Amerika

I have written nothing socio-political in quite some time now, but when I read Brett’s excellent piece, Arise!, I was moved to do so again.

As a reader of Amerika, you already know that our world desires nothing more than to have us continue to fool ourselves, to lie to ourselves; in short, to remain lost. It, like Lucifer, would have us lost to faith, hope, and charity. The things that we fight in this world to maintain these qualities that keep us sane are adept at their game. It is not new to them, only to us as humans living in yet another society that finds itself in the last throes of its own failure. A failure brought about by rewriting history, so that the very tactics of our enemy do, in fact, seem new to us.

I began to look into the occult a few years ago. Staring into that abyss until it revealed itself to me, I found Solomon’s old adage to be truer than it had ever been to me: There is nothing new under the sun. Like most people living in America, I used to be lost as to the tactics of the enemy. I wondered in the same manner as most, asking questions like, “How can people not see where we’re headed? How can they not see what’s going on?” These questions are easily answered by looking into the tactics of the enemies our ancestors faced, which are the same enemies we face today. Human history is like a circular cycle moving across a linear timeline. Those who would have us prisoners within our own minds use the same tactics every time, and because of our nature as humans, we fall for the tactics over and again.

Leftism is, in my view, occult. It seeks to keep Truth hidden. It is unlike God, who desires that we know the Truth. Leftism is much akin to the original Mosaic Law in the sense that it creates systems that no human being can possibly live up to, as the original Law was intended to demonstrate. And rather than grant people the freedom of any grace at all, Leftism, under the guise of pseudo-humanitarian lies and virtue-signaling, hides and denies grace and forgiveness of human nature, instead demanding lockstep adherence to ideologies that reality cannot sustain. It’s the damned serpent, personified politically.

There is nothing new under the sun, indeed.

As I mentioned on the outset, I was moved to write again on such topics after reading Brett’s piece, Arise! In it, he concisely points out a few of the many lies of our society now, and reminds us that these are old lies, and shows us that there are paths that we can take to maintain our sanity, and find ways to pursue bettering ourselves in the midst of a world that would have us do nothing at all but remain comfortable and in adherence to its own Law, with no room for grace, forgiveness, human nature or reality. I will pull a couple of paragraphs from it for context:

Consider two people similar to those you may have met:

1. Sal sits on his couch, orders pizza, smokes weed every night, and then goes back to his job that he can do in a few hours and then slack off. He is having fun, and enjoys his life in the moment, but admits he has trepidation about the future. “No one is going to really remember me for anything,” he says. “I’m just having a good time, but I feel like I’m passing through, just letting the days slip through my fingers.”
2. Sam has more of a hard life. He gets up early, grinds on a vision of his own, then goes to a job that he can do in a few hours, then goes back home to work on his vision, which may or may not pay off. He spends the rest of his time on family and goes to bed exhausted. “I’m not really having fun,” he says. “I would say more that I am satisfied. I am where I should be, and the future will have even more options.”

For quite some time in my life, I sat somewhere between Sal and Sam, but far more so as Sal. I smoked a lot of weed, bought a lot of pizza, and slacked off a whole hell of a lot. I did this for many years. I’m what one might call an extremely talented idiot by nature. I can play the hell out of a guitar, write good stories and non-fiction, snap good photos, design for print and web, and a slew of other things, and I am an intelligent man, to boot. That being said, I am not very smart. I am a late bloomer with wisdom, and managing my own life has always been something that I have struggled mightily with. While I maintained my core principles that allowed me to not diverge completely into the vapid expanse of nothing that is our culture, I was doing nothing to better myself. To shore up the faith, hope, and charity that maintains my sanity.

Because of my nature, I have been able to slack most of my life while still accomplishing more than most in terms of my vocations and talent. While I have not had a cable or antenna signal for almost a decade, I still have spent countless hours in front of a computer screen or a TV, gorging myself numb on movies and select television series. Given the overuse of weed, entertainment, and comfort, I can say that I had a lot of fun during those years. But the enjoyment of sin is only for a season. And I view sin as not merely some easy to use excuse word, nor some simple affront to God that one smacks oneself over the head with a Bible for committing, then goes right back to it like a dog to its own vomit, but rather a multi-layered sickness that we willingly engage in repeatedly that offends both God and the very nature of our own souls.

In time, I found myself wandering a desert, looking for the things I’d never bothered to find while having so much goddamned fun. I noticed how many things in this world adversely affected me. I was a victim to emotional responses and internalizations like most in our world. I would rant on Twitter or my own blog, my attitude at work soured to a pernicious disdain for everything I was tasked with doing, and I became more insular with time, eventually quitting most of the things that I enjoyed that involved anyone besides myself. I was, to continue the comparison, under the Law of our leftist society. Without realizing it, for the most part. I saw myself as conservative, and though my views were certainly conservative-libertarian, I had no freedom at all, thus I numbed myself. I was running with the herd, pretending otherwise. But I was also a slacker in the herd, caught in the middle, and getting trampled often by my own stupidity.

The first steps of my awakening Brett was a part of, as we had many discussions via email about gaining control of the mind. As I said, I am a late bloomer, and the process took me quite a while, but in slow steps, I began to rebuild and shore things up. Slowly (sometimes I felt like it would never happen and I asked myself “why bother” many times) my life took to the change in small doses. I would fail, stand up, fail, stand up, fail, etc., until pieces began to fall into place. I became less Sal and more Sam.

Even then, my vision was too grandiose. I wanted to change the world. I didn’t realize that I did for many months, but when I began to see this, I changed my focus. While I do not wish to foist God on you (have faith in something Good and Decent, I care not where your faith resides), I must thank God for being willing to hear me and push me in stages until I became more ready with each passing week to see a new vision for my life.

I eventually stopped writing about socio-political issues. I stopped posting these views on Twitter, or any other forum. I stopped trying to change the world and changed myself instead. I opted for a much simpler and direct vision: to become a man that people remember. Sure, as I noted, I am talented, but so what? While art may be lasting, while it may be transcendent in many ways, I found myself ill-content with the notion of people remembering me simply because I can play a guitar well, weave a good tale, or design a nice brochure. I began to desire that they remember the man doing these things. While I have no hope of perfection on this plane of existence, I do desire that, in this mad culture where rationalizations and explanations of bad behavior are rampant, people remember that one guy who always wears jeans and a black shirt who speaks in plain, direct language, who does his best to not make excuses, and who does his best to live in a genuine manner, mistakes and all, and genuinely cares for others in ways that are tangible to them. I seek to please no man, but to, in some small manner, make a difference in their lives.

Counting on people in our culture is almost impossible, because the lies of our enemy have cornered us into believing that our only feasible option of being heard is by being part of the herd. But this is simply a damned lie; one of a deadly nature. Like the serpent in the garden (and all the ilk that mimic that brilliant but evil creature), the Luciferian tactics of our modernity have poisoned us with lies that contain the most terrifying of truths within them. To be apart — to be the other — terrifies us, as we are created to be communal creatures (not to be confused with a hippie commune, mind you). Thus, it is a relatable lie and easy to fall for as community creatures. Yet the truth that this poisonous lie hides from us is the utter terror (and death in some form) that we will encounter when (not if) the herd turns on us, and runs roughshod over us. Thus, most in our modern culture have no innate desire to be the sort of person that one can depend on, because this requires personal responsibility and the digestion and internalization of Truth, a notion that is indeed terrifying to the herd. And, so while I fail like anyone else, I have a constant vision that I maintain wherein I desire to be someone in people’s lives that they can count on to be genuine, direct, and as dependable as possible. Someone that they remember.

Humans in a herd are much like animals, and we’ve all seen the stories of wild animals wherein some human entered their lives at the precise moment where that human was needed most, and that animal remembered that human above all others, often ignoring its own instincts concerning the danger of the bipedal superpredator to show affection. In the world of humans, perhaps we can call it “planting seeds.” While my vision was once grandiose and ultimately self-serving, in that I wanted to expose the lies of the enemy in a very public manner (to get the credit for being just so danged enlightened!), I now desire more than anything to affect the lives of people I meet daily by planting seeds that hopefully later germinate into some kind of hope in their lives. Because I have hope. I have faith. And, slowly, I develop more charity. But one check of a Facebook public timeline shows how little these qualities, which keep us sane, exist in our modern culture. Our modernity has created a hopeless herd, fenced in by mesh, by ridiculously transparent and idiotic ideologies, but like the wild animal, the herd sees only a barrier because it has no hope, no vision, no purpose.

I can only hope that whatever legacy I might leave one day is littered, at least a little bit, with the remembrance of that guy who always wore a black shirt and jeans and played guitar as being someone that they knew they could count on to be genuine with them. A man who stood there and kept his ground, if perhaps quietly, while the herd tried to trample them.

One final note: my revised vision of what sort of legacy I might leave behind in this world has resulted in no small amount of benefit to my mind, body, and spirit. I have a corporate, make-work job that I endure each day, and in this vision I have found meaning for that job. Like Sam, I cannot say that my life is always exactly fun, but there is purpose in it now. As a friend once told me when it comes to matters of integrity and personal responsibility, “We often have to do the things that we don’t naturally want to do in order to find peace.” He was not wrong.

Arise, as Brett told us. There is a selfishness that desires to make others our footstools, but there is also a better, useful selfishness that understands the ultimate answer to “why bother” is because it is worth it in the long run to our very soul.

Carey Henderson works a corporate day job. In his spare time, he reads, writes fiction, plays in his band, and tries his best not to become the insular hermit he once was. You can find him on Facebook and he and his band, Junction Road, on YouTube. He still enjoys the herb from time to time, but as it is intended to be enjoyed, not as a numbing agent.

Tags: corruption, evil, occult, why bother