Saturday, December 05, 2009

What's this Button here For? Oops.

Dog Poet Transmitting.......

I must be pretty careful and... watched out for because I seldom have difficulties or do stupid things resulting in unfortunate consequences, still... this time the jury may be out for a few days. I had been getting a near constant series of email requests from people to be their friend on Facebook. Some of them I could identify and some I hadn’t heard of or didn’t connect with their screen names. It got to where there were several hundred of these names. Yesterday, I decided to catch up on my emails, which I had let slide over several weeks. In the course of this effort, I thought I would take care of this Facebook situation.

I had registered at Facebook a couple or few years ago; I can’t remember how long ago it was now. I couldn’t remember why I had done it and then it came to me last night in bed. A fellow I had known years ago had sent me a message through Facebook. The only way to get the message was to register in order to read it. So, I did this and answered him and then promptly and not so promptly (grin) never heard back from him. I forgot about it and went on with whatever it is that I do and... the other invitations started coming in because I was on Facebook now. It was just my name and a few bits of information such as my being 99 years old and living on Malta; which I am not and where I have never been.

I know that Facebook is some part of the Sump Pump Murdoch Empire. That doesn’t concern me overly because every one of us, every day; purchases, ingests, sits on, walks on, travels in (and so on and so on) something that came from some company that is owned by some international corporation. We can lie to ourselves about this feature and tell ourselves that we live independent of the products of the beast but a lie is what it would be. Besides this sort of thing, I occasionally hear from people who tell me what I should think, who I should worship, how I should conduct my life and what I should be saying. It’s a small minority contingent but it’s there and inescapable. This applies to all of you in the same way as it does to me and you get more or less of it depending on how much of the public you are in contact with.

I may live in an unusual mind set, engage with invisible beings and normally operate in a hermetic manner but... I connect with the world on a lot of levels and in various ways just like all of you do. Some of my olive oil finds its way into bottles bound for areas well beyond my neighborhood, even if most of it comes to me. The price of having my olives processed is a percentage of the oil for the cooperativio pool. People of all political stripes and religious persuasions hear my songs and read at these blogs even if it’s only by accident and even if it is only once (grin). We are connected to everything.

With all of this in mind, I thought it would be fine to just go ahead and let these people who wanted to call themselves my friends, call themselves my friends. In any case, I don’t have to answer to anyone but myself and my maker. People can expect things from me but my first duty is to my conscience and if I can live with it that is my business.

So I went to Facebook and attempted to bulk process the requests I had received and save myself some time. What happened was- and I find Facebook to be difficult to operate at the moment- it sent out permissions AND invitations to everyone in my Inbox which turned out to be over seven hundred people. My immediate reaction was, “Oh shit.” Most of the people in my Inbox are good people but... some of them are not people I want to communicate with; the publisher who treated me and my novel in such a shabby and demonic way, the woman who called Interpol on me because I got tired of her hallucinating ravings at Smoking Mirrors, people from the past who had become important in the world (in their minds) and wanted me to make them important (in the same way) to me also, people who were soliciting me about something and whatever the case might be.

My first reaction was, “this is a nightmare’. All evening, I had to put aside my recording project and attend to confirmations and... while I was at Facebook, people were opening chat boxes so that I had a dozen conversations going on at once. I also had to explain over and over at Gmail that it was an accident; for people who could not understand why I had invited them to Facebook and even more; what I was doing there in the first place.

Then I noticed something very strange for which I have no answer. In the process of attending to all of this, I discovered that I had been contacted by about a dozen people from the long past. Some of these people I hadn’t heard from in more than 20 years. I didn’t even know if they were still alive. In some cases I wasn’t even Les Visible then. How did this happen? They weren’t in my Inbox. Suddenly... there they were; a woman from the body-working college that I attended, a fellow I had met when I was 21, a woman I had been enamored of years ago, someone I had met during the short time I lived in Palm Springs. I’m almost afraid to go back there now because who knows who has shown up in the last ten hours? Maybe I will start hearing from some of the people I met in prison and the mental institutions (grin). “Hey Les, this is Feet’s Robinson, remember me? I’m the guy that raped and killed all those nurses? We met in the max-ward at The John Howard Pavilion at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital.”

Well... the point is... you never know what’s going to happen because you push the wrong button. I’m glad to be back in touch with some of these people. They remind me of who I was in ways I hadn’t thought about in years. I can’t see myself spending any great time at Facebook but this is certainly interesting. My daughter, Allison, got in touch with me this way. We haven’t had all that much contact, although we remain close in an invisible way. We’ve always been friends but life has placed us at great distances for years. She’s in graduate school now. Presently I’ve had a lot more contact with her than has been the case in awhile.

I’m thinking this was no accident. I don’t generally believe in accidents anyway. It’s human nature to consider things mistakes before we even know what they mean. Sometimes something happens and we identify it as a problem and it turns out to be a blessing in disguise. I even gained rapprochement with a couple of people, where there had been some kind of a misunderstanding. What this tells me is to not define or label anything on initial appearance but to watch it and see what it does. We are guided all the time but we don’t take that into consideration. Our limited faith doesn’t allow for us to accept that something greater than ourselves could love us so much and be constantly engaged in bringing us closer.

I’ve been engaging in certain spiritual practices lately. It’s a different image and a different intensity level than what I was doing before. I’ve been noticing things happening that weren’t happening before and I’ve noticed that I am much more anchored in myself and better at what I do; this may not be for me to determine but it feels like it is so.

I watch and study people when I am around them and I’ve found certain characteristics in most of them; fear of the unknown, attributing false meaning to events, atavistic superstitions and hard wired presumptions about God, Nature and the world. It seems that the hardest thing for people is to admit that they don’t know. They do not realize how ‘knowing’ traps them in the conclusions they arrive at. Children don’t know and it gives them a flexibility and learning capacity that no adult can match unless... they have returned to being like a child in this respect. When we assume command of our lives we take the reins out of the hands of God. We can hold the reins but there must be an awareness of something within and above ourselves. This is the source of conscious guidance and intuition.

The presence of the divine permeates and surrounds us at all times. We have to move with this awareness, even if we can feel nothing at all in the beginning. Surrender is an incremental thing. It can also be terrifying and exciting, like surfing or skydiving. You do have a parachute.

What I am trying to do is to live what I have been shown is true for some time now. I want to approach everything as if it was put before me to make greater understanding possible. I want to look at every highway I enter upon as some tributary to the Halls of Wisdom. I want to see it as the greatest adventure possible for us and to soar away beyond my formerly drab perceptions of this world and see it as that beautiful blue-green planet spinning in illuminated space. I want to rediscover the profound mysteries of the Sun and Moon and remind myself that they are the seats of conscious beings. I want to make them my friends but maybe not on Facebook.

I want to walk through Nature, as I do, and regard her as my wise and benevolent friend and remind myself that she is alive and conscious of me as I go. I want to remember that she is showing me things all of the time if I will only take the trouble to look and put aside my presumptions. If only I will sink into the reality of not knowing... what wonders might be revealed? This is where I find myself today and hope I find myself tomorrow.


End Transmission.......

I’ll be on the radio tomorrow night with a Visible Origami flavored broadcast. My apologies to any and all of you disturbed by the Facebook mailings; don’t take it personally because it happened without my knowing it was taking place. That will be sorted as everything is sorted... in the proper time and place.

Visible sings: The eponymous Les Visible Music Album♫ All The Things That I Wanted ♫
'All The Things That I Wanted' is track no. 7 of 10 on Visible's eponymous
'Les Visible' Music Album

Lyrics (pops up)

The eponymous Les Visible Music Album


The New Shangri-La.

26 comments:

psychegram said...

Ha! So that's what happened.

Facebook really can be infuriating. I tend to spend as little time as possible there, as my time is limited as filling it with knowledge of the mundane or trivial happenings in the lives of my two-hundred-odd facebook friends is simply not in the cards. For me, FB is basically just a supplementary email, one that allows me to get in touch with people whose emails I don't have as I haven't seen them since before either of us had email in the first place.

And on that note ... you have a daughter!? I Had no idea (or maybe I did and simply forgot). You don't talk about her much. All to the good that you guys found each other on FB, though: that sort of thing is the site's primary redeeming feature.

Pstonie said...

The thing about Facebook is that's it's also now being used for a new breed of spam. As you know friends have more access to your info than non-friends on Facebook most of the time, so sometimes you get an invitation from someone you don't know, which is a fake name and a chick in a bikini as its profile pic - guaranteed add in most cases.

Related to the knowing, apparently people see the perception they lied themselves into as an investment, which I guess is just another result of a skewed view of life and time.

Personally I've found it difficult to define the borders of the lies that I'd apparently been perpetuating. And what's the point anyway? It's all just physics. We're naive if we think that evil will be destroyed forever after this war.

As I see it, the overlapping of shadow and light will always happen. It's all just cause and effect and no matter what you can observe, no matter how wonderful or horrible something is, it can ultimately be explained as something inherently simple and of its own design. Cause and effect. The fuck do I have to sit here and watch it for?

What I see in life is an ultimate, soul-crushing sadness. A bunch of people, some of whom are trying to do good, who have everything taken from them by those with power. "Evolve" to the next level and the only thing you can expect to encounter is a yet more powerful group of fuckheads on their way down.

What am I missing? Is it expectation messing with me? Along that line of reasoning the only solution is seemingly to learn to love suffering, because that seems to be the sole constant of life.

I'm hoping that someone here has answers because you've obviously been doing this a lot longer than I have. I apparently don't have a choice whether to participate in this farce so if there's a way to enjoy it I'd like to know what it is.

Visible said...

Two things occur to me right off the bat; don't take it seriously and don't identify it as you are doing. It's hard I know but we have to train ourselves to look beyond appearances. I was discussing this very thing at the end of the post. We don't really know what things mean. We buy into the collective view; either believing in it, or disbelieving it and getting into conflict with it. There's another way of doing it. It's a kind of psychic martial arts that is required. The mindset of Aikido is really applicable.

doubtingneil said...

imagine my surprise when I found in my inbox an invitation to be the dog poets friend on facebook. truly honored really because I count Les as a friend,although we will probably never meet in this life he has helped me through some dark days indeed by his ability to put feelings and thoughts into words that I don't have the capability to myself.
I have stayed away from that site with the idea that it was another chain the "man" uses to distract us from things more important, but if Les does it there must be a reason,grin.
so I set up my account and echos from the past began to vibrate in the present,how strange, how interesting, I agree with you Les, I will watch to see where this path leads.

Anonymous said...

Zoner -
There are various places to download/listen to the Jody Stecher/Kate Brislin song LEELA from album Going Up On The Mountain.
I have dialup, so haven't done it yet.
Check Joogle.
-bholanath

Pstonie said...

Thanks for replying, dawg. I think I know what you're getting at because it seems to be the same thing that I thought I'd learned from my few experiences with LSD.

I actually got to laugh at what some call the celestial joke but of course promptly forgot how to see it. Seems that our sense of time, that in turn causes our acclimation, is our biggest enemy. Because it's so fine it creates the illusion that the small part that we can observe has importance and also makes us forget the rest of the circle.

"Someone... is hiding it from us." -Revolver

Ben There said...

I resisted Facebook for years but my wife seemed to thing it was one of the greatest things since God removed on of Adam's ribs, and she was so adamant that she took the liberty of signing me up. I was reluctant but it's really been a neat thing because, like you, I connected with some people from the past, people who were a big part of me 'back then' and who I have wondered about. Plus it enables me to stay in contact with a couple family members and I've found it both amusing and annoying to constantly be updated on the mundane details of the day-to-day lives of old friends and distant acquaintances.

So anyway...it's nice to now have Mr. Les Visible on Facebook. I trust that you'll keep us all posted anf informed on every trip you make to the restroom and whether or not you stub your toe on the way to check the mail. (Trust me, I've seen worse!)

Anonymous said...

i'm sorry gang, but i have to disagree with the usefulness of facebook (unless perhaps you have acute agoraphobia....no, even then you can have friends who visit)

there is a war coming our way. its the war that never ended, just fought over land far away, against people with names i cant pronounce. when we have to actually start fighting physically in this war, anonymity will be our greatest friend. it will be impossible for the enemy to infiltrate if we remain in cells of those closest to us. as soon as we start looking for groups, we are finished.

cut the conduits and be very, very careful.

oh, les, i think we do make mistakes. what is important is knowing when we do and learning from them. they dont have to be regrettable.

jean francois

juste dit non,
vive la resistance

lightandlongshadows said...

Pstonie, I understand your sentiments. I can't really disagree as I'm in a similar place at many moments. WTF do I have to deal with this b.s. for?
Fortunately I had more insight in the past before my seeking fearlessnss led me deep into the darkness that can be the human experience.My light is still flickering as is yours if you're still asking.
This world is like a prism that separates light into it's various aspects,colours. A place for expression manifesting in unimaginable variety. Everything suffers towards the light, reunion.
As humans it seems we have the ability to appreciate the ultimate harmony of this light and shadow play and call it love.
Words are inadequate though. Open your mind and heart and build a bonfire just because you can.
Anyway I'm talking to myself as much as you (but then aren't we always). Cathartic.
inside out
Jeff Buckley & Elizabeth Fraser - All Flowers In Time Bend Towards The Sun http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pFx4nlETsFI

Visible said...

That's good because I don't have any regrets at the moment.

I' not going to give those guys any power. They are going to be too busy destroying each other and running for their lives to worry about me; just my perspective and so far it's worked fine. I'll adjust when the circumstances require it.

gurnygob said...

It’s not fair...I didn't get an invite.
Everybody say ahhhhhhhhhh.



Only joking I did get one and after thinking about it for like 10 seconds I thought nah...

(grin)
gurnygob

Visible said...

Heartbreaking news, gurnygob.

Rebel 4E said...

Old Joke...

You-Tube, Twitter and Facebook will soon merge.
They will then be known as.....

'You-Twit-Face'

(0__o)

kikz said...

:)

the devil's 'n the... applications/permissions details *evil grin*

all the crap/blurb user content can be curtailed. just a matter of fine tuning...the news feed parameters.

i've even nuke/blocked the obnoxious 'ad box flash' images...
however adblock won't get rid of them entirely...

Visible said...

Well Kikz, You're a much more savvy tech than I. I'm a hunt and peck guy with that sort of thing. I occasionally work a wonder here and there but it takes some time (grin).

............................

I've actually heard that You Twit-face line.

Still, a lot of personal good came out of it for me. I've found friends that have been lost for years and one of them lives just up the way in Rome.

I use computers whose parts are made all over the place and some of them not good places I suspect. I drive a car that was made by a large corporation. I use diesel fuels that comes from the oil companies. I check where my food comes from but I can't always be sure.

I use blogger which is owned by Google. I could make a great man more connections about all that. However... the one I serve knows all about that and is only concerned with the hearts intention and where my loyalty lies.

I'm looking forward to going back to my native planet but I can't leave till I'm finished here.

Rebel 4E said...

Live Long & Prosper Vis (-____-)

I used to have a Facebook account,
But I cancelled my it when old fiends started using it to hunt me down just so they could whinge & moan at me (plus I only had 6 friends..boo hoo)

Respects,

7R6 said...

I can see what the appeal of Facebook is - reconnecting with old friends, etc. But for me, this is overshadowed by the fact that I don't really want to be a part of the "data-mine/consumer focus group" that is Facebook.

Anonymous said...

sunday morning
another week gone by
more lies circulated
more dead childs lives
more war,more hate
and then climate gate
evil spins
it lies in wait
but it already knows
its mind been slowed
cold hearts infected
with the want of gold
if thats what they want
let them have it all
drive round in big car
make all the rules
pretend they are wise
know everything
clever the devil
through his own fear
he sink
he dont know he is connected
just another one of us
one day old truth
will come
and turn
the devil back to dust
beware devil
you know what come
higher nature rise
and shine internal sun

...peace love to all....

Joe Bloggs said...

Aha! That explains why the MyFæcess police were rooting through my old hard-dives when I got home from another dazzels hard work at the unemployment lazency.

I would of added you to my 6+ billion "friends" but I forgot the 72 digit code I once made up in a fit of serious inebriatiousness.

If you like we could always temporarily be in(tee-hee)mates on Roopert Mirthaz MySpazz

ps the ante-scriptum is, Nice post!

Anonymous said...

Les wrote: "I'm looking forward to going back to my native planet but I can't leave till I'm finished here."

Funny, the thought that keeps coming to me more and more these days is " I want to go home, please God, can't I come home now?" I feel a little like Dorothy in Oz. :) I've misplaced my ruby slippers though, and time is running short to find them. You and a few others are very generous with clues, and I do believe they will turn up in time.

Chiah

Visible said...

There's a new Smoking Mirrors up-




From Bondage to Rothschild to Freedom Within.

Anonymous said...

Bhagavad-gītā As It Is 8.5

anta-kāle ca mām eva

smaran muktvā kalevaram

yaḥ prayāti sa mad-bhāvaḿ

yāti nāsty atra saḿśayaḥ

TRANSLATION

And whoever, at the end of his life, quits his body, remembering Me alone, at once attains My nature. Of this there is no doubt.

PURPORT

In this verse the importance of Kṛṣṇa (God) consciousness is stressed. Anyone who quits his body in Kṛṣṇa (God) consciousness is at once transferred to the transcendental nature of the Supreme Lord.

Anonymous said...

illusion likes illusion
illusion leads the way
delluded by confusion
blind men play their game
dividing with deceit
dont know who or why
sold their peace for profit
all they do is lie
despize the truth
when it come near
they try to kick away
dont like old peace
hate love
they try to take away
when their time comes
for their own truth
the rising of their inner eye
well I will offer them help
but mother nature
is all wise

...peace....

Visible said...

There's a new Reflections in a Petri Dish up now-




Cliff and George and the ALTA Report.

Pstonie said...

lightandlongshadows, it's interesting what you say about the prism and the return to unity. During clearer moments I got the image of a muscle, where density enters one end, expands, and returns to itself again.

But then that's just another sine wave, isn't it?

Anonymous said...

Hi Les,

So that's what your email was all about! I did wonder.

My daughter's in Facebook and she's had the same benefits from it as you; i.e. catching up with friends and people she had in the past, before we moved countries and continents. She tried to get me to join, but I have more demons in my past than friends, although there were some of those as well.

So, regretfuly, I must decline your invite (only this one though!).

Great post, btw, as always.

S. Cat





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