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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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Saturday 18 April 2015

Cairngorm Spring






The second photo is a rare Pale Green Vortex challenge: spot the ptarmigan.

'Walking thus, hour after hour (on the Cairngorm plateau), the senses keyed, one walks the flesh transparent. But no metaphor, transparent, or light as air, is adequate. The body is not made negligible, but paramount. Flesh is not annihilated but fulfilled. One is not bodiless, but essential body.

It is therefore when the body is keyed to its highest potential and controlled to a profound harmony deepening into something that resembles trance, that I discover most nearly what it is to be. I have walked out of the body and into the mountain. I am a manifestation of its total life, as is the starry saxifrage or the white-winged ptarmigan.'  Nan Shepherd, The Living Mountain.   

Monday 13 April 2015

New World Order - Progress Report


'New World Order' is not a term I often use. It is very loaded, and can easily evoke responses that I feel to be neither appropriate nor intended. I generally prefer to utilise some of the concepts used by Neil Kramer: 'Control System' is a more general and all-inclusive designation than New World Order; 'the Construct' and 'Distortion' describe some of the overriding metaphysical aspects of the situation; and 'Empire' represents the way that the Control System goes about its practical day-to-day affairs. All the same, I have decided, for no special reason, to give the term 'New World Order' (NWO) an outing today.

New World Order or not, there is little doubt as to the creeping globalisation and increased interference in peoples' lives nowadays. You don't have to be a conspiracy fanatic to see increasing regulations in all directions, more controls on what you can or cannot do: eat, drink, buy, sell, grow, write, say, or otherwise express - particularly relevant here is the totalitarian scouge of political correctness -, all concerned with thought and behaviour control. Have a look around certain elements of the alternative media, and you will feel that we are on the brink of total domination and wipe-out by the nasty characters at the top of the tree. From a different perspective, the mainstream media is full of the machinations of politicians, finance people and the rest. This is hardly surprising, since reporting this stuff and insisting on its importance and reality is the function of mainstream 'news' and 'current affairs'. Look at life within these frameworks and you will give New World Order a serious thumbs-up on its endeavours, slowly yet inexorably moving towards its objectives of global domination and control.

I was struck, therefore, to listen to a recent interview with Neil Kramer in which he opined that Empire was about to implode. Actually, he continued, it has already imploded; its self-serving agenda is not sustainable. This was, I felt, an unorthodox take on current proceedings. Although there appear to be increasing numbers of people 'waking up' and seeing through the veils hiding deeper realities, still the signs are that Empire is progressing rather nicely, thank you very much.

I decided to run with Neil's notion for a while. One thing that quickly dawned on me while going about my daily affairs was how much of moment-to-moment experience is not touched by the grubby mitts of Empire. This is, indeed, one of the tricks of Empire, to deceive you into thinking it is more important than it really is. It gets into ones mindset, eating away at the wider experience that is invariably there, should we just stop to allow its influence to come through. Going for a walk in the mountains and spending all the day thinking about windfarms is just one example that Pale Green Vortex needs to be constantly aware of.

Should Empire be in the process of imploding, the New World Order quietly crumbling as I write, it is not surprising that it may not be immediately apparent. Rather like a bicycle speeding along the road. Its motion is obtained through energy input - that of the cyclist pedalling away. The cyclist stops putting in energy, but the bike continues to move, its momentum provided by the energy provided beforehand. It slows down inexorably, however, before finally grinding to a halt, possibly catapulting its rider painfully to the ground in the process.

It is axiomatic that Empire requires the input of energy provided by human masses for its continued existence. This comes from people investing in it in one way or another; the imperial trick of deluding folk that reality as presented by Empire is the only reality is a crafty way of achieving this - and in this way we return to the theme of a previous post, the deeper meaning of the threat posed by the Leary slogan of 'Turn on, tune in, drop out'.

A barometer of my local state of affairs with regards the health and strength of the Control System has recently appeared in the form of the imminent General Election, a mere few weeks away. An event such as this is an excellent way for Empire to inject into its workings the energy it needs constantly for its functioning. That energy, it goes without saying, derives from the populace investing its own energy into this event, treating it (because they believe it to be so) as an authentic expression of reality, and their own great privilege to be able to participate in this marvellous process of western democracy. A little thought and accompanying bitter experience show this to be utter bullshit, but there we go. Time and again, people who have spent the past few years deriding this charade end up signing up to its self-proclaimed validity by putting their energy behind one candidate or another. In this way, Empire is fed, validated, and permitted to roll on its grubby way as normal.

To see the whole thing being rolled out yet again beggars personal belief. Suddenly, they are all at it again ('they' being the media flunkeys and the politicians), arguing, analysing, behaving earnestly and enthusiastically, as if it's all ultra important and the future depends on it. The strategy is simple: stuff something in front of people often enough, ram it down their throats forcefully enough, and sufficient folk will buy into it to grant it some reality - vapid, for sure, but past the threshold for validating Control System worldview.

The spectacle paraded before the British public this time round is uniquely jaw-dropping. There was a time when the political leaders at least made an effort to appear as people of seriousness and substance: Macmillan, Heath, Wilson, Douglas Home from my youth. Today's candidates don't even bother with that. They appear tired, worn-out, as if they know somewhere deep inside that it's the end of the line, time's running out, the game's up. Cameron, Miliband, Clegg: sad, hollow figures, acting out their parts in a sad, hollow play that has all the marks of ending up as a tragedy.

Confronted with this deficit of vitality, our local corner of Empire gains a much-needed boost of energy (remember, it requires energy for its existence, like any other organism) from the phenomenon of the 'false dawn'. Amidst the rubble, the horrible wreckage, there arrives - hope. False dawn first appeared in the form of UKIP. A breath of fresh air, so the UKIPpers told us, pledged to the interests of Britain, rather than Europe and the hordes of faceless bureaucrats. Not very good New World Order people at all, the UKIP folk. As predicted on Pale Green Vortex a while ago, UKIP has been the object of a torrent of mainstream media bad publicity - a lot of our media is fully paid up to the aims of Empire, and finds people like UKIP a bit threatening - and the wheel appears to have fallen off somewhat.

False Dawn number two (at least in the northerly regions of our locality): Scottish National Party (SNP). The local heroes, standing up for local people against those nasty people down south. In my view this is all unfortunately bullshit. One spin-off from my own passionate concerns about windfarms and energy provision is that I have had to dig a bit deeply into the mechanics of how things in this area take place, and how decisions are made. I can report that the systems put into place by the SNP in this respect are highly insulting to the wishes of local folk, highly undemocratic and high-handed, the kind of thing some totalitarian regimes from the past would be envious of. The priorities are the programmes and agendas - you hear these words a lot from some members of the SNP - rather than local concerns. Bulldozing in the name of the 'greater good'. Programmes and agendas are dangerous things: people who think in those terms are dangerous people.

When I moved to Scotland about a decade ago, I was struck by the sense of pride and identity that many people had with being Scottish. This sense of belonging I felt to be a healthy thing, and was very noticeable for me, coming from southern England, where it is little in evidence. It's a quality that I don't manifest in my own being very much. It seems to me that this 'positive patriotism' embodied by many Scottish people has been hijacked and distorted by the SNP, with its programmes, agendas, ill will and extreme polarisation. Lots of folk who support the the SNP are, I know, good and decent people, but I feel they have been duped. The movers and shakers of the SNP are, it seems to me, ideologues first and foremost. And make no mistake; fully paid-up members of the Imperial world view. They just want a bigger slice of the pie.

Old, tired, running on empty? Quite possibly. Empire staggers on to another dreary day. As far as the British General Election goes, it provides an excellent opportunity to practice in its genuine meaning the art of turning on, tuning in, and dropping out. In the meantime, we could do worse than contemplate for own lives Neil Kramer's maxim:'The fastest way to dissolve Empire is to cultivate your own power and excellence.' Go for it.





                   

Saturday 4 April 2015

Return of the Drop-Out Boogie


Wow, the medium is the message, folks. Look at that badge (available in a variety of places online) morph and swirl and almost dissolve into No-thingness before coming back into focus again.

The best of western culture and civilisation, it seems to me, is in good part the result of the creativity of the Flawed Genius. Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert; Shelley, Byron; Michelangelo, Leonardo, Giorgione; a pleasure boat full of Impressionists on the Seine on a Sunday afternoon. I quote from the few slender slices of cultural history with which I am familiar. There is, in some quarters, a tendency to romanticize the Flawed Genius. Not a necessary move, I propose. And the notion finds itself devalued and debased, the 'genius' bit removed altogether, with the arrival of 'the Loveable Rogue'. This tag could fruitfully be thrown straight into the bin. Look at little Billy. Robbed an old man of his savings, beat up his girlfriend and her sister, but he's always got a chirpy smile when he goes to buy his Sunday newspaper. Always buys his mum a nice Christmas present. A loveable rogue. No, I don't buy that one at all.

If we were to look for the perfect embodiment of the Flawed Genius archetype from recent times, we would need to look no further than Dr. Timothy Leary. His flaws were incontrovertible and enormous. They revolved around his tendencies to shameless opportunism and an endless thirst for self-publicity. Anyone trying the 'Leary said this..... Leary believed this....' gambit is onto a loser: he said almost everything at some point or other in his rich and all-too-varied life. People try to put all sorts of things on to Leary - he was a Control System stooge, he was in the pay of the CIA etc etc - based on some random comment he once made, or one teensie weensie sliver of his life story, but it's all a blind alley. There is a remarkable couple of minutes (like many other things, you can find it on YouTube). Leary is almost dead, you can see it in his gaunt and wasted face, and he is being interviewed by some dude or other. 'Doctor Leary, you have been  deeply involved with psychedelic drugs during your life. Do you have any regrets about this?' 'Yes I do.' (And at this moment the world is waiting for that great deathbed confessional). 'I regret that I didn't take more psychedelic drugs during my lifetime.' Brilliant.

It is fashionable to trash Leary nowadays. He gets it from both mainstream and 'alternative' directions. But, despite the bullshit, he said more of insight and wisdom than all the heads of state of the past fifty years put together. He gets a particularly huge amount of flack for the motto he made a commonplace: Turn on, tune in, drop out. It's the 'drop out' bit that folk have particular problems with. It's been turned into 'take over','transform','transcend' and doubtless others that I haven't come across or have forgotten over time. But the thing is this: Dr. Leary had it well-and-truly nailed. He hit the spot, spot-on. 'Drop out' was it to perfection.

The meaning that Leary gave to 'dropping out' has been widely distorted and misrepresented, sometimes wilfully, sometimes through ignorance. I don't think he ever had in mind the classic student drop-out, who rolls out of bed in the middle of the afternoon for a strong coffee, a joint, and to hang around the rest of the day on the sofa watching television. For Leary, dropping out was an act of strong intent and volition. The notion of 'dropping out of society' meant leaving behind the many games, as Leary put it, that characterise modern life, and which ultimately act as barriers between us and our deeper, more real and authentic nature. Here it is in his own words:

'By drop out, I mean to detach yourself from involvement in secular, external, social games. But the dropping out has to occur internally before it can occur externally. I'm not telling kids just to quit school; I'm not telling people to quit their jobs. That is an inevitable development of the process of turning on and tuning in.'

To succeed in what Leary is advocating requires a profound turning inside-out of ones life and entire being. I would suggest that the good man himself was only partial successful in the endeavour - hence some of the 'flaws' in his life, which inevitably influence his work. In Leary's psychological theories, one of the central concepts is 'games'. Most people, most of the time, live their lives through the unconscious adoption of a succession of games. These games are more basic, more visceral, than what we normally attribute to the word 'role'. For a time, Tim Leary played the professor game, wearing the clothes, adopting the style, the social milieu, the values, the motivations and objectives suitable for that particular game. And so it continues.....

A section from 'Flashbacks', Leary's autobiography, illustrates for me most poignantly the devastating effects that shattering the world of games can have. The good doctor is in the middle of his first and terminally game-changing LSD trip:

'After several billion years I found myself on my feet moving through the puppet show of reality. The thought of my kids led me upstairs to my daughter's room. Susan was sitting in bed, the very picture of a thirteen-year-old with her hair up in curlers, frowning at the school book in her lap while rock-and-roll music blasted through the room. It was pure Saturday Evening Post. "Hi, Dad." She was biting a pencil. I slumped against the wall, amazed at this marionette stranger from assembly-line America. She glanced up at me. "Dad, what would you like for Christmas?" She went on biting the pencil, frowning at the book, waving slightly at the beat of the music. In a minute she looked up again. "Dad, I love you."

Leary continues: 'A shock of terror. This was my daughter and this was the father-daughter game. A shallow superficial stereotyped meaningless exchange of Hi, Dad,  Hi, Sue,  How are you Dad? How's school? What do you want for Christmas? Have you done your homework? The plastic doll father and the plastic doll daughter both mounted on little wheels, rolling past each other, around and around on fixed tracks. A complete vulgarization of the real situation: two complex trillion-cell clusters, rooted in an eternity of evolution, sharing for a flicker this unique configuration of space/time. Offered this chance to merge souls and bring out the divinity in the other, we exchanged Hi-Dad-Hi-Susan squeaks. I looked at her beseechingly, straining for real contact. I was stunned with guilt.'

Knowledge, insight, wisdom, awakening: with what a price they come!

Let's return to dropping out, and run through this again: 'dropping out must occur internally before it can occur externally'. This is the nub of the matter. What Leary is doing here is nothing less than reformulating the mystic way - the game to end all games. Invoking the spirit of the Wise Ones of Yore, and presenting it for the times that he found himself in. Dropping out of games, the habitual ways we go about our lives, in large part unconsciously; our default identities, thrust upon us partly by ourselves and partly by the world around us. It's the alchemist's way, purifying the vessel. It's removing the obscuring veils, as one ancient Buddhist text puts it. It's creating the ground on which we may miraculously blossom into our authenticity, our original face, our magnificent uniqueness.