Rant 45: Vignettes from the land of Fuck All

[Irreverend Hugh, KSC]

Rant 45
I have been away a while. I have been derelict of both my cabal duties and my internet activities. Don't worry, shit happens and it is happening to me at the moment. But here is the latest sermoniacal material. I wrote it a few days ago, during a moment of absolute anger. Now that I am angry again, here it is.

Vignettes
(the occult drink takes effect)

“City dwellers will only have their money to eat.”
-Andean Prophecy

“You take this key and when none o’ them Britishers is lookin’ you let our lads out, hear me!”
-Random bit of conversation from Dublin in 1916

Some vignettes for those on the go or who have no attention spans. Any of you out there who read them and go “Damn! Hugh’s too serious”, should carefully note that they are part of a ‘rant’ and that the term usually implies a measure of anger or excitement. Not everything that is truly funny need be presented in the frou-frou white-light fluffy humor that some of you have become so used to that you have developed the erroneous belief that nothing else could be funny.

Vignette 1: national origins
Stolen land. You live on stolen land. Land that was fertilized with the mass murders and conquests that made your nation.  The food you eat comes from others’ labor. The wealth you enjoy and see around you comes from the destruction of entire groups of human beings. You care little to nothing for this as you are part and parcel of the victors. Your version of the events and the history is all you need know. But even so, deep down inside, you know it is all a lie. Otherwise why keep reiterating your rights, privileges, and freedoms? You keep trying to prove to yourself how much more developed you are, even as you live comfortably on the sweat of people you don’t care to know. You are European, American, Hispanic, Australian, Muslim, Christian, Chinese…or whatever other imperial name you go by. Your days are numbered and passing rapidly. The Earth will give way beneath you. The mountains will crumble over your cities. Your global network of shouting and screaming your decrees and desires will be torn asunder and silenced. Your sky father gods and their deranged rituals will be forgotten.

Vignette 2: freedom
Do you call yourself an independent person with a free will, and yet can not sustain your own life through your own efforts? Yeah, right. Think again. You merely buy the things you need and claim you are an independent person with no thought to your dependence upon money and the production of those goods by others. Frankly, this tepid notion of individual freedom staggers my mind with the infinity of its stupidity. Let me ask you this question: How much would you be willing to do for yourself if and when whatever revolutionary changes or liberation or whatever-else-it’s-called-these-days happens to show up? I venture to say that you wouldn’t do a damned thing. Nada. Zilch. Zip. Zero. Why? Because, you aren’t doing anything now. So why should I accept the fact that you’d do something in the future after some romantic hotheads succeed in killing enough leaders to make a vacuum of power open up for themselves to come in and become the next gang of rulers? You won’t do anything in the future because you don’t do anything now. And doing nothing is not so much a problem as is doing nothing and yet claiming to be doing something, as most self-proclaimed independent persons or revolutionaries do. You think you are special? You’re not one of those types? Liar!

Vignette 3: spirituality
For every distinction you raise as an example of your uniqueness there is an equally valid explanation as to why that makes you a part of the so-called herd. Truly the yearning to ‘discover oneself’ is really just a symptom of boredom exhibited by people living in a society of markets. Your vapid lifestyles of positions and things leaves you with something desired so you imagine yourself a free thinker or a spiritual seeker in the vain attempt to deceive yourself and others into thinking something significant is going on. You go off on heroic spiritual retreats or quests in the effort to convince yourself that you are a hero when all you are really doing is playing with a vivid imagination. You see how little influence you have over the world so you instead fall into the justification that you can only change yourself, and by that, somehow the world is changed too. Your spirituality is the giving up of any will before it is even tested. Thus, you attack and criticize those who persevere onto spiritual training as being ‘selfish’ or ‘power-tripping’ or even by the blatantly boring vapid phrase “too deep”.

Vignette 4: enlightenment
You either think that enlightenment is either too easy or too hard thus missing the obvious fact that you really don’t know what you’re on about. Some of you feel it should be given to you in exchange for the sum of money you’re paying whatever institution it is that you attend. Some of you feel that you should go off and pretend to be Tibetan [or insert your favorite ‘noble savage’ group here] holy people in the wilds of some foreign country. Some of you believe that if you pretend to have no beliefs that you will find enlightenment—or that it makes you somehow smarter or better than everyone else. Whether you are a believer or non-believer of anything has no bearing on your chances and opportunities to find enlightenment. (Though it helps to have candles or electricity.) Most of you don’t REALLY want enlightenment anyway—nothing wrong with that if you would just stop pretending otherwise. Most of you just want the acclaim, or the divine white light, or the constant feeling of ecstasy which you believe are signs of enlightenment. And if that’s the case, then just use drugs or read self-help books. Enlightenment is a lot of things (like eating, fucking, and shitting). It is not simply a way for you to give a false meaning and purpose to your boring post-modern global marketed lives, no matter what the sponsors and the flashy ads tell you.

Vignette 5: reality
Everything you think about and believe in is simply a pretense. Your supposed heritage, your supposed race, religion, nationality, ethnicity, class, occupation—the whole thing. It’s all merely a pretense, game-like in its expression no matter how much that is forgotten. The very core of who you are is merely a tightly held bundle of beliefs cleverly disguised as essential spiritual aspects/dispositions. You can claim that this is just semantic diddling or philosophical meander and that there is no argument with ‘reality’. Yet you have poorly investigated the nature of reality embodied in your personal existence, so how can you claim to know ‘reality’. Reality is just a word people use when they want you to agree with their personal biases and opinions. “Get real!” “Or be realistic!” they will say, as if the phrases themselves had some potency. But they are just badly crafted thoughts to cobble over failures in reasoning. No one wants to know what the hell is REALLY going on. They just want to learn as much as they need to delude themselves into firmly believing in their own pretenses. Instead of trying to be ‘realistic’ or trying to prove your version of ‘reality’, why not just investigate what is really going on?

(Confusion 55th, 3170)

KALLISTI!

SINN F?âIN!

[The Good Reverend Roger]

RAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!

[Rupert Giles]

RAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!

QUAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA?

[President Bush]

We have ways to dealing with people like you. Just wait until my second term.

heh heh heh heh

[gnimbley]

But here is the latest sermoniacal material.

::bows to the master::

::wanders off in search of reality::

[Irreverend Hugh, KSC]

But here is the latest sermoniacal material.

::bows to the master::

::wanders off in search of reality::

Don't go looking for that thing, let me tell you. It's right where you left it.