Apollo's Creed

Hello out there.

It’s me again.

I have been thinking about our last conversation, where you said nothing.

Sometimes it feels like I am communicating through a Bliss Board, one of those devices with limited choices of images, when there is so much to talk about, so many questions I have to ask.

I know, my questions evoke the answers.

Lots of answers float around, ideas of the why and how of things.

I believed they were my own thoughts,

until I wondered where I had gotten them from.

Interestingly, there were always a few answers; some made sense, some were ridiculous or paranoid, and some were brilliant.

I had to learn to differentiate between the thoughts, see how I felt about them, what ‘voice’ they had in my mind. I sensed some thoughts came from things I was afraid of, unresolved fears and anxieties, those I kept on the periphery where I could keep an eye on them.

The human psyche is interesting, and we have not explored much of it yet.

I came to believe some thoughts came from you,

or the me that is you,

or however, it works.

How else can we see ourselves from so far away?

Some say it is a walk on the edge of madness,

trying to talk to you out there,

but somehow,

I know I have done this before and I think I know the way.

I have so many questions.

Is it that we choose what thoughts we have from a collective pool of our everyday experience as psychologists suggest?

Do we have the experiences of our ancestors as well to draw from as so many of us believe, coded in the blood, the bones, the DNA?

Do we also have access to other people’s knowledge, as some savants demonstrated?

Or is it all this and more...

Of course.

We are so complex, we humans.

We have no idea of what we are capable of.

Yet with all that we are, we are so ensnared by something that we can’t see.

I hope you understand, we need help.

I am trying to communicate to you through this Bliss Board of human experience,

collective imagery and beliefs,

hoping you will understand more than I can say.

I wrote a poem back in 2003, one of the inspired ones,

the ones that write themselves so quick you can barely type fast enough to catch it all.

I love when that happens. I wrote it to this prompt.

“Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular.” ~Aristotle~

An old Greek guy who died 2400 years ago said this. It made me want to try to write a poem about a particular thread of human history from a more universal viewpoint.

I think we can express both and sometimes poetry is the only way both can be expressed.

‘For those with eyes to see, and ears to hear’ they say.

I think it’s for those who are looking and listening is all.

I hope you can hear me, I hope it’s you I am hearing.

Here’s my poem...

Apollo’s Creed,

mistaking Mithras’ intention

weighed in upon the temples of mercy

where Zeus beheld Hera

in highest esteem

but wavered

in judgement.

War

Rape and pillage

as leader bequeathed leader

the right of the mighty

Ships of knights

in passing,

judged not.

Stories told by the victors

were left

where the living may find them.

Burn

Damnation and hell-fire

who’s tale to tell

in the final moment

of life between life?

Spires rise higher

and spiral out of control

of the masses

performing for millennia

the practice of patience

and redemption.

Escape

Hope of the hopeless abide

and hide in a new world

where fortune is found

and fought over.

Picket fence and union dues

subdue the natives

who are restless.

Ancestors ghost dance a future

out of a past

that was mistaken

for another world.

Taking it apart for contextual information.

This bliss board is clumsy and I will have to define some of the imagery.

I know I didn’t get it all.

First verse

Apollo’s Creed-. Rocky movie reference, the fighter beaten by the underdog, Apollo, sun god of the Romans, the one god of war and vengeance, beaten out and replaced by the son of the god of the Judaeo-Christian belief system. Sun God replaced by the son of God.

Mithra- the Greek god who’s touch turned everything to gold, Mithra’s intention to accumulate as many riches as possible backfired. Today people think of Mithra’s touch as someone who can turn anything into money, few get the moral of the story, as everything he touched turned to gold he could no longer interact with people, or feel anything. It was a curse, not a gift, a curse that continues on in the civilization that bred out of that ancient time. We are not heeding the warnings the poets left us, and are cycling through the same stories still.

Zeus and Hera- equal partners in ruling civilization, king and queen, god and goddess and the decline from equality. From here that Mediterranean civilization tumbled down into to misogyny and patriarchy where it’s philosophy is still holding women in bondage today.

Second Verse

The spin off into fighting for the holy lands, knights of templar, missionaries, masons and the whole progression of the idea of groups of warriors fighting for a God. The rape and pillage of whole civilizations while presenting as being servants of something holy is common. In actuality, these warriors are in service to whatever king, emperor, or corporate hierarchy is currently in control of the coffers of whatever church they put into power. War, rape, and pillage, disguised as spreading democracy or protecting a ‘way of life’ is still the same technique of submission used today to gain control of oil, gold, lumber, agricultural land or whatever riches the few in charge covet.

Third Verse

Our collective history is a fiction written by the war winners. Look at which histories and which pieces of history are taught in our respective school systems. Most of what we are taught are lies. Christopher Columbus did not discover America.

Fourth Verse

The religious fear of hell holding people mesmerized into obedience and fanaticism, taking sides in religious wars fighting for control of the soul. This insanity is spreading across the planet, again.

After death when it is realized how easy it was to be sucked into a collective consciousness, losing your own sense of self, there is a time of awareness and resolve.

We take time between lives gaining perspective only to incarnate back into the cycle of life, with the risk of losing one’s self again into the craziness of that collectively created reality of the European/Middle Eastern patriarchal lineage that have affected many North American’s consciousness.

In big cities of business, corporations fight over who will have the tallest building on the horizon, but the highest peak of our ancestor's villages, and many still today is the cross of the Christian church. Over and over we go repeating the same insanity, trying again to make it work. We come up with all kinds of reasons why we keep spiraling, believing it must be so.

Fifth Verse

The exodus from Europe to ‘The new world” seeking a way to start over, yet really just re-creating the same crazy system, and doing the same thing to the people here as was done by Apollo’s followers of Rome.

Sixth Verse

The picket fence is the American Dream of owning property, a luxury denied back home. Unions and rebellions uniting as one people for a common cause, and paying into whoever holds the coffers now. Assimilate.

But the original people here are different and are not so easily subdued. No matter how much the European way is imposed, dictated, blanketed over, there are stirrings underneath, rustlings of something untamed. They are not going away anytime soon.

Seventh Verse

The ancestors of the Americas had different ceremonies and understandings of reality and are not so easily incorporated into the European Sun God collective. It took seven generations of subjugation but the healing begins.

This is not Europe, and these people have a different history and different beliefs about life. The ceremonies once outlawed are coming back.

The Ghost Dance awakens the ancestors, the ancient wisdom that recognizes insanity and works towards healing it.

A shift in the long story of our emergence as humans has begun.