Innocence Lost, Found, and Stolen

So, when we die, the mask slips off. But while we live, the mask is in place, to a greater or lesser degree. This immediately brings to mind Adam, whose fall is simultaneous with the placement of the mask. One moment he's walking in the cool of the evening with the Creator, the next moment he's confabulating all over the place. The confabulation fills the gap between divine and human reality.

"Adam, where are you?"

"Er, I was hiking in Appalachia. Yeah, that's it."

Innocence lost. In-nocens, i.e., free from guilt or sin thorough lack of knowledge of evil; blameless; harmless in effect or intention; candid; lack of guile, sophistication or self-consciousness; artless; ingenuous.

So the guilty always wear a mask. The corollary of this is that those who wear a mask are guilty. Which is why they wear it (although sometimes it's for protection -- to hide the true self until it's safe to come out).

"Michael, where were you?"

"Er, I was just sleeping with this boy. I do it all the time. Taking another person into your bed is a beautiful, innocent thing."

Over at Return of Scipio, a (our?) Will made a comment about how Jackson spent his life trying "to reverse the course of spiritual/psychological evolution in [his] egotistical desire to return to a 'land of innocence.'" However, "one can’t return to the land of innocence. If one tries, the result is psychological fragmentation, the center cannot hold."

This is an interesting point, because it suggests that the Fall is associated with the principle of entropy, which results from the fact that time travels in one direction, i.e., that it is irreversible. It is not analogous to a film, which can be run forward or backward. For example, in our world we might see a cup fall to the floor and shatter. But we never see broken fragments on the floor fly onto the table and form a cup. Spilled milk stays that way. Shattered innocence too.

In the case of Jackson, he didn't just wear a mask; he became his own hollow weenie mask. Remember what we were saying yesterday about how in the post-mortem state, there is no "friction" from matter to interfere with thought? One of the perils of great wealth is that it can, in a way, do something similar, so that there is no friction between fantasy and reality. Dreams and wishes can instantly become hearses, no matter how much buggering is involved. But in the process, the real person dies -- slowly and insidiously.

Note also that, instead of being in the image and likeness of the Creator, Jackson had the power to remake (or de-make) himself in the image of himself. He became like a god, and he was his own hideous creation. But this cannibalistic creation fed off the innocence of others in order to maintain its spurious sense of life. Truly, s/h/it was a vampire.

This is why the case of Michael Jackson is so familiar to us. Read Peter Guralnick's great biography of Elvis. Nothing new here. As fantasy displaces reality, it takes more and more energy -- or, let us say psychic substance -- to prop up the fantasy. The fantasy is not real -- it is parasitic -- but like any system, it requires an input of energy to go on being.

I don't want to delve too deeply here into esoteric psychoanalytic theories, but what occurs next is the development of a "psychic twin," or dopplegänger, that displaces -- or exists side by side -- with the real self. Imagine in your mind a kind of ghost that feeds off the psyche, and eventually drains it of substance. This is what we saw in Jackson: by the time he "died," he was already a hideously decayed corpse, kept afloat in a sea of time-stopping opioids. He was just the last to know.

No, wait a minute. The MSM is the last to know. But that's understandable, since the MSM mostly consists of the living dead -- corpses, zombies, and assorted ghouls. So one of their own has... you can't call it "died," since that's redundant. Nor can you call it "grief," since there's so much manic glee associated with it. Call it a "monster party" with all the ghouls in attendance: Larry King, Deepak Chopra, Geraldo, Al Sharpton, all reminiscing about their fellow ghoul. All the corpses are weeping today: Elizabeth Taylor, Madonna, Justin, Britney.

But where is the person with sufficient childlike innocence to blurt out the simple truth to these undead souls? I mean, Dude, he fucked little boys!

Regarding his choice of embalming fluids -- we are hearing stories of demerol, soma, dilaudid, oxycontin -- several of these heroin derivatives do have the property of arresting time. I well remember my colonoscopy in 2007 -- yes, it haunts one forever -- specifically, the blissful afterglow of the anusthesia. For the rest of the day, I was absently floating in a kind of Eden, just observing my thoughts -- my existence, really -- like so many passing clouds.

One could get used to that. However, remember what we said above about the entropic, irreversible nature of time. We live in the middle-earth area between Eden and Heaven, so to speak. As Will mentioned in his comment, we cannot go backward, nor can we remain static, on pain of rotting from within. Rather, once out of paradise, the soul is in motion. Where is it going? Well, that depends on you. In conjunction with some friendly nonlocal operators, of course.

In my book, I discussed the nature of this motion, and the saints, mystics, and assorted pneumanauts who represent the exact opposite of Michael Jackson. Caught up in the deathstream that runs from future to past, he marshaled all of his earthly powers to try to return to the lost paradise of childhood. But that way is ultimately blocked by cherubim bouncers with flaming swords. Nobody gets past them, although many celebrities try to crash the gates in their long black limousines.

In contrast, the saint faithfully throws himself into the lifestream that carries us forward to our deustiny, that "return-route to the forgotten country from which humans set out Before the Beginning. Venturing across the great divide separating man from the incorruptible sphere of the gods, our virtual adventurers then found themselves pulled into the orbit of the Great Attractor, the very ground and goal of existence, the unseparate Source of all being, a mostly uninhabited region at the outskirts of consciousness, the Final, Absolute Reality where cosmos flowers into deity and Bang! you're divine."

No lies. No mask. Holy childhood, shabbatman! Innocence found! It's always in the last place you look....