Established Marvel : a Monk by Abbreviation

3. THE BROKEN HABIT OF EDDIE McBRIDE:

"I've always tried to advance and help my fellow man, in everything I've done. But somehow I feel as if I've accomplished nothing." The person who said that was Eddie McBride, (lately of pride) sitting next to me. I turned towards him and said 'Eddie, Eddie, you dumb-assed, small-brained character. I can't believe you don't see your own problem! You can't 'try' to do any of that stuff; it has to just happen. And the fact too that you're 'aware' of yourself 'trying' to do those things is incredible to me. It's no wonder you find no satisfaction. It's not authentic at all, and people can see that. You're ineffectual because people can tell that you're 'trying' - having chosen a role to play or a character to flesh out, your efforts belie your intentions. There's got to be a certain distancing and a detachment from 'you' the actor in the doing of all this. You have to spin the distance and find the working grace which makes it just happen. That's something people can pick up on positively - someone attuned to his own state of being, someone in harmony." And he looked back at me, with that incredibly earnest Eddie look I'd grown used to and said "You mean to say that people can tell I'm trying too hard, trying to be something that, to them, appears forced?" And I said back to him - "that's pretty much it." He slouched, and a forlorn and tired look came over his face - as I figured that THAT was certainly authentic, and that he'd be in the mood to listen, I decided to go for the fences.

"You see, Eddie, you're caught up in a gargantuan mess with no way out. No matter what it is that you 'try' to do, it's going to fall on deaf ears and eyes - because the mass of men before you are deadened and silenced already. They're not going to react to anything which appears to them to be even slightly out of their mode of interpreting the world. They're so caught up in the bear-trap of coercion and forced circumstances that, unless you appear as superfluous and inane to them as much as THEY already appear to themselves, you'll miss the point entirely and never connect. No one knows how to recognize any longer the things which come to them from a core we all share. Oh, sure, they can tell authenticity and forced affectation - that's all salesman stuff anyway and they're used to it - but anything stronger than that they avert their eyes and minds from. It's all an enigma to them, and a dangerous one too. One they'd rather not deal with.

You'd never imagine how many people have now willingly given themselves over to the grand Moloch, the Evil God with whom they've forged the allegiances of mass culture, materialism and false belief. It's been so long now that society and its transformation have been overtaken and re-enacted by the alien Evil creatures who have co-opted and pre-empted the authentic values of life (creative, forceful, positive and steady) with their false and negative junk, that no one even remembers. It's like some oft-told tale from their grandparents or something - legions of stories and descriptions of 'what used to be' and no one can any longer really attest to the rightness or the value of what's dribbled down to our present day. Myths. Illogical stories. Twisted tales with incorrect names. You simply cannot join all that and try to fight it. You must simply stay out of it - and fight it if you must from the outside. There's no co-opting the enemy; for that enemy is incarnate, other-worldly and far stronger and resilient than the staggering stupidites of the meager mankind they've genetically constructed. Stories and tales -- Bible, myth, cultural, storybook -- all try to tell us something that we miss.

People trade their lives away for a false construction of what is right, valuable and correct; and then they spin around in circles for the rest of their days (like a dog chasing its own tail) to achieve the chimerical 'satisfaction' this was all supposed to give them. Teachers teach the proferred Evil they've been programmed with - for a few dollars more and a retirement of materialism and vapid opportunity - after having indoctrinated and bent so many other young minds while doing their 'work'. Unions, construction, developers, lawyers, politicians, authority, everything and anything connected with the propogation of the falsehood and deceit which becomes the dressing of the illusion which is the world we make and live through. Too bad. And too bad you have to try wholeheartedly to portray yourself as attempting to achieve the gain of your fellows. Remember, it's not always true that there a 'good' to be had. Sometimes Satan comes in the name of the Lord.

I'm a believer in the Book of Enoch. That's an original book of the Bible which was ejected from the Bible when it was digested and constructed by the early church fathers - after they carefully altered and doctored all that needed to be so as to fit the new credo of the over-weening material kingdom which the early church became. Nicene creed indeed! Sometime by about 300 AD, Enoch was GONE! Never to be heard from again - except by those who make it a point to ferret out the gold from its hiding places. There's a wonderful passage in Enoch wherein he speaks of how the superior alien life forms who came to and seeded Earth, and had many of their numbers enticed later by the beauty of what they'd created (Genesis 6) - all of which we later adopted as our sky-form Gods and Goddesses - well a great war ensued in the Heavens (left to us in the shambles of the wars of Mt. Olympus, stories of mythology, tales of the great battles of the gods). The losers of that war, fallen to earth, interbed and passed their seed into half-God, half-men creatures who took over the concerns and affairs of earth - for their debased and evil purposes. The passage in question shows how, in order to interest and bring to the earth-people the lower form concerns of beauty, music, dance and all of the alluring and distracting charms through which we are lost and taken away from our real goals of creation and grace, the demi-Gods entranced and marched the people over a hill and to a valley where they were taught to sing and dance, make sounds like music, learn warcraft, sexuality. From that point on, the people were lost, the world was sundered and twisted from its original shape, and we have the resultant society of pain, anguish and anxiety now which we live with. Today, we have, in the guise of evil and the rights of its Kingdom, millions of people squirming, reciting debased lyrics, keeping their eyes far from the progress of the inner life, enticed by the rank and base sounds of their non-culture, the sickening leaders, the media-devils and barons of trash, and all that goes with it. Songs pound in their heads at all times, and the sacred airwaves are filled with filth and drivel. And we wonder WE WONDER EDDIE, why there are wars and famines and horrid pangs of pain and guilt everywhere...!"

I looked over, and Eddie McBride was, I noticed, fast asleep...