You will not expect it from such an angle

Meher Baba spoke of the coming of a Dark Cloud in 1957. He said it would come from an unexpected angle.

In 1960, and again in 1964, Baba referred to the news as the "bogus news." (Lord Meher)

Now the attached meme is not to imply that the CIA 'is' the Dark Cloud.

But it should be noted that after WWII, intelligence agencies, which increasingly collude with media, have as their main mandate from the states that form them to create new realities, by forming 'narratives.' More and more politicians, media, intelligence agencies create narratives that have nothing to do with the truth - and are aimed at outcomes.

When George Tenet famously said that the Iraqi WMD's were a "slam dunk," he later clarified that he did not mean it was a slam dunk that it was true, but that making the public believe it was the case was a "slam dunk" (an easy basket to make). By clarifying this, to save his own reputation, Tenet was inadvertently admitting what the role of the intelligence agency was -- as is true of all intelligence agencies.

Intelligence agencies are in fact propaganda ministries, not intelligence-gathering agencies. Intelligence gathering is the job of military intelligence, not security agencies.

We are now living in a time when people live under narratives, and not the truth.

Some time ago, facilitated by the rise of psychology and especially social psychology, it was noticed (by elites in social science and government) that desired outcomes could be created by manipulating human social behavior, and that social behavior was in turn downstream from perceptions. If you could shift human perceptions by propaganda and other forms of manipulation, you could control behavior and in turn produce outcomes. The power in this knowledge was especially realized by government and business. These methods were first explicitly expressed in 1928 in the book Propaganda by Edward Bernays, nephew of Sigmund Freud.

Since that time, this has been the modus operandi for control by all those who had the resources to control mass media. As those with vested interests (corporations, politicians) only needed to harness the power over human perception to achieve their desired outcomes, the incentive grew for collusion between the holders of those interests and media. None of this is theoretical. It is an historical reality.

It was realized that you needn't control people with guns if you could cause them to 'want' their own enslavement. We see this dramatized in Brave New World (1938). Notice in that book desires are used to enslave (especially sex), along with false illusory narratives about the world and history, and also drugs. This bears very close resemblance to life after that period -- and a paradigm example is the creation of the me generation. This literally included the emphasis of 'free love' and 'drugs' pushed then and now in media. These are methods of control, cynically sold to the public as forms of freedom. And people, just as expected, believe it.

The military industry can bring out outcomes the same way, as people are made to perceive other nations as enemies, even when they aren't. This too is happening now.

Corporations used the same techniques to create 'needs' people can be made to think they have.

Obviously politicians create narratives.

So over and over, the same techniques are used. One of the ironies of this is that by so much constantly lying, the liars themselves come in time to believe in their own hype, and you actually have alternative narratives, bubbles of illusion. And bubbles of illusion that finally there is no escape from. Life eventually becomes divorced from reality, which is exactly what psychosis is. Hence we have mass-psychosis -- or a Cloud of illusion.

One problem with all this is that it erodes trust in media. However, this mistrust is itself very easily manipulated and directed. So people flood to certain conspiracy theories (that they are being directed to by media hype) and wind up disbelieving things that are true, and believing things that are not. There are clear coercive ways to lead the masses in these chosen directions. Often a 'big conspiracy' in the media (trumpeted over and over to create a groundswell) is in fact a deliberate diversion from other more important facts. It is the old magician's trick of diverting attention with one hand from things in the other. Hence, many if not most people who think themselves so clever as to see through something, are in fact seeing exactly what they are meant to see, and suspecting what they are meant to suspect, as diversion of their attention.

So cynicism is no solution. The cynic, not trusting anything, winds up trusting his distrust, that is manipulated.

Notice something about conspiracy theories. They are almost never expressed as theories, but as facts. People don't say, "I have a theory that . . . " but rather "I absolutely know for a fact that." People in this way get stupider and stupider, and the clouds thicken to such a degree that escape becomes virtually impossible.

And all this is to say nothing of the fact that the deeper subjects, that are spiritual ones, are paid no attention to at all. And this hidden hand is what Baba called the 'anti-God element.' For increasingly in all this, faith in God is diminishing, which is the biggest story of all, and one hardly told. It is enough to make one believe in a devil (who deceives) if it were not that Baba said such a concept is pure fancy and symbolism.

I'm partly just rambling, because the days of this blog are coming to an end. I don't have a whole lot more to say in this venue or on these subjects.