On Proper Track

An interesting experience in my local park yesterday: I happened to be reading, in the novel that I am eagerly into and close to finishing, about Cicero and his times - ‘A Pillar of iron,’ by Taylor Caldwell - Cicero’’s famous oration and specific quote regarding traitors,1 when a guy came up to me out of the brilliant blue of the day, with his bike, and started asking me questions.  He handed me his card, and I instantly realized who he was, for he had interviewed me about four years ago, on the streets here of my home town of Long Beach.  He calls himself a Street Photographer, specializing in ‘Humans Of Long Beach,’ and he spends his days going around Long Beach and interviewing citizens of our fair city.  He had ‘accosted’ me in a different part of town those many years before, asking me various questions, as was his pleasant shtick, about who I was and how I felt about such-and-such, and he remembered me, too.  This time I gave him a far more detailed earful, which material he hastily scribbled down in his notebook, before taking a few pictures of me and moving on to a dinner engagement that he had closely pending.  I don’t know how much of the material will end up in his blog on FB, but here is the gist of what he asked and what I replied. 

What was I writing when he saw me, and was curious about it.

"I was writing down some ideas that were coming to me, based on what I was reading."

"What’s that."

"It’s a novel about the great Roman statesman, Cicero, and his times.  Which are very similar to our own.  We could learn a lot from such history on this planet."

"What will you do with your thoughts?"

"I have a blog.  It’ll probably end up there, in some form."

Here he asked me its name, and the sort of thing that I write about.  As a ‘kibitzer’ - and I had to tell him what that was (‘A person who observes, like a couple of people playing chess in a park, and occasionally lobbing in some comment, often not very appreciated by the players, engrossed in the pursuit of their game’) - and a 'truth-seeker,’ it was kind of self-evident, but I explained, and how it was a journal for me, so I wasn’t all that fussed over how many people followed it.  He asked me how many did.  I told him, from the report on the ’Stats,' that it was anywhere from 25 to 200 a day - "although once they showed that 657 had viewed it the previous day.  But that soon disappeared.  I think - "

"Good thing it wasn’t 666."

"Yes.  But I think they cheat on these things, and we don’t always get the real truth on such matters."

Moving on (why he wasn't interested in my take on 'how 'they' are cheating on us,' which opens up a whole can of interesting worms, I didn't know at that point), he next asked:

"Would you say that you were a philosopher?"

"…Yes.  But an active one.  An engaged one.  A philosopher is basically someone who is an observer.  I would like to get involved as well.  Because these are very corrupt times.  Interestingly, just like those in Cicero’s day."

Here I launched into the example of how, when I returned in 2012 to LB after having lived abroad for many years, I was stunned to find, when I went to vote, that they didn’t ask me for my ID, and told him how I had subsequently - after refusing to vote under such corrupt circumstances - even inquired at the L.A. County Voter Registrars Office about the matter, and had been told by that official body that they don’t clean the voter reg rolls, because “people commit perjury if they sign up on it,” as if that were a reason, in and of itself only, a legitimate excuse, not to do their job.  (Which they must do, not so incidentally, under federal law on the matter.  So California is breaking the law in this regard.)  He didn’t show much interest in this part of my sharing with him, being a Brit, married to an American citizen, and with no major interest in political things, more interested in the daily life of people, he said;2 but he did ask:

"What do you think of Trump."

Knowing by then of his interests, and that Long Beach, with its very mixed-race makeup, is predominantly liberal in its politics, I figured that he didn’t meet many conservatives on his daily haunts through the streets of this city; but I replied honestly:

"I think he’s trying to do a good job of cleaning things up; but I feel that he is compromised, somehow, and can’t be counted on doing the job properly." 

"What needs to happen."

"…We are living far beneath our potential.  -  "

"Our human potential."

"Yes, but more than that.  My belief system is that we are living in a sort of prison, assuming that what we access with our five senses is all there is.  When there is evidence that there is far more than this limited take on things.  We are gods in the making.  Are creators in our basic essence.  Like our Creator Source.  Are facets of our Creator, and so have those qualities." 

"God."

"Yes.  The All That Is.  And to be more precise: I think that there is a Creator of our universe; in perfect alignment with a Prime Creator, of all the universes.  And that life is not to make money.  Life is to achieve Self-Realization.  As very gods in the making.  And above this 3D realm there is a fourth dimension, and a fifth, and a sixth, and a seventh.  I have read that there are thirteen dimensions.  Before we return Home."   

He was probably glad that he had to go at this point - with his wife honking at him as she drove by (he had done that rendezvousing on his cell phone while we were talking) - but he had one more question to ask, obviously one of his stock questions to his interviewees:

"If you could take only five thing with you in life, what would you take."

After a bit of a false start - wherein I started with ‘a pen and paper,' and then broadened it to my five senses, which, he noted patiently, would make it over five items, I settled on:

"A pen, and paper; and my ability to communicate, and my ability to listen - to give out and to take in…"

"And the fifth?"

"...Friends."

"Who’s your best friend."

"Actually, I don’t have one.  But I mean it in the sense that we are all in this together.  As gods in the making.  We are One.  - "

It was time to wrap things up:

"What is it all about, in a word."

"Love."

"Love.  That’s a good note to end on."

Whereupon he took his photos, said "See you in four years," and left.  After a handshake.  I don’t mean to leave it as sounding as though he were in a hurry to get away from a wild-eyed fanatic; he was a decent guy, doing an interesting, and valuable, thing in his life:

helping to create community.

   

P.S. And that evening, back at my little studio-apartment pad, at the back of an apartment complex where I don’t know any of the other occupants, my birthday-card message to Pres. Trump (sponsored by the Committee to Defend the President):

‘Happy Birthday, Mr. President…

…and all support to

DRAIN THE SWAMP!   And get America back on its proper track.’

P.P.S. And as to his off-the-cuff comment about ‘666’: I found it interesting that that evening - last night - I also came across, amongst my daily plethora of emails, one that led me to a video by some ‘spiritual’ woman who talked about things such as how we are transitioning from carbon-based to crystalline-based (and moving from a two-strand DNA to a 12-strand one, that will allow us to broaden our senses, perceive beyond them from the 3D prison that we have been in), with the number 666 being the number of Man, based on the carbon molecule of six each of protons, electrons, and neutrons. 

     The number of Man…

     …who appears simply to go around and around, on his karmic merry-go-round; not ever making any headway, even from over 2000 years ago, in the days of Cicero and Rome, so remarkably similar to what is happening in the U.S. in this day and age……

     We live in interesting times.

—

footnotes:

1 “A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious.  But it cannot survive treason from within.  An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and he carries his banners openly against the city.  But the traitor moves among those within the gates freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself.  For the traitor appears no traitor; he speaks in the accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their garments, and he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men.  He rots the soul a nation; he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of a city; he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist.  A murderer is less to be feared.  The traitor is the carrier of the plague.  You have unbarred the gates of Rome to him.”

     He was giving his oration to the Senate, as they were about to censure him, and drive him into exile.  It is a long story.

     Read it.  It relates to our own day and age as, and very, well.  With much to mull on.

     About who we are.  And where we are at.

     In our spiritual evolution.

     As gods in the making.

     For all that: Read on...

2 I had included talking a bit about how the "naive and idealistic youth" on the Left were into environmentalism - mentioning that I was as well - but that they didn't understand that it was not just a matter of a 'left' and a 'right' - with the far right being fascists, which I explained/commented was a nexus between the corporate world and the government (and I could see that I was beginning to lose him, but I needed to finish my point) - but of a pyramid, with the same people on the top, controlling both 'sides' and the "moderates" in between them; gesturing with my hands as about a pyramid with some sides.  It was at this point that I knew that I had lost him/his interest in that subject, of 'politics'.  Or at least my take on it all.
     (Next time, Matt, I'll go specifically into the New World Order.  If I/we still can.
     And you are still allowed to be a free agent, circulating freely amongst the other slaves.  Albeit with the lampposts monitoring your every move.  And conversation.)