James, Thank You.....

I was recently in the throes of writing my previous piece, on Carlos Castaneda. It should have been easy, but turned out to be a real struggle. I reached the section on how our reality is created by the stories that we tell ourselves, when my mind found itself turning in the direction of one James Hillman. Maverick student of Jung, father of modern archetypal psychology, Hillman was the person who first impressed upon me how our life is best read as an ongoing narrative, a fiction. While I had barely cast a glance in the direction of his works over the past three years, in the period previous he had been an enormous guiding presence. I decided there and then to check out what he had been up to recently. The answer, I quickly discovered, was dying. On October 27th of this year, to be precise.

I found myself unexpectedly disturbed by news of James's departure from this material world; unexpected at least given the lack of attention I had paid him in recent times. Yet, from a wider perspective, Hillman can be counted among the dozen or so greatest philosophical, psychological, and spiritual influences on my life to date.

My introduction to Hillman came in a roundabout (yet plausibly inevitable) fashion. Around 1998, in an attempt to find a way out of the cul-de-sac I had led myself up with my practice of Buddhism, I decided to experiment with something else. Shamanic journeying. Once I embarked upon this course of action, quite remarkable things began to happen. During my journeys through the 'lowerworld', as shamanic traditions call it, I found myself participating in all sorts of strange stories, passing through dream landscapes, and encountering all manner of beings human, animal, and 'mythical'. I appeared to be entering an entirely different dimension of existence; only a hair's breadth away and with its own particular coherent reality, yet the door into its magical world seemed normally tightly closed. And participation in this dimension was leading me smoothly out of exclusive identification with the narrow confines of my ego, something which my Buddhist practice, despite its avowed aims, was failing miserably to achieve.

Needless to say, Buddhism as I knew it had nothing to say about the experiences I was having, despite their relevance to the professed goals of Buddhadharma of expanding consciousness beyond the limits of ego concern and identification. In Carl Jung I eventually found somebody who could shed light on all of this. Notions such as 'the collective unconscious' and 'autonomous contents of the psyche' began to provide a conceptual framework for my world-shifting experiences. Most importantly, Jung was clearly someone who had 'been there': a read of 'Memories, Dreams, Reflections', his sort-of autobiography, makes this abundantly clear. And Jung readily accepted the reality and value of such non-ordinary states of consciousness.

From Jung and his archetypes, it was a seamless transition to Hillman's archetypal psychology. Hillman's contention that there is an ever-present archetypal dimension 'behind' or 'beneath' our everyday realities resonated deeply with me. His emphasis on 'soul-making' was a welcome counter to the disembodied spirituality that I had occasion to fall into during my Buddhist heyday. And in his later years Hillman explored with passion anima mundi, soul of the world. By so doing, he was taking psychology right away from its obsession with self and ego, instead aligning it with ancient western teachings about existence. He was saying that soul is to be found as much in the animated, ensouled world around us as literally inside our own limited selves. The title of his 'psychological foreword' to 'Ecopsychology' says it all: 'A Psyche the Size of the Earth'.

In the spirit of my reflections on Castaneda's final book, I would like to say a belated yet heartfelt 'thank you' to James Hillman for his courageous work detailing many insights into the workings of the human (and the non-human) soul. Especially I would like to express my gratitude for these of his works: 'The Dream and the Underworld' for helping me to see that images, and non-ordinary states in general, should be taken 'as is', rather than translated into dayworld concerns; 'Anima' for re-presenting Jung's inspirational notion but cutting through the macho and endlessly oppositional bullshit; and 'Thought of the Heart and Soul of the World' for its masterly deconstruction of pernicious modern notions of separateness and its presentation of a far more beautiful alternative. James, thank you.

A Book For The Dying

The Sonora Desert: but where is Don Juan Matus?

Among the few surviving material fragments from my life in the mid-1970s is the bundle of age-worn faded yellow pieces of parchment-like paper that goes by the name 'Journey to the Centre of the Brain'. You probably get the idea. Much of it is unprintable, consisting as it largely does of convoluted ramblings on the themes of attachment, overcoming the ego, transcending materialism and asceticism, and the like. Yet, sprinkled amongst the purple hippie prose of the sixteen chapters of 'Journey' are, if I may say so, some genuine insights. And there is Chapter Fifteen: the Booklist. Having reminded the reader of the limits of the written word - that it merely points the way, rather than being the way -, I conclude with the sentiment: 'I would like to thank my authorities, the authors.'

The list includes some of the usual suspects for the time: Alan Watts, Norman O. Brown, Herman Hesse, along with my personal Tibetan primer, 'Secret Oral Teachings of Tibetan Buddhist Sects' by Alexandra David-Neel ('The Tibetans have got it all sussed out,' I enthuse in my accompanying notes. 'This is the best summary.'). But pride of place on the list ('Perhaps these are my favourite books.') goes to the first three volumes in a series that was to impact deeply on mine and innumerable other people's lives: 'The Teachings of Don Juan', 'A Separate Reality' and 'Journey to Ixtlan' by one Carlos Castaneda.

I took Castaneda, the unwitting and sometime witless sorcerer's apprentice, and Don Juan Matus, his shaman/sorcerer teacher, the 'very wise fool', as I described him in 'Journey', extremely seriously. Long fireside conversations into the depth of the winter night with one of my fellow communards became the order of the day. Like most other Castaneda readers of the time, we didn't think to question the literal veracity of the stories and teachings that cast their spell upon us. Since then, however, a goodly number of sceptics (not to mention out-and-out non-believers) has emerged. For some people, this debunking of the literal Castaneda has been hard to take - a trawl through the internet throws up sites where folk clearly feel betrayed on discovering that Castaneda might have written most of his stuff in the library rather than faithfully recording 'real' meetings with Don Juan, Don Genaro, and the rest.

Just where all Castaneda's material came from we will never really know: it's a secret the author took with him to his grave - or on his final flight from the tonal, as he might put it in his books. At the end of the day, it's a piece of information that I feel is largely irrelevant. Those who bewail the possibility the stories didn't literally happen have fallen precisely into the mindset that the books are intended to shake us out of. They have fallen prey to the same literalism that plagues Christian and Muslim fundamentalists, insisting on the historical reality of the stories comprising their central texts. They have failed to see the narrative basis to our reality; how reality is created by the stories we tell ourselves. Even those who protest with 'I don't fall for this story bullshit, I just believe in what I see and hear' are still telling themselves a story.

All the 'major world religions' are actually based on stories, whether they like it or not. Hindus seem generally more comfortable with this state of affairs, happy to found their systems and practices on myths about the gods and goddesses as communications of deeper realities. And some Buddhists I have known develop a pragmatic approach, pointing out that the historical accuracy of the Buddha's life story is secondary to whether the Buddhist practices work or not.

Whatever the historical status of Castaneda's writings, their continued power as narratives that influence people, and specifically orient them toward wider realities, cannot be doubted. This is as true for the final book in the Castaneda corpus, 'The Active Side of Infinity', as for any other. Penned shortly before he died, it is remarkable for several reasons. While not explicitly stated, one of the prime concerns of this book, written by a dying man, is how to prepare for death. Obliquely, it addresses the question: if we know we are soon to die, what should we be doing? The overall context for appropriate action is provided by Don Juan Matus's instruction to Carlos to 'relate the memorable events of his life.' At first, Castaneda doesn't get it. He relates stories about what he thinks were important moments: being admitted to university, the time he nearly got married. 'No, no,' protests Don Juan. 'These stories are too personal.' Stories that finally fit the bill are ones that 'touch every one of us human beings, not just you.'

Carlos is further instructed to undertake the 'recapitulation'. He has to make a list of all the people he has ever known, and recall everything he can about each one. Carlos soon finds out, as Don Juan says, 'the power of the recapitulation is that it stirs up all the garbage of our lives and brings it to the surface.' Further, he is told to find the people who have been important in his life, but to whom he has failed to express his thanks. 'Warrior-travellers don't leave any debts unpaid,' says Don Juan. 'You must make a token payment in order to atone, in order to appease infinity.' Castaneda must search them out and buy them as a gift anything they may ask for. The people concerned turn out to be two women he had known at junior college, Patricia Turner and Sandra Flanagan. Finding them again requires the service of a private investigator, but atone Carlos eventually does. And as if all this is not enough, he is then confronted by Don Juan with those people he failed to thank and who are no longer alive, including those he did not communicate with because he was blind to their proximity to death. Strong stuff.

To cap it all, it is in 'The Active Side of Infinity' that Don Juan gives his teaching on the 'topic of topics', namely the flyers, the mind predators, an episode previously covered in 'Archons Everywhere', Pale Green Vortex January 25th 2011.

Texts for the dying? The Bardo Thodol (popularly known as 'The Tibetan Book of the Dead')? Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, maybe? But 'The Active Side of Infinity' is right up there as a most instructive book for facing the inevitable disintegration of our physical form. And its final chapter is one of the most disquieting things I have ever read; no happy-ever-after endings in the Castaneda version of life. A chapter that deserves an essay of its own.

Picture: Wise Woman University

Images of Summer Gone....

Sacrificial Lambs

Eden Court is the number one venue in Inverness for the arts: music, theatre, independent cinema all proudly gathered on the banks of the River Ness. Eden Court was noticeably devoid of high culture for three days just over a week ago, however: it was closed to the public while staging a very special event indeed. Though notably lacking in good jokes, the theatre undoubtedly saw plenty of buffoonery, generously provided by a veritable gaggle of court jesters. Experts in the performing arts were there aplenty, intended to deceive the unwary, and with ambition and intrigue fit for a Shakespearian historical drama. The event: the annual conference of the Scottish National Party.

Delegates were treated to a special welcoming party on the Saturday, as folk from various anti-windfarm groups across the length and breadth of Scotland met outside to protest at the Scottish misgovernment's crazy plunder-a-hill policies. I decided to go along. It would, in fact, have been hypocritical not to have done so, given the ferocity of my own objection to these metal-and-plastic monsters that are now bestriding some of the most marvellous wild locations in Europe. The result of my own investigations over the past several years, reported in part on Pale Green Vortex, is that large-scale windfarms possess no redeeming features whatsoever. They are promoted by, and benefit, three groups of people only: as a publicity stunt by politicians wishing to appear 'green' on the world stage; by energy companies and landowners who stand to make a fast and easy buck from government policies; and by those infected with a delusional, abstracted notion of 'environmentalism', as distinct from the real thing.

With their high-fives and victory fist-waving, the leading lights of the Scottish National Party demonstrate a worrying triumphalism. And, because they are driven by ideology - independence at any price and renewables at any cost - they can be blind to the pragmatic concerns of ordinary human beings. Put another way, they are dangerous people. They will be undone by their hubris in the end, I am confident; history seems to teach this lesson. But in the meantime, Scotland is subject to their shrill cries of 'Scotland for the Scots', while simultaneously blighting the lives of many who happen to live within their domain.

The SNP version of independence for Scotland seems firmly bedded in what, following John Lash, I refer to as the victim-perpetrator mindset. And as a grand ideology, independence, like all Big Ideas, transcends the individual. It follows, therefore, that it has its own sacrificial lambs. And foremost among those lined up for slaughter in the name of the Great and Good Cause are those who cherish wild places as a vital source of spiritual nourishment. At the head of the queue, as many of Scotland's upland and rural areas are destroyed, are those who happen to live there in the first place.

People tend to inhabit rural places for two main reasons. Either they are born there, or they move there because they find the rhythms of nature and the countryside more conducive than those of the Big City. Whichever way, to suddenly find your chosen way of life shattered by an army of enormous turbines waving at you from a nearby horizon or right on your doorstep, as a result of a decision made hundreds of miles away and in which you have played no part, is shocking. I am fortunate enough not to gaze at a bunch of turbines from my bedroom window, but many of the people gathered outside Eden Court now suffer this fate. And simply moving away often proves impractical or downright impossible, since nobody wants to buy a house next door to an industrial junkyard.

One of the placards being carried at Eden Court posed the question: 'Does independence mean dictatorship?' In the SNP version of events, most likely 'yes'. Even local democracy stands no chance in the face of the juggernaut of SNP-driven central government. Critical example: many decisions on windfarm applications are initially made by local councils. If turned down by the local bodies, they may be taken to central government by the energy companies. Get this - every single large-scale application refused by Perth and Kinross Council (which includes within its remit some of the most quintessential of Scottish landscapes) has subsequently been given the go-ahead by the powers-that-be in Edinburgh. So the more local form of government, which might just be a little more in touch with the realities of the location concerned, is held in total contempt. We have a situation of complete disempowerment by Central Control. Otherwise known as 'modern democracy'.

The terms of discourse of modern politics are such that everything which endows human life with true value is excluded. Matters of soul, heart, and spirit; of our intimate and intrinsic connectedness with the non-human world. These are strictly off the map, in general, and specifically when decision-makers discuss windfarms. Even the vague and cliched 'quality of life' gets short shrift nowadays, treated as a luxury, when finance and economics are presented as being so pressing. Times of apparent economic difficulty actually suit the political classes very well, since they can concentrate their materialistic minds exclusively on what comes naturally to them: food, water, property, employment, division of resources. They are on home ground.

Delegates strode in and straggled out. Some were courteous, accepting the leaflets offered to them, while others marched brusquely by. One or two stopped to engage in 'heated discussion', and a few more quietly, almost conspiratorially, whispered that they agreed with us. The protest had excellent front-page coverage in the Press and Journal, one of the local newspapers, which hopefully brought the scam to the awareness of more people. Thanks go to the reporter and photographer for this. As I walked home from the demo, I realised that I had been touched quite deeply by a mixture of sadness and inspiration. Sadness at the needless destruction of landscapes, wild nature, and the lives of those living proximate to them. Yet inspired by the tireless efforts and courage of people fighting for what is of real value to their souls, and for the soul of the natural world of which we are part.

Photo: Oast House Archive

The Gagging of Casey Hardison

Photo: Casey Hardison, entheogenic activist (Erowid, Brighton Argus)

Readers of Pale Green Vortex will already be familiar with Casey Hardison, sentenced in 2005 to twenty years in jail for producing psychedelic-type substances at his home in leafy Sussex, southern England. On September 22nd this year, Casey received a letter. I paraphrase freely, but this is the gist: 'Mr Hardison. We are finding your persistent correspondence with us on the subject of the legal status of various drugs increasingly tiresome and irritating. We are unable to stop you in your tracks rationally, as the logic of your position is irrefutable. Therefore, we have no option but to simply issue an order to shut you up. Yours, etc.'

Yes, folks, this is what those great western values of freedom of speech and democracy have come to after all these years: we don't like what you have to say, so shut up! It's as simple as that. During the course of the past seven years, Casey has consistently stood up for truth, honesty, liberty, and equality. At his trial, he did not do as criminals are expected to do - bow their head in shame, mumble something about seeing the error of their ways, and hope for a lighter sentence. Instead, he asserted his right to freedom of consciousness - cognitive liberty -, and argued that the 'War on Drugs' is in fact a War on Consciousness. As evidenced in the Operation Julie trial 25 years beforehand, such unrepentant behaviour is guaranteed to antagonise the powers-that-be, and result in a suitably harsh sentencing from an affronted man in a wig.

Instead of shutting up and lying down on his prison bed, Casey has devoted his time and considerable energy to delving into UK drug laws in great detail. The fine print of his investigations can be found through either the freecasey link on Pale Green Vortex or the Drug Equality Alliance website. I suggest that anybody concerned about freedom and discrimination in modern western society should take some time to look carefully at this information. But in summary Casey has argued that, on the basis of scientific evidence of their relative potential for harm, the socially and culturally acceptable drugs alcohol and tobacco are currently under-regulated, while various other substances, such as ecstasy and LSD, are over-regulated. The current scheduling of drugs does not mirror their relative dangers in the slightest. This is not personal opinion, but fact - see the work spearheaded by Professor Nutt for starters - and is not what you would expect if the purpose of law was to protect the individual from the effects of dangerous substances.

Furthermore, Casey has suggested that alcohol and tobacco, being drugs with a certain potential for harm, should logically be placed alongside other drugs under the strictures of the Misuse of Drugs Act, 1971. The special status that they enjoy is based on cultural factors - even the government has admitted as much -, and in effect discriminates against those who may which by personal preference to use other drugs instead which are no more harmful. This does not mean that alcohol and tobacco should be prohibited: this act simply provides the framework for regulation in one form or another of a variety of substances. Casey's argument has been wilfully misrepresented, however, and on September 22nd an 'Extended Civil Restraining Order' was duly placed on this individual who dares to repeatedly point out that the emperor wears no clothes. By the time the Order expires, Casey will most likely have been conveniently deported to the USA after completing his jail sentence.

As the 1960s and early 1970s, years that shaped much current UK drug policy, fade into distant memory, ignorance can no longer be held up as an excuse for the continuing disconnection between the legal situation and reality. It is impossible to avoid the conclusion that another agenda is at work. The Casey Hardison fiasco is further evidence that the prime purpose of law in modern 'democratic society' is not, as might be supposed, to protect the rights and freedoms of the individual, and to ensure fairness. A main function of law, in fact, appears to be to protect and perpetuate a particular version of reality. It also serves to advance the interests of the few at the expense of the many - but this is simply one aspect of that particular version of reality. There is no other possible conclusion that can be drawn from a close examination of the facts that we are confronted with, and it is vital to grasp this realisation if we wish to understand much of what happens in the world today.

A hallmark of the 'reality' that we are fed as the one and only reality is its strongly hierarchical configuration. The greatest enemy of the pyramid-of-power dominator culture spawned by this version of reality is anything that reveals other, wider realities, with their other, more positive attendant realms of consciousness. Dominator culture is terrified by the stance of Casey Hardison like it is terrified of nothing else; widespread access to other realities and forms of consciousness will be its undoing, and it will do anything within its power to suppress this knowledge. And while access to other realities can be afforded by a variety of means, the quickest and most reliable is with the assistance of psychedelic-type, or entheogenic, plants or substances. Not everyone is comfortable with this notion, but ask any Andean or Amazonian shaman. And on the subject of one of Casey's products, Andy Roberts summarises neatly in 'Albion Dreaming': 'At its most potent, LSD gives the user no option but to examine and challenge all accepted notions of perception, thought, identity, culture and the nature of reality. The danger to the Establishment must be that if enough people used LSD there might ....... be a revolution that could threaten how life in Britain is lived.' (Chapter Thirteen, 'Revolution in the head'). Just so, Andy, just so. And we wouldn't want that, would we?

Producers of psychedelic-type substances generally get a bum deal - particularly if they are caught. No mention in the New Years' honours lists for their excellent products or services to humankind. Andy Roberts bemoans the lack of public protest when the Operation Julie defendants were tried and sent to jail, but I wonder what the point would have been: I can't see how it would have helped the chemists in any way. Manufacturers (or alchemists, depending on your take on reality) such as Casey Hardison and some of the Operation Julie defendants were primarily motivated by idealism, but this was outside the frame of reference of Judge Niblett's consciousness in the Hardison case, when he could only envisage greed and profit as motives. He could only envisage greed and profit because they are the currency of his version of reality! The truth is that thousands, if not millions, of people have had their lives quietly enriched and enhanced as a result of the substances that came out of a farmhouse in rural 1970s Wales and a room in rural Sussex. The acid chemists have helped improve countless more people's lives, opened more eyes, than have all our politicians and High Court judges put together.

When Al-Megrahi of Lockerbie notoriety was returned to Libya by the Scottish Misgovernment, he was accorded a hero's welcome on his coming home. Will a true man of courage and unflagging positivity receive a similar reception when deported to his native US soil? Probably not. But Casey certainly should be.....

Bring On the New.....

Visionary art by Alex Grey

In his seminal presentation for ARC 1,'Guerilla Psychonautics', Neil Kramer briefly goes into the notion of 'neophobic shutdown'. This, he explains, is the condition of refusal to entertain new and strange ideas and angles on life, reality, etc. Neil suggests various reasons for the defences going up in this apparently irrational manner. There's fear, built up and played upon by the media. Previous investment: if we have spent all our life buying into a particular version of reality, backing out can pose a threat to our very identity. Then cognitive dissonance, the uncomfortable and potentially depressing feeling of holding conflicting ideas about life simultaneously. Finally, Neil enumerates our inability to focus for any length of time. Fast cut edit in the media has led to attention deficit disorder being the modern norm, with a consequent inability to evaluate new information.

For myself, I have the opposite tendency. If anything, I am a neophile. Strange, unorthodox notions attract me like a bee to a honeypot, while most of 'normal' is old, tired, the same old fraudulent song played over and over again. It's an attitude I've had since an early age. I loved my parents, but I had no wish whatsoever to emulate the kind of life they led - even more so for my aunts, uncles, and grandparents. 'There must be more to life than this' was an intuition of mine even in infancy; which was accompanied by its darker corollary, the sense that a 'normal' life is stuffy, limited, and (to turn Buddhist for a moment) unsatisfactory. Then the 1960s arrived with an explosion of the new. Musical sounds that had never been dreamed, yet alone heard, before hit the radiowaves on a weekly basis. I was tailor-made for the era.

Pale Green Vortex is liberally sprinkled with ideas to make a neophobe's blood curdle: the multidimensional nature of existence, the entheogenic origins of our sense of the sacred; archons and nature spirits; partnership cultures as an integral part of our heritage. Not to mention the windfarm scam and global warming fraud as two of the least ecologically-enlightened topics on the political, social, and economic agenda. It may well be that some of these notions prove without foundation. But, in the spirit of a review of Terence McKenna's pioneering 'Food of the Gods', which declared that 'if only a fraction of McKenna's thought is true, he will someday be regarded as the Copernicus for consciousness', if only a handful of themes explored on Pale Green Vortex have real substance, this is enough to force a radical revisioning of what life and consciousness are about.

So, on to this article's neophobic spine-chiller, which concerns the function of the brain and its relationship to consciousness.....

Modern science, it would seem, now understands a good deal about how the brain works. Interestingly, though, with regard to 'what is consciousness?', it has failed to make much headway at all. Which is a polite way to say that it still hasn't a clue. There is a telling 'editorial note' provided by one Professor Richard Gregory in the New Penguin English Dictionary (2000) which sits on my bookshelf. 'The human brain is the most complicated structure known, with its 100 billion nerve cells, each with around 2000 connections' is its boggling factual introduction. But the note ends with this frank yet ominous statement: 'How it generates consciousness remains mysterious.'

Just so, just so. It's a magnificent giveaway of the mainstream 'scientific' assumption that gets in the way of any real understanding. That the brain generates consciousness is the only way that modern science can conceive of things. This is the necessary reflection of its model of the universe as made up of separate units of matter and other stuff that are, of themselves, by-and-large dead. From a shamanic and psychonautic perspective this view is totally ridiculous. The shamanic, psychonautic universe is alive, its separate units actually inextricably interconnected. This worldview proceeds from a direct experiential rather than theoretical basis, that of anima mundi, the world ensouled. Consciousness is not generated by the brain, but is a 'given' of reality itself. As John Lash writes of those specialists in reality and consciousness, the initiates into the Mysteries of Eleusis: 'They realised that the entire cognitive field of human beings and of all sentient life is set up and supported by the external world, a projection of the living intelligence of the planet.' And, as David Abram says in his article 'The Perceptual Implications of Gaia': 'the psyche is a property of the ecosystem as a whole' (quoted by John Lash, 'Not in His Image', ch 16).

The brain turns out to be, not so much a generator of consciousness as a receiver. And we can take this further. Not only is it a receiver, but it can tune into different channels given the right circumstances. Prime among the aims of shamans, tantrikas, Gnostic telestai, psychonauts, and others is developing the ability to tune into other channels of reality for reasons of gnosis and healing. To expand the analogy: there is, it seems, a default channel to which we are tuned as human beings from early on. This is 'channel normal',' channel survival'. While familiarity with this wavelength is obviously important, it is commonly presented as the only one, and anybody protesting this viewpoint is dismissed as either dangerous or mad - or both. But it is like having a television complete with satellite dish and capable of receiving a hundred stations, only someone has hidden the remote control and all you can watch is BBC One. I submit that any quest for wholeness, wisdom, or whatever, will be futile, or at best seriously compromised, without experientially embracing the multi-channelled nature of consciousness and the universe.

This realisation that the relationship between brain and consciousness is not as often assumed can create a good deal of soul-searching for the best-qualified minds educated within the paradigms of mainstream science. One such example is Stanislav Grof. Classically-trained in psychiatry, he became a leading figure in the use of psychedelics in psychotherapy until this became legally untenable. He went on to develop the technique of holotropic breathwork ('holotropic' meaning 'moving towards wholeness') as a powerful means of opening the doors of the psyche (or tuning into other channels of consciousness, to use the model in this article).

In the Preface to 'When the Impossible Happens', his personal memoir, Grof relates the following: 'My initial encounter with holotropic states was very difficult intellectually, as well as emotionally challenging. In the early years of my laboratory and clinical research with psychedelics, I was bombarded daily with experiences and observations for which my medical and psychiatric training had not prepared me...... I was experiencing and seeing things that...... were not supposed to happen......' And later: 'After I had overcome my initial conceptual shock, incredulity concerning my observations, and doubts about my own sanity, I began to realise that the problem might not be in my capacity to observe or in my critical judgement, but in the limits of current psychological and psychiatric theories and of the monistic, materialistic paradigm of Western science.' And in the Epilogue he concludes: 'I now believe that the universe was created and is permeated by cosmic consciousness and superior creative intelligence (anima mundi) on all its levels and in all its dimensions.' Newtonian worldview, bye bye.

Another such example is Dr. Rick Strassman, who was privileged to conduct the first legally-sanctioned research on consciousness and psychedelics in the USA for 20 years during the 1990s. As he describes in his interview with Graham Hancock in 'Supernatural', he tried very hard to explain away his volunteers' many strange experiences under DMT (which include numerous encounters with alien beings) through more orthodox models. He tried the idea of subjective hallucinations, followed by Freud's notions of the unconscious and Jung's archetypes. But his volunteers were all unimpressed. Eventually, he was forced to treat their experiences 'as is': 'It was then I began allowing myself to consider that DMT provides a portal into alternative dimensions of reality.' And he says further: 'The receiver model is just that. The brain receives information at the level for which it happens to be tuned at that particular time.'

With the subjects of multidimensional consciousness and the brain as organ of reception rather than generation, we have stumbled into an area wherein lie some of the greatest fears of the Control System, including the hornets' nest of current inquisitorial approaches to psychedelic (entheogenic) usage. All for another time.......

With thanks to Nilo for mentioning to me Rupert Sheldrake, so inadvertently reminding me of the theme of this blog piece.

It's a Gas, Gas, Gas.....

Father of free energy?: Nikola Tesla

Maybe it's time to come clean on the Archons. Unlike the Gnostic mystics who, it seems, as a result of their direct experience, took the Archons to be literally and inorganically real, I have to date no such personal experience (I should consider myself fortunate in that respect, I suppose). I can therefore claim no definite take on their status. In the manner described in my most recent post, 'Conspiracy? Wot Conspiracy?', I 'hold' them in my mind, an item in the portfolio of possibilities. Whatever the literal truth of the Archons may be, the adjective 'Archontic' to denote a mindset, a way of thinking and the creation of that way of thinking, is illuminating like no other. It has helped me to understand various phenomena in a clear, precise manner that previously seemed impossible.

Large segments of the modern environmental movement (so-called) is obviously a product of Archontic thinking and action. As John Lash describes in Chapter Seven of 'Not in His Image', the main method of Archontic deception is, in Greek, antimimon, literally 'countermimicry'. 'This means to copy something but make the copy, the fake version, serve a purpose counter to the original thing or idea.' Much modern environmentalism fits the bill to perfection, so much so that it takes the breath away. The sense of sacred connectedness felt by indigenous peoples from time immemorial, fed into the modern west by pioneers such as John Muir a century ago, and more recently by others like Arne Naess and the notion of 'deep ecology', has been turned on its head by self-serving ideologists and delusional groupings who have already taken up more space on Pale Green Vortex than they deserve.

One such grouping in particular, the multinational windfarm conquistadors, are probably pooing themselves at the moment. If not, they should be. This is as a result of the discovery of huge deposits of shale gas in Lancashire, northern England, which opens up the possibility of reasonably-priced, reliable energy supply for decades to come; in brief, everything that wind turbines fail to deliver. There are pollution questions surrounding shale gas and its means of extraction, 'fracking'. How serious these are, I don't know, and probably neither does anyone else. Predictably, the CO2 fanatics are up in arms as well. But these concerns can hardly outweigh those of the wholesale destruction of wild landscapes by wind abominations, not to mention the devastation of large tracts of peat bog, the Scottish CO2-trapping equivalents of the Amazon rainforest.

Energy is the key to many things. It is a topic through which people can be easily manipulated by the generation of fear, be it of nuclear leakage, the Earth frying due to Anthropogenic Global Warming, or whatever. Free energy is anathema to the current Power Complex, since it would liberate people from one of the main means by which the Dominators can control them - their need for energy. In the past, it would seem, anyone getting too close to the secrets of free energy would be dealt with appropriately: ridiculed as mentally unstable, bought out and the plans thrown away, or with poison or a gun. Interestingly, 'open source methodology' has been introduced into the field to avoid such problems in the future. This consists of making ideas widely available immediately; getting them 'out there', into the public domain, so taking out the inventor will be pointless.

Of course, some of the chief local Archons, notably Chris Huhne and Caroline Lucas (a self-confessed Watermelon, by the way, and proud of it!), are already up in arms about shale gas. Presumably, they prefer to see people die of cold - it's mainly old people, after all, not very productive members of society, but at least dying in a good cause. In the meantime, the shale gas story will, I suspect, unravel most interestingly. I predict a concerted dirty tricks campaign, spearheaded by the BBC and one or two choice national newspapers. It will focus on pollution hazards (real, imagined, and exaggerated), CO2 fears (largely Archontic imagination), and give great prominence to deluded, new-school environmentalists protesting. This is actually already happening on the BBC, by the way. It's funny how these same media outlets don't give ANY coverage to all the other protests and campaigns that spring up locally in response to nearly every new windfarm proposal. Still these are real people, whose real quality of life is being threatened, not self-righteous ideologues out on an Archontic picnic. This is media eco-fascism for you.

Conspiracy? Wot Conspiracy?

When I write about BBC 'news' and 'news documentaries' being propaganda, and a means by which a particular form of consciousness implants its own version of reality, some people just don't get it. Since this all now seems transparently obvious to me, I find this a bit irritating - but that, I suppose, is my own problem. If any programme fits the bill of being what Neil Kramer calls an 'official broadcast', telling people what to believe, it is the BBC's 'Conspiracy Files 9/11', recently beamed into the homes of the millions as part of their season to commemorate the tenth anniversary of 9/11.

I was slightly dismayed when a friend of mine told me that he had watched it, and found it good enough for him to be convinced that the 'official story' on 9/11 was the one and only truth. For myself, I had a look at the programme out of curiosity, to see whether the BBC would do what I suspected it might with the subject, and clearly viewed it through a different lens. It was indeed the selective and not-so-subtle cut-and-paste hatchet job on conspiracy theories that I could have predicted. The commentary was delivered in a rather old-school upper middle class BBC female accent, the type that is designed to ooze 'believe what I tell you, I'm not the kind of girl who sleeps around' respectability. The message of the programme was clear: 'Do not believe the doubters, have faith in us. We have your best interests at heart and would never dream of lying or hiding anything from you. There really is nothing to worry your little heads about. So shut up, get on with your life as normal, and leave us to fight terror and generally look after you.'

By chance, a couple of days ago I tuned into a programme - two hours long, no less - devoted to analysing and dissecting the 'Conspiracy Files' programme. And a most thorough and convincing job it did as well, clearly demonstrating the half-truths, the partial and selective nature of the information broadcast by the BBC. Surprisingly, this programme was not actually put out by the BBC, nor any other mainstream media network. UK Sky channels 200, 201, and 203 host Controversial TV and Showcase TV (this is liable to change, and they sometime go off air completely due to lack of funds), which relay, among a variety of other stuff, material by Paradigm Shift and Edge Media. A wide variety of viewpoints can be found on these networks, with a 'we present, you decide' approach, as Red Ice Radio (accessed via the internet) puts it. But these networks are invaluable for presenting material that otherwise just does not get any exposure at all in the mainstream - so, in effect, does not 'officially' exist. It pays to be selective, but in recent weeks I have seen some excellent stuff: the films 'DMT: the Spirit Molecule' and 'Cancer: Forbidden Cures'. And the coverage surrounding 9/11 was first rate.

One thing that is worrying for the mainstream is that doubts about, and disbelief in, the 'official story' on 9/11 continue to be voiced, not by wacky, easily-dismissed, fringe radicals, but eminently respectable and well-qualified engineers, physicists, and university people in suits and ties. It was John Lash (I think) who predicted that, with the tenth anniversary of 9/11, the message would be 'Forget all that conspiracy stuff now. It's all in the past anyway; time to move on.' This was actually the underlying agenda of the BBC programme. But 9/11 refuses to go away. That so many people, both in the USA and around the rest of the world, fail to swallow the official story must be highly encouraging. It shows how more and more people are waking up to the reality that the Control System and its emissaries cannot be trusted or believed at all; in fact, may act in ways that we might normally consider unthinkable.

For myself, I have no final take on 9/11. There is a plethora of data on melting points of metals, dynamics of building collapse and demolition etc, that I am simply not qualified to evaluate properly. Having said that, the more I see and hear, the more the official version appears riddled with inconsistencies and improbabilities, with difficulties in its narrative glossed over and many questions left unanswered. Following Neil Kramer's advice, I am 'holding' possibilities in my mind, rather than grasping at belief in a desperate need for certainty. To 'hold' an idea in ones mind, not believe or disbelieve and thereby attach it to ones already weighty ego identity, is elegant and open-ended. To hold ideas such as 9/11 being an inside job, a controlled demolition or whatever else, is something I can live with for now.

Out on the fringes of the abundance of ideas about what really happened on 9/11, and true to the general observation that the fringe is where things get most interesting, is the work of Dr Judy Wood. In the events of that fateful day, she sees evidence of the possible use of directed energy weapons, a technology that few people even realise may exist. If this seems far-fetched, bear in mind that the truth often seems fantastic from any current limited vantage point, just as the once preposterous notion that the Earth revolves around the Sun was. Inconveniently for the scoffers, Judy Wood is detective-like in approach: her work is based rigorously on hard evidence, not a priori theory. The facts are laid out on her monster website, where she goes into everything in detail. She also has an equally monster book, 'Where Did the Towers Go?'

There is another world-changing spin-off from Judy Wood's investigations: the existence of directed energy weapons would also point to the possibility of free energy. 9/11 conspiracy theories effortlessly morph into that area of undoubted Control System scam, fraud, and conspiracy: the Great Global Warming Alarmist Lie. As with 9/11 shenanigans, here too there is hope, as more and more people see through the surreal fiction peddled our way by politicians and the mainstream media. Increasingly, the Global Warming Alarmist Lie is becoming the preserve of a section of guilt-ridden, life-denying, Guardian-reading, white middle classes (in Britain, at least). The man who uttered to me the other day 'Global warming, my arse' is far more in touch with reality. As with 9/11, the Control System hopes we will cast aside our doubts, accept their stories and their taxes and high prices for inefficient and intermittent energy supply, destruction of the face of the planet in the name of saving it, and just get on with it. How long the windfarm scam can continue in Britain before even politicians cannot hide how much it is crippling the economy and effectively throwing people into needless poverty, I do not know. But the prospect of free energy, even as a hypothetical idea, raises yet another suspicion I have about windfarms. Doesn't it seem strange that, in this modern world of cutting edge physics, hosts of amazing new technologies and the rest, we are expected to have faith in a form of energy production that even Fred Flintstone would have considered prehistoric. I mean, sticking pointy bits of metal and plastic into the sky and hoping the wind will blow is not exactly sophisticated thinking. Yet the Control System appears set on shackling us with inefficient and expensive forms of energy production, rather than exploring the possibilities of liberating cheap or free energy for all. Funny, isn't it? Work that one out for yourself. And whether our so-called 'green' organisations and people would embrace cheap, plentiful energy for all is an acid test of their real attitudes towards humans that deserves an article by itself.

Once again, the reality foisted upon us by the Control System proves more surreal than anything a science fiction writer could come up with. And whether we can really buy the story of a bunch of Muslim extremists fresh out of pilot school and wielding box cutters stage-managing and choreographing the pure and perfect theatre and tragedy that was 9/11 is another question we need to soberly consider. In the meantime, I suggest that it behoves any aspiring responsible planetary citizen, not to mention any budding Bodhisattva, to research these matters. The resources are there and can be easily accessed, thanks largely to the internet. Check out Judy Wood, 9/11 truth, Paradigm Shift TV and the rest; google PNAC, and explore some of the stuff that the BBC and the rest of the mainstream doesn't tell you, doesn't want you to know about. Don't fall victim to what Neil Kramer terms neophobic shutdown, the tendency to dismiss new ideas and information because of the threats and challenges it might pose to our current way of life, sense of security etc. Without this work, any understanding of mind and consciousness is, I feel, seriously lacking an essential dimension. This is where I come into this field....

A Democracy of Visions

Edgar Broughton and Sidney Cohen: two sides of the same tab.....

I passed the 1960s in the pleasant but generally unremarkable Home Counties market town of Aylesbury, England. An unexpected gift was bestowed on the place in 1969, however, when it began to play host to a rock music club named Friars. The club quickly gained a reputation for its discerning eye in spotting good quality bands in their infancy. Some, such as Mott the Hoople, went on to commercial success; others found fame elusive, yet were equally good.

One fairly regular fixture at Friars was the Edgar Broughton Band, and I saw them several times. They put on a solid set, but two songs always stood out. One was 'Out, Demons, Out', a kind of public exorcism of the evil that surrounded us all. The other was 'Dropout Boogie/Apache'. Edgar Broughton was, to one impressionable sixteen-year old at least, hairy, scary, and very hip, the very epitome of everything that my parents' generation had so lamentably failed to be. We would all watch, wide-eyed and slack-jawed, as His Royal Hairiness scowled, growled, and magically intoned those fateful words: 'What do you want, what do you want/ They think they know what it's all about/ Turn on, tune in, drop out, drop out/ I told you once, I told you twice'. From that moment on, the die was cast, my fate sealed: I didn't stand a chance.

Turn on, tune in, drop out: Timothy Leary's clarion call to the mass of disenchanted visionary youth that terrorised a generation. For those with any sympathies for psychedelic culture in its many guises, the third in the triad of exhortations always proved the most problematic. Ray Manzarek, keyboard player in the Doors, says that, instead of urging people to turn on, tune in, and drop out, Leary should have been urging them to turn on, tune in, take over. Elsewhere, Paradigm Shift TV exhorts us to turn on, tune in, and transcend. Sidney Cohen, an early LSD researcher and therapist, bemoaned the effect of Leary's ravings: 'Cohen had warned that Tim was skimming the cream of a generation and leading them down a blind alley. While the Best and the Brightest were grooving on the cosmic, the second-rate and the venal were appropriating the traditional slots of power' ('Storming Heaven' by Jay Stevens, Epilogue). As an Oxford graduate who went on to help form a cosmically-grooving commune then teach Buddhist meditation, I take Dr Cohen's charges very personally.....

Once the 1960s were out of the way, it was difficult to find anybody (with any social credibility at least) who would give much support to Tim Leary's apparent crusade for social revolution spearheaded by psychedelics. Terence McKenna, a leading light for the next generation, was at pains to criticise the excesses of the '60s, pointing to the use of psychedelic substances by a pioneering dedicated few, rather than widespread ingestion by the psychedelicised masses. And more recently still, Rick Doblin of MAPS (Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies) has bemoaned what he calls the backlash that took place against psychedelics as a result of their reckless use in the 1960s. This backlash has meant that research into their value in psychotherapy (as psychological aids for the terminally ill, for example, or for those suffering from post-traumatic stress) has been curtailed or, in most cases, brought to a grinding halt.

These pronouncements echo a debate amongst protagonists of psychedelics in the early years: whether they should be available to all, or whether access should be reserved for those who mystic-cum-author Aldous Huxley referred to as 'the Brightest and Best'. This was Huxley's more cautious approach: provide LSD for the philosophers, politicians, artists and academics - those mainly responsible for shaping and influencing society at large.

For the record, it is worth noting that the advocacy of indiscriminate distribution of LSD sometimes accredited to Leary is a caricature and/or distortion pumped up by the popular media. Leary was in equal measure visionary genius and unashamed opportunist/personal publicist, and he said many different, often contradictory, things at different times. In his more sober moments, however, he called for careful and responsible use of psychedelics, as sacred substances, to be taken in a conducive environment by those who were psychologically prepared. He claimed that, had the US authorities listened to him and established clinics/temples where people could use psychedelics in the company of experienced guides, much of the negative fallout could have been avoided. If it is to be associated with any one figure of the era, the more casual use of LSD could possibly be linked with Ken Kesey and his busload of tripping Merry Pranksters.

The idea of restricting access to psychedelics to 'the Brightest and Best' is all very well. Except that it is unworkable and terribly naive. Who decides? Cui bono? What's the basis on which 'the Brightest and Best' are selected? The critique peppered liberally throughout the posts on Pale Green Vortex - of Control System dynamics, dominator culture values, and the insight that all this is a construct of consciousness - makes it abundantly clear that there is no benign Ubermensch who is likely to look favourably upon drawing up a list of the deserving few on whom the privilege of psychedelic experience is to be bestowed. There is something that rankles about Rick Doblin's continued lament about the backlash against psychedelics as if, had Timothy Leary not been around, the research and the therapy could have quietly continued unabated. Despite the stupid and ill-judged things that Leary said over the years, the disturbing truth remains that enormous numbers of people found their lives enriched by following something of the course he outlined. More fundamentally, there is the very nature of the vistas opened up by LSD and other psychedelics. While sometimes described as 'non-specific amplifiers', they have tended to turn people away from a life dedicated to 9-to-5 and a blind belief in the diktats of dominator culture. The potential that they embody is inherently threatening to the status quo. This is the unspoken agenda in the 'War on Psychedelic Drugs' that sees Casey Hardison serving twenty years for producing psychedelic drugs (for comparison, Albert Speer, Minister of Armaments and War Production to the Third Reich 1942 - 45 received the same length of sentence at the Nuremberg Trials). So I think Rick Doblin is mistaken in pointing the finger solely at the 1960s for the collapse of official research into psychedelics. Point one finger, yes; but look at the effects of the substances as well. Access to the multidimensional nature of our being is the greatest danger of all to the continued reign of dominator culture. If Rick thinks that the Control System will eventually smile upon research, provided it conforms to the standards of modern science and is conducted by folk with PhDs, I hope he is correct. I rather doubt it will come to pass, however.

By the same token, Sidney Cohen's (and Ray Manzarek's) objections are fatally flawed. It is not a case of slotting envisioned beings into the places of power, thereby producing a benign government. The ego-softened consciousness does not want to - is not able to - function within an apparatus constructed by dominator cultures over millennia. It needs to find other ways of working, to create different forms of social organisation that reflect its own experience of reality.

I suspect that, at root, the collapse of the psychedelic-fuelled counterculture of the '60s and early '70s was tied in with the lack of a mythology connecting it to a sacred past. It imagined itself as something new, unprecedented, an evolutionary leap. Better to envisage the rejection of dominator culture as part of a greater tradition extending into deepest prehistory. It is not a case of creating something new, out of thin air, but one of reconnecting with humanity's true, but almost lost, heritage. It is here that Terence McKenna made one of his greatest contributions, through his work on what he terms the 'Archaic Revival'. The modern western counterculture - to the extent that we can talk of such a thing - senses its heritage stretching back to pre-Christian times: to the Minoans, the Gnostics as expounded so elegantly by John Lash, the partnership cultures of Catal Huyuk and beyond. Now the tree does not simply show off flowers of great beauty: it boasts a sturdy trunk and hardy roots that penetrate to the deepest strata of an enriching subsoil.

It is not a question of limiting use of psychedelic substances to therapists, medical researchers, or any other 'Brightest and Best'. Indigenous cultures regard their psychedelic, or entheogenic, plants as sacred, and their sacredness is not normally reserved for an elite. It is a matter of ensuring the substances are accorded the respect and seriousness they warrant; handing out acid like sweeties at free festivals in the '60s and '70s wasn't a very clever idea. Timothy Leary had likened tripping to being an aeroplane pilot, where training and a licence are required. For more sense on the subject than anything Control System emissaries such as politicians have ever said, take a peek at the section on psychedelics in Transform's document 'After the War on Drugs: Blueprint for Regulation' (available online). Introduce an element of rationality to the subject and it's not so hard to get your head round at all......

Place of Power, Part Two

Photos: same place as in Part One, different season......

Neil Kramer encourages us to seek regular contact with nature, which should be in as pristine a state as possible (interview on Hundredth Monkey Radio, July 17th 2011). This immersion in a world that is not created by the ideas of human beings allows certain processes to take place that cannot in an environment that is synthetic, he suggests. He might also include the perceived effects of climbing upwards: how, as one enters the realm of the mountains, the skin containing us within one particular type of experience becomes more permeable, and the realisation that we are multidimensional beings in a multidimensional universe becomes more apparent (this is the theme of my first ever post on Pale Green Vortex). On the mountains, what is first interpreted as an encounter with 'Other' slowly morphs into an experience of 'Self' in its truer, broader form, free of the artificial constructs of human ideas. Paradoxically, it is when we are away from the world of human inventions that we can feel our humanity most deeply. Factor in the personal coefficient - of a place in the mountains that had first issued an invitation to me over thirty years ago - and it is no surprise that I was back on the hillpaths at the first available opportunity, en route to the mountain of power.

As twilight descended, I clattered into a bothy (a small hut), waking up two other mountain people already curled up in sleeping bags in the process, and managed to grab a few hours' sleep. Then, with the other residents still in the land of dreams, I headed into a fresh but overcast early spring morning, intent on following the route I had stumbled on the previous year. The decomposed remains of a once-magnificent stag deer straddled the sides of the gorge I followed up to the col, the gap between the two mountain peaks. I turned right, into cloud and utter silence, and began scaling stony slopes towards the summit - of the mountain named Lurg Mhor, incidentally. Strange shapes emerged from the mist; the divide between form and formlessness became indistinct, irrelevant. I passed a tiny upland loch on my right, cradled in the arms of low crags, then hauled myself up more steep rocks. At last, I made out the summit cairn through the gloom. Circumspectly I approached, before finally standing on the very top of the mountain. Nothing. Not a sound. Nothing to see, apart from a few undistinguished grey rocks. No animals or plants. Not a movement. I did not care. I had done what I needed to do.

The following spring found me in the grip of a personal crisis. Giving up my day job, I voluntarily entered what Tibetan Buddhists call a bardo, a kind of gap or interval between one state or stage and the next. It can feel like suspended animation, as if the ground has been pulled from beneath ones feet. In this state of extreme mental discomfort, I knew there was only one thing to do: go to Lurg Mhor. By the time I reached the foot of the mountain I was already exhausted, but I was nevertheless certain that this was the right place to be. The peculiar quality of the area began to impress itself on me more strongly than ever as I began the slow climb. Finally reaching the col, I looked out over neighbouring peaks from a truly magical spot and allowed new, strange influences to impinge upon my consciousness. Once on the mountain summit I lingered long, then ventured out along its rarely-visited eastern ridge. At last I managed to pull myself away from the mountain top environment. Beginning my descent, something inside me gave, and tears started to roll down my face. By the grace of the mountain gods, a crack was opening up in my psyche, allowing me to shed whatever I needed to relinquish from the past, and catch a glimpse of a new life ahead.

This year I returned to the mountain once more, in less turbulent circumstances (coming off a mountain with your eyes swimming in tears is no easy matter!). Having put my tent up on a remote and lonely lochside the evening before, I emerged into the total silence of the place soon after first light. A smattering of rain greeted me rudely as I packed up my belongings before starting up the steep slopes that lead onto the west ridge. This was a new route, a tough one, and for a short time I considered abandoning the climb altogether. What is a man doing, at 7 o'clock on a Sunday morning, struggling up slopes of deep heather, slippery peat, and thick wet grasses? Then a reflection of the early morning sun streaked fiercely over the top of the ridge far above, where a group of deer appeared silhouetted on the golden skyline. Motionless, they peered at me, and motionless I returned their gaze. At that moment, I knew why I was there. In a curious way, I had come home........

Earthship Notes for Lammas

Highland Scotland in twenty years' time?

In the beginning (well, fairly near the beginning) was the Club of Rome:

'Men and women need a common motivation, namely a common adversary against whom they can organise themselves and act together...... Bring the divided nation together to face an outside enemy, either a real one, or else invented for the purpose...... In searching for a common enemy against whom we can unite, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine, and the like would fit the bill...... The real enemy then is humanity itself.' (italics mine). This is an extract from 'The First Global Revolution' 1992 report by the Club of Rome, self-appointed group of VIPs which, along with the sister organisations the Clubs of Budapest and Madrid, apparently numbers among its members Henry Kissinger, David Rockefeller, Mikhail Gorbachev, Al Gore, Desmond Tutu, Bill Clinton, and the Dalai Lama.

Even NASA, some of whose folk have been at the forefront of the Human Global Warming scare, has conceded that the situation is not quite the way they thought it should be. A new study in the science journal 'Remote Sensing' (peer-reviewed, so it must be true - ha ha!) reports that NASA satellite data from the years 2000 to 2011 show the Earth's atmosphere is allowing far more heat to be released into space than alarmist computer models have predicted. The study further indicates that far less future global warming will occur than UN computer models have forecast. This real-world data contradicts multiple assumptions fed into alarmist computer models. 'There is a huge discrepancy between the data and the forecasts that is especially big over the oceans.' (Dr Roy Spencer, report co-author).

You might think that such findings, impacting deeply on the future of humanity on Planet Earth, not to mention the way that billions of pounds are scheduled to be extracted from our pockets in the form of planet-saving carbon taxes, and the further huge amounts of our money that are going to subsidise painfully expensive and inefficient forms of energy production (planet-saving, of course) that litter our beautiful landscapes with trash, would warrant a mention in the mainstream news. Not so. The BBC (now officially an abbreviation for British Brainwashing Conspiracy) failed to report it. Strange, that.

Just in case anybody hasn't got it yet: the whole Anthropogenic Global Warming scare is a fraud, a total fraud. I could spend half my free time cataloguing the evidence on Pale Green Vortex, but it's all out there for everyone to find; it just needs a bit of personal homework. Plus, the prime purpose of this blog is solution-oriented, rather than intended to dig up more and more dirt on the Control System and its tactics, a depressing and never-ending task. To paraphrase the alarmist twisters-of-truth, the science seems pretty settled, for the time being at least. Which is not to say that humans have no effect on the climate - I don't think anyone makes that claim - but our impact is relatively small.

Sadly, our modern 'environmental movement' is an archontic construct. It bases itself on computer modelling and other artefacts of one-eyed science, and is a deception away from real environmentalism, which has as its root what John Lash calls 'rapturous bonding with the Earth'. The real thing is an empathetic emanation from direct experience, not a product of database and pathological fear, paranoia, and hatred of humanity. It embraces and celebrates the multidimensional magnificence of Gaia, instead of reducing her to single-dimension points on a computer graph. Believe in the Great Fraud, and you have been well and truly suckered. It's as simple as that, I conclude.

Place of Power, Part One

First acquaintance was, I think, in 1968. August school holidays with my parents in north-west Scotland. By now, my father probably regretted deeply the moment when he first introduced me to mountains: now, while he wanted to read his newspaper in peace, and my mother potter about the holiday cottage or caravan, I was champing at the bit to climb a few more peaks.

One warm, grey afternoon (typical Highland fare in August), my patience ran out, and I took off alone. I followed a dry and narrow stalkers' path winding through the heather. After what seemed like hours of snaking across lonely moorland, I suddenly found the ground falling away in front of me. An awesome prospect opened up below and beyond. It was as if I had stumbled upon some unknown, or at least long-forgotten, paradise, a shangri-la placed to one side by modern civilisation. A broad but deep valley stretched out below me, containing a lone distant dwelling place, beyond which the enormous shapely spire of a mountain lifted upwards. The mountain was green - all was green - unlike the rocky landscapes I had become accustomed to around Torridon further north. Everything was still and silent; I stood entranced, for once my hyper teenage soul at peace.

A few years on, I went into self-imposed exile, renouncing the mountains and wild places in favour of a life dedicated to truth, realisation, and other big words based in the big city. For thirty years, the vision remained buried beneath the untidy pile of urban life. Until, one day about six years ago, the wheel revolved full circle, and I found myself taking up residence not a million miles from Shangri-la.

I declared the best part of my first year of living in the Scottish Highlands a sabbatical. I was in truth an urban refugee, bruised by too many years of the big city nightmare and by the death of both my parents. Into the open space that I had created slowly re-emerged the vision of that solitary walk more than thirty years ago. It was a memory etched more deeply into my mind than any other from my teenage mountain years. Surreptitiously, I set out to rediscover the location of this magical place. Poring over the maps during the long Scottish evenings of winter, I eventually had a hunch.

In mid-January, a period of cold, crisp, heaven-blue weather descended upon northern Scotland. The wind was from the east, which meant that the skies would be clearest on the west coast. Feigning nonchalance, I suggested to Martha an overnight stay in a place she hadn't visited before (always an irresistible carrot), with a little walk thrown in for good measure. The die was cast; we were soon on our way to Strathcarron.

The ground was frozen hard as we started off through the heather. The colours were pristine, surreal, and soon we were passing through landscapes with a real remote, untouched quality about them. The serrated outline of the Cuillin Ridge on Skye appeared sharp on the western horizon.

It was not so much a walk as a slip-and-slide; progress was slower than anticipated. Huge flat slabs of ice and frost awaited us as we finally left the world of light and squeezed through the defile of the Bealach Alltan Ruaridh, a place the sun's rays never get to penetrate during the months of winter. A herd of deer disappeared silently up the hillside, and the vision opened up in front of me. The valley seemed slightly less deep than in my imagination, but I still stood there entranced; this was the magic place. A wisp of cloud hung playfully over the top of the mountain, and the hillsides, while brown in their winter raiment, seemed to glow diaphanous from a source within.

During the ensuing months, the mountain began to crowd in on me. It seemed that I couldn't climb a single hill without its distinctive cone appearing on some distant skyline or other. The mountain was mocking me. In the end, I had no option: I had to get up close - which means climbing to the top. There was one problem, however. The books will tell you that, along with its neighbour, the mountain is one of the most remote of the Scottish Munros (the highest peaks in the country). However I looked at it, I couldn't see me getting there and back in a day. Besides, the mountain demanded greater respect. So I invested in a lightweight sleeping bag and bivi-tent (a dark, rustly, condensation-prone roof over your head so tiny that you cannot sit up inside) fit for purpose. And Saturday, August 26th, 2007, was earmarked as the day for the expedition.

I radiated optimism as I approached Inverness bus station in mid-afternoon, a few light clouds racing across the wide blue sky far above me. My mood darkened, however, when the bus I was catching failed to materialise. A diminutive elderly lady shuffled across the pavement in my direction. 'Are you waiting for the Lochcarron bus? It leaves at four o'clock on Saturdays now, not three. They haven't amended the timetables yet. Very bad.'

Yes it was very bad, since the days of long evenings are well past by the end of August; I realised how tight my schedule was. The omens continued to be unfavourable when we finally set off an hour late. The blue skies above Inverness quickly gave way to a pall of grey, and by the time we reached the small settlement of Achnasheen the rain was coming down. I was disgorged from the minibus at Strathcarron station, where it was nearly dark. On hearing that I was camping out for the night, the bus driver looked back at me with an extremely odd expression. 'I wouldn't fancy that' he remarked. 'You'll probably get your tent ripped apart by a stag.'

I set off up the hillpath like a bat out of hell; or a bat into hell, more like. Ink-dark clouds scudded across a glowering sky, and the evening was punctured by a smattering of sharp showers blown in on the brisk wind. Approaching the bealach in the long, dull twilight, I could see that everything in the direction of the mountain was obscured by heavy, grey cloud. I descended to the broad, green floodplain, which proved to be swampy and less conducive to bivi-pitching than it appeared from a distance. There was also the presence of considerable numbers of tent-demolishing deer to be taken into account......

It was completely dark when I finally set up camp by a stream, where another squally shower started up as I tightened the insubstantial-looking guy ropes by the light of my head torch. The wind flapped the walls of the bivi-tent in the early night mercilessly, and sharp showers continued to punctuate any attempt I made at a decent sleep. Around 2 a.m. I ventured outside to add to the growing sogginess around, only to discover that one of the tent pegs had completely disappeared. I had camped in a rapidly-expanding quagmire of peat.

By first light, almost all energy had been sucked from my being. I had pretty much given up on climbing the mountain. As I poked my head out of the canvas, however, the wind had died, and the cloud was beginning to lift. Packing up my soggy abode, I headed straight up the hillside, which was rough, tough, and boggy. As I approached a craggy section, the cloud came down again, however. Rock faces appeared fleetingly, before hiding once again behind swirling masses of thick grey, creating the impression of a landscape of incredible complexity. 'Not good' I muttered to myself. Then another voice, maybe that of a guiding spirit, spoke: 'Chill out. Relax. Just be.'

I came off the hillside, and adopted the leisurely and mindful style, venturing still further into back-of-beyond country with my senses wide open, and stumbling upon what looked like a secret and more simple route onto the mountain. In the meantime, the magic place of power had taught me a vital lesson: respect.

Bright Midnight

They will be out in force this Sunday, I suppose, a ragbag of devotees straggled down the boulevards of Paris leading to the cemetery Pere Lachaise. Their destination will be the spot that, to the continued discomfort of the French authorities, remains one of the most-visited places in Paris after the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre. Here resides the grave of one Jim Morrison, and this Sunday marks the fortieth anniversary of his death.

During his brief time on Earth, Jim Morrison was many things to many people. The speed of his physical deterioration, from the lithe poetic rock-and-sex Adonis of 1967 to the podgy grizzly bear figure awash with alcohol of 'Roadhouse Blues' and 'L.A. Woman' remains difficult to grasp. Yet he stands apart from the rest of the pantheon of the era on more than one count, thereby qualifying for serious mention on Pale Green Vortex in a way that Lennon, Hendrix, Clapton and the others simply don't.

I have come across the criticism that Jim Morrison's verse reads like the poetry of a high school kid. Setting aside the question of what is wrong with teenage poems anyway, communicating as they can from a mind that is relatively fresh and uncluttered by the luggage that burdens the mind in later years, the fact remains that there is a simple directness about the best of his work that is rare indeed. A few words strung together is all it takes to conjure up imagery that is deep, vivid and powerful, a communication direct from the primeval swamp, the source of his vitality.

Unique among his counterparts, Jim Morrison was endowed with a genuine shamanic sensibility. Replete with images from the animal world and nature, his words can communicate the intense aliveness and (sometimes disturbing) meaning of the world around us. At his best, he calls up those primitive and archetypal forces that are part of our being, but which 'civilisation' has done its level best to disown. Chris Knowles, author of 'The Secret History of Rock'n Roll', shares a similar view in his interview on Red Ice Radio, Sept 30th 2010 (second hour, for subscribers only!). Speaking about the cultural upheavals of the late 1960s, including the revolution of the psyche centred on psychedelics, Chris asserts that Jim Morrison, alone among the icons of the period, recognised that this was all an attempt to reconnect with our shamanic heritage, reaching back into deepest prehistory. Its roots were profound and natural (a theme more fully elucidated for the next generation by Terence McKenna in his call for an 'archaic revival'). We can speculate that the overall failure to properly realise this ancestral birthright was a major factor in the eventual demise of the cultural revolution of the time.

Read as a metaphor, an incident in Jim Morrison's life can shed light upon this topic. In January 1966, Jim took off with a friend, one Felix Venable, heading for the Mexican desert. Their aim was to find a shaman with whom to eat peyote, the sacred cactus. However, taking some acid on the way south, they never made it beyond Arizona, and returned to Los Angeles battered and bruised (literally), having been attacked, presumably by a bunch of southerners who didn't take kindly to longhairs.

Had he reached Mexico and found the great cactus shaman, the 'total fantasy' take on the story goes, Jim Morrison's life just might have turned out differently. As it was, his own primordial visions remained insufficiently anchored, and his life began to spin increasingly out of control. Without a strong and concrete sense of connection to the gnostic shamanic traditions of the past, life can be extremely difficult indeed. I speak from personal experience here. If the archaic connection is not directly - and regularly - sensed, the individual can be tossed around like flotsam on the surface of the great stormy ocean: of inner psychic craziness, alongside extreme dissonance with Control System consciousness on the outside.

Jim, of course, was also an object for Control System fear, aggression, and paranoia. He didn't play by the rules, created trouble; like Timothy 'most dangerous man in America' Leary, he was a man marked by the authorities. Inciting kids to tribal riot wasn't exactly the name of the game; basically, they wanted him out. Their chance came in Miami, on March 1st 1969, when a characteristically alcohol-loaded Morrison went into overdrive, with the result that he was charged with lewd behaviour and indecent exposure while on stage. The surviving Doors have always maintained that the charges were trumped up, a claim laughably backed up on December 9th, 2010, when Florida State granted Jim a pardon. Thanks, Florida; that makes everything all right then.

That he had been thumbed by the U.S. authorities and stood to spend time in jail clearly spooked Jim: 'Can you give me sanctuary/ I must find a place to hide/ A place for me to hide. / Can you give me soft asylum/ I can't make it anymore/ the man is at the door' he sings plaintively near the beginning of 'The Soft Parade'. He fled the U.S.A. in March 1971 to France. With no extradition order between the two countries, it was a place he could feel safe. He spent four months in the cultural haven of Paris before dying the typically ambiguous death of a rock star, at the black magic age for that era, twenty seven. Dead most likely from heroin on top of the savage treatment meted out to his body over several years; and hastened, I would add, by the machinations of the Control System. The translation of the words on his gravestone at Pere Lachaise reads 'According to his own daimon.'

'Now night arrives with her purple legion/ Retire now to your tents and to your dreams/ Tomorrow we enter the town of my birth/ I want to be ready.' (Celebration of the Lizard)

Constructs of Consciousness

Elucidating consciousness: Neil Kramer at the first ARC Convention.

One afternoon some time back I was lying on my bed in the dark, eyes closed (as one does), when a vision appeared vividly before me. I was out in a vastness of black space, staring up at a bright elongated whorl. Composed of various gases and tiny particles of matter, it seemed to be a self-contained unit moving slowly through space. As for myself, I was standing on another whorl of material, but one of greater substance and solidity. As the image persisted, remaining both vivid and real, I became increasingly puzzled about its meaning. Then I heard a voice uttering the words 'Control System', before the vision faded, leaving me once more alone in the dark room.

I have pondered over this strange experience as the weeks have passed, slowly coming to digest its meaning, and only now feeling prepared to share it with others. It was indeed a vision of the nature of the Control System, a term coined by Neil Kramer and applied on Pale Green Vortex as most suitable for describing the matrix of politics, finance, law, media, religion, and pure thirst for power that tries to mould the human environment we inhabit. Significantly, it presents itself in the vision as a separate, self-contained unit. Although in one way we all participate in its machinations, simply through being unable to live literally separated lives, in another way the Control System constitutes a world unto itself, the various elements feeding off and supporting each other. Significantly also, despite seeming at first sight to be a huge, bright mass, on closer inspection the System is seen to be formed of gases and small particles only: it's all hot air, and insubstantial beyond its superficial appearance.

Most vitally, I have come to realise that the Control System as manifested in the vision is in turn a construct of consciousness; or, let us say, a particular form of consciousness. The social, political, and economic world we find ourselves in is a creation of a particular type of consciousness. Nothing more, nothing less. And, what's more, there is nothing fixed or inevitable about that form of consciousness and the hold it currently appears to have on the mainstream of human affairs. Ideas such as 'this is the way we were made' or 'this is the way we've always been'; ideas about 'this being human nature' or Darwinian survival-of-the-fittest evolutionary declarations reveal themselves to be merely superstitious beliefs, and/or excuses dished up to help maintain the current heartless and shameful status quo.

As alluded to in various posts sprinkled throughout Pale Green Vortex, it has become clear to me that there is nothing inevitable about the form that a human consciousness takes. The Control System, along with its concomitant dominator culture, continues to replicate like a bad habit, or some kind of malignant virus. It maintains its power by constantly feeding its own poisonous view into the popular culture, and by forcibly cutting off knowledge of, and access to, other possibilities of consciousness. A good deal of its energy goes into reinforcing and deepening a sense of unconsciousness in other human beings, as well as bolstering erroneous beliefs such as the 'this is all inevitable' one.

A deeper engagement with our own minds, achieved through courageous practice of a variety of means and techniques, especially maybe those associated with shamanic traditions, reveals the veracity of what I have written. Habits, thought patterns, begin to be seen as just that - habits and patterns only. Slowly, like peeling an onion, layer after layer of habit falls away, until the human rests in a state of pure openness, consciousness and energy tied to and identified with nothing in particular. We approach what I refer to as zero point, and thereby enter a realm of infinite possibility.

It is this, the true nature of mind, that is anathema to the Control System which, as in my vision, appears to be so strong but on closer inspection proves to be insubstantial. Living in a state of constant fear and paranoia, its tactics become evermore desperate. Too many people experience their own true nature, and the Control System will implode on itself, collapsing like a castle built of playing cards.

A well-known pictorial representation of this 'existence as construct of consciousness' idea is the Tibetan Wheel of Life. This teaching aid (which is what it really is) consists of four concentric circles, one of which purports to illustrate the six different 'realms of existence'. These are the following: devas, godlike beings; asuras or titans - jealous and ambitious warrior-types, who fight for supremacy; the humans; animals; pretas (beings with insatiable cravings); and hell beings, consumed by anguish, pain, and tortures. As believers in multi-dimensional reality, Tibetan Buddhists traditionally have no difficulty in taking these as literally different types of being. More modern western interpreters, hot on psychology but burdened with the constricts imposed by pseudo-scientific rationalism, regard the realms as depicting potentials within the mind of the individual human; the teaching is about inner life rather than outer realities. The construct of consciousness as manifested through the vision actually cuts through both overtly subjective and objective interpretations. It suggests that very different types of consciousness can incarnate in the human form. Control System consciousness (roughly aligned with the asura realm on the Wheel of Life) forms its own distinct world, to the extent that it is almost as if it has become its own type of entity. I include the 'as if' caveat deliberately; I am talking visionary/observational rather than philosophical/ metaphysical here. But I am suggesting that Control System consciousness is at such variance with, say, deep spiritual/shamanic consciousness that it is as if we have different entity forms here.

While literal detachment from the machinations emanating from Control System mentality is hardly practical, elegant disengagement forms a satisfying and realistic strategy. Weaving around and through, deftly dancing, touching and being touched without getting trapped in the tangled web.

And the vision makes clear one aspect to a recurring theme on Pale Green Vortex: how to make the revolution? The demonstration or Zen? It shows that direct confrontation is futile, since it can take place only on the terms set by the construct that is being confronted. The construct works by rules that we do not share; 'taking over' won't work, but will simply invoke the spectre of Animal Farm once again. Revolution, radical change, is first and foremost a matter for consciousness.