The Meaning of Life for Dummies

Dog Poet transmitting.......

You can feel it in the air but that’s no reason to cue Phil Collins. However, just like Phil’s music there’s more reverb than the actual sound it’s applied to; the overall effect being something like a sixties shag haircut; so much for an irrelevant intro.

I’ve been receiving ten times my usual emails lately. Many of you are grateful for the work and that’s been motivating and heartening since I was going to stop altogether for awhile and this has put that on hold. I get tired of this at regular intervals. It’s good to know that most of you don’t. For reasons unknown, I began to acquire this flood of input... literally on the day of my decision. In equal measure... many of you are either fatalistic or resigned (looking for some kind of light in the encroaching darkness) or, optimistic without knowing why. The solution is not to look in the darkness for light. You’re supposed to look for where the light is. I can argue both sides of the equation and leave you with either a half-full or half-empty glass of something.

We put spin on things determined by the nature of our outlook. Outlook is going to be determined by the times in which you live and what street corner you’re standing on. Outlook is the problem. Inlook is the point. Everything outside of you is controlled by what’s going on inside of you, unless... unless you surrender that control because you have an affinity for being a pinball, you’ve become accustomed to it or you don’t know any better. I’m not just saying this... that’s the way it is. I’m not this chick here. I’m not trying to create a new age, snake oil business while dressed up in a white goddess outfit by way of H. Rider Haggard’s, “She”. There are a whole lot of people recycling the words of the ancients as if they were suddenly the main portal into an eternal kingdom of bliss with surround sound by Dolby and which costs a lot more than the usual dollar three eighty. When you need the special effects and the costumes it can only mean you don’t have the item itself... just like The Wizard of Oz.

I’m going to explain the world and your situation in the simplest terms I can think of and ask you to dress this explanation in whatever perspective you’ve come to observe your existence through. This explanation will translate into most any religion or philosophy that isn’t a man in the mirror stroke-book by one of the vanitymeisters whose sole purpose for manifesting was to give pseudo-intellectuals something to talk to each other about while engaged in mutual frottage. I speak of clowns like Sartre, Wittgenstein and their fellows or, on the other hand, those darlings of the flamboyance queens such as; Crowley, Hubbard and their ilksters. Some of you are satisfied with the pipe and the tweed jackets with leather elbow patches and some of you want something a bit dressier like a floor length black velvet cape. For this type, the real powers that be usually arrange it so that they wind up standing alone on one of the moons of Saturn with a balloon over their head that says, “I’m with stupid.”

A real and simple explanation, that’s the ticket. My personal perspective is to see everything in terms of The Lord of the Rings or as a Hindu might. It’s usually one or the other. However, as I said, you can transliterate this and get you a game-plan once you have the road map. You can’t play the game if you can’t see the game-board. This is most of the reason why people wind up depressed or feeling helpless. Once you can see the board you can see the way out, even if it looks scarier than what satisfied your eye for beauty at closing time last night ...when you awaken the following day. That particular scenario is also part of the problem. The wise-ass format being employed here is being done for a reason.

Okay... here it is. The whole world is on fire and it is consuming itself in every moment. This is the meaning of the serpent with it’s tale in its mouth. Don’t analyze this; just swallow it whole like the serpent. You get born into a world of appearances reflected in an infinity of funhouse mirrors and whatever you see is defined by how you were schooled, your unique nature and following circumstance. There is no other point to life than to find this out. You’re free to wallow in the whole thing like a dog at a roadside carcass or isolate yourself on a mountain top.

The world is like a movie that loops but there may be a better example. It starts out with a few people left over from the last movie and it goes through a sequence of changes until it resembles an enormous mall surrounded by an even larger parking lot. At this point, the power of the spectacle overwhelms the power of most people’s ability to be self aware, content, moral or even human. They become like tubes that process matter through one hole and then out the other. They are uniformly unhappy, frightened and ill at ease and here’s why...

It is impossible to satisfy any hunger or craving for very long. Sooner or later it comes back. As I said, the world is on fire and that fire is desire. The more you pile it on the stronger that hunger becomes, so a wise person strives to keep the fire like a cool, blue white gas flame. Unfortunately, the more complex, crowded and diverse the world becomes, the more things there are to steal, fuck or eat. All wanting is based on a basic hunger which is not any of the hungers that are being temporarily satisfied in its place. This is the cause of all that angst, weltschmertz and ennui and which the pseudo’s might call existential despair.

At certain points where the world has gotten stuffed with burning crap being consumed by too many tubes it adjusts itself. Like those maps you sometimes see at bus kiosks, “You are here.” Typically, most people refuse or are unable to see the adjustment in process. They go right on doing what they were doing before, attempting to satisfy something that cannot be satisfied and... they get hammered. This is known as a wakeup call only it might mean you get dead too. Then you can be a lesson.

Throughout the period of any particular movie there is a group of people who are well aware of what the world is. Let’s say there are two basic groups. One group likes it here just fine and their sole motivation is to entice everyone else into buying whatever they are selling. They are also engaged in creating debt, often manufactured out of thin air. They create wars and all sorts of mischief in order to increase their holdings and they don’t stop until they have the last lonely nickel at the bottom of the sea. They are immune to the suffering of others and often entertain themselves, sometimes even erotically, by making it happen just so they can watch it. It is at this time also that the world makes an adjustment and takes away everything they have or renders it worthless. Most people admire these people and believe them no matter how outrageously they lie.

Then there’s the other group who knows what’s going on and tries to help most people understand what’s going on. They seek harmonious accord with their fellows for which they are often rewarded with contempt and distrust because they can’t understand why someone would want to do the right thing when it doesn’t seem to get you anywhere.

The first group hates the second group and does their best to slander, imprison and murder them. Both groups exist for a reason and the reason is for you to get a clue that there is no point to most of the things you do. The world is set up for you to fuckup so that eventually ‘what it is’ dawns on you.

Some say there is a mysterious power that works within humanity to bring it to a state of self-realization. They also say there’s another power that works contrary to that. The second power is obvious. We see it at work every day. I’m not here to argue about whether this first power also exists. I will tell you that people have been dressing up their own idea of what this power is in all kinds of different outfits for millennia and still don’t seem to know very much but they do get around to a lot of torture and murder just like the people in the first group and that is because the people in the first group are usually running this scene as a business the same as any other.

What I personally know is that it is possible to be ‘relatively’ free of all of this unhappy horseshit by studying yourself and making that the primary objective of your life. You are free to study others as well. You are only a victim of the game due to playing the game and the degree of your victimization is relative to the degree of your involvement which is based on the degree of your belief in it. Hidden within this text is the answer to what troubles you but you’ll have to catch that on your own. It doesn’t work otherwise. But I will say this... it is the focus outward that is giving you all this inner grief. A little more inner focus might provide you with a greater degree of outward relief. Oh yeah... and “don’t fear the reaper’.


End transmission.......

This kind of says it too
Visible sings: ♫ In That Shape Again ♫
'In That Shape Again' is track no. 8 of 10 on Visible's eponymous
'Les Visible' Music Album
Lyrics (pops up)


The New Shangri-La (as does this).