The Black Arts of the Elite

 

Brian George

In the forum for my essay "The Snare of Distance and the Sunglasses of the Seer," Jasun Horsley wrote, “I'd like to address the idea of the stupidity of the 1% also. I think it may be true of 99% of the 1% but not of the 1% of the 1%; not at all. These do not appear to be driven by a goal of wealth or worldly power but something deeper & darker.” I responded: The whole of the economic, political, media, and corporate landscape does strike me as an exercise in black magic, a part of which is instinctive and a part of which is quite conscious. This exercise may be sophisticated in its means, but it is also, I believe, still fairly basic in its ends, to the extent that anything is. Even wealth and power can be seen as ritual acquisitions; how much of either can anyone really use? Just beyond this, as you say, there may be a space where something more opaque and perhaps more pointlessly malevolent is going on. If I were going to look for examples of opaque malevolence, though, I don’t know that I have to peek behind any curtains. There seem to be more than enough immediate examples of it to go around! And if I were going to piece together some sort of super-intelligent dark globalist cabal, I would probably select a different cast of characters, one that did not include Margaret Mead and Arthur C Clarke and Aldous Huxley. But I think your point is that they are dangerous exactly because they widely admired and appear to be so innocuous. Richard Dawkins, on the other hand, I would be happy to put on any sort of a hit list.

Exceptions aside, I think that I get what you are saying. We are far more at risk from those who have somehow managed to successfully appropriate and rearrange the almost invisible substructures of our minds than we are from any external form of coercion. This has probably been true from the time of the first empires and bureaucracies. I think that it is the rule rather than the exception that the most successful form of colonization is internal. Get people to enthusiastically embrace the forces that oppress them, and there is only a minimal need to resort to force. The brilliance of this method can be everywhere seen in the sad spectacle or US politics. The threat of career death or prison or physical violence is, of course, always there, just out of sight, in the background. I still don’t think that any of this necessarily demands any depth of intelligence or breath of ritual power on the part of the colonizers. To some extent, the process would seem to be an almost automatic one; wealth generates wealth and power tends to accumulate in smaller and smaller circles. Those with power want to hold on to it and those without it want to be a part of something larger than themselves. These are natural enough instincts, which are just as naturally perverted. Whatever the opaque malevolence that we might attribute to some person or group, my attitude and strategy remain the same. As the Roman playwright Terrence said, “Nothing human is alien to me.”

Contrary to what John Lamb Lash and some other contemporary theorists assert, when the Gnostics spoke of the hypnotic power of the Archons, I do not believe that they were referring to the actions of gray aliens from Zeta Reticuli or of blood drinking interdimensional reptilians or whatever; rather, they were pointing to the all too familiar political, economic, artistic, religious, and occult powers that have somehow managed to monopolize the foreground of our attention, who have caused us to believe that we are smaller than we are. (There is a good smallness, of course, of the sort that allows us to slip though the eye of a needle, as well as a bad smallness, which causes us to kiss the boots of those who do not have our best interests at heart.) In The Snare of Distance, I have tried to point to the space that exists between and beneath and within and around things.

All that we see will pass. The familiar will again become strange, and will then cease to exist altogether. The current global empire—which is perhaps maintained by a web of conjurations—will inevitably fall, as has every previous one. “But ours is so much bigger!” some might argue. Unfortunately for the current empire and its henchmen and apologists and true devotees, great size is no protection, as has been proven by the Mastodon and the Tyrannosaurus Rex. The common adage “Time heals all wounds” is, of course, not especially reassuring, and, viewed from one angle, even silly. This is sort of like saying to a person suffering from an agonizing attack of appendicitis, “Don’t worry, you will soon be dead.” Viewed from a different angle, such a statement may indeed point to a meeting place in which all of our current problems will be redefined. It all depends, I guess, on what we think death is, and on how we imagine the space that will open up beyond it.

Continue reading at Metapsychosis:

https://www.infiniteconversations.com/t/the-snare-of-distance-and-the-sunglasses-of-the-seer-part-one-by-brian-george/668/32

Illustration: Ernst Fuchs

The Gods that Descend from the Black Sun Must Be Fed

 

By Brian George

I wrote this piece on sociopathy in high places about five years back. It seemed appropriate to repost it on this national day of mourning.

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Jonathan Zap, in his essay “”Foxes and Reptiles; Psychopathy and the Financial Meltdown,” wrote, “Many have commented that the SEC tends to employ those trained in finance but who are not as clever, ruthless or determined as those they are trying to monitor. I would suggest that they be open to hiring psychopaths with MBAs and offer them multi-million dollar bonuses and recognition, celebrity recognition if possible, for catching high level scams. Since psychopaths are a force of nature we are unlikely to eliminate, we should instead harness their unique talents to serve the socially useful purpose of catching other psychopaths. Who could possibly be better qualified, better able to pierce strategies of deception, than other highly motivated psychopaths? To use Wall Street metaphorically, we need a highly motivated team of clever reptiles and foxes to catch other reptiles and foxes.”

A key principle in medicine is that few things are toxic in and of themselves, or rather, that the amount of the toxin is what determines its effect: a large amount might result in death, but the right amount might heal us of a dangerous disease. The way that the toxin is introduced would play a role. “First, do no harm,” wrote Hippocrates. If only things were so simple! For “what harms can heal.” In their different ways, Allopathy and Homeopathy make use of this principle, which perhaps can be more generally applied. The current global laissez-faire economy is like a body without an immune system.

Death is imminent; doing nothing is not safe. No laws protect us, and a vast shadow eats the animatronic organs of Democracy, which should leave, in the near future, just a shell. It has been 66 years since happy US soldiers jitterbugged with nurses in the street, or grabbed random strangers to kiss. We had beaten the Axis powers. The Free World loved us. We were a beacon to the dispossessed. Now Corporate Fascism rules. Lawyers are the new Luftwaffe. Judges are the SS. Hedge funds are the new Reich Bureau of Occult Affairs. MSNBC, FOX, and CNN compete for the mantle of Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda. They report all the news that’s fit to be projected, that is to say: Before its Time, and provide us with all viewpoints from A to B.

In love, from childhood, with the American Dream, we are hesitant to acknowledge that the year is not 1948. A few dollars are left; they will be sent to an off-shore bank in the Caiman Islands. We are not what we were, but at least let it be said that we have kept up our appearances. No one knows when the Barbarians walked casually in through the gates. Now, they are more inside than we are. They are closer to the Mad Fetus in the control room than we ever were, except, perhaps, at ceremonies for dead heroes in their transfer tubes. At such ceremonies, the presence of the Mad Fetus hovers over us. The dead are a priceless resource. Our grief is a kind of food, which he consumes.

There are rings inside of rings, with fail-safe mechanisms at key bioenergetic points. The gods that descend from the Black Sun must be fed. Select Stockholm Syndrome victims may be called upon to remove the remnants of the burnt offering from the table, at which point the law specifies that it be ritually re-sanitized. The Barbarians wasted no time in dismantling the gates, in order to put up their own gates, which keep us from getting out. The life of the Republic is hanging by a thread. The Supreme Court will soon meet to decide a case about scissors. Perfectly dressed, a force that is not quite human has been scheduled to attack. There are those who say that our response is several decades behind the curve.

And so, to develop our analogy: If we think in terms of “the sociopath-as-toxin,” then we had best be prepared for each possible side-effect in advance, and, in each test case, pay close attention to determine just what it is that we see. We could also compare the two systems in terms of “the sociopath-as-virus.” In Allopathic medicine, whose key principle is supposedly that “opposites treat opposites,” it is—oddly enough—accepted that a neutralized form of a disease might also serve to catalyze the cure. Homeopathic theory is supposed to be the opposite, 180 degrees off, on the other side of the circle, but the key principle is “let like be cured by like.” This is not that different in the abstract from mainstream immunology.

What does this tell us? Perhaps it tells us that opposites interact in ways that we don’t expect. Perhaps it tells us to put aside pet theories in order to focus on whatever works. An almost occult correspondence exists between the toxin and the symptom, such that a small amount of something can help to protect us against a larger and more threatening quantity of the same. A virus attacks, and, once our system has gained access to its encrypted DNA, we are able to manufacture the corresponding antigen. Unseen to the world, a transfer of life-altering data has occurred, which brings the earlier right/ left opposition to a halt, as it redefines the nature of the contest. In Chapter eight of the “Tao Te Ching” we read, “The supreme goodness is like water…It gathers in unpopular places. Thus it is like the Tao.”

The best defense is to co-opt one’s enemy, and to get him to do exactly what one wants. In a similar fashion, Jonathan Zap has suggested that we could use a sociopath with an MBA to root out other sociopaths on Wall Street. If bureaucrats are impotent, and less sharp than those they monitor, then sociopaths may be the necessary agents—whether calibrated toxins or pre-processed viruses—to prompt healing in the Body Politic.

Brian P. Akers, one of the participants in the Reality Sandwich forum for this essay, was somewhat horrified by the suggestion. He wrote, “Any notion that evil or manipulative psycho-malignancy can be hitched up to our wagons plays right into its hands. Evil loves such good but misguided ideas…To afford it an opening, of any least kind, is only to woo, court and flirt with disaster…Psychopathy rests on inherently violent interests or abusive purposes. Period…(We must) recognize that stuff for exactly what it is, and deal with it accordingly…Otherwise, we become its host or prey, no ifs ands or buts." I would categorize this as the classic “You’re either with us or you’re with the terrorists” approach. Well, that isn’t always foolproof, as we have seen. Evil does exist, but it can be a mistake to attribute to it vast mythological powers. Much evil is, indeed, banal, and only appears strong because of our ignorance and the mystique that we lend to it.

As a society, we make a great many “bargains with the Devil,” and, whether rightly or wrongly, we believe that our very survival depends upon some use of “controlled lethality.” On Wall Street, for example, we trust sociopathic hustlers to make vast amounts of money for themselves, in the hope that some portion of the wealth will “trickle down.” And it’s not as if we are unaware of what Wall Street firms are capable of; financial speculation and corruption have fueled countless boom and bust cycles, which have caused incomparably more suffering than all the serial killers who ever lived. Why is it such a problem to employ a sociopath to attempt to take back a little of what another sociopath stole?

The military is another illustration of a bargain with the Devil. In the current climate, Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib are not aberrations, and then there are all of the dead Iraqi civilians that nobody seems to notice or to talk about. 120,000 is one official estimate—but who knows? It is so unimportant that we have not really bothered to count. We could no doubt do things in far better ways. My point is that, in practice, most societies do tend to do exactly what Jonathan Zap suggests—to strategically make use of the particular talents of the sociopath, or, at a minimum, to activate and harness their members’ sociopathic shadows. Sometimes this works. At other times, such as now, it tends to blow up in our faces.

In spite of wholesale surveillance programs, such as the NSA’s NIMD—or “Novel Intelligence from Massive Data”—and the FBI’s now (supposedly) defunct “Carnivore”(!), there can be no prophylaxis against Evil. But we can ask questions that might help to keep us conscious, such as: "Have we incorporated the enemy on purpose or by accident?" The key thing is perhaps transparency. It would probably be best, too, to remove the fox from his role as supervisor of the chicken coop. Somehow “regulation” has become a dirty word.

As Baudilaire said in "The Generous Gambler," “The lovliest trick of the Devil is to persuade you that he doesn’t exist.” In the same way, sociopaths in high places have convinced us that “markets are self-regulating,” that the jet-setting heirs to family fortunes are heroic Ayn Randian “job creators”—veritable Atlases!—and that the best thing that the victim of the Stockholm Syndrome can do is to kiss the hand of his/ her captor. So too: that the 3497 of our 9/11 dead must be avenged by the murder of 120,000—and still climbing—innocent civilians in Iraq, that US citizens can be arrested and detained for a lifetime without being charged, and that midnight military tribunals are a substitute for Justice. A bit of intelligent oversight might be nice.

In the end: Sociopathic evil, as sly and charismatic as it is, is generally not quite as strong as goodness that is active—as opposed to merely polite—and that does not allow itself to be treated like a mark.


(Illustration:  Victor Brauner) )

A Note on "Autumnal Fallout," a childhood memory of the Cuban Missile Crisis

 

 

Brian George

My memory of childhood events is generally hit or miss, and I am always curious to discover why certain events are so much more vivid than others. Why can I return to some as though they were still happening while others are now totally obscure?

I was just looking at the dates for the Cuban Missile Crisis, which began on October 14th and ended on October 28th of 1962. (Others date it from the 15th or 16th to the 27th.) What I had not really thought about before was the length of the crisis, which was roughly two weeks, in relation to my somewhat peculiar psychology as an eight-year-old. Like many kids with the beginnings of an artistic orientation, I was what you would describe as “over-imaginative,” although I don’t know that this really describes my degree of suggestibility and my sense that physical reality was not a closed system.

For example, that same year, I had an odd experience with my friend Francis S. (Francis was three years older than I was, and he would later go on to become a career criminal.) One day, at around 3:00 PM, Francis and I were climbing a long cement stairway with several landings that wound up a hillside behind a neighbor’s house. Halfway up, Francis grabbed my arm, stared into my eyes, and announced that I would never be allowed to leave the landing where we stood. “If you ever take even one step off this landing,” he said, “you will be immediately cut to pieces by ghosts.” I have no idea why I would have believed him, but I stayed on the landing for about two and one half hours. Hunger finally got the better of me, and I summoned up the courage to head home for supper.

Given my sometimes dangerous naiveté, I can only imagine the effect that the threat of imminent planetary destruction might have had on me. Even at the beginning of the crisis, my experience of this threat was visceral, and my sense of its full reality then had two weeks to sink in. I suspect, as I say at the beginning of the piece, that this experience changed my whole way of looking at the world. The two-week time period also gave me an adequate chance to visualize and process the possibility of my own death. The peaceful fall of the autumn leaves at the end of piece, which signals a kind of bittersweet embrace of the possibility of my own and the planet’s annihilation, now strikes me as even more of a literal memory than I had thought.

Read "Autumnal Fallout" at

https://www.infiniteconversations.com/t/autumnal-fallout-by-brian-george/773

Illustration: Brian George, Autumnal Leaf-Head, 2004

Autumnal Fallout (Excerpt and link to full post and reading)



Brian George

"Autumnal Fallout," my surreal memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis, was posted a few days ago on Metapsychosis. I also did a reading to accompany the piece. (Pat Madigan, who was the sound tech for the reading, has offered to help me record a number of other pieces, which I plan to do.) Here is an excerpt from the piece:

We knew too much, by far, without knowing that we knew anything. Just recently, we had decided to take our powers out of storage, and our ignorance was a danger to the cosmos as a whole. In our toy ships, with shovels in hand, we would set sail from our sandbox! With our miniaturized brains, we would boldly go where no man had gone before! The path was not a straight one, however, and the arc of our discovery bent towards the Abyss. We had stepped into the last act of a drama that had been set in motion years before our births, in the springtime of the world. Then, war was a game that the omnipotent seers played; death was an adventure, and the ocean was a vast but comprehensible text. Not only could we read the glyphs inside each atom, we could also read the emptiness on which they had been written. The gods were our contraptions. We had little respect for the authorities that would bar our access to “junk” DNA. We were living mirrors, from whose backs the mercury had not yet been removed. An oath prompted us to throw away almost everything we had, recklessly, and to cover our tracks by destroying the horizon. How infinitely strange it was to be a leaf that somehow did not know that it was hanging from a tree. At last, we had tied the year into a perfect figure eight. October, as predicted, had arrived.

 Continue reading at:

 https://www.metapsychosis.com/autumnal-fallout/

 

 Illustration: Brian George, Bird with Vortex and Primordial Bow, 2004 

The Ubiquity of the Eight-Armed Sphere



Brian George

A few weeks back, I responded to a question posed by Antero Alli, which read, “Are men really mutant women?” I wrote, “I'll stick with Plato's analysis: men and women are the mutant halves of what was once an eight-limbed sphere.” Antero replied, “An eight-limbed sphere...an early model for Leary's 8-Circuit Brain?” (Antero has written two excellent books on this model of the eight-circuit brain—The Eight-Circuit Brian: Navigational Strategies for the Energetic Body and The Shamanic Path to Quantum Consciousness: The Eight Circuits of Creative Power.) I wrote that I was also preoccupied with the number eight, and posted an excerpt from a recently revised essay about the West African tricksters Eshu and Ananse that explores the central significance of this number. Here is one paragraph of the excerpt:

“The number eight (8) struck me as significant. In the Yoruba tradition, eight gives birth to all other numbers. Even one is born from eight. There are eight elements of primordial consciousness in the Hindu cosmos. There are 108 prayer beads on the mala of a sanyasin, or monk. The god of destruction, Shiva, is sometimes portrayed with eight arms, and his roadside shrines, where he takes the form of a small cement head with three shells for the eyes and mouth, look exactly like those for Eshu, the Yoruba trickster god who is the guardian of the crossroads. Shiva is said to have either eight or 108 dance forms. In the Hebrew tradition, boys are circumcised eight days after birth. Ananse is notoriously phallic. It seemed possible that there was some type of connection. Perhaps the trickster invented circumcision a way to show his phallus off. In the Symposium, Plato has Aristophanes argue that human beings were originally spherical creatures with eight limbs, whose halves were arranged back to back. They wheeled around like clowns doing cartwheels. They were enormously powerful, and Zeus feared that they would assault Olympus, so he decided to cripple them by chopping them in two. In Taoism, it is said that the four gives birth to the eight; the eight then gives birth to 10,000 things. There is a Gnostic text about the boundary of the created world called Discourse on the Eighth and Ninth. Ananse mediates between Nyame, the obscure god of the sky, and Asase Yaa, the mother of the Earth. At the boundary of the nonexistent, he weaves an open house. He drops on a self-created thread from the circumference.”

Antero responded, “Going by your post here it seems you may be a little more than ‘preoccupied’ with the number 8. Though I have written two books on the 8-Circuit model (and teach a course on it once a year), I rarely refer to it in my daily thinking processes. It's the experience that symbol systems refer to that has my attention.”

I wrote, “My concern is not so much with the number eight as with the nature of the primordial body. In the late 1980s, I had several experiences during meditation in which my various bodies fell away like the stages of a rocket. At the end, I experienced myself as a kind of crackling electrical sphere. These experiences did not last long, but, ever since, the memory of what it felt like to exist in this type of body has stayed with me as an almost constant presence. My normal four-limbed version and this spherical version somehow coexist. A bit later, in 1990, after a yogic initiation, a small luminous sphere appeared in my field of vision. It was sometimes very bright and at other times almost invisible. Unlike the experiences in the 1980s, which were spontaneous, my interaction with this sphere had more of the aspect of a dialogue. These experiences were subtle rather than violent, and mercurial rather than dualistic, with a sense of the vantage point being everywhere and nowhere. In my poetry and prose, I have attempted to explore these experiences from a number of different angles.”

Image: Victor Brauner, Mythotony, 1942

On the Stupidity of the One Percent (Excerpt from The Snare of Distance forum)



Brian George

Hi Jasun (Horsley),

You wrote, “I'd like to address the idea of the stupidity of the 1% also. I think it may be true of 99% of the 1% but not of the 1% of the 1%; not at all. These do not appear to be driven by a goal of wealth or worldly power but something deeper & darker.” The whole of the economic, political, media, and corporate landscape does strike me as an exercise in black magic, a part of which is instinctive and a part of which is quite conscious. This exercise may be sophisticated in its means, but it is also, I believe, still fairly basic in its ends, to the extent that anything is. Even wealth and power can be seen as ritual acquisitions; how much of either can anyone really use? Just beyond this, as you say, there may be a space where something more opaque and perhaps more pointlessly malevolent is going on. If I were going to look for examples of opaque malevolence, though, I don’t know that I have to peek behind any curtains. There seem to be more than enough immediate examples of it to go around! And if I were going to piece together some sort of super-intelligent dark globalist cabal, I would probably select a different cast of characters, one that did not include Margaret Mead and Arthur Clarke and Aldous Huxley. But I think your point is that they are dangerous exactly because they widely admired and appear to be so innocuous. Richard Dawkins, on the other hand, I would be happy to put on any sort of a hit list.

Exceptions aside, I think that I get what you are saying. We are far more at risk from those who have somehow managed to successfully appropriate and rearrange the almost invisible substructures of our minds than we are from any external form of coercion. This has probably been true from the time of the first empires and bureaucracies. I think that it is the rule rather than the exception that the most successful form of colonization is internal. Get people to enthusiastically embrace the forces that oppress them, and there is only a minimal need to resort to force. The brilliance of this method can be everywhere seen in the sad spectacle or US politics. The treat of  career death or prison or physical violence is, of course, always there, just out of sight, in the background. I still don’t think that any of this necessarily demands any depth of intelligence or breath of ritual power on the part of the colonizers. To some extent, the process would seem to be an almost automatic one; wealth generates wealth and power tends to accumulate in smaller and smaller circles. Those with power want to hold on to it and those without it want to be a part of something larger than themselves. These are natural enough instincts, which are just as naturally perverted. Whatever the opaque malevolence that we might attribute to some person or group, my attitude and strategy remain the same. As the Roman playwright Terrence said, “Nothing human is alien to me.”

Contrary to what John Lamb Lash and some other contemporary theorists assert, when the Gnostics spoke of the hypnotic power of the Archons, I do not believe that they were referring to the actions of gray aliens from Zeta Reticuli or of blood drinking interdimensional reptilians or whatever; rather, they were pointing to the all too familiar political, economic, artistic, religious, and occult powers that have somehow managed to monopolize the foreground of our attention, who have caused us to believe that we are smaller than we are. (There is a good smallness, of course, of the sort that allows us to slip though the eye of a needle, as well as a bad smallness, which causes us to kiss the boots of those who do not have our best interests at heart.) In The Snare of Distance, I have tried to point to the space that exists between and beneath and within and around things.

All that we see will pass. The familiar will again become strange, and will then cease to exist all together. The current global empire—which is perhaps maintained by a web of conjurations—will inevitably fall, as has every previous one. “But ours is so much bigger!” some might argue. Unfortunately for the current empire and its henchmen and apologists and true devotees, great size is no protection, as has been proven by the Mastodon and the Tyrannosaurus Rex. The common adage “Time heals all wounds” is, of course, not especially reassuring, and, viewed from one angle, even silly. This is sort of like saying to a person suffering from an agonizing attack of appendicitis, “Don’t worry, you will soon be dead.” Viewed from a different angle, such a statement may indeed point to a meeting place in which all of our current problems will be redefined. It all depends, I guess, on what we think death is, and on how we imagine the space that will open up beyond it.

Continue reading on the "Infinite Conversations" forum at Metapsychosis:

 

https://www.metapsychosis.com/the-snare-of-distance-and-the-sunglasses-of-the-seer-part-two/

 

Image: Anselm Keifer

 

Agonistic Cooperation as Mind Jazz: Ralph Ellison Vs. Amiri Baraka (as Reenacted by Greg Thomas and Greg Tate)



Brian George

Excerpt:

In their debate at the Hiphop Archive and Research Institute, Greg Tate and Greg Thomas have attempted to correct history by staging an exchange of perspectives as it could and perhaps should have occurred. In their re-imagination of the Ellison/Baraka opposition, direct challenges alternate with playful taunts. These exchanges have the energy of a competition but the warmth and generosity of a collaboration. Such a paradoxical tension is perhaps similar to what happens in a jazz group, where the players must constantly push each other to take risks, if not to the breaking point, and where they must somehow be both competitive and telepathically attuned. Jazz trumpeter and critic Steve Provizer told me once, “People always underestimate the athletic side to jazz. The traditional attitude is 'Prove what you can do or get the hell off the stage.’” In these debates, Greg Thomas and Greg Tate do indeed prove that they are virtuosos of the affectionate provocation, the anti-gravitational riff, and the context-shifting aside.

Continue reading at Metapsychosis:

https://www.metapsychosis.com/agonistic-cooperation-as-mind-jazz-ralph-ellison-vs-amiri-baraka-as-reimagined-by-greg-thomas-and-greg-tate/

Image: Ramare Bearden, Autumn Lamp

The Snare of Distance and the Sunglasses of the Seer/ Part Two

 

If we are a storehouse for the “seeds of every form and the sprouts of every sort of life,” as Pico della Mirandola argues, who knows but that we might not scare ourselves? “The New Man is living amongst us now!” said Hitler, “He is here! Isn’t that enough for you? I will tell you a secret. I have seen the New Man. He is intrepid and cruel. Even I was afraid of him.” Once, we were not so easily impressed. We had not yet volunteered to be eaten by the gods, they to whom we had recklessly given birth. We were not afraid of giants, who burned as brightly as atomic bombs, nor of tiny beings with large eyes, who were skilled at creating simulacra. Our craniums were large, and open at the top, but we did not necessarily need large bodies to go with them. One size fit all. It was endlessly interactive. Mercury had attached its power to our ankles. We did not need wings! Few realize that the oceans fill the footprints that we left, that megaliths mark the vast multitude of our navels, or that the sky is filled to overflowing with our tears.

Much stupider than they think, Earth’s top one percent are nonetheless quite adept at playing games. Let us posit: that they rule by reactivating some antediluvian trauma, the fear of which has been bred into our bones, the records about which have been hidden in the coils of junk DNA, which they, and they alone, have somehow learned to read. Such feats of micromanagement! All data is then made to correspond. Not being actual prophets, of course, their reading of these records is hit or miss at best. “As you are figuring out the world,” they say, “we will have manufactured a new one, and then another one after that!” This does not mean that they are actually in charge. Like us, they are subject to whatever spells they cast, and, as the apparatus of the Great Year turns, they are swept along with the other 99 percent. No part can ever be taken from the whole, nor does the One increase when added to itself. We move as One, unconsciously, and pushed forward from behind.

Read the rest at Metapsychosis

https://www.metapsychosis.com/the-snare-of-distance-and-the-sunglasses-of-the-seer-part-two/

The Snare of Distance and the Sunglasses of the Seer/ Part One



 



 Hi All,

After taking several years off to focus intensively on writing, I am just beginning to send work out again and will be posting a few things on this blog. Here is the beginning of "The Snare of Distance and the Sunglasses of the Seer/ Part One," which has just appeared in a terrific new cutting-edge journal called Metapsychosis. Part two should be coming out sometime later in the week.

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In a comment on my essay “The Vanguard of a Perpetual Revolution,” Okantomi wrote, “I often feel like I can see what is happening in the world, as well as what is just about to happen, and what will almost certainly happen later on, and it’s like no one else sees what I am seeing. It’s eerie, shocking, and finally depressing.” People do have visions of the future, both individually and collectively. Quite often, these visions are troubling, but few bother to follow the implications of their vision to the end, let alone change their lives. One way or another, though, our visions have ways of making themselves felt, even if we do not register what it is we are seeing. The world is a kind of eyeball. There is no such thing as a “safe space.”

Such visions do not necessarily depend upon telepathy; they can be equally present in the automated workings of the culture, in the demographic analyses that drive the decisions of corporate boards. Hollywood blockbusters, for example—such as Star Wars, The Fountain, The Terminator, Blade Runner, Total Recall, Planet of the Apes, Avatar (and all of their various spinoffs)—strike me as a potent vehicles for contemporary mythmaking, whatever their variations in quality, whatever the motives or self-awareness of their directors. There are cues. There are occult knots. Our responses are overdetermined. Our hands freeze in mid-air as they reach for their absent weapons. Our lips form the first vowels of a chant that will atomize a whole city. As we stare into the distance, the ancient world resurfaces as a technological dream on the horizon. We remember the collapse of complex systems, the hierarchical clash between the rulers and the ruled, but we mix and match the specifics of the story. Our best efforts to solidify the Rorschach blot of the future only point us towards the enigma of our origins. To discover what we know, we must sometimes pause to observe what we create. Seized from afar, as by the magnetism of an almost nonexistent teacher, we are pulled by a current all too eager to instruct us. An unresolved agenda speaks to us from the screen. The screen also acts like an iron curtain, through which the bodies of the living may not pass.

Or, in a different mode, people give form to the future through their fears, by what they do not do as much as what they do, by their belle indifference when presented with a series of ultimatums. Our psyches are jagged. Whole periods have gone missing. As crises converge, our refusal to act is a testament to the scale of the coming upheaval. We finger the rigid outlines of our scars, as if they belonged to someone else. We shape the future by our under-the-skin sense of all of those things we know but go out of our way not to think about: that reserves of oil will almost certainly run out in our lifetimes, that the U.S. doesn’t manufacture much of anything anymore, and that there is not enough locally grown food to sustain most cities in a real emergency. There are many things that it seems better not to know. The future is one of the better places in which to store such unasked for knowledge.

It is always possible that the march of progress will indefinitely continue, that “someone will think of something,” that our way of life will require only a few small modifications, that windmills and solar cells will save us. As ancient souls, we know this is absurd. The problem is, of course, to separate and categorize these alternate versions of the future—in simplistic terms, to discriminate between the more false than true and the more true than false. We can see the details but somehow miss the pattern; we can see the pattern but somehow miss the details. To see clearly we must see from more than one location, from all of the 360 degrees of a circle, and then out beyond the 28 U-Turns of a labyrinth, there to access the ten-dimensional records of a sphere.

https://www.metapsychosis.com/the-snare-of-distance-and-the-sunglasses-of-the-seer-part-one/


The Lost Mariner and the Keys to the Holographic Theatre

By Brian George

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In chapter two of “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat,” Oliver Sacks tells the story of “The Lost Mariner,” an alcoholic ex-sailor named Jimmie G., who was 49 years old in 1975, the time of their first meeting. For Jimmie, the Second World War had just ended in a triumphant Allied victory. FDR was dead. Truman was at the helm of the freshly painted ship of state. Silk stockings were again available. Radios blasted boogey woogey. New aerodynamic cars were getting ready to roll. Girls could be expected to spontaneously kiss servicemen on the street. It was 1945. The free world loved us. There were great times ahead.

Bounced from Bellevue to a nursing home in Greenwich Village to The Home for the Aged, where Sacks worked, Jimmie came complete with a cryptic transfer note. It read, “Helpless, demented, confused and disoriented.” At first suspicious of 1945 as a cut-off point—as a year that seemed too symbolically sharp—Sacks went on to diagnose the mariner as a victim of Korsakov's syndrome, resulting in near total short-term memory loss, in this case compounded by extreme retrograde amnesia. For Jimmy, there would always be 92 elements in the periodic table, as he would be glad to demonstrate by drawing you a chart. The “transuranic” elements would never be included. 

Navy records indicate that he was functional until his discharge in 1965. A born sailor, he was well liked by his friends, who gladly made excuses for his reluctance to grow up. His casual good humor was contagious. For sure, there was a taste for alcohol. Now and then a few missing days. A tendency towards impulsive action. It was not like he was a mama's boy; he pitched in, followed orders, and did not complain when the going got tough, but the dream of perpetual youth was already active in this macho Peter Pan. A mariner is meant to be at sea, braving dangers, responding to sirens, perpetually setting off in search of a lost continent. Jimmie was not able to translate water into earth. He should have stayed in the Navy, which provided some structure for this happy go lucky being. 

He never knew how good he had it. You never know what you have until it's gone. Who knew that the Second World War would turn out to be so much fun? After being discharged, he started to drink heavily, quit several jobs and, according to his brother, one day just “went to pieces.” He was never again the same. Around Christmas of 1970 he “blew his top,” became deliriously excited and confused, and at that point was taken to Bellevue. Soon, his pleasant attitude returned. His memory did not. The years flew backwards until 1945, where the pages of the calendar stopped turning.

According to Sacks, intense verbal energy is needed to maintain this constant re-imagining of the present as the past. Events, of course, cannot be trusted to cooperate. It is of no importance, since, in several minutes, no memory will be left of this lack of cooperation. You are, let’s say, a 19 year old sailor, glad to be on shore leave, and the good doctor has just handed you a mirror. Your breath stops—as you stare in horror at the face. Who is this gray-haired stranger so intently looking back at you? Is this some demonic joke? Are you dreaming? Kids can be heard playing baseball in the park outside the window. A man in a white lab-coat sits before you. He seems to be a doctor. It is just possible that you have seen him somewhere before. 

No. You are an expert in Morse code, a trained observer, who during sleepless nights with binoculars on the bridge has scanned the horizon for ME 262s, the latest of Nazi aircraft. You would never forget a face. Is there something wrong? Your heart still seems to be pounding. It looks like your breath has stopped. The good doctor has directed you to look out of the window. The trauma disappears, as though never having existed. Across from you, a man in a white lab coat has asked if you know what city you are in. Your hand shakes, and there seems to be a mirror in it. Just a few hours ago you had cut yourself shaving. So why is there no cut on this puffy clown mask in the mirror? You have two days to get back to your battleship at the San Diego Naval Base. First, you must deal with this jerk off in the mirror, who seems to be repeating every word that you say. 

An informative conversation with the man in the white lab-coat follows. It is, however, quite disturbing. How is it possible that you have never heard of a submarine called “The Nimitz?” Are there Reds in Hollywood? Are you the victim of a secret government mind-control experiment? It is again time to look at the kids playing ball outside the window. No. It can't be. Some girl has hit the ball out of the park! The year is 1945. Things are good all over. Villagers laugh—having overcome their fascist ways—as they hang by the heels the ox-like Mussolini. Hitler and Eva Braun have been hosed out of their subterranean bunker. Budweiser is the king of beers. You not only would but have walked a mile for a Camel. You have just been discussing baseball with that man in the white lab-coat, who you first met at a bar called “Sleepy Joe's.” He is a physicist, perhaps. Does he work at Los Alamos?

You are glad to be a 19-year old sailor out on shore leave. From household appliances to the female body, everything has been redesigned for maximum acceleration. They are just about to take off. Who knows, in 50 years it might be possible to send a rocket to the moon, or is that way out science fiction, Flash Gordon stuff? There are 92 elements in the periodic table. Uranium is the last, but not the least. It was fun to think about atomic energy, which might one day be employed to more efficiently boil water. The splitting of the atom would soon turn us into gods! “Hula-hoops” have appeared in someone else's dream, inexplicably, since they have not been invented yet. Immune to current photographs, you are never hung over at the end of even the wildest shore-leave binge. Although subject to subject to the occasional black out, it is true, and sometimes oddly creaky at the knees, it was good to be an intelligent young man in the pre-Sputnik era!

Is there anything to be done, a way to orient the Lost Mariner? The subject enjoys games, such as tic tack toe and checkers, which do not require long term concentration. Easily bored, it is often hard for him to say if he feels anything at all. Music and art, however, are able to reach inside to touch him, and he is moved to tears by the celebration of the mass. A dove appears. The music of the spheres invades Normandy. Against the bow-ramps of the Higgins landing craft, machine gun bullets ping. Brave soldiers run into them. Pillboxes explode. Kamikaze pilots in their A6M Xeros fall like cherry blossoms on the Leyte Gulf. At Iwo Jima, flame liberates the once human shadows from their maze of underground tunnels. There are no noncombatants. Heads break apart, but not in a bad way, as the light within them reaches out to deconstruct the horizon. Harmony in great waves washes every beach. Time future and time past now turn like a tornado, lifting what they kill. 

Up, and then further up, beyond the smoke-clouds of the Pacific and the European Theatres, beyond the network that the Fates wove from fake archeological artifacts, to the realm of the Ideal. A seizure will instruct the Mariner in the art of bi-location. Shock upon shock overtakes him; he is neither here nor there. Doors to a transparent city open. From its data-banks there is no one who has, in all of History, departed. Passionate in concentration, he waits for the host to land upon his tongue. 



2

Sacks comments on the therapeutic value of this state of total attention. He first quotes Luria: “A man does not consist of memory alone. He has feeling, will, sensibility, moral being. It is here that you may touch him, and see a profound change.” Sacks then says, “Seeing Jim in the chapel opened my eyes to other realms where the soul is called on, and held, and stilled, in attention and communion. The same depth of absorption and attention was to be seen in relation to music and art: he had no difficulty, I noticed, following music or simple dramas, for every moment in music and art refers to, contains, other moments.” Though the author does not use the word, the concept of the hologram is implicit in this passage; however blurred, perhaps the story of each life is a hologram, which refers back, first, to the already completed pattern of that life, and, beyond that, to the larger story of the world. 

The study of disease may yet provide a key to open the locked doors of the memory theater, which, for unknown reasons, has been boarded up since the Renaissance. In every niche of the rotunda is a cue that serves to activate an engram.

If, as folklore and some contemporary research has it, a person’s life flashes before his/ her eyes as the moment before death, we must ask where this Tsunami of information has been stored. It seems strange, indeed, that a process of such scope and power should be able to get underway so quickly. Not that the shutting down of the body is a trivial event, yet it can seem as though the process is just waiting for some pretext to occur.

If chemicals, such as DMT, flood the brain as death approaches, the skeptical reductionist would argue that the visions that result are no more than hallucinations, of a particularly detailed sort. They may look dramatic, yes, but they have no objective significance. A depth-charge of neurotransmitters has disturbed the locus coeruleus, and has caused the right temporoparietal junction to short circuit; “tunnel vision” can occur when blood and oxygen flow is depleted from the eye. The only truth revealed pertains to the abnormal functioning of our cells. It would be just as reasonable to argue, however, that these chemicals purge, prepare, and then activate the brain centers for an alternate mode of processing. In this mode, we may witness the reversal of all previous frames of reference, as consciousness attempts to break from the space outside us in, and not, as is habitual, from the space inside us out. 

So, let us grant that our brains go through chemical changes when the moment of death approaches, as they do during every other aspect of our lives: this is hardly some sort of revolutionary insight. In fact, things could not be otherwise. Let us say that you are diving with your family in a car and, quite suddenly, a tractor trailer turns the wrong way onto the highway and is just about to flatten you. Your brain will no doubt undergo some significant chemical changes. This does not mean that the truck does not exist, that you will not, within a few seconds, be in a catastrophic wreck, or that your neurotransmitters have somehow caused the accident. No, it is simply that death approaches, and that this prompts certain changes in our chemistry. Correlation is not the same thing as causation, as every skeptical reductionist should know. Because a set of chemical reactions may be present in the brain, it does not follow that an NDE must be caused by that set of chemical reactions.

If this flood of information is somehow able to self-organize, and is a purely physiological process, we must ask why such a talent took so long to reveal itself when, in countless situations, we might have put it to good use. If we can access a talent only when we will soon cease to exist, what possible evolutionary purpose does this serve? How utterly perverse: to be able to gain access to the key facts in our story at the exact moment when we are powerless to put such knowledge to practical use. We might theorize that such knowledge is not meant to be practical, or that it is practical, in its own way, but only in regards to ends that we have long been prevented from seeing. Life itself, not only Korsakov’s Syndrome, can create lacunae large enough for whole worlds to pass through, as well as occult blocks that we do not dare to touch. When we are deaf, dumb, and blind, and our hands still seem to work, there is no end to our enthusiasm for grand self-defeating projects. Our hyperactivity drives us to reach the far side of the hamster wheel. When our vision is at its widest, however—and quite maddeningly—we may pause to note that there is no life in our hands.

If this death flash video is other than an accident of biology, a set of haywire neurotransmitters, a massive overstimulation of the temporal lobe, this expanded state might point to the existence of an alternate self, with which we, under certain conditions, can communicate, and of a parallel system in which all events are stored. If this backup system is outside of time/ space as we know it, then there is no reason that s syndrome such as Korsakov’s, as devastating as it is, should be regarded as more than a foreground inconvenience. 

Jimmie, the lost mariner, seems to intuit the existence of this alternate form of memory, of a backup system to the all too human one, and to be fully at attention only during the celebration of the mass. No longer scrambled, his mind was absorbed by each necessary action. His feelings were transformed. His consciousness became one-pointed. If, as Parmenides asserted, there is actually only ONE—one body that is coextensive with its mind; one databank whose limit is the circumference of a sphere; one seed that contains the genetic code of every species; one tongue that twists the grammar of the universal language, so much so that it makes no sense at all; one oceanic dodecahedron that has gone in search of our fingers—then there may be no detail so insignificant that upon it the whole sphere does not depend. Still unable to gain access to its breadth, the lost mariner was nonetheless reassured: It would not be long before he stepped back through the aperture that just yesterday had clicked shut behind him at his birth.

Is Jimmie a lost soul, and if so, what does this imply? Has he lost his soul or has he lost touch with his soul? Towards the end of “The Lost Mariner”—about a different patient, who had suffered a sudden thrombosis in the posterior circulation of the brain—Sacks writes, “Forthwith this patient became completely blind, but he made no complaints. Questioning and being tested showed, beyond doubt, that not only was he centrally or cortically blind, but he had lost all visual images and memories, lost them totally, yet had no sense of any loss. Indeed, he had lost the very idea of seeing, and was not only unable to describe anything visually, but bewildered when I used words such as ‘seeing’ and ‘light.’” Sacks presents this as a clinical description; we could, however, choose to interpret this type of blindness as a metaphor. Like this patient, we have forgotten what it once was like to see. Our vision is quite different than it was, before the pineal gland became no more than a vestigial appendage, before Earth’s Guardians locked the top part of the skull and then threw away the key. 

Six ages or more back, before the Deluge redrew the coasts of every continent, we possessed both local and nonlocal bodies, which together functioned like a kaleidoscopic field. The ocean was a womb, and our incantations were the catalytic seeds. Vast energies danced on the head of every pin. It came as something of a relief when we first noticed that our bodies had grown dimmer, for the world had come to seem too overwhelmingly bright. 

Now, for unknown reasons, we prefer to exist in a contracted state, which to us seems the definition of good health. Life means moving forward. We experience the one all-encompassing moment as a threat.

Dead-end circumstances require desperate means, and invite the use of unconventional technologies. Unconventional technologies do not necessarily imply technologies that are new. We humans have suffered from metaphysical brain damage for millennia. Some technologies that are new to us may be actually very old. If there is no hope for a cure, we should, perhaps, question the assumptions upon which our diagnosis is based. If the physical brain has, in fact, been irreversibly damaged, we should not assume that we have the power or the breadth of vision to begin to figure out what to do. True healing may depend less on what we know than on what we do not and can never know. It is possible that healing may be waiting only for the right pretext to occur. To provoke a near-death experience, for example, initiates from ancient Greece would sometimes throw themselves from cliffs into the sea. Our problem with this method would be twofold: we would prefer to avoid pain and we do not want to die.

If time/ space is a construct, a mere tragicomic convenience, a kind of crutch that assists us in crossing from one lacuna to the next, it could be that any necessary healing may have long ago taken place. If we are deaf, dumb, and blind, we are not well positioned to even begin to form an opinion on the intricate, nonlinear clockwork of the time-cycle. It is always possible that the Mariner may not actually be lost, that some aspect of his consciousness may have never been diminished, and that he may be doing exactly what he had once agreed to do. Let us say that the Mariner has been picked up and transported: Death’s aperture clicks open, and the light, quite unexpectedly, no longer hurts his eyes. An epileptic ocean heaves, and his memory expands to all horizons on its currents. Events that, while he was alive, might have vanished into the depths, might there be again visible down to the smallest of details. With his left foot in one world and his right foot in the next, it seems nonetheless possible that he might have been informed, “No, this is NOT your time. Your mission is not yet complete.”

(Illustrations: Philip Guston)