Happiness

Your Life is One Big Lie

One of the central themes of all my writings – even the My Haunted Life series – is the nature of reality and the role that we may play in dictating that. Over the last twenty or so years (if not my entire life really), I have read, meditated on, studied and discussed this topic and the process I have come to several conclusions. One of these is that I now believe that much of our world is an illusion.

It’s easy to draw analogies with movies like the Matrix here and I and others often do but what I mean is a lot of what we think we know isn’t real. It isn’t truth nor fact. I once said (and thought it was rather cute) –

“The more I think on it the more I realize that certainty is an illusion. History was written by the winner, the news is provided with a spin and other people are opaque. We know nothing for certain. It used to be that the internet might provide information,but it too is now nothing but opinion and scare mongering. Nothing can be relied upon. We have to look inside ourselves for anything of value – anything that can be relied upon – but it too is colored by our ego and personalities.

So in the end, if the past is a colored view and the future a fancy, what do we have left?

Simply to live in the moment…..” (The Mystical Hexagram (Vasey & Vincent, 2012)).

Life is an enigma and I may never actually understand the answers but I do know this. Everything that we take to be true is probably not. Let me give a few examples;

1. History – history is written by the winner and it reflects a perception or view of what happened. There are alternative histories for everything and the sad thing is, they are all colored by the same issue.

2. Education – Education is partly about providing certain tools – reading, writing, critical thinking, analysis – but only in limited degree. The rest of education is essentially to ‘brainwash’ you with cultural normalities, cultural convention and to ensure you don’t actually challenge the system. Most people accept what they are told as the gospel truth and never for a minute stop to think critically or analytically about things. In this way, the illusion is maintained.

3. Religion – While all religions are probably based on wisdom and spiritual truth, they are all and without exception, subverted to match someone’s political or cultural agenda. They become the basis by which people can be manipulated and controlled.

4. On a more mundane level, the music or entertainment industry can be used to prove its all illusion too. Many singers can’t sing (they use computer software now to ensure perfect pitch), many musicians can’t actually play, many live performances are lip synched. It’s all a lie (It didn’t used to be). Actors and actresses public personas are creations and false often nothing like the reality. Show business is really all a show – an illusion – just like everything else in your life.

5. You are bombarded day in and day out with messages – some subliminal and others in your face – buy this, eat this its good for you, holiday here and so on. The marketing machine uses our ability to imagine and visualize – a rudimentary skill though it is in the  majority of us) and uses OUR magic making ability and equipment to have us make THEIR reality. Our magic has been hijacked!

I could go on and on but I won’t. Don’t ask me who the THEY might be. I have no idea and I am not a conspiracy theorist – that’s just another fantastical dead end. That there is a THEY – whether THEY actually know it or not, I am sure.

I also have concluded this. Given everything turns out to be illusion and that I cannot trust anything, then I must turn to the only thing I can rely on – me. Unfortunately, I have to first clear the Me of all the nonsense I have been conditioned with and am bombarded with daily. As Mark Stavish terms it – I must know my own mind. This is far from easy and may not be attainable at all but I can make progress towards it and, in doing so, I can take control of my life and my reality. I can be a true mage and imagine my thoughts into reality. Of course, I also live in other people’s realities too and I must learn how to interact with their parallel universes too.

You know, if the outer world we call life is an illusion while the inner world is real then surely, the Kingdom of heaven truly is within us and faith – well, it can move mountains.

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A Quandary of Existence

Stillness
A quiet so loud
I am deafened by the nothingness
Brightness
A light so bright
I am blinded by its’ darkness

Inside is outside
Life is just a dream
Inner worlds reflected
To the outside deflected
Sanity in my madness
Light in my darkness
An upside down world
Or am I the hanged man?

Voices that talk to me
They say I am not alone
That I am connected
To everything I rejected
All is me just reflected
In a word – redacted
Where is the edge to this?
Is my head hanging beyond?

I am so small, so very tiny
Just a speck in eternity
I am though at the center
And yet I don’t remember
This is all simply just me
Yes, everything that we can see
Everything and nothing too
An eternal quandary

Is there an answer?
How would I possibly know?
I mean how?
When I can’t even
Frame the question
Got a suggestion?

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Life is But A Dream

I recall singing that song when I was a small child and wondering what did it mean? – Life is just a dream?

Row, row, row your boat,
Gently down the stream.
Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily,
Life is but a dream.

But where did this come from and who wrote it? A bit of research suggests that the earliest printing of it was in 1852 but who wrote it and why seems lost in the mists of time. If anyone knows, please let me know…

I thought life a dream when I was a child or rather, I thought it a game that I controlled. It was a sort of virtual reality (as it would be called now) and I was sat in a box connected to a machine that gave me vision and senses. So to be honest, I didn’t puzzle too much over the idea that life might be a dream. I rather accepted that it was.

I have lost so much as I have grown and yet I have gained so much. My imagination as a child was beyond equal. I could create other worlds right there in my head and my dreams and my waking life seemed interconnected and one. I could fly back then. Magic – physical magic was real and so were elves. There was a girl I loved so much trapped on an island of towering cliffs looked after by her wicked witch of an Aunt that I dreamed about over and over again. One dream ran into the next even weeks apart until I finally rescued my love and the wicked witch met her destiny.

There may have unlimited imagination as a child but there was no experience of life. In the Mystical Hexagram, I talk about the hardened horny matter that is built up by life. We talk about the burning away – the transformation through fire – of life’s experience. The breaking down of this hardened horny material that we build up through life.

It’s as if we build ourselves a prison.

It starts early with our parents who, knowing no better, burden us with some of the hardened life material. Next, its other kids (peer pressure) and our teachers (culture, way of seeing things etc.). We lose our ability to just imagine and it is replaced with the straight jacket that is normality and acceptance. We no longer ‘row the boat, gently down the stream’ but rather fight the currents going in God knows which direction and to what end? Oblivion?

Life loses its innocence, its gaiety, it’s merriness. It’s no longer a dream but a nightmare.

That is until you remember how to imagine. How to center yourself and imagine. Learn how to dream again. How to cast off the horny matter and transform the experiences – no matter what they are – into something of eternal value and meaning. Something spiritual and energizing. The combination of childish imagination skills and the adult’s experiences of life to at first remember to row, gently DOWN the stream (with the current – Just as Asteroth said ‘don’t fight, go with the flow merrily understanding, it is YOUR dream and you can create your own reality.

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Originally posted on Asteroth’s Domain.

Divide et impera

What is the definition of divide and conquer? A strategy for achieving political or military control (my italics).

There are a lot of ways to divide and conquer but the three that most easily come to mind are as follows;

1. Nationality
2. Religion
3. Race

Politicians use all three of these and many others on an almost daily basis to gain what they want for their personal power. They pit us against one another by playing to our sense of injustice. The us and them statements designed to obtain an emotional response because if we surely thought about what we are being said we would recognise it as BS it really is.

I’m English and a yorkshireman apparently. Why? Because by accident of birth I was born there. Nothing more. But, as I grew up I was constantly told how I should think and behave by those around me. It’s normal for that to be the case. I left though – Yorkshire at age 18 and England at age 28. I have not returned and now I see what utter bullshit I was told to think about being a yorkshireman and being English. I am also British, European but most importantly I am a human being and I poop and pee and worry about stuff just like the rest of you. We have in common much more than what divides us but those devious Divide et impera politicians do not want us to remember this. Oh no, for without division how could they achieve their vision?

Meditating, studying the esoteric and observing has told me that we create our own reality. So, to take a current debate as an example, if I am Scots I have been likely raised being told a bunch of BS about the English (or the protestants/catholics – if I am west coast Scots). I emotionally yearn for yesteryear when Scotland was a Kingdom in its own right free from southern control and when Mel Gibson covered in blue daub beat the crap of out them and even stole the King of Englands queen’s heart… oh wait, no that was a movie right? and historically that queen hadn’t been born before Gibson’s character met his death…. well, what does it matter, we’d be better off without them anyway. Stand back a minute and think about that. Being Scots is an accident of birth and then being programmed by the local society. As is being English. It’s all one big fairy story perpetrated to keep you angry, jealous and ready to fight people just like you.

I know some people are still trapped in that paradigm and will not get it. They adore being Scots, English, Russian, Ukrainian or whatever it is and they will argue and fight for their own – their clan. Fine. I won’t because it is bullshit and its anti-human.

We focus on what divides us don’t we as opposed to what unites us. To finish using the same current debate. If the Scots were determined to make the UK work, it would and they would be building a different reality to the one in which they want independence. We create our own reality – its that simple.

I don’t really have an axe to grind and whatever happens I wish the Scots and the English and the Welsh well but I do hope that one of these days people will wake up and realize they are being manipulated. They are allowing their reality to be created by someone else. So, when you get that reality that you ceded to someone else please, quit moaning.

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Two Weeks of Silence

After today, I can promise you almost two weeks of silence from G Michael Vasey. While I am gone, I will imagine you all running out to buy my books and reading my archive of delicious articles on this blog and on Asteroth’s Domain Me? well, I will be laying in the sun, swimming and drinking cold beers to cool off in Kos. I can’t wait.

I have been neglecting Asteroth’s Domain which I reserve for more esoteric articles mainly. I guess, I simply haven’t had much to say esoterically recently. Instead, I have been focused on building a business (Commodity Technology Advisory LLC) and trying to build a platform for my writing. Both are non-stop activities and can slowly eat away every minute of the day one way or another. After a while, you look up and kick yourself because you realize that yet again, you have slowly losing sight of what is really real and important. Meditation has gone from 30 minutes plus daily to once in a while again. I think at such times, my subconscious self gets truly pissed off with the other me. That’s when I get bad and weird dreams like the one I described the other day. I have had weird dreams all of this week to be honest and so as I lay in the sun and in between frolicking in the pool or ocean with my daughter, I shall try to refocus again……

I often think that in fact, this is the dream and the false illusion that we get sucked into and allow it to become our only reality. The truth is that there are almost certainly many realities created by the many me’s that exist. Some of you may take that as the statement of a crazy man but think about it. We are all fractured characters playing roles and being different people for different purposes aren’t we? Mum, daughter, friend, enemy, clown, and so on…. as we play out our roles, we are creating a reality for them too. Each character that we play has an audience and an energy and they create the daily dramas that occupy our lives.

The trick, I think, is to wake up and recognize this. To start to try to bring all these separate bits of ourselves and all of those different reality streams under control… the control of our true will. Some people will call this God, some Goddess and yet others Divine Providence or simply the Perfected Self. Whatever you name it, it is the same thing. In order to listen and take guidance from this presence, we have to be quiet and listen. We have to talk to it via prayer – creative visualization. We have to allow It to guide us and in doing so, hopefully, we bring together the fractured aspects of ourselves into the Divine whole we were always meant to be.

energy-in-motion by michael-massurin

energy-in-motion by michael-massurin

The Travel Queen

I am just returned from an overnight trip to Prague where I dropped my Mother off for her return trip back to Beverley. She had been here 10-days and it was her 5th such trip since my Dad passed away. My Mum can talk the hind legs of a donkey and if you had a chance to chat, she would tell you how she has travelled the world because of me. And she has.

It all started back in the late 1970’s with trips down to the Midlands to drop me off and pick me up at Aston University. That shifted to Leeds and then to Glasgow as I continued on with my PhD with the British Geological Survey and University of Strathclyde. It became Aberdeen when I started my career as a Geologist with BP. Then, when I was moved down south it was Surrey and Basingstoke visits. In between, we invited my parents for a week away in mid-Wales as well. Then came the “world’ bit. We moved to Houston, TX and then to Dallas, TX before heading back to Basingstoke. Together with Mum and Dad, I discovered just how long a drive it really is from Houston to the Grand Canyon! Nevertheless, we did visit Monument Valley, the Grand Canyon, along with much of Arizona, New Mexico and west Texas to boot! Mum always recalls Tombstone with some fondness. I’m not sure why!

The

The

Of course, I returned to Texas and spent another 17-years there. Ever year, over they came for a month and we would visit Galveston, Padre Island and other beautiful locations. Mum tried new foods and drinks like Crawfish and Hurricanes. The Hurricane was devoured with gusto but then Dad had to walk Mum around the block for half an hour to sober her up!

The Cast

The Cast

On my return to Europe, the visits continued but now to Brno and Prague and other parts of the Czech Republic. This last trip we spent a day in Vienna.

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Yes, my Mum is well travelled. She is even planning a trip to Turkey with her older sister later this year. Not bad for a woman close to 80-years old who smashed her wrist to pieces just 4-weeks ago and still carries a heavy and painful cast, who is half blind from glaucoma and has had monthly injections in her eye to break down a blood clot there, who has bad legs and now has an open wound on one leg that will not go away and who for the last 30 or so years has suffered from debilitating colitis.

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She is a brave and adventurous woman my Mum. She is a travel queen and Dad would be so proud to know she still travels albeit without him.

Lazarus

Memories fade as the years gently pass
The urgency of attraction has gone too
Wished fond goodbye as the years flew
But Lazarus sings still from time to time

Our bond slowly strengthens bit by bit
Shared experiences and the pass of time
Takes care of that my dear partner in crime
As our Lazarus makes his soulful reappearance

Who would have ever have given us a chance at all
The unlikely impossibleness of such a meeting
Our differences should have made our time fleeting
But beautiful Lazarus was our siren song

Kept us together all along.

Julia Robert’s Smile

Troublesome emotions unchecked
Anger deepens, rises and overflows
Where does this deepening depression lead?
Meanwhile the stars dance and twinkle
Uncaring, unsharing shards of light
A smile widens; teeth shining bright white
Happiness is a viral happening at times
Like Julia Roberts in Notting Hill
No need to swallow any bitter pill
Laughter tickles in the back of my throat
A sneeze of exquisite joy explodes
Those little drops of laughter burst out
Infecting those around me
It’s simply now a cacophony
Infectious, riotous and bold
As global laughter takes a hold.

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Life

Blame

I know that you blame me

And everyone else

But I can tell you

You must blame yourself

You can’t live life

Without actually doing

You can’t truly experience

Without taking some risks

 

Life

Accept the responsibility

That comes with living

Reach out and thrive

It’s not the taking but the giving

You can’t live life

By never being a part of it

You can’t truly experience

Without just diving right on in

 

Words

You say that they don’t matter

But it’s better to be silent

Than to utter ugliness

The Word created this firmament

You can’t live life

Cursing those around you

You can’t truly experience

Especially, if you completely alienate

 

Be

All that you can achieve

Raise yourself and fill that cup

Let light shine down on you

Pull yourself onwards and up

You can’t live life

Shut up inside your own shell

You can’t truly experience

The intensity of this gift of Life

 

Wild-Side-Of-Life

This poem from Dr. G. Michael Vasey’s Moon whispers collection.

The Five Characteristics of Rich People

I was just over on Linkedin where some business/wealth magazine had posted an article with the above title. Their five characteristics were the ones that you would expect… communication, blah blah blah blah….

In my life I have met my fair share of rich people. I don’t mean wealthy and I do mean rich – in excess of $10 million minimum. They did all share a set of characteristics but it wasn’t the ones I just read about. The first characteristic was to be honest greed. They coveted money and they would do almost anything to get it and absolutely anything to keep it once they had it. One man I know whose child played on a ice hockey team with my son would routinely call me up and ask if I would be renting a car for the weekend tournament in Denver or wherever it was? I always said Yes and yes again when he asked if he and his son could share it with us. After about 4 of these trips I began to realize what he really meant was would you give me a free weekend when it comes to a rental car please chump? He was worth many millions of USD this man and he was a devout christian but it never once entered his head to pay half the car rental with me….. Another very wealthy person I know has no friends. None. You see he is paranoid that anyone he meets is after his money and he feels that no one can be trusted… poor guy.

I think another trait of very wealthy people is utter selfishness. They don’t give money to charity unless their tax accountant tells them it will help and they display characteristics like those above. They out for one person and only one person and that is themselves. They would sell their grandmother and rent out their wives to make more money. Ego is usually another characteristic. They are rich, they did it from nothing. They are the special gifted and talented one. Everything they touch turns to gold and they have that Midas touch. My fourth characteristic would be tirelessness. When it comes to getting more money they work ceaselessly and tirelessly to do so and they expect others to work with the same work ethic to make them money too – employees are worked and worked hard. Finally, the other characteristic is a good tax accountant. Someone who can make sure they don’t pay any taxes on all that dosh or, if they do, its not very much.

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I can’t think of a single rich person I have ever met that didn’t display these traits frankly. Even the heiress I met when a student as she was a lecturer at a college and involved in a similar field wore the same dress day in day out, drove an old beat up car, spent nothing but was constantly seeking her next dime….

I’m not anti rich people by the way. I’d love to have 5-6 million myself so I could relax and take some time for myself. I just do think that the way we try to emulate their super characteristics is ridiculous. Usually these so called characteristics are a myth and the real reason they got rich is because they used people, stole ideas and got lucky. Bill Gates didn’t think of windows, Richard Branson screwed his best friend over crying as he did so…. I do really think these people sell their soul for material wealth and power. They don’t write a contract with the Devil (usually anyway) but they do lose sight of their inner treasures and are deceived by material things. They sell themselves down the river….

Let’s stop trying to emulate these people. Putin is such a person – he is worth billions all stolen from the people that elected? him. Berlusconi, the just ousted Ukraine President, Gaddafi and on and on…. Richard Branson, Bill Gates and so on aren’t people to emulate but people to feel sorry for and to avoid like the plague quite honestly.

Just my view….