The Mosaic Effect 31: Common Sense is Not So Common

   Ahhh… here we are again. You almost forgot I did this stuff, didn’t you?

    But anyway. Some things on my mind, which touch upon our recent climate debate, politcs in general, and the pernicous nature of philosophical( or even worse, spiritual) relatavism.

   Plato and platonism, the buddha, existentialism, mob psychology, a bunch of labored breathing, some traffic noise, and a bit of politcal theory.

podcast page here

Direct download: ME31-common_sense_is_not_so_common.mp3

… to tide thee over

a new round of podcasts starts today or tomorrow, I think. they’ve all been recorded and nothing has been missed. We’ll pickup exactly where we left off.

In the meanwhile, enjoy this( via trapped in matter ). I certainly did, and keep it in mind, for certain aspects of what ends up getting talked about in the next few episodes.

http://video.google.ca/videoplay?docid=8109822533221897197&q=alchemy

The Mosaic Effect 7: Pattern Integrities

   A slightly grungier-than-usual sounding sermon under the bridge, as we plumb the life and inspiration of buckminster fuller.

   Life, death, rebirth, the highest good, and the alchemically smelted self run headlong into carbon nanotubes, metaprogramming and playing spirit horse.

   pull up a chair and unleash your “mini-christ“  here

The Mosaic Effect 3: Revolt of the Elf Machines from Hyperspace

        

  Fate delivers us to the door of Uncle Terrence, and we rhapsodise wildly about heroic doses, neoteny, and the ‘human problem’.   

 I’m contemplating purchasing a bit more upload capacity from libsyn. the cost is negligible to my mind, but I was curious to see how far i could stretch the baseline level. For the moment i am at my limit for the month, but I’ll let you know what i decide.

   In any case, I come dangerously close to incohate ranting on this one, so enjoys youselves.

Interrogate the Terrorscape

 Part of the downside of being injured for awhile is that I had plenty of time to read and think, but not so much avenue to track my thinking here, cause sitting in a chair kind of hurt, and all.  I’ve started to realise that in trying to express everything on my mind, I’ve skipped a lot of influences and progressions in my reasoning that may leave some people high and dry. So let’s wheel back a few steps and talk theory. Starting with the prophet of media himself, Marshall McLuhan.

The thing everyone remembers about McLuhan is ‘the medium is the message’ even if almost nobody seems to understand what it means, which is part of the point.

McLuhan’s whole work is predicated on the idea that consciousness is inherently seperate from the environment it travels in. It’s like a fluid that takes the shape of it’s container. If you pour consciousness into the medium of tv, it takes the shape of tv, if you pour it into phonetic alphabet, it takes the shape of the phonetic alphabet.

What he tried so hard to point out was, everyone tends to be obesessed with content, with what you do with the media, and what your put in your consciousness after you adopt it. But what he showed was that the almost invisible shape changing of consciousness itself was by far more meaningfull and important than anything you did with it afterword.

That changing of shape, that alteration in the use of the senses, was like the water to fish. It affects everything, but it becomes so pervasive that you can’t see it after awhile. It’s the ground to the figure, when we tend to be fixated on the figure, and ignore the ground.

If we start with language it’s easy to see. In preverbal humanoids, everything was mediated by touch. Scratching, petting, grooming, hitting, slapping. All our inner and outer experiences had to be translated largely through touch. Anything we wanted to share with another human had to pass through the filter of tactility, and our minds were shaped almost exclusively by that, and hence it was invisible to us. When everything is translated through the surface of the skin alone, there is no room for abstraction, for example.

When we adopted language however, this went into upheaval. Suddenly the tactile consciousness was forced into an abstacted verbal medium. Suddenly, most everything was being carried in the form of sounds. The mind takes the shape of auditory resonance: the song, the echo, the tonal nuance. This had such a profound effect on us that it created the gap between us and the rest of nature. And this too, quickly became invisible to us, to the point that most auditory cultures truly believe that song created the world.

And when we made the medium shift to writing, the gap turned into a full-blown rupture, not just with nature, but from preliterate humans as well. The auditory world was again violently translated into a more visualised mode. Experience was locked into the time-binding symbolism of visual script. This resulted not just in a change in the way we use our senses, but in the speed of our whole society. When consciousness takes a eye-biased form, it becomes possible to abstract things like history, geometry, architecture, mathematics, linear extension and speed markers. Pushed to the highest level by the printing press, this makes it possible to turn the entire universe into a linear visual metaphor of shaped spaces.

McLuhan resisted the temptation to make value judgements that might distort his perceptions, but he was quite clear that to move from one medium to the next unconsciously was potentially disastrous. Like stumbling from one dream to another with no inkling or sense of awareness. Our minds twisted by ouruncriticised media into forms we could not even see, or recognise.
In this, it’s clear that McLuhan adopted the concerns of the subject of his earliest scholarship, none other than James Joyce, and specifically, Finnegans Wake.

Much can be said about the Wake, but it is generally agreed that the book is a kind of oral history of human consciousness transcribed into print, in that it represents a bridge between the oral and visual words. It takes the form of a cyclical dream of constantly changing, but ever the same, archetypes, acting out the same themes over and over again, but always asleep. Chieftains become kings become fathers. From cave painting to advertisements and back again, locked ever in this dream. But Joyce pushes the cycles so closely up against themselves that the dreamer, unnamed, struggles to awaken. In some sense Joyce strives to awaken the reader, to lift us out of the sleep of unconscious cycles again and again. Or, alluding to the title: ‘finn… again and again’.

McLuhan carries that mandate into his own work, and in his own way sees humanity pushing itself faster and faster through these cycles of sleeping, nearly waking and then plunging below the water of the unconscious, again and again. Lost in the endless speed-up of our media until time and history threaten to dissolve back into the primoridal dream of tribal consciousness, which is not so terrible in and of itself, but that we are doing it robotically. uncritically.

I’ll pick this idea up again soon, but let talk a little more about ‘electric retribalisation’.

Essentially what this means is that with the advent of electric media like the telegraph, where information can be moved at instantanous speeds, it eliminates a sense of time in relation to experience. If everything can be known at a keystroke, then nothing is ever really distant from you, and hence time loses one of it’s cornerstones. Certainly telecommunications,webcams and instant messaging accentuate this.

One of the hallmarks of visual cultures is that they have the sense of perspective, of vanishing points in the distance. It’s a kind of filing system for information arrainged visualy. Such a thing revolutionised the arts, in the renaissance. What instantaneous speed does is that it retrieves the kind of time sense that existed in oral cultures, where everything is right next to you, at all times. You are immersed in the proverbial ‘echo chamber’ of resonant information. When consciousness takes that shape it starts to dissolve the biases of linear extension, detatchment, past and future, and perspective. McLuhan said that while this would not litteraly plunge our society back into the material conditions of tribalism, ( at least not by itself) it would, if absorbed unconsciously, take our minds back to that same place, and hence open the way for all the manifestations of that consciousness to come back as well. Some of these are desirable, like empathy, depth involvement, oral culture and storytelling, and a sense of community. But bundled with that, if we take it all uncritically, are race hatreds, tribal warfare, xenophobia, illiteracy, sexism, and superstitious obesession with resonance ( astrology and the new age, anyone? )

So that’s the short primer on the father of media studies. You may or may not see how that folds into my recent timeline so far.

 But that’s not all: imagine my suprise when this line of thinking led me to the solution to my very first obsession; or, at least, the very first obesession that impelled me to start up AB. No hints just yet, except the title:

 Next: Dreaming Saturn

And out come the wolves…

Now that the thrill of the massacre is over
Isn’t it sweet when she sucks on your veins
Glimpses of grandeur now faced with defeat
I’ve waited so long
Now that your kingdom of Babylon’s fading
where will you turn when you can’t find Your soul?
the Tea Party-Babylon

Ah, poor Dubya. I’d hate him if only he weren’t so clearly a sock puppet. Whatever they did to the poor bastard to make him a viable presidential robot obviously broke something inside of him. It’s sad to see him constantly whimpering that no one supports his ‘democracy building’ initiatives.

But never mind that. I’m not here to piss on the guy anymore. It’s beside the point.

I’m here to declare victory. Yes you heard me right. It’s all over but the crying. I realize that’s a bold statement, but it’s patently obvious that whatever support he had in most quarters has dissolved. His war is lost, his base is turning against him, and his retarded flailing is bad for business. Sometime in the last couple weeks the force shifted and everyone and their dog can smell George’s blood.

So I imagine that in short order we’ll see what’s left of the neocon agenda unravel entirely. There’s probably enough scrutiny out there to preempt any manufactured terrorist events from having any useful purpose. The real powers have enough to deal with without this clown and his gang of fanatics whipping the populace into a frenzy. When gas is $5.00 a gallon, and the housing bubble bursts, no one wants this embarrassment still sitting in the white house. He’s too obvious of a scapegoat for a soon to be enraged populace. There aint enough troops to control Iraq, let alone a combustible homefront in the grip of social upheaval. Far better to shuffle George off the stage and replace him with a less controversial puppet to help calm things down and gird the american people for ‘tough times ahead’.

Which is not to say it’s smooth sailing. Like I say, there are plenty of gut punches coming from the reality priesthood, but they’re about to toss the scapegoats out the exit hatch, and get on with the real plans. Namely a grab-back of resources and wealth to make the great depression look like a garage sale.

But for the moment I will kick back and look forward to George’s long-deserved public asswhuppin, and have a drink in honor of old Hunter S. Thompson, god rest his soul, who sadly didn’t live to see his prediction come true.

Immediately after the first debate ended I called Muhammad Ali at his home in Michigan, but whoever answered said the champ was laughing so hard that he couldn’t come to the phone. “The debate really cracked him up,” he chuckled. “The champ loves a good ass-whuppin’. He says Bush looked so scared to fight, he finally just quit and laid down.”

…”What is that horrible smell in the office, Tex? It’s making me sick.”
“That is the smell of a Loser, Senator. He came in to apply for a job, but we tossed him out immediately. Sgt. Sloat took him down to the parking lot and taught him a lesson he will never forget.”
“Good work, Tex. And how are you coming with my new Enemies List? I want them all locked up. They are scum.”
“We will punish them brutally. They are terrorist sympathizers, and most of them voted against you anyway. I hate those bastards.”
“Thank you, Sloat. You are a faithful servant. Come over here and kneel down. I want to reward you.”
That is the nature of high-risk politics. Veni Vidi Vici, especially among Republicans. It’s like the ancient Bedouin saying: As the camel falls to its knees, more knives are drawn.

…They all loved the whiff. It is the perfect drug for War — as long as you are winning — and Hitler thought he was King of the Hill forever. He had created a new master race, and every one of them worshipped him. The new Hitler youth loved to march and sing songs in unison and dance naked at night for the generals. They were fanatics.
That was sixty-six years ago, far back in ancient history, and things are not much different today. We still love War.
George Bush certainly does. In four short years he has turned our country from a prosperous nation at peace into a desperately indebted nation at war.

…Bush is a natural-born loser with a filthy-rich daddy who pimped his son out to rich oil-mongers. He hates music, football and sex, in no particular order, and he is no fun at all.

…We were angry and righteous in those days, and there were millions of us. We kicked two chief executives out of the White House because they were stupid warmongers. We conquered Lyndon Johnson and we stomped on Richard Nixon — which wise people said was impossible, but so what? It was fun. We were warriors then, and our tribe was strong like a river.
That river is still running. All we have to do is get out… while it’s still legal, and we will wash those crooked warmongers out of the White House.

Justice delayed, but never denied, George. History will stomp all over you and everyone like you. You aren’t the first. Buh-Bye. Victory party in the comments!

——
Hunter S. Thompson 1937-2005 R.I.P.

The “Open” Conspiracy

It seemed to me that all over the world intelligent people were waking up to the indignity and absurdity of being endangered, restrained, and impoverished, by a mere uncritical adhesion to traditional governments, traditional ideas of economic life, and traditional forms of behavior, and that these awaking intelligent people must constitute first a protest and then a creative resistance to the inertia that was stifling and threatening us. These people I imagined would say first, We are drifting; we are doing nothing worth while with our lives. Our lives are dull and stupid and not good enough. Then they would say, What are we to do with our lives? And then, Let us get together with other people of our sort and make over the world into a great world-civilization that will enable us to realize the promises and avoid the dangers of this new time. H.G. Wells- The Open Conspiracy

So I had nothing to do today, and I decided, ‘ hey, I’ll go swing a sledgehammer at a hornet’s nest! ‘

and it goes like this…

When you look at the history of the internet you find, perhaps not so suprisingly, that a lot of the seminal guys involved in online media were also tied up in magick and conspiracy theory as well. Whenever some sort of dramatic new innovation is appearing chances are there will be some variation on the shaman figure cobbling it together in the background, whether he or she is conscious of that role or not. Sometimes they are very much so. Mark Pesce is one of them. And for our purposes, Joe is the other.

Now when you’re talking about one of the grand wizards of the internet, it’s hardly suprising that his presence online is pretty strictly managed, so it’s hard to get a lot of background on Joe, which is compounded by the games he likes to play with it, but there’s enough. I can visualize someone like us, back in the day, when the internet was first picking up steam, who for whatever reason is able to cultivate relationships with all kinds of delightful counterculture characters. I’m talking, in particular, Hakim Bey, Nick Herbert, Robert Anton Wilson, and Dr. Christopher S. Hyatt, among others.

Now I can’t track down all the sources anymore, but young Joe cultivated an interest in two particular esoteric fields. One was ‘metadata’ or what you might call the archetypal informational structure of the universe, what is sometimes called the akashic record. It’s not hard to imagine why an information technology student would be attracted to the idea that reality might have an underlying code. The other field was ethnomethodology, which is essentially the study of how people understand the world and implement that understanding.

Now let me step back for second. Maybe you’ve heard of Ong’s Hat? Maybe not, but the core documents are worth a read simply as entertainment. Now, if you’ve done that, read a little bit by Hakim Bey. The style of writing of the mysterious author of these conspiracy documents, and the elusive poetic terrorist are awfully similar aren’t they? Which makes sense, since Bey has essentially admitted to writing them.

Okay then. So what Joe does, back in the day, is to take that fictional seed, and use it in a kind experiment on the emerging culture of bulletin boards, now the internet. What you do is take the faux-conspiracy documents, and build up just enough ambiguous evidence around them that it becomes nearly impossible to sort what is real from what is not, especially when Joe can carefully manage what is fed into the emerging internet on the topic.

Now leaving aside the content of the Ong’s Hat mythos itself, Joe’s experiment seems to have blown up in his face a little bit. It appears he was subject to harassment, paranoid delusions, stalking, bizarre synchronicities which may have led him to wonder whether his ‘fictional’ story was as fictional as it seemed. Under these circumstances, it’s not suprising that Joe seemingly engaged in some pretty intense and heavy handed efforts to secure his privacy and sanity. Fair game, I say. But it doesn’t stop there.

I’ll leave OH for now, and concentrate on the Maestro. By the looks, he took what he learned from that experiment, for good or ill, and helped pioneer what is known as ‘alternate reality gaming’, using some of the same fictional themes in books as well, as well as cultivating a substantial resource base for his circle of friends and fans. He’s popped up as a facilitator for events with RAW, Bey, Rob Brezney, Genesis P. Orridge, and disseminated all kind of materials here.

And the metafictional media-hoax games continue. He’s right at the heart of the Poker Without Cards media blitz, and there’s no reason to doubt he’s a principal architect. It seems like a move to bring greater awareness of corporate/media manipulation into the mainstream, and to manufacture a latter Christian Rosenkreuz /Cogliostro figure to play with. Although the game is rather transparent by now, and probably only ‘works’ on the marks who fall prey to media as it is. So is the only way to wake people up, to punk them one more time?

As recently as 2002 he’s sat in room full of people and spent a couple hours fucking with them and treating them like ‘two-dimensional’ lab rats with his Ong’s Hat routine. Not that I’ve never done the same type of thing, or been tempted to play headgames with people, but when is enough enough?

It’s kind of like Discordianism. Some of the same people involved after all. It’s fake but it isn’t, but it is but it isn’t. It’s fun if you hold it lightly. It makes you think. It’s supposed to help free your mind. That’s what these people profess to be about, after all. Helping to free our minds, yes?

In some sense it’s like a recruiting scheme. As if one day, Joe or his friends will appear to you like Morpheus and offer you the red and blue pills. They want you to play the game and become an ‘extreme individual’ like them.By all means play the game, but don’t ever forget whose game it is…

addendum: I did want to add, on further consideration, that I do have a lot of respect and gratitude towards these people and everything they’ve done. I cannot guess where I would be without these people’s work. I simply felt it important to point out some of the duplicitous and manipulative nature of some of these activities. Not to take anything away from Joe or any of these guys. I just respectfully disagree with some of these tactics.

Hi. An Angel told me to give you this acid…

“He blew in with that uniform…Laying down the most incredible atmosphere of mystery and flamboyance, and really impressive bullshit!” Leary recalls. “He was pissed off. His Rolls Royce had broken down on the freeway, so he went to a pay phone and called the company in London. That’s what kind of guy he was. He started name-dropping like you wouldn’t believe…Claimed he was friends with the Pope.”“The thing that impressed me,” Leary remembers, “is on one hand he looked like a carpetbagger con man, and on the other he had these most-impressive people in the world on his lap, basically backing him.”
Meet ‘Captain’ Al Hubbard, the latest seminal CC figure we’re going to treat. I’d have to say, after looking at Al a little more closely, I had one of those moments where as they say, ‘the penny dropped’.

In the context of the some of the research I’ve done in the past, and will do in the future, and especially in light of some the ambiguous roots of the so-called counter culture, Captain Al raises some troubling and inspiring questions about our human destiny and whether there really is a clear line between the magnanimous and the malignant.

When I talked about Lilly earlier I sort of discussed how I thought the drug approach to illumination is a kind of mixed blessing. It certainly helps to open people up in a way that may have been impossible otherwise, but it does that in a way that, if you never outgrow the drugs, subtly erodes your ability to achieve your own innate capacities.

What makes this somewhat more disturbing, and fascinating, is that Captain Al, who was about as ideal a vehicle to bring the acid revelation to the people as you can imagine, was apparently selected and motivated to do so by some kind of otherworldly presence.

This man who started out a ‘barefoot’, dirt poor, Kentucky hick, at the age of 18 was instructed ‘by a pair of angels’ on how to construct a simple kind of radioactive battery, which patent netted him a small fortune, and was never seen again.

He then goes on to storied career in covert operations, pre wwII, which lent him the support of no less a political figure than the president himself, followed by entrepreneurial ventures in the uranium business which made him a millionaire.

To his credit, Captain AL wanted more a purpose than to live as one of the idle rich. Another angelic revelation kicked off his search for the ’sacrament’ of LSD which became his lifelong quest to pass on to the world.

Now one estimate of the number of people Captain Al turned on ranges into the thousands. And Al was not like Leary, throwing the stuff onto the winds to whoever cared to try it. He was very selective. In many cases he administered it to alcoholics and depressives of various stripes, and apparently had a great deal of success with that, mostly through skilled use of what Leary would later term ’set and setting’. I think Captain Al was very aware of the sensitivity of a person in a state of drug induced boundary dissolution and how important it was to orchestrate the experience carefully. But I digress…

The larger part of his recipients were what you might call ‘the elite’. Scientists, artists, academics, celebrities, even a politician or two. Thousands of them. And because he was working on his own, with no real oversight, protected by his contacts and money, we may never know how many people Captain Al actually turned on.

And here’s the thing: he had even bigger plans. He wanted to expand the use of LSD into the medical establishment full speed ahead. But he knew he had to be careful. He deeply resented Timothy Leary for invoking the panic that brought his work to an end. How many more politicians, scientists and businessmen would he have turned on, if he had been able to finish his life’s work? We know about Aldous Huxley, Ram Dass and Timothy Leary. We know the impact they’ve had on our culture. Imagine that ten fold, twenty fold, a hundred fold. Where would we be now?

We can theorize about whether or not the counter culture was co-opted from the outset. We can argue that the co-opters were themselves co-opted. Tim has covered that ground before in some detail. But, what if the whole thing has been co-opted by a source that isn’t even human?

It wouldn’t be the first time. Rene Descartes. Buckminster Fuller. Jack Sarfatti. Aliester Crowley. And on and on…. All touched by voices from beyond the human realm, or so we are told. And if we add the latter day UFO ‘revelations’ how many more is that?

We tend to circumscribe artificial lines around ‘counter culture’. We want to believe that it is populist, egalitarian, spiritual, non materialistic, peace loving, democratic. So what are we to make of the ‘Johnny Appleseed’ of LSD? This undereducated military veteran, covert operator, staunch Christian, uranium millionaire, and psychedelic elitist. Who just so happened to be taking pointers from something that crosses all our arbitrary political fences without a care in the world. We know Captain Al was protected by his contacts and money, but it seems like he had even bigger backers than that, doesn’t it?

This is a dolphin. This is a dolphin on drugs. Any questions?

JOHN: If you stay around me long enough you’re going to get a whole new language. Some people stay around me for a while and run away. I can’t keep a woman here. They all get frightened sooner or later. I’m crazier than hell.

Whoo boy. I thought I’d spend a little more time on the counter-culture thing. When I spent a little time looking at it, it seems there are tons of little connections and mysterious characters waiting to be brought forth.

It seems like the most efficient way of doing this is to start as close to the beginning as possible and work forward from there. I’ve already touched on Burroughs, and he comes back into it a bit later, but I really wanted to do someone else first.

Chances are if you’re reasonably familiar with Timothy Leary, you know the work of John C Lilly. If you’ve seen the movie Altered States, that’s pretty much based on Lilly. If you’ve every used or read the term ‘metaprogramming’ applied to human brains, that’s Lilly. If you’ve every been fascinated by the conscious nature of dolphins and their communication with us, that’s Lilly too. If you ever know anyone who’s every slipped into serious drug addiction and paranoid insanity, well…. that’s Lilly too.

John Lilly is a perfect and seminal example of the strengths and weaknesses of human consciousness research. On the one hand he came up with brilliant pioneering, visionary discoveries, made huge strides in the ethical and humane treatment of dolphins, and laid the foundations for so many of the counter cultural tropes that we take for granted today.

On the other hand, he also is a perfect example of a scientist who clung obsessively to the delusion of objectivity, even when he went on three week ketamine binges where he was injecting himself once every hour and eventually decided earth was under threat from ’solid state’ artificial life forms that were going to exterminate organic life and go elsewhere. He even tried to warn the president. Even towards the end of his life he insisted on measuring everything quantitatively, to the point he claims not to know what ‘qualitative’ even means.

And, I shit you not, he gave acid to dolphins:

DJB: Have you ever given ketamine to a dolphin?
JOHN: No. I gave them acid to see if it would knock out their respiration. It didn’t. I couldn’t understand what was happening to them on LSD except for one thing they did. They turned around along the tank at the same time, and suddenly they turned their beaks down and turned on their sonar straight downwards. I remember on my first acid trip that suddenly the floor disappeared and I saw the stars on the other side of the earth, so I stamped my foot on the floor to find it. That’s what they were doing.

when you’ve looked at a few interviews you’ll notice a pattern. Lilly will be talking extremely rationally about something, and then he’ll say ‘ this morning when I did ketamine’ or ‘ the other day when I was on on LSD’.

Not that there’s anything inherently wrong with that, mind you, but I feel it typifies a certain instrumental approach that has bent the counter culture (CC)spiritual project in a lasting way.

One of the key skills in spiritual practice is learning to control attention. In yoga they call it pratyahara or withdrawing attachment to the senses. Partly as a way of achieving clarity but also to cultivate strength of mind to master one’s states.

The use of drugs and isolation tanks lets you get all kinds of amazing experiences, but at the cost of actually developing the discipline to control your sense experiences independent of drugs or machines. I’ve heard it said that the difference between a shaman and a schizophrenic is, that the shaman controls the window to other dimensions, but the schizophrenic has had his window kicked in, he has no control, and must rely on medication to reestablish boundaries. ( incidentally you could make a case that a lot of conspiracy thinking is a case of people who’ve had some or all of their windows kicked in )

A common misconception among drug advocates is that the experiences they have on drugs are not attainable any other way. Perhaps in terms of chemically specific side effects this is true. But in terms of the profound states of consciousness that mirror religious revelations of various types, this is categorically wrong. I have done plenty of drugs and plenty of meditation, and in my experience, drugs give a sneak peek at a profound state that takes long years of work to acclimate to everyday life. It’s much easier to pop a pill, inject something or eat a mushroom. So I can see why drug advocates would think that way, but it’s not correct.

One of the questions I’ve heard about ‘the sixties’ is a kind of bewilderment that the social changes that seemed to be in the air never took root and altered things permanently. The simple answer is that they did, but not in an obvious way. The complex answer is that so much of that energy was based on a quick fix. Absent the discipline to master a different state of being, that energy vanishes, leaving disillusion, or the temptation of addiction.

Lilly’s story also sheds some light on the relationship between CC and intelligence agencies. You’ll see it again and again: the CIA or whoever provides the money and lets the crazy eccentric genius run wild. Lilly thought he was getting out from under when he swore off putting electrodes on the brains of animals, to go study dolphins peacefully, but that project was still funded by the establishment, they had just learned to give John his space. The illusion of independence. The spooks, archons and counter initiates are perfectly happy to let the freaks get crazy and come up with new ideas because they know they’ll end up owning the applications anyway. And it’s hard not to see shocking parallels between Lilly’s early work in behavioral modeling and invasive manipulation of the brain and the latter accounts of mind control. Even his work on the self as metaprogrammer is readily applicable to conditioning others. Perhaps even more readily than it is applicable to oneself, for the reasons I stated above.

A few freaks want to self-program? So what? While they’re busy shooting ketamine and dropping acid to attain fake enlightenment, the control system will happily implement those same principles on prime time television to keep everyone else docile the rest of the time. It’s a win/win situation.

I sort of made light of Lilly’s paranoia that mechanized life forms were going to wipe us all out and migrate to other worlds to do it all over. But maybe he saw a metaphor for what really is happening . Maybe he saw the spreading stain of alienated mechanistic Ahrimanic consciousness, striving to turn humans into ruthless amoral machines, serial killers and paedophiles dressed in silicon and steel, ready to rape the world and walk away?

Lilly made a distinction between what he called ‘insane’ and ‘outsane’. There’s things you keep inside and there’s things you call tell others. I wonder which one that theory would be?

el Hombre Invisible

_____

29. “Don’t let them see us ! Don’t tell them what we are doing !”
30. Are these the words of the all powerful boards, syndicates, cartels of the earth ?
31. The great banking families of the world
32. French, English, American ?
33. Like Burroughs, that proud American name ?
34. Proud of what exactly ? Would you all like to see exactly what Burroughs has to be proud of ?

_____

the last words of hassan sabbah

In the interest of lightening things up a bit, and since Tim had a good idea to sort of plumb the roots of what we call counter culture, I thought I’d play a little bit.

And ya know, if you’re gonna do it, do it properly. If you want counter culture, look no further than Old Bull Lee, The High Priest of Junk, William S. Burroughs.

 

Everyone with even passing familiarity knows the writer aspect of Uncle Bill, but did you know that he was a pioneer of psychedelic fiction? Not only did he write about yage ( ayuhausca ) long before Terrence Mckenna, but he wrote Naked Lunch while tripping on a cannabis/hash jam native to Morocco, where he was living at the time. In fact, he hardly remembered writing any of it. You could almost consider Naked Lunch channeled prophecy, certainly on the par of the Book of the Law.

Is that a bold statement? It might be if you didn’t know Burroughs was a magician too. Probably the formative magickal pioneer of the latter half of the 20th century. He was introduced to sorcery by Brion Gysin in Tangiers who was himself educated by the natives of morocco. Pretty much all of his work after Naked Lunch is undertaken with some kind of social mutation or subversive intent in mind. His methods were as occult as occult gets. The agenda with Uncle Bill was always escape from the systems of control.

And why? Well maybe because he was a gay man, persecuted and ostracised by his family. A family where his uncle, Ivy Ledbetter Lee, was a publicist for the Third Reich, and who is considered the father of modern ‘public relations’. And we all know the Nazis were into ‘public relations’ don’t we? Burroughs later married a Jewish woman to help her escape the Nazis. That’s a fairly extraordinary step for a gay man. His shame in his family is quite evident later in life.

It’s hard to underestimate Burroughs’s influence. He was a formative mentor to the Beat Generation authors, like Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, who seeded the sixties counter culture to a large degree. He developed a satirical, horrific, highly sexual aesthetic which achieved that highest of artistic goals: non-commercial. Lots of people have ripped Uncle Bill, but no one has translated his vision with any degree of success into a commercial medium, with the possible exception of David Cronenberg’s adaptation of naked lunch.

Through his life, Burroughs was obsessed with freedom from control. He despised ‘narcs’ of all kinds, and his personal cosmology was populated with authoritarian horrors that make the archons look weak. He spent most of the sixties in London publishing underground screeds such as the ‘revised boy scout manual’ which is semi satirical treatise on guerilla warfare which ranges from biological terrorism, to overthrowing cultures and assassination by list. He walked around armed at all times and was not at all shy about using his weapons.

His magickal methods were innovative and by all accounts highly effective. He experimented with his famous ‘cut-up’ methods to the point were he was using sampled sounds at ambient volumes to influence what he called the ‘reality film’ He could cause riots or accidents on the street, or change the mood of a crowd.

Much of his magickal knowledge was passed onto Genesis P-Orridge of the pioneer industrial band Throbbing Gristle, who went on to form postmodern magick collective Thee Temple Ov Psychick Youth , who are generally attributed with inventing the sigil method which is the backbone of modern chaos magick. Indeed, Burroughs postmodern sensibilities and collage aesthetic were instrumental in the current movements of the occult community.

He took pretty much every drug there was, experimented with Wilhelm Riech’s orgone accumulator, joined the church of scientology, and then told them to fuck off.

Burroughs and Gysin modeled themselves on the historical/mythical Hassan Sabbah, old man of the mountain, head of the order of assassins, and the two of them used the pseudonym interchangeably. The hashishshin were fanatical mystics who held their sanctified fortress against all comers with a campaign of terror and blackmail, safe to pursue occult knowledge and absolute freedom.

So am I saving Uncle bill intentionally seeded an occult counterculture to subvert the system of ‘narcs’, to wage a guerrilla war for human freedom? No, I kind of doubt it. Do I think he would’ve been pleased to see just such a thing unfold?

63. Are these the words of the all powerful boards and syndicates of the earth ?
64. And you want the name of Hassan Sabbah on your filth deals
65. To sell out the unborn ?
66. “Protect us from our gooks, our dogs, our human animals !”
67. Are these the words of the all powerful boards, your powerful syndicates
68. Your powerful governments and nations of the earth ?
69. Liars ! Liars! Liars! Cowards! Cowards ! Cowards!
70. Who cannot even face your own dogs !
71. Traitors to all souls everywhere ! Sold out to shit forever :
72. You, miserable collaborators,
73. Now ask protection of Hassan Sabbah ?
74. “Protect us from our gooks, our human animals ?”
75. No, no, no, I will not protect you,
76. And you will never use the name of Hassan Sabbah - William Burroughs to cover your green shit deals with crab-men.

-what do you think?