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Trompe-l’œil Dissonance (poem and perspectives)

The air was worse. L.A. Civic Center masked by smog on January 6, 1948. Courtesy of UCLA Library Special Collections – Los Angeles Times Photographic Archive. Image source: https://www.kcet.org/shows/lost-la/las-smoggy-past-in-photos

 

 

 

A mind deceiving the eyes
presented by a past image
the lens of make-belief is challenged

long I have asked
questions of what is true and real
questions to understand and serve
a bigger picture
What is true?
What is real?
questions to discern
trompe-l’œil, or the real
the power gained by designing
and controlling a story

most days I get to wonder
the difference between I and me
the difference between tragedy and comedy
the uncanny closer to the real
something I can feel
sensed and embodied

consciousness
(as spiritual matter) not a dense
but vital matter for people starving
from a lack of conscientiousness
linked between desire
affection for the senses
thoughts begging for attention

belief businesses really hurt
reality always a hit
always in reach
the kind of life
you wanna live

what is the business of
helping others and doing good about?
though the correct way to go
last I looked we were all born with the right to be
and with such a knowing, people still go on fighting and killing
instead of living, loving, working, and playing

the silent things no one dare speak
the conflation of value
with imaginary currency
though shame and guilt
are useful feelings
once mantracized are pathologized
“if I just love myself more”
everything will be alright
or are whores of the self loving sort cleaner

one thing made into another
through the power of an, as an is
love is care, care is love
love is love, care is care
though one often becomes the other
as labor delivers
one thing to the other
and so the wars are not about class
but who works and who pays
who pretends to be free
and who works as a slave

all inner and outer experiences await
in the life looking for you
awaits your work to bring it to be
with your own body and hands.

—

Recently I attended a symposium at KHiO organized by OCA and OSLO PILOT in collaboration with IKT. The presentation shared the indigenous perspective on human rights: a right to a history, a right to a present, and a right to a future.  These coherent principles struck me as wise in comparison to the polemical display of social justice warrior-ship.

 

That was an enlivening perspective to consider. One that seems highly valuable today, in servicing sincere questions about responsibility, trust, and values. In a world where people travel. In a world with wars and peace zones. In a world where the internet connects lives that would otherwise not know anything. In a world where not everything is possible, but more choices are available.

 

There’s a term adapted to the language today called: climate change. The words themselves point to a fact of life on earth: changing. Anyone simply asking questions is taken to be cast as challenging the legitimacy of the claims of climate change. How can someone who cares instead of dancing around parroting what everyone else is treated as heretics?

 

The concerns I have are about the loss of biodiversity and what are humans going to do about the gaps in understanding of nature is expressed in Ruisseau Holocene. Additionally, the Devonian period is a gaping hole of magnetic resonance knowledge. Ivar Giaever’s presentation and arguments about the causes and correct courses of action around climate change are often erased to simultaneously favor the belief of the masses guided by politicians, who are not scientists, and the continual debaucharous behavior of the civilian.

 

Climate, miljø, atmosphere, environment. That is all the things that are around the body that effect the interior function within the body. I often wonder how much of the social chatter is created affective disorders through either cognitive dissonance. What would it look like for a moral compass to find a true north through the noise? To understand that, we always have to go within. Change is the most certain aspect of life is change. Within change, there are patterns. The window of data set viewing must be openly approached. We are past needing to fight about things and do the choices that create the reality we want to live in. Over-confidence in a single point of view, posits a view through an oculus when the nature of reality is holographic. From Oxford dictionary:

      1. a round or eye-like opening or design, such as a circular window or an opening at the apex of a dome.

 

Conclusive story drawing has been well-articulated in the field of psychology as a form of cognitive bias. Whereas allegorical storytelling is more intriguing and filled with paradoxes serving as catalysts for creating. I fully understand and appreciate the subjective discomfort and anxiety of not knowing. There are nefarious lingering intentions shrouded in vague language and rote didactic-ism.

 

In this situation about the climate is often conjured notions of the cosmos or god, paranormal or extraterrestrial. So one really has to look at whose vision is the anointed one. Personally, I think about responsibility, love, dignity, reverence, trust, and values creating an inner sense of fulfillment independent from the concept of an all seeing eye, god, or archetype. Though God as a monastic or polytheistic notion, emanation or aura, felt too grandiose in comparison to the grounded sense of animism I sensed since I was quite young. Retrospectively, it’s easy to see a mythological persona can be used or applied to control populations, the ideas and the stories disseminated understandings that can lead to:

  • health
  • life generation
  • creating harmony among people otherwise prone to fighting

 

As concepts are malleable as even words arrive as forms within the reader or listener differenly as they may from the author or orator, the application of concepts determines the use and misuse, unless a shared sense of higher and deeper spiritual sovereignty is developed. Was it the fault of religion to give rise to people who abuse power? From my view, the responsibility is always the hands of people; not some act of god. So when it comes to the Algorithmic Savior technocrats are programming, the very thing at stake is the human imagination, consciousness, and perhaps soul.

 

In the face of reality, we can see the repeated abdication of responsibility and complicity buttress these avenues for corruption to take place. Corruption also gives rise to other motives, and so in 2019, we see an acceptance and normalization of an increasing amount of life motives and expressions that would have been imprisoned or burned. Human life in certain regions has experienced sharp increases in individual freedom, and food availability, and has been fed media stories about moral and economic superiority without having the lived experience to back up the claims.

 

In thinking about what is true and real, or what is good as life-giving, there is the benefit to gain in approaching ideas to see their contents and results. The study of history can be a leading method of charting the course of the future with responsible choices for future generations to reap benefits instead of dire consequences for current missteps. Humans are continually at several intersections of moral, ethical, political, personal, and aesthetic choices. As people learn how to read the signs, and visual cues, and weigh their intuitive senses with critical thinking, a sense of moral compass can be retained.

 
“Yes, my friends, the conceptual revolution we are beginning goes this deep. We need to rediscover the mind of nature, to return to our original animism, and the ensouled universe it perceived.  We need to understand nature, the planet, the sun, the soil, the water, the mountains, the rocks, the trees, and the air as sentient beings whose destiny is not separate for our own.  As far as I know, no indigenous person on Earth would deny that a rock bears some kind of awareness or intelligence.  Who are we to think differently?  Are the results of the modern scientific view so impressive as to justify such arrant presumptuousness?  Have we created a society more beautiful than they?  In fact, as the example the quantum particle suggests, science is finally circling back toward animism.  To be sure, scientific paradigms that countenance an intelligent universe are mostly heterodox today, but they are gradually encroaching on mainstream.  Take the example of water.  Emerging from the shadows of homeopathy, anthroposophy, and research by marginal figures like Masaru Emote and the brilliant Viktor Schauberger, the idea that water itself is alive or at least bears structure and individuality, is now being explored by mainstream scientists like Gerald Pollack.  We still have a long way to go before anything like the sentience of all matter can be accepted, or even articulated, by science.  But imagine what that belief would mean when we contemplate mountaintop removal mining, polluting aquifers with fracking fluid, and so on. Whatever mechanism–greenhouse gases, deforestation, or solar fluctuations– climate change is sending us an important message.  We and Earth are one.  As above, so below: what we do to each other, even to the smallest animal or plant, we do to all creation.  Perhaps all our small, invisible acts imprint themselves upon the world in ways we do not understand.” from The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible page 51.
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