Everything is regulated by the intelligence of the system to which it belongs: Psyops Both Local and Cosmic

(the following was posted by myself at another thread at RI, here)

At what point can a manufactured meme (a psyop) be seen as separate from a natural meme, such as pertains to the collective zeitgeist itself? I don’t think it’s possible finally to separate the one from the other: i.e., psyop movies (and CIA Hollywood) from the greater, “synchromystic” (sorry) operation that is the Universe. It’s Russian dolls: any agenda you care to map always exists inside another, greater agenda, and so is informed and shaped by it.

Unfortunately I don’t know enough either about movies or Hollywood, so I’ll have to take Hugh Manatee’s word for it when he says that all mainstream movies (which I’m afraid go under — or over? — my radar) are intelligence-created psyops designed to shape and direct our consciousness. Sure, why wouldn’t they be? Everything else is.

But why single out movies when Western culture itself is one great psyop, from Moses on down? What about Shakespeare? Wasn’t “he” a psyop? A perhaps more interesting question is: how do such psyops work, exactly? Is Hugh suggesting that everyone who works in Hollywood is an operative? Or is it more subtle than that?

My instinct tells me it’s a lot more subtle. If Hollywood is a meme-creating industry, set up, like any organization, with a specific agenda, then anyone who makes it into the inner circles — and is able to make and release mainstream products — has already been subtly “converted” to that agenda, probably most of the time without ever actually realizing it. Perhaps it’s like a computer program which converts files before “opening” them (allowing them access to it)? Anyone making movies in Hollywood has presumably been through a slow, steady infiltration (initiation?) process, in which they have been “reconfigured” (acclimatized) to be compatible with the Hollywood agenda. This would make them “infected” carriers of the “virus,” meaning anything they do, whatever their conscious intentions, is also going to be a carrier for the “virus.” It would be like a factory that produces a seemingly innocuous, “harmless” product — a soft drink, say —that is actually subtly poisoning and/or addicting the populace. The factory workers and advertising staff, 98% of employees for the company, think they are just selling Coca Cola. But really they are involved in something more complex and “sinister.”

I believe this is how conspiracies work—by creating “programs” (memes and organizations, belief systems and social-cultural movements, etc.) with hidden functions that people then unwittingly “install” into their hardware and then become dependent on, slowly (often unknowingly) converting all their “data” (beliefs, opinions, and behavior) to make it compatible with that program. Hence we become servants of the secret agenda (upholders of the meme, sleeper agents of the grand psyop), without ever suspecting an agenda even exists.

That’s the first Russian doll — our culture. But there’s a much bigger, subtler layer of intrigue at work here, which is that even the highest-level meme-creators and psy-operatives are working unconsciously for a vastly greater agenda. They can’t escape the fact that anything they do—any memes or psyops they create—will inevitably be a distorted expression of a cosmic meme, or “zeitgeist.”

There’s no need to posit any God in this, at least if we admit that any system that gives rise to conscious individuals must itself be conscious. Every movement of matter on the planet is being directed—is inseparable from—the movement of matter throughout the Universe (i.e., is just a very local expression of a galactic process). In exactly the same way, all expressions and operations of consciousness within the human realm are reflections and/or extensions of the consciousness of the Universe. Perhaps this sounds mystical, but if so, it’s because I am struggling to find the right scientific terms. This is really all physics, and inescapable logic for anyone who takes the time to think it through. The workings of human groups and individuals—be they Hollywood, CIA, Masonic sorcerers, or whoever—can no more work in isolation from the movements of planets and stars than our cells can function outside of our bodies. Everything is regulated by the intelligence of the system to which it belongs.

In the metaphor I used, if Hollywood (Western culture) is the “program,” then I guess Earth/humanity is the computer, and the Universe is both the manufacturer and programmer. The element of human intervention here is small but significant: as “program designer,” humans determine the ways in which the computer interacts with its maker—thereby testing the possibilities of both. In the end, though, nothing we do can ever depart from the original design, the blueprint which gave rise to the experiment to begin with. We can only operate within these very precisely laid out parameters.

Back to the virus analogy: the creators of the “fake virus” of psyop Hollywood, etc., are unaware of being carriers of the real virus, that of the Spirit, or if you prefer, Nature itself. So even as they design their products to be Trojan Horse-style carriers for their Masonic mind-control memes, the artificial virus they have created is itself (inevitably, since the Universe is everywhere) a carrier for the Spirit-meme—dolls within dolls, horses inside horses. This is why “CIA-Hollywood” comes out with “psyop” movies like Matrix, Fight Club, or Three Kings, movies that, despite whatever secret toxins they may contain to pollute and stupefy the mass mind, are also designed to activate creative centers in the psyches of at least a few individuals. Face it, we are all not just double but triple agents: working not only for our personal ego gratification and our secret handlers (those dastardly Masonic sorcerers), but finally, gloriously, for the Universe herself.

The real occult technology of power is accessible to everyone. It depends first of all on recognizing our own signatures dimly engraved upon the secret architecture of reality. As Nietzsche said, “We are all greater artists than we know.” That goes double for sorcery.

Mr. Gorightly, Charlie Manson and the Ufos

(apologies for the speeded up song at the end, which is now fixed)

Do paranoids toe the party line?

There are areas of Chapel Perilous that are more dangerous than others. Parapolitical research begins with questioning what we are told. If there are areas that are especially dangerous to question, are these areas we are going to stay away from? It might seem the wisest policy, but it’s pretty hard to map a terrain if you deliberately avoid specific areas of the land being mapped.

That thought experiment had almost instant results at RI: somebody accused me of being an anti-Semite and skirting the edges of holocaust denial. Jeff, the owner of the site, locked the thread for fear it was stirring things up too much, and that was that. This of course proved my point well enough, but at the same time it ended the “experiment” before I could explain what I was really getting at—that all this is obfuscation to distract us from what’s really going on: not a bunch of white “motherfucking arsehole” elite but Masonic sorcery and reality-creation.

So what’s the difference between parapolitical analysis and historical revisionism? Actually, “historical revisionism” has two meanings, one being simply scrutinizing the official facts and discovering discrepancies or outright lies among them, thereby coming up with a new, more accurate narrative (in other words, parapolitical research). The other (also called “negationism”) entails deliberately suppressing or distorting agreed upon “facts” in order to create a false narrative that serves specific political ends. So these are two opposite meanings that are also very close to each other, which is sort of Orwellian use of language, not equating war with peace but equating intelligent inquiry into historical events with “denial” of them.

But who are the real negationists here? The creators of history and the spinners of Consensus Reality, who say that we must not question what we are told, and that to do so amounts to dissidence, subversion, terrorism, or—horror of horrors—anti-Semitism!

Since history as we know it is already a revised version of events dependent on the suppression of facts (“history is fiction”), then how are we to trust the judgment of Consensus as to which category a given reading falls into? How do we know whether a researcher is guilty of negationism, or simply of uncovering facts that have been deliberately suppressed, and to be dealt with accordingly by being branded a Nazi, terrorist, or anti-Semite? Clearly, we can’t, except by doing the research ourselves.

“He who controls the present, controls the past. He who controls the past, controls the future.”

Forbidden Waters & Big Lies: Holocaust, Hitler, and Hollywood

(from a post at RI thread here)

Oh yes this is a tricky subject isn’t it.

Let me try a thought experiment on you all:

If there were a Judaic elite attempting to extend its influence in world affairs and consolidate its power base, wouldn't the Holocaust have been a highly effective way to advance such an agenda?

After all, not only did it lead directly to the creation of the state of Israel, it effectively gave carte blanche to that state, and to Jewish groups, thereafter. As “victims” of the Holocaust, the chosen people are permitted to get away with ideologies and actions that no other groups can - because criticizing the chosen people is pretty much guaranteed to get you accused of anti-Semitism.

Try another thought experiment: Suppose Hitler was mind-controlled by his “handlers” (who may or may not have included the Jewish elite, the Rothschilds et al.) to hate the Jews and programmed (like Manson) with Messianic aspirations, to serve as a patsy for the secret plans of the Masonic elite? Hitler was cured of hysterical blindness by a hypnotherapist Dr. Edmund Forster after WWII, and it was during this period that he developed not only his anti-Semitic tendencies but also his aspirations to becoming world leader and avatar of the Aryan race.

Here's a passage from "Before Hitler was: Looking for a Doppelganger"

Quote:
There is considerable controversy regarding precisely when Hitler became driven to destroy the Jews and dominate the world. There is strong evidence, however, that the 'hate and pain' which characterized Hitler's speeches in 1919 and afterward, as well as his fanatical purpose, were not in evidence prior to his psychiatric treatment.

Other psychologists have also published conclusions similar to those of Dr. Binion. In November 20, 1998, for example, the following feature article was dispatched by Reuters to international newspapers:

'Baton Rouge, Louisiana (Reuters) -- Adolf Hitler's belief he was meant to rule the world may have stemmed in part from a hypnotic suggestion given during treatment for hysterical blindness in 1918, a Louisiana psychiatrist said in the November Journal of Forensic Science. Dr. David Post, a forensic psychiatrist at the state's forensics hospital in Jackson, Louisiana, based his theory on a book he believes used material from a German military hospital where Hitler was treated after he was temporarily blinded in a mustard gas attack in the First World War in October 1918. Hitler was a corporal at the time, but the hospital records from that period were later destroyed by the Gestapo, although Hitler wrote of his sudden blindness and his resolve to enter politics if he regained his sight. After Germany's surrender on Nov. 11, 1918, Hitler wrote that he had "a supernatural vision ... A miracle came to pass" and he could see again.

In a book called "Eyewitness" by Ernst Weiss, an exiled German doctor and novelist, a German psychiatrist in a military hospital uses hypnotic suggestion in a still-accepted medical protocol for post-traumatic stress syndrome. He tells the patient A.H.: "I am a simple doctor. But perhaps you yourself have the rare power, which occurs only occasionally in a thousand years, to work a miracle. Jesus did it. Mohammed. The saints.... An ordinary person with such a condition would be blind for life. But for a person of particular strength and will and spiritual energy, there are no limits.'

Psycho-historians agree that the greatest change in Adolf Hitler's life occurred in Pasewalk Military Hospital while recovering from a mustard gas attack at the end of World War I. His hatred for Jews may have been implanted there by hypnosis, drugs and modern brain washing techniques.


(There is a book The Man Who Invented Hitler by David Lewis, that covers this subject in depth.)

To continue our thought experiment: suppose Hitler was set up by hidden controllers as a Messianic patsy to implement a global agenda (centering around the establishment of a power base in the Middle East), and then made to take the fall for a mass extermination program (one that he may not have even known about)?

Is it entirely coincidental that the direct result of Hitler’s (alleged) attempt to exterminate the Jewish people led to the creation of their own state in the Holy Land (in other words, had the precise inverse effect to that supposedly intended)? Or that so much of the global machinations of the elite continues to center around this Middle-Eastern power base, the exploitation of its natural resources (oil, opium, etc), as well as its more abstract ones (occult knowledge of Sufis, et al)?

It seems safe to say that we have been deceived about Hitler, the Holocaust, and everything else. A smoke screen has been created that is so impenetrable that anyone who dares to try to get past it, will almost certainly choke to death on all the toxic gases s/he will encounter. Are many parapolitical researchers too afraid to question the official story too closely, for fear of being branded Nazis and/or racists?

But consider this: can anyone imagine a researcher being jailed for suggesting that the extermination of Native peoples in North America never happened? Actually, the systematic destruction of Native children in residential schools in Canada has been covered up for decades, and is only now coming to light through the work of independent researchers (“revisionists”?), who are themselves facing persecution for trying to uncover this unsavory truth. Different “rules” seems to apply, depending on which part of history (and which peoples) we are speaking of.

The Masonic sorcerer elite do seem to favor a Judaic flavor to their rituals and ceremonies, most of all in the practice of blood sacrifice (as upheld by Moses on his bloodthirsty trek to the promised land). And what our "handlers" are most intent upon assuring is that we, the profane, become further and further estranged from the truth, from gnosis, and therefore susceptible to their methods of control. This is accomplished by indoctrinating us with false beliefs about reality, including though not restricted to historical events. The bigger the lie they can get us to believe, the further they can remove us from our knowing, the more malleable we become.

(Random example: the faked Moon landing – even if they really did get to the Moon, there is an advantage in getting us to believe in a falsified version of the event as real, because by believing in something we - our bodies - can easily see to be untrue, we are falling more and more under the mind-spell they are weaving.)

Hollywood is of course a key apparatus in this spell-casting agenda; and yes, Hollywood is and always has been run by the chosen people. But also by Scientology and the CIA, who are not, so far as I know, predominantly populated by Jewish folk. Like every other faction or group, the Jews are simply being used to deceive us. And the best way to ensure this deception continue is to forbid any and all intelligent discussion of the subject.

The reason I raise the above possibilities is not that I necessarily believe them to be true (though they may well be), but to illustrate how potentially alienating, damning, such ideas are for the person who raises them. Killing (scapegoating) the messenger not only suppresses the message, but discourages anyone else from trying to keep that meme alive.

If holocaust investigators are being jailed for attempting to suggest that some aspects of the holocaust are not true, or exaggerated, distorted, or obscured, then two things become clear: something is being concealed; and woe betide anyone who dares try and uncover it. If these investigators are simply zealots trying to push their own ideology, why not look at the “evidence” and expose it for what it is? If a question or area is too sensitive for even the most rigorous researchers to want to look at it, surely this is a reason to take it seriously, and to overcome our personal discomfort and see what's going on? Not because we have a case to prove, defending Hitler or demonizing Jews or anything else, but simply out of curiosity?

The fact that this particular subject is almost impossible to talk about openly suggests, to me, that it is a key to the Pandora’s box of Masonic Sorcery Theater. If so, the first step is to take a step back and try to see the forest, and not merely the trees. This is not a subject to be emotional about.

What happened to the chosen people is no worse, no different, than what happened to Native American peoples or any number of populations being systematically persecuted and destroyed by a secret elite and their hidden agendas – except that for some reason it IS different. Why? Because we are told that it is. Why? Because the holocaust meme (as propagated by CIA Steve, Scientology, and the Hollywood Elite) is a central element in an elaborate system of psychological control. It may even be “the Big Lie” that Hitler spoke of, little suspecting that he would become the central player (scapegoat?) in this lie. . . ?

Revelation of the Method.

As to the title question of this thread: perhaps all the Holocaust movies are designed as counter propaganda to Scientology’s holocaust museums? Part of the on-going “war” between Scientology and Jewish Hollywood (as embodied by CIA Spielberg), a war which is probably itself (like the “war” between Masonry and Roman Catholicism) a central part of the sorcerers’ smoke screen?

Great American Psycho

Latest podcast-chat with the little-known writer Phil Synder about the Great American Psychopath, including a discussion of the psy-op cultivation of "cereal killers" and meme creation via cultural/genetic modification...

Image as ever by the talented Lucinda Horan, with some none-too-subtle direction from myself.

Beyond the Grassy Knoll Interview

Chat I did with Vyzygoth for V's site Beyond the Grassy Knoll; first hour with myself, second hour with Adam Gorightly. You can download the show like this

Illuminati 'R' Us

I have gone out on a limb for this latest show, which covers the whole gamut of subjects, centering around the tendency of parapolitical/occult researchers to use little-understood (& ill-defined) terms like "Illuminati" and "Luciferian" and thereby get sucked into paranoid mythic narratives designed to hijack our imaginations as fuel for the Masonic Sorcerers. Question raised: is the real secret society (the autist-shaman "elixir") secret even from its own members, and if so, how do we cop to our membership? Was Hitler a patsy of the M.S's and was the '60s one great big psi-op?

I'd also like to extend an invitation to listeners to contact me via Skype; look for Aeolus Kephas, Afghanistan, and let me know why you are calling (to chat on SW), and I'll answer any questions you have, put them on the show (or not, depending on how it goes)...

Obama's Dark Side

For those interested in mainstream parapolitics and the Great Obama Swindle, there's a very rich and rewarding thread at Rigorous Intuition, full of recent articles mapping the continuing nexus of betrayal and Masonic Sorcery Theater of which the BO tap-dance is the latest piece of eye candy and brain-fogging for the ever-hopeful masses.

Follow the thread here

How to Deal with Hormones

In a follow-up to last week's podcast, Cary McCoy and I discuss what it means to be primal. Topics include: animal transformations, blood lust, unrefined masculine energies, the role of the sexes, the joys of sex and cooking, is there life after the libido, did Jesus preach the sermon on the mount with an erection, stage fright, how to channel hormonal (nervous) energy and chat up pretty girls, Jesus' sin of sins (and the masonic sorcerers secret recipe?), dreams of the anima, role-playing in sex, men-women relations and do strong women like to be dominated?

As Cary suggests on the show, this is a subject listeners might enjoy providing feedback on: ladies, do you appreciate a forthright male offering a no-nonsense, non-loaded appreciation of your sexiness? Guys, do you get uptight whenever in the presence of an attractive female? Would relations between the sexes be easier, more fluid and open - and less tense! - if we were upfront and honest about our sexual feelings, instead of maintaining the perennial mind games and secret agendas?

Oh and has anyone ever tried a mix of lentils, sperm and menstrual blood? ; )

Getting Primal

here we are again, lost a little momentum for missing a week but i hope you'll agree we are back with a vengeance, discussing what REALLY COUNTS (?) - everybody's favorite subjects, sex and violence! I know if people are listening then they must have some pretty strong opinions about what's being sai at the podcast, so let me have them, don't hold back, express your primal selves, as well as any ideas, desires, for where SW might go over the coming shows, what subjects need covering and depths want plumbing. Eventually hope to have a full forum up and running but first need to see there is sufficient interest in creative discussion - WHAT ARE WE UP TO HERE besides looking for a warm place to sleep and food for the winter? The prime agenda of the Primal, the hidden purpose behind all our fleeting personal agendas and goals?

Quantum Astrology

This week I talk with quantum astrologer and author Lyn Birkbeck about the historical and contemporary revolutionary influence of Pluto/Uranus/Saturn waves, last seen in the '60s, currently underway in 2008/9. We discuss a new astrological paradigm in which we are co-creators of reality with the Planets rather than subject to them, and how to experience their energies coming through us rather than AT us. Also covered: President Elect (Momma's Boy) Barak Obama's hidden agenda, Charles Manson and the 60s, and the Awakening of the collective Shadow.

Lyn is the author of several books, including Understanding the Future & Divine Astrology, reviewed at this blog here

Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Love (But Were Afraid to Ask)

The moment (i know) you have all been waiting for: Aeolus takes on Love Relationships, Soul Mates, Romantic Love, Alchemical Marriage, emotional celibacy and tantrix sex - and how to make the most of being single & turn the Whole Universe into your Dream Lover

Secret Life of DNA

as the crack between the worlds opens, year's twilight arrives goblins and witches lead the way for saints and ancestors and the multitudes of the dead
wish you a very happy visitation/haunting/abduction/communion - or whatever the cheeky, creepy id has in store for you this year
special Halloween broadcast at stormy weather, come join the festivities, wherever you are, for more treats from the trickster

Example of Revelation of Method

I have been listening to Alan Watt's show lately and he drew my attention to a very revealing piece on psi-warfare by Ralph Peters, a US major, called Constant Conflict

Considering it's over ten years old, the piece is surprisingly frank and revealing about the covert methods which the shadow govt uses to undermine "enemy" peoples (tho it refrains from including its own citizens among the target groups).

Here's some sample bits for those not up to reading the full piece:

In this age of television-series franchising, videos, and satellite dishes, this young, embittered male gets his skewed view of us from reruns of Dynasty and Dallas, or from satellite links beaming down Baywatch, sources we dismiss too quickly as laughable and unworthy of serious consideration as factors influencing world affairs. But their effect is destructive beyond the power of words to describe. Hollywood goes where Harvard never penetrated, and the foreigner, unable to touch the reality of America, is touched by America's irresponsible fantasies of itself; he sees a devilishly enchanting, bluntly sexual, terrifying world from which he is excluded, a world of wealth he can judge only in terms of his own poverty.

Most citizens of the globe are not economists; they perceive wealth as inelastic, its possession a zero-sum game. If decadent America (as seen on the screen) is so fabulously rich, it can only be because America has looted one's own impoverished group or country or region. Adding to the cognitive dissonance, the discarded foreigner cannot square the perceived moral corruption of America, a travesty of all he has been told to value, with America's enduring punitive power. How could a nation whose women are "all harlots" stage Desert Storm? It is an offense to God, and there must be a demonic answer, a substance of conspiracies and oppression in which his own secular, disappointing elite is complicit. This discarded foreigner's desire may be to attack the "Great Satan America," but America is far away (for now), so he acts violently in his own neighborhood. He will accept no personal guilt for his failure, nor can he bear the possibility that his culture "doesn't work." The blame lies ever elsewhere. The cult of victimization is becoming a universal phenomenon, and it is a source of dynamic hatreds.

It is fashionable among world intellectual elites to decry "American culture," with our domestic critics among the loudest in complaint. But traditional intellectual elites are of shrinking relevance, replaced by cognitive-practical elites--figures such as Bill Gates, Steven Spielberg, Madonna, or our most successful politicians--human beings who can recognize or create popular appetites, recreating themselves as necessary. Contemporary American culture is the most powerful in history, and the most destructive of competitor cultures. While some other cultures, such as those of East Asia, appear strong enough to survive the onslaught by adaptive behaviors, most are not. The genius, the secret weapon, of American culture is the essence that the elites despise: ours is the first genuine people's culture. It stresses comfort and convenience--ease--and it generates pleasure for the masses. We are Karl Marx's dream, and his nightmare.

...

Ours is also the first culture that aims to include rather than exclude. The films most despised by the intellectual elite--those that feature extreme violence and to-the-victors-the-spoils sex--are our most popular cultural weapon, bought or bootlegged nearly everywhere. American action films, often in dreadful copies, are available from the Upper Amazon to Mandalay. They are even more popular than our music, because they are easier to understand. The action films of a Stallone or Schwarzenegger or Chuck Norris rely on visual narratives that do not require dialog for a basic understanding. They deal at the level of universal myth, of pre-text, celebrating the most fundamental impulses (although we have yet to produce a film as violent and cruel as the Iliad). They feature a hero, a villain, a woman to be defended or won--and violence and sex. Complain until doomsday; it sells. The enduring popularity abroad of the shopworn Rambo series tells us far more about humanity than does a library full of scholarly analysis.

When we speak of a global information revolution, the effect of video images is more immediate and intense than that of computers. Image trumps text in the mass psyche, and computers remain a textual outgrowth, demanding high-order skills: computers demarcate the domain of the privileged. We use technology to expand our wealth, power, and opportunities. The rest get high on pop culture. If religion is the opium of the people, video is their crack cocaine. When we and they collide, they shock us with violence, but, statistically, we win.

As more and more human beings are overwhelmed by information, or dispossessed by the effects of information-based technologies, there will be more violence. Information victims will often see no other resort. As work becomes more cerebral, those who fail to find a place will respond by rejecting reason. We will see countries and continents divide between rich and poor in a reversal of 20th-century economic trends. Developing countries will not be able to depend on physical production industries, because there will always be another country willing to work cheaper. The have-nots will hate and strive to attack the haves. And we in the United States will continue to be perceived as the ultimate haves. States will struggle for advantage or revenge as their societies boil. Beyond traditional crime, terrorism will be the most common form of violence, but transnational criminality, civil strife, secessions, border conflicts, and conventional wars will continue to plague the world, albeit with the "lesser" conflicts statistically dominant. In defense of its interests, its citizens, its allies, or its clients, the United States will be required to intervene in some of these contests. We will win militarily whenever we have the guts for it.

There will be no peace. At any given moment for the rest of our lifetimes, there will be multiple conflicts in mutating forms around the globe. Violent conflict will dominate the headlines, but cultural and economic struggles will be steadier and ultimately more decisive. The de facto role of the US armed forces will be to keep the world safe for our economy and open to our cultural assault. To those ends, we will do a fair amount of killing.

Masonic Sorcerers Play Fair

This week I devoted the show to answering the questions posted at this blog. Subjects covered: Gnosis as an antipode to belief and opinion. How not to get lost in the data-deluge of paranoid research. Alex Jones and David Icke as unwitting disinfo agents? Mysteries of dream life, the second attention, and the other self. Movement of the assemblage point, ego transformation and death of the personal self. Lunar vs solar being. ET invasion as the ultimate manifestation of the Other: archetypal energy that creates a vortex which draws all our disowned aspects to it, like iron filings to a magnet, and from these creates "form." Grays as aspects of our collective Shadow. Movement from individual consciousness to collective, local awareness to non-local awareness that will include the consciousness of the planet, solar system and on, over the next 100 years. Humanity is the mind of the Earth. Earth awakening through a self-imposed crisis. Awareness of the body as a hive mind, a collective of cells just as the Universe is a collective of cells. Manufactured mythic narratives, the current financial (environmental, population) crisis setting up the conditions for us to accept totalitarian control system and become slaves of the State. The opportunity of the Revelation of the Method. Even Masonic sorcerers play fair (obey divine law).

Are there any questions?

questions for the Podcast, please, or there may not be a show this week!

Latest Episode

Picks up the debate on synchromysticism and the difference between animism and mysticism, answering questions from anonymous:

"What does it feel like when the very trees and fields are alive and interacting with one? How does one tell when one has made 'contact.' How does one know one isn't simply crazy??"

I discuss the bicameral mind, the parallels (and differences) between schizophrenia and shamanic consciousness, and ways to open a dialogue with the environment and mine our day-to-day life for symbolic meanings.

Cary McCoy's Dream Life

Probably the most personal of the SW podcasts to date this week — for Cary that is, but also in a less obvious way for myself. For one thing, it was pretty gratifying to encounter another person’s dream life as weird as my own. Why do we assume that dreams have no actual bearing on reality? If “aliens” were trying to interact with us, what better place than while we are totally open, vulnerable, and in a state of consciousness that embraces, rather than flees from, strange and novel experiences? I’d wager that if any one of us could recall even a fraction of our dream lives, our ideas about who we are and what we are doing here would be so radically altered that we would barely even recognize ourselves or our lives. Does that sound like such a bad thing?

Somehow talking with Cary helped jog loose concepts in my own mind which I had barely begun to formulate, such as the idea that what we call consciousness is really unconsciousness, and vice versa. If, as I have long suspected, we actually block out the vast majority of our experiences of reality simply in order to maintain a solid, consistent sense of identity, then that means we are defined primarily by all the stuff we manage to remain unconscious of. So the more we become conscious of things outside this tightly sealed identity—other people’s thoughts and feelings, for example, the secret life of plants and animals, to say nothing of “the alien” — the less “we” as individuals will exist, clearly. “We” will slowly become awareness itself, rather than a loose jumble of personal memories, strung together and called a “self.” It is by clinging so tightly to this arbitrary identity that we manage to turn neutral experiences — such as alien energies — into malevolent and hostile forces. And it’s probably why we work so hard not to recall our dream life, too.

What’s most satisfying about these podcast chats for me is that they accelerate a process of personal discovery while simultaneously capturing it for others to listen in on. While trying to steer Cary into the more rewarding areas of his own psyche (not out of altruism, I hasten to add, but in the interests of a good show), I often find myself discovering previously unmapped areas of my own. And I may not even fully realize it until I listen in.

Animism Vs Mysticism

Continued thoughts: this from the thread I started at Rigorous Intuition

One of my problems from the start with “synchromysticism” was the irrefutable fact that neither the word nor the practice actually adds anything to Jung’s initial concept of synchronicity. In fact, Jung’s concept entailed reading the events of one’s life (not just pop culture) as part of a design that intersected in precise but mysterious ways with our own psyches. So my main query about Jake’s work and the whole synchromystic “movement” remains—why mess around with movies when the whole world is a kind of movie screen onto which our psyches are collectively projecting? My guess is that it’s at least partly a case of guys who don’t get out enough, succumbing to the dangerously seductive quality of movies and pop media. Maybe synchromysticism is even a case of fledgling sorcerers being hoodwinked into paying attention to stuff they would be better off putting behind them? Instead of getting out there and doing something? After all, movies, not religion, are now the opium of the masses. So what better to keep sorcerers plugged in than a religion based around movies?

(I say this in all humility, as a still reforming movie addict.)

My other main contention with SM—and I think it’s connected—is the use of the word mysticism itself. It’s not a word I care for, or rather, a perspective that I value very highly, the reason being that, as essentially an Eastern mode of thinking, mysticism is the very antithesis of the way we are genetically hardwired to connect to the Source as Westerners. Mysticism, like movie-going, is essentially passive—it’s the very opposite of sorcery, which is interactive, and which creates patterns rather than simply contemplates them—and not just by observation but by action. A shaman doesn’t simply read the signs around him, he or she is in constant communication with the natural world—it’s a dialogue. And how much dialogue can you have with a movie?

Regarding the difference between mysticism and shamanism, two days ago I was “coincidentally” reading a chapter in Wilhelm Reich’s Ether, God and Devil (thanks SZ). I came across this:

“The primitive view of emotional life was not mystical, as is our view today; neither was it spiritualistic or metaphysical. It was animistic. . . . ‘Mysticism’ means, in the literal sense, a change of sensory impressions and organ sensations into something unreal and beyond this world. Anthropology teaches us that the devil with the tail and pitchfork, or the angel with wings, is a late product of human imagination, not patterned on reality but originating from a distorted concept of reality.”

“The process of animating the surrounding world is the same with the animistic primitive as it is with the mystic. Both animate nature by projecting their body sensations. The difference between animism and mysticism is that the former projects natural, undistorted organ sensations, while the latter projects unnatural, perverted ones. . . Mysticism is rooted in a blocking of direct organ sensations and the reappearance of these sensations in the pathological perception of ‘supernatural power.’”

“Functional natural science must defend primitive animism against perverse mysticism and take from it all elements of experience corresponding to natural sensory perceptions. . . . The widespread and acknowledged view of the harmony of nature is basically an animistic view which, in the mystic, is degraded to a personified cosmic spirit or a divine universal being. The mystic is trapped in the absolute. The absolute is incomprehensible. The animist remains flexible, his views can be shifted. He has the advantage that his view of nature, contrary to the mystical view, contains a practicable core of truth.” (pg 87-94)

Bringing it back to Jake again (sorry Jake, you aren’t the whipping boy here, just a necessary case study!): in my opinion Kotze is a shaman who has been temporarily lured into mysticism—passivity, and an excessive love of movies—through a natural desire to avoid the nuts and bolts of the left-hand path. In-the-field, fully interactive sorcery entails not just psychedelics and sex (things I expect Jake is fully at home with), but real, dirt-under-the-nails, honest-to-Lucifer work—above all healing work, dealing primarily with human misery and woe.

Shamans are the garbage collectors of the Universe. To be fair to Jake, he is doing this with his movie stuff—gathering nuggets in the trash can of pop culture—but it’s at a fairly infantile level. Nothing wrong with that, shamans have to start somewhere. But it becomes questionable—and open to rigorous scrutiny—when such activity begins to flower into a whole movement—and especially when what is at best shaman playschool gets touted as the full graduation experience.

All for now. I hope Jake will forgive me this trespass and totally uninvited amateur psychoanalysis.

Jake Kotze and Synchromysticism

On the latest SW podcast, I chat with synchromystic Jake Kotze, in Winnipeg, Canada. I discovered Jake's work ("scrying" popular culture for hidden archetypal resonances) a few months back, and was curious to find out more about his philosophy. As you'll hear on the show, Jake and I have pretty much the same take on things, but seem to opt for a different emphasis. Jake is more playful and "optimistic," leaving me to play my usual role as somber doomsayer and devil's advocate. Is the species really heading for "galactic consciousness" or is it simply self-destructing? More to the point: is there a difference?

Jake argues that the conspiracy view of global events and culture is passé, because behind all the plots is a single intelligence guiding everything – thus propagating a religious view over that of paranoia. Yet isn’t paranoia a form of religion and religion a form of paranoia? My counter-argument is that the two views need to co-exist, at least for now, rather than for the one, "holistic" view to prematurely supplant the other.

In my view, Jake is trying to hopscotch over the global web of control we are ensnared in and go straight to the Source (via movies, no less!). I don’t think this is possible, or even desirable. Since we have no choice but to interact with our culture and society, we have no choice but to acknowledge the forces that are controlling it (and us). Jake says he no longer sees it this way, that since all is One, the controlling elite don’t exist. OK, but then neither does he. So who’s having this conversation? So long as there is a subject-object relationship between the perceiver and what is being perceived, surely we have no choice but to recognize (and honor) the layers of good and evil that come between us and "It." Isn’t that just good manners? More to the point, how can we counteract the manipulation if we aren’t fully cognizant of it?

In Jake's own model (one I have also written about in different ways), there are two views of reality. I have called them focused and unfocused awareness (tonal and nagual); Jake describes them, very effectively, as "side-on" and overhead views. Though he uses a mandala image, I would posit a maze as a more apt example: from the one POV, side-on, we see an endless series of corridors and walls; from above, we can see the pattern of the maze itself (and therefore the way out).

Jake himself admits that it's not about the "higher" view supplanting the lower but both viewpoints co-existing; yet isn’t he attempting just such a supplanting with his dismissal of the conspiracy layer (of pop culture) as irrelevant to his concerns? As I see it, the side-on view of the maze does not allow for intelligent movement down the labyrinth, while the overhead view takes us out of the reality experience entirely. Therefore, as Jake says, free movement between the two points of view would seem to be the key. Of course, the POVs aren’t equal, because being stuck in the maze doesn’t give us the option of rising above - while once we are looking down, from an “impersonal” viewpoint, we still have the option of returning to "the trenches" (though at the risk of forgetting and getting snared by a personal perspective again).

Put differently, once we move the assemblage point beyond the dualistic view of “us and them/good and evil,” we retain the memory/understanding of dualism, and the option of returning to it without being restricted by it. While we are still ensconced in polarity consciousness, however, we cannot ever see beyond it – it is all we know.

Though it's true that from the overhead view, there are no controlling elite, only movement of energy, this is a luxury that only avails as long as we are outside our reality tunnel. Once we move back inside it, the conspiracy comes into being again, along with everything else. If our movement to unitive awareness is premature, however, if it depends on a denial/rejection of the polarity view, then it is clearly a suppression of truth (and the personal) rather than its evolution.

It could be that I am simply attached to my viewpoint and too jaded to see Jake’s “follow your bliss” optimism as wholly authentic. Or it may be that Jake simply likes watching movies too much to admit he’s using them as much as a means to escape reality as to access it. I am not sure. Probably a bit of both.

Stormy Weather

keeping up the podcast, two more shows, with Cary McCoy
http://kephas.podomatic.com/

John deRuiter:

“Waking up is not necessarily pleasant:
you get to see why all this time, you chose to sleep.
When you wake up, the first thing you will see is
Reality does not exist for you, you exist for it.
Shocking as it is, when you let it in,there is rest.
You do not have to labor anymore
to hold together a reality that does not exist;
forcing something to be real that is not real.
You and this life you have been living are not real ...
In letting it in,
even through the shock ... pain ... shattering, there is rest.
Reality is when all you want to know is what is true ...
just so that you can let it in and be true.
Reality is not a safe place for you —the you that you have created.
It is the only place where you would die;
where there is no room for your hopes, your dreams.
Once you have let it in, once you begin to re-awaken;
to let Reality wake you up,
nothing can get it out.
That is the beginning of your end.
Waking up can be much more painful
than the agony of your dream, but waking up is real
...And there will be integration: a merging of Reality and you.
You and Reality will become one
in a world that does not accept nor want one, but two.
You will become a beloved servant
instead of a controlling master ... "

John is visiting London in Sept. His website is http://www.collegeofintegratedphilosophy.com/

New Podcast, weekly show with AK's alternate purrspectives
http://www.podomatic.com/people/index/kephas

Blue Rose interview. I did this two nights ago, with the very amenable and discerning intelligence that is SMiles Lewis. Here's the link:
http://www.bluerosereport.com/2008/06/25/blue-rose-report-17-080625-waeolus-kephas

Paranoia Interview

Could you please give us your thoughts on exactly how the bias for right-handedness is ingrained in the collective subconscious in this present era?

There are various ways to illustrate or represent this “bias” at a social level. You could describe it as “patriarchy versus matriarchy” or as what the writer Paul Bowles described (in The Sheltering Sky) as “the war between reason and atavism.” In esoteric terms, it relates to the prevalence of mystical belief over magikal (shamanic) practice, which ties into the male/female dichotomy: mysticism is male or left brain, magik is female, right brain. Because women have wombs and can create life with their bodies, they are directly connected to the Earth and to the Universe—the Spirit actually moves through them in a very real, pragmatic (bio-logical) sense. For men, however, lacking wombs as we do, we can only conceive of Spirit (and of life) in abstract terms, and then relate to our own interpretations of it. Hence our bent is towards the theoretical or “mystical” rather than the practical.

Ironically, in this admittedly simplified breakdown, science is not at odds with mysticism but more or less synonymous with it: both are theoretical rather than practical systems. The main reason why orthodox science has not recognized magik (the occult sciences) as a valid discipline is that magik can only be “verified” by practice, never by observation. It is not “empirical,” because the essence of magik (like that of quantum mechanics) is that we live in a subjective Universe. Ideally, these two perspectives—male and female—should work together, as analysis and synthesis. What happens instead is that, because the male or analytic/patriarchal mind-set revolves around separation and categorization, it has very cleverly excluded everything that cannot be categorized as being “beneath” categorization rather than simply beyond it. In the same way, patriarchal religion has done all it can to vilify the feminine and strip women (witches) of their earthly (“satanic”) power.

Another (less esoteric) way of saying this is that a patriarchal society depends on rigid structures, organization, beliefs, laws, morality, language, and so forth, and appeals to the rational mind. Because of this, it has been able, over the centuries, to create a specific structure and system of beliefs in which anything that cannot be understood or organized rationally—that cannot be expressed verbally or represented as words—becomes either an article of faith (i.e., God, soul, Heaven and Hell) or of superstition and ridicule (magik, Ufos, the occult in general; to some extent this also includes borderline paranormal phenomena such as global conspiracies, etc). The “right hand path” is all about systems of worship arranged in social patterns to exercise control over the worshippers. And since words, in the end, are what we worship, whoever controls language, controls the world. Another (again less esoteric) way of putting this would be to say that, if you want to control a populace, the first, essential step is to determine their system of values, i.e. what has meaning and importance to them. Naturally, for the control to be effective, a populace must be trained to value what is easiest to control, in other words, external things, whether concrete (money) or abstract (“God”). The reason the right hand path is considered to be the morally correct one, and the left-hand “satanic,” is that the right hand path externalizes and gives power to what is outside of us, i.e., moral imperative, God, law and order, etc, whereas the left-hand places authority and power within the individual, suggesting anarchy, rebellion, freedom, and “atheism” (i.e., rejection of a Higher Power outside of oneself; in actual fact it is closer to animism—the acknowledgment of spirit or consciousness equally in all things, including oneself). Cleary, such an idea is anathema to the patriarchal mind-set, which is all about separation, i.e., defining things by what they are not rather than what they are (hence the prevailing dualities of our culture, rich/poor, sickness/health, sanity/madness, winner/loser, and so forth). One can posit a conspiracy here, by saying that an elite group chooses to keep the secret of individual sovereignty (the Godhead) to itself in order to Lord it over the ignorant masses. But it is probably more useful to perceive the situation as a collective choice, made by the human species, to favor one “path” over the other as a means of avoiding responsibility collectively. The right hand path allows us to invest everything in external factors, either the “here and now” of home, work, marriage, family, and material comforts, or the “never-never” of the afterlife, faith, and supposed “spirituality.” In both cases, the end result is a sense of security and meaning which depends neither on individual thought nor action. Naturally, people tend to embrace values that are both ready-made and shared, that neither challenge them nor require (or even permit) any serious degree of questioning. It is the line of least resistance, and amounts to “do unto yourself as others would have you do.”

Do you see a commonality in this bias and what science now knows regarding the left/right brain dichotomy?

I think I have answered this above. Apparently the left/right brain description is currently under scrutiny as being simplistic to the point of inaccuracy, so perhaps a truer, because more esoteric, dichotomy would be Castaneda’s first and second attentions, pertaining to physical (waking) reality and energetic or “shamanic” reality (as experienced in dreams and visions), respectively. Once again the bias of the right hand or left brain (which controls the right side of the body) has rendered the realm of the imagination, however rich and exciting, as basically “unreal” (i.e., “imaginary”); in the same way, it has reduced a “myth” to “something that is untrue.” For this reason, I use the word “Imaginal,” in order to suggest not merely an offshoot or a distortion of “consensus” reality but an entire realm of being unto itself (what Castaneda called “a separate reality”). The task of every sorcerer or paranoid (and in our present time, every human being) is to reconcile and unite these two separate halves—that of the self and the double—into a single, cohesive existence. Solve et coagula, analysis and synthesis.

And, if one side of the brain develops speech, while the other side puts the words in order, do you then see the development of speech itself as intrinsically flawed?

I think, intuitively, that speech as we know it today was not only the result of a gradual loss of connection to the Spirit (or silent knowledge), but also the primary factor in accelerating this “split.” It amounts to the separation between ego and unconscious, the unconscious being a synonym for any number of concepts, all of which refuse to be encapsulated by words, e.g., Spirit, God, magikal reality, even “the Universe.” The primary “flaw” in language, to my understanding, is that it enabled people to talk about concepts without a corresponding understanding of them (just as today we talk of soul or spirituality with no clear idea of what we mean). This in turn led, over the millennia, to replacing the word (i.e., the interpretation) for the thing it was meant to describe, leading to a kind of rational dementia in which we devour menus instead of meals and mistake our fingers for the Moon.

I believe that, prior to language as we know it, humans communicated directly by what we would nowadays call telepathy. However, if I’m right, humans did not really exist as “individuals” during this period but as parts of a collective consciousness, like cells in a brain or fingers of a hand, much like plant life: apparently (from a superficial view) independent but actually (via the roots) connected to the whole Earth and partaking of its consciousness (and that of all the other plants). If so, no “telepathic” communication would be necessary, since humans would have shared the same consciousness, and in effect the same “being.” This “beingness” became gradually less cohesive as individuality began to take hold, until a point at which other forms of “communication” were introduced, such as body language. Spoken language would originally have been similar, perhaps, to that of animals today, a series of sounds or songs (judging by the Aboriginals and Native Americans, song is an even more elementary form of verbal communication than speech). If so, spoken language would have been a degeneration more than an evolution, since whatever can be communicated by speech can also be conveyed in song, with the added factor of emotion and aesthetic value.

In Ancient (magikal) Egypt, certain words (e.g., God names) required the precise vibration or tone to be spoken; to intone the word was to invoke the power of that concept (or God). (In Native American magikal practices, a spirit will tell a warrior its name, often in the form of a song, so the warrior can contact it when in need; the name will be specific to that warrior, however, so only he can use it.) To my mind, written language is when the trouble really began, and it’s worth noting that, in Egypt, the original written language was hieroglyphs, i.e., images, hence still very much in the realm of “right brain” or Imaginal reality. The difference between hieroglyphs and alphabet is roughly synonymous with that between song and speech, the former belonging to the realm of the imagination and feeling, the latter to thought and reason. According to The Alphabet and the Goddess, the original (Hebrew) alphabet can be traced back to Mount Sinai and the Jews (the ten commandments of Moses), hence was simultaneous with the invention of written Law. It was literally the Word of God. Once God (Imaginal truth) could be represented by symbols, it was no longer necessary to know Him (or Her) directly.

Could you please explain/describe this "93 current".

My primary source on this would not be Crowley but Kenneth Grant. Crowley never referred to Lucifer in relation either to Aiwaz (whom he understood to be his Holy Guardian Angel) or to the 93 current, which was summed up best perhaps by two phrases from his Liber Al: “Do what thou wilt is the whole of the Law,” and, “Love is the Law, love under will.” In other words, Free Love. Far from what the counterculture envisioned, however (at least according to Grant), both the love and the freedom which the 93 current heralds has such an otherworldly flavor to it as to be quite terrifying in its implications. There are perhaps two basic ways to understand this “free love” current (which Grant referred to as an “atavistic resurgence”): as either an external or an internal event. Externally, it relates to sexual congress with non-human beings. These beings will emerge from nobody seems quite sure where, probably because they are not locatable in space-time as physical-temporal beings, but exist as a form of conscious energy that manifests when, where, how and to whom it pleases.

Despite this, and again due to the necessary limitations of language, I think the simplest (though also most alarmist) way to describe this manifestation of Aiwaz-Lucifer-Lam is as a bona fide “extraterrestrial invasion.” If so, it may be identical to what is being experienced already by thousands of people across the world (particularly in America), amply recounted by Whitley Strieber. Since most occultists think of the 93 current as a magikal system, however, I should add that such experiences are relatively “impure” (distorted) for the simple reason that “abductees” have not consciously evoked the beings in question, are not actively seeking congress, but are being whisked out of their beds in the dead of night and having strange and disturbing things done to them (being impregnated, implanted, etc). Since the essence of current 93 is “do what thou wilt,” it follows that such experiences—lacking the key ingredient of will—are not representative. Such beings, to be properly understood, must be understood (as Strieber did, finally) as using the human mind to manifest and materialize through—in other words, as inorganic, non-physical beings (conscious energy) that employ the raw material of our beliefs to assemble a temporary form and so enjoy congress with us. Which begs the question: how can inorganic beings have sex? Why would they even want to? The answer may be in the question—if sexual congress is the means by which these beings enter fully into the material realm. Also, the assumption that sex is a purely physical, biological function must be brought into question. It’s possible to have sex in a dream, for example. The succubae and incubi of ancient folklore were not thought to be physical either, yet they definitely had libido!

Which brings me to the second, perhaps more productive, understanding of current 93, as an internal force, synonymous with the Kundalini energy described by the Hindu religion and (less reputable) Tantric systems: the sleeping serpent and sine qua non of individual empowerment, healing, magik, and heightened awareness. There is so much to say about this subject that I’d rather say nothing at all, and refer the reader to my books (particularly Homo Serpiens), which are all about the process of “waking the snake,” and hopefully even help to facilitate that process.
Regarding the relation of current 93 to the twin towers, it’s worth noting that, central to Crowley’s formula of the Aeon was the equation “0 = 2,” i.e., from nothingness comes duality. 9 + 11 = 20; the attack on the world trade center, which was a “snake-awakening” event if ever there was one, can be seen as a dramatic, magikal enactment of this formula, 0 = 2 (or rather, 2 = 0, as the twin towers became ground zero!). The Aeon of Horus signals in the most profound sense the end of duality which occurs with the fusing of left and right sides of the brain and of first and second attentions, when the ego self meets and is submerged into the Other, the double, the Higher Self. This is the fusion of soul with body that the rising of the Kundalini entails.

Do you see the end of the "love-children" as engineered by nefarious forces; as historically inevitable; or the product of a combination of both history and human interference?

Everything is a “product of history and human interference,” assuming by “history” you mean transpersonal forces. But the idea of humans interfering with the natural flow of destiny is an illusion, finally, since to act upon “history,” we would have to separate ourselves from it. History isn’t made by humans but through them.

The counterculture sowed the seeds of its own destruction. On the one hand, it was too idealistic and insufficiently pragmatic (disciplined), while on the other (paradoxically), it was overly socially orientated. As John Lennon sung, “You tell me it’s the institution, but you better free your mind instead.” The counterculture was too busy trying to engineer external change (as demonstrated by its preoccupation with fashion, beads, long hair, etc) to realize that such apparent advances are useless unless accompanied by (and in fact, mere side effects of) a deeper, internal transformation. You can take the hippie out of the establishment, but it’s a damn sight harder to take the establishment out of the hippie. The movement was destroyed from within, making it poetic (though diabolic) justice that Manson was the instrument the Establishment used to bring about this destruction. Manson was the Shadow of the counterculture, brought forth by its inability to acknowledge its own darkness and its insistence upon projecting it onto society.

Nonetheless, the real reason the counterculture didn’t “work” was simply that it had completed its work, at that time, its natural cycle. It was never meant to change anything socially, or rather, it did change things, but in the opposite way to how it imagined. The counterculture allowed the Establishment to dig its heels in and “evolve” (or degenerate) into a more fully realized totalitarian structure, as we are now witnessing. The astrologer Lyn Birkbeck (whose Divine Astrology I review here) forecasts a sort of ’60s revival, beginning in 2009 as a result of a Uranus/Pluto opposition, a massive transit of global consequences. If Birkbeck is right, I suspect this period will (in the words of a now forgotten Hollywood movie) make the ’60s look like the ’50s; but since the Shadow should fully manifest in tandem with the light (not merely as a response to it), it will also probably make the ’40s look like the ’20s.

The key difference between then and now, I think, is that this time the counterculture will operate at a far subtler and more pragmatic level, and as a result, will assume an actual temporal authority (I hesitate to use the word “political,” since the current 93 of free love which such a counterculture embodies is anathema to politics). If so, the machinery of the Establishment will have no choice but to reveal its true colors as a life-destroying, totalitarian regime, and begin to implement overtly the agendas it has been pursuing covertly for the past century, i.e., those of genocide and the open enslavement of populaces. This would be easier to justify, politically, as a more mature and functioning counterculture would be perceived as a correspondingly more serious threat, and as essentially terrorist in nature. It will be as if Manson (the Shadow) were assimilated into the counterculture—“no more Mr. Nice guy”—and as in a good Hollywood action movie (or a bad one), the nastier the “villain” becomes, the meaner the hero gets to be.

In your chapter on "Chemical Weddings" ( P. 90), you make the following statement: "Goodness, that desires but never acts, is indistinguishable from evil, that wills but holds back: both meet in the middle, both are essentially passive." Could you provide an example of this principle in action?

The paradox of providing an example of a passive principal in action! I am not sure if this is what you are after, but the first example that comes to mind is a very general but pervasive one, that of moral judgment regarding sexual deviancy. The average person regards pedophilia, for example, as a great evil, yet all such people actually “do” about it is judge, despise and revile the people who practice it (or indeed, those who even fantasize about it, such as someone who surfs the net for kiddy porn). But what is the difference between a person who indulges in pedophiliac fantasy but is self-aware or controlled enough not to act upon those urges (i.e., is passively “evil), and a person who believes pedophilia is a great evil but does nothing about it, not even by trying to understand the mentality behind it (much less helping victims deal with it), and stays comfy and smug in their own “virtue,” basking in the warm glow of righteous hatred and moral judgment? These people are simply disowning their Shadow and projecting it on others.
Another example, perhaps closer to what you are after, would be that of the liberal minded person who expresses (and genuinely feels) concern for the environment, who recycles his garbage and suchlike, yet is unwilling to consider living without the luxuries of a system built around environmental destruction. Compare this with someone who takes an “irresponsible” stance and scorns environmental concerns, taking pleasure in jokes about endangered species, but who lives a lifestyle no more destructive than that of the liberal. Or you have the example of a “racist” who makes jokes about black people and Jews but basically treats everyone as equals: compare this to a “liberal” who constantly rails against racism but remains comfortable in his own white, middle-class circle. Which is preferable? To my mind, “evil” that holds back and wrestles with its lower nature is infinitely more admirable than “good” that avoids the issue altogether.

On P.125, you propose a model of "consensus reality" dependent upon an "energy, all pervasive", which "manifests according to natural, terrestrial currents – so-caled leys – and that these currents form a grid about the Earth, in both space and time ."
Does "the Lucid View" of this phenomena perceive an actual road map for this manifestation?

Well, I’ve not seen this “road map”(except possibly during nocturnal visions or alien abductions), but I have no trouble imagining it does exist. As the quote makes clear, it would be a four dimensional map, however, which we couldn’t understand, rationally, merely by looking at it. In fact, the map you posit presumably exists in the human body itself (the DNA), and one could therefore only consult it by becoming it.

Have you any idea where one might find the nodal points, or intersections, on this grid – the earth's "hot spots", if you will?

No.

Would any of these psychic intersections be harmful to the modern paranoid? Could these spots actually be beneficial?

That would be a question of experiencing them and seeing for oneself. On this subject, Castaneda quotes don Juan as saying that, when a warrior passes through a place of power he feels tired and is naturally inclined to remain there to charge his batteries, as it were. When he passes through a negative energy spot, the reverse is the case: he feels energized and moves through it quickly. The body seems to know how to respond to energy in the most pragmatic and self-serving manner: energy responding to energy. Earth and body are linked in such a profound and mysterious way that they cannot be understood as separate at all (bringing us back to my opening discussion on plants, etc).

On an imagined "Paranoia Scale", where would you fall?

I like to think of myself as an eso-terrorist. I practice disseminating paranoia rather than partaking in it (any more than a real terrorist would blow himself up with his own bombs—come to think of it, that happens all the time!) The goal is paranoid awareness, not paranoia per se, i.e., paranoia in the poetic and magikal sense rather than the mundane, clinical, or political sense. Whether effective or not, my work is designed to administer jolts to the reader, shocks of truth and/or beauty that I hope will put the reader in a state of heightened awareness perhaps similar to (if not indistinguishable from) a form of paranoia, i.e., the feeling that nothing is what it seems. Etymologically, paranoia means “outside the mind.” Interestingly enough, this is quite close to the original meaning of ecstasy, which means “outside the body.” In its deepest sense, paranoia entails an awareness of an order of reality beyond the parameters of the mind, i.e., outside rational understanding. It is the forerunner to heightened awareness, and the gateway to the Imaginal realms. To see the “big picture” (be it God, magik, or the Great Conspiracy), we have to leave behind everything we think we know about “reality.” The insecurity and uncertainty of such a departure—the journey into the unknown—is akin to paranoia, not in the sense of feeling persecuted, but in the sense of not knowing what is real. “All we see and all we seem, is but a dream within a dream.” What could be more paranoid than that? Yet what could be more romantic, poetic, and empowering? The key distinction between paranoid “beliefs” (or perceptions) is that only some of them empower; the rest weaken and confuse. Paradoxically, in my experience at least, it is ideas which most unsettle, derange or terrify us that give us power; ideas that provide a weird sort of comfort—albeit the comfort of despair and resignation—are the ones to watch out for. On the imagined scale of paranoia, I see myself as one who creates (or at least tries to) new myths, rather than buying into already existing ones. I am interested primarily in the conspiracy of the gods, only peripherally in those of mice and men.

Is there any question at all, that you've always wished some interviewer would ask you? [If so, here's your opportunity!]

Can’t think of one. I always find a way to say what I want to say, regardless of the question.

Using the Apocalypse as an Advisor (thoughts inspired by a debate at Dream’s End forum)

First point: regarding what DE called “apocalypse fetish”: though I admit to having a certain tendency in this direction, my intent behind sharing these ideas is not to present a rationale for population reduction but rather to reach a clearer understanding of why it may be on the cards at all.

My quandary is this (and it appears to be the same as Strieber’s): since I am convinced a massive “dieback” is about to occur, it is nigh impossible for me not to dwell upon it and seek ways to understand and prepare for it. Now it may be that WS and other folk have a covert agenda that I am not aware of, and that they are, in fact, helping to justify and thence bring about a dieback through human means. I do not know. All I know is that I don't have such an agenda myself, and that my feeling that there are too many people on this planet has less to do with any ecological facts or numbers than it does with simply looking around and listening to my instincts.

DE’s argument was that it is not the number of humans that is creating intolerable pressure upon the Earth biosystem but the system which we currently depend upon. My response was that you cannot separate the two. The greater the number of people on this planet, the more confusion and disorder prevails, and the more expedient some sort of external system of control such as capitalism, tyranny, elite manipulation, etc. But there is also a deeper factor to consider, and it is this: consciousness is proportionally lowered according to the size of a group.

Jung put it fairly well: “Don’t you know that if you choose one hundred of the most intelligent people in the world and get them all together, they are a stupid mob? Ten thousand of them together would have the collective intelligence of an alligator. Haven’t you noticed that at a dinner party the more people you invite the more stupid the conversation? In a crowd, the qualities which everybody possesses multiply, pile up, and become the dominant characteristics of the whole crowd. Not everybody has virtues, but everybody has the low animal instincts, the basic caveman suggestibility, the suspicions and vicious traits of the savage. The result is that when you get a nation of many millions of people, it is not even human. It is a lizard or a crocodile or a wolf. . .
(C. G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters, editor: William McGuire and R.F.C. Hull. London: Pan Books, 1980, pg. 139)

There is an exception to this rule, but it is an extremely rare one; it entails the forging of a "group mind" whereby individuals in a given collective are no longer independent but act as a single organism, a "hive." It's feasible that the Earth could support ten billion humans, but ONLY if they all partook of such a group mind - which would in effect be the consciousness of the Earth herself. I don't see any way that six billion humans will ever get sufficiently "enlightened" to fuse at such a profound level as this. As I see it, the only way is for humanity to be reduced drastically in numbers and then to come together and form a new arrangement, at which point a new race could be birthed directly into this enlightened state or group mind. I know how unpalatable such ideas are to many people. But despite this I find myself going out on a limb to convey them.

What I am saying is that I really can't see any way for humans to organize themselves along more "magikal" (for lack of a better word) or holistic lines in their current numbers. This is evidenced (to my isolate mind) by the fact that, even as ecological awareness apparently increases, individual humans become not more but less responsible, more and more hooked into their cell phones and their computers, more driven by consumer madness, and less and less connected to the living Earth; and so of course, government policies become more and more brazen and destructive despite all the lip service to environment. Just as the cause of peace is the most effective rationale for a war engine to continue shredding bodies and decimating terrain, so the cause of ecology is now being used to justify all manner of natural destruction.

This is not human nature, but it is the human condition: because humanity currently exists and functions not as individuals but as a mass; and the mass, like the dinosaur, is doomed by its very nature to extinction.

There is one final point I want to make and it is that, so far as I can see it, the only way that the current system of mass control and elitist plundering is ever going to change is through collapse. Such a collapse would force us as individuals to draw on our inner ("spiritual") resources, and from this chaos a new balance would eventually emerge. But how many people today would survive such a collapse?

Perhaps I am wrong about all of this but I really don't think so. Since I was twenty years old I have felt in my bones that a huge catastrophe was coming and that, on the other side of it, very little of what we have come to take for granted as our way of life, or indeed our sense of reality, would remain. In the decades since then, I have modified just about everything I believe in one way or another, but this one deep, deep certainty remains unchanged. I suspect the reason has less to do with a neurotic desire to see the world destroyed than the fact that this awareness is in my bones, and not merely my head. It is akin to what the snake feels when the earthquake is due.

None of this means that spreading fear of an Apocalypse is a good thing. If I am right, there is nothing that anyone can "do" about this anyway save to prepare for possible annihilation and make the most of our time while we are here. So the kind thing, perhaps, would be to leave the average folk to enjoy their complacent illusions of sustainability, and let them carry on shopping.

I'm not sounding the trumpet blast here – I have done far too much of that already - but I suggest there is a middle way, and that no matter how much "apocalypse fetishism" or covert disinfo gets exposed, it doesn't necessarily change the fact that we are on the edge of extinction. If this is the case, it is up to the bolder and more imaginative souls among us to face this fact head on, and to deal with it in a sober and compassionate fashion.

This post may be more about myself than anything. No one knows what is going to happen, or what has to happen, or what "should" happen. We can only go by what our guts and hearts tell us. I am not trying to set myself up as an outside authority. Knowing that a catastrophe is coming doesn't make me special. Thousands are aware of it. I am just one of those who is trying to make sense of it in the "before" period, rather than waiting until "after."

My gut tells me that the death of billions of humans at this point in time is OUR BEST-CASE SCENARIO, and that we may as well get used to it. And that the alternative is something I personally don't even want to contemplate.

William Irwin Thompson pretty much summed up my viewpoint in Coming Into Being: Artifacts and Texts in the Evolution of Consciousness (New York: 1998, St. Martin’s Press):

"From this cosmic point of view, the catastrophe in which billions die and enter bardo all at once may not actually be a catastrophe at all, but a galactic opportunity for accelerated evolution. If humanity goes on as usual, we may simply slide down into a Bosnia that lasts for an aeon. For those who require an optimistic outlook on life to get out of bed in the morning, consider the fate of the dinosaurs. The dinosaurs died in the last great collective death of the Cretaceous extinction, but they came back as the birds that we see all around us.” (pg. 153)

The main thing to grok in all this is that there is a LOT more at stake here than mere survival, either of the individual or of species.

Finally, I would say that whether or not the species is about to go extinct, it may be useful to use this idea as a means to drive us to change. Every individual needs more than the simple desire to change, he/she needs to be goaded or pushed to make the necessary changes, and this pushing invariably entails an external factor. "Using death as an advisor" is not merely optional but essential for a warrior, in order to have this necessary context in which our actions and decisions are imbued with power and urgency. We have now taken it to a collective level. It is time to use the Apocalypse—species extinction—as an advisor.

I have been sharing some of my dreams of late with Amy George, an extremely insightful dream-reader. I recommend you check out her site. My own exchange with her is on April 7th
The link is:
http://blogs.capecodonline.com/n/blogs/blog.aspx?webtag=cc-dreamQueen

AK

Pluto's Law

Essentially, my philosophy of life is simple, yet words are not sufficient to frame it.

The seed must go into the earth, and abide alone, and crack open, in order to bear fruit.

We must seek out the darkness that will reveal our true natures to us, and bring forth the light that is within us. Without this darkness, we can neither summon nor find nor recognize the individual sparks of light which we are.

This darkness is our Shadow, both individual and collective. We must move towards it, meet it head on, and allow it to embrace us. It is impossible to do this without fear, but we can at least have the grace and humility to surrender to the terror and allow it to bring us all the way into the moment. This way, we can fully experience the confrontation with the Shadow, maximize our gains, and minimize the trauma.

The seed that surrenders to the darkness and pressure of the earth and focuses on what is within it will soon break open and send forth the shoot by which new life can push upward, back towards the light. The seed that struggles against its fate and tries to rise back to the surface by its own power is doomed. Its own resistance will ensure its failure. It will never crack open; it will not sprout; it will not see the light.

This is Pluto’s law, and this is my philosophy—in a nut shell!

From here it is possible to see the light at the end of the tunnel. The tunnel is my own psyche, and I am going inward. The light is there at the deepest, most recondite place within me.

The will to sprout and push upward can only come from within the seed. No external force can substitute—no love, no god—there is no salvation or deliverance without this will. In the final hour, the light must come from within us or there will be no light at all. It is this that the darkness is for: to bring each soul-seed to fruition.

Here is the true meaning of self-sufficiency: that so long as we continue to reach outside of ourselves for meaning—love, truth, joy, grace—we will always come up empty-handed, and each time a little more crushed and disillusioned.

Each soul must draw salvation from within itself, and this can only occur in complete isolation from all other souls. Until then, there can be no solidarity, no community, no love, that is not contaminated by need, no companionship uncompromised by the fear of aloneness. Only when we can abide alone, as seeds within the Earth, and shine like solitary stars in the darkness of space, will there be togetherness.

Castaneda & Strieber

A couple of new pieces I wrote have been posted a forums instead of here, as I enjoy the feedback

the first is called "Carlos Castaneda, Whitley Strieber, and the Perils of the Literary Shaman," which you can find either at dreamsend2 forum or at Rigorous Intuition

The second is a long piece on Whitley Strieber, Will the Real Whitley Strieber Please Stand Up?

AK

Self-Promotional Prophet: Daniel Pinchbeck’s 2012

“If a person is open to a new world view, it can often mean that he is not firmly rooted in the reality of the old world view; as a lunatic or alienated artist, his own neurotic traits can become magnified as they tremble with the new energy pouring in from the universal source.” (William Irwin Thompson, quoted by Pinchbeck, in 2012)

While reading Daniel Pinchbeck’s 2012: The Year of the Mayan Prophecy (formerly The Return of Quetzalcoatl, change presumably instigated by the publishers), I became so enthusiastic that I began to write a review halfway through it. Then something odd happened. Around page 300 (with part six), the book began to go horribly wrong, and by the time I was finished, I had an entirely different take on it. For the first 200 pages or so, I didn’t want the book to end. For the last hundred pages, I couldn’t wait to be done with it. To say that Pinchbeck overstays his welcome would be a grotesque understatement. By the end of the book, he has more or less destroyed whatever good will we had for him, and I wound up holding my head in my hands, muttering to myself: “Another good mind bites the dust.”

Since my first notes are an accurate description of my response to the book up to that point, however, I’ll include them here before moving onto my final judgment. These initial impressions amount to a review of the first 250 pages of 2012.

Pinchbeck’s book is a tour-de-force; an astonishing achievement that manages to blend worldly (and world-weary) skepticism with a wide-eyed sense of wonder. What the author attempts—and by and large achieves—is to build a bridge between the rational/sensationalist viewpoint of mainstream media (Pinchbeck’s background is as a New York journalist and editor), and the cutting edge of shamanic vision, an area which the mainstream generally relegates to the “lunatic fringe.” Yet at no point does Pinchbeck resort to dumbing down or simplification. 2012 is certainly not a book for everyone, but it has a very wide reach, and potentially it could connect to even the most skeptical of readers—if not to persuade, then at least to challenge. Pinchbeck is a futurologist, attempting to describe concepts that have yet to take hold of the consensus, being basically incompatible with it, by using terms apprehensible to our current worldview. This is no easy task, yet Pinchbeck manages it without coming off as either a raving lunatic or prophet of doom.[1]

For a work as chock-a-block with ideas as this (perhaps only 20% of which are original to Pinchbeck), the author stays remarkably on track, and there’s very little here that struck me as being off-the-mark.[2] Yet apparently the book was not well-received (Rolling Stone described it as being “widely panned”). Taking a hostile, even derisive stance to Pinchbeck’s brand of apocalypticism, the mainstream media latched particularly onto his avocation of the psychedelic experience, and his claim to being the chosen prophet of Quetzalcoatl. (It has to be said that Pinchbeck walked right into that one.[3]) Yet 2012 is in no way spurious or outlandish, nor is it poorly argued, researched, or written. It’s an exemplary work of apocalyptic scholasticism, and the only way to dismiss it is to argue that Pinchbeck is just another drug-damaged lunatic with delusions of grandeur. To this extent, in keeping with tradition, the more virulently the world rejects the message, the more it—inadvertently—confirms the truth of it. Pinchbeck has volunteered for the most thankless role there is, and he ought not to trouble himself too much about such a chilly reception. His reward is not of this world anyway.

That said, there are times when Pinchbeck doesn’t seem quite equal to his task. Brilliant as 2012 is, it lacks a unifying poetic vision. It is more of a compendium, an overview of ideas, than a unique creative work, and although Pinchbeck writes extremely well, he doesn’t appear to have an especially strong sensibility. Most of his insights come from the head and not the heart. In an odd way, he seems a little too worldly, and perhaps this is what has led to his coming up against the world in such a fashion. Apparently, despite all his fevered convictions, part of Pinchbeck still wants to curry the world’s favor. Eager to receive credit for being the messenger, he’s busy building bridges to a world he knows, in his heart of hearts, won’t be around much longer. He might be better off burning them instead.

*

These were my first impressions. The last quarter of 2012, however, is such a fatal error of judgment on the part of the author that the book winds up as a cautionary tale: a warning about what happens when the messenger gets consumed by self-importance and decides to “improve on” the message, thereby destroying it in the process. Pinchbeck’s ideas on masculine-feminine energies, the Kali Yuga, and the unnatural restrictions of monogamy are not actually bad, nor are they poorly expressed. But they belong in another work, as does (considerably more so) his distinctly uncomfortable private accounts of marital break-up and unrequited sexual desire. For the previous 300 pages (or at least 250, up to the end of part 4; part 5 is a somewhat superfluous but not uninteresting retread of crop circles in Glastonbury), Pinchbeck presented an almost unassailable argument for the end of consensus reality. After such a relentless but inspired barrage of information, it’s extremely difficult to sustain interest in such relatively trivial questions: our attention is all used up. As a result, all the air begins to leak out of 2012, as it slowly sinks into the quagmire of Pinchbeck’s personal obsessions and neuroses.

Pinchbeck not only dissipates our good will towards him, he rapidly erodes his credibility. If he had kept the work to the first four or five parts and left out the final hundred ages, I have no doubt his book would have received a vastly more positive response. As it is, those people desperate to dismiss the book as the work of a self-obsessed crank found, in this last section, all the proof they needed. Pinchbeck’s description of the process by which he comes to realize he is the chosen avatar of Quetzalcoatl and the Great Beast 666 is embarrassing. (No wonder Pinchbeck took a couple of pages out to revile Crowley earlier in the book: he was setting the stage for his own assumption of power and had to be sure to banish all pretenders first.) Then, when Pinchbeck reveals the Quetzalcoatl “transmission,” it is a lackluster piece of prose, offering nothing he hasn’t said already, and better, in the previous pages. Pinchbeck writes:

“The writer of this work is the vehicle for my arrival—my return—to this realm. He certainly did not expect this to be the case. What began as a quest to understand prophecy has become the fulfillment of prophecy. The vehicle of my arrival has been brought to an awareness of his situation in sometimes painful increments and stages of resistance—and this book follows the evolution of his learning process, as an aid to the reader’s understanding. . . . almost apologetically, the vehicle notes that his birthday fell in June 1966—6/66—‘count the number of the Beast. . . .’ The Beast prophesied is the ‘feathered serpent,’ Quetzalcoatl.”

Is Pinchbeck so deluded he fails to see that the proof of his prophet-status is only ever in the pudding? If he had let the work speak for itself, he might have had a shot at becoming a leading spokesperson for the Eschaton; instead he couldn’t wait to be coronated, and manufactured his own tawdry crown, turning his book into a declaration of its own importance, and of its author’s quasi-divine status. As a result, he merely demonstrates the pathological delusions which invariably befall the magician on his path to freedom. What makes this even more depressing is that Pinchbeck is fully aware of the possibility, and yet maintains the delusion anyway.

“[P]erhaps I had succumbed to a trap set by malicious entities from the astral plane, puffing me up with delusions of grandeur, ready to tear me down in future, as they had done to poor Aleister Crowley…?” He even cites his hero Terence McKenna: “The notion of some kind of fantastically complicated visionary revelation that happens to put one at the center of the action is a symptom of mental illness.” Apparently Pinchbeck believes that simply acknowledging these possibilities is enough to banish them. (He makes it clear he is nobody’s fool.) But I’d wager the reverse is the case: by showing himself willing to entertain the idea that he has been duped, he convinces himself that such a thing could never happen to him. But it did.

I have little doubt Pinchbeck’s editors begged him to leave out the last segment of the book, but you can bet Pinchbeck was having none of it. This was the essence of the work, the essence of his message, that the quest for prophecy, etc, etc. But by making the whole work—the whole “return of Quetzalcoatl”—about himself, he reduces 2012 to a personal rant and almost obliges the reader to reject it, baby with bathwater, as a deeply embarrassing demonstration on the pitfalls of psychedelic self-importance. In the words of William Irwin Thompson (Coming Into Being), “One ends up with the mushroom-chewing hippie trying to pretend he is a yogi, but what he really is a [sic] psychically inflated personality whose ego has gone through a process of magnification and explosion rather than purification. . . [a] psychedelic fundamentalist, the Mushroom Mullah on the lecture circuit, with all the dissonance of a charismatic but nevertheless disturbed and unstable personality.”

A Rolling Stone article notes how Pinchbeck’s original publisher dropped the book: “Gerald Howard, a venerable editor of authors like Don DeLillo, offering the comment, ‘Daniel, you’re not Nietzsche.’ Says Pinchbeck, ‘It was hard for him to conceive that someone of my generation was doing something of primordial significance.’”

It’s clear where Pinchbeck stands in regard to his own talent. Does he really believe, in the light of all his visions, that a cosmic shift in consciousness hinges around a book he wrote about it?! Apparently, that’s exactly what he believes. Pinchbeck has mistaken his finger for the Moon, and is busy fobbing off menus for meals. He has succumbed to the common delusion that the messenger is more important than the message, that the intellectual apprehension of an idea is essential to its existence. This ties in with Pinchbeck’s fanciful, New Age notion that we (and especially he, as a “visionary”) are creating the future through our thoughts. There is a huge difference between admitting that our thoughts influence reality and claiming that they create it, but it’s a difference Pinchbeck seems to have willfully ignored. It’s basically the same abyss that lies between the idea of tuning into the archetypal energy of “Quetzalcoatl,” and of being the (sole) chosen vessel of a god: the difference between enlightened responsibility and demented self-importance (i.e., hubris).

The sad fact is that this kind of thinking usually winds up having the very opposite effect to the one intended. Pinchbeck’s insistence on believing he is The One—the world’s savior—doesn’t make it so; it only cripples his ability to be an efficient messenger. By the end of the book, Pinchbeck has accomplished something I would have thought impossible: he made me feel jaded and cynical about the Apocalypse. In the end, 2012 presents probably the best argument there is for steering clear of psychedelics and of consciousness expansion in general. If taking the red pill is going to turn us into Daniel Pinchbeck, for God’s sake take the blue pill! Pinchbeck has gone over to the dark side without even knowing it. Great beast indeed.

Aeolus Kephas © 2008

[1] By choosing to call the book 2012, however, Pinchbeck has gone out on a limb. It seems unlikely, to say the least, that the kind of global shift of consciousness he predicts will occur in the next four years, and if it did, that it would mean anything besides madness and catastrophe for the vast majority. Since Pinchbeck is describing a movement of paradigms so total as to entail “the end of reality,” he might have been wise to have allowed a few decades for such a shift to occur.

[2] Two things come to mind. His dismissal of Crowley’s (channeled) Book of the Law as “much like the rhyming reams of mediocrity verse produced by Crowley himself” seems deliberately obtuse: The Book of the Law stands so far above Crowley’s other poetry that this discrepancy is perhaps the best evidence for the book’s otherworldly origins. And Pinchbeck’s insistence on viewing “the grays” as a wholly negative phenomenon seems slightly paranoid, to say the least (though his description of Dolores Cannon as a Cronenberg-style villainess is amusing).

[3] The moment critics realize Pinchbeck has a personal stake in his message, they are bound to move in for the kill. 2012 is advocating a total transformation of values, beliefs, modes of thinking and lifestyle. Its message, between the lines at least, is identical to that of prophets of old: Repent, for the end is at hand. The fact that Pinchbeck may be right does not make the message any easier to swallow (on the contrary), and the easiest way for his audience to escape the responsibility which such a message carries is simply to kill the messenger.