Prophets and Possession: PKD & Gnosticism-Part Two

What is really meant by the term gnosis? Gnosis is usually translated from Greek as "knowledge." However, the "knowledge" that the Gnostics sought and still do is not of the quantifiable, scientific kind; it is not even rational knowledge or the insights gained from the build-up of knowledge over many years. The Greek language makes clear the difference between knowledge of the type 2+2=4 and knowledge gained through direct experience. Direct experience would best describe gnosis. Elaine Pagels, in her wonderful book, The Gnostic Gospels tells us that in the sense the Gnostics used the word that perhaps it would be best translated as "insight." Gnosis has a way of connecting the "stars in their heaven"-the divine reality and mystery with a very grounded, earthy self-knowledge. Not only does Gnosticism seem to share many ideas with neo-Platonism and some of the early Greek thinkers, it also has some fascinating parallels with Eastern schools of thought, especially Mahayana Buddhism, which may have been influenced by Gnostic ideas. In 225 AD, an enemy of Gnostic thought, a Christian named Hippolytus took note of some similarities of Gnosticism and the Eastern religions in his refutation of the "heresies": " They say that God is light, not like the light one sees, nor like the sun nor fire, but to them God is discourse, not that which finds expression in articulate sounds, but that of knowledge [gnosis] through which the secret mysteries of nature are perceived by the wise."

A non-Christian school of Gnosis was also to be found in the pagan philosophy of Hermeticism. The exact origins of the Gnostic "movement" may never be known, but a fascinating scripture-The Gospel of Thomas was found in the priceless scrolls uncovered at Nag Hammadi in 1945. The Gnostics were definitely one of the lost offshoots of Christianity. A very hopeful and striking declaration is made at the very beginning of The Gospel of Thomas-"Whoever finds the meaning of these sayings will not taste death." The Gospel of Thomas is one of the most interesting of the scriptures unearthed at Nag Hammadi, Egypt in 1945. This gospel is very short and only fills twelve pages in one standard edition. However, the brevity of Thomas belies its importance and it has received more attention than any other Gnostic scripture. Many of the sayings of Jesus in the Gospel of Thomas are like the ones in the New Testament. The words attributed to Jesus in Thomas are fairly abstruse: "Be passers-by" (Thomas, 42.). "I have cast fire upon the world, and see, I am watching it until it blazes." (Thomas, 10.). "When you see one not born of woman, fall upon your faces and prostrate yourself before that one: it is that one who is your father." (Thomas 15.). It almost seems as if some of the sayings and teachings in Thomas are not meant to be taken literally in such a way that contemplating them causes the mind to look more deeply inward.

Perhaps the inward nature of the gospels that are considered Gnostic are part of the reason mainstream Christianity renounced Gnosticism. Inner spiritual work and illumination is very difficult and aslo illusive-no guarantees or set timeframe. So much easier is it to preach fire and brimstone, sin and atonement to placate the judgment of a angry and vengeful god. This style of anticipating and appeasing the wrath of an angry god is exactly the stance adopted to pagan antiquity in relation to their own deities. In fact, the angry, wrathful, vengeful God of the Old Testament is not always easy to reconcile with the infinitely loving God of Jesus' teachings. One philosopher eho was around centuries before Christianity seems to have had a profound effect on Gnosticism. His name was Plato and he lived in the fourth century BC. He founded an institution of higher learning called the Academy in Athens. Plato's influence on Western philosophy can't be stated enough. Some maintain that all Western philosophy is a footnote to Plato. Plato describes reality in an esoteric fashion. But this does not mean that his thoughts are difficult to grasp. Esoteric derives from the Greek word esotero, which means "further in." Two meanings of this word can be thought of in regards to Plato.

He felt some of his teachings could only be passed onto his more advanced pupils who were "further in" his circle of students. Another-and I think important meaning can be taken from his use of the word. This would mean that his teachings are about inner experience-"further in" towards the Truth the mind can envision in its more sublime moments. Modern philosophers and thinkers tend to look at the vast inner "soul life" of the mind as purely subjective and therefore unreal. Esoteric philosophy says that not only is the "soul life" of the mind as purely subjective and therefore unreal. Esoteric philosophy says that not only is the "soul life" of the mind real, but that the dimensions the mind encounters have their own objective reality and can be described. Plato basically turned conventional thinking of his day completely around. The world that is comprehended by the human senses is the one that is unreal. The solid objects of mundane reality are merely copies or imitations of ideal "archetypes" that he called "forms"-non-concrete images that exist in the realm of thought. It is the "forms" alone that are real Plato believed, because they are eternal and unchanging-unlike the constant state of flux "our" world is ceaselessly undergoing. Timaeus-a late dialogue is the most important of Plato's works in regard to Gnosticism. Timaeus expounds on quite a few ideas. This is the work that introduces the lost continent of Atlantis (Plato said that records of Atlantis were preserved in Egypt). The dialogue then gives an esoteric view of the creation of the universe.

Here is a beautiful Gnostic statement that leans towards a definition and some conclusions about the experience of gnosis:
What makes us free is the gnosis
of who we were
of what we have become
of where we were
of wherein we have been cast
of whereto we are hastening
of what we aree being freed
of what birth really is
of what rebirth really is. (Excerpta de Theodoto)
I think Gnosticism has some of the most interesting religious and philosophical concepts when looked in a certain light. One of these ideas/concepts is the idea of the archons-a concept I read about almost twenty years ago when I read my first copy of Gnosis magazine. More on the archons later. Getting back to the previous Gnostic statement, Excerpta de Theodoto-it would be thought that one who intuitively apprehends the correct answers to these questions has attained liberating gnosis.

These questions and their answers are central to Gnostic doctrine and to the very heart of both gnosis and Gnosticism. Whereas many religions, especially those of the Judeo-Christian traditions accuse the transgressions of the first human couple, Adam and Eve, for not only the fallen state of the human race-but of all creation. The evil present in our world is a consequence of this fall. Gnosticism has quite a unique take on this. The Gnostics tell us that the insanity and evil in our world are there because our world and the universe was created by an insane, crazy or evil (perhaps a combination of all three or two depending on which Gnostic sect one refers to) god called the Demiurge. Gnostics and Buddhists have often been thought of as pessimists and haters of our material reality. The Gnostics would certainly agree that life on the earth plane is filled with suffering and misery. Looking at the situation from on high it would seem that all forms of life on earth (except for the plant and mineral kingdoms) sustain their existence by consuming other forms of life. This whole cycle of course perpetuates pain, fear, death and of course great emotional sadness where higher life forms are concerned. In fact, the "higher" up the ladder and more complex a species is-the greater its ability to feel these negative emotions. However, for the Gnostics (and Buddhists) there are paths that lead to liberation from this suffering and delusion.

Readers may be familiar with Plato's famous allegory of the cave. This allegory holds that prisoners being held in the cave (being unable to see anything outside of it) mistakenly believe that the shadows on the wall of the cave represent "true" reality. Of course, the light that produces the shadows is the only true reality. This is where an important analogy with Gnosticism comes in. Out created world, along with a large segment of the human mind is seen as evil by the Gnostics primarily because it puts all of a human being's focus on the physcial plane of existence-away from the "true" eternal light of the divine. And the constantly changing nature of the human mind tends to put its focus on itself and trivial things-going from one thought to another in a matter of seconds or less. By the dual distraction of the material world and the tumultuous, constantly changing focus of the mind, the inner, eternal self or soul is consigned to oblivion. However, it is only the inner self or spirit (Greek pneuma=spirit) that has a link to the ultimate, divine reality. The Gnostics lived in a time where Jews, Christians-and even the pagan Hermeticists believed in one god only-monotheism. The God they ascribed to was a supreme builder and architect. Not only did this God create the universe-this God also gave it laws, started time, and propagated it. The Gnostic view of God was more profound and complex than the God of these other traditions.

Similar to the interpretation of the Kabbalists and other esoteric traditions, Gnostics conceived of the universe being an emanation of the Divine opposed to a creation. Going back to the fascinating ideas of physicist David Bohm mentioned previously in this blog about the implicate and explicate orders, with the implicate being the more fundamental level of reality and the explicate the "seen" level of existence, Gnostics imagined a transcendent God who isn't involved with anything of such gross materiality as "building" a universe. The Gnostics believed in a primordial, unmanifest (think implicate order of reality). Perhaps saying this God "existed" in an unmanifest (implicate) level of reality is wrong as this God would embody and actually be this transcendent level of existence. From the implicate, unmanifest level or order of reality the Divine Being emanates forthe in a ray of creation that goes out from it creating at first more subtle forms and modes of being to coarser states of existence.

Like many esoteric systems the Gnostics put our fallen world at a far remove from the Divine source. They also believed that the architect of our human, three dimensional reality believed itself to be the ultimate level of existence. The Gnostics called this architect the Demiurge from the Greek demiurgos (half-maker), because it only made the physical forms but not the inner divine spark of the world. The Demiurge also had helpers and future overseers of this world who they called the archons, using the Greek word for ruler. Most if not all Gnostics equated the God of the Old Testament with the Demiurge. Depending on the offshoot or sect of Gnostics they thought of the Demiurge as evil, insane or stupid-or as stated before a combination of two or three of these. The Gnostics did not think of humans as primarily beings of this demiurgic level of creation. The important thing to keep in mind with this statement is they knew humans had a physical shell (obviously) and a psychic component also and that both the physical and psychic parts perished at death. The Gnostics also thought that each human being had a spiritual component that was eternal and was a part of the divine essence, sometimes called the "divine spark." Gnosticism is one of many religious and philosophical traditions that recognize the dual nature of the human soul, so it is also called a dualistic religion.

In a 1981 entry in his Exegesis (a very large journal he kept to keep up with theories and insights of his 2-3-74 experiences), PKD wrote an honest assessment of his abilities as a writer: "I am a fictionalizing philosopher, not a novelist; my novel & storytelling ability is employed as a means to formulate my perception. The core of my writing is not art but truth. Thus what I tell is the truth, yet I can do nothing to alleviate it, either by deed or explanation. Yet this seems somehow to help a certain kind of sensitive troubled person, for whom I speak. I think I understand the common ingredients in those whom my writing helps: they cannot or will not blunt their own imitations about the irrational, mysterious nature of reality, &, for them, my corpus is one long ratiocination regarding this inexplicable reality, an integration and presentation, analysis and response & personal history."

Here are the Ten Major Principles of Gnostic Revelation, from PKD's Exegesis. 1) The creator of this world is demented. 2) The world is not as it appears, in order to hide the evil in it, a delusive veil obscuring it and the deranged deity. 3) There is another, better realm of God, and all our efforts are to be directed toward a)returning there b) bringing it here. 4) Our actual lives stretch back thousands of years back, and we can be made to remember our origin in the stars. 5) Each of us has a divine counterpart unfallen who can reach down to us. This other personality is the authentic self; the one we have now is asleep and minor. We are in fact asleep, and in the hands of a dangerous magician disguised as a good god, the deranged creator deity. The bleakness, the evil and pain in the world, the fact that it is a deterministic prison controlled by the demented creator causes us willingly to split with the reality principle early in life, and so to speak willingly fall asleep in delusion. 6) You can pass from the delusional prison world into the peaceful kingdom if the True God placed you under His grace. 7) Christ gave, rather than received revelation, he taught his followers how to enter the kingdom, while still alive. Where other mystery religions bring about amnesis: knowledge of it at the "other time" in the "other realm," not here. He causes it to come here, and is the living agency of the Sole Good God (i.e. the Logos). 8) Probably the real, secret Christian Church still exists, long underground, with its members absorbed into it. Through participation in it they probably have vast, seemingly magical powers. 9) The division into "two times" (good and evil) and "two realms" (good and evil) will abruptly end with victory for the good time here, as the presently invisible kingdom separates and becomes visible. We cannot know the date. 10) During this time period we are on the sifting bridge being judged according to which power we give allegiance to, the deranged creator demiurge of this world-or the One Good God and his kingdom, whom we know through Christ.

It suits the archons just fine that human beings are unaware of the divine spark within them. Being the lesser cosmic rulers, archons want anything that keeps people attached to earthly things-not only material things-but people can also be enslaved by mental ideas and concepts; such as a political philosophy, and of course people can be enslaved emotionally to other people and events in their lives! Another fascinating esoteric and philosphical practitioner and theorist that seemed to borrow a lot from Gnosticism is George Gurdjieff and I would like to talk about his ideals later in the series along with getting back to PKD and other teachers and teachings. I thought this article would be important as far as background information to upcoming articles including more PKD hopefully soon! PS-not really sure where I am going with this series next-it may be more Gnosticism or something different-I definitely would like to come back to PKD, Gnosticism and others at some point hopefully soon-either way I hope people enjoyed information about this fascinating man. Thanks again for all of your thoughtful, intelligent and interesting comments! Here are some links where you can also learn a lot-from Michael's Gosporn blog- HERE and Nina's Musings and Observations blog- HERE

I enjoyed both Michael's and Nina's articles enormously and if anyone else has done anything they feel would fit into this series by all means let me know-I am more than happy to link info up here and would appreciate it actually-as sometimes I am not sure if I am drifting too much and making things unclear. Peace and be well to anyone stopping by!

Prophets and Possession: PKD & Gnosticism

The amazing man known to us as Philip K. Dick was a great science fiction writer who also wrote about many different subjects about his own life. Philip Kindred Dick was born on 16 December, 1928 and died on 2 March 1982 at the age of 53. Philip K. Dick-why don't we call him PKD for this series was haunted by the lifelong trauma of his twin sister who passed away six weeks after they were born. Jane Charlotte Dick was the name of the twin sister. They were born to Dorothy Kindred Dick and Joseph Edgar Dick in Chicago. The twins were born prematurely and PKD blamed both of his parents for her loss and this intensified when they divorced when he was five years old. The theme of the "lost twin"or "phantom twin" and "twin-poled dilemmas" came out in many different ways in his work.

Besides science fiction PKD also wrote essays and many short stories. He had 36 books published in his lifetime and 121 short stories. PKD explored sociological, political and metaphysical themes in his work. Other ideas he also explored were monopolistic corporations, authoritarian governments and altered states of consciousness. In his later works PKD focussed on his interest in metaphysics and theology. PKD often drew on his own real life experiences and explored drug use, paranoia and schizophrenia and transcendental experiences in such novels as A Scanner Darkly and VALIS. The novel The Man in the High Castle bridged the genres of alternate history and science fiction and won the Hugo award for the best science fiction novel of 1963. It portrayed life in the United States after it had lost to the Axis powers in World War II and the eastern half of the US was governed by Nazi Germany and the western half Imperial Japan. Flow My Tears the Policeman Said was about a celebrity who awakened in a parallel universe where no one knew who he was. This book won the John W. Campbell memorial award for the best science fiction novel of 1975. "I want to want to write about people I love and put them into a fictional world spun out of my mind, because the world we actually have does not meet my standards." "In my writing I even question the universe; I wonder out loud if it is real, and I wonder out loud if all of us are real." Although PKD spent most of his career as a writer in near poverty-nine of his stories have been adapted into popular movies since his death including Blade Runner (One of my all time favorite movies) the book version was called Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Total Recall, A Scanner Darkly, and Minority Report. In 2005 Time magazine named Ubik one of the one hundred greatest English language novels published since 1923. In 2007 PKD became the first science fiction writer to be included in the Library of Americas series.

I always thought it incredibly sad and yet somehow so ironic because of the nature of the subjects he wrote about that PKD didn't live to see Ridley Scott's Blade Runner completed. PKD died a little over three months before the movie was released in June of 1982. PKD's untimely death denied him the chance to have a taste of material wealth that would have been a great change from what he was used to-I do not believe he was at all a "thing" oriented person-but an "ideas" person-still though, what a change it would have been for a man who had been near homelessness many times. Besides a measure of material wealth I also wonder what he would have thought of the success of the movie-and other movies that were made out of his books in relation to the fact that he got people to think about some very deep topics. The nature of reality is one topic that also comes out in much of his work. I find PKD the man, his ideas and his life even more interesting than his books. He spent a great deal of his life battling mental instability, depression, paranoia, failed relationships and drug abuse. In the 1970s his California home became a crash pad for petty thieves and drug addicts-basically-lost people. This is probably because he was able to identify so well with being lost in the world. PKD married five times and had three children. Also in the 1970s his home was broken into. In a fascinating spiral of thoughts he first thought that perhaps it was a government job. This was during the Nixon years when paranoia was at an all time high. PKD was a very open, free and in many ways politically liberal man (although politics hardly defined him) who had grown up in Berkeley, California and although usually very poor in material things he was the kind of man who would give you the shirt off of his back if you were in need. He was certainly no stranger to drug use and he wondered if perhaps he had made it onto Tricky Dick's "enemies list." Then after a while he began to feel that he had burglarized his own home!

He thought that the reason he didn't remember robbing his own home was due to a blackout while on narcotics or the onset of mental illness. This incident in his life led to him writing the book, A Scanner Darkly. The title is a reference to a passage in the Bible in 1 Corinthians 13, which states: "For we know in part, and we prophecy in part. But who that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away. When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I beame a man, I put away childish things. For now we see through a glass darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part, but then I shall know even as I was known." The books protagonist is required to view clips from his life on a "scanner", a holographic recorder projects. In Chapter 13 of the book, the protagonist muses that he has seen life with a scanner, but came no closer to properly perceiving his life than Saint Paul with his primitive mirror or glass. True understanding he suggests will only come when death is defeated. Many of his friends also thought he was the unhappiest man they had ever met. By far-the most interesting experiences in his relatively short life were yet to come.

In the early months of 1974 PKD experienced hallucinations, dreams, synchronicities and gnostic visions that he collectively thought of as 2-3-74 or shorthand for February/March 1974. PKD would spend the rest of his life attempting to understand the meaning of these events in a thousand page handwritten manuscript he came to call the Exegesis. Even when his fictional output slowed down he continued to work on his Exegesis every night-analyzing, sorting and interpreting through 2-3-74, as well as his published novels and short stories. Besides its function as mystical exegesis it also served as a daily diary along with self-analysis and a dream journal. Very seldom in the history of literature is their such an open window into the mind of a writer penetrating his deepest spirit and psychological space. PKD came to believe that an alien intelligence that could quite possibly be god was communicating with him through an interface called the Vast Active Living Intelligence System (VALIS). This system took the form of a ship in outer space delivering highly concentrated doses of information to him through beams of pink light. He described it as an "invasion" of his consciousness that also "by a transcendentally rational mind" he also claimed to believe that co-existing within himself was a "plasmate." PKD believed that his "plasmate" was an early Christian who though very much alive in the first century was simultaneously interpenetrated into PKD's body and mind space. Like many of the protagonists from his own novels, PKD believed in the possibility that he was hallucinating his current life and was really living in another place and time.

In this case the Roman empire-this is the origin of the rather haunting phrase frequently found later in his writing-"The Empire Never Ended." He also experienced a series of voices that gave him information telling him things he couldn't possibly know otherwise, including a just-in-time lifesaving medical diagnosis of his newborn son whose life was saved by an emergency hernia operation. PKD was well aware of how insane this all sounded and wrote many different theories about what was happening to him in his Exegesis and why he came to believe in the veracity of his spiritual experiences. One "proof " of his sanity was his claim that crazy people don't doubt their own sanity. Those who knew him at the time living in a modest apartment in Santa Ana, California considered him an eccentric, disheveled, intense, personally unhygienic, gentle, arrogant, emotionally hairtriggered and religiously bizarre.-BUT quite possibly the most brilliant person they knew-and certainly not a delusional schizophrenic. Despite his numerous psychological problems his friends considered him to be quite sane. Four astonishing novels came out of the whole experience. Radio Free Albemuth was his first attempt to deal with VALIS through fiction. In this tale-of which two of the characters are Nicholas Brady and Ferris Fremont-there is yet a third -PKD himself! In an attempt to defeat Fremont-who is a thinly disguised Richard Nixon (would have made a perfect 43 later!) Brady and Dick embed messages in popular songs in order to oppose Fremont's plans to impose a police state. The novel is a great counter-cultural response to Watergate filled with mystical interpretations of rock music, shizphrenic delusions and alien technology. Radio Free Albemuth was PKD's most daring work and the most autobiographical.

VALIS published in 1981 was a complete re-working of his 2-3-74 experience. The protagonist who now undergoes Gnostic illumination is the paranoid schizophrenic twin of science fiction writer Philip K. Dick and is named "Horselover Fat" Philip being Greek for horselover and dick being German for thick or fat. VALIS is more solemn and serious than the previous works mentioned and includes many of the most important events of his spiritual life and is very autobiographical in nature. Here are some quotes by PKD about his actual VALIS experience: "March 18, 1974: It, from inside me, looked out and saw the world did not compute, that I-and it-had been lied to. It denied the reality, and power, and authenticity of the world, saying, 'This cannot exist, it cannot exist.' " "March 20, 1974: It seized me entirely, lifting me from the limitations of the space-time matrix; it mastered me as, at the same time, I knew that the world around me was cardboard, a fake. Through its power of perception I saw what really existed, and through its power of no-doubt decision, I acted to free myself. It took on in battle, as a champion of all human spirits in thrall, every evil, every Iron Imprisoning thing."

Here is a direct quote from the book VALIS where PKD links his dead twin to Sophia, the sister/bride of God who experiences exile in the material world: "The changing information which we experience as world is an unfolding narrative. It tells about the death of a woman. This woman, who died long ago, was one of the primordial twins. She was half of the divine syzgy. The purpose of the narrative is the recollection of her and her death. The Mind does not wish to forget her. Thus the ratiocination of the Brain consists of a permanent record of her existence, and, if read, would be understood that way. All the information processed by the Brain-experienced by us as the arrangement and rearranging fo physical objects-is an attempt at this preservation of her, stones and rocks and sticks and amoebae are traces of her.

Now-what does all of this have to do with Gnosticism? I hope to give just a little insight today and then follow up-hopefully very soon with some more on Gnostic thought and other things also. I am not quite sure how this "series" will go quite yet-its kind of experimental-yet I think extremely important. Some of the ideas in this series have actually been kicking around in my little skull for quite awhile. I have often wondered at the apparent-and very real insanity of the world around us. Here I am not talking about the "fun" crazy stuff-but the horrific stuff in our world. I often thought of the leaders of this planet-both seen and unseen -and wondered-"Aren't some of these men and women afraid of a possible afterlife and its consequences at all? It seems to me like if I were one of these people who is on a pacemaker no less-I would sure as hell be trying to make peace with my maker if you know what I mean (guess who I am thinking of:-)! Then in 2004 I started looking at the superb and thought-provoking work Jeff Wells has done at his blog (along with many wonderful people at the Rigorous Intuition forum)-and I began to think-"Oh I get it -well kind of anyway-why some of these despicable dealers of death in this world might not be so scared of consequences upon their departure from this earth.

Then a matter of nights ago-even though I have had Jeff's book, Rigorous Intuition: What You Don't Know Can't Hurt Them since December-I gave the book yet another read through-probably my third -and after this reading during a wide awake insomniac night-I felt I had an experience of gnosis (roughly-knowing, knowledge). I think Jeff is one of the few people out there who "get it" in what is a very small club of women and men who are concerned with the direction the world is heading and most importantly WHY-it is heading in the wrong direction. I wish in American high school civics class they would cut all books out of the curriculum and have two or three as required reading-one is Howard Zinn's -"A People's History of the United States" and another is Jeff's Rigorous Intuition-and maybe I can think of one or two more about the way our "republic" really works-a "representative democracy" my hairy derriere-please scuse the French. Well once again I am tired and rambling-let me give you all a quote out of Jeff's wonderful book (ps -think non human intelligences when reading this-it is kind of where I am going with my new "series"-Donald Schrum is a man who had a bizarre encounter in 1964 with non-human "beings" and also Carl Higdon who had a bizarre encounter in 1974)from pages 299 to 300: "A wild tale, and like all such tales, impossible to verify. Yet his [Higdon's] bullet was in his pocket where he placed it, folded like a glove. And to ask But was it real? is likely to miss the point. Fungus the Bogeyman returned to a home and family after a good night's scare. To what, and to whom, do these entities return? Does the yellow man in the black uniform ever say "Honey, I'm home!" Are there factories assembling the bizarre and ungainly robots of Schrum's and many others accounts? Why is there so little standardization of craft, and why are there so many different kinds of entities? Religion and occult lore have more to say in this regard than exopolitics, because the things are manifesting themselves for us. Higdon might not have been terrorized, but he was drained, left a blubbering mess, like so many who encounter the Other, The Otherworld, too, has those who play good cop/bad cop. So long as they feed."

I thought this quote of Jeff's fit perfectly with where I am going with the Gnosticism link and thoughts of good and bad "possessions" and contact with non-human intelligences. I hope this made some sense and will try to give some links-I wanted to call it a rough draft until I could check up on a few things. Thanks again for all of your wonderful and thoughtful comments! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_K._Dick

http://www.ufoevidence.org/cases/case308.htm Carl Higdon Case

http://www.nicap.org/640904dir.htm Donald Schrum Case

PS-puter is doing the online/offline tango-I meant to say the Gnosticism part will be in the next article -I meant to have it in this one -but ran out of time-I also hope to get caught up with all the updated blogs tomorrow also! Peace and best to anyone stopping by!

Edgar Allan Poe: A Dream Within A Dream

Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow--
You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.

I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand--
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep-while I weep!
O God! can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?


I thought this poem captured the surreal essence of the series I am trying-keyword trying- here to work on. I may just start posting some of the thoughts in smaller bits than I had intended because I can start "Xing" things I want to double check off my list. Peace and be well anyone stopping by! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edgar_Allan_Poe

R U Sirius? More Dogon Zamora Thoughts

Here are some more thoughts I have in relation to parts or a part of the UFO mystery. I would also like to give a couple of paragraph sized quotes from my all time -can't live without-if I was forced to take one book only to a desert island exile-this would be it book-Jeff Wells splendid Rigorous Intuition: What You Don't Know Can't Hurt Them. I am also calling this a rough draft because insomnia struck yet again last night and I feel really, really slooow-so I would like to come back later and make sure it reads all right, the links work and maybe add more info and pics. How slow am I today? Well I just spent like an hour and a half trying to figure out WTF trans-Plutonic meant-and am still not quite sure. I think it just means outside the realm of our solar system-beyond Pluto. At first I thought it could be some mystical realm or even a level of "being" beyond the element Plutonium.

I think I should first say that I always wondered if at least part of the answer to the secret of the UFOs and some other paranormal phenomena is that a gateway or portal to another dimension or spacetime was opened, either intentionally or accidentally. That probably sounds very wild to many people but the high strangeness of many of the reports led me to consider that we were not just dealing with physical manifestations on our level of reality-but perhaps manifestations opening/unveiling beyond our three dimensional world and spacetime and also interpenetrating it. Jacques Vallee is one UFO researcher who has reported UFO encounters that seem to straddle the boundaries between the physical, non-physical, archetypal and even mystical. Over the years I began to think that the UFO mystery did indeed have some sort of meaning but I also wondered if humanity would ever be able to understand the meaning of the phenomena. I often thought of the analogy of a caveman trying to explain a 747, but a magnitude of difficulty in understanding beyond that.

Getting back to gateways and portals. In 1918 Aleister Crowley was working with a female partner named Roddie Minor using Ceremonial and Sexual Magick with the intent of invoking what he referred to as "intelligences" to manifest. If they are to be believed they had success with this and through Minor's psychic mediumship made contact with an entity called "Lam" through a tear in spacetime that created a portal between realities. Here is a quote from Jeff Wells', Rigorous Intuition from pages 292 to 293: "Remember Lam, and Aleister Crowley's "Amalantrah Working"? Using sex magick with his partner and psychic sensitive Roddie Minor, Crowley claimed to have opened a dimensional portal, through which passed Lam, whose portrait appears an archetypal grey, though Crowley drew him "from life" in 1918, many years before the greys entered our cultural consciousness. Before Lam appeared, Minor channeled messages from a spirit-wizard called Amalantrah, who told Crowley to "find the egg." Ian Blake, who has much of interest to say about Crowley, Lam, and the egg metaphor here, writes that "one of the earlier versions of the Amalantrah Working ended with the sentence, "It's all in the egg." During the final surviving version of this Working, in reference to a question about the egg, Crowley was told: "Thou art to go this way."

That was the first of two quotes I wanted to use out of Jeff's superb book for this post to hopefully illuminate what I am trying to say with my clumsy wordage. If anyone is having trouble following do not worry whatsoever-the story with Crowley and his entourage-perhaps I should say proteges is bizarre and it gets moreso by the time further on when two names are added to it. One of these names will possibly be familiar to you and one obscure. I won't go into them today but I will tell you the names: Jack Parsons and L. Ron Hubbard. Interesting to me is also the fact that Crowley recieved channeled information from his first wife Rose in 1904. Here is a quote about that event from of all things a newsletter put out by the sublime musical group TOOL: "A possible example of just such a Sirian communication is LIBER AL, better known as "The Book of the Law." According to Crowley, Liber Al was a received text, channeled through his first wife Rose (named Ouarda the Seeress by Crowley) while in Cairo, Egypt. The foreboding prophecy of the text was dictated in a rich timber by a higher intelligence which called itself Aiwass, an emissary from the Egyptian Neter, Horus. One passage in the book even asks "is a god to live in a dog?" A possible reference to the Dog Star Sirius."

Michael Bertiaux claims to be a more recent Lam contactee. He is supposed to have had much success in communication with the "intelligence." Bertiaux sees Lam as a "subterranean burgeoning of Lucifer-Gnosis." Gnosis which is higher or intuitive knowing would bring out the meaning of that statement to be that "knowing Lam is to know a welling up from the unconscious of an inner knowing of Lucifer." It is important to note here that Lucifer here is not to be thought of as the Christian devil but the "Light Bringer." "Lam" is also considered to be a class of entity-as opposed to an individual being. If a person invokes "Lam" they are asking an entity of that type to manifest rather than a particular being. Here is yet another quote by a man named Ian Blake who also discusses Crowley and the Sirius connection: "During the 1950s, Crowley's last disciple, British occultist and current Outer Head of the Typhonian O.T.O., Kenneth Grant, worked rituals with the NU-ISIS lodge that were designed to receive Maatian emanations from Sirius. In his remarkable Typhonian trilogies, Grant leaves a record of the lodges attempt to establish traffic with non-human entities from a planet that he describes as being trans-Plutonic."

So I am wondering what is going on? Sirius-if I remember my astronomy correctly is of spectral type A1 (not like the steak sauce;-)-sorry for the "Lam" attempt at humor-I can always tell when I am getting tired. It is a very bright star, so the fact that it is mentioned from antiquity until the present day in all kinds of ways makes sense. However, my understanding is that this type of star is extremely unlikely (of course this is just by our "current" understanding of science) to support life. Yet certain ancient societies and a very old tribe existing today mention it as sustaining physical life. The Dogon in Africa is a very fascinating tale that I will provide a link for. This tribe "knew" things about the Sirius star system that by any conceivable means they should have had no way of knowing-first of all that it is indeed a pair and not just one star and secondly they seem to have knowledge of the physical qualites of the smaller star-a "white dwarf " that modern physics didn't even begin to describe until the twentieth century. Sirius-it seems to me anyway-not that I am claiming to know about all metaphysical systems-but in so many that I have heard of the status of Sirius is extremely important. The information about Lam and his image-which I will come back with. Coincidences do happen but I remember getting a shiver up my spine when I first viewed the Lam image and realized it was from 1918. And what is with all the egg stuff? So many thoughts come to mind with the word "egg" that I wonder if that is part of the "game" also whatever the "game" is. I think of creation myths, the big bang (which some scientists are starting to question), how everything from chickens to us homo saps are born, for some reason the "alpha and the omega" always come to mind when I think of the word egg. I am probably the only person weird enough for this! Well I am going to close the post out with a last quote from Jeff's book-I have probably been very much overly-wordy which seems to become worse the more tired I am. I am also going to be coming back to other subjects in Rigorous Intuition. There are so many varied and interesting subjects in this book it will be hard to choose which ones to work with-it is five hundred pages of paranormal, parapolitical and conspiratorial yummy goodness!

OK now more about the Zamora case and other thoughts from page 294 of Rigorous Intuition: "One final thought. Lonnie Zamora reported seeing "markings in red letters about a foot high on the side. It looked like the crescent and a horizontal bar beneath that." To those who regard UFOs as nuts and bolts spacecraft, perhaps these markings would be regarded as the designation of an extraterrestrial authority. Their "flag." But it's quite anthropomorphic to presume aliens would think in such terms.

If we consider ritual magick, the symbol resembles a "sigil," used for the invocation of angelic and demonic entities. I haven't searched yet for a crescent with a vertical arrow within it and a horizontal bar beneath it. But I wonder what the implications would be if one were found."

When I read Jeff's thinking about the "sigil" it really hit home how very odd and out-of-the-box this phenomena is, because that is indeed what the marking Lonnie Zamora saw looks like and also the marking on the "UMMO" UFO in the above picture. I am realizing I not only forgot "Lam's" image but also some links-like sigil-I will try to come back with these shortly. If anyone reading this post didn't understand it please let me know-I would much rather re-do a whole post and have people understand than people looking at it just saying WTF?! Anyone hearing of this for the first time may need to go to the links I will provide to get a better understanding. I am still trying to decide what to focus on next and have several ideas. I also owe Autumnforest a "thanks" for giving me the idea to start a new series to go along with the Mind, Soul and Reality series. I think I am going to call it "Prophets and Possession" and have no idea how quick the next post will be here-maybe not that long and I would also like to return to Rigorous Intuition and other sources for it. Here are the links-I hope anyone stopping by had a beautiful weekend!Finally got the image of "Lam" here at the top of the post.

http://www.boudillon.com/lam/lam.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/Ordo_Templi_Orientis

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ummo

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thelema

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigil

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleister_Crowley

http://www.toolband.com/news/letter/2000_07.php

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogon

Lonnie Zamora Encounter 45 years Later

On 24 April 1964 a very important UFO encounter took place outside of the small town of Soccoro, New Mexico. The incident was very interesting because of the extreme credibility of the main witness, multiple witnesses reported it and physical trace evidence. At about 5:30 pm that afternoon police officer Lonnie Zamora had just noticed a black Cadillac drive past him in the other direction at excessive speed. The description of the car that was speeding is also interesting in light of the "Men in Black" reports around the world as they are often said to drive big black luxury cars! Thinking to catch the speeding vehicle Zamora quickly turned his police car around, and with squealing tires was in hot pursuit. He was on State Road 85 with the Cadillac still speeding ahead of him, when he heard a noise like a roar or thunder. Towards the southwest direction and about three-quarters of a mile away, an orange and blue colored flame shot across the sky. A dynamite shack was located in the area in that general direction and Zamora had hoped there hadn't been an explosion there. At this point Officer Zamora decided to let the speeder get away and go investigate. Once he had driven up the first hill he looked in the direction of the dynamite shack and saw a glowing white object at the bottom of a gorge about 500 feet away from him.

Now he was thinking some terrible accident had taken place there-perhaps a small plane crash or car wreck. Zamora radioed to the Soccoro police station that he was going to leave his patrol car and "check the vehicle." As Zamora got closer he realized that what he had thought of as a wrecked vehicle was something entirely different. Two "persons" in white overalls were standing near a white, glowing, metallic object that was shaped like an American football or egg and standing on four thin black landing struts. One of the humanoids looked in the direction of Zamora's car and was apparently startled by it an began moving quickly. Officer Zamora approached the object still thinking that whoever the occupants might be they might need help. As he got closer, Zamora again heard the noise of thunder and also saw a flame. The flame was bluish in color; accompanied by a loud roar and was coming from the underside of the object. Zamora noticed a sign or symbol on the object. It was painted in red on the white side of the object. It looked like a semicircle, drawn horizontally, about twenty-five inches long. Inside it was an arrow pointing upwards with the shaft cut off at the level of the barbs. Zamora was now quite frightened and thought the object was in danger of exploding and didn't hesitate hitting the ground running. Once he got to the other side of the hill he felt a little more safe and turned back to observe the egg-shaped object. He took shelter behind some rocks and bushes and watched the craft fly away at a low height of fifteen to twenty feet above the ground. It missed the dynamite shack by only about three feet. After gradually increasing its velocity the object finally disappeared in the distance.

Officer Zamora ran back to his car and radioed to a fellow officer at the police station, "Look out the window and tell me if you can see an object. It looks like a balloon." However, a moment later Zamora realized that it would be impossible for his fellow officer to witness the object as the window at the station faced the wrong direction. Here is a quote by Officer Zamora describing how the object took off, "After I fell by the car and my glasses fell off, kept running to north, with car between me and object period. Glanced back a couple of times. Noted object to rise to about level of car, about 20 to 25 feet guess-took I guess about six seconds when object started to rise and I glanced back. I ran I guess about halfway to where I ducked down -about 50 feet from the car is where I ducked down, just over the edge of hill. I guess I had run about 25 feet when I glanced back and saw the object level with the car and it appeared about directly over the place where it rose from. I was still running and I jumped just over the hill-I stopped because I did not hear the roar. I was scared of the roar, and I had planned to continue running down the hill. I turned around toward the object and at the same time put my head toward ground, covering my face with my arms. Being that there was no roar, I looked up, and I saw the object going away from me. It did not come any closer to me. It appeared to go in straight line and at same height possibly 10 to 15 feet from ground, and it cleared the dynamite shack by about three feet. Shack about eight feet high. Object was travelling very fast. It seemed to rise up, and take off immediately across country."

Almost immediately upon the object leaving the area, State Police Sargeant Sam Chavez arrived having overheard Officer Zamora who had radioed wildly to his dispatcher hoping that someone else might be able to see the object. Together they noted the evidence in the arroyo: a half-burned bush, four angular impressions in the soil where the "legs" had been and several small footprints and other impressions.

Hector Quintanilla, Jr., the former head of the Air Forces Project Bluebook writes in a declassified CIA document from 1966-"Studies in Intelligence" that: "There is no doubt that Lonnie Zamora saw an object which left quite an impression on him. There is also no question about Zamora's reliability. He is a serious police officer, a pillar of his church, and a man well-versed in recognizing airborne vehicles in his area. He is puzzled by what he saw, and frankly so are we. This is the best documented case on record, and still we have been unable, in spite of thorough investigation, to find the vehicle, or the stimulus that scared Zamora to the point of panic."

The first image is a drawing Lonnie Zamora made of the "insignia" on the craft. The next iimage is a sketch Zamora made of the craft itself. The last image is an artist's conception of the encounter. http://www.ufoevidence.org/cases/case90.htm Best to anyone stopping by and thanks again for all of your considerate, insightful and intelligent comments! PS-I may be back with a bit more about this case soon-not sure yet- may have some more thoughts and information about it.

Don't Look Now!

Many cultures around the world believe in the power of the "evil eye" and certain ways people can hope to ward off its evil essence or curse in their lives. These five images contain symbols used as protection against the evil eye's influence. The first image idea comes courtesy of commenter "foam". It is of an Owl Butterfly and shows the "eyes" on its wings for protection. The second image is of a Turkish airliner sporting a blue- eyed symbol of protection on its tail. The third image is of a batch of the blue-eyed symbols (nazirs) for sale-although I do not know the location this picture was taken at. The belief in the evil eye is so widespread it could be from many different places. The fourth image is of a Sheela na Gig on a 12th century church in Herefordshire in the United Kingdom, protecting the church from various evil influences. The fifth image is of a "Hamsa" hand. This is called a Hand of Fatimah by Muslims and a Hand of Miriam by Jews-also used be devotees of both religions to ward off evil eye influences. The last image is a gargoyle guarding the splendid Notre Dame cathedral in Paris. I was going to try post something with a bit more substance today-but didn't like the way it sounded so I saved it to drafts. Some people that comment here have given me wonderful ideas for some ideas for articles in the future and I really appreciate that! I had the misfortune of seeing a new (I think) Burger King commercial the other day. Now I have a stupid song stuck in my head. Sheeesh no doubt the lyrical phrase "My anaconda don't want none unless you've got buns hun!" will ring down through the ages right along with Shakespeare and William Blake. I do suppose I would be safe from any hypothetical advances Sir Mixalot might make towards me-even if he were bisexual. My derriere-backside whatever is so flat a game of chess could probably be played on it -althought its rather small so it might not be large enough-perhaps Tic-Tac-Toe-Not that anyone reading this blog really needed to know that! Best to all of you and thanks again for the great comments! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evil_eye

Mind, Soul and Reality-The Mothman Un-Prophecy

At the very beginning of John Keel's book, The Mothman Prophecies, he tells the story of a couple awakened by a bearded stranger at the ungodly (unless you are an insomniac like me) hour of 3 AM. The morning was wet and cold. It was late November in 1967. This was a place where strangers were rare and suspect. The stranger who had hammered at their door was described as over six feet tall and dressed entirely in black. His face which was barely visible in the darkness sported a neatly trimmed mustache and goatee. The flashes of lightning behind him added to the eerie effect. "May I use your phone?" he asked in a deep voice that didn't have the familiar West Virginian accent. The woman who answered the door was so frightened that she backed away, said, "Talk to my husband" and closed the door. Some minutes passed and a rugged young man returned with his wife and said through a crack in the door, "We aint got a phone here," and slammed the door. The stranger disappeared into the night. In the days following the encounter with the stranger the young couple told their friends about the man and the strangeness of the encounter. Bearded, men in black formal suits with muddy black dress shoes and strange accents appearing at people's houses at three in the morning were-needless to say-an extremely uncommon occurrence in the poor back hills of the Ohio Valley

The couple concluded that the man had been a fearful omen-maybe the devil himself. Three weeks later this couple was killed in the worst tragedy to strike that section of West Virginia. They were driving across the Silver Bridge, which spanned the Ohio River, when it suddenly collapsed. The friends of the couple remembered the story of their friends strange visitor of the weeks before. This confirmed their religious beliefs and superstitions. Perhaps the devil himself had visited Point Pleasant, West Virginia before a terrible tragedy. There turned out to be a very prosaic explanation as to the identity of the "devil" in the rain that night. Paranormal investigator and "dedicated nonconformist" John Keel's car had gone off the road and he had been searching house to house in search of a telephone to use so he could call a tow truck! He had driven up from Atlanta, Georgia where he had delivered a speech to a local UFO club. By the time West Virginia was almost a second home to him. He had already visited the state five times investigating strange events and had many friends there. One of these friends, Mrs. Mary Hyre, a reporter for the Athens, Ohio, Messenger was with him that night. The pair had been out talking to UFO witnesses that night, and earlier in the evening had seen a very strange light in the sky themselves.

Keel writes in The Mothman Prophecies, "Since there was a heavy, low cloud layer it could not have been a star. It maneuvered over the hills, its brilliant glow very familiar to both of us for we both had seen many such lights in the Ohio Valley that year. Mrs. Hyre waited in the car while I trudged through the mud and rain. We had been trying to climb a slippery hill to a spot where we had seen many unusual things in the past. I found the telephones in the houses closest to our location were not working, apparently knocked out by the storm. So I had to keep walking until I finally found a house with a working phone. The owner refused to open his door so we shouted back and forth. I gave hima phone number to call. He obliged and went to bed. I never knew what he looked like. My point, of course is that Beelzebub was not wandering along the back roads of West Virginia that night...But from the view of the people who lived on that road, something very unusual happened. They had never before been roused in the night by a tall bearded stranger in black. They knew nothing of the reasons for my prescence so they were forced to speculate. Even speculation was difficult. They could only place me in the frame of reference they knew best-the religious. Bearded men in city dress simply did not turn up on isolated back roads in the middle of the night...So a perfectly normal event (normal that is to me) was placed in an entirely different context by the witnesses. The final proof of my supernatural origin came three weeks later when two of the people I had awakened were killed in the bridge tragedy.

Some future investigator of the paranormal may wander those hills someday, talk with these people, and write a whole chapter of a learned book on demonology, repeating this piece of folklore. Other scholars will pick up and repeat his story in books and articles. The prescence of the devil in West Virginia in November 1967 will become historical fact, backed by the testimony of several witnesses." I wanted to include this bit from Keel's book because I think it is very instructive as to how easy it is for people to misconstrue events and misinterpret facts. Also I didn't want to 'waste' the research I had done when I thought I might be doing an actual Mothman series;-). I think no matter what one's stance is on the paranormal, that anyone objectively looking into the events going on in Point Pleasant, West Virginia and its environs from late 1966 until the Silver Bridge collapse on December 15, 1967 will agree that something very strange was happening. Some folks are saying there are "aftereffects" going on until the present day-but I don't want to delve to much into this in case I come back to the story-and also know more about what these more recent people are saying. The story of the "Mothman" has everything from, of course the mothman itself-himself -whatever;-), Men in Black or MIBs, UFOs, Poltergeist phenomena, odd phone calls and seeming other wordly contact-very spooky contact at that. Thanks again so very much for all of your thoughtful, intelligent and insightful comments. I had a "nice" surprise this morning when I got an email and comment-I say this not to bitch-but just because some of my surprises of late haven't been of the nice variety. I hope things like this continue in my life as I do in all of the people I am in contact with -through emails, blogs or "real life"-Best wishes to all of you! The top image is the "best" rendition of the Mothman according to the two young couples who witnessed it on 18 November 1966. I better double check-but I believe the drawing was done by the fantastic Loren Coleman himself. The next image is of a very handsome man holding a ball-I think that image is courtesy of stevo's Hot Men Appreciation Society. Someone kindly send the man with the ball to my address and I will do something nice for you! Here is a link http://www.lorencoleman.com/

Mind, Soul and Reality-My Life of Spiritual Crisis & Other Stuff

In his excellent and thought-provoking book-Breaking Open the Head-Daniel Pinchbeck talks about the deepening spiritual crisis that led him to explore the psychedelics and modern day shamanism. A note here -I am wondering if I should call this a rough draft as about an hour ago my back started acting up and I am in a lot of pain -plus I took some pillz for the pain. I just don't think modern folk-least of all yours truly are made of the same stuff in relation to fighting off pain. There is an beautiful thought -from the Buddhist religion I think-that says when you are in a lot of pain you should pray that your pain can take away the pain of other sentient beings -so this is my prayer for the moment. And if this post doesn't make any effin sense whatsoever I will re-do it and aplologize beforehand if it is unreadable. The spiritual crisis he was going through had or has some echoes in my own life-and perhaps many of you have felt the same way at one time or another. At times the emptiness I have felt in my own life has been so overwhelming that I am somewhat surprised at times to still be here. I think one of the reasons for my survival is that I come from a strong loving family and at the times of the deepest darkness I have been lucky to come in contact with exactly the right friends and people who have helped me get through.

These feelings of otherness and alienation came to me quite early in my life-even before my teenage years. Compared to a lot of other gay women and men I have talked to over the years I don't think my particular "spiritual crisis", alienation-whatever you want to call it was born much at all from my very early in life realization that I was homosexual. I don't know exactly why this didn't add to my sense of disaffection with the world-it could have been that as a lifetime member of a club called "Bookworms", I realized from an early age that I was not the only gay guy in the world. A man I talked to in the 1980s told me that he actually felt he was the only homosexual in the world back when he was growing up in a small Kansas town.

One of the ways I remember feeling that did begin as a teenager after I had begun to know just a little about what the adult world was like was along the lines of "Gee-if I work hard and behave all my life will I get something resembling a big fucking hunk of cheddar cheese at the end-like a mouse or rat rewarded for running through a maze?" The 'values' and 'enchantments' of modern life seemed horribly empty to me. It seemed -to me anyway-that at the ass end (or would it be the mouth?:-) of capitalist consumer culture that there was this wide chasm of terrifying proportions. It appeared like the maw of this beast of 'wants' and 'needs' (needs have always been somewhat confusing to me-for I have known people who consider a Mercedes-Benz or a Mont Blanc pen a 'need' like a man dying of thirst needs water) would never be fulfilled. Perhaps this was the whole idea? So many people seemed hypnotized-entranced by this ravening beast of desires -but I only saw an unspeakably horrifying abyss and emptiness that would never be sated.

The situation in consumer-mass production society reminded me a great deal of the realm of the "Hungry Ghosts." These hapless beings (also from Buddhist thought I believe)that are supposed to inhabit this most unfortunate level of existence have huge bellies to fill, but only tiny mouths and long thin necks. So they are never full and without want. I actually wonder if some people when they pass from this life that are addicts and the like are where the reports originate of some ghostly and paranormal behavior. I think the "out of body" or OOBE investigator Robert Monroe claimed to have seen many departed spirits who were in places like bars trying to pick up a 'real' glass which they found they couldn't --but it didn't stop them from trying-and he also saw other spririts frustrated in their attempts to smoke cigarettes and other things that cause addictive behavior.

And added to this was the hugely 'introspective' 'intellectual' and 'questioning' nature of modern culture itself (sarcasm)-especially in the United States. Of course I will admite here and now that I was guilty of partaking of its 'insights.' I can still remember watching the "Who Shot J.R." episode of Dallas. I had always thought and hoped it would be Sue Ellen, played by the lovely actress Linda Gray-but this is probably a topic for another post:-)

However, I wasn't without ideas or notions of what i could fill my empty soul up with. The names of the two 'friends' who came to my 'rescue' in this matter I will call by the pseudonyms Stoly and Dick. I will say a bit about these two vacuum filling entities in the next post. Before going I would like to give a quote from Breaking Open the Head from page 15 that I feel is very relevant to the feelings that started me on my spiritual journey: "As I wondered the streets in a desolate funk, I would ask myself the impossible, the embarrassing, the ultimately childish question of Why?-Why this city? Why this life? Why anything? Of course I knew that why was a question you were supposed to stop asking around the age of ten, but I couldn't free myself from it."

I would love to hear from any readers who may have felt they have gone through a kind of spiritual "emergency" in their lives and if they were able to remedy the situation. I do not have any idea when the next post will be here and don't worry it will not be so much about me-but it may contain examples from my life about the theories of the soul and reality I am trying to bring forth in this set of posts-anything from near death experiences, reincarnation, psychedelic experiences, ghostly encounters-you name it. For some reason I feel a great need in my life to be surrounded by the ineffable, magical and the unexplained. Thanks again for all of your thoughtful, insightful and intelligent comments! OOOPS I did it again. I am trying to edit HTML to take out stupid space at top-there are two "div" thingies-when I try to delete these blogger gives me the message: Your HTML cannot be accepted: Closing tag has no matching opening tag -and then it gives me another "div" symbol I am afraid to put here to mess it up even more haha-O well its not as bad as some of my other multiple image efforts:-)

Mind, Soul and Reality

One of the most brilliant mathematicians (and physicists) who ever lived was a Hungarian born man named John von Neumann. He calculated that over the course of a human lifetime the brain stores about 280,000,000,000,000,000,000 bits of information. This is an incredibly vast number. Scientists have thought about the ways this immense amount of data could be both stored and retrieved by the brain. Could the holographic theory explain this? Remember that holograms have an enormous capacity for information storage, and as far as retrieving the information goes, with the part containing the whole perhaps this makes it much easier? I wonder if there is a law of the conservation of not only energy-but also information and memory. Maybe all of the things the billions of people (and other species too) have experienced down from the dawn of time are never lost. I wonder if there might be some truth to the universal library or Akashic records. The great investigator of the human soul, Dr Carl Gustav Jung had a fantastic "synchroncity" event that happened while treating one of his patients. The woman Jung was treating at the time had a very stern, materialist and rational approach to life. This was a woman who simply had no need-and maybe want of the ineffable and sacred dimension of human existence. The woman's attitude was severely hindering her progress in therapy.

She had a series of frustrating sessions with Jung, but one day told him of a dream she had that involved a scarab beetle. Jung knew a great deal about mythology worldwide and this was hardly the first time a symbol from ancient mythology came up in a patient's dream. In ancient Egyptian mythology the scarab was a sacred representation of rebirth. As he believed dreams were greatly influenced by the collective unconscious, Jung wondered if the dream meant that she was about to go through a psyhcological transformation-a rebirth. Jung had just started to tell her of his interpretation, but before he could he heard a tapping on the window from outside. He was astonished to see a gold-green scarab beetle on the other side of the glass. Keep in mind, he was in the mid-European latitudes and sightings of scarab beetles were extremely rare to non-existent in these climes. Jung opened the window and let the scarab fly in as he presented his interpretation of the dream. The entry of the scarab beetle both in the woman's psyche and then physically amazed her and she was able to let go of some of her excessive rationality. From this day forward her response to therapy improved.

Quoting again from Michael Talbot's The Holographic Universe: "Jung encountered many such meaningful coincidences during his psychotherapeutic work and noticed they almost always accompanied periods of emotional intensity and transformation: fundamental new insights, deaths, births, even changes in profession. He also noticed that they tended to peak when the new realization or insight was just about to surface in a patient's consciousness. As his ideas became more widely known, other therapists began reporting their own experiences with synchronicity." Talbot also gives another example of a synchronicity involving an associate of Jung's based in Zurich named Carl Alfred Meier. A woman surgeon, who had headed a mission hospital in China for twenty years was suffering from serious depression. She traveled from Wuchang, China to Zurich, Switzerland to be treated by Meier. In the course of her therapy she told Meier of a dream in which she had seen the hospital she worked in with one of its wings destroyed. She was originally from America but had become involved in Chinese culture and was an expert in Chinese philosophy. Meier thought that her dream meant she was losing her sense of self, her American identity and that this cultural dislocation was causing her depression. Dr Meier advised her to return to the United States, which she subsequently did. After her return her depression ended quickly. This woman had also given Meier a detailed sketch of the crumbling hospital in her dreams before she left. Years afterwards, the Japanese attacked China and bombed Wuchang Hospital. The woman sent Meier a copy of Life magazine that had a double page photograph of the partially destroyed hospital. The photographs and her drawing of nine years previously were identical!

I thought this synchronicity of the woman, the hospital, her dream and the eventual bombing of the hospital was a fascinating-though tragic in ways-example of a synchronicity that had a deep personal meaning (via the interpretation of the dream) and also because the dream image had gone beyond the boundaries of the woman's psyche and became a part of physical reality nine years later. "Because of their striking nature, Jung became convinced that such synchronicities were not chance occurences, but were in fact related to the psychological processes of the individuals who experienced them. Since he couldn't conceive of how an occurrence deep in the psyche could cause an event or a series of events in the physical world, at least in the classical sense, he proposed that some new principle must be involved, an acausal connecting principle hitherto unknown to science." The Holographic Universe, pg 79. Leaving synchronicity for a bit and going to some ideas I have talked about here before-how is 'reality' created? -does 'reality' exist independently of conscious observers? Most physicists ignore the implications of the theory of quantum mechanics. They accept the theory and standard interpretation of it, however, they also insist on the reality of quantum systems (in other words the deepest level of 'reality') even when they are not being observed. However, in experiment after experiment pertaining to quantum physics it has been shown that the best description of a quantum state when it is not being observed is an infinite superposition of states. Without an observer nothing is concrete. And of course you can go beyond these deep questions to ask-what constitutes an observer?

"Human consciousness may not be the only thing that participates in the creation of reality-fields. Remote viewing experiments have shown that people can accurately describe distant locations even when there are no human observers present at the locations. Similarly subjects can identify the contents of a sealed box randomly selected from a group of sealed boxes and whose contents are therefore completely unknown. This means that we can do more than just tap into the sense of other people. We can also tap into reality itself to gain information. As bizarre as this sounds, it is not so strange when one remembers that in a holographic universe, consciousness pervades all matter, and "meaning" has an active prescence in both the mental and physical worlds." The Holographic Universe, pg. 145.

In his book The Spectrum of Consciousness, Ken Wilber has some excellent thoughts and information about just who and what the 'observer' in all of us is at the very core of our beings. "Now in speaking of Reality as non-dual consciousness, most of us conjure up ideas of consciousness as somehow being connected with subjectivity. That is, we feel consciousness belongs not to "objects" such as this page but rather to myself as the subject who is supposedly "conscious" of this page. This is of course dualistic to the core. But since consciousness is Reality, and Reality is actually non-dual, it would be much more accurate to view consciousness not as a relative subject confronting objects but as Absolute Subjectivity above the dualism of subject vs. object. Consciousness, as Absolute Subjectivity, belongs exclusively to neither subject not object, but embraces both. In this sense, Absolute Reality is Absolute Subjectivity...Every individual habitually feels that his ego, his self, is the subject of his own experiences, feelings, and thoughts, that his subjective self is now reading the words on this page. And this he expresses by saying "I am aware of myself reading." But the fact that something in me can look at my subjective self, that is, the fact that there exists in me right now an awareness of my "self" reading this page, should show me clearly that my supposedly subjective self is really an object of awareness!" Ken Wilber, The Spectrum of Consciousness, pages 70 and 71.

I was going to say some extra things here about other aspects of our souls and personalities, things along the lines of how sometimes I wonder if the "dumbing down" of the world and also its surfeit of mundane sensual pleasures (such as the Oreo cookie I am eating now) are intentional? I wonder if there is some part of the human personality that some forces or aspects do not want to go any higher. Sound insane? Yes I know it must to a lot of people-and if you have an opinion against this -please by all means comment. Perhaps these thoughts are best left to be developed in the next post. I am a bit tired and I do not like to tread so much terra incognita when I am not 100 percent wide awake. I would like to leave you with this bit from the always magical and masterful William Blake: To see the world in a grain of sand, and to see heaven in a wild flower, hold infinity in the palm of your hands, and eternity in an hour.

Thanks again everyone for your thoughtful and intelligent comments! I hope to have the next post here in two to four days. The image on top is Andrew Wyeth's Christina's World and the beefcake is Jae Garcia from stevo's Hot Men Appreciation Society blog. What a hottie! You have great taste stevo! I will try to include an image for my straight guy and lesbian readers next time;-)

Mind, Soul and Reality

It's very easy. Instead of thinking of things as things, you have a habit. We all have a habit of thinking that everything around us is already a thing, existing without any input, without my choice. You have to banish that kind of thinking...Instead you really have to recognize that even the material world around us, the chairs, the tables, the room, the carpet, the camera included, all of these are nothing but possible movements of consciousness. And I'm choosing moment to moment out of those movements to bring my actual experience into manifestation. This is the only radical thinking that you need to do, but it is so radical. It's so difficult, because our tendency is that the world is already out there, independent of my experience. It is not. Quantum physics has been so clear about it. Heisenberg himself, codiscoverer of quantum physics, said atoms are not things. They're only tendencies. So, instead of thinking of things, you have to think of possibilties. There are possibilites of consciousness.--Amit Goswami Ph.D.

In study after study, whether the person suffered from a psychological disorder or not, Grof found the same general levels of the unconscious were uncovered a step at a time. Again from page 70 of The Holographic Universe: "It was almost as if LSD provided the human consciousness with access to a kind of infinite subway system, a labyrinth of tunnels and byways that existed in the subterranean reaches of the unconsciousness, and one that literally connected everything in the universe with everything else." In the 1960s Grof coined the term transpersonal to describe the experiences where the person "tripping" would visit territories beyond the traditional boundaries of the personality. In the late 1960s, Grof joined with Abraham Maslow and other professionals to found a new branch of psychology called transpersonal psychology. One theory that would explain transpersonal psychology is the holographic model of the universe. A holographic image is created when a single laser beam is split into two seperate beams. The first beam is bounced off the object to be photographed. Then the second beam is made to collide with the first. The resulting interference pattern is recorded on film. The image on the film doesn't resemble anything like the original object. The image looks more like the colliding waves and troughs that are created when a handful of pebbles are thrown into a pond simultaneously. The magic happens when another laser beam (sometimes just a bright light is used) is used to illuminate the interference pattern on the film. A three dimensional image of the object will appear.

These images are so life-like that you can actually walk around them and view them from different angles. If the photographic plate with the holographic interference pattern is broken in half-either of the halves will still contain all the information to recreate the original three dimensional image when illuminated by a laser. The plate can even be broken into fourths and eighths and so on, and will still produce the image when illuminated, although the detail and clarity of the three dimensional image will be compromised. The reason this happens is that unlike normal photographs, every small portion of the holographic film contains all the information recorded in the whole. This reminds me somewhat of a bit of Hindu (I think?) mythology. There is a saying that in the heaven of Indra each pearl reflects the infinity of other pearls -the part does indeed contain the whole. I wonder if this is the way our brains, souls and universe itself are constructed-or at least encoded? The holographic model would explain a lot.

I think one of the most fascinating areas that the holographic model would explain are synchronicities-meaningful coincidences. A great example of a synchronicity that I always think of is from UFO researcher Jacques Vallee's life. In the mid-1970s he was trying to look up information on an obscure group called "The Order of Melchizedek." He hadn't been having any luck in his search. He was in downtown Los Angeles at the time and at one point needed to take a cab. The driver's name of the next cab he got into-A. Melchizedek. Surprised, Vallee later looked in the Los Angeles phone directory to see how common this last name was. There was only one Melchizedek listed in the whole directory for Los Angeles-his cab driver. It was as if Vallee had asked the universe for a Melchizedek and the universe offered him the closest one on hand!

Getting back to Stanislav Grof and transpersonal psychology, it would be a good idea to go back to Michael Talbot's, The Holographic Universe. From pages 70 and 71: "If our current way of looking at reality cannot account for transpersonal events, what new understanding might take its place? Grof believed it is the holographic model. As he points out, the essential characteristics of transpersonal experiences-the feeling that all boundaries are illusory, the lack of distinction between part and the whole, and the interconnectedness of all things-are all qualities one would expect to find in a holographic universe. In addition, he feels the enfolded nature of space and time in the holographic domain explains why transpersonal experiences are not bound by the usual spatial or temporal limitations.

Grof thinks that the almost endless capacity holograms have for information storage and retrieval also accounts for the fact that visions, fantasies, and other "psychological gestalts," all contain an enormous amount of information about an individuals personality. A single image experienced in an LSD session might contain information about a person's attitude toward life in general, a trauma he experienced during childhood, how much self-esteem he has, how he feels about his parents, and how he feels about his marriage-all embodied in the overall metaphor of the scene. Such experiences are holographic in another way, in that each small part of the scene can also contain an entire constellation of information. Thus free association and other analytical techniques performed on the scene's miniscule details can call forth an additional flood of data about the individual involved.

The composite nature of archetypal images can be modeled by the holographic idea. As Grof observes, holography makes it possible to build up a sequence of exposures, such as pictures of every member of a large family, on the same piece of film. When this is done the developed piece of film will contain the image of an individual that represents not one member of the family, but all of them at the same time. "These genuinely composite images represent an exquisite model of a certain type of transpersonal experience, such as the archetypal images of the Cosmic Man, Woman, Mother, Father, Lover, Trickster, Fool, or Martyr," says Grof. A final quote from Grof's Beyond the Brain, that is given in Talbot's book would also be good to end this post with: "Bohm's concept of the unfolded and enfolded orders and the idea that certain important aspects of reality are not accessible to experience and study under ordinary circumstances are of direct relevance for the understanding of unusual states of consciousness. Individuals who have experienced various nonordinary states of consciousness, including well-educated and sophisticated scientists from various disciplines, frequently report that they entered hidden domains of reality that seemed to be authentic and in some sense implicit in, and supraordinated to, everday reality."

I didn't realize when I started this that I was going to begin a whole new series. I had actually thought of keeping this blog "lite" for awhile as I tried to get work done at my other blog. I am going to have to come up with some sort of schedule for when I do work for the two blogs-maybe two days on one-and then two days on the other? I am also not sure how soon posts will be appearing here as I am working from 4 main books and 2 others here and there and do not want to get the information and thoughts hopelessly confused. Still and all I am happy about the new series-one of the books that I will use later down the road brought up a new (to me anyway) idea of how NDEs and encounters with poltergeists and ghosts have so much variety and yet so much the same. The two books by Stanislav Grof that I used to own and wish I still did were Beyond the Brain and The Adventure of Self-Discovery if anyone reading these posts would like to look more into transpersonal psychology and the depth and the variety of the experiences people who were undergoing various forms of transpersonal therapy reported. Thanks again for your extremely intelligent and thoughtful comments! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Talbot

Mind, Soul and Reality

Stanislav Grof has a successful life in the United States these days, however he wasn't always a US citizen and earlier in his career he could not have foreseen the new areas he would explore. Grof began studying nonordinary states of consciousness in the 1950s in his native Prague, Czechoslovakia. Starting out in his career Grof was a believer in the tenets of Marxism and thought that there was no reality beyond the material world we see around us. Many scientists and psychiatrists felt that the unusual states of consciousness induced by LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide) and other psychotropic drugs were nothing more than the brain's way of reacting to a foreign substance. Of course, many scientists probably still feel this way. But while Grof continued his research at the Psychiatric Research Institute in Prague, he began to feel there was a continuity of experience in his patient's records that was hard to explain by the brain reacting to noxious chemicals theory. "Rather than being unrelated and random, the experiential content seemed to represent a successive unfolding of deeper and deeper levels of the unconscious," stated Grof in his 1976 book, Realms of the Human Unconscious. What Grof and his colleagues discovered is that serial LSD sessions jumpstarted the psychotherapeutic process and greatly shortened the time needed to treat many psychiatric disorders.

Repressed traumatic memories that had disabled the patient for many years were brought to the surface and the terrible hold they had over the patient was diminished or banished completely. Sometimes such crippling disorders of the mind were even cured including one of the most terrible of them all-schizophrenia. More incredible was the fact that many patients moved beyond personal issues into transpersonal areas that had never before been explored by Western psychology. One common experience was the reliving of what it was like to be in the womb. The following is from page 67 of Michael Talbot's, The Holographic Universe: "At first Grof thought these were just imagined experiences, but as the evidence continued to amass he realized that the knowledge of embryology inherent in the descriptions was often far superior to the patient's previous education in the area. Patients accurately described certain characterisitics of the heart sounds of their mother, the nature of the acoustic phenomena in the peritoneal cavity, specific details about the various cellular and biochemical processes taking place. They also described important thoughts and feelings their mother had during pregnancy and events such as physical trauma she had experienced." There were occasions that Grof could directly question the mother and other people involved in the experience the patient was reporting and was able to verify them.

Even more astonishing, patients began reporting experiences that extended far beyond the boundaries of the ego. They would report what it was like to be other living creatures and even inanimate objects. Patients were also able to explore ancestral memories. Again from page 68 of Talbot's book: "One woman experienced what it was like to be her mother at the age of three and accurately described a frightening event that had befallen her mother at the time. The woman also gave a precise description of the house her mother had lived in as well as the white pinafore she had been wearing-all details her mother later confirmed and admitted she had never talked about before.. Other patients gave equally accurate descriptions of events that had befallen ancestors who had lived decades and even centuries before." Racial and collective memories could also be accessed by the patients. Patients of Slavic descent relived the experience of what it was like to participate in the conquests of Genghis Khan, to undergo tribal initiation rites, and even to die as a human sacrifice of the Aztecs. Once again both the quality and quantity of the historical facts they reported contained a degree of information that was totally at odds with the patient's education, race, and previous exposure to the subject. An uneducated patient gave a very insightful and detailed account of Egyptian embalming and mummification procedures-all the way down to what certain amulets symbolized, the materials used, the sizes of those materials and other esoteric data about Egyptian funeral services. Certain patients with no knowledge or connection to the Far East and other areas of the world were able to describe what it was like to have an Asian psyche and also had esoteric knowledge of Hindu, Taoist and Buddhist teachings.

There didn't seem to be a limit to whatever source the patients were acquring there knowledge from. The patients described so many different aspects of reality that the whole array of existence seemed to be with their grasp-knowing what it was like to be a plant, animal, a blood cell, an atom, a star-even the consciousness of the entire planet and even the cosmos itself. The patients would gain eerily accurate precognitive information. At times they also encountered many different types of nonhuman intelligences. Every now and then subjects would seem tto transcend "our" level of reality and perceive other universes and levels of reality. From page 69 of The Holographic Universe, "In one session a young man suffering from depression found himself in what seemed to be another dimension. It had an eerie luminescence, and although he could not see anyone he sensed that it was crowded with discarnate beings. Suddenly he sensed a prescence very close to him, and to his surprise it began to communicate with him telepathically. It asked him to please contact a couple who lived in the Moravian city of Kromeriz and let them know that their son Ladislav was well taken care of and doing all right. It gave him the couple's name, street address, and telephone number. The information meant nothing to either Grof or the young man and seemed totally unrelated to the young man's treatment. Still, Grof could not put it out of his mind. "After some hesitation and with mixed feelings, I finally decided to do what certainly would have made me the target of my colleagues jokes, had they found out," says Grof. "I went to the telephone, dialed the number in Kromeriz and asked if I could speak to Ladislav. To my astonishment, the woman on the other side of the line started to cry. When she calmed down, she told me with a broken voice: 'Our son is not with us anymore; he passed away, we lost him three weeks ago.' " I am calling this a rough draft because as someone whose dance card isn't what you would call full-I forgot a social engagement this afternoon-so I need to get off the puter. When I am back on tomorrow I want to check and make sure the post "reads" right and that I have credited Michael Talbot's book properly. I used to own two books by Stanislav and Christina Grof that had a huge variety of experiences in them in regards to psychotropic and holotropic breathwork therapy-sadly I don't anymore, but I would like to see if any of these experiences are mentioned on the net. I haven't done anything new here in a while and I hope to start a new series soon about many different theories and experiences of the mind and reality. Thanks so much for all of your wonderful comments! http://www.stanislavgrof.com/

Anne Sexton: The Inventory Of Goodbye

I have a pack of letters.

I have a pack of memories.

I could cut out the eyes of both.

I could wear them like a patchwork apron.

I could stick them in the washer, the drier,

and maybe some of the pain would float off like dirt?

Perhaps down the disposal I could grind up the loss.

Besides-what a bargain-no expensive phone calls.

No lengthy trips on planes in the fog.

No manicky laughter or blessings from an odd-lot priest.

That priest is probably still floating on a fog pillow.

Blessing us. Blessing us.

Am I to bless the lost you,

sitting here with my clumsy soul?

Propaganda time is over.

I sit here on the spike of truth.

No one to hate except the slim fish of memory

that slides in and out of my brain.

No one to hate except the acute feel of my nightgown

brushing my body like a light that has gone out.

It recalls the kiss we invented, tongues like poems,

meeting, returning, inviting, causing a river of need.

Laughter, maps, cassettes, touch singing its path-

all to be broken and laid away in the tight strongbox.

The monotonous dead clog me up and there is only

black done in black that oozes from the strongbox.

I must disembowel it and set the heart, the legs,

of two who were one on a large woodpile

and ignite, as I was once ignited, and let it whirl

into flame, searching the sky

making it dangerous with its red.

This wasn't really a very light hearted poem for April Fool's Day-to say the least! I need to let go of a relationship and this has been hard for me to contemplate-much less do. "The Inventory Of Goodbye" reminded me of the detritus-both emotional and physical that surrounds all of these partings. My emotional mood has been going from not-so-good to depressed as hell when I think of the inevitability of this parting. However, great kindness was sent to me today in the post and I was once again reminded of the very goodhearted and kind people in my life-I am not a very strong person-but I will make it. OK-break out Gloria Gaynor now[~ ;-)