It's a Gas, Gas, Gas.....

Father of free energy?: Nikola Tesla

Maybe it's time to come clean on the Archons. Unlike the Gnostic mystics who, it seems, as a result of their direct experience, took the Archons to be literally and inorganically real, I have to date no such personal experience (I should consider myself fortunate in that respect, I suppose). I can therefore claim no definite take on their status. In the manner described in my most recent post, 'Conspiracy? Wot Conspiracy?', I 'hold' them in my mind, an item in the portfolio of possibilities. Whatever the literal truth of the Archons may be, the adjective 'Archontic' to denote a mindset, a way of thinking and the creation of that way of thinking, is illuminating like no other. It has helped me to understand various phenomena in a clear, precise manner that previously seemed impossible.

Large segments of the modern environmental movement (so-called) is obviously a product of Archontic thinking and action. As John Lash describes in Chapter Seven of 'Not in His Image', the main method of Archontic deception is, in Greek, antimimon, literally 'countermimicry'. 'This means to copy something but make the copy, the fake version, serve a purpose counter to the original thing or idea.' Much modern environmentalism fits the bill to perfection, so much so that it takes the breath away. The sense of sacred connectedness felt by indigenous peoples from time immemorial, fed into the modern west by pioneers such as John Muir a century ago, and more recently by others like Arne Naess and the notion of 'deep ecology', has been turned on its head by self-serving ideologists and delusional groupings who have already taken up more space on Pale Green Vortex than they deserve.

One such grouping in particular, the multinational windfarm conquistadors, are probably pooing themselves at the moment. If not, they should be. This is as a result of the discovery of huge deposits of shale gas in Lancashire, northern England, which opens up the possibility of reasonably-priced, reliable energy supply for decades to come; in brief, everything that wind turbines fail to deliver. There are pollution questions surrounding shale gas and its means of extraction, 'fracking'. How serious these are, I don't know, and probably neither does anyone else. Predictably, the CO2 fanatics are up in arms as well. But these concerns can hardly outweigh those of the wholesale destruction of wild landscapes by wind abominations, not to mention the devastation of large tracts of peat bog, the Scottish CO2-trapping equivalents of the Amazon rainforest.

Energy is the key to many things. It is a topic through which people can be easily manipulated by the generation of fear, be it of nuclear leakage, the Earth frying due to Anthropogenic Global Warming, or whatever. Free energy is anathema to the current Power Complex, since it would liberate people from one of the main means by which the Dominators can control them - their need for energy. In the past, it would seem, anyone getting too close to the secrets of free energy would be dealt with appropriately: ridiculed as mentally unstable, bought out and the plans thrown away, or with poison or a gun. Interestingly, 'open source methodology' has been introduced into the field to avoid such problems in the future. This consists of making ideas widely available immediately; getting them 'out there', into the public domain, so taking out the inventor will be pointless.

Of course, some of the chief local Archons, notably Chris Huhne and Caroline Lucas (a self-confessed Watermelon, by the way, and proud of it!), are already up in arms about shale gas. Presumably, they prefer to see people die of cold - it's mainly old people, after all, not very productive members of society, but at least dying in a good cause. In the meantime, the shale gas story will, I suspect, unravel most interestingly. I predict a concerted dirty tricks campaign, spearheaded by the BBC and one or two choice national newspapers. It will focus on pollution hazards (real, imagined, and exaggerated), CO2 fears (largely Archontic imagination), and give great prominence to deluded, new-school environmentalists protesting. This is actually already happening on the BBC, by the way. It's funny how these same media outlets don't give ANY coverage to all the other protests and campaigns that spring up locally in response to nearly every new windfarm proposal. Still these are real people, whose real quality of life is being threatened, not self-righteous ideologues out on an Archontic picnic. This is media eco-fascism for you.

Conspiracy? Wot Conspiracy?

When I write about BBC 'news' and 'news documentaries' being propaganda, and a means by which a particular form of consciousness implants its own version of reality, some people just don't get it. Since this all now seems transparently obvious to me, I find this a bit irritating - but that, I suppose, is my own problem. If any programme fits the bill of being what Neil Kramer calls an 'official broadcast', telling people what to believe, it is the BBC's 'Conspiracy Files 9/11', recently beamed into the homes of the millions as part of their season to commemorate the tenth anniversary of 9/11.

I was slightly dismayed when a friend of mine told me that he had watched it, and found it good enough for him to be convinced that the 'official story' on 9/11 was the one and only truth. For myself, I had a look at the programme out of curiosity, to see whether the BBC would do what I suspected it might with the subject, and clearly viewed it through a different lens. It was indeed the selective and not-so-subtle cut-and-paste hatchet job on conspiracy theories that I could have predicted. The commentary was delivered in a rather old-school upper middle class BBC female accent, the type that is designed to ooze 'believe what I tell you, I'm not the kind of girl who sleeps around' respectability. The message of the programme was clear: 'Do not believe the doubters, have faith in us. We have your best interests at heart and would never dream of lying or hiding anything from you. There really is nothing to worry your little heads about. So shut up, get on with your life as normal, and leave us to fight terror and generally look after you.'

By chance, a couple of days ago I tuned into a programme - two hours long, no less - devoted to analysing and dissecting the 'Conspiracy Files' programme. And a most thorough and convincing job it did as well, clearly demonstrating the half-truths, the partial and selective nature of the information broadcast by the BBC. Surprisingly, this programme was not actually put out by the BBC, nor any other mainstream media network. UK Sky channels 200, 201, and 203 host Controversial TV and Showcase TV (this is liable to change, and they sometime go off air completely due to lack of funds), which relay, among a variety of other stuff, material by Paradigm Shift and Edge Media. A wide variety of viewpoints can be found on these networks, with a 'we present, you decide' approach, as Red Ice Radio (accessed via the internet) puts it. But these networks are invaluable for presenting material that otherwise just does not get any exposure at all in the mainstream - so, in effect, does not 'officially' exist. It pays to be selective, but in recent weeks I have seen some excellent stuff: the films 'DMT: the Spirit Molecule' and 'Cancer: Forbidden Cures'. And the coverage surrounding 9/11 was first rate.

One thing that is worrying for the mainstream is that doubts about, and disbelief in, the 'official story' on 9/11 continue to be voiced, not by wacky, easily-dismissed, fringe radicals, but eminently respectable and well-qualified engineers, physicists, and university people in suits and ties. It was John Lash (I think) who predicted that, with the tenth anniversary of 9/11, the message would be 'Forget all that conspiracy stuff now. It's all in the past anyway; time to move on.' This was actually the underlying agenda of the BBC programme. But 9/11 refuses to go away. That so many people, both in the USA and around the rest of the world, fail to swallow the official story must be highly encouraging. It shows how more and more people are waking up to the reality that the Control System and its emissaries cannot be trusted or believed at all; in fact, may act in ways that we might normally consider unthinkable.

For myself, I have no final take on 9/11. There is a plethora of data on melting points of metals, dynamics of building collapse and demolition etc, that I am simply not qualified to evaluate properly. Having said that, the more I see and hear, the more the official version appears riddled with inconsistencies and improbabilities, with difficulties in its narrative glossed over and many questions left unanswered. Following Neil Kramer's advice, I am 'holding' possibilities in my mind, rather than grasping at belief in a desperate need for certainty. To 'hold' an idea in ones mind, not believe or disbelieve and thereby attach it to ones already weighty ego identity, is elegant and open-ended. To hold ideas such as 9/11 being an inside job, a controlled demolition or whatever else, is something I can live with for now.

Out on the fringes of the abundance of ideas about what really happened on 9/11, and true to the general observation that the fringe is where things get most interesting, is the work of Dr Judy Wood. In the events of that fateful day, she sees evidence of the possible use of directed energy weapons, a technology that few people even realise may exist. If this seems far-fetched, bear in mind that the truth often seems fantastic from any current limited vantage point, just as the once preposterous notion that the Earth revolves around the Sun was. Inconveniently for the scoffers, Judy Wood is detective-like in approach: her work is based rigorously on hard evidence, not a priori theory. The facts are laid out on her monster website, where she goes into everything in detail. She also has an equally monster book, 'Where Did the Towers Go?'

There is another world-changing spin-off from Judy Wood's investigations: the existence of directed energy weapons would also point to the possibility of free energy. 9/11 conspiracy theories effortlessly morph into that area of undoubted Control System scam, fraud, and conspiracy: the Great Global Warming Alarmist Lie. As with 9/11 shenanigans, here too there is hope, as more and more people see through the surreal fiction peddled our way by politicians and the mainstream media. Increasingly, the Global Warming Alarmist Lie is becoming the preserve of a section of guilt-ridden, life-denying, Guardian-reading, white middle classes (in Britain, at least). The man who uttered to me the other day 'Global warming, my arse' is far more in touch with reality. As with 9/11, the Control System hopes we will cast aside our doubts, accept their stories and their taxes and high prices for inefficient and intermittent energy supply, destruction of the face of the planet in the name of saving it, and just get on with it. How long the windfarm scam can continue in Britain before even politicians cannot hide how much it is crippling the economy and effectively throwing people into needless poverty, I do not know. But the prospect of free energy, even as a hypothetical idea, raises yet another suspicion I have about windfarms. Doesn't it seem strange that, in this modern world of cutting edge physics, hosts of amazing new technologies and the rest, we are expected to have faith in a form of energy production that even Fred Flintstone would have considered prehistoric. I mean, sticking pointy bits of metal and plastic into the sky and hoping the wind will blow is not exactly sophisticated thinking. Yet the Control System appears set on shackling us with inefficient and expensive forms of energy production, rather than exploring the possibilities of liberating cheap or free energy for all. Funny, isn't it? Work that one out for yourself. And whether our so-called 'green' organisations and people would embrace cheap, plentiful energy for all is an acid test of their real attitudes towards humans that deserves an article by itself.

Once again, the reality foisted upon us by the Control System proves more surreal than anything a science fiction writer could come up with. And whether we can really buy the story of a bunch of Muslim extremists fresh out of pilot school and wielding box cutters stage-managing and choreographing the pure and perfect theatre and tragedy that was 9/11 is another question we need to soberly consider. In the meantime, I suggest that it behoves any aspiring responsible planetary citizen, not to mention any budding Bodhisattva, to research these matters. The resources are there and can be easily accessed, thanks largely to the internet. Check out Judy Wood, 9/11 truth, Paradigm Shift TV and the rest; google PNAC, and explore some of the stuff that the BBC and the rest of the mainstream doesn't tell you, doesn't want you to know about. Don't fall victim to what Neil Kramer terms neophobic shutdown, the tendency to dismiss new ideas and information because of the threats and challenges it might pose to our current way of life, sense of security etc. Without this work, any understanding of mind and consciousness is, I feel, seriously lacking an essential dimension. This is where I come into this field....

A Democracy of Visions

Edgar Broughton and Sidney Cohen: two sides of the same tab.....

I passed the 1960s in the pleasant but generally unremarkable Home Counties market town of Aylesbury, England. An unexpected gift was bestowed on the place in 1969, however, when it began to play host to a rock music club named Friars. The club quickly gained a reputation for its discerning eye in spotting good quality bands in their infancy. Some, such as Mott the Hoople, went on to commercial success; others found fame elusive, yet were equally good.

One fairly regular fixture at Friars was the Edgar Broughton Band, and I saw them several times. They put on a solid set, but two songs always stood out. One was 'Out, Demons, Out', a kind of public exorcism of the evil that surrounded us all. The other was 'Dropout Boogie/Apache'. Edgar Broughton was, to one impressionable sixteen-year old at least, hairy, scary, and very hip, the very epitome of everything that my parents' generation had so lamentably failed to be. We would all watch, wide-eyed and slack-jawed, as His Royal Hairiness scowled, growled, and magically intoned those fateful words: 'What do you want, what do you want/ They think they know what it's all about/ Turn on, tune in, drop out, drop out/ I told you once, I told you twice'. From that moment on, the die was cast, my fate sealed: I didn't stand a chance.

Turn on, tune in, drop out: Timothy Leary's clarion call to the mass of disenchanted visionary youth that terrorised a generation. For those with any sympathies for psychedelic culture in its many guises, the third in the triad of exhortations always proved the most problematic. Ray Manzarek, keyboard player in the Doors, says that, instead of urging people to turn on, tune in, and drop out, Leary should have been urging them to turn on, tune in, take over. Elsewhere, Paradigm Shift TV exhorts us to turn on, tune in, and transcend. Sidney Cohen, an early LSD researcher and therapist, bemoaned the effect of Leary's ravings: 'Cohen had warned that Tim was skimming the cream of a generation and leading them down a blind alley. While the Best and the Brightest were grooving on the cosmic, the second-rate and the venal were appropriating the traditional slots of power' ('Storming Heaven' by Jay Stevens, Epilogue). As an Oxford graduate who went on to help form a cosmically-grooving commune then teach Buddhist meditation, I take Dr Cohen's charges very personally.....

Once the 1960s were out of the way, it was difficult to find anybody (with any social credibility at least) who would give much support to Tim Leary's apparent crusade for social revolution spearheaded by psychedelics. Terence McKenna, a leading light for the next generation, was at pains to criticise the excesses of the '60s, pointing to the use of psychedelic substances by a pioneering dedicated few, rather than widespread ingestion by the psychedelicised masses. And more recently still, Rick Doblin of MAPS (Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies) has bemoaned what he calls the backlash that took place against psychedelics as a result of their reckless use in the 1960s. This backlash has meant that research into their value in psychotherapy (as psychological aids for the terminally ill, for example, or for those suffering from post-traumatic stress) has been curtailed or, in most cases, brought to a grinding halt.

These pronouncements echo a debate amongst protagonists of psychedelics in the early years: whether they should be available to all, or whether access should be reserved for those who mystic-cum-author Aldous Huxley referred to as 'the Brightest and Best'. This was Huxley's more cautious approach: provide LSD for the philosophers, politicians, artists and academics - those mainly responsible for shaping and influencing society at large.

For the record, it is worth noting that the advocacy of indiscriminate distribution of LSD sometimes accredited to Leary is a caricature and/or distortion pumped up by the popular media. Leary was in equal measure visionary genius and unashamed opportunist/personal publicist, and he said many different, often contradictory, things at different times. In his more sober moments, however, he called for careful and responsible use of psychedelics, as sacred substances, to be taken in a conducive environment by those who were psychologically prepared. He claimed that, had the US authorities listened to him and established clinics/temples where people could use psychedelics in the company of experienced guides, much of the negative fallout could have been avoided. If it is to be associated with any one figure of the era, the more casual use of LSD could possibly be linked with Ken Kesey and his busload of tripping Merry Pranksters.

The idea of restricting access to psychedelics to 'the Brightest and Best' is all very well. Except that it is unworkable and terribly naive. Who decides? Cui bono? What's the basis on which 'the Brightest and Best' are selected? The critique peppered liberally throughout the posts on Pale Green Vortex - of Control System dynamics, dominator culture values, and the insight that all this is a construct of consciousness - makes it abundantly clear that there is no benign Ubermensch who is likely to look favourably upon drawing up a list of the deserving few on whom the privilege of psychedelic experience is to be bestowed. There is something that rankles about Rick Doblin's continued lament about the backlash against psychedelics as if, had Timothy Leary not been around, the research and the therapy could have quietly continued unabated. Despite the stupid and ill-judged things that Leary said over the years, the disturbing truth remains that enormous numbers of people found their lives enriched by following something of the course he outlined. More fundamentally, there is the very nature of the vistas opened up by LSD and other psychedelics. While sometimes described as 'non-specific amplifiers', they have tended to turn people away from a life dedicated to 9-to-5 and a blind belief in the diktats of dominator culture. The potential that they embody is inherently threatening to the status quo. This is the unspoken agenda in the 'War on Psychedelic Drugs' that sees Casey Hardison serving twenty years for producing psychedelic drugs (for comparison, Albert Speer, Minister of Armaments and War Production to the Third Reich 1942 - 45 received the same length of sentence at the Nuremberg Trials). So I think Rick Doblin is mistaken in pointing the finger solely at the 1960s for the collapse of official research into psychedelics. Point one finger, yes; but look at the effects of the substances as well. Access to the multidimensional nature of our being is the greatest danger of all to the continued reign of dominator culture. If Rick thinks that the Control System will eventually smile upon research, provided it conforms to the standards of modern science and is conducted by folk with PhDs, I hope he is correct. I rather doubt it will come to pass, however.

By the same token, Sidney Cohen's (and Ray Manzarek's) objections are fatally flawed. It is not a case of slotting envisioned beings into the places of power, thereby producing a benign government. The ego-softened consciousness does not want to - is not able to - function within an apparatus constructed by dominator cultures over millennia. It needs to find other ways of working, to create different forms of social organisation that reflect its own experience of reality.

I suspect that, at root, the collapse of the psychedelic-fuelled counterculture of the '60s and early '70s was tied in with the lack of a mythology connecting it to a sacred past. It imagined itself as something new, unprecedented, an evolutionary leap. Better to envisage the rejection of dominator culture as part of a greater tradition extending into deepest prehistory. It is not a case of creating something new, out of thin air, but one of reconnecting with humanity's true, but almost lost, heritage. It is here that Terence McKenna made one of his greatest contributions, through his work on what he terms the 'Archaic Revival'. The modern western counterculture - to the extent that we can talk of such a thing - senses its heritage stretching back to pre-Christian times: to the Minoans, the Gnostics as expounded so elegantly by John Lash, the partnership cultures of Catal Huyuk and beyond. Now the tree does not simply show off flowers of great beauty: it boasts a sturdy trunk and hardy roots that penetrate to the deepest strata of an enriching subsoil.

It is not a question of limiting use of psychedelic substances to therapists, medical researchers, or any other 'Brightest and Best'. Indigenous cultures regard their psychedelic, or entheogenic, plants as sacred, and their sacredness is not normally reserved for an elite. It is a matter of ensuring the substances are accorded the respect and seriousness they warrant; handing out acid like sweeties at free festivals in the '60s and '70s wasn't a very clever idea. Timothy Leary had likened tripping to being an aeroplane pilot, where training and a licence are required. For more sense on the subject than anything Control System emissaries such as politicians have ever said, take a peek at the section on psychedelics in Transform's document 'After the War on Drugs: Blueprint for Regulation' (available online). Introduce an element of rationality to the subject and it's not so hard to get your head round at all......

Place of Power, Part Two

Photos: same place as in Part One, different season......

Neil Kramer encourages us to seek regular contact with nature, which should be in as pristine a state as possible (interview on Hundredth Monkey Radio, July 17th 2011). This immersion in a world that is not created by the ideas of human beings allows certain processes to take place that cannot in an environment that is synthetic, he suggests. He might also include the perceived effects of climbing upwards: how, as one enters the realm of the mountains, the skin containing us within one particular type of experience becomes more permeable, and the realisation that we are multidimensional beings in a multidimensional universe becomes more apparent (this is the theme of my first ever post on Pale Green Vortex). On the mountains, what is first interpreted as an encounter with 'Other' slowly morphs into an experience of 'Self' in its truer, broader form, free of the artificial constructs of human ideas. Paradoxically, it is when we are away from the world of human inventions that we can feel our humanity most deeply. Factor in the personal coefficient - of a place in the mountains that had first issued an invitation to me over thirty years ago - and it is no surprise that I was back on the hillpaths at the first available opportunity, en route to the mountain of power.

As twilight descended, I clattered into a bothy (a small hut), waking up two other mountain people already curled up in sleeping bags in the process, and managed to grab a few hours' sleep. Then, with the other residents still in the land of dreams, I headed into a fresh but overcast early spring morning, intent on following the route I had stumbled on the previous year. The decomposed remains of a once-magnificent stag deer straddled the sides of the gorge I followed up to the col, the gap between the two mountain peaks. I turned right, into cloud and utter silence, and began scaling stony slopes towards the summit - of the mountain named Lurg Mhor, incidentally. Strange shapes emerged from the mist; the divide between form and formlessness became indistinct, irrelevant. I passed a tiny upland loch on my right, cradled in the arms of low crags, then hauled myself up more steep rocks. At last, I made out the summit cairn through the gloom. Circumspectly I approached, before finally standing on the very top of the mountain. Nothing. Not a sound. Nothing to see, apart from a few undistinguished grey rocks. No animals or plants. Not a movement. I did not care. I had done what I needed to do.

The following spring found me in the grip of a personal crisis. Giving up my day job, I voluntarily entered what Tibetan Buddhists call a bardo, a kind of gap or interval between one state or stage and the next. It can feel like suspended animation, as if the ground has been pulled from beneath ones feet. In this state of extreme mental discomfort, I knew there was only one thing to do: go to Lurg Mhor. By the time I reached the foot of the mountain I was already exhausted, but I was nevertheless certain that this was the right place to be. The peculiar quality of the area began to impress itself on me more strongly than ever as I began the slow climb. Finally reaching the col, I looked out over neighbouring peaks from a truly magical spot and allowed new, strange influences to impinge upon my consciousness. Once on the mountain summit I lingered long, then ventured out along its rarely-visited eastern ridge. At last I managed to pull myself away from the mountain top environment. Beginning my descent, something inside me gave, and tears started to roll down my face. By the grace of the mountain gods, a crack was opening up in my psyche, allowing me to shed whatever I needed to relinquish from the past, and catch a glimpse of a new life ahead.

This year I returned to the mountain once more, in less turbulent circumstances (coming off a mountain with your eyes swimming in tears is no easy matter!). Having put my tent up on a remote and lonely lochside the evening before, I emerged into the total silence of the place soon after first light. A smattering of rain greeted me rudely as I packed up my belongings before starting up the steep slopes that lead onto the west ridge. This was a new route, a tough one, and for a short time I considered abandoning the climb altogether. What is a man doing, at 7 o'clock on a Sunday morning, struggling up slopes of deep heather, slippery peat, and thick wet grasses? Then a reflection of the early morning sun streaked fiercely over the top of the ridge far above, where a group of deer appeared silhouetted on the golden skyline. Motionless, they peered at me, and motionless I returned their gaze. At that moment, I knew why I was there. In a curious way, I had come home........

Earthship Notes for Lammas

Highland Scotland in twenty years' time?

In the beginning (well, fairly near the beginning) was the Club of Rome:

'Men and women need a common motivation, namely a common adversary against whom they can organise themselves and act together...... Bring the divided nation together to face an outside enemy, either a real one, or else invented for the purpose...... In searching for a common enemy against whom we can unite, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine, and the like would fit the bill...... The real enemy then is humanity itself.' (italics mine). This is an extract from 'The First Global Revolution' 1992 report by the Club of Rome, self-appointed group of VIPs which, along with the sister organisations the Clubs of Budapest and Madrid, apparently numbers among its members Henry Kissinger, David Rockefeller, Mikhail Gorbachev, Al Gore, Desmond Tutu, Bill Clinton, and the Dalai Lama.

Even NASA, some of whose folk have been at the forefront of the Human Global Warming scare, has conceded that the situation is not quite the way they thought it should be. A new study in the science journal 'Remote Sensing' (peer-reviewed, so it must be true - ha ha!) reports that NASA satellite data from the years 2000 to 2011 show the Earth's atmosphere is allowing far more heat to be released into space than alarmist computer models have predicted. The study further indicates that far less future global warming will occur than UN computer models have forecast. This real-world data contradicts multiple assumptions fed into alarmist computer models. 'There is a huge discrepancy between the data and the forecasts that is especially big over the oceans.' (Dr Roy Spencer, report co-author).

You might think that such findings, impacting deeply on the future of humanity on Planet Earth, not to mention the way that billions of pounds are scheduled to be extracted from our pockets in the form of planet-saving carbon taxes, and the further huge amounts of our money that are going to subsidise painfully expensive and inefficient forms of energy production (planet-saving, of course) that litter our beautiful landscapes with trash, would warrant a mention in the mainstream news. Not so. The BBC (now officially an abbreviation for British Brainwashing Conspiracy) failed to report it. Strange, that.

Just in case anybody hasn't got it yet: the whole Anthropogenic Global Warming scare is a fraud, a total fraud. I could spend half my free time cataloguing the evidence on Pale Green Vortex, but it's all out there for everyone to find; it just needs a bit of personal homework. Plus, the prime purpose of this blog is solution-oriented, rather than intended to dig up more and more dirt on the Control System and its tactics, a depressing and never-ending task. To paraphrase the alarmist twisters-of-truth, the science seems pretty settled, for the time being at least. Which is not to say that humans have no effect on the climate - I don't think anyone makes that claim - but our impact is relatively small.

Sadly, our modern 'environmental movement' is an archontic construct. It bases itself on computer modelling and other artefacts of one-eyed science, and is a deception away from real environmentalism, which has as its root what John Lash calls 'rapturous bonding with the Earth'. The real thing is an empathetic emanation from direct experience, not a product of database and pathological fear, paranoia, and hatred of humanity. It embraces and celebrates the multidimensional magnificence of Gaia, instead of reducing her to single-dimension points on a computer graph. Believe in the Great Fraud, and you have been well and truly suckered. It's as simple as that, I conclude.

Place of Power, Part One

First acquaintance was, I think, in 1968. August school holidays with my parents in north-west Scotland. By now, my father probably regretted deeply the moment when he first introduced me to mountains: now, while he wanted to read his newspaper in peace, and my mother potter about the holiday cottage or caravan, I was champing at the bit to climb a few more peaks.

One warm, grey afternoon (typical Highland fare in August), my patience ran out, and I took off alone. I followed a dry and narrow stalkers' path winding through the heather. After what seemed like hours of snaking across lonely moorland, I suddenly found the ground falling away in front of me. An awesome prospect opened up below and beyond. It was as if I had stumbled upon some unknown, or at least long-forgotten, paradise, a shangri-la placed to one side by modern civilisation. A broad but deep valley stretched out below me, containing a lone distant dwelling place, beyond which the enormous shapely spire of a mountain lifted upwards. The mountain was green - all was green - unlike the rocky landscapes I had become accustomed to around Torridon further north. Everything was still and silent; I stood entranced, for once my hyper teenage soul at peace.

A few years on, I went into self-imposed exile, renouncing the mountains and wild places in favour of a life dedicated to truth, realisation, and other big words based in the big city. For thirty years, the vision remained buried beneath the untidy pile of urban life. Until, one day about six years ago, the wheel revolved full circle, and I found myself taking up residence not a million miles from Shangri-la.

I declared the best part of my first year of living in the Scottish Highlands a sabbatical. I was in truth an urban refugee, bruised by too many years of the big city nightmare and by the death of both my parents. Into the open space that I had created slowly re-emerged the vision of that solitary walk more than thirty years ago. It was a memory etched more deeply into my mind than any other from my teenage mountain years. Surreptitiously, I set out to rediscover the location of this magical place. Poring over the maps during the long Scottish evenings of winter, I eventually had a hunch.

In mid-January, a period of cold, crisp, heaven-blue weather descended upon northern Scotland. The wind was from the east, which meant that the skies would be clearest on the west coast. Feigning nonchalance, I suggested to Martha an overnight stay in a place she hadn't visited before (always an irresistible carrot), with a little walk thrown in for good measure. The die was cast; we were soon on our way to Strathcarron.

The ground was frozen hard as we started off through the heather. The colours were pristine, surreal, and soon we were passing through landscapes with a real remote, untouched quality about them. The serrated outline of the Cuillin Ridge on Skye appeared sharp on the western horizon.

It was not so much a walk as a slip-and-slide; progress was slower than anticipated. Huge flat slabs of ice and frost awaited us as we finally left the world of light and squeezed through the defile of the Bealach Alltan Ruaridh, a place the sun's rays never get to penetrate during the months of winter. A herd of deer disappeared silently up the hillside, and the vision opened up in front of me. The valley seemed slightly less deep than in my imagination, but I still stood there entranced; this was the magic place. A wisp of cloud hung playfully over the top of the mountain, and the hillsides, while brown in their winter raiment, seemed to glow diaphanous from a source within.

During the ensuing months, the mountain began to crowd in on me. It seemed that I couldn't climb a single hill without its distinctive cone appearing on some distant skyline or other. The mountain was mocking me. In the end, I had no option: I had to get up close - which means climbing to the top. There was one problem, however. The books will tell you that, along with its neighbour, the mountain is one of the most remote of the Scottish Munros (the highest peaks in the country). However I looked at it, I couldn't see me getting there and back in a day. Besides, the mountain demanded greater respect. So I invested in a lightweight sleeping bag and bivi-tent (a dark, rustly, condensation-prone roof over your head so tiny that you cannot sit up inside) fit for purpose. And Saturday, August 26th, 2007, was earmarked as the day for the expedition.

I radiated optimism as I approached Inverness bus station in mid-afternoon, a few light clouds racing across the wide blue sky far above me. My mood darkened, however, when the bus I was catching failed to materialise. A diminutive elderly lady shuffled across the pavement in my direction. 'Are you waiting for the Lochcarron bus? It leaves at four o'clock on Saturdays now, not three. They haven't amended the timetables yet. Very bad.'

Yes it was very bad, since the days of long evenings are well past by the end of August; I realised how tight my schedule was. The omens continued to be unfavourable when we finally set off an hour late. The blue skies above Inverness quickly gave way to a pall of grey, and by the time we reached the small settlement of Achnasheen the rain was coming down. I was disgorged from the minibus at Strathcarron station, where it was nearly dark. On hearing that I was camping out for the night, the bus driver looked back at me with an extremely odd expression. 'I wouldn't fancy that' he remarked. 'You'll probably get your tent ripped apart by a stag.'

I set off up the hillpath like a bat out of hell; or a bat into hell, more like. Ink-dark clouds scudded across a glowering sky, and the evening was punctured by a smattering of sharp showers blown in on the brisk wind. Approaching the bealach in the long, dull twilight, I could see that everything in the direction of the mountain was obscured by heavy, grey cloud. I descended to the broad, green floodplain, which proved to be swampy and less conducive to bivi-pitching than it appeared from a distance. There was also the presence of considerable numbers of tent-demolishing deer to be taken into account......

It was completely dark when I finally set up camp by a stream, where another squally shower started up as I tightened the insubstantial-looking guy ropes by the light of my head torch. The wind flapped the walls of the bivi-tent in the early night mercilessly, and sharp showers continued to punctuate any attempt I made at a decent sleep. Around 2 a.m. I ventured outside to add to the growing sogginess around, only to discover that one of the tent pegs had completely disappeared. I had camped in a rapidly-expanding quagmire of peat.

By first light, almost all energy had been sucked from my being. I had pretty much given up on climbing the mountain. As I poked my head out of the canvas, however, the wind had died, and the cloud was beginning to lift. Packing up my soggy abode, I headed straight up the hillside, which was rough, tough, and boggy. As I approached a craggy section, the cloud came down again, however. Rock faces appeared fleetingly, before hiding once again behind swirling masses of thick grey, creating the impression of a landscape of incredible complexity. 'Not good' I muttered to myself. Then another voice, maybe that of a guiding spirit, spoke: 'Chill out. Relax. Just be.'

I came off the hillside, and adopted the leisurely and mindful style, venturing still further into back-of-beyond country with my senses wide open, and stumbling upon what looked like a secret and more simple route onto the mountain. In the meantime, the magic place of power had taught me a vital lesson: respect.

Bright Midnight

They will be out in force this Sunday, I suppose, a ragbag of devotees straggled down the boulevards of Paris leading to the cemetery Pere Lachaise. Their destination will be the spot that, to the continued discomfort of the French authorities, remains one of the most-visited places in Paris after the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre. Here resides the grave of one Jim Morrison, and this Sunday marks the fortieth anniversary of his death.

During his brief time on Earth, Jim Morrison was many things to many people. The speed of his physical deterioration, from the lithe poetic rock-and-sex Adonis of 1967 to the podgy grizzly bear figure awash with alcohol of 'Roadhouse Blues' and 'L.A. Woman' remains difficult to grasp. Yet he stands apart from the rest of the pantheon of the era on more than one count, thereby qualifying for serious mention on Pale Green Vortex in a way that Lennon, Hendrix, Clapton and the others simply don't.

I have come across the criticism that Jim Morrison's verse reads like the poetry of a high school kid. Setting aside the question of what is wrong with teenage poems anyway, communicating as they can from a mind that is relatively fresh and uncluttered by the luggage that burdens the mind in later years, the fact remains that there is a simple directness about the best of his work that is rare indeed. A few words strung together is all it takes to conjure up imagery that is deep, vivid and powerful, a communication direct from the primeval swamp, the source of his vitality.

Unique among his counterparts, Jim Morrison was endowed with a genuine shamanic sensibility. Replete with images from the animal world and nature, his words can communicate the intense aliveness and (sometimes disturbing) meaning of the world around us. At his best, he calls up those primitive and archetypal forces that are part of our being, but which 'civilisation' has done its level best to disown. Chris Knowles, author of 'The Secret History of Rock'n Roll', shares a similar view in his interview on Red Ice Radio, Sept 30th 2010 (second hour, for subscribers only!). Speaking about the cultural upheavals of the late 1960s, including the revolution of the psyche centred on psychedelics, Chris asserts that Jim Morrison, alone among the icons of the period, recognised that this was all an attempt to reconnect with our shamanic heritage, reaching back into deepest prehistory. Its roots were profound and natural (a theme more fully elucidated for the next generation by Terence McKenna in his call for an 'archaic revival'). We can speculate that the overall failure to properly realise this ancestral birthright was a major factor in the eventual demise of the cultural revolution of the time.

Read as a metaphor, an incident in Jim Morrison's life can shed light upon this topic. In January 1966, Jim took off with a friend, one Felix Venable, heading for the Mexican desert. Their aim was to find a shaman with whom to eat peyote, the sacred cactus. However, taking some acid on the way south, they never made it beyond Arizona, and returned to Los Angeles battered and bruised (literally), having been attacked, presumably by a bunch of southerners who didn't take kindly to longhairs.

Had he reached Mexico and found the great cactus shaman, the 'total fantasy' take on the story goes, Jim Morrison's life just might have turned out differently. As it was, his own primordial visions remained insufficiently anchored, and his life began to spin increasingly out of control. Without a strong and concrete sense of connection to the gnostic shamanic traditions of the past, life can be extremely difficult indeed. I speak from personal experience here. If the archaic connection is not directly - and regularly - sensed, the individual can be tossed around like flotsam on the surface of the great stormy ocean: of inner psychic craziness, alongside extreme dissonance with Control System consciousness on the outside.

Jim, of course, was also an object for Control System fear, aggression, and paranoia. He didn't play by the rules, created trouble; like Timothy 'most dangerous man in America' Leary, he was a man marked by the authorities. Inciting kids to tribal riot wasn't exactly the name of the game; basically, they wanted him out. Their chance came in Miami, on March 1st 1969, when a characteristically alcohol-loaded Morrison went into overdrive, with the result that he was charged with lewd behaviour and indecent exposure while on stage. The surviving Doors have always maintained that the charges were trumped up, a claim laughably backed up on December 9th, 2010, when Florida State granted Jim a pardon. Thanks, Florida; that makes everything all right then.

That he had been thumbed by the U.S. authorities and stood to spend time in jail clearly spooked Jim: 'Can you give me sanctuary/ I must find a place to hide/ A place for me to hide. / Can you give me soft asylum/ I can't make it anymore/ the man is at the door' he sings plaintively near the beginning of 'The Soft Parade'. He fled the U.S.A. in March 1971 to France. With no extradition order between the two countries, it was a place he could feel safe. He spent four months in the cultural haven of Paris before dying the typically ambiguous death of a rock star, at the black magic age for that era, twenty seven. Dead most likely from heroin on top of the savage treatment meted out to his body over several years; and hastened, I would add, by the machinations of the Control System. The translation of the words on his gravestone at Pere Lachaise reads 'According to his own daimon.'

'Now night arrives with her purple legion/ Retire now to your tents and to your dreams/ Tomorrow we enter the town of my birth/ I want to be ready.' (Celebration of the Lizard)