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.