Waters of Life and Death

Waters of Life and Death

Where will you run to be reborn when the time comes, and why?

After decades of relentless partying and various ongoing relationships of all kinds with thousands of human beings, this heretic hermetic hermit finally managed to trick himself into entering a life of almost complete isolation.
I convinced myself that I wasn’t the only one who wanted to leave the city and move onto the land, even when the tide of new settlers was retreating back in the opposite direction at the end of the old Cold War – when greed became good and everyone was invited to sell out their dreams for a devaluing bankroll of inedible potage.
Many people had gone bush after becoming convinced the world was about to be torn apart in nuclear confrontation in the hideous times that elected the likes of Ronnie Raygun and Maggot Hatcher, when hundreds of thousands of urban dwellers took to the streets in the last great gasp of the Twentieth Century’s public protests. The first big wave of back to the land, down to Earth ‘tree changers’ happened earlier, back in the ‘60s and ’70s, when there were suddenly far more baby booming young people than old codgers in the Western world. Escape into paradise was much cheaper, more widespread and seemingly easier than it is today.
Now the demographic pendulum has swung back the other way and an inverted pyramid of oldsters balances on a fine point of put-upon youngsters.
Young people no longer have the freedom provided by safety in numbers and are expected to knuckle down and conform to the humdrum treadmill that masquerades as ‘daily life’ for their purblind, surveillance minded, paranoid rat-racing elders. It was a fate far more easily escaped by adventurous youngsters of the preceding generation, when today’s ossified straight old timers were hunkering down into lifelong toil while sneering at the small minority of freedom loving young hippies – laughing at all their talk of environmental destruction, alternative energy, the creation of healthy, child-oriented societies and how we could all be making love instead of war.
When I moved to this semi remote forest there were more than forty kids on the school bus that winds through this little valley from the nearest hick village. Now there’s one teenage kid left, and as he takes Wednesdays off there’s no public transport at all on Wednesdays. Or on weekends. Or school holidays.  When the phoney Cold War ended and the kids of the hippies began to grow up and leave (and helicopters began to make it difficult to grow mull) most couples followed their kids downstream to the beach, or back to the entertaining cities of their youthful memories.
The local hick town lost its only real industry when the loggers ran out of trees (they were too greedy, short-sighted and stupid to save any nearby forests for later) and has been repopulated by greying Tree Changer oldsters – retirees with no children to brighten up the town. Nonetheless, they’re a great improvement on the previous tenants.
The villages hereabouts are microcosms of Western society. Oldsters don’t usually move to the actual bush, or anywhere more than a few minutes from a nearby hospital. They never really have, unless, like me, they call widely respected doctors ‘dog turds’ and, like good old Baron Munchausen, avoid the inept Hospitalier’s gloomy, bloody temples of half-arsed death worship at all costs.
Despite various impediments including multiple snake bites, dingo attacks, tetanus, golden staph, internal bleeding, broken bones, smashed teeth, dislocated joints, infected abscesses, hernias and many more difficult personal experiences over the past decades, I’ve always avoided the dog turds and dealt with such difficulties myself – and healed all damage without resorting to modern pills or nostrums, while many others I know have been killed or maimed by ‘medical errors’.
Metaphysician, heal thyself.

Now many of the lands that were liberated from loggers and ranchers and replanted with fruit and nut trees have reverted back into the hands of those dumb redneck destroyers once again. I regularly watch new idiots appear, illegally bulldoze swathes of forest and riverbanks and tie down the Earth Mother with bloodstained barbed wire fences only to give up within a year or two, running back to town and leaving their horrendous messes for some poor hippy or permaculturist to clean up.
Fat chance. The land has become ludicrously expensive and (or course) most of it is really owned by banks and other financial institutions. Only those with access to large amounts of money feel enabled to go bush these days, unless they’re a freedom-loving person with uncommon sense. A single house in the Emerald City could have been exchanged for a thousand acres or more and multiple dwellings on paradisiacal, well watered fertile land twenty years ago; now one urban building can only be exchanged for a single house on a much smaller acreage.
Laws controlling rural communities and communes have multiplied, and even though they’re never enforced in practice they’ve served to keep timid town dwellers from entering lives of bold experimentation. The worst aspects of the nanny surveillance state are still easily avoided out of the prying sight of the townies but hardly anyone realises how simple it is to live in real freedom any more. Hardly anyone knows that there are still many populous alternative communities tucked away on the land, or that many have become viable, successful places that still accept newcomers with open hearts and arms. Hardly anyone knows how easy it is to live breathing clean air and drinking clean water, or how little you need to be happy in a clement climate. Humans have become so cocooned and insulated and screened that hardly anyone knows what good land in a good climate is any more.
Understandably, most such places that have survived the backlash years of Greed Is Good straightness don’t advertise their existence too widely. If you’re a straight person who doesn’t want to change their ways please stop reading now, and forget I ever mentioned the fact that an alternative society actually still exists. You’ll only wreck it if you want to join without transforming yourself and leaving your horrendous baggage behind where it belongs, in the shitty.

A few weeks ago this bearded, long haired, wild and woolly her(m)etic hermit (someone you might well eye with suspicion and cross the road to avoid on an urban street) was camped out on a paddock in the valley Bello, in a landscape originally liberated from the hobnailed hands of meatheads by the fabled Findhorn Community back in the 1970s.
Homeland is one of the communities that still thrives in paradise, having survived the ravages of the straightie eighties, whiney nineties and Nazi noughties to emerge largely unscathed into these brand new days of the post-dawn Aquarian Age.
Unlike aging rural towns filled with retirees in search of life at last in the last days of their lives, some alternative communities still attract and produce a younger, freer, wiser breed. During the Thora Bora celebration at the start of this southern spring, young people easily outnumbered the older, tireder  forerunners – who’ve made a large slab of land available for festivals, parties and even (pause to spit) doofs, to keep the alternative lifestyle and spiritual seeker ball rolling along.
Graced by a local Aboriginal elder (also a rainbow-clad ‘green’ councilman) who opened the gig with an old, old song accompanied by clapsticks, the celebration was warmed, nay heated, by huge bamboo bonfires that echoed the Burning Spark – a local version of Burning Man that burst onto the site a few weeks earlier.
By two in the morning, as the moon was rising beyond the mist of the river and shining through clouds of billowing smoke, a group of celebrants was sitting around a handful of hundred year old blazing hardwood stumps. A still dreadlocked ex-feral asked me where I was from (like native people, few in the alternative movement open conversations with ‘what do you do?’) and when I told him, pointing south through dark forested ranges, he said, “Oh, I was just there yesterday. I was looking at some land.”
“What a coincidence! Hardly anyone makes it out that way any more. Which block?” Most of the valley is currently for sale. It transpired he’d been inspecting some land right beside my home, where the next door neighbour is selling the title to two comfortable houses and an easily manageable forty acres for a third of a million Aussie dollars.
“I don’t know about the river,” he said.
“It’s the dry season,” I reminded him. “Everything’s just about as dry as it gets right now. I’ve been drinking the river for twenty years, and so have the kids; it’s perfect. The water’s been tested quite a few times by government departments, and it’s amazingly clean – right up until it gets to that cow farm downstream from the block you were looking at. It’s totally toxic by the time it leaves his place.”
“I saw some cowshit on the banks.”
“That’s because no-one’s been living there and chasing the cows back to the meathead’s place. The fences were damaged in the last big floods and the cattle farmers take their time repairing them if they think they can get free feed from their neighbour’s land. Stealing other people’s soil makes lots of filthy lucre for them.
“I don’t have any neighbours with cattle, but they used to chase their horned beasts kilometres upstream onto my place for a free feed. I still have to chase a handful of genuinely wild ones away from the fruit trees and veges every dry season. The graziers all illegally overgraze the land, and the soil on their paddocks is all compacted and washing away…”
“Can’t you call the cops or something?” a teenage hip hop artist asked.
“The impounding officer,” I replied while watching people take turns at the eyepiece of Tim’s impressively large reflector telescope on the greensward nearby, surveying the moon and the moons of Jupiter. “According to the law the owners owe agistment money for all those wayward cattle – they ought to be paying a hundred bucks a week ‘or part thereof’ if a dozen cows eats the grass on your land – but of course they don’t unless you take them to court.
“The easiest way to deter them is to shoot a couple of their cattle. They only pay attention when it costs them.”
“Have you ever done that?” the rapper asked with eyes gleaming.
“When I first moved to the bush the cows were everywhere. The ranchers – none of them are ‘farmers’, they don’t actually grow anything, just fatten meat for slaughter – told all the hippies that if they made trouble for them or their cows they’d make sure their mull plants were busted. They chase their cows onto everyone else’s land and wander all over it, so they often know where the secret trees have been planted – and most have a brother or cousin with the local cops.
“When I complained that the meathead’s cows were destroying my fruit trees the inbred bumpkins tried that tactic on me, but I told them to feel free to sool the cops onto me – I had nothing to hide. So they claimed, ‘We can’t control the cows – they break out in the dry and head for green feed.’ They said that for seven years, until I finally had the jack of being nice to them and put a few blunt arrows into the cows that were trashing my trees, just before they were about to be taken to town and murdered.
“When the cattle came running home with a few shafts sticking out of their thick hides it was a dramatic sight – the blunted target tips didn’t penetrate and probably hurt about as much as a wasp sting, but the meat growers suddenly had no trouble at all controlling their herds; the meat was bruised and it cost them next week at the slaughterhouse. Those guys don’t send their cows my way any more and the forest has had a chance to grow back. And I haven’t had to cause any more pain or terror to any more of their poor gentle beasties. That’s their job. I’m a vegetarian.”
A small group was listening in by now as we warmed ourselves around the remaining blazing fire. “So the water’s fine then?” he asked.
“Aye – come on in,” I laughed. Mind you, it’s one of the only rivers that’s still drinkable anywhere on the eastern half of the continent.” I gestured across the paddock toward the winding Bellinger River. “This is one of the only other ones, and you can’t drink any of them once they’ve left the upper catchment.”
“Really?” a woman seated on the other side of me asked. “You can drink this one, here?”
“You’re drinking it now,” I told her with a glance at her coffee cup. Those taps over there come from big tanks up the hill, and they’re mostly filled with river water.”
“I didn’t realise.”
“The central amenities block here alone – showers, baths and washing machines – goes through twenty thousand litres a month, and most of that’s from the river. I wouldn’t drink river water in most other places, though,” I warned. “It’s all been trashed and poisoned. The towns downstream all drink fluoridated bore water; there’s plenty of water in the rivers that pass through them but it’s all toxic. Don’t even let it touch your skin anywhere near Coffs Harbour or any other place that grew bananas, for instance.”
“Where would you recommend?” the would-be land buyer enquired.
“I searched all over the country for ten years, looking for a place to live. One of my prerequisites was clean drinkable water that was plentiful and warm enough to swim in, and that ended up narrowing the search right down.” My little audience leaned closer; the dreadlocked man wasn’t the only one in search of a healthy new home.
“Right here is about as far as you can get from a city and still be in a green area. You see that escarpment?” I said, pointing at the nearby cliff on the other side of the river. “The only clean water left on the eastern slopes of New South Wales – and I certainly wasn’t going to live in goddamned Queensland or trashed Victoria; the only comfortable subtropical land in the country is around here, about thirty degrees south – the only clean water lies between that escarpment and the Kempsey basin. There are only about half a dozen pure streams left, and only in the upper catchments.”
“What about the Washpool, or the headwaters inland of Kempsey?” the young woman asked.
“Sure, if you want to go right out into the remote mountains you’ll find clean water, but it’s all icy cold and thoroughly isolated– except for the worst brands of murderous rednecks – and usually pretty small and impermanent flows. Not many people could hack moving way out there.  The best places are always where the mountain ranges approach the sea. That’s where the hippies all move to.
“As for Kempsey and the Macleay River – I was bothering someone from the government water department quite often a few months back and they ended up getting something off their chest to me; they’re not allowed to tell anyone that the entire Macleay is undrinkable, and they asked me to pass the news along. So I’m passing it to you. Humans and cattle are dying from cancer and from other things caused by the water all along the river.”
“What’s wrong with it?”
“It’s full of arsenic and heavy metals.”
“How come?”
“Old gold mines a hundred years or more ago at the headwaters – just like a lot of other places. All the coal mining country is fucked, too, and the mines are spreading out like toxic waste. But all the rivers in the Kempsey basin are fucked from the gold mining and the cows are poisoned, too. The toxic sludge gets thrown onto the paddocks every time it floods because they don’t maintain ‘filter strips’ of trees along the banks, as they’ve been supposed to by law since the 1840s. They’re all dying young and selling arsenic-tainted meat to idiot carnivores and keeping a lid on everything to maintain ‘land values’.”
“Wow.”
“And land ‘values’ are so high – not just in the shitty city, but anywhere in the bush you’d want to live – that people have just about priced themselves out of a free happy life.”
“All those idiots in the suburbs who think they’re rich because their house is too expensive to keep unless they work like Trojans until they drop,” the woman observed. All attired in colourful partying glad rags, living on pittances in the most beautiful part of the best of all possible worlds, we smiled into the flames as one, reflecting upon our self-chosen good fortune.
“If you want to buy title to some land,” I told the dreadlocked man, “the entire headwaters of my valley’s for sale – it’s a defunct multiple occupancy that covers twelve hundred acres. There are about a dozen shares and the cheapest is – well, obscenely inexpensive – and only one person still lives there, tucked away in a comfortable place he built on a share way up the back. Or there are plenty of  freehold blocks, but they’re more pricey of course.
“If you prefer, I’ll give you a share in my place for free if you’re someone who won’t destroy the place. That way you can afford to set yourself up instead of spending everything you have and winding up broke.”
“How much land do you have?”
“I live on a couple of hundred acres, but most of it’s forest.”

Do It (For) Your Self

When one wishes to engage in deeper meditation or chakra work it’s wise to move far from the overpopulated habitats of domesticated primates. This isn’t merely to facilitate the expansion of one’s consciousness; it’s necessary to protect all those larval forms of as-yet-unevolved humankind from the transformations wrought by explorations of higher, deeper consciousness. Everyone is interlinked, and societies all exist inside explosive hidebound mind fields that a truly focused mind can easily trigger.
You don’t want to wake or transform anyone but yourself. That’s the real lesson of the falsified crucified Jesus myth, after all. You have no right to affect or effect anyone’s conscious evolution but your own, and will cause great unnecessary suffering if you attempt to do so in others before they’ve chosen to awaken. You’ll freak them out, (wo)man. Your awakening awareness will rouse theirs before they are primed and ready to choose the path for themselves. All chicks have to peck their own way out of the shell of their personal egg. Otherwise they never truly mature and will be too weak to thrive, or even survive.
Besides, workaday workmanlike worms will only twist any genuinely potent enlightenment you successfully transmit (or attempt to impart) into effective brainwashing and ‘religious’ claptrap. It will all be misused to reinforce the primate pack mentality and egregious hierarchical power structures of larval humankind. If you start to wake them up they’ll likely put you down and wilfully go back to sleep.
If you want to pursue enlightenment be ready to abandon the urge to take anyone or anything along with you. Nothing but your most vital inner essence can pass through the Gate of Immortality. A rope cannot pass through the eye of a needle – ‘camel’ is a mistranslation wrought by unevolved Western monk(ey)s – and an egocentric personality cannot enter the brilliant heavens. Nor can it survive in paradise on Earth – not without destroying the place in futile search for the inspiring reality that always lurks within, patiently awaiting that enlightening moment when an immature aspirant finally opens their inner eye and casts off the superfluous.
In practice few truly break free until the day of their death, when the shell of the cosmic egg is shattered and the sweet bird of youth flies from the withered husk of self-damaged age.
Everything mundane and material pales to insignificance; the Gulf Stream and Atlantic Conveyor have shit down, though they may still restart before the northern hemisphere enters the next Ice Age. Floods, fires, firestorms, freezes, exponential increases in earthquake frequency and intensity, erupting volcanoes, reforming planetary magnetic fields, sunspot minimums, poisoned land and water and diminishing and polluted food supplies – for one with eyes to see the signs are unmistakable.
Don’t die wondering; live in wonder. Don’t wait until your personal Last Days. Live NOW!
Time appears to roll onward as the ball of the planet spins, creating the slow stroboscopic illusion of the passage of time…
- R. Ayana

Images – author’s

For further enlightenment see –

From the New Illuminati – http://nexusilluminati.blogspot.com

 http://newilluminati.blog-city.com

 The Her(m)etic Hermit – http://hermetic.blog.com

New Illuminati on Facebook – http://www.facebook.com/pages/New-Illuminati/320674219559

The Prince of Centraxis

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From the Her(m)etic Hermit – http://hermetic.blog.com

New Illuminati – http://nexusilluminati.blogspot.com

 http://newilluminati.blog-city.com