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?

Hollywood Tulpas

Some responses to Peter Levenda's passage in Sinister Forces, vol. 3, The Manson Secret (taken from a post at the Stormy Weather Inner Forum):

Some key ideas from the passage:

"artists are the first point of contact for upcoming events of a global nature."

the question this raises in my mind is: can artists and art-forms then be used to actually shape and direct - to summon in the sorcerous sense - events? Artists are attuned to growing memes, and by expressing their own impressions of these thought-forms or mind-viruses, they inevitably make the memes stronger. So - what if memes are created from whole cloth by the corporate control system of HW (apparently for commercial agendas, but actually with subtler intent), using artists-for-hire (former artists, now "hacks") to give substance and Imaginal resonance to these memes, as in (e.g.) when Spielberg was (possibly) recruited by US intelligence to make E.T.? (And, to address a somewhat stickier area of false narrative creation, Schindler's List.)

"Hollywood is the new religion of America and, to a certain extent, of the rest of the world as well. Hollywood brings the gods ... down to earth, where they can be seen and heard and touched by the masses."

Once again the idea of magikal evocation is suggested here. What if stars are actually tulpas, thought forms created via sorcery using the fantasies of the sleeping masses - and not human at all? Just an idea!

To bring it a little closer to Earth, what if the humans who are chosen to become stars - having been primed or initiated to this end - then become vessels or "hosts" for archetypal/demonic energies to work through? Could this relate to why Scientology is so prevalent in HW - because stars need to be handled at a metaphysical level? They are literally "high" (magik) maintenance!

The energy stars draw off the masses - via their charisma and sexual magnetism - would then be directed towards these entities or forces for their own sustenance. This would enable the creation and maintenance of a subtle power system by which - as of old - the gods devour the awareness of their worshippers - and by the traditional method no less: that of "idols."

So, every time someone gazes lovingly, or admiringly, or desirously, at an image - moving or otherwise - of a "star" - just as through supplication and prayer - their psychic energy, prana, orgone, whathaveyou, is being directed, into and through that image, to a hidden recipient. Energy follows thought.

This would be why the sexual element is so key to HW movies and to star-appeal.

In the same book, another passage (pg. 346, quoting Wolfgang Pauli), Levenda addresses this idea of "a ‘magical’ connection between sexuality and eroticism on the one hand, and political or historical events on the other.” Levenda then posits “the political ramifications of a consciousness that can be manipulated as much as subatomic particles can be manipulated, but using as the ‘energy source’ … ‘sexuality’ and… ‘eros,’ resulting in the phenomenon of induced synchronicity.”

What a can of worms indeed.

Moving on:

"Americans emulate movie characters more than they do the saints of their religions: they dress like them, drive the same cars, have the same attitudes, talk like them, and eventually adopt the same cultural mores."

This relates directly to the idea I posited in the last podcast, that tulpa creation is a way to direct the species into specific modes and mores of behavior, via imitation. Stars would be particularly affective because of course one single star (tulpa) can reach millions via a movie, and what’s more, they are not just imitated but admired and emulated at a far deeper level, that of worship, i.e., complete subjugation. People would "give anything" to meet such and such a star (or to be a star, which of course they know can never happen - hence proximity is the best they can hope for). As in the myths of Vampires, humans are mesmerized and willingly submit to the devouring supernatural presence, if only for the chance of a taste of immortality!

Tulpa creation could be achieved via a combination of stars and specific narratives/characters, such as, for example, Clint Eastwood and Dirty Harry, or Bruce Willis and the Die Hard persona, or Stallone and Rambo - all of which are maverick heroes who represent the lone wolf, "rebel" figure, and yet actually serve (and discreetly represent) the State, the US as a Nation.

Whenever we read a book, we essentially create a thought-form for the events and (especially) the characters within that narrative. The more emotionally invested we are (the stronger our attention/identification), the more energy will be directed into the creation of that thought form. So imagine millions of people watching a movie and adoring/identifying with the character: can this process create an actual “living” (somewhat conscious and "autonomous”) thought-form in the astral/Imaginal realms? If so, wouldn't it then become more powerful and autonomous, exponentially? The bigger it gets, the more it can enter our subconscious, the more energy it draws off us, and so on, ad infinitum. (Freddy Krueger and the Nightmare films would then be a sort of B-movie "revelation of the method" of this phenomenon!?).

There is also a subtler process at work here, witnessed by the ways in which male audience members (especially teenage) embrace dubious role models who, tho apparently rebellious, actually serve and represent the controlling elite. This form of misguided hero worship strips males of their true heroic (solar) potential, by giving them a false model, and a false narrative to follow, that of “resistance”, defiance, and brutality, which completely subverts and undermines the true heroism of surrendering the personal self to Spirit, that of service to what is greater. Such ideas are seen as wimpy, unmanly, in the context of the HW narrative (and especially the revenge fantasy of the "heroes" mentioned above).

HW heroes rarely actually serve the community in a true way – they aren’t nurturers or providers, and they certainly aren't healers. Their heroics comes down to one thing: killing and destruction—exactly in imitation (embodiment) of the military industrial complex that covertly directs the making of these movies.

Diet Soap Interview

Did this interview last night with Nightstalkers radio, talking about Homo Serpiens, galactic consciousness, and retards!

Night Stalker (1972)

OK, here's some journal bits from recent SWEDA posts:

It is passivity. It is like giving up. But in a way that's warm and soft, not cold and hard.

I am a dead man. If I stay in the knowing that I am already dead, I experience being a ghost among the living, and the whole world becomes a ghostly hologram. I have found what is real within.

What is real, what has meaning and value, is there at the center of knowing within me.

Silence is an awesome possibility.

***

Feeling a pleasant sense of detachment and neutrality, and faintest curiosity. I wonder if this is, or would be, the predominant mood of consciousness, once it is freed from our patterns: faintest curiosity?

The way the shaman glances at the clouds and passing cars, for signs or indications, but uninvested in the story, like a child reading a comic book on a lazy sunny afternoon? Not wanting to miss anything, yet unconcerned by the outcome.

***

Was thinking yesterday about how, for most of my life, I have been imagining and willing myself into some future state, of happiness and completeness and joy and perfection, while becoming increasingly doubtful I will ever make it to this imagined state. I have clung to this belief that some day, I would be "there," but inevitably combined with the fear, the nagging voice: "What if I never am?" What if this is as good as it gets?

What struck me yesterday (while swimming) was that I don't feel or think like this anymore; I have become, without really noticing it, "warmly OK" with being less than happy and less than perfect as a human being. But the real surprise was that this being warmly OK was what I had always been yearning for, without knowing it. The idea of needing to be something I was not (happy, carefree, funny, loving, whatever) was the only thing keeping me from being OK with myself as I am. And yet this is all we really want anyway!

Not expressing it very clearly, its a sort of living paradox. The moment we are OK with never being OK, we are OK! Really, really OK.

Give it a try some time. It is so much easier than you think.
(Even so, it took me til my 40s to get it! )

***

Living for others as a way for us to feel good about ourselves: it never works. Taking other peoples' "needs" seriously when we can no longer take our own seriously is just habit. It's even a kind of hypocrisy, don't you think?

I used to say it was about giving in without giving up. But now I think that, for us as persons, there really isn't much difference. If anything besides warm OK-ness is what gets us out of bed in the morning, maybe its better if we stay in bed? Maybe we need to be warmly OK with being useless before we can even begin to be useful to anyone?

Secret Life of Movies, the book is out, after ten years sitting on my hard drives, as well as Homo Serpiens, about 8 years in the pipeline. Both books came out the same month, which is an old ambition of mine finally fulfilled: to have two books coming out the same time and double my chances of Being a Somebody. As you all know, by now I am more than a little ambivalent about the whole business of writing books. Maybe for children.

Wish I could encourage you all to buy the book but at $40, I can't blame anyone for giving it a miss. Still, I am pretty sure you'd enjoy it. It's easily the most thorough work I've written on movies. There's an e-book due out soon, and if I can get enough people interested, I will probably make an audio book.

So raise your hands anyone who'd like to buy an audio book, via the Net, for maybe $10? I'd say about 20 buyers would be enough to justify my time in doing it.

My, how the mighty have fallen.

All my time goes into SWEDA now, but maybe I'll start posting some of my personal journal stuff from there, here, just to keep this blog alive.

It's sort of confusing, not knowing who, or even where, my audience is anymore! Since I started doing SWEDA, it feels like my audience is getting smaller, not bigger. But also much closer! So that is probably the right way to be going.

God's Channel




from Secret Life of Movies


Richard Kelly‘s Donnie Darko (2001) is about as rare an experience at the movies as finding a genuine psychic at a fun fair. It’s a celluloid vision. Donnie is a schizo with the power to see the future and thereby create it. As in Don’t Look Now, Donnie’s visions are self-fulfilling: it’s his terrible fear of what is going to happen (on October 30, 1988, at a precise minute and hour) that causes Donnie to act in just such a way as to ensure that it does. And yet, paradoxically (and Donnie Darko is not merely about paradoxes, it is a paradox unto itself), the knowledge he gains into the mysterious workings of time through his experience permits Donnie to rewrite his destiny, by turning the clock back. This he can only do at the cost of his own life.

Initially, Donnie is spared death due to his tendency to sleepwalk, which is one symptom of his schizo-visionary state and which causes Donnie to be out on the golf course when a passenger plane jet engine falls from the sky and crashes through his bedroom. Donnie was already strange before this, but the inexplicable event (no airline claims the severed engine) only serves to cement his dementia, his sense of strangeness. At the same time, it alerts the audience to the fact that we have entered into a world every bit as weird and incomprehensible as Donnie’s world must seem to him. We have entered the Twilight Zone.

Donnie Darko is the first of its type—the surrealist teen schizo angst comedy (Static, Repo Man, Heathers, Parents, etc)—to successfully pull all the elements together and forge them into a genuine work of art. It’s a bit slack in places (Gretchen’s death, for example), and it’s occasionally self-indulgent, or perhaps just self-conscious, but it’s all of a piece. Unlike the films mentioned above (Static excepted), it has depth both of meaning and of feeling; it comes from the heart and not just the head. Donnie Darko is teen comedy romance spliced with hallucinatory horror movie, and yet the splicing is seamless, invisible and impeccable. Except in the early high school scenes (which the director seems to be deliberately undermining by speeding up the images and drowning out the sound), there’s never a sense of watching a cross genre movie. In fact Donnie Darko doesn’t seem like a genre movie at all, principally because it isn’t. It’s closer to Blue Velvet than The Faculty: It’s a rite of passage, a mythological journey. Donnie Darko is a schizo movie about adolescence in which objective reality (so far as there is one, which is debatable) is even weirder than the subjective reality of the schizo himself. It’s not that Donnie is too weird and crazy to understand what’s happening to him, it’s that he’s just weird and crazy enough.

Richard Kelly, the writer-director, has an intuitive grasp of his material that marks him as a genuine visionary, which may be just what he is. What’s more, he has sufficient grasp of his ideas and a basic movie sense (and the technical know how) to do almost full justice to his vision. In the current, post-9/11 climate, this movie is practically a revelation: a work that takes place entirely “inside” the character’s (i.e., the filmmaker’s) head, and yet connects to the universal experience. I certainly know a few young folk, adolescents or post-adolescents, who see the world a lot like Donnie does. They may not see tubes of liquid light coming out of people’s chests, and they may not literally converse with giant rabbits or travel through time; but they have the same basic, shifting sense of reality, the feeling that neither time nor space—or anything at all—is what it seems to be. These kids intuit that something, maybe not “the end of the world,” but something equally awesome and indescribable, is just around the next corner, and even that all of this has something to do with “God,” or with whatever it is we have chosen to call God, in our all-too-human reaching after the intangible.

Donnie doesn’t believe in God until he sees It. I say “It,” because Donnie doesn’t have a religious experience of a Deity, as such; what he experiences is both more subtle and more profound. He perceives a force coming out of people’s bodies, looking like a sort of tentacle that extends forward through space. The opposite of the trail left by a snail, this tentacle doesn’t follow people but leads them; it seems to anticipate their movements, and so gives Donnie a glimpse into the future. At first it seems that these tubes or tentacles are simply that: Donnie’s fourth-dimensional view of reality, i.e., when time is also a perceivable dimension, people become like tubes that twist and turn throughout the spaces they inhabit as they come and go from one point to the next and back again. But when Donnie witnesses this force emerging from his own chest, he sees something else, as the liquid light—clearly a conscious “thing” unto itself—stops and turns and beckons Donnie to follow it. He does so, and it leads him into his parents’ bedroom and to the closet, where he finds the gun with which he will shoot the boy who runs over his lover Gretchen (Lena Malone), all at the designated hour. This same boy, dressed as a giant toothy rabbit, is “Frank,” the other-dimensional entity who has been leading Donnie through his visions to the inevitable apocalypse, or revelation: that Donnie is just a play thing in the hands of Fate. Yet in Donnie Darko, “Fate,” less oppressively but even more mysteriously, is a living Force that exists inside Donnie and within every other living creature.

Donnie admits to his shrink (Katherine Ross) that he has thought about the question of God, or more precisely whether or not he is “alone,” until it has lost all meaning. To Donnie, “the quest for God is absurd.” Yet despite this, or maybe because of it, Donnie finds God. When he witnesses this inexplicable phenomenon, he doesn’t have to think about it; there’s no two and two to put together here, he just knows. And when Donnie speaks with his science teacher, the latter can’t grok Donnie’s discovery as anything but a paradox. If you can see your future, he insists, then surely you have the option of altering it? Donnie has the privileged knowledge of the prophet: he hasn’t just heard about this “God,” he has seen it. “Not if you stay in God’s channel!” he says, or words to this effect. He’s speaking about Destiny vs. Fate.

What Donnie Darko is saying is that there is only one destiny for each of us (or rather, one destiny per person per universe), that this is our path, and that the only “free will” we have (the only way to escape from mere predestination) is to live out this destiny, to find and then stay within “God’s Channel.” The third alternative (never voiced) is to reject our destiny, to rebel, as Lucifer did, and sever our connection to the Universe, the Divine, and so fall out of the sacred groove, out of God’s Channel. Apparently Donnie’s experience, from his narrowly escaping death to his boldly embracing it by entering the time vortex (expressly in order to save Gretchen from the fate that should have been his), is solely for Donnie (and us) to learn this vital truth. The movie gives us the philosopher’s stone and holy grail of human endeavour, the truth that will reconcile the seemingly irreconcilable conundrum of destiny (God) and free will. Donnie didn’t fall out of God’s Channel by surviving, however; what he did (so far as I understand the movie) was to enter into a parallel universe, an alternate time stream in which he survived, and thereby got to see what would happen if he did live, and so understand the meaning of his death, the reason behind it. At the risk of being pat, the movie might be seen as Donnie’s dark and troubling dream, in the final moments before that jet engine lands on him and death takes him forever.

Like Run Lola Run, Donnie Darko adheres to a very old religious tradition, that of blood sacrifice. It suggests that when God, or Death, decides to take someone, He cannot be denied. If His intended prey somehow evades Him, by some unexpected miracle, He will simply take someone else, usually someone close to the original choice of victim. This is not just religious belief, however; it’s also something like physics. It’s as if Donnie’s unwritten escape creates the opposite of a vortex, a sort of excess of particles in the universe, and that this imbalance has to be corrected by the removal of someone else, preferably someone as similar to the intended “target” as possible. For this reason Gretchen is taken. Having seen all this, Donnie is given a choice. Like John Baxter in Don’t Look Now, Donnie has the all-too-rare gift of seeing God’s plan in action, His method, His modus operandi. Unlike Baxter, however, Donnie is smart (or crazy/open/adolescent) enough to understand what he sees and act upon it, to seize the opportunity of intervening and become co-designer of his destiny. He does indeed, as Gretchen has intuited, become a Super Hero. (Super Heroes have always been schizos; Donnie Darko gives us the first schizo to become a Super Hero.)

Recognizing that he only survived due to a glitch in space-time, Donnie uses the same glitch to repair the damage, and in the act sacrifices himself. The glitch, however, will always remain: there’s still that mysterious jet engine to contend with. Maybe the glitch is Donnie himself? Being on the verge of developing the power to see through the illusion of time and space, to see God Itself in action, Donnie is one of those freaks of nature (like the white-faced dynamo of Powder) who simply has to be removed (translated to a higher dimension) before his existence causes the whole universe to collapse. Donnie’s gift of magic allows him to escape his death, but then it forces him to see why his dearth was necessary, and so compels him (if he wants to stay in God’s Channel) to go back to meet it at the designated time. As a result, the world does not end. This time. But if people (and movies) like Donnie Darko are becoming more and more frequent phenomena, in a world where neither science nor religion is equipped to reconcile the awesome paradox of a magical reality run by God, then it’s only a matter of time. Like all good prophets, Donnie Darko warns us, in the most entertaining fashion, to get ready. The sky’s about to open.