Friday, November 18, 2011

SHAMANSIM, SCIENCE, and SPIRITUALITY

PREFATORY NOTE:I wrote this paper in April, 2000, after ushering at the 1st International Conference on Ayahuasca held in San Francisco, Spring, 2000. This was for one credit toward my doctoral degree at CIIS and the instructor was Ralph Metzner, Ph.D.

I had not yet tried and experienced ayahuasca at the time of the conference. In fact, I was leery of any drug as a spiritual path. Although the conference changed my mind on this issue, more or less, I still held out trying it...until very recently...over eleven years later. Now I see ayahuasca as a research tool. I have since relegated 'structures of consciousness' theory to the dustbin, even though it makes for a convenient and intriguing template in some respects.

Intro and Context

At the beginning of the conference my mind began chattering with itself. I jotted down the following notes:

The inebriant (visionary medicine) disables the mental rational. One then has access to the archeo-magic/mythic, unsuppressed by the mental and unyoked from the rational. The imagery here is the genetically encoded “akashic record” of these ancient consciousness structures. In fact, this meme treasure trove, delivered to the mind, is the psyche emptying its dualist, emotive, pict-o-grams.
And on the last day of the conference, as Alex Polari de Alverga began speaking, I jotted this down:

Love of visions and images as a dialogue with creative powers – a kind of sensory appetite for re-creation of self or self-knowledge – can be a seduction itself if it accepts the exploration of mind as reality-truth – an enhanced desire for the phenomenal through obsession with the trans-phenomenal.
After the conference and after finishing my two texts (see footnotes 4 & 5, infra), I still hold these views. And throughout this paper I will return to develop them.

One bias of mine is that I am naturally suspect of “big names” who went to Ivy League schools. I had seen Ralph Metzner’s photo in the CIIS catalogue and knew something of his recent work through a friend who had participated in the Manaus conference, Franco Giunta. I first made contact with Dr. Metzner about a year ago on a CIIS boat outing on the bay. After a short how-do-you-do conversation with him I was left with my assumptions and beliefs about him more-or-less intact. That is, my first impression of Ralph Metzner was that he was a kind of older, burned-out hippy-white-man academic, not particularly friendly, who had little baraka or electricity in his human contact. About a year ago, my IND mentor, Monte, had urged me to take Ralph’s class on psychedelics, but I resisted because I was ill-disposed toward hallucinogens as a spiritual path or a self-research tool. I was of the opinion that they were a “poor man’s spirituality” for those who could not achieve much spirituality in their lives in a more “natural” way, i.e., through just plain love, constancy and hard work. I had experienced various natural and synthetic hallucinogens back in the late 60s and early 70s, rarely if ever with the proper set or setting. I had an intense, young man’s curiosity but also saw this period of my life as a despairing desire for self-abnegation in the face of conventional consensual reality (a popular sentiment during this time of flower power, Vietnam, and socio-cultural malaise). Not surprisingly, perhaps, I suppose that I concluded from these experiences that one can go out into the great beyond, have some mind-blowing thrills, but will always return to the same old shit. I tried after that to find my ecstasy and fulfillment in the mystery of “just plain life.” Since that time I have knocked around on the quest circuit and have achieved little success at traditional meditative-type contemplative practices, though I have reached a modicum of awareness that has provided me some sort of contentment, in spite of myself and my bumbling way.

Handicapped by my biases, shortcomings and predispositions, there I sat at the ayahuasca conference anxious to learn what I could find out about the secret knowledge that ayahuasca was purported to precipitate. Not since I had read in Playboy magazine in the late 60s about William Burroughs being one of the few white men to have experienced yagé had I felt such a captivation with learning more about the cornucopia of wisdom this visionary medicine reportedly offered. My studies at CIIS were leading me to re-evaluate all available blueprints for exploring the psyche and retrieving the dissociated pieces of our selves – pieces which are sectored off perhaps in previous lives, in utero, at birth, and early in life (and continually reinforced) by our dissociative keepers, peers and others; the developmental culture trance conditioning we all undergo as we are taught to embrace consensual mental-rational reality, the seemingly normative pathological condition that is dominant these days in the Western world and whose influence has spread worldwide.

At CIIS I had studied holotropic breathwork in an introductory course offered by Stan Grof. And I took a weekend workshop on “kundalini jazz” presented by Stuart Sovatsky. I felt that each of these techniques would likely be efficacious in making swift and potent contact with the psyche and would likely allow the practitioner to retrieve, begin to heal and integrate, and then move onward into more transpersonal realms of being and becoming. There certainly are other paths toward wholeness, each one unique to the individual’s needs. My personal and professional goal is to restore and integrate the totality of a phylogenic self while aspiring toward the trans-rational as an on-going completing or self-knowledge. Now I am considering this third ayahuascan shamanic technique – perhaps not as “unnatural” or out of tune with “just plain life” as I had heretofore judged it to be.

My doctoral interests include structures of consciousness theory, viz., Jean Gebser (1) and Eric Neumann’s work (2), further developed, integrated and popularized of late by Ken Wilber.(3) Structures of consciousness theory assists the researcher by positing certain contents and qualities specific to human evolutionary development as it proceeded through the archeo/magic, the mythic, mental, mental/rational and now emerging integral ways of being in and perceiving the world. As a framework for intuitively grasping the essences of phenomena, it hopefully provides a kind of trans-cognitive template for exploring non-ordinary reality states such as the ayahuasca experience.

This paper will discuss through the lens of structures of consciousness theory various points picked up at the presentations during the conference and in two texts: Ralph Metzner’s, Ayahuasca: Hallucinogens, Consciousness and the Spirit of Nature (4)and The Cosmic Serpent: DNA and the Origins of Knowledge (5), by Jeremy Narby.

Ayahuasca: Exploring the Abnormative/ Exposing A Fragmented Self:
Preliminary Questions

What is the psyche? What is the soul? Could the soul be the unique individual’s grasping of a world-soul called psyche, which tries to hold onto a stream of metaphorical image/sound-messages, this “global network of DNA-based life.”(6) ? What if all of the biospheric energies of DNA-based life resonate in a diaphanous jumble of morphogenic (7) frequencies – and the non-DNA physiosphere is the basin attractor that allows these infinitely interweaved fields to localize on a planet, accessible in time and space to life forms at once embedded in and capable of noospheric interpretation of its multivalent manifestations? Can we call these morphogenic resonances the “spirits” or “holographic inner essences” or “Platonic forms” of living entities? Are we being anthro-snobs by allowing that only humans possess “souls,” and relegating all life forms of lesser neurological development to one, separate designation of possessing “spirit”? Are there and should there be developmental levels within Spirit, that all-embracing synonym for the collective repository of psyches or the world-souls of eternally infinite universes? And when we exit time and space by accessing the achronon (8) can these world-souls be experienced without their being bound to their phenomenal, substrate material? Indeed, how essential is material existence to the realm of the psyche? Is it an absolute precursor for the birthing of psychic elementals? Do these psychic elementals then continue on in the universal web of psyche after they cease to be hosted by DNA-life? Does inanimate matter or non-DNA life host such psychic elementals? Or do the forms “exist” autonomously, hosting DNA-life for a while as a kind of flowering and then re-release themselves back into the psyche? To what extent do humans participate with psychic elementals in a symbiotic synthesis, bestowing meaning and hence a categorical existence to them as parasitical to human knowing? Or is it the other way around? Is it possible that humans leech onto bits of psyche, the world-soul playing host while we vampirize it to support whatever twisted sense we can, given the limitations of our meaning-making abilities? Are those abilities “caged” and thereby “pre-determined” by our “phylogenic passing through” so that our ontogenetic reality is both produced by and producing magico-mythic images to feed those very meaning-making capabilities?

I believe that the above preliminary questions beg to be answered within the context of any phenomenological exploration. Particularly when we begin speaking about the ayahuasca experience, people wildly attribute personal meaning to it, barely ever questioning the fundaments of their own mind-machinations. This is not to demean or marginalize the heuristic enterprise, quite to the contrary; bio-assays (9) can help us to begin uncovering the layers of confused imagery that enmesh us as much in consensual reality as in such abnormative forays. And this is the point: while we cannot use the same thinking to solve the metaphysical riddle of self and self-in-the-world, we need not jump to other ways of knowing only to go back to articulating our discoveries in the old manner of processed mental-rational thinking that habitually and almost inevitably resurfaces. The pathos of consciousness in the dominant Western model is one of leading us to ever-extrapolate into finer abstractions as we conceptualize – in an egoistic and body-distancing way – accounts that are as partial as our own personal development. That is, not only have we largely disconnected from the body, nature, feeling and emotion, the imagination, archetypal notions of various descriptions such as the feminine, a sense of unity and cosmic wonder (all of which, according to structures of consciousness theorists, find their home in the magic and mythic) – we are trying to live our lives by leaving these treasures repressed and non-integrated while making a move toward the integral, or next structure of mind. We are transpersonal fish trying to learn how to walk in water, forgetting we have no legs; we are fixated on and seem content masturbating-our-brains, forgetting that the mind resides in every fiber of our bodies’ DNA, as well as in the world of the “water within which we swim or try to walk.” For humans as for all life (to various degrees), the mechanisms of molecular biology support the hermeneutical ability. Plants “know” in a primordial way that water and photons will nourish them and they open themselves to both. Animals smell or taste a thing and “know” that it will help sustain them and so they eat it. Humans know that they can find nourishment in the communicative social intercourse in which they often incessantly engage. Once stimulated, there is some degree of meaning being made by all organisms.

Let us first try to approximate the method by which humans perceive and make meaning. According to Gebser, in this era of the mental-rational self, consciousness, the ego, the human that is affected by the dominant Western way has a mind that functions like this:

perspectival (eye/brain) outer-relating to space, characterized by a directed dual oppositionality in cerebral functions of reflection, abstraction, will and volition, emphasizing a causal and directed rationality that conceptualizes and reflects, sees and measures using thought and ideation to perceive a materialistic reality from an egocentric [inflated self/other, ego-enthroned subject/object] representation-conception of the world, through projective speculation toward a predominately future orientation to time (in purpose and goal) and within a patriarchal social system that is bonded through religion, characterized by believing-knowing-deducing. (10)
I am wondering whether ayahuasca helps to reconnect us to nature, dethroning the ego from its over-emphasized place in our minds, helps us to restore and reintegrate the dissociated fragments of our minds, and then helps us to cut through the distorted welter of the mental-rational. Again according to Gebser, this new integrated or integral mind would perceive and make meaning in the following manner:

aperspectival (vertex => crown of head) inward-relating in a space-free, time-free “inhalation,” characterized by presentiating in a diaphanous “rendering whole” in integral functioning of concretion-verition, emphasizing an acausal, integrated arationality of verition transparency, using openness and spirituality to apprehend an amaterial, apsychic reality of ego-freedom in a world-perceived mutivalence [pluralism] within a social system that is an integrum of feminine/masculine energies, infused by a praeligio of presentiating-concretizing-integrating.(11)
I wonder if aboriginals who have been faithful to their traditions are, as a result, more naturally integrated and less “Western pathologized” by the rational (deficient mental) because they have preserved and integrated the archeo-magic/mythic and mental structures in their minds. If so, then it seems likely that they are also making strides in developing themselves toward the more complex emerging structure of mind, the integral. With ayahuasca to help precipitate the integration and the structuration of mind process generally (and I suspect this to be the case), it is among the aboriginal tribes of the world that humanity might set its gaze to discover what kind of future is in store for the planetary mind. With these thoughts percolating, let us turn to the conference notes to see how they might provide support for such ideas.

Evidence Tending to Support the Above Ruminations

During the conference Ralph Metzner described ayahuasca as a perception-enhancing tool and made the following assertions:

• The ayahuasca experience is subjective, with a highly emotional charge and is not reproduceable (in the sense that an empirical experiment might be);

• Animism is the oldest worldview (that everything is animated by consciousness) [but cf., e.g., Erich Neumann’s definition of consciousness as the mental/mental-rational only; a more accurate expression might be “morphogenic resonance” or some degree of “vibratory life force”]. Animism values spirit, subjectivism, dreams and [the experiences of mind which he called] consciousness;

• There are multiple levels of reality and other realities are inhabited by different entities;

• Ayahuasca precipitates a kind of dream injunction leading to instruction which we can apply or integrate; a “seeing” that calls on us to “act”;

• Ayahuasca taps into a kind of “Janus-faced god” of past and future, and imparts assistance in divination, visions, healing, etc., which are the same, but interpreted in different directions, so that we access a variety of visionary outcomes:

1) future work: inclines you toward doing some special life work; the green man archetype [Khidr, the guide for seekers of God in the Islamic/Sufi interpretation] as an ecological metaphor of preserving and restoring the Earth;
2) knowledge: Jeremy Narby discusses this at length in his work wherein molecular biologists use ayahuasca as a tool of perception or “psychic microscope” for exploring at the cellular level;
3) precognitive: one may see oneself in a scene from a future state; a multilayered visionary experience in which one connects to another visionary experience which in turn connects to another across space and time;
4) planetary visions: collective and karmic resolutions [similar to Grof’s work], or prophetic visions (of undersea communities, for example);
5) past lives: in the cultural unconscious or “river of letting go” one might experience a past life state or trauma that might help to explain why some certain thing has been dogging one around in this life.

Other observations included the fact that 25% of pharmaceutical products come from plants and half of those plants are located in the Amazon. The ayahuasca experience has nurtured a general awareness of the incalculable natural value of the Amazon, leading to the notion of “conservation through transformation.” An early pioneer in this work, Michael Harner, founded the Shamanic Conservancy as a result. So interest in ayahuasca is drawing people to the forest and toward a more Gaian mindset. And interest in entheogens has led to speculations that they have been instrumental in humanity’s awakening from ignorance. For example, a primordial human may have ingested a psychoactive mushroom which then started him or her wailing, beating something with a stick and making a rhythmic drumming sound – so that just this one entheogenic evolutionary trigger may have given rise to linguistic expression, technology and music. One panelist mentioned the “bird bringer myth” that says “ayahuasca will help you remember who you are” (I am not sure what one has to do with the other). Another mentioned late-breaking news from the Institute for Frontier Sciences.com of “energy medicines” that, when ingested, open a wedge in one’s aura for high energy to come in and go out of the head, reportedly recorded by a machine capable of detecting such subtle [morphogenic] resonances.

Campos reported in his presentation that extensive healings have been performed by ayahuasqueros who are able to move and balance energy in those who are ill; they are able to draw on the healing properties of a variety of plants, such as one that is reputed to open the heart and allows access to the emotional/affective level to release life-long, constraining repressions; healing through plants has been effective in “rejuvenating, childhood feelings”; helping to ground normally “ungrounded” people; revealing, clarifying and helping people to remember their dreams; and fortifying the body and soul through a deep cleaning or purging of the body.

Dennis McKenna (and others) reported that ayahuasca acts as an anti-depressant, an addiction interrupter for alcoholics and drug addicts, and is a treatment for mood disorders because it increases serotonin uptake activity.

Jonathan Ott, autodidact and psychonautical inner space explorer, presented his perspective in a way that made me wonder whether he had already shifted into Gebser’s integral structure of mind. He interposed complex abstract conceptual expression with imagistic prose, sometimes creating words (“ethnocognosci”) needed for his efforts. This kind of presentiating, aural hierolglyphic, affective connecting with his audience I believe is the communicative way of the future. His “pharmahuasca,” a synthetic, mimetic ayahuasca analog (among other permutative analogs, e.g., pharmapaena and bufotanine), holds promise for providing visionary medicine without hacking down the Banasteriopsis caapi vine and pruning the Psychotria viridis plant, and in instances when a local brew and an officiating shaman puffing on black tobacco are just not available. He masterfully fielded a question (in my opinion) on the issue of plant spirits being absent because of the inorganic origin of his analogs. He replied that “plant spirits” were “not a part of his belief or disbelief system, not a part of my reality,” adding that he assumes such beliefs are akin to a “ritual left over from another time, place and culture.” As a bold statement of how we naively tend to wildly attribute our visions to archaic fantasies, oversacralizing them as these psychic phantasms obligingly cooperate, Ott hit the mark of furthering the evolution of imagination by leaving past mythic imagery in its temporal grave. Alex Polari de Alverga, a leader in the entheogenic religion, Santo Daime, exclaimed that “existence on Earth becomes a mere abortion unless we wake up the divine spark within us.” De Alverga believes that entheogens are the original plant teachers/tools for leading us out of our worldly paradox-box, this “unholy union of materialism and nihilism.” (12) De Alverga described mystical consciousness states as finding a treasure in one’s heart +; This “+” must be “unburied” and used with discipline and determination, consecrated as something special, sacred. He described both opening a book and taking a psychoactive drug as equally efficacious paths in the search for knowledge. For de Alverga the founding and building of Santo Daime is the effort to create a community life that transforms knowledge into the union of community; to risk becoming an institution. The church’s end is to preserve a spiritual path by way of opening up in charity to community, as opposed to the solitary psychonautic navigator who is committed to his or her own voyage of discovery. For him, Santo Daime typifies the modeling of what we learn from our insights, by expanding consciousness through communion with spiritual elevation – this, for him, is an inalienable right and the true liberty of spirit.

We would be amiss if we did not mention other sensory phenomenona such as the aural hallucinogenic experiences induced by ayahuasca inebriation, the vomiting commonly induced by ingestion, and the bodily sensations of feeling oneself as a living, pulsating organism. The shamans say that each plant has its own song, and if you know the song you don’t need the plant – interesting. Indeed, a shaman at the conference whistled some of the plant songs into the microphone for us, which for me was rather meaningless. I suppose first impressions are misleading, a sub-theme of this paper. I conclude by continuing to wonder about all of this. If the plants themselves have revealed to psychonauts the inner properties of each, oh how much there remains to be discovered!

_______________________________________

1. The Ever-Present Origin, (Ohio University Press: Athens, Ohio, Eng. trans. 1985, orig. pub. 1949 and 1953)

2. The Origins and History of Consciousness, (Mythos, 1995, Orig. pub., Rascher Verlag: Zurich, 1949; 1st Eng. trans., Bollingen Series XLII, Princeton University Press, 1954)

3. See, e.g., Sex, Ecology, Spirituality (1995)

4. New York, NY: Thunder’s Mouth Press (1999)

5. New York, NY: Tarcher/ Putnam (1998)

6. Id. 110

7. See generally, Rupert Sheldrake

8. Gebser, 284, 292

9. Jonathan Ott used the term “bioassay” at the Ayahuasca Conference, San Francisco on March 19, 2000 to describe his self-experimentation/ research by ingesting psychoactive preparations.

10. I am presenting this paraphrase of Gebser’s mental/rational consciousness (paraphrased from the table appended to the back of The Ever-Present Origin) as being identified most closely with populations in post-modern Western industrialized nations. It is my own contention that mental/rational consciousness, while universally “available” to populations and cultures of all nations, is adopted and “retrofitted” in part or in whole, according to the prevailing lifestyle norms, values, assumptions and beliefs in “non-Westernized” areas – or rejected altogether in pockets of relative changelessness, i.e., in populations wherein mental-rational consciousness barely comports with traditional ways of being and knowing, such as with certain aboriginal peoples worldwide. It might also be argued that certain populations are selectively accepting the mental, while rejecting rational (deficient mental) consciousness.

11. Id. (my paraphrase)

12. Quoted from Dan Chapman, the CIIS book dealer at the Ayahuasca Conference.

Thursday, November 3, 2011

OCCUPY WALL STREET MOVEMENT ECONOMICS

Economics 101 teaches that the quantity of a product or service is determined by the demand, which is reflected by its price and is a function of its quality.

The Occupy Wall Street (OWS) Movement might be deconstructed using this same analysis:
The number and size of Occupations worldwide can be determined by the demand, reflected by the price we pay for sympathizing and participating – a direct result of discerning the quality of the values it promotes.
The individual making such a discernment wants an assurance of its quality before committing to the OWS Movement. He or she does not want to be bamboozled by some phony color revolution sponsored by a hidden power elite, or a false flag operation carried out by its governmental minions. An individual requires a solid basis upon which to make a reasoned choice that this Movement is in his or her best interests.

If the masses can be steered into demanding what the World Order has been cooking up for at least a hundred years or more – a one-world, socialist dictatorship – then they are simply silly putty in the NWO hands. (Witness the so-called “Arab Spring.”)

G.K. Chesterton has written that “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.” What’s Wrong with the World, p.48 (1910). If we transpose “capitalism” (or even “democracy”) in place of “Christianity” we grasp a certain truth that has been eluding the Occupy Wall Street demonstrators and many (if not most) of their sympathizers. Has capitalism really ever been given a fair shake – or has it been undermined almost from the start?

Capitalism is a system that allows any man or woman to produce a product or service, which is then vetted by a free market of buyers which determines how much buyers are willing to pay for that product or service. It puts the freedom to choose in the hands of the People – the freedom of sellers to produce and sell, and buyers to inspect and buy, viz., the freedom of both to possess and use money to do as they see fit.

But subverted capitalism is not capitalism at all. The most insidious example of subverted capitalism is corporate “capitalism,” also termed crony, predatory, or crisis “capitalism.” Corporate “capitalism” is not capitalism at all. What is it then? The modern corporation aggregates large amounts of capital in order to make a profit for a shareholder class that expects maximum income. To operate, it forms a semi-monopolistic structure. Its purpose is to dominate a market in order to dictate price by limiting quality according to its own profit-based analysis – buyers be damned! This is not capitalism it is a corporate command economy, viz., private socialism. It is public socialism to the extent that government is involved, and this unholy alliance can be referred to as a “corpocracy.” A corpocracy is a mixture of private and public socialism, i.e., some monolithic WE decides what products and services are allowed into the market, their price, quality, and quantity.

In order to fund the banksters, the governmental part of the monolithic WE taxes your income on the “dollars” from your private labor. These “dollars” are currently called “federal reserve notes” and are used to pay the interest on the money the government borrows from the Federal Reserve. A note is a promise to pay. “Promises to pay” are in fact debt instruments. They are absolutely not true dollars as contemplated in the U.S. Constitution. All of this nonsense is capitalism turned on its head.

Probably one of the few times we enjoyed real capitalism in this country was in the 1840s, when Pres. Andrew Jackson terminated the central bank (what he termed “a den of vipers”). That period was one of incredible growth and plenty for all. But, predictably, it was subverted by the unscrupulous interests of modern corporatism.

Libertarians would have us believe that business can have free reign over all; that government should not interfere whatsoever in the affairs of the individual, including the business sector. And this is essentially what we have had in commerce, beginning with the dismantling of the regulatory function of government in the Reagan years and that culminated in the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999. All of this deregulation allowed banks to run amok, leading to the current meltdown. Ralph Nader has pointed out two weaknesses of libertarianism: consumer protection and labor unions do not figure into its ideal system – and where does environmental protection enter into the calculus?

Government needs to ensure that the individual retains his or her ability to compete in the marketplace. The regulatory role of all three branches of government is to preserve the rule of law; viz., a rule of law that secures individual liberty by protecting individuals from the depredations of corporate dominance of the marketplace (and from any and all crony government alliances). In commerce, the Federal Trade Commission and the Securities and Exchange Commission probably have the lion’s share of the executive regulatory roles. Let them be what they were instituted to be: watchdogs for the People.

I judge a healthy economic climate by the number of individual enterprises and mom-and-pops businesses I see as I walk down the streets of any town, not by the number of corporate, cookie-cutter franchises that litter the urban-suburban sprawl in the U.S. If the modern corporation cannot be put back into its cage by relegating it to what traditional corporate entities once were, then they must be closely scrutinized under the law to protect the People from its Goliath-like influences in commerce and in politics. Free legislatures from the overwhelming influence of the monied (read “corpocracy”) class! Let the courts actually be the arbiters of fairness and justice for individuals, instead of enforcers for the corpocracy’s values-vacuum-laws! And while we’re at it, free the press from oppressive control by the forces of corpocracy! Ideally, capitalism can only operate within the free flow of information, with real investigative reporting, instead of mind control by presstitutes!

Chesterton’s Christianity, like true capitalism, might be given a fair chance. True capitalism is closer to the precepts of individual freedom than is socialism – by a long shot. Thus, regaining true capitalism should be a professed value of the OWS Movement. And while we’re at it, OWSers (and all the forces of corpocracy) – be sure to remember to give peace a chance!

______________

Jonathan D. Suss is a cultural mutant multi-career virtuoso (blues piano player and singer, woodworker, poet/writer, one-time military officer, lawyer, English professor, and Ph.D. in Humanties) who is bereft of ambition to “be anything” in this phony baloney world – secular or otherwise. He is always on the look-out for an enlightened patrone from deep in the woods or from the plutocratic elite who also “sees thru the world” and may wish to join forces to further worthwhile underdog agendas by performing weird tasks, such as piercing the veil of corpocracy. Some of his ideas can be further studied at http://spyoptaelip.blogspot.com and he can be contacted at theo4b@gmail.com

Friday, October 14, 2011

BUG-A-BOOS


 
The stinkbug and the grass skipper are two very different bugs. The former showed up on Sos’s desk the night he was filling out an application to join in fieldwork that involved the sighting of extraterrestrial craft; the latter made its debut the morning after Sos had to beg-off the expedition for lack of funds. To Sos these bugs were message-bearers.

The fieldwork hosted by the Center for the Study of ET Intelligence (CSETI) was pricey, $2500, and that didn’t even include food and lodging. But the Greer group had a remarkable success rate at making contact with ETs and its leader, Steven Greer, seemed like the real deal. A former emergency room medical doctor, transcendental meditation teacher, and a recognized pioneer in the inner reaches of outer space, what sold Sos was the fact that the black ops USAP (Unacknowledged Special Access Project) folks were reportedly intimidated by his work. According to Greer, elements from these ubermenschlich elites, charged with suppressing information on ETs, had contacted Greer asking him to knock it off. Greer politely declined and they then tried to kill him and his closest associate. Also according to Greer, cancer can be transferred via radionics from a distant Petri dish into the bodies of uncooperative, free-agent operatives such as these. Greer managed to beat the cancer; his associate succumbed. Greer writes that they tried a second time using another exotic type of weaponry – and again they failed. Finally, a truce of sorts was called, but the Greer group is closely monitored, especially during their fieldwork. So, thought Sos, perhaps it was all for the best that he was short of funds, thus staying off the radar for the time being (perhaps).

Sos’s mind returned to that CSETI application. The group called the ET Contact fieldwork a “retreat.” The application asked if Sos had any overriding fears, obviously about ETs and about maintaining control in what could easily be a rather dicey ET encounter situation. He ruminated on that, searching deeply into his soul. The perennial outsider, Sos would probably feel more at home with an ET than he would with the typical representative of his own planet. Really, how could he fear an advanced race of intelligent ETs?

It was around this time that he began eyeing the stinkbug making itself at home on his desktop. The stinkbug is supposed to have come here as a stowaway from China, but I’m pretty sure it really comes from Uranus. It has a mottled, gray-brown body that looks like a shield, and a sort of pinhead with two antennae. It’s generally no bigger than your thumbnail and has a propensity to demonstrate persistent imbecility. It can fly around making a racket. But what it seems to prefer is to crawl around in a slow, deliberate way, seemingly almost asking to be squashed or otherwise liquidated (i.e., flushed down the toilet). It doesn’t bite. It just gets in your way. And it does give off an unpleasant odor if threatened – like something metal would smell if something metal could die. Worst of all, there are many of them, and they won’t go away!

He didn’t want to touch a stinkbug. He didn’t want this bug to be in contact with any part of his epidermis. Bugs were creepy. How alien this little fellow Earth-creature was to him! Was this feeling of his due to the stinkbug’s lack of intelligence? What was intelligence, anyway? Really, he was no arbiter of intelligence! Let’s face it, fear played a major role here; fear of something he didn’t know a thing about and didn’t want to know a thing about. Yes, somewhere within the psyche of Sos was a primordial revulsion – a fear – of bugs. And then the alarm bells went off in Sos’s head – HE WASN’T WORTHY! If he can’t even abide this generally innocuous speck of a thing, how could he be an ambassador of goodwill to some more exotic, off-world creature?

Suddenly, in this context, Sos’s deeply engrained bias against this life form called “bugs” hit home. In the interests of full disclosure, Sos referred to the stinkbug in his CSETI application, hoping that his aversion to the little guy was not fatal to his acceptance (it wasn’t).

Alas! A month went by and then some. Sos was quite broke. In fact, he was quite literally bankrupt and he couldn’t cough up the fee. He had to own up to it and he did. So late one evening he emailed the news to the CSETI coordinator, then planned to head out to the beach around 3:00 AM the next morning. (At least he had enough dough for a day on the beach!) And that next morning, long before dawn’s rosy fingers appeared, Sos was up, loading his beach chair into the back of his old Honda station wagon.

Little did he know at the time, but a stowaway slipped in just then.

Sos drove on into the darkness of night. The road was his and his alone. On he went, passing the NSA facility, then Annapolis. Soon he was gliding over the Chesapeake Bay, the Bay Bridge depositing him on that flat expanse of land known as Maryland’s Eastern Shore. On through the veil of darkness went Sos, searching out the right road through the crosshatch of back roads leading to the lovely salt air and the mighty Atlantic Ocean.

Dawn came, just east of Bridgeville, the place with the billboard that says, “If you lived here, you’d be home now.” Cute. Quaint. Quite.

Suddenly a rustling flutter rose up in the back of the wagon. In the long rays of morning light Sos could barely make it out. Something was fluttering up against the back window. It sounded BIG, VERY BIG, wings beating like a machine, like those of a hummingbird, but not quite. In a half-panic Sos pulled off the road. With his eyes still searching the rear view mirror he yanked on the emergency brake, pushed open the driver’s door and jumped out. He walked to the back and guardedly pulled up the rear door. Did something just fly up and out a window? It seemed like it did, but he wasn’t sure. In the faint morning light Sos scanned the interior. Nothing moved. All was silent. Oh well, whatever it was must have flown away, thought Sos. So off he went, back down the road again, but casting a worried glance up at the mirror from time-to-time for the next mile or so. The stowaway seemed to be gone.

By the time he pulled up to the beach the sun was already an orange blaze on the horizon. Hardly a soul stirred. Sos grabbed a towel, cooler, sunglasses and a book, then yanked his 25-year old solid oak beach chair onto his shoulder and trekked out to find the right spot in the sand.

Early morning on the beach is a heavenly place. The plaintive cries of gulls rise and fall, mixing with the distant crash of waves. The sand was not yet hot. He looked and saw jewel-specks of light dancing all about on the huge expanse of ocean. Sos inhaled deeply. His lungs took in the salty draft as the brew of air blew in and around him. A gentle wind carried away his stress. He surveyed his domain. The beach was eternal; as long as sea and land existed, so would exist that magic in-between spit, where water melts into a terra firma in flux and the air licks at all that traverse its sands.

Sos soon found his spot. He began unfolding his beach chair. Then he saw it. It gave him a sudden start. On the corner of the wooden frame of the chair that had been up on his shoulder moments before was the biggest bug-of-a-thing he had ever seen!

At that moment it looked like the BIGGEST moth in the world. (Later he determined that it was something called a “grass skipper” that’s classified as a butterfly, for some unknown reason). Its body was thick and wide with a kind of brownish-gray, furry-looking appearance at first glance. It had some color on its dusky wings that looked like big, yellowy eyes. When it was in the air at the back of the car it could easily be mistaken for a hummingbird, the way it beat it wings. It’s about the same size as a hummingbird (which sometimes seemed like an insect to Sos).

Once the shock wore off that this bug had been practically riding on his shoulder all this way, Sos looked for a stick of some kind to shoo it off the beach chair. He didn’t want to touch it. He found a piece of driftwood and gave it a flick. The grass skipper just lamely fell onto the sand, settling a few feet away into a little depression a foot had made in the sand the day before. There it stayed, much to Sos’s dismay. Why didn’t the dang thing just fly away!? But stay it did. Grudgingly, Sos accepted the grass skipper into his little spot on the beach.

It was supposed to hit 100º that day. Shirt off and sunglasses on, Sos settled into his chair and gazed seaward. Dog walkers soon appeared. One dog came over to sniff him. It almost stepped on the grass skipper, but the thing just remained where it was, motionless. The sun was climbing steadily. Sos pulled out his book and was soon engrossed.

By and by the sun did its work. He was getting hot and decided to go tromp in the surf for a bit. He brought his book with him. The cool water lapped up his calves. With each wave his feet sank deeper into the sand. Sos didn’t like that because he imagined crawly things lived down there. So Sos ambled around, turning this way and that, to keep from sinking too far down. The water swirled around his feet as it splashed up and then receded back. It was like floating in the bright morning air, detached but at once a part of the surf’s ebb and flow.

The grass skipper was all but forgotten. Not until he returned to his beach chair and was sitting there a few minutes did Sos notice that his footprints had come dangerously close to little Mothra. Still it sat there, content, not moving. Sos got back into his book for a while, napped a little, then looked around some, and finally picked up his book and began reading some more.

Suddenly, from the little depression in the sand there came a kind of buzzing flutter. Sos looked up from his book, puzzled. There was the grass skipper, still ensconced in its tiny pit but its wings were all a-hum. Strange, he thought, how can it stay there when its wings are going like that? All of a sudden the grass skipper came flying up at Sos, who barely had time to dodge his head to one side. The thing came flying right at him, then hooked around and zinged off and out of sight.

Not until that moment did Sos think back on the stinkbug of so long ago. His close encounters with the alien bug world seemed to have a discreet beginning and end. When Sos first contemplated joining the ET Contact Group, Mr. Stinkbug imparted his fearful presence; now, when it turned out Sos couldn’t join them after all, Ms. Skipper furtively showed up, signaled her presence, then got all snug – finally making an awesome acrobatic display as she zipped away into the ether, like an ET spacecraft

As with the bugs all around us that remain alien and feared, Greer maintains that the ETs tenaciously standby on the periphery to save us from ourselves; they won’t go away either, and are just as feared and particularly distrusted by the black ops folks, those gatekeepers and conservators of the status quo.

It could be that Sos was making fanciful, connective projections. And yet the timing, especially that of the grass skipper and its odd behavior, seemed too coincidental to ignore or to write off as just a curious little episode. He was not saying that ETs came to him in bug-form. But if, as “they” say, everything is connected, then might the consciousness of these bugaboos be sharing somehow in the consciousness of cosmic visitors, called-in (so to speak) by Sos’s own thoughts and desires? Was love attracting love, while demonstrating to Sos his own fears and foibles when it came to bug-aliens in his own world, on his home planet?

Sos’s thoughts were gushing now, here, on the beach, sun and salt dancing through his hair. “They” also say, there are no coincidences. We know of C.G. Jung’s serendipitous synchronicities. How strangely wonderful is the world! Life! – being alive and able to connect-up with other life forms… Maybe he’d just had a close encounter of the insectoid kind. He feared them less now – at least he imagined so – but in any case the thought and wonder they provoked brought comfort in his solitude. At the same time he knew he needed to work on his meditative abilities, as Greer referred to meditation as a crucial component in the Contact work. There was a kind of meta-force in meditating with one or more, wasn’t there? Still, he might be as lost in a group meditation as he was in his solo efforts. This confounded and worried him a bit.

***

As the day wore on and the sun bore down on him, Sos dallied a bit at surf-reading some more. Finally he settled back and totally opened himself to the light, the air the steady pounding of the waves. Suddenly an idea came to him: surf-breathing. It occurred to him that the rhythmic sound of the waves coming ashore was akin to his own heart-driven pulse; listening to the waves was like listening to the Earth’s pulse. What was it “they” say about being one with nature? Instead of being surrounded by manmade structures and machines, and the artificiality of synthetic sound and sensibility, nature is pure, the mind of God, the creative force, the authentic. So, Sos wondered, if he coordinated his breathing with the sounds of the surf, might he atune himself to be more at one with the natural world? He would try it.

With eyes closed and all muscles relaxed as could be, he took in a deep breath, drawing the air in through his nostrils and holding it for a few moments. As the next wave crashed he slowly let the breath out through his mouth, emptying his breath completely as the wave washed up onto the beach. As it receded back out he took in his next breath, held it and let it out as the wave crashed again, washing in. A few tries and he had it down – he was surf-breathing!

Sos centered himself. He tried moving out all thought. A pulsating magenta hue came in and out of focus. A certain calm descended. He smiled. He felt contented. He wondered whether this little technique was a gift bestowed on him by a knowing Other or Others. Just then, an errant thought came racing in like a wave-too-soon, it’s message? – Be Not Content!

Sunday, March 20, 2011

THE GREAT DECEPTION

How does one question the artificial constructs?  The truth is both within you and out there.

Presented below are some of my most unimpeachable sources – links to information worth knowing and researching further:

RED ICE CREATIONS
Listen free to the first hour of audio interviews of the most intriguing researchers on the cutting edge of what's really happening. Henrik Palmgren is the thoughtful interviewer. It broadcasts from Sweden (but don't let that fool you.) Also has links to relevant current events and more, without the b.s.

Stephen Greer, M.D. is widely regarded as the world's foremost authority on UFOs and extraterrestrial intelligence, and is the author of four insightful books and multiple DVDs on the UFO/ET subject.

       Just What Is Astro-Theology?
Secrets in Plain Sight by Scott Onstott
Masterful!

Strawman: The Nature of the Cage (Full Movie)
Bankster Humor
      (Regretably, the great bankster fireside chat/poem above has been removed. Alas!)
             
Bankster Busterhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4hgA9j-4dB0  A very encouraging interview of former World Bank senior attorney, Karen Hudes, turned Whistleblower; a heroic insider separating out the real from the phony baloney.
David Merrill explains that the 1913 Federal Reserve Act has a remedy written into it, amended in 1933, and still in full force and effect today.  Redeeming Federal Reserve Notes for lawful money (currency issued by the US Treasury) is safeguarded pursuant to 12 USC 411.  It's the same cash; the difference is in the internal accounting of the bank, based upon an account holder properly setting up his or her account.

MICHAEL HOFFMAN: Truth-teller extraordinaire!


PATRICK HUNT worked alongside the legendary Anthony C. Sutton on Trilaterals Over Washington. http://sandiego.indymedia.org/media/2006/10/119694.pdf
Here is Hunt's latest book:
"The dark horse of the New World Order is not Communism, Socialism or Fascism: It is Technocracy." Hear him being interviewed here:

THE MATRIX REVEALED
For $125 Jon Rappoport will sell you some masterful interviews that blow the lid off of consensual reality and point toward the imagination as the way forward to realizing our full human potential:

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1. Farrell, Joseph P., Babylon’s Banksters: The Alchemy of Deep Physics, High Finance and Ancient Religion (2010)

2. Brown, Ellen H., Web of Deb: The Shocking Truth About Our Money System -- The Sleight of Hand That Has Trapped Us in Debt and How We Can Break Free (2007, 2008)

3. Vieira, Edwin, Pieces of Eight: The Monetary Powers and Disabilities of the United States Constitution (2002, 2011)


4. Sutton, Anthony C., America's Secret Establishment: An Introduction to the Order of Skull & Bones, (2004):
Psychotronic Weapons and Behavior Modification:
The Best Enemies Money Can Buy:

5. Coleman, John, The Committee of 300, 4th ed. (1997)


6. Astle, David, The Babylonian Woe (undated)

7. Reality Research Resource: Exposing the papal Roman empire's covert global power structure & the mystery Babylon New World Order agenda  http://troyspace2.wordpress.com/

8.    Springmeier, Fritz, Bloodlines of Illuminati (1995)


9. Webster Tarpley


10. Larry Becraft, Memorandum of Law: The Money Issue (2009)
Larry Becraft, Destroyed Arguments (2010)

11. Eustace Mullins

12.  JFK to 911: Everything Is a Rich Man's Trick.   (2017) incorporates the important finds of citizen investigators over the years since the dastardly deed shocked the world. It confirms for me what I have always suspected -- when JFK was publicly executed the chickens came home to roost and are STILL roosting, clucking and crowing over We the People.
NOTE: In addition to pulling out of Vietnam, proposing the elimination of the oil depletion allowance, going after the Mob, and reining in the CIA, another reason for assassinating him was his issuance of Executive Order 11110 wherein he authorized the US Treasury to create billions in lawful currency. Did this threaten the Federal Reserve cartel's monopoly on creating money and lending it back with interest owed?

13.  WATERGATE: The Back Story.  Rick Raznikov outlines a more plausible explanation. Ten parts. (archived version; original taken down) 

14. September 11: Inside Job or Mossad Job? by Laurent Guyénot -- The final verdict on 9/11:  http://just-another-inside-job.blogspot.co.uk/2013/07/september-11-inside-job-or-mossad-job.html

15.  Max Igan
The Awakening (2011)

Trance Formation (2012)  

16.  Love For Life Truth Tellers from Down Under: Arthur Cristian and Family

Is America the Greatest Country in the World?
(Please forgive the professor's bad language.  The video is embedded in this dandy article: 10 THINGS MOST AMERICANS DON’T KNOW ABOUT AMERICA  found at
17.  The Greatest Story Never Told, DVD set. Blows the lid off of the cover-up and false claims made about Hitler and World War II. Highly recommended.  http://thegreateststorynevertold.tv/

18. NWO Forbidden History -- A New World Order timeline by Mike King. (Prepare by having plenty of rotten tomatoes in hand.) Worth buying the hard copy. It starts at 1763 and presents the highlights up until the present.

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Forbidden Archaeology:  
Michael Cremo

The Illinois Caves


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Ragbag:
Sons of Liberty Academy – Videos

Online Books


 
Konstantin Meyl

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Off the Charts:
Hidden Human History





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Health

Hemp Oil Cures Cancer and Many Other Ailments by putting the body into a state of homeostasis.
Rick Simpson's website:

Cure Cancer - Lots of Links:

Dr. Robert Dowling
North Carolina Institute of Technology
95% of people have oral pathology due to a root canal, wisdom teeth removal or some other cause.  Oral pathology can be detected by a thermograph (which can find tumors 10 years before a mammogram can).  Removal of the dead tooth from the jaw will put an end to the neurotoxins being spread throughout the body, causing many, if not all, degenerative diseases.  This, together with Dr. Dowling's proprietary enzyme supplement tonic and bio-ablation of any tumor(s) will cure you.  Dr. Dowling has been harassed and threatened.  I believe he has relocated to Ecuador as a result.  Do the research; read the testimonials from many. many people who have been cured after the medical cartel (of slash, burn and poison) gave up on them.

Gary Null's website

The Physiospect
  To hear Robin Falkov discuss her health condition on Coast to Coast AM, you can visit:   

Forbidden Cures

Cure for All Diseases:
Dr. Hulda Regehr Clark
Find a Zapper:

If all else fails, you are sure to find the resource you seek in the Soil and Health Library.
This website provides free downloadable e-books. The three major topic areas are radical agriculture, natural hygiene/nature cure, and self-sufficient homestead living. There are secondary collections concerning social criticism and transformational psychology. A study of these materials reveals how to prevent and heal disease and increase longevity.  These materials also suggest how to live a more fulfilling life and reveal the social forces working against that possibility:  http://www.soilandhealth.org