Card #249 – Soul Imprisoned

“In every cry of every man,

In every infant’s cry of fear,

In every voice, in every ban,

The mind forged manacles I hear…”

— William Blake, Songs of Innocence

INFANT SORROW

My mother groaned! my father wept.

Into the dangerous world I leapt:

Helpless, naked, piping loud:

Like a fiend hid in a cloud.

Struggling in my fathers hands;

Striving against my swaddling bands;

Bound and weary I thought best

To sulk upon my mothers breast.

— William Blake, Songs of Innocence and Experience

The weeping child could not be heard;

The weeping parents wept in vain.

They stripped him to his little shirt,

And bound him in an iron chain.

— William Blake, “A Little Boy Lost,” Songs of Innocence and Experience

“Dinosauria, We”

Born like this

Into this

As the chalk faces smile

As Mrs. Death laughs

As the elevators break

As political landscapes dissolve

As the supermarket bag boy holds a college degree

As the oily fish spit out their oily prey

As the sun is masked

We are

Born like this

Into this

Into these carefully mad wars

Into the sight of broken factory windows of emptiness

Into bars where people no longer speak to each other

Into fist fights that end as shootings and knifings

Born into this

Into hospitals which are so expensive that it’s cheaper to die

Into lawyers who charge so much it’s cheaper to plead guilty

Into a country where the jails are full and the madhouses closed

Into a place where the masses elevate fools into rich heroes

Born into this

Walking and living through this

Dying because of this

Muted because of this

Castrated

Debauched

Disinherited

Because of this

Fooled by this

Used by this

Pissed on by this

Made crazy and sick by this

Made violent

Made inhuman

By this

The heart is blackened

The fingers reach for the throat

The gun

The knife

The bomb

The fingers reach toward an unresponsive god

The fingers reach for the bottle

The pill

The powder

We are born into this sorrowful deadliness

We are born into a government 60 years in debt

That soon will be unable to even pay the interest on that debt

And the banks will burn

Money will be useless

There will be open and unpunished murder in the streets

It will be guns and roving mobs

Land will be useless

Food will become a diminishing return

Nuclear power will be taken over by the many

Explosions will continually shake the earth

Radiated robot men will stalk each other

The rich and the chosen will watch from space platforms

Dante’s Inferno will be made to look like a children’s playground

The sun will not be seen and it will always be night

Trees will die

All vegetation will die

Radiated men will eat the flesh of radiated men

The sea will be poisoned

The lakes and rivers will vanish

Rain will be the new gold

The rotting bodies of men and animals will stink in the dark wind

The last few survivors will be overtaken by new and hideous diseases

And the space platforms will be destroyed by attrition

The petering out of supplies

The natural effect of general decay

And there will be the most beautiful silence never heard

Born out of that.

The sun still hidden there

Awaiting the next chapter. — Charles Bukowski

Sometimes the soul is imprisoned by incarnation in the Babylon Matrix.

Sometimes the soul feels imprisoned by incarnation, but the bondage is of its own making.

In the first case you need to have the compassion for yourself and others that the world did not have for you.

Many forces beyond individual control can imprison the soul — war, political oppression, economic forces, gender oppression, oppression based on race, religion, sexual orientation or mutant divergence of various sorts. The oppression could be an ailing body that imprisons the soul with its mortal limitations. Not every form of oppression can be reduced to negative thinking or neurotic complex. Only the very sheltered and naive believe that everyone is creating his own reality.

On the other hand, very often it is we who imprison our own souls. We give our power over to another, look for wholeness outside of ourselves, reach for bottle, pill or powder. We suffocate within the cocoon of our own illusions.

Sometimes we imprison our souls by disowning our essence and betraying our True Will. As Blake says, “Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires.” The desires he means are the desires of our soul, not those of our reptile brain.

Consider this a propitious time to have compassion for yourself and others who are imprisoned by external forces of oppression. But if you yourself are the warden of you own soul’s imprisonment, consider this a propitious time to throw off the shackles of self-imposed bondage and liberate yourself into life.