Rob Brezny’s horoscope for Cancers this week is as entertaining as ever, and it provoked me to revisit a subject I’ve been trying to ignore for twelve years:  the nature of humans as (among other things) mind-controlled and genetically manipulated for the purposes of Others whom we’re mind controlled not to notice or talk about.

My first reading of Rob’s horoscope was so provocative that I forwarded it to my partner to read with me later, so I could delete it from my inbox and get on to other tasks.

End of day, Greg read me his horoscope – wonderful, inspiring, over-the-top with promise for what we can make of our lives and the adventure it is.

Then Greg read me my horoscope “for the week beginning October 1”:

CANCER (June 21-July 22): In the wild, very few oysters produce pearls — about one in every 10,000. 

Most commercial pearls come from farmed oysters whose pearls have been induced by human intervention. 

As you might expect, the natural jewel is regarded as far more precious.

Let’s use these facts as metaphors while we speculate about your fate in the next eight months. 

I believe you will acquire or generate a beautiful new source of value for yourself. 

There’s a small chance you will stumble upon a treasure equivalent to the wild pearl. 

But I suggest you take the more secure route: working hard to create a treasure that’s like a cultivated pearl.

Why did I about swoon with that?

And why did I suddenly remember a woman I only knew by name – nine years ago – until the night she spoke to me at a gas station on a lonely dark road in Cochise County, south of Elfrida, Arizona.  She was nearly hysterical as I stood listening, truly having compassion, but unable to offer her any consolation, and knowing that no one could.

She’d heard – I don’t know how because I kept it a secret – that I’d had “alien” experiences; she had too, and she began to relate how she finally understood reality:  we are like cattle to Them, nothing but cattle, and They will do anything to us that They want.

She saw no point in living – and said this not with despair, but as much impassioned hysteria as a person could show while trying to convey a secret to the only person in the world who might get it – standing next to gas pumps with the clerk looking out through the window.

I don’t remember anything I said in response.  I had no hopeful words.  I’d been suffering all sorts of weird things in my hermitage – going up into the sky with no other memories, highway stops while immobilized with missing time and no other memories, waking unable to move while people seemed to be moving furniture in my house, being hit between the eyes with a beam and immobilized, waking with a healed thyroid scar on my neck, and a hundred other weirdnesses.  I was trying to be brave and figure it out, learn whatever spiritual skills might make me a warrior able to keep Them at bay, and maybe offer help to others.  I had no energy for hysteria, but I understood hers very well.  Perhaps some inner parts of me were agreeing, “Yeah, that’s how we feel,” while my outer alter just stared.

She was going to flee her land.  She was outa there.  She’d invested the last decade and all her money there, and now she didn’t know where to go, but she couldn’t stay.  She might just run, live in her truck forever, and make it hard for Them by never staying in one place.  It might be horrible, and maybe They’d chase her, but she couldn’t stay.  Could not stay.

The last I saw of her, this woman whose name I can’t remember was driving away in her old truck with a hand-built wooden house on the back, tearful and hysterical.  I worried for her and was frightened that her theory of being like cattle wasn’t one to simply dismiss.  It fit all our symptoms, and had obvious metaphors in nature and in human nature.  Thank Goodness there were other theories to entertain, less scary, but not all symptoms made sense with each of the theories.

For nine years, until very recently, I’ve mostly evaded the question:  What is the nature of these experiences, and is the cattle metaphor in any way instructive?  What other metaphors should we entertain?  Stepford Wives?  Invasion of the Body Snatchers?  Or which, if any, of the many other theories espoused by ET enthusiasts and ET fear-mongerers?  I’ve come back to these questions now and then, but never stayed on the subject long until recently, when I began tracking my fractured (but “high-functioning”) mind with my new Journal/Notebook.

I’d been playing with this idea that the Controllers are not evil, just inconsiderate – which has this going for it:  The theory is compatible with the rest of nature.  In fact, it’s suggesting that our experiences are caused by beings just like us (not strange at all!), treating us just like the way we farmers, ranchers, scientists, and consumers treat other beings or endorse with our dollars.  We’re not evil, we’re just  doing what nature – Nature with a capital “N”?  or human nature?  whatever – has evolved us to do.

It’s been a week or so I’ve been facing this idea more squarely:  of mind control not as an “evil” thing, but simply what we do to other animals and plants being done to us.  Then Rob Brezsny’s horoscope arrived in my inbox – though I’m not sure he wrote it the way I interpreted it.

Greg read Rob’s horoscope again to me, and I commented after each line.

“In the wild, very few oysters produce pearls — about one in every 10,000.”

I did not know wild pearls were so rare.  I did know that commercial pearls are made by irritating the oyster with a piece of grit inserted artificially between its shell parts, which it otherwise keeps from happening quite well without this intrusion.  Insulted, it secretes juices that coat the grit and harden into a pearl, which doesn’t bother the oyster as much, I presume.

I wasn’t sure Rob wanted me to identify so strongly with the oyster, as opposed to, say, a connoisseur of pearls, but I couldn’t help it.  Oysters are yet another species on this planet treated to weird manipulations to make them do what someone else wants, in this case, secrete juices that have value to the human in the form of pearls.  As a mind control subject, made amnesic and multiple for someone else’s purposes, I relate to the oyster.

Cattle are similar, but who wants to think of themselves as cattle?  (Maybe it was that metaphor driving my neighbor acquaintance most hysterical.)  What if we thought of ourselves instead as oysters with a pearl of beauty inside – sure it was someone else’s plan, but oh well, that seems to be our fate.  Would it be better to rant about evil government or aliens or both?  I think it best to try to understand from as wide a perspective as we can (using metaphors to try to understand reality in other dimensions), and if the reality is that we’re like cattle or tomatoes or oysters, then we might as well know that and make the best of it.

I like the idea of being an oyster, even if forced to deal with irritating grit to make a pearl – at least it feels better than being a cow, or – here’s another theory – an energy source for Archons – that’s reality as espoused by no less than the writers of the Gnostic (pre-Christian and Christian) gospels – but it’s just as disturbing to me as being cattle.  So I’ll work for a while here with the oyster metaphor.

Back to Rob’s horoscope:

“Most commercial pearls come from farmed oysters whose pearls have been induced by human intervention.”

As I was saying.  And today they don’t just put little pieces of grit inside oysters; they’re putting big disks of metal inside to create big disk-shaped pearls, and other irritating objects, just for something different in human jewelry and fetishes.  I wonder how the mute oyster feels about that.

And what an appropriate extension of our metaphor! – Earth as a big oyster farm (we humans as the oysters), in which they’re inserting programs and technologies into us, not caring a whit whether we’re uncomfortable, unless we cost them.

(That’s why I’ve considered suicide so often:  I want to cost Them!  In my gloomiest days I have figured, with numbers, it’ll be the only feedback their organism/organization will heed to decide to run their operations with better care and concern for their producers.  Of course, I have my reasons for not offing myself, but it seems to make sense, from a “scientific farming” and business feedback standpoint.  The plant, oysters, or cattle must sicken or die and cost Them money before They change their practices.  But I digress.  And: apologies for being “dark.”  Just being practical, “problem-solving,” as I was trained so well to do.)

“As you might expect, the natural jewel is regarded as far more precious.”

Another interesting analogy:  A human being with some accidental grit (some traumatic accident) that made them, say, a multiple-personality mystic/shaman – they would be rare and more valuable – as they are.  And because they’re rare, they’re able to be cared for properly and supported in their tribe, “precious,” like a wild pearl.

But there’s very little precious about it when everyone is given grit (the irritating mind control of this culture), and no one is left with the energy to value or care for another.

“Let’s use these facts as metaphors while we speculate about your fate in the next eight months.”

Eight months?  Are you just having fun, Rob, or do you know something that entails 1/12th of the world’s or America’s population experiencing something life-changing the beginning of next June?  Ah – we’ll call it poetic license – and I’ll let that question go.

So what about these metaphors, Rob?  Enlighten us, please.

(I should have said earlier that I really love Rob Brezsny’s book Pronoia Is the Antidote for Paranoia: How All of Creation Is Conspiring To Shower You with Blessings.  I think it saved my life once.  So I make this plea with only a little exaggeration.)

“I believe you will acquire or generate a beautiful new source of value for yourself.”

I like that.  I’ve been working at finding some value in what has been done to me.  (Sorry I can’t just think about “value for myself,” but I can hardly conceive of myself anymore as anyone other than someone who was mind-controlled and is struggling to be free.  But, having said that, I promise to keep an open mind that I might actually discover “new value for myself.”)  But I have to admit I’m geared to discover a new value for what has been done to me – this thing I think is depicted so well in the farmed oyster image.

I already do understand some value in my childhood programming:  When I want, and when I’m not interfered with, I can focus on a task and accomplish a great deal, successfully synthesizing skills and understandings from various vantages, even testing as genius levels sometimes; I can sense things in other dimensions and sometimes work successfully in those realms; and … uhmmm, I think there’s more, and I hope to become clearer about them in the next eight months.

(They better be worth all the ways in which I’m sometimes a mess, with amnesia, alter switches, lost time, bad memory, social isolation, difficulty keeping or wanting to keep a job, and all the Taser burns, biopsies, surgery scars, and other physical wounds I wake with over the course of a year.)

“There’s a small chance you will stumble upon a treasure equivalent to the wild pearl.  But I suggest you take the more secure route:  working hard to create a treasure that’s like a cultivated pearl.”

I can work with that.  I can see we’re all working with some sort of grit injected into us, and our task is to secrete some juice (I like that metaphor too) around it and turn it into something beautiful.

I’ve certainly been trying.  I feel on pretty solid ground, now that I’ve been tracking my mind with my Notebook/Journal, and now that I know (or fairly-certainly suspect) I’m a farmed oyster, I can let go all the fantasies of living in a natural world and society I supposedly helped create and just settle down to live within realistic parameters.

(Of course, They tell us all the time how we evolved here on Earth naturally, and we created this culture ourselves, even though we can see we haven’t been living naturally in a natural ecosystem for a long, long time.  And now we’re waking up to discover we’re in a factory farm!.  But of course:  “As above, so below.”  Or is it, “As below, so above”?  To secure the metaphor, and the irony, some of us eat factory-farmed shrimp, salmon, and other GMO foods, completing the circle.  Damn, maybe some of us even become a food source for some factory-owner/Archon.  Fractal harmony.  And our progeny will survive if we make a pretty pearl.)

(Uh oh.  Do we want our progeny to survive?  If not, perhaps that’s why They keep the whole farm a secret and tell us we live in a natural world and culture of our own making, assuring us that mind control and “aliens” aren’t real, so we won’t know enough to consider such a question as whether this is a world for which we want our children to live.  But I have digressed again.  And into a dark area, for which I apologize, but isn’t this the task of life?  To explore ideas that seem to make sense of things?)

In any case, I want to know our reality, even if it turns out we’re living in an oyster – or human – farm.  (And I’m not the only one, of course.  Others have espoused plenty of variations on this theory:  hell planet, prison planet, Archon food source (the righteous Gnostics, after all!), etc., so this isn’t a unique idea that should be shocking to good people.)

Believing the oyster farm is as good a metaphor as any, I still think I’ll stay here on Earth and keep working on my pearl.  I don’t know why.  Maybe because I’ve been here 62 years, and I’m starting to like life now (with the help of good people like Rob Brezsny and, nearby, my friends).  Of course, maybe I’ve been programmed to stay as long as I’m useful to them.  I don’t know.  Mostly I think I want to be around to give advice to my kids when they ask me about this crazy stuff some decade in the future.

Certainly, life is sometimes more harrowing than I think I can take, and sometimes it’s absolutely inspired – like when we sing, tend the garden, and make our place suit us aesthetically and functionally.

And sometimes I believe we really can create something brilliant, of value, like a pearl.

Sometimes I even understand how irritation, like death, is necessary in that creation.  And having been through a lot of it in this lifetime, I think I’ve begun to see its value – even if I resent the hell out of it sometimes.  Thanks, Rob.