Stories

Stories are not always a fiction

From He-Man and the Masters of the Universe 

 There is more truth in myth than in history.

Robert Anton Wilson on Cabala - Tasting the Forbidden Fruit of the Tree of Life

There's a tale they tell at Military Intelligence in London, when the candles gutter low and the fog curls about the windows. It happened in 1914 (they say), when England was losing the first world war and it seemed only a miracle could save her. There was this writer bloke (they say), name of Arthur Machen, never popular or well known, a bloody Welshman in fact and a mystic to boot. Well (they say), this Welshman, this Machen, took it into his head to write a story about the kind of miracle England needed, so he imagined St. George himself leading a group of medieval archers to aid the English troops at Mons. And after the story was published in a magazine, some enterprising newspapers picked it up and reprinted it as fact. And (they say) the whole damned country was gullible enough to believe it. It did as much for national morale as the real miracle would have.

What is even weirder is the sequel -and the chaps at Military Intelligence only discuss this when the candles gutter quite low and the fog is very thick, of course. Soldiers at the front, in Mons, began claiming that they had actually seen the phantom archers created out of Machen's imagination. They insisted on it. Some of them were still insisting on it 40 years later. They said they had won the battle because of this supernatural assistance.

Fair gives you a turn, doesn't it?

Stranger still: Machen, the man with the contagious imagination, was a member of a secret society in London. This was known as the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, and it claimed to know the long-hidden secrets of Cabalistic magic.

There were several other members of the Golden Dawn who made a bit of a name. Florence Farr, one of the great actresses of the period, was a member, and it was she who gave Bernard Shaw the ideas about life-energy and longevity dramatized in Back to Methuselah; those ideas are currently influencing life-extension research. Algernon Blackwood and Bram Stoker (Dracula's creator) were members; so was the coroner of London; so was an electrical engineer named Alan Bennett who later, as Ananda Maitreya, played a key role in introducing Buddhist ideas to the West.

The egregious Aleister Crowley; who claimed to have come to earth to destroy Christianity; was a member for a while, and I know a good World War I story about him, too. It was Crowley's habit to give his pupils a word to meditate on every year. In 1918, Crowley gave them a number instead of a word: 11. All year his pupils meditated on 11 for at least a half hour every day. . . And the war ended on the 11th minute of the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month.

Did you feel another queer flash then?

The most famous Golden Dawn alumnus, however, was the great Irish poet, William Butler Yeats. In 1894 Yeats predicted that "the right pupils will be drawn to (the Golden Dawn) by dreams and visions and strange accidents . . .”

Cabala, the working philosophy behind the Golden Dawn, is the science of "strange accidents” – which are known as "mere coincidences" to the rationalist or "synchronicities" to Jungian psychologists.

Cabala (also spelled Qabala or Kaballah) was either taught by God to Adam in the Garden of Eden, according to its own tradition' or was invented by a group of rabbis c. A.D. 200 as a means of transmitting the esoteric inner teachings of Judaism after the fall of Jerusalem and the Dispersion. Among the prominent medieval and Renaissance philosophers who were Cabalists one can mention Raymond Lull, Cornelius Agrippa, Giordano Bruno, Dr. John Dee, Pico della Mirandola and Isaac Newton. Cabala became unfashionable in the 18th century and did not begin to make a comeback until the Brain Explosion of the 1960s -the drug culture, the consciousness movement, the importation of Oriental mind-sciences, the popularity of Jung and Leary and Castaneda.

One way to get into the Cabalistic head space is to reflect long and hard on the singular fact that we could not live-could not breathe, in fact-without the trees busily pumping oxygen into the air. Yet the trees are not "thinking" about producing life-support for us. To the rationalist, it seems that our need for oxygen has no real connection with the trees' production of that element; sheer chance (or, the more vehement rationalists will anthropomorphically say, "blind chance") happens to have produced trees, through natural selection, over many aeons. The fact that we exist is, to this philosophy, a total accident, a very strange coincidence.

And, to the same rationalist, Arthur Machen's imagination has no real connection with what was happening on the battlefield at Mons. The magical link between Machen's imagination and the "collective hallucination" of the soldiers is just coincidence – like the magical link between us and the trees.

To the Cabalist, the rationalist sounds like a man found in a closet by a jealous husband, who hopefully explains, "Just by coincidence, while you were away on business I happened to wander into this closet without my clothes on. . .”

To the Cabalist, the whole universe is a network of meaningful connections. The seemingly coincidental is as full of meaning as anything else. To begin thinking like a Cabalist you must regard everything as being just as important as everything else. All that seems "accidental," "meaningless," "chaotic," "weird," "nonsensical;' et cetera is as significant as what seems lawful, orderly and comprehensible.

An elementary Cabalistic training technique is to try every day to "regard every incident and event as a direct communication between God and your sou1." Even the license plates on passing cars are such communications-or can be considered as such-by the devout Cabalist.
Some will be thinking of Freud at this point; and indeed Nathan Fodor points out in Freud, Jung and the Occult that Freud was heavily influenced by a friend who was a Cabalist. The "dreams, visions and strange accidents" that Yeats thought would bring people into the ambience of the Golden Dawn are all Freudian "unconscious material.”

A more modern metaphor is to be found in current neurology; which points out that the brain is divided into two hemispheres. The left hemisphere is where we do most of our conscious thinking, and it is linear; it breaks things down into sequences of A-causes-B, B-causes-C, and so forth. The right hemisphere, on the contrary; thinks in gestalt-meaningful wholes, comprehensive systems.

Cabala, like dope, is a deliberate attempt to overthrow the linear left brain and allow the contents of the holistic right brain to flood the field of consciousness. When you are walking down the street and every license plate seems part of one continuous message-one endless narrative-you are thinking like a very advanced theoretical Cabalist. (Or else you're stoned out of your gourd.) Practical Cabala (or Cabalistic magic) is the art of utilizing such holistic perception to create effects that will seem like "strange accidents" to the non-Cabalist.
A legendary example concerns an incident when the king of Poland was being urged by his advisers to authorize a pogrom against the Jews. One old Hasidic rabbi and the Hasidic rabbis spend most of their time studying Cabala-sat down, on hearing of this, and pretended to be writing something; but he did not write. Instead, he deliberately knocked his bottle over three times. His students, who saw this, thought the old man was getting a bit funny in the head. Then, a few days later; came news from the capital: The king had tried to sign the order for the pogrom three times, and each time he had-by "strange accident knocked over his ink bottle. "I can't sign this," the king finally exclaimed. "God is against it!"

Every Oriental culture has some equivalent to Cabala – some neuroscience of meditations, visualizations and yogic contortions calculated to shift consciousness, or part of consciousness, from the usually overactive left hemisphere to the usually underactive right hemisphere. Cabala differs from all these Oriental disciplines in being as systematic as any natural science-although far weirder:

The system of Cabala is contained in a kind of ontological periodic table of elements (see illustration). The purpose of this diagram has been nicely defined by the eminent contemporary Cabalist (and Jungian psychologist) Dr. Israel Regardie, who describes it as "a mnemonic system of psychology. . . to train the Will and Imagination."

The tree, as you can see, is made up of ten circles, called lights, and 22 paths connecting the lights. Each light represents a separate level of consciousness, and hence a separate level of "reality:' That is, to the Cabalist, each perceived reality is a function of the level of consciousness which perceives it, and how much reality you can absorb depends on how rich your consciousness is.
The paths, which are more technical than the lights, are techniques for getting from one light (one level of awareness) to another: '
The aim of the Cabala is to always know which "light" you are in, which is the level of consciousness that is creating what you are perceiving; and then to know the paths, or tricks, to get from one light (perceived reality) to another.

Dion Fortune, a Cabalist who also practiced psychoanalysis under her birth name, Violet Wirth, sums it all up by saying Cabala is "the art of causing change in consciousness by act of will"

The Tree of Life may be regarded as a map of those parts of consciousness which (a) are active in everybody-the lower parts of the tree; and (b) those which are only active in various orders of adepts-the higher parts of the tree.

The pragmatic theory of Cabala is that each action creates a new "universe," each experiment creates a new experimenter, each dance creates a new dancer. We are growing and evolving all the time, without noticing it usually; but a_ certain crucial points we can make a mental quantum jump to a level of awareness that puts us in a new reality we have never noticed before. Each of the lights on the Tree of Life represents such a quantum jump.

Concretely, we all start out in Malkuth, at the bottom of the tree, which represents the lowest level of awareness. This is what Freud called the oral stage: We simply drift and wait to be fed. Alcoholics, opiate addicts and most of the people on welfare for "psychological" reasons represent this state in its pure form, but we all contain it and relapse into it under sufficient stress. "I can't cope; somebody come help me:' Hear the infant's shrill cry. "Maaa-Maaa!" and you know what Malkuth is all about.

Above this is Yesod, the area of strong ego-awareness and what Gurdjieff called conscious suffering. This is where you struggle to be a real mensch, to be honorable, responsible, and self-sufficient. If you never get beyond this, you become what doctors called Type A and are a good bet for an early heart attack.

There are two ways to transcend Yesod's struggles. One takes you to Hod, which can be called the tactic _of the rationalist (Dr: Carl Sagan will serve as a model for this), and the other to Netzach, which is the strategy of the ordinary religionist (Jerry Falwell, say).

According to Cabala, both the rationalist and the vulgar religionist are unbalanced; in modern neurological language, the rationalist leans too much on the left brain and the religionist too much on the right brain. The synthesis, or balancing, brings you to the Middle Pillar and is represented by the light called Tiphareth-which charmingly enough means "beauty" in English.

Looking at the tree, you can see that the rationalist has a different path to Tiphareth from that of the religionist. The rationalist must go the path of nun ("fish") and the religionist the path of ayin ("eye"). Any book on Cabala will tell you what nun and ayin imply in terms of the psychological transformation involved. Fortunately, the tarot cards were either created or revised by a Cabalist and the meanings of nun and ayin are vividly conveyed to the unconscious by the two cards called, respectively. Death and the Devil. Anybody with even a rudimentary knowledge of psychology can grasp part of what is meant here-the rationalist must "make friends with" Death and the religionist with the Devil. This is what Jung means when he says each man must face his own shadow.

(Every path on the tree has a tarot card illustrating it, and the quickest way to make the tree clear to your unconscious is to layout the cards representing the paths' between each light. The next step is to redesign the cards in terms of your own understanding. Some Cabalists redesign the tarot every two or three years, as their understanding grows.)

Tiphareth, the balanced center between and above both rationalism and religion, means beauty, as we said above. It is the first light that does not appear in normal, statistically average consciousness, and is identified with everything we mean by rebirth or awakening. It is dhyana in the Hindu system, "Buddha-mind" in Buddhism, the "New Adam" in St. Paul's epistles, Cosmic Christ Consciousness to Christian Cabalists. It represents a total reorganization of the psyche for a higher level of functioning than most humans ever attain. When Dr. Timothy Leary says gnomically that "the nervous system sees no color, feels no pain;' he means that the nervous system on this level sees no color; feels no pain. You are floating, and this is the first light on the tree that really feels like a light. Acidheads will know.
Above Tiphareth are two more unbalanced lights called Geburah and Chesed. Roughly; Geburah is the stage of Nietzsche's superman: he who is much more conscious than ordinary people and knows it. In George Lucas's symbolism, Geburah means "being seduced by the dark side of the Force:' It needs to be balanced by Chesed, which is humility in the deepest, more ego-destroying sense. In Castaneda's lingo, Geburah is "taking responsibility" and Chesed is doing so while always remembering that "you are no more important than the coyote.”

Geburah says "I am God"; Chesed says, “And so is everybody else – and everything else!"

There are three more lights on the tree. These are known as the supernals and are much further from ordinary human consciousness than Tiphareth, Geburah or Chesed. Many Cabalists say that you cannot reach the supernals without the direct help of the Almighty. Even with such divine aid, reaching the supernals is known as "crossing the abyss" and is regarded as fraught with peril.

The first two supernals are Chokmah and Binah. You will note on the diagram that they are both unbalanced – off the Middle Pillar. Basically; Chokmah is direct contact with the masculine aspect of "God" and corresponds to whatever you associate with Jehovah, Jupiter; Brahma, Zeus, et cetera. Binah is direct contact with the female side of divinity and corresponds to Venus, Ishtar, Kali or the White Goddess that Robert Graves is always writing about. Cabala says that each of these Close Encounters has to be "balanced." That is, you have to get beyond both Big Daddy and Big Mommy to arrive at the ultimate light, Kether, the balanced center of all consciousness, which is beyond gender, beyond space, beyond time, beyond words and beyond all categories. In short, Kether is exactly what all the Oriental mystics are seeking: pure consciousness without a blemish of emotion, idea or image, and therefore infinite and formless.

Cabala is very complicated and very; very intricate; the above sketch is no more than a hint of what the Tree of Life contains, on about the level of a discussion of chemistry that tells you there are eight families of elements but does not go on to list the elements in each family. To discuss Cabala fully requires many books; and indeed there is one good-sized book, Liber 777, by Aleister Crowley; which consists only of listing the elements in each light and path of the tree, and Liber 777 consists of 155 pages with four columns on each page.
The purpose of such lists is to design rituals, and the purpose of rituals is to program your own experience as you navigate from one light to another. As Tim Leary once said, "Ritual is to the inner sciences what experiment is to the outer sciences.” Cabalists agree.
For instance, suppose you have had a very powerful experience of the Punishing Father aspect of God, such as John Calvin once had. Within the orthodox Judeo-Christian tradition, you might take this literally and proceed, as Calvin did, to establish a new religion. As a Cabalist, you will recognize it as a Chokmah experience and know that it needs to be balanced by a Binah experience.

You then look on the Tree of Life for a path from Chokmah to Binah. That turns out to be daleth ("door"), which corresponds to the Empress card in the tarot. If you look at the Empress you will immediately note that she happens to be a pregnant woman sitting in a field surrounded by vegetation. That should tell your unconscious what the path of daleth means. (By a "strange accident" or "mere coincidence" the Empress card, in most tarot decks, contains the women's-liberation symbol and always has, long before there was a feminist movement. That should help jar your consciousness. )

If the Empress card doesn't tell you enough, you look up daleth in any Cabalistic textbook, such as Crowley's 777. You will find that daleth is "in correspondence with" such things as the planet Venus, the color emerald green, the swan, the rose, sandalwood incense, the heptagram (seven-sided polygon), et cetera, and is most powerful on Friday. Thus, to get from Chokmah to Binah, you construct a ritual-a dramatized rnindchange operation-to be performed within a heptagram, on Friday evening as Venus is rising, using emerald green decorations, roses, swan feathers and sandalwood incense. If you follow all these correspondences, and know how to write rituals, and have had enough experiences with Cabala to have developed a powerful will and imagination, you should achieve Binah, the vision of the All-Loving Mother.

Similarly, there are favorable days, and perfumes, and geometric figures, and other accessories, for every type of brain change operation. Sunday is best for Tiphareth (Christ consciousness), Monday for Yesod (building a stronger ego), Tuesday for Geburah (accumulating powers), Wednesday for Hod (wisdom). Thursday for Netzsch (moral strength), Friday for Binah and Saturday for Chokmah.

This is only the skeleton of Cabala, however. Real Cabalistic practice consists of so familiarizing yourself with all the correspondences on the Tree of Life that everything you experience is filed and indexed by your brain as a Cabalistic "message.” Thus, if you walk out the door and see a palm tree, you immediately (by self-conditioning with Cabala) think of Venus and Hermes – because door is daleth is Venus, and palm is beth is Hermes. If you see a license plate with 333 on it, you remember that that is the number of egotism and deception, and you must ask what egotism and deception remains in yourself. In short, nothing is trivial; nothing is insignificant; nothing is meaningless. The whole universe, as Crowley says, becomes a continuous ritual of initiation.

A Zen Master was once asked, "What is Zen?" “Attention,” he replied. "Is that all?" asked the inquirer. "Attention,” the Zen Master repeated. "Won't you say anything else?" persisted the questioner. “Attention,” said the Master, one more time.

Cabala creates attention by using the Tree of Life to "key" every possible impression to one of the lights or paths and hence to a stage in the evolution of consciousness. The world becomes – as it was to Plato and Mary Baker Eddy and Sir Humphrey Davy when he tried nitrous oxide – nothing but ideas.

Theoretical Cabala is much concerned with words and numbers, and indeed insists that every word is a number. This is literally true in Hebrew, because all Hebrew letters are numbers, and the number of a word is the number obtained by adding its separate letters together. Cabala claims that any words having the same number are in some sense identical or "in correspondence with" each other.
For instance, achad (I am writing the Hebrew as if it were English, for simplicity's sake) has the value of 13. So does ahebah. What does this mean? Well, achad translates as "unity" and ahebah as "love,” so by the mathematical theorem that things equal to the same thing are equal to each other; the Cabalist calculates that love (ahebeh) equals 13 and unity (achad) equals 13 and therefore love equals unity. And, of course, when you love somebody you are in union with them: You are happy when they are happy; you suffer when they suffer.
Better still, it works backwards, too, according to some Cabalists: 31 is 13 backwards and therefore 31 is mystically the same as 13. And AI, the oldest name of God in Hebrew; has the value 31. Therefore, God equals love equals unity.

Which is all very nice and cheerful, and it's pleasant to have our first lesson in theorhetical Cabala coming up with such pleasant information.

Unfortunately; la (nothing) also equals 31. Is God therefore nothing? Or is it unity that is nothing? or love?

The theoretical Cabalist is not abashed. God is nothing, he says firmly – no-thing. And in this he is in agreement with the Buddhists and Hindus and, indeed, the most advanced mystics of all traditions. It only sounds queer to those primitives down at the bottom of the Tree of Life in Hod (rationalism) or Netzach (conventional religion); if you persist in Cabala long enough, the divine no-thing will make perfect sense to you.

Unfortunately; before you arrive at Kether – "the Head without a Head," the divine nothing – you will be sure to encounter even worse shocks in theoretical Cabala. Thus, neschek, the serpent in Genesis, the devil himself, has the value 358. You don't have to look far to find another Hebrew word with the value 358. It jumps up at you, as soon as you start studying Cabala. It is messiah.

In what sense is the devil the messiah? Some Cabalists have gone quite batty working on that one.

The charm of Cabala is that the universe adjusts-or in your excited and overstimulated state, appears to adjust-in ways that heighten such perplexities. When I first discovered the 358-equals-devil-equals-messiah paradox, I had to go to Los Angeles on business. Arriving at my hotel I found I had been given room 358. That's the sort of "strange accident" that Yeats was talking about, as one of the portals to Cabala. . .

For several years English biologist Lyall Watson has been collecting the products of Jung's "collective unconsciousness" – dreams, hypnotic states, mediumistic phenomena, automatic writing, et cetera. In his book, Lifetide, Watson offers a tentative summary of the data: "... there is a sameness in the tone, the word structure, the feeling, and the delivery of almost all the material. It has a dreamlike quality; and my feeling is that the vast majority of all the evidence I am looking at is a series produced by one prodigious dreamer" (italics added).

William Butler Yeats, trying to justify his interest in Cabalastic magic to rationalistic friends, came up with the same metaphor: "The borders of our minds are ever shifting, and many minds can flow into one another; as it were, and create or reveal a single mind. . . our memories are part of one great memory; the memory of Nature herself.”

This "one great dreamer" or "one great memory" can be accessed by Cabalistic practices, or by Zen meditation, or by LSD, or by a dozen other gimmicks. It has the quality of oneness in that it is the same no matter who accesses it or when-whether they are in India 500 B.G or Florence A.D. 1300 or in New York City today. It seems to be "timeless" or unconnected to our conscious notions of sequential time, as even so materialistic an observer as Freud noticed. One of the benefits of the psychological investigations of our times-from Freud and Jung to the LSD research of the '60s and the human-potential movement-has been to make most of us aware again, for the first time since the 17th century; that this level of the psyche exists in all of us and cannot safely be repressed or ignored.

The Cabalist, scorned by the 19th century as a crank or a charlatan, seems to be having the last laugh after all. There may be only one person in 10,000 – or in 100,000 – who seriously studies Cabala, but the avant-garde third of the population understands Cabalistic logic very well. If you show them the Tree of Life, and explain it, they might say that it is an alternative map of the charkas – if they are into Oriental mind-science; or an anatomy of the collective unconscious- if they're into Jung; or the circuits of the nervous system-if Tim Leary is their bag; but one way or another they will recognize it. It looked like gibberish to Yeats's contemporaries.

Military Intelligence never could figure out how the "angelic archers" escaped from Arthur Machen's imagination to the perceptions of the soldiers at Mons. But the readers of this magazine understand.

Don't you? 

from High Times, July 1981 - via the official rawilson.com

Subliminal-Synchro-Sphere: 666 - The 'Solstice Sun King' and the 'Moon Baby'

Got a few hours to spare to get your mind blown?
666 - The 'Solstice Sun King' and the 'Moon Baby' 
from the Subliminal-Synchro-Sphere
Horselover Phat, I salute you!

Just a few teasers: 
 In December 1948, Parsons took “the Oath of the Abyss” in a ritual conducted before W.T. Smith. This is tantamount to willingly suffering the “long, dark night of the soul” that is common in artistic and psychological literature. While most occult initiations can be “given,” i.e., passed on through ritual and the laying on of hands or some other appropriate ceremony, the initiatory levels of the “Abyss” and beyond cannot be imposed by human intervention, according to the tradition of the western mystery schools. In this case, all of creation is seen as the Qabalists’ “Tree of Life,” a diagram containing ten spheres connected by twenty-two paths. The top three spheres and the bottom seven spheres are “separated” in this instance by the Abyss, a place where one’s ego is destroyed… or not. If not, then one becomes a “black brother,” or “magician of the left-hand path,” that is, an evil magician and source of pestilence. If one has successfully passed the Abyss, however, then one attains greater spiritual glory.
Peter Levenda - Sinister Forces Book One:The Nine  

Tim the (bolt throwing) Enchanter (druid) led them to the cave of the rabbit and he is able to cast 'bolts' (drui lanach/druids lightning)


The ancient Druids, masters of magic and hidden sorcery, defined two kinds of lightning, the one Dis-Lanach, the Lightning God, the other Drui-Lanach, the Lightning of the Druids, and hence their tremendous power. Volcanoes in eruption led to the discovery of this secret, for in eruption they throw out masses of rock and stones with tremendous velocity and exemplify terrific force. In these emissions occur sulphur, saltpetre and carbon, the ingredients of gunpowder.
The Riddle of Prehistoric Britain - Comyns Beaumont

The Tower in Holy Grail seems a strong and repeated thematic!

  A dejected Arthur leaves the castle tower...where he expected to find the grail
The French soldiers berating him and throwing things from the top!

 To others, the Tower represents the paradigms constructed by the ego, the sum total of all schema that the mind constructs to understand the universe. The Tower is struck by lightning when reality does not conform to expectation (see pic above and below). The querent may be holding on to false ideas or pretenses; a new approach to thinking about the problem is needed. The querent is advised to think outside the box. The querent is warned that truth may not oblige schema. It may be time for the querent to re-examine belief structures, ideologies, and paradigms they hold to. The card may also point toward seeking education or higher knowledge.

Life of Brian

 A WTF interlude...Brian (Chapman) falls from the tower and an alien spacecraft takes him on a trip and crash lands next to the same tower.

  To others, the Tower represents the paradigms constructed by the ego, the sum total of all schema that the mind constructs to understand the universe. 

The Tower is struck by lightning when reality does not conform to expectation

 ...moments before Brian is whisked away into space

 The querent may be holding on to false ideas or pretenses; a new approach to thinking about the problem is needed. The querent is advised to think outside the box. The querent is warned that truth may not oblige schema. It may be time for the querent to re-examine belief structures, ideologies, and paradigms they hold to. The card may also point toward seeking education or higher knowledge.
(the above text...seemingly fitting this scene like a glove & perhaps, aimed just as much at us, as it is Brian)

Green 3rd eye aliens

A variety of explanations for the images on the card (The Tower) have been attempted. For example, it may be a reference to the biblical story of the Tower of Babel, (Babylon) where God destroys a tower built by mankind to reach Heaven.

 The Tarot of Marseilles depicts a burning tower being struck by lightning or fire from the sky, its top section dislodged and crumbling.

Cleese's other 'turreted castle tower'...lol.

  "Well, may I ask what you expected to see out of a Torquay hotel bedroom window? Sydney Opera House, perhaps? The Hanging Gardens of Babylon?"


The Holy Grail? 

Orion (Osiris/Arthur) as an overflowing grail chalice cup...the tarot has colum/dove near, like the sky map (see below)!  The tarot 'ace of cups' also evokes the OTO insignia badge!
Ace of Cups (W) W=23...Psalm (Palm/hand, see ace pic) 23...'Lord is my shepherd' & 'my cup runneth over' etc. 

 Ace of Cups...Palm 23

The Lord (Orion/Osiris) is my Shepherd (Anu/Orion/Osiris)...one and the same!

Puppets...being mastered by both ends of the spectrum...the cross and the devil!

Catalyst

This will probably only make slight symbolic sense if you watched the first vid here, maybe.

from the first episode of Fate/Zero

If I'm going to have a past, I prefer it to be Multiple Choice

From Alan Moore's Killing Joke

Jacques Vallée's Messengers of Deception - Humans posing as Aliens?

This book is amazing, it's like it was written last week. Unbelievable that this was written in 1979, that we still know as little as back then, and that the bullshit cults and belief systems keep springing up. (Here's looking at you Steven Greer & co.)

update: check this post and see this through another reality tunnel, see this phenomenon as ourselves out of time peering through to us in time here and just confusing the hell out of us.

Read it here

Excerpt: Foreword to the 2008 Edition: 

Nearly 30 years have elapsed since Messengers of Deception first appeared in the US. Since then, the controversial views it expressed have been vindicated and thrown into sharp focus by shocking events that were reported worldwide. In particular, the stark warning I issued in connection with the HIM cult ("It only costs your life!") appears as unfortunately prophetic in light of the March 97 collective suicide of Heaven's Gate, as the group became known. The mass killings of the adepts of the order of the Solar Temple in Canada, France and Switzerland in 94 illustrated the dangerous form of mind control and the simulation of extraterrestrial contact I first described here in connection with the "Adventures of a Grand Master." The cattle mutilations phenomenon remains unsolved. As for the Raélians, the cult started by Vorilhon whose early lectures in San Francisco are recalled in this book, it has flourished internationally and burst into prominence in recent years with claims of human cloning.

Not only have these issues continued to simmer under the surface while UFO believers basked in their benign expectation of aliens from the stars, but a veritable mass conversion has taken place among the public and the media elite. The belief in extraterrestrial visitation is practically taken for granted among wide section of the population, and especially among the young. While the hypothesis of alien contact is an exciting one, justified on the basis of continuing observerations of unidentified flying objects, it carries the potential for exploitation and manipulation by deceptive groups with their own hidden agenda.

I believe that UFOs are physically real. They represent a fantastic technology controlled by an unknown form of consciousness. But I also believe that it would be dangerous to jump to premature conclusions about their origin and nature, because the phenomenon serves as the vehicle for images that can be manipulated to promote belief systems tending to the long-term transformation of human society.

"Give me the superstitions of a nation, and I care not who makes their laws, or writes their songs!" Mark Twain

From later in the book:
 

If we are not dealing with space visitors at all, but with powerful imagery projected in order to alter individual belief systems, then the dream-like, hallucinatory nature of the experience begins to make more sense. We could even imagine that the object is a form of natural energy; that close exposure to it triggered the vision; and that the most important question to ask is, what effect do such visions have on the society around the witnesses? Let us not forget that the society in question is badly in need of "space brothers," and has lost much of its faith in the scientific genius of mankind.

Such is the social matrix within we must consider an experience like Helen's abduction. Certain factors combine to suggest we should believe that she was interviewed by space creatures, but all the facts taken together suggest a different, more subtle interpretation: what she thought was a "contact" may have been a symbolic manifestation or a trap. Her "spacemen" may have been messengers of deception.

Witnesses to close encounters with UFOs give reports similar to this one in case after case. The phenomenon involves more than a simple craft using an advanced form of propulsion; it involves a technology that can distort the observer's sense of reality.

Psychic Technologies

We already have human technologies that are both physical and "psychic" (in the sense of influencing the consciousness of an observer). An example of such a technology is given, very simply, by your television set. There is no question that it is physical. You can talk about its size, volume, weight and temperature. But if you turn it on, it will begin to control your awareness in peculiar ways. You will observe scenes that, as far as you can tell, could be either "real" or faked. You may be a witness to an actual crime committed right now, or to something that happened years ago. You may also believe a scene to be absolutely real, when in fact it is actually staged in a studio in Hollywood. Based on what you can observe, you have no way to know the truth, even if you have a nobel prize in physics. Besides, your television set influences you in other ways. It determines what toothpaste you use, how you shave, who you go to bed with, and how you will vote in the next election.

In some respects I think UFOs are similar to television sets. They are physical objects, the products of a technology, bu tthey are also something else: the tools of a major cultural change. I think UFOs are perpetrating a deception by presenting their so-called "occupants" as being messengers from outer space, and I suspect there are groups of people on Earth exploiting this deception. I have written this book because I am concerned with the changes which would be triggered by the belief in an outer-space invasion, real or simulated. In the words of a Brookings Institute report on the cultural impact of extraterrestrial life:

The consequences of such a discovery are presently unpredictable because of our limited knowledge of behavior under even an approximation of such dramatic circumstances. The fundamentalist (and anti-science) sects are growing apace... For them, the discovery of other life would be electrifying.

update: Check out CaM's excellent remarks in the comments section.

18 DAYS by Grant Morrison

The video series is just snippits to warm you up for the graphic novel.

18 Days, is a re-imagining of the great eastern myth, Mahabharata and follows the course of the climactic war that concludes the age of the gods and begins the age of man. It is the prototype for every war ever fought. The scale is epic, wherein the biggest armies ever conceived of face one another across the ultimate battlefield to decide the fate of the future. Featuring the complete illustrated 144-page script book from Liquid Comics and will allow readers a first glimpse into the mythic animated series being developed by Morrison. The book reveals the inner workings of the acclaimed writer's process and features the original animation scripts, story bibles, character descriptions and commentaries. Grant's groundbreaking story is matched perfectly with original illustrations created by acclaimed artist, Mukesh Singh (Devi, Gamekeeper, Shadow Hunter).

"18 Days is a labor of love made all the more exciting by having a collaborator as original and groundbreaking as Mukesh. His techno-Vedic superheroes and spectacular scenes of cosmic warfare bring a dazzling new and contemporary dimension to one of the world's greatest stories."
- Author, Grant Morrison

"Grant Morrison is a post-modern myth-maker."
- Deepak Chopra, from the introduction

"Readers are immediately cast into the inner workings of Morrison's mind and there is little time to take pause and reorient oneself. Yet, this feeling of being thrown deep into the creative waters is not disorienting as Morrison's skills as a craftsman and storyteller are vividly apparent from the inception. Adding to this comfort in unfamiliar territory are the stellar visualizations and designs by Mukesh Singh."
- Broken Frontier

 

via Alienpunk

Jacques Vallée - Messengers of Deception - hypnotic regression

M a g i - L a b y r i n t h o f M a g i c

Enjoy this post before the (C)opyright dogs come!

SPOILER ALERT
this is from episode 25

Alma Toran was once a world ruled by a powerful magician, Solomon. He was a well loved and respected king, and three Magis supported him. At some point, after betrayal of one of Magis, a war exploded where the Magicians and Goi fought each other. They were attacked by the Medium, its Black Djinn and Al-Thamen. In order to fight against them, Solomon's 72 Household Members became Djinn and attacked one after another. In the end, a lot of the people of Alma Toran were left dead. Solomon created a new world, the actual world where the humans live, and the survivors of Alma Toran were settled there.