Are You Being Served?

These hard times come down like an avalanche
And I'm lost and detached
Along with all those who never had a chance - T Bone Burnett

And it's just like that.

I've been having a hard time lately, and it's largely because of the times. I don't think I've ever regarded this world, or even any other, with less hope than I do now, and frankly it's costing me. Though bearing the cost feels like an indulgence, because it seems so superfluous to the everyday business of just getting on with things.

Know what I mean? Life goes on regardless of what states we worry ourselves into, and all our effort to understand the forces at play does nothing to keep them in check. However much we know - and who can know how much that is? - knowledge does not change our condition, but adapts us to its accommodation. Charles Fort said "I think we are property." If so, what becomes of property when it knows it's property? More pointedly, would it be better if it never knew?

Hiroshima, 1945, August 6th, 16 minutes past 8 AM
Question: Who really gave that order?
Answer: Control. The ugly American. The instrument of Control

An odd story appeared a few weeks and made the usual, credulous rounds: "Scientists find Extraterrestrial genes in Human DNA." As I posted on the RI forum there is nothing to corroborate the story, nor even that there is a "Sam Chang" associated with the Genome Project. And while DNA programming makes an intriguing hypothesis, and it's something that we've entertained here, that a scientist might say that the program's off-world genesis is "now a verified fact" is simply silly.

Greg Bishop picked up on the article for the blog he shares with Nick Redfern, UFOMystic.com, and while he too dismissed the particulars of the story, he regards the premise of intelligent encryption a credible proposition for consideration.

Most significantly, Bishop was reminded of the claims of a mystical Swedish artist from the turn of the 20th Century named Hilma Af Klint, who "convened a circle of women who claimed to receive messages from 'ascended masters'":

They gathered once a week for seances and readings from Af Klint, who later ventured off on her own and produced a series of incredible paintings from 1906 to about 1916 based on the messages she claimed to have received. Just before her death in 1946, she requested that the works not be exhibited publicly until at least 20 years after her death. One of the received messages said "Protect your drawings. They are pictures of drenching waves of ether that await you one day when your ears and eyes can apprehend a higher summons."

One work in particular resonates with this alien DNA argument. Entitled "What A Human Being Is," it depicts a twisted double strand that looks remarkably like a DNA molecule. This was almost 50 years before Francis Crick and James Watson won the Nobel prize for the discovery. Aliens talking? Remote Viewing? These sorts of "coincidences" are just the sort of thing that orthodox Ufologists routinely ignore, to their peril.


"What a Human Being Is" - ca. 1910

As well, on the RI forum thread, "Attack Ships on Fire" smartly noted that along with the DNA-like double helix, "there appears to be a prism effect happening near the base....another odd connection/premonition about DNA being able to emit photons of light."

Of course, even when we admit the possibility that the painting suggests some manner of information transference beyond Af Klint's ability to hoax or even to recognize - as we may do with the shamanistic art of ayahuasca's writhing vines and snakes, and shimmering UFOs - we have just the schematic, only slightly more impressionistic than that inscribed on Voyagers' golden discs. The answer from Klint's "ascended master" is no answer. The answer is that we should ask different questions.


Question: If Control's control is absolute, why does Control need to control?
Answer: Control needs time.
Question: Is Control controlled by its need to control?
Answer: Yes


We've seen how aspects of the new physics can curiously resemble the old metaphysics. For instance, in the holographic model of the universe, in which consciousness precedes matter and is the ordering principal of the wave pattern out of which the observed universe arises. In this construct, time can be construed as the record of matter's separation, and recapitulation, to universal consciousness.

Amit Goswami puts it this way in The Self-Aware Universe:

The brain/mind is a dual quantum system/measuring apparatus. As such, it is unique: It is the place where the self-reference of the entire universe happens. The universe is self-aware through us. In us the universe cuts itself into two - into subject and object. Upon observation by the brain-mind, consciousness collapses the wave function...by acting self-referentially, not dualistically.

In altered states, the shaman and the mystic shed his or her "skin-encapsulated ego," as Stanislav Grof calls it, in a transpersonal experience of undifferentiated unity. "In the extremes," Grof notes in Ervin Laszlo's Science and the Reenchantment of the Cosmos, "it is even possible to experience an extension of consciousness, which is so enormous that it seems to encompass all of humanity, the entire human species.... in rare instances, it is possible to experience consciousness of the entire biosphere, of our planet, or the entire material universe."

But in the normal course of our lives, the human ego serves as a temporary "fiction suit" through which consciousness experiences the world. Consciousness tries us on for size. And consciousness, so conceived, has an insatiable thirst for experience. Which means we get played.

If so, we are not being taken for a ride. We are the ride. And it's a thrill ride.


Question: Why does Control need humans, as you call them?
Answer: Wait, wait. Time, a landing field. Death needs time like a junkie needs junk.
Question: And what does Death need time for?
Answer: The answer is so simple. Death needs time for what it kills to grow in for Ah Pook's sake. Death needs time for what it kills to grow in for Ah Pook's sweet sake, you stupid, vulgar, greedy, American death sucker.


If consciousness hungers for experience - a dinner and a show - then we're on both the menu and the playbill. And what are we serving up to sate the universal appetite? It's not exactly family entertainment. Just as in our ego's own recursive fictions, it's the villains who have run of the stage. So what kind of universe is coming to self-awareness, if its experience is shaped, beyond the ego-bound categories of good and evil, as much by our monsters as by our saints? Ain't nobody here but us chickens.

How many maniacs have claimed "God made me do it"? How many states have adopted the same defense? And how many "gods" have spoken, if only by a whisper in a solitary ear, and been nourished by the experience of ghastly worship?

America is rapture ready. The signs and wonders are not only appearing in its skies (in Chicago, the disc above O'Hare; in Charlotte, "911 callers report lights in sky"; in Hawaii, "UFOs seen over south shore sky"), but also in its WalMart aisles:

An unaccompanied little girl around four years old appeared [late Saturday night] on the aisle and was just staring at [employee "Chelsea" and two friends] smiling. They all just looked back and in the awkward silence finally said hello, wondering where her parents were and why such a little girl was alone. She looked at them and replied "Did you have a good Christmas?". Chelsea and her friends smiled and kindly replied "yes we did, did you have a good Christmas?" No answer, few seconds of silence, and she asked the same question again, "did you have a good Christmas?", again they answered yes and with no answer to their question, she asked again, "did you have a good Christmas?". They thought wow, this is getting kind of weird but again answered just yes hoping she would go on and find her parents. The little girl just stood there staring at them with still no expression on her face and this time said, "hope you had a good Christmas because it was our last here on earth, we won't have another on because God told me Jesus is coming back before then." The girls looked at each other in amazement and tears started filling their eyes and they looked back for the girl and she was gone. All three girls were left there in the toy isle crying because as Chelsea said deep down inside we felt it was true. Was she an angel I don't know, but as they say out of the mouths of babes. Let the Holy Spirit guide your heart with this, but to me it is just another confirmation to me that Jesus is at the doorstep just waiting for God to hand him the key to get in.

In Iran, state radio has announced the imminent return of the Mahdi, who will appear suddenly with Jesus at his side, working great miracles and apocalyptic wrath. "According to reports, [President] Ahmadinejad understands that mayhem and global chaos will precede this coming." Even in profane Hollywood, Tom Cruise has allegedly been tapped by Scientology's David Miscavige as the church's pop Messiah. Miscavige is said to believe that "in the future... Cruise will be worshiped like Jesus for his work to raise awareness of the religion."

Strange days, that appear to many to be intimations of the Last Days, because they seem to promise, for the first time in Our Time, a limitless potential for ruin. To consciousness, until the End of Experience, that's entertainment.

In 1969, the United States Government Printing Office issued a 400-page volume study by the Library of Congress commissioned by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research entitled UFOs and Related Subjects: An Annotated Bibliography.

In her preface, the reports senior bibliographer Lynn Catoe wrote the following:

A large part of the available UFO literature is closely linked with mysticism and the metaphysical. It deals with subjects like mental telepathy, automatic writing, and invisible entities, as well as phenomena like poltergeist manifestations and "possession."...

Many of the UFO reports now being published in the popular press recount alleged incidents that are strikingly similar to demonic possession and psychic phenomenon which have long been known to theologians and parapsychologists.

The religious, occult and psi characteristics of UFO phenomenon are often edited out of accounts by "nuts and bolts" proponents of the ET hypothesis, and naturally unknown by those who regard the whole business with suspicion. But perhaps now, since the United States is undergoing a new "flap" (globally, the phenomena never went away), more consideration may be paid to the mystery of the manifestations, and their connections to ego and consciousness. Even when they're of this world.

A few weeks ago, Retired Colonel Brian Fields, a 32-year veteran of the US Air Force, claims he witnessed and photographed a display of hovering lights in the sky over western Arkansas two weeks ago that were "not anything I ever had any experience with.... They were some kind of energy or something." Since then, the US Air Force has explained them to be flares from an A-10 training mission. But before then, photographs of Fields' lights were analyzed by "digital-production expert" Mark Kirby, president and CEO of EIC Research. "I was kind of surprised," Kirby said. From a black-and-white analysis of an image of yellow light, he saw what "looks like a clean silhouette of someone sitting behind a console or flight control." Analysis of the orange light was "a bit scary.... You could literally see two eyes and a mouth," Kirby said. "It looked like someone looking at you."

A religious newswire picked up the story, calling the alleged occupant of the craft a "possible angelic creature." The author of the wire item also claims to have seen a similar light in the sky the same night, though in Louisiana. Meanwhile in Texas, a national sales manager for Clear Channel Radio says that in late December he "observed a bright, white round light looking exactly like Col. Fields' pictures."

Fields himself described his sighting in stark religious terms:

I believe it's prophetic, something do with what's happening in the Middle East today. If this is some kind of event with visitation, it's entirely possible. When the anti-Christ comes into power, it's not going to be something we expect. The deception that is going to be attached to it is going to be so powerful, you're gonna have to go against your reason to reject it.

Be awake, be mindful you can be deceived. There are things that can shake our world.

Even when we deceive ourselves, the world can still shake.

Our planet is "very rapidly heading back toward the greenhouse world of the dinosaurs." After that, it's straight on to Venus. The Iran pre-game show is almost wrapped, and "a certain degree of fatalism" pervades the capitals of the world, Washington included. Another carrier group has been dispatched to the Persian Gulf to tell Tehran to "back off," according to a straight-faced US official, though with diplomacy rejected out-of-hand, and the White House again in Cheney's thrall, the "last resort" of warcraft is once again the first and only choice. Ahmadinejad could tap dance Yankee Doodle on the grave of Khomeini and it wouldn't stop this falling hammer in mid-swing.

Contactees, from the beginning, have been sharing the warnings of the saucers' bizarre occupants (who often say of themselves, "we are one") that the world is heading to nuclear and environmental ruin - the end of experience - and that this somehow impacted gravely upon their own existence, and even existence itself. I don't see a way around the nonsense of this, if we regard the occupants as interstellar travelers and off-Earth residents. There is enough space for all, that our world's calamity would not doom their own. But what if they themselves are fiction suits: a dramatic eruption into our ego's reality by deep consciousness - the "universal mind" - to grip our attention, and to keep us from shuttering this production?

I don't know. It sounds crazy, but then so does everything else these days. I just know it's a shame what signs and wonders usually portend, because we're seeing quite a few of them. And I've seen enough to know I've seen enough, already.


Ah Pook, the Destroyer, is here