Part One

My copy of 'Exit the Cave' by Howdie Mickoski arrived. I set to reading it for the first time, and it proved compelling. "I don't see you with a book like that very often" commented my wife. "From time to time I come across an important book" was my reply. "And this is one of them."

I gobbled it up first time round. And then, having got the general gist, I started going through it again, skipping sections while paying close attention to the parts that seemed most important.

The theme of the book is the reincarnation soul trap, the in-between-life deception and trickery that is played upon souls, to get them coming back, again and again, in an endless cycle for more. This world we inhabit, so-called 3D matrix, is, according to Howdie, the product of evil. It is a simulation of the real thing, designed by what the Gnostics referred to as the Demiurge, the false god (who, by the way, is working overtime at the moment). This place, says Mickoski, is intended to be a realm of division, hurt, and suffering. There is no point in trying to fix it; the only remedy is getting out completely. Leave behind this matrix, this simulation. Exit the Cave.   

During the second reading of the book, I noticed my mood change. At first subtly, and then quite dramatically. Some of that initial enthusiasm, elation even, was melting away; in its place there began to emerge something of a bleak feeling. Inner investigation revealed that this new feeling was prompted partly by some of the subject matter. It was also, maybe, a transmission of aspects of the writer's psyche as communicated through the book.

At this point the muscles in my lower back all tightened up, though fortunately not going into spasm as they have been known to do on occasion. I searched through cupboards for the 1980s Pifco massager which was inherited from my parents, and which is more effective for loosening muscular tightness than anything else I know. 

And then I woke one morning to streaming eyes and nose, painfully desiccated nasal passages, and general feeling of unwellness. Maybe it's a hay fever-type allergy; maybe it's my body doing a spontaneous detox; maybe it's the book - or, rather, a reaction to the book; maybe it's a combination of all three. Or none of them. I don't know. But I certainly felt crap for two or three days which coincided with my study of 'Exit the Cave'.

I rewatched an interview given recently by Howdie on Ickonic, to do a double-take. I scrutinised both him and the content of his words for clues. I seemed to receive some confirmation. I'd say that Howdie is basically a really good guy, and he has some significant, even invaluable, things to say. His book is indeed an important one, and he demonstrates courage in delving into areas that few others dare to touch.

At the same time, while agreeing with his overall thesis, I don't go along with some of the details that he presents. Some probably boils down to attitude. While David Icke talks about similar subjects, he is also at pains to emphasise the pathetic nature of the trickery, and how we are actually infinite consciousness, with these individualised experience a brief interlude. While he does indeed subscribe to this notion, Howdie sometimes seems to lose it, and can create a sense of hopelessness as a result. He speak of traumas earlier in his life: it's possible that his presentation is coloured by this, and he remains tinged with the after-effects of personal trauma. I don't know. 

Meanwhile, to anyone who doesn't know anything about exiting the cave, this will all make little sense at all....

Part Two

The cave referred to in the title is Plato's Cave. This allegory is to be found in 'The Republic', and is fairly well-known. In it, a group of chained prisoners are facing the wall of the cave, where they watch shadows cast by a giant fire behind them, which they do not know exists.

The shadows are all they know and all they have ever known. The prisoners believe the shadows to be real, and treat them as such. They have no inkling that they are in reality just reflections cast from behind them. They are watching a film, a movie, ancient Greece-style.

One of the prisoners eventually gets up and has a look at his surroundings. He has a glimpse behind him, and all around. He finds his way out, only to be blinded by the light and come hurrying back. So he is dragged out of the Cave, and eventually realises that things are far better outside than in. He goes to try and encourage the other prisoners to leave the cave, but they consider him mad, and stay put.

In a rough and ready, and probably inaccurate, way, this is the story of Plato's cave. Read it for yourself to get a better idea of what the story has to say. The main thrust is not difficult to grasp. 

Illustrating as it does the unreality of what most people take to be real, the one and only 'real', Plato's Cave is an image with various correlations. It has a similarity with the notion which comes through various Buddhist and Hindu traditions of maya. Maya is illusion, and 'the world' is precisely that, illusory.

The Cave clearly resonates too with more modern concepts such as our inhabiting a matrix, the Matrix, and the proposal that we are living in a simulation, a kind-of monster sized computer programme.

While this all sounds great, Howdie Mickoski is left unimpressed with Plato's allegory. It lays out the bare bones, but begs many questions which remain unasked and (obviously) unanswered. Who are these prisoners? How did they get in this situation? Who runs the prison? What do they benefit from running this prison? 

For Howdie, the fact that these questions are not addressed points to something fishy about the whole business. What is Plato's purpose in giving us this story? Is it to help people see their predicament and assist them in escaping? Or is it a bit of a trick in itself?

I am not convinced - though not closed either - of what Howdie seems to suspect. Maybe Plato just told the story, and was simply saying 'This is the situation that humans are in. Now I'll go and have breakfast.'

It is reasonable, however, to feel suspicious. I have become a little the same about some of Buddhism. It portrays clearly the human condition, and the alternatives. There is Nirvana, Enlightenment; and there is ignorance, samsara, the endless wheel of rebirth. Take your pick, folks.

The Buddhist traditions, however, generally fall shy of answering the question of how it got to be like this in the first place. In one of the schools of Tibetan Buddhism, in reply to when the samsara began, it is said that samsara has been here since beginningless time. This answer can be taken as a brilliant explanation from the depths of ontological wisdom. Or it can be taken as a cop-out, the kind of thing that politicians say.

In similar vein, there is a story in which somebody asks Buddha how we got into the state of ignorance. Buddha says you don't bother asking the question, you just get out. Like a guy who gets an arrow in the eye; you don't wonder who shot the arrow, why, where it came from, and so on. You simply pull the arrow out. So it is with Buddha's teaching.

I submit that from one point of view Buddha is correct, but from another not at all. Without the answers to such questions, you are more likely to walk into an ambush again; you may not be able to warn others who are about to be attacked; and so on. I sometimes wonder whether there are those among the chief weavers of Buddhism who knew more than they let on. About the deceivers, the builders of our prison the matrix. They are happy to help out, but only so far. So a bit like Plato and his simulation cave world.

Part Three

"This is not a school. Why would an omnipotent being create a bunch of ignorant people, and then torture them to make them better?" Richard Rose

Howdie does a thorough demolition job on the notion held by some people that this world, this realm, has been created by a loving god. He brings to the table a number of interesting examples.

One such is the food chain. He points out the obvious, but rarely discussed: the food chain is an unthinkably vicious system. Everything on planet Earth depends for its continued survival on eating something else. Bird eats worm; fox eats bird; human kills fox. And so it goes on. The mistake that humans make is that they assume they are immune to this system, stand at the end of the line, and never stop to wonder if they are being eaten themselves, used to nourish another entity. Which, by the by, they are....

So, would a loving god come up with such a brutal, painful, fear-inducing system of living as this? Wouldn't he/she create a more kind and peaceful means of energy exchange? I think so.

Of the six realms depicted on the Tibetan Wheel of Life, the tradition most often recommends the human one. Here, it tells you, there is a balance of pleasure and pain, of successes and failures, and the rest. I have always concurred on this one; but is it really true? Scan the world of humans as we know it today; take in what we have learnt about the history of the species: is it not largely a tale of great hardship and brutality, a struggle to survive, a fight against dark energies and entities of all shape and form. I have had it lucky, but even I bear the scars of decades of battle.

It's birth, old age, sickness, and death, the eternal cycle: another Buddho-Hindu notion. Does it deal out the cards evenly, though? In how many lives does the pain outweigh the pleasure, the tortures and hardships punctuated by short, sharp interludes of peace, relaxation, er, happiness - maybe that's too much to ask.

People are born and people die, yet the death is frequently not the peaceful and apparently natural extinguishing of a candle. All too often folk undergo slow, painful, nay insufferable final phases of their life. Things that I wouldn't wish on anybody. This seems to be how human life on Earth is designed. It's horrible and it's rubbish. If there is a creator of it all, this being must be some kind of sadistic psychopath. Literally.     

I sense that some people recognise what a mental and insane system we all live in. They will do anything to alleviate the world's, and their own, suffering. Sensitive souls, with what some call 'a divine spark', which knows that something is wrong, wrong, wrong. And then it all gets messed up....

I have been there myself. In the autobiography section of this blog, I recount how I adopted the attitude of total harmlessness and became vegan overnight at the age of seventeen. Looking around me, all I saw was deception, cruelty, exploitation, and endless hurt. I wanted nothing to do with it, and in effect tried to counter it by living the opposite.

I came to recognise that this was not a viable way of living, and I could not save the world by myself. I changed strategy, principally by beginning to 'save myself' rather than trying to save the world from a basis of personal messed-up emotions and attitudes, which never was going to work.

Many of today's sensitive souls have failed to see this. Instead, their continued lack of deeper self-awareness has allowed their energies and intentions to be hijacked. They have been rounded up to populate groups such as Extinction Rebellion, Just Stop Oil, Hope not Hate, and 'Wokery' in general. Desperately believing they are doing good, while the truth is the converse.

What has been done is exceedingly cruel. It amounts to the theft of the emotional body of these people. To varying degrees sensitive to the negativity surrounding them, they have been fed a programme of lies which they have sadly consumed whoIeheartedly. Their fear, insecurity, and despair have blinded their powers of discernment - or, rather, totally extinguished them - and they rail against inappropriate opposition, fuelled by their vision of a bleak future.

All of this, thanks to emotional immaturity and blindness, morphs easily into aggression, intolerance, and hatred. The badge declares them to be freedom fighters; the reality is that they have become nasty authoritarians, in the worst cases neo-fascistic.

Such is the fate that awaits, should you not open the all-seeing eye of discernment.

And the other things about the Woke converts is that they are, practically speaking, a pain in the ass. They stand in the way of real progress in the awakening of human beings. Many of them will be the last to see what is really happening in the world....