The Meaning Of Life

Mu

Gaining and holding power is a deceptively simple thing.  It is absolutely dependent on ignorance.  More specifically, it requires either the fact or illusion of knowing something that no one else does, and the desire of others to possess that knowledge.

Whether you run a religion selling the image that you monopolize some Universal truth and only you can show me how to find it, or you are a bankster selling the illusion that acquiring wealth is a secret process and you are depent on me to make that happen, all power and control stem from the same root - complete ignorance and dependency.  In fact, the Secret to Life, the Universe and Everything is convincing as many people as possible that you have a vital secret and the only way anyone else can learn it is through you.

Religion, easily the greatest scam of all time, is nothing more than an individual receiving secret knowledge that only he can interpret and pass on.  People have paid billions of dollars and spent their entire lives trying to learn the Secret, little realizing that the big secret is the process itself.

Governments are absolutely dependent on secrets.  As fast as you form a government, it starts creating secrets, and thereby creating power and control, as a means to keep people in line.  As long as the people believe that government has all the answers, they will spend their lives begging government to release just a little of that information to them.  Witness the whole UFO scam or global warming or whatever you care to choose.

The whole body of intellectual property is based on ignorance.  If I discover some new technique, process or fact, I want to control knowledge of that thing in order to enrich myself before anyone else figures it out.  My getting rich depends on your ignorance of my fact and your desire to get it  Government inserts itself into the equation by offering to help me protect my fact long enough for me to get rich off of it.

Parents use ignorance to control their children.  How many times have you been told, or said, "You'll understand when you get older"?  Why do children yearn to grow up?  It's all based on control of information and the desire to obtain it.  Children are controllable only so long as you keep them ignorant.  Once they have information, they no long need you to guide and steer them.

And so it is that the 'elite' are in a panic these days.  They have built elaborate command and control systems based solely on the illusion that they are authorities through whom we must go to obtain information.  Only the 'elite' know certain things and we must be initiated into the fold in order to touch the hidden wisdom.

The system is beautifully self-perpetuating, too.  After all, if you spend years of your life and a small fortune seeking knowledge, and when you find it, it is so incredibly simple and benign, are you going to tell the whole world?  Or are you going to perpetuate the system so that you can be reimbursed for all your trouble and expense to find the secret?  Chances are pretty good you won't tell anyone.

It's like this: you spend six years of your life and hundreds of thousands of dollars to get your MBA because you want to know the Secret of Finance.  At some point in your career, you realize that it's all just a big scam, a confidence game.  Now, you are faced with two choices: either you tell the entire world what a joke it all is, or you look out at those masses of folks with fist-fulls of money wanting to buy your Secret.  What do you do?  More than likely, despite any impulse toward truth and light, you continue the scam so that you can pay off your student loans and buy that mansion up the street and stuff it full of designer gee-gaws.

The people who really profit from these confidence games are the ones who start the scams.  They just sit back and reap a lifetime's profit from watching piles of people scrambling up the hill to get your Secret.  They even measure it and show us the results of our scramble.  It's called Consumer Confidence, and they sit there and laugh at us rubes stepping on each other to get just a little taste of...nothing.

Pick any religion, it's the same scam.  The pope sits on a mountain of writhing souls all clamoring to understand the Great Secret.  But only the pope knows there is no Secret.  It's just a fairy tale told again and again so that you and I will do anything, obey anyone, follow any edict, just to have a small taste of the Big Secret.

In the end, all power and control is like the Zen puzzle - what is the sound of one hand clapping.  Mu.  Nothing.  If a tree falls and no one hears it, does it make a sound?  Mu.  Nothing.

That is the Big Secret to Life, the Universe and Everything.  It's 42.  It's meaningless clap-trap designed specifically to keep masses of people completely and totally focused on obtaining your Big Secret.  It's Mu.  Nothing.

Any power game involves you believing that I have a key to something you want.  In the end, my power is predicated solely on how much you are willing to give and give up in order to get what you think I have.  It's so deceptively simple that most people never figure it out.  They layer piles and piles of hopes and dreams on top of their never-ending struggle to obtain some Secret.  If they ever get there, they realize there was no Secret in the first place, but now they must perpetuate the scam in order to be made whole again.

And so it goes on down through history.  People arguing over the meaning of obscure texts.  People killing and maiming to get just a little closer to the Secret.  All of it to find out that you had everything you needed before you started.

What a cruel joke it all is, and how cynical and evil one must be to dangle such carrots before our eyes for fun and profit.

Perhaps the internet will finally be the Great Liberator one day.  Perhaps we will amass all of human knowledge and experience and realize en masse that it was all pointless in the first place.  All we had to do was to sit down on the stream bank and watch leaves float down to the distant ocean.

What will that moment be like?  Will humanity commit mass suicide at that point, realizing that all of our collective striving was for nothing?  Or will we laugh at our foolishness as we all head for the beach to build a massive bonfire and dance till dawn?

In the end, there is only one answer:

Mu.

Power Is A Put-On

In the past few years, there has been a virtual tidal wave of superhero movies.  I confess to enjoying them.  I particularly like Batman.  Always have.  I like that he doesn't have super-powers.  I like Iron Man for the same reason.

But superhero movies and comic books teach us something.  They implant strong symbolic messages deep in our psyches.  In fact, one really enjoyable film is M. Night Shyamalan's 'Unbreakable,' with Bruce Willis and Samuel L. Jackson.  It gets into a lot of the meta-types and symbols in comincs.

There's something in particular that I notice about the comics.  Superheros have one particular weakness that no one ever talks about.  They have one thing that can stop them cold, but none of the bad guys ever figure it out.  And it's pretty much the same weakness in every one of them, with few exceptions.

They all need a uniform.

Think about it.  Superman has his tights.  Batman has his armor.  Iron Man has his suit.  Thor, Captain America, Spider Man...you name it.  Without their signature clothes, they are completely powerless.  If they ever use civilian clothes, and they are forced to use their power, they almost always cover it up with clumsiness and bungling.

Of course, they tell us that no one can exercise power without government support.  Batman works with Commissioner Gordon of the police.  Iron Man has his military-industrial complex support group.  Even Superman works with and supports US federal hegimony throughout the world.  But in every case, they can not project power without their uniform.

Even in 'Unbreakable,' the Willis character is a security guard with a uniform, and when he starts to realize his superpowers, he dons yet another uniform (a cape substitute using a pancho-brilliant).  Once the character begins to realize his own innate power, he resorts to projecting it through a uniform.

In fact, the only superhero I can think of who doesn't use a uniform is the Hulk.  He is a rather interesting character.  His power comes from inside himself, and when he projects it, he loses his clothes, not changes them.  He is hunted and hounded by government and military, rather than controlled, or at least in cahouts with them.  There are many layers to the Hulk that I find compelling.  However, in the end, his power comes from an accident in a government lab, and his father was a government scientist, as is Bruce Banner.  So not entirely free.

The X-Men, which involve human mutations that find themselves with great powers start to break the mold of government control, but they still have uniforms.

Even the bad guys have uniforms.  As it was so well put in 'The Dark Knight,' in a throw-away line, they wear war-paint.  They use uniforms to project and signify their power.  Even the musical themes change when the uniform comes out.  The scenes in 'Spider Man,' where his love/hate relationship with his powers are symbolically centered around the uniform.

Why do cops, soldiers and TSA goons all have uniforms?  Because we are trained to see those types of clothing as powerful.  A cop without his uniform is just another meat-head in khakis and t-shirt, just like the rest of us.  But stick him in a uniform, and he will shoot, taser and berate us by virtue of the power in his uniform.

Take a high-school dropout with little or no prospects, and who operates on barely more than automatic cognitive function.  Indoctrinate him and give him a decent paycheck and bennies, and slap a uniform on him, and you have abusive brutes.  They feel like superheroes in their nifty little tights and ID cards.  Sew a couple of patches and a flag on them, and watch out!  They have power and purpose by virtue of their togs.

Oh, and if you get the least little out of hand, they run to 'Uncle' and cry like you stuck them with a hot iron.  Then 'Uncle' comes along and beats you into submission.  If need be, 'Unicle' drags you in front of yet another uniform, a black robe animates by yet another powerless weasel, for further processing.  And the black robe uniform likes us to think that it is the highest authority, with unlimited power over life and death.

When it comes down to it, all government is, is a vast warehouse full of uniforms by which puppeteers can project power and control over the masses.  We are trained, even by things as seemingly innocuous as comics, that uniforms mean power.  Those pieces of cloth, cut and colored in a certain pattern, and placed on callous troglydites, transform normal, everyday people like us into powerful heroes defending truth, justice and the American Way.  The somewhat humerous part is that the uniform animators are even more clueless about abstract concepts like truth and justice, than the average Joe.

As for the American Way, well shucks, anyone can drop bombs and torture.  Just has a certain 'authority' to it  if the person holding the live wires to your genitals has a uniform.

Even the uniforms come in ranking levels of power.  Just put some nifty logos, pins and baubles on them, and you you have increasing layers of authority.  "I have more power than you because I have this little pin on my collar and this little stripe on my sleeve."

'Men In Black' make quite a tadoo out of uniforms.  In fact, it is the black suit that 'authorizes' them to be initiated into the inner circle.  Will Smith obtains occult information and experiences a new level of existance by simply putting on a uniform.

We are trained from birth that uniforms contain power, and convey that power onto the person wearing it.  When you are young and watch your dad kow-tow to uniforms, you learn.  When you read (hahaha!) the comics or watch the movies, you see that uniforms allow us to project power.  When you join the junior sports league, you can't play without a uniform.  When someone asked you what you wanted to be, you probably rattled off some occupation with a uniform.  I wanted  to be an astronaut, because I liked the bulky white uniforms.

The westerns were the superhero movies of yesteryear.  The good guy's uniform had a white hat and a tin star, while the bad guy's uniform was black and didn't have jewelry.  But if your uniform was buckskins and feathers, you were the ultimate baddy...or a comic drunk, if you watched F-Troop.

'Hogan's Heroes' was a comedy of uniforms.  The whole show revolved around uniforms.  All the characters had distinctive uniforms that told us something about who they are and how much power they have.

Our training is so deep that it is very hard to uninstall.  Think about it any time you confront a uniform.  What was the first feeling, not thought, you had when you saw the uniform.  Coming from Houston, I fear cop uniforms, because those uniforms killed a lot of people and beat the rest to pulp.

Uniforms are neither good nor bad, in themselves.  The important thing is becoming cognizant of how we respond to them, and how they are used to control us.  It one of the deepest and most pernicious forms of mind control today.  And it's so bleeding simple, that it's almost laughable.

It's everywhere you look, on the streets, on TeeVee, in the movies, everyone is parading uniforms as projections of power.  Without, those people are nothing.  They are just regular folks, taking out the trash and mowing the lawn.

Put a uniform on them, and everything changes.  Now they can molest you, violate your most personal liberties, and even main and kill you, all with impunity.  They have 'authority' by virtue of their clothes.

That's it.  Just clothes.

Why does Superman never fly without his uniform?  Why does Spider Man never spin a web without the official togs?  Why is Bruce Wayne just a rich, spoiled playboy until he dons the armor?

It used to be, when I was young, that officials in uniforms were outranked in every way by civilians.  Seems that has fallen by the wayside these days.

"You'll dress only in attire specially sanctioned by MiB special services. You'll conform to the identity we give you, eat where we tell you, live where we tell you. From now on you'll have no identifying marks of any kind. You'll not stand out in any way. Your entire image is crafted to leave no lasting memory with anyone you encounter. You're a rumor, recognizable only as deja vu and dismissed just as quickly. You don't exist; you were never even born. Anonymity is your name. Silence your native tongue. You're no longer part of the System. You're above the System. Over it. Beyond it. We're "them." We're "they." We are the Men in Black."  - Zed