Virtue signalling is of course, acting as if one had it

in response to the themes in:

https://off-guardian.org/2019/11/01/wearing-your-heart-on-your-lapel/

On poppy lapels and the glorification of war.

Everything serves double duty. That is - it will serve the meaning for you that you hold in your heart.

Others make their own choices according to their current sense of themselves and their reality.

I watched a documentary on Putin this year in which I was alert for the messages he gave out - ie for propaganda or deceit. Insofar I did see it - it was towards upholding a national identity that was willing to focus on strengths rather than focus in old hatreds and divisions. 

The practical reality is of maintaining a workable sense of self and society as an ongoing balance of interests. There are backgrounds to world wars that are still ongoing and are morally toxic to even consider.

Virtue signalling is of course acting as if one had it, but virtues are qualities of being that shine and share in resonant recognition that holds social or cultural consciousness - whereas the masking in forms of virtue feeds a cynicism that - on recognising the hypocrite - hates and attacks the truth the mask was passing off as.

I look outside the narrative mind - indeed to look from a new place upon it.

Great destruction is catastrophic to our sense of self-continuity - whether man-made or assigned by guilt as 'humanly deserved' or simply the shock of no longer sharing life together or even having the same life - because everything has changed.

While grieving is grievous, the original sense of mourning is a releasing into Life - a greater Life than my terms, conditions or expectations and demands. There is an honouring of the dead in Life that aligns us in love and love is our primary connection and communion within ourselves and among ourselves.

Grievance that refuses Life is a kind of blind hatred that 'knows not what it does'. This seeks vengeance or vindication in its own terms and worships the pain of lost love and power as the driving force for defence set against reliving or re-opening to Life perceived as treacherous - and therefore deserving its own 'coin' in return.

Sustainability for self-illusion must hide or pass off in the forms of social acceptance and reinforcement. And so wherever a light shines, the forms of its expression become attractive to those who seek to gain by association or indeed mitigate a fearful sense of isolation and self-conflict for which they may have no reflection or articulation - and so suffer 'mental illness' in secret within a society that is set IN the mask and AWAY from its own conflicted purpose and desire.

So yes - there is a denial of Light that compels sacrifice to maintain the conditions of darkness - or the lies that must be asserted and enforced to hide the already lies on which we stand as if solid ground. And yes it operates a hateful agenda of using our minds against ourselves - and each other. But do we GIVE it the power to deny our right to a natural Communion within our self as with our lives and everyone who lives in us?

Seeking moral high ground is the first sign of a lack of awareness of a deeper integrity - that we do not make or manufacture - yet shines forth under the conditions of aligning in transparency to it - to a love that moves us though we know not how.

Our narrative continuity is an invested self-identity played out in the flux of always shifting appearances - but if we choose to take it FROM our past, we shall repeat its themes - via every kind of attempt NOT to.

The nature of a naturally felt Communion within Life is of Presence - always arising anew.

Apocalyptic revelations of 'what lies beneath' echo back to great catastrophes that shaped or structured our thought and development of consciousness. 'Gods' or Power set over Life being associated with Terror and Destruction. Terraforming of the earth was WITHIN humanly recorded memory - but set in a frame that is incomprehensible to the Human developments of such consciousness AFTER the stage was set to a stable Cosmos in which a Foreground Power became background to our psycho-physical expression of its emulations and appeasements in human thought and behaviour.

We now live AS IF our current sense of World is the same as what has been for millions of years. But we MAKE our prequel as the frame of support of a present sense of definition and control - and if you intuit Orwell’s illumination here you are not altogether wrong.

The mindset of control is rooted in denial of its own chaos, and is stamped upon the presence as a mask that reiterates its theme under the attempt to control, defend, atone, or amend.

Yet I marvel that "Behold I make all things new!" - as applied to terraforming events that literally made raised up and moved or levelled mountains is also true at the deepest quality of awareness of Existence.

While we may think with Heraclitus that we are never in the same river of the same man - to feel and know the newness or nowness of each moment as it own is a quality of resonant recognition - which even a moment or a touch of - can completely shift our experience of our day.

Yes - I am aware of much 'Hidden History' of deceits that pains the heart to contemplate - and yet I also see that we each and all live our choices within the frame of our living, and I cannot make yours or another's. But unless we step outside the dictate of the frame, we shall not have perspective or freedom to  transform it.

Manipulation seeks to engineer our thought and reaction to serve hidden agenda - that must sacrifice transparency and accountability to an overriding dictate - however presented or structured. 

Listening in the Heart is a willingness to pause of the mind of its own spin and open a true connection.

The 'territory' around the awareness of Life whole may be every kind of fear.

Running off as if a separate 'whole' is a false inheritance.

But despite the Wasteland of war in pain of loss, in debt and death, the poppies bloom.

Consider the lilies of the Field...