Tuesday, February 8, 2022

CONFERENCE OF THE NATURE GODS (revisited)


A lot goes on in Bangkok, the City of Angels. I was there eight years ago and met a reincarnated god named Pangu.

Not many today know about Pangu, unless they are familiar with Chinese mythology. This is the legend of Pangu, according to Wikipedia:

In the beginning there was nothing in the universe except a formless chaos. However this chaos coalesced into a cosmic egg for about 18,000 years. Within it, the perfectly opposed principles of Yin and Yang became balanced and Pangu emerged (or woke up) from the egg. Pangu is usually depicted as a primitive, hairy giant with horns on his head and clad in furs. Pangu set about the task of creating the world: he separated Yin from Yang with a swing of his giant axe, creating the Earth (murky Yin) and the Sky (clear Yang). To keep them separated, Pangu stood between them and pushed up the Sky. This task took 18,000 years; with each day the sky grew ten feet (3 meters) higher, the Earth ten feet wider, and Pangu ten feet taller.

After the 18,000 years had elapsed, Pangu was laid to rest. His breath became the wind; his voice the thunder; left eye the sun and right eye the moon; his body became the mountains and extremes of the world; his blood formed rivers; his muscles the fertile lands; his facial hair the stars and milky way; his fur the bushes and forests; his bones the valuable minerals; his bone marrows sacred diamonds; his sweat fell as rain; and the fleas on his fur carried by the wind became the fish and animals throughout the land.



In other words, the planet we inhabit is the transmogrified body of Pangu – literally and metaphorically. Few remember this, however, and humans have long believed that the Earth is theirs to do with as they like – and that is why they keep building sprawling cities and civilizations upon her surface, poisoning and destroying in the process all that is natural and life-sustaining.

This really pisses Pangu off. Indeed, he’s pissed off enough to personally intervene and see what’s to be done about the terrible mess humans have wrought upon the planet.

Pangu with his chaos generator

So, how did my encounter with Pangu come about? Like attracts like, they say. I have always identified strongly with the Arcadian nature god Pan. It was only natural that Pan would someday meet up with Pangu - whether in Pangaea, Pago Pago (also spelt Pango Pango), Pangkor Island or Pangkok.

This time around, Pangu is cleverly disguised as a Punk God named Aobo, born 19 October 1972 in Xingguo, China. He grew up in a place called Longtan, which means Dragon’s Pool. In fact, his human name Aobo can be translated as “Dragon’s Domain” – where dragons spawn and contemplate eternity.


From the realm of myth he stepped into the role of punk shaman. In the early 1990s Aobo bought a $50 guitar and began writing songs – angry, explosive, deeply emotive songs, with lyrics that would send a shiver up the spine of every cold-blooded autocrat, plutocrat, bureaucrat and technocrat in China.


Just as Jim Morrison of The Doors mesmerized an entire generation with the emotional intensity of his performances, Aobo had a radioactive effect on Chinese youngsters everywhere he performed with his band, PUNKGOD.


His raw, primal voice howling the pain of countless generations who have suffered tyranny’s oppression, Aobo sang about freedom – a word blocked on Chinese search engines – and taking action to reclaim the land from institutionalized greed’s ravages. He sang about the hurt in his heart when he heard a loud slap in the night – and realized the sound was from next door. A 17-year-old girl had returned home at 11:30pm to find an angry mother ready to hit her – for doing what nature intended her to do.


Songs charged with feeling, passionate feeling. Songs that evoked in the listener a sense of outrage that life on earth has been so viciously violated and perverted into Civilization As We Know It. More specifically, Aobo’s PUNKGOD project inspired a new wave of alternative bands and pioneered a revolutionary pantheistic consciousness that would ultimately supersede and neutralize traditional power hierarchies.


The overthrow of brute force and state-sponsored violence by people power appears frightening to those who cling to the status quo, but to the rest of us it only means an end to Sauron’s influence and Saruman @ Sharkey’s misrule (and who hasn’t seen the movies or read Tolkien’s books?)

The Chinese government grew nervous at the swiftly spreading PUNKGOD phenomenon and began to harass Aobo. Police would disrupt his concerts and once even attempted to arrest him on stage. As the story goes, Aobo took the police officer aside and spoke with him for a few minutes. That was enough to reactivate the human component in the policeman. He bowed curtly to Aobo and withdrew his men.


Turning robots into humans is considered a threat to national security in China – for that matter in every country where the vampires of industrialization and globalization have feasted. Friends in the force informed him the government was preparing the grounds for Aobo’s arrest and detention as an inciter of hatred towards authority, a dangerous advocate of lawlessness. So he quietly left the country and found political sanctuary in Sweden. After a while he gave up trying to master Swedish and opted to operate from an Asian base instead.

All Aobo desires is that humans will awake from their artificially induced cultural trance and reclaim their glorious destinies as freely evolving beings who know how to have fun and who deeply appreciate nature and everything natural. How dangerous is that?

Dining room studio: Aobo working on his new album

Pangu died in order that the world may live. Now he wants to enjoy the human experience to the max on his own resurrected mythic body - the Earth, the Solar System, the Galaxy, the Whole Universe in fact!


I conducted a brief interview with Aobo through a translator and this is what transpired:

Q: Are you Pangu himself – or just borrowing the name?

A: The politically correct answer is that I am merely an agent of Pangu. But those who know and speak the truth have no need for political correctness.

Q: Now that you’re back in conscious form, do you have any plans you can reveal?

A: It’s very simple. Originally, all that existed was Chaos. I emerged from that Primordial Chaos and became the world of forms; and when humans began to dominate the earth, we had a compulsion to impose our limited concepts of order upon nature, that’s how civilization started. Civilization has thus far been antagonistic to nature; it has grown more and more destructive. There is even talk of introducing a New World Order on this planet. I came back to remind people that Chaos is nothing to fear; it is our original, pure state of innocence, simplicity and spontaneity. It is the wellspring of all Life. Embrace Chaos and the New World Order will fail. Nature – or the Tao – will be reinstated and the Earth will be restored to pristine health and beauty, and all living beings will regain their freedom.











Now listen to some "jungle pig" music by PUNKGOD!

[First posted 14 February 2011, reposted 8 May 2014 & 3 May 2019]


Monday, February 7, 2022

RECLAIM YOUR POWER NOW! (reprise)


The pheromonal reek of political fever is in the air. It's as if the entire body politic turns into a bitch and goes into heat once every four or five years, and the streets are overrun with growling, salivating mutts each desperate to lay genetic claim on every fecund female in sight. Apart from the maddening noise at night, mating season amongst canines is really a routine affair and can be fairly entertaining to watch. In the human sphere, unfortunately, these ritual mindfuckfests often have dire consequences.

As polling day approaches, opinions fly around the blogosphere and in coffeeshops everywhere. The only place where meaningful debate is conspicuously absent is, alas, the mainstream media. You will find no alternative views on the pages of the national dailies or on any TV channel (all controlled by the incumbent political party, Barisan Nasional, through its capitalist cronies). But that's pretty obvious to anybody with even half a brain cell to call his or her own.

Last week in a coffeeshop I heard someone say something utterly inane: "In Asian countries only a dictatorship will work. We need a strong leader like Dr M!" This was no daily-paid menial laborer, mind you, this man was obviously well educated and from a comfortable middle-class background. We were discussing the tragic and ruinous legacy of Dr Mahathir and the sorry mess the country is in today, largely owing to his megalomanic ambition to crown himself emperor of an evil empire ruled through fear and greed.

Granted, the carrot-and-stick management method has been effectively utilized since the Year Dot: wave a carrot at the donkey to appeal to its greed; and if it refuses to succumb to temptation, wield the stick, inflict pain and instil fear. This approach to government assumes the intrinsic asininity of the electorate.

Judging from the geopolitical state of affairs on this planet, the bulk of humanity certainly appears to be no more than a beast of burden. The word "sheeple" - though overused to the point of ineffectuality (since a great number of humans who subscribe to Christian doctrine seem perfectly content to be likened to a flock of woolly white sheep guided by a Good Shepherd) - is still particularly apt.

Nevertheless I choose to accept the occasional disappointment of overestimating - rather than risk underestimating the intelligence of others. It is in this spirit that I offer my own insights on the true nature and purpose of power, and why each of us has no real option except to consciously reclaim our power from all existing institutions and external authorities.

The whole idea of needing a strong guiding hand - whether you call it dictatorship or shepherding - is in effect a handing over responsibility to somebody else to decide your destiny and future. Now that's fine if you're a child who hasn't reached voting age and you have to depend on Mummy and Daddy for food and shelter. But sooner or later you're going to outgrow your dependency and claim your adulthood. No harm lending an ear to whatever good advice your parents might have to offer - but the ultimate choice is yours.

NO CRIME NO PUNISHMENT

Take the absurdity of drug laws, for instance. Has declaring various substances illegal effectively curbed "substance abuse"? On the contrary, drug addicts now form a growing subculture worldwide - more than 13 million injecting drug users reported, plus an unknown number of unregistered addicts probably ranging in the tens of millions - enough at any rate to fill the continent of Australia to the brim.

The criminalization of any substance serves one purpose only - and that's to inflate its market price a hundredfold. Declare soap illegal and the cost of a single bar could shoot up to RM50. Any streetwise individual can tell you that almost every consignment of marijuana that hits the streets has passed through police hands. On the global level one can state with a fair amount of certainty that the biggest distribution network for cocaine and heroin is controlled by covert agencies like the CIA, working with powerful triads and underworld syndicates, in many cases laundering the staggering profits through Vatican-owned and Mafia-operated banks. Do I have "concrete proof" of these wild allegations? Of course not. However, use your common sense: the drug trade is massive and involves precisely the sort of cloak-and-dagger operation that covert agencies are designed to carry out.

What would happen if trading in all sorts of substances was decriminalized? Well, prices would fall so dramatically that dealing in drugs will no longer be as lucrative. Within a matter of years the supply will fizzle out - along with the demand. Why? Because drug addicts are for the most part rebellious types for whom the prime attraction is the element of danger associated with drug use. Without the romantic appeal of doing something very naughty a lot of drugs will lose their glamor. I mean, if I tell you there's a chemical in chichak* shit that can get you high, you might try it a couple of times out of curiosity. But picking chichak shit off the table and ingesting it isn't a particularly adventurous notion. You might as well get off on sniffing bicycle seats or women's underwear stolen off clotheslines. These might be habit-forming behaviors, it's true - but ones easily outgrown and forsaken. In any case, they pose as much threat to national security and personal health as nail-biting, nose-picking, and masturbating. Imagine: if wanking was declared a criminal offence, our prisons would be bigger than cities like Bangkok, Jakarta and Tokyo. I'd be blogging from jail for sure!

In effect, external government (as opposed to self-government) rules through fear to enforce the outward appearance of Law and Order. At the same time it forces the spirit of freedom underground where it turns into a variety of antisocial tendencies, mostly destructive. Most people have been brainwashed into believing that without strict laws governing social behavior there would be sheer chaos everywhere. Little do they realize that the chaotic or disruptive behavior is a direct result of law enforcement. Authoritarian rule breeds mindless rebellion on all levels. Autonomy, on the other hand, only exists when an individual or organization has attained sufficient self-awareness and maturity to monitor its own behavior and make constant adjustments towards achieving coherence and integrity. In short, you can govern yourself only when you've become a master navigator and are able to steer yourself safely through life.

The ultimate goal of self-governing autonomous individuals living symbiotically within self-governing communities requires that we constantly strive to reduce the influence, dismantle the machinery and abolish the concepts of external authority and government. Part of the process requires that we replace dysfunctional government with one that functions well enough to choreograph a conscious evolution towards the day when its job is done and it can go on permanent vacation, leaving us to govern ourselves as sentient adults.


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* chichak (pronounced "chee-chak") = common Malaysian household lizard

[First posted 16 February 2008]