Wanted: One Galvanized Pressure Cooker

The weather report indicated that today was the last cold day, at least for a small stretch of about one week. Harland was never so weary of winter. After all it was almost mid-April. It reminded him of his time in Glorieta living in a cabin a few miles up the Sangre de Cristo mountains just outside of Santa Fe, New Mexico. Even well into May the weather stayed cold and crummy there. Ah well, no need to fuss. Funny how we find fault with the weather even though we treasure being alive on this lovely (though troubled) planet.

 

It’s the same being among people: they can seem as fickle as the weather and we can never be quite sure where they’re coming from. Here's the point=>how do we know that the opinions we hold of others have not been "engineered" in slick ways so that we hold biases that may be completely wrong?—and if so, might that "put us off the scent" of otherwise solid and true allies in fighting the good fight? 

 

Someone may say or write something that is off-putting to you because it doesn’t comport with your beliefs. Yet you find, overall, that there is great worth in what the person otherwise says or writes and you feel that this outweighs what you considered to be one mistaken notion. Let’s explore this phenomenon, thought Harland. 

 

Groups we are biased against may have been infiltrated and subverted from within. Of course, "by their fruits you shall know them." Yet discerning the "them," particularly from afar in our digital-display, modernist world is fraught with difficulty. 

 

Degeneration tends to happen with every institution; a founder founds something and it starts out as a beautiful thing but people screw it up for their own personal agendas, egos, manias, or nefarious purposes. If you think about it, so-called spiritual and/or secret societies that are founded for worthy, altruistic purposes are particularly subject to being in the crosshairs for subversion by cabals of evil-doers. The last thing they want is for people to discover the truth about who we really are, e.g., our innate sovereignty, the divine potential of the human being and the mysteries of consciousness. They certainly don't want the gospel of Jesus to proliferate nor any real esoteric path that leads to enlightenment (as opposed to the occult path to Luciferianism).

 

But how do we determine the real, the Good? We can use our discernment. What's that? It's our accumulated knowledge and experience guided by intuition, right? So what if our knowledge, experience and perhaps even our intuition is or has been misguided, confounded? Then what? 

 

Douglas Gabriel and his wife Tyla run https://AIM4truth.org/  That's a news aggregator Harland tends to trust. Also, their in-depth analyses of past and current geo-political players and happenings that support the current events they present is superb. Additionally, it is a place where they make their neo-anthroposophy explicit to those “seekers of esoteric knowledge” who are interested. They are both adepts of Rudolf Steiner’s work, known as “anthroposophy,” and they recently put out an audio discussion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wbNA3sOdh58&feature=youtu.be  It is entitled Secrets of the Invisible College. It features Douglas Gabriel in discussion with another Steiner adept, John Barnwell. Harland finds Gabriel to be quite the intellectual giant, albeit wordy and rather arid and annoyingly “left-brained.” He is able to warm up a bit more to his Steiner compatriot historian friend, Barnwell, who also comes across as a towering and informed intellect though more lovingly “right-brained” and personable.

 

Harland found this recent discussion between them to be quite fascinating and found himself wanting some feedback from like-minded folks. Why?—because he’s not sure he buys the Steiner anthroposophy, or at least their interpretation of it, which they call "neo-anthroposophy." When Barnwell speaks, Harland is inclined to like what he hears; when Gabriel starts bloviating he’s put off a bit. Harland does like what Jesus says about "the meek inheriting the Earth" and tends to agree with that wholeheartedly. He noticed, curiously, that Gabriel upturns this “meekness notion” in their discussion (but he qualified it, didn’t he?—might have to listen again).

 

One of his pet peeves is that he is suspect of anyone who has ventured into the Matrix and then proclaims essentially being “red pilled.” This is because of who Harland is. He never bought into the hissing lie of the normative. Instead, he dabbled a bit here and there in his bumbling way but never wanted to compromise his liberty as a "joiner"; though some might say we expand our liberty by the opportunities we encounter just by being a joiner and learning (with the right perception) what is to be found there. Still, Harland mused, those who are joiners, well, they're not like me and so I can't identify very easily with them. This arouses a natural suspicion in him. It could very well be a weakness of mine. I don't know. Maybe it has caused me to become an incurable romantic, a dilettante. I just don't know… 

 

Now in Gabriel's case, he claims to be clairvoyant and has advised people as an astrologer. Once upon a time he worked in the Army for the NSA doing intelligence work of some kind; then he became a Jesuit, assigned to infiltrate and find out as much as possible about Rudolf Steiner's work; this resulted in his mind being blown by what he discovered there and he "quit" the Jesuits to become a Waldorf teacher for the next 20-30 years. He loves to bloviate about how he consulted on the story line for Star Wars (a film Harland never liked, by the way). Gabriel has mentioned that he is a Freemason and a Rosicrucian. Now all of that sounds as tainted as can be to me. But then, to understand the world today such a background—if it has truly been re-directed to the Good—could be a definite force to be reckoned with.

 

Harland recalls too that Gabriel once mentioned his "friend," David Spangler. Now isn't he the guy who wrote: 

Lucifer comes to give to us the final gift of wholeness. If

we accept it, then he is free and we are free. This is the

Luciferic initiation. It is one that many people now, and

in the days ahead, will be facing, for it is an initiation

into the New Age…No one will enter the New World

Order unless he or she will make a pledge to worship

Lucifer. No one will enter the New Age unless they will

take a Luciferian initiation.

            —David Spangler, Reflections on the Christ

                (Forres,UK: Findhorn Press,1978), 44-45

These days you almost need an intelligence background in order to cull and parse the truth in current events; you definitely need to be a sleuth-hound, a real investigative journalist. Gabriel seems to be the real deal even though his persona doesn't resonate very well with old Harland. Tippecanoe and Tyla too, with her Sophia Goddess stuff and aw shucks populist-sounding rhetoric. There may be such a thing as a good "witch"—like Oz's Glinda, the Good Witch of the North—and maybe Tyla is such a one, but Harland has no way of knowing. Whatever...

 

The occult is a tricky thing. It can be used for good or for evil. Without proper caution and guidance a person can easily ​become duped, which I think is why the Church in the West has always steered away from occult practices, even something as seemingly innocuous and therapeutic as meditation. Instead, prayer is the way of Christianity and I've come to see that prayer really is a powerful thing.

 

So Harland is struggling in a bit of a paradox box here. How do we clean the doors of perception, purify ourselves in body, mind and soul, so as to plough the clouds toward making the world a better place? That's a big question for him—THE big question. We can hobo our way, approximating things with our discernment, always seeking to improve upon it. That's the point he’s at right now. Harland intends to gather up the many threads of his research (including the many strands of himself!) to explore this whole identity/trust/discernment conundrum.

 

Just as David Byrne takes on various personas, telling his interviewer, “maybe later,”  https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=dE-mxVxFXLg#  Harland too (with his own host of personas) finds himself in this limbo world that Byrne explores by improvs in his video.

 

If he remembers correctly, Gabriel might ascribe the identity conundrum to “not yet learning to control the desires of the astral body.” As the warmth of Spring envelopes him, Harland will need to bring such thoughts out into the natural world for airing and percolation. In this regard Harland will follow the charmingly blasphemous “Jack” in The Ruling Class (1972, starring Peter O’Toole), i.e., he will need to put these notions of his into his “galvanized pressure cooker.”