Practising the Dark Arts

It was during the late 1970s, a period I may speak of as my Buddhist apprenticeship, that I was told about the Dragon's Head, Snake's Body. The term refers to a person with a highly-developed mental and rational faculty, but underformed emotional self and poor physical awareness. At the time that I came across it, the description was aimed primarily at certain Buddhist academics and scholars, whose fierce intellect was used to argue and defend all manner of dubious standpoint. The image is more apposite still today, however: we live daily under the constant spectre of the Dragon's Head, Snake's Body.

I am thinking primarily of the majority population of our current scientific and academic communities, a cartoon depiction of whom would portray a bulging brain wobbling atop a pimple-sized body. I have some first-hand experience of these malformed serpentine creatures, having passed some, in their fledgling form at least, in the darkened corridors of Oxford University during my undergraduate days. More recently, personal need has compelled me to delve into their dark world more deeply than I would normally wish to do, in the attempt to shed light on various shady goings-on that have been the subject of several previous blogs.

Various tools are available to analyse the reptilian hybrid - Jung's study of psychological types comes readily to mind - but, most simply, Dragon's Head, Snake's Body is not whole or complete. It takes one part of the human psycho-physical organism and treats it as the finished product. Unfortunately, this bloated rationality has no consciousness of anything else, particularly of what is often motivating it in the first place (unacknowledged emotional and physical drives and instincts, giving rise to unconscious initial standpoints and prejudices). As such, Dragon's Head, Snake's Body activity simply cannot be trusted.

These reflections come to mind as the carrion creatures gather in Cancun, Mexico, for another round of global warming scaremongering, along with 'let's see who we can screw for some more big bucks, and take away a bit more of their personal liberty in the process' in the name of the 'save the planet' chimera. A trawl of relevant blogs and websites shows a veritable plethora of statistics that finally give the lie to the fantasy of scientific objectivity. The endless to-ing and fro-ing of apparently contradictory data demonstrates mainly that you can prove anything you want; look long and hard enough, and the statistics will be there to back you up. The one clear fact shining through all of this is that global climate remains poorly and only partially understood. The people who we should be worried about are the scientific and political reptiles who would have us believe otherwise, claiming that anthropogenic global warming is an undisputed fact and an unprecedented danger, and that we should adopt all manner of drastic measure immediately or we'll all be doomed. This is dark sorcery indeed, the weaving of malefic spells.

And, because of our own predispositions, 'weaving a spell' is precisely what scientists, academics, and politicians are able to do. Science is the current religion, the means by which truth is apprehended; scientists are vessels for that truth, in the same way that priests and men of the church once were. Given our own faith in science as the means by which the world is to be understood, we modern folk are extremely vulnerable to the words, suggestions, and sometimes manipulations by the science-priests. Dress a notion in the cloak of data and statistics - any notion - and there will be people who will believe it. Given the already-discussed lack of self-knowledge of most of our reptilian friends, the danger increases twofold. And given the fatal conjunction of power (politicians, big business) and faith (scientists) in modern times, which replicates the conjoining of power (the State) and faith (the Church) in times gone by, we have a perilous and manipulation-prone condition indeed.

The general populace is fair game. How many times do newspaper articles and BBC Breakfast newsbites begin with the phrases: 'Scientists have found......','Academics have discovered....', 'In a report released today......', 'New research suggests....'? This is all magic, infecting the minds and hearts of people without their normally even realising it. Treat these magic incantations with the utmost caution, I beg you. The safest ways to avoid being a victim of these mind-warping dark arts is simply to turn off the television and stop buying the newspaper.

To repeat: science is a modern religion. It encompasses a belief system, a way of looking at the world. It is not infallible, and nowhere near a complete picture, especially in the stripped-down version, defined by the confines of rational materialism, that forms its mainstream. A cursory investigation of ancient and medeival western socieities, along with extant shamanic cultures, is all that is required to demonstrate that ways of looking at the world other than modern rational materialism can exist, and in their own ways serve a society quite well. Any modern believer who protests that our system is 'the truth, the whole truth, and the only truth' is repeating the same mantra that was used by the medeival priesthood. And, by the way, laying themselves open to the dark sorcery of the current age.

P.S. The photo is of Prof Phil 'Climategate' Jones, from the University of East Anglia, who has no connection whatsoever with the practice of the Dark Arts as described above.

The Many Hues of Autumn (well, a few....)

Anyone who prefers highland Scotland to remain a place of (relatively) remote lochs, unspoilt moorlands, and wild mountains, rather than become an industrial junkheap littered with useless metal-and-plastic wind turbines should visit the stopcorriemoillie website (stopcorriemoillienow.co.uk) and register their objection to the Highland Council (it's easy through the website). A rubbish heap of flailing windsticks has already been approved in the area: now Eon, the energy-and-government-subsidy company, wants to build another one immediately adjacent. Together, these two industrial sites will create a mass of industrial sprawl at one of the major gateways to the deep north-west Highlands of Scotland, clearly visible to all who enter. They are part of Chief Reptilian emissary Salmond's grand plan to make Scotland into the 'Saudi Arabia of renewables.' This is clearly his main desperate grasp at fame on the world stage. More likely, he will go down in history as the man who destroyed the Highlands, even outdoing notorious characters such as the Duke of Cumberland. Write to Highland Council by November 22nd; not long to go. But every objection makes a difference.

Apart from this, Pale Green Vortex points its distinguished readers in the direction of two recommended pieces of listening. For a taste of the fine work of Neil Kramer, you could do worse than go to his 'Cleaver' site through the link on the right, and his interview on Vantage Point Radio, September 27th. And for a (very) personal and impassioned blast about another major theme on Pale Green Vortex, drug laws, listen to Opaque Lens, aka Niall Murphy, in the 'DMT roamcast' , the October 27th presentation on Shamanic Freedom Radio. A special treat awaits those who listen to the beginning of the following episode: Mr Lens reads out a letter written to him in response to his own travails by yours truly.....

Sometimes I think the Control System and its emissaries are getting increasingly desperate. Busts and general harassment of headshops and online vendors of mimosa hostilis - perfectly legal, even within our current restrictive framework - are pathetic, and laughable apart from the fact that it is real people whose lives are intimidated. Similarly, thanks in part to the tireless work of James Delingpole, Christopher Booker, et al, the huge scam surrounding the proliferation of wind farms, and the dodgy foundations of human-made global warming theory in general, are coming more into the limelight. The Control System continues with its extremely unenvironmental policies regardless, hurrying along until general opinion makes them inoperable. Our softly softly totalitarians won't give up without a fight, but their actions suggest that they are up against it, and they know it.

The Bad Trip: Migraine

It's 4.30 am. Several hours of sleep are terminated by an internal projector screening trauma-tinged scenes from the previous day. I am unable to turn it off; this is not a good sign. More ominous still is the vague but unmistakeable gnawing indigestion in the pit of my stomach. I consider medication but am uncertain, and can't be bothered anyway. I turn over and attempt to banish the discomfort by conscious relaxation.

Two hours later, Martha gets up. I inform her that I am suffering from a semi-migraine. It's not long before 'semi' can be removed from the equation. A headache has moved into a familiar spot to the right of my temples, and the nausea has intensified. The outside world begins to shut down, and I am plunged into an interior cinemascape of vivid fantasies: a procession of people from the distant past, sexual images dating back forty years. They eventually fade away, leaving me in a dark, still space, painful and exhausting. The headache is less severe than sometimes - I do not need to groan in anguish. The nausea is more problematic, however, and I feel afraid. I know the pattern. I shall not be free of the pain until the entire process has played itself out completely.

Seven hours later, I am retching from deep inside my intestines. 'Please come out' I implore, as the slowly growing but obstinate clenching sensations refuse to reach their conclusion. The earlier phases, hours before, are easy to handle, coming from the stomach proper. Each successive series of convulsions emanates from a deeper point, however, and nothing can stop it. I try to relax and stay quiet in bed, but this is not always the best thing. The sound of Martha walking downstairs is enough to disturb my false equilibrium and bring on another session of necessary retching. Once the final bodyquake has issued from a spot way below the belly button I recognise the signs immediately, and can once more look forward to a future.

For mild migraines, a medicine called Migraleve can relieve the symptoms. Working in classic symptomatic medicine style, it contains painkiller for the headache and an anti-nausea ingredient for the gut. I also have a pill entitled Sumatriptan. If taken in time, it is like magic, cutting off the symptoms and permitting me to go to work, climb a hill, or whatever. I am not fond of Sumatriptan, however, and use it sparingly. Sumatriptan works by narrowing the blood vessels which dilate during a migraine through the agent of serotonin. It can leave me with a muddy feeling the day after, as if a mysterious but necessary psycho-physical process has been artificially cut off. Temporary relief, but no guarantee that it is beneficial in the longer term. In contrast, a migraine allowed to run its course may leave me feeling light, purified, and refreshed.

It is fair to say that, behind its armoury of medications, orthodox medicine does not understand what migraine is at all. It can wax lyrical about symptoms and dealing with the effects, but that is all. It is strange for ones life to be overwhelmed from time-to-time by a condition which root is unknown, but you get to live with the fact. My own experience over almost two decades points to migraine being a disturbance in the energy field, but this is not the kind of statement that has conventional medical researchers jumping up and down with excitement. There is probably somebody out there - in a village in the depths of the Amazon rainforest maybe, or deeply versed in the arts of acupuncture - who actually knows. My own task is simply to become more proactive, and discover what is out there in the first place.

Coming Out

(The photo is of James Delingpole, blogger extraordinaire. His writings, along with the copious links contained therein, are probably the best source of information on the subject I write about below. His is a blog for the Daily Telegraph - an unlikely resource for Pale Green Vortex, it may be thought. But a voice of truth cannot be ignored, whatever its origin.....)

'Coming out' is a term once the preserve of homosexuals. To come out required considerable courage, putting at risk relationships with family and friends, endangering chances of success in the workplace, and invoking the spectre of social estrangement and hostility, violence even, from those who regarded your position as wrong, wicked or sinful.

Today, a new object has emerged as the butt of a blind prejudice which, in some circles at least, seems deemed acceptable. This is the Human-Made (Anthropogenic) Global Warming sceptic - AGW sceptic for short. Think I'm exaggerating? Ask Peter Taylor, subject to vicious ad hominem attacks from former colleagues in Greenpeace and the like, following his work questioning the validity of the AGW theory (and, remember, it is a theory, a hypothesis, not a proven fact). Ask David Bellamy. Ask a host of scientists who have in essence put their livelihood at risk by daring to question the received wisdom of AGW. No manner of insult, abuse, half-truth, lies, and attempt at suppression, is out-of-court in dealing with these renegade and extremely dangerous individuals. It often falls to retired members of the scientific community - no longer needing to toe the line in order to get funding for their work - to blow the whistle on the pseudo and false science that fuels the AGW juggernaut.

The nasty side of the AGW camp really came out in the recent scandal surounding the 10:10 snuff movie. 10:10 is a movement aiming at reducing our carbon footprint by 10% every year. In a nutshell, its video nasty (involving such luminaries as Richard Curtis of 'Love Actually' fame, Gillian 'X Files' Anderson, and members of Tottenham Hotspur football club) portrays sceptics getting gorily blown to pieces for their doubts. Remarkably, this was intended to be rather funny, which in itself says something about the mindset behind it all. Think for a moment. Could a similar movie be made and purport to be a jolly laugh if, instead of AGW sceptics, it was blowing up Jews? Or members of the Taleban? Or homosexuals? I think not.

Another giveaway to the dark side of the Warmist agenda is the appelation given to those who dare to disagree. They are termed 'deniers'. Ring any bells?

So I close my eyes, take a deep breath, and hereby declare myself an AGW sceptic. After a fair bit of weighing up the evidence, and while not doubting that human activity must have some effect on global climate, I seriously question the claim of its overriding significance.

My own credentials for taking such a stand are not so hopeless. I undertook some study of the theoretical mechanics of human activity's influence on climate at Oxford University during the 1970s, decades before the topic hit the mainstream. More recently, I was one of those who read James Lovelock's apocalyptic 'Revenge of Gaia' and began to get worried. However, as the years have passed, I have come to see how economic, political, and academic power-and-money agendas have usurped the cause, twisting the matter beyond belief. The result has been the birth of a new religion, Warmism. And, as often happens with religion, it is built on shaky ground. In this case, the belief of the faithful is based on dodgy, selective and sometimes manipulated statistics; amateurish computer models; and an ideology that, ironically, is rather life-hating.

The philosophical paradox is that these so-called environmentalists fail to see the greater environment at all. They are a cross between Old Testament believers, seeing humanity as the centre of everything, and pre-Galileo scientists, who missed the bigger environmental picture altogether, and the greater significance of that huge golden mass around which our little Earth circles. Psychologically, the cult of AGW feeds on a sense of the innate wickedness of human activity, which in turn has its roots in the doctrine of Original Sin. Financially, AGW is the fraud and scam of the age, meaning big bucks for the few and higher taxes for the masses. And politically it is an excuse for further fear-mongering to justify more interfering with peoples' lives and eroding any remaining vestiges of democracy.

More to be said, more to be said.........

Summer's Almost Gone...

Wake Up!

There are some who influence our lives as models fit for emulation. Others simply burn brightly, dazzling and disturbing briefly with their incandescence, before leaving this theatre of life exhausted, the light extinguished seemingly before its proper time.

Into the latter category steps one-time poet and singer with the Doors, Jim Morrison. Some portray him as the great rock god, the lizard king, heir to the mantle of Rimbaud; others as a drunken, debauched caricature of rock music excess. Both are probably in their way correct. But it is in celebration of the lizard king that we come today.....

Jim Morrison's life is sometimes depicted as a tragedy. From first flickerings of success to death in a bathtub in Paris in six short years. I am inclined to read things differently, however. There is a certain 'rightness' about the trajectory of that meteoric life: every note, every one-night stand, every confrontation, each and every shot of whisky, have their place in a story that could be nothing else but short and sharp. It is as if the gods took as a vessel for communication a particular human life and, once done, discarded it by the wayside. It could be no other way. There is only so much daemonic frenzy a human soul can bear and pour forth before it burns out. The same goes for those others who came incandescent, before the fire was extinguished at an early age: Mozart and Schubert; Raphael and Giorgione; Shelley and Keats. Morrison joins their noble ranks. This is the Romantic reading, at least.

At a certain point in his onstage career, Jim Morrison took to berating the audience at the beginning of a concert:'Wake up!' he would yell into the midst of the collective candyfloss. And, while forcing people to awake from their psychic slumbers cannot be done, there's no harm in politely suggesting that maybe, just maybe, they are wasting away in the unwitting throes of a deep unconscious sleep.....

Forty years on, and the collective somnolence continues, now aided and abetted by all manner of socially-sanctioned tranquilisers, the like of which make diazepam seem like a pick-me-up tonic. Today's dumbers and downers come in the form of new technologies, all of which perform the major function of keeping us asleep and blocking the mental pathways into those most dangerous of territories, personal introspection and self knowledge. Take the texting and mobile phone culture: designed to keep the user incessantly occupied, hopping, skipping, and jumping, but always on the surface of things. Info bytes:'I'm on the train.' Never enquiry about the condition of the soul. How many people cannot venture beyond the front door without their constant companion clutched hard in their hand? Next up: multi-channel television and computers. So much information, all there at the push of a key or a button. Total convenience, instant distraction. Ten minutes to spare: time to skim a few dozen channels, check the sports results, the latest celebrity news. Anything to escape that most dangerous and frightening of all things - stopping, being still and experiencing what is really going on. I know: it happens to me. Nowadays, I need to make far more effort to stay still, do nothing, just 'be', than fifteen years ago. I am not immune to the grasshopper mentality which has infected the whole of western 'civilisation' with a collective attention deficit disorder.

And what about digital cameras and home video? The ease and cheapness of digital photography mean that it is now possible to compile a full record of a holiday for family and friends without actually experiencing a place at all! Notice how people no longer stop to directly sense their surroundings. They simply get hold of the camera and click. The non-experienced present exists merely as a potential record of the past.

All of this serves to create a fast-moving, surface-defined mentality that takes itself as the norm so much that it does not even consider slowing down as a possibility. And this mentality of zappy stimulated dissatisfaction generated by full deployment of these modern technologies then feeds into the apotheosis of Control System strategies....... shopping.

Walk into the indoor shopping mall, and the narcosis is complete. Even those who normally go about life with a sense of vital purpose soon acquire the glazed eyes, the slow, soporific way of moving, the massaged brain, the softly-softly idiocy that are prerequisites for hardcore shopping. The population finally reduced to the narcoleptic dream state in order to fulfil its major functions at the service of the Control System: spend/consume and shut up.

While it may be untenable to conceive of this unfolding of modern technologies as part of an active conspiracy, still they are tools and devices that have the full encouragement of our current Control System and its emissaries. Do not think that a technology is neutral. If in doubt, imagine the opposite. A technology that enables people to reflect, slow down in order to become more aware, to go deeper into themselves and the world around them. As a result, they become more interested in matters of spirit and soul, less enthralled by Saturday afternoon shopping and the acquisition of consumer goods. Do we imagine dominator culture happily tolerating such a thing? Actually, such a technology does exist. It was discovered in the 1940s, developed in the 1950s, and popularised in the 1960s. It is called LSD. See what the Control System thinks of that.

The mass sleep of modern uncivilisation would bring no pleasure to Jim Morrison's soul (or souls: he toyed with the notion of being entered as a boy by the several souls of Native American Indians he saw newly dead in a road accident. 'Indians scattered on dawn's highway bleeding/ Ghosts crowd the young child's fragile eggshell mind'). Wake up!

Over the Rainbow: the 2nd ARC Convention

I had vowed not to go to the 2nd ARC Convention. Once more the venue was Bath, far away. Being such a busy and obviously important person, I didn't have the time for such a luxury, and I didn't have the money either. Then I saw the line-up of speakers, and changed my mind.....


ARC - Alternative Research Community - is the brainchild (or soulchild, more like) of the seemingly indefatigable and infinitely good-humoured Karen Sawyer. One of Karen's many remarkable qualities, fully in evidence over the weekend, is that nothing appears to faze her. The mikes don't work: no problem. Computers crash: a mild expletive before she's up there on the stage joking, helping to sort things out. Karen actually introduces the weekend in front of a large picture of Sheela Na Gig, ancient representation of the eternal feminine, and a portal into another reality, the deeper reality of the event to come. Then she starts to sing/chant primordial sounds, and a communal shift in consciousness seems to take place. It is not so much HER singing, as allowing herself to be the vehicle for an archetypal dimension to make itself known through her. The atmosphere is electric; the weekend has been blessed by something sacred.


The first main speaker on Saturday morning is Michael Dunning. He has come to talk to us about, er...... a tree. Now, while I derive a good deal of personal sustenance from the non-human world - a skim through this blog will make as much obvious -, I harbour doubts as to whether he can maintain the interest of all of us for ninety minutes by talking about his relationship to a tree. The arboreal manifestation in question is the yew, a magnificent plant that reaches both upwards into the sky and downwards deep into the earth. Michael relates the rich mythology connected to the yew, and his own healing from serious illness through lying for long periods beneath its mighty boughs. I am entranced.


Next up is Peter Taylor. I am extremely grateful to Peter for his presentation at the previous convention. Alarm bells had been ringing for some time, as I witnessed weird things in the so-called green movement: lies, half-truths, support for big business destroying the natural world in the name of saving the planet, with zero respect for the sacred nature of things. Then I heard Peter speak on the 'corporatisation of the environmental movement', and I realised that my own instincts had been correct: much that passes itself as 'green' is a sham and a scam, absorbed into the dominator culture mainstream. This time round, Peter ends by talking about his own spiritual work, transforming energy and consciousness through the chakras, starting at the base and moving upwards. His message seems to be 'no transformation of self, no real change of the world.' He appears invigorated by this part of his presentation. I recommend finding out more about Peter's work on climate and the non-greens on the holistic channel and on Red Ice.

Afternoon arrives; enter Michael Cremo. The 'alternative research' giving its name to the convention is that which the 'information filter' imposed by mainstream dominator culture deems to be unfit for general consumption. This is work, often involving years of painstaking investigation, that does not sit comfortably with the belief and value systems that form the basis of our current non-civilisation. Michael's 'forbidden archaeology' is a classic case, calling into question as it does the orthodox Darwinian view of human origins. Michael's claim is that fully human remains have been discovered that vastly predate those normally recognised as being the earliest, findings that have been rubbished and discarded purely because they do not conform with the conventional belief system.

By the time Kenn Thomas takes centre stage to take us through the incredible amount of detailed investigation that goes into conspiracy theories, an imbalance has already occurred in the energetics of my chakra system, with a concentration of energy in the upper chakras (experienced less esoterically as a brain being immersed in a deep fryer). I am unable to follow clearly, but two vignettes leave their imprint. Firstly, there is a hilarious clip of Timothy Leary being 'interviewed' by a right-wing madman on American television. Then, as part of Kenn's tribute to recently deceased Jerry E. Smith, we see Jerry in full flow, describing the two main groups who wield power over our modern culture. There are the Banksters, who we are all familiar with; and there are the Water Melons, referred to on Palegreenvortex variously as eco-fascists and green Stalinists. Water Melons: green on the outside, red on the inside. Brilliant. And, while the Banksters and Water Melons appear superficially to be at odds with each other, they are actually part of one and the same system.

While those of infinite energy dance the night away to Karen Sawyer and Dirty Dog, I retire early to my room, to absorb the day's proceedings. Sunday morning, I am fresh and early for education, entertainment and participation from Nick Clements as he leads us into aspects of shamanism in modern times. The pace remains more relaxed with Ellis C. Taylor's tales of encounters and experiences with what we can loosely call the paranormal: time shifts, orbs, and others. For some this might appear ridiculous in the extreme. To me, it's pretty much business as normal. And that's either worrying or consoling, depending on which side of the fence you've decided to put up your tent.......

It is at the beginning of the final afternoon panel session that something begins to click. Someone asks 'Where are the women?' to the team of biological males lined up on the stage. Sitting to the side, Karen leaps up immediately, talking about male and female as literal physical embodiments being less the point than masculine and feminine energies (I am paraphrasing wickedly here, by the way...). She takes a good look at the array of goodly gentlemen on the stage before pronouncing that, in her experience, they have all recognised the feminine within, so the feminine energy has been well represented during the course of the weekend. What's more, she does not consider herself as a 'masculine' woman, but nevertheless requires access to that kind of energy, to organise conventions such as this for example.

A light begins to dimly flicker. Feminine as personal realisation, masculine as active principle for that realisation. My mind drifts off towards the koan that has followed me intermittently over the past thirty five years, and right into the palegreenvortex, appearing all over the shop either implicitly or explicitly: 'How to make the revolution? The demonstration or Zen?' It begins to vaguely dawn that, as so often, the answer to 'either/or' is in fact 'both/and'. 'Zen', personal transformation, and 'the demonstration', aka directed action in the world, are not opposites but compliments. Each needs the other for its complete fulfilment. For a Milarepa, directed action may be accomplished simply by seeding the collective unconscious with the power of your positive thought-forms. For most of us, a more mundane manifestation is required as well. The question is put further (by me, in truth): is there a place for direct action? Peter Taylor opines that yes, there may be a place, but the emphasis must be on our own transformations. And he is right. For me, the implications are clear. Write and protest about windfarms and drug laws, as manifestations of a reality I feel deeply inside. But remember that this is not the main story: it is an interface with mainstream dominator reality, and too much cannot be expected from this. Most importantly, take up the shamanic rattle, go deep into my own soul and the soul of the world, and travel wherever the journey may beckon.

I awake on the sleeper train soon after the sun has risen. I open the slight cabin window. A hillside of heather stretches upwards, before meeting a sky of pristine early morning blue. The gods and goddesses of the Scottish Highlands have woken to greet me. A tear wells up in my eye.