Led to Believe

 by  shaun  lawton 

     Once again, it's my birthday, and today is weird since I begin my 60th year on this planet.  So let's get one thing straight right away.  I do not turn sixty until next year.  I am still in my 50s, so thank our universal equilibrium for that!  It's weird, while part of me does seem to remain relatively unphased by the decades piling on, there's another part of me sitting here shocked and dismayed about it.  (No sir, I don't like it.)  Then again, my worrisome mind eases itself back into a state of complacency and acceptance in almost no time at all.  One thing I've learned after all these years...is that I'm super resilient like that. 

     Above is the snapshot I took of my work desk this morning, with my breakfast laid out on top of it. First is the cup of coffee, which we always buy whole bean, organic, and I grind it up fresh every morning and prepare it with a stainless steel French press.  Next is the one banana I always have with my coffee, since I've been led to believe that the potassium in bananas helps absorb the acidity in coffee, and that's presumably why folk living down in the tropics (where bananas are plentiful) don't suffer the acidity in their coffee that much.  If you think about it, the coffee bean is a berry, so yeah...I prefer consuming nothing but fruit & berries for breakfast. High in antioxidants, the food of the gods. I once read that eating fruit for breakfast is easier on our digestion, so to be honest, that's good enough for me.  I love cantaloupe and grapes too, so the more variety of fruit the better.  

     We are led to believe a lot of things, and sometimes our brains try to process it, only to reject it out of hand; I don't know really, but I can say that I myself lie somewhat balanced in between extremes as a "Skeptical Believer," which is a phrase I learned from John Shirley, who used to write an online column with that title.  I suspect that if I were to undergo a comprehensive analysis about just what percentage of the way from "Skeptical" (say, 1 on the scale of 10) to a complete "Believer" (a 10) I happen to be, well I'm of the mind that I most likely rank at least a 6 or 7 (or even higher) which I find very interesting, indeed. 

     I often suspect I was born an 11 on that scale.  A total Believer...  (That doesn't mean I'm religious, necessarily.  Just that I Believe...in nothing.   Which-in-turn-leads-to-something-that-in-the-end-becomes-nothing-at-all-so-you-go-figure-it-out-for-yourself)  ...So let me tell you what.  The overwhelming magnitude and intensity with which I Believe (in nothing and something) is such that even the healthiest dose of skepticism injected into my consciousness would likely bring that rating of an "11" down to a decent 6 or 9!  That's how powerful our need to believe (in anything) seems to me.  I've read that we human beings are more or less "born to believe," which is to say, it's a deep-seated drive to want to find meaning in this life.  And that's the very crux of the matter, right there.  We shape our own respective realities. 

     If you ask me, I suspect the power to believe may actually be programmed into us, written in the very code that produces DNA and infuses our planet with this spectacular and miraculous thing we call Life. Whether this drive to rationalize our existence remains a sort of complex algorithm encoded in our genetic scripture, or merely subsists as a fundamental and singular aspect of being a "one" instead of a "zero" in our existence, well anyone's guess could be as poor as mine...

     There's no room for doubt that nonetheless, I Believe.  I'm sort of like an atheist who believes in God. That's because I've actually taken the intellectual leap (anyone can do it, it's not that hard, easy as falling off a cliff) to determine by a process of inference that the ever-elusive idea of absolute truth must be tantamount to the notion of paradox.  I am telling you right here and now that my mind has divined and locked onto this concept and for lack of a better explanation, has by default allowed this seemingly incongruous notion to replace any ideology such as what drives religions or people to believe in the existence of God, etc.  God is Nothing, I am Everything. I am Nothing, God is Everything. As Janis Joplin once famously put it, "It's all the same fucking day, man."  

     As Walt Whitman put it, "I am large, I contain multitudes."  I can wrap my mind around most of that, so sure I stand with both of my feet planted directly on terra firma, as the saying goes, but more to the point, what I've come to understand is that by doing so properly, I remain true to the very ground of being, which just so happens to be time itself, and not just the dirty ground we stand upon.  It's sort of like learning to walk a highwire tightrope, and getting so accustomed to it that you're no longer aware of doing it.  The main difference being that instead of a sheer drop-off on either side of your tightrope walk, you have the past to your right and the future to your left.  Ignoring those ephemeral concepts of past & future allows us to focus on the here and now. That's as close as I can come to describing my belief system.  So happy birthday to me... I have been led to believe...in the here and now, at the very least. 

     Cheers to you all!    

Fractal Dragon of the Moment

Do what thou blooming wilt shall be the whole of reality

 

Azsacra Zarathustra: ϟ Electric ϟ Ecliptic ϟ

by Shaun Lawton 

 

 

NihillihiN! 

The Over Without a man! 

Absolute Break of the Spirit! 

Death against Death! Nothing to Power 

and Emptiness to Supremacy! 

It comes always without any clothes 

and appreciative audience. 

Any «heroic aesthetics» and 

every «political heroism» 

is but the hidden cowardice 

of the «hero».

   

       Who is the mysterious online figure known as Azsacra Zarathustra?  Some of us (who have spent a lot of time on the world wide web) have glimpsed his visage lurking along these cybernetic circuits and hallways, and perhaps wondered.  A quick online search will yield some curious and alarming headlines, in addition to somewhat disturbing images of him:  lurid slogans such as "The Devil of Philosophy,"  "Utopia as Weapon," "Danger is the Initial Condition of Philosophy,"  "Creator of Shunyarevolution," and "Symbol of Nothing to Power" remain just some of the sensationalist reports, some of which include savage images of him inflicting what would be perceived as bodily damage to most, but for him seem to function as severe punctuation marks to carry across his meaning to let it better sink in, than to elicit cheap thrills from idle browsers of the web. As far as I'm concerned, these shocking impressions and tortures to self honestly depict his true essence.  I've gotten to know him better over the past couple of years by having connected on Facebook, and for starters, I can tell you his name is Andrei, and I consider him a friend because I like him, and I believe he's real, and so we've pierced the veil of the online social utility networks that connect us, and to our pleasant surprise, have formed a long distance friendship of sorts, despite his being kept a veritable prisoner in the Urals of Russia.  

       Referred to often as a poet-mystic and anti-philosopher (as well as anti-filmmaker), cursory internet searches produce random images of him skewering his cheeks with long sharpened rods, or carving himself with large knives, holding his hands over open flames, allowing scorpions and poisonous centipedes to crawl over his face and shoulders, and some photos have been posted that display him permitting others to bludgeon his torso with heavy chains and iron mallets, objectively in stark demonstrations of machismo, although his reasoning covers much wider ground than that. But of course, to some idle passersby browsing the web, it would appear he may be some sort of internet shock jock, or something.  A cursory skimming of his surface appearance might lead anyone on a wide variety of disparate reactions, or trigger them to leap to all sorts of conclusions without bothering to look into his character any further. What you will find, should you trouble yourself to determine the facts about him, is that he's a supremely conscientious deep thinker who despises fascism and anything to do with extreme conservativism that leads to autocracies and oligarchies worldwide.    

      These days leaping straight to the Island of Conclusions has become all too common, unfortunately.  It's no wonder that many who merely skim the surface clues of this esoteric person would get the mistaken impression he's some sort of extreme nationalist, or any sort of baseless shockmeister, perhaps even a facile proponent of evil, an accusation absurd as it may be which nevertheless is to be expected in this day and age of the ever-shortening attention span and the all-too-eager to condemn out of hand. Let me say that as far as I'm concerned, nothing could be further from the case.  For one thing, he's not the Persian / pro-Islamic Zarathustra, he's based in Russia and India, which he considers his two primordial Sacred Native Lands.  His philosophical language has been derived from both Russian and Sanskrit.  He's a self-described "Indo-European" thinker, or "Indo-Aryan," as he likes to put it. He's trying to revive the Spiritus Mundi, to help it awaken to combat and in his words, "overwhelm the consumer-addictive illusions of post-contemporary and temporarily weakened Europe." 

 

"Is everything an illusion? Yes, everything is an illusion

of an illusion, everything is a copy of a copy,

but only you alone will die in reality." ~ AZ 

 "Believe nothing.  Nothing is true. 

Nothing is real. Nothing matters. 

But the bird will always kill the Buddha, 

if the Buddha replaces a bird." ~AZ

      

       You may be led to think that Azsacra Zarathustra might be in need of taking advantage of attention-grabbing shock tactics just to help him get "clicks" or to separate him from the rest of the pack, but actually he's always been a rogue agent, a lone wolf by nature.  A closer examination of his legacy will reveal that his anti-philosophical stance and treatises all point toward a de facto grounded willpower resolute in its unflinching stand against any and all forms of negativity, including the types of negative thinking that so effortlessly gum up the machinations of our modern industry and time and again corrode the foundation of a fair and democratic society.  He's always been against money-leeching, power-mad sycophants, of which (unfortunately) there's no lack of in today's burgeoning population cultivated from underneath our rotting floorboards.  Where in the Hell else are all these wanna-be autocrats and aspiring dictators spewing up from, if not the infernal bowels of human nature itself? 

       Even after a casual glance at an online black-and-white photograph of his strong muscled body covered in what might appear to some as questionable tattoos, it turns out that a more careful overview of their intended point will reveal they are not neo-fascist markings or any other such trendy nonsense at all, but rather, the decisive symbology of a primal and humanistic retaliation against all futile ideograms and oppressive scripts which happen to be in tribute to worn-out authoritarian tropes.  Azsacra Zarathustra has time and again proclaimed himself the vital enemy of rightwing neofascists the world over. In his own words, "There will be a revolution from within! For this purpose the 'soul of each' will pass through the Over-active Shunya―a magical and terrible Zero point―a point of Nothing to Power and Emptiness to Supremacy."  

        

A rebellious intuitive Yes to Life against all rules 

of "will to power."  The conservative "will to power"

as the political dictatorial Absolute is Absolute Treachery

of real Enigmatic Life and the Secrets of Eternal Rebellion.

       What does Shunya mean, exactly?  More cursory internet searches will yield simplifications of the term as meaning, more or less, "a neutral state of nothingness," and while this may technically be valid, the significance, as exemplified by our life-force in all its myriad glories, reveals a much more pertinent understanding of the term to be necessary.  Shunya's association with stillness and receptivity provide us with another deepening clue.  It's at this point of my essay that I must depart from conventional approaches and instead, focus on my own particular identification with this concept, for in this manner alone I feel that I stand a better chance at hearkening a micro-degree closer to its irrepressible and infinitesimal essence. 

       For me, it also means to "shun you," which is to say, eliminate the ego completely and eradicate our base and mechanistic essence from existence, in other words, to remove one's self from our own consciousness as if we were attempting to step out of our own shoes and then dare to take that first barefoot step onto the irrepressible ground of reality.   I'm sure an entire book could be written about the actual diverse meanings behind the term Shunya, and I figure many books have already been published concerning the various manifestations and approaches different cultures have had about the same basic concept.  

       In the interest of keeping focused on our subject at hand here, I will forego the necessity to go into more detail about it, and instead let my reader's minds fixate on the idea of Shunya from whatever purchase they may be equipped to make, in the hopes they will allow themselves to be guided from within, and blossom towards the light of understanding their own discovery. After all, it's the only way for anyone to learn anything, really. Suffice it to be said that wise men throughout the ages have often indicated the paradox of just how everything in creation appears to have come from nothing.  

शून्य :±х शून्यता = ही ऊर्जा है |

↑△↑ शून्य क्रांति का समय निकट आ रहा है।

↓▽↓ निरपेक्ष क्रांति का समय निकट आ रहा है।।

△↑△ Nihil:±хlihiN ↑△↑

       Arrows stabbing inward, arrows pointing outward. These are just some of the symbols of chaos and order empowered. They are the sigils that may help trigger consciousness, if not conscientiousness; and they just as easily may help generate senselessness and pathogenesis, if we're not careful enough.  It always depends on the interpreter, of course.  As a decipherer of both dreams and reality myself, I don't want to lose track of the main thrust of my analysis, here. I need to stay focused on the subject at hand while declaring my autonomy.

       So how may we dare to take that first barefoot step onto the irrepressible ground of reality? The answer to that is as easy as it is simple.  By being aware that time remains the actual essence upon which we are truly grounded.  As to how we go about focusing ourselves on staying grounded in time exactly, well that remains another sort of discourse altogether. 

       I don't happen to be aware of any conscious method or tricks. Instead, I seem to have accepted that I must've gained some sort of natural inclination to live in the present moment, whatever that means. If you ask me, I think it's a mental conditioning, an outlook, if you will.  Perhaps being able to more or less let the past go, and to somehow not overly concern one's self with the future, which is to suggest this penchant might yield the mental conditioning to stay more focused on the present and it's infinitude of potential, but in what manner I don't know exactly...I just get the feeling I'm more or less in tune with the present moment, regardless of why or how I manage to do it. I don't know, they say even a broken clock is right twice a day; so maybe that's what I am, just another man breaking against the wheel of time. It's not an easy thing to explain, trust me on this. 

Void :±х Voidness = is energy.

↑△↑ The time of zero revolution is approaching.

↓▽↓ The time of absolute revolution is approaching.

△↑△ Nihil:±хlihiN ↑△↑

       Azsacra Zarathustra appears to be a man who remains unbroken on whatever wheel he may be willfully or otherwise strapped onto, be it an ancient torture device made of rusted iron or the imperceptible machinations of time itself, as if he may have imbibed and processed some of his vanquished predecessor's ruminations, such as the old adage "what doesn't kill me, makes me stronger."   Whereas Nietzsche learned this out of "life's school of war," Azsacra has decidedly one-upped his opponent by having learned his Shunyarevolution aesthetic from our own warring school of life!  

       Azsacra delves deeper, into and through the heart of Nothingness, to emerge in the Here and Now victorious with his affirmation for the Yes of Life! But its not as easy as I make it sound, because it's one thing to glibly assert "you must enter through the gateway of the void to emerge upon the solid ground of being," and quite another to follow through with the total dissolution of the ego and then to stand tall with head raised on high and eyes focused on our own event horizon.  

       With the aforementioned summary of Azsacra Zarathustra's anti-positional and paradoxical philosophic persona rooted in the ground zero of Shunyarevolution, it doesn't require that much intelligence for the dawning of comprehension to begin illuminating that liminal space behind the eyes (the ordinarily undead compacted zone of gray matter sparkling with reflexive chemical and electrical signaling, the mechanistic and semiautomatic behavioral regulations which indubitably mark the everyman's robotic programming) but rather, it just requires a receptive heart that beats to sustain an equally open mind.

From the point of view of TDAS 

[The Theory of the Destruction of All Systems]: 

There is no crime, except endless existence of the System. 

That is: The only crime is the System itself, and nothing more. 

Hence: There is no crime in the Absolute Spiritual Revolt per se and in infinity.

       As it happens, keeping an open heart and mind seems to be a combination in people that's becoming scarcer the further across time we develop. Whether that's just a natural illusion or trick of the light or even more of a dissolution of mentality among a rapidly growing humanity, I don't know, and to be honest, have no need of finding out.  As far as I'm concerned, the big mysteries should remain preserved. Man(un)kind seems to be here in greater numbers than ever, bringing with it a seemingly ceaseless barrage against the very nature that somehow conspired by a mysterious agency to conceive us in the first place.  Some may go and try to figure. Others will stay rooted and resist! 

        Azsacra Zarathustra may be a lot of things, among the more striking for me remains his obsession over caring for animals, in particular his having founded Maiastra, an establishment I'm not exactly sure remains in the Urals of Russia or somewhere in India, except that it's a center for providing help to wounded animals, including apex predators from tigers to birds of prey, along with any natural wildlife requiring treatment in the vicinity.  (I’ve determined since this article was published that Maiastra was, indeed, located in Russia, but has been destroyed by that totalitarian state some years ago.)  Andrei’s lifelong devotion toward helping injured creatures of the wild remains just one of his many personal features, and dovetails with the arcane role he's cultivated since daring to transcend the various ideological challenges of philosophy, which can lead to distressing pitfalls as easily as they can secure bridges for us to advance forward. 

       In his willful subjugation of the more domineering aspects of prior philosophical concepts that have helped to occasionally pave humanity's pathway toward despotism, autocracy and tyranny, I find Azsacra Zarathustra's counterintuitive approach to be a refreshing recourse that serves to help us all gather the courage and strength required to lionize our own refutations of the imperious aspects of totalitarian dogma which invariably lead toward dictatorships and help to foster the sort of power-hungry regimes our world has been steadfastly struggling to outgrow ever since the day each one of us were born.  On a bad day, this struggle seems futile at best; and on a good day, our dream of overcoming tyranny in all its manifestations may still seem tantalizingly out of our reach, like the mirage of an oasis perpetually rippling on the horizon. 

Freedom Viewed from the Right? No.

Freedom Viewed from the Left? No.

Freedom Viewed beyond the Left and the Right? No.

Freedom Viewed only: Ex Nihilo!

Out of Nothing! From NihillihiN!

        It has been stated over and over by many around the world and throughout history that "fire must be fought with fire," and echoes of this may be traced about Azsacra's campaign to annihilate tyranny's fearmongering with fear itself, the foremost thing we have been advised to be most cautious of.  It's a disarming tactic to be sure, and may even backfire on occasion, as might be illustrated in the severe reactions to Azsacra's somewhat intimidating online presence. If anything, the rigid character of his symbolist approach can be misleading and even disheartening, were it to be taken the wrong way or mischaracterized.  Fear itself has practically become our daily bread, at least here in the United States of America, where our two major political parties have faced off against one another with an uncompromising opposition I'm not sure we've really seen become this far gone, before now. Add to this mix the wars raging abroad, and you have a recipe for being nervous, if not worse. 

       Azsacra Zarathustra does not speak in unsolvable riddles, but rather paves a path forward for our spirit and souls to see our way through the contemporary underbrush of our cybernetic machinations that would otherwise keep us spellbound under ceaseless fusillades of fear.  His constant struggle works toward the Absolute Making of the Spirit by both defying and ultimately destroying fear itself, which we should all keep in mind remains our proverbial Enemy #1, if we are to take the words and wisdom of FDR to heart.  To quote Azsacra, "I build upon my philosophy in order to deprive man of his 'indispensable fear.'"  In this roundabout way, he leads us to better develop our own bravery and fearlessness.   

       While on the surface and at one glance Azsacra Zarathustra may appear intimidating and even scary to many among us idly browsing the world wide web today, with some going so far as to automatically conclude he appears to be up to no good, while truly his keen and focused mentality has been deadlock aimed at nothing short of taking on the responsibility of all lives–all at once–and without the idea of separating "bad" and "good" acts of bravery.  To quote him once again, "To be strong really means to be, as bequeathed from Nietzsche, beyond Good and Evil," further clarifying with his own personal flourish, "to be only in the Flaming Depth of one's own fearless heart."

Only: The Revolution from within!

Only and Par Excellence: 0 →↑← 0

       To me, Andrei remains a friend and fellow poet, an editor in his own right and affiliated mastermind that I met online and with whom I've made a consequential connection.  As I channel his electric NihillihiN philosophical current to augment my own visions, I see this new latter day land through the eyes of the dead who were led by the hand to the valley behind the shadow of death, and it helps to regulate my own heartbeat and to be more conscious of whenever I take a breath. Perhaps its his sense of immediacy that I react to, yet nevertheless I can see what he means about destroying our ego to focus on being plugged into the moment, since after all, there's no time like the present. Like all human beings, Azsacra Zarathustra is a conductor of electricity, but unlike most of us, he knows it and thus can channel the infinite potential of its force.      

      

    

Syntherian Azsacra model 2.0

THE ABSOLUTE REVOLUTION 

Our line of sight in the Revolution:

One must learn to ride the dragons ↑

Dragons of Horror kill dragons of fear ↑

The Revolution from within ↑ …

Beyond the beyond and Upward ↑

Beyond all forms, and no forms ϟ

To think about Shunya only with

the help of Lightnings ϟ ϟ ϟ ϟ

AzsAcrA

↑A↑A↑A↑

 

Dragons of horror kill dragons of fear 

       The alpha symbol at the top of this human interest story as well as the omega-variant located at the bottom  (of an eagle flying free) represent what I think of as the core essence of Andrei.  I conjured this variant of a stock image I found online, first colorizing it (the 'alpha' version at the top of this article), and then I applied my Griffin-style template (from my hidden file of classified synthography techniques) which resulted in the beautiful tapestry of coruscating energy patterns you see below in the 'omega' version.  I really like how it looks like internal organs within the biological tree of life as seen through a hallucinogenic lens.  When death eventually claims each and every one of us, our true spiritual lives will begin once again of course, and our individual transformations into the next iteration of the eternal cycle of life and death will recommence, and I'll bet the exact nature of how we're recycled through the endless mobius of creation will continue to remain unknown to our various incarnations, and that's as it should be, because nothing can be more beautiful than the enigma of our existence. It's a puzzler that one of my many fictional alter egos, variously named and described as Viridian or Thorn, Guardian of Ambush, soldier for the army of trees (instead of men), and Mystifier, they all kind of merge into one abstract figure that I imagine to be this antihero whose sole mission remains to protect the eternal secret from ever being revealed.  

Every will to power is but the same will-downwards [↓]

Any rebellious philosophy, which becomes ideology of the System

— diligently serves and feeds the same damned spirit of gravity: ↓

     Azsacra Zarathustra's poetry means a lot of things to a lot of people.  For me, it connects directly to the great mystery, becoming inseparable from lightning itself.  His philosophical musings amount to the voltage of an orchestra, or the coruscating voice of a choir.  His statements echo the crackling whiplash of plasmic energy. His vision is like the avatar of awakening from nightmare into dream.  When he says "I'll be dead soon," not only does he mean it, it's also a stark reminder that we will all be dead soon, as a matter of fact.  But at least we may rest assured of one thing.  After he sheds this mortal coil, even if tragically all too soon, Azsacra Zarathustra will have grown a million mouths by then, and you better believe they will all Scream in unison! 

Andrei Free At Last