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anarcho-shamanism, mountain spirits; sacred wilderness, sacred sites, sacred everything; psychonautics, entheogens, pushing the envelope of consciousness; dominator culture and undermining its activities; Jung, Hillman, archetypes; Buddhism, multidimensional realities, and the ever-present satori at the centre of the brain; a few cosmic laughs; and much much more....


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Thursday 30 June 2011

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)


Thursday 16 June 2011

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.