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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.

Happy Microbes Safe in God's Hands

As microbes inside the Galactic Organism, we are puppets, yes; but with the option of following the strings and becoming at one with the Master. At which point, we are free.

There will be a new dawn for Man, but it will also be the end of the species (never mind the market!). This will occur in the lifetime of our generation, though few will live to see it. The stars have vouchsafed this knowledge to me. It is a burden but also a blessing. For every moment of life—even this Hell-world around us—becomes sweet, knowing it will soon be gone.

And don’t forget the ALIENS!!!

Soon They will reveal themselves to us, and then you know all HELL breaks loose. Yeeah. This also has been made known to me.
(I can hardly wait.)

But fear not, fear is a hell-thy response to all this!
Terror is better. Love conquers all.

It’s only the little self that fears the light outside the chrysalis. The butterfly self has no interests to protect, hence nothing to fear from “jeopardy” or catastrophe or collapse.

The shell must collapse for the butterfly to be born. The most we can do, the least we can do, is to help it along by not clinging to old ways, old patterns, old fears.

Easy to say, perhaps, but not so easy to practice? Not easy, perhaps, but simplicity itself. Simply live as if tomorrow the world ends. For one of these tomorrows, it shall.

We have to cancel all our holdings before we can see the benefits of Apocalypse. But they are many! Oh yes. This is the greatest secret of all which has been revealed to me.
The benefits go beyond our wildest dreams.

When the world ends, breathe a sigh of relief. There will be so much to look forward to.

The Role of Eso-Terrorist Vs. Role of Philanthropist

I just listened to Daniel Pinchbeck arguing with Whitley Strieber, which I may discuss in depth later (since I am currently working on an article about Strieber). Pinchbeck mentioned David Lynch and his transcendental meditation techique for reducing crime in high crime areas by sending out positive waves; by a curious synchronicity, minutes later i recieved an email about the same subject, from a reader who wanted to know what I thought of the idea of "philanthropic sorcery." I am trusting he won't object to my mentioning this, and citing my response here, as it seems also to pertain directly to the argument between Strieber and Pinchbeck, in which Pinchbeck took the side of the "positive" (arguing that humanity could adapt and survive in the coming years and create a new, more enlightened society), while Strieber took the "negative" position, insisting that a "dieback" was inevitable and that we just needed to get ready for it. To my surprise, altho i agreed with Strieber about the facts of the situation, my sympathy was almost entirely with Pinchbeck, who kept his head throughout (and even had the dignity to apologize) while poor Whitley wound up sounding like a petulant teenager (even telling Pinchbeck he wouldn't be his friend anymore!).

My question is, however, why is a dieback necessarily such a “negative” thing anyway? This is basically a humancentric POV, and unworthy of a supposed cosmic culture prophet such as PB. We are all going to die anyway, so why not en masse, especially if it is necessary for the Earth and other species to survive? And surely it is better, wiser, to predict a dieback and get people psyched for it, and then to be wrong, than the reverse, to be optimistic and give people a false sense of hope? Pinchbeck argues for a visionary's job to imagine the best-case scenario. I guess I am more old-fashioned, and stand by the Koran on this one: "a prophet's job is to give warning."

But Whitley certainly lost a whole lot of my respect. You would think he had never heard of the Blakean principle that "friendship is opposition." The best way we can "help" our fellow men is to oppose them, and Pinchbeck certainly acted in that spirit. But his insistence on saving humanity, and even civilization, struck me as narrow-minded, cosmically speaking.

I am not a philanthropist and i doubt i ever will be. My interest is simply in those to whom I am personally connected; beyond that, i do not consider it any more worthwhile, and probably considerably less so, to connect to the "masses" than to insects or other life forms. Frankly, they deserve our attention far more than most people do, and they are better company too. I also think we can benefit far more by "serving" Nature than by aspiring to any kind of social function. I feel absolutely no loyalty to my species. The idea of philanthropy is probably the most fundamental, and also the most dangerous, trap a sorcerer can fall into.

In my estimation of the situation, the best we can do for most people is to help them prepare for their deaths. And since they won't be open to any direct counsel there, really all that means is being considerate and kind to everyone we meet, and trying to see them as they are, as individuals. The mass does not exist at a higher level. It is by definition soulless, a mechanism, an automaton.

Nor am I particularly inclined to want to enhance the atmosphere in any way that will make it more "comfortable." On the contrary. People need to confront their shadows, to be hurled into conditions of terror and duress under which they can overcome their complacency and self-importance, and open to other modes of perception. This is why I chose to call myself an eso-terrorist.

In the words of Jung: “The modern world is desacralized, that is why it is in a crisis. Modern man must rediscover a deeper source of his own spiritual life. To do this, he is obliged to struggle with evil, to confront his shadow, to integrate the devil. There is no other choice.”

This is why I feel as sure as Whitley that dark, dark times are coming, and yet why I feel deeply optimistic: not despite this, but because of it. We have summoned the shadow, and now we must confront the shadow. Only so - under conditions of direst necessity - can we discover the true source of light within us.

What is good for the individual - the Soul of Man - in the long term, is evil for humanity as a collective, in the short. We must make our choice as to which we consider more worthy of our attention. Are you going to try and save the human race, or rescue your own soul?

Aeolus

Latest Interviews
Two new interviews currently online, the best one is with James Haarp at Cosmic Horizons. You can download at:
http://www.mediafire.com/?8d2jt02dgrw
I have yet to listen to this, but it seemed to go pretty well at the time. (Apparently the sound is a bit patchy, however.) Subjects discussed: sorcery 24/7, Crowley, Christ and Christianity, conspiracy consciousness, Masonic world control, revelation of the method and rigged elections, demons and alien abductions, divine astrology, etc, etc.
Then there's Kentroversy Tapes Podcast 25 (December 10, 2007): http://kentroversytapes.blogspot.com/2007/12/kentroversy-tapes-podcast-25-december.html
This interview starts kind of dull but picks up after about 10 mins (when Kent tells me about his Ufo experience), then with a little meandering more or less sustains momentum to the end. Subjects discussed: The X-Files, paranoid mass media, Christianity vs. occultism, faith vs. practical magik, Christ's message, living in the end times, Crowley & Hitler, politicians and the occult, social engineering, 2012, humanity's enslavement to technology, Armageddon, Homo Serpiens and the DNA coil, stellar man, etc. Watch out for some cheesy music and a weird electro-sonic effect that makes me sound like the severed android head in Alien.

The Adversarial Leaf

If we are property -

How can we feel "special"?

Or follow our sense of who we are

If we are property?

Aliens

The Sun has been in the sun too long

We are part of something greater than we know

Does the cell resent being property of the body?

Is the will to live a mental or a physical thing?

Is having no will to live the same as wanting to die?

Why do we feel worthless without someone to tell us how special we are?

What makes us want to get up in the morning?

If all the choices we have are the choices of livestock being reared as food - is that why we are so obsessed with eating?

We are property of the Universe

It looks bad. It IS bad. But not all bad.

To be a leaf on a tree. The adversarial leaf.

Follow the leaf to the branch to the trunk to the roots to the Earth

The whole existence thing

Where's the tragedy in that?

Don't think, just act

In the long grass, cutting a path, back to where we left the knowledge of our planetary meaning, the will of the gods, at a certain point, thought runs dry

We can only think negative thoughts for so long before they lose their meaning, hence their power over us

What we think determines how we act, what we believe, choose to believe, starts young and becomes set in flesh, a program, and we have to see it through to its logical end.

If we are property then - I want to know - who or what owns us

Intend to get free

We are not just food

We are also this will to expand, to love, to know, to experience infinite possibilities, beyond the dark and the light, eater and eaten, master and slave, carrot and whip.

Fear and desire. A broken record.

Everything we do is aimed at creating some sort of impression, because daddy didn't love us enough, because our fathers couldn't love us. Raised by cripples we are crippled. Except there is a difference. Unlike our parents we have a choice because we know better, that we are not defined by our weakness but on the contrary, given the opportunity to grow beyond it, to become the opposite of that, to refuse to be defined by anyone or anything, not even the gods.

We are property because we do not have the courage or the imagination to seek freedom.

Until we make the first step outside the box of identity passed down by our ancestors, there will always be limits and these limits will torment us.

Our infinite nature will not tolerate the limitations of identity that possess us.

And why should it?

Aeolus on the Airwaves: Interview with Adam Gorightly

Besides Adam's pronouncing my name wrong, this show went pretty well, covering the bases of mind control, alien visitations, DNA and kundalini rising

Uneasy listening for all

http://gorightly.podomatic.com/

Are You Sitting Comfortably? Meditations on Zeitgeist & No End in Sight and How Covert Rule Becomes Overt Rule

(there is also a shorter version of this piece at http://www.myspace.com/aeoluskephas)

“When the power of love overcomes the love of power, the world will know peace.”
Jimi Hendrix

Question: Do we know how lucky we are?

To live in a world that moves further and further into chaos and yet to be so damn comfortable?

Question: if our comforts and luxuries and our peace of mind all depend upon an economic and political system that is steadily stripping the world of all comfort, all possible peace—of mind or any other kind—how long do we expect that comfort to last? How long? And is it worth it?

Question: Would you be willing to see the end of that system if it meant losing all the comforts you have come to rely on and returning to nothing—to nuts and berries—knowing that the planet would survive as a result of your “sacrifice”? Well, would you?

If you ever wonder how easily the public is deceived by the people in power, don’t. Awareness of the truth comes at a high price, and few of us really want to pay it.

How many of us really want to join a revolution or return to the forest? How many of us would do just about anything rather than that? Yet I guarantee you, if you knew the real truth about this way of life we depend on for our comfort and stability, you would go gladly into the wilderness. The alternative would be complete and irrevocable despair.

In the end, the revolution is coming to us, my friends. And then the wilderness will come also. We have seen the birth of the last generation. There is no future past this point.

Do you doubt this? Then you have just proved how effectively your need for comfort has blinded you and how susceptible we are to the lies that control us, because of our desire to believe.

I just watched a series of documentaries, Loose Change, Zeitgeist, Michael Moore’s Sicko, and No End in Sight, about the Iraq “war.” I am left wondering not “Is there any hope for mankind?” I have known for a long time the answer to that one (the answer is no). I am left wondering a much deeper and more urgent question: “What am I supposed to do with this knowledge?”

It will surprise no one that the only thing I came up with was to write. If I can’t testify to personal despair, what good is it to me, or to anyone?

Loose Change leaves no room for the discerning person to doubt that 9/11 (along with most if not all major “terrorist” attacks, before or since) was an “inside job” with precise ends that have more or less all been accomplished in the six years since. Primary among these—besides of course the infinite-budgeted and open-ended “war on terror” itself, including handy new “rationales” for meddling in the middle east—was the rapid corrosion of whatever was left of the democratic governmental process: individual rights, and so forth. And yet, you or I are probably largely unaffected by this at a personal level, beyond the ubiquitous presence of CCTV and the ever-increasing security measures at airports. (Our phones may be tapped, true, but we won’t know it if they are.) Amazing isn’t it? How big the lie, and yet how subtle the effects once we have agreed to swallow it. We are still comfortable, that’s the main thing. Right? Complicity—all down the line.

Zeitgeist goes a fair bit deeper into the intrigue, and hence that much further out on a limb. It shows how a small group of individuals are able to control events—and therefore people—by controlling the economy, and points out that the Federal Reserve (which prints all the money in the US) is anything but federal, being a privately owned corporation that increases its power and wealth—its hold over a nation, or for that matter a planet—by steadily increasing the collective debt. What’s curious about this fact is that the people who control wealth actually don’t need money, and become more powerful, not so much by amassing capital (though it doesn’t hurt) but by disempowering the rest of the world and making it ever more dependent upon their “resources”—even though they are really just colored bits of paper. This is a very advanced form of sorcery, and like all black magic, the proof of how well it works is that we are almost completely unaware of it. We are under the spell of money, and all the “comforts” it can buy.

Another interesting fact which the documentary points out —especially interesting to American citizens—is that there is no actual law obliging people in the US to pay taxes, because taxes are in fact unconstitutional. According to the film, 90% of taxes paid by US citizens go straight into the pockets of a tiny group of individuals, the ones behind the Federal Reserve and the central banking system. Taxes essentially have nothing to do with government (who as everyone knows are the deepest in debt of all), which is presumably why there’s no law enforcing tax payment. (This doesn’t mean the IRS won’t harass you if you don’t pay, only that they can’t actually prosecute you in a court of law.) Of course, anyone who is even beginning to wise up—and these days you have to really be out of the loop not to be wising up at least a little bit—knows that “the government” has little to do with much of anything these days. It has become almost as nominal a “power” as the monarchy in the UK.

No End in Sight amply illustrates this fact by showing how the major decisions in the Iraq “war” were made by a tiny handful of individuals without ever consulting any of the relevant parties (e.g., military advisors and US officials posted in Iraq). Admittedly G.W. Bush was (possibly, though not definitely) included among these chosen few, but the general impression given by the film (without ever actually suggesting this) is that the visible government was covertly following an agenda that had already been set, by unseen intelligences for undivulged reasons. This was the reason the token, visible government officials who were included didn’t bother consulting anyone: because a) they were going to do it anyway (they had their orders); and b) they were such blatantly “bad” ideas that the only way to implement them was by ensuring that as few people knew about them as possible until it was too late to do anything about it—only those, in short, who were being directed from “on high” by the “unseen hand” of the shadow government.

Any intelligent person who is also moderately informed on this can’t help but be aware that the US government basically ensured the Iraq war continue indefinitely, even though (as the film shows) it was “won” back in 2003, or could have been if different decisions had been made. The problem is that intelligent people tend to take a lazy view of things: putting such decisions down to incompetence rather than to a darker, Machiavellian agenda, they effectively give the government the benefit of the doubt. This is why GWB is the ideal patsy President for the last 8 years: he has helped immeasurably to compound the erroneous notion that, behind the increased level of madness and just plain malevolence in US foreign and domestic policies (which by extension have impacted the whole world) lies nothing worse than plain stupidity. Naturally, though this idea is troublesome, it is far more comforting than the notion that specific individuals are consciously implementing these policies in order to ensure the world sinks deeper and deeper into chaos, and to profit thereby. To take on board such an idea, we would have to then accept that the situation is not going to get better, but will only continue getting worse, and worse, and worse, until the day (maybe sooner than we think) on which the marching chaos arrives on our doorsteps and pounds down our doors, demanding our blood.

According to No End in Sight, the total cost of the Iraq war so far is around $1.8 trillion. Cui Bono? Not you and I, that’s for sure. And not Iraq, that’s for damn sure. So who? Increased spending equals increased debt, equals increased power—for someone.

Follow the money and you will find the truth. And the truth will make you very, very uncomfortable.

*

Perhaps the most surprising little nugget of information in Zeitgeist relates to the North American Union and the creation of a common currency for the new US/Canada/Mexico state: the Americo. Did anyone out there hear about this? I didn’t think so. The entire superstructure of Western society was fundamentally altered, and it didn’t make the evening news? Does that make you wonder what’s wrong with this picture?

Bush (and the Mexican and Canadian supremos) signed the agreement back in 2005, without involving either Congress or the “voting public” (ha ha). This hasn’t been kept secret, exactly—it was reported and even criticized by CNN at the time—and yet somehow no one is talking about it. Barring that initial, brief disclosure, the media have kept entirely mum on the subject. The day that CNN refers indignantly to a “group of elites” changing history without consulting us, don’t you think maybe it’s time we stopped talking about “conspiracy theories” and started facing the facts? The fact, for example, that hidden forces behind government are making all the decisions that count, and the news is being carefully controlled to ensure any resistance is kept to a minimum? The US government responded to charges of underhandedness at the time by saying that the union wasn’t covert: it had been reported on their website. Oh well, in that case….

What these documentaries all show is an increased level of amazement and confusion on the part of people who actually belong to the institutions involved in these bizarre new policies. This includes people at (apparently) high levels of government. It is exactly as if some mysterious rogue element or “virus” were taking over the system and had little or no worries about being detected. Perhaps the reason is that it is now sufficiently advanced to know it can no longer be stopped? What seems beyond doubt is that covert forces behind visible governments are becoming increasingly active in the policies being implemented, and as a result are slowly emerging from behind the scenes. Covert control is becoming open rule. This is presumably because these parties wish to accelerate their agenda, and can no longer afford to waste time getting new bills by Congress, much less courting “public approval” (ha ha).

Judging by No End in Sight, the “secret elite”—what else you gonna call them?—knew full well that the military and other US advisors in Iraq would have been strongly opposed to dismantling Iraq’s armed forces, since by doing so the US practically guaranteed that disenfranchised soldiers would join the Iraq uprising and resist the US army, instead of joining forces with them (as they were apparently quite ready, even eager to do). But since there was no way to “explain” this questionable decision without admitting to the hidden agenda behind it—to keep Iraq destabilized and so keep the game of war going—the US advisors in Iraq found out about it by seeing it on CNN! The same applies to the North American Union: since it was known that many North American citizens would have opposed it and Congress would have questioned it, neither were consulted. Their opinion was considered worthless, since they could not possibly understand the nature of the “game.” Of course, only the elite can do that.

The alternative to this complete bypassing of democratic—or even governmental—process entails creating circumstances like 9/11 which create the necessary conditions to steamroll dubious new policies past Congress and the public (e.g., the Patriot Act, Homeland Security). Needless to say, such “event manipulation” is a far more elaborate and costly procedure and must be kept to the minimum, i.e., until strictly necessary. It’s also costly in other ways: in the parlance of currency, the less of it there is, the greater its value, a law that applies as much at the psychological level as at the material. The events of 9/11 have gone a long way in terms of furthering the policies of the elite, but the danger of having too many dramatic “terror” scenarios play out over a short period is that people will become desensitized to them, and will need increasingly dramatic scenarios to get the desired response, that of fear, anger, and despair. Like in a movie, you have to be sparing with your effects to maximize the impact on the audience. This is similar I suppose to torture techniques in which the victims are given time to recover their strength before the next onslaught: to be sure they’re awake enough to feel it! Put another way, if conditions of discomfort are maintained indefinitely, people become used to them. They must be given a temporary illusion of comfort to soften them up for the blows to come.

This is why a sophisticated totalitarian regime resembles Brave New World as much as (or more than) 1984: a controlling elite keeps its people comfortable not merely to prevent them from causing trouble, but also to make them progressively softer and more pliable. A person who cannot survive a day without a cell phone and cable TV and comfort food products is very, very easy to terrorize.

*

Enough morbid thoughts! We are still left with the question of what to actually do about any of this.

It seems common sense to me that, before deciding on any course of action, one should first get all the facts (or as many as one can), and then try to see what the overall picture looks like. The first, maybe the only, thing to really do “about” any of this is simply—get informed. Forewarned is forearmed. Beyond that, the answer is the same as it always is: we have to look within.

The only thing to be done about the situation we are currently in as a society and as a species is—face up to our part in it. If we want to find out what the hell is wrong with “human nature,” we may as well start with our own. The world is a condition that must be treated. First of all it has to be diagnosed, which means looking unflinchingly at the symptoms: all of them. And although the “disease” is within, many of the symptoms are manifested without. What I am trying to say is that this fucked up world is our responsibility. By allowing the worst elements of the species to take charge of our collective destiny, we have sold ourselves into slavery—and into something even worse than slavery.

Our challenge is to have the courage and strength to look at the very worst aspects of existence and, instead of judging them, take responsibility for them. There but for the grace of God go you and I. Not only could we be numbered among the miserable oppressed—a year, a month, a day from now, your home town could look like Iraq does today; we could also find ourselves among the even more miserable oppressors. Both extremes exist in us: the horror of the helpless victim, and the deeper horror of the those psychopaths who, in their own way, cannot help themselves. Instead of judging the demons that lurk behind the scenes—engineering misery and profiting from atrocity as surely as a baker trades in bread—and instead of pitying the victims, we need to ask how we profit from this self-same system, how we depend on it for our comfort and security, making us the inmates and the guards, trapped inside a prison, with no conceivable way of escape.

How helpless are we? Look at it this way: if peering for a moment or two behind the paper-thin veneer of our comfortable lives of luxury, at the seemingly bottomless abyss in which we live—I mean really live—if such a glimpse drives us to look inward, at the bottomless abyss inside us, isn’t that perhaps a good thing? Isn’t it an opportunity to grow, evolve, to transform ourselves into something a little bit less sympathetic to this horror we call the world? Because in the end, isn’t our horror, our pity and despair, directed at ourselves? Isn’t there somewhere in us the sneaking certainty that, at some level, we are complicit with all of this horror?

For every zone of comfort we have taken refuge in, there is a corresponding zone of misery and despair: both were created by the same forces, the same agenda. We have agreed to look the other way and pretend it isn’t really happening, in exchange for our own peace of mind. But what kind of peace of mind is it that requires complete indifference to the suffering of others so long as they remain but numbers on a page, images on a screen? How long do we really think this peace of mind is going to last? How long?

This world is our world. The miseries belong to all of us. The longer we keep the truth at bay, the worse it is going to be when it finally catches up with us. We all know this, deep down: that’s the one truth we keep furthest at bay.

This isn’t a sermon. The last thing I feel qualified to do right now is tell anyone what to do with their misery. It’s not an appeal. It doesn’t make any difference to me personally if you get up in arms about this world or the secret forces that have made it this way (with our implicit approval). If you want to carry on with your head in the sand and your ass in the air until the bombs fall on all of us, that’s fine with me. But I don’t suppose you would have read this far if that were the case.

In my experience, taking a look at how truly awful things are doesn’t necessarily make us feel any worse. It can actually be a kind of relief. It lets us get a better grip on why we feel so bad for so much of the time. For a moment or two, the pressure of denial is reduced. We can let the truth wash over us, in a great bloody wave, and see what’s left in our lives that we really care about.

We live in fear every moment; isn’t it about time we looked at what we are so damn afraid of? Until we identify the source of that fear—of the misery, despair, rage and self-loathing that eats away at the hearts of us all—we can’t even begin to process it. The price of repressing our feelings—repressing the truth—is that the good gets shut out with the bad. We can’t even begin to love with such a backlog of pain to process. We can’t even begin to live.

But no, this isn’t a sermon. This is just my way of saying to those of you who are ready to accept responsibility for this mess—ready to say along with Howard Beal in whatever way is right for you, “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!”—that I am with you all the way. You are not alone. The beauty and power of accepting that we have created a perfect Hell on Earth is in realizing that, by the same token, we can take the whole damn thing apart and start over, the moment we choose to do it. So why not do it today?

A change is coming: whether we know it or not, whether we want it or not, a wave is coming that will sweep all of this away, leaving only the beautiful, terrible truth of who we are, and what we have become. All we have to do is make sure, when that day comes, that we know, really know, where our allegiance lies.

Are we shackled to our comfy little lives, our fancy toys, our fond and fervent “agendas” and this world of manufactured madness around which they revolve? Or are we ready to kiss all of that goodbye, put our trust in the Sun—the One they can’t bring down—and let the wilderness gather us home again?