Baum's Coat and Lee's Gun

Reality is an illusion. Albeit, a persistent one." Albert Einstein.

"All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream." Edgar Allan Poe.

One must first try and explain Einstein's "Parable of the Train". As William S. Burroughs once said of Poe's essay "Diddling," "I've had it explained to me twice, and I still don't understand it." Be that as it may.

To explain the theory of General Relativity, Einstein told a parable about a man watching a train pass by. On either end, he can see a light, and in the center, waving to him from a window is his girlfriend. He can see the lights at either end of the train, but she cannot. As she waves, she is getting farther and farther away, and yet, he can still see that there are two lights at each end of the train. But she will always see only one light. So, because of vantage point, her perception is relative only to that which can be perceived. Thus, the Theory of Relativity. I think.

Last night I had a dream wherein I was sitting in a lecture hall, listening to a young man explain to me the illusory nature of "reality "; i.e. the consensus nature of what we perceive as the Truth. His idea was that it was all a fabricated hallucination, that "society" accepts certain truths based upon the collective lie they choose to believe. And then he started in on the fact that, truly, our "solid" world is anything but--a collection of molecules, atoms, protons, neutrons, electrons, quarks, and neutrinos, floating in the Void--empty space floating in empty space. Held together, we must ask ourselves, by what?

New Age guru and "conspiracy theorist" [1] David Icke was also there, and at one point, the young Teacher grasped the older one in a loving embrace, tears streaming down his face. And I have had tears streaming down my face, all morning.

I should add that today is the birthday of L. Frank Baum, the author of the all-time children's classic, The Wizard of Oz, which of course inspired the famous film. This is significant. Liber Oz is one book, for instance, in the canon of Aleister Crowley, the famous occultist who transcribed the Liber AL vel Legis in 1904, in Cairo, having been contacted by a "Higher Source" entity, Aiwass, Minister of Ra-Hoor-Kuit. The book heralded the Aeon of Horus, it is claimed; a time when the Law of Thelema would ensure men, "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law." Also"Love is the Law, Love under Will." And that "Every man and every woman is a star." A time of vast social upheaval, replacing the old patriarchal Aeon of the Jewish-derived religions (Christianity, Islam), with a new era, a new "Yuga," as it were. So mote it be. (Note: I am not opining, one way or another, whether or not this is desirable. Only it seems to be at the nexus of his beliefs.)

There is an apocryphal story about Baum, that the actor in the film Wizard of Oz portraying the Professor Marvel character, Frank Morgan, was given a bunch of old coats from a Salvation Army, and told to pick the one that "fit him best." He did so and was a little taken aback to see the initials "LFB" written on the collar. The costume department or wardrobe person (or whatever) was so intrigued that she took the coat to Baum's widow, who confirmed that, indeed, it had once belonged to her husband.

One is tempted to ask: Who is controlling the levers of what we perceive to be our "reality"?

I woke up from my dream with the song "Return to Innocence" by Enigma in my head. Also, thinking about the movie JFK (1990), the book Crossfire: The Plot that Killed Kennedy, by the late Jim Marrs (also the author of Alien Agenda and Rule by Secrecy), the teachings of Icke, and the nature of "reality," illusion, and TIME. Time, I maintain, is a "golden circle," one in which we walk the karmic pathway that always, like the sacred ancient symbol of the Ouroboros, the snake eating its tail, is a thing that devours itself. Of course, Lee Harvey Oswald killed Kennedy, having just happened to have brought his cheap Mannlicher-Carcano rifle (that retailed for about eight dollars and, incidentally, had a busted scope) to work that day. [1] Then he squeezed off three marksman-style shots while looking out through the foliage of a tree, in 3.3 seconds, a feat NO MARKSMAN HAS EVER BEEN ABLE TO DUPLICATE.

Then he left the building without anyone ever seeing him. He killed Dallas officer J.D. Tippit, went to the movie theater, conspicuously didn't pay to get in although he had the money, and waited for the usher, the police to come and arrest him. He protested his innocence, and said, "I'm just a patsy!" Then, while being escorted through a garage surrounded by cops, he was gunned down by "Jack Ruby" (real name: Jacob Rubinstein), an interesting alias considering that a "Jack Ruby" is a fake ruby in the jewelry trade.

New Orleans DA Jim Garrison, who brought the only case ever brought to trial in the assassination of John F. Kennedy (portrayed excellently in Oliver Stone's film JFK by Kevin Costner), uncovered a sordid and bizarre underground of characters, including David W. Ferrie, who knew Oswald in the Civil Air Patrol (and who was portrayed explosively and memorably by Joe Pesci in the film), as well as Clay Shaw, a local business magnate portrayed in the film by Tommy Lee Jones. Although he lost his case, most jurors believed that Garrison was correct when he claimed to have uncovered a conspiracy that led to the murder of President Kennedy--they just didn't know if Claw Shaw could be definitively said to have had anything to do with it. "That's another kettle of fish," as one juror in the film states.

Years ago, I wrote this:

Reality is built upon consensus, which is a shared illusion. If you could get enough people to agree that the sky is green and the grass is blue, it would become generally accepted that this was so. Furthermore, if the television and print media, movies, radio, and electronic media trumpeted this fact as the generally agreed-upon “norm” all day every day, day in and day out, you would find precious few people willing to disagree with it, despite the best evidence of their own eyes. Anyone that dared do so would be considered an outcast, heretic, or “witch,” and would be perceived as a threat to the survival of the whole. They would be isolated, unpersoned, or destroyed.

Did Lee Harvey Oswald fire the fatal shot that killed Kennedy? That is the agreed-upon illusion. But, of course not. It's a mirage.

So is your body. So is this physical plane, everything you've ever been taught, and the box they try to put you in at birth. Or manage to do so, at any rate. America, as David Icke has observed, is a brutal dictatorship. It's a "smiley-face" fraud that has overthrown the democratically-elected governments in far-flung places, and has bespoiled and terrorized Latin America and other locales (including staging a coup on behalf of the United Fruit Company in Guatemala, supporting brutal Contra rebels in Nicaragua, and helping to put the Shah back on the throne in Iran, overthrowing Mossedegha and ensuring the Islamic Revolution that would see that country become what it has in the intervening years). And we could go on and on about Vietnam and Southeast Asia, and of course Iraq and Afghanistan. [2] They have been caught dealing drugs, trading arms for hostages, lying about it all endlessly and shamelessly, etc. They have shipped cocaine into the black ghettos of the major cities, in an attempt to stifle revolutionary fervor and control the populace. They've progressed to killing people by flying robots now.

America, the land of "equality and prosperity," allows hundreds of thousands to sleep on the streets, many through no fault of their own (many are employed, at least to some degree), but the media fosters an image of them as lazy, drug-addled (perhaps by the mind-melting, body destroying toxins prescribed by psychiatrists), and somehow "less than human" because they didn't achieve the propaganda tale proffered as the "American Dream." The wealth and inequality gap, according to researcher Christopher Hedges, is greater now than at any time since the so-called "Gilded Age."

They still practice slavery, calling it the "Prison-Industrial Complex." They still practice child labor. They still sell deadly weapons all over the world, to friends as well as (those who will eventually become) foes. They foment wars for phony reasons, rip trillions out of the pockets of the People, and lie with every 24/7 news cycle about everything, all the time, every day, day in and day out. They manufacture pharmaceuticals to kill you. Or drive you crazy. And, my, don't we have a tremendous lot of daily shootings now in these United States?

But this is not a political article. It's about the nature of reality. About the flesh suit you wear. About that wall you think is holding up the ceiling--according to physicists, it's not any more real than the programmed delusions imprinted in your consciousness to keep you sane. The main one being: that anything, finally, has any meaning in any objective sense. How can it? Inevitably, it DISAPPEARS. YOU disappear. You stop breathing, your heart stops beating, you fall over, and then you start to smell bad. The lights go out. And death, Eternal Death, claims you, and everything you perceived yourself to be. All that you thought was so important vanishes into insignificance. And you're gone forever.

Or are you?

Bhagavad-gita (Chapter 2) tells us:

Verse 11: The Supreme Being is saying that your words of wisdom should not be a cause of grief. The wise neither mourn for the living nor the dead.

Verse 13: The soul within the body passes from childhood to youth to old age, and similarly passes into a new body at death. The wise soul is not confused by this change.

Verse 14: Happiness and sorrow are temporary, like the changing seasons. We must learn to tolerate them without getting disturbed.

Verse 15: A person who is not disturbed by happiness or sorrow, and remains steady in both, is eligible for liberation.

Verse 22: Just as a person discards old clothes and puts on new ones, the soul discards old bodies and accepts new ones at the time of death. This is what we call death.

Verse 27: Birth and death are certain for all living beings. So, one should not lament one's duty when it involves the process of death.

Verse 28: All beings take birth and then eventually disappear when destroyed. Lamentation is not necessary for this process.

Verse 29: Some may see the soul as amazing, some may describe it as amazing, and some may hear it described as amazing. Others may not understand it at all.

Verse 30: The soul residing within the body can never be killed. So there is no reason to grieve for any living being.

Verse 32: Kshatriyas (warriors) who get an opportunity to fight without seeking it are blessed and are on the path to heavenly planets.

Jesus of Nazareth, the radical socialist reformer and anarchist, said it was "Easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle (i.e. the narrow opening through the walls of an ancient city, put there in the event of a siege) than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven," (Matthew 19:24) and was inarguably the most influential man to ever walk the face of the Earth. (Never forget: He also chased the money changers from the Temple, exclaiming, "...You have turned my Father's house into a den of thieves!", in Matthew 21:13.)

He likewise said that "In my Father's house are many mansions." (John 14:2) Did he mean that there are many lives to live yet, that death was inevitable but not final? When he asked, "Who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?" was he asking whether or not the sins or curses of his parents were delivered upon him (one would think unjustly), or did he mean that the man had LIVED BEFORE and that he had perhaps his karmic debt to repay, by being a "leper sitting amidst broken pots and nettles, at the foot of a sun-blasted wall" (as Rimbaud said in Season in Hell)?

Everything They've Ever Told You is a Lie

A hundred years ago, what this world is NOW, would have been the subject of science fiction speculation of the wildest sort. Yet, now, we accept thinking computers as commonplace, and even the government, for some reason, is coming clean on subjects such as UFOs. (What are they preparing us for?) We have mass shootings as a daily occurrence, and any image or sound can be reproduced and mass-broadcast perfectly, fabricated courtesy of AI. The annihilation of the human species can be accomplished BY the human species, many hundreds of times over, in multifarious ways. And our ecosystem is in dire straights. This is beyond science fiction dystopia. This is Hell.

We live in a cloud of ever-shifting frequency fields, and energy patterns, a "dream within a dream," as Poe put it. We have the frequency of "illness" often propounded by doctors; the frequency of sadness, emptiness, aloneness, of "never being enough." We have delusions that keep our heads screwed on straight. But man, as Charles Gatewood once said, if you could see things as "they truly are, it would be just like you were tripping." You would see the Infinite, the All, the Eternal, and not in a linear framework or the sense of A, B, C...wait. It would be the Eternal NOW. All that matters, and your brain would perceive the illusion of itself, as a "decoder" of a reality construct that is neither solid nor real but is a permeable and infiltrated DREAM OF ITSELF. The World Matrix, to use the allusion to a movie I've never actually sat through. "You were born a slave Neo." But the slave can break his chains, can free himself from his bonds, walk through the door, and experience that Oneness on the other side. I want to go home. I want to be one of those rays of the Sun. I want to be reabsorbed into the All.

My late friend and co-author, Jonathan Titchenal, the brilliant young novelist, wanted that Eternal Now. (We spent many long hours and nights discussing what Charles Fort called "New Lands," and new horizons; other realities.) To that end, he used the drug Ayahuasca [3] to break free from the reality constraints that imprison us in the cruel world of material flesh, the illusion foisted upon us by the ...demons, Archons, what-have-you. I believe the resultant voyage must have cost him his life. [4]

The four walls can't stop you. The Establishment can't stop you. The "Box" of "Who I Am" can't stop you either. You have a mind bigger than the entire world. You are All, Infinite Awareness, Universal Consciousness, one continuum of Beingness stretching on into infinity. You are not "slain when the body is slain [...] you are eternal, immutable. The wise mourn neither for the living, nor for the dead." Lord Krishna.

They will poison you. They will lie to you. They will even kill you. It doesn't matter. They're no more real than anything else outside your skull. And even THAT is not real.

What collective mind controls the coincidences behind Baum's Coat? What mass-proffered delusions, such as "Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone assassin of JFK" do we have foisted upon us, that we "doublethink" away, knowing we're being deceived, but accept, as a form of consensus reality, as truth? And why? Years ago, I wrote this:

The men of today are not substantially different than they were four hundred years ago, insomuch as they will foolishly swallow any lie or absurdity foisted upon them by those invested with “authority.” Anyone deviating from the popular delusion will be cast aside, isolated, persecuted, made to confess, and summarily destroyed. Now, today, as in days of old, the heretic is made to seek penance in the eyes of the merciless populace; yet, many accused of witchcraft and other lunacies went to the scaffold or stake, in ancient times, spitting and wailing, cursing their tormentors and delivering hexes upon the heads of them and their generations to come. Today, we have, largely, acquiescence in the face of the barbarous stupidity of our “fellow citizens.” Pray to God that, if you are to be condemned anyway, march to the whipping post or death chamber with an unrepentant heart. Anything else is scurrilous, unseemly, and, ultimately, a true disgrace.

Having said that, I'll also quote this from David Icke:

"Infinite love is the only truth. Everything else is illusion."

Yes.

Notes.

1. A loaded term used by the Establishment controllers and gatekeepers of thought to discredit anyone with an alternative idea as to whatever lies the news media or government is currently feeding the populace.

2. In the film JFK, actor J.O. Sanders (a ruggedly handsome veteran of hardboiled cop shows and crime dramas) makes the very pertinent observation, "You know, I never could figure out why the guy would buy a rifle by mail order and have it sent to a P.O. Box when he could walk into any gun store in Texas and get a gun that could never be traced." Not an exact quote, but you get the idea.

3 It is also known that the American CIA still practices torture, sending their victims overseas, in a process referred to as "extraordinary rendition" to CIA-operated "Black Sites".

4. Ayahuasca is a powerful hallucinogenic plant grown in the Amazon rainforest and used in a ritual as a "teacher plant" by shamans. It is claimed by its adherents to be able to "break through" the barrier of the material world, and deliver the user a vast vision of other realms, a collective unconscious that lies beyond, a vast living Intelligence of which we are all cosmic variations or parts, "Masks of God."

5. I have received a few communications, electronically, by telephone, which I take to be from Jon. The departed man's way of letting me know, "There is no death. There is no dead. We live and love you still."

Nassiri - "Love Sees No Color"