American society has fallen under a series of collective madnesses, all of them perpetuated by the people who profit from them. This is all quite out in the open, but people have been conditioned not to look too closely. All of these mass beliefs fall under the rubric of Buy Now, Pay Later.
The republic has been financialized for a couple generations now, to the benefit of a handful of profiteers and robber barons, and the can has been kicked down the road throughout. But eventually the bill comes due, and we are in that time now. We hear a noise outside at four in the morning, look out the window, and see the repo man making off with our pre-owned leased Beemer.
The long project of the money class has been to suck up all the profits while making the peons eat the shit sandwich. They have been enormously successful in this project so far, and the COVID crisis has served to be (again to use the industry jargon) a force multiplier. Four trillion has been dumped into their coffers, like a dead hooker into the Hudson River after a Don Junior coke rampage.
To offer up a comparison, four trillion would cover student loan debt and infrastructure repair, and still have plenty left over to bribe the fossil fuel companies to shift to renewables without sucking and squeezing every goddamned drop of oil out of the ground.
The myth that wealthy people have pushed on everyone else is that they're smart and you're dumb, they work hard and you don't work hard enough. What we're finding out -- some of us a bit slower on the uptake than others, but all of us finding out the hard way eventually -- is that they're mostly luckier than everyone else. And a lot of that luck comes from the self-reinforcing dynamic that wealth imparts to those lucky few.
There's an economy-of-scale mathematically baked into net-worth levels of money, which are impossible to achieve from the bottom rungs of the ladder, and almost impossible to lose from the top rungs, unless you're just a complete dipshit wastrel cokehead. For every Michael Jackson that you read about, spiraling hilariously into debt thanks to the expenses of keeping a private zoo and paying off victims, there's a Paris Hilton or a Wyatt Koch, a completely useless person who never worked a second for their inherited fortune, who does nothing but indulge their base instincts every moment of every day, and still manages to remain solvent.
Now, instead of doing the human thing and simply securing their wealth while leaving the peons alone, they decided that most of everything is just not enough. They want it all. And Trump is just the guy to get it for them, because he uniquely understands what rich people want and what poor dipshits want. And he's more than willing to gull the latter group into helping him dump it all into the pockets of the former group.
This is the logical outcome of fifty years of Republican and conservative poison permeating the culture, the airwaves, public discourse. Trump is the culmination of this, not the cause, the symptom and not the disease, etc., etc.
But one of the other symptoms of the disease is the liberal teleology that the Republican/conservative base has been tricked and bamboozled into their voting patterns. If only they knew, blah blah blah. Well, don't worry, they know. They know what's best for them, and they fucking hate you more.
It's like the recent "lockdown protesters," the neckbearded goobers roaming the state halls with their dick replacements, the big revelation that it's a big astroturf operation, like the tea party crap from a decade ago. These assholes aren't taking a fucking check from Betsy DeVos. They're doing it for free, and they're more than happy to. Don't kid yourself. This is not about money or policy, or any concern about contracting the plague and taking it home to Grandma. This is about fuck you. This is about horrible people doing what horrible people do.
I encourage them to do it all -- take the hydroxychloroquine, drink bleach, congregate without masks on random sidewalks to harass passersby and hapless mediots. Crowd themselves into bars and churches and restaurants. Take Captain Clorox's medical advice along with his financial advice, see how that works out for you on both fronts. If I encountered someone who thought that drinking bleach had curative properties, I would seriously try to convince them that drinking twice as much would be twice as effective.
You know the real problem with this fucking country? There are no longer appropriate consequences for being stupid. People used to have to keep their wits about them and pay attention. Not anymore. Again, if you're the sort of dope that seriously turns to Donald Fucking Trump for any sort of advice about anything, you deserve every bit of what you get, good and hard. No sympathy, no mercy. If you needed yet another reason to stay the hell away from your Facebook uncle, there ya go. Just step back and watch the fun. Yes, it sucks that they will take some innocents with them, but it's not like there's anything you can do to dissuade them anyway. They are determined to act out their performative psychoses.
We like to tell ourselves that these fools are merely statistical outliers, a small but extremely vocal minority. Okay. What does it say about this huge country, with its enormous population and $15 trillion economy and its sophisticated systems of communication, that a supposedly tiny sliver of angry morons can so consistently drive the modes of discussion? What does it say when people who were previously out on the margins of extremism have been mainstreamed so thoroughly?
When I call those people losers, it's not really to be a mean asshole, although I definitely am a mean asshole, and I make no apologies for it. But it's really to emphasize that they have no real agenda, no goals, no ambitions, not for themselves or their communities or their state. They just want to wave their dicks and whine that they can't get a haircut or go to Red Lobster.
So? Fucking go already, please. Get your riblets and your shitty beer and your got-damned haircut. The rest of us will be watching patiently, eating the proverbial popcorn, biding our time until nature finally has its due, without the constant interference of civilization. We don't create or innovate anymore, we just hustle each other and feebly attempt to mitigate self-inflicted damage.
And the bottom line is that only a failed state, a hollowed-out husk, would allow such people to dominate the debate and draw the lines of discussion. Only a polluted media ecosystem that is wholly in the tank would continue to give a handful of slapdicks a daily soapbox for their imaginary grievances. They could have been talking to doctors and nurses, photographing mass graves and refrigerator trucks stacked with bodies. A few have done those things; most have been content to sit there and faithfully transcribe the lies, as always.
I don't know about you, but the battle going on my brain right now, as we all watch multiple cities descend into violence and subversion and fear, the collective rage of the oppressed being sabotaged by undercover cops and white-power operatives salted into the crowds to start the window-breaking and the looting, the battle for me is no longer trying to figure out how we can "save" the nation, but whether it's even worth saving at this point.
Save what, exactly? A corrupt system where psychopathic billionaires bleed the masses dry and rent thugs to keep them from reacting to it? A series of financialized rackets designed to preserve and heighten wealth inequality and reject economic justice, and a political system designed to buttress all that?
Look at all the ugliness that has taken place just in the last few days, the chief executive stoking fear by talking shit like a dime-store Ceausescu, openly licking his chops at the prospects of siccing his mutts -- human and canine -- on peaceful protesters. He's a fucking piece of shit, a deformed soul in a deformed body with a smooth brain of oatmeal and dementia and unearned resentment, and forty percent of the people in this country still support all of it.
This country needs a reckoning and an enema, both on massive scales, and it beggars the imagination to see how either of those things happen. If things get too weird, the oligarchs will probably be happy to let Trump dangle and Biden win, if only because they can get nearly the same cut of the action under Biden, without all the grief and drama and toxic stupidity. And they can spend the next four years grooming Josh Hawley or Tom Cotton, while triumphant Dems pat themselves on the back and get complacent all over again.
At best, the angry sidewalk chumps want things to "go back" to what they used to be. That is no longer possible nor desirable. Anything written about them that doesn't frame it as such is doing a disservice to them and to the rest of us. Playing into their delusions and self-pitying anger does no one any good. There is nothing to discuss with them or convince them of, because they are not there for that. It's just a prolonged temper tantrum with guns. Maybe law enforcement oughta, you know, start enforcing the fucking law, before this gets out of hand. I gotta dump my keys and phone and shit into a tray to go into a courthouse, but these assholes can take long guns in there? Bullshit.
You have to recognize such people for what they really are, and decide and act accordingly. Not just at the ballot box, but every day. Your ballot is important, but not nearly as important as your wallet.
Because I'm a Rush fan, I am fond of paraphrasing Freewill and saying something along the lines of choosing not to decide still counts as a choice. That's true enough, but the stakes are high and getting higher, and it seems that one close corollary to that argument is this: if you choose not to decide, someone else will step in and make a decision for you. How's that sound?
As they walked through the doorway of the room at the top of the great pyramid, a thousand or five thousand steps high or more, Aapo felt a thought unbidden lurking in the back of his mind.
This is the weirdest dream I have ever had.
This is not a dream. The jaguar looked at him, head cocked slightly, eyes blazing from gold to orange.
Aapo looked around the room, which seemed somewhat larger on the inside than it had appeared from the outside. The room was suffused with a green light that had no apparent source, illuminating the walls, which were bare, and the floor, which had an array of various mundane objects strewn about -- work gloves, a ring of keys, a rechargeable driver, a wallet, a photo of a family, dishes, a remote control. Aapo bent to retrieve the photo and it shimmered as his hand went through it. He stooped lower to get a closer look at the people in the photo -- a man, a woman, two young children -- but did not recognize any of them.
If it's not a dream, then where am I?
You are in the bardo, the plane between planes. Your previous visit to the world has ended. You are waiting for your next visit. We will see if you learned anything from before that you can take with you into the next one.
Aapo struggled to take this all in. I'm dead?
You have lived and died many times. This is just the most recent time. Do you recall anything about any of your past visits?
Long pause. No. Nothing at all.
That is not surprising. At most, we may see something that you can learn from. Put your hand on my shoulder.
I thought I wasn't supposed to touch you.
Well, you're not supposed to pet me. But I may be able to help you see your pasts with more clarity.
He reached tentatively to put his right hand on the mighty cat's left shoulder, which was at Aapo's chest level anyway.
Immediately a series of images and scenes swirled and converged in his brain. A bartender in what appeared to be a Wild West saloon. A military pilot miles in the air in the cockpit of a plane of some vintage, pressing a button and looking at a landscape below, colored tiles suddenly in full bloom. A farmer in a field, behind a plow being pulled by two yoked oxen. A medium-sized dog in a filthy alley. A woman in what appeared to be a laboratory, wearing goggles and a lab smock. A young girl on a boat in the middle of a large body of water, no land in sight, crying for her mother as the storm and the sea overtake the craft. A chicken in a large, crowded hutch on a farm.
More vividly: a man, looking much like the reflection Aapo saw in the stream, operating a large earthmover, pushing dirt, dumping concrete into enormous pads and foundations, erecting high fences and walls topped with giant coils of razor wire. He wore a blue work shirt with a small oval crest on the left chest that read "Mike."
Aapo could see Mike continuing with these various building projects, all of which seemed to be for structures that were meant to confine or repel. Then he saw Mike in a nice suburban backyard, sun out, ice chest and barbecue grill on a large wooden deck, neatly manicured lawn below. An attractive woman brought Mike a bottle of Michelob. Mike took the bottle with an appreciative swig, kissed the woman and playfully patted her ass, and flipped the burgers on the grill.
This looks familiar, he murmured. The cat rumbled in response.
Another scene of Mike sitting in his truck in an empty parking lot, dusk falling off to the right, an abandoned KMart in the background. Mike held a mostly empty bottle of Wild Turkey, and fiddled with the radio knobs with his free hand. He looked despondent, exhausted. A gun lay in the passenger seat of the truck.
Mike and his wife fighting, Mike scolding his kids, Mike pouring more concrete, Mike playing with his kids, directing work crews on the construction site, laying in bed with the wife, drinking in his truck, uncoiling razor wire, mowing his lawn, yelling at the wife and kids, standing in front of what appeared to be a freshly constructed penitentiary, on and on and on.
I used to build things. Buildings.
The jaguar looked at him with its flat gold eyes. Prisons. Walls. Detention facilities. You were a construction foreman for a company that solicited contract work for certain types of structures.
Nothing else? Houses, schools, playgrounds? Office buildings? Skyscrapers, museums?
No.
Well, I had a family to support.
Everyone does.
What was I supposed to do?
The cat made a gesture that almost looked like a shrug. What do you think you were supposed to do?
So you're going to punish me for what I did in my previous life, is that it?
If it was up to me, I would have punished you already.
Aapo/Mike was taken aback by that blunt assertion. What -- why?
It's nothing personal. In fact, as far as individuals of your kind go, you seem to be not so bad. But collectively, your kind destroys much more than you create or nurture, either for material gain or just for the joy of destroying. Your kind have all but exterminated my children, and the children of the other spirits. You kill and take, and enslave others to help you take more, and are offended when anyone proposes that you might at least clean up your mess, return the place to what it was before you came and took.
But I didn't do those things.
No, not you. Someone like you. Many someones like you. It doesn't matter. It is not my role to judge and punish you. That is the role of the judges.
What judges?
You will meet them at some point. Soon.
How will they punish me?
It depends on what you can show you learned in the bardo. You can go back as a human with a bit more enlightenment of your role in the great game, or as a dung beetle, or something in between.
Aapo/Mike looked again over the "items" along the floor, lingering on the photo and the wallet, the keys, eyes flickering past the gun a bit more quickly. He noticed a small hole in the far right corner of the room, where there appeared to be a set of steps descending.
Where does that go?
Depends.
Are you going to keep doing that?
Look, my role here is not to judge your previous actions, nor to give you all the answers for the next round on the Great Wheel. I am here to show you possible paths. You can draw your own conclusions about your prior actions and motivations, and decide for yourself what you wish to take forward with you.
But I don't know.
Most don't. Life is complicated, and most would rather not make the effort to sort out those complexities. But that affects the outcome, in the judges' view. Either you are willing to learn and apply, or not.
Aapo/Mike furrowed his brow. I don't know what I did wrong. But I don't want to be a dung beetle.
That's unlikely. Those who made a life out of preying on the vulnerable, victimizing the helpless, those are usually the ones who get that level of punishment. Mostly it's because they are never repentant.
Really?
Really. They don't think they did anything wrong. They always claim that they were conforming to some set of "natural laws" that always just happens to favor them and oppress everyone else. They don't think there's anything to learn. So they get to start back from the bottom.
How many lives does it take to get to the top?
There's no set sequence, and there isn't really a "top" for that matter. For most it's a few steps up, a couple steps back, over and over again. Some reach enlightenment in a dozen or two dozen lives, some take hundreds, some never get there.
How many have I had?
Hard to tell. It doesn't matter anyway. Don't worry about the "top," just concern yourself with learning a little more each time, and sharing it with whoever you can.
That sounds like a religious cult.
No. It doesn't mean you go door-to-door proselytizing. It means you identify what is true and correct for yourself, and live that truth consistently. In fact, it's not really about right or wrong, or good or evil. It's mostly about recognizing cause and effect.
The jaguar continued: Humans think that the Universe moves toward some ideal of "justice" that they invent for themselves. It does no such thing. The Universe moves toward its own balance, through entropy and decay and attrition. Every organism, every inert object, every elemental molecule and every grain of sand, is deployed toward that end. It is up to the judges to determine in the bardo whether an individual has come closer to that understanding, or not.
Aapo/Mike furrowed and squinted again, clearly uncertain of what this meant.
Think about the ones who become dung beetles, all the things they have to do in order to earn that punishment. They can't do everything themselves. They need others willing to help them.
Help them?
Consider the worst of the worst. Emperors, kings, tyrants throughout your history. The demented and sadistic. Countless innocents died because of them, but they themselves killed very few people at most. Others did almost all the dirty work for them. They could have said no, but didn't. Maybe out of fear, maybe out of greed or power or lust or ideology. But they did it all the same.
Now Aapo/Mike was confused, frustrated, defensive. Are you saying that I'm responsible for what they did, because of the projects I worked on?
Maybe not as much as the people who profited from the suffering of others and directed you to do the work, but yes, they couldn't have done it without you.
Someone else would have taken that job.
Ek Balam chuffed. Yes, and I would be having this conversation with them, and a different conversation with you. Are you saying that the only things you were good at in your previous life were dumping mud and stretching wire? That's what you wanted to do with the time you were given?
No. I loved my wife. I loved my children. I'm sure I had things I enjoyed outside of work.
Yes, but you also saw the anger and frustration you carried with you. Where do you think that came from?
I don't know.
Yes you do.
Aapo/Mike looked over again at the dark descending staircase, unlit and forbidding, yet strangely beckoning at the same time. He walked over to the head of the stairs and peered down. There was a little bit of light after all, a dull glow that did not reveal much, but at least made the steps visible enough to navigate.
Where does this lead?
Down into you, your previous life, your lives before that, all the thoughts, hopes, dreams, fears, motivations, schemes, desires you have ever had throughout all of your incarnations. Each layer down another previous life, each a maze unto itself.
Can I go down there?
Can you?
Aapo/Mike rolled his eyes and looked at Ek Balam sternly. You're being cryptic again.
No, I mean it. Do you really want to do that? Do you really think it's necessary?
Will it help?
It can. For some it can grant enlightenment. Others are driven into madness. Consider the ramifications seriously before making the decision to go. You might not be able to find your way back out. It comes down to your ability and will to see things as they are, instead of how you want them to be. All of those things that comprise your existences, they are each like separate entities, hungry ghosts seeking to justify themselves to you. They will trick you if they can, and they will try.
There was a protracted pause between them, dead silence. No animal sounds outside; indeed, aside from the doorway behind the jaguar leading back out to the top platform of the pyramid, there was no indication that there even was anything outside this strange little room, with its sourceless glow and hollow images of personal items laid randomly around the floor.
Where is my family? Are they still alive?
That is not your concern. They are not here with you, so chances are they are still in the upper realm. Or they are simply not in your jati, their souls do not travel in the same small group as yours. You may have different things that you must reckon with than they do.
How did I die?
You have to see that for yourself. It is not for me to tell you such things. You may not want the answer.
He lowered his right foot down from the top, toward the first step, slowly and then with more certainty. I have to see. I have to find out.
It is better if you know what you are looking for before you set foot in there.
He set the next foot down to the next step, looked back over his shoulder at the great rumbling beast. I think I know. I hope I'm right. I wish you could come with me. Another step down.
I think you know that I cannot do that. Another step. He could no longer see the jaguar.
Yes, I know. Only the top of his head was still visible.
Be safe. Stay alert. I will be here when you return.
Ek Balam lowered his body to the floor, laid his head on his paws, and listened to the echoes of the slow footfalls down the steps.
The republic has been financialized for a couple generations now, to the benefit of a handful of profiteers and robber barons, and the can has been kicked down the road throughout. But eventually the bill comes due, and we are in that time now. We hear a noise outside at four in the morning, look out the window, and see the repo man making off with our pre-owned leased Beemer.
The long project of the money class has been to suck up all the profits while making the peons eat the shit sandwich. They have been enormously successful in this project so far, and the COVID crisis has served to be (again to use the industry jargon) a force multiplier. Four trillion has been dumped into their coffers, like a dead hooker into the Hudson River after a Don Junior coke rampage.
To offer up a comparison, four trillion would cover student loan debt and infrastructure repair, and still have plenty left over to bribe the fossil fuel companies to shift to renewables without sucking and squeezing every goddamned drop of oil out of the ground.
The myth that wealthy people have pushed on everyone else is that they're smart and you're dumb, they work hard and you don't work hard enough. What we're finding out -- some of us a bit slower on the uptake than others, but all of us finding out the hard way eventually -- is that they're mostly luckier than everyone else. And a lot of that luck comes from the self-reinforcing dynamic that wealth imparts to those lucky few.
There's an economy-of-scale mathematically baked into net-worth levels of money, which are impossible to achieve from the bottom rungs of the ladder, and almost impossible to lose from the top rungs, unless you're just a complete dipshit wastrel cokehead. For every Michael Jackson that you read about, spiraling hilariously into debt thanks to the expenses of keeping a private zoo and paying off victims, there's a Paris Hilton or a Wyatt Koch, a completely useless person who never worked a second for their inherited fortune, who does nothing but indulge their base instincts every moment of every day, and still manages to remain solvent.
Now, instead of doing the human thing and simply securing their wealth while leaving the peons alone, they decided that most of everything is just not enough. They want it all. And Trump is just the guy to get it for them, because he uniquely understands what rich people want and what poor dipshits want. And he's more than willing to gull the latter group into helping him dump it all into the pockets of the former group.
This is the logical outcome of fifty years of Republican and conservative poison permeating the culture, the airwaves, public discourse. Trump is the culmination of this, not the cause, the symptom and not the disease, etc., etc.
But one of the other symptoms of the disease is the liberal teleology that the Republican/conservative base has been tricked and bamboozled into their voting patterns. If only they knew, blah blah blah. Well, don't worry, they know. They know what's best for them, and they fucking hate you more.
It's like the recent "lockdown protesters," the neckbearded goobers roaming the state halls with their dick replacements, the big revelation that it's a big astroturf operation, like the tea party crap from a decade ago. These assholes aren't taking a fucking check from Betsy DeVos. They're doing it for free, and they're more than happy to. Don't kid yourself. This is not about money or policy, or any concern about contracting the plague and taking it home to Grandma. This is about fuck you. This is about horrible people doing what horrible people do.
I encourage them to do it all -- take the hydroxychloroquine, drink bleach, congregate without masks on random sidewalks to harass passersby and hapless mediots. Crowd themselves into bars and churches and restaurants. Take Captain Clorox's medical advice along with his financial advice, see how that works out for you on both fronts. If I encountered someone who thought that drinking bleach had curative properties, I would seriously try to convince them that drinking twice as much would be twice as effective.
You know the real problem with this fucking country? There are no longer appropriate consequences for being stupid. People used to have to keep their wits about them and pay attention. Not anymore. Again, if you're the sort of dope that seriously turns to Donald Fucking Trump for any sort of advice about anything, you deserve every bit of what you get, good and hard. No sympathy, no mercy. If you needed yet another reason to stay the hell away from your Facebook uncle, there ya go. Just step back and watch the fun. Yes, it sucks that they will take some innocents with them, but it's not like there's anything you can do to dissuade them anyway. They are determined to act out their performative psychoses.
We like to tell ourselves that these fools are merely statistical outliers, a small but extremely vocal minority. Okay. What does it say about this huge country, with its enormous population and $15 trillion economy and its sophisticated systems of communication, that a supposedly tiny sliver of angry morons can so consistently drive the modes of discussion? What does it say when people who were previously out on the margins of extremism have been mainstreamed so thoroughly?
When I call those people losers, it's not really to be a mean asshole, although I definitely am a mean asshole, and I make no apologies for it. But it's really to emphasize that they have no real agenda, no goals, no ambitions, not for themselves or their communities or their state. They just want to wave their dicks and whine that they can't get a haircut or go to Red Lobster.
So? Fucking go already, please. Get your riblets and your shitty beer and your got-damned haircut. The rest of us will be watching patiently, eating the proverbial popcorn, biding our time until nature finally has its due, without the constant interference of civilization. We don't create or innovate anymore, we just hustle each other and feebly attempt to mitigate self-inflicted damage.
And the bottom line is that only a failed state, a hollowed-out husk, would allow such people to dominate the debate and draw the lines of discussion. Only a polluted media ecosystem that is wholly in the tank would continue to give a handful of slapdicks a daily soapbox for their imaginary grievances. They could have been talking to doctors and nurses, photographing mass graves and refrigerator trucks stacked with bodies. A few have done those things; most have been content to sit there and faithfully transcribe the lies, as always.
I don't know about you, but the battle going on my brain right now, as we all watch multiple cities descend into violence and subversion and fear, the collective rage of the oppressed being sabotaged by undercover cops and white-power operatives salted into the crowds to start the window-breaking and the looting, the battle for me is no longer trying to figure out how we can "save" the nation, but whether it's even worth saving at this point.
Save what, exactly? A corrupt system where psychopathic billionaires bleed the masses dry and rent thugs to keep them from reacting to it? A series of financialized rackets designed to preserve and heighten wealth inequality and reject economic justice, and a political system designed to buttress all that?
Look at all the ugliness that has taken place just in the last few days, the chief executive stoking fear by talking shit like a dime-store Ceausescu, openly licking his chops at the prospects of siccing his mutts -- human and canine -- on peaceful protesters. He's a fucking piece of shit, a deformed soul in a deformed body with a smooth brain of oatmeal and dementia and unearned resentment, and forty percent of the people in this country still support all of it.
This country needs a reckoning and an enema, both on massive scales, and it beggars the imagination to see how either of those things happen. If things get too weird, the oligarchs will probably be happy to let Trump dangle and Biden win, if only because they can get nearly the same cut of the action under Biden, without all the grief and drama and toxic stupidity. And they can spend the next four years grooming Josh Hawley or Tom Cotton, while triumphant Dems pat themselves on the back and get complacent all over again.
At best, the angry sidewalk chumps want things to "go back" to what they used to be. That is no longer possible nor desirable. Anything written about them that doesn't frame it as such is doing a disservice to them and to the rest of us. Playing into their delusions and self-pitying anger does no one any good. There is nothing to discuss with them or convince them of, because they are not there for that. It's just a prolonged temper tantrum with guns. Maybe law enforcement oughta, you know, start enforcing the fucking law, before this gets out of hand. I gotta dump my keys and phone and shit into a tray to go into a courthouse, but these assholes can take long guns in there? Bullshit.
You have to recognize such people for what they really are, and decide and act accordingly. Not just at the ballot box, but every day. Your ballot is important, but not nearly as important as your wallet.
Because I'm a Rush fan, I am fond of paraphrasing Freewill and saying something along the lines of choosing not to decide still counts as a choice. That's true enough, but the stakes are high and getting higher, and it seems that one close corollary to that argument is this: if you choose not to decide, someone else will step in and make a decision for you. How's that sound?
As they walked through the doorway of the room at the top of the great pyramid, a thousand or five thousand steps high or more, Aapo felt a thought unbidden lurking in the back of his mind.
This is the weirdest dream I have ever had.
This is not a dream. The jaguar looked at him, head cocked slightly, eyes blazing from gold to orange.
Aapo looked around the room, which seemed somewhat larger on the inside than it had appeared from the outside. The room was suffused with a green light that had no apparent source, illuminating the walls, which were bare, and the floor, which had an array of various mundane objects strewn about -- work gloves, a ring of keys, a rechargeable driver, a wallet, a photo of a family, dishes, a remote control. Aapo bent to retrieve the photo and it shimmered as his hand went through it. He stooped lower to get a closer look at the people in the photo -- a man, a woman, two young children -- but did not recognize any of them.
If it's not a dream, then where am I?
You are in the bardo, the plane between planes. Your previous visit to the world has ended. You are waiting for your next visit. We will see if you learned anything from before that you can take with you into the next one.
Aapo struggled to take this all in. I'm dead?
You have lived and died many times. This is just the most recent time. Do you recall anything about any of your past visits?
Long pause. No. Nothing at all.
That is not surprising. At most, we may see something that you can learn from. Put your hand on my shoulder.
I thought I wasn't supposed to touch you.
Well, you're not supposed to pet me. But I may be able to help you see your pasts with more clarity.
He reached tentatively to put his right hand on the mighty cat's left shoulder, which was at Aapo's chest level anyway.
Immediately a series of images and scenes swirled and converged in his brain. A bartender in what appeared to be a Wild West saloon. A military pilot miles in the air in the cockpit of a plane of some vintage, pressing a button and looking at a landscape below, colored tiles suddenly in full bloom. A farmer in a field, behind a plow being pulled by two yoked oxen. A medium-sized dog in a filthy alley. A woman in what appeared to be a laboratory, wearing goggles and a lab smock. A young girl on a boat in the middle of a large body of water, no land in sight, crying for her mother as the storm and the sea overtake the craft. A chicken in a large, crowded hutch on a farm.
More vividly: a man, looking much like the reflection Aapo saw in the stream, operating a large earthmover, pushing dirt, dumping concrete into enormous pads and foundations, erecting high fences and walls topped with giant coils of razor wire. He wore a blue work shirt with a small oval crest on the left chest that read "Mike."
Aapo could see Mike continuing with these various building projects, all of which seemed to be for structures that were meant to confine or repel. Then he saw Mike in a nice suburban backyard, sun out, ice chest and barbecue grill on a large wooden deck, neatly manicured lawn below. An attractive woman brought Mike a bottle of Michelob. Mike took the bottle with an appreciative swig, kissed the woman and playfully patted her ass, and flipped the burgers on the grill.
This looks familiar, he murmured. The cat rumbled in response.
Another scene of Mike sitting in his truck in an empty parking lot, dusk falling off to the right, an abandoned KMart in the background. Mike held a mostly empty bottle of Wild Turkey, and fiddled with the radio knobs with his free hand. He looked despondent, exhausted. A gun lay in the passenger seat of the truck.
Mike and his wife fighting, Mike scolding his kids, Mike pouring more concrete, Mike playing with his kids, directing work crews on the construction site, laying in bed with the wife, drinking in his truck, uncoiling razor wire, mowing his lawn, yelling at the wife and kids, standing in front of what appeared to be a freshly constructed penitentiary, on and on and on.
I used to build things. Buildings.
The jaguar looked at him with its flat gold eyes. Prisons. Walls. Detention facilities. You were a construction foreman for a company that solicited contract work for certain types of structures.
Nothing else? Houses, schools, playgrounds? Office buildings? Skyscrapers, museums?
No.
Well, I had a family to support.
Everyone does.
What was I supposed to do?
The cat made a gesture that almost looked like a shrug. What do you think you were supposed to do?
So you're going to punish me for what I did in my previous life, is that it?
If it was up to me, I would have punished you already.
Aapo/Mike was taken aback by that blunt assertion. What -- why?
It's nothing personal. In fact, as far as individuals of your kind go, you seem to be not so bad. But collectively, your kind destroys much more than you create or nurture, either for material gain or just for the joy of destroying. Your kind have all but exterminated my children, and the children of the other spirits. You kill and take, and enslave others to help you take more, and are offended when anyone proposes that you might at least clean up your mess, return the place to what it was before you came and took.
But I didn't do those things.
No, not you. Someone like you. Many someones like you. It doesn't matter. It is not my role to judge and punish you. That is the role of the judges.
What judges?
You will meet them at some point. Soon.
How will they punish me?
It depends on what you can show you learned in the bardo. You can go back as a human with a bit more enlightenment of your role in the great game, or as a dung beetle, or something in between.
Aapo/Mike looked again over the "items" along the floor, lingering on the photo and the wallet, the keys, eyes flickering past the gun a bit more quickly. He noticed a small hole in the far right corner of the room, where there appeared to be a set of steps descending.
Where does that go?
Depends.
Are you going to keep doing that?
Look, my role here is not to judge your previous actions, nor to give you all the answers for the next round on the Great Wheel. I am here to show you possible paths. You can draw your own conclusions about your prior actions and motivations, and decide for yourself what you wish to take forward with you.
But I don't know.
Most don't. Life is complicated, and most would rather not make the effort to sort out those complexities. But that affects the outcome, in the judges' view. Either you are willing to learn and apply, or not.
Aapo/Mike furrowed his brow. I don't know what I did wrong. But I don't want to be a dung beetle.
That's unlikely. Those who made a life out of preying on the vulnerable, victimizing the helpless, those are usually the ones who get that level of punishment. Mostly it's because they are never repentant.
Really?
Really. They don't think they did anything wrong. They always claim that they were conforming to some set of "natural laws" that always just happens to favor them and oppress everyone else. They don't think there's anything to learn. So they get to start back from the bottom.
How many lives does it take to get to the top?
There's no set sequence, and there isn't really a "top" for that matter. For most it's a few steps up, a couple steps back, over and over again. Some reach enlightenment in a dozen or two dozen lives, some take hundreds, some never get there.
How many have I had?
Hard to tell. It doesn't matter anyway. Don't worry about the "top," just concern yourself with learning a little more each time, and sharing it with whoever you can.
That sounds like a religious cult.
No. It doesn't mean you go door-to-door proselytizing. It means you identify what is true and correct for yourself, and live that truth consistently. In fact, it's not really about right or wrong, or good or evil. It's mostly about recognizing cause and effect.
The jaguar continued: Humans think that the Universe moves toward some ideal of "justice" that they invent for themselves. It does no such thing. The Universe moves toward its own balance, through entropy and decay and attrition. Every organism, every inert object, every elemental molecule and every grain of sand, is deployed toward that end. It is up to the judges to determine in the bardo whether an individual has come closer to that understanding, or not.
Aapo/Mike furrowed and squinted again, clearly uncertain of what this meant.
Think about the ones who become dung beetles, all the things they have to do in order to earn that punishment. They can't do everything themselves. They need others willing to help them.
Help them?
Consider the worst of the worst. Emperors, kings, tyrants throughout your history. The demented and sadistic. Countless innocents died because of them, but they themselves killed very few people at most. Others did almost all the dirty work for them. They could have said no, but didn't. Maybe out of fear, maybe out of greed or power or lust or ideology. But they did it all the same.
Now Aapo/Mike was confused, frustrated, defensive. Are you saying that I'm responsible for what they did, because of the projects I worked on?
Maybe not as much as the people who profited from the suffering of others and directed you to do the work, but yes, they couldn't have done it without you.
Someone else would have taken that job.
Ek Balam chuffed. Yes, and I would be having this conversation with them, and a different conversation with you. Are you saying that the only things you were good at in your previous life were dumping mud and stretching wire? That's what you wanted to do with the time you were given?
No. I loved my wife. I loved my children. I'm sure I had things I enjoyed outside of work.
Yes, but you also saw the anger and frustration you carried with you. Where do you think that came from?
I don't know.
Yes you do.
Aapo/Mike looked over again at the dark descending staircase, unlit and forbidding, yet strangely beckoning at the same time. He walked over to the head of the stairs and peered down. There was a little bit of light after all, a dull glow that did not reveal much, but at least made the steps visible enough to navigate.
Where does this lead?
Down into you, your previous life, your lives before that, all the thoughts, hopes, dreams, fears, motivations, schemes, desires you have ever had throughout all of your incarnations. Each layer down another previous life, each a maze unto itself.
Can I go down there?
Can you?
Aapo/Mike rolled his eyes and looked at Ek Balam sternly. You're being cryptic again.
No, I mean it. Do you really want to do that? Do you really think it's necessary?
Will it help?
It can. For some it can grant enlightenment. Others are driven into madness. Consider the ramifications seriously before making the decision to go. You might not be able to find your way back out. It comes down to your ability and will to see things as they are, instead of how you want them to be. All of those things that comprise your existences, they are each like separate entities, hungry ghosts seeking to justify themselves to you. They will trick you if they can, and they will try.
There was a protracted pause between them, dead silence. No animal sounds outside; indeed, aside from the doorway behind the jaguar leading back out to the top platform of the pyramid, there was no indication that there even was anything outside this strange little room, with its sourceless glow and hollow images of personal items laid randomly around the floor.
Where is my family? Are they still alive?
That is not your concern. They are not here with you, so chances are they are still in the upper realm. Or they are simply not in your jati, their souls do not travel in the same small group as yours. You may have different things that you must reckon with than they do.
How did I die?
You have to see that for yourself. It is not for me to tell you such things. You may not want the answer.
He lowered his right foot down from the top, toward the first step, slowly and then with more certainty. I have to see. I have to find out.
It is better if you know what you are looking for before you set foot in there.
He set the next foot down to the next step, looked back over his shoulder at the great rumbling beast. I think I know. I hope I'm right. I wish you could come with me. Another step down.
I think you know that I cannot do that. Another step. He could no longer see the jaguar.
Yes, I know. Only the top of his head was still visible.
Be safe. Stay alert. I will be here when you return.
Ek Balam lowered his body to the floor, laid his head on his paws, and listened to the echoes of the slow footfalls down the steps.
