Wot's This Collectivism Lark Then???

Here's a clear, non-extreme discussion of some of the world-moulding stuff happening behind the scenes that people don't know about but should.  I don't go along with everything that Ed says, but that's not really the point. Turn on, tune in, digest, spread the info.

http://www.redicecreations.com/radio/2012/12/RIR-121213.php

John Lash: The Final Interview

Pale Green Vortex recommended reading (highly recommended reading)

On Red Ice Radio on November 22nd 2012 (link from this blog) John Lash gave what he declared to be his final interview to a wider audience.  This is not because he is retiring, or anticipates imminent death, or is going off to join the Salvation Army.  No.  He sees, quite reasonably in my view, that he has said enough in this particular genre. His task remains to work in deeper and more intimate fashion with those more fully involved in the projects most dear to his heart: Planetary Tantra and the Gaian Navigation Experiment.

Since the initiatory events I described in a recent blog piece, the two people who have spoken to me most directly, who have said the right things at the right time, have been Neil Kramer and John Lash.  The nature of their respective contributions to my life have been rather different, at times complementary.  One area in which they have both provided clarification is the important one of belief.  This is worth a few words here.

As Neil explains, we actually need very few beliefs in order to function perfectly well.  A belief is a heavy thing: adopt a particular belief, then everything else has to fit in around it.  Sustaining a belief can be an exhausting, full-time activity.  Instead of believing, Neil suggests that we simply 'hold' ideas.  Just hold it.  Don't give in to the knee-jerk reaction to either say 'yes, I agree', thereby accreting it to your already top-heavy ego identity; or to say 'no', in so doing making a contrary absolute statement.  Hold an idea and see where it goes.  You can lightly hold an enormous number without them dragging you down.

John Lash's section about belief on metahistory.org (link from this blog) is well worth reading.  'The unexamined belief is not worth holding.' 'It is desirable to believe as little as possible' because 'belief can destroy our capacity to experience.'  Here's the nub of the situation.  A fixed belief acts as a veil between the believer and the world that is perceived as being outside.  It's a kind of screen through which all incoming data is filtered.  In truth, belief is for cowards, those unprepared to face the ever-changing uniqueness of the eternally present moment.  Because belief can destroy our capacity to experience, it alienates us from what is really going on.  Our full-body, open-heart response is denied; everything has to go through the head.

When belief solidifies, it becomes ideology.  And ideology is the focal point for all the social movements that we may come to label that elusive term 'evil'.  Nazism, Stalinism.  More recently, the sinister machinations of collectivism and 'ideological environmentalism'.  They all thrive on the blindness and stupidity that are planted inside the individual by belief. Blind, insistent belief, abstracted ideology.

To change tack, while staying with John Lash: his book 'Not In His Image' is one of the most important on my bookshelves. On the one hand, it provides a deeper and more comprehensive critique of the Christian ethos than any I have encountered.  On the other, it describes in great detail the Gnostic mythos of Gaia-Sophia, along with the part we humans have to play in its unfolding.  When I read all this, I took it as one of the most beautiful myths I had ever come across. And when I read about the Gnostics, I felt that I was reconnecting with my true but lost spiritual heritage in the west.  For anybody serious about understanding how we came to be where we are now, and intent on finding their own place in the spiritual/mystical traditions of the west, 'Not In His Image' is a must-read.

John Lash is a firebrand, and in his final interview he signs off from the exoteric world in typically provocative fashion.  He introduces what he terms 'the taboo subject': violence.  Why, he asks, are humans endowed with such an extraordinary capacity for violence?  He suggests that there is indeed a reason, and that it needs to be taken in hand via magical/tantric action to take out the psychopaths who have perverted the course of human history and heaped so much misery on the great mass of people.

Hmmmm.....  Certainly a novel idea.  Personally, I have no problem with the elimination of various psychopathic politicians and other control system big boys (and a few girls).  I name no names, but there are those whose physical demise I would greet with a sense of relief.  However, there remains a problem; I'm not sure that John has really thought this through.  Remove a bunch of psychopaths, and there will be another gang waiting in the wings ready to take their place. For anyone thinking that psychopaths are mainly criminal serial killers, it's time for a reality update.  Studies suggest that around 3% of males, 1% of females, can be classified as psychopathic.  This is, it seems, across the board, regardless of culture, ethnicity etc.  The chief characteristic of psychopathic behaviour is absence of conscience.  Psychopaths, therefore, tend to turn up in large numbers in politics, high finance, big business, positions where power is the thing.  They can work the system like no-one else.  So John's approach seems rather like symptomatic medicine: get rid of the signs of the disease without really getting at its roots.  Symptoms will continue to pop up elsewhere.

Anyway, plenty of food for thought.  And, in the meantime, thanks for everything so far, John Lash.  I, for one, shall be keeping track of his words and deeds for the future.

            

Initiation

Ralph Metzner

Initiation.  To me, the word conjures up a gompa, a tiny monastery, set high in the snowy Himalayas, remote from the normal affairs of humankind.  Trails of incense hang thick in the air across the room; candles light up dimly the chill dark space.  Strange mudras are performed, eerie guttural chants are chanted.  An icy wind blasts against the side of the building, threatening to blow into obscurity the sacred space being created.  Meanwhile, a deeply wrinkled Tibetan deftly wields a dorje, cutting through the air with rhythmic movements.  Slowly and deliberately, the initiate is introduced to a weird, archetypal figure. Half human, half animal, blue-black in colour, huge bulging eyes, and with a panoply of arms and legs.  A necklace of dry bones adorns the torso.  For the mass of humanity, it would be a vision from the most hellish of nightmares......

Initiation. 'The ceremony or formal procedure with which somebody is made a member of a sect or society' (New Penguin English Dictionary).  Hmm.... not really.  To initiate is to begin, especially to start something new.  The dictionary definition is merely a narrow, formalised version of a function that is universal in scope.  An initiation is an introduction, an invitation, to the hitherto unknown.  Many indigenous people confer initiation upon their members as they pass from one phase of life into the next - from childhood into the world of adults, for example.  Initiation manifests an opening, a doorway, a crack in the world, beyond which perception, and experience in general, will be forever changed.

Some people undergo some form of initiation from sacred plants and other entheogenic substances. 'Take a look at this.  You never imagined the world worked like that.....' Through whatever means, and crucially, initiation shows a doorway, but that is all.  It is up to the initiate, the student, to put in the hard work, the blood, sweat, and tears, to properly actualise that initial insight.

Two events over recent years have performed vital initiatory functions in my life, though in both cases their full significance has become apparent only with time.

In April 2009 I attended a five-day course on 'Alchemical Divination'.  Held in the mountains of Switzerland, it was run by Ralph Metzner, close friend and associate of Timothy Leary in the 1960s.  I do not go along with quite everything that Ralph has to say, but as a researcher into consciousness for half a century he is probably peerless, and invites deep admiration.  Following his LSD-assisted forays into multidimensional space and consciousness, he embarked upon a period of entheogen-free practice, before more recently studying and participating in the ways and rituals of indigenous peoples who include the use of psychoactive plants within a wider cultural and spiritual context.

This particular course focussed on the past, a singular and predictably cathartic challenge for me, having grown up spiritually within a Buddhist environment that concentrated on the present and the future, while relegating much interest in the past to the realms of morbidity or narcissism.  The initiatory aspect of the course for me resided in its emphasis on energy: working with energies, and realising experience as different forms of energy.  My previous Buddhist training and practice had majored conceptually on 'mind'.  'Look at the workings of the mind.'  While sometimes helpful, 'mind' easily becomes too, well, mental.  Identification with the conceptual, the personal, especially personal emotions. A tendency to become vague, colourless, vacuum-like.  Additionally, for anybody raised in the western tradition, 'mind' inevitably gets entangled in the mind - body dichotomy/dualism, with all its attendant problems. To change the movie and see instead a continuous flow of energies has led me into a far more participatory relationship with my own psycho-physical organism, as well as the cosmos around me.  On arriving home from the course, I immediately felt empowered to work with chakras and other energy systems, confident to be creative in ways that had previously been impossible. The shift in orientation, from 'mind' and 'the mind', those peculiar Buddhist preoccupations, to energy and consciousness, has facilitated the opening of many doorways.

With the snow still deep on the ground, I ventured forth from Highland Scotland once more, in February 2010, my destination Bath, south-west England. The event was the first ARC (Alternative Research Community) convention, organised and hosted with grace and humour by Karen Sawyer.  I was enticed south primarily by the promise of listening to two speakers.  Neil Kramer, with whose work I was starting to become familiar, was talking on 'Guerilla Psychonautics'.   And Peter Taylor was presenting 'The Corporatisation of the Environmental Movement', a theme that was beginning to require urgent personal attention.  While these two talks were the highlight, both stimulating significant changes in personal perception, the entire event acted as a kind of initiation into the present-day alternative community scene.  Extremely heterogeneous, and incorporating many people who might disagree significantly with one another ('We present, you decide', the guiding motto of Red Ice Creations, could be equally applied to the whole alternative research thing), it is nevertheless united by the effort to find out what is really going on.

It soon began to dawn on me that there was an awful lot of interesting stuff going on out there, and I wanted to do my own bit, whatever that might involve.  I had needed to cut all my formal ties to the Buddhist tradition in order to effect this entrance into the wider world; however subtly, I was always tethered to a post called Buddhism, which finally prevented me from entering into a more objective relationship with myself and the rest of the world.

These two initiations have informed a good deal of what has ended up on Pale Green Vortex, a project which (not coincidentally) I began soon after the ARC convention.  They have profoundly influenced the direction of my life generally over recent times.  Metzner Alchemical Divination, ARC: to the contributors and participants, I give hearty thanks.


                      

How to Start a Religion

       Ah yes, the Sun of God

Part One

'Zeitgeist: the Movie' is pretty much standard fare in the world of alternative/authentic research.  Unlike Hollywood productions, turned out by people who hardly need the money but insist on getting it anyway, Zeitgeist is offered up freely by Peter Joseph, and is easily accessed on Youtube.  The original 2007 movie with its 2012 updates is what I am referring to, not the second and third films in the trilogy, some of which material is more problematic, and not up for discussion here.

A ten-minute collage of an intro leads into part one proper, exploring the mythological origins of Christianity. It is this, rather than parts two (considering the veracity of the official story on 9/11) and three (on the financial/banking system, and how it holds us all to ransom) that I am mainly concerned with.  It's not a question of 'agreeing with' or 'believing' every detail that's put up in the film; the general flow is both convincing and compelling. And for anyone reluctant to work through the hundreds of pages written by Acharya S. devoted to the astro-mythical roots of Christianity, the first part of Zeitgeist provides a nifty thirty-minute summary of many of the salient points.

The story of Jesus, it seems, has little novelty about it. Instead, it echoes myths based around the sun, the stars, and the precession of the equinoxes, stories that have been the preserve of humankind for millenia.  What made Christianity different, however, was that its mythology became literalised, turned into spurious facts and 'history'.  Timelessness was reduced into time, thereby allowing wonder and direct experience to be usurped by rote learning and blind belief.  Now the proud owner of a literal history with real events, Christianity could introduce the notion into its armoury of heresy. Believe or disbelieve; believe or die. This simple, easy-to-believe religion was eagerly taken up by the Roman Empire, desperately seeking a single religion to make official and help to reunite its crumbling frontiers.  Thus began the long, painful tyranny of the one true religion with its one true god.  

It does not pass unnoticed that there are close parallels between the development of organised, state-sanctioned Christianity and the rise of the modern environmental movement with its own 'Green Religion'.  In the same way that a universal solar myth was literalised into a particular history, that of Jesus, so was the myth, or the various myths, concerning Gaia literalised into the historical truths, the scientific data, of human-made global warming.  Once more, a timeless myth fell into history, with its accompanying 'facts' that we are obliged to believe: facts concerning CO2, temperature rises per decade, the salvational nature of renewable energy sources, etc.  Once more, humankind could be divided into believers and disbelievers ('deniers'); those following the righteous path and those heretics whose influence should be effectively stamped out.  And in  identical fashion to Christianity, the system of doctrine developed has been used as a means for social control and manipulation, with fear of a future in hell as a prime weapon.  In addition, just like Christianity, the new green religion effectively detaches the human species from its direct connection with the natural world and its own true nature (while cunningly maintaining that it is doing the opposite).

When 'Green' is referred to as the new religion, this is not just a cute, vague or metaphorical statement.  It is perfectly precise, intended to be taken at face value.  One of the features of the Zeitgeist movie is that, as its own narrative unfolds, it becomes apparent that an entire fabric of control has been imposed and sustained over millenia through the repeated use of a small number of simple yet remarkably effective strategies - effective largely because enough people have fallen for them hook, line, and sinker. And right up there, still being used, is the strategy of organised, literalised, religion.

Part Two 

Ask almost anybody in Britain interested in 'the great outdoors' and they will have heard of Cameron McNeish.  In Scotland, especially, any television programme containing the words 'wild', 'outdoor' or 'adventure' in its title will invariably find Cameron having wormed his way into its narrative somehow or another.  Some people consider Cameron a great champion of our wild places; others see him as an opportunistic self-publicist.  Maybe he is a bit of both.

A while back I caught Cameron (by chance) on a programme doing a long walk across highland Scotland.  He was standing at the entrance to Glen Dessary, in one of the wildest and most remote corners of the western Highlands.  He pointed out the afforestation that has taken place in the lower reaches of the glen, noting how it has somewhat compromised the wildness of the place.  Still, he mused, we have got used to the plantations, and indeed barely notice them now. 'Maybe we'll do the same with windfarms' he continued cheerfully, before gaily striding off into the sunset.

Whether the Ven. McNeish realised the import of what he was saying, I do not know.  But it amounted to a betrayal of the dignity of the human species.  We have a remarkable flexibility and adaptability about us, which has stood us in good stead when faced with new and adverse conditions. It has given us an edge over other species; we are survivors.  At the same time, our adaptability has left us vulnerable to all manner of abuse and exploitation.  Stick us in a concentration camp: no problem, we'll get used to it.  Hit me with a stick every day: it's OK, I'll learn to manage.  Almost anything will eventually become 'the norm' that we will come to grin and bear. This is a fact well recognised by those who would control and oppress.  Windfarms are a classic example from modern times - or at least that's what is hoped, in the manner given voice to by Mr McNeish.  The perpetrators of the windfarm fraud are counting on our getting used to them as if nothing ever really happened, given sufficient time and sufficient exposure to the inevitability and 'benefits' of turbines through the media.  Which leads neatly into......  

Part Three 

Question: what might you do if you disapprove of unnecessary maltreatment of animals? Answer: stop eating battery eggs and meat from intensively reared animals.

Question: what can you do if you find a particular regime especially repressive and obnoxious? Answer: don't buy mangoes and pineapples from their country.

In an excellent blog piece (November 2nd 2012, 'The BBC and Jimmy Savile: peas in a pod') James Delingpole asks who has been most responsible for the global warming and windfarm propaganda that has duped so many people, thereby making easier the criminal proliferation of windfarms over the years.  The number one guilty party, he concludes, is none other than the BBC. It takes little reflection on my part to agree.  He also says that the BBC's constant propaganda in this respect is more harmful than the case of Jimmy Savile, celebrity serial paedophile, since far more people's lives have been seriously affected. Again, a few moments of thought lead one to the same sobering conclusion.

Question: what do you do if a major player in mainstream media turns out to have been acting in a persistently disingenuous manner, deceiving large segments of the public, all the while hiding behind a spurious cloak of objectivity? Answer: stop watching altogether.

This is the only conclusion that comes close to satisfying personal honour and integrity.  To be honest, this may not amount to much of a sacrifice.  I rarely watch anything on BBC anyway: even its teletext weather updates regularly prove wide of the mark.  I suppose there may be a point in catching 'Newsnight' for five minutes a week, just to see what the dark clowns are up to at the moment, but even that may prove too tiresome.  So for me, it's BBC bye bye.

  



    

In the Realm of the Dark Jester

Ask people to think of respect and reverence for the natural world and the chances are they will conjure images of folk hugging trees and dancing naked in the forest.  Good old Mother Earth: benign, nurturing and caring, looking after us all.  Very nice.  The reality is far more complex than this idealised fantasy of smiley-smiley paganism.  Love for, and spending time in, the natural world is neither inherently good or bad, pleasant or painful, nice or nasty.  It is a case of reconnecting with the wider matrix of which we are all part.  Time spent in the wild is, for me, a matter of purification, of disentanglement from the artificial, the synthetic, and a reassertion of personal authenticity.  In my experience, this can involve, in high places especially, the possibility of strange things happening.  And while this may sound like entering paradise, it is just as likely to manifest as mockery - the universe laughs at us darkly, pouring cold water over all our cherished human hopes, desires, inclinations and infatuations, all our frenzied and oh-so-important human activities.  One such day occurred only recently.......

I went out by myself.  The specialist mountain weather forecast was pretty good: possibly a little drizzle early on, but soon clearing up to leave a fine day.  Alighting from the train mid-morning in good spirits, I followed the way that is fairly familiar to me by now: up the side road by a small river, down the path through the woods to eventually cross the water by a wooden bridge, follow the estate road up past the estate lodge and onto the wild land.  The magnificent roar of a stag greeted me as I headed up the glen.  It being autumn, a profusion of fungal entities lined the sides of the track, including a number with undoubted psychotropic attributes.

My heels began to hurt.  I've had these walking boots for a year now.  In many respects they are excellent, offering plenty of support and instilling confidence for crossing rough and rocky terrain.  The problem is that the heels rub like hell.  This kind of thing is supposed to disappear with use, but in this instance it just hasn't happened.  They have got worse.

There is, I know, a grove of trees ahead - a little oasis before abandoning oneself to the upland heather and moor -, and I decide to stop there for a snack and foot repair.  I am walking increasingly gingerly, however, and the trees are getting closer very slowly.  I find that I'm stopping frequently to move my feet around in the boots to alleviate the pain.  I finally hobble my way to the trees, where I shuffle myself onto a fallen log.  I spy more of the psychotropic-type mushrooms nearby; is this a message?  On closer inspection, however, they reveal themselves to be 'lookalikes'.  My attention returns to my feet.

One of modern technology's brightest creations is Compeed.  This is a magic blister plaster, which works by forming a kind-of second skin over the wound.  I have always found it miraculously effective.  However, today, it fails to work its usual wonders.  I set off, but immediately am in pain.  I wiggle my feet around.  Pain.  I try a variety of ways of tying up the bootlaces.  No go.  I remove and put back in a variety of insoles.    Nothing's making the slightest difference.  I hobble along for a couple more minutes before succumbing to a fit of despair that would do Basil Fawlty proud (one of the good things about going to isolated places is that you can fall apart in ways that would be totally unacceptable in social situations.  The rocks and heather just don't care).

I descend to a bridge crossing a river in a shallow gorge in crisis.  What do I do?  I can't continue like this.  When even Compeed doesn't work, it's like running out of gears in a car on a steep slope.  I consider turning back, but what's the point?  That still entails walking for a couple of hours. I continue onward and upward, rudely punctuating the silence with groans and curses.

Soon, though, I'm over 600 metres above sea level.  This is when things normally begin to get interesting.  Two pairs of ptarmigan, their underwings and belly white in readiness for the winter, fly out in front of me, providing a change from the omnipresent grouse that come screeching out of the heather at frequent intervals.  A mountain hare appears on the track in front of me, nonplussed by my presence.  Three more lope closely by.

By now, the cairn on top of the hill is in clear sight.  Then it starts to rain.  I can see it raining on lots of hills around.  I recall the mountain weather forecast, and a song by Lou Reed plays itself through my mind: 'You can't depend on a lot of things/ You need a busload of faith to get by.'  By the time I reach the rounded summit, the rain is quite hard, and the cloud is right down.  Committed lowlanders do not get to experience the unique type of precipitation characteristic of Scottish hills and mountains.  Cold, rock-hard pellets of icy hail blown almost horizontally in a stiff, blustery wind, lashing the skin on the face and rendering it numb.

'The wonderful view from the top of the hill': another cherished human dream mocked into nothingness by the Dark Jester.  Any reason to linger on the top now eludes me, and I am soon heading along the ridge.  Downhill is not too bad; any climbing, however, sends sharp pain shooting along the lower back regions of my legs.  Suddenly, out of the fog, appears a mountain hare.  Then another.  And another.  About fifteen come out of the heather in quick succession, taking their time, some standing for a moment on their hind legs before moving on.

I'm in the Monadhliath.  These are not spiky mountains, more like rolling whalebacks, covered in vast swathes of heather and peat.  Some people seem to find them tedious, but they need to be experienced with a different mindset than the dramatic, rocky peaks elsewhere. They offer a deep sense of space and solitude.  Go now, though, if you want the full Monadhliath experience.  Emissaries of the Dark Cabal are in the process of converting them into an obscene industrial windfarm park. As I reach the end of the ridge, the clouds part for a moment, and in the distance I glimpse the flailing arms of a windfarm.  Closer to hand, I look down on the site of another proposed act of wanton vandalism, Allt Duinne.  I can hear the ugly laugh of the Dark Cabal ringing in my ears; unlike the Jester's laughter, it serves no higher function.  It is laughter without a sense of humour.

Coming off the hill, showers continue to dapple the landscape.  Strange truncated rainbow segments stretch vertically into the sky, like ladders to the clouds.  I find the courage to look at my heels; in all my years on the mountains, I have never seen such a sight before.  The sun comes out; I begin to write......

Photo: Dax Wasser

          

Ship Of Fools?: an exploration in five parts

Act One: Nearly the final word on windfarms......

 Fed up with pictures of nasty windfarms?  Me too.  So here's a nice mountain photo instead.

It was, I suppose, decided a long time ago: 'give them windfarms.'  The juggernaut that has bulldozed them through regardless of matters of sane economics, local democratic concerns, unreliability, damage to the environment and community quality of life, and loss of landscape, suggests something of a predetermined programme.  A quick piece of personal research into the realities of the situation will confirm that any claims of 'democracy and consultation' are a fake that has become increasingly transparent.  The web of lies, deceit, and dishonesty surrounding the windfarm scam becomes increasingly brazen and blatant by the day.  The perpetrators no longer even bother to hide their criminality, with politicians transparently engaged in conflict-of-interest scenarios.  I know that James Delingpole's blog appears courtesy of the 'Daily Telegraph', a fact which ruffles some readers' political sensibilities (sensibilities, I may add, that are outmoded and no longer relevant).  But his tireless work on this theme is more than admirable.  To see something of the entire thing unravel shamelessly right before your eyes, read some of his articles: the one dated August 22nd 2012, on Tim Yeo and Lord Deben, is an eye-opening place to begin.

In one sense, giant windfarms are entirely appropriate for the world we live in - at least the sliver of reality that likes to present itself as the whole thing. They are metal-and-plastic totems to the essential ugliness, inefficiency, materialism, and power hierarchy that control system operators would have us believe is the one-and-only truth.  Even the Victorians would not have accepted windfarms: how can you build an industrial revolution on a power source that doesn't work half the time?  The goodly Queen of Empires would not have been amused.  Indeed, we can begin to speculate that the expense and inefficiency of wind is actually a deliberate part of a creeping agenda.......


Act Two: We don't need no edyookayshun

  

In an interview given last year (18/11/11, Grok-the-Talk), John Lash declares that, in his view, 're-education'  is more essential than 'raising consciousness' at this point in time.  Re-education, in this case, referring to educating ourselves as to what is really going on, rather than simply what we have been told to believe is true.  He uses the popularisation of Social Darwinism as an example of an area where this process of re-education is needed: how, requiring an ideology to back up and render respectable their predatory activities, bankers, lawyers, and other authorised criminals of the late 19th century leapt at Darwin's theories, embracing the notion of 'survival of the fittest'.  Darwin's ideas were quickly reified into hard fact, and distorted to justify elitism and the entire edifice of dominator culture.  A bastardised form of Darwin is now accepted by the majority of people (in Europe, at least) as indisputable fact, while its premise, that predation within a single species is the general modus operandi, turns out to be a lie.

As I listened to John Lash, I couldn't help but draw parallels with the so-called environmental movement of today, and the global warming con.  In fact, the strategy remains exactly the same!  Globalist predators, those control freaks on a big scale, similarly require an ideology to use as a front for their nefarious deeds.  Global warming turned out to be an ideal cause.  Firstly, it is indeed fit for a global agenda - it affects every single being on the planet, so is an ideal carrier for a planetary clarion call.  Visions of cities drowning as seas rise, glaciers and ice sheets crashing dramatically, crops burnt to a cinder, readily invoke fear and insecurity, creating an atmosphere in which people can easily be manipulated and will readily cede to new controls, regulations, taxes, etc.  All in the name of 'saving the planet'.  Finally, through the global warming con, an appeal is made to people with genuinely good hearts but who have failed to do their homework.  This, in a sense, is the most evil aspect of all: how good, well-wishing, caring people have been hoodwinked into supporting measures that, beneath the mask, are intended to play into the hands of a small number of people whose aims are control and domination.  The plan is gloriously simple - yet superbly effective.


Act Three: Planet Slave, 1969-style

    We, like sheep, have gone astray (George Frederick Handel, of course)

March 1st 1969 is one of the more notorious dates in the calendar of rock music history.  Late on this day, the Doors gave a concert (of sorts) in Miami that led to Jim Morrison being charged (wrongly) with lewd and lascivious behaviour, a move by the authorities that had profound effects on the remainder of Morrison's brief life.  Film clips and photos from the night famously fail to illustrate Jim actually engaging in this 'lewd and lascivious behaviour', but they do reveal other fascinating material.  At one point in the fiasco that barely deserves the title 'concert', the alcohol-riddled Morrison berates the already uncontrollable audience: 'You're all a bunch of slaves.'  This ranting could easily be dismissed simply as the drunken Morrison behaving obnoxiously, as the drunken Morrison was inclined to do.  There may, however, be more to this outburst than random babble.

In his short yet meteoric career, Jim Morrison had learnt, among other things, how to precisely and utterly manipulate an audience (plus the cops often out in force).  On form, he was a master of the art.  Ray Manzarek, Doors keyboard player, considered Morrison at his best to fulfil a function similar to that of the ancient shaman, leading others into states of consciousness that would otherwise remain inaccessible to them.  But there is another, darker, side to this power over the audience.  In Morrison, the ease by which a crowd could be manipulated, provoked contempt for its members.  'You're all a bunch of slaves' is not exactly the way to ingratiate yourself with an audience.  No other figure from the pantheon of '60s rock could be imagined as insulting his/her fans in this way.  Fascinated by how the mass of people could be controlled, and in fact were controlled, Morrison saw more than he could reliably handle.  He saw how even the youth of America, supposedly the vanguard of change, ushering in a new, more aware and liberated era, were on the whole no different from the generations that had gone beforehand.

During the summer before the Miami incident, Jim had told Ray Manzarek that he wanted to leave the band. He wasn't feeling too good; in fact, he was having a mental breakdown. 'I just can't take it any more.' The prospect of the Doors without Morrison was unthinkable: Ray persuaded Jim to stay on, to review things after six months.  Commentators glibly parrot the notion that fame was proving too hot to handle. In Jim's case, however, I suspect things were more complex. His own experiments in pushing the boundaries and in wilful manipulation led to his seeing an awful lot about the human condition.  Not all of this was very pretty - specifically, the essential slave nature of the mass of humanity. Complicated further by mass adulation, a poetic soul, and being the sexiest rock god on the planet, Morrison proceede to devote himself to the consumption of vast quantities of alcohol, eschewing more sober and psychedelic approaches to the human condition.  The rest, as they say, is history.  To perceive a shocking truth is no joke.  When Jim died two years later, the Lords of Darkness will have shed few tears.


Act Four: Developing the Slave System

 Rosa Koire develops the theme

I began investigating the truth about windfarms over six years ago.  Uncovering the windfarm fraud led me seamlessly into the hornet's nest of global warming lies and deception.  From here it was a small step to the Pandora's box of control system machinations in general.  The crucial skill to develop along the way has been the ability to identify when what we are told is happening is dramatically different to what is really going on.  A detective's approach, involving a mix of critical discernment and keeping those antennae of intuition in good shape, is what's needed.

Now, for me, things are really beginning to come together.  Political, social, economic, and cultural events which once would have appeared weird, inexplicable, or merely random, all make sense within a perspective of overall global agendas.  Everything fits together, once the picture the jigsaw pieces are intended to create is recognised.  Politicians, officially the movers and shakers of the scene, are revealed to be nothing of the sort, merely puppets for public distraction and, if necessary, consumption.  Take David Cameron as an example.  Watch him pre-election and, regardless of personal political inclination, it's difficult not to detect a certain vigour, vitality, belief.  Now, as if by magic, all this has gone.  There's no passion, just a hollow man mouthing vacuous words.  Has there, indeed, ever been a more ineffectual Prime Minister?  The only thing I can recall him doing during his time in office is repeat the words 'cuts' and 'austerity' at frequent intervals.  He's clearly been neutered; the same is the case with Obama. They've been got.

Meanwhile, as the nature of elected groups and officials becomes ever more pitiful, real control is increasingly being passed to undemocratic bodies working as far as possible out of the public eye.  Unrepresentative and unaccountable groups are quietly and stealthily making the big decisions, partly funded by national governments (that is to say, by 'ordinary' people who pay taxes to the government).  In this way, the even skeletal democratic process we now have is being cleverly bypassed.  Which brings us nicely onto the United Nations and Agenda 21........

Gone are the days of my childhood, when our family would buy UNICEF Christmas cards in the hope that we were bringing a better life to the poorer children of the world through the beneficent channel of the United Nations.  Sadly, this body now encompasses many of the dreams and wishes of the psychopathic few who would control the rest of us. For 'United Nations' read 'Single World Governance'.  In a most excellent interview on Red Ice Radio, 16th August 2012 (link from 'favourites' on the right of this page), Rosa Koire talks on Agenda 21, the U.N.'s plan for the 21st century.  She describes it as a 'global totalitarian state in progress.'  Those who think these fancy ideas are all concocted by fringe wackos should note that Rosa is a real estate appraiser, no less; and anyone who dismisses climate change scepticism as the preserve of James Delingpole and the political right might take heed of the fact that she is also a Democrat in the USA.  There's no ideological excuse for not doing your homework now, folks.....

Agenda 21 is, among other things, 'an action plan for sustainability', and one manifestation of the way that genuine love for Gaia has been hijacked.  One of the primary aims of the programme is to create a perception of scarcity: perceived scarce resources = fear, insecurity = people will do whatever you ask if you promise to look after them.  In this context, Rosa says something for which I shall be eternally grateful.  It is something I had personally concluded, yet never stated, for fear of appearing irretrievably insane: the main reason windpower is pushed so forcefully is precisely because it is unreliable, and wastes resources in the form of enormous subsidies.  It is a huge manipulation in order to create scarcity. Thank you, Rosa, for uttering this almost unspeakable truth, the only rational conclusion to draw after examining the evidence.

The time has arrived, it seems, to haul the middle classes fully aboard the galley of slaves; Agenda 21 and the creation of scarcity is one means by which this can be achieved.  In Britain, at least (and I can only write with any authority about Britain), the working classes have been well-and-truly enslaved already.  They were effectively disempowered politically by the Thatcher regime in the 1980s.  Since then, befuddled by flat screen TVs, junk food, alcohol and heroin, dispossessed of any hope of progress through lack of meaningful job opportunities and a ghetto mentality, and tethered to state benefits for the duration, a populous underclass has been created.  Effective control system slaves for life, the kind of people the control system really likes.  Until now, the middle classes have been the willing foot soldiers of the control system, but now they must be reined in as well.  Occasional enterprise, the odd independent thinker, all a bit dodgy.  Spare time - always a dangerous luxury - must be snuffed out with long working hours, another product of the fabrication of scarcity.


Act Five: Time to Jump Ship?

   Another Rosa: looking across Glen Rosa, Isle of Arran

This all sounds very dark and nasty. It is.  But it should serve only as a wake-up call, a hefty kick in the direction of our own growth, liberation, unfoldment, call it what you will.  We cannot be free without knowing how we are unfree; we cannot grow while ignorant of what we are to grow from.  A certain education in control system dynamics, along with their effects on us and everything around us is a necessary step on the way. Our awareness of this has to be sharp, clear, and precise.  Vague Buddhist mutterings about the unsatisfactoriness of samsaric existence, or the poisons of greed, hatred, and delusion, just don't do it - for me, at any rate -, and at worst can be used as abstracted excuses to avoid the real nitty-gritty of the human condition.

Frankly, anybody who still supports the invasion of the windfarms is either hopelessly and worryingly naive, too lazy and irresponsible to do their homework, totally blinkered by ideology, or set to make a hefty buck out of it for their own back pocket.  This expensive and intermittent power source damages the planet while pretending to help it, and is part of a far wider programme of control, undertaken largely by unelected and unaccountable bodies.  The intention is not the betterment and enlightenment of the whole of humanity, but the creation of 'Planet Slave'.  To repeat: we can only become free if we know what we are to become free of.  Time to discern, discriminate, disentangle.  Time to jump ship.

          

Life Inside a Random Universe

Well, it's pretty pretty sometimes..........    (Photo: Nirananda)

As outlined in my previous piece ('Weird Scenes Inside the Goldmine', July 10th 2012), things haven't quite worked out as planned this summer.  In place of the reading list on alternative history, the expeditions to remote mountain peaks, the various mystical practices, I have been enduring a season of unanticipated, enforced homelessness.  Stress and manual spadework have been major characteristics.  Yet, among all the emotional and physical upheavals, the inconveniences and privations, the dust and plasterboard, the endless to-and-fro between places, the sense of being rootless with the attendant inability to focus on anything properly, there has been a feeling niggling away constantly in the background.  That the entire episode is elegant and gracious, timed to perfection, and absolutely the right thing to be happening.  This apparent domestic crisis, with its accompanying element of trauma, has forced me to face fair and square one of the big questions: how does the universe work?

One reading is that it's all a bit of an accident.  What happened in my home was simply a dose of 'bad luck'.  I was in the wrong place at the wrong time, that's all.  Specifically, old galvanised water tanks do sometimes spring a leak.  Could've happened to anyone, really.

The thing is that intuitively, instinctually, emotionally, physically even, this explanation doesn't really ring true.  Once I've seen beyond the debris of personal emotional reactions, it is more like part of the dance of the universe.  Once we've got over the puerile (non)distinction between things that are alive (mainly human beings), things that are deemed dead (rocks, tables, oceans), and those that are in between but treated as pretty inert (trees, dandelions, sardines), we see that everything is both interconnected and animated.  This is not, apparently, just a strange mystical notion harboured on Pale Green Vortex and by other assorted weirdos: it is borne out by quantum physics and other cutting edge science.

The confection of animation and interconnection as foundation building blocks for the universe implies that there are not literally and ultimately separate beings and consciousnesses at all.  My apparently separate being is at most a pragmatic, ever-changing fragment, in endless relation to the flux of the whole, the universal.  And in the case of this summer's events, universal consciousness has decided the time was right to help me along my sacred path by arranging an 'accident' that might facilitate my movement onward.  As an example, themes that I have been working on, at times struggling with, for years, related to energy imbalance in the psycho/physical organism I call 'me', have been rudely thrown to the fore as a result of this summer's happenings.  The old has been ruthlessly flushed out by the destructively purifying agent of the water element.  My own shamanic/energetic/mystical/meditation practice has, over the past year, expanded in ways I would hitherto have considered inconceivable.  Maybe I have been being primed for the accident event.  Maybe I should feel privileged that universal consciousness has decided to take a serious interest in me at this moment, deeming me strong enough to take some hefty medicine.  Maybe.

The notion that the universe is not only an interconnected system, but is imbued with intentionality, is not one to find favour with members of the Richard Dawkins fan club.  But if life and the universe are not just random directionless accidents, what can they be?

I am reminded of a number of ideas emanating from the diverse world of Buddhism.  In one of his more brilliant moments, my former Buddhist teacher expounded on the theme of the 'Cosmic Going for Refuge' (sadly, probably one of his half-lost-and-forgotten teachings, displaced by concerns of a more prosaic and organisational nature).  Proposed tentatively and as a poetic rendering, the Cosmic Going for Refuge nevertheless suggests that everything is involved in the movement towards greater truth and wisdom.  Subtly, obliquely, imperceptibly even, yet every rock, deer, tree, and can of beans participates.  It is hard-wired into the consciousness of the universe.

A more traditional foundation stone, of the Mahayana schools of Buddhism, is Bodhicitta.  Though sometimes translated as 'Enlightenment Mind' or 'Thought of Enlightenment', it is really more a matter of volition and of the heart.  In its manifestation as 'Absolute Bodhicitta', it expresses the same universal consciousness in its intentional or volitional aspect.  It is the fundamental drive in the universe, towards greater awareness, wisdom, and impeccable emotionality. This drive too becomes embodied in the Bodhisattva, a being who traditionally vows not to enter Nirvana until all others have come to enlightened fruition.  Given the interconnectedness of all phenomena, it would be impossible for a Bodhisattva to literally disappear off the chart anyway.  To even think in that way would be a disavowal of what a Bodhisattva is in her/his deeper aspect, a manifestation of the basic intention at the heart of the universe.

The Gnostics conceived of primal intentionality for the human species in a slightly different way.  For them, it consisted of realignment with Gaia-Sophia, the Wisdom Goddess embodied in planet Earth.  Gaia-Sophia would have us throw off the deviating influence of the Archons, rediscover our true nature, and embark on a joint venture with her, thereby bringing to fruition both our own deeper nature and hers.

A  consideration of the primacy of the intentional, volitional aspect in the universe also sheds new and fascinating light on some of the 'big subjects' of modern times.  For instance, there is the matter of 'the environment' and the apparent scarcity of physical resources.  If intentionality is indeed hard-wired into the fabric of the universe, then it is not just 'what we do' but 'how and why we do it' that matters.  Using up the planet's resources is near the top of the guilt list for members of modern western societies.  But we could speculate differently.  Maybe Gaia-Sophia, out of the pure love that is the reflection of her great wisdom, has provided from the very womb of her being for our benefit.  Use these resources wisely and judiciously, with care and love, to support our own growing awareness and harmony with the greater intention of the universe,   and we will be smiled upon by Gaia-Sophia.  She is happy to give of herself in the name of awakening.  Should we squander these gifts, however, using them for personal gain, to feed separate selfhood rather than our deeper natures, then all hell may well break loose.

Whatever the status of these speculations, a disquieting feeling near the bedrock of my being remains: maybe the universe doesn't work the way we normally think at all.........