The Saccharine Prison

You are at the echo's end of a long tunnel of hollow, and powers unimaginable distances away call to you, though their voices are faint. You are trapped in a world of illusion, surrounded by Utgard, endlessly distracted, and the voices are calling you back to presence, to the deep longings that rise up from the earth, to break the saccharine menagerie and come out of the false-trance into something far more entrancing.

You are so surrounded by bullshit you don't even see it anymore, you've acclimated to it, you'd defend it from those trying to haul it off and restore a little sanitation.

Without that sanitation, without wiping free the bullshit, how will you ever know sooth? And without sooth, you cannot ever have a connection to the Gods, beyond some monkeybrain comic-book mind-chatter.

This means it is a religious imperative to confront propaganda and pierce through it. Political, social, psychological, and anti-environmental propaganda that surrounds you on all sides, psyops and total immersion in public relations campaigns, which obscure your view and paint the prison with false colors. Come to your senses and reinhabit your wits! (Those wits anxiety-boding has scared you out of, to lull you into illusion.)

Wits : sense, common sense, awareness, mental dexterity and agility, poetic ability to see through literalism and appreciate irony, uncompromising but ultimately humane humor.

Only your wits can break you out of the saccharine prison. If you ever want to taste honey, real honey, you must break free of the saccharine prison. For that prison-agroindustrial complex is poisoning the planet and threatening the mothers of honey, beloved bees.

Your escape begins with tiny flashes of awareness in the dark, surrounded by a normality which shakes your head and asks what that nonsense was all about. But will you listen? Can you believe in an integrity deeper than the systematic cynicism about you? (Have you learned the art of the economy of cynicism, where you are cynical where it matters, so you can retain your idealism where it matters even more?) It's difficult to believe the little sparks of awareness, because they can make one feel that most of one's life is virtually drowning in dreck --- which it is, and that feels desperate. Easier to dismiss such desperation and go back to the comfortably numb, that near-diabolical parody of moderation and reasonableness that keeps us trapped in the saccharine prison by convincing us that all exit signs are extremist and unreasonable. Those shouting "fire!" are certainly just troublemakers. But then there's that troubling smell of smoke ...

It takes practice. You think you've awakened only to find yourself nodding off again. You have to resist the state of permanent narcolepsy that resides in the saccharine prison, linking aware-moment with aware-moment, and clinging to your sense of aliveness. It's hard for the Gods to guide you in this prison, so one of your first priorities ought be, escape. You've forgotten it's a jail. It just seems normal. Yet there goes your life ... tick, tock, hiss the sands of the hourglass ... while you are caught in triviality within triviality, bullshit distraction wrapped in red tape after hogwash drama designed for those autistic to the pulse of the living earth ...

Touch the soil. Insist on sprouting grass. Keep the million-mile channel down the long, hollow tunnel open, and listen.

And dare to believe what Gods crazy to your fellow inmates --- crazy for their unbelievable integrity and grim optimism --- have to say.