Special Ones

I enjoy reading Casey Hardison's occasional articles for Erowid in his section 'Metanoia - Diet for a Drugged Planet'. Casey's writing style is articulate, witty, and lively, the content of his pieces honest, heartfelt, thought-provoking, and gently provocative. Not that I agree with everything he writes. I don't agree with anybody on everything. I don't agree with myself quite frequently, if truth be told.....

His contribution of November 27th, 2014 ('If a plant told you to jump off a cliff, would you?') contains observations and reflections following his attendance at the World Ayahuasca Conference held in Ibiza during September 2014. In case anybody is unfamiliar with ayahuasca, it is a potent psychedelic-type plant brew associated predominantly with the Amazon Basin. It is composed of two or more different plants, which are boiled and combined into a brew that many claim to be not only psychologically active, but to also possess powerful healing qualities on the physical level. While being one of the staple technologies of transformation used for millenia by people indigenous to the Amazon, it has become increasingly popular in the west among that niche population that finds such things to be of interest.

In his article, Casey writes once more about 'Cognitive Liberty', a subject close to his heart. His (self) defence during his trial for the manufacture of psychedelic substances a decade ago focussed upon cognitive liberty, the individual's freedom to do whatever he or she wishes to with their own consciousness, provided they are not thereby impinging on others' freedoms. Needless to say, the judge was not impressed, instead curtailing all manner of freedoms by sentencing Casey to twenty years in prison.

Cognitive liberty is allied, though not identical, to freedom of speech and thought. Rather than the freedom to communicate whatever we think or feel, it is concerned with the  freedom to experience internally whatever one wishes to. Should I hanker to take a plant or a pill, thereby facilitating a meeting with the Godhead, union with the cosmos, encounters with aliens and psychedelic serpents, relive pre-birth experiences or dredge up long-forgotten psychological trauma, then that is my business and my business alone. Government has no place in such matters.  This is the nub of cognitive liberty, as least as far as its application to forbidden substances goes.

Casey writes cogently about the 'special exemptions' sought by various self-styled religious groups with regard to the consumption of ayahuasca and other entheogenic plant substances ('We use these substances as religious sacraments; they are part of our religion. Therefore we should not be subject to the general prohibitions surrounding these substances'). Groups such as the Uniao do Vegetal and the Native American Church have campaigned with success using this approach. Their 'special case' is not a valid one, argues Casey. Spiritual aspirations are equally spiritual aspirations, regardless of whether they involve meeting up with a bunch of like-minded people in a 'church', or sitting alone at home or in a forest. Cognitive liberty applies whether psychedelic-type substances are ingested for spiritual motivation or in order to watch the swirly colours and pretty patterns.

Casey goes on to consider some of the ayahuasca enthusiasts he met at the conference, and the 'specialness' that strong experiences with psychedelics can confer upon the partaker:

"At the Ayahuasca Conference, after listening to umpteen people tell me what 'Mama Aya' had told them - she told me this, she told me that - I was struck by more than a few thoughts. Many of those tales were of the more mundane nature of what to eat, who to break up with, who to get together with, what career to pursue, how to handle some tricky inter-personal situation, and so on. But more than a few of these stories were of a fantastical nature, about how the spirit of ayahuasca had facilitated talking with long-dead ancestors, how through ayahuasca they had gained access to a higher spiritual plane where they made contact with extra-dimensional beings who acted as guides or healers......"

Go through all this stuff - experientially, that is - and it's difficult not to end up feeling a little bit different. A little bit special, even: Mama Aya spoke to ME. A browse through a few entheogenic-based websites suggests that consumers of ayahuasca among the different psychedelic-type substances are especially prone to this.

I find it personally a bit disappointing that things do not seem to have changed much in this regard since my own LSD-fuelled epiphanies forty years ago. You knew at the time that it was erroneous, if not downright delusional, but it was hard to escape the 'us and them' mentality. 'We' had been there and seen things; while 'they' had not. 'They' were stuck in a little box of their own making without even realising it, and this limited the frame of discourse available. Our sense of being different only too easily morphed into a feeling of being special.

It is a tricky one. There is a sense in which 'we', and for that matter the ayahuasca visionary with the extra-dimensional soul guide, were different, and kind-of special. But not in the manner that normally revealed itself. The error - difficult to avoid - involves identifying with, becoming attached to, ones visionary experiences. Allowing them, if you like, to get swallowed up and become part of ones ego-identity. In 1976 I stopped using psychedelics the way I had for the previous three years. I was getting confused by going up and coming down into different psychic spaces all the time. Each experience seemed to correspond to something numinous, resembling a chapter from a Buddhist or Hindu text that I had read. But which was the real deal? To which could I truly say 'This is It!'?

The trick lies in letting go of all that commentary, that pigeon-holoing. Adopt instead an attitude of endless exploring of the mysteries of consciousness and the universe. Avoid the temptation to reify
experience by  looking for 'the Answer'. Changing all this is not easy - it involves a good deal of 'deep letting go'. But it can be done. I once read about an old South American shaman who was asked how many dimensions of existence there are. He was silent for a moment before replying. 'The number of dimensions is infinite' he said.'Every time I venture, I find something new.' So be it.

Having, in 1976, renounced the peculiar specialness conferred by LSD-catalysed mystical experience, I demonstrated how little I had learnt in this respect by becoming deeply involved with a certain Buddhist organisation. Which of course had a very special teacher. With a very special message. And was peopled by very special human beings doing very special things for the planet. Now, it was all special in a manner of speaking, whether in peak psychedelic experience or deep Buddhist meditation. But not in the way we normally think of it.....

The Secret - Postscript to the Postscript

It is nearly three years since Neil Kramer's book 'The Unfoldment' came out. I have read through it several times, and it takes its place on my special bookshelf of 'important books'. In some respects it is a curiously unassuming work, with no frills or unnecessary sensationalism. This, though, is in the style of Neil, who tends to tell it like it is, clear and simple. There is, furthermore, in my experience, something unique about the way this book works. If I pick it up and open it randomly at a page, whatever is there always seems uncannily relevant to my life at the moment. Additionally, it reads like a book with a book within a book. Every time I read a chapter, it seems like I am reading it for the first time. It is as if it is a text that speaks on many different levels, always relevant to wherever you are at the time. The diametric opposite is those books (and, very often, films) that you read or watch once, thoroughly enjoying them, but knowing that you won't bother going back to them again; their meaning has already been exhausted.

Of particular relevance to the recent discussion on Pale G. V. of the Secret, the Lie, and what's behind them, are chapters seven and eight: 'Imperial Secrets' and 'The Distortion'. In the former, Neil Kramer spells out his understanding of the different layers to the Control System. This outline illustrates how the System functions on a day-to-day basis, and runs as follows (additional comments are mine):

Layer One: Enforcement. Army, cops, private security.
Layer Two: Government. Our public figures, the puppet slaves as described in 'The Secret - a postscript'. The custard pie fall guys and gals.
Layer Three: Realpolitik. Largely behind-the-scenes politicking. Practical and power-based, as Neil says, rather than principled.
Layer Four: Think tanks. Our buddies in Bilderberger, Club of Rome etc. Filtered through United Nations, Earth Summits, etc. 'Managed social, economic, and cultural change' (Kramer).
Layer Five: Esoteric Groups, using sequestered knowledge from the ancient past. This is where we seriously begin to lose people.
Layer Six: Ultra-terrestrials. Beings of a different density/ in a different dimension. We're back with the archons, folks.

The Control System has efficiently organised itself in similar fashion to that which may exist in terrorist groups or large drug organisations and syndicates. Each layer is only in meaningful contact with the layers immediately above and below. Folk on layer two, for example, will have no direct communication with layer five, and will most likely be totally unaware of its existence. In this most elegant of systems, to quote Neil Kramer, 'if any elements within lower layers become compromised, they can easily be denied, deactivated, or terminated.' In other words, our militaries, who bravely go out to defend our nations with their lives, are just cannon fodder anyway. Similarly the politicians - completely dispensable within the bigger picture.

As we approach layers five and six, the world views of many people will be severely stretched. It is not my purpose here to try and convince you of the existence or otherwise of esoteric groups or archontic ultra-terrestrials. The general principle of the Control System hierarchy is the first thing to be cognisant of; the details are a matter for personal unbiased and discerning study and contemplation. Probably the main thing to avoid is taking 'reality' as presented by folk on lower layers, especially layer two, as the entire and real thing. It ain't. It's just a tiny slice of the cake - and one without a cherry filling.



  
  

The Secret - a Postscript

We can surmise; and surmise is all I am prepared to do, not having the personal certainty that some mystical and esoteric traditions possess on such matters. But we can reasonably surmise that, once upon a time, the Secret did not exist as such. Access to whatever the Universe chooses to offer was there for all who wished to partake and explore. It was, if you like, the natural, untrammelled, state of human affairs. Then the first stage in the long and tragic fall of humanity took place. There appeared the shaman types, experts and specialists in matters supernatural. Access remained available to all, but these were the people especially skilled in multidimensional contact and journeying. Got a problem? Check it out with the shaman.

These shamanic-type societies held sway for many-a year. Then, in a fatal move, appeared the priestly castes or classes. The priest-kings. These represented a further distancing of the general populace from direct experience of the totality of reality. A sequestering of knowledge began, and the Secret started to gestate. Experience of gods, spirits, non-linearity, what have you, needed to be had through the priests, who increasingly acted as intermediaries between 'heaven' and 'earth'. Experience of 'higher realms' became restricted to certain people, or certain selected times and places - in Greece, for example, through the Mysteries, as in the Mysteries of Eleusis.

Then came the Roman Empire and its eventual religious arm, Christianity. Thus began the sytematic extermination of anyone who laid claim to direct access to the Secret. Gnostics and Cathars; witches and experts in herbal lore; victims of the Inquisition; further afield, Aztecs, Incas, Muiscas, and the rest. All cultures requiring eradication, not primarily because of their 'inhuman ways' or their non-Christian beliefs as such. But because they kept open access to the Secret.

And so here we are now. The dream is of a totally secular, materialist, humanist society, whence all knowledge of the Secret has been thoroughly banished. Ordinary folk will now be, completely unbeknownst to themselves, willing slaves, their lives confined to a tiny box without their faintest suspicion of the reality of the matter.

Into this wider context we need to insert our politicians, and those other darling public figures we love to rail against. They are easy targets, and I do my fair share of despising them from time to time (a personal characteristic of which I am not proud). The thing is that, in the main, they are not worth our emotional energy. Far from being the great decision-makers, policy and world-shapers, movers and shakers that the official narrative portrays them as being, they are nothing more than puppet-slaves to programmes set up long ago. They are the unwitting gatekeepers for plans and policies, the origins and purposes of which they are probably blissfully unaware; prime among these programmes being the sustaining of the Secret and the Lie. Cameron: puppet-slave. Miliband: puppet-slave. Obama: puppet-slave. I pick out these three as, to me, particularly transparent examples. Watch them without the normal accompanying narratives - that they are 'important, special people' for example - maybe turn down the sound on the television, and see what happens. They are hollow people, acting out a script that is far removed from their own minds. These are the fall guys, the public face of the Secret and the Lie, set up to have custard pie thrown in their faces if need be. Replacements can readily be found if required.

Further up the line of programme-shaping are the think tanks, the NGOs, the groups cloaked in anonymity gathered in Brussels and Strasbourg: non-democratic, non-accountable, infinitely shady. Then there are the dudes who come up with twisted data and lies at places like Earth Summits: the IPCC; the sneaky worms who come up with documents like Agenda 21. Policy - big policy - comes from places that the Camerons and Hollandes are probably quite unaware of. And this is only the beginning of the poisonous paper trail. Homework time again......

    

  It's too late now, folks.....                                Image: bluelight                                                                                                                                                                                       

The Secret

Divine Goddess......... Ooops, sorry, no......

On January 7th of this year, the United Kingdom became a better and safer place to live. Under the umbrella of the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971, a number of previously legal substances were declared Class A drugs, the most serious classification available. Among them were AL-LAD and LSZ, two LSD-type substances that had become available in recent times through a number of (completely legal and above-board) internet sites.

A browse through some of the websites that specialise in such matters will reveal no incidences of harm caused by the consumption of AL-LAD or LSZ. Nevertheless, they are deemed worthy of serious criminalisation, as recommended by the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (once a body that could claim a degree of independence; nowadays unashamedly a government policy mouthpiece). Following the logic of the situation, I shall be writing to the Home Secretary in due course, urging her to criminalise carrots and electric toasters. No harm appears to have been caused by them as yet, but you never know......

Over the past few years, a game of cat-and-mouse has developed between ever-expanding drugs laws and the appearance of 'novel substances' to replace those that have just been criminalised. The United Nations 'World Drug Report' for 2013 reported as follows: 'The international drug control system is floundering, for the first time, under the speed and creativity of the phenomenon known as new psychoactive substances....... No sooner is one substance scheduled than another one replaces it, thus making it difficult to study the long-term impact of a substance on usage and its health effects.' To my knowledge, the report does not point out that the novel substitutes are sometimes far more dangerous than the original criminalised substance. LSD, a fairly harmless substance physically, is a classic case, with NBOMes, LSD-type substances that came onto the scene a few years ago, having been responsible for quite a number of deaths.

Theresa May is the latest in a line of British Home Secretaries that I have come to despise. Their small-minded interference in other people's business knows no bounds, demonstrates deep personal ignorance, and is worthy of nothing but disdain. I have little wish personally to check out novel psychedelics, but I have some respect for those who choose to do so. They have generally done their homework, and their motives are healthy enough. Purchasing such substances, even when legal, involved quite a palaver, so the buyer needs to be serious before entering into such a course of action. For such folk, ingesting a blotter of AL-LAD is probably safer than driving  on the motorway on a Friday evening.

Drug laws, with regard to psychedelic-like substances at least, are so irrational that it begs the question (dodged by even plenty of members of the so-called psychedelic community): Why? It's not, as some apologists would have us believe, about appearing 'tough on drugs' so as to garner votes in the next election. There are nowadays huge numbers of ordinary folk who see that current drug legislation is hopelessly out of touch with reality, and the 'war on drugs' has failed miserably. No, it is something else, more existential, more esoteric, more troubling......

My mind goes back to two seminal psychedelic-assisted realisations I had in the 1970s, the consequences of which I am still in the process of absorbing fully.

In the first, I was immersed in the most harmonious and beautiful experience of my life to date, a state of being facilitated by my recent consumption of LSD. It suddenly occurred to me that the means to this blessed state was highly illegal; indeed, it had been thoroughly demonised by politicians and the media over recent years. How could this be? It just didn't make sense. What, then, were the real purposes of politicians and the mainstream media? At that moment, it clicked that they weren't my friends, they were not interested in true human betterment, and my life would henceforth be lived as far as possible from their slimy grasp.

The second realisation took place in the aftermath of my first fleeting experience - again with the help of our chemical friend - of non-duality. Of a unitary mode of consciousness, where the habitual subject - object distinction dissolved, revealing in its stead a completely different (and, it seemed, more real) mode of perception. This experience, brief though it was, turned me inside out. Life could never be the same again. But what struck me was that nobody had told me about this before. I had successfully negotiated the entire British education system, culminating in a good-grade degree at the cream of British universities, and no-one had uttered a word. Once more, what was this all about? How could this be? This was not a rational state of affairs at all.

I had stumbled upon what I nowadays refer to as the Secret. The Secret is that we are not what we have been told we are at all; or what, indeed, most of us experience ourselves as being. We are not - or are not purely - separate beings dwelling in a universe of separate things, living strictly dualistic (subject - object) lives. We are, if you like, multidimensional beings, with the capacity to experience things in very different ways, which can appear to be more 'wholly real' than the habitual dualistic mode of experiencing.

Closely allied to the Secret is the Lie. The Lie goes something like this. We live in a random, meaningless universe. It is our lot to live our lives as follows. We are born, we get an education of sorts; we find a sexual partner with whom we can give birth to a younger generation who can undergo the same treadmill; we get a job and, if it's a good job, a mortgage; we eventually finish all this stuff and, with a bit of luck, our poor worn-out bodies can do a bit of gardening for a few years before it becomes too painfully old or simply expires.

The everyday world that most of us live in - of politics, economics, finance, social organisation, media, entertainment and leisure activities - depends entirely on the successful functioning of these two, the Secret and the Lie, for its survival and further propagation. Neil Kramer describes this very clearly: how the Control System, as he calls it, 'Empire', is specifically designed to keep the mass of humanity's consciousness at a low level, that of the Lie. The very fabric of most people's existence depends on the continued maintenance of the Lie, and the hiding, the suppression, of the Secret. And here, looking more deeply, lies the Achilles Heel of the whole rotten charade.

The Control System, the Construct, call it what you will, is built on shaky foundations indeed. It must do anything within its power to keep the Secret a secret. Anything that threatens to let the cat out of the bag on anything than the smallest scale must be dealt with decisively. Hence the hysteria surrounding LSD consumption in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It was OK when it was the domain of a few psychotherapists and artists. But when Timothy Leary and his buddies came along encouraging Joe Public to go psychedelic, something had to be done. 'The most dangerous man in America', President Nixon said of Leary in 1974, and he wasn't kidding. Even if the majority of LSD users continued with life 'as normal', there remained a substantial minority who had effectively been let into the Secret, and had seen at least something of the Lie. They were ready to consider what Neil Kramer terms 'withdrawing consent'. Enough withdrawing consent and the Control System crumbles. Job done.

Of course, effectively withdrawing consent is easier said than done. The means need far more serious discussion. It is partly physical withdrawal, partly psychological/spiritual - a matter of consciousness. But it's the only way. Complain, protest, demonstrate against politicians, capitalists, banksters, as much as you want. It may be OK and in certain circumstances may have its place. But don't expect much real change. You are still playing by the rules laid down by the propagators of the Lie. It is familiar territory to them, the world they know and understand, and they can be relied on to play it skilfully to their own advantage.

So we  come back to AL-LAD and LSZ. We can see why they must be criminalised, taken out of the equation. They must. They must.



      

  

1984 'n all that....

Pale Green Vortex has always prided itself in its position (or non-position) of non-alignment. We live in troubled times, and words of wisdom will be readily welcomed whatever their source. Should Ed Miliband, David Cameron, or Nicola Sturgeon communicate words of intelligence, compassion, insight, and integrity, they will be happily embraced. We are, however, still waiting.

Labels and political -isms and -ologies are irrelevant to the style of this blog. Socialism, liberalism, communism; Conservative, Labour, Lib Dem; left-wing, right-wing. None of them work. If someone comes to me and says 'Hey, Mister Pale Green Vortex, some of your ideas seem a bit left-wing to me', I shall reply 'That's your personal take on it. Those are your own pigeon holes, which I do not personally accept. I simply say what seems at the moment to be getting nearer to the reality of things.'

Ideology is a worn-out, dangerous mask. Ideologies are products of insecurity, egos searching for an identity. I crave to know who I am, what I am, what I believe, and how it all fits together. So I go in search of my belief system. Then I can stop having to think for myself,  and I can relax. I have my own Bible of choice, which I can refer to for my views and opinions.

This desperate search for certainty in the shifting sands of being has to go, if we want to seriously get closer to the reality of things, both in terms of consciousness and of the 'outside world'. We don't need heavy sackful of beliefs to carry round with us, blinkering us to what is really going on. Any beliefs we do decide to hold, we can hold lightly, pragmatically.

So we're not playing this game of unreality, of one-size-fits-all. One aim of Pale Green Vortex is to tear asunder the constructed veils obscuring our direct vision of reality.

Bearing all this in mind, I include below a quotation from Tom Sunic (from nonalignedmedia.com), in which he succintly expresses some ideas similar to what have been occasionally put forward on Pale Green Vortex. Tom's father and sister were both sentenced to jail in the former communist Yugoslavia in 1984 (!) for communicating 'hostile propaganda'. Tom himself was granted political asylum in the USA. So he probably doesn't suffer from an anti-western bias! Nevertheless, he has been astounded at the curtailment of free speech in the west, through 'political correctness' and 'hate speech laws'. In this quote, he is talking about Canada; but he could be talking about many countries in western Europe, I feel. Including the UK.

'This is very scary stuff..... the privilege of living in the Communist Yugoslavia and the Communist Soviet Union was very simple: you could, even a person without a university degree, tell right away that this was a brutal system, that it punished people savagely..... and this was a privilege. Why? Because everybody could detect this system; it was physical, it was palpable, it was tangible. Even for a Joe Six-Pack in Communist Yugoslavia.....

Now the problem with the Canadian legislation and specifically the criminal code, or for that matter the criminal code in Germany, is that it is far better veiled in this Mickey Mouse - excuse my language - in this Mickey Mouse language full of euphemisms, full of coverage with human rights, tolerance, diversity, and you really have to be a master of the language first and a master of the psychology of the people who wrote those paragraphs in order to detect the omnipresence of this surveillance state.'

In actual fact, a lot of the time it's not even about law. The most successful form of policing is self-policing by society, and the relentless messages given out by the mainstream media.

Maybe you don't know what I'm talking about. Then you could usefully do a bit of homework. For starters, you could take the words 'racist' and 'sexist'. To be labelled a racist or sexist is one of the worst things in modern society; nobody wants it on their CV. Check out the way that these words are often used nowadays by certain sections of the media and the political/power classes. The use of these words has been severely distorted, away from the original laudable goals of providing unprejudiced, equal opportunities in life for folk regardless of their race or sex. They are more normally employed as tools of thought repression these days. You need to do your own thinking and homework, though, reader. I can't do it for you.

In the UK, I predict a concerted attack over the coming months on UKIP from certain sections of the media. Much of this will focus on trying to demonstrate that UKIP is awash with racists and sexists. Now, I have no doubt that there are plenty of slightly dodgy dudes among the UKIP people. But the whole thing is a sick joke, a piece of Orwellian thought control. Suddenly the racist UKIPpers are being pitted against the decent folk: Cameron's Tories, Miliband's Labour dudes, Clegg and his Lib Dems. To repeat, this is indeed a sick joke. These are largely people of little honour, who steadfastly come out with their own matchbox version of reality and shove it down people's throats until they will hopefully believe that is all there is to life. Disgusting people in the main, really, killers of dreams, purveyors of a crappy vision of life with a blatant disregard for truth, acting in wilful ignorance of what many people are concerned about.

Don't be deceived! Turn off your television if need be, tear up the newspapers, spend a maximum of ten minutes daily checking the 'headlines' on the internet. spend an equal amount of time with 'alternative media' - not that it's always any better than the Guardian, but at least to get a different perspective on things.

Kill an idea and it's gone. Make a viewpoint unacceptable enough and it will wither away - that's the hope, anyway. Empires and control freaks have been familiar with the tactic for centuries. The libraries at Carthage were burned, removing the accumulated wisdom, ideas and discoveries of the 'pagan' cultures forever. What did they know? We have no idea. A treasure of wisdom was lost. Similarly with the witch hunts and burnings in Europe. taking out those with special knowledge that was inconvenient to the ruling tyrants of the time. What angle on life did these non-Christians of Europe have? We don't really know. Take out the knowledge. Take out the ideas, the viewpoints, that are antithetical to the mainstream endgame. It's continuing today. 1984, over and over and over again.



            

Notes From a Sick Room

During the final years of her life, my mother was chronically ill physically, in a whole number of ways. I was known to refer to her as a walking medical dictionary - until she was no longer able to walk. When people asked me what was wrong with her, I would reply 'Everything.'

During this period, my mother endured an amount of physical pain that I can only wonder at. Despite periods of intense physical suffering, she remained remarkably - miraculously - cheerful. Then one day, after yet another angina attack, breathing crisis, or whatever, she turned to my sister and said 'I've had enough.' Within a matter of weeks, we were sitting at her bedside as she breathed her final few heaving breaths in this life. I've always wondered about all that.......

During December gone I felt unhappy about the way the winter had begun. The weather was hostile, the sky uniformly threatening, and there were hardly any more benign days. I counted the days to the solstice, and felt relief when it arrived.

At the same time, I felt a quiet contentment about affairs, and how I was getting on with matters practical. Work, as usual at this time of year, was more than I wanted - but I felt relatively contented with it at the time. I was feeling some satisfaction in preparing for the festive season, something I often don't do. And I was delighted to see my sister and her husband over New Year, for the first time in a decade.

During December, there was this background hum to everything. It felt warm, soothing. In part it concerned death. For me at the time, death had lost its terror, its sting. This seemed not a bad space to be in at all. What's more, I felt that there were no great ambitions still to be achieved in this life. I had more or less done what I needed to do.

On January 2nd, at 9.30 am, I was walking to work. It was still half dark, Inverness was silent and empty. There seemed something deeply wrong about the situation. Nearly the whole of Inverness was still in bed, save one or two intrepid runners and dog walkers. And here was I, pacing the darkened streets in order to go and make a few pennies (not much more).

When I arrived at work, the mild head cold that I had been nursing for a few days exploded into a deadly rainbow of sneezes and splutters. I finished my shift with difficulty, then went home.

For years, I had wondered what it would be like to have a migraine while already ill. I was about to find out. The following day the sharp migraine pain focussed on the right sinus area, and the vomiting of copious bile from deep retching gave me an experience I hope never to repeat. In the late afternoon my sister, her husband and dog came round on their last day in the Highlands. I could barely speak a word.

The following day I slowly began to feel better. Then, in the evening, a vice-like grip caught the bottom of my chest. There followed one of the most viciously painful nights of coughing in all my life. I've never known such symptoms turn up so quickly.

And so it began. Ill, ill, ill. I am accustomed to the intense but fairly short-lived pain of a migraine, but not this. Day after day of almost constant coughing, all the energy poured out of me. I would get up, have a shower if I felt I could manage it, get a little unappetising food down me, check my emails, before going to sit in a chair for the rest of the day. The effort required to get up and close the curtains on the other side of the room was the same as that normally reserved for climbing a remote mountain peak. I hadn't experienced anything remotely approaching this level of seriousness since arriving in Inverness almost a decade ago.

All the time, the warm, fuzzy feeling was playing quietly in the background.

On Wednesday of the second week of the illness I made an appointment to see a doctor. However, I needed to cancel due to lack of energy. I sat in the chair by the window as the light was fading, about four o'clock. I felt myself sink down, down, down. All sorts of things began to fade away: my ideas and opinions about life, about who I am. Habits, preferences, identity. Everything that goes to make 'me'. Just slowly dropping into the warm, fuzzy, oceanic space.

I felt as if I was descending into a realm of the cthonic (netherworld/underworld) gods. And there they were. Clear at centre stage was Cernunnos, the antlered one. The one about whom so little is definitively written, yet about so much is said: Cernunnos Lord of Nature and of the Underworld. Cernunnos the psychopomp, guide of souls from one life to the next.

In this space, there is no striving for life. The matter of life or death bears little relevance, is of little concern. It is viewed with indifference. In this pain-ridden, god-inhabited space, with its peculiar peacefulness, certain qualities of mystical experience reared their head. There was the oceanic feeling in and of itself. And there was time. I closed my eyes, drifted off (I had no strength to do anything else), then looked up, hoping that time was passing quickly and this would all come to an end. Half an hour seemed to have passed, but when I looked at the clock, it was a mere five minutes! I tried again. Twenty minutes, please. No, three.

(Incidentally, the only other context in which I have come across anything bearing any relation to this oceanic fuzz is Stan Grof's Basic Perinatal Matrix One in the pre-birth drama).

Things continued to focus around stasis, stagnation, intermittent feelings of despair, pain. On Saturday  morning I looked out of the bedroom window. For once the weather, though still cold, was more benign. It was bright, with the sun sparkling on the snowy hills beyond.

All of a sudden, a change came upon me. This was the world, and I wanted to be part of it. This was the medium for my soul's journey, and was where I belonged. This was where 'my' consciousness had turned up for this lifetime as a suitable place for it to do whatever it had to do. It's here that things happen, all manner of wondrous thing, and it befits me to be out there in this phenomenal world. This is still the place for me, not the fuzzy, quiescent world I had inadvertedly allowed myself to sink into over recent times.

I felt a bit of energy move. Recuperation was on its way. Slowly, fitfully, at times painfully, the road to recovery stretches out before me.  I walk it with gratitude.

 

    

Peaches and Pears

'If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.'  George Orwell, 1945

It is, I have to say, a fascinating case. It involves the geneticist James Watson, co-discoverer with Francis Crick of DNA (discoverers in the mainstream western narrative, that is: it seems likely that shamans of the Amazon have known about DNA for ages). He recently decided to auction off his 1962 Nobel Prize (and received big bucks for it). He needed the cash it seems, having become, in his own words, an 'unperson' in 2007. The reason for his fall into unpersonhood was comments he made about Africa. He was, he confessed one fateful day in 2007, not optimistic about the future of Africa because of what he perceived to be the generally lower intelligence of Africans. Not exactly PC, eh. As a result of his remarks, he was banned from speaking at the Science Museum in London at short notice, fired from the boards of several companies, and not invited to give any more public lectures anywhere. As he says, he became an unperson.

I am not, in this short piece, considering the rights or wrongs, the wisdom or folly, of James Watson's remarks. I am concerned with the way that certain opinions cannot be held or discussed. You just can't say that. And if you can't say it, you can't think it either. And that is the end of freedom of speech.

This is how things pan out in the western world of today. Governments, authorities, have realised that taking out the opposition by torture or killing isn't very clever - at least on home ground, People start to get upset and angry. It's not a good long-term strategy. No. What you do is take out the undesirables through denying them airspace, and through public censure. This has the added advantage of getting lots of decent, well-intentioned but inadequately researched people on your side. I mean, nobody likes racism, do they? Or sexists. We all want a fair and equal society, don't we? So we simply shift the goalposts a bit, so that our catchwords of evil, such as 'racist', encompass pretty much anything and everything we want. Note that, whatever its value as a point of view, Watson's on intelligence contained no hatred or ill-will. He was simply reporting what he felt to be true.

Meanwhile, from Scandinavia, I read this: 'A new law will come into effect in Sweden in Christmas 2014 that will allow people to be prosecuted for criticizing immigration or politicians' unwillingness to tackle the issue...... This new law is meant to stop Swedish people from complaining about their country being turned into a third world nation.' (speisa.com)

I read a little bit about Sweden since Red Ice Creations is based there. During 2014, interviews and articles have appeared in abundance on the themes of uncontrolled immigration in Europe and the development of the destruction of European cultures in what is sometimes termed 'white genocide', the systematic destruction of the traditional cultures of the nations and peoples of Europe. Red Ice has pushed this topic so much that I almost stopped looking at their stuff a while ago!

I was personally very sceptical of this notion of methodical eradication of our cultures. My view softened, however, following a visit to Paris in spring this year. What I saw in an admittedly brief and partial stay I found dismaying. A social and cultural mish-mash that seemed to benefit nobody. Not the folk of black African descent on the Metro in varied states of depression and/or aggression. Nor the Rumanians hanging around on the street corners or fleecing tourists on their way to the Eiffel Tower. Nor again the people whose families had inhabited the city for generations, and who were trying to hang onto their sense of identity. And all this has been presided over by the French authorities, who have either sat back and allowed it all to happen, or actively encouraged it through European policy and legislation.

To return to Sweden. Rec Ice comments thus: 'In the last three decades Sweden has been transformed into an unrecognizable heap of chaos....... The criticism that now is beginning to take place against these undemocratic policies has caused the government to turn on its own  native population. Swedes themselves are not protected under the new 'hate speech laws', for example. The country is on the verge of utter totalitarianism, only comparable with the USSR.'

Clever, huh? And you thought Sweden was the perfect model for the future. Totalitarianism in the name of the good, the fair, justice, FREEDOM!! Ha Ha! The least we can do is continue to speak freely, honestly, whatever appears to us to be true. We actually have no rights. But we do have our own power, inner spirit, integrity, and sovereignty, which nobody can take away. 'If liberty means anything at all....'