In My Father’s House Are Many Mansions

Just watched a great video Room 237, about Stanley Kubrick, as a number of film makers try to dissect what The Shining was really about. Each one of them noticed different elements that Kubrick has seeded and salted into the multi-layered movie.

If you don’t recall, on the surface it’s about Jack Nicholson bringing his family to the luxury Colorado mountain lodge called the Overlook Hotel, where he becomes possessed by the memories and subconscious of the “hotel” as it were, as the madness rises up and overtakes him. If you thought this was an adaptation of the Stephan King “horror” story, you would miss the point. It is about the layers of horror “civilization” is built upon, and thus, if you dig deep enough into the Collective Psyche which is the soil in which we grow, we have to face that history is one long interleaving cycle of growth and bloody compost. It is raw energy some Evolutionary Gardener tends, in which we have our little momentary coming and going like the life of a sprout. Blood is life and it is returned to the Collective Soul Soil, we are all cut down and recycled. I would like to believe that the synthesis of this warm, wet, pleasurable horror is the birth of some spiritual fruit, which lays in the center of the Garden on the Tree of Life and Knowledge, a fruit we can eventually eat from.

But to get there we have to accept the entire ongoing process of life and slaughter in death, not by evading it by going detached and “rising above it all”, but I believe by looking at it in its rawness, by penetrating into it and extracting its essence. Those scary demons in the mandala tankha have to be embraced like Neo jumping into the agents in the Matrix, and then they will let you pass to find the Lake of Joy. My guides advised me as a psychedelic newbie, if you start to loop into a bummer, don’t resist, but turn and run into its center. And true enough, like the dragon guarding the treasure in the Dark Wood, once past, the dragon becomes the Wise Old One who initiates. 

But how can I ask you to follow me unless you watch this movie too? Well, you will have to email me and I will provide a way (isnoshaman@gmail.com). If you are internet savvy, Google for it and you will find it as I did. 

The Shining opening shot: enter the world of Reflections

“History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake” says Stephan Dedalus in Ulysses by James Joyce.


Kubrick got swept into this waking nightmare and attempted to decode it and leave us clues how to get out of the Daedalian labyrinth, which extends back to when that Minotaur Monolith of black abstracted Perfection first got laid into our primate wetware as in Kubrick’s 2001. As that alien meme worked its way through our DNA on its pilgrimage back to the astrums by way of Campostella, it watered vineyards flowering in high art and beauty, nourished with blood meal and sweat. The Hamlet Mills of God grind slow and grind fine.

The 20^th  century was the culmination of the last great 2500 year cycle, taking us to the bottom of the Kali Yuga, ending in torrents of blood as one “civilized” country tore apart another in numbers of dead sacrificed upon astronomical altars beyond anything before. If we believe as I do with McKenna that this is the phoenix birthed at the end of history, then Kubrick was the poet who embodied that shamanic passage.

You have to know more about Kubrick, that he was a genius who absorbed so much information that it synthesized in him to a higher vision of the Mythos of mankind’s bloody journey. As a boy in Britain he was saturated in the movies with war footage of the clashing colonial powers which ride on waves of lofty idealism while they crush their own peoples like clusters of grapes in a bacchanalian frenzy. His themes were of the awakening spirit of freedom in individuals breaking out of the murderous worlds of slavery, war, perverse sex, Secret Societies and Overlords who play chess with humankind. 

His obsession for detail and information is shown in a video of Kubrick and his boxes. Boxes of information meticulously gathered on every subject he looked into. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5k3BzPXMaPw&list=PL7080338AB4EEEBCA

He hired professional photographers to drive down a long street and photograph every store, house, doorway, and structure, and bound it into a book, so he could find just the right look for a doorway. He sent a team to the Hotel of The Shining who did intensive research on the history of Colorado and photographed every inch of the hotel. He absorbed himself into all the intertwining threads whose confluence created the present moment of time he was depicting, but as he did so, he conveyed all the hidden layers from the past that were seeping into the action of the present. Like we do each morning we return to the dream of being awake, and for a brief time we may also remember the nighttime dream that underlays this world we call “reality.”

I see in him the act of a shaman who knows that the current disease cannot be healed or exorcised unless we dig up and travel back on the timeline that lies underneath. This becomes a hypervisorial role like a coder who realizes the ancient bugs in the human software must be cleaned up, not just patched over and over again, pushed down into forgetfulness. One must REMEMBER, for the very definition of Truth, as the shamanic Greeks understood it in their etymology was “a-lethia”, “not to forget”, not to drink the waters of the River Lethe, of forgetfulness. Each life we die and cross the Lethe into the Underworld, composted, recycled, and when reborn again, we remember nothing of the memories and memes our psyches are made of. To cure our disease we must Re-member our fragmented selves.

One director saw images linking back to the (so-called) Jewish Holocaust; another saw repeated themes of the holocaust laid on the American Indians by Europeans; another diagrammed out the Hotel showing that Kubrick while making an elaborate labyrinth, introduced Escher-like dimensional play of impossible loop-backs, halls that got longer, floor levels that mixed, windows that couldn’t be there. There is nothing in the Kubrick created world that was not intentional, that did not have a multi-layered pun of meaning. And if an object disappeared from scene to scene, it wasn’t an error in continuity, but a comment on how objects in our own construction of the movie of our present are constantly edited by our selective forgetfulness.

Kubrick’s “Overlook” Hotel isn’t a place that exists in one dimension or one time. It is the Collective Memory and Subconscious History of Mankind, it is the Father’s House with Many Mansions.  Night after night a different visitor may occupy the same room, and share memories left in the same bed. We all pass through this Hotel of Human Culture, psychotronically sharing our lives in resonance with the thoughts and emotions of every other human. We are embedded in each other’s dreams. Until we awaken and see that our personalities are constructs in this dream we share with all the Others, we will remain in the dream. Jack Nicholson is only beginning to awaken in The Shining; but he is more possessed by all the ghosts who have gone before, than awake. But Kubrick is the one who is the real director of the “Overlook” and he wants to shake us awake, if we can't look into the horror and the machinery that runs this psychic life we dream, we won’t awaken from the nightmare of history. And when we do, when we can See as Seers, then the Light begins to illumine the dark places of memory, and we begin to become The Shining Ones.

The Jay Weidner take on Kubrick is my favorite for Weidner is drawn to the teleology and Chiliasm of Fulcanelli, of the strange attractor at the end of time that draws us on,...the Black Monolith. Weidner has shown how Kubrick was seduced into the world of the Black Illuminati, the Secret Societies who want to recover the knowledge of physics of the Lost Civilization that crashed around 12,000 years ago; these are the Overlords, the Banksters, the war-traders, the mind-slavers whose aristocratic parasitism has lead us to the bottom of the Kali Yuga. When he made Dr. Strangelove his technical expertise made him the man the Societies needed to produce the fake footage of the moon landing. How heady it was to sit around in Arthur C. Clarke’s London apartment with Clarke and Werner von Braun; Clarke who seemed to know details of the planets and moon before we had gone there; von Braun and his Nazi space scientists who openly said that they had help from extra-terrestrials. 

They promised him carte blanch to make whatever movies he wanted as a reward, full editorial control, but it was a deal with the devil, as he came to find he was now their plaything. Invited to Black Illuminati parties as in Eyes Wide Shut, he entered a world of secrecy and lies, a world that brought death to friends when he spoke out of school of things he now knew, of lies he had to tell his friends and wife to keep them out, which then divided him off from them, until he ended his days living in seclusion, his home a fortress. At the end he left us images of this secret perverse world of these Societies in his last movie Eyes Wide Shut, but died under suspicious circumstances, as happens in high level spy thrillers, and his version was edited by other interests to muddy the revelations.

Now we too must enter the Father’s Many Mansioned House of the hidden Race Psyche and find out our true history as spiritual beings who have come to take lives incarnate in this human Amusement Park. At some point we must leave the Park instead of repeatedly going on the rides designed by others to keep us in thrall. Our eyes must no longer be wide shut, but wide open. 

It is time to be good children. If we don’t take our Medicine, we won’t get well.