From CGI's Morgan. CGI is RMN's Readers forum where Morgan is a member. Come join the fun!!!!

Ah... Yes... as we wait for the world to change- which is foolish because the world is always changing from what it looked like previously, into what it will later look like previously, while remaining the same, except for appearing to be different- we note the drop off curve, where stupidity and superficial obsessions, prove that there is no more of an actual limit to dumb and dumber than there is to wise and wiser; not everyone is taken in however.

That said ...and regardless of appearances of an even deeper collective sleep, Mr. Apocalypse is taking no prisoners and is going chapter and verse in a War and Peace meets James Michener at a meth tasting cocktail party in a doublewide... somewhere in the hills outside of Riverside. When reality encounters any version of bullshit, whether it is in exceptional and professional packaging, or comes with no packaging at all, except the palm of your hand, where it steams in a redolent and unmistakable certitude of itself, reality wins. Reality is a kind of fire and bullshit is flammable so... you can imagine what the result might be when they come into contact. It would be different than burning those pine branches that you trimmed the other day. Lies can be equated with bullshit and depending on the force and intent of the lies, on that depends what the intensity of the aroma and atmosphere will be. In the case of some lies, the noxious smell reaches to the gates of Heaven and offends all life, present and absent. When Heaven moves, nothing can stand against the force of it. As Lao Tzu said, “Heaven prefers no man but... the wise man prefers Heaven.”

One might equate the meaning of that quote with the image of reeds bending in the wind; cities rising and falling in sequences of time lapse photography, or any example of irresistible change that history has demonstrated over and over again to be a fact of manifest life. We live and breathe in the wreckage of relics that are merely ghost echoes now and overlaid with the pending relics of the present moment. Shelley put it well with, “Ozymandias.”

“I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter'd visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock'd them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

This is not to be confused with Ozzy Osborne, I don't think. Then again... If he or she or it is here, it is arguably true that none of them will be at some point. This is one of those peculiar mysteries that is always with us. We move up and down the sidewalks of temporary cities in temporary life, chattering about all the objects and events that are disappearing as they are mentioned and seldom if ever give a moments thought to that ineluctable destiny that awaits in every direction, regardless of whatever direction we take. Samarra awaits. Samarra awaits. Whatever the truth of it may be, it sure is interesting how many coincidences there are. Some maintain that there are no coincidences, simply examples of momentary pattern recognition. Sometimes we see them and sometimes we don't. When we do, we think it is coincidental. It's a bit like miracles. Sometimes we see them and sometimes we don't but they are happening all the time. We have come to the place where we identify the miraculous as pedestrian events. Children see the miraculous every day, which is the point of becoming like a little child. Then puberty turns the world into a dance of opposites and all the rest of the time of our passing residence, we are enroute to senility or regenerated innocence. In times of material darkness, the former is pro forma. It takes an exceptional person to persist unto the latter. It's all about degree of difficulty but persistence furthers.

There is childlike and there is childish and childish can be awesomely destructive when performed by an adult. One has to use the word, 'adult' with caution. Just as Love and fear cannot occupy the same space at the same time, the like applies to childish and adult.

In a world of appearances and fun house mirrors it can be very difficult to tell the difference between what is and what is not. Even when it is there, it is not there in its true form. The form has been bent out of shape by the twisted perceptions of a diseased mind. When these perceptions are shared by a crowd they become a plague and can spread like an epidemic. It's like the Black Plague, where the opacity implies the darkness of ignorance. It's a cloud. It's an unholy mist. It's what it's not.

There's a game that people play sometimes in their parlors when they've had a few. It is often played by children as a tool of learning, though it is doubtful whether the point gets made or not. Everyone sits in a circle and whispers something in the ear of the person next to them. As the phrase is passed from ear to ear it finally comes full circle and the last person to hear it is asked what they heard and most of the time, what they say bears little resemblance to the phrase when it was first spoken. The world operates like this. Another example is when one hears a story and then later tells that story to another. For some reason they fell compelled to embellish the tale. Maybe it wasn't exciting or lurid enough in the original. So the tale passes from narrator to narrator. Sometimes the tale is completely manufactured and the events and exchanges spoken of never even took place. Sometimes identities are created to tell tales of conditions or events that never existed or never even happened, such as we heard, ad nauseum during the run up to the Iraq War.

One learns at some point that telling the truth is not a profitable enterprise. Lies are the negotiable currency of the world at this time. Those who were inclined to tell the truth are purged from the ranks of those waiting on their opportunity to lie. Thank god for Mr. Apocalypse. There was a film with Jim Carrey in it called “Liar Liar”, where a lawyer was forced to tell the truth for 24 hours due to his son's birthday wish. This is the nature of these times, in which Mr. Apocalypse holds all the cards and where he also happens to be the joker in the deck. Behind the Byzantine complexity of all of our personalities making a fool of us, individually and collectively, there resides the one personality that has command over each and every one of the surface personalities that we interact with and act out of every day. Usually this personality acts (doesn't act?) as the silent witness and recording angel. In times of apocalypse, this personality takes a more active role and begins to usurp the power of the vehicles it lives in for the purpose of demonstration. We are in the time of demonstration. That is observably true, regardless of the fact that we are 'always' in a time of demonstration. It shouldn't be hard to realize this; predicting the eventual outcome is significantly harder but what is the point of being able to tell the future when you are in a position to change it?

We pray that fortune in its finest fashion comes upon you one and all, in the manner most suitable to you. That said... carry on.

http://www.smoking-mirrors.com/2016/08/war-and-peace-meets-james-mincher-at.html