kimberlysteele | Entries tagged with metaphor

Thinking Like a Mage series:

https://kimberlysteele.dreamwidth.org/tag/thinking+like+a+mage

In the dream I am in Chicago, the city where I was born. I am trying to wind my way home through a sea of concrete and steel. I have one imperative: to get home. The sun is setting in the dream. It's almost never morning or midday. The horizon glows like hot coals being snuffed by the ragged petticoats of approaching night. The feeling this inspires is terror. Chicago was never a friendly place for me. Though both my parents grew up there in the 40s and 50s, by the time I came of age, the criminal element was enough to inspire awe in coddled suburbanites like myself. Nevertheless, Chicago always had the cool factor and its subsequent allure. There is a je ne sai quoi about the place; a beautiful hostility. In my dream, Chicago is the danger presented by the madness of other humans forced to live cheek to jowl. I am often forced to cross dangerous intersections on foot, waiting for brief traffic light signals, or stepping carefully through railroad junkyards, navigating piles of discarded infrastructure. Lake Michigan often figures prominently in the dreams, the edge of which is a flooded road. I drive my car through hip deep water, worried about stalling out.

The Journey of a Trillion Steps

Dreams are personal but not unique. As far as I can tell, Chicago represents the cycle of lives that I dwell in, along with everyone else. We all are part of this age of cheap petroleum, which is as far from the era of natural, easy communion with spirits and gods as the human race is ever going to get. We live in an age of atheists, many of whom who are still faux-faithful and preoccupied by nature-hating religions co-opted by greed. This greed is accompanied by disregard and haughty disdain for the unseen worlds with which religion is supposed to better acquaint us. We live in an age of rampant overpopulation, and as a result we have blotted out every influence upon this world except our own material one. Driven to mass psychosis, we anxiously await punishment for our own hideous wickedness in the form of an Apocalypse that (thankfully) never arrives.

The age in which we live is Chicago on steroids. I am but a cog in the machine, hence the dreams. I long to be home with my Creator, and like all people, animals, and plants born into my age, I travel a long and dangerous road on my way back home.

Sometimes I dream common dreams like the one about the multi-storied Mall, or the creepy School. These are also shared metaphor dreams that speak of the monkey's-paw trap of the meat plane and commercialism. They represent the long, hard educational processes of the soul: how to play nice with others, how to build a mental sheath.

Understanding French Films

Outside the world of dreams, you can get your fill of metaphors simply by looking up a French film that stars the great actress Isabelle Huppert. I kid, but what I am saying is that if you can glean the underlying message of an art film to the point where you can be satisfied by the messages it is trying to communicate, congratulations, you've just mastered a set of metaphors. I am from the Midwest, and what that means is that my tribe doesn't wear its heart on its sleeve. Midwesterners practice a form of extreme Nice that masks a pulsing cauldron of emotion at any given time. What is said is only half as important as what is not said.

In life, knowing when to keep one's mouth shut is a priceless skill -- the art of slamming limits down around one's speech is potent protection. Understanding metaphor is the key to understanding the astral plane. To understand metaphors takes great subtlety and the ability to discriminate between what is the metaphor and what is not the metaphor. There isn't much that is subtle about the material plane but you have to learn subtlety in order to successfully and happily navigate it.

Here's a goofy question for you: If your life was an art film, what would be the underlying messages? If our era was an art film, what would it be trying to say? Personally, I think our era would be a dark comedy about a spoiled child who is given too many toys and throws escalating tantrums when Mommy and Daddy fall on hard times and can no longer afford to buy her nice things.

Everyday Metaphors

At least six times a day, I kneel in seiza to serve my cat a thin stream of water into a bowl. She could drink water out of the bowl like a normal cat, but I serve it to her in a special way to communicate to her, the spirits, and the gods that I love her. This seated position has become a metaphor for my dedication to cats in general, but especially for my passion for my own cat.

Nearly every day, I get into my car and travel to and from work. This is an act of bad faith -- I don't like driving and never have -- and has become symbolic of all the things I do that are against my own will yet feel trapped into doing.

The black and white keys of my piano represent a highly flawed system of music theory (double sharps and unnecessary time signatures, anyone?) that is nevertheless magnificent and the soul of Western music.

Metaphor calls us to pay attention, to suss out the meaning of our lives, and to understand the limits we must work within in order to return to the forces that made us.

Illustrator Harry Clarke's image for Edgar Allan Poe's The Masque of the Red Death

My sister is a nurse in Texas. She had covid. These bull***t denier post don't help a single person. They do hurt many and possibly kill some. My sister is on the front line and paying the the price. I hope all you loud mouth cowards contract covid. Karma is a beautiful thing. If you do contract it and while you are coughing up your lungs while s***ing your petty brains out...please reread all your posts. A***oles.

This post is an absolute study in ignorance and making s*** up. Bravo!! 👏🏼👏🏼

All bull***t excuses. Every. Single. One.
Yes, they are sad things, but not one of them is a reason for not masking up.
If you don't want to wear a mask, stay out of stores. And if you can't wear one for the 20 minutes you need to be in a store, then seek mental help, and in the meantime, order curbside or delivery.

This is absurd, just STFU. Yes, I do shame people who don't wear masks, because f*** you selfish a***oles. This looks like something a Trump worshipper would post, in addition to a few other posts of yours in the last couple of months. Bye Felicia!!

The above comments were sent in an attempt to force me to take down a meme I posted on social media. The meme explained to the devout mask wearer that certain people cannot wear masks because of breathing issues, sensory issues, or certain types of PTSD. These responses reveal a commonplace yet disproportionate rage. All of the above commenters are leftist former friends of mine who seek to control my thoughts and behavior via shaming.

The COVID mask does not serve its most obvious function, which is preventing suspended droplets of COVID-loaded bodily fluids from finding a contagious human target. COVID is endemic. I'm not going to explain what this means, because I am sure if you are reading this paragraph, you are already aware of how an endemic disease is the viral equivalent of wallpaper.

For those who wish to harass me like the examples above, I will warn you now that your entreaties won't be published here, so you will do best to take it elsewhere. Comments are fully moderated by me, filtered for profanity, and this site gathers the IP addresses of all who comment, whether I choose to publish them or not.

What I want to talk about is the non-physical aspects of masks and what they represent in the group subconscious. I want to peel back the layers of bluster and tough guy posturing to reveal the working guts. I want to talk about the real reasons behind the unhinged, hateful comments I received for posting an innocuous meme.

Hegemony

"We Are All In This Together" bellow the ad sloganeers. Yet who benefitted politically from the shutdowns? Which classes and types of people reaped the most benefits from a stop to all but "essential" labor? The answer: the middle and the upper classes and their aspirants. Anyone who questioned the shutdowns, like the April 16 protestors at the Michigan capitol building who wanted to go back to work, was shamed and ridiculed. Unmasked rioters like the ones who drove a UHaul to loot luxury stores in Chicago last weekend, however, have been cheered on by Black Lives Matter. We were clearly never all in this together, nevertheless, the pro-mask people figured out they could enforce the appearance of successful groupthink even though the reality was far different. That's why all those who wear masks wish to force mask-wearing on everyone else. A mask wearer's unconscious statement proclaims that he or she is benefitting from the policies designed to give us all an artificial boundary of safety -- the mask, distancing, and shutdowns -- that have all been repeatedly revealed as ineffective shams in stopping a mostly non-lethal, endemic disease. We Will All Appear To Be In This Together Whether You Agree Or Not.

Fear and paranoia have quickly turned 2020 into a lost year for funerals, weddings, graduations, concerts, and games. Whether it was the opportunity to hold your dying child's or grandpa's hand as they left this incarnation or to harmonize in a church singalong to raise money for the less fortunate, those who were paranoid about a disease with a less than 3% fatality rate cancelled it. The coddled, fearful, obedient believers helicopter-parented us all without our consent.

The mask is a muzzle to those who would speak evil or like me, attempt to go deeper into their astral plane meaning rather than examining them from the materialist, scientific standpoint where they have already failed. The mask is an astral plane symbol with a material plane set of rules to accompany it. The mask identifies its wearer as a unit of the hive mind, like a badge, armband, or special tattoo. Those who do not comply will be shamed, cancelled, forced to die outside castle walls. I am reminded of threats from Christians, "You had better repent your sins to God or you will burn in eternal Hell." Narcissistic, abusive God loves you though!

Isolation

The mask and distancing that goes with it erects an astral plane barrier to prevent potential dissenters from communicating with other people. The mask isn't meant to prevent the spread of a virus so much as it is meant to prevent the spread of ideas. Masks are often compared to condoms: only icky, low class, date-rapist skeezeballs refuse to wear them. As usual, wearing one signifies belonging to the middle and upper classes or at least aspiring to belong. In the case of sex, as someone who grew up terrified of accidentally becoming pregnant, I know that abstinence is the only way of doing this between menarche and menopause. For mask-wearers, the ideal of abstinence has its direct parallel in mandatory stay at home orders. If abstinence in the form of complete social isolation for everyone was the goal, they have done a remarkable job of achieving it in the last few months of cancelled gatherings.

The staunchest cheerleaders of mask-wearing and social distancing are natural introverts who fear other people, especially the working poor. For them, social distancing was a welcome respite from being obliged to interact with low class strangers on a daily basis. The mask keeps the dreaded Other far, far away from the fearful and their misanthropy. The mask's double bonus is its function as a talismanic Binky. The feeling of safety that the illusion of a masked face provides is more potent than its value as a face covering. The mask is the molded plastic velociraptor that guards the terrified toddler from the Boogeyman he is certain lives in the bedroom closet. The mask is the mark of lamb's blood on the doorframe to drive away the angel of death. The mask is the hottest trend in superstition.

Speaking of death, you'll notice that one my detractors in the opening comments heartily wished it upon me and everyone who thinks like I do, which is a practice I do not reciprocate because nowadays I have an appreciation of the kind of karmic retribution it brings. The paranoia around COVID arises from the imbalanced fear of death that remains unexamined in our culture. COVID primarily slays the elderly no matter what the mainstream corporate media tries to invent. Instead of taking a cruel to be kind route and helping any elder drowning in their own fluids to an easy death of opium sleep bliss, our society chooses to isolate them in ICU wards while frantically inflating their lungs so they can succumb to the Reaper while exclusively surrounded by "essential" workers, which is to say they will die alone. Meanwhile, nurses and doctors hold corpses aloft while dancing in choreographed Tik Tok routines through mostly empty hospital wards. One might almost dare to think they have plenty of time on their hands.

The end goal of mask enforcers is a permanent government funded welfare state of mandatory shelter in place. In this Marxist welfare utopia, nobody has to work because Progress will deliver the technology in order to feed, shelter, and clothe everyone. The salary class had it the easiest during the shelter in place orders in March and April, and their naive assumption is that such a state of affairs can go on forever just as long as it is applied with a one size fits all brushstroke. This is evidenced in the "order curbside or delivery" comment. This is Marie Antoinette asking why the peasants don't just eat cake. It presumes the restaurant is kept open because of endless government cash, that the home will not be lost to foreclosure or eviction, and that the person living inside has the money to order expensive take out and grocery delivery. Marie Antoinette does not understand that real people live outside Versailles and they must work in order to eat. For the antisocial corporate drone marooned at home with her computers and smart devices, it seems like nobody should be permitted to gather in public ever again because she personally does fine in social isolation. In her mind, nobody needs to go to church or see a movie in a theater because they can have online worship services and Amazon Prime Video. The top-riding Marie Antoinettes of the Coronapocalypse want to create the world of Wall-E with slightly less junk, though it will be the same amount of junk soon with all of the take out containers and Amazon trinket packaging piling up.

Virtue

It is interesting to watch people pretend to hate a situation they brought about out of political necessity. The panic over the current administration lasting four more years is thick. Though I have never revealed my 2016 vote, one commenter above paints me as a Trump supporter with gleeful spite. The people who accuse me of being a Trump lover (I don't honestly give Trump much thought) doth protest too much. I think they secretly love Trump. Their hatred of them belies Freudian sexual turbulence. They sincerely believe they hate him but I think they're more hot and bothered by Trump than simply bothered.

The Left has a pathological need to feel victimized and oppressed. Trump does the job nicely, doesn't he? The revival of The Handmaid's Tale uncovered leftist longing for a Big Daddy Christian takeover that would make liberal women feel as oppressed as authentic victims of religious male oppression, such as Muslim women in Somalia. Leftist women had the gall to uniform themselves in red Handmaid's Tale outfits to protest Trump's locker room banter about grabbing women by their crotches. Meanwhile, the tragedies wrote themselves as trafficking gangs targeted white girls in Britain and Islamists hung gay men on public city walls while Joe Biden had yet to be implicated by Tara Reade. Since they are not personally oppressed, the tormented black, white, and multiracial souls who wear masks must invent their tormentors, whether it's a disease or a president.

Progress, the true religion of the affluent, brought a longed for Apocalypse. Like Progress itself, the Apocalypse in the form of COVID did not live up to expectations and had to undergo much fluffing and stuffing to appear like it was arriving on schedule. Materialist Science's Coronapocalypse, although disappointing, was good enough for mask-wearers who needed to believe in the Narrative. Those like me who don't go along with the Narrative are shunned as Deplorables. Only a Deplorable would reject the Marxist welfare state utopia. Only a Deplorable wouldn't be concerned about what the neighbors think.

Charging Away On Revolving Credit

The reason masks are pushed as the New Normal is a rational fear of accumulated blowback. Just as a twenty-something chases more degrees via grad school in order to delay the first of many inevitable invoices for student loan debt from arriving, the mask-wearer seeks to delay the tipping point when the masses discard the New Normal. Such a reckoning must be avoided at all costs, lest those who were disenfranchised start thinking about whom they should hold accountable for lost time, lost income, and forever lost connections with loved ones.

Though they have their virtues, Millennials are a soft, easily led, placid group with deep reservoirs of entitled rage. Without realizing it, they have pushed the cost of their hysterical rage primarily upon Generation Z, which is at this time too young to marinate in the hatred of their parents' generation. Boomers are already hated by Millennials, but this will pale in comparison to the hatred Generation Z will feel towards Millennials when Generation Z comes into its own. The mask, like pastel rainbow wall art and Netflix binges, is at risk of becoming a Millennial moniker: a symbol for the scaredy-cats who ruined lives because they couldn't admit that their political side was losing for solid reasons. I'm not sure how this will look to the youth who bore the brunt of Coronapocalypse in twenty or thirty years, but I cannot imagine it will be flattering.

Current Mood: recumbent

Thinking Like a Mage series:

https://kimberlysteele.dreamwidth.org/tag/thinking+like+a+mage

If a picture is worth a thousand words, a symbol is worth a thousand pictures. Symbols occur to us in obvious ways all the time: the red cross that means first aid or health care, the color green on a traffic light that tells us Go, and the very alphabet letters of this sentence, which your human brain miraculously puts together and deciphers a message from me to you.

The human brain is wired to unpack symbols. For this reason, one of the great tragedies of our time was the hobbling of the Christian tradition of discursive meditation. Discursive meditation, once common practice, was nearly done away with during the twentieth century. Personally, I was shamefully ignorant of discursive meditation until well after my college years, and that’s too bad, because I would have been a much happier, smarter, more well-adjusted person had I discovered it sooner.

What Is Discursive Meditation?

Discursive meditation is a procedural method of thinking where one severely limits ones thoughts to a narrow focus and then deeply explores the object of that focus. Discursive meditation is one of the great traditions of the West. European Medieval monks codified exercises of prayer, discursive meditation, and mysticism, commonly using individual Bible topics or passages as meditation subjects. Only in the 20th century did the practice become nearly extinct among regular people. My friend’s father, who is now near the age of 80, was taught Catholic discursive meditation when he studied to become a priest (he obviously decided against becoming a priest).

The picture below is an Orthodox depiction of Saint Benedict of Nursia, a 6th century monk who is considered founding father of discursive meditation.

If you want to try discursive meditation for yourself, all you have to do is pick an object, find a chair, plant yourself in it, and go into anywhere from five to thirty minutes of intense thought about that object. For instance, as I write this, there is a pencil sitting to the right of my right hand. The pencil was most likely made in China as it was part of a Dollar Tree pack of Halloween-themed pencils. It is about seven years old. It is made of soft wood and its writing tip is made of graphite. The pencil was invented by a blind-in-one-eye scientist named Nicholas-Jacques Conte serving in Napoleon’s army. The etymology of the word pencil means “little tail”, which evokes images of the delicate brushes used to illuminate medieval manuscripts. Writing itself was most likely invented in ancient India, though some speculate it was simultaneously invented in China and Sumeria. From what we can tell, only humans engage in it. I can also relate to pencils personally: in the opening scene of my first novel, two characters earn a high school detention because one borrows the other’s pencil. I could go on at length, but I hope you’ve understood that a pencil isn’t just a pencil. With discursive meditation, a mere pencil becomes a treasure trove full of information to be discovered and explored.

When Westerners threw out discursive meditation for the plethora of garbage that replaced it, our ability to communicate and negotiate with each other also went down the toilet. I don’t entirely blame myself for the disaster my brain became as a young person. Television displaced reading as a popular habit in the 1950s and I grew up in a household that was obsessed with it. Nowadays, internet/smart phones are displacing television. In effect, most people born after 1940 became consumerist zombie victims of Madison Avenue and I was as bad as any.

One predicament of the human mind is our tendency to free-associate and daisy chain our thoughts whether we try to do so consciously or not. A simpler of saying this is “we tend to jump to conclusions”. The less disciplined our minds are, the quicker we are to make snap judgements and rash decisions because of the daisy-chains that are always going on in our mental-emotional backgrounds. Discursive meditation is an excellent way of grasping the reins of the subconscious and bringing it into the light of understanding.

There is so much in our rich, weird world to meditate upon. No single human mind could ever get to it all. I recently commented to my atheist, rationalist husband that one could spend an entire lifetime in discursive meditation on a single tarot card. If the tarot card is a trump, one could spend several lifetimes!

Eastern meditation, where one deliberately empties one’s mind, can easily become poisonous and destructive. Used improperly and without the context of traditional co-disciplines, various Hindu and Buddhist meditation techniques decimate rational thought processes and provide a convenient vacuum where ill-intentioned gurus, advertisers, and corporate interests can implant their programming.

Bastardized, out-of-context Buddhist and Hindu meditation of the kind taught in American yoga studios and corporate retreats represses the thought process and prevents it from exploring the potentials of the object by shoving it all neatly back under the surface. The result: The subconscious mind remains a hot mess. Despite frantic efforts to supplant the Christian traditions with Eastern ones, is it any wonder we have four generations since the invention of television who are tormented by depression, anger, greed, and materialism? One way or the other, we have been taught and encouraged to empty our minds. Driven by subconscious urges placed in us by the heads of large corporations and sociopathic mainstream media, we desperately seek refuge in religion, including the godless religion of atheism/Progress. Most religion is eager to tell us that all of our materialistic wishes will come true if we simply believe.

Discursive meditation easily reveals nefarious agendas and renders the forces behind them powerless, so it is no wonder the powers that be have no interest in letting people know about it!