by shaun lawton reporting for the Oscillating Oculus
It's been brought to my attention by a serpentine world in tumultuous convulsion. As tectonic battleships of molten slag erupt from the surface of the sea. While the waters of the Persian Gulf darken with the blood of oil money. Even as right wing politicians across the formerly united States of America choose to look the other way, while their self appointed God Squad decides to vote in favor of allowing certain precious species to go extinct. As their congregation, for which there could be no more perfect word, of blind and devoted constituents froth at the mouth in abject avowal to a mythos they hardly understand, all of them kneeling in rows at the altars of uninformed idiot worship.
Meanwhile, the natural empire of the wild asserts the sovereignty of its ordinary power comprised of more than a billion aeons of cosmic supremacy. Any living being upon the surface of the Earth can perceive it for themselves, any day of the week, any time of day or night. You can observe it sprawled across the constellations, the ghostly shed snakeskins of long lost civilizations now wreathed in decorative sublimation draped in the wake of their stellar demise. A distinct reminder, even as vague as it may appear to be for us now, that we currently represent that minor fraction of the one percent of living species left in the grand scheme of things.
For we, each last single one of us have awakened onto the current stage of existence at this great time of our cosmic development. Since the day we each were born, we have struggled and relaxed against this colossal backdrop of teeming echoes reflecting the once upon a time long lost generations of species and life forms that were already granted their opportunity to express themselves fully upon the stage of their own respective points in time. What does it all mean? I'm here to inform you, through the recurrent themes that run through these sentences. Nevermind the fact that few of us here get to figure out what the true definition of 'spirit' happens to be {SPRVTH = Sephiroth = ten divine emanations or attributes through which God reveals and manifests Himself in the universe = numerals = to which each letter of the Hebrew alphabet are valued = letters = The Alphabet + Mathematics = SCIENCE = SPRVTH = Spirit}.
Nevermind all that, it's unnecessary for any individual human being to understand (but it does help). My point remains, we are beings with consciousness; we remain conscientious that we are possessed of a consciousness, and we attain this by a means of "split-mind objectification." Suffice it to say, we have a tendency (or are actually "hardwired") to perceive the world around us in terms of black and white. 0s + 1s. Even what you're reading right now, on your smartphone screen, or computer screen, was assembled by an astonishing alchemical process involving electricity facilitating these images into an endless series of zeroes and ones to display the dazzling array of images and words we encounter online.
To shift this essay into the next gear, I want to share with you what's been brought to my attention, as of late. Let's say (for the sake of argument) that we're undergoing a relentless transition from an era of light and humanitarian and environmental "hope," to an eclipsing age of darkness, represented as a setback driven by rightwing, neo-fascist administrations gunning their capitalist regime engines full-throttle in a last, desperate attempt to "hold on" for dear life to their precious assets (money & power). It's not a stretch. It's a hardline fact. This appears to be our reality, and the deeper you look into it (you are invited to use the latest LLMs to sort through the details and track down the evidence) the more you can see how true it is. The one half of the world's population (liberals) that care about the environment and each other are finding themselves increasingly under the iron thumb of (conservatives) those who appear to have lined themselves with Project 2025 for a host of reasons too complicated and mind numbing to get into (look it up).
Just last year was the Year of the Snake, representing a world wide paradigm shift, when the world sheds its skin, undergoing a natural process of molting, to continue its life in a new, shiny form. Regardless of the possibility that we may have shifted from a benevolent, green garden (of Eden) snake and transmogrified into a rugged, iron Puff Adder of militant war and aggression, the underlying truth of our great, wide vast green fields of Earth remain under our feet. The same evaporating mist of constellations remains shrouded overhead, in their comforting positions, twinkling in every color of the spectrum, emitting the ever so faint music of the spheres that if you pay attention to and listen ever so closely, you may even just hear it echoing within your ears. Go outside at night and wander into the forest, if you can. Or step out into your own back yard, and take in the city or country sounds. Observe the clouds overhead gradually forming and unforming, these great paradoxical wonders of nature weighing several tons of liquid water, somehow floating up there as if lighter than air.
And remember this. The stereophonic world in which we live, despite our limitations at seeing it for how it is, remains a symphonic overture of events coinciding into a greater Gestalt than we, each individual human being, can fully process or figure out. It's a way of saying, "things are not just black and white," despite knowing that we are each hardwired to do just that. We look at the news, and see the latest coverage of this world leader waging an unjust war, or that other one having usurped the fair and good people of their country for the last forty-five years, or that other one who got into office by nefarious means, and has taken their country on the ride of their lives, often at the cost of good things that were carefully built up over generations, dismantled for no good reason except to divert funds into the pockets of the powerful and wealthy, all in the name of some "justified cause" they have managed to cobble together through their PR teams.
None of it matters. Why? Because of the fact our world operates on a mysterious synthesis of multilayered simultaneity, a process we can only get close to defining with a qualifier like "quantum," which happens to be a counterintuitive method of attempting to understand how the natural world and our existence within it operates. So we are left with that narrow divide over which the creationists and scientific minded atheists glare at one another in reproach. Nevermind them. It's up to each one of us, as individuals, to rise above all of this and at least try to see the world through new eyes. It doesn't have to be through the traditional eyes of religious faith, nor does it have to be through any other populist approach or belief (or lack thereof) or system. What remains happens to be a mystery which nobody has ever managed to resolve. The mystery of our existence, and that of the whole universe, of which our solar system, and Earth, upon which we were all born, remains in its ongoing glory.
All I'm saying, is that even if we've just begun the inexorable transformation from a golden age into a dark age of Iron, the process takes time, and for every battle won by the forces of darkness, another one ends in victory for the people who fight for our right to be good. Even as the Great Snake's Scales begin to shift from Silver and Gold into Iron and Tin, nothing can stop the good guys from fighting on to win. And nothing but time can transform every last scale on this great Dragon's Hide into solid, immutable iron. That takes a period of time longer than our lifespans. I hope you can see exactly what I've been trying to say here. Keep your eyes wide open. Continue to uphold the values in life that you represent. Never give up on setting a good example for others. Keep your faith in the mysterious workings of the world. Help your neighbors and others toward us all getting along together here in the United States of America, and everywhere else on this mysterious living planet we call Earth. Thank you.
Reid Wiseman from of the Orion spacecraft's window after
completing the translunar injection burn on April 2, 2026.
