous dimensions and want to reveal to the world who’s really behind the 9/11 attacks, or who actually killed JFK, or question why the privately-owned central bank of the United States can call itself the ’Federal’ Reserve bank and continue inventing more money at will - you should simply try and do something about the matters that actually are within your own reach. Otherwise you’ll end up feeling like total failure, as you’ll be engaging your mind in something the body instinctively knows it can do nothing about.”
”Ahh. Great solution. To stay passive on every level of resistance towards the corrupted System. Now, that’s the way to go.”
”No, no, no. Take action against manipulation, for goodness sake. But do it on your own level. Then you might be more successful. And if you’re really serious about wanting to do something about the big stuff; sell your car and start walking, or get a bike. Then you won’t need any oil at least in your own life.”
”I don’t have a car”
”See. You’re already saving the world!”
Vix had to take a deep breath, but continued talking as he did:
”Anyway I believe most people don’t have any confidence left in ’small protests’.”
His lungs were all empty when he reached “-tests”, and he couldn’t fit another word.
Mr. Friend grabbed the opportunity:
”Of course you don’t. That’s how it should be. Otherwise the whole thing wouldn’t have worked. As I have tried to explain to you on more than one occasion, the system of global hypnosis functions in a most excellent way. I take great pride in being involved in its architecture.”
”You do?”
Vix had planned to hit back, offended as he was to have been included in ‘most people’, but was surprised at Mr. Friend’s sudden revelation.
”Well, of course. I would have hated to think that I’d spent the large part of my life wasting my time,” Mr. Friend said, then went silent.
Vix looked out the window for a while. He took a sip of his coffee, and also said nothing for a while.
Then he said:
”But why would you tell me all this if you’re happy about how things work?”
”I didn’t say I was happy with the way things work. I said I was proud of the work I put into it. That’s two quite different things, I believe.”
”Yeah, but you seem mostly unaffected by the horrors of this world – horrors that you now claim to be partly responsible for.”
Mr. Friend firmly put his cup down on the table with a sharp noise. His eyes glinted with something Vix decided was a tiny fraction of a lost temper.
”Let me put this straight, Victor. None of the inner mechanisms that lead the people of this planet to act as they do are particularly ’innocent’ in nature. Being a so-called ‘victim of circumstance’ is nothing but a chosen condition. It requires that you refuse to take responsibility for your own actions, and – listen to what I’m telling you here – to actually make the decision to abandon your natural responsibilities takes a lot of conscious willpower.”
Whatever he was on about seemed very important to Mr. Friend.
Almost personal.
Vix chose to shut up and let him go on:
“You can spend most of your early grown-up life working hard on escaping your natural childhood sensibilities, especially in the field of your sense of responsibility and consequences from the use of your free willpower. Eventually you can manage to escape yourself through deceiving yourself, and the reason people are willing to do so is that they can finally get a personal excuse to act as a victim - and never really have to face any consequences of their own choices, as they are not really ‘their own’ anymore.”
Vix had enough of the monologue at this point.
”So you’re telling me that humans who suffer do so out of their own choice? That’s a truckload of crap if you ask me.”
”Of course people don’t choose to suffer – on a conscious level. People are far too greedy by nature to choose things that aren’t good for themselves. They are simply suffering because they have made the wrong choice of trying to escape the consequence of free will, and deep down they instinctively know that the mess they’re in is their own doing.”
”Yeah, right …”
Was all Vix managed to say, as it made his thoughts wander.
Mr. Friend didn’t stop:
”There is one widespread popular myth when it comes to hypnosis; the one that you can’t hypnotise someone who doesn’t want to become hypnotised.”
”And that’s also just a lie, of course?”
”No. That’s the truth. Very much the truth.”
”So you say that all these people sleepwalking the planet, letting themselves be screwed-over by the power-hungry, harassed by the unjust money-system, and caught up in the modern slavery that is consumerism. You’re saying that they chose to do so by their own free will? Humbug!”
”The free will is a scary tool, my friend. Using it means that all your choices can be blamed on yourself, and no-one else. No parent, no God, no ‘System’, and certainly no politician. How many people in your neighbourhood would you guess would be willing to give up all these excuses for their own misery?”
”Well, putting it like that...”
”Have you never wondered why children who are in the process of becoming teenagers almost always end up in constant conflict with their parents?”
”I wouldn’t know. I left.”
”And maybe that was the right choice. It certainly might seem so from where I’m sitting, watching the result.”
”Get to the point, please,” Vix snapped. He could feel the usual unpleasant feelings rise as they touched in on the subject of his own family background.
”Every human being who enters into adolescence from childhood, instinctively experience a phase of their decision-making skills and sense of responsibility awakening inside. From the careless life of childhood - if you should be so lucky to be allowed one in your early years - you suddenly feel that you have to face yourself and start testing these new abilities of yours.”
”And if you don’t?”
”Don’t what? Face them?”
”I mean, what if you haven’t had a playful childhood to look back at?”
”Unfortunately, you are at the mercy of your parents’ ability to make the right choices for you until you develop these skills yourself. That’s probably the worst consequence of letting people choose to become parents without first having reached a certain personal maturity to make important choices for themselves. Which has very little to do with their age. Just a most unlucky side-effect of the combination of free will and the mammalian reproductive system.”
”It probably would’ve worked better to combine free will with automitosis?”
”Probably. Why weren’t you working on the team of Mother Nature’s original architects when this whole thing was designed?”
”The pay was too shitty.”
”Right. But back to the inner workings of a troubled teen.”
”You realise you’ll win the Nobel price if you manage to come up with an explanation of this?”
”I wouldn’t need one, but thank you very much in advance. How about I’ll give you one if you stop interrupting me?”
”As you’re really on a roll today: shoot.”
”As you begin trying-out your skills of decision-making and responsibility, you also start realising that most of the people surrounding you - people that you have trusted all your life - don’t use them at all, or at least to a very small extent. That’s usually when you discover your first ’conspiracy’.”
”And then they just keep coming?”
”If you choose to look at such revelations that way, yes. If you on the other hand just shake them off, and continue the process of developing your skills the way you should, you’re most likely to find yourself in a lot of trouble.”
”Tell me about it.”
”That’s what I’m doing.”
”And that’s probably why I’m still listening...”
”Firstly, you are committing the crime of reminding the ’superiors’ around you that they’ve chosen not to use their skills, and that is considered treason of the highest degree. The whole illusion is dependent upon everyone participating in the drama. The first repercussions are therefore most likely to be attempts from your surroundings to make you feel guilty for stepping out of the ’victim’ pattern.”
”And that certainly works.”
”Yes, it is a simple form of suggestion, and it works. But as the guilt starts building inside you - at the same time your feelings tell you that it’s not real guilt, but guilt imposed by others. And as you know deep within that you’ve done nothing wrong, you end up in a conflict inside yourself between the ’real’ feelings of the right to exercise your birthright, and the ’fake’ guilt invoked by those who want to stop you from doing so. You can then choose to get very angry, and take that anger out on your surroundings, or you can turn it inwards and start blaming yourself and get very self-destructive and depressed about your own situation. Either way, that’s usually when the real trouble starts.”
”Not bad.”
”If you can stand having all the people you looked up to and loved throughout your whole childhood being angry with you for a prolonged period of time, you can persist and get out on the other side a stronger and perfectly healthy person. If you don’t, you’re most likely to give in and just accept things ’the way they are’, and carry the whole scenario on to the next generation.”
Vix paused to try and take some of this in, the conversation had suddenly started getting personal for him, too.
After a short break, he said:
”Put this way, it could be far worse having people you love around you as you grow up than not having any. Then at least you don’t have that many to feel guilty about.”
He could feel a sting inside.
Mr. Friend looked as if he sensed the change of mood, and continued with a lowered voice:
”If the disappointment of not being given your rightful share of love and support in your early years doesn’t overshadow the sense of freedom attained by not having lots of unhealthy relations, then the answer is yes. That might be why orphans who make it through to adulthood without losing track are usually set for great things.”
Vix smiled, and said:
”Makes you wonder. Sometimes I don’t know what might be the worst, nuclear war or the nuclear family.”
Mr. Friend laughed aloud with his short, combusting laughter. He patted Vix lightly two times at the tip of his shoulder with the palm of his hand.
”That’s why I put my faith in you, Victor,” he said, and then he leaned back in his chair and stared into the distance out through the café window.
Vix could see the distance in Mr. Friend’s eyes growing, and said nothing.
They just sat like that for a while, and soon Vix reckoned it was time to make a move before the evening crept in and left him with the night bus from the station as the only option to get back to The Shelter.
He said goodbye to Mr. Friend, who smiled back in an unfamiliar fashion. He almost seemed vulnerable as he sat there watching the afternoon slowly giving in to the creeping evening darkness.
Vix thought to himself that Mr. Friend was a great man, and that after all, he was genuinely very happy to know him.
Then he left.
The driver on the bus back from the station kept his little FM radio as loud as practically possible, for the convenience or despair of his tired late-night passengers.
The metal-sounding, tinny voices went on overdrive about the great crisis that had hit the world’s financial system.
Vix couldn't escape the repeated disinformation, and soon found himself getting severely wound-up over the whole thing.
When would people learn?
He spent the entire journey fuming and raging, and knew he had to do something about it.
Back at The Shelter, he stormed in, put on the kettle, and sat down by the computer.
He hesitated to log into the blog. Something felt not quite right about it. Like having a little rant wouldn’t be enough on a night like this.
After a day like this.
Vix had never thought he would go to this step, but something inside him almost made him want to reach out to the world.
It could even be that he felt just a tad invincible this evening.
He knew he had to do something outrageous – something daring.
He almost closed his eyes as he typed the home URL to Facebook, as if his mind was looking the other way from what his hands were doing.
He quickly hit the 'sign up'-button, and filled in his email address, a ‘weak’ password, and – much to his own surprise - his full name.
His own, real name.
As if afraid of suddenly changing his mind, he checked and answered the confirmation email at record speed, and after another mouseclick, Vix had an account at one of the world's largest social networks.
He skipped filling in any more info about himself, except 'religious views' and 'relationship status', and then he created an open group, naming it 'Save the rich'.
He quickly wrote from the top of his head:
People!
We have a crisis spreading like wildfire across the planet these days.
This time, we're not talking a mere 'minor accident', like a trillion billion people dying of hunger in Africa, or thousands losing their lives in the flooding of Bangladesh, or even thousands more being slaughtered in Darfur with weapons produced and sold from our own country, while we all look the other way.
No, this time REAL disaster has struck.
You see, those of us, those very few of us, who can afford to play the big money games; the stock market, the moving around of imaginary money for the gain of real profit, have been so unlucky to have gone and overspent their cash.
Of course, it's not really their cash in the first place, but a loss is a loss, and we are now in danger of having people who matter lose their silver-lined jobs.
In other words, salaries in the hundredfold of what a simple hard-working cleaning assistant or bus driver can expect in a lifetime are threatened.
If this cancer isn't stopped, it can all end with the financial system of the world collapsing, and what then? We might face the horror of creating a new, more fair system of sharing our assets on a global level. The terror!
WE MIGHT EVEN END UP HAVING TO CONSUME LESS!
So, to stop this frightening scenario, join us in our new campaign:
I appeal to you, people of the Earth; bend down once again and let your aching backs carry the richer man, so he won't fall and get dirt on his suit, or lose the champagne glass he's carefully balancing in his hand.
Join our slogan with your voices raised to the full:
SAVE THE RICH!
LET'S UPHOLD THE GREAT PYRAMID
AT ANY PRICE!
Then he did a quick Google image search, and downloaded three different pictures that he opened and edited in his cracked copy of Photoshop.
The pictures were portraits of the top 3 billionaires from the Forbes' Top 100 list, and each portrait had the text 'save the rich' written underneath in the simplest font he could find.
Then he wrote an appeal to people to download and print the pictures onto self-adhesive paper and stick them up around their neighbourhood.
He decided to do the very same thing himself the next day, and put the stickers all over town - if this sudden courage was still there by morning.
He logged out, and felt fantastic about the whole thing.
As he walked over to make a cup of tea, he said out loud to himself:
”I am a virus. A social virus.”
It made him feel even better.
He logged onto his blog, and uploaded the track "Sleepwalker" by the Norwegian electronic band Frost.
The song title nicely summed-up the present state of people in general, he concluded - especially after today's conversation with Mr. Friend.
Then he wrote once again:
SAVE THE RICH!
LET'S UPHOLD THE GREAT PYRAMID
AT ANY PRICE!
He logged-out, noted down the events of the day in his log, and had his tea while surfing the web for any crucial updates.
Shortly, Vix fell asleep on the chair in front of his desk.
He somehow expected his dreams to become sweet, now that he had filed his protest.
Soon he slept.
Happily unaware that nobody noticed his actions.
After all, he had no friends on Facebook.
Vix was almost shouting, and could see heads turning inside the coffee-shop. He lowered his voice a little, leaned over and looked Mr. Friend straight in the eye with the most intense look he could manage, and said: ”They know what they’re doing, don't they?”
Mr. Friend slowly sipped his coffee, and then replied calmly:
”Well, of course they do. What did you expect?”
Mr. Friend was sitting at the usual window table at the coffee-shop when Vix had arrived.
Vix realised that it must have been several months since they last met, but when he walked over to the table to make his presence known, Mr. Friend had simply glanced up from his paper and said: “What? You’re not having any coffee?”, whereby Vix cancelled his line of ‘hello, long time’ and walked over to the counter to order.
As he returned with the coffee in hand, Mr. Friend had looked up at him briefly, and said: “Quite chilly draft in the air. Bit early, don’t you think?”, and just continued to read.
It didn't take long before they were getting to the point of dismantling the workings of the world, and they were now deep into a heated discussion on one of their favourite topics:
”But if it's all true, then the game has already been lost by anyone who would wish to oppose these fuckers,” Vix said in an almost desperate tone.
”It could well be so, but remember one thing; if you play a game of poker, you don’t win by having the best cards on your hands."
"No?" Vix shrieked.
"No. You win by convincing your opponent that you have the best hand. This is the true tactics of every ’closed’ scenario - it can’t withstand the exposure of daylight.”
"Are you insinuating that 'they' don't have any real power?"
"Of course they have real power. They have all the power you and everybody else on this planet have given them. And all the power that most breathing men and women throughout history have sacrificed to them by believing in their lies," Mr. Friend stated matter-of-factly.
"Oh yeah? You're blaming the victims for making this mess now?"
Mr. Friend narrowed his eyes at Vix, resembling some kind of pointy-faced bird: "If you choose to let yourself be controlled, it's your choice, your responsibility. And your own mess to clean up."
"That's quite stale, if you ask me," Vix replied.
"So is Nature."
He had to think for a second. Things were being said that collided heavily with his whole view of the world, or at least the view of the world he’d always wanted to have, but still he found it very hard to argue against the logic of what Mr. Friend said.
But his emotions were working in overdrive to try and find a way to oppose the old man’s sickening confidence in his own insight.
"Listen! How the hell can people even know about this? They don’t know that they’re being controlled. Therefore, it leaves them no choice. The authorities of all nations are all keeping the lid tightly screwed-on as always, and trying to oppose anything in a more active way either gets you locked up in jail, or will get you parked in the fringes of society – stowed away like a freak at a sideshow - way outside the whole system. And that just leaves you free to be poor and have no influence whatsoever."
"Now that's a thinking man speaking! More of this, please." Mr. Friend smiled and gestured as to give Vix a round of applause, to yet another large portion of irritation.
But Vix swallowed and continued: "Without any political, spiritual or financial influence, you are by society's standards a nobody, and nobodies don't change the world. Or am I wrong?"
"No, you're not wrong, Victor.” Mr. Friend looked him straight in the eye. “You are, in fact, very right.”
Vix felt confused, and somehow empty, now suddenly being right.
Mr. Friend continued:
“’Illuminated’ outcasts have never really stood a chance at saving either humanity or the planet, have they? More often than not they haven’t even been able to save themselves - no names mentioned, no offence taken.”
“So, no Saviours, then.”
“I strongly doubt it. For anything to change in this world on any scale of significance, it seems to require vast collective efforts. Only when new ideas start to move the masses do such ideas become important, and only then do they have any lasting effect.”
“But that leaves us truly fucked in all orifices. The masses have long since proved that as long as they’ve got their trash televisions and their bellies stuffed with cheap beer and drive-by junk food the last thing they need is new ideas for the world.”
“Ah, the language!” Mr. Friend pretended to be offended.
“But seriously. It’s a lost game, this one. People are so immersed in their cultural prisons that even though they were about to recognize and act on the notion they have deep inside, that everything is simply wrong, and start searching for a way out, they will have nowhere to turn. It’s no point changing your mental diet if the whole forest is poisoned.”
Vix felt defeated by his own arguments.
Mr. Friend quietly scratched his moustache as he sat looking very calmly at Vix. His eyes had lost some of their usual darting quality and had some kind of unfamiliar warmth in them.
Almost a kind of softness.
“But you have forgotten one aspect, Victor,” he finally said, after a sip of the now lukewarm coffee. “It’s something we’ve discussed many times before. A place where all information - ‘secret’ or not - can be found for anyone who bothers to take a closer look."
"What? The Internet is gonna save the world now?"
“No, no, no. Not your beloved Internet. As such,” Mr. Friend shook his head. "History!” Mr. Friend shouted, in a hissing, whispery voice, like in a movie containing at least one dwarf. “History is the key! Knowledge of history is the real power.”
He tapped the table with his now rolled-up newspaper as he said this, as if to make Vix feel that these words were of the greatest importance possible.
“But I take it most people think that money is the real power,” Vix suggested.
“I’ve hinted quite strongly that the power gained from controlling history by far transcends that of controlling money. But also knowing your history will get you much further than the worldly riches any person without the right heritage can ever expect to accumulate. That said, most people can't resist a bribe the moment the size of the bribe size exceeds their personal threshold - usually situated somewhere just above mid-way between their moral and their greed – so it’s a tough one, I agree. But it’s a way out.”
Vix didn’t consider Mr. Friend’s solution a genial one, but decided to follow the line of thought for a bit.
"So you mean that if people knew their history, they would have a chance at withstanding the power of the world’s false authorities?"
"Yes I do! If people knew the real story, and had some light shed on what's been going on throughout the years, they would probably understand that there really wasn't much to fear to begin with, and would ask more questions instead of following the whims of charlatans."
"We should all just turn on the lights, you mean?"
”Exactly! That’s when you’ll realise that the monster growling beneath your bed at night really is just a mouse with a megaphone.”
This made Vix smile, and gave him a slight feeling of relief.
He sipped his coffee.
”So that’s the whole game, then? Distracting people from the real knowledge that lies within history. I guess it’s simply a question of hiding a couple of fruitful trees in the forest?”
”Absolutely,” Mr. Friend looked content.
“But in a way it’s still quite similar to the hiding of spiritual knowledge in the darkness of occultism, only this time there’s nothing being covered up, it’s just a foggy mass of information if you don’t know what to look for,” Vix suggested, knowing that this would trigger Mr. Friend on the subject of people’s spiritual health once more.
“Quite so, Victor. If you want to take away people’s spirituality you have to make sure to hide it very well and make it look threatening enough to scare them away from trying to get it back. It's amazing what torturing, hanging or burning a few thousand mothers, sisters and daughters on stakes can do to an onlooker. Especially to a child. I guess seeing someone you love burn to death in front of your very eyes has an immense impact on your future willingness to dwell in "witchery" yourself. And you might not be so keen on advising your own children to touch on the subject either when the time comes for you to raise kids of your own."
“An overly effective cure for eradicating all future generations' spiritual heritage, in other words."
Mr. Friend seemed too happy with the lack of resistance in the conversation, but Vix decided to let him go on undisturbed:
”But it’s not just in the area of people's spiritual health these muddling techniques are at work. The same mechanism lies behind all the secrecy of military and government 'intelligence' matters, or even in so called 'National Security'. Make it seem dangerous enough to oppose the System, and soon you'll have people eating any lie you give them, in fear of the punishment they would face by seeking the truth."
”But then there really is a big, global conspiracy going on. Like the really crazy people discuss on the Internet; in which those who seem to be fighting the big wars on opposite sides are secretly meeting in darkened rooms, comparing notes and making decisions to make each other even more wealthy through arms sales and other forms of war-profiteering. You mean I shouldn’t trust the ’official’ version of anything at all, refuse vaccinations and watch out for reptilian-looking politicians?”
Mr. Friend laughed.
”All of your paranoid fears are probably quite true – if you want them to be. But let's put this a bit differently: There’s nothing in this so-called civilization of ours that hasn’t been planned by human minds in one way or other. From roads to commercial campaigns to the price of sugar to the distribution system of ’illegal’ drugs to the banking pyramid to...”
”What’s the banking pyramid?”
”The world's financial system. But you'll soon understand this." Mr. Friend went on: "So. From the banking pyramid to the voting system of Florida to the road systems of the world – well probably not the road system of London Town, but you get my point.”
”But, Banking Py...”
”All of these things can be perceived as conspiracies as long as you’re not aware of the fact that they’re simply the results of the human will at work to begin with, but instead realize it slowly over time.”
”What? That we’re being tricked all the time without realizing, but that some have started seeing the truth? Sounds a bit too close to 'The Matrix'.”
”No. I mean that most are being ignorant and lazy most of the time. There really are not that many areas in which anyone cares to cover up their underlying motives anymore. They just trust this human laziness and the fact that people won’t use their brains unless they absolutely have to.”
”Yeah, right. For example?”
”Shopping mall psychologists.”
”What, shrinks who have their offices located inside shopping malls? Big deal. I’d go crazy myself by spending a whole day in such a place.”
”No, I’m talking about psychologists hired to assist architects behind designing shopping malls, and who later assist the stores to arrange their stock in such a manner that their customers react in a certain pattern and consume more goods. And obviously far more than they actually need in life.”
”Aha. Come to think of it, I think I saw a documentary on a bloke whose job was something along these lines on Discovery Channel once. He made sure the colour of the carpet on the floor inside the store didn’t differ from the one in the corridor outside, as people unconsciously would perceive it as a psychological barrier, which prevented them from walking into the store. And that men's clothes weren’t hung on tall racks, as women often do the shopping for their men and are statistically shorter.”
”Now did you? And what did you do about it? Did you rush out into the streets and scream ’conspiracy!’, standing outside your local mall in the rain with a megaphone, handing out leaflets, warning every poor soul who passed through the doors? Or did you set up your own internet site to end this evil conspiring shopping empire?”
”Well, no. I considered blowing myself up at the premises of the newsagent down the road, but then I strongly doubted that old Ali had the turnover to employ such conspiring services and decided to let it rest.”
“I’m sure you did.”
“Well, he does keep his fags just in head-height behind the counter, though. Makes it really hard not to pick up a packet as you pay…”
”Hmm. You’re a wise little snot, aren’t you?” Mr. Friend all too-transparently enjoyed the direction this discussion was taking again.
Vix didn’t let the opportunity lie.
”Ok. So modern shopping malls are cunningly designed so that people are being manipulated further into consumerism, which in turn holds up the unjust trade-balance of the world, so that the capital powers further cement their position. I see that. But what are you getting at?” he said in a slow, stoned voice that he thought would have suited such a statement.
Mr. Friend fired back:
”I’m simply pointing out that before you start screaming about a global conspiracy of enormous dimensions and want to reveal to the world who’s really behind the 9/11 attacks, or who actually killed JFK, or question why the privately-owned central bank of the United States can call itself the ’Federal’ Reserve bank and continue inventing more money at will - you should simply try and do something about the matters that actually are within your own reach. Otherwise you’ll end up feeling like total failure, as you’ll be engaging your mind in something the body instinctively knows it can do nothing about.”
”Ahh. Great solution. To stay passive on every level of resistance towards the corrupted System. Now, that’s the way to go.”
”No, no, no. Take action against manipulation, for goodness sake. But do it on your own level. Then you might be more successful. And if you’re really serious about wanting to do something about the big stuff; sell your car and start walking, or get a bike. Then you won’t need any oil at least in your own life.”
”I don’t have a car”
”See. You’re already saving the world!”
Vix had to take a deep breath, but continued talking as he did:
”Anyway I believe most people don’t have any confidence left in ’small protests’.”
His lungs were all empty when he reached “-tests”, and he couldn’t fit another word.
Mr. Friend grabbed the opportunity:
”Of course you don’t. That’s how it should be. Otherwise the whole thing wouldn’t have worked. As I have tried to explain to you on more than one occasion, the system of global hypnosis functions in a most excellent way. I take great pride in being involved in its architecture.”
”You do?”
Vix had planned to hit back, offended as he was to have been included in ‘most people’, but was surprised at Mr. Friend’s sudden revelation.
”Well, of course. I would have hated to think that I’d spent the large part of my life wasting my time,” Mr. Friend said, then went silent.
Vix looked out the window for a while. He took a sip of his coffee, and also said nothing for a while.
Then he said:
”But why would you tell me all this if you’re happy about how things work?”
”I didn’t say I was happy with the way things work. I said I was proud of the work I put into it. That’s two quite different things, I believe.”
”Yeah, but you seem mostly unaffected by the horrors of this world – horrors that you now claim to be partly responsible for.”
Mr. Friend firmly put his cup down on the table with a sharp noise. His eyes glinted with something Vix decided was a tiny fraction of a lost temper.
”Let me put this straight, Victor. None of the inner mechanisms that lead the people of this planet to act as they do are particularly ’innocent’ in nature. Being a so-called ‘victim of circumstance’ is nothing but a chosen condition. It requires that you refuse to take responsibility for your own actions, and – listen to what I’m telling you here – to actually make the decision to abandon your natural responsibilities takes a lot of conscious willpower.”
Whatever he was on about seemed very important to Mr. Friend.
Almost personal.
Vix chose to shut up and let him go on:
“You can spend most of your early grown-up life working hard on escaping your natural childhood sensibilities, especially in the field of your sense of responsibility and consequences from the use of your free willpower. Eventually you can manage to escape yourself through deceiving yourself, and the reason people are willing to do so is that they can finally get a personal excuse to act as a victim - and never really have to face any consequences of their own choices, as they are not really ‘their own’ anymore.”
Vix had enough of the monologue at this point.
”So you’re telling me that humans who suffer do so out of their own choice? That’s a truckload of crap if you ask me.”
”Of course people don’t choose to suffer – on a conscious level. People are far too greedy by nature to choose things that aren’t good for themselves. They are simply suffering because they have made the wrong choice of trying to escape the consequence of free will, and deep down they instinctively know that the mess they’re in is their own doing.”
”Yeah, right …”
Was all Vix managed to say, as it made his thoughts wander.
Mr. Friend didn’t stop:
”There is one widespread popular myth when it comes to hypnosis; the one that you can’t hypnotise someone who doesn’t want to become hypnotised.”
”And that’s also just a lie, of course?”
”No. That’s the truth. Very much the truth.”
”So you say that all these people sleepwalking the planet, letting themselves be screwed-over by the power-hungry, harassed by the unjust money-system, and caught up in the modern slavery that is consumerism. You’re saying that they chose to do so by their own free will? Humbug!”
”The free will is a scary tool, my friend. Using it means that all your choices can be blamed on yourself, and no-one else. No parent, no God, no ‘System’, and certainly no politician. How many people in your neighbourhood would you guess would be willing to give up all these excuses for their own misery?”
”Well, putting it like that...”
”Have you never wondered why children who are in the process of becoming teenagers almost always end up in constant conflict with their parents?”
”I wouldn’t know. I left.”
”And maybe that was the right choice. It certainly might seem so from where I’m sitting, watching the result.”
”Get to the point, please,” Vix snapped. He could feel the usual unpleasant feelings rise as they touched in on the subject of his own family background.
”Every human being who enters into adolescence from childhood, instinctively experience a phase of their decision-making skills and sense of responsibility awakening inside. From the careless life of childhood - if you should be so lucky to be allowed one in your early years - you suddenly feel that you have to face yourself and start testing these new abilities of yours.”
”And if you don’t?”
”Don’t what? Face them?”
”I mean, what if you haven’t had a playful childhood to look back at?”
”Unfortunately, you are at the mercy of your parents’ ability to make the right choices for you until you develop these skills yourself. That’s probably the worst consequence of letting people choose to become parents without first having reached a certain personal maturity to make important choices for themselves. Which has very little to do with their age. Just a most unlucky side-effect of the combination of free will and the mammalian reproductive system.”
”It probably would’ve worked better to combine free will with automitosis?”
”Probably. Why weren’t you working on the team of Mother Nature’s original architects when this whole thing was designed?”
”The pay was too shitty.”
”Right. But back to the inner workings of a troubled teen.”
”You realise you’ll win the Nobel price if you manage to come up with an explanation of this?”
”I wouldn’t need one, but thank you very much in advance. How about I’ll give you one if you stop interrupting me?”
”As you’re really on a roll today: shoot.”
”As you begin trying-out your skills of decision-making and responsibility, you also start realising that most of the people surrounding you - people that you have trusted all your life - don’t use them at all, or at least to a very small extent. That’s usually when you discover your first ’conspiracy’.”
”And then they just keep coming?”
”If you choose to look at such revelations that way, yes. If you on the other hand just shake them off, and continue the process of developing your skills the way you should, you’re most likely to find yourself in a lot of trouble.”
”Tell me about it.”
”That’s what I’m doing.”
”And that’s probably why I’m still listening...”
”Firstly, you are committing the crime of reminding the ’superiors’ around you that they’ve chosen not to use their skills, and that is considered treason of the highest degree. The whole illusion is dependent upon everyone participating in the drama. The first repercussions are therefore most likely to be attempts from your surroundings to make you feel guilty for stepping out of the ’victim’ pattern.”
”And that certainly works.”
”Yes, it is a simple form of suggestion, and it works. But as the guilt starts building inside you - at the same time your feelings tell you that it’s not real guilt, but guilt imposed by others. And as you know deep within that you’ve done nothing wrong, you end up in a conflict inside yourself between the ’real’ feelings of the right to exercise your birthright, and the ’fake’ guilt invoked by those who want to stop you from doing so. You can then choose to get very angry, and take that anger out on your surroundings, or you can turn it inwards and start blaming yourself and get very self-destructive and depressed about your own situation. Either way, that’s usually when the real trouble starts.”
”Not bad.”
”If you can stand having all the people you looked up to and loved throughout your whole childhood being angry with you for a prolonged period of time, you can persist and get out on the other side a stronger and perfectly healthy person. If you don’t, you’re most likely to give in and just accept things ’the way they are’, and carry the whole scenario on to the next generation.”
Vix paused to try and take some of this in, the conversation had suddenly started getting personal for him, too.
After a short break, he said:
”Put this way, it could be far worse having people you love around you as you grow up than not having any. Then at least you don’t have that many to feel guilty about.”
He could feel a sting inside.
Mr. Friend looked as if he sensed the change of mood, and continued with a lowered voice:
”If the disappointment of not being given your rightful share of love and support in your early years doesn’t overshadow the sense of freedom attained by not having lots of unhealthy relations, then the answer is yes. That might be why orphans who make it through to adulthood without losing track are usually set for great things.”
Vix smiled, and said:
”Makes you wonder. Sometimes I don’t know what might be the worst, nuclear war or the nuclear family.”
Mr. Friend laughed aloud with his short, combusting laughter. He patted Vix lightly two times at the tip of his shoulder with the palm of his hand.
”That’s why I put my faith in you, Victor,” he said, and then he leaned back in his chair and stared into the distance out through the café window.
Vix could see the distance in Mr. Friend’s eyes growing, and said nothing.
They just sat like that for a while, and soon Vix reckoned it was time to make a move before the evening crept in and left him with the night bus from the station as the only option to get back to The Shelter.
He said goodbye to Mr. Friend, who smiled back in an unfamiliar fashion. He almost seemed vulnerable as he sat there watching the afternoon slowly giving in to the creeping evening darkness.
Vix thought to himself that Mr. Friend was a great man, and that after all, he was genuinely very happy to know him.
Then he left.
The driver on the bus back from the station kept his little FM radio as loud as practically possible, for the convenience or despair of his tired late-night passengers.
The metal-sounding, tinny voices went on overdrive about the great crisis that had hit the world’s financial system.
Vix couldn't escape the repeated disinformation, and soon found himself getting severely wound-up over the whole thing.
When would people learn?
He spent the entire journey fuming and raging, and knew he had to do something about it.
Back at The Shelter, he stormed in, put on the kettle, and sat down by the computer.
He hesitated to log into the blog. Something felt not quite right about it. Like having a little rant wouldn’t be enough on a night like this.
After a day like this.
Vix had never thought he would go to this step, but something inside him almost made him want to reach out to the world.
It could even be that he felt just a tad invincible this evening.
He knew he had to do something outrageous – something daring.
He almost closed his eyes as he typed the home URL to Facebook, as if his mind was looking the other way from what his hands were doing.
He quickly hit the 'sign up'-button, and filled in his email address, a ‘weak’ password, and – much to his own surprise - his full name.
His own, real name.
As if afraid of suddenly changing his mind, he checked and answered the confirmation email at record speed, and after another mouseclick, Vix had an account at one of the world's largest social networks.
He skipped filling in any more info about himself, except 'religious views' and 'relationship status', and then he created an open group, naming it 'Save the rich'.
He quickly wrote from the top of his head:
People!
We have a crisis spreading like wildfire across the planet these days.
This time, we're not talking a mere 'minor accident', like a trillion billion people dying of hunger in Africa, or thousands losing their lives in the flooding of Bangladesh, or even thousands more being slaughtered in Darfur with weapons produced and sold from our own country, while we all look the other way.
No, this time REAL disaster has struck.
You see, those of us, those very few of us, who can afford to play the big money games; the stock market, the moving around of imaginary money for the gain of real profit, have been so unlucky to have gone and overspent their cash.
Of course, it's not really their cash in the first place, but a loss is a loss, and we are now in danger of having people who matter lose their silver-lined jobs.
In other words, salaries in the hundredfold of what a simple hard-working cleaning assistant or bus driver can expect in a lifetime are threatened.
If this cancer isn't stopped, it can all end with the financial system of the world collapsing, and what then? We might face the horror of creating a new, more fair system of sharing our assets on a global level. The terror!
WE MIGHT EVEN END UP HAVING TO CONSUME LESS!
So, to stop this frightening scenario, join us in our new campaign:
I appeal to you, people of the Earth; bend down once again and let your aching backs carry the richer man, so he won't fall and get dirt on his suit, or lose the champagne glass he's carefully balancing in his hand.
Join our slogan with your voices raised to the full:
SAVE THE RICH!
LET'S UPHOLD THE GREAT PYRAMID
AT ANY PRICE!
Then he did a quick Google image search, and downloaded three different pictures that he opened and edited in his cracked copy of Photoshop.
The pictures were portraits of the top 3 billionaires from the Forbes' Top 100 list, and each portrait had the text 'save the rich' written underneath in the simplest font he could find.
Then he wrote an appeal to people to download and print the pictures onto self-adhesive paper and stick them up around their neighbourhood.
He decided to do the very same thing himself the next day, and put the stickers all over town - if this sudden courage was still there by morning.
He logged out, and felt fantastic about the whole thing.
As he walked over to make a cup of tea, he said out loud to himself:
”I am a virus. A social virus.”
It made him feel even better.
He logged onto his blog, and uploaded the track "Sleepwalker" by the Norwegian electronic band Frost.
The song title nicely summed-up the present state of people in general, he concluded - especially after today's conversation with Mr. Friend.
Then he wrote once again:
SAVE THE RICH!
LET'S UPHOLD THE GREAT PYRAMID
AT ANY PRICE!
He logged-out, noted down the events of the day in his log, and had his tea while surfing the web for any crucial updates.
Shortly, Vix fell asleep on the chair in front of his desk.
He somehow expected his dreams to become sweet, now that he had filed his protest.
Soon he slept.
Happily unaware that nobody noticed his actions.
After all, he had no friends on Facebook.
Monday, September 14, 2009
Shapes
After the revelations of August 4th Vix had decided to be even more careful than he had been in the months after the April 8th experience.
He’d kept his door firmly locked with all three locks at all times, and had been severely cautious about not leaving too many personal stains behind him online.
Still he woke one morning from a dream that left an impression for hours after waking up far too early:
He had been flying through a dark, foggy space.
The space seemed endless in all directions, or it was simply too dark in there to see its outer limits, he couldn’t tell from inside the dream.
Out of the darkness a luminescent structure gradually appeared.
At first the glowing red matrix of beams blinded him completely, but as his eyes adapted to the light he could see a familiar triangular shape being drawn out of the empty space.
A red, radiant Pyramid was emerging in front of him.
Suddenly a deep, humming sound hit his eardrums, like an electrified didgeridoo. The bass made him feel sick.
He desperately tried to turn around and escape, but couldn’t move.
He tried to close his eyelids, but the red beams had left an imprint on his retinas, and he could still hear the humming sound.
He was inescapably pulled in by the gravity of this ruthless geometrical being.
His heart was pounding inside his chest and his breath made a fast, whining sound between his teeth, like a sweating dog locked inside a car on a hot summer’s day.
The pulling didn’t stop until he found himself right in front of the light-structure. And then he saw it.
This was no Pyramid at all.
He slowly moved down along the side of the thing. It was triangular at each end, with ended in an upside-down “V”-shape. It was much longer at the two sides, and it looked more like an old wire-mesh computer graphic of the roof of an old house than a Pyramid.
The loud humming sound had disappeared, and instead he thought he could hear the sound of birds, like seagulls, and waves hitting the shore in a lazy, slow pulse. Only the sounds were like lo-fi digital representations of the real sounds, like the sound of a bad internet-stream.
Then Vix started laughing. Quietly at first, then more and more hysterically.
What a con this Pyramid was. Not scary at all. Just stupid and weird in some quirky way.
Then he became overwhelmed by a feeling of anger.
“This is such a fucking scam!” he thought.
When he woke up, he was still somehow angry at being conned and scared this way. Still it felt as if something was about to change, that this was some kind of sign.
He decided he needed to go see if Mr. Friend was in the Village.
After all, it was Sunday.
He’d kept his door firmly locked with all three locks at all times, and had been severely cautious about not leaving too many personal stains behind him online.
Still he woke one morning from a dream that left an impression for hours after waking up far too early:
He had been flying through a dark, foggy space.
The space seemed endless in all directions, or it was simply too dark in there to see its outer limits, he couldn’t tell from inside the dream.
Out of the darkness a luminescent structure gradually appeared.
At first the glowing red matrix of beams blinded him completely, but as his eyes adapted to the light he could see a familiar triangular shape being drawn out of the empty space.
A red, radiant Pyramid was emerging in front of him.
Suddenly a deep, humming sound hit his eardrums, like an electrified didgeridoo. The bass made him feel sick.
He desperately tried to turn around and escape, but couldn’t move.
He tried to close his eyelids, but the red beams had left an imprint on his retinas, and he could still hear the humming sound.
He was inescapably pulled in by the gravity of this ruthless geometrical being.
His heart was pounding inside his chest and his breath made a fast, whining sound between his teeth, like a sweating dog locked inside a car on a hot summer’s day.
The pulling didn’t stop until he found himself right in front of the light-structure. And then he saw it.
This was no Pyramid at all.
He slowly moved down along the side of the thing. It was triangular at each end, with ended in an upside-down “V”-shape. It was much longer at the two sides, and it looked more like an old wire-mesh computer graphic of the roof of an old house than a Pyramid.
The loud humming sound had disappeared, and instead he thought he could hear the sound of birds, like seagulls, and waves hitting the shore in a lazy, slow pulse. Only the sounds were like lo-fi digital representations of the real sounds, like the sound of a bad internet-stream.
Then Vix started laughing. Quietly at first, then more and more hysterically.
What a con this Pyramid was. Not scary at all. Just stupid and weird in some quirky way.
Then he became overwhelmed by a feeling of anger.
“This is such a fucking scam!” he thought.
When he woke up, he was still somehow angry at being conned and scared this way. Still it felt as if something was about to change, that this was some kind of sign.
He decided he needed to go see if Mr. Friend was in the Village.
After all, it was Sunday.
Monday, May 4, 2009
More about shapes and structures
”But let's go back to those Pyramids again.”
Vix was sitting at the window table in the coffee shop with Mr. Friend. They both had their freshly topped-up coffees on the table in front of them, and Vix felt very comfortable about the situation.
”Yes. What more about them?” Mr. Friend asked.
Vix could feel that he was getting nervous again, as always whenever he tried to close in on this subject.
”You never seem to get around to tell me anything specific about them when they turn up in a conversation. You always mention them briefly, but then you move away from the subject into something else. I want to know more.”
He wondered why this topic would always build up such emotion in him. He could vaguely remember his dreams, but had more than once woken up in the middle of the night, sweating, with his mind fixed on a pyramid-shaped figure.
It didn’t make sense. He’d never even been to Egypt.
When he’d googled ‘pyramid’, he would get 35,400,000 hits ranging from food-pyramids to Meso-American architecture to wild theories from scary-looking, right-wing biased websites in the south of the USA.
”You’re really interested in those things, arent you?” Mr. Friend looked at Vix with an inquisitive look on his face. “For any specific reason, may I ask?”
”It’s just that I keep seeing them in the strangest places, that’s all.”
He didn’t feel like being too specific about it to Mr. Friend.
“Any particular pyramid that catches your fancy?”
“Umm... Not really. Let’s see… What about the one with an eye near the top?”
He made it sound as if he chose this one for no particular reason, which was somewhat weird, as he actually did choose it for no specific reason.
”Ah, that one. If you look at it from one angle, that one’s just an extension of Constantine’s Labarum mixed with some old Egyptian ideas.”
”I don't really follow you. It’s just some kind of symbolic mash-up?”
”If that makes more sense to you, please think of it as just that.”
“It sounds a bit coincidential put like that.”
“Oh, far from it. The Labarum is meant to symbolize the monopolization of faith – the transfer of all spiritual power from the people to the self-appointed keepers of the truth, who themselves continued to practise all the pagan arts and techniques behind closed doors in order to keep in touch with the sources of life, and thereby being able to sustain their own personal power.”
”So you’ve told me. And as the masses lost touch with Nature and their own spirituality because of this, the ones at the top expanded theirs. Blah, blah. And so it goes.”
”I’m glad you do your homework. It proves that I’m not just talking to an open window. There's enough people in my position doing just that."
"There's a lot of people in your position?"
Mr. Friend didn't answer his question, but just continued talking, "This strategy proved so successful to our old friend the Emperor Constantine that things couldn't look better. But it didn't stop there. The next thing on the agenda was that all religions but Christianity started getting persecuted and outlawed within the Empire. After Constantine’s two sons came to power, they immediately started persecuting all religions other than the new ‘official’ and heavily moderated version of Christianity, and in 391 Emperor Theodosius the 1st declared that anyone caught practising any other religions would face the death penalty.”
Vix’ mind started wandering, and he was weighing the thought wether or not it was possible that Mr.Friend had been working for the Discovery channel or something similar in the past.
He snapped out of it and posed a question to keep him going: "But why turn around and outlaw simple beliefs?"
"Any spiritual practice based upon natural science, like meditation, herbalism, ritual and affirmation of the forces of nature do actually work as tools to vitalise people’s personal powers and their relation to the world around them. That’s why anyone, like our Emperor, who set out to build a hierarchial system of monopolised power still had to get rid of all such practises among the masses.”
”To weaken people? So you're saying all this could also be the reason for everything from the witch-hunts in the middle ages to the persecution of Falun Gong by the Chinese government today?”
”That’s exactly what I’m saying. Those in power want to keep these practises to themselves, while the masses project all their spiritual powers through external sources like The Church, and thereby get weakened and start losing faith in their own creative powers - the same powers that they would actually need to run their own lives in a healthy and satisfactory fashion."
Maybe – just maybe – Mr. Friend had been working for the Discovery channel, then gone mad after a trip to the Amazonas to cover a lost tribe who’d fed him their most potent hallucinogenic? Yes, that was possible. That would explain the mutant-like nature of the old man. He was a perfect mix between a very articulate gentleman and a rambling madman. He was careful to not reveal his thoughts, and threw in another comment to keep the conversation flowing: ”But that's how Christianity got treated by the same people in the beginning. Wasn’t it an actual threat to them?”
Mr. Friend became very pleased with the way this comment did nothing but underline what he himself had just said.
"Exactly! Instead of trying to eradicate these new ideas, they just hijacked them, re-wrote them, and released their own version. And this was the very end of Constantine and Licinius’ ’Edict of Milan’, the one that declared total religious freedom within the Empire - and let Christianity into the warmth only a few decades before.”
”And then the shit really hit the fan for 'independent' wizards and witches, I guess?”
”That was the start of more than a milennium of blodshed in the name of the now copyrighted God of the Roman Catholic Church.”
Or – it could be that he came from a religious background, maybe had been a minister or priest? After all, he had a total hangup in religion. Maybe that was it? He’d set up a missionary in Brazil, and gotten kidnapped by the same lost tribe as in the Discovery channel theory, fed the same lethally potent hallucinogenic - and lost his marbles.
Only - that would not explain his TV-presenter-like skills.
”Amazing.”, Vix said, irritated about the way his theory didn’t add up.
”Oh, it’s very fascinating indeed. And this time they had a more long-term plan. When the whole Roman Empire fell to pieces from the late fourth to the late fifth century, the Church already had their first ’Vicar of Peter’ or ’Bishop of Rome’ in place, with a new kind of power rapidly expanding.”
”What kind of Bishop was that?”
”The figure also known as The Pope”
”Ah. That explains how the Labarium-thing ended up on his hat, too.”
”Among other things. As the position of the Church had cemented itself solidly within most of society by now, it had no real borders anymore. It had spread its tentacles all over the European continent. It didn’t even suffer much from the Empire being split into smaller pieces through small wars and uproars. This fact rather strengthened its position as a gathering point for people. After some time the power of the Church exceeded that of the political leaders and little regional Kings.”
Evangelist-TV!
That was it!
Of course. Mr. Friend had been a presenter in those dreadful Evangelist programmes where they pull the savings from old ladies through the TV-screen. That explained it all. TV-Preacher, missionary, potent hallucinogenic and 'bang', the cultural Frankenstein that is Mr. Friend was born out of a cloud of smoke.
”This must have been very effective, as they even managed to bring those crazy Vikings in on it. To make these guys turn their back on Thor and Odin to join the crusade sounds like a real miracle. That’s plainly quite impressive.”
”Well, yes, they did manage this, but only after the Norse Viking King Olaf Tryggvason had been in some very shady negotiations over in England. There are even two contradictory ‘official’ historical explanations to his conversion to Christendom. One is that he met a hermit from the Isles of Scilly who convinced him to betray his Gods of old and start following the cross. Another one is that he received a nice slump of money from the King of England - of which a large part were money paid to the king by the so called Danelaw in the North of England. The Danelaw also paid some kind of 'protection' money in order to be left in peace from Norwegian Viking raids. Whatever really happened, when Olaf returned to Norway, he was on fire and slaugthered every living soul that tried to oppose his newly embraced doctrine, burned the temples and made a right mess.”
Perfect TV-pundit styling again.
”Charming. And it worked? The Norsemen all became good Christians?”
”I’m not sure of how deep it really stuck, but yes, he was quite successful. Not only did he enforce his newly won compassion for his fellow man on the people of Norway by efficient use of his sword, but he also succeeded in bringing the people of Iceland, Shetland, the Faroe Islands and the Orkney Islands to their knees.”
Damn! The Historian didn’t fit the theory that well. He’d forgotten all about the museum aura that surrounded Mr. Friend. He knew far too much about history far beyond the narrow view that a man with a Evangelist background would have known.
Back to square one.
He almost fell out out the conversation, but threw in a last minute comment: ”No wonder Norwegian black metal artists were so eager on burning churches.”
”Well I guess it's quite an explainable reaction if you dig into history on a deeper level than they let you in on in school, only it’s about a thousand years too late, and anyway as I said this is still just one aspect to the story.”
“Which means?”
“Which means that probably a lot of great things came out of all these changes, too. However gruesome they seemed, and however cunning their enforcers were, this was still a step on the evolutionary ladder, still just a part of an ever-expanding universe for mankind to dwell in.”
“That sounds like a mix of some silly hippie fodder and a cynical fascist excuse.”
Vix realised he had no idea who or what Mr. Friend was.
No idea at all.
“If you wish. But anyway, if you'd like to direct your anger towards anything today I'm not sure the Church is the right thing to aim at. Do you really regard the Church of today as an institution that can reach into people's lives and keep any kind of control on anyone? In my experience those taking refuge in it these days are either those who are hiding from the immigration authorities, those who honestly believe in human compassion, or those who have too much to hide on a personal level and is scared to death of being exposed.”
"Could be, but from all you've told me it's unlikely that these people would let go of such power."
"They would never let go of any power, but they're clever people. Why would they keep on steering a sinking ship? No, they move where the real power is. You'd be more likely to find the darkest priests at board-meetings or running governments these days."
Vix was so disappointed about all his own theories on Mr. Friend’s background falling to pieces that he realised he’d lost interest in the whole conversation. In a sulky teenager-like way, he snapped: “Ok. That's all fine. Interesting. But still no pyramid-talk?”
“This is all ‘pyramid-talk’ as far as I’m concerned.”
”But you’re started saying the eye-pyramid thing came out of the Labarum? Why would the Catholic Church’s secret power-elite of Emperors and the like in the early first century, or whoever is behind this, pick such an ancient figure as a pyramid as part of their new symbol of power? I thought the pyramids were over 3000 years old, at least the Egyptian ones. This doesn’t make much sense as this whole story about the Labarum came more than a thousand years later.”
“Oh, the pyramids are a lot older than that. But the point is that this specific power-elite we’re talking about had now put a lot of effort into centralising political, economic and military power so they could keep it all at their own hands. They had also succeeded in “hermeticising” spirituality and the natural sciences to only be available to the chosen few, and they'd presented a watered-down variation through the Church that they controlled themselves. But they still had one more thing up their sleeve that needed to be expressed symbolically in their new seal.”
“Which was?”
“To show that they were now also controlling history.”
Maybe Mr. Friend was just plain mad. Full stop.
“Controlling history?”
“Yes. History. You know? The most rightful heritage of our species apart from the very globe we live on. The ancient wisdom and experience of our predecessors that is to be freely passed on from generation to generation to teach us all where we come from, where we might be going, and why some moves and choices in life might be smarter than others.”
“Sounds kind of a big deal.”
“Oh, it’s probably the biggest deal there is.”
Or a dangerous political extremist. With ties to the old regime of South-Africa? And Nazi-Germany? And the Communists?
"How?"
“Imagine if the people on this planet knew their history correctly? Do you think they'd be as easy to mislead? What if all this mindless entertainment got replaced by the real stories of what happened to The library of Alexandria, or the real story behind the ancient wisdom of the cosmos encoded in the Mayan pyramids, knowledge that had the Catholic church so worried that they made sure all Mayan writings ended up on the fire. Or the real history behind the modern banking system? Do you think people would accept all this bollocks happening to them now if they had their history-lessons right?"
Vix got worried that Mr. Friend would burst, or have a heart-attack. He really wound himself up to the point that a ranting red-faced old man with gleaming eyes had replaced his usually oh-so-smug appearance.
"Whoa! Take it slow here. That's a lot of information at once."
Mr. Friend dried his forehead with a napkin, slowly sipped his coffee, and like a cat that had just tripped on its own tail in front of your very eyes, he had restored the elegance like nothing ever happened, at least nothing that he didn't want to happen - in a matter of seconds.
"So they've stolen history, and to symbolise this they've made a sign that has a pyramid representing history, or knowledge with an eye at the top, representing the insight of the chosen few who sits at the top of society's pyramid, right?"
"Right."
“But if this is all true, why this obvious use of symbols? Anyone could break the code at any time, and then it would all be out in the open.”
“Oh, but vanity is often extraordinarily present among the power-hungry. And they love their symbolism. And what they really have a habit of utilising, is symbolism that usually mean nothing to the uninitiated, but that still manages to show off their success to those of their opponents who understand all this symbolism, the people they would want to know about their superiority.”
“To piss them off.”
“Probably. But also to make them feel conquered and powerless. To send a signal that there is no point to try opposing their will.”
Mr. Friend gazed out the window, and Vix wondered whether he felt conquered and powerless.
”Just one more thing.”
”Yes?”
”What if there actually exists living creatures, or living structures like that?”
"Like what?"
"Like a pyramid."
”Like a living pyramid?”
“With an eye near the top.”
“Pray you never meet one.”
”I think I might have already.”
”Well, then you’ll just have to put your faith in the weather.”
He ended up playing Pong for a couple of hours back at the Shelter. It was a nice thing to get lost in this evening, he thought. As he started having real trouble keeping his eyes open, his playing reached such poor standards that he decided it was much better to give up for the night.
"Strange thing." he thought. Why would people like to change their games all the time, to make them more complicated? Wasn't life complicated enough? Leisure should be just that. The challenges of life were constantly queuing up, anyway. There was no stopping them, as much as he ever tried.
As he fell asleep, he soon dreamed that Nikola Tesla came to him. Tesla told him not to worry, that he was all right where he was now. He also informed Vix that he held no grudge against Thomas Edison, should he wonder. He insisted that his life's work had been much more successful due to the fact that he didn't have to deal with too much public attention and fame when he lived, but rather had the luxury of being able to concentrate on his inventions.
This made Vix feel much at ease, as it was something that had bothered him all his life. At least ever since he had developed a special interest in Tesla and gotten very angry on his behalf, due to the terrible lack of recognition history had offered him and his fantastic work. Tesla assured him that his support was much appreciated still, and to show his gratitude he had designed a very special gift for him. The inventor had then presented the most beautiful machine for him. It was an old-fashioned black&white computer screen mounted on a varnished wooden base. All the electronic components were openly exposed, but the whole construction had the kind of elegance and finesse about it that only true craftsmanship could provide.
The machine was mounted on four long metal spikes, and at the front end a brass sign with swirly lettering read: "Pong".
Vix was sitting at the window table in the coffee shop with Mr. Friend. They both had their freshly topped-up coffees on the table in front of them, and Vix felt very comfortable about the situation.
”Yes. What more about them?” Mr. Friend asked.
Vix could feel that he was getting nervous again, as always whenever he tried to close in on this subject.
”You never seem to get around to tell me anything specific about them when they turn up in a conversation. You always mention them briefly, but then you move away from the subject into something else. I want to know more.”
He wondered why this topic would always build up such emotion in him. He could vaguely remember his dreams, but had more than once woken up in the middle of the night, sweating, with his mind fixed on a pyramid-shaped figure.
It didn’t make sense. He’d never even been to Egypt.
When he’d googled ‘pyramid’, he would get 35,400,000 hits ranging from food-pyramids to Meso-American architecture to wild theories from scary-looking, right-wing biased websites in the south of the USA.
”You’re really interested in those things, arent you?” Mr. Friend looked at Vix with an inquisitive look on his face. “For any specific reason, may I ask?”
”It’s just that I keep seeing them in the strangest places, that’s all.”
He didn’t feel like being too specific about it to Mr. Friend.
“Any particular pyramid that catches your fancy?”
“Umm... Not really. Let’s see… What about the one with an eye near the top?”
He made it sound as if he chose this one for no particular reason, which was somewhat weird, as he actually did choose it for no specific reason.
”Ah, that one. If you look at it from one angle, that one’s just an extension of Constantine’s Labarum mixed with some old Egyptian ideas.”
”I don't really follow you. It’s just some kind of symbolic mash-up?”
”If that makes more sense to you, please think of it as just that.”
“It sounds a bit coincidential put like that.”
“Oh, far from it. The Labarum is meant to symbolize the monopolization of faith – the transfer of all spiritual power from the people to the self-appointed keepers of the truth, who themselves continued to practise all the pagan arts and techniques behind closed doors in order to keep in touch with the sources of life, and thereby being able to sustain their own personal power.”
”So you’ve told me. And as the masses lost touch with Nature and their own spirituality because of this, the ones at the top expanded theirs. Blah, blah. And so it goes.”
”I’m glad you do your homework. It proves that I’m not just talking to an open window. There's enough people in my position doing just that."
"There's a lot of people in your position?"
Mr. Friend didn't answer his question, but just continued talking, "This strategy proved so successful to our old friend the Emperor Constantine that things couldn't look better. But it didn't stop there. The next thing on the agenda was that all religions but Christianity started getting persecuted and outlawed within the Empire. After Constantine’s two sons came to power, they immediately started persecuting all religions other than the new ‘official’ and heavily moderated version of Christianity, and in 391 Emperor Theodosius the 1st declared that anyone caught practising any other religions would face the death penalty.”
Vix’ mind started wandering, and he was weighing the thought wether or not it was possible that Mr.Friend had been working for the Discovery channel or something similar in the past.
He snapped out of it and posed a question to keep him going: "But why turn around and outlaw simple beliefs?"
"Any spiritual practice based upon natural science, like meditation, herbalism, ritual and affirmation of the forces of nature do actually work as tools to vitalise people’s personal powers and their relation to the world around them. That’s why anyone, like our Emperor, who set out to build a hierarchial system of monopolised power still had to get rid of all such practises among the masses.”
”To weaken people? So you're saying all this could also be the reason for everything from the witch-hunts in the middle ages to the persecution of Falun Gong by the Chinese government today?”
”That’s exactly what I’m saying. Those in power want to keep these practises to themselves, while the masses project all their spiritual powers through external sources like The Church, and thereby get weakened and start losing faith in their own creative powers - the same powers that they would actually need to run their own lives in a healthy and satisfactory fashion."
Maybe – just maybe – Mr. Friend had been working for the Discovery channel, then gone mad after a trip to the Amazonas to cover a lost tribe who’d fed him their most potent hallucinogenic? Yes, that was possible. That would explain the mutant-like nature of the old man. He was a perfect mix between a very articulate gentleman and a rambling madman. He was careful to not reveal his thoughts, and threw in another comment to keep the conversation flowing: ”But that's how Christianity got treated by the same people in the beginning. Wasn’t it an actual threat to them?”
Mr. Friend became very pleased with the way this comment did nothing but underline what he himself had just said.
"Exactly! Instead of trying to eradicate these new ideas, they just hijacked them, re-wrote them, and released their own version. And this was the very end of Constantine and Licinius’ ’Edict of Milan’, the one that declared total religious freedom within the Empire - and let Christianity into the warmth only a few decades before.”
”And then the shit really hit the fan for 'independent' wizards and witches, I guess?”
”That was the start of more than a milennium of blodshed in the name of the now copyrighted God of the Roman Catholic Church.”
Or – it could be that he came from a religious background, maybe had been a minister or priest? After all, he had a total hangup in religion. Maybe that was it? He’d set up a missionary in Brazil, and gotten kidnapped by the same lost tribe as in the Discovery channel theory, fed the same lethally potent hallucinogenic - and lost his marbles.
Only - that would not explain his TV-presenter-like skills.
”Amazing.”, Vix said, irritated about the way his theory didn’t add up.
”Oh, it’s very fascinating indeed. And this time they had a more long-term plan. When the whole Roman Empire fell to pieces from the late fourth to the late fifth century, the Church already had their first ’Vicar of Peter’ or ’Bishop of Rome’ in place, with a new kind of power rapidly expanding.”
”What kind of Bishop was that?”
”The figure also known as The Pope”
”Ah. That explains how the Labarium-thing ended up on his hat, too.”
”Among other things. As the position of the Church had cemented itself solidly within most of society by now, it had no real borders anymore. It had spread its tentacles all over the European continent. It didn’t even suffer much from the Empire being split into smaller pieces through small wars and uproars. This fact rather strengthened its position as a gathering point for people. After some time the power of the Church exceeded that of the political leaders and little regional Kings.”
Evangelist-TV!
That was it!
Of course. Mr. Friend had been a presenter in those dreadful Evangelist programmes where they pull the savings from old ladies through the TV-screen. That explained it all. TV-Preacher, missionary, potent hallucinogenic and 'bang', the cultural Frankenstein that is Mr. Friend was born out of a cloud of smoke.
”This must have been very effective, as they even managed to bring those crazy Vikings in on it. To make these guys turn their back on Thor and Odin to join the crusade sounds like a real miracle. That’s plainly quite impressive.”
”Well, yes, they did manage this, but only after the Norse Viking King Olaf Tryggvason had been in some very shady negotiations over in England. There are even two contradictory ‘official’ historical explanations to his conversion to Christendom. One is that he met a hermit from the Isles of Scilly who convinced him to betray his Gods of old and start following the cross. Another one is that he received a nice slump of money from the King of England - of which a large part were money paid to the king by the so called Danelaw in the North of England. The Danelaw also paid some kind of 'protection' money in order to be left in peace from Norwegian Viking raids. Whatever really happened, when Olaf returned to Norway, he was on fire and slaugthered every living soul that tried to oppose his newly embraced doctrine, burned the temples and made a right mess.”
Perfect TV-pundit styling again.
”Charming. And it worked? The Norsemen all became good Christians?”
”I’m not sure of how deep it really stuck, but yes, he was quite successful. Not only did he enforce his newly won compassion for his fellow man on the people of Norway by efficient use of his sword, but he also succeeded in bringing the people of Iceland, Shetland, the Faroe Islands and the Orkney Islands to their knees.”
Damn! The Historian didn’t fit the theory that well. He’d forgotten all about the museum aura that surrounded Mr. Friend. He knew far too much about history far beyond the narrow view that a man with a Evangelist background would have known.
Back to square one.
He almost fell out out the conversation, but threw in a last minute comment: ”No wonder Norwegian black metal artists were so eager on burning churches.”
”Well I guess it's quite an explainable reaction if you dig into history on a deeper level than they let you in on in school, only it’s about a thousand years too late, and anyway as I said this is still just one aspect to the story.”
“Which means?”
“Which means that probably a lot of great things came out of all these changes, too. However gruesome they seemed, and however cunning their enforcers were, this was still a step on the evolutionary ladder, still just a part of an ever-expanding universe for mankind to dwell in.”
“That sounds like a mix of some silly hippie fodder and a cynical fascist excuse.”
Vix realised he had no idea who or what Mr. Friend was.
No idea at all.
“If you wish. But anyway, if you'd like to direct your anger towards anything today I'm not sure the Church is the right thing to aim at. Do you really regard the Church of today as an institution that can reach into people's lives and keep any kind of control on anyone? In my experience those taking refuge in it these days are either those who are hiding from the immigration authorities, those who honestly believe in human compassion, or those who have too much to hide on a personal level and is scared to death of being exposed.”
"Could be, but from all you've told me it's unlikely that these people would let go of such power."
"They would never let go of any power, but they're clever people. Why would they keep on steering a sinking ship? No, they move where the real power is. You'd be more likely to find the darkest priests at board-meetings or running governments these days."
Vix was so disappointed about all his own theories on Mr. Friend’s background falling to pieces that he realised he’d lost interest in the whole conversation. In a sulky teenager-like way, he snapped: “Ok. That's all fine. Interesting. But still no pyramid-talk?”
“This is all ‘pyramid-talk’ as far as I’m concerned.”
”But you’re started saying the eye-pyramid thing came out of the Labarum? Why would the Catholic Church’s secret power-elite of Emperors and the like in the early first century, or whoever is behind this, pick such an ancient figure as a pyramid as part of their new symbol of power? I thought the pyramids were over 3000 years old, at least the Egyptian ones. This doesn’t make much sense as this whole story about the Labarum came more than a thousand years later.”
“Oh, the pyramids are a lot older than that. But the point is that this specific power-elite we’re talking about had now put a lot of effort into centralising political, economic and military power so they could keep it all at their own hands. They had also succeeded in “hermeticising” spirituality and the natural sciences to only be available to the chosen few, and they'd presented a watered-down variation through the Church that they controlled themselves. But they still had one more thing up their sleeve that needed to be expressed symbolically in their new seal.”
“Which was?”
“To show that they were now also controlling history.”
Maybe Mr. Friend was just plain mad. Full stop.
“Controlling history?”
“Yes. History. You know? The most rightful heritage of our species apart from the very globe we live on. The ancient wisdom and experience of our predecessors that is to be freely passed on from generation to generation to teach us all where we come from, where we might be going, and why some moves and choices in life might be smarter than others.”
“Sounds kind of a big deal.”
“Oh, it’s probably the biggest deal there is.”
Or a dangerous political extremist. With ties to the old regime of South-Africa? And Nazi-Germany? And the Communists?
"How?"
“Imagine if the people on this planet knew their history correctly? Do you think they'd be as easy to mislead? What if all this mindless entertainment got replaced by the real stories of what happened to The library of Alexandria, or the real story behind the ancient wisdom of the cosmos encoded in the Mayan pyramids, knowledge that had the Catholic church so worried that they made sure all Mayan writings ended up on the fire. Or the real history behind the modern banking system? Do you think people would accept all this bollocks happening to them now if they had their history-lessons right?"
Vix got worried that Mr. Friend would burst, or have a heart-attack. He really wound himself up to the point that a ranting red-faced old man with gleaming eyes had replaced his usually oh-so-smug appearance.
"Whoa! Take it slow here. That's a lot of information at once."
Mr. Friend dried his forehead with a napkin, slowly sipped his coffee, and like a cat that had just tripped on its own tail in front of your very eyes, he had restored the elegance like nothing ever happened, at least nothing that he didn't want to happen - in a matter of seconds.
"So they've stolen history, and to symbolise this they've made a sign that has a pyramid representing history, or knowledge with an eye at the top, representing the insight of the chosen few who sits at the top of society's pyramid, right?"
"Right."
“But if this is all true, why this obvious use of symbols? Anyone could break the code at any time, and then it would all be out in the open.”
“Oh, but vanity is often extraordinarily present among the power-hungry. And they love their symbolism. And what they really have a habit of utilising, is symbolism that usually mean nothing to the uninitiated, but that still manages to show off their success to those of their opponents who understand all this symbolism, the people they would want to know about their superiority.”
“To piss them off.”
“Probably. But also to make them feel conquered and powerless. To send a signal that there is no point to try opposing their will.”
Mr. Friend gazed out the window, and Vix wondered whether he felt conquered and powerless.
”Just one more thing.”
”Yes?”
”What if there actually exists living creatures, or living structures like that?”
"Like what?"
"Like a pyramid."
”Like a living pyramid?”
“With an eye near the top.”
“Pray you never meet one.”
”I think I might have already.”
”Well, then you’ll just have to put your faith in the weather.”
He ended up playing Pong for a couple of hours back at the Shelter. It was a nice thing to get lost in this evening, he thought. As he started having real trouble keeping his eyes open, his playing reached such poor standards that he decided it was much better to give up for the night.
"Strange thing." he thought. Why would people like to change their games all the time, to make them more complicated? Wasn't life complicated enough? Leisure should be just that. The challenges of life were constantly queuing up, anyway. There was no stopping them, as much as he ever tried.
As he fell asleep, he soon dreamed that Nikola Tesla came to him. Tesla told him not to worry, that he was all right where he was now. He also informed Vix that he held no grudge against Thomas Edison, should he wonder. He insisted that his life's work had been much more successful due to the fact that he didn't have to deal with too much public attention and fame when he lived, but rather had the luxury of being able to concentrate on his inventions.
This made Vix feel much at ease, as it was something that had bothered him all his life. At least ever since he had developed a special interest in Tesla and gotten very angry on his behalf, due to the terrible lack of recognition history had offered him and his fantastic work. Tesla assured him that his support was much appreciated still, and to show his gratitude he had designed a very special gift for him. The inventor had then presented the most beautiful machine for him. It was an old-fashioned black&white computer screen mounted on a varnished wooden base. All the electronic components were openly exposed, but the whole construction had the kind of elegance and finesse about it that only true craftsmanship could provide.
The machine was mounted on four long metal spikes, and at the front end a brass sign with swirly lettering read: "Pong".
Sunday, February 8, 2009
Trouble
"This is not the food I ordered!"
The sudden revelation was echoing loudly down the corridors of his aching mind.
Scared again. Descending further into the merciless pit. Gasping for air and her eternal nurturing embrace. Always losing track. Undefined intelligence. All-empowering, undeniable. Enter emotional force majeure. I've had enough now. I need to stop this ride. Get off. Get off as I never have before. Jack me up - up to where I am all-seeing, all-knowing, all-being. The Master - not the victim. The cause of events - not the slave of consequence. I know this should be the way, the righteous and natural way of things. The capital rule with no exception. I should know. I made all of this real.
Vix looked lost. The man behind the counter at the Chinese take-away once again tried to get some response from him.
"Your food, Mister. Three pound fifty, please."
No reply. Staring apathetically into the void. Blankness repeating itself like an old vinyl record stuck in the run-out groove, recycling nothingness. The man was waving the plastic bag in front of him, but Vix's gaze stayed fixed beyond the veil of matter.
"Ok. You don't want it? Would you please move to the side, then? There's a queue building up behind you."
Vix quickly handed the man his thoroughly pre-counted coins, grabbed the bag of food and swiftly ran out the door. A big guy in a red tracksuit, carrying a couple of rental DVD’s spawning youthful, naked promise on glossy covers got knocked over in the movement.
The videos relocated to street-level.
Loud swearing taking place.
Evoke the spirits unknown to you, sleeping soul. Lost and blinded. They would be here soon. He could sense their approach. Not a too difficult trail back to the Shelter. Remember the path, stick to the path. Thoughts roaring. Lock focus on task. No disturbances allowed. Funny-looking magpie screaming from a rooftop: "Who's your Master?"
He got inside and slammed the door behind him, locked all three locks, and sat down on the pink inflatable chair.
The usual vein on his forehead had started thumping.
A bit short of breath now (still breathing, though).
He will soon remember the cause of it all, and be the Master of the rhythm again. He who beat the first drum and uttered the initial words.
Soon.
The warm, sweet and salty food inside the foam container spread its warmth and comfort in his lap. Rising fumes of ancient eastern knowledge slowly materializing.
Shelter.
Close shave.
Vix ate the food, laid back on the chair, and floated off.
As he did, the framework of the Pyramid emanated from the depths.
All-empowering. Ever-growing.
Stretching out to encompass his soul.
The Pyramid is shaking at its foundations. Its woven dreamflesh of broken hearts, tears, pain and blood is about to rip into a million pieces of rotting debris. As this happens, the souls of its makers are screaming with agony, as the Master of Darkness is barging in to collect his rightful property: their dreams, their hopes, and the chilly numbness that's left of the soul they once were given. The soul they chose to exchange for their mortal power and short-lived pleasures. I know their fear, I know their loss, for I gave them everything: my unconditional love, and life itself.
A bulldog with shattered limbs of ex-human between its jaws barked and sneered at him.
Animal darkness radiating.
Hurting him.
Hot canine jaws penetrating his dream-flesh.
He woke screaming.
A loud noise came from next door.
Hammering on wall.
"Shut the fuck up, stupid junkie!"
I - love my brother
You - love your sister
We - love eachother
We are love, love, love, love, love, love…
The sudden revelation was echoing loudly down the corridors of his aching mind.
Scared again. Descending further into the merciless pit. Gasping for air and her eternal nurturing embrace. Always losing track. Undefined intelligence. All-empowering, undeniable. Enter emotional force majeure. I've had enough now. I need to stop this ride. Get off. Get off as I never have before. Jack me up - up to where I am all-seeing, all-knowing, all-being. The Master - not the victim. The cause of events - not the slave of consequence. I know this should be the way, the righteous and natural way of things. The capital rule with no exception. I should know. I made all of this real.
Vix looked lost. The man behind the counter at the Chinese take-away once again tried to get some response from him.
"Your food, Mister. Three pound fifty, please."
No reply. Staring apathetically into the void. Blankness repeating itself like an old vinyl record stuck in the run-out groove, recycling nothingness. The man was waving the plastic bag in front of him, but Vix's gaze stayed fixed beyond the veil of matter.
"Ok. You don't want it? Would you please move to the side, then? There's a queue building up behind you."
Vix quickly handed the man his thoroughly pre-counted coins, grabbed the bag of food and swiftly ran out the door. A big guy in a red tracksuit, carrying a couple of rental DVD’s spawning youthful, naked promise on glossy covers got knocked over in the movement.
The videos relocated to street-level.
Loud swearing taking place.
Evoke the spirits unknown to you, sleeping soul. Lost and blinded. They would be here soon. He could sense their approach. Not a too difficult trail back to the Shelter. Remember the path, stick to the path. Thoughts roaring. Lock focus on task. No disturbances allowed. Funny-looking magpie screaming from a rooftop: "Who's your Master?"
He got inside and slammed the door behind him, locked all three locks, and sat down on the pink inflatable chair.
The usual vein on his forehead had started thumping.
A bit short of breath now (still breathing, though).
He will soon remember the cause of it all, and be the Master of the rhythm again. He who beat the first drum and uttered the initial words.
Soon.
The warm, sweet and salty food inside the foam container spread its warmth and comfort in his lap. Rising fumes of ancient eastern knowledge slowly materializing.
Shelter.
Close shave.
Vix ate the food, laid back on the chair, and floated off.
As he did, the framework of the Pyramid emanated from the depths.
All-empowering. Ever-growing.
Stretching out to encompass his soul.
The Pyramid is shaking at its foundations. Its woven dreamflesh of broken hearts, tears, pain and blood is about to rip into a million pieces of rotting debris. As this happens, the souls of its makers are screaming with agony, as the Master of Darkness is barging in to collect his rightful property: their dreams, their hopes, and the chilly numbness that's left of the soul they once were given. The soul they chose to exchange for their mortal power and short-lived pleasures. I know their fear, I know their loss, for I gave them everything: my unconditional love, and life itself.
A bulldog with shattered limbs of ex-human between its jaws barked and sneered at him.
Animal darkness radiating.
Hurting him.
Hot canine jaws penetrating his dream-flesh.
He woke screaming.
A loud noise came from next door.
Hammering on wall.
"Shut the fuck up, stupid junkie!"
I - love my brother
You - love your sister
We - love eachother
We are love, love, love, love, love, love…
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