Notice Other Things

[kimberlysteele]

To notice other things is to escape programming.  Nobody is as programmed (without knowing they are programmed) as a teenager. I don't remember starting out in life as a materialistic, paranoid, insecure twit but I certainly became one. Ironically, certain teachers (I believe it may have been Social Studies class) warned us that television and advertising was evil. In one of the study units, we were tasked with identifying specific methods TV was using to brainwash us: bandwagon, emotional appeal, association, repetition. It got me anyway. By my 20s, the names of Hollywood actors and famous supermodels were more familiar to me than those of my second and third cousins.

Soap Opera Life

The term "soap opera" spells it all out rather plainly: the soap opera is clearly not an actual opera, but it is designed to sell soap. In the case of those TV shows I used to watch so religiously, like soap operas, they appealed to the basest and most melodramatic instincts of women: cattiness, perverted lust, lying, and cheating against the flamboyantly bogus backdrop of materialist gluttony as normalcy.  Since their inception, soap operas have been used to indoctrinate women into general dissatisfaction as a lifestyle and to trick them into blowing up their lives. Does anyone remember when Luke raped Laura in a 1979 episode of General Hospital? Or the messed up "everybody hooks up with everybody" mess that was Melrose Place? Now that daytime/primetime TV is basically no longer a thing and the soap opera crowd has long since aged out, we have the Hallmark channel, which supplants cookie cutter prurience with Happily Ever After stories. The trouble with Hallmark is there is no darkness -- instead there is Mary Sue and Marty Stu, predestined to find each other and pair off in towns with no Walmarts or McDonalds. Said romances are sandwiched between copious Big Pharma commercials that always end in the phrase "Ask your doctor" with a list of terrifying side effects that are worse than whatever disease they were meant to treat. Also, it is always Christmas.

I once knew a woman who grew up in an awful, fundamentalist Christian setting. She hated cats and most likely abused them when she owned them, though the reports were hearsay, so I won't go as far as to incriminate her. At any rate, her hatred arose because as the victim of violent sexual assault herself, she had major issues with the imprudence of animals. She hated the way cats stretch, arching their backs and sticking their butts out. She saw this as obscene. She could not see beyond the fact that cats are animals: everything she perceived was tainted by her dogmatic upbringing and multiplied by her warped, stunted sexuality. I once knew another person, a man this time, who constantly judged others by their appearance, including the elderly. He did not seem to notice his own failures in deportment as much as the failures of others. It struck me as odd that someone of his advanced age at the time would care about the stain on someone's shirt or an unzipped fly. In the case of these two people, they had no ability to get out of their own heads. In the woman's case, she was forever locked in the trap of sexual abuse, unable to free herself from the notion that sex is dirty and abhorrent. In the man's case, he was not able to perceive other human beings beyond the most superficial of appearances, and his capacity for meaningful thought was amputated as a result.

Voice in Your Head

Talking to the disembodied beings generally called spirits is all about noticing other things. By paying attention and ignoring the outrage du jour, sensitivity and awareness increases. I believe anyone can talk to the spirits. I am not special. If you have ever talked to yourself, and this includes talking to yourself both silently and aloud, you have most likely talked to spirits. I don't mean to freak anyone out here, but you've probably spoken to at least one dead person. The difficulty is not in talking to fairies, elementals, dead people, demons, gods, and everything in between. No, the hard part is discerning who you are talking to and when you are doing it. Mostly via discursive meditation, I have discovered how dumb I am, and to a lesser degree how smart I am. Too little sleep and I become irate, depressed, and nihilistic. Too much caffeine causes delusions about how great things will be in the near future. My own voice is recognizable by the jokes, a habit passed down from my late Dad despite not having the benefit of heredity (I am adopted). I am always making jokes at inappropriate times, which invokes my father but also is because I was a traveling court jester in one of my more memorable past lives. Just as you can learn the tolerances and symptoms of your body, you can learn to pick out your own voice in the crowd of voices in your head if you work at it hard enough. In my own experience, my own voice is only dominant twenty percent of the time. The other eighty percent of it is the crowded ecosystem of entities I speak with on a daily and nightly basis.

Who You Callin' Pollyanna?

In the 1913 novel Pollyanna, a young orphan girl is taken in by her grumpy aunt and made to sleep in a threadbare room in a forgotten area of the aunt's house. Instead of sulking, Pollyanna teaches the denizens of her aunt's town a game of her own invention, the Glad Game. When someone, including herself, starts getting down on their situation, Pollyanna gets them to consider the positive aspects and to build upon them by focusing on the good. Pollyanna's Glad Game soon gladdens her town and her aunt, inspiring love, acceptance, kindness, and grace. Pollyanna was a popular bestseller in its era with lasting legacies: it was made into two films and its message preceded the 1952 book The Power of Positive Thinking. To play the Glad Game, you must first understand that humans are biologically wired to remember and fixate on the negative. This evolutionary mechanism helps us to physically survive. In the meantime, however, our evolutionary feature eats at the mind, causing misery, drama, and mayhem. Enter looking at the bright side. True occultism is Pollyannism. The bright side is often the most occulted and hidden thing. Negativity? That's obvious.

I was atheist for twenty five years. Atheism is nihilistic. As an atheist, I believed in the Void. The Void was the thing that swallows all humans up when we die, erasing our sins and feeble triumphs. Atheism made it easy to see humanity as a failed and unworthy project. I viewed the Earth itself as horrible, brutal, and essentially dead. There is hardly a leap from not being able to see the good in human existence and not wanting humans to reproduce. When we look at the members of VHEMT, the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, we see plenty of angry atheists who are not content for the human race to end naturally. They would rather see the process sped up.

I believe televangelists are atheist materialists because only an atheist materialist cold fail to notice the awfulness of McMansions. The worship of one god in a dead, human-centric system that flows towards whatever the worshipper wishes to be resembles atheistic Satanism than it does traditional Christianity. The televangelist says GIMME GIMME GIMME until he disappears into the Void. His ungratefulness makes him into a Wendigo of consumption and greed; the more he eats, the more hungrier he gets.

Pollyanna is often used as an insult: to be Pollyannish is to suffer naivete and credulity. I disagree. An entity that I swear was not me because I am simply not this bright said to me that gratitude transforms everything it touches by the power of seven. Generosity that comes from the heart sublimates on seven planes and is returned with seven times the power with which it was sent. By getting others to play the Glad Game, Pollyanna got people to see the beauty all around them. Beauty of the true kind (not the surface kind) is hidden where ugliness seems plain.

The most occulted truth of all is the silver lining to the cloud. To take an example from my mundane and average life, let's say I have to go grocery shopping. I can easily find a hundred reasons to make grocery shopping into an unbearable burden. If I play the Glad Game, however, I can be grateful for all the people who produce the food, bring it to the store in a truck, load it onto shelves and into bins, and stand all day at a register so I can buy it. I can be grateful for the honest work I did to get the money to buy the groceries. I can be glad for the working infrastructure, town, and country management that enabled me to get to the store without having to cross a minefield or dodge bullets to get there. I can be grateful for my generous donors at various sites who are the reason I can afford little luxuries and perks such as bubble tea and gourmet cat food for my kitties. Finally, I can be grateful for the bountiful Earth herself, which is anything but dead and without a voice. The Glad Game is exceedingly difficult until you get used to it. Like its negative counterpart, it is an invocation. The Glad Game is a constant choice, and because of the way evolution works, it is very much an exercise. It is a muscle that starts out flabby and atrophied, but when nurtured and challenged, becomes a force to be reckoned with.