More Sort Of Poems

The Battlefield


you are on the battlefield


watching your comrades blowing up

losing limbs, hearing their screams

thinking, how did i get here?

still thinking about what's on the other side

of the battlefield

that there's a reason you are fighting

there is no reason

seeing another man go down

you have to believe

they died for something

but they didn't

except maybe to see

what they wouldn't see while alive

and then they see

that they didn't have to die

to see it



you are only fighting

to re-own your reality

watch out for that

when you do re-own it

you may find yourself alone

re-owning your reality means opposing

those who tried to take it from you

by imposing their version

your family

secondly

if no one else is willing or able to see

and own that reality with you

then you are going to be alone in it

as you choose reality

over the comfort of illusion

and enmeshment



The Hole


i am learning to listen more and talk less

even talking is

or can be

listening

finding whatever it is

that i need to hear

that is what i get to say

it's not about the other person

the desire to touch, somehow denied,

becomes the desire to grab

denied becomes the desire to fuck

denied becomes the desire to hurt and kill

"I couldn't feel, so I tried to touch"

if we knew how alone we were

we would crawl up into a hole

and die



The Father

it doesn't matter how down i am

i have to go to work

and no matter how down i am

to some people

it still looks like up

perhaps because honesty

is the only measure of where we are at

being honest about our insistence and indulgence

soon curtails it

if you find yourself dishonest

then own up

instead of adding to it

by covering it up

even if you have to go back and re-open

a 10 yr old case

and say, "I did it"

right now i wish i knew

it's dishonest of me to feel sorry for myself

because i know that's not true

so half my family died

so what?

that's the true of it

it happens to everyone

one way or another

we think we are especially burdened

and in that belief

we start to believe the lie

that we matter

truth is, none of us cracks easily

then knowing that it doesn't matter

if i indulge in thinking i matter

that makes it *really hard

i keep making it about others

i ought to keep it together for others

then i know that's BS

so i think, fuck it

i'll come apart

but what about me?

why not do it for me?

live?

the answer is:

self loathing

I couldn't hate my father

so i had to hate my self

punish my self to get back at him

and now i am crippled like he was

so now i feel for him, a little bit

that is a hell of a loop

now I am feeling for him!

what he couldn't own

his hatred for life

for doing this to him

casting him out and down

luciferian

when my father died

i felt no connection to him at all

it was like he never existed

i just didn't believe that any of him

survived death

because he never really existed in life

for me

i wonder if he's been in bardo all that time

some souls take longer to process...

he was so deeply entrenched in denial

and so fervent in his disbelief

he may have gone into black out

he believed there was nothing after

so that was what he got?

until now...

Settle for Less

as persons, we equate intimacy with the personal


the reverse is really the case

only the impersonal can really allow for intimacy

most couples "put out" to keep the agreement of enmeshment intact

it's scary to let that "meshing" come apart

but there are times

when you love the other to the core

without wanting or needing anything from them

a moment, here & there

a moment is enough to know

that that deeper connection is there

letting the moment be enough is hard

settling for less

always a little bit less

when we're programmed to always want more

is hard

we want to bring the deep into the shallow

to make what's fine coarse

in order to secure it

instead of dropping down to meet it

just drop through the thoughts and feelings

into what you know is true

settle for less

The Alchemy of Marriage

(the missing 82nd chapter of the Tao Teh Ching):

The Cunt that stays closed

When it is time

Is every bit as insistent

As the Cock that stays hard

When it's not

If as the one softens

The other opens

Then there is true flow

and everything comes into balance

Morality

Morality is the invention of people who are triggered, as the means to avoid being triggered again. “Thou shalt not trigger me.” Jehovah acts in the same way: he gets triggered, his wrath descends on humanity, and he sends Moses to lay down the law. Man then agrees to follow the commandments in order never to trigger God again. Enmeshment on a cosmic scale.

And what was Jehovah most afraid of? The Goddess.

Morality is the root of all evil, because the root of all morality is fear of the female.


I do have a deep fear of female sexuality in me, and it does come out in rage and intolerance.

I was thinking this morning that the Nazis were sweethearts compared to the Inquisition. That’s the real naked face of distorted masculine energy, directed wholly at the female. I think I have an Inquisitor inside me. It just wants to snuff out female power, female sexuality, at the first sign of it. Because of how terrifying it was to me, as an infant.

Lion & the Lamb

I finally watched the JDR video, the one with me in it. (See here. Or see Transcript of our dialogue here.) It was uncomfortable seeing myself. I look like a frightened rabbit in the first part; funny, because I wasn't aware of it at the time. I was only aware of trying to be as open as I could. I guess my body was experiencing fright, and being open meant I wasn't doing anything to disguise that fact. But compared to all the perception management I do with my videos and podcast, it was quite painfully exposing. It's the first time I have felt distaste seeing/hearing myself in a long time. Mild distaste, but distaste nonetheless.

There’s a moment in the video in which John is looking at me and his eyes tear up and I felt this fatherly love emanating from him. I hadn’t consciously experienced it at the time, but it was there in the video. Watching the whole thing back was a strange experience. I wondered afterwards, why they picked this particular one, and whether it was John who chose it. It doesn’t seem to be the most accessible talk he gave during that trip. I also thought how, if someone were skeptical of John, they would think I was such a putz, with my eyelids flittering away like a little bird. They’d think I was faking it, a New Age sucker.

So be it. If this “historical” event ~ a public transmission of my encounter with JDR ~ wasn't undermining for my person, I’d know something wasn't right.

Two days later, today.

I thought about John, the words he'd said to me. That was the thing I didn't mention above: I wrote about what my person thought about the whole thing, but not the effect hearing his words had on me. They are powerful words, and since this is John, I know they are true, because John can't lie. When I was hearing the words at the time, a big part of my reaction was to do with my person feeling special, happy that John recognized me and what was happening in my life. But hearing them again without that element of “me” (in fact, I felt anything but special seeing myself looking so timid and goofy), it drove home the meaning of the words: that I am in the midst of a huge shift in orientation, a shift that is going to happen no matter what I do.

I remembered then that John tears up right after I say to him, “I couldn’t have done it without you, John.” My Wife laughed at that bit, watching the video, and I didn't know why at the time. Now I’d guess it was because it’s true, what I said. It took some presence of mind to say those words, and afterwards, I wished I hadn’t said them. I’d had to close a little, and come out of that unfocused/surrendered space, in order to assert myself to the degree of saying something like that. As a result, it seemed a bit forced. But then, when I watched the video, it appeared as if somehow, if not the words then the truth behind them, seemed to move John. I felt this fatherly love coming out of him. And now I wondered if maybe it wasn’t fatherly, so much as male motherly? If when I said those words, John recognized that one of his chicks was about to hatch, that his attention and nurture had caused another being to come forth. So his love “shone” through for a moment, seeing that and knowing that.

That is the truth: I couldn’t have done it without him, not the way it turned out anyway. And so John was getting to see how the fruit of his being had seeded the fruit of another’s being.

Recently, my Wife told me that I am exuding gangly teenage energy. Apparently, it has to do with how my individuation process has finally begun again, having been hijacked/arrested in adolescence. Joseph Chilton Pearce writes about how, in adolescence, we are readying for a huge shift in consciousness which entails a whole new area of the brain being activated, and which probably has to do with the heart opening also. A natural enlightenment. But because this never happens, that sense of a big event being on the horizon is never satisfied. We are left incomplete, unformed, dormant.

What John told me was that I was about to experience “a massive, clean, clear growing up.”

Remembering all this on the rock, seeing all this, I opened and tears came. I was careful not to try and make it into anything. The closer I get to this, the bigger it seems, and the more I see just how ordinary it is.

John wasn't seeing my person heading for some great apotheosis. He was simply seeing another being coming forth into its fullness. It didn’t matter in the least bit “who” I was. All that mattered was that another flower was opening in the great cosmic garden of being.

It is massive; and yet it is nothing at all. Just in the natural way of things.

I thought about how everything we fear is in the past: the supreme terror is a memory of the distant past. So although we live in dread for the future, what we fear is actually in the past. What is in the future that gives rise to fear is a time when we get to let that terror-trauma all the way back into consciousness. So then, we live in fear of that fear.

I know that I need never fear anything outside of me again, because I have identified the great fear within me. And nothing external could ever amount to more than a trifle, compared to that vast, nameless (because it's pre-verbal) internal terror.

Weeding the Garden

Really all we need to 'do' to allow a deeper knowing, and a deeper seeing, to begin to inform our lives, is to clear up enough space for our unconscious beings to begin to emerge into and express through. That comes down to de-cluttering our lives, our heads, hearts, and bodies, weeding the garden, as it were, so that the flowers and fruit of truth can begin to grow there.


Overly intellectual, analytical types continue to try and 'figure out' the riddle of our despair. Trying to find the answer that will 'fix' the problem. But the distortions of our mind and heart (and body) are precisely reflecting the ways in which we have distorted yourself as consciousness. Then, as consciousness, all we need to do is really see those distortions, and by seeing, be fully present inside them, without trying to fix, change, or use them for our person. Then we-as-consciousness will begin to return to our true, original form.

Naturally, this takes time, and the process of being more and more fully in those patterns as a means to see them, this means that we are likely to feel worse, overall, rather than better, during the first part of this process. So our tendency is to keep seeking ways to feel better, ways to come out of your patterns and find some relief, whether through a candy fix or a video game, getting to be 'the man' at our job, a sexual high, or whatever it is (or getting to feel like we have a handle on the process and are making progress!).

Asking the right questions is a start, provided we don't require answers, because the right questions are those that only we can answer: not so much by thinking about them, but through new forms of action which being in a questioning frame of mind allow.

The first obvious step is to change our habits and free up some space, so that we can start to generate some self-worth that actually comes from an inner sense of knowing, and not from surface achievements in the external world ~ all of which are really of no value at all, unless they stem from an inner knowing.

Advice on Parenting From a Childless Sorcerer

If a parent comforts a child from a place of excess personal involvement ~ feels pity, anxiety, and such, because his or her own wounds are being stirred up ~ then this increases the enmeshment. Although the child is ostensibly being "comforted," what's really happening is that their own patterns are being confirmed and consolidated by the parents' patterns. When a child falls over, it looks to the parent for a cue as to how to react; when the parent shows fear and concern, the child then begins to cry. The parent has taken the child's feelings seriously, so now the child knows it is supposed to do the same (or that s/he can get away with it!).

Enmeshment, all down the line.

The alternative (stand back for the wisdom of a guy who never had a kid advising fathers!) is to hold a neutral, impersonal space for the child, one that is constant. This way, the child knows that, when it really needs protecting or soothing, the parent is there. The rest of the time, it is on its own. The space is always available to the child, but because there is no enmeshment, there's no pull for the child to go into the space simply for comfort, only for real nurture and support when needed.

That "pull" is the result of the parent wanting the child to need him or her, in order to feel especially loved themselves.

***

What it comes down to is that, as long as we raise our kids from a personal space, no matter how functioning and "happy" they may turn out, they are still going to be living from a place of personal sovereignty, hence, in a way of being that's untrue based on the way of being taught them by their parents. So they are basically in Hell.

Perhaps this is why sorcerers don't generally have kids. They know they'd be raising livestock, food for entities. Knowing that, but not having the ability to change it, could make for an insufferable tension.

As for the kids-in-bed thing, it's not true that children naturally grow out of wanting that sort of proximity and comfort from the parents. Again, this would depend on whether the parent is enmeshing, using the child for its own comfort. A close relative allowed her daughter to sleep in her bed until she was 12 (for all I know she still does), largely because the child was so insistent. She was unable to sleep alone and her mother didn't have the necessary ruthlessness, or neutrality, to be detached about her child suffering. De-enmeshment is always painful for both parties.

Clearly, a case can always be made for both sides of the argument, or any argument. Too much love and not enough discipline spoils the child; the reverse, and the child grows up damaged in other ways. No parent could ever get the balance right through conscious will alone; the only way is not to be personally involved with one's children. I would guess that even sorcerers find that nigh-impossible.

***


Spelled out very simply: when a child doesn't receive enough of a clean, loving physical connection to its mother, it is imprinted with that lack and seeks it elsewhere, into adulthood and sometimes unto death. This wound is further compounded if, during later infancy (from about 2), when the child begins to individuate and wants to bond with the father, the father is also lacking, absent, or physically distant or disconnected. Then the child grows up with a double wound that comes down to a sort of emotional hunger for touch, for "validation" (for an infant, physical touch can be necessary not just to well-being but to survival).

As adults, we are unlikely to find ways of bonding with men to meet this hunger (though lots of guys get into sports and join the army just to rough-house with guys); so then almost 100% of that emotionally-patterned neediness is going to be directed toward women. What guys consider horniness is usually nothing of the kind, because their physiological responses are hooked into those emotional/psychological patterns, and when they think they are looking to get laid, they are really looking for mommy's (or even daddy's!) love and attention.

If a child was really cut off from the father, and maybe overly smothered by the mother (as well as sometimes neglected by her ~ which was my case), they often wind up homosexual, or, as in my case, rather waif-like, ephemeral, romantic types with low libidos. (My Wife might disagree on the last point!)

***

Notes from Underground

Collection of different seeings occuring at SWEDA over the past week or so.

We inherit the unlived life of our parents. One way to ensure that we continue to carry that load is to make sure that we always fail, because then we’ll continue to be driven by that ambition passed down to us.

Because when we fail, we are left always wondering what we could have achieved if things had been different. That's a real curse. On the other hand, if we become successful at whatever our parents program us to want, we might eventually see it wasn’t our thing and move on to other goals: goals that aren’t installed in us by our parents. As it is, because we can't quite let go of that ambition, we continue to carry that load for them: the parents’ unlived lives become our unlived life.

It’s a similar situation with me and writing. My father wanted to write, but never got anywhere with it, and quickly gave up and became a businessman. I became a writer and to a degree succeeded (I got published); but by and large, I have failed as a writer, at least on my own terms (and those of my father), since I haven’t been able to make a living doing it.

If the son fails in realizing the father’s dreams, then the son is never a real threat to the father. Even if, at a conscious level, the father wants his son to succeed, at a deeper level, the father needs the son to fail, because that way, the son continues to carry the load of the father’s unlived life.

I know for myself that one of the reasons I kept on writing more books was because none of the ones I wrote had the kind of success I felt they deserved. Failure breeds ambition. Success tends to create a healthy indifference.

***
Reconciliation between the brothers (Cain & Abel) is all about each brother owning the shadow. A big part of owning the shadow comes down to integrating the unlived life of the father, by recognizing it for what it is: a foreign element passed down to us, like some genetic disorder, that cannot define us or tell us who we are, but that nonetheless has to be fully assimilated in order to be overcome.

***



The male individuation process entails repeatedly separating from the female, to re-experience that key period in childhood, when we no longer "have access to the woman's body." This is a kind of "crossing of the abyss," because the father isn't quite there yet to provide an alternate physical connection, but the mother is already withdrawing.

The matching pattern for a woman is perhaps that a girl identifies with the mother, and only begins to experience herself as separate through a connection with the father. Hence women only experience themselves through men, where men only experience themselves by separating from the female.

In The Lovers card, woman is connecting to divine, while man is connecting to woman. This has to do with women being all the way in the nagual, with their wombs, so they don't exist in the same way men do, as individuated beings.

Is the reason why women tend to kill themselves over men more often than the reverse because a woman has no purpose outside of a man? My Wife agrees there is truth in this. But then the reverse is kind of true, in that I experience myself as having no purpose, and even no existence, with my Wife ~ except when my cock is doing its thing.

It is like the Moon: women reflect the light of the man and so they exist, but they also have a dark phase, when they turn away from that light, toward the mysteries, the nameless or nagual. This is when the man is "pushed out of the nest," denied access to the woman's body, and has to wander the wasteland, cross the abyss, in order to continue the endless journey of individuation. It happens time and again, in cycles, because the original trauma and disorientation is so great it takes repeat experiences to fully integrate it. And most relationships die because the winter phase is too hard on the persons, and leads to recrimination, bitterness, violence.

It is only when we allow death to become a part of love that it becomes alchemy. This is not even preparation for death, it is death. We die a little bit at a time, until there's nothing left.

Inhuman love: the scariest thing there is.

***

In the Gospel, Christ promises to send "the comforter" (the paraclete) in his absence. Women bring a different sort of comfort to men, not access to the female body but something finer, an awareness of our own innermost potential, or Christ consciousness.

The upright father = solar king = Christ.

Sexuality awakens in the male infant after mother-bonding and father-bonding have passed, and the child begins to experience his "uprightness" (individual physical existence) through erections and sexual sensations. This is another reason why we seek sexual connection when we are in the abyss, or in despair or a disconnected state, as a way to feel grounded, connected to our own bodies, present, alive.

***


My Wife pointed out yesterday that part of why a husband is unable/unwilling to see his wife, and therefore contain her, is that he doesn't have a support system of male allies to provide a space for him, a space in which he can be neutral and receptive enough to hold the space for the woman.

I couldn't be the husband I am to my Wife without the other men at Thessaly helping to create a matrix (morphic field) in which I can experience my own non-existence (connect to the nagual) ~ by some other means than access to the female. Without that nexus of connections to other men, we, as males, are too individuated, too self-aware, and at the same time, too desperately dependent on experiencing a loving connection to women.

***

Someone posted at SWEDA recently about how their parents had done all they could to prevent them from developing their self-awareness, but that they had failed. I had the thought that it was more than that they failed, because their efforts to suppress that side of the child actually made it stronger. That’s the way it always is, and we often even need that kind of parental or sibling adversity to strengthen our spirit for later in life. That sparked the thought that the worst thing a parent could do was provide a superficially “loving,” “healthy,” “functional” background, while not providing a deeper connection. I suspect that this cripples us far more than outright abuse does, because it is then almost impossible to identify and own those distortions. It is all under the surface. At least if we know we hate our parents, and why, we can begin to move past that.

Don Juan talks to Carlos about how all the men of knowledge he knows endured all kinds of adversity and suffering right from day one. When parents try to protect their children from suffering and create a bubble for them, they provide all the surface elements of a loving childhood only by concealing the stark reality from them. So not only is the child not protected from “harsh reality” (since it is being affected energetically anyway), but it is deprived of the opportunity of conscious growth and individuation, because it isn’t allowed to see and confront all those unpleasant truths about reality ~ starting with its parents. There is a dark complicity at work, a secret agreement to maintain the cover-up into adulthood; so then the wounds are passed onto the grandchildren, with no possibility of being owned and healed.

It makes me sick to the core. Presumably, this is how I felt growing up with a drunken, sex-addict of a dad, who was totally indifferent to what was happening with (and to) his children, while at the same time ostensibly providing everything we “needed”: a nice house, comfort, and all the surface luxuries of a happy childhood (he even took us swimming every week, presumably some sort of token gesture in order to make himself feel like a “real” dad).

The truth is, my father really had no business having children at all.

And yet here I am.

Jake Horsley and Jason Kephas Together Again for the First Time

How I Wound Up as a Film Surgeon

From a post at the forum:

Morality and taste are both equally irrelevant so far as being honest goes.

One thing first off: BL II had a point about bringing the big picture into it, because if I didn’t, at that time, really believe that George Lucas (or any corporate entity of his ilk) wasn't strictly human anymore, I wouldn't have let loose on his ass with such fury and glee. At the time, I considered Lucas fair game for anything I might say, because he was One of Them. (Which he probably is, but that's not relevant to this post.)

Father issues are at base of it all, on top of which is my frustration at failing to attain even a modicum of the recognition and success that George had attained. And of course, the very drive to attain such success (getting world’s attention) is itself sourced in those father issues.

But all that is rather rudimentary, and a bit simplistic. It’s true that if I had succeeded as a scriptwriter/filmmaker in Hollywood, I wouldn't ever have written The Blood Poets. But on the other hand, I began writing film criticism before, or simultaneous with, writing film scripts (at about 14). In fact, some of the first “reviews” I wrote were imaginary ones of the films I would some day make (I recall one called Houses in Motion, starring Robert De Niro and Jessica Lange, the title taken from the Talking Heads song). . . . So the two drives co-existed from the start, which indicates that it wasn't frustration that led me to write the film books, but merely a natural alternative mode of expression that pertained to the same area, that of movies.

What actually inspired Blood Poets was re-reading Pauline Kael for the umpteenth time and thinking, “I wish I could do that.” The penny then dropped: "Hey, I could!" By that time (late 20s), I was less into movies, watching or making them, than I was into reading about them, and as already stated, I had more passion for Kael and her writings than I did for most, if not all, filmmakers. She was closer to a kindred spirit, let's say, than any filmmaker, presumably (in part) because I was more of a writer than a visual artist.

One of the things that most impressed me about Kael was how she could influence my own feelings about a movie. Films I liked I would grow cool towards after reading her totally demolishing them; films she admired I would give a second look. (Ironically, she was less persuasive in this direction, and rarely did one of her reviews change my mind about a movie I didn’t care for, while it was frequent occurrence for the reverse to happen.) Kael saw through the contrivances and conceits of filmmakers, and the gullibility of audiences, and exposed the hypocrisy and dishonesty at their core. Her influence was especially profound on me because I discovered her while I was still a teenager, so with movies that I would have grown out of/seen through eventually, she accelerated that process. (A good example would be Midnight Express, a film I loved at 14, so that I must have been disappointed by her trashing it at the time. Yet by the time I wrote about the film for Blood Poets, I found myself trashing it also, albeit in my own voice ~ because she had been right, it did suck as a movie!)

I said already to BLII that my desire to write film crit., and specifically to demolish films that were highly regarded and bring the filmmakers down to size, pertained to a need to validate my reality.

When during our discussion, I, as Jake, defended my vitriolic attacks by stating that the filmmakers rarely read the pieces, BL pointed out that, in that case, they weren't having any effect on the quality of filmmaking per se. This is probably accurate, and now that I think about it, the target of my vitriol was always less the filmmaker than the audience , who, by buying into such crap, were endorsing it and keeping the crapola machine running. If a talented filmmaker made a poor movie and was critically drubbed for it, I had no interest in mucking in. Why kick them while they are down? My target was always films that were crap but which audiences embraced as wonderful works of art, that won awards for their filmmakers despite being some of their worst work, films such as Wild at Heart, Silence of the Lambs, Barton Fink, Match Point. I wanted to show how, when a filmmaker gets praised for his worst work, he is likely to lose sight of his own gifts and never recover. Beyond that, I wanted, needed, to “set the record straight,” if possible, by persuading audiences who had let themselves be fooled into thinking a work had merit (just because it won awards) that it clearly didn’t.

(On the other hand, like Kael, I often went out of my way to praise, and even overpraise, works of merit that were being ignored, such as United States of Leland, some of Keith Gordon’s films, Hottest State, and so forth.)

In the case of Lucas’ films, it's true that no one was really praising them, but countless people were defending them, even critics, not only because the great whore of the media was ensuring they do so, but because of “the psychology of previous investment”: all those star wars fans who’d grown up on Lucas' pop mythos, and were now determined to enjoy the new movies, no matter how bad they were. I felt disgusted by that, and obliged to point out just how naked the Emperor really was.

Reality validation.

To this day, it disturbs me if I get the impression that only I can recognize something that isn't right. Recently, I watched Bad Lieutenant with Nic Cage. Halfway through, Cage begins to distort his voice and assume a very broad, almost cartoonish accent. I kept asking my wife if she’d noticed. It baffled me that he would do this deliberately, it was so obvious to me, and I became mildly anxious that maybe I was the only one who noticed it. Did the director even spot it? Why did he allow Cage to do it? (My wife did notice it, at least when I pointed it out, but she put it down to the character’s exhaustion.) Something like this might even cause me me to go online and do a Google search, just to make sure that other people spotted it. I find it unsettling, to say the least, if something very obvious to me, something that seems incongruous, isn't being commented upon.

As a child, there is one thing that was very obvious to me that others didn’t see: my brother’s bullying. There must have been countless other things also that I saw that weren't commented upon, even if they were obvious to all (my mother's madness, for example). I suspect that this is what’s behind my emotional need to validate my own perceptions about movies: if I can see, clearly, that a movie sucks, for example, it upsets me when people are talking about it like it’s something wonderful. This is especially the case when they are people close to me. One of the most uncomfortable social situations for me is if someone I respect brings up a movie which I hate, and starts praising it. (A recent example was In Bruges, a really mediocre movie that lots of intelligent people seemed to enjoy.)

Consider the following, an argument of my former self:

Dan Brown is a great author.

Opinion, or error of judgment?

Dostoyevsky is a great author.

Opinion, or statement of fact?

To my way of perceiving, neither of the above statements are opinions. One is a fact, while the other is an error. Most people here (at least if they have read the authors in question) will surely agree, intellectually at least, even if they have an emotional resistance to this position and perceive it as “tyrannical.” They might then argue (intellectually) that it is all relative, or whathaveyou (define “great,” etc, etc).

OK. Now try these ones:

Stanley Kubrick is a great director.

Opinion or statement of fact?

Stanley Kubrick is overrated.

Opinion or statement of fact?


Eyes Wide Shut is an underrated movie.

Opinion or statement of fact?


Eyes Wide Shut is a pile of horse manure.

Opinion or statement of fact?

As most of you know by now, I would consider the second statements to be statements of fact, the first ones to be mere opinions.

If given the time, I, or my former self, could show you why, whatever greatness is on display in some of his movies, and however much you may like his work, Kubrick certainly is overrated. I could also describe to you the sociological, and even conspiratorial factors (a culture that worships intellect, for example) that contribute to Kubrick’s false canonization, and the way the psychology of previous investment obliges Kubrick-devotees to defend a work of such shocking ineptitude as Eyes Wide Shut: in order to maintain their structure of beliefs around its maker.

The question is, however: why the Hell would I bother? Why would I care enough to try and change people’s minds about Kubrick, or anything else?

The answer is two-fold, like everything. First there are the patterns mentioned above, which cause me to feel threatened when my own perception of what-is isn’t being supported by other people’s perceptions.

This creates a rift. Sweatyk is one of my closest associates; the fact that he adores Kubrick doesn’t come between us, as such, but that’s only because we don’t spend much time talking about Kubrick. In my mind, it is still there. I think, "Keith is great, but he does love Kubrick. Damn. That’s a real shame. I really need to do something about that."

Now, is that entirely because I want Keith to validate my perception of reality, and to be as much like me as possible?

Or is it also because I know that he has been hoodwinked, and want him to see something that he is unable to see?

When Kael exposed the dishonesty of a movie I liked, she also exposed my own complicity with that dishonesty. It was disillusioning, even painful, and sometimes infuriating; but it was also liberating. After all, I had “lost” an emotional attachment to a movie I’d liked, yes. She had "ruined" it for me. But then, I’d also found a more honest, accurate perception, one that allowed me to see that the attachment I’d forged wasn’t worth having. It was basically a lie.

So then, my desire to criticize movies and filmmakers and “set the record straight,” wasn’t just an emotional need to validate my perception of reality. It was also an impersonal drive to get to the truth, and to bring the truth to others, by exposing their own distortions to them.

In other words, just what I do at SWEDA!


(Eos mocked me a while back as having gone from film critic to dream critic. This was one of his insights which I suspect he failed to understand himself, since he apparently used it to denigrate what I do, rather than to deepen his own awareness of it: not that it can't be both!)

So there is my answer, to BabyLion II and Eos and all the trolls, and why I'd like to thank you for poking and heckling me into seeing this, and into coming clean about it. Because insofar as I use the power and authority given me (that of seeing the truth of our distortions) as a way to validate my own reality and make it more comfortable for myself, then I am abusing that power and authority, in however subtle a way. And in both cases, the giveaway is when I take a little too much relish and personal gratification in tearing others down to size. What's going on then is that it has become a way to big myself up. (Kubrick, schmubrick. I'm the guy who gets to judge Kubrick.)

My apologies to all those I have taken down a peg or two, in order to increase my own status.

Surrendering to Matriomonial Bliss

Some of you guys still think I'm a Somebody in this Town!?

Only four copies been sold so far.

All copies are signed and come with a free JK DNA sample.





SWEDA Mythic Narrative Series, No.1

Order it today at over here

Seeking Goodness

Men Like Fish

Not feeling very writ-y these daze, so here's some doodles:

Knowing Vs. Intuition

From the forum:

A knowing can be expressed through thoughts and feelings and intuition; but it's not sourced in those things. What experiences knowing is you-as-consciousness. That's what makes it independent of those surface layers of identity: physical, emotional, mental, intuitive, and volitional bodies. It is like a part of you that is totally foreign and unfamiliar to you, and yet that is you, the real you.

We can only tune into that part by dropping through the surface noise of thoughts and feelings and by going finer and finer, into intuitive and instinctive (bodily) responses, then dropping even through these, into something so fine that it is as if it doesn't exist, and yet it is there.

The essence of second matrix program is to lure us into putting our hands on our awakening. I am an Aries so my whole adult life, I have been all about becoming. But like the man says, "No one can do 'to be.'" A caterpillar doesn't feel any pull to become a butterfly. It feels a pull to go inside the chrysalis, lay its head down, and die. That's all any of us get to do.

A caterpillar doesn't have to "do" anything, except maybe make it to the right place at the right time for its putrefaction to begin. And even there, if it doesn't, then the process will probably start without him. The point is: butterfly-ness is wonderfully none of the caterpillar's business. The caterpillar's discomfort or effort or desire has no influence over the transformation process. Neither, I'd say, does ours.

I never thought I'd end up quoting Osho, but this one seems apt:

All the Buddhas of all the ages have been telling you a very simple fact: Be –
don't try to become. Within these two words – being and becoming, your whole
life is contained. Being is enlightenment, becoming is ignorance.

There are two ways we can go, one is inward, deeper into what we do know; the other is outward, and upward, looking for more to know. Being, and becoming.

It becomes increasingly clear to me that the latter is actually the surest way to come out of that little bit we do know. Even the "pull to become" goes against a very simple knowing, that the little we do know is enough.

We may never fathom the mystery of being that is a chair. Yet we are not interested in chairs; we want to know the galaxy.

An interesting metaphor occurs to me: the oceans of the planet are largely unexplored; yet instead of exploring them, we fill them with toxic waste and garbage, and focus our gaze on the stars. The ocean then is considered beneath our interest; besides which, it's full of shit! The stars, man! That's where it's at.

In this analogy, the ocean represents our unconscious being.

From Warrior Dialogues (new pre-SWEDA waiting area at the inner forum)

There are no good things ahead for any of us. There are only good things here and now, and there is nothing grandiose about them.

Settle for the little that you know and begin to discard the rest, based on the knowing that it might well be a delusion, and that if it is, there's nothing to lose by discarding it, and if it isn't, it will stick around anyway.

Truth is the one thing you can count on to never let you down.

It is only the mind that says we cannot know anything. And the mind is right: IT cannot know anything, including that WE cannot know anything. The intellect assumes since it can't access reality, then nothing can. But our bodies know all sorts of things, and so do our hearts. Try listening to them for just one day, one whole day, ignore your mind, and see how that changes your perspective.

***

Family relations: The main thing is to find and reestablish our own boundaries. Then it will cease to feel (so much ) like other people are doing something to us, because their actions won't be interfering with our own orientation and space, except when they really are, which is when those boundaries are being crossed. Then we will know it and are free to respond with all the anger and hostility (protective energy) the situation calls for.

Being surrendered isn't about being Ghandhi, or a walk-over for all our family and friends. Anyway, the AA is to learn about being a warrior, not about surrendering. That comes later.

There is nothing wrong with direct confrontation with other people, provided we aren't trying to change them, only their behavior around us. "This is acceptable, this is not." If the other, or the mother, understands our reasons for drawing those boundaries, that's great. If s/he doesn't, it's not our business. They can at least respect them, and we are entitled to give them hell when they don't. The trick is to give them hell from a place of openness and not a place of hardness. That's when you can really have some impact!

In simple terms, it is more effective to express your anger calmly ("I am really furious with you now and here's why") than to let our anger possess us. ("Fuck you, you bitch, I fucking hate you!!")

***

Being all at sea reduces our options. All the paddling and thrashing we do may help or it may not; chances are it's superfluous, because the wind and the current is going to determine whether we reach shore or not, and if we don;t even know which way the shore is, then stillness would seem to be the only reasonable option.

Observing the signs may help, however. Birds are usually a signal that land is close. And floating debris.

I am certainly feeling all washed up myself these daze. Is the advice of the fellow shipwrecked worth anything? Perhaps more than those still sitting comfortable on their ships, at least, unaware of the iceberg ahead.

As for people depending on us: are we sure that's true? We are responsible to our own story, our own truth. No one does anything to a warrior, so then a warrior isn't beholden to others. Our life intersects with those of another, or others; does that mean those lives are then conjoined? If we experience others' dependence on us as a heavy load, it's safe to say we are becoming a burden upon them. A warrior sees all beings as equal, whether a king or a cockroach. He never alters his coarse out of a sense of duty or obligation to another, because to do so would be to assume he knows better than that person what they need. Not only that, it is to assume he knows better than the Universe, since, whatever predicament that person finds themselves in, it was the Universe that brought them there.

The only question then, as ever, is does this path have heart? To leave our path because we perceive others as depending on us is to let everyone down, starting with ourselves and ending with the entire Universe. And our paltry compensation? Knowing we did "the right thing"?

If we can't do right by ourselves, and keep to that path with a heart, how are we ever going to do right by another?

Patterns 101

From an email to a friend of the family, a heavy drinker.

We are all wounded by childhood, there are no total exceptions, only relative exceptions. And there's no such thing as a 'normal' or 'healthy' childhood, because the world we are born into is too greatly distorted, so whatever the local environment you are born into, it is still part of the greater environment of 'the world.' You only have to look at hospitals births, and the incalculable damage they do to us, to see this.

The wounds we carry are all the things that happened in our early life, starting with that nightmarish birth process, that cause us to harden and close in defense against the world, and to construct the false identity which we think of as who we are. This is what we all do, as children, because it is the only way to survive. Our identity, then, is made up of patterns of reactive behavior, habits of thought and action, that are sourced in early wounding. Wilhelm Reich calls it identity armor.

The "genetic affliction" you refer to is generational wounding. It's in the genes, sure, but this is why it's in the genes, because of repeat, generational abuse. It's not either/or, it's both/and. There is a reason why our ancestors were alcoholics. Nothing is entirely random.

Unless we can remember (let in) those early traumas, we can't let them go.

I don't recall anything majorly traumatic in my past, but i am fairly sure that it happened, because of the way that I am now. I can deduce backwards, without actual memories to go on, and tap into emotional patterns and even physical responses, to find those wounds, without knowing exactly how they got there. Yet I know they are there, now, because i can feel them. Feeling and locating the wounds then allows healing to begin. As we let in that disowned trauma, we can let go of the defensive behavior (such as drinking, for example) that we have been using to keep it out of our awareness.

This process has nothing at all to do with anyone apologizing for past wrongs. But one thing that does help to allow the letting in/letting go, is to revisit those wounds with the person directly involved in them, because this can be a way to literally right the wrongs of the past. For example, for my mother to see that side of my brother that tormented me in the past, to see it now, would provide some sort of 'closure' for the part of me that was wounded, all that time ago, by her refusal to see it then. It is a form of reenactment that allows the letting in to be complete, and the letting go to follow.

The Greeks had a theater based on this, called catharsis. Naturally it is painful and uncomfortable. But then, so is child birth.

Blueprint of a Wound

• In the face of the Mother’s uncontained sexual passion and dementia/rage, the Father realizes his lack of uprightness (falls on his ass), and experiences a wound that will eventually cripple him.
  
  
• Though he resolves to remain, to be as upright as he can, despite the wound, this is itself an avoidance – a way not to go deeper into the wound (which is the solar quest for healing/transformation).

• The Father begins to fear intimacy with the Mother, due to her lack of tenderness, her cold fury, her power and dementia. Instead, he seeks comfort through the pseudo-intimacy of casual sex.
  
  (Note: Jason’s Father was a Taurus; astrologically he has Venus, which rules comfort as well as sexuality, in Taurus.)
  
  
• As a result of this growing estrangement between Father and Mother, the Mother turns to the Son (often the youngest Son, i.e., Jason) as a Husband Surrogate. This might also stem from a desire to protect the Son from an abusive Father or, in Jason’s case, to compensate for the aloofness of the Father.
  
  
• The Father reacts to this Mother/Son bondage (presumably due to jealousy) by becoming further estranged from the Mother, and experiencing/expressing hostility (or indifference) towards the Son.
  
  (Note: if there is more than one Son, the older Son receives the brunt of this hostility, since, the older the Son, the more of a threat he is perceived to be, and the more he can receive the Father’s projected anger and disowned masculinity.)
  
  
• In Jason’s case, at least (and this blueprint is particular as well as general), the hostility of the Father towards the Son (and the Son’s fear of the Mother) leads to an unbalanced relationship with (reliance upon) the power of the Intellect. The Intellect, instead of being a sword to discern, becomes a weapon to defend, a shield to protect, a buffer against the raging uncontained Feminine. Hence, the Father scorns the Son for his perceived lack of Intellect, or even for his femininity. Perhaps the Father is unconsciously challenging the Son to develop his Intellect—to be less feminine—in a misguided attempt to give the Son the means to survive?
  
  
• The result is that the Son receives neither comfort from the Mother, nor guidance from the Father. In the case of two Sons, the younger Son—being a threat to the older Son’s sovereignty—not only doesn’t receive comfort from his Brother, but becomes the object of his anger and hostility, specifically that which the older Brother himself received from the Father.
  
  
• Since what we cannot receive we often try to provide, the younger Son then seeks to comfort the older Son (as well as the Mother, though not the Father). This he does primarily by becoming less of a threat to him, i.e., by suppressing his own nature (uniqueness). In Jason’s case, he developed Intellect as a less threatening way to outshine his Brother, though this backfired because the Father had already made Sebastian feel inferior about his Intellect!
  
  
• For Jason to develop his Intellect is a way to impress the Father, then, but also a means to supplant him. By comforting the (older) Son and developing those same intellectual capacities which the Father values as a means for dealing with (being superior to) the Mother, the second Son is perhaps attempting to replace the Father.
  
  To add a new twist to the tale, in Jason’s case at least: a New Man arrives when the second Son is 2 (his Brother being 7), and things then move to a new stage in the wounding process.
  
  
• With the arrival of the second Man, the Mother’s affection and desire moves away from the second Son. The second Son, like the first, now experiences the loss of his own specialness, as he is “replaced” by another.
  
  
• The Father, on the other hand, receives his deepest wounding yet (in the context of the Marriage), that of betrayal. This then finalizes the Father’s loss of uprightness—as he is metaphorically slain by another Man (though actually by the Mother). He then seeks deeper refuge in two places: sex and work. In both cases, the movement is away from intimacy (vulnerability), which means, most of all, estrangement from his children.
  
  
• When the Father cannot contain the Mother—female sexuality—two things occur. He loses his confidence as a Man, and so becomes even less upright than he was before. And secondly, the uncontained female sexuality strikes at the Father and wounds him more deeply still—completing the emasculation process started by the Father’s own Mother. This second wounding is often fatal, and results in complete emasculation. (In the case of Jason’s father, he became a cripple.)
  
  
• Thus the relationship becomes sadomasochistic and vampiric: the Female feeds upon the Male’s wound, growing drunk upon it, until there is nothing left but an empty shell.
  
  
• Because the Man does not provide containment for the Woman, the Woman does not give comfort (nurture) to the Man. Instead, she offers only heartbreak.
  
  
• This is why Marriage so rarely works. Each partner seeks pleasure and comfort in the other, and loses sight, in fact never actually realizes, the true nature and purpose of Marriage, which is surrender of the personal to the archetypal, allowing for the alchemical transforming of lead into gold. Sensing the pending annihilation that a true Marriage forces to occur, the two Players, in terror for their identities, strike out at the other, attempting to destroy the other rather than surrender together, to mutual annihilation. Ironically, tragically, it is only in this surrender that any true, lasting comfort or pleasure exists. The other route leads only to anguish, despair, and divorce.
  
  
• Symbolically then, this process is designated in the Tarot by the Moon card (Pisces, for female) and the Tower card (Mars, for male), both of which relate to a form of annihilation, the Moon spiritual/emotional, the Tower psychological/ physical. Both also relate to powerlessness, and both represent the respective energies of male and female in their destructive or overwhelming forms: the Moon signifies madness, despair, dementia, while the Tower represents war, violence, and extreme crisis. Yet, as means and not ends, the Moon signifies initiation, and the Tower signifies regeneration.
  
  
• Bringing it back to the personal: As he enters into adolescence, the Son(s), following the Father’s example, seek comfort through sex. This may be done by imitating the Father (as in Sebastian’s case, whoring and alcoholism and work-fixation), or by going against it, as in Jason’s case (celibacy and vagrancy).
  
  
• Inheriting the Father’s wound, the Son also receives the Father’s disowned hostility and rage against the Mother. This is then added to the Son’s own, somewhat more conscious hostility towards the Mother, from the terror and instability of growing up with an uncontained Female. (He would also then develop Intellect—and the cold contempt which Intellect allows—to keep the Mother’s annihilating influence at bay.)

• Since no comfort is forthcoming from the Mother (in fact the reverse), the Son seeks comfort in sexuality that is empowering and violating (rape fantasies), which is the inverse of intimacy. This betrays the Son’s shame of his sexuality. On the other hand, using rape and murder imagery for sexual stimulation is a more extreme way of avoiding intimacy, since rape and murder are an inverted form of intimacy. Rather than mutually sharing the same feelings, rape/murder allows the Male to experience the opposite feelings to those of the Female, and to experience a supreme sense of power and control. At the same time, such activity still relates to shame, being an attempt to banish it through shamelessness, i.e., committing acts (even if only in fantasy) in cold defiance of any “moral” (empathic) considerations. The effect may be the inverse, however (as is often the case), because by indulging in dark practices, the shame that has been suppressed actually forces itself back into consciousness.
  
  
• This also relates to the development of the Intellect as a buffer against female sexuality, since the Intellect is cold and removed, potentially cruel, and is the inverse of female Mother energy, which (ideally) is warm and nurturing.
  
  
• Mercury/the Intellect also serves as an ideal (tho false) surrogate for the true masculine energy of Mars. Intellect allows the Son to feel manly (and the Father to feel upright) when actually he is not, wielding his Intellect when he cannot wield his sexuality (i.e., through casual sex, prostitutes, and through a dominant role in work place). Yet, because it is being wrongly applied, in a compensatory fashion, the Father’s (and Son’s) Intellect becomes distorted, ineffective save as a weapon, or shield. This is because Mercury is not an exclusively masculine energy, as Mars is, but is both masculine and feminine (in the Tarot, the Magician/Mercury is androgyne).
  
  
• There ends the first layer of the blueprint for the male wound.
  
  
• The next phase of mapping the blueprint/wound, then, is to look more closely at the Brothers. The Cain and Abel myth is the abstract core of this wound, as made abundantly clear by Jason’s relationship with Sebastian. If there is only one Son, however, then the Cain/Abel dynamic must play out inside a single Psyche.

For this, the interested observor is referred to the current series of Warty Theorems podcasts, starting tomorrow.

The Real Environmental Crisis

“If you want to know where you are at, look around you.” JDR.

By definition, there is nothing we can “do” about living in the end-times.

But we can do something with this awareness. Paranoia becomes paranoid awareness, which eventually grows into self-awareness.

The apparent environmental crisis. First, we learn that the Earth is under threat and our future is in jeopardy. Paranoia. Then, we discover that there are secret agendas manipulating (and even fabricating) this crisis for other, more mysterious ends. Paranoid awareness.

The final step, that of self-awareness, is when we begin to see that the crisis is our own creation: a way of waking ourselves up to our lost identity as primal beings dependent upon the organic matrix of life itself. In our slumber, we are rebelling against the program: our unconscious minds are calling forth the memory, the spirit, of Nature, in all its terrible glory.

From this perspective, the ecological crisis is not a threat to survival but a means to a greater awakening, the collective unconscious becoming conscious of itself. As conditions within our false-construct world become increasingly intolerable, the pressure from the unconscious mounts. We begin to stir in our slumber and to doubt the validity (and durability) of the program. Consensus reality cannot hold up.

One major manifestation of this collective unease is the apparent environmental crisis.


Garbage Man

Information is what ‘in-forms’ us, i.e., forms us from within. An organism is shaped and defined not merely by its physical and biological make-up, its external form, but also by its inner experience. If we are defined not so much by what we eat as what we contain—our programming—then humans, having supplanted their natural, genetic program for the social program, are the garbage cans of the cosmos.

This is our function, and this is why we, as individuals, can only ever experience living in the end-times. So far as this information in-forms us and becomes true knowing ~ that we are worthless garbage in the process of being recycled ~ we then have the option of transformation into a new state.

So-called “evolution” is the journey of the caterpillar into the chrysalis. It is a process of putrefaction. History, as such, is the chrysalis, a rigid, confining structure that serves not as an end but as an intermediary phase between two states of being, that of the animal and the “god” ~ the information entity, holographic man.

Convictions Make Convicts


There are three kinds of belief.

There is belief that we insist is fact that becomes opinion/conviction.

There is belief that we assume dispassionately, to try it out (the spirit in which Lucid View was written, and which my alternate creation theory of tulpas was presented).

A conviction is a belief that we insist is a fact, while to believe something without insisting it is fact can be effective as a thought experiment.

The third kind of belief is one that is sourced in what we know.

To believe what you know means to turn a knowing into a feeling and a way of being or action. In the coarsest way this comes out as principles, but of course principles usually fit squarely in the first class: beliefs that are convictions. Sometimes a warrior dies for what he believes without being a fanatic, i.e., warmly and tenderly. Then he is dying for what he knows.

A belief that stems from a knowing is warm and open and doesn't ever need to be defended, or even communicated. The only reason to share it at all would be out of enjoyment, as when we wish to communicate to a beloved our belief in our knowing that we are in love with them. Or as when a prophet walks the earth and spreads the gospel.

To the intellect, it's an absolute that we cannot know anything. Yet we know, if we are honest, that it is only the intellect that cannot have an absolute knowing about anything, including this statement!

Anyone who has ever been in what they know, even for a moment, knows this.

When we know something, no one can tell us that we only "think we know." All they will succeed in communicating is that they don't know, and perhaps that they feel threatened by our knowing, or by our knowing something they do not.

Put differently: we may not know "what Truth is"; but we do know it when we see it, provided we are being honest.



If we try to persuade another of our POV, we must come out of what we know, close and harden and cease to really communicate; we then oblige the other person to oppose or dismiss our arguments, in order to hold fast to their belief. They match our own closing and hardening.

The mistaken assumption is that two POVs cannot co-exist in harmony, even while being opposed.

Yet this is precisely how the Universe functions: as a polarity of male and female, yin & yang, black to white.

It is only when the moral criteria of good and evil, right and wrong are superimposed over this natural, cosmic polarity, that war supplants love as the ruling principal of existence.

Fingers & Farts, and the Limits of Free Will

Picking up where the above post left off, and coming back to Lion Attacks:

When faced with a hungry lion, zero intellectual interpretation of the situation is needed, so far as "do I run or do I make a stand?" goes. The body would simply know what to do and do it; the adrenalin rush would ensure that there was no hanging about making conscious "decisions" about it. ("Lemme see now....")

In a way, this is always the situation: every act is a life and death act.

This is what surrender comes down to, IMO: reducing the element of intellectual decision-making until all that is left is pure response. And pure response is always an opening and softening, no matter what is happening on the outside. (One can run or fight to the death while opening and softening.)

Granted, in many circumstances less extreme, we do have to make a conscious decision to act upon a response, to embody a subtler movement of being and turn it into real action. This is one more paradox of self-awareness: the more we assume responsibility for our thoughts and actions, the more we come to see that we have almost no say in them, save at the most wonderfully shallow level.

The fingers do not move the hand, much less the body.

An easy analogy would be a passenger on a train: he has lots of freedom of movement so far as where he wanders on the train, who he interacts with, and even possibly where he sits; and most of all, on where his attention goes ~ whether inside or outside the train. Yet the traveler has absolutely no say about where the train is going or what stops it makes. He could choose to jump off while it's in motion, but (besides pulling the emergency chord) that's the only real way he can override the train's trajectory: by self-destructing.

If a starving baby (or in my case, a tiny black kitten) is placed in our path, this is the conscious Universe doing its thing (i.e., it's a grand circumstance that was presumably beyond the conscious control of any of the players). Whether we attend to that baby or not in no way depends on whether we have personal sovereignty, but simply on whether we allow ourselves to respond to a movement of being (assuming there is one). Such movement is the Universe gently nudging us into that baby's path (and it into ours), in order for some exchange to occur.

It may be no more than noticing and connecting to that baby, or it may be taking that baby home and adopting it. That decision, however, isn't ours. Personal sovereignty is the illusion (and insistence) that we ever get to determine the outcome of something on that scale. It may seem like our decision, but that doesn't mean it is. I'd say it only means we aren't sufficiently sensitive to movements of being, even when they are moving us. And so we take credit for our actions, and blame ourselves when we act wrongly. Credit and blame (the whip and carrot) are the business of sovereignty, but have no meaning to the Universe.

We are only responsible if we are able to respond. If we simply act on our own volition, from a place of personal sovereignty, based on our beliefs and opinions about what is the right thing, etc, etc, although we are still accountable, we are not responsible. We are simply being used as an unconscious tool. Our actions then will always be unclean, because only conscious action can be clean.

The only way to be out of alignment with the Universe would be to attempt to serve our personal agenda, including (or especially) the personal agenda of "serving the Universe." It doesn't matter what it is: if we really think that we are doing it, then we are holding onto our sovereignty and acting unconsciously, which means we are being driven by unconscious wounds and patterns. (And dark entities.)

Those who aren't the Universe's fingers are merely its farts.

Some thoughts on Lion Attacks, Global Warming, & Personal Sovereignty.

If a lion is attacking you, do you need someone to tell you you have the "right" to run?

The whole idea of rights is predicated on the idea of personal sovereignty, manifest destiny, democracy, and an unholy mess of MiST-created memes meant to nudge us ever further out of what-we-know, and into a morass of empty theory and polemics.

Global warming isn't directly threatening either ourselves or our families. The only thing it is threatening, maybe, is civilization, and so what? Living in a stinky, polluted city is a real drag. But no one has to live there. It's a choice.

I live in a relative paradise, free of visible or smellable pollution, while still on the grid (I shop at a grocer's store, go to the sauna, and download movies on my PC), and on an income of around $500 a month. That's my reality. So from my POV, I know the environmental crisis is a scam. At least for today.

It's true that I think our current way of life is messed up, but I'm OK with it and I don't pretend to have any solutions. Nor do I think a solution is required. The urge to create "solutions" and improve upon the way things are is at the root of any and all problems you could care to name.

The real disease is personal sovereignty, and one of its leading symptoms is the desire to want to fix or change things.

The Universe is taking care of everything, and absolutely nothing happens that isn't a direct result of its mysterious movements.

All we get to do is look after our own: our bodies and those under our protection. It's not a right, either; it's a delight.

There's nothing else to this life, once we let go of our personal sovereignty (and the arrogance that thinks we have control over anything outside our own actions), besides that sheer delight of being.

The world may appear to be in a quandary; but that's only because the world (like our constructed identities) is a false edifice blocking the flow of being.

If a snake identified with the skin he was shedding, that snake would perceive itself to be in a quandary. But snakes are not that dumb.

The Universe is not in a quandary; how could it ever be? The idea's a joke.

Does anyone here really think that we-as-a-species are more responsible for global warming, or anything else, than the Universe?

We are just the fingers and farts of the Universe anyway. Anything we do, the Universe is doing through us. Might as well get used to it. Fun and frolics for the Universe is a living Hell for sovereign beings.

Molecular Showtime

OK, I have started a new podcast site (see over there ->) and recorded the first audio for my awesome, unknown amorphous audience...

The first episode is called A Conglomeration of Molecules and is a free-associative discussion on living beyond struggle, grotty sorcerers, the effects of I-phones on our chances of survival in the end-times, attachment theory, people-connections as the means to connect to Earth, love as the only engine of survival, and the incalculable cost of freedom.

The woman I mention who discusses attachment theory, Sue Johnson, can be heard here.

Maintaining two blogs, a podcast, a forum, running an Existential Detective Agency, and putting together a new website is not easy ~ lemme tell you!

The best solution seems to be to think less about what i am doing and just let whatever comes, come. Hence this post, which is the beginning of an attempt to keep this blog chugging along rather than let it slide away into non-existance, which seems like it would be a shame, since, however silent my readership may be, they do seem to be out there.

The Aeolus blog will be focusing on mythic narratives as a warm-up to the unveiling of the new website, and the all-new SWEDA courses. This blog, then, will be a place for me to air everyday personal thoughts about stuff. I may even start up a new, sporadic podcast, if i can do it without any fancy editing or packaging, for the same end. We'll see.

So what's new? Just read David Byrne's Bicycle Diaries (Viking Pernguin, 2009), which is a collection of David's blog posts (here), accounts of his visits to various cities which he traverses with his trusty folding bicycle, inc. London, Istanbul, New York, & Buenos Aires. It's an enjoyable read, a mixture of historical detail and eccentric obvervation, with somewhat less of the expected irony that has been DB's trademark for most of his career. There is also some borderline paranoid-awareness commentary on self-censorship, thought control, and the like, and some suitably visionary theories about organic architecture and morphic fields and the like.

By the end, however, I felt a tad disappointed at how "pedestrian" (ha ha) DB's view of the world is, not compared to your average human, of course, but compared to what i have grown used to, here in the alt. perceptions community where I currently quite happily fraternize.

It's all too easy to take for granted being among folk who take it as a given that all politics is theater, that reality is being manipulated by hidden non-human forces, and that the end is nigh, etc, etc. I forget that plenty of otherwise sophisticated folk still seem to harbor the illusion that humans have a future that has anything to do with what we understand from our present POV. Not to say that we don't, because who really knows? It's just that - well, much of my own apocalyptic bent comes from Byrne's lyrics having shaped my consciousness from teenage years on, so it's a bit odd to find that he doesn't necessarily see things that way, after all. Or maybe he is just keeping it under his hat, and letting his music speak for him?


Speaking of the APC, I noticed yesterday (checking to see what Chris Knowles had to say about Avatar, the trailer of which was enough to ensure I stay well away from), that CK has removed the link to Aeolus' blog from his site; Kotze did the same a while ago, which was no big surprise; but I wonder what caused Knowles to withdraw his support like that? Was it something I said?