Tuesday, November 11, 2014

Veterans' Day 2014



Tomas Young died just recently, having left a scathing remembrance directed at the people who decided that there was a reason to go to war in Iraq in the first place. He chose to serve his country because 9/11 happened. The Iraq War had nothing to do with 9/11, and his service was in that theater.

The fall-out of the Iraq War is, surprise, more war. WWI was dumb, but set the scene for WWII. The original Gulf War was dumb enough, and the second Iraq War was no smarter. And I know I hate ISIL like a motherfucker, but I know war is dumb. (What they are doing, however, is appalling.) And I know what we are doing there now is dumb. And sometimes even necessary service is dumb. War is dumb. Tennyson's Charge of the Light Brigade pulls no punches.  Kipling and Owen knew it. Pete Seeger got it.

I know bodies and minds get screwed up and that lives are disrupted, that futures of veterans turn on our willingness to admit their privations and compensate them accordingly. And do we?

There's things we could do.  But we fall short. We always will. Until we somehow figure out a way to not solve our problems this way anymore. And we aren't there yet.

I honor those who served. I wish we knew better ways to solve our stupid problems.

2 comments:

Formerly Amherst said...

Hi Vixen, Teilhard de Chardin said, "Evil is inevitable in the course of a creation which develops within time."

We live in Malkuth of Assiah where evil is inescapable, because Malkuth of Assiah exists within space and time (the largest part of it). If we lived in Malkuth of Briah we would rarely see evil, and life would be paradisaical.

However, Malkuth of Assiah is where we come to experience the vicissitudes of time and space in a little flesh capsule and no one lives long enough to learn a great deal. Those giant sea turtles can live up to 300 years. We don't make it to 100. I frequently tell people when asked how i'm doing, "I'm doing fine. If I could only live to be 300, I think I could get it all straightened out."

And then of course we live in the Kali Yuga. Graham Rooth said, "The Kalu Yuga, or 'Black Age' is said to have begun 6,000 years ago, is the last and worst of the four ages into which each manvantara or human cycle is divided. It represents the final stage in a progressive distancing from the Principle as the cycle moves further away from the primordial state. Spirituality weakens and becomes inaccessible, and society is increasingly dominated by material values. Traditional ways are overthrown, and society becomes less hierarchical and more archaic."

When he refers to "hierarchical values" he is referring to a society built around seers with the ability to cognize and experience enlightenment and how a society could operate in as close an approximation to enlightenment as is possible.

For example, when the emporor Ashoka converted to Buddhism, he created his entire kingdom to be a reflection of the enlightenment state. Architecture, statuary, religious practice, series of laws and regulations were designed so that where ever people went in the daily grind they were reminded of the fulfillment of human potential that they should direct their attention to.

It is said that the biblical Fall (whether of angels or of Adam and Eve) is a Semitic archetype describing the Fall into the Kali Yuga as seen from the Babylonian-Assyrian traditions. Or a "fall" from the "Principle" (complete unity with the divine nature of the universe) into time and space where we find ourselves in Malkuth of Assiah.

Incidentally, Zechariah Sitchin is dismissible, but Michael Cremo of 'Forbidden Archeology' has become low-key dissent in the archeological community. He found over 100,000 artefacts in museums around the world that were inexplicable by conventional archeological theories, and he used the Vedic model to find references to six entire creations before this one. You may be interested to know that knowledge of all these six are found in the satchel that the Fool in the Tarot deck carries over his shoulder as he begins to step out from the precipice of time and space with his companion dog Sirius.

If there is any good news to be found in all this, the next yuga that follows after we ride to self destruction in this one will be the paradisaical Satya Yuga equivalent to living in Malkuth of Atziluth.

Vixen Strangely said...

The most succinct summation of the Kali Yuga (well, to me, anyway) occurs twice in Wilson's Illuminatus! Trilogy--in the Kali Yuga, all our games are played with live ammunition. It's one of those "funny because it's true" thoughts, in that we experience morality in a literally material life or death way where our choice of actions are "loaded guns".

The notion of the history of man as experienced in "ages" having a defining arc strikes me as compelling mostly because our heritage as human beings with our type of brain and thought capacity has existed longer than our recognizable recorded history. Things like our relationship with animals, art, writing, divisions into city-states, that we recognize as occurring about 6000 years ago (or around when Bishop Ussher started counting) certainly had to go back farther--the nature of those things are just mostly effaced by entropy so that we can't see the broad patterns. What we do have is something like the evolutionist's "punctuated equilibrium". We see patterns based on the groups of information that we can link up.

(I'm not adverse to viewing this current Piscean Age in part as the Aeon of Horus, because the concept of an Aeon of Ma'at to follow is genuinely appealing to me in terms of justice, fairness, and truth-saying.)

The slower pace of the life the megalith builders led likely resulted in a life of the mind (outstanding memory for oral history, geography by "eyeballing it", systems for mental mathematics) that we, snobbily assured of our technological prowess because of the coolness of our artifacts, would consider...magic.

Sometimes I think it isn't so much that we need more chronological time to sort ourselves out, but more ability to "make time stop". People can be rash and superficial in their judgments, but actually knowing things and doing right things takes time. Although my meatsack is liable to wear out in another 60 years, I've found it useful to entertain the idea that it might...not. And use time accordingly.

Although that sound might just be my pose as a folded Joker in the spokes of the wheel of Dharma.

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