Sunday, January 29, 2006

"No man sees my face and lives"



I and I
One says to the other, no man sees my face and lives.
- Bob Dylan


Antonin Artaud traveled to Mexico in 1936 in order to become Europe's first "shamanic tourist" among the Tarahumara Indians. "Peyote, I knew, was not made for whites," the surrealist wrote in The Peyote Dance. "And a White, for these Red Men, is one whom the spirits have abandoned."

The Tarahumara tried to fob off on Artaud "old men who would suddenly get the bends and jiggle their amulets in a queer way," but he held out for the genuine shamans. Finally he was permitted to join an all-night peyote ceremony, and partook of the "dangerous dissociations it seems Peyote provokes, and which I had for 20 years sought by other means":

The things that emerged from my spleen or my liver were shaped like the letters of a very ancient and mysterious alphabet chewed by an enormous mouth, but terrifying, obscure, proud, illegible, jealous of its invisibility.... Peyote leads the self back to its true sources.

To which Daniel Pinchbeck comments in Breaking Open the Head: "as powerful as they were these revelations could not cure his inner divisions":

They could not heal him. Artaud spent the last twelve years of his life in mental institutions, treated by electroshock, writing paranoid letters and increasingly incoherent rants, and revising the text of his revelations among the Tarahumara.

Naturally. The inner divisions were heightened. Artaud wasn't seeking wholeness and reintegration; he was seeking transcendence. Dissociation appears to be a chief characteristic of such a venture, and of intentional boundry crossings. (I say intentional because we need to account for the many witnesses and victims to boundary crossings of which they wanted no part.)

A book by Bruce Moen entitled Voyages into the Unknown records his training in astral projection at the Monroe Institute. A Wednesday night during one of Moen's residencies Robert Monroe led a discussion on what he called the "I/There." Monroe taught that the self as we know it is merely the fragment of the "Total Self" which is currently living a physical life. The total self is a cluster of many beings who each live many lifetimes. So, to astral travellers, many of their "guides" must actually be astral aspects of their total self.

This packet of information overwhelmed Moen:

I ran out into the cool evening air and headed for an open grassy field. Something inside me was being overwhelmed. The old me was dissolving into thin air and a new unfamiliar me was taking its place. I pulled off my shirt and began rolling around in the grass, trying to get a grip on myself. I wasn't sure why I felt the need to do so, but rolling on the ground seemed quite reasonable at the time. The feeling of agitation and internal chaos flying around inside me were overpowering. It felt like rushing waves of some new reality crashing into sea walls of long held beliefs. Some parts of the walls were being pulverized into little bits and washed out to sea.

While rolling shirtless on the grass Moen was ignored by others strolling along the grounds, perhaps because they'd seen it all before. In 1984 an INSCOM lieutenant named Doug Pemberton enrolled in the same Gateway course Moen was attending. According to Schnabel's Remote Viewers, after three days and 15-minutes into another hemi-sync session, Pemberton was found wandering naked and babbling incoherently, and taken to a Walter Reed psychiatric ward.

After Moen pulled himself together he returned to his Monroe Center "CHEC" unit (Controlled Holistic Environmental Chamber) for that evening's tape session: "I stood for a moment at the opening to the CHEC unit, feeling how much it seemed like a Gateway into another dimension. Something in me was struggling to hang on to its old identity.... That part of me was trying to prevent my passing through that Gateway and entering whatever dimension of the beyond awaited."

Reading this and Monroe's theory of a fragmentary self, I'm reminded of "body Thetans" from the higher teachings of Scientology, and of the over-representation of high Scientologists among the military's remote viewers. (For instance, the NSA's Major Hal Puthoff was an "Operating Thetan, Level III," Pat Price OT IV, and Ingo Swann OT VII.) And after reading Moen's book, this is familar, too: "Tom Cruise became psychotic during a secret Scientology initiation in which one is told that rather than being one person, one is composed of thousands of aliens from all over the universe fighting for control of your body. After completing this initiation, known as OT III, Tom appeared sickly with black circles under his eyes and pasty skin."

L Ron Hubbard leads us back to Aleister Crowley. In Crowleyan occult science, ego death is called the "crossing of the abyss," and entails for the magician a wrestling with the "great demon" Choronzon, the dweller of the abyss, found in the 10th Aethyr of John Dee's Enochian system. (An excerpt from Alex Owen's The Place of Enchantment recounts Crowley's 1909 crossing with the aid of companion Victor Neuburg: "Both men now felt that they understood the nature of the Abyss. It represented Dispersion: a terrifying chaos in which there was no center and no controlling consciousness.")

I believe all this talk - and against a deep, black backdrop of military study and sponsorship - of a fragmentary cluster of selves, "body thetans" and ego death, has considerable resonance for the study of ritual abuse and mind control, which is also concerned with the deliberate destruction of ego integration, though naturally not by choice. In the ritual context of ego death and its regard as a prerequisite for transcendence, the creation of programmable alters may be regarded as a high sacrament.

Moen begins Voyages into the Unknown curiously with pages of detail concerning a bizarre early childhood "daydream." In it, he enters a bedroom, and a woman on the bed raises the covers and beckons him to join her. Moen writes, "as a five- or six-year old boy, I never understood what we did in that bed. I only felt the frolicking atmosphere, pleasure, and a lot of bouncing and moving." Then he feels terror at the image of a menacing figure in the doorway. ("I knew in that instant if he got his hands on me I would be dead or worse.")

Later in life I began to wonder, so where had this daydream come from? How could I as a young boy have any knowledge of brass rail beds, sex, or another man's jealousy that was strong enough that he wanted to kill me? And the feelings that accompanied the experience - where had they come from? The pleasure, joy and frolic I'd felt with the woman. The throat-gripping terror I'd felt with the knowledge I'd be killed or worse if the man in the doorway caught me. Where did those feelings come from?

By my early twenties, it was clear to me that I had no reasonable, logical explanation for how a five- or six-year old boy could have such a daydream.... After many years I came to accept the only possible answer, reincarnation.

Even though I'd known, when I first picked up Moen's book, that he would be going there, to me this "only possible answer" immediately cast doubt upon his self-knowledge, even though he now believes, following Monroe, that the self is illusion. Because if it ever occured to him that the peculiar "daydream" could be memories from this life - suppressed images of traumatic childhood abuse - he doesn't say.


By the way, here's an oddly-worded wire story about a security breach inside an Arkansas chemical weapons plant. "There's no doubt in my mind that the officer saw something, but it wasn't human," Col. Brian S. Lindamood said. "At this time I have no idea what it could be." RI board discussion here.

39 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

In one of Colin Wilson's books (and I forget which one - I'll try to find it) he discourses at some length about a psychiatrist during the 1920s who developed a theory that severely psychotic patients were possessed by the spirits of the dead. He apparently worked out a treatment regimen based on this idea that gave quite good results for the day.

I'll try to find the reference.

-Sepka the Space Weasel

6:02 a.m.  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Anonymous One,wow,isn't it strange that Antonin coined the phrase virtual reality back in 1938? Take a look at Antonin's life on Fusion Anomaly.net,this is a great find Jeff,later.

6:55 a.m.  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Sepka:

I'm not sure which one of Colin Wilson's books dealt with the "possession by spirits of the dead" idea, but the late Scott Rogo did a whole book on this with great detail from the period you cited. His book is entitled: "The Infinite Boundary: Spirit Possession, Madness and Multiple Personality"

7:42 a.m.  
Blogger A Fake Doctor said...

Boy, I'd hope that if some person or group learned some metaphysical revelation, they would choose to do more with it than create a multi-million dollar "self-help" venture that is not granted religious status in some nations. Barely checked speculation follows.

Something intuitively feels as wrong to me about "astral travel" as a separation of "spirit from the physical body." I am more attracted to Jungian ideas of a joining of minds via some channel into or from a collective unconscious that does not exist in a place, but is "non-local," as consciousness itself is.

As a sci-fi writer (among other practices), L.R.H. would no doubt have been familiar with the multiverse theory of reality that is now gaining attention among theoretical physicists. That is, all posible outcomes and realities exist in an infinite number of parallel dimensions. If people somehow managed to gain mental access to alternate selves in alternate worlds, would the results not seem very similar to "reincarnation" or out-of-body experiences? You would experience thoughts and events from a perspective of a "you" resulting from subtly altered causal processes, and if you were not fully in control of the "travel," it would be chaos in your mind as you experienced a self in a world that seemed to be changing randomly and unpredictably as you moved from one parallel reality to another. The further you moved from the reality you know, the more different the world would appear and the more alien your perspective would be. Perhaps you would find yourself changing into a "you" that you found unrecognizable as you entered stranger and stranger realms. Coupled with the thought of an inability to return to familiarity or just a stable state of being, the psychic bombardment and ungroundedness might well result in insanity. Personally, I find this world very disorienting as I function in the day-to-day changes.

Jungian psychology/philosophy (and also Patrick Harpur) suggests to me a structure of mind formed from evolution, directed or otherwise, on Earth or the physical plane. The mind has some innate structure and we share this in common, or else consensus and communication would be impossible as the world would be perceived as different things in different ways and we could agree on nothing in common.

Given this structure, were we connected to one another and perhaps other selves, we would likely perceive these connections in common ways. However, just as there are infinite variations among individuals, so there are among our perceptions. As we focus on differences, it is harder to see what we perceive in common. Could this be the canvas on which we experience memories that are not "ours," have impressions of structures we have never been anywhere near, and have other "symptoms" of remote viewing, reincarnation, etc.? Of course, the idea of false memory syndrome and intentionally/forceably implanted memories results in terrible confounding and a great reduction in certainty.

Look what a philosophy undergrad degree and sudden influx of caffeine does to you: It's not even 9:00 and I'm engaged in mad speculation.

8:39 a.m.  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

With regard to Sepka's comment (as well as a lot of other writings on this board), has anyone read Malachi Martin's "Hostage To The Devil," about 5 case studies of demonic possession? I got my copy out of the house after perusing it: simply too frightening to keep on the shelf. The story of the Californian and his 'familiar,' Pongo, would be of interest to RI readers.

And by the way, where do we sign up for the course credits?

9:09 a.m.  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I recall one night as a boy when I slept on the downstairs family room couch. The geometry was mentally confusing, I was closer to the floor and could see across the room. That night I had a bad dream and awoke myself (I had found I could wake up from nightmares by rolling my dream body). As I awoke I had the sensation and visual effect of floating down the steps and over to the couch.

This episode, and other occassions where I saw myself sleeping in bed, convinces me there is something to astral projection, though I have no clue what.

9:18 a.m.  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

While reading your post, Jeff, I was strongly reminded of the influential but largely forgotten writer of scientific romances, A. Merritt.

Born in 1884 -- and thus a decade younger than Crowley or Charles Fort and just a few years older than Lovecraft -- Merritt was caught up by many of the same materials. As a young reporter in Philadelphia, he became a protege of S. Weir Mitchell, a researcher into anomalous events, folk magic, and the paranormal. Then in 1903, after witnessing something that might have embarrassed the powerful, Merritt found it expedient to spend a year seeking exotic adventure in Central America.

Exactly what he did in that period is obscure, but Merritt wrote of himself that he "gained a curious knowledge of Indian customs and religious ceremonies that would have stood his Quaker ancestors' hair on end." And in later life, he was known for keeping a garden of witchy -- which is to say, psychedelic -- plants.

(I do love the way people of that period used the word "curious." It has such a redolent air of the forbidden and possibly peverse.)

Merritt's fiction, written between 1917 and 1933, is loaded with lushly described psychedelic imagery, as well as with many of the of the same themes that keep coming up here -- unplumbable abysses, multiple personalities struggling to control a single body, menacing alien presences of hypnotic allure, journeys to alternate universes.

And Merritt is not merely a curious side-issue. He was by a long shot the most influential SF writer of his day, inspiring everyone from H.P. Lovecraft to Robert Heinlein. Even now, everything from Star Wars to X-Men is still drawing at secondhand on themes from writers of the 30's and 40's who originally got them from Merritt.

L. Ron Hubbard in his not-very-original career as an SF writer also cribbed a lot from Merritt. (For example, his "Slaves of Sleep" might fairly be described as Merritt's "Ship of Ishtar" retold as wise-cracking pulp adventure.)

So any consideration of shamanistic themes and images and the question of what emerges spontaneously from the drug experience vs. what is drawn from specific cultural reference-points really needs to take account of Merritt and his lines of influence.

10:49 a.m.  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

It's interesting how Daniel Pinchbeck's experience after taking ayahuasca "I felt like an alien intelligence was coursing through me, examining my organs and nerves and cellular processes, making subtle adjustments. It was like I was a computer and ayahuasca was a program performing scans and repairs. When it had done its work, I threw up - the vomiting was like the beep at the end of a program."

...parallel this man's (from an Aug. '98 MAPS article - http://www.maps.org/news-letters/
v08n3/08322top.html...

"...the rippling quickly turned into full-blown turbulence. The plant was loose, and was wildly racing around exploring its new environment. It felt as though a caged animal had been released inside me, and was having the time of its life." He continues "As the images and shapes began to appear, they had an air of joy and exuberance. The serpents were smiling, the jaguars laughing, and the giant birds swooped down over me caressing me with their outstretched wings. A parade of persons, both known and unknown, streamed by, each of them smiling and reaching out to touch me and tell me by look that they loved me. As the serpents and plants twisted and flashed before me, they appeared to be smiling and reassuring me that they had looked everywhere inside me, and that everything was o.k....Images would come directly towards me at breakneck speed, smiling and laughing, then veer off for another tour of my entire system."

11:19 a.m.  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

As one who has intimate knowledge of decidedly non-erotic uses for restraints, including more than ten "manic" episodes, I identify strongly with the "otherness". Otherness defined as larger parts of my own consciousness losing their filters. I have never, even at the peak of the experiences, felt any negative or controlling influence; more a metaphysical interconnectedness with the minutia: sounds in a seeming "order", enhanced color sense (toward the red end of the spectrum), along with the "tip of the tongue" near-understanding of "what it all means". I present no more than my own experience; no assumptions or extrapolations, but one thing is certain: Had I not developed a metaphysically spiritual attitude toward these experiences, I would have killed myself long ago.

11:22 a.m.  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

THANK YOU, Jeff !!!

I have actually been looking for this Artaud story for YEARS, but could not remember the name and repeatedly found nothing in google searches for the name or the title.

Probably just to obscure perhaps --- but I am fairly certain it is the same story I read (or think I have) many years ago describing these journeys (but seems to me that it had a different title which I will now search).

I am currently readin Gopi Krishna's book "Kundalini" which describes in many details the same experiences (or similar ones) as those desribed above (but which almost sent the author to madness and death but for his devoted wife).

He did it by meditating for years on the thousand petalled lotus in his crown chakra and by years of devotion. It opened his doors of perception and provides an interesting account of how he did it and what it means for humanity.

Having experienced the opening of the crown chakra quite by accident myself, releasing the kundalini power, it seems, by a combination of accidental, natural and (legal) artificial means --- I can say with some comfort that these "openings", using Yogic meditation and posture and breathing as part of the natural means, can send one to these places and open these doors. But the question becomes "what is real?".

Krishna says with confidence in his book that this is an evolutionary course for humanity available to all of us so that we can reach the divine bliss of the union of Shakti and Shiva and that srudying this method and means of producing such ecstasy biologically will lead to global peace and an evolution of consciousness.

Just wanted to share that with you in gratitude.

11:44 a.m.  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Self-knowledge is not according to any formula. You may go to a psychologist or a psychoanalyst to find out about yourself, but that is not self-knowledge. Self-knowledge comes into being when we are aware of ourselves in relationship, which shows what we are from moment to moment. Relationship is a mirror in which to see ourselves as we actually are. But most of us are incapable of looking at ourselves as we are in relationship, because we immediately begin to condemn or justify what we see. We judge, we evaluate, we compare, we deny or accept, but we never observe actually what is, and for most people this seems to be the most difficult thing to do; yet this alone is the beginning of self-knowledge. If one is able to see oneself as one is in this extraordinary mirror of relationship, which does not distort, if one can just look into this mirror with full attention and see actually what is, be aware of it without condemnation, without judgment, without evaluation-and one does this when there is earnest interest-then one will find that the mind is capable of freeing itself from all conditioning; and it is only then that the mind is free to discover that which lies beyond the field of thought.

After all, however learned or however petty the mind may be, it is consciously or unconsciously limited, conditioned, and any extension of this conditioning is still within the field of thought. So freedom is something entirely different.

J. Krishnamurti
The Book of Life - January 31

11:54 a.m.  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Two excerpts of over 100 Amazon reviews of 'Hostage to the Devil:'

DANGEROUS!!!!, August 20, 2005
Reviewer: J. P. Sheganoski (Park Ridge, NJ) -
This book is dangerous. By opening it up, you are inviting a world of evil into your life. I am a non-denominational christian who was raised catholic, so i've seen both sides of the coin regarding excorcism and spiritual warfare. Not only is this book one-sided in favor of oldschool catholocism, but it focuses on evil in such a way that compells and captivates the reader, glorifying Satan in a not-so-obvious way. Remember, Satan is the father of lies, and many might think reading a book about excorcism written by a jesuit priest is harmless and safe, when in fact it is not. After the introduction and story of Father Michael in China, i felt driven to prayer, and then promptly returned the book to the store i purchased it from earlier that same day. I should have just burned it instead.

Invasion from the Middle Plateau, September 24, 2005 Reviewer: Gary D. Smith "piperdaemon" (Los Angeles) -
Father Martin has spoken on radio about the "middle plateau" which is the space in which demons can move in spirit form and enter the unwary individual who experiments with astral projection, remote viewing and other such pursuits..."

And so on.

It's interesting to me that Jeff wonders that the writer didn't recognize the possibility that his precocious childhood sexual memory wasn't from a real traumatic episode, but seems, in many of his otherwise excellent ruminations, oblivious (or inured?) to the very real possibility that much of the phenomenology he chronicles is simply diabolical. It's highly entertaining to speculate on M-theory, holographic universes, parallel solutions of wave equations underpinning our sense of reality, as well as the intelligence communities' interest in remote viewing, etc., but one should be at least aware of the dangers involved. Or, to quote another Amazon reviewer, "Beware, to those who keep dazzling with those ouija boards, spirit calling seances, trying to contact the dead, and the like. They must understand that dealing so lightly with the unknown endangers them and everyone to big risks since there is a great possibility to open, in their ignorance, a "gate" for the Dark Spirits to enter our dimension..."

Like a Charles Williams novel--best read with the lights on.

12:55 p.m.  
Blogger Jeff Wells said...

"It's interesting to me that Jeff...seems...oblivious (or inured?) to the very real possibility that much of the phenomenology he chronicles is simply diabolical."

It's interesting to me to read that, because I've been often told I'm guilty of the opposite: a presumption of diabolical machination.

When writing the post I was looking for a place to plunk in this quote from Schanbel's Remote Viewers of Fern Gauvin, a military RVer who became the branch chief of the DIA's RV program in the late 80s. Couldn't find one, but it may be appropriate here:

"The biggest concern is - will I be invaded by evil spirits? Maybe, but I can protect myself. Some other people call it, Okay, "cover yourself with the white light," and so on. All that is good intention.... I think that goes a long way in this line of work.

"I've seen intrusions, temporary intrusions, but you know, nothing that could affect anybody or anything if they didn't want to be bothered. That's speaking broadly. It was never a huge problem."

Schnabel adds of the DIA program at this time: "To hear some remote viewers tell it, the unit was slipping into paranormal chaos - a dark place, infested by madness and mischievous sprites, as in one of those paintings by Hieronymous Bosch."

1:21 p.m.  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

"Naturally. The inner divisions were heightened. Artaud wasn't seeking wholeness and reintegration; he was seeking transcendence. Dissociation appears to be a chief characteristic of such a venture, and of intentional boundry crossings."

Without addressing Artaud's quest directly, I would beg to differ with your explicit assumption that genuine transcendence differs somehow from wholeness and integration, other than in the unfortunate experiences of people such as Artaud who seem to be in need of basic peronality integration / psychic wholeness / healing from some form of "mental illness," so to speak.

People with a history of trauma, dissociation or neurosis will rarely, if unassisted and without very competent aid (and even then it is an iffy prospect), will very rarely achieve transcendence, but rather only suffer further disintegration of their personality.

One must be reasonably "whole" in order to enjoy the fruits of any "transcendence." There's an excellent book that covers much of this material, "Transformation of Consciousness," by Jack Engler, Dan Brown (not THAT Dan Brown, another one), and a third author.

That said, completing the process of transcendence ultimately is all about wholeness and reintegration. There are many different cultural examples of this, such as the ten ox-herding drawings of zen. The last one is "return to the city". The same stage occurs in yage' and peyotl shamanism, for example, where some have listed stages beginning with brujo/bruja to curandero/a to sabio/sabia (wise person).

One can find such continua in every complete tradition. They are not found in Crowley's bs, however, and his take on the lack of a controller at his alleged center of the void or vortex, simply demonstrates conclusively that he remained forever on the outside looking in - stuck in the terrors of the barrier to wisdom that is there to keep evil mf's like him out of the center of true knowing.

And while my memeory may falter, since it's been 35 years or so since I read Gopi Krishna's autobiograpy, I seem to recall that he had spent 20 years focussing on the visualization of either a two petalled or four petalled lotus situated in the ajna chakra, just between and about the center of the eyebrows, not the sahasrara. One doesn't start there, ie. the latter.

But the apparent mundanity of spending 20 years in such a practice, and the earth shaking result of his "sudden" veil-rending, just goes to show what is involved in such a process, in terms of humility, persistence, and devotion. He had all of these, a stable family life, intelligence and wit, and yet look at the aftermath.

A fascinating, but cautionary, tale, if ever there was one.

1:48 p.m.  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Corregidum

That was meant to be "psychosis", and "severe, rather than simple, neurosis."

1:50 p.m.  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Jeff--

Following your link the other day to Albert Hoffman's "Problem Child," I found intriguing his description of grappling with a dose of his own medicine:

"Everything in the room spun around, and the familiar objects and pieces of furniture assumed grotesque, threatening forrns. They were in continuous motion, animated, as if driven by an inner restlessness. The lady next door, whom I scarcely recognized, brought me milk - in the course of the evening I drank more than two liters. She was no longer Mrs. R., but rather a malevolent, insidious witch with a colored mask.

Even worse than these demonic transformations of the outer world, were the alterations that I perceived in myself, in my inner being. Every exertion of my will, every attempt to put an end to the disintegration of the outer world and the dissolution of my ego, seemed to be wasted effort. A demon had invaded me, had taken possession of my body, mind, and soul. I jumped up and screamed, trying to free myself from him, but then sank down again and lay helpless on the sofa. The substance, with which I had wanted to experiment, had vanquished me. It was the demon that scornfully triumphed over my will. I was seized by the dreadful fear of going insane. I was taken to another world, another place, another time. My body seemed to be without sensation, lifeless, strange. Was I dying? Was this the transition?"

That was in 1943, a year clouded by evil. And now, 2006, we seem confronted by our own Thule adepts, in the form of GWB and his 'familiar,' Dick Cheney. Philip Dick has a passage in 'The Divine Invasion' that seems pertinent: "The power of evil...is the ceasing of reality, the ceasing of existnece itself. It is the slow slipping away of everything that is, until it becomes...a phantasm." When we hear ringing endorsements for a nuclear strike on Iran, when Charles "Dr. Strangelove" Krauthammer (a psychiatrist, unsurprisingly) tells us "we must all be prepared to torture," we are left wondering whether Justin Raimondo may be correct in arguing that Sept. 11 tore a hole in the space-time fabric, throwing us all into a Bizarro world where up is down, good evil, and all the rules that we thought applied are no longer in force.

Continue shedding light on these festering governmental grimoires, Jeff--we all benefit.

5:49 p.m.  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

That is a stunning insight you made Jeff when you distinguish between transcendence and integration/wholeness.

Spiritualities seeking transcendence versus those seeking integration and wholeness.

Just about every spirituality in the Marketplace of Spirit, if you can put it that way, from Christianity to Hinduism to every variety of Newage (rhymes with...) belief appear to belong to the former category. There and then. Here and herafter. From now to forever. Life after life.
They one and all foster fundamental rifts in the integrity of the person who cleaves to that belief structure.
Perhaps designedly so.

Whereas, in the real world, all you have is Now. Here. Right here right now.

6:02 p.m.  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Look out! Beware! Achtung! If you fall asleep, Freddy Kruger will get you… in your dreams! Aaaarrgghhh!!!

Also beware the Reefer Madness! And sex, and the internet, and teenagers, they’re all out to get you bwahaha!!!

Bloody wimps. The “real” world is dangerous and scary, but we keep going out into it every day regardless. Why? Because hiding from death and danger is hiding from life and love.

So too with the “other” realms. Dive on in. It’s actually pretty cool, even the scary bits. Hey, maybe there’s some nasty fuckers there, but certainly no nastier than car crashes, aspartame, E. coli, gun-toting thugs, mosquitoes, rabid coyotes or whatever. Should we board up the windows and sit quivering in front of the TV sucking our thumbs, scared of the fucking dark? Or should we step outside, day or night, with the confidence of adulthood, fully prepared to explore and discover?

To all the wowsers and peddlers of immobilising cautionary tales I ask: Where has your faith gone?

Yea though I walk through the valley of death… Ring any bells?

Take drugs, take the demon in the mirror head-on, enough care has been taken already.

There’s nothing to fear.

Think I’m wrong? You lose. Living in fear is no life at all.

“I've seen intrusions, temporary intrusions, but you know, nothing that could affect anybody or anything if they didn't want to be bothered.”

Right on. Too many people here want to be bothered, but won’t admit it, and run around shrieking “Bewaaare the hour of Saaatan is upon us!”

OK Satan, keep it in your pants.

7:02 p.m.  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Obie.jargon, maybe you can straighten something out for me regarding all those parallel universes and "alternate selves." If the self has any meaning, it must refer to the person I am here and now. If I am also other places and times, then, if it IS my "self," I must be experiencing it (no experience, no "self"). But I am not experiencing anything other than the self I am now. Therefore, all those "altternate selves" cannot be "selves" at all. It contradicts the meaning of "self" as an integrated being having experiences.

7:19 p.m.  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

ooh i'm sooo scared said...

Look out! Beware! Achtung! If you fall asleep, Freddy Kruger will get you… in your dreams! Aaaarrgghhh!!!...[more cajoling]

I'm inclined to agree that fear is counterproductive. And my inclination is experimental. Nevertheless, it's prudent to be cautious and have sufficient preparation to be able to handle stuff that exists on the other side of the veil.

You wouldn't send a child out onto a busy street unchaperoned, nor would you as an adult blindly dive into the same busy street without first checking to look for oncoming traffic.

The most important form of protection is a discerning intuituion: the ability to know a being's intentions regardless of how it appears to you or what it says.

I would refrain from casual visits into the astral plane without having developed such skill.

7:35 p.m.  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Fools tread where angels dare not go.

9:03 p.m.  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

.
That magnificent dervish, Bayazid Bestami,
came to his disciples and said,
"I am God."

It was night, and he was drunk with his ecstasy.
"There is no God but me. You should worship me."

At dawn, when he had returned to normal,
they came and told him what he'd said.

"If I say that again,
bring your knives and plunge them into me.
God
is beyond the body, and I am in this body.
Kill me when I say that."

Each student then sharpened
his knife, and again Bayazid drank the God-Wine.
The sweet dessert-knowing came.
The Inner Dawn snuffed his candle.
Reason, like a timid advisor,
faded to a far corner as the Sun-Sultan
entered Bayazid.

Pure spirit spoke through him.
Bayazid was not there. The "he" of his personality
dissolved.
Like the Turk who spoke fluent Arabic,
then came to, and didn't know a word.

The Light of God
poured into the empty Bayazid and became words.

Muhammed did not dictate the Qur'an. God did.
The mystic osprey opened its wings in Bayazid
and soared.

"Inside my robe there is nothing but God.
How long will you keep looking elsewhere!"

The disciples drew their knifes and slashed out
like assassins, but as they stabbed at their Sheikh,
they did not cut Bayazid. They cut themselves.

There was no mark on that Adept,
but the students were bleeding and dying.

Those who somewhat held back, respecting their Teacher,
had only lightly wounded themselves.
A
selfless One
disappears into Existence and is safe there.
He becomes a mirror. If you spit at it,
you spit at your own face.

If you see an ugly face there, it's yours.
If you see Jesus and Mary, they're you.

Bayazid became nothing,
that clear and that empty.

A saint puts your image before you.
When I reach this point, I have to close my lips.

Those of you who are love-drunk on the edge of the roof,
sit down, or climb down. Every moment spent in Union
with the Beloved is a dangerous delight,
like standing on a roof-edge.

Be afraid up there,
of losing that connection, and don't tell anybody about it.
Keep your secret.

~Jalaluddin Rumi, Mathnawi Book IV: 2102-2148

Version by Coleman Barks in Delicious Laughter
published by Maypop books, 1990
.

9:03 p.m.  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

“Fools tread where angels dare not go.”

So the fool has nothing to fear from angels. Remember that demons are just angels in costume (and vice versa). Thanks Anonymous!

Slomo, there’s nothing wrong with holding mommy’s hand or looking both ways, granted.

“I would refrain from casual visits into the astral plane without having developed such skill.”

But casual visits into the astral plane are the fastest and most effective way to develop such skill. We learn to walk by falling down, not sitting down, and certainly not by crying “Don’t walk!”

I cajole because I love. Now let's get out there and kick some demon ass!

11:07 p.m.  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Funny. All this talk about astral travel and dark entities and fragmentation (and keeping in mind the imagery of serpents/lizards) ...

Just yesterday on a list I belong to which discusses things mystical, someone posted a disturbing tale about what happened when he tried to contact his "power animal," i.e., familiar.

The idea of a power animal was something completely new to me,
but I liked it and decided to give it a try. I sincerely asked for a
sign and then went downtown for some hours to have a look at shops,
parks, people, pets etc. and wait for something to jump at me. Nothing
jumped and I did not get my sign in the material world; but after a
couple of hours I saw with my mental eye right in the middle of a shopping mall a cobra.

It took me quite some time to appreciate this, because my first
reaction was rather negative. The cobra stayed away from my inner world until I had learnt enough to accept him/her. After that I had a constant companion and he/she changed from a dark-colored normal-sized cobra to a
transparent shadowy spirit cobra that was quite a bit taller than me.
He/she led me through several underground travels and I thought
there might be some shamanic background to it. But I was clearly told that that was not the case.

In the last few weeks I had several experiences that my power
animal directly interacted with me or rather my body shape (I am both
watcher and actor on those travels. So I experience and watch myself at
the same time). One time I was swallowed and travelled through the snake body.

Then my power animal picked up my body and carried me in his/her
mouth to a circle where several cobras waited, and when my body was
placed in the middle, they dissolved the body with their poison. I also changed
into a cobra myself once. A couple of weeks ago, while I was doing some
pretty intense ego-work I found myself travelling underground
for several levels and was hacked to pieces and re-assembeled at every
level.
Finally, just when I thought my body shape was really
looking bad, my power animal all of a sudden appeared right before my
eye.

He/she had turned into a fire serpent and attacked me at once. The
moment I (the watcher) was struck the body shape turned to ashes, but I felt that in the place where the body had been a field of clear awareness remained.

That all looks pretty violent, but it doesn't feel that way. I don't
feel threatened, I don't feel scared and some part of me seems to
understand what is going on. After the last experience I was wondering
whether the burnt body was just a symbol for an ego-level I had
successfully removed.

A couple of hours ago I experienced some kind of movement in my spine
for the first time. And again my power animal changed appearances. After the fire incident he/she had changed back into the transparent
shadowy look. Today he/she was constantly changing between solid gold (with scales) and polished white marble (without scales).

I have no idea what to make of this.

By the way: I had a visitor for about two weeks some time ago
(obviously when I needed one): A neon green tiger, size and appearance of a
Siberian tiger. But I knew he wasn't going to stay.




Sheesh. Power cobras (doesn't that sound like a malt liquor, by the way?), astral tigers .. what's the point? Why invoke these critters?

mr e

2:48 a.m.  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

7thson mentioned kundalini. I am quite familiar with this and have had many powerful experiences with it over several years. However, I've never had any of the sort of psychotic or spooky episodes related by Krishna or some others. According to everything I've read, the crazy stuff seems to happen to those who are trying to "force" the process. Mine occurred rather naturally and accidentally, as I was pursuing actual spiritual aims - rather than pursuing kundalini itself. Unlike so many who, I believe, claim to know more than they do, I make no claims to know for certain what kundalini is or what it is supposed to do.

mr e

3:08 a.m.  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Fantastic post, as usual. "And a White, for these Red Men, is one whom the spirits have abandoned." This is the difference between anglo researchers and indigenous (non anglo indigenous- anglos are indigenous peeps too, just most are lost to that knowledge and why its important)medicine people. When you go looking for something instead of letting it 'come to you' naturally, like love- ehhh, you can never receive the true format of what you are looking for (as mentioned in a previous message).

This is why you have so many corruptions of spiritual/psycho/religious practices by men like Lovecraft, Crowley, Swann- to name a few. They have no TRUE concept of the ingrained importance of what they believe they are practicing, because the spirits have abandoned them. There is no spiritual guide, much like in western society, for them to be led by in their quest. To be fair, indigenous histories of the world have been filled with evil men of similar nature, intent on using 'otherworldly' power to put their fellow men and women in some sort of peril. And our histories are filled with the stories of how these evil ones were fought and conquered, yet even in defeat their presence in some form was still respected and feared.

With the lessening of spirit guidance in the western world it has become possible for these evils to regain some of their lost power. Whether you belive in ET's, spirit demons or other entities, they are mostly only successful in this realm if provided the right vehicle.

I've had some interesting experiences in sweatlodge, which I cannot discuss in this type of forum, that are complemented interestingly enough by much of what I read on RI. The melding of religion, the spiritual and science...Bhagavad Gita, Olmecas, Michio Kaku- thanks for the info, we're on the right path..

2:04 p.m.  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

"...one is composed of thousands of aliens from all over the universe fighting for control of your body..."


"Who am I?
Where do I come from?
I am Antonin Artaud
and I say this
as I know how to say this
immediatly
you will see my present body
burst into fragments
and remake itself
under ten thousand notorious aspects
a new body
where you will
never
forget me."

2:18 p.m.  
Blogger A Fake Doctor said...

I've been having far too much fun reading these comments. I'm one damn weirdo to be sitting between classes doing this.

Anonymous, I have been inclined to agree with you about the nature of "self." The comments about integration and wholeness are in line with my thoughts. After reading Harpur's book, it occurred to me that what we perceive as self may be "ego" and not the entirety of the psychic landscape. "Self" functions as awareness of being in the present. Experience by definition requires reflection on an event after it has happened to you (so you cannot "experience" something you cannot reflect on later).

To try and suss this out, consider changing a few memories somehow. You could change your belief of your birth city and still have an integrated awareness of who you are--it would not alter your present awareness. You could suffer a head injury and forget who you are and personal facts and still have a present conscious awareness of yourself. You can change small numbers of factors about your psyche and still retain a sense of "ego." A key factor is the causal nature of substitutions in these things, like the question of whether if you replace the planks in a wooden ship one by one, if it is the same ship after every piece has been replaced. If you use the old pieces to rebuild the ship after substituting new pieces, is it the same ship?

So, if one by one you replace a memory or belief with a very similar one, at what point are you no longer yourself? Instead of viewing the self as isolated from the environment and from other things, I am forced to conclude that separation of material things and mind itself is more on a spectrum of change than discreteness. I then imagine that if you took your present awareness, ego, and shifted it into a similar psyche with almost the same memories, almost the same beliefs, you would recognize the familiar aspects of this psyche your ego was inhabiting, but you would also become aware of differences, especially as you encountered greater and greater differences in the psyche in which your ego found itself. This imaginary transition also would necessitate memory of your starting point as well as the incongruity with your "new mind," as the Swans (a band) song goes.

In making a shift like this, from the perspective of your ego moving from one psyche to another, there is a causation, so you are aware of the shift as long as this ego exists. However, if the psyche is not entirely aware of itself, the change could hypothetically result in dissonant, surreal images and ideas floating about the sub-conscious. To the psyche's sub-conscious, the inhabited "vessal" mind, the shift in ego would be acausal, sudden, and chaotic.

So, considering it from the point of view of the vessal psyche, suddenly you have a different ego, and this different "self" manifests itself outwardly as a sudden change in behavior, belief, and surprises your friends and family around you who do not know what to make of it.

I am fascinated by this line of thought, and I apologize if I'm making some inscrutable leaps of logic.

Let's say you want to somehow give this a go. The important question is whether you could stop the process and reach stability, or return the ego to its proper starting point in the host psyche. Alternately, what if there actually is no such thing, and the ego is in some way independent of the wider psyche, or psychic landscape of the "self?" Might you lose your ego, just as Kenneth Grant and Buddha posit tends to happen at some point if you leave the body while maintaining some sort of awareness? Would you not experience chaos of shifts both within and outside your sense of self? Might you experience changes that, from your perspective were non-causal, appearing randomly, when from a different perspective they might be causal?

Shoot, I don't know.

10:38 a.m.  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Jeff, I think you're on to something here with ritual abuse as a means of forced ego death. If an adult makes a decision to "Cross the Abyss"--hopefully they don't do it with the aid of the Scientologists--that's one thing. The fact that so many military types freak out at the Monroe Institute on a few hemi-synch tapes blows my mind, though--are they that attached to normal waking consciousness and ideas of self that they revert to rolling around like Nebachadnezzar?

But with children--that's different. Their identities--as false as identity is in the big picture--aren't formed. Introduce trauma, and you effectively permanently robotize them, make them a broken vessel--not only will they jack into Karl Rove's bullshit republican survival-of-the-fattest reality, those children will leave misery in their wake and bog down everyone around them. Someone without an "aura" acts like bait for psychic predators and brings trouble into the lives of others.

With regards to drugs letting big scary ultraterrestrials through--I'm not as concerned about that. Most individuals and shaman who ingest these things know that many of the entities they encounter are ambigiously good at best, and that even "good" spirits can be totally indifferent. The cause for concern is dumbass kids and spiritually retarded scientists who go out into the ether and stir up all manner of bad shit...

Which I suspect the Milindustplex has done, a bunch of stupid white guys not listening to their red, black, and yellow brothers. Elron is a great example--a serious occultist who had access to powerful techniques--look, Scientology does "work", but it's half-baked, watered down, and psychotocized: look how it starts with self-help, remains totally secular, then goes OT III from business-as-usual New Age blather to Battlestar Galactica.

12:05 a.m.  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Re: Colin Wilson's book, the man he is referring to is Dr. Carl Wickland. He wrote at least two fascinating books (red them here at http://www.harvestfields.ca/ebook/etexts/57/00.htm) about life after death and the reality of spirit interference in the realm of the living. His wife was a trance medium who allowed these ignorant spirits (they were usually unaware of their deceased condition) to use her body so that they could communicate with her husband and be talked into common sense ("You're dead! Leave these people alone!"). These books changed my life, they were the begininning of my truth quest which eventually brought me to this wonderful site of Jeff's. As a Spiritualist, I have faith that the evil of this world will NOT win. At least not on this physical plain.

4:52 p.m.  
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