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.