February 23, 2011

Jan Irvin


website
Gnostic Media podcast



youtube playlists

Pharmacratic Inquisition
Astro-Theology
Shamanism and entheogens
Shamanism and personal liberties
Cannabis, Hemp, Marijuana
Psychedelic Research
Non-Violent Communication
Did Jesus exist?
Sex and Sexual Suppression
Money's Dirty Little Secret
The Trivium Method – Grammar, Logic, Rhetoric


website comments

12/02'10 PR 12) Origins of Money
A Virtual Round-Table Discussion by Brett Veinotte, Jan Irvin, Paul Verge, and Richard Grove

GM # 41 Stephen Zarlenga pt 1) Money's Dirty Little Secret
GM # 57 Stephen Zarlenga pt 2) Why Gold and Silver are not the Answer
GM # 67 Stephen Zarlenga pt 3) A Response to the Austrian School
GM # 88 Stephen Zarlenga pt 4) Silver and Gold

Gene Odening)
I will just say go research the Iroquois Confederacy for an example of the once working form of social order that worked until the "eastern, read middle eastern" thoughts of greed and elite-ism were introduced.
The "representative" had no choice but to comply with the tribes wishes. If the rep. voted and there was no total agreement his vote was invalid and then a new rep. was select and the whole process was repeated.
Many of the things you guys have gone over before are in the documentaries "Psywar" and "Human Resources". (There are questionable persons in these as well misnomer of the facts but still good stuff.)
Both are here at Metanoia free for download.

Monica Ballyurban)
I read with sadness both commentators' words.
Two obviously intelligent individuals with many interesting ideas. I learned much, so much. But somewhere lost in the dialogue between the two, was the concept of "agree to disagree".
I was born in America, to Hungarian parents, escaping Communist oppression in 1956 Europe.
I absolutely agree with the fact that the status quo of the European mindset is dangerous and will more than likely lead us down the road to human extinction.
It takes time to change. People need to hear new ideas, expressed with conviction, but also with compassion. Opposing sides need to come together to understand each other. I would like to think one day there will be a world where "we can all just get along". Perhaps there was once such a time, and perhaps it may come again. [...]
I read the articles and watch the videos on the Gnostic Media website every Christmas, to remember and learn about the great and sacred pagan traditions that are all but lost and forgotten.
Yes, some religious people cannot handle these ideas – that is why so much of religion has always been allegory, a way for the masses to understand at least something (also a way for those in power to control the masses of course, with fear and threats and guilt). The concept of gods and religions are a cultural construct. What is out there, the great spirit, exists and cannot be comprehended or described by any of us. No one is an authority. Perhaps when we leave this plane of existence we shall know "the truth" but only time will tell.
Europeans came to America ... and now look what we are doing: expressing ideas via the internet. Something good always can come out of something bad. We must always look at the big picture and focus on what good the future can hold, not just the bad. The world is not black and white.
I think one of the greatest tragedies of American history is the brutal, almost complete annihilation of the Native Peoples of this great land. Close behind that, is what the US did to the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I am glad I was not alive during both events, I do not know how I could have justified living in this country I was (to be) born in.
I am a botanist and honour the plants that sustain us. The sacred mushroom is truly special.
I have never used it, and more than likely, never will. It's just a choice I made. There is so much good in this world, and beauty. Let's learn from each other, and from this planet, if we can. Let's make it a better place, not worse. I have a poem in my room, that I have read everyday for years: [...] Wishing you all the best.

Albert) In a word, at 2 am with the prospect looming to get up in a couple of hours to assume my "cog space" in the wheels of the machine, awesome! Thanks gentlemen.


12/19'10 GM 97 – Mike Crowley: Secret Drugs of Buddhism

Jan) Everyone should pose for photos with a Tibetan Lama in a "sinner" T-shirt.
Not quite sure what that means ... fallacy of equivocation.

Evan Martin) Great interview, Jan. So fascinating.

Bram) Been listening to your podcasts for a few months now, and I have to say, it's great stuff.
The connections you and your guest make, with entheogens and other subjects, to all these various religions and philosopies, from christianity to Buddhism to psychiatry, all with the trivium in mind, are great. Appreciate your avoidance of tunnelvision (as many in your field only focuss on the drugs).
Thanks a lot for doing this, it's great inspiration for my own uni-research, and personal development.
Having lived in Cambodia myself – and having often seen the beautiful inscriptions on the both hindu and buddhistic buildings of Ankor Watt – this particular podcast was extremely interesting to me and I will def check out the book by Mr. Crowley. Also thanks for keeping the work of Mr. Allegro alive!
Greetings from the Netherlands, and keep on doing what your doing, it's much needed!

David L. Foster) Really enjoyable interview, Jan. I read Mike's Secret Drugs of Buddhism on-line quite a while ago and found it extremely thought provoking. There are still a lot of unanswered questions about the mushroom hypothesis, but I don't believe anyone has suggested that the appearance of mushroom motifs both in art/esoteric texts and in consciousness may be not just literal but an anticipatory bio-empathetic neuro-phenomenon. That is to say, it may suggest (evidence of a sort of fractal archetype that points to) a universal process of hierarchical consciousness, as for example in Chakra/cakram symbolism. You may be interested to know about Geoffrey Samuel's Cardiff University research project – of course not all of us can qualify for £150,000 grants ...


01/31'11 GM 102 –Christopher Knowles: The Mystery Origins of Modern Music

February 11, 2011

A dream-worshipping Druidic society


Neil Kramer lopo

continuing with pt 3 (or playlist)

And though we can see in older classic spiritual texts, there is an observance that one should know oneself and that perhaps what is outside emanates only from inside, and if you really want to push that to the extreme you could say: there is no outside, there is only the inside. This gets me misconstrued, this gets me misunderstood over time, and this outer world gets depersonalized – this is the key to a lot of the work I'm doing.
This externilization process depersonalizes what is our responsibility. And we see that the world out there is actually starting to disconnect from us and we don't assume responsibility for it.
So, you know, there are exceptions to this. There are those that do push through. There are spirits who do question authority and who are kind of organically defiant and which will always push through this. And when you find these souls, sometimes they are political radicals, or the revolutionaries, or the philosophers, but when you push it to the fringe, you know, they are terrorists, or they're nutters, or they are excentrics, or the mentally ill.

And the degree and duration of one's investigation into reality can determine what severity of label you get. So when you get someone like David Icke, who comes out with all this fantastic information and then talks about higher dimensional entities and reptilians and so on, that's very easy for the control system to box him off, and put him in a certain place, and categorize him.
So we have to be very careful with the words we use.
I think if you had talked about transdimensional, hyperdimensional things fifteen years ago, it was very very suspect and it was very very esoteric indeed, whereas now, as the informed individual becomes more unacquainted and confident with science and particularly quantum physics and so on, hyperdimensional physics is very mainstream now, is very popular now, and the core concepts – not necessarily the mechanics of the mathematics, which is always best expressed as equations and these kind of really abstruse, you know, mathematical formulas and stuff, but the principles of it – we can all understand, we can all grab and get to.
My feeling is, the sort of no excuse anymore to remain in ignorance and I'm kind of quite interested in studying the Gnostics and the Gnostic system of information. And this is one of my favorites of texts within the Nag Hammadi texts that is called "The Book of Thomas the Contender," and it's just this one line in it that particularly enjoy, which really sums it up for me. And it goes like this:

"Woe to you who dwell in error, heedless that the light of the sun, which judges and looks down upon the all will circle around all things, so as to enslave the enemies. You do not even notice the moon, how by night and day it looks down, looking at the body of your slaughters!"

And to me this is a simple thing. It says, there is no excuse, people, for being ignorant. Do not dwell in error, do not move forward in shows and distraction – it' s not a way forward. And there is another line that says "woe to you who hope in the flesh and in the prison that will perish", which basically says: If you concentrate only on the sensual life – and by that I don't mean the erotic life, I mean of the senses, of the five-sense world – if that is where you are based, you are putting yourself in a perishable world and you're making a deity of a perishable world.
And I think pretty much that's an unacceptable way to behave anymore and why it is not our job to go around and wake people up and all that. And I'm really vehemently attached to the notion that the only thing we can really do if we accept this plenum, this Akashic Field ...
If we enlightened and better ourselves – to use a more mundane word, if we just want to keep it simple – if we concentrate on our own growth, that is the most phenomenal thing we can do to affect everyone else, because every thought you have, every emotion, every feeling, every impulse is automatically kind of holographically shared all the time with the entire field that stretches through the whole multiverse. Nothing is separated. Nothing is decoherent. We live in this hugely interconnected coherent universe. And again, that is a principle that the control system doesn't really want you to go into.
So those nuggest are took away in inaccessible science books or they're took away in () texts that only nuttish read, and that has to stop. And, of course, programs like this start to overturn that nonsense and show that this information is there for all of us and there is a kind of damn good reason for it.


pt 4 All these polarizations are so ridiculous now

I can see how that could be interpreted that way. There is a flipside to that, and it's this: The people who are here, now, are also taking the opportunity of the most extraordinary times of polarization that we have ever seen.
There is no clearer, more distinct demonstration of how reality unfolds from consciousness than living on this planet. And it is so polarized, it is so ridiculous, it is so brilliant, all at the same time, that eventually you either have to acknowledge, and understand, and move forward with that, or it will crush you. And that is what is happening on this planet.
So I would say, to some degree, that the amount of polarization that one sees – and by that I mean how things are collapsed down into opposites so often of peace and violence, and love and hate, and zero and one, and black and white, and whatever – those polarizations are so ridiculous now and, of course, we examine that tonality in programs like this as regards society, and civil liberties, and personal freedoms, and so on and so forth, but those are just human constructs, you know. I would say, no one has any rights, or liberties, or freedoms and yet everybody has rights, and liberties, and freedoms. You know, you're here, you show up on earth – good luck. That's it. There's no rights, there's no freedoms, there's no nothing.
So people get attached to that and social reform and radical political change ... for me that's a dead end. That is playing with the Jazz pieces that someone else has constructed.

That's right, yeah. And I would say: to a very great degree. Everything we do, everything we see, everything we feel, and all this information that we're imbibing, we have to bring it into the personal. We cannot afford to abstract things all the time, into this distant metaphysics, or this distant social common, it has to be brought into the personal, into what you actually do, into what you actually feel, into what you actually are.
So my kind of litmus test, my yardstick for the gnosis, and the wisdom, and the information that I come upon is, how can I integrate it into my own felt experience of life. And if I cannot, I disregard it, I reject it. Because the only thing that we have is our felt experience.
And it's important to understand, yes, I'm talking about, you know, the food you put in your mouth and the toothbrush with which you brush your teeth and all the rest of it, the nuts and bolts of reality. But consider this:

In Druidic times in England, the Druids contemplated the idea that experience on earth was a shadow and light experience, and the light experience was waking life and the shadow experience was what we call going to sleep and dreaming. And they placed equal volume on those two things, equal volume on those two things.
So did the Toltec sorcerers, so did many of the Gnostic seers. ("Jesus was a Toltec Sorcerer.")
We don't do that now in our society. Dreams are a bit of silly fluff that you just forget when you wake up. Dreams are like nonsense. Dreams are dreams – they are just not real. And that represents where we start to see a complete bifurcation of what is real and what is unreal. And it is important to acknowledge, as a very simple example, that obviously half your time you spend asleep and half your time you spend awake – whatever the percentage is of that it doesn't matter, but you get the point. There is a light and a dark. And that doesn't mean "good and evil", it just means light and not light. It means shadow, it means illumination, it means darkness. As anybody who is familiar with torture technics knows, one of the most cruel things you can do to a human being over an extended period of time is not give them darkness. To keep someone in a cell with a bright light in it is a very very subtle, but very very penetrating and horrible way of torturing somebody. We need darkness. We need shadow. It's part of our system. It's part of our ecology. It's part of our consciousness.

And so I think it's important to recognize that experience here begins to become richer and more important and more synchronous when we understand that this concept of light and shadow is central to the human experience. And it can be demonstrated by describing the old Toltec sorcerers, or shamans, or bruchos or whatever you want to call them. And when I say "sorcerer", again, I underline this, I'm not talking about like dark sorcerers or like, you know, you have a good magician and then a sorcerer is someone who is bad. I mean sorcerer just as one who is interested in knowledge, in knowing, in information. (I kind of quit that on a video recently when someone wants to look into that. It's important to get to the root of that word.)
So sorcery is a neutral thing. Sorcery is working with reality of fundamental level – that's all it means.

The old Toltec sorcerers used a limit what they would do in their waking life.
And they would be careful of what food they ate. They would be careful of wearing certain colours. They would be careful of going to certain places, because those energies in those places would reduce the amount of psychic energy they had to practise that sorcery when they were asleep.
And so they viewed life the other way around: that sleep was the real, important, juicy, exciting bit, and the waking life was just a functional bit. And yes, they would go out, and smell the roses, and walk under the trees, and eat fresh juicy peaches, and all the rest of it, and enjoy what is wonderful about life, but they treated that as very much the basic level of manifestation – high density experience of life.
The final life, the freer life was actually what happened when that consciousness, if you like, freed itself from the organism and assimilated it: moved, drifted, glided it – whatever you want to call it – back into the real field of creation where it is free, from where we came and to where we go. And this is an interesting counterbalance just to show how fundamental the constructs, how fundamental that fake browser through which we look is. So even the acceptance of the waking world as the real one and the dream world as unreal is bollox basically.
It's not like that at all.
And the only sort of interface we have between the two is so rare and is so obscure.
Really the only two methods we get to it is through these esoteric systems of meditation or through these questionable substances that in our society we just call "drugs" or "hallucinogens" which probably we could perhaps describe as "sacred plant medicine" or "entheogens" or whatever. In the 60s people call them "psychedelics". And these things pop up time and time again and it's a very decisive issue to talk about that.

And yet those two methods, meditation and entheogens, are perhaps the only clear ones we have as examples of how you can interface directly between a higher densitiy experience, i.e. physical experience, and a lower density experience, a finer, higher resolution experience such as in, what we would call, a "spiritual" experience, where you're dealing with energy of purer level.
Is very important one's intent in this – everything what we do is directed by our inclination, our motivation.
Our intent is the juice for this thing to occur. If you talk to somebody about Salvia Divinorum one person will say, yeah, this is just like teenagers take it and fall over the back of the sofa, and laugh a lot, and freak out, another people will say, well, it's a sacred medicine, not to be used lightly essentially. So again, the construct dictates, and upholds, and stears, and monitors what is the perception of a given thing, and even we ourselves ...

February 7, 2011

The news is horseshit


Neil Kramer lopo


02/23'08 Crossing The Rubicon: Breaking The Fake News Trance

"In terms of the awakening process, "Crossing the Rubicon" ("Alea iacta est") is a key revelatory stage when you realize, beyond any doubt, that the government is not your friend. The stark recognition that you have been living in a false paradigm created by someone else begins to sink in. It is here, at this bleak philosophical crossroads, where most people experience such a disturbing degree of cognitive dissonance, that they instinctively turn back. Too much to process and the implications are huge.
So even knowing that there is a greater truth on the horizon, they choose instead to return to the Control System, to the Village, with all its securities and comfortable certainties.
[...] They found two striking things. First, when they tried to trace the origins of their 'facts', they discovered that only 12 % of the stories were wholly composed of material researched by reporters. With 8% of the stories, they just couldn't be sure. The remaining 80%, they found, were wholly, mainly or partially constructed from second-hand material, provided by news agencies and by the public relations industry. Second, when they looked for evidence that these 'facts' had been thoroughly checked, they found this was happening in only 12 % of the stories. The implication of those two findings is truly alarming.
Where once journalists were active gatherers of news, now they have generally become mere passive processors of unchecked, second-hand material, much of it contrived by PR to serve some political or commercial interest. Not journalists, but churnalists. An industry whose primary task is to filter out falsehood has become so vulnerable to manipulation that it is now involved in the mass production of falsehood, distortion and propaganda."

The news is horseshit. This can no longer be construed as unconventional, activist opinion anymore – it is plain, well evidenced, undeniable fact. We must seriously discipline ourselves (and those we care about) to stop being suckered by what we see on BBC and CNN, and by what we read in The Times or The Post.
A far better alternative is to seek out one's own news. Believe nothing unless you have done your own research. Use the Internet. Practice being a prudent and discerning researcher, employ equal measures of intuition and critical judgement at every turn. And remember, the Internet was not even widely available before 1994. There were no other easily accessible alternative news sources. You got your news from the TV and the paper or you got nothing. You could haul your ass down to a decent public library and spend a few days trawling through archive newspapers and microfilm. But rather unlikely. So now the Internet is here ... use it.


08/06'10 From Britain to Brazil

"Terry Gilliam's 1985 dystopian fantasy film "Brazil" satirized the debilitating apparatus of bureaucracy and how it completely dehumanizes the free thinking individual whilst being firmly supported by a zombified populous who absorb and repeat its disempowering memes without question.
If you're not familiar with Britain's particularly exasperating brand of totalitarianism, watch Brazil (The Directors Cut) for a crash course in pen-pushing authoritarian squalor. The film vividly illustrates Gilliam's own frustrations on a personal creative level (regarding the increasingly corporatized movie industry), whilst succeeding in portraying the cold-blooded machinations of an oppressive regime that has finally thrown off the tiresome camouflage of democracy. [...]

The modest island of Britain has been deliberately overpopulated with a combination of the highest rate of teenage pregnancies in Western Europe and insensitive immigration policies that create poverty and ethnically specific ghettos that leave everyone dissatisfied. More than 70 million people are crammed within Britain's shores and it is, therefore, the perfect experimental platform for an infrastructure that is earmarked for global deployment. Nowhere in the world will you encounter more surveillance and enforcement cameras than in the green and pleasant land of Britain. Whether on foot or in the car, in the country or in the city, cameras track individual human movement.
On some motorways, driving beneath a particular camera array will see your licence plate automatically run against a criminal database and will measure your average speed over a given distance, automatically triggering the delivery of a sensationally alarming County Court Summons to your door if you fall outside the tolerance parameters.
[...] The surveillance infrastructure in Britain is not designed to keep humans safe, it is designed to keep them compliant. The inferred message behind the propaganda is clear: you can't get away with anything, so behave yourself and do as we tell you.

Disavowal of the shadow occurs when we perceive our own inauthentic actions and continue to do nothing about them. This is exasperated by surrender to the dominion of the ego, me-centric thinking and self-absorbed pleasure hunting or escape. This principle is vital to the conscious evolutionary shift that is required to overturn the old hierarchy.
The core teaching is simple: we are the shadow.
Each and every polarized negative entity that manifests in this world is our responsibility, our creation. The immutable flow from mind to matter, from consciousness to creation, does not allow us to disregard a given challenge. We cannot just let things go unresolved, try as we might. Negative energy patterns – destructive impulses concealed in dysfunction, fear and pain – cannot simply be abandoned. They must be faced and understood in order for their patterning to dissolve.
Ignoring a negative energy pattern ensures that it will return again and again. Each time it does, it gains density, it becomes harder and harder to reject, until finally it emerges as an inescapable crisis.
A single ignored negative emotional impulse may turn into a mild apathy in a relationship, which turns into discontent, which becomes dysfunction, finally resulting in separation and anguish.
This may occur over and over, until that incipient emotion is fully comprehended.

Short-circuit the escalation routine. Face the first negative impulse head on – as soon as it's identified. Whether it is embedded in one's psyche, intellect, sexuality, memory, dreams or wherever – face it and trace it to the root.
When the energy dynamic and its associated emotional patterning is understood, it will never return.

[...] Demon Cameron gave a speech on Monday 7th June 2010 at the Open University in Milton Keynes, UK, where he warned that Britain's "whole way of life" would be disrupted for years as painful measures to cut public spending would be introduced. Specifically, pay, pensions and benefits would suffer. In other words, the reason people bother to work at all – to earn money – will become even more constrained. The problem is, that this ludicrous political battle cry of "it's time to tighten our belts for the good of the nation" doesn't work anymore. Firstly, because there is no nation to speak of. Britain is now technically a unit within the emerging European Superstate, following the obscenely undemocratic Lisbon Treaty which neuters the last vestiges of Britain's self-governance. Secondly, because no-one with more than two brain cells firing actually supports the political process anymore. It is quite simply absurd. The reason people still choose to engage with it is because they're not sure what else to do. What are the alternatives? What exactly can be done?

[...] One does not have to look very hard to see that owning luxury items and displaying fashionable brands is nothing more than psychological chicanery. A brand is a cultural accessory. It's not simply the logo and jingle of a company that is determined to create the very best 'fabric conditioner' possible. A brand is designed precisely to fit demographic profiles – appealing to a well mapped social sub-group with clearly defined income, education, age, health, ethnicity, location, political opinion and cultural expectations.
A particular fabric conditioner advertisement may be targeted at 20-40 year old mums who like Madonna, Bacardi and coke, don't read, but watch a lot of television. Everything about the branding, from the product name, the colours, the music, the lighting, the words used, the editing and the advertisement duration are chosen to trigger an inclusive social response from the target sub-group. In the end, it's all just "buying stuff you don't need, with money you don't have," as the late George Carlin liked to term it.

[...] The credit based economy collapsed a long time ago. Slickly marketed frauds like futures trading, derivatives markets, sequestering emerging third world markets, printing non-existent money with no real-world value and the perpetual fabrication of international conflicts have propped up the Capitalist machine for years.
The fake credit crunch is merely the public-facing advertisement for the unchecked centralization of political, economic and military power. Delusions of discord with North Korea, China, Russia, Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan are diversionary sideshows for the uninitiated. Regardless of politics, religion or geographical origin, all political figureheads are receiving orders from the same masters. They sit at the same table. Obama and Cameron do as they are bid, as do Ahmadinejad and Putin. Some know it, some don't, but that is quite irrelevant to the success of the grand conjuration. Even apparently independent lovable rogues like Hugo Chávez and Viktor Yushchenko, when we dig a little deeper, are either directly connected to, or controlled by Control System enforcers like the CIA, George Soros' Open Society Institute and the Bilderberg Group. Even more arcane shadow organizations lie beneath the surface. The trail is well documented and available for all to uncover. You really do have to do the homework yourself to appreciate the actuality and penetration of these entities. Ignorance of them is no longer an excuse: the data is out there.

[...] The dissonance lifts and we can focus on being who we actually are, rather than getting lost in the mouldy NWO puppet show. Ultimately, the Control System knows its influence is waning.
The grip loosens and the game nears its end. We are witnessing the final spasms of the beast.
The magnificent human spirit has been unduly suppressed over the last few millennia. Now that time is over. We ascend once more. Reject their fake media hype and stop using their corporate services. Discard their fear memes and erase their counterfeit history. Extricate yourself from their politics and laugh at their sinister melodramas. They hate that most of all – not being taken seriously. From the Control System's perspective, there is no greater fusion of terrifying characteristics in a human being than authenticity, humour, creativity, sovereignity, defiance and love."


Something fresh from "The Cleaver": 02/17'11 The Path Of One

"The world of academia does not resonate too strongly with many who walk the path of conscious and spiritual growth. [...] from a shadow perspective, it's relatively straightforward to hijack the academic edifice.
After all, if you can sequester the system, you can effectively steer all those who study under it.
In the West, the academic paradigm is still perceived as the ultimate hub for establishing scholarly credibility and continues to serve as the empirical arbitrator of accomplishment and consensus reality.
Here in the US, I have noted that there's still a great deal of fuss made about sticking Dr. in front of someone's name. Billboards, TV and radio commercials, books and business cards are plastered with such academic titles. Dr. Somebody is wheeled in as a talking head for some garish infotainment show, so as to offer an 'expert' view of politics, science, history or whatever. Many people buy it, hook, line and sinker. [...]
To put it bluntly, lots of people from many different walks of life believe that academic qualifications = authority. After all, who knows better?
Faith in the academic edifice is beginning to crack in some European countries, most notably England. [...]
Even the most serious, free-thinking and well-intended scholars will often find themselves pulled into a vortex of insularity, prejudice and separatist specialization. It is the way of things in academia, particularly if you need approved funding for your work. You have to play the game, or else risk getting sidelined or even booted out. Collectivism is rewarded over independence, compliance over distinctiveness. [...] in such a rapidly changing and disinformation-saturated world, we cannot rely on academia to assist with our knowing.
We have to do it for ourselves.

[...] Being an autodidact does not mean having no formal education at all. It simply means that it is not the chief source of one's learning. [...]
In my own life, I have routinely acknowledged that the most insightful people I have met have all been autodidacts. In some instances, the breadth and penetration of their knowing totally eclipses any apparently corresponding academic mindset. The opposite side of this equation has also proven true: the professors and Cambridge graduates that I have conversed with, at length, have been some of the least discerning and most blinkered folk imaginable. [...]
The great privilege of the autodidact is that they have a totally free hand to do whatever they want. [...]
No concept is too far out, no subject is taboo, no creative tangents are considered a waste of time and belief systems are often gratifyingly upgraded or even totally jettisoned. [...]
It is incumbent on the independent scholar to hone a range of skills to endow their studies with the integrity, balance and penetration required to formulate empowering knowledge. Specifically – the ability to employ critical reason and discernment. To correlate and corroborate. To weigh any given idea against the consensus reality tunnel and one's own personal reality tunnel. To use intuition. To watch how a notion moves through our belief systems and intellectual apparatus. What remains? What changes?

Another key difference between autodidacticism and academia is the value placed on direct felt experience. [...] Anyone can read books, hunch over a laptop, visit a few temples, libraries and museums. But none of this constitutes real, juiced-up, direct encounter. The autodidact naturally places a far greater emphasis on the practical application of their knowledge than the academic. After all, they're playing very different games. [...]
Ascertaining the truth of a thing is always a strange and slippery business. [...] We can overlay a thing against our inner knowing and feel the essential veracity of it, judge its usefulness as a positive tool for perceiving and articulating our own reality tunnel. To call something 'true' in this way, is simply a piece of functional shorthand.

So what happens when the trueness of a thing diminishes? When it became clear that many of Carlos Castaneda's accounts of his sorcerer's apprenticeship with Don Juan Matus were factually inaccurate and even total fabrications – it changed the nature of his work for many people. Believers were disheartened. Skeptics were delighted. When I first read his works, it was very pre-Internet, and I had no idea of any of this. I read the classic six books and thoroughly enjoyed them. They spoke deeply to me. I have re-read them many times over the years. To this day, what is remarkable about them is how full of real gnosis they are.
Despite the lo-fi anthropological value, I nevertheless find them to be truer than most other texts I've ever read. Just how the hell Castaneda came across such fabulous wisdom is still a mystery. Perhaps it was all an intentional double-bluff from the beginning, orchestrated to protect the real source of his teaching? Who knows. I'm just glad he put pen to paper, and decided to share it.

[...] The further I walk down my own path, the wider I have to set the boundaries for what is real. It works both ways. What was fantasy, becomes actual. What was solid reality, becomes incongruous fakery.
'9/11' being a textbook example. Most people don't want to seriously study the events of '9/11', because in the back of their minds, they can feel the latent domino effect of collapsing belief systems. The real story of '9/11' is so off the map, that even the solemn ramifications of prior-knowledge and high-level treachery, pale compared to the issues of wider reality manipulation. Too weird.
Certainly, as we become more conscious, we become less susceptible to illusion. Garbage constructs begin to fade and eventually dissolve altogether, with very little 'mechanical' effort from us. Even more significantly, with heightened awareness and a cleaner mental platform, we are able to channel greater resolutions of energy.
We can go deeper with our knowing. Deeper into ourselves. Deeper into the universe.

It's intriguing to watch how a thing can move from one reality filter to another with such fluidity – contravening the human boundaries of truth, belief and existence as if they didn't exist at all. As I stated in an essay from May 2009, diverting all ones energies into the question of whether a given phenomenon is authentic or fake, may be missing the point. Many of the dozens of phenomenological koans that are routinely investigated in the alternative/esoteric field, go right to the heart of our complicity in the simulated reality construct we labor under. They exist to teach us not to judge whether something is real or not – but rather how it interacts with our own consciousness. As in quantum physics, consciousness itself changes the nature of the thing perceived. We really do have to take a long hard look at the operational value of consensus, received wisdom, peer acceptance and criteria for truth. This plays to the strengths of the autodidact, unshackled as they are from the chains of academic accord or the dreary guidelines of normality.

The real discipline of the independent thinker and the spiritual warrior, lies not in their scholarly capabilities and education, nor even in the anchoring of their knowledge into felt experience – it is in their willingness to transform their own consciousness. To change. This means letting go of things that we think we need, things we have become attached to, things we suspect might even be essential parts of us. More than anything else, it is this clinging to self that prevents us from moving forward. We sometimes forget that we are not the avatar."

I highly recommend nearly everything that Mr. Kramer lets loose in written or spoken form.
02/18'11 CCA via Facebook)
A very original but as well even-keeled article: Wow, I am not a bit less impressed than I hoped I would be!
Congratulations, these are excellent observations that come with yet carefully thought-through conclusions (as they can be appreciated by my humble level of apperception of what's really going on).
Thanks anyway for sharing such sophisticated statements. *still blown away*

February 5, 2011

Neil Kramer


lopo)
02/07'11 The news is horseshit
02/11'11 A dream-worshipping Druidic society

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Guerrilla Psychonautics playlist
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08/19'10 Radio interview on red ice) Owning the Dystopian Daydream

pt 1 (or playlist) Nobody should be necessarily trying to wake anyone up

@ 4 min) And what's most disturbing about it is the () acceptance of the society that completely goes along with this apparatus that, you know, ceaselessly lays itself down upon the people.
So most of the time, if you go to somebody in where I derive from, so to speak, England, and say, what do you think of the Fascist state apparatus that is gradually been, you know, reaching its tentacles into our everyday lifes, most people just look at you as if you come from another planet and they don't really understand what you're saying. And even if you use less provocative language and say, don't you think that the government has overstepped the mark in terms of its reach into one's personal life and its desire to shape everything that we do and all the things that we can't do, people don't really see that very often.
And I'm aware that these are big, sweeping generalizations I'm making and, of course, for your listeners and for people who research and study these kinds of topics it's not quite the case 'cause people are obviously more informed. I'm talking about Joe Public, the normal guy in the street.

As long as the system consistently frames what it is to be a human being, which is always focussing the individual on what they have, then the individual will always concede to the principles that the system puts upon them.
("Bruce6000" 11/03'10 That's a good indication that people are just soaking up Government Language, abstract language. Ephemeral language comes and goes but it's supposed to be describing something that is real, something that is tangible. And what is real and tangible about what happens with the government is that there's always a gun in the room. There's always somebody pointing a gun at someone, that is draped over with language, and patriotism, and propaganda, and all other kinds of government nonsense to get you to accept it as a pragmatic reality. You can't win against abstract, nonsensical sentimentality.
[i.e. no child left behind, IRS, social security, collateral damage, national debt, law enforcement, social reform, sobriety checkpoints ...] In other words, as long as the masses accept as a pragmatic reality the abstract language that comes down from government and through mainstream media, drugs will never be legalized.)
So as long as they continue to go to the supermarket, and put petrol into their cars, and watch television, and freely walk around the streets, and go in a restaurant, or go on holiday for two weeks to Portugal, or whatever, then they're quite happy. And if you measure one's personal life on that basis things are much the same as they were a generation ago. If, however, you start to look out personal freedoms and personal liberties from a more abstract and more zoomed-out level it's completely different now, completely different now.
So ten years ago, the landscape to me from where I perceive, from what I look out is unrecognizable from what there is in 2010, and it's certainly distinctly different from when I was a child or a 7, 8, 9, 10 years old kid.
Things are incredibly different. So, the social, the financial, and the morale of the people is different. Is definitely a more pressurized sense of consciousness being held in place. And again, people don't think in those terms.

It's difficult to describe that to those people and, to be quite honest with you, I rarely try it. It's not something I'm interested in doing. I consistently say this and nobody should be necessarily trying to wake anyone up. You just play your own game and you work on your own consciousness and we'll come to this later in the session, but in so doing that's the best way you can wake people up, and I'll explain that fully later. But even in casual encounters with people just down the street, or on a train, or in restaurants, or in the supermarket, or whatever, you got a sense of conversation of what people are focussing and what people are doing. And, of course, a lot of our friends and family have a distinct disdain for this kind of information because it makes them essentially feel uncomfortable and it's not something they really want to talk about. So one of the control system's little deceits, one of its little tricks is to keep people comfortable. And when you do that, as other researchers have point it out, you don't necessarily need this over level of control, it can be relatively covert. But the interesting sort of corollary for that is that when people are comfortable they're less likely to get upset about increasing numbers of speed cameras and surveillance cameras and all these different taxations and stuff.
They just see it as part and path of modern life and that's the way things are:
'Oh well, you know, let's just get on with it and make sure we're trying keep a few dollars or a few pounds aside to mitigate any problems that might happen.'

The main thing here is: people need to recognize – and again, we are talking about two distinct types of people: People who concentrate on self-awareness probably have already recognized this but people who do not, who only move within the social and the culture () that has been the default reality construct for them ("Countries create their own mythical reality construct about how they see themselves and how hey want other countries to see them."), they're not aware that they live in an artificial construct. They are not aware that the world they live in is derived from, you know, a fantasy essentially, is derived from a fake matrix that is not strictly representational of what we actually have before us. So you have to draw people's attention to analyze this machinery and to look at these complex systems of management, but as soon as you talk in those terms people think, 'yeah, whatever ... sure, yeah, I think, I'll just go on and get a pizza and a beer instead and watch it out later – that might be good – and go on watch "Battlestar Galactica" instead.' Which is, you know ... I like those three things as well and it's nothing wrong with that. By design, the construct kind of normalizes the perception of everything and everybody and it becomes, as I might say, the default gravitation for those individuals who decide not to generate reality from their own field of creation. ("This is constantly underpinned by mass media acquiescence to government propaganda. TV commercials are morbidly graphic in their insistence on human compliance with these anti-human diktats. [...] Why do so many fine British citizens put up with this fascist nonsense?") So there is a distinct disowning of reality: They say, 'well, reality is just this big space that we all get put into and reality is as reality is and there is nothing we can do about it.


pt 2 A despiritualizing effect on the human psyche

And the reason most people choose not to generate their realities is simply because they don't realize that they can. Now, all this information is not in the public scope of normal libraries, and television, and broadcasting and so on – it's not there. And the slivers of knowledge and wisdom that do filter into the public domain are just far too oblique and fragile for a mainstream-cultural saturated mind to take hold of, let alone understand. And that is the deceit. So I would say, the propagation of the constructs into a consensus belief system is a sort of primary edict of the control system. Is not an elected thing! And its parameters are instilled into us from birth. And we call this normality.
'It's normal. This is normal.' Taxation is normal. You know, erosion of civil liberties is normal. Having deseases is normal. Going to the hospital is normal. Watching television is normal. And that is the trick of the control system.
So we're trained in this completely homogenous apparatus, its procedures, its policies, its conventions and so on. And even for the intelligent people who look beyond the surface of this – nevertheless we imbibe its science, its religion, its legalities, its restrictions – everything is labelled, recorded and filed. And this is where we start it to connect to "Brazil": This conditioning, this construct, is echoed through all hopes, if you like, of the system.
It didn't just only come through the literature and the media but it comes from our parents, from our schools and universities, our workplaces, and even the mouths of our friends and family, as we said earlier, and certainly through the media, but it's everywhere. Everywhere we look this construct stares back to us.

And I would say the danger is, the prolonged exposure to this has what we could summarize as a despiritualizing effect on the human psyche. *)
It makes you just into a biological machine and it reduces you down to just nuts and bolts and, of course, that is an aspect of us.
And when we talk about metaphysical concepts, we always have to acknowledge that we are multidimensional in the sense that yes, perhaps we do have a metaphysical higher dimensional, spiritual aspect, but we also are an animal. We're also of flesh and blood and we sweat, and piss, and shit, and eat, and fuck, and all the crude, gross material level things that all () animals do – yeah, we do those things. But when you despiritualize somebody, the play, the creation, and the charme of existence begins to evaporate and people acknowledge at deep level in their hearts that they're living lifes they do not want to live. The families, relationships, jobs, finances become disfunctional, become untrue.
So wether somebody's life is completely off the rails or completely on track, life does not satisfy anymore and perhaps it never did. And the only respite from this sort of perpetual gloom really is this fleeting relief that is afforded by distraction and sensual pleasure, and we all know what those things look like. And yes, we all partake in those things from time to time: whether it's just a nice night hour, few beers, TV, movie ... all those things. They're all good things, but when they are offered up as the only respite, as the only reward for living live, something is going terribly wrong. And so even the most cynical hedonist who leads a life of total debauchery knows deep in his or her heart, the sort of squalor of this sensual infusion is a very very poor surrogate for what should be a very inspired acceleration of life.

I mean, to a lot of people it's very esoteric to say we generate or own reality.
And the Reductionists or the scientific mind will say: 'Well, what did you mean by that? Give me evidence for that, I want to need to know more about that.' And you can point people in certain directions for this.
And I spoke recently about this notion of what perhaps can be called the "Akashic Field" which is ... Akasha is like an ancient sort of Vedic idea, Sanskrit word really for this field of interpenetrating ether, which perhaps is what it was called in Victorian Occultist times. Which was obviously immediately upturned by classicists or the scientists: 'What are you talking about? There is nothing there.' But as times gone by, we recognize this thing is like the sort of vacuum field and we could say that this field is sort of like a plenum that is the basic platform for all wave forms to communicate through the universe and it is full, it is full of stuff.
And rather than perceiving space and reality as this huge black space with a load of things in it, it isn't quite like that. And we see that this field has this ability to generate, and conserve, and convey information. And as I have said recently that Heisenberg said that, you know, reality is build as a mathematical, not a material structure ... And so when we understand that you start to think okay, so we're not talking about a world of objects, we're talking about a world of information.
A world of potential.
A world that is encoded with kind of mathematics basically. [...]

*) "Marrying the Unconscious, as Adriana Mazzarella, author of "Alla Ricerca di Beatrice, a Jungian interpretation of Dante's Divine Comedy", told me during the English lessons she took from me while preparing for her seminars on the book in the US, puts the person in a position of having to deal with not just what to do, but the why of our having been put in the midst of all this strife on the planet. Marrying the Unconscious is not a choice, but a dreamt declaration of what the psyche in its autonomy is doing.
The redemption of the individual on a one-by-one basis sets the stage for the overcoming of this stage of humanity where the kind of strife that many here lament, but many here lament without an apparent grasp of why we were born into this. As Gurdjieff said, outer freedom, the freedom to be in the world doing as we would really wish, is premised on inner freedom, what we get as a result of his or others' spiritual exercises, e.g. self-remembering to the point of actually hearing the voice of conscience directly, yielding to that voice.
Most of what he taught as practice is remarkably similar to Jung's alchemy, and, of course, it had to be as alchemy represents the mixture of Egyptian alchemy with imagery and understanding of the Jewish Christians who remained outside the church, breaking with it in the 4th century in the dispute over where the chief church of Christendom should be with the pope, who wanted it to be in Rome, while they wanted it to be in Jerusalem.
Gurdjieff's teachings also represent that combination of the Jewish Christian mysticism with Pythagoreanism in Syria. All of this was taken back to the West by the Muslims who added the "Al-" to the -chemy of the study of the Egyptian chi, a word which had something to do with Matter, our Mother, the Earth and by Knight Templars who influenced Dante, according to Dr Mazzerella.
All of the great religions are highly flawed interpretations of a more universal system, which can be found in Jung and Gurdjieff."


It isn't the code itself, it is a representation of it. And what the control system does is a very simple thing, but it's very profound: It only gives you one browser to look through, and it says, this is the browser, this is the interpretation of reality that you will use. There is no other, this is it, we control that translation and everything that you see through our browser, through our matrix is it – that is it. That is the default construct.
What we need to do is recognize that the point of being here on this planet, the crucial point is to explore, is to discover, is to unfold, is to create. And anyone who doesn't see that has missed the point I would say. And whatever your religious system is, whatever your philosophy, whatever your science is, surely those are the human principles that define us. The browser therefore is our own creation.
We create, we should create our own browser. We should create our own translation devices, our own filters, to either remove them or add them, and decide how we interpret the code that is there. And so it's a very important thing for people to realize that they unfold their own reality. We're responsible for this reality that we see before us. So what occurs and translates for each of us is entirely dependened on what emanates from our own consciousness.


pt 3 That darkness, that emptiness that you see is you

And the most damaging thing that one can do in this world is not be aware of that, because when you're not shaping your reality you're basically living in someone else's. Someone else('s) is shaping it for you. So it's like the default setting is the control system reality.
They are bunking on the fact that – to a high degree – most people, for the entire duration of their lifes, never truely question the reality, the constructs. They don't feel this impulse to explore it, peep behind the curtain, to look at it. And sometimes when occasionally somebody does do that, it's such a cultural and psychic discomposure that any sort of inquiry is immediately dropped and never returned to again in any sort of meaningful way.
Culture, however colorfull, and rich, and beautiful it is, often dissuades people from doing that. So the fail-safe of the system is that it deters people from walking what I would prefer to as their ascendant path of evolution.
And this dissonance that they put in arises really when the construct is questioned by anyone who inquires after it. And initially what they see is, it's a mirror, and it mirrors back into them and it shows them their own darkness. This leads into other areas that I will detail a little later, but when you first examen the construct, that darkness, that shadow, that hole, that emptiness that you see is you. It is the mirror of you. So for people who dwell solely within the constructs, unacquainted with their own inner landscape of their own psyche and their own spirituality, they're really unprepared for any sort of () that may involve any degree of self-reevaluation. And this emptiness in their own psyche is simply too much to handle. So they retreat and they go back to the complete undisrupted terrain of the constructs, and that is what the construct relies on time and time and time again.

The follow up can be found here: 02/11'11 A dream-worshipping Druidic society