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.