The Prison Gods' Union
Oprah.
I use this metaphor a lot lately, because it works for me but I think it doesn't work for a lot of the people who hear it.
So here, this is what it means to me when I say "Oprah" or the "Oprah" mentality. It's not her as a personality, I like her media presence personally, and I think she's done a lot of good work in raising people up, giving them ways to go to improve themselves; it's what she hasn't done and hasn't said, either because she's not allowed to or because it isn't sound financially, and the shape that that's left her "audience" in, that makes that a negative term. It's the audience really anyway, not her.
I see this huge flock of disembodied spirits all earnest and realizing that enlightenment comes in stages and it's a long hard road. But it's like Hawaii, the way I see Hawaii, now. People go there and feel they've found their home place, their spirit center, it's where they belong. And there's nothing in the experience to say it's contrived, artificial, created by the same hands that makes Las Vegas the hedonistic center of darker more wicked pleasure-seekers.
Hawaii was destroyed, the real one, the living one, the place when it was truly in flower, that place was paved over and rebuilt to make your stay a lovely one, and there's nothing in your awareness of it to point to that.
It's like that around here too, the pleasant warm Central California coast, small towns filling up with LA transplants who find a touch of paradise in the blank canvas of good weather and land that's expensive enough the poor and criminal classes are isolated into little pockets along with the service population. And there's nothing in that awareness to point to what came before.
The brutal and bloody campaign against the original "owners", the real people who really lived here and were driven from their homes and broken into slavery or the more degrading compromises of assimilation. There's no undoing that story, and ignoring it just makes whatever else you do hollow.
That's not isolated, those are just two obvious examples close to home for me. Human history is like that, being human is being that, our awareness of who we are has been dissipated through the continuous bombardment of flattering illusion and cathartic pageantry.
So on a national scale this majestic herd of mostly middle-aged women, with the power to overnight make an author's fortune or surround a picked-out villain with a seige of bad vibrations, live in that same past-less country. All new, all optimistic, and because of that disconnection from the past, all untrue.
There is a way through I think. But it's not in any of the directions being offered. It's why this is called what it is. There's a parasitic thing attached to your rising awareness, and in that it may be better that you not take on the past as a responsible heir, because you'll bring that thing with you.
Be nothing but the present moment's children, so that when the future really does arrive we can be done with all this once and for all.
