The Preposterous Nature of “Reality”

It is not uncommon to be doing something seemingly innocuous when one is flooded with wild thoughts, musings that seem randomly meaningless, leading nowhere.  Thoughts that think us.  To dismiss them, however, is a mistake.  For me, these unbidden guests usually visit me when I am out walking or lying in bed right before sleep.

Recently, as I was again walking across the meandering Housatonic River through the covered wooden bridge in Sheffield, Massachusetts, I found myself waylaid by the thought of the word “preposterous,” which is usually understood to mean absurd, very silly, or foolish.

Being happily eccentric and language obsessed, I thought of its etymology, which from the Latin means before-behind or before-after, which makes preposterous an absurd, nonsense word itself, which seemed appropriate to thoughts that were approaching me from the other side as I walked ass-backwards (my behind behind me) toward them.  I wanted to see ahead to make sure I wasn’t bushwacked by something more absurd than a word.

For when I exited the bridge, I passed a plaque commemorating a reported UFO sighting by forty people and an alleged abduction on September 1, 1969 by Thomas Reed, who claims that when he was nine years-old he and his family were taken briefly aboard a disk-shaped flying UFO as they were driving down the dirt road between the corn fields and the marshes that I was approaching.  While this strange, fascinating story is not the focus of my reflections, if it interests you, you can read about it here.

I mention it because of what the plaque evoked in me and the seemingly preposterous nature of Reed’s claim and the weirdness of those of the many people who said they saw the same UFO.  I am not passing judgment on them, for I believe those forty people saw something, but what they saw I do not know.

I must admit I am glad I was not beamed up on my recent walk, for I wasn’t dressed appropriately for such an encounter.

What intrigues me about their stories is that they happened at a time very similar to today when the world seemed to be spinning out of control.

In 1969, secular black magic was in the air as the U.S. war against Vietnam raged on, led by the “peace candidate” in the 1968 presidential election, Richard Nixon.

There was the counterculture’s wide use of drugs (the CIA”s introduction of LSD, etc.), its turn to eastern religions and New Age esoterica, and the crisis of traditional religion as pagan practices were revived.

There was the murder of Sharon Tate and others by Charles Manson’s gang (deeply involved with satanism, Nazism, and occultism) in early August that was shortly followed by the Woodstock music mud festival, with both preceded by Apollo 11 to be followed by Seymour Hersh’s revelations about the My Lai massacre.

Throughout the year, and those preceding and following, the FBI’s COINTELPRO, the CIA’s operations CHAOS and MKULTRA were in full force, spying on Americans, creating chaos and mayhem in minds and on the streets, a part of a vast effort at political mind control and disassociation of the personality through the most evil means.

And “ironically,” in December 1969, the U.S. Air Force’s Project Blue Book – its decades long investigation of UFOs – was officially ended with the conclusion that there was no evidence indicating that sightings categorized as “unidentified” were extraterrestrial vehicles or were in any way beyond the range of modern technological science.

In October, as in before-after, the U.S. Department of Defense’s ARPANET program – Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (now DARPA) – the predecessor of the Internet, made it its first communication between two computers.

Then, as if to culminate a decade of assassinations and absurdity, despite a very vocal peace movement, in December, the Altamont music festival was riven by murder and mayhem, as if to imply, contrary to Don McLean’s 1971 “American Pie,” that this was the day the music died.

The list goes on and on.  Let’s just say the times were psychedelic, as if society were on a non-stop bad acid trip and the CIA’s takeover of the country was nearly complete.

Jump ahead a half-century to today.

Now we have the long-planned Internet – ARPANET’s and the Pentagon’s baby – and digital madness with conflicting narratives that are akin to acid-trips.  Mental dissociation at its finest.

Nixon is long gone but his successors have carried on his ruthless Vietnam war policies in grand traditional style with the U.S forever wars (El Salvador, Iraq, Serbia, Afghanistan¸ Libya, Syria, etc.) , with war against Russia via Ukraine, its backing of the Israeli genocide of the Palestinians and aggressive war against its neighbors, the push for war with China – all leading to the greatest chance of nuclear war since 1962.

The renewed media reports about UFOs (now called “unidentified anomalous phenomena”) and the Pentagon’s denials are kept alive by technologues like Elon Musk, among others, in his recent jocular exchange with Tucker Carlson.  You know, there are a lot of satellites up there but let’s not discuss the Pentagon’s mind control, the games it has being playing for decades to create fear.

We have Artificial Intelligence (AI) and massive drug use far exceeding that of the 1960s that is officially promoted, as reality evaporates before and behind more and more people’s eyes.

For the massive growth of mental problems, LSD, that old bad-ass standby, is now advocated by the mainstream media as excellent therapy, while the weaponization of disease with Covid propaganda spins along as the world awaits the promulgation of the falling leaf virus and the call to cut down all trees.

Spying on Americans and censorship of free speech is the rule of the day, far deeper and wider than the most inflamed imagination could conjure.

There is an electoral system in shambles that has become a running joke, at least for those who get it.

MKULTRA mind control on a vast scale flourishes, despite all the denials, via the Internet and digital devices meant to confuse, promote doubt, and crazy speculation.

There is the leitmotif that has persisted for 60 years, the continued decline and mockery of traditional religious beliefs together with the promotion of New Age “spirituality” tied to consumerism. Shopping being the real religion now.

And lest I forget, we have the media and educational promotion of sexual and identity confusion under the guise of new definitions, such as the meaning of the word “gender.”

Finally, there is no mass peace movement as wars rage, except for those college students protesting Israel’s genocide of Palestinians and a few scattered groups.

You can easily fill in what I have omitted because there is no doubt you feel this disturbing “reality” of living in a society of screen spectacles and scrambled brains.

In other words, social madness, the “after” to  1969’s “before” – absurdity repeating itself, is the rule of the day, or more accurately, has been continuing for the past 55 years.

A preposterous scene.

Weirdness and Chaos are today’s celebrity couple, as people are subjected to, and subject themselves to, smoke and mirrors and mind control through an addiction to cell phones, the perfect propaganda tool.  Just put your hand in your pocket wherever you are and “they” are with you, in your hand, in your head, your constant companion, corrupting your mind and soul.

All this juxtaposed history did not occur to me in specifics as I walked down the beautiful dirt road past the UFO plaque; it came to me in more general terms.  But in a flash.

The particulars here recounted come from my having lived through the 1960s and my knowledge of history, the teaching of which has fallen into desuetude as universities have, in the words of the recently retired Columbia University Professor Rashid Khalidi…

For some time now, I have been both disgusted and horrified by the way higher education has developed into a cash register – essentially a money-making, MBA, lawyer-run, hedge fund-cum-real estate operation, with a minor sideline in education, where money has determined everything, where respect for pedagogy is at a minimum.”

In his book, Scorched Earth: Beyond the Digital Age to a Post-Capitalist World, Jonathan Crary, sums it up nicely:

One of the foremost achievements of the so-called knowledge economy is the mass production of ignorance, stupidity, and hatefulness…programmed unintelligibility and duplicity.”

A close relative of mine, a brilliant man, highly skeptical, scientifically inclined, and very logical, a guy who scoffs at wild claims that he subjects to careful analyzes, was recently on a flight into LAX airport.  He had a window seat, and as the plane was on its long descent, the plane at approximately 15,000 feet, he saw a quivering disk-shaped object about 150 feet beyond the plane’s wing.  Startled beyond belief, he regretted not taking a photo of it before it was gone.

As soon as he landed, however, he asked the pilot if he had seen it.  The pilot said no, but it was probably a drone, which would make it a very high-flying drone indeed.  My relative called me immediately to tell me.  He said it was the size of a small car and it quivered like a quarter when dropped on a countertop.  He said it looked like no drone he had ever seen, and though amazed, characteristically concluded that he didn’t know what it was.

I mention this because such sightings are not just the wild imaginings of people prone to believe anything.  They are part of our current “reality,” seen by many people but shrouded in mystery.  Government authorities dismiss these sightings as figments of people’s imagination or weather balloons, drones, etc.  Any evidence to the contrary is dismissed, like so much else, as the conspiracy thinking of nutty people.  In other words – preposterous, meaning absurd.  This is part of the game of mind control that has been going on for decades, the effort to create social neurosis and confusion throughout society.

I offer these thoughts because I was waylaid by a word – preposterous – that went to my head.  If I have not kept to the subject, whatever it might be or whatever you expected, it is because, as the psychologist Adam Philips puts it, “In this picture digression is secular revelation, keeping to the subject is the best way we have of keeping off the subject.”  And so I will end with a few words from the great mystical and political poet, Czeslaw Milosz, a former Polish diplomat, who raises a question that cuts to the heart of our current dilemma.

Most people are ashamed, Milosz has written, to ask themselves certain questions that the seething infinity of modern relativity has bequeathed us. Such relativity is at the heart of our modern spiritual crisis, which is also the political one.

Space and time have lost all dimensions; the experience of the collapse of hierarchical space and time is widespread. 

For those who still call themselves religious believers, “when they fold their hands and lift up their eyes, ‘up’ no longer exists,” Milosz rightly says.  The map and the territory are one as all metaphysics are almost lost.  And with its loss go our ability to see the advancing banner of the king of hell, to grasp the nature of the battle for the soul of the world that is now underway.  Or if you prefer, the struggle for political control.

What is before is behind or what is before is after.  It is preposterous but it is true.