Fundamentals of the Age of Aquarius, Part Two

This entry expands upon my previous prophecy concerning the outline of the New Age of Aquarius.  This is not a joke, by the way.  A sweeping view of history and the development of several strands over the past 1000 to 3000 years suggest in outline what is to come.

Oh come, history!

The West began with the Protestant Revolution of Martin Luther.  This was about 500 years ago.  An explosion and spread of knowledge happened with the invention of the printing press of Gutenberg.  We cannot fathom what this means in total.  For thousands of years, books cost one million dollars.  Labor required scribes, carefully trained over generations, to create and copy books.  The rich near centers of learning with books controlled all knowledge.  The only way to learn was memorization after you had access to the books in the libraries.  Most people were ignorant and really had no need to read.  

Thus, now any bit of knowledge could spread to the four corners of the Earth, and cheaply.  We can make paperback books for less than $5 even today and spread them far and wide.  There was an elite still - those who could control the presses.  However, with the invention of Internet, it seems the old guards of the press have lost their control and we are in the midst of a great struggle over who controls information - if it is even possible.  

One can now live in Wyoming and read the finest books ever written in any age and in any language.  

So, books launched the Protestant Revolution.  It played itself out until the 1960’s when the Age of Aquarius dawned.  Things truly changed at that time.  Vatican II changed everything, also.  Since the Catholic Church is the repository of all Western morality and ethics, this is what makes any significant changes with the Catholic Church world-changing.  Ignorant people generally do not understand this, but learned people who know history understand that a civilization has a center.  The center of the West is the Catholic Church, and it has been for hundreds of years.  The major philosophical center of the West is Paris, because the center of all Western philosophy is Thomas Aquinas.  Again, ignorant people have no concept of this, but we who have studied hard, know this to be a fact as definite as the sun rising in the morning.  

The man to unite all of this Western narrative into something digestible was Jacques Barzun, in his magisterial book, “From Dawn to Decadence.”  Again, an ignorant people cannot understand this, but we who have studied long and hard, know this as a fact.  

One must scan the ages of time, and integrate all observed patterns into a whole.  Learned people will see the same thing, although in sometimes different perspectives, but they will observe the same grand statue, as it were.  In these things, there is no personal opinion; there is only perspective and taste.

What drives the West?  Is it science?  No!  It is philosophy.  The ignorant think it is science, but the worthies know it is philosophy.  Philosophy answers and poses our fundamental questions, and not science.  Science is a branch of philosophy, and is under the authority of Philosophy, as it always was and always has been.  

So, if Aquinas was the most important philosopher in the Catholic Church, who was the most influential philosopher is the West that got everything started?  Rene Descartes.  Of course it is!  He opened up the fundamental Western question of the Cogito, and the mind-body duality.  We now know the paradox of the Mind in the Vat, which is why the Movie The Matrix is perhaps the finest in tackling and illustrating Western philosophy.   

Aside from Descartes, who was the most influential philosopher?  Immanuel Kant. Everyone knows this who is in the know about history.  Kant’s famous opening of the question of things-in-themselves put everyone’s mind into a pretzel for a few hundred years.  Hegel, the systems builder in German philosophy was simply writing footnotes to Kant.  What philosopher caused several strands of inquiry that enriched outlives in the area of spirit, and even science and religion?  Arthur Schopenhauer!  He was the intellectual Father of Darwin, Nietzsche, and Freud!  

Who was the most important scientist of ALL TIME?  Issac Newton.  Nobody comes close, and nobody ever will in the foreseeable future of the next 1000 years.  It is dazzling at the effects of everything physical we have as a result of Newton, the perfect Genius!  

Who was the most influential man in law in the last 500 years?  Napoleon!  Read about the Napoleonic Code, and its basis of law in virtually every country in Europe. 

///

What does all this mean for the coming Age of Aquarius?  Well, the West in one word is Hope.  It is an offshoot of Christianity in the hope of creating art, and in the conquest of nature.

What shall the next age be - this Age of Aquarius?  Immortality, my friends.  This is the next stage and the quest of the next 2000 years.  It took Christianity about 1500 years to realize the Hope on Earth itself actualized as the achievements of the West in Art, Philosophy, and Technology.  We solved the problem of starvation, infant deaths, an infectious diseases.  The next step is the conquest of Death itself.

Some believe in the anti-aging movement that this will come from drugs and science.  And, this may play some part in it, but it will take more than that.  We will still want to fuck out brains out and have tons of kids, so we will have to solve the problem of living forever and fucking and having more kids than the land masses can handle.  How will we solve this?  We will have to learn how to populate other areas of the universe.  It will take a long time to figure out all this shit.  To live on the moon is a big deal even now.  Just think how long it will take us to understand how to populate Mars and some of the near Earth asteroids.  2000 years may not be long enough.  But, in the quest for immortality, it will have to be done, since we cannot help but want to fuck our brains out as a species.  

Immortality is a technical issue, a spiritual issue, a pragmatic issue, and several other problems come with it.  It will take all the brainpower to solve in the next 2000 years.  The Gods will challenge us because we are supposed to be Mortals.  We will have to fight the Gods and wrestle and steal from them the Gift of Immortality.  The Gods will perhaps kill off large segments of humanity is this great struggle.  But, struggle we must, because the Gods will not give it to us - we will have to fucking take it!

Let us end this post.  Vodka has helped in its writing, and now it is time to retire for the night!  

Sleep tight.   Much love to all of you out there!

Fundamentals of the New Age of Aquarius

A new age dawns upon the world.  A new form of government and a new order of being comes forth.  

• The majority shall no longer rule, for democracy is rule by the ignorant mob, and the mob shall be crushed.
• The bureaucrats shall no longer exist.  Like inspector Javer in Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables, these too shall pass away and be crushed under foot - if necessary. 
• Kings shall no longer rule, for brute force shall have some currency in power, but it shall be one tool of many more much more powerful.
• Capitalists and money lenders shall be laid low and stripped of power for their currency shall have little to do wit the future order of the worlds.

Who shall rule in this new age, you ask?  

• The Genius.  
• The Artist.  
• The One in touch with the Sublime.  
• The Artist-King!

The Sublime is the undefinable, ineffable knowledge that the Artist knows.  Reason shall be crushed forever once and for all.  Reason rules the material world, but has no place in the Spiritual world of Humanity.  Reason is sterile, dry, impotent, and weak.  It lacks sense.  It lacks vision.  It lacks that which we live for.  We do not live for things.  Rather, we live for purpose.  We live, as Jean Paul Sartre said, as a For-Itself.  Reason rules the In-Itself - stuff, mechanics, physics, electricity, and chemistry.  The Sublime rules the For-Itself.

Reason shall be subservient to Purpose and the Sublime.  A work of Art shall be superior to the latest invention of efficient processes - the boring, dead, lifeless, sterile realm of Pure Reason and Boring Physical Sciences.  Beethoven shall supersede Newton.  We live to feel.  We do not live to arrange things in an efficient organized manner.  We live to shine the light upon the darkness of the universe, not to wallow in the darkness with sterility and boredom in our chemical-induced moods to kill ourselves and our spirits.  Rather, science and chemistry shall be used in service of the Sublime and Art.  When it fails to serve The Sublime, it shall be crushed underneath the foot of the Artist-King.

The future is for the Artists who refuse to accept reality as it is, and who choose to shine a light into the darkness and say yes to life and no to death, like the First Century Christians proclaimed with vigor, violence, and valor.  The Artist shall look upon the universe with its pull toward death and decay, and shout “No!” and seek to rearrange the entire universe for Eternal Life.  The Ancient Christian goal of Eternal Life shall be made manifest upon this Earth in real time.  The Artist shall pave the way to this path of Bright shining light.  The Artist-King shall establish a kingdom to accomplish this.  

Above all else, the new age shall have purpose, and everything upon this Earth shall be subservient toward that goal.  The goal is shining a light in the darkness, and a refusal to accept Death and Decay.

This demand from the Universe will take the old Christian concept ten steps further.  We shall Demand from the Gods Eternal Life.  We shall defy them until they relent and grant to mortals Eternal Life.  We shall fight on for a long time against the forces of the Universe.  We shall threaten the Gods.  We shall challenge the Gods.  We will demand of the Gods, Godhood.  Yes!  This is the Age of Aquarius where we shall take the Hope of Christianity and make it real as the promise of a Heaven on Earth.

The Age of the Artist-King shall last another 2000 years until all men around the world shall finally subdue the Gods and wrestle from them the Hope and the reality of Godhood.

This is the Light.  This is the Hope.  This is the next Age of the Earth.  Be Strong!  Be Brave!  

Stretching the Limit

Note: I will now try to write something while I am drunk and see where that goes…

So you stretch a rubber band a little bit.  What happens?  Nothing.  You stretch a rubber band a lot, and what?  Nothing!  You stretch a rubber band even further, and then boom!  The damn thing snaps and whacks your forearm and slaps the crap out of you.

What happened?  Boring became interesting.  A rubber band that does not pop and smack the crap out of you does not make a story.  The rubber band that whacks you makes a funny story.  

To make a funny story - any story - there must be conflict, and there must be a plot.  Things that act as they should are boring.  Blowing shit up with dynamite makes a story.  Shit happens.  Stories are told.  Humans are wired for this.  Every story has a conflict, or it is not a story.  Shit happening is a story.  Susie following all the rules is boring as hell.  Bob getting married and doing the right thing makes us yawn and go to sleep.

What does this tell us?  You have to stretch and break the rules, or break something.  Lift that weight you think you cannot lift.  Make the call that seems like the most likely to screw with your head.  Visit the customer that vowed to shoot you in the head if you ever came back.  Tell your boss that shit you need to tell him, even if you think he will fire you.  He won’t.  

Do shit every day that scares the crap out of you.  Then, suddenly people will begin to wonder how you got to where you are.  It is simple.  You stretched that rubber bank until it popped.  You created some conflict, and you created a story, and everyone likes to hear a good story.  

Those boring bastards that followed the rules are stuck in their boring lives wondering what the hell happened.  You are wondering what is next in the grand adventure.  What is next?  Do I slit my wrists just to see what will happen?  Probably not, but you at least consider it, and perhaps think of something else with more of a chance of getting the fire lit under your ass.  

Living on the razor edge - what is this?  You stretch the limits without killing yourself.  But, you do run the risk of killing yourself.  The trick is to not kill your soul.  When your soul dies, that is the ultimate living suicide.  That is the fucked up person who gave up.

Seth Godin said that artists ship.  So, when the Lizard Brain begins to freak out on ship date, what do artists do?  Ship the damn thing!  You have come to the end of the presentation and it is time to ask for the order.  It is time to let the art out to the rest of the world.  It is show time.  Do you hesitate?  Do you grasp the sword and swing, or do you hesitate, and freak out and freeze?  The Lizard!  He is our worst enemy!  He thinks we are still in the jungle and thinks he protects us at all costs, but in reality, he holds us back and makes us freeze like a freaking ice cube on a sunny day in Laredo, Texas on black-top pavement.  It is ridiculous!  

Oh!  The perils of modern man!  We are such crazy people freezing  and there is nothing out there to eat us alive - at least, not literally.  Unless you are in an African National Wildlife Refuge with tigers and lions and other things we have killed off in the civilized world.  

What do you do?  You fucking jump.  Jump and the net will appear!  

Spiritual Retreats

To function efficiently, we have to have routines.  We wake at similar times, and perform certain morning routines, before beginning work.  Then we retire and settle in to close the day with more routines we repeat quite often.

When we get into autopilot, sometimes we get stuck and lose perspective.  Those fine-tuned to spirituality know that we must break the routine to regain perspective when we become numb or low energy.  We need something to break the repeating infinite loop to re-inject some life.

A country ride is one way to do this.  I recently took a drive through the desert to clear my head and to rejuvenate.  

Drinking to the point where you are no longer your normal self is another way of regaining spirituality.  Judaism and Christianity have sacred meals with wine for a reason.  All spiritual people know the importance of intoxication of some sort.  Teetotalers are generally lacking in spirituality unless they have another form of intoxication to reprogram the mind from routine boredom and numbness.  

But, one way or another, you have to break the routine when you approach numbness.  Perspective brings meaning, and Spirituality, at its core, is finding meaning.