Two Sides to the Monster of Life

It is as if there are two different programmes running simultaneously in my brain. They treat information differently.

One I can call the Zen Programme. It runs on 'This Is It' software. Everything is simply the way it is, the way it is, and that's pretty much it. Wishing anything different is stupid, because things are the way they are, and that's all we've got. A bird is a bird is a bird, and it does birdie things. The person living next door does what he or she does because it's what he or she does. In the Zen programme, furthermore, not only are things the way they are, but there is a kind of perfection attached to all this. Everything 'is' in precise reflection of its own nature. Taken seriously, the Zen programme gives rise to a certain kind of contentment, a deep acceptance, and possibly feelings of unconditional love.

But there is also running in my brain a second programme. It hasn't got a name. I could call it the Alchemy Programme, but alchemy is all a bit mysterious. I could name it the Jung programme, but I have discovered that there are lots of people who don't like Jung.

It is this second programme which gives rise to sentences such as these in my recent post 'The Bliss'. Speaking of mainstream 'news and current affairs' programmes, I wrote: "Should I stumble into a thirty-second exposure to such programmes, it is like looking at another world on the other side of a pane of glass. And it is a hell world, composed of pure evil." These sentences actually provoked a couple of remarks from readers; and they speak volumes about the nature of this second programme.

Light and dark; good and bad; masculine, feminine; up and down; night, day; sun, moon: these are the stuff of the second programme. It runs on opposites, dualities, couplings, pairs. Polarities. Syzygy, to go Jung and Hillman. Differences, distinctions, discriminations. Even if everything is One, that One is composed of the Two, and of the manifold. The One splits into Two, the Two unite as One. But without due cognisance of the Two, any experience of the One is wan, partial, one-sided, superficial. And, er, delusional and possibly dangerous....

So it is within this context of polarity that I wrote of the hell world on the other side of the pane of glass, composed of pure evil. 'Evil' is one of those words, isn't it? For many people it is a very loaded and emotive word. Philosophers, theologians, and metaphysicians have debated for centuries - nay, millennia - the nature of evil: what it is, or indeed if it exists at all. It goes without saying that we are no closer to knowing the answer now than were folk in Plato's time.

My own use of the word 'evil' comes divested of these big philosophical, ontological speculations. It is actually quite practical and pragmatic. 'What is the greatest good?' I ask myself. The greatest good is human beings fulfilling their potential, their most magnificent possibilities. Contact with Higher Self, with God; growing towards the Absolute; Enlightenment, saturated with Wisdom and unfettered Compassion. Individuality, Authenticity. The variants are many, and I'm not bothered with their differences at the moment. The main point about 'good' is the thing. It has this impulse, this motive, this direction.

If this is the greatest good, then evil is the opposite, the biggest bad. Evil is therefore whatever leads human beings away from achieving their miraculous birthright of 'awakening'. In particular, blinds that are tied before peoples' eyes, so they are unable to see what they could become. Deliberate confusing, deluding. Or denying that such higher potential exists. This, in my book, is evil.

So when I look through that pane of glass, I see the public being presented with a particular version of reality. It is a version in which misery reigns supreme. Fear, insecurity, anxiety, are created by what is spewed forth as 'news' and 'the issues of the day' for the unwitting consumption of the unknowing. It is a manipulation of people into hopelessness and powerlessness; away from their own authenticity into a strange fabricated world. A manipulation into ideology, especially the ideology of political correctness, and away from ones unique and direct personal experience of life. At best it is very partial, at worst completely false. It points away from that most dangerous truth for any powers-that-be: from the knowledge that god lives within, if you like, can be realised, and that everything else just pales in comparison.

This is why 'news' is full of reports of rapes, abuses, murders. Of abject apologies from celebrities and politicians for supposedly sexist or racist tweets or facebook posts. Keep people afraid to speak, afraid to speak. And why 'news' is not full of alchemy, kundalini, seeing God through the assistance of meditation or psychedelic substances; telepathy, advances in energetic treatments for disease, or efforts to produce cheap or free energy, all of which would liberate people from the shackles of the construct which 'news' exists to perpetuate.

There is a thing in human existence, a special evil, we could call it. Light and dark exist in the animal world. A crocodile tearing its prey to pieces, a cat playing with a pain-wracked dying mouse; the horror of a volcano, an earthquake, a tsunami. Death through starvation on the desert plains. It all seems pretty harsh and dark to me. But I submit that human existence comes overlaid with an extra layer. It is a layer which appears deliberately intended to keep human beings in ignorance, blind to what they could become, if only somebody showed them. This is what I term 'evil'.

So it is outside the natural cycle of Creation, Preservation, and Destruction, as elucidated by Hinduism, for example. It is another, new, factor fed into that system of nature. Deliberate, synthetic, pulling people away. And this is where, for me, the demiurge and the archons come in.

It is some of the Gnostics who insist upon the reality of the demiurge and his minions, the archons. We can take them literally, or we can take them metaphorically. Whichever, as a story, and as a description of what goes on in human affairs, it speaks to me in a way that nothing else quite does.

The demiurge is a false god. He is an impostor on the godly scene. He stands up and rants about how he is the creator of all, the one and only. It's a bit of a bad joke, until the tragic happens and the mass of humanity actually believes his story. He ends up creating most of the world that gullible people inhabit as a result. His job, his purpose, is to keep people believing this nonsense, and to keep them away from the truth. In order to assist in his subterfuge, he has his hordes of inorganic helpers, the archons.  They are his foot soldiers, engaged in deceiving and deluding  people. They lead humans astray through ideas and ideologies. To continue the computer analogy (a ridiculous thing for me to do, given my own parlous knowledge of things virtual), they are like a virus which infects the workings of the brain.

It's been going on for a long time: our early Gnostics are contemporaries of the first Christians. Mind manipulation, warping humanity's view of reality, is nothing recent. But it is this which, I submit, is the foundation of the really really bad: of evil.    

To look through that pane of glass is to peer from a place of relative authenticity into a synthetic creation, a manufactured bubble, a nightmare induced by the god of falseness. Which is not to say that everything which turns up on the BBC Six o' Clock news is 'untrue' or designed to scare and manipulate. Of course not. But that is the overall context, the general worldview which issues from such a dark place.

It is possible to develop out of, to become free from, the clutches of the demiurge and his nasty minions. Courage to be sovereign, authentic, is the key. This may or may not come with recognised spiritual practice. Sometimes yes, sometimes no. There are plenty of people who may spend a lifetime sitting on a meditation cushion and go to the grave with their archon-derived notions intact.

No. The key seems to be awaking to the innate power within ones individual life, free of any organisations, systems, gurus, leaders, religious or non-religious traditions, ideologies. The spiritual anarchist stands the best chance. That is not to say that the demiurge will not impact upon ones life. His henchmen may turn up on the doorstep one day and drag you away because you've been a naughty boy or girl. Nothing much to do about that. But emotionally, psychologically, energetically, the person is free. Which is plenty to aim for.

Living and Dying in the Mountains

Every winter people die in the Scottish mountains. This season has been pretty bad, a reflection, in part at least, of the weather. It has been relentless for three months now, and that's at sea level.

I am always affected when people die in the mountains. I know why they went, why it was so important to them: the feeling is one shared among mountain people. I sometimes think: 'It could have been me.' Except that I don't normally go to the mountains when weather conditions are suspicious, in winter time especially.

'Dying on the mountains' is a real enough notion for me to indulge in some morbid fantasising concerning different ways you can perish on the hills. Falling down a cliff face in summer may not be so bad: hard and swift. But winter? Snow, blizzards, hypothermia, slowly losing all bodily sensation, physical and emotional energy, the will to live slowly sapping away. Or it could be quick and horrid: a mighty avalanche sweeping you away, or burying you alive.

It can't get much worse than this. "He died doing what he loved" (it is more often 'he' than 'she' in mountain mortalities) is the theme sometimes expressed in the search for solace, but it fails to convince me really.

The most anguished examples hail, not so much from Scotland, as from Himalayan, and occasionally Alpine, mountaineering. It was with fascinated horror, or horrified fascination, that I used to read about expeditions to the high Himalayan peaks, when only half the team would manage to get back to base camp. There's a mountain - it might be K2, I'm not sure - where climbing it entails passing bodies frozen solid into the snow. They have been there for years, but the oxygen's so thin at that altitude that nobody's got the strength to bring them down.

Closer to home, one incident in particular has affected me. Over a week ago now, two brothers - one in his 50s, the other in his 60s - along with a dog, set off to the mountains from the tiny hamlet of Achnashellach. They didn't return.

The incident has continued to play on and through my mind. I know those mountains well. The brothers set out to traverse the round of summits encircling Achnashellach. I have ascended these mountains many times: they comprise one of my semi-local happy hunting grounds.

On a fine day, there are no special problems for a person who knows what they are doing. But ice, snow, blizzard, wind chill, freezing gales blowing snow horizontally into your face.....

I can imagine in my mind's eye those two guys setting off on the path - across the railway line, turn left through the trees then down beside the cascading stream. Following its course as it climbs up into the mountain-encircled coire. Then choose a peak.

The images continue to play fruitlessly through my mind. What happened? Where did it go wrong? I travel the entire route in imagination: the climb, the ridges, summits, the little scrambles, the stalkers' path of descent. I know it so well. On a fine day......... as I said.

These are serious mountains, outliers of the famous Torridon group. Plenty of vertical faces of cliff, lots of rock. Lots. And, under winter conditions, plenty of places to get avalanched. One March a few years ago I was in these hills. The path cut below an enormous bank of snow. I moved gingerly, ensuring I created no disturbance, at one point diverting away from that bank, keeping all the while a close eye on it.

Those admirable, courageous people from Mountain Rescue found one body. I believe they've given up for now, with the search for the other body considered hopeless until there has been significant snow melt.

Personally, I love mountains, but have grown to feel that there are times when they are not really a suitable haunt for me. We are not 'meant' to be there, similar to how a walrus is not meant to be hanging out in the Atacama Desert. Love gives birth to respect, and to restraint. In my case, at least....

Images: Mountains above Achnashellach, late spring

The Bliss

'Society cannot allow ecstasy. Ecstasy is the greatest revolution.... If people become ecstatic, the whole society will have to change, because this society is based on misery.' Osho, Body Mind Balancing.

Not everyone in the 'spiritual world' greets ecstasy and bliss with such enthusiasm. Some schools of Buddhism are full of sharp wits queuing up to issue stern warnings. 'Bliss, ecstasy, rapture are all very well, but heed my wise words. They are impermanent, just like anything else, fragile as the leaves on the trees in the autumn wind. Pay them attention, get attached at your peril. Suffering will follow in their wake as sure as night follows day.' 'Lofty but still mundane possibilities' is what Sangharakshita calls the jhanas, or higher states of consciousness, which are suffused by such qualities. And that need to emphasise 'mundane' seems to bring bliss, ecstasy, and rapture down into the same category as queuing up at the supermarket check-out.

Fortunately, not all Buddhism views ecstasy in such a dim light. Vajrayana, Tantra, see the energy of bliss as a quickener, creating a kind of short cut to wisdom, or gnosis as I might prefer to call it. It is fuel for the path, as well as a reflection of the blessedness of gnosis in and of itself.

As I sat in a shrine room full of meditators in the 1970s and early 1980s, a wry sense of humour would come over me whenever these bliss-alerts came to mind. One would-be meditator would be sitting there trying to banish fantasies about the girl he saw on the bus en route to the class. Another would be assailed by an avalanche of jobs that needed to be done by the weekend. Another would be engrossed in irritation at the stupid guy he was talking to over a cup of tea before the meditation. Yet another would be shaking and wobbling internally, undergoing his regular visitation from generalised anxiety. And there we were, told to beware of the dangers of too much bliss and ecstasy.

Jana Dixon amplifies on what 'society based on bliss, rather than misery' is actually about. 'The bliss is a permanent background which is impervious to both suffering and pleasure. The bliss is all pervasive. That is, we can be in the worst physical or emotional suffering and still be in radical bliss. Then on top of the bliss there are emotions, desires, suffering, numbness, anhedonia and whatever our relative response to life is at the time.' (Biology of Kundalini, section 'A tolerance for bliss'.)

So, promoting bliss does not mean becoming a 'lightworker' who shuns the dark side of life. It is about background; the programme running quietly yet continuously in the background.

A better feeling for this may come from considering the opposite. As Osho says, a society based upon misery. Everybody will be familiar with this as the backdrop to existence, either from personal experience or from those they are close to.  It is the wash providing the context, influencing everything and all. Birthday with lots of nice presents: great, but with a background of misery. Promotion at work: yes, but the background's there. Holiday abroad: sun, sea, sand, and a backdrop of misery.

Spend any substantial time in the company of mainstream media, and I suggest that it is almost impossible to experience life as anything but misery. 'News', current affairs progs and documentaries, soul-destroyers like 'Newsnight' and 'Victoria Derbyshire' on BBC in the UK. My own continued 99% boycotting of these noxious programmes has yielded interesting results. Should I stumble into a thirty-second exposure to such programmes, it is like looking at another world on the other side of a pane of glass. And it is a hell world, composed of pure evil. 'Are you telling me that this.... is..... the....world?' I ask slack-jawed in disbelief. It is a synthetic, manufactured version of 'what is important'; and it is purpose-designed to instruct the viewer that life, the world, is misery. It's a lie, a vicious piece of mind control. Better by far the way of bliss.

Image: Chinnamasta. Or, from Tantric Buddhism, it could be Chinnamunda, a form of Vajrayogini. When I saw this thangka, I immediately thought 'Ah, Kundalini.'

Out of the Desert

I have sometimes wondered how much of his readership Carlos Castaneda lost in that one single move. It was a bold step, even for a writer as daring as Castaneda.


We are in Part Two of 'Tales of Power'. Castaneda is in Mexico City on a Sunday afternoon. He is wandering around the market stalls in aimless fashion, when there is a tap on his shoulder. It is none other than Don Juan. And he is wearing a suit.

Castaneda is as dumbfounded as the typical reader probably was. Don Juan has to keep on getting Carlos to close his mouth, which falls open in astonishment at regular intervals.

Not only is Don Juan wearing a suit, but he is apparently wearing it impeccably. He looks, Castaneda tells us, 'an impeccably tailored urban dweller.'

Something of the impact of this event is captured in notes I made in a personal diary-of-sorts. "When Don Juan first turns up in his city suit in 'Tales of Power', it's the moment when you feel like giving up on Castaneda. 'He's gone too far this time. I'm not letting him get away with this.' Gone the solitary nature ascetic, the desert shaman, the wise old sorcerer standing remote and alone, aloft and above it all. Instead we've got this guy in pinstripes who's got a job and goes to restaurants."

For three and a half books we've got accustomed to Don Juan in his sandals and straw hat, leaning against the wall of his rude little house, maybe, or out beneath the unforgiving desert sun, speaking to the plants and the wind. He embodies the image perfectly, the archetype, if you like. And now...... As Castaneda says a few pages on: "Your suit scares me more than anything you've done." And later still: "I did not know what to think. I felt that I had arrived at the end of my path."

So much adheres to an mage. When it collapses, we too can feel lost, or confused at the very least. Merlin, Gandalf, Don Juan: all of a type. Wise old men who live 'out there', deigning to enter our own vulgar, tedious world on the rare occasion. The Don Juan of the desert will always be there. But by turning up in Mexico City in his pin stripes and brown shoes he acquired another dimension altogether.

'Tales of Power' is the fourth and final - I would say climactic - volume in Castaneda's first and best known series of books. It appeared in 1974 to an eager audience of folk like myself, riding the wave of 'back to the land' ethos, and intent on leaving behind as quickly as possible the world of the pin-striped suit. However, any aversion created by Don Juan's newest manifestation was dissolved by some of the content of this book. In my view, it is one of Castaneda's finest works. 'Tales of power': it's not just the incidents themselves, about the power surging through the cosmos. The tales in this book are related in writing that is indeed full of power, some of Castaneda's best.

It is in 'Tales of Power', over a lunch of soup in Mexico City and in his suit, that Don Juan gives his explanation of the tonal and the nagual. "The tonal is everything we know" he informs an increasingly perplexed Carlos, while "The nagual is the part of us for which there is no description." The tonal is like the table we are eating from, continues Don Juan; the known items are the knives, forks, salt cellars and the rest.

In typical fashion, Castaneda tries to get to grips with all this. "Is the nagual the soul?" No. Let's say the soul is the ashtray. "Is it the thoughts of men?" No, these are the silverware. A state of grace? Heaven? God? What about God? Surely the nagual is God, who is everything. No again. Don Juan is amused to say that God is the tablecloth. Nearing his wit's end, Castaneda demands to know: where, then, is the nagual? 'Don Juan made a sweeping gesture and pointed to the area beyond the boundaries of the table.' "The nagual is there, surrounding the island... where power hovers."

The most magnificent section of all, in my view, is reserved for the end of the book. It is the moment for great farewells, sorcerer-style, and Don Genaro expresses his love for the Earth. Whenever I return to these paragraphs, their effect is invariably profound. ".... the earth knows that Genaro loves it" explains Don Juan "and it bestows on him its care ....... Genaro roams on the paths of his love and, wherever it is, he is complete." And so it goes on.

My recent revisit of this outstanding piece of writing  has led me to realise yet another aspect to the power of these tales. It is one part of how, I suppose, over forty years ago, I became a Buddhist rather than heading off to the desert in search of a Mexican shaman.

Much of my own experience of multidimensional realities, let us call them, could be couched in terms of 'consciousness'. Pale Green Vortex is full of references to 'consciousness'; less so to 'mind' which is a more problematic word, more prone to being identified with 'brain' and with 'thoughts'. A major personal gateway in the early 1970s was LSD.  And, in my experience, LSD was all mind, all consciousness. I have since then had the privilege to sample the blessings conferred by other 'psychedelic type plants and substances', such as cactus and ayahuasca. But none, in my view, approach old-fashioned LSD in terms of pure consciousness.

The emphasis has remained. A common thread weaving its way through many of the topics turning up on this blog is that 'c' word.

Read Castaneda, though, and it's very different. Much of the experience described in the books is somatic. It happens in the physical, in the body. Just open any of Castaneda's books at random and it will stare you in the face. I let my copy of 'Tales of Power' fall open in the chapter entitled 'Shrinking the Tonal'. See what happens to poor little Carlos here as he goes through typically strange experiences under the tutelage of Don Juan. "There was a pressure in my head, a tickling feeling, as if carbonated soda were going through my nose. I was speechless. I tried to say something without success." A couple of pages on: "We walked in silence for a moment. My body was feverish. I noticed that the palms of my hands and the soles of my feet were burning hot. The same unusual heat also seemed to be localized in my nostrils and eyelids." And another from near the end of the chapter: "I shivered. My body felt it was at the edge of an abyss........ The struggle made me numb by degrees, until I could not feel my body. My mouth was open and my eyes were half closed....."

This is what you get for involving in 'the evil world of sorcery', as Don Juan terms it. Pressure in the head, fevers, burning hands and feet, shivers and numbness. And it's a far cry from consciousness, at least as commonly understood. Not only is it physical rather than mental, a lot of it doesn't seem very nice at all, a million miles away from the calming mindfulness that some meditation promises. Not the sort of thing that any right-minded person would sign up to at all. In truth, Castaneda's experience bears more resemblance to some full-on kundalini event than it does to a public meditation class. Which is where things all begin to tie up, I suppose.....

The fairly unconscious urge to revisit this book of Castaneda's has opened this up for me. My own 'spiritual life', if we can call it that, has recently become filled with physical, bodily events. It is energetic and physical, radically different to what I have been accustomed to in the past. But the world of sorcery, as described in 'Tales of Power' and elsewhere, resonates with the weird happenings within my own body. I 'feel' Castaneda more fully than in the past.  

Images: Sonoran Desert
             Mexico City